Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [69]
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.
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