Books Burn Badly (21 page)

The fact I had an open body calmed Olinda down. She suffered just to think I was no good at repartee and had inherited her silence. Not that Olinda stuttered or had a short tongue. She was very alert. When she was young, when she worked at Zaragüeta’s, making matches, she could lift the roof all on her own, she was the life and soul of the box-room, ‘the Spark of Castiñeiras’, according to Polka, not a small thing in a matchstick factory. ‘My spark,’ he says when he’s feeling romantic or wants to encourage her. Among the old, yellowed papers in the drawer of his night table is a cutting from
La Voz de Galicia
with the title ‘A Trip to Castiñeiras’ and a circled bit which says: ‘The ones seen here chatting work at tables in a nearby room, sticking boxes and building crates for them. They’re all women, lots of pretty women!’ Polka repeats, ‘“They’re all women, lots of pretty women!” Now that’s what I call a good journalist.’ Something happened to Olinda, silence entered her body. But that’s another story.

She doesn’t talk a lot now. Not that she’s dumb. She’s afraid of mute silence. Says it can get inside you and then doesn’t want to come out. She had friends at the factory who suffered from this silence. But there’s another silence she calls friendly silence, which helps. She says, ‘Good words don’t cost much and are worth a lot.’ It’s obvious she chooses her words. Which ones to say and which ones to hear. As when Polka’s talking. She doesn’t mind him being like a radio. But she doesn’t listen to him all the time. Sometimes he can be broadcasting and she’s immersed in silence. But suddenly she’ll come out of her hole and pay attention or laugh out loud. Those are the words that matter. I wish I knew which ones they were.

Guillerme, or Pinche, my little brother, is a lot like her, like Olinda. He was born quiet. He was born a man. A little man. The first time I got to appreciate how similar they were was when I saw him help wind the tangled wool from an old sweater into a ball in order to knit a new one. Pinche with arms outstretched, straight, parallel, pulling the wool taut. The two of them joined by the moving thread. Not a word. Winding silence.

Speak, when it comes to speaking, he’s not bad. Except for ‘salicylic’. He can’t say ‘salicylic’.

‘Not “sacilytic”!’ shouts Polka. ‘Salicylic.’

According to Polka, I could say ‘salicylic’ when I was only two. It was the first and last time Olinda took me to see him in the labour camp. A Sunday visit. A few minutes. The mine wasn’t easy to get to! Couceiro, the seller of herbs and spices, took us in his sidecar. And Polka all the time making me say ‘sa-li-cy-lic’. ‘Salicylic acid’. I could not have known this was an expression of a father’s great love for his daughter. Making her say ‘salicylic’. I think I cried and everything. I had the impression when they came out of the mine shaft, they were possessed by strange words. But I said it: ‘salicylic’. And then he gave me a pair of clogs he’d made with his own hands. He said, ‘They’re for when you go to the river.’ But the clogs, made of birchwood, were too small and could only be used as thimbles. Or for playing in the water. For making ladybird boats.

When he returned from the camp, one of the things that made him happy was listening to me read aloud.

‘Shame you weren’t born half a century earlier,’ he said. ‘You could have read in the Tobacco Factory.’ He explained how the workers paid a colleague to read novels to them while they went about their tasks. ‘Shame. You could have been an expert in Dickens!’

‘Sure,’ said Olinda, ‘but if we gave her an extra half-century, she’d be an old woman by now.’

Polka became thoughtful. Took out the little book with the marks. The novel
The Invisible Man
. He’d hidden this one and a book by Élisée, together with some newspaper cuttings, in a leather pouch he buried under a large, chair-shaped stone. You could see he was emotional. To him, it was something important. Something like a treasure trove.

‘Here. What’s in it? What’s in this book that twitched its ears in the ashes?’

I often read the story. For the three of them. For the neighbours who’d come on a Saturday evening in winter to eat roasted chestnuts or something. We laughed a lot when the invisible man had to watch what he ate. He was invisible, but the food wasn’t. Milk at night, moving through his intestines like a luminous snake. The invisible man was much talked about in Castro. How we laughed at the poor man when a dog found and bit him! And at the cat’s eyes when Griffin conducted his first experiment and managed to make the cat invisible, but with two exceptions: its eyes, which carried on shining, and its claws. This was one of the most successful episodes in the book. The listeners would search for those solitary eyes in the shadows. For an invisible man, snow is a problem. The snowflakes settle on and expose him. The great dream of being invisible has turned into a fatal condition. Which is why, after laughing so much at his misfortunes, people kept a respectful silence when the dead albino becomes visible and someone shouts, ‘Cover his face! For Gawd’s sake, cover that face!’ I think at the time Griffin was more popular in Castro than in Iping. Perhaps because this was the disguise which had always been used during Carnival. Those who dressed up were, in effect, invisible men for a few days. They covered everything, mouth as well, using nylons, sheets, cloths and bandages. Part of the disguise involved not speaking or speaking very little with a distorted voice. At one point, I began to feel sorry for the invisible man. I stopped laughing and read with a pain in my stomach, as if my own cramps could be seen as well. What Griffin, the albino, experienced was the height of loneliness.

Years later, when I went to England to work as a domestic, I was sent to a house in Chichester, not far from Brighton. I went first and Pinche came a few months later to work as a gardener or whatever was needed. Before Pinche arrived, I had a terrible time, there were days I felt like an invisible woman, but I didn’t think about Griffin at all until one Sunday in spring Pinche went for a bike and the owner of the house, a Mr Sutherland, pointed to the horizon with his pilot’s arm and said, ‘Let’s see if you can get to Iping!’

‘I wish you’d keep your fingers out of my eye,’ the invisible man was forced to protest. A sentence I never forgot. And often used as a retort.

Not being good at repartee is like being born without hands. A washerwoman is unarmed if her tongue stops working. Like any woman who lives from what she does. You have to know how to defend yourself. If you’ve lost an item of clothing, well, you’re in a tight spot and you’ve got to have what in crime films they call an alibi. Take unpaired socks, for instance. That’s a problem. Socks have a nasty habit of getting separated. If you stutter, the other people laugh. If they laugh, you stutter even more. And then you’re unarmed. You can’t defend yourself. Polka disentangled me, undid the knots we all carry inside.

‘You have to turn words slowly in your mouth. Think about it. A bird, a blackbird, for example, carries food in its mouth to give its chicks. What it’s carrying is a measure. A beakful. You are both mother and chick. You have to have a beakful with which to defend yourself. Take the necessary words. Turn and re-turn them so that they’ll sing to your tune. Know that you’re not afraid of them.’

Polka also taught me to practise in front of the mirror.

‘Don’t always say you’re right. That’s no good. The first thing you have to tell the mirror is that you don’t agree. Even if it isn’t true. You say, “I don’t agree”. The first commandment is to have the courage to say no.’

When we tried it out, I was good at that part. Better than at re-turning words. I eyed up my opponent in the mirror and spoke from the heart, ‘Well, I don’t agree . . . My dog caught a fly, now how about that?’

‘That’s my girl! Keep going. Don’t let her look over your shoulder.’

Of course not. I went and told my opponent in the mirror, ‘I wish you’d keep your fingers out of my eye.’

‘That’s my girl! A perfect retort.’

I walked around the house with a small mirror. To start with, I’d object all the time. But I couldn’t always be arguing. I looked pretty when I was annoyed, it suited me, but it wasn’t my natural state. So, from time to time, I’d say some nice things. And when Polka appeared, I’d put her back in her place. I didn’t want her taking liberties.

Everything changed when we began talking in the river. In the river, I couldn’t argue with her because she wasn’t exactly the same. She was different. For a start, we were both older.

And there were more people in the river. There were the water figures.

Dead Man’s Slap

It was the Castrelos iron bridge over the Miño. The night enlarged its arched contours. The night enlarged everything. The dark mountainside as well, crowned by a church with its fortress-like structure. When there’s no hope, everything seems to be on the side of the crime. The moon’s projector. The barn owl’s timed call. The metallic echo of footsteps. Everything grew bigger, the mouth of the river as well, the roar of its current, the yawning abyss, except for him. He felt smaller, the size he was when he visited the bridge for the first time with his father, who read out the inscription of the foundry, ‘Zorroza Bilbao 1907’, and talked to him of progress. The bridge was beautiful. ‘An improvement on nature,’ his father said. And he agreed that the riverbanks and mountains, even the church, looked better thanks to the bridge. Because there they were, in the middle, leaning on the parapet, seeing the river with the bridge’s new eyes. If they made a postcard of Castrelos, it would have to show the bridge. Being there now, on the bridge, at night, he knew what it meant. There was no need to write anything. Just the sender’s name. A sign of non-existence. Wherever the postcard went, they’d know he was no longer important to the force of gravity. What happened to him wouldn’t even be death. The murderers, if they drank, would say, ‘We took him for a walk by the river.’ There is no killing, only the dead.

When the murderers threw him off the bridge, he weighed the same as that postcard he’d imagined on his first visit. Suddenly he regained his real body. He gripped the two iron bars with such strength his hands were made of iron, formed part of the foundry, ‘Zorroza Bilbao 1907’. The landscape was not a hostile stage set. It was on tenterhooks, amazed, waiting for something other than that premeditated crime to happen. Perhaps the Castrelos iron bridge had also grown tired of being a place of horror in the hunt for humans. To start with, the murderers laughed. ‘He doesn’t want to fall,’ said one of them, kicking at his hands with the toecap of his boot. Gradually getting annoyed because he wouldn’t let go. ‘Blasted eternity! Let me.’ And the other rammed his fingers with the butt of his rifle.

‘They’re made of the same metal as the bridge! Considering he’s a teacher, he’s got a blacksmith’s hands.’

‘They’re not iron,’ said the other. ‘You’ll see.’

He took out a knife and flicked it open. For the victim hanging from the bridge, night again enlarged things. The voice of a face he couldn’t see. A blade glinting in the moonlight.

‘It’d be better if he let go,’ said the one with the knife, cutting into his first finger, addressing his colleague, not him, as if the latter no longer responded to the world of words. ‘Why won’t he let go?’

The second in the group (there was a third with a rifle at one end of the bridge) stood watching two fingers, wondering why, having been cut, they didn’t move. Like lizard tails. ‘I don’t think he’s going to let go,’ he said.

The group leader quickly sliced through the other fingers. He was furious and very offended by the victim causing all this mess. The normal thing would be for him to die as he fell against the rocks on the bottom and be carried off by the waters. When he did finally let go, the third soldier, feeling impatient, shot at the white shirt flying through the air as if it were the barn owl from before, enlarged and fallen. Then the three of them started shooting. At the human specimen, the river, the night. Another job for the Arnoia boatwoman, who’d have to recover another body from the water. Apparently the magistrate had said to her, ‘No more dead, please.’ But she rescued them for the families, who trudged up and down the river, searching for missing relatives. Besides, however careful they were, neither she nor the other boatmen downriver would ever find all of those who’d been sacrificed. Some bodies would end up going westwards, out to sea. Who knows where the ocean currents will take them? A man thrown off Castrelos bridge could end up off Rostro, or Galway, in Ireland. Or in the Atlantic trench by Cape Prior, at a depth of eight hundred fathoms, from where he’ll never come back.

Or he’ll come back on foot, upriver, to a bar in the Ribeiro region, in the self-same parish, twenty years later.

‘What are you having?’ asks the bar owner, a man they sometimes call Abisinio, sometimes Silvo. He has a bitter look. His wine isn’t made from the finest grapes.

‘A jug of wine,’ says the outsider.

The barman serves him a jug and cup. Time goes by. The outsider remains silent and motionless. Staring at the jug. The barman comes and goes. Also glances at the jug from time to time.

He doesn’t usually talk to his customers, especially if they’re strangers. When he clears his throat, it sounds like a snarl.

‘What? Not drinking?’

He doesn’t like being a barman. Behind the bar, he feels shut up inside a cage.

‘Not if you don’t serve me,’ replies the customer calmly.

He’s in the same position he was in when he arrived.

‘Customers here serve themselves,’ says the barman, suppressing his anger. ‘We’re all on good terms.’

The outsider then takes his hands out of his pockets. With stunted fingers.

All on good terms.

‘That’s what a dead man’s slap is like,’ related Polka.

The Doorknocker

All sorts of things are done for money, even killing, the value of life and all that, there are even some executioners on a State salary. When it came to Foucellas, the most wanted resistance leader, apparently they sent him their finest executioner, so he can’t have been as bad as they made him out to be if they sent him an executioner from outside, from Salamanca, the best they had. Not the worst, the best killer. They kept the day and hour a secret, but people knew. Because the executioner got off the train in Teixeiro to have a coffee. And the one who served him realised it was the executioner as if he’d been wearing a badge or uniform. How did he know? From the hands. His hands were refined, manicured, hidden, peeping out of the burrow of their sleeves. And because he added a lot of sugar. No one had ever added so much sugar to their coffee in Teixeiro before. Some even said, ‘He had a good death, they sent him the quickest.’ Some consolation when you’re being garrotted! He had a thirteen-year-old daughter, who went knocking at the governor’s door to stop her father being killed. We were walking by, with our bundles of clothes, and my mother whispered to me, ‘That’s Foucellas’ daughter at the governor’s door.’ Very early, it was cold. The only sound in the city was that of the doorknocker. Everyone walking by, all the office clerks, the squad lugging an enormous carpet, the workers taking down the hoarding from Colón Theatre, the brickies with their tile-coloured pots under their arms, everyone moved away from there, from that sound of a clapper. The sticky trail a broom leaves on the road. The knocker sounding like a clapper made of bone.