[under]construction

stories are always being constructed. the words work like hands, setting brick after brick in its place.

a wall that protects us.

birthday

my father was born in 1949, the year after the war had come to an end. my mother came into the world in 1952 and the maquis still roamed the hills. the war seemed far away, but it was there.

and it is still there.

seams

i don’t know the whole story. i only recall, although this i do recall clearly, some scraps. not even scraps of the story, but rather the ones of the stories that grandma glória told about the story, or of the stories casilda struggles to remember that she heard from aunt ubaldina. how can you identify the links between one remnant and another? what stitch should you use? where should you cut the fabric? in fact, what cloth should be used? what is the right pattern?

is there a correct way to do it?

family architecture

i come from a family built on longing, on nostalgia for bygone days.

grandma glória was always talking about the times in the big house of portaris, about how she was happy before what happened happened. mom always talking about the family, about how important we were, about how in vigo we even had a coat of arms on a gothic-style stone house. aunt pilar always remembering her childhood in the house of one of her uncles, who was quite sophisticated and very rich.

i come from a family built on anger, because the ruin we suffered wasn’t fair. if it weren’t for uncle manuel, portaris would be ours, if it weren’t for that fight, we would still have sunday lunches with relatives, if it weren’t for the war, i would be living in redondela.

oh, if only it weren’t for…

the portrait

uncle manuel is in the only family photograph that my grandmother kept. uncle manuel was one of her older brothers, she was the youngest. there were thirteen of them, not counting the ones who had died. that’s why, in the photo, my grandmother is at my great-grandfather’s feet and is just two years old. uncle manuel looks straight-backed and stiff, in one of the outer corners of the photo. even though my great-grandparents are sitting in the center of the picture, as if they are on a royal throne, the one who is presiding over the scene is uncle manuel. because he has that air about him. and he plays up that majestic appearance with the white suit and white hat and white shoes. as if he were an indiano, the emigrant returned from the americas.

the rest of the brothers and sisters, thirteen in all, besides the ones who had died, and even my great-grandparents, sitting on their royal throne, look like uncle manuel’s poor servants, the tenant farmers who work his fields, the washerwomen who rinsed out his pristine laundry, the wet nurses who nursed my grandmother.

always serving the lord.

portaris

portaris was a place of immense wealth, with the meadows, swiddens, oak groves, community fields, wheat fields, and hills where cart after cart of manure was carried down. they said that portaris had five hundred square meters or so for every day of the year and had at least thirty tenant farmers. there wasn’t a lunchtime during the week when there weren’t at least two priests sitting at the table.

saying

where the priest says mass, he gets fed.

once this was all ours

one day my brother went with uncle josé to alter the course of the water. going up to the heights where the monastery was, where the well was and the irrigation streams started out, he looked where his uncle was pointing and listened to what he said:

—everything you see there on the horizon—and he pointed toward the north—were lands that belonged to portaris. when the words came to an end, he rested a hand on the boy’s shoulder, like they do in films with the cavalry set in the far west, and they watched the sun set.

areias

areias was a place of immense wealth, with the meadows, swiddens, oak groves, community fields, wheat fields, and hills where cart after cart of manure was carried down. they said that areias had five hundred or so square meters for every day of year and had at least thirty tenant farmers. there wasn’t a lunchtime during the week when there weren’t at least two poor persons and beggars sitting at the table and workers who were unemployed and ill.

the doors to the house of manuel gonzález fresco were always open and nobody went away empty-handed.

fishing without a hook

one day my brother went with uncle josé to change the way the water ran.

—everything you see there on the horizon—and he pointed toward the north—were lands that belonged to portaris.

inhaki was sad when he came back. he didn’t give a hoot about contemplating the horizon lit up by the sunset.

—i just wanted to see eels.

dad had told him the well where the irrigation streams emerged was full of them, as big as serpents. and he hadn’t caught sight of even one.

slippery fish, like the memories we retain of bygone days.

the illness

for years, during sunday visits to the house in ceia, my grandmother glória would tell my father: uncle manuel is very ill, he might not make it past christmas. and christmas went by and a new sunday came. uncle manuel is really ill, he might not make it past easter; and easter came and went.

one of those mournful warnings by grandma had given rise to the rumor. dying he’s dying, but he hasn’t died yet. it might be he keeps going because of those shots of cane liquor, the old woman with the voice of a sassy young lass would affirm. even a frost won’t get rid of weeds, a member of the family would inevitably let slip out every sunday.

and that’s when grandmother glória would get all riled up:

—shhhh! show some respect! he was never a good person, but i don’t wish him dead.

and then what died was the conversation. until the next sunday arrived bringing the same comment as always.

uncle manuel is very ill, he might not make it past midsummer eve.

chest ailment

version 1 (more outlandish and unpredictable): one day my great-grandfather went to the county fair in cambados and when he came home he ordered everything to be packed up because he had just bought land over yonder, along the sea, that they told him was better for planting gardens and growing fruit trees.

version 2 (more sensible and boring): the old man had become very ill with a chest ailment. he sold everything in cervanha and bought new land, near the coast, so he could go more often to bathe in the waters at a toja, the resort, which they had said could cure you and he would cough less and wouldn’t suffocate from the spasms in his diaphragm.

the point is

the important thing about the imaginative and random version, as opposed to the sensible and boring one is seeing how each thing that happens has many versions that people tell, one, two, twelve, not as many as there are people.

as many as the times this story is told.

wardrobe

shoes ask for stockings

stockings ask for shoes

the shoemakers in the mountains

want land in cambados, they do

migration

the oldest children were all fairly grown. only the little girls had been born in the new house. the move took a couple of days and required four or five ox carts, with the chestnut bed frames, the dressers and trunks for the bed linens. on the trip they had to go back a ways, because along the way they’d lost aunt carmem, who was very little then.

they say uncle manuel, one of the older ones, had a girlfriend acquired during the festival in bandeira, but the relationship never made it past bandeira. who knows if that’s how the meanness entered his body.

marketplace

we don’t know what market our great-grandfather went to, but we think it was the one by mosteiro, in meis. it was held on the ninth and twenty-fifth of each month and it was the biggest one in the area. who knows if that’s where the muleteers decided to accept dried octopus as payment for oil and paprika, and was thus the origin of polvo à feira, octopus market-style, a national dish, gastronomic seal of quality. what was definitely true is that was where they sold cows who had just given birth, pregnant ones, the ones meant for slaughter, young cows, calves, oxen, pigs and horses. the wagon drivers from carvalhinho traded ribeiro wine, chestnuts from the courel mountains, walnuts from brolhao. the shepherds from ourense visited houses to buy livestock for wool. people came from meanho and valga, and caldas, and moranha, and cambados selling and buying, or just stopping by the vendors’ stands to listen to stories and have a glass of wine.

and in the middle of this hoopla great-grandfather heard them talking about a farm that belonged to some friars that nobody wanted: portaris.

the coup

grandmother glória had the family portrait, with all of them, male and female, in front of the family home, perhaps in order to soften the suffering from having lost it. but every time the photograph emerged from the drawer and the parchment paper that it was wrapped in, the trauma, like the phoenix, was reborn from its silver nitrate.

—back then, back then, we were really happy, before uncle manuel.

one who saves, never goes without

version 3 (who knows if it’s the last): the old man was a clog maker. he went around to the big markets, and in his stand he repaired soles, replaced laces, tried to renew worn-down clogs. at one of those fairs he heard them talking about portaris.

the job as clog maker wasn’t a small business, considering the profit.

old wives’ tales

years ago i heard about the strength of the agrarian movement in the area around taveirós. the peasants, women and men, organized in unions, listened to the emancipating sermons of basilio álvarez and, in partnership with the ones who had emigrated, set up the first secular schools in the region, because they wanted daughters and sons who were deserters of illiteracy.

one of the things that amazed me the most was when i found out what happened in 1915. as always, the big houses with 365 ferrados were not required to pay taxes, the huts with a few cuncas, scraps of land, a granary with a single section, had to pay for the rest. and there was a general strike: for weeks the villages in the area refused to sell their produce in town, which meant the people there had no milk, no flour, no eggs, no vegetables or apples.

i had the idea that my people were downtrodden and had no backbone, and i was quite surprised at its astonishing history of resistance. astonishing and forgotten.

breakfast

in the morning, uncle manuel only had two shots of cane liquor, one the white kind, the other with herbs. so they say.

oral literature traditions

one of the sayings i recall from grandma glória is her i’m going to tell you a story. a saying that always surprised me because what my grandmother would tell was what we children called gossip. my grandmother never lost her fondness for telling stories and she never lost the ironic way in which she told them even when her memory failed.

i never saw them, because i hadn’t been born yet, but i can see them in the tiny kitchen in ceia, crowded in there, sitting on those white and green stools, around the table, my aunt yoya pretending she didn’t know anything and grandma glória telling about the big house in portaris and about when the whole family had come from cervanha with the beds and dressers in ox carts and they lost aunt carmem, the one some missionaries passing through later took to become a nun, because grandpa, abuelito, was a man who went to mass every day and had the priest to eat at the house and that peddler who stopped in the big house on market days and the odd rubber that he kept in his traveling case and how aunt ubaldina egged grandma glória on to steal the rubber and…

rivers that run to the sea

our lives don’t begin when we’re born. they’re not over when we die, either. i don’t want to hear about rivers running to seas that are death. somebody already wrote that somewhere.

lives are lives when they’re mentioned and talked about and noted. there’s the one who leaves footprints in the dust of the roads for years until life finally arrives. there are people who are born dead, nobody says anything about them.

and that’s why memory is important. it provides a space for names and faces. it creates a place where people can live, whether it’s in the language of everyday life, or on the paper that gives itself up to writing. and there are people, institutions, media, caught up in the huge task of attaching labels, chronicles, footnotes, speeches, glosses, images, death notices, doctoral dissertations, songs, photographs, odes, news reports, obituaries, brief announcements, stories for all the grandchildren, so that their loved ones will exist, be, remain alive.

yet there are also people who try very hard not to have been, not to have existed, not to have lived. the person who might have known about them, might have told their lives and experiences, dies and we comb through files and libraries, the cabinets of notarized documents, drawers full of old letters, depositories of journals from bygone days, tales told in the taverns, and we can’t find those people. they didn’t want to have a life, they didn’t want to be remembered.

why do we write about them, then? because they don’t deserve to be anonymous, because they really did live their lives and their lives were the suffering of others, because they caused pain and terror, fear and death.

because they were bad, and they were powerful.

intifada

when we were little girls and we went to mass in lois, the communists would hide along the side of the road and, protected by the embankment and the tall corn, throw stones at us.

—and we were just little girls going to mass!!, grandmother glória said, angrily.

veracity/truthfulness

—that wasn’t corn, papá protested, those were oak trees.

—i’m telling it the way i heard grandma glória tell it.

—well people are going to think you’re lying, when it’s really true, other than the fact that it wasn’t corn.

the eel of memory slithering through your hands.

television programs

grandpa ramiro only watched three things on tv, he allowed others to watch with him and forbid anybody to interrupt: the news, curro jiménez, and cowboy movies.

in the car

i like the old road from cambados to ponte vedra because it goes through portaris. my great-grandparents’ big house faces the main thoroughfare and so does aunt ubaldina’s house and casilda’s and andrés’s, and rosa’s. and when i sit down at the table on sundays i always have something to talk about: i went through lois the other day, a branch on ubaldina’s big oak tree broke, there’s a nursery in portaris now, they fixed the roof on the shed, glória has filled her garden with gnomes, she probably brought them from germany.

if it’s not an ox, it’s a cow

ever since i can remember i’ve felt sorry for the oxen, or the cows, it’s all the same. whenever i saw a wagon go by overflowing with hay, gorse, potatoes, manure, and the animals were hauling the load, so slowly, i couldn’t help feeling so bad seeing how hard they worked. reading saramago one image was engraved in my mind, of the ox carts pulling the enormous stone that was destined for the threshold of the convent. in the old photographs of the galleons of arouça, my gaze still settled on the carts and the oxen that waited for the load of stone, wood, clay. and i thought about how they were low in the sand straining like when we drag dories toward the shore. they told me that in vau, between arouça and leste, when there were high tides the ox carts went by hauling sand and stone and salt. and as i listened to the story, my thoughts strayed to the animals, the water up to their groins, not knowing why they were cold and afraid of the current and feeling the slap of the mullets and the heavy weight of the chores.

nickname

since great-grandpa came to portaris from cervanha, in the area around silheda, he was given the nickname montanhés, the fellow from the mountains, by the people in lois and the land around barrantes. that says a lot about the imagination and ironic mindset of the people who lived around there.

ride

let me up on the cart

driver as you’re singing

let me up on the cart

i want to see my girl

exodus

every time grandma glória told the story about moving to portaris, i thought of that film where lines and lines of wagons, covered with flowers and tarpaulins, because only women and robert taylor rode on them, crossed the desert, the mountains of utah, the ones in a rocha, anlhada, santo andré de cesar, lantanho, paradela—until they found the pleasant, paradise-like valley where they were going to found a new line.

the ones who took part in conquering the west didn’t know that evil was leading the wagons.

the devil on wheels. uncle manuel.

the grandfather with the cucumbers

in our house there were three grandmothers, because there were the two real ones and we had to add aunt ubaldina, the only sister who, other than grandmother glória, was born in portaris. my father loved her like a mother and it’s brotherly love he feels toward his male and female cousins, because he spent more of his childhood playing games with them than he did with his real siblings.

we liked to go to lois to visit aunt ubaldina and uncle josé. their garden was even better than our grandparents’ in ceia and much more fun. while grandma glória planted potatoes, lettuce, tomatoes, cabbage and turnip greens, ubaldina experimented with cucumbers, padrón peppers and hot malagueta peppers, cherry tomatoes, and other delicious things that back then you never saw in the genetically modified hot stores. for years, when we were told we were going to go to lois, my little sister received the news with excitement and said great! we’re going to see the cucumber grandfather!

thinking on your feet

grandma glória’s neighbor wanted to make a storage shed bordering on her land. grandma glória’s neighbor had money with a shady origin, like all the money the rich people have. when the rich and shady neighbor went to her to get permission to make use of the wall along the land she’d inherited, grandma glória hesitated. oh, i have to talk to my children, i don’t want to ruin their inheritance. and she didn’t speak with my father, nor with rubio, mon or jorge. not even with her husband, my grandpa ramiro. she went straight to her nephew benito, who was a lawyer, and like his title says, specialist in criminal actions by neighbors: ask him to pay you, see how much he’s willing to cough up. and so grandma glória went, with a fearful sighing, complaining about the suspicious children she had, who didn’t want to trust the man, worried he was planning on robbing land from her. the rich, dishonest neighbor offered two hundred thousand pesetas for the right of access. ask for more, said benito, he can afford it, and grandma glória went crying to him that she had a lot of children and there wasn’t enough money to go around. the neighbor paid five hundred thousand pesetas, and grandma glória bought a new stove.

my father was upset that she’d left her children high and dry like that, without taking real advantage of the situation, the greedy treasure hunters.

i decided that i had the smartest grandmother in the world.

naïveté

aunt ubaldina was as sweet as a woolen blanket. our mother always told us about when she and my father were already married and when we little kids were still nearly babies, they went to lois for a visit. already back then my father would go around picking up everything he thought was worth collecting and that day he noticed one of those old irons, the ones that had the name on the side and still had to be filled with hot coals to heat them. he asked aunt ubaldina to give it to him.

she lowered her voice so we children wouldn’t hear and asked, very upset and grabbing the tin with the bills and coins in it:

—good lord, don’t you even have enough money to buy an iron? how much money do you need?

it took quite a while for my parents to convince her that they only wanted it to decorate the living room.

i decided that aunt ubaldina was the most candid woman in the world.

the inheritance

it’s not clear how, but the truth is as follows: uncle manuel, little by little, one brother at a time, one sister at a time, managed to consume the inheritance of his thirteen brothers and sisters, not counting the ones who were dead. out of all the land that portaris had, one field for every day of the year plus at least thirty caretakers, nothing was left for grandma glória and the rest of the family.

only two sisters managed to collect their share, aunt carmem and aunt ubaldina.

aunt carmem because she was a nun and the holy church looked after her patrimony, because we know that it looks out more for landholdings than for souls.

the thing with aunt ubaldina was a mystery, maybe her husband, uncle josé, stood up to uncle manuel.

that’s the reason why we looked at uncle josé with admiration, like a hero, because something magic must have happened for a short little man, scrawny and with eyeglasses thicker than the bottom of a bottle, to get the better of uncle manuel.

because we’d always known and remembered uncle josé as an unimportant little old man, and uncle manuel, whom we never got to meet, was always the good-looking young man in the photograph.

chorus

if that’s how badly he treated his sisters and brothers, imagine how he treated people who weren’t his family…

requiem

when uncle manuel died, reading the notice of his death in the farodevigo, we discovered two things: one, that aunt ubaldina was in reality waldina, quite the odd and amusing surprise; and two, that uncle manuel had been the mayor of riba-d’úmia in 1940, four years after the triumphal year.

farming

the only thing we know about great-grandpa is the way he looks in the family portrait. he’s a small, thin man who, having been gifted with a gaggle of sons and daughters, suffered from tuberculosis or asthma or bronchitis. he was very religious, grandma glória used to say, he went to mass every day and had such strong faith. my father, when he talked about him, called him abuelito, grampy, he never called him mr. manuel or sir or anything like that.

that’s why the image of my great-grandfather with the ox yoke around his neck, pulling the plow, in the meadow to the east of the big house in portaris, harrowing his own fields with his own equipment and his limited muscle, made such a strong impression on me.

aunt ubaldina swears she saw that. and i, guided only by words, photographs, and the movies, can only imagine uncle manuel in a white suit, with a white hat, white shoes, cracking and sparking a braided whip at abuelito who, like the slaves picking cotton, could barely drag himself along beneath the weight of the flagellation.

maybe these and other abuses were the reason why grandma glória took her folks to live with her.

chorus

if he treated his father that badly, what did he do to people who weren’t his family…

questions

which came first, the pity for the oxen or the pity for great-grandfather? are they both the same feeling?

empathy

when i listen to chelo rodríguez, the guerrilla fighter, tears in her eyes, tell in the documentary as silenciadas, the silenced women, how the civil guards arrived at her house one morning early, at dawn, how they entered the bedroom of her father and mother to beat them to a pulp, but first calling her mother a whore, and how they left them there almost dead, in the same bed, my imagination makes me think of uncle manuel and abuelito and great-grandmother casilda.

in soulecim, in the house called fortaleza, in contrast with portaris, the one who did the beating wasn’t the son.

blurry

—when was the last time you saw the photograph?

—i don’t know. years ago.

—you described it wrong, my father complained. uncle manuel is not wearing white, and he never stands, and he wears a dark suit, and sits up straight in the chair. yes, he does wear white shoes, but only the shoes.

—oh, i only wrote it the way i remembered it and i’ve already organized the book with uncle manuel dressed like that all the way through.

—well, people are going to think you’re lying, when it’s all true, except the fact that uncle manuel is not wearing white.

the eel of memory begins to slip through my hands. all slimy.

fowl

sing cuckoo sing cuckoo

on the handle of the plow

the wren is in the nest

waiting for the honest man to come

limits

aunt ubaldina’s garden ended in a stream, which was the one she used for water and abundant crops. on the other side of the stream an embankment marked the line that couldn’t be crossed. the red river that separated texas from the rest of the world.

—that’s where grandmother glória was born, my father used to say, now it all belongs to uncle manuel.

democracy

in grandma glória’s house you had to vote conservative. for every election she chose the party, more or less right wing, more or less serious, and all the adults who slept under her roof had to help her with the selection. we never knew if the orders were respected or agreed with in silence but then afterward there was a subversive switching of the envelopes.

but what grandmother wanted to make clear was that in her house the socialists could not receive any votes, and much less the communists. never that.

forbidden fruit

aunt ubaldina’s garden ended in a stream, the one that provided her with water and good crops. on the other side of the stream an embankment marked the line that could not be crossed. an apple tree grew exactly over the line.

—i never ate such sweet apples, papá recalls, but we were so afraid of uncle manuel that we didn’t even take the apples that fell on aunt ubaldina’s side. they rotted on the ground.

better off as fertilizer than being eaten by the children of the bad apples.

caring for someone

great-grandfather took a long time to die and spent a lot of time in bed. he needed hands to change his sheets, bathe him, give him his medicine at the right time, clean vomit and excrement, prepare soups and broths. and those hands belonged to grandma glória, the youngest daughter. she had to tend to the old man, so others had to take care of her children, turtledoves that sat on the cuckoo’s eggs to keep them warm. her many children were taken into the homes of sisters, friends, neighbors. my father spent years, he doesn’t know how many, in lois, in aunt ubaldina’s house.

those of us who grew up helter-skelter in the family house, more or less strapped for money but at least we were together, always felt that movement of sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, like something showy, calculated moves on a chessboard.

and so ubaldina couldn’t have cared for her folks, who lived right nearby? and so wasn’t that uncle manuel’s responsibility, since there was a reason he’d ended up with the big house?

contrasts

the garden in ceia was a forbidden space. grandpa ramiro never let us go in there. we might break branches, ruin sprouts, destroy flowers that had been pollinated and even scare the chickens and then they’d stop laying eggs for good.

in contrast, the first thing aunt ubaldina did when we got to lois was to take us to see the things growing there, to show off the orchard…

afterward she’d knead some flour really well, fry it in oil and then she’d invite us to have freshly-made churros.

harvest

i planted a walnut tree for my granddaughters

grandfather announced at a sunday dinner

once in a while

playing outside the garden

a voice would arise from the thick growth

of grape vines and ripening fruit:

girls, that walnut tree is yours

you’ll still be eating walnuts

when i’m no longer here

and we would laugh at how silly grandpa was

the union pigs

the biological mission of ponte vedra was born from the hand of cruz gallástegui, agronomist specializing in genetics. there he experimented with hybrid corn and crossing types of livestock to improve the productivity of the species. during the republic, gallástegui founded the union of seed producers. through the union he collaborated with the women and men farmers in order to spread his hybrids around the rural areas of galiza, in an effort to achieve social progress. he wanted the years of famine to be just a part of history.

in april of 1935, a worker from portaris, manuel garcia sampayo, beat the record for raising pigs that belonged to the seed growers’ union. and he’s there, straight-backed and stiff, in the center of the photograph, with his pigs, all of them, except for the ones that died.

—he already was running the whole house, my father says, surprised.

how it must have been

if he was that mean to his family, how did he treat those who were from outside, grandma glória would wonder.

and when she speculated like that she was lying. because she knew, oh she knew, how uncle manuel behaved with people who weren’t family members; but in her kindness, or rather, because of her sense of family honor, even though she could definitely imagine it, grandmother wasn’t the sort to condemn him, to say it out loud.

or maybe she thought, and rightfully so, that not saying things was the best way to put them to rest, to make some realities disappear, because just thinking about them made your skin crawl.

they always say it’s the victorious who write history, but it’s also true that they write it inaccurately, they unwrite it. and that’s why uncle manuel, who was always bad and acted like it, only appears in the records of local history as the mayor of his town for a few years.

and that’s all.

about the abuse

it was said that portaris had a field for every day of the year and that there were at least thirty caretakers. still, one of uncle manuel’s evil doings was to starve our great-grandparents to death.

matarile, a song

give me your bread married woman

the one you give to your husband

my husband has gone away

he took the keys when he went

agrarian meeting

in the market area of mosteiro, on the ninth and twenty-fifth of every month, there weren’t only mule drivers who had perhaps decided to accept dried octopus as payment for the oil and paprika, not only cart drivers who traded with ribeiro wine, chestnuts from the courel, walnuts from brolhão, not just shepherds from ourense who came by the houses to buy livestock for the wool. not only clog makers from cervanha who bought more land.

in the market area in mosteiro there were big meetings to discuss agrarian issues, like the one on may twenty-fourth, 1931, when a rabble-rousing, learned, enthusiastic, and baroque basilio álvarez urged the peasant women to exercise their power and their dignity.

i don’t know how much uncle manuel enjoyed these meetings, manuel of portaris, owner of a field for every day of the year and a minimum of thirty caretakers.

farmers

among the founding members of the union of seed producers there were four priests, from curro, leiro, baión, and quintela. who knows if one of them had told uncle manuel about the project, during one of those midday meals in portaris when there were at least two clergymen seated at the table.

forest policy

i planted a walnut tree for my granddaughters, they’ll have walnuts from it to eat. my grandfather ramiro said that at dinnertime one sunday.

grandpa ramiro was definitely a man of few words.

a new dawn

i see unions for seed producers, run by experienced geneticists. i see stone manor houses that provide space for the cooperatives, better than the ones in denmark, wrote castelao in his book forever in galiza.

what he didn’t see were the manuels of portaris who were destroying everything as a new day was dawning.

the belt

after my great-grandparents were out of the house, the abuses didn’t stop. those went with uncle manuel wherever he went.

the oldest son fled as soon as he could. he himself told how his father beat his mother every day.

—yet we never heard her cry or yell. she didn’t say anything so we wouldn’t find out.

one day, when he was older, he couldn’t stand the silence he heard on the other side of the wall. he knocked on the door of the room with so much fury that he knocked it down. then, shocked, he saw his mother, naked and hunched over in a corner, curled up like a miserable worm, and uncle manuel, his father, with his belt raised, a whip made of braided leather, flashing like lightning on the bloody skin.

his son never spoke to him again. when he was old enough he boarded the steamship to buenos aires.

he never caught the return ship.

chorus

if he treated his wife so badly, what was he like with other people…

black-and-blue marks

so i grew up hearing that aunt carmen, uncle manuel’s wife, was a really bad person, my father says, sadly.

funeral

i didn’t participate in the funeral service for uncle manuel. when he finally died he only had six sisters and brothers left: uncle rafael, uncle andrés, uncle pepe, aunt carmem, aunt ubaldina and grandma glória. during the service, between one response and another, they made quite the spectacle. the priest began his panegyric for the deceased, praising a good life and the christian spirit, and from the mouths of his six brothers and sisters there was nothing but childish laughter escaping. it was a real sight, my father would say, six old persons, full of wrinkles and bent over, one hand perched on their back or on a knee, controlling their need to laugh out loud in the middle of a funeral. for once, grandma glória, who was very definitely religious, denied the infallibility of her god:

—this priest doesn’t have a clue!

kindness

and aunt carmem, who was a nun, because some missionaries who were passing by took her with them to barcelona, and was very religious, since she lived in a world of total naïveté, said something that bordered on sacrilege: manuel finally did something good, even if it was after he died.

it’s been so long since the six of us have gotten together!

cosa nostra

i was always amazed, i don’t recall how old i was, with how naturally my family talked, first, about the death of a person, and second, about how bad he was. and that was even though he was a member of the family, of course, not from somewhere else.

angry

the biological mission of ponte vedra was born from the hand of cruz gallástegui, agronomist specializing in genetics. with the mission’s help he collaborated with the women and men who worked the land to distribute his hybrids in the rural areas of galicia. the coup of 36 destroyed the project. many of the cooperatives and associations that collaborated with the mission were exterminated, forbidden, confiscated.

a laborer from portaris, manuel garcia sampayo, really took advantage of the before and after.

the union pig.

anti-hero

my childhood bogeyman was always grandpa ramiro. i never stopped being afraid the times i had to go up to greet him because he rarely smiled and often scolded us. he was a tall man with impressive shoulders, strong. when he wasn’t spraying sulfate on the garden, pruning, grafting, drawing off or bottling the wine, he was in the threshing area, under the grape vine, seated on the wine press by the door of the wine cellar and growling softly. the only thing we knew about him and from him is that he went to a war in france riding on a donkey. you said hi abuelo (because we always called him abuelo, grandfather) and you got a grrrrrrrrr! as the only response. you would be playing on the ground and he’d yell out pigs, you’re a bunch of pigs! you’d be sitting properly in the kitchen listening to the grownups tell their stories: these children who live in stables don’t even know how to play!

—my grandfather always called apartments stables and the bunch of granddaughters and grandsons were the children.

because grandfather was the bad guy in the story we never quite figured out what uncle josé was like, with that scrawny little body he’d gotten the best of uncle manuel and, in contrast, grandpa ramiro hadn’t been able to.

Text © Susana Sanches Arins

Translation © Kathleen March

This title is available to read in English – see the page “Novels”.