He felt the crises arrive in the barometer of his chest. They were increasingly strong. He’d adopt the lotus position without moving, like a diver running out of oxygen.
The worst thing was when his temperature rose, because then he’d consume oxygen in his dreams, his nightmares.
One day, he emerged from his delirium, looking wide-eyed and mutilated, as if he’d lost all his teeth. He said he’d been pulled out. He felt in his flesh how he’d been pulled out of the register. Of the book of births.
‘Don’t think about it, Daddy. They’d never do that.’
‘I don’t even know who he is, this governor who wants to tear out my birth certificate. I have to study this, the nature of hate.’
‘Don’t think about it now, Daddy.’
‘You’re right. It uses up lots of oxygen.’
And then he spoke with his hands. If she gave him a finger to hold on to, he’d grab it with the strength of a newborn baby.
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?