Books Burn Badly

Open Body

‘A WASHERWOMAN HAS to be good at repartee. A quick retort, girl, otherwise they’ll eat you alive. But keep it polite. Words and stones, once thrown, you can’t recall.’

Olinda taught me the trade. I even know how to make lye using vegetable ashes. But it was Polka who taught me repartee.

He said, ‘This girl has an open body. She won’t have any problems. Her body’s more open than Moeche’s.’

‘Moeche’s?’

‘A girl who one day started talking with the voice of a priest, and expert in dogmatics, who’d died over in Havana. On Sundays, she’d go out on to the balcony and deliver the most wonderful sermons in a Cuban accent. People came from all over the parish in their droves. Until one day she got fed up, went out onto the balcony and called them pagans and Corinthians. Among other things.’

‘You’re always pulling my leg.’

‘It was in all the papers. Manuela Rodríguez. Back in 1925. This is what happens when people are bored. If you ever talk in a voice that isn’t yours, don’t worry. Don’t panic. It’s what you get for having an open body.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘That’s my girl! A perfect retort.’

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

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

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