Sample

I know I shouldn’t complain since, as far as things go, I am a privileged man, seventy-six years old, an iron constitution, a family with whom I share great affection, a generous income, a head that still works, and this poor Lázaro, who does so much to lighten the final stretch of my existence. But despite all this, Rosalía, I miss your thick silence in front of the hearth, our marriage of absences which we undertook with love and, like a standard, paraded around America. I know I’m being foolish, but I can’t help the memories constantly searching me out and rummaging through my insides. What can you say, my turtledove? Time does away with scruples and dignifies those early mornings when you raised your fearsome cries to make me jump out of bed and harness the oxen, since you hated it if you heard Xan de Castro or Paco Uzal’s carts anticipating the cock crow and broadcasting through the valley the harsh sound of their wheels, a piercing moan that emanated from the axles like the screams of a child.

You should see what has become of our little home. Branca, our daughter, who used to stay away from the village, has got it into her head to put everything back the way it was and bring out all the junk that was stored in the cellar: the chestnut bench, smoked stools, the trough where you used to chop the cabbage… and lots of other things that were thrown out in deference to modernity and have now returned to the kitchen with their aristocratic airs. They swept the hearth and hung old implements on the walls: the firedogs, tongs, bellows, trivets, spits… The only thing they removed was the cauldron that used to hang on the hook, since there was no way of getting rid of all that rusty blackness. Even those blue cups with their dainty patterns your parents gave us for our wedding are proudly displayed on the sideboard, alongside the ceramic from Sargadelos. Everything has acquired a brand-new sheen, the beds, iron headboards, wash-basins, the flaming glare of varnished wood, the polished stone of the entrance…

The well has water again, and the garden is full of tomatoes, carrots and lettuces, just as when the two of us were living here, in domestic bliss which was only ever broken when we argued over the position of the vegetable seeds…

We spend every summer here and lots of weekends, and may even leave Coruña for good and come and live here if Agustín manages to sort out the heating.

You don’t need to worry about me. I behave myself very well, better than with you… I don’t know… Branca certainly seems happy, I overheard her talking to her friends. I sit on the lavatory in order not to pee outside the bowl, I make my bed, offer to wash the dishes, even though there’s now a dishwasher, I polish everybody’s shoes at night, take care to fold my clothes, and look after young Lázaro as best I can. He’s not very hopeful about his operation in Barcelona. The chances of success are slim. When we come here, his mood changes. You have to bear in mind the noises of the city are a constant threat for someone like him.

Five years without you is a long time, Rosalía, five years spent dreaming of you every night, in the profane hope of seeing you again somewhere. I like to think there is something on the other side of death, not because of an egotistical wish to start another life, but so that I might be near you once more. There are nights, when the moon gets entangled in the branches of the Pardieiro fig tree, I am assailed by benevolent thoughts that almost lead me to pray, but in the end the tall walls of my conscience soon put a stop to this attempt at prayer and clothe me in the agnostic armour I am accustomed to wear. You know I don’t believe in priests – those creatures who never stop insisting that the whole of life is a sin – or in any other religion than the one that belongs to good people, but today is your anniversary and I don’t think I have any choice but to go to Mass. Our daughter would never forgive me if I didn’t.

I won’t say anything else for now, Rosalía, so receive a warm embrace from this old party-goer.

Camilo Sabio Doldán

Celas de Peiro, summer of the year 1992

Overcome by a bout of nostalgia that moistens his eyes, Camilo lets his cetacean corpulence fall back on the sofa and closes the folder where he keeps all the letters he’s written to his wife over the last few years, a correspondence he hides away as if it were the intimate diary of a teenager.

The cleanliness of morning sweeps down from Mount Xalo in waves of scaly, purifying light. In the garden, a magpie pecks at a pippin that’s fallen from the apple tree, while a goldfinch whistles from the midst of the Telva cherry trees.

Since Lázaro has yet to get up, Camilo decides to insist with his phone calls. He presses the numbers with bureaucratic automatism and is attended by a woman at the other end of the line whom he asks, in a voice dampened by nostalgia, whether they might happen to have the book. The woman, who is the librarian, confirms that the book does indeed appear in the Athenaeum’s catalogue, but several years earlier a certain A.D.B., a resident of Vilar Street in Santiago de Compostela, persuaded the director to accept thirty thousand pesetas in exchange for the only copy they had left.

Camilo writes down the full address and notices the tingle of disquiet running down his spine. He’s spent many years, forty perhaps, searching for this book, yearning after this printed treasure that had so much meaning in his life.

His enthusiasm transforms him into a little boy who has just been given a present for his birthday and, for a long while, he doesn’t stop shuffling dates until he finally postpones his trip to Santiago until the same week in which Lázaro is going to be operated in Barcelona.

The first to arrive was Maruxa do Souto, the wife of the Bagpiper, Elisardo Fandiño, who was taking part in the campaigns in the Rif. It wasn’t nine yet, but she was there because she wanted to get a seat by the door. She stuck a prong in a crack in the stable wall and called out to Paco Uzal to hand her the oil lamp. A few moments later, the other women appeared, engrossed in fervent conversation, in an attempt to shield themselves from the devilish cold that descended the hillside, like a sharp knife, driven by the wintry north-east wind: Pura de Ramallal, Luz de Cobelo, María Vázquez, Concha de Barreiro, a pair of marriageable young ladies, and Mrs Francisca overseeing the uncorrupted beauty of her daughter, Clara. They all took up their distaffs and spindles and began to thread the flax and their opinions at one and the same time:

‘Isn’t the old man here yet?’

‘He’ll be coming.’

‘That’s quite a story of his.’

‘Do you really think it happened?’

‘Well, it’s in the book.’

‘You’d have to be very open-minded to do what he did.’

‘I feel sorry for her.’

‘Oh, she knows how to look after herself!’

A dog came through the door, shivering with cold, and sat by the hearth where Paco Uzal was encouraging the flames with dry sticks.

Mr Estevo didn’t take long. As always, he was accompanied by his grandson Camilo, carried his guitar on his back, the book under his arm, and wore the extravagant scent of an exotic lotion.

María Cardo, Paco Uzal’s wife, helped him divest himself of his cloak and hat, and served him a glass of warm wine and honey.

‘Sit down there, next to my husband, and warm yourself a little, since some people have yet to arrive.’

Mr Estevo spread a white cloth on the stool so that he wouldn’t dirty his trousers and, before taking a seat, checked the consistency of the legs and the distance he needed in order to double up without any of his bones, licked by the gnawing of time, suffering a breakage. It was all a matter of study. He measured everything with mathematical precision and pushed the precepts acquired in America to delirious, unsuspected limits. In spite of everything, Mr Estevo was much esteemed in the whole region of As Mariñas. Only the priest didn’t trust him or his revolutionary theories. He said he was always putting devilish ideas into the heads of good people.

Mr Estevo had a bourgeois air about him and spoke with a refined deference that was surprising in a peasant farmer from a village like Celas. In a manner differing from his neighbours, he had set a timetable for his work, which he respected with a scrupulousness that verged on being an obsession. On his return from stubbing the land, harvesting, hoeing and threshing the corn, he always bathed in cold water, every day, come summer or winter. He said work was not incompatible with cleanliness and at about nine he would take the book and, were there no gatherings to spin or at the mill, he would teach the young men how to read with the only condition that they helped pay for the oil in the lamp. He also played the guitar and liked to sing songs from Argentina.

‘It’s a devilish night, Paco.’

‘I’ve seen worse ones, sir.’

‘Tonight there’s a hint of snow in the air.’

‘It’s been four years since the last time that happened.’

‘Yes, but I think it could snow again.’

The clattering of clogs on stone warned of the arrival of those who were late. The boy went over to his grandpa and told him the men were here.

Once everybody was seated, they waited for the old man to begin. There was a miraculous sense of expectation, since everybody wanted to know the outcome of that story written in the American book.

Old Estevo snuffed out his pipe with an extinguished stick, got up with the movements of an ox, taking particular care, and called to his grandson to wipe the stool that was next to the oil lamp. Camilo was playing with his friend Marcelo, Paco Uzal’s grandson, but quickly responded to the request of his grandfather, who sat down again in order to progress with the reading of the second chapter.

His silences force me to speak, his melancholic words are like stones that collide with my forehead. The poor boy is not to blame for his terrible impediment, but such misfortune causes me a pain in my stomach.

‘What bird is that singing?’

‘A starling.’

Lázaro is tall, and there is a gleam of snow in his eyes so strong that it hurts. Today he’s happy. His father has confirmed that we will spend the whole summer here, in the house in Celas, so that we can watch the Olympic Games, which I understand are being held in Spain this year, in comfort.

I realize my presence has become necessary and I am not so afraid of death as of leaving him alone, with his blindness unsatisfied, because the poor wretch wants to know everything he can. I am his eyes. I’m always standing beside him, clearing up his voracious doubts and translating images which he processes with greedy speed. What else can I do?

He will soon turn twenty, the same age I was that afternoon when the football championship in Cecebre was cancelled owing to the outbreak of the Civil War. I was playing for Celta de Rutis against Rápido, and lots of the players, who were on leave, had to return to barracks. To start with, I thought the news might be a false alarm spread by Tiroliro, a mentally retarded boy from Vilaboa who, ever since the first few years of the Second Republic, had gone around with a radio stuck to his ear, announcing a supposed uprising of the military, and I even stopped at Galán’s shop to drink a beer. But that same night, blinded by intense fear, my blood curdling, I found myself running with unusual speed, feeling my way up the side of Mount Xalo, fully aware that the whirling heather of Souto and Barreiro could be hiding a watchful presence. That night, the moon failed to appear and an ashen vapour arose from the oak woods. My shotgun pointed at the millenary solitude of the dark while my boots sought out the unfathomable ground through the art of invisibility. It was like walking over a field bristling with mines. It was impossible to see. Only the warm whistle of the south wind in the broom and the distant barking of a sleepless hound pervaded that infinite, panicked silence. Behind, in Celas, I had left a piercing pain in the chest of Rosalía and my parents. In time, my eyes would grow used to the darkness, and night would begin to serve as my alibi. During the day, I slept in a damp cave, since it was well known that the Civil Guard scoured the mountainside with trained dogs. At night, I would emerge from my gloomy hole and I even found the strength to go down to the yard in front of our house out of a desire to hear the routine of familiar voices. My body was filled with melancholy from that pale, domestic light which contained Rosalía, my wife, and a marriage we’d only just begun. Our wedding had been at the start of the month of July, when there was an act at the Athenaeum in Rutis, and we’d walked around Vilaboa that day with our guests and comrades from the other cultural centres. There’d been a conference on naturalism, something Grandpa Estevo always talked about, and at night there was a dance at the house of Torres Taboada. When I think about those days, I do so with a sense not of remembering, but of seeing. My memories have no age. My eyes reach the events as they happened with photographic precision and wander over the scene, transcending the barrier of time. Now, as Lázaro and I head down this cart-track, my memory takes snapshots and, behind those green brambles, I can see my bearded face disappearing into the gauzy mist. I am straining under the weight of a sack of bricks which I have stolen from a nearby building site and my shotgun is banging against my back. Rosalía has yet to find out about the defeat inside me. She doesn’t know that winter and nostalgia have overwhelmed me and are pushing me towards the kamikaze action of descending the mountain to our house with a burden of bricks and the firm decision to remain there permanently. The night is cold, and at three in the morning there is not a soul in the streets. I cautiously enter the house without waking my wife, lay down the sack, light the wick of the oil lamp and watch Rosalía while drinking brandy to banish the cold that, like a restless tenant, has inhabited my bones these last few months. Rosalía stirs and wakes with the violent joy of seeing me there, beside her, after five pitiless months in which we have had no news of each other. We postpone our reunion and work like wolves to erect a double wall. In one corner, we leave a square of two dozen bricks with dry cement I can come out of at night. In this way, before dawn, I am already entrenched in this part of the house where the only light is that which filters through the tiles. Nobody would ever suspect my hideaway because all the walls are bare; because of the war, I haven’t had time to plaster them. Not even my mother will miss the half metre stolen from the dining room.

‘What was that noise, grandpa?’

‘A weasel or a lizard.’

Lázaro is about to turn twenty, the same age I was when we conceived his mother during those nocturnal meetings when what we sought, rather than words, was the warmth of each other’s body. How difficult to explain to somebody what the days are like when you can’t see how the light illuminates things! Only a blind man like this poor boy could ever know what I felt during that time when I spent whole days behind a wall, desperately trying to listen to Rosalía perform her chores: the poetic clatter of dishes, the obstinate percussion of rain, the wind shaking the tiles, the unending hours of familiar cold that not even the pile of blankets Rosalía gave me could lessen, the amorous warmth of my mother’s voice when she came around in the afternoon to keep Rosalía company, which sometimes frightened me, because I would be overwhelmed by an oppressive desire to emerge from my hiding place and embrace her, but the discipline of fear restricted all my wishes. We’d agreed to keep my presence a secret, so that nobody else would be compromised. Even so, in order to relieve my mother’s suffering, Rosalía pretended that a militiaman from Bergantiños had come in the night to give her a letter from me, in which I took my leave from on board a ship transporting me out of the country. I’d written this letter during the night, and it went some way to assuaging my mother’s pain. Lies were everywhere at that fearful time. I was even obliged to withstand the serpent of rage clambering up my body when I heard my mother lament the murder of my father. I knew nothing about it, Rosalía had kept it from me in order to avoid my suffering, but the truth was that my father had been summarily executed just for this, for being my father. I almost went crazy and, if I didn’t grab my shotgun and head for the barracks that same night, it was because Rosalía confessed to me, in a voice overcome by grief, that she’d fallen pregnant.

‘You know something, Lázaro?’

‘What?’

‘I found the book.’

‘Who has it?’

‘A man in Santiago. The strangest thing is he paid thirty thousand pesetas for it.’

Thirty thousand pesetas, Rosalía! Someone paid thirty thousand for the book! Who can it have been? And they paid this amount some time ago. I’m dying to find out who it was.

I talked to our daughter, Branca, and she’s OK with me travelling to Santiago next week.

Lázaro is nervous, I don’t know whether it’s because he’s uncertain about the success of the operation or because of the journey. They’re going to travel by plane! They must be crazy. You’ll think I’m stupid for dwelling on such things, but my head functions obliquely at the best of times. You know I don’t like this at all. I can’t help remembering the accident in 1973 when that aircraft crashed in Montrove and we were waiting for our friends Elvira Suárez and Manuel Abeleira, who were on their way back from Caracas to settle in Vilaboa. It was terrible. I wish the perverse will of destiny could bring them back here for good. How often have I imagined the huge sense of joy they must have felt just before the accident when they spotted As Mariñas as on an interactive map of the world! Perhaps their enthusiastic vision attained for a fleeting moment Cecebre Woods, the football pitch where we used to play for Celta de Rutis, a team Manuel was president of during the Second Republic, the Burgo’s wounded bridge, the factory in Cros, the Labour University’s geometrical buildings, and they might even have spent their final breath in searching out the house in Vilaboa. I don’t know, I’m not at all happy that they’re travelling to Barcelona by plane. Branca says it’ll only take an hour. Well, it’s up to them. In the meantime, I will travel to Santiago. I have the address and sense that this time I will again hold the book in my hands, those formidable pages that meant so much to me and protected my life. But you know all about their value, there’s nothing I can tell you…

I’ll keep you informed.

I love you, my absent, blue-eyed turtledove.

Camilo Sabio Doldán

Celas de Peiro, summer of the year 1992

Camilo is seated in the living room, where the stables used to be, and he goes so far as to reinvent the stink of manure there was back then, when a natural temperature was sought for spinning. He is sad because his thoughts dwell on the blackest period of his life, filling him with ancient shadows: the mountain’s homicidal cold, the cervine melancholy of absence, prison, pain…

Lázaro comes in, registers objects with his audacious touch and soon recognizes the other’s presence by his laboured breathing.

‘What you doing, grandpa?’

‘Fighting with memories.’

Lázaro lights a cigarette and feels for the ashtray. It doesn’t take him long to find it.

‘Do you miss grandma?’

‘I do sometimes.’

‘Tell me about her. About the war.’

Camilo strokes the glass of a silver portrait on the table while his eyes fill with yellow nostalgia.

‘Rosalía was strong, like you. She had an optimistic character that covered pain with the verdure of its hope. To start with, when she fell pregnant with your mother, I stayed in the family hideout, but by the fifth month it was no longer possible to conceal her belly and the rumours began. The Civil Guard performed a couple of searches and took her to the barracks so that she would tell them where I was. With her convincing sense of theatrics, she confessed that the baby she was expecting wasn’t mine, but Mauricio’s. She was so careful about her movements that she accepted the rumours and, to stop them suspecting me, she even allowed Mauricio to visit her on a couple of nights, simple caresses that served to confirm the rumour of adultery.’

‘Who was Mauricio?’

‘A poor simpleton who, on the death of his mother, had been left to wander in the woods.’

Lázaro smiles sadly and pulls hard on his cigarette.

‘So what did you do?’

‘I waited in my coop until one day Rosalía came rushing in and didn’t wait until evening to tell me to take to the mountain again. They’d started searching all the houses very carefully because, not far from Canabal Fountain, some guards had been attacked with explosives, an act that would later be attributed to me. Our separation that night was the worst ever. Your grandmother was in her eighth month. Terror was transformed into indifferent resignation.’

Camilo places his elbow on the back of the sofa, wipes his forehead with his hand and examines the portrait on top of the brazier table, in which Rosalía smiles with ambiguous complicity. He continues, his voice trembling with the drama of his words:

‘The world turned its back on her. She had to put up with the daily hatred of insults and the silent rage of people who used this opportunity to spread lies you wouldn’t even imagine. I spent a month and nine days on the mountain. I wasn’t cold because winter had yet to arrive, but I would have preferred the metallic barbarity of ice to that renewed solitude I couldn’t get used to. I had the sense my actions were those of a coward. So one night I came down, I don’t know whether it was out of a hungry wish to see the baby or to protect my wife’s honour. The fact is I didn’t hang around. I passed straight through the village at dusk, not caring whether I bumped into any of the neighbours, went straight to the house, urged on by my desire, and, long before I actually crossed the threshold, I heard your mother’s lung-filled cries. Rosalía opened the door, as if she’d been expecting me, and without saying a word we kissed each other and I held the baby in my arms until the Civil Guard arrived.’

‘Did they arrest you?’

‘I knew they would. My friend Marcelo Uzal was desperate when he saw me in the village and tried to persuade me to return to the mountain, but at that point I didn’t really care. I had restored your grandmother’s honour, and that was all that mattered.’

Lázaro raises his defenceless eyes and, guided by his grandfather’s moist voice, gazes at the restless hands that caress the portrait bathed in the melancholic light of an immense afternoon. Chance seems to furnish his look with a spot of clairvoyance.

‘Anyway, aren’t you afraid of travelling by plane?’

‘Don’t be daft, grandpa.’

Estevo Doldán Patiño had been born on the deck of a boat in 1851, assisted by the lullaby of Atlantic waves and the shrill cry of seagulls that wished to announce illegitimate islands on the horizon’s blue hairpiece. The Burgo’s physician had been very careful to advise against such a journey, but the pair of lovers were in search of a life overseas and the birth took place two months early. The mother had refused to be separated from her husband and was one of only a few women to embark on that lumbering hulk.

Estevo Doldán Patiño was born at sea, but he didn’t have the makings of a sailor. Setting foot on a ship turned his insides. He couldn’t bear it. When he returned to Galicia, having been expelled as a result of the Argentinian Law of Residence, married and with a ten-year-old daughter, he almost drowned in his own vomit. He spent the journey of thirty days throwing up over the side.

He was raised in Buenos Aires and attended the school on Callena Street, where he learned to play the guitar with an Italian by the name of Giovanni Rocini, a naturalist and anarchist who was the first to talk to him about Bakunin and libertarian ideals. He was a well-known bum on the pampa, as individual anarchists were known, who used to travel long distances with a bundle on their back in which they carried a change of underwear and pamphlets of socially minded prose they distributed to local farmers. He had the same beard as Kropotkin, was tall, a little slow-moving, and possessed of considerable erudition. Later, in his old age, he would vouch for Estevo in front of the director of the anarchist daily La Protesta Humana, where Estevo started work as a typographer and ended up writing articles on agrarian issues under the pseudonym of Anselmo Sendón.

Estevo Doldán read Proudhon with relish and became an anarchist. He acquired an interest in naturalism and moved in with a Philippine girl by the name of Cristal, who used to clean the newspaper offices. They fell in love suddenly and rented a small house on Fitz Roy Street, where they would have a daughter named Nora after a character in a play by Ibsen.

One morning in the year 1905, during the state of siege, repressive measures were carried out, the newspaper was searched, and a treacherous employee let out that Anselmo Sendón was the man who had been born at sea. Cristal and Estevo were forced to leave the country, deported as a result of the Law of Residence which in its second clause stated that the executive could order the exit of any foreigner who by his or her conduct compromised national security or disturbed public order. The two lovers returned to a land they’d only ever heard about, bringing with them Estevo’s father, who died two days after setting foot in Celas, as if the old man had planned his own demise. Having suffered two storms and constant seasickness on board ship, he reached his home next to the medieval tower and passed away in a moment of abrupt quiet which left the imprint of a vague smile on his face.

Cristal Castro and Estevo Doldán worked the land with scientific rigour. They brought new spices and seeds with them, and planted civilized lawns that gave the house a symmetrical appearance. They refrained from eating too much meat, they never touched alcohol (except for a drop of wine sweetened with honey), nor did they play cards on wintry evenings. The only indulgence they permitted themselves was tobacco. Estevo smoked a pipe while Cristal smoked at home after lunch. The priest in Celas spent a large part of the Mass on Sunday mornings pontificating against this pernicious habit of a woman who wasn’t satisfied to do just that, but who also came out with extravagant proclamations on the nature of freedom and justice. He couldn’t bear to set eyes on the Argentinian couple, who refused to attend church and convinced a dozen simple-minded folk to do likewise. And so, when Primo de Rivera, shielding himself behind the disaster in Africa, came to power, the priest saw an opportunity to accuse them of being revolutionaries. Overcome by his inquisitorial zeal, he arrived at the headquarters of the Civil Guard and demanded justice.

The sun lights up Mount Xalo, and a blue cleanliness swims in the fields. It is eight in the morning, and the Castromil bus reduces the distance by sweeping around the green line of oak trees. A restless gleam ignites Camilo’s eyes. The driver doesn’t ask any questions. He knows the old anarchist waiting at the stop and opens the door so that he can lift his seventy-six years on board.

Camilo hasn’t been to Santiago in more than seven years. He can hardly forget that journey. He went with Rosalía to the general hospital, where a specialist friend of Agustín’s confirmed, with violent sincerity, that she had cancer. At that point, Camilo felt a strong pain in his chest, an enlarged fear of the death sentence chance was passing on his blue-eyed turtledove. Defenceless, without the courage to calm her down, Camilo embraced her on the third floor landing, restraining an impulsive desire to cry, and noticed how an inner disintegration plunged him into a kind of lonely desolation which only increased his love for her. On that horrifying day, and during the two years of life she had left, Camilo did his best to distract her. That same afternoon, he suggested they make the most of their trip to visit the cathedral, both overcome by the cynicism of words they’d never used before, which now, trembling with fear, they pronounced in compassionate, alien tones, in a spurious attempt to relieve each other’s suffering.

The memory of that day is an open wound in Camilo’s heart, but he knows he has to keep going and prefers to concentrate on the journey ahead and its motive.

For him, just going to Santiago is a rejuvenating adventure, a situation that goes some way to restoring the energy he used to enjoy, affording him an independence that unfortunately most people of his age no longer possess.

At the bend in the road by Canabal Fountain, Camilo thinks about the book and a joyful heaviness in his chest sends a bolt of electricity through him that makes him forget, for a moment, the sad image of Rosalía when she was sick. He never ceased to accompany her during interminable nights in Coruña, in a hospital which curiously bears the name of a founding member of the Falange whom Camilo knew from before the war: Juan Canalejo.

Four months there, stuck to his turtledove while she inwardly disintegrated, sleeping on that imitation leather sofa and watching over her medication, the saline solution in the darkness of the room, feeding her, encouraging her on trips down memory lane, inoculating her with absurd projects for the future, consolidating an increasingly warm relationship with the nurses who kept warning him, like Rosalía, Branca, Lázaro and Agustín, that he should go and spend a night at home, his insistence on staying there would end up killing him, but he refused with impregnable conviction, referred to his good health and determination to stay with her until the end of her life. It’s the least I can do, he would say while holding her hand in a cephalopodal grip. Early in the morning, protected by the darkness in the room, he would weep with an inclination stored up during the day, unable to bear seeing the nostalgia in the sad gaze of Rosalía, who preferred not to share her discomfort and suffered heroically in silence. With the passing of time, however, Rosalía could no longer conceal her terrible pain and Camilo was assailed by contradictory sentiments. There were some nights when he considered the possibility of helping her and curtailing her agony; others when he regretted such homicidal tendencies and limited himself to pressing the button and asking the nurses to increase the dose of morphine. Rosalía, as if deep down she knew the voluntary nature of her actions, took advantage of Camilo’s absence in the café one day and died as if not wishing to disturb anyone. When he entered the corridor of the fifth floor, he sensed what had happened from the nurses’ pained expressions and sought, on the wall of his eyelids, the integrity of memories that could serve as a psychological prophylaxis against the suffering that grew in him like a new tumour of sadness.

Almost always, when he goes to bed, he is pursued by the memory of prison, and the scenes play over and over again, with the same density as a nightmare. He recalls episodes as if he’d experienced them the day before. It’s like a penance in which he is obliged to stare down the umpteenth video of his life. He constantly finds himself back in the gallery and perceives the nauseating stench of the inside of the prison. Broken glances examine him as he goes by and easily predict the reason for his being there. The motive is the same for everybody, a unanimous destiny that wreaks havoc on sick people’s faces, which are deprived of life, barely sustained by the crushed armour of their bodies. Strangely enough, Camilo is placed in cell number thirty-six with a living dead man who confronts the night in silence, lying in a foetal position on the floor, his eyes lost in the darkness of memories. He doesn’t sleep on the bed because the comfort there is less than that afforded by the carpet of mud. Camilo sits down on a stool and allows the footsteps of the guards to be swallowed up by the distance. Now all he hears are the hoarse death rattles of the laboured breathing emanating from the sick person’s chest.

There is no glass in the windows, and the air is automatically renewed. Camilo says his name, and his words resound in his mind as in the empty void of a well.

On the wall, where moss grows over the scratchings of solitude, is a rusty nail from which, like a liturgical object, hangs a pot for relieving oneself.

‘What have you done?’

The man’s voice is drunken and coarse.

‘Nothing.’

‘Like the rest of us.’

The conversation peters out, and night brings the distant murmur of waves eating away at Herminia Point with treacherous, saddening violence.

Camilo starts to nod off, but is assailed by the lugubrious terror of soon taking on the appearance of his comrade whose sleepless eyes are infused with the definitive nostalgia of someone who’s dead.

It is seven o’clock, and the light of morning stirs up coughs and laments throughout the prison, which is swarming with inmates. From an adjoining cell comes the hopeful voice of a welcoming question:

‘What’s your name?’

‘Camilo.’

‘I’m Andrés. Where you from?’

‘Celas.’

‘I’m from Santiago, but I got married in Carral.’

They have breakfast together and are soon chatting animatedly in the prison yard. The guards try to separate the prisoners. They don’t like them being in groups of more than three. Andrés is a barber. Like many, he’s waiting to be sentenced. He knows he’s going to be shot for belonging to the Iberian Anarchist Federation. He can’t be persuaded otherwise. His feet have cracks and are missing their nails: Dalmiro Ferreiro pulled them out in one of his merciless interrogations which, however, failed to obtain the names of anarchist comrades hiding in the mountains. In spite of everything, Andrés is talkative and transmits a light sense of enthusiasm.

‘You got lucky with your cell-mate.’

‘How so?’

‘Bernardo Figueiras is a famous personality in here. A living legend in the anarchist struggle. He was court-martialled. He’s been sentenced to death, but those bastards won’t kill him because they know that’s what he wants. He says death is the only act of freedom he has left. Have you never heard of the San Amaro Cuntlicker?’

‘No.’

‘It’s him, he’s a real master, a sworn member of the National Confederation of Labour. He went mad when he found out that the Falangists had shot his parents and screwed his little sister. At four in the morning on Fridays, he livens up the cells with his indecent libertarian stories. Is it Friday today?’

‘It is.’

‘Then there’ll be a story tonight. It’s well worth staying awake to listen to him. He keeps all the rest of us going.’

‘He looks half dead.’

‘Yes, but on Fridays he resurrects.’

‘Why is he called the Cuntlicker?’

‘You’ll find out tonight. Never did a nickname suit someone so well. Deep down, I don’t think he’s such a lunatic.’

Camilo doesn’t want to remain in doubt and later, in the cell, he reiterates his question:

‘Why were you given that nickname?’

Bernardo Figueiras traces a smile that contains three teeth. He looks just like a skull whose mediocre dentures are visible. It’s a miracle he’s alive. He sits on the boards of his bed and lights a cigarette. His profile is so slight that in the darkness it’s not easy to know when he’s full face.

‘I noticed that book. When they see it, they’ll take it off you. Can you read?’

Camilo frowns, as if offended, and picks the book up in his hands.

‘This book has done a lot of good in the world. It belonged to my grandfather.’

‘Support for the rebellion, so said the sentence.’

‘Which one?’

‘Mine. Yours will say the same.’

Camilo interprets the words of his cell-mate as a wish to talk.

‘Why were you arrested?’

‘For belonging to the National Confederation of Labour, I suppose, or for being a witness in the trial for the assault on the barracks in Oleiros, because, while I let off a few explosives, they have no proof of my actions.’

‘They don’t need any.’

‘I know. I was up in the mountains, then I erected a wall in the dining room of my house. Later a daughter of mine was born, I came down to see her, and they caught me.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Branca.’

‘I was luckier than you. I enjoyed the baroque hospitality of a marble mausoleum, that’s right, in San Amaro Cemetery. I slept during the day on the coffin’s mattress and only emerged at night. In that hiding place, I discovered the kind of ecclesiastical security I could never have found in the mountains or the basement of a house. No one knew where I was, not even my comrades in the trade union who, with the help of the milkmaids, received the fruits of my booty, nor the gravediggers, nor the most sorrowful widows, nor even Palmira, the one who fixed my clothes and gave me something to eat at four in the morning when her husband was snoring with the force of dynamite. That sepulchre was conditioned for winter. The only thing that bothered me was the perfumed scent left by the son of a bitch who’d been buried there.’

Camilo smiles. In the distance, a dog can be heard barking.

‘Who did it belong to?’

‘A policeman by the name of Castañas who died in a fight in Atochas. His was a stench that, despite it being several months since the funeral, still prospered on a butterfly’s wings in all the cemetery. I had to journey to San Xurxo and put him in the same box as Toño Penelas.’

Bernardo Figueiras pauses, stares at his watch and sniffs at danger from between the bars. He then continues:

‘Toño Penelas was an anarchist this same policeman had tortured during one of his appalling interrogations. I left the two hostile corpses in a single embrace for them to resolve their differences. A studied act of revenge which I culminated with a visit to the policeman’s widow, a woman of about forty, with a reputation for being very devout. She lived on her own in Parrote. Since my father was the third in a line of Coruña locksmiths, I had no problem opening the door to her apartment at five in the morning. I wandered lazily about the house with domestic ease and gathered all the valuable possessions in a sack.’

Bernardo Figueiras is smoking. The embers light his face, permitting Camilo to study the sad features of the narrator, a man of solid prose and erudite commentaries.

‘Once I had ransacked the house, I moved to the woman’s bedroom and, with the deliberation of a worm, slipped into her bed. She was a little uncovered. I lifted her nightdress up to her navel and stared for a while at the gleam of her knickers. The woman was asleep. I aimed at her temple with the pistol while accommodating my left index finger in her sleepy triangle, which reacted with an autonomous uterine spasm. The woman wet herself in her sleep as if banishing a fictitious weariness, and I remained still, leaving my index finger on the increasingly visible line of her prurient slit. The woman felt for her sex and stuck her fingers inside that vaginal wetness. I was amazed and retired a little all the better to observe the convulsive movement of nails which didn’t stop digging, with growing euphoria, in that evangelical hole. She was biting the lace of her nightdress and arousing the nipples of her pearly white breasts when suddenly she awoke from the lascivious passion of her dreams. It wasn’t necessary to cover her mouth because she seemed unaware. Caught in such sinful infamy, she remained silent, staring at my cadaverous face, and quickly understood my pistol’s threatening gestures. She lowered her knickers herself, with a lover’s delicacy, and made a martyr’s effort not to articulate cries that arose not from fear of my haggard presence, but from the unlikely pleasure of my pulsating, libertarian tongue, which drowned her soul and extracted a list of the addresses of policemen working in the same police station as her late husband.’

‘Did you kill her?’

‘I did. I carried out this first secret act against Fascism for the sake of Toño Penelas. The operations that followed were aimed more at family compensations.’

Camilo has yet to appreciate Bernardo Figueiras’ true merit. He is certainly a curious creature, especially in the ornate way in which he speaks, but Camilo attributes such genital violence more to a kind of madness or desperate depravation than to a radical, effective struggle. He doesn’t understand the ultimate happiness of things narrated by this colleague with the gruff voice. It will be some time before he does, even though the night is full of speech.

By four in the morning, the expectation has reached fever pitch, and shrill cries demand the presence of the San Amaro Cuntlicker. Temporary laughter and saucy remarks emerge from various cells. The insomniacs are waiting. Camilo pees in the pot and lies down on the bed. A distant voice leaps from mouth to mouth: ‘Valverde’s, Valverde’s…’ Bernardo Figueiras coughs and quells the murmurings. The silence becomes religious in nature.

‘Valverde Alonso was married to the daughter of a captain in the infantry. On Thursdays and Fridays, he used to visit the Sporting Club, where he played dominoes with other nationalistic patriots. I watched him on several nights until I realized the policeman’s monotony was of a military strictness that would not imperil my revolutionary projects. I waited for the maid to leave with her boyfriend on Capitán Galán Street and, at around midnight, once Valverde Alonso had left the building with his Fascist swagger, I slipped past the night watchman and entered the house like a ghost. The house was dark. Only a thin line of light from under the door of a room invaded that taciturn blackness. Cautiously, with feline stealth, I approached the keyhole and saw a woman lying on the bed, absorbed by the pages of a blue book she was holding in her hands. The woman was swarthy, of a tribal beauty, and turned the pages so quickly I thought it had to be a prayer book or possibly a book of poems, though I rejected this idea since the wives of Falangists don’t normally entertain any other poetry than the rhymed responses in their breviaries. I found it difficult to marry such beauty with that Fascist who must now be banging domino pieces on the Sporting Club’s marble. She had a certain romantic air and a premonition of sweetness in all her movements.’

Camilo hears the murmurs of prisoners trying to jump ahead in the narrative and admits that his cell-mate possesses the gift of speech.

‘I grabbed hold of my pistol and almost imperceptibly raised the golden latch, which groaned like a small kitten. The woman was petrified, but buried her eyes in her book to avoid encountering my dead man’s face and waited to hear what I had to say. I asked her what she was reading, and she replied it was a story. I sat on the bed and lifted her nightdress with the barrel of my pistol. She clenched her legs, trembling like a girl, and said to me in terror…’

‘“Who are you? What do you want?”’ Andrés, the prisoner who got married in Carral, knows the script and intervenes with a woman’s voice. Camilo laughs to himself.

‘“I’m a zombie who loves to suck cunts such as yours, recently washed and with the pure fragrance of lavender.”’

‘“My husband is on his way home. Don’t do anything to me!”’

‘“Your husband won’t be home until twenty to four in the morning. We have the whole night ahead of us,” I answered. She twisted around to face the pillow like a worm frightened by the metallic cold of the pistol. Terror had deposited frenzy in her eyes and seemed to be preparing a strategy clothed in autistic armour. She couldn’t bring herself to look me in the face. Such stubborn negativity was not owing to the traces of lust or resentment in my voice, which boomed with loud resonance, but because of the spectral apparition that imposed not fear, but the inescapable prediction that she wasn’t long for the land of the living. As you can see, she was right, I do look like a spectral apparition, all I need is a coroner’s certificate. I’ve spent too much time out of the sunlight, and the air of cemeteries is infused with decaying balsams that colour the skin with ashen, definitive tints like indelible stigmas.’

‘“What do you want?”’ Andrés’ effeminate voice is increasingly pathetic.

‘“I told you! To suck your cunt! But first I’m going to tell you a story which is far more real than the one you’re reading.” I lay beside her, placed my left hand on her navel, and the tips of my fingers began to toy with the elastic.’

‘“Please leave me alone. Don’t do anything to me!”’

‘Her voice of supplication acquired a tone of strange intimacy which failed to stem the overwhelming onslaught of caresses under the elastic of her knickers. I finished undressing her and stared for a moment at her naked body, soft belly, and the enormous parchment of her abundant breasts. But I was absolutely famished and asked her if she knew how to cook.’

‘“Please leave me alone.”’

‘“Get up. You’re going to make me a potato omelette. What’s your name?”’

‘“Asunción.”’

‘“OK, Asunción, head straight for the kitchen and, if you shout or do anything stupid, I’ll shoot you.”’

In one cell is a young man who is reputed to be the spitting image of an Andalusian writer. He has been sentenced to thirty years. He is cutting off the circulation in his right arm. He wants it to fall asleep so that he can masturbate. He says when he doesn’t feel his hand, he can pretend it’s the Falangist’s wife participating in his onanistic passion. His name is Leopoldo, but he’s better known as Pallas.

‘The woman covered her body with her arms and entered the kitchen, mumbling some unintelligible kind of prayer which soon turned into a contained lament. I sat on a chair and revelled in the torture. I knew she was suffering terribly, being there, all naked and bare, breaking eggs into a bowl and whisking them with a music that made her breasts dance. But it was also true that my stomach was rumbling. I hadn’t touched a mouthful in hours, and Saracen resentment was not sufficient to repel my voracious appetite. I told her there was a girl by the name of Lucía, with an infinite blue in her eyes that promised seas of love and sweetness, a girl with the fragrance of pippins who lived for her parents and liked to draw stars and yellow suns with a gleam that did honour to her name, a girl who grew up, little by little, until turning fifteen and who, despite the hunger that wandered about the house like another member of the family, acquired a grown woman’s body, a terrible thing, because one day, while she was colouring in one of her blazing stars, a savage sound knocked the door of the house off its hinges, and half a dozen pitiless men were not content to take her parents to a definitive destination, but also had time to taste this innocent fruit, who ended up in a madhouse, painting bright red suns.’

‘“I don’t see where you want to get to. What does this have to do with me?”’ Andrés the barber finds in his throat a tragic inflection which he transfers to his captive audience.

‘The crackling of the potatoes in the oil forced her backwards to avoid getting burned, and I placed a hand between her legs. She began another hasty prayer while I told her that I congratulated myself for not being there. Just imagining it was unbearable suffering.’

‘“Was she your sister?”’

‘“You could say that.”’

‘“But what does this have to do with me? Please leave me alone.”’

‘“Anything I do to you will be little. You’re not a girl, and I doubt very much you know how to paint a yellow sun. Are you going to tell me you don’t know who you’re married to?”’

‘“No, Valverde is not like that!”’ Andrés invents a retrospective weeping.

‘“Your Valverde, my love, was the first to have a go, and the last, because the little shit came back for more, yes, he repeated. And do you know something? I’m not here to kill him, that would be easy, I’m here for you to tell him I sucked your cunt and you enjoyed it. I’m sure that will hurt him more than any bullet.”’

Now Camilo understands Bernardo Figueiras’ reparative intentions and identifies with his intimate struggle, though he still feels sorry for the woman.

‘She turned the omelette over and remained silent for a moment, gauging my words and perturbing caresses. I grabbed a knife, cut the omelette into four pieces and left it to cool.’

‘“For the love of God, please don’t do anything to me! I’m not to blame for my husband’s actions.”’

‘“You have nothing to fear. I already told you I’m not going to hurt you. Quite the opposite, you’re going to feel a pleasure you’ll never forget. All I ask is that you tell your husband the truth. If you don’t tell him what has happened here tonight, then I will come back, but this time to kill you. Do you understand, Asunción?”’

‘“Please… I can get you some money.”’

‘“Oh, don’t worry, you will give me some money. What the poor need is not charity, but justice. Now you’re going to lie on this table, without complaining.”’

The inmates live out the tale and are unable to contain their clamorous chorus.

‘I accompanied my words with a flourish of the pistol. I cleared the contents of the table and saw how the woman wept silently, using a stool to lift her naked body. It was one in the morning, and the atmosphere for her had acquired a point of terror. I sat on a chair and opened her legs with some difficulty. The woman’s suppressed laments drowned out her voice and made it impossible to discern her final entreaty. I grabbed a piece of omelette and used it to cover the entire extent of her pubis. It formed a perfect triangle which enabled me to kill two birds with one stone.’

The prison resounds with laughter, and the night prolongs the humble hilarity of prisoners who unanimously applaud the tale. Camilo traces a smile that travels fifty years and finds him lying on the softness of a mattress, at that hour of the night when the two worlds meet to extinguish the light of sleep.

What Camilo liked best about Grandpa Estevo was the scientific measure with which he gave advice, the persuasive cadence of his fleshy voice with its military resonances. He had a quote or remark for every situation. The neighbours consulted him on everything: business, sales, illnesses and land disputes. There was a time, before Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, when, without wishing to, Grandpa Estevo turned into judge, teacher, veterinary surgeon and medical assistant. There was almost always someone at home with an illness or dispute that needed resolving. Camilo’s grandmother made an effort to persuade him to stop working, since with the neighbours’ gifts they had enough to live on, but he carried on working the land until he was seventy, which is when he began to entertain the spinning circles with readings from his book or the romantic strumming of his guitar, with its silver pegs and wood that gleamed archaically. He was convinced that culture had to form part of a peasant farmer’s existence, at least to a minimal degree. He always said that knowing how to read and write, together with a smidgen of accountancy, was necessary for the improvement of the countryside.

Camilo never left his side. He worshipped the ground he walked on and spent more time with him than with children of his own age. For Camilo, Grandpa Estevo was something like the centre of his world.

Camilo attended Don Xesús Mejuto’s school, where his best friend was Marcelo Uzal. They were of the same age and the smartest children in class. They related everything they learned at school to Grandpa Estevo, who endeavoured to polish up the extent of their childish, voluble understanding.

Grandpa Estevo had no problem talking to them about sex. He analysed the act for them with artistic drawings and even showed them sepia prints of naked women, which were of an absurd, anachronistic eroticism. Their learning was such that, when their classmates were just setting out on the road of masturbation, Camilo and Marcelo had already come up with a whole range of erotic possibilities in this vice, which they undertook in the shady privacy of their bedrooms. Grandpa Estevo proposed – and Camilo had heard him say this during evening talks with Don Xesús Mejuto, after the latter had been transferred to the school in Sésamo – that children should be taught amatory techniques at school so that, when they were older, they could enjoy themselves cleanly and break with the taboo imposed by the Church on ignorant consciences for a number of centuries. Don Xesús Mejuto was a liberal man who rejected religion at school, but he could never bring himself to say anything on the subject of sexuality.

What Camilo could never understand, and wouldn’t for quite some time, was what suspicious motive made his grandfather, who was wiser than Don Xesús, continue to work the land. He couldn’t understand what forced him to get out of bed every morning, with Swiss punctuality, harness the oxen to plough the fields and then, on his return, wash the dishes and cook the way women did. In those days, this was something unusual, especially given how at night he would acquire a restored appearance, which cast a golden reflection on the years spent in America, displaying pride in his ancestry, in noble possession of himself, preserved by the aged enamel of his smile, holding his book and guitar in such a way as to trigger collective consciousness and wisdom.

Camilo believed that his grandfather was immune to the dangers of life, but one night the Civil Guard turned up at a gathering in the mill in Rexidoiro. Grandpa Estevo stopped what he was reading, positioned his hat and put on his cloak against the cold. He called for Camilo, who was only just eleven, and told him he had to accompany these gentlemen to attend to a few matters. Camilo took the book and guitar and, were it not for the intimate bitterness that invaded the collective silence, he wouldn’t have worried. He carried on asking why they had arrested his grandfather and, since nobody wanted to answer him, he ran off into the night and, entering the house in a fright, found his father warming himself at the fire and his mother consoling Grandma Cristal, who was weeping silently in the kitchen.

Despite his tender years, Camilo sensed that this wasn’t the time for questions and obeyed his father’s order to go to bed. He said good night, opened the bed and pressed his ear against the door of the bedroom. After a long silence during which nothing could be heard except for his grandmother’s occasional sobs, there was a knock at the front door and in swept a river of indignant voices cursing Don Manuel Andión. Camilo realized that the priest had been instrumental in his grandfather’s arrest and clenched his fists in an adult gesture. That night, he couldn’t sleep because his childish brain was devising a strategy with which to avenge his grandfather.

A few days later, Camilo put on his Sunday best and sat on the beating stone to watch his father harness the oxen. Several men placed Grandpa Estevo’s coffin on the bed of the cart. It was a black, shiny box which reflected all the distinguished faces that had come from Coruña and were comforting his grandmother with pleasant phrases. There were so many that, when the pair of oxen went down the road to the cemetery, from out of the house, as from an anthill, came men and women who had never set foot in that place and were amazed by the perfect geography of lawns surrounding the small farmstead that had once belonged to Estevo Doldán Patiño, the anarchist who died in prison of pneumonia, according to the forensic report; men and women who disguised rabid remarks aimed at Augusto Seijas, Primo de Rivera and all the priests not present at an irreverent, secular ceremony that would surely have pricked their consciences like a pointed knife.

Camilo didn’t cry at the funeral, he just experienced the inverted tremor of hours spent in his grandfather’s company, the procession of visionary advice that inflamed with virtuous, legendary fables. Never had a funeral gathered so many people. For this reason, when the crowd departed from Celas, crushed by the rebelliousness of silence tanned in resentment, Camilo entered the house by his grandmother’s hand and waited until nightfall with an adult’s vigilance poisoned by revenge.

The sky was livid, and the stars put on sudden, fleeting appearances that gave the night the effect of sumptuous pyrotechnics. Camilo climbed out of a window because he knew that the door groaned terribly. It was four in the morning. He clung to the walls like a shadow, overwhelmed by a bout of bravery that swelled his chest. From behind the trees came the humidity of aquatic murmurs and the fervid surprise of the stream in Pereiros where Grandpa Estevo used to wash his feet while the cattle were drinking. He carried on walking until he reached the church and pushed open the enormous door. The rusty hinges creaked, and he stood for a moment, gazing at the liturgy of candles and barefoot saints that impregnated everything with a mystical, unreal aura which sent devout shadows over the vault and walls of the church in a spectral reconstruction of the Via Crucis. Camilo washed his face in the baptismal font and, immune to fear, covered the altar in all kinds of objects that were fit for burning: prayer stools, Gospels, hymn-books, saints of linen embroidered with apocryphal gold. He set them alight with a match that burst into flame, casting its eucharistic profanation against the stone. The fire quickly spread to the chancel, and Camilo remained for a short while, revelling in the insomniac taste of the revenge he had just exacted in posthumous loyalty to his grandfather, who must now be proffering a stentorian guffaw from inside his shimmering coffin.

With impossible peace of mind, Camilo left the church and returned home, whistling a song invented by the undaunted courage of his eleven years.

The moon arose in honour of the incendiary fervour of the church and the unprecedented gaze of a boy who gave himself up to the viscous dreams of a newly inaugurated adolescence.

A plane draws an oblique line in the clear sky and disappears between the trees in Sigüeiro. It lands successfully because the screech of its tyres on the runway can be heard with the suppressed rumble of a thunderstorm. Camilo watches everything through the window of the bus approaching Santiago and thinks of Lázaro, who must now have arrived at Barcelona Airport with his parents. For a moment, Camilo closes his eyes and is assailed by the perverse image of an air crash whose only survivor is his grandson, whom he imagines rummaging with his stick among corpses and metal in search of his parents, calling for them with the anguish of a lonely castaway, his cries smothered by terror. Camilo endures the image and opens his eyes to recover the reality of houses that the speed of the bus passes like colour slides.

He concentrates on the light of morning and stares into the distance at the multiple lines of trees and verdant horizons that prevent him from realizing they have reached the bus station.

He gets off the bus and lights a cigarette with the silver lighter that once belonged to his grandfather, a secular, sybaritic heirloom which has perpetuated a whole generation of smokers.

Since it’s early, Camilo decides to walk and passes through Pastoriza, Basquiños, Santa Clara, until arriving in Penas Square, where he has the impression he’s been transported to another century.

The morning is fresh, and Quintana and Praterías are full of bearded pilgrims carrying packaged tents on the racks of their bicycles. Many of the tourists are German, and it’s easy to see how they shed the Teutonic sadness of their demure, phantasmagorical paleness on the stone.

Camilo has the address in his pocket. He heads down Vilar Street with unsettling urgency, as if pursued by an accursed music, a symphony of sounds that modifies the stone and gives the impression the echoes are endowed with the religious solemnity of pious murmurs.

Camilo is driven by the suspicion that he might lay hands on the book with the cowhide corners. He’s aware that the encounter with its pages could be an almost human encounter that will shake the foundations of his seventy-six years.

Portico of Galician Literature

Antón Riveiro Coello

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