Books Burn Badly

Live Phosphorus

POLKA HAD STOPPED playing the bagpipes long before. He hadn’t played them since the war. When he was freed, after labouring in a wolfram mine, it was some time before he could even hold the instrument, let alone play it. While he was away, Olinda would occasionally allow their daughter to blow and try to fill the bag, made of goatskin covered in dark blue velvet with a similar-coloured trim. The girl thought it was always on the verge of turning black as if night had sheltered in the bagpipes with the mystery of her father. But her father returned and the bagpipes remained hanging on the wall. As time passed and the bagpiper paid them no attention, O thought they got smaller, condemned to extinction, like an ancient creature in a forgotten legend, skin and bone of a rare, long-legged bird, with their melancholy colour and golden tassels which seemed to have lost their majesty, but for her were like coloured caresses. No, he couldn’t touch them. Later maybe. Polka said he’d run out of air. His chest wasn’t strong enough. But one Christmas Eve, when Olinda was pregnant with Pinche, he played them again. O was amazed and Olinda almost died laughing as she cradled her own belly. To start with, both Polka and the instrument looked as if they would burst. Polka’s face was red from the effort of containing the air. But the bagpipes sounded again and it seemed to O they were finally letting go of all they’d been saving.

The bagpipes kept not only the light they’d saved up inside their black velvet, but a lot of silence. Silence must be kept. O soon distinguished two classes of silence. There was mute silence. The silence of suppressing what cannot or should not be said. A precautionary, fearful silence. And then there was friendly silence. The silence that makes you think. The silence that protects you and allows room for meditation. The silence of the bagpipes waiting for Polka.

She and her mother had also saved on joy. While Polka was away, they had to save on everything. Like women dressed in mourning. They saved as well. Not only did they wear the same dull clothing, but their nature changed. They spoke less, didn’t laugh, hardly spent anything on looking at others. They saved on words, joy, light. And yet all the people in mourning, like O and Olinda, didn’t feel any less, more perhaps, and they didn’t have any less to say. More perhaps.

They saved.

Everything that had been saved at home, in all the homes, now emerged from Polka’s bagpipes. Because once again he’d sized up those booming pipes, those snoring pipes, an inheritance, good for parties but also for accompanying choirs, processions and union marches.

On 1 May, the priest had said to him, ‘You played the bagpipes in town for Sacco and Vanzetti and now you come here to play them for St Joseph.’

‘I play Saudade, father, for all souls, yours included. This danceable requiem doesn’t hurt anyone.’

No, it wasn’t that priest who informed against him. This was something he’d never know. Some people died as a bet in a game of cards. They had no idea, were asleep perhaps, while their fate hung on a movement of cards or dice. After Polka was arrested, Olinda was sacked from Zaragüeta Matchstick Factory. In fact, all the employees were sacked, mostly matchstick-makers, about three hundred women, and their union was outlawed. The factory didn’t work for several months. Then it opened again with staff specially selected by the Falange who had to belong to the Glorious Movement. Olinda didn’t pass the test. She obtained a not unfavourable report by bribing one of the local bosses who’d multiplied in an ever increasing chain of command supervising the confiscations. But it was all for nothing, because another local boss decided the jobs would go to a group of highly recommended women who’d recently joined the Fascist Party. Within a few months, parallel power structures having quickly sprung up, this marginalised, fanatical group of pre-war gangsters took control of the city. As she staggered about from place to place, Olinda was shocked. The governor had ordered the Roman salute to be obligatory. In any official building or even in the street, whoever should ask for it, you had to raise your arm and respond with the standard ‘vivas’. In an atmosphere like that, Olinda witnessed a change in many people that went beyond political opportunism. Something like a biological mutation. Not just in appearance. Some people’s voices changed. Some people didn’t hear her. And, most upsetting of all, some people didn’t see her. Despite the fact she was pregnant. She even wondered if she still existed. Lots of people had disappeared. Maybe she had too, without realising. Many workers from the Tobacco Factory in Palloza and the Matchstick Factory in Castiñeiras lived in the suburbs like Olinda. They’d get up early, when it was still dark, with oil lamps and candles to light the way. These luminous processions would converge. Get their bearings, see each other like lines of glow-worms in the night. These moving lines carried words as well as light. Constructed murmurs, songs, news, as each candle arrived. Sometimes one of the lights would be missing, there’d be an empty place, a gap in the sentence, murmur or song. This meant someone had disappeared. Olinda never missed the procession of lights until she gave birth. These lines of female workers reminded some of the Holy Company of Souls, but for Olinda it was just the opposite. With the death of Arturo da Silva, the arrest of Polka and the disappearance of all those young people who were supposed to board the special train to Caneiros, being there, being a candle, was a strange duty she had to fulfil while she could. The child she was carrying, the heavy load in her belly, was another certainty, you might have thought. The uncomfortable graft in her body was like an advertisement, a guarantee of reality. Or at least it should have been. But what worried her was that no one, on her bureaucratic rounds to safeguard her job, referred to her state. No one, even out of habit, used the phrase ‘happy condition’, as if in her case it would have been a mistake. No one congratulated her. You can have disappeared, thought Olinda, and be pregnant. The child be real, but not you. That’s why she had to get up every morning and join the procession of candles.

Olinda did not get past the so-called ‘period of purges’. As far as she could tell, there were at least two weighty arguments against her. Her husband was in prison and she had just given birth. She tried not to think with her mind so as not to lose it. At times, however, furtive thoughts would come to her, such as the belief that a situation like hers was a cause for mercy and not greater punishment. But she had to avert such thoughts, otherwise she’d go mad. This elementary law no longer applied. She also had to forget the word ‘purges’. She had not got past the ‘purges’. Those now holding power did so on the basis of hundreds of uncleared murders. Who raped, tortured to death and slashed the breasts of the librarian, the Republican governor’s wife, having caused her to miscarry? Who were the purgers? She should feel honoured to be a purgee. She should take comfort in the whispers she heard as she passed, ‘That’s one of the purgees.’ But no. Everything that was happening took its toll on her body. She found herself ugly. She’d lost the shine in her eyes and hair. Purged, impure. She hardly had any milk to give to the baby. How could she have been born so pretty?

The Matchstick Factory was surrounded by a tall wall. She’d worked in that enclosure for many years. She’d started when she was still a girl. She had to get up early, under cover of darkness. But in her memory it was a party. Like the day a street band came from the parish for her to carry the festive bouquet. She loved carrying her candle. She wasn’t sorry to leave home, to be separated from her parents, as at other times. She worked in all the different departments. Started by counting matches. Her hands and mind were very alert and she got to count so quickly, by thirties, fifties, seventies, nineties, that her fingers ran ahead of her brain, danced attendance on the voices. She then took to sticking the strips of glass-paper that were used to rub and light the matches. The department she liked best, because of the work and company, was the one for cutting and assembling boxes. She was extremely skilled in making boxes. She knew the importance to a household of a good box of matches. She also knew these boxes, especially those bearing phototypes, could become small chests. For keeping someone’s first tooth, a curl, a letter, a ticket for a special train. The women who cut and assembled boxes acquired a certain way of telling stories. Their stories, their secrets, were designed to fit inside a box. Which is why a box of matches, when it’s empty, if you hold it half-open to your ear, will whisper to you.

This box doesn’t say anything.

There were days the women were silent. And then the boxes had matches, but no voices.

She also spent time as an assistant in the laboratory, weighing and measuring live phosphorus, potassium chlorate, glue, ground glass and red aniline, the paste that contains a matchstick’s true soul. Known as English paste. Fire’s mystery. Smoking blood, they call it in the factory.

Olinda woke up in the middle of the night and looked through the window at the lines of candle-women.

In his hut in the labour camp, every time he lit a match, Polka would let it burn until the flame reached his fingers. A match was very important to him. To everybody, since they were hard to come by in the camp. This is the advantage of small things. A ‘wagon-box’, for example, containing ninety matches, with a little skill, passed from hand to hand, can store vital information, detailed plans, for a train not to arrive in port with tons of wolfram. A yellow ‘economical box’ contains seventy matches. Some are even smaller, pocket-sized, and contain fifty or thirty matches. The most attractive are those bearing coloured phototypes. The skill to turn a simple box of matches into a magnificent transmitter of secret information resides in one box in fact being two. But for this they have to be cut and assembled to perfection. The information can be walled up inside this delicate stucco work on rolling paper. In code. For this you need the people giving and receiving the information to be referring to the same book. One number identifies the letter, another the line, another the page. If you don’t know or can’t find the reference book, it’s very difficult to decipher an intercepted message.

Polka held a new match in front of his eyes, closed his left eye and examined the head as a surveyor’s reference point for measuring the world.

The matchstick head filled the mouth of the mine shaft.

‘Let me tell you what it’s made of, the formula for English paste, smoking blood: live phosphorus, potassium chlorate, gypsum glue, ground glass and red aniline.’ He could add, ‘And Olinda.’

‘And Olinda as well.’

‘What’s Olinda?’

‘A special ingredient in some matches. The ones that light straightaway have got Olinda in them.’

One of the technicians in the mine was a Portuguese engineer. He picked various prisoners to be his assistants, some of whom were highly competent. There was one, a Catalan, who’d been in Coruña in the summer of 1936, when war broke out, with some architect friends. Joan Sert got on well with Polka. Actually he followed him wherever he went because he’d never heard him complain. Polka carried the wounds of a failed escape. He said ants were left inside and then told him about the wasps that grow inside figs.

‘They lay their eggs in a flower and then the fruit grows and the wasps have to bore a hole through the flesh. Which is why fig trees are always surrounded by wasps. The same thing happened to me. They tied me to a tree with open wounds and the ants used this opportunity to come inside me. Now, from time to time, they want to get out.’

Polka put his hand in his mouth and produced a handful of ants. ‘See? See how they want to get out?’

Joan Sert looked at him in amazement and said, ‘You’re a surrealist!’

‘Don’t lay any more charges against me. How many years would I get for that?’

‘For what?’

‘For being a surrealist.’

Olinda was not allowed to return to the Matchstick Factory. There was always the river. The traditional occupation of women in Castro, washing for Coruña’s middle classes. Washerwomen, for good or bad, were from another world. Even their shape, their figure in the street, was different. Bodies with bundles, with a huge globe on top of their heads. Amphibian creatures from villages by rivers and streams who took away dirty clothes and returned them clean. Sometimes even ironed and smelling of roses.

So Olinda joined the procession of women carrying things on top of their heads. A washerwoman living nearby gave her a job. Washing for the eye doctor’s house and surgery. This was lucky. Because it gave her confidence. Reality. If she could wash for the eye doctor, then there was a certain amount of light. This was followed, she wasn’t quite sure how, by the opportunity to wash for Chelo Vidal. One door opens another. She was not without matches. Invisible friends kept her supplied. She could throw a few boxes in the bundle and sell them. She could even take the odd box, the odd phosphorus box, to the doctor and painter.