MAY MY HAND, LORD, NOT TREMBLE

‘And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.’

         Thou shalt surely die, yes.

         At my age, there has been so much death that dying is no longer a case of fear, but of waiting or perhaps warning when one hears of the departure of someone close…

         I have spent years considering the form of a declaration, a story that reveals the substance of my own life and the life of those who advanced alongside me against the current, against the faith, incorrectly in the eyes of others. I have been delaying the effort of pen and paper, photographs and documents, memories that bring to life past anxieties, and have done so out of a sense of modesty rather than shame. We believers have nothing to hide in front of men, even less so in front of our Creator, who would have us be free in spite of the original sin we took part in.

         I modestly observed silence whilst accusing myself of tempting God with the inactivity of a hand that remains steady, apt for fulfilling the tasks of a profession I learned with pride. I was tempting God because he could bring my hours to an end at any moment.

         Every human realizes when he has reached the point in his existence at which each new dawn is a divine present. This is why I say I tempted, and continue to tempt, God because I do not know if I will have sufficient days and strength to carry out the task before me.

         In short, I ask the Almighty to forgive my negligence and deliver me from the mistake of a chronicle written hastily for fear of not revealing what has to be revealed.

         I talk of death…

         Today there passed through the central arch of the cemetery a coffin borne by the town’s illustrious males, surrounded by dignitaries of the Roman Catholic Church, the Holy Mother.

         It was a summer’s afternoon pervaded by the scents of still unripe figs and grapes. There was a long procession from the temple that presides over everything and recalls the unity of creed in a Spanish nation forged by fire and sword, and I politely joined the retinue of people who regard me as distant even when I hold them close.

         The swallows were screeching in jumbled flight; it was difficult to discern the sound of murmurs and footfalls. Everyone was taken up with his own ruminations, many no doubt recalling the deceased man’s orations or perhaps the questions he asked in the confessional, his recommendations to the naked soul suffering as a result of its exposed weaknesses, the penances he imposed with the temerity of a priest who is convinced he represents Christ as judge.

         For thirty years, Don Diego was shepherd to the town’s orthodox flock, and not only that. As a good priest, an example cited before other priests by his Eminence the archbishop, he was an active member of civil society. The vicar wielded such power he achieved what neither we nor well-intentioned papists could have ever imagined. He amazed all of us who had respected the bones of those clothed in flesh, laughter and mourning, who shared everything with us.

         He orchestrated an outrage. He envisaged the greatest contempt, the greatest insult against people buried ‘like dogs’ owing to a lack of prayers for the dead and holy water. Today men and women of a certain age gave me sideways glances, having looked towards the porch on the left of the cemetery, because they remembered where the coffins without an entourage of priest, acolyte and pious ladies entered, where the graves of Protestants were dug alongside those of suicides and the summarily executed. On the left of the cemetery were the graves of the marginalized; in the centre, the tombs and sepulchres of the children of God who viewed themselves as correct; on the right, the burial places of ‘little angels’ and virgins, the wives of Christ, as they call themselves.

         Today, however, on the left of the cemetery were the new niches.

         We stood amongst them, gazed at them in silence. We were all quiet because it would have been an offence against the propriety of the act had someone started shouting at the heavens that such abuse was beyond description, without precedent in the history of crimes committed by some neighbours against others. It is a wretched thing to burden the living, but the living, if they cannot defend themselves, can at least protest, whereas the dead are not even able to speak…

         Don Diego was deposited in the sanctuary reserved for Rome’s obedient, in a provisional niche, until a mausoleum could be built to match his dignity and we all returned, talking about what must follow, namely life. In the arcade of Real Street we said our final farewells, goodbyes and so longs, each to his labours and Christ with all of us in spite of quarrels and hatreds.

         I turned to home. My wife raised her pretty, black eyes, the remains of her youth, from her sewing and let me in without asking any questions. I had come from the funeral of someone who had offended her greatly, in blindness. We didn’t talk. It was better to keep quiet, to forgive in the name of the Lord.

A house deprived of children and grandchildren on a long summer’s evening. Absolute silence in the study. Shelves and books covering the walls. Golden letters on the spine of the Book before which lying is blasphemy.

         A clear table and a notebook. On the calendar, the date: 19 July 1986, fifty years after that day of rumours, armed people, hope on those radio stations still loyal to the Republic. Don Diego, defender from his church of the Unvanquished Caudillo, passed away yesterday, fifty years on from the Glorious Uprising, and his remains rest on top of the very ground where contempt was shown for laws that do not even need to be recorded.

This afternoon’s service marked the epilogue of a story that has never been written.

         Let’s go to it, from the very beginning.

         May my hand, Lord, not tremble.

MEMORY BY THE RIVER

My full name is Manuel Valeriano Liñares Couto. I was born in a town where Galicia faces Portugal, with the River Miño in between. My parents came from families with the most common professions in the region: husbandry and emigration.

         I have often thought that the most normal thing in my life would have been to follow one of these two paths: one leading to a furrow behind a pair of oxen, the other leading to a port and from there to America. And yet each man is called by God to exist in a moment and in that moment circumstances arise which may distance him from what appears to be a familiar destiny.

         My paternal grandfather, Valeriano of Ponte Tea, only ever tilled the land and passed on his husbandry skills to his first-born, who was also called Valeriano (Valerio for short, as he was generally known). This man, my father, was a cartwright when young, very taken up with transport and curious about reading and writing, which, as he used to say, ‘make heads gleam with the shining in them’. Such interests brought about a change of profession when, with the arrival of the railroad in these parts, he was able to demonstrate, pen in hand, all that he knew of letters and numbers.

         Valerio Liñares passed the exam to become a pointsman and married Minia Couto, a well-to-do girl from a family with plenty of lands and money which, as the saying goes, originated from Buenos Aires. Her father, Xoaquín of Capela, nicknamed the Notary, had spent twenty years in the city of La Plata. He kept a piece of paper that confirmed he’d worked in a clerk’s office and was highly proficient in the execution of documents.

         With the first hairs on his chin, Xoaquín had embarked for Buenos Aires. A grown man by now, he’d returned, married a local girl and then travelled to Argentina on his own owing to difficulties arising from the pregnancy which quickly materialized. He spent many years like this, with intermittent visits and plenty of affection towards his wife, who lived like a widow and in whom he engendered seven children.

         When Grandma Virtudes fell ill – because of her bones, it would seem – he took the decision to stay in Galicia for good, to administer the properties he’d acquired and to work as a cattle appraiser and clerk, which he did with expertise and a reputation for justice. To look after those interests he’d acquired on the banks of the River Plate, he dispatched two male heirs as soon as their age and judgement permitted.

         I never met this ailing grandmother and it would be some time before I encountered my emigrant uncles, but, as my story will show, my grandfather played a providential role in my life. I remember him from my childhood as a tall, considerate man with a trimmed beard in times of shaven heads and Kaiser-like moustaches.

         Xoaquín of Capela may not have thought a railwayman like Valerio of Ponte Tea a suitable match for his daughter, but Minia certainly took a fancy to Valerio, a gallant with the stature of a warrior who was more than prepared to tackle the world.

         They were similarly robust and shared a taste for progress. Encouraged by their robust affection, they got married. I had been born and they had little to offer me when their luck changed, with God’s help, owing to the misplacement of a package on the railway.

         The package in question was a hamper of sardines such as used to leave the port in Vigo and be deposited at stations en route. This particular hamper failed to arrive in time and the railway management was obliged to refund the value of the merchandise. Fish possessing the ugly habit of turning rotten, edicts were swiftly published, offering it at auction. Paper and paste all over the town summoned traders and casual bystanders to the railway warehouse.

         Valerio attended the auction with his cap under his arm and the conviction there was something for him in this transaction. The fishwives from the square and railway employees, who perhaps had their minds set on a sardine feast with plenty of wine, upped the price until my father, ashamed to ‘be there and come away with nothing’, shouted something he could ill afford:

         ‘Ten reales!’ one more than he earned in a day.

         The hamper was his. The other employees guffawed:

         ‘Oh dear, Valerio, your wife will shut you out of the house!’

         He took the sardines home on a borrowed cart, informed his wife of what had happened and she took the decision:

         ‘We’ll have to smoke them.’

         The hamper provided a dish of the day at an improvised inn with a single table shared by workers from the station and traders from the outlying villages. Sardines and omelette were the woman’s domain; the wine, her husband’s. It seems the price was right and word got out that people were satisfied.

I acquired an understanding of life in that primitive inn, in a clearing with the remains of an oak wood where carts, horses and draught animals took shelter. I must have been happy there. I never lacked amusement, what with so many people, animals and artefacts on their way to the station or fairground and back again. And I enjoyed the softness of women who were loaded with kisses.

         I was raised by my mother and a young woman, Carmiña of Cachenos, who served as errand-girl, waitress and help. They let me follow them around, in the kitchen and pantry. They took me to the river to wash the clothes, sitting on their haunches.

         Everything in the inn went smoothly. The number of pots and frying pans increased, as did the number of places at table. Carmiña of Cachenos was joined by other young women, though she was still the object of my love, which I guarded jealously, since she was visited by one of the soldiers who used to march about in the fortress that overlooked the town and glared disparagingly at Portugal…

         That was until God decided to put the first test on my road.

         I spotted a broken egg in the hen yard and immediately thought of the fox, a glutton with a narrow snout and large ears which always appeared in stories from the land of Cachenos (a mountain breed of cattle found in the province of Ourense). I hurried to inform my nanny, asked for her in the kitchen and was told she’d gone out to the clearing. So I rushed over there… I spotted her leaning against a tree, lifting her mouth to that of the soldier-thief intent on devouring with his eyes the soft incline of breasts I wanted only for me.

         I don’t know exactly what happened after that. All I can recall is a large commotion: a dog snarling, barks, dust, the soldier’s rough boots, his forceful voice, more snarling, which gradually died away, a hot, liquid pain in my legs and finally the scent of soap on Carmiña’s bosom.

         ‘Oh, my poor baby, my poor little thing, my precious heart!’ Carmiña kissed me with the same ecstasy I found in kissing her.

         I felt myself being carried away and then laid down as my mother gave orders for my ‘wounds’ to be washed.

         It wasn’t long before my father arrived with the doctor, Don Abel, a man with a white beard and a sprig of anise in his lapel.

         ‘Hydrophobia,’ the physician passed judgement.

         ‘Blasted dog,’ growled Valerio. ‘It’s been hanging around for days. Damn me for not killing it long ago.’

         ‘We’re fortunate Carmiña’s boy was here,’ continued the doctor. ‘There’s a chance the child will survive. The dog was little and didn’t touch his face.’

         In our Sunday best, my parents and I travelled to Pontevedra, a larger town than ours, with sailing boats and a river so wide it was called an estuary.

         ‘Provincial Anti-Rabies Institute,’ read my father, and in we went.

         That was the first time. There would be others and a diet. I suffered the loss of all the sweets that occupy the life of a child. I made journeys with lots of accents, visions of landscapes and things, and illustrated books the adults used to divert my attention from the apparition of a syringe that was more than a span in length and of a needle they stuck in my belly, which filled me with the horror of something strange slowly entering my body.

         It was around that time my mother taught me how to pray. We used to say the rosary during each journey. I have the impression I learned how to speak Castilian Spanish whilst praying and chatting to the men in white coats at the Institute.

         During my treatment for rabies, my mother acquired an enormous belly. I was still being subjected to the most horrific injections when my brother Alfredo came into the world. And over his irritating moans I heard that Carmiña was going to ‘move in’ with her uniformed, cooing pigeon. His military service now over, it seemed they planned to emigrate, like everybody else, to Buenos Aires, which had to be a sprawling city.

         Such a common course of action in this case gave rise to numerous comments. That was probably the first time I heard the terms ‘Protestant’ and ‘heretic’, which were used to refer to the fair Carmiña’s boyfriend.

         ‘Apparently they’re going to tie the knot in Buenos Aires,’ my mother informed Valerio. ‘But I tell you in the eyes of God that marriage won’t be worth a thing. See what the misery of a family can do, allowing Carmiña to marry a Protestant!’

         ‘What misery are you talking about, woman? Affection might have something to do with it,’ replied my father. ‘The fact they love one another… I don’t suppose she cares he’s a heretic or he cares she was once so pious.’

Alfredo began to occupy places that had previously been reserved for me: the tub or basket in which the linen and other clothes were transported to the river for washing. At the same time, I began to receive notebooks and pencils from my father. Around the inn, we used often to hear such words as ‘Africa’, ‘disaster’, ‘war’, ‘free’, the names of generals, who were clearly extremely influential people, and events in Madrid, the capital of Spain, Spain being whatever was not Portugal. They were dispirited conversations, but, relieved of my illness and able to eat anything sweet or savoury, I felt happy as a mountain bird and spotted joy in the eyes of my industrious parents.

         That was when they started talking about getting into debt.

         One day, we were just leaving Ponte Tea when Grandpa Valeriano took my father by the arm.

         ‘It’s agreed then. We’ll get a mortgage,’ he said out loud, much to the pleasure of my parents. So much so that, later that evening, I heard the strange sounds, somewhere between moaning and laughter, that sometimes revealed the revelry going on in their bedroom, behind closed doors.

         Soon after that, Xoaquín of Capela arrived at the inn to discuss with his daughter the formation of a company. Favourable terms were agreed and the foundations laid for the erection of a hotel alongside the railway station.

         ‘I shall leave my share to Minia in my will,’ concluded the Notary.

         There followed months of excitement, plans and drawings. My heart still misses a beat when I think of the sun-filled room, gleaming white, the floorboards covered in fresh lime and the empty window-frames, where my father took me one day and said:

         ‘This is where you and your younger brother will sleep.’

         Granite blocks and wooden beams gave shape to Valeriano’s House, as the partners had agreed to name it during a meeting. For me, it was as solid as the fortresses on either side of the River Miño, and just as lofty. VALERIANO’S HOUSE: BOARD AND LODGING rose up into the sky, looking like the centre of the world, halfway between the station, the barracks of the Civil Guard, those of the border guard and the local casino. It was a gathering place for guilds and classes, locals and outsiders.

         Inside and outside the buildings of the railway company were the railwaymen, a troop in blue uniform. The railway was theirs and they guarded it jealously (especially the linesmen, who knew their rails, sleepers and ballast down to the last detail). They set an example to their children, who would follow them in the profession, and encouraged them to play on the platform with carts containing packages between the waiting room and left-luggage office. They formed a tribe, but were always open to others.

         The members of the Civil Guard, on the other hand, kept themselves to themselves, in isolation with their families in the barracks.

         My father acted as ambassador to the members of the Civil Guard for his colleagues. He’d conquered the guards with a performance that was somewhere between a warning and a challenge. Whenever a new guard was posted in town, he’d come to the hotel, knowing he’d been invited. The other guards had already explained the portent and, incredulous by profession, he’d come to see it for himself.

         ‘Come on, Valerio,’ the veterans would say. ‘He claims it can’t be done.’

         Word would get around and people would congregate at the barrack gates. Valerio would ready himself by symmetrically twisting the ends of his heavy, black moustache. They would bring him two enormous rifles, which he would hold in each hand by the end of the barrel and raise until their butts touched above his head. We children looked on in horror. After that, it was no use the guards’ children trying to claim paternal ascendancy, my dad was a Hercules…

         The border guards, in their light green uniform and silver caps, were more conciliatory than their counterparts in the patent-leather tricorns and extremely relaxed when discussing politics. It was not unusual to hear them, amid laughter, telling anecdotes about their constant toing and froing along the frontier, where smuggling was a trade and smugglers were venerable people. Nor did they hold back when criticizing hierarchs and local bosses, including Don Alfonso and his coterie of advisers at court.

         Other regular visitors to the hotel were the gentlemen from the casino, who often retired in the early morning just as the workers were greeting the sun. Those with hats and sticks looked more lordly than solvent when it came to fulfilling their obligations and were joined by priests in boots and cassocks, who would hitch their horses to a ring for hours on end.

         The hotel was full of rumours about such relationships.

         ‘I heard the priest of Oleiros got fleeced last night,’ somebody would comment. ‘He was allowed to ride away, but he’ll have to give up his horse tomorrow.’

         To my childish imagination, a game of cards was like cheap liquor dragging men into a pit of sin and misery. Having received moral instruction from my mother, I simply couldn’t conceive of priests with cards in their hands. Nor could she, by all accounts, because whenever she heard rumours implicating the clergy, she would launch an all-out attack on the informants, accusing them of slander.

         Valerio, however, carried on listening at the coffee tables.

         ‘Hush, woman, you don’t spend the night on duty like those of us in uniform. Enough talking,’ he would add, ‘those priests of yours are scallywags and aren’t likely to stop by the hotel either on their way to the casino or on their way back. They prefer not to be seen or accosted by parishioners.’

At that time, in the 1920s, with Alfonso XIII on the throne, a slip of a lad with loose legs like a puppet, Spain was a far cry from the ‘democracy’ espoused during railwaymen’s conversations. It was so far away that most people regarded anyone who didn’t side with the politics and religion of the authorities as a criminal. In discussions at the counter in our establishment, stories would arise that could only impress the spirit of a child.

         ‘Did you hear what Rabid got up to?’ a recent arrival would say whilst everyone else fell silent in expectation of the feat. ‘Well, he handcuffed Ubaldiño the anarchist, tied him to the tail of his horse and took him off to Tui.’

         There were numerous comments, everybody had an opinion to express, and someone might add:

         ‘Well, last Thursday, he got hold of one of those lunatics who come from Vigo to sell heretic Bibles and shoved him out of the market. There’s no telling with Rabid…’

         This nickname, which caused me certain terror after the hydrophobic misfortune I had been through, belonged to a lieutenant in the Civil Guard and was always uttered with tones of admiration, owing perhaps to the fact that this bully made no distinction between an outlaw and an anarchist worker or between a blasphemer and a polite-mannered preacher.

         That said, there was still respect for rights that would soon disappear down the abyss we were slowly but surely heading towards.

         My father, who owned a business, was also delegate for the railwaymen’s union, something he never attempted to conceal even during the harshest days of the ‘dictator’ Primo de Rivera (a jolly fellow with a moustache, somewhat bald and pot-bellied, we waved flags at when he passed through our station in the carriage filled by railway company dignitaries). Valerio, with his pointsman’s cap, would happily send his first-born to collect the other employees’ dues.

         ‘Boy,’ he would say, ‘go and collect the money for the trade union,’ and I would run off to houses where I would receive a real as well as some sweets from the ladies.

         From the workers’ houses I might end up at the house of Don Ramón Afonso, a boss who was always welcome in our establishment, where, with wine on the table, he would further relations with lots of people. This gentleman was tall and thin, bendy as a willow, and, seeing a love of books in my eyes, he offered me his library, sanctum sanctorum with a scent of varnish, paper and glue, where the hours flew by.

         Don Ramón was the local boss. That was his profession. He’d held the post of secretary to the town hall and had erected a large shop opposite the station selling iron fittings and implements. He was ‘extremely right-wing’, though this didn’t stop him having dealings with Valerio the Socialist, whilst Valerio, my father, scarcely ever mentioned in secret the story of a particular anarchist who was bumped off at someone’s orders during certain elections.

         Don Ramón wielded influence in the provincial capital and was cultured enough to have read Hamlet, which he would quote when complaining about politicians because ‘words without thoughts never to heaven go’. Good relations and a greater intelligence ensured he was able to give orders in life and not to be disturbed in death, as will be seen.

         Old people used to say there had never been so much money doing the rounds in Spain as during that dictatorship.

         The truth of the matter is that in Valeriano’s House silver leaped on top of the counter. The establishment cried out to anyone getting off a train. It grew. The grey granite of the building received additions of brick, wood and glass. It also acquired a dining room and guest rooms. There were two bedrooms left for the family: one for my parents and the other for us children, the latter resembling the inside of a barracks. There five brothers came into being, as many as God chose to populate this valley of tears, all boys and all prepared to fight over a toy or butter with sugar at tea.

         The hotel had plenty of light and a reasonable temperature, and was never without people or a fire in the kitchen. Everything was clean, be it wood, cloth or the crockery of hygienic utensils. At normal hours the inside was filled with the measured murmur of conversations, in the café and dining room, accompanied by noises from the station marking time, stroke by stroke, whistle by whistle.

         The shop and pantry combined the smells of vegetables, sugar, honey, spices, soap with brand names like Heno de Pravia, Chimbo, Lagarto, Sevillano, bars that were square or oval, dark or white, the cheapest still impregnated with aroma. There was also the fragrance of bread, rolls that came in sacks on the back of donkeys, and of strips of cod from Norway and Iceland, bought at El Rey del Bacalao in Vigo, which ingeniously lost their salt by being washed in channels descending to the river and tied to stakes stuck in the soft grass.

         From the kitchen and oven came the fumes of daily cod, pies, meat stews, grilled sardines, smoked sardines, beans, matriarchal soup, which warmed our insides, tripe necessarily spiced with cumin.

         Such odours appealed to everybody, as honey calls to bees. There was no distinction between townspeople and villagers, Spanish and Portuguese, commoners and nobles. The only thing that varied was the frequency of their visits, what they ordered and the amounts they owed.

The sounds and smells of the establishment were complemented by the habits, voices, peculiarities of guests, some of whom were passing and others who stayed longer. Amongst those who stayed, I must mention two: Father Domingos and Captain Marcelino. They both took a stand in the century’s upheavals and were treated differently by chroniclers. The priest appeared in my happy childhood; the border guard in the period before a war which would make me old before my time.

         Father Domingos was unusually elegant, perfumed by a mixture of incense, cologne and tobacco. We children were desperate to kiss his hand. He would tap us on the head and say:

         ‘Ah, children, children, have patience.’

         He was Portuguese, but a monarchist, whereas the Portuguese were Republicans, ‘as we should all be’, according to my father.

         ‘He’s a Manuelite, one of the organizers of the coup, very important,’ my father informed a young lieutenant from the Civil Guard. ‘He kept the monarchy going for twenty-eight days. He comes from a good family, with plenty of income. He’s always on time when it comes to payments.’

         The priest occupied a room facing his impossible, beloved country. He would sometimes leave the door open and we children would spy on him without a cassock, in a white shirt and dark trousers, gazing at the frondosity of the River Miño, smoking and listening to music on his gramophone with its tortuous horn.

         He liked to eat and drink the best of everything. But at midnight, like a rite, the libations would finish, unless it was water.

         ‘That’s because he wants to clean out his body prior to morning Mass,’ Grandpa Xoaquín would say. ‘He has no need of any more work than that.’

         And so it seemed. Whereas the other priests ran about, cobbling together tithes and oblations, and criticizing the state of the nation, Father Domingos would sail through his morning rituals and vaguely comment on ‘the people’s bad habits, their superstitions’, or warn against ‘the threat of Protestantism’, which for him was represented by ‘certain sellers of Bibles, Lutherans paid in sterling, invading us with the powers of the Bank of England’.

         He said Mass, went for walks, chatted to neighbours and visitors, attacked a certain Luther and praised kings who were ‘defenders of religion’. Until one day, to our amazement, he suddenly disappeared without taking any of his belongings.

         I was waiting at table when I heard he might be somewhere in Brazil. I missed him because he had taught me how to contribute to ‘the holy sacrifice’ and the meaning of Latin phrases. I was grateful and had nowhere to write to him.

         For a time, his room was kept just as he’d left it, as one does with the dear departed. Then my mother bid the maids collect all Father Domingos’ belongings and store them in a trunk in the attic, where they remained along with the scents of his rich perfume next to the place for ripening fruit, all except his gramophone, which my father had installed in our own private sitting room.

         There we would often listen to the voice of Miguel Fleta in memory of the absent man, who had admired him greatly.

The Miño the Portuguese exile had gazed at so hard was the source of our love, and always a place of observation.

         On either side, trains raced each other on parallel railways. Portuguese and Spanish drivers pushed their engines, hooting all the time, looking each other in the face in an attempt to identify who was driving the opposite train in order then to meet for a round of drinks on this or that side of the frontier.

         In the middle of the river, where the waters were shared, people fished for salmon with a boat and net.

         ‘Tighten! Loosen! Pull in! Let go!’ went the orders, and the fishermen would sweat until the stubborn fish finally gave in.

         ‘They’re headed straight for the tables of magnates,’ my father would say.

         In a heap by evening, they were tied to planks of wood, the railway’s patent, travelling by night and still damp when they reached the kitchen of the king of Spain or the Portuguese president.

         The river was the stage for many routine, peaceful events, and the odd horror, such as when the wood factories on our side caught fire and voluntary firemen from Portugal came to help, taking the risk of wading with their equipment through waters infested with cuttlefish traps. But the greatest amusement back then, one that brought our towns to a standstill, was the arrival of a hydroplane.

         We were in the classroom when we heard the roar of an engine. The children closest to the windows lost the concentration needed for the fearful arithmetic of fractions. The teacher, Don Paulino, realized what was going on and demanded their attention. He raised his cane. But then the bells of St Benedict’s Chapel up on the hill, surrounded by olives, started pealing. They rung like crazy, as if announcing the end of the world. The teacher went to the door and we children formed a huddle next to the window that overlooked the river.

         A green machine, with high and low wings attached by a lattice-work of iron cables and wires, came crashing down on the water and stayed there without sinking.

         ‘Come on, children! Come, come!’ shouted Don Paulino. He formed us into a line and marched us quickly to the stream where we used to fish for eels when it was season.

         The bells carried on ringing, as did those on the Portuguese side. People rushed towards the meadows on either riverbank. A butcher ran, still wearing his apron, with a bloody hatchet in one hand. Both civil and border guards hurried along.

         We schoolchildren were not the first to arrive, but we knew how to advance through the reeds to the front line and we were amazed. Men dressed in leather from their heads to their toes anchored boats supporting the enormous flying machine.

         Small dinghies approached from either bank. Those rowing shouted to the aviators in Spanish and Portuguese, but they replied in a strange language which led to all sorts of conjectures amongst the crowd.

         ‘They’re talking French,’ said some. ‘German,’ said others. ‘English,’ declared the Yankee, so called because he’d been an American prisoner during the war in Cuba.

         When hunger set in, my brother Alfredo deserted and I had no choice but to follow him so that my mother wouldn’t tell me off for having abandoned him.

         After lunch, the enigma was resolved in Valeriano’s House: the aeroplane had been travelling from England to Brazil when the pilot had detected a fault and managed to land the plane before our eyes. On the next day, the teacher defined what we had seen:

         ‘A hydroplane. Hydroplane, with an “h”,’ and he wrote the word on the blackboard.

         We were all waiting for Thursday to come so that we could go to the town on the other side where the men in leather were rumoured to be.

         The day arrived and the men were easy to find. Tall and blond, they wandered around the market-place, cracking jokes, picking up things from stalls, talking in a way only they could understand. They went for a tour of the town. We followed them. They entered a church and sat gazing at the church from one of the back pews. Some children pointed to the holy water stoup, but the foreigners paid no attention. They didn’t even make the sign of the cross, as we were accustomed to do.

         That whole week, people came from Vigo and Pontevedra with their cameras. On the following Monday, it became impossible to listen to Don Paulino’s lessons because the hydroplane’s engine started roaring and echoing in the bowl of the river. It would fall silent and then roar again, distracting us with its unpredictability.

         At dawn on Tuesday, the roar caused lots of us to rush to the river still with the sleep in our eyes. I arrived just in time. The hydroplane had turned, it was no longer facing upriver, as when it had been anchored, but downriver. Two ropes, tied to poles on either float and to trees on either side of the river, were drawn tense, resisting the pull of the propellers.

         At a given signal, two crewmen released the ropes, which recoiled like wounded snakes, and, with a dragon’s roar, the flying machine took off in search of the sun.

         The field from which I watched this wonder of aeronautics belonged to my family and was named after a neighbouring stream, but soon became ‘the hydroplane field’, the one where we used to fantasize about flights and acrobatics and barely had time to witness a spectacle that would soon become commonplace in the sinister, warlike circumstances of our lives.

But the war was still distant for us children who would be soldiers and for adults who would mourn so many deaths caused by bombs and bullets from planes. Nobody could have imagined it. We received occasional news about the war in Africa, but for the most part people were taken up with fashions in Europe and the States, with ‘Parisian refined tastes’ and advances in technology.

         The cuplé and tango were in vogue. The gramophone we’d been left by Father Domingos played all the songs from Buenos Aires on records children of the town sent from there to the premises of the Society of Natives. Sensual music, risqué lyrics, livened up dances that took place in the halls of the casino or our own banqueting room, with the lights blazing.

         In the hotel, word had it that a company had been formed to make powerful steam engines. There were discussions about a clean railway produced by electric traction, something like trams that could cover large distances without the need for coal, water and steam. Telegraph operators talked about a telegraph without wires running alongside the tracks, a ‘radiotelegraph’ with which ships at high sea, as well as distant countries, were already communicating.

         But it was one thing to read the newspapers and another to look around.

         ‘In the time of airships,’ Don Ramón would say, ‘we were still afraid of automobiles. At the end of the day, everything remains the same.’

         ‘Especially when it comes to politics,’ mocked my father.

         Some things were just as they had been for centuries.

         On a Thursday, women would come down from the villages with baskets full of produce from the vegetable garden and fattening pen. Men would come, leading cattle. Stalls would be set up, selling tools, implements and domestic appliances. People would travel from one fairground to the next, crossing the river by boat and buying chickens – polos on this side, frangos on the other – wherever the price was better.

         This gathering of people in turn attracted curious characters, each with their own purpose and ability: gypsies with trained animals, blind men who sang to a violin, bagpipers… One such strange creature, verging on outlandish, whom I cannot help remembering was a man with a satchel full of books.

         He was corpulent with a tidy beard and something in his look which drew attention to his large, kindly face with its high cheekbones and clear, streaked eyes. He walked slowly and from time to time would stop, take a little book out of his jacket pocket and start reading. His name was Severo.

         Severo would sometimes end up at our hotel, where he would order the cheapest dish. I used to be somewhere between the shop and dining room, and would watch his behaviour and that of my parents around him. Strangely enough, my mother, who was sympathetic towards anyone who had to ‘stave off hunger with shame’ and in the kitchen would have their plates piled high, showed this good man scant attention. My father, however, would rarely pass up the opportunity to sit at his table and engage him in conversation. My mother adopted a rough tone when discussing the pedlar of books with her husband. She would pull at her blond hair tied up in a bun. Place her hands on her hips. Come out with accusations:

         ‘He may be a good man, as you say, Valerio, but he’s still a heretic and he’s here spreading their heresy.’

         This roughness and a desire to avoid any arguments may have been the reason why my father hid the book he bought from Severo one hot day, when he turned up just as we were clearing the tables and all that remained in the air was a strong, stale smell of the cod with chickpeas we had served to ten dozen fairgoers. I was helping the waitresses remove the dirty plates when I heard the pedlar say:

         ‘The Gospels are ten céntimos; the Bible, a peseta.’

         ‘Give me one for a peseta,’ replied my father, and I thought there must be a convincing explanation for such extravagance.

         I fixed my eyes on the book the pedlar took from his satchel with one hand whilst with the edge of the other he wiped the sweat from his brow. It was a thick, dark blue volume imprinted with golden letters. My father placed it in the pocket of his jacket hanging on the back of his chair and I set to wondering where this object of my curiosity would end up whilst trying to link this scene with the ‘powers of the Bank of England’ which had so worried the mysteriously disappeared Father Domingos.

Caetano was also Portuguese, like Father Domingos, but he stayed with us for life, becoming better known and more popular as time passed. He was a tailor, alfaiate in Portuguese, and had a pleasant, rubicund air that was reminiscent of a glossy apple. He had come over to our side for the sake of love and taken the sensible decision of setting up shop within sight of the station. My father admired him greatly.

         ‘Caetano,’ he would say, ‘remembers things even the devil has forgotten.’

         This master of needle and thread was certainly both ingenious and amusing. He was always prancing about, mainly in the company of children.

         Near the door to his shop was a fountain with two spouts, one pointing towards a fig tree in a neighbouring garden, the other towards Cosme’s cellar, a gloomy establishment with a wine-soaked earthen floor. Because they pointed in these directions, the tailor claimed the water from each spout had a different taste and would warn us children not to drink from the one pointing towards Cosme’s cellar since he said it would make us drunk.

         Valerio and Caetano were the best of friends and would always be cracking jokes and swapping stories across the railway line when they weren’t already in the hotel, engrossed in conversations that sometimes took a serious turn. That was how I heard them talking about the ‘colporteurs’.

         ‘Like the one with the satchel, Severo,’ my father explained. ‘The men in his guild are called colporteurs. They live a life of great sacrifice. I’m told they receive five céntimos for every sale, which is hardly enough to live on.’

         ‘Do they only sell books of their own religion?’

         ‘That’s all,’ affirmed Valerio emphatically.

         ‘I’d like to see some of our priests living with such discipline.’

         ‘I would too.’

         ‘“Colporteurs” did you say?’ Caetano seemed in some doubt as to the designation.

         ‘“Colporteurs”, that’s right.’

         I remembered the name. Later, at the fair in Ponteareas, I saw men who shared Severo’s profession, each with a satchel of books, which they sold in low whispers. They were dressed like decent paupers and equipped with humble gestures. Some of them owned a bicycle, but most travelled on foot. They were generally well respected, though this wasn’t always the case.

         On one occasion, my father and I were returning from the fair on an open cart, my father directing the horse with an absent-minded gaze, when I caught sight of some boys stoning one of these sellers of ‘prohibited Bibles’ on a bicycle.

         ‘Away with you, Satan, away!’ shouted the rascals, who were old enough to be doing their military service.

         I drew my father’s attention to what was going on and he pulled in the reins and threatened the boys with the Civil Guard. They retired to the field from which they’d taken the stones and the colporteur made the most of this truce to mount his bicycle and pedal hurriedly down the road.

         The episode now over, I asked my father the reason for such stoning. He turned his sharp, determined profile towards me, against the oncoming wind:

         ‘We live in a country of intransigence… Intransigence,’ he repeated, perhaps so that I wouldn’t forget the term. ‘You’ve seen the ruins on the way to Grandpa Xoaquín’s house. Well, they belonged to the Inquisition, that’s right… When the Inquisition was in charge, heretics were burned alive, Jews were banished from Spain and converts were burned just in case they were concealing their true religion. Don’t think it’s enough for them today to throw stones at heretics, sometimes they give them the most terrible beating.’

         ‘But tell me something, father,’ I couldn’t help myself asking, ‘what makes them heretics?’

         ‘Well…’ the old man hesitated, passing the hand that wasn’t holding the reins over his eyebrows and nose and touching the ends of his moustache. ‘That’s a complicated question, boy. I’d say we’re all heretics: Protestants are heretics to us, and we are to them.’

My father was adept at encouraging interests in his children and then providing them with the means to bring them to fruition.

         ‘You’ve an eye for business,’ he said to me one day because of all the questions I kept asking concerning the shop and hotel. ‘We’ll have to see if you’re capable of selling something.’

         He must have been musing on this matter when we found out that the lieutenant from the Civil Guard was being posted away and was willing to sell for twenty-five pesetas a brand-new bicycle leaning against the wall of the barracks, its chrome glistening, with clean wheels and a freshly painted black frame. People passing by cast admiring glances at it and carried on their way, calculating the cost of acquiring such a precious object.

         One day, however, it was no longer there. On our return from school, we spotted it in the storeroom at Valeriano’s. My brother Alfredo informed me in secret:

         ‘It’s for us, that’s what Suso told me.’

         Our friend Suso had a father in the Civil Guard and had managed to confirm the acquisition. And yet I didn’t dare imagine that this prize could be ours. If I closed my eyes, I saw myself pedalling this magnificent machine, confident in my size now that I was big enough to ride a man’s bicycle which had a crossbar. I couldn’t be sure, however, and refused to enquire about the artefact’s final destination.

         So the days went by until my father decided to talk to me after lunch one Sunday as we children were leaving the table.

         ‘Wait a moment, boy.’ He took a lingering sip of his coffee and asked, ‘How good are you at riding a bike?’

         ‘OK, I suppose,’ I replied vaguely.

         ‘In which case…’ he winked at me. ‘In which case we’d better do some business. Do you know how to distinguish ground pepper, good from bad?’ I shook my head and he continued, ‘You take some brown paper, put the pepper on top of it, scrunch it up and, if the pepper doesn’t stick, that means it’s good. If it sticks, it has oil in it.’

         This conversation was the start of my initiation into trade, a profitable occupation if ever there was one, which my father seemed to have in mind for me. He gave me the bike on condition that I used it to work and took my brothers for a ride on the crossbar or rack with the utmost caution. So I became a seller of pepper from house to house, shop to shop, village to village. Come sun or rain, in the time I had off school, I covered large distances, climbing heights which allowed me to gaze at the River Miño in all its magnificence, blue amongst the greens.

         It was amazing to leave with a cargo and come back with money and a clear conscience that none of the pepper I had sold, red, had stuck to the testing paper. I was also pleased to be discovering new places. One of them, which gave me much to think about, was the ruins of the ‘palace of the Inquisition’, a huge façade of stone turned golden by lichen, facing the wind, the empty windows and doorways crowned with reliefs, a mixture of hats, cords and tassels surrounding frames, declaring they belonged to people I supposed were the inquisitors my father and others talked about.

         This bicycle of my puberty, of shorts and hair on skin punctuated by leg muscles, gave me plenty of moments of silence, of questions inside my soul which no one seemed able to answer. The loneliness of paths in forests and fields created in me a need to believe in a Higher Being somehow separate from what I had imagined whilst reciting the catechism.

         My occupation as a travelling salesman represented a period of calm in my life which would come to an end on account of a book that had almost been abandoned in the corners of my memory.

         One evening, I went to tell my friend the tailor about my dealings when my eyes landed on a dark blue volume with golden letters that reminded me of Severo the colporteur. It stood on a shelf. I looked at it until Caetano followed my gaze.

         ‘That’s an Evangelical Bible,’ he explained and offered it to me. ‘Should Manuel like to read it, he may read it as much as he likes.’

         I took the book and thanked him.

         ‘No need to thank me, child, it’s your father’s,’ he replied whilst concentrating on the thick fabric before him and we carried on talking without referring to the subject again. I thought the good man had forgotten my father’s Bible, but, as I left his workshop, he warned me, ‘Manuel, don’t go about telling people you’re reading that book, it may cause you no end of complications.’

         At that point in time, neither he nor I could have imagined quite how many. Nor how serious they would be. Only God knew that.

GOD MUST HAVE BEEN WORKING FOR US

My education in the town reached as far as a small town had to give. At school, I learned Don Paulino’s lessons and I read everything the library of the local boss had to offer.

         It was Don Ramón himself who intervened in matters, giving my father the following recommendation:

         ‘Valerio, this boy needs studying,’ he said when I was there. ‘If, as you say, he has an eye for commercial dealings, then why not send him to the Mezquita?’

         And so began a new stage in my life, in a city I had visited many times to obtain supplies for the hotel. ‘At great sacrifice to my family’, my parents sent me to the Mezquita college in Vigo, located on García Barbón Avenue, which was full of life and bustle. That was in the year 1930.

         When I found out that I was leaving, I went to visit all the places I would miss most. I climbed up to Picada, sat on a rocky outcrop and gazed at the Miño flowing by with its eternal tranquillity, boats crossing from side to side, trains running over parallel tracks of soot and steam in a race between Spanish and Portuguese drivers. I let the sun go down over the mouth of the river, watched the colours change, the smoke of houses thicken, and, in the peace of the sunset, recalled the need to commune with God in solitude, to understand him on my own terms through Scripture, where it said, ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’

         This verse from St John’s Gospel had stuck in my memory and accompanied me down narrow streets on my return. Pondering its meaning, I went to see a friend from school at the door of his father’s workshop. His father was a carpenter and we would meet there, surrounded by pleasant smells and constructive noises. The boy was called Feliciano Dafonte, a sensitive soul whom I’d already consulted about my doubts concerning the religion that had been imposed on us when we were born.

         I sat with him on a stone bench and we talked, first about my imminent departure and plans for the future and then about a subject that was close to both our hearts.

         ‘I asked all the old people in the family,’ he told me. ‘Aunt Consuelo is the only one who can’t read. The others all read the parish newsletter and the odd newspaper. But nobody’s ever seen a Bible. They say that’s up to the priest.’

         ‘And what do they think of Don Severo?’

         ‘My grandpa reckons they should burn him with the fire of the books he goes about selling, which he says are heretical and tailored to their taste.’ We both fell silent and I recalled Caetano’s warning when he’d given me my father’s book. Feliciano seemed to gather energy and continued, ‘My grandpa was the verger at St Benedict’s Chapel. It was he who handed over the blessed nail so that people could go around the church and hammer it in. My father once said this was a superstition the priest took advantage of in order to charge for the blessed nails; my grandfather said he would disinherit him for being a Protestant.’

         ‘Don Domingos was always going on about superstitions and Protestants. He was obsessed with it,’ I remembered and we both conjured up images of the Portuguese priest.

         ‘Another thing,’ Feliciano took us back to the present. ‘I went to see Don Santiago and told him our idea of reading the Scriptures and discussing them with him, since he’s our parish priest, and he said this was a crazy idea and, if we were so interested, the doors of the seminary were always open to young men with a vocation.’

The school in Vigo offered me a conducive atmosphere and colleagues I could be on cordial terms with, though without the religious intimacy I shared with Feliciano. In the classroom, I did my best to concentrate on the lessons concerning commercial expertise, repeating to myself that I was only able to attend them at great cost to my four brothers. I was frequently distracted, however, now that the search for the Truth had become an obsession.

         I was distracted during the day and anguished at night. When it came time to go to sleep, I would lie with my eyes wide open, afraid I might die in my sleep and be condemned for not having exhausted every possibility leading to the knowledge of God. Until once again St John in his Gospel offered me a line of light: ‘For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.’ Basing myself on this verse, I began to pray on my own and, whenever I was seized by fear in the silent darkness of my room, I would ask Christ for indulgence, patience, assistance, time…

         Weeks of school activity went by, then months, and already the Christmas holidays were approaching. I then had to accept that my academic achievement had not been all it could be, as a teacher, Adrio, gently informed me. He was an extraordinarily kind man with an interest in astronomy and a great lover of Galicia, ‘our land’, as he used to call it.

         ‘Something has to happen to you inside, Liñares,’ he stated whilst we watched the other children playing during break. ‘And it will, don’t worry, you’re an intelligent boy and intelligent people are always restless. But it behoves a good mind to go in search of solutions. So, please, if you need any help, don’t hesitate to ask me.’

         I never dared ask him for help. Adrio may have been wise, able to understand and explain Bode’s law for measuring the distance between stars in the firmament, but my problem was spiritual. Only I could resolve it, perhaps by seeking help from someone who dealt with matters of the Kingdom which was the destination of faith.

         Something hidden, God’s hand no doubt, directed my footsteps. During outings on a Thursday and Sunday, I observed places and people’s movements until on Pi y Margall Street I finally identified a ‘Protestant church’, a whitewashed, two-floor building with stone lintels and, on the ground floor, double doors and a sign that caught my attention: ‘EBENEZER’.

         After careful thought, I decided to go in without looking around.

         I did so slowly, nervously, feeling like an intruder in broad daylight. Whereas outside, in the street, it was night-time, the inside of the church was all lit up, white, with thin, round columns that were also gleaming. At the end of the aisle was a pulpit and a large book on a lectern.

         A noble-looking man was preaching. He had a small, white beard and a foreign accent, but this didn’t detract from the value of his sermon. He was talking about the plagues of Egypt suffered as a result of the arrogance and falsehood of a pharaoh unconvinced that Moses and Aaron were speaking in the name of the One True God, who had chosen the people of Israel to reveal himself to the world.

         God had given Moses powers, his staff would turn into a serpent at God’s will and the sea would part so that the chosen people might finally return to the Promised Land. God was the Supreme Power, the Irresistible Will, the Law above all laws of physics, the beginning and end of the Universe, the origin and destination of all created beings. We had to give ourselves to him, without any doubts, since doubting was of no use. We had to live constantly watching out for signs with which the Almighty would reveal the Will it was our duty to obey. And, abandoned to that Will, we would then receive what our Creator had in mind for each of us, according to the calculations he had made for all his creatures.

         I was struck by such perfect, resounding statements, my mind full of images of Egypt taken from representations in history books. By the time I realized, I was standing up like all the others at the service. But I kept quiet whilst they sang a harmonious hymn repeating the ‘promise of our Saviour’ always to be beside whoever believed in him, always to calm the fears of those who dedicated their souls to him. I felt like an outsider, in a place that wasn’t mine. And when I understood the hymn was reaching its end, I dashed out of the pew and into the street, my thoughts all confused.

Still confused, I returned to the town at Christmas, at a time of great political upheaval, when conversations at Valeriano’s all had to do with the ‘end of the dictatorship’.

         ‘There’s nothing worse than a dictatorship within a monarchy,’ complained my father and his colleagues, who were Republican out of conviction and because of their Socialist obligations. But they weren’t alone in their complaint, they were accompanied by many opposed to the system.

         One dark evening, the wind whistling along the river, Don Ramón arrived at the hotel, intending to ‘wish everyone a merry Christmas’, and coincided with the men from the union, who offered him a cider on the house. He sat down with them and there followed a discussion about Primo de Rivera and Berenguer, the one who came up with the ‘dictablanda’, all in the friendliest tones, as befitted the season. Mention was made of the names of incompetent generals, of the war in Africa which had brought mourning to so many families, and there was criticism of Alfonso XIII, a ‘womanizing parasite’ who lived off others and surrounded himself with a coterie of tin soldiers and blue-blooded layabouts. A railway employee referred to the disasters in Morocco with a song of injustice:

         To war I have to go

         because there is a need.

         If I had any money,

         I wouldn’t go, not me!

         Nobody forgot the differences between recruits subject to quota, who escaped the horrors of battle in return for money, which included a uniform, and the poor, who stowed away on steamers to Argentina to avoid dying in lands of infidels.

         Don Ramón defended Primo de Rivera’s ‘good intentions’, reminding everyone present that the dictator had managed to solve the ‘Morocco question’ and had fostered large industrial projects such as La Maquinista Terrestre y Marítima, though he admitted he’d been powerless to prevent the ‘global economic crisis’.

         ‘That said, nobody here committed suicide like the bankers in New York,’ he concluded, waving his arm like a willow branch, at which point the discussion gave way to toasts and Don Ramón came out with a statement nobody could find fault with, ‘I don’t know if we agree how to do it, but I think we’re all agreed that this situation needs turning around…’

         In such a heavily political environment, my holidays went by. On the day I was due to leave, after breakfast, I visited my friend Feliciano at his father’s workshop and we went for a walk along the road by the River Miño. The air was calm, the grass covered in frost, the thickets greyish-brown owing to the lack of leaves. The smoke of houses rose vertically upwards and a heavy silence smothered the world. It was then I described my experience at the church of the Protestants.

         ‘You have to come with me, Feli,’ I ended my account, trying to play down my need for company on a road I now saw as inevitable.

         At this point, Feliciano narrowed his small, dark eyes and suggested:

         ‘Why not ask those gentlemen to come and preach to us here? If people from the town see they’re as you say they are, then they might be persuaded it’s not a sin to read the Scriptures.’

         Whilst pondering such a daring step, which I considered impossible, on our return we bumped into Maruxa Gómez, a girl who was well advanced in her studies, the daughter of a medical practitioner known as Don Olegario the Mason. She was accompanied by her mother, Dona María, a very pleasant lady who sympathized with our ‘opposing ideas’.

         She invited us to a cup of hot chocolate and a chat. When she enquired about my adventures in Vigo, I didn’t hesitate to include my visit to the church on Pi y Margall, which she followed with attention.

         ‘Well done, Manuel. I’m pleased that a boy like you should dare to visit a Protestant temple,’ she supported both attitude and action. ‘One should try out everything in order to satisfy one’s curiosity. Maruxa here will be attending normal school in a year,’ she stroked her daughter’s silky, black hair. ‘If she likes, she also can go and listen to the Evangelicals preaching. If she discovers their preaching doesn’t interest her, as what the Catholics have to say doesn’t interest her either, then she’s free to become an atheist or agnostic. We think there’s no playing with people’s consciences.’

         Such superiority of thought gave me courage and I returned to Vigo with the sense there were at least three people supporting me from a distance: Dona María, her daughter and Feliciano.

         This enabled me to attend the Evangelical church almost every week and my visits there were like a private Mass. I was never disappointed by the sermons and began learning hymns that would always keep me company, especially in that tunnel with no end we entered one day in July 1936.

         The first hymn was based on a poem Teresa of Ávila had written in the dungeons of the Inquisition and, owing to circumstance, it marked my life, as will become obvious from the pages of this story:

         Raise your thoughts,

         to heaven go.

         Let nothing afflict you,

         nothing bring you low.

         Follow Jesus Christ.

         Never give way.

         And whatever happens,

         never be afraid.

         I was encouraged to join in by a swarthy woman of generous female forms, accompanied by two sons and a daughter who was also swarthy, with pretty eyes like black suns that swallowed up the light of the universe. This woman handed me a sheet with the words and smiled at me in a motherly sort of way when she realized I also was learning how to sing. I was sorry the daughter didn’t look at me and swore I would fight to conquer her evasive look.

In the months that followed, the tension in Spanish society increased. In the classrooms, corridors and playgrounds at school, our teachers made an effort to convey an impression of calm. But nothing could prevent the reality of the streets invading the haven of our studies.

         ‘I don’t know about a Galician republic…’ I heard the teacher Adrio say to a colleague. ‘I’m not sure about that…’

         ‘I was told they were going to declare republics in Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque Country,’ the other remarked. ‘That was the pact. That’s the end of Spain, I would say.’

         ‘No, it isn’t,’ Adrio spoke reassuringly. ‘No pact of San Sebastián, Casares Quiroga or anything like that. What we want is autonomy. And a Republic, of course, we’ve had enough of those Bourbons, the worst cancer in history, and that incontinent lecher, the English upstart and all those crazy haemophiliacs…’

         I have only a hazy recollection of this teacher who used to insist that ‘astrology isn’t the same as astronomy’ and ‘Galicia is its own land and Galicians its people’. And yet I can distinctly remember his voice, which brings with it the terrible anguish that I might have stepped in his blood on those early mornings when people were taken out and shot in the hill-fort in Vigo.

         But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It is still the year 1931, which saw the resignation of Berenguer (a low-key general, not as visible or ostentatious as Primo de Rivera) and subsequent municipal elections.

         I prayed to God that the Republicans might win, who proposed something my father defended in front of the trade union:

         ‘A secular state, that’s right. We don’t want to have to feed the clergy, taking bread away from our own mouths. The Church should not receive any taxes. Let the Catholics sustain their own priests voluntarily.’

         Religious services should be like those of the Protestants, carried out by someone who received affection and money from parishioners. This was the opinion expressed by Maruxa, Feliciano and me on the very day municipal elections took place, an event with serious ramifications.

         I came back to town especially, one Sunday 12 April, and we gathered in the Mason’s house, where there was no crucifix, no print or image of a saint. His daughter’s large, green eyes were absorbed in a dream beneath arched, black eyebrows like a swallow’s wings whilst she pronounced statements that seemed to have been learned by rote:

         ‘The Republic will be freedom for all who think and feel differently, differently from those who do not think for themselves or want to acknowledge feelings that may not be considered right…’

         In effect, the Republic was like a liberation arriving with a bang, the tick-tack of telegraph machines resounding in every station. We found out about it with hugs, toasts, cheerful faces, all of which went on for two days.

         ‘Boy, go and hang this flag out of the gallery,’ my father ordered me without any of the usual warnings (‘Be careful, don’t lean out too far, make sure the flag doesn’t fall into the garden…’). The old man could hardly contain himself as he quickly passed me the emblem of the new nation. It was early on the morning of 15 April 1931 and the mist was rising from the river. I opened the window and stuck the flagpole in the iron socket dripping with dew. From the top floor of Valeriano’s, the world was like a theatre on opening night and, against the brilliant backdrop of the newly hoisted flag, I thought about Altamiro, the son of the freight clerk in the station on the other side. He must have known by now what had happened in Spain. We were all Republicans, which constituted one less difference between us neighbours separated by the River Miño.

         Ladies on their way early to Mass, with veils, missals and rosaries, were met by workers still celebrating the election victory. The latter kneeled down in the middle of the road and didn’t let the women pass. Thumping their chests, they cried out:

         ‘Absolve me, father! Absolve me, father, for I have sinned!’ and they burst out laughing.

         I couldn’t help smiling, but soon became serious. I reprimanded myself for such levity since nothing save reasoning should prevent those pious ladies, slaves perhaps of the priest, from doing what they wanted.

The school year passing aimlessly by, the maelstrom arrived. Events happened quickly and the front pages of newspapers were full of headlines that seemed to me religious in content. Religion and its opposite marked the changes in Spain. Throughout that spring in the whole of Vigo, from taverns reeking of cheap wine to cafés perfumed with the finest fragrances from Colombia and Brazil, customers discussed the news. Whilst ocean liners filled with people and trunks, souls and things which would be swallowed up by America, those who remained turned into expert journalists based in Madrid.

         ‘The government will separate Church and State. That’s the least they have to do! And if that means those bastard priests dying of hunger, then so be it,’ could be heard amongst cups of wine.

         ‘Monsignor Segura has no idea what he’s saying. This isn’t Bavaria, nor are all Republicans the same as Communists,’ was remarked against the counter of an elegant bar. ‘Many of us are just as Catholic as he is, even though he doesn’t like it.’

         ‘Freedom of worship is part of freedom of thought,’ declared people on the trams. ‘The greatest misfortune that ever befell Spain was the expulsion of the Jews.’

         I wandered about this city of magnificent granite buildings, steep streets and wide views over the ample, generous estuary. A need to be at ease and take in what I saw kept me away from my academic duties. Outside the school, I learned continuously and in an unusual place I found balm for my wounds.

         ‘Christ,’ the English pastor on Pi y Margall Street would declare, ‘warns the Pharisees and Scribes about their meanness, their conceit, coming from an exaggerated sense of self-esteem because they considered themselves close to God. The Redeemer points to the centurion with his sick daughter who, because he gives orders to soldiers and servants, understands how Jesus can control the laws of nature. Jesus of Nazareth is able to heal misery and get broken hearts working again.’

         Pharisees and Scribes in our world were the devout, the priests and monks. And the bishops with all their glitter, members of a Sanhedrin that dared to discuss proposals by Alcalá-Zamora and Azaña.

         ‘They’re afraid they’ll be thrown out of the schools,’ said the teacher Adrio to me in private. ‘That would make them lose their influence over their students, who will then become professionals in many fields and influence society.’

         Soon after that, churches burned. This worried me, even though the fires were far away from our land. I returned to the town, upset because of this and because in Vigo I hadn’t done my homework or dared to speak openly with the Evangelicals. Worst of all, I couldn’t forget the black eyes of that girl who refused to look at me between hymns whilst her mother smiled.

The summer of 1931 was a period of hope and confrontation for everybody. In Madrid, where the best salmon from the Miño continued to arrive, the Constituent Cortes were in debate. In the town, every citizen who was able to speak took part in discussions. Valeriano’s was a kind of forum. Perhaps there was the need to change everything, even that which carried most weight. ‘Spain,’ according to one newspaper, ‘cannot continue to support 50,000 monks and nuns, together with their property, without taxes.’

         So the newspaper said, but the women who addressed my mother from the other side of the counter insisted on a possible danger:

         ‘The day the government ceases to help the Church, there won’t be much religion left and, without religion, nobody will have respect for anything. Without the fear of God, we’re not going anywhere.’

         Having heard this, my mother suggested a solution:

         ‘Pray. The only thing we can do is pray, my daughters…’

         I felt the need to gauge the state of mind of those most threatened by the Republican revolution and decided to pay a visit to Don Santiago, aware of his intransigence, but still confident of the affectionate treatment he meted out to boys like me, who had once served as acolytes without being paid and even bringing to the church donations from our families.

         I found an excuse to visit him in the criticism of Christ towards those who fasted whilst making a display of their sacrifice. I approached, musing on the inconsistency between fasting and papal bulls, and, with such thoughts in my head, went and knocked on the door of the vicarage.

         The vicar received me under his vine with a large slice of sponge cake. He enquired as to what had brought me there and I replied ‘questions of faith’ and the unfortunate man must have imagined that God had destined me for a higher calling than that of the family business. His round face, bluish because of his beard and shining as a result of the barber’s skill, lit up with a single hope: that of seeing me as a seminarist. His face would soon cloud over.

         ‘Listen, Don Santiago,’ I theorized. ‘I agree with what you said about a man being dirtied not by what goes into his mouth, but by what comes out of it. And yet I wanted to know what you think about it.’

         The priest avoided giving a direct response. Instead he focused all his attention on finding out what ‘bad company’ had been filling my head with ideas.

         ‘Nobody’s been making me think about these things,’ I assured him. ‘I’m the one who has interest.’

         ‘Then listen, Manuel,’ he concluded. ‘Only the Holy Mother Church has the authority to give opinions on what is contained in the Gospels. Carry on fasting when you have to and let the priests watching for your soul tell you why you’re doing it.’

         I fell silent. Feliciano had been right. I wished the priest good day and left without him seeing me off the premises.

         ‘Only the Holy Mother Church…’ I imagined this Holy Mother as a large woman dressed in rich clothes, like those of the Pope, an influential lady directing the lives of her children just as my mother did, who interfered with everything, ordering family members and servants about in the hotel without giving an inch.

         That wasn’t the only confrontation between the vicar and me during those holidays.

         Another confrontation was caused by a seamstress who turned up at Valeriano’s to work on tablecloths and place mats, which she embroidered with initials. Her name was Benedicta, Dita for short, and she had wheaten hair and chestnut eyes in a face like a ripe apple. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen, but her womanly features were already apparent, tucked into tight, showy clothes.

         I liked her and never missed an opportunity to talk to her when it was time for tea, which I served to her myself with the generosity of someone who moves freely about the shop and store. It didn’t take us long to discuss which fairs we were going to and soon we ended up dancing under the sympathetic gaze of a sister of hers, who had a serious boyfriend, a worker on the railway.

         He issued the following warning:

         ‘Do you hear me? Only do to that girl what you wouldn’t mind someone doing to the sister you don’t have. Got it?’

         The weeks went by and I couldn’t bear not seeing her when I thought it was time, so, whenever her work as a seamstress caused her to spend hours outside the hotel, my fiery heart went into mourning.

         Then I hit upon an excuse so that we could meet every day. I would teach her how to write. Every evening, Dita’s meek eyes settled on the letters in the handwriting notebook. The young girl sat beside me in a corner of the dining room, before any guests arrived. In the solitude of the empty dining room, I imparted lessons and received a silent reply to secret caresses from the hand that wasn’t working with the pen. Afterwards, on the shadowy path to her house, I would endeavour to obtain other favours.

         I discovered the taste of her lips and this disturbed me so that I almost thought of going to confession, but ‘how is confession possible,’ I had read in a church newsletter in Vigo, ‘if the New Testament says that only God can forgive and Christ is our only intercessor?’

         The vines were in full bloom and the flushed face of my love was always humid. I imagined her body being hot and humid as well and grew increasingly anxious, more disposed to ask of her what I wouldn’t want anyone asking from a sister of mine. Feeling doubtful and confused, inexplicably I went to talk to Don Santiago again. I waited for the end of Mass and headed to the vestry to help him remove his celebrant’s robes. When he saw me, he dismissed the acolyte with an order:

         ‘Go and tell them at home to prepare two cups of hot chocolate,’ and turning to me, ‘What is it, Manuel?’

         ‘Well… I came about a question of conscience.’

         ‘Yes…’ he pointed to two chairs next to the wall.

         ‘I don’t understand why women attract us so and provoke us into doing what we shouldn’t, even when it isn’t their intention.’

         The priest’s close-shaven beard gleamed and his clear eyes flashed wildly.

         ‘You’re not in need of confession?’ he went straight to the point.

         ‘No, father. I just wanted some advice. For confession, I have Jesus, who always listens.’

         ‘Then why don’t you go to him for advice?’ he remarked to my surprise. I fell silent and the priest continued in an admonishing tone, ‘Manuel, my son, you’re on a dangerous road, as I have already told you. A priest is Christ’s representative for everything, for giving advice, for hearing the mistakes of God’s children. Listen,’ he made an effort to be understanding, ‘we’re living in a period of great turbulence, in which the worst ideas are being spread throughout the world, causing people to fall into errors and abominations. Today it’s Protestantism with all its fallacies, tomorrow it will be Communism and anarchism, you’ve seen some of the atrocities they’re capable of committing… You cannot continue along this road, Manuel, even if it’s only to stop your family suffering or feeling ashamed.’

         As the priest spoke, I gradually got up from my chair and withdrew to the door of the vestry. He didn’t prevent me. With a blood-red face, he even dared to make the following prediction:

         ‘While alive you will pay for your heretical arrogance.’

After the feast of St Michael of the Grapes, I took my leave of the town and its people. I made it very clear to Dita what my address was in Vigo and she gave me a kiss and a promise that she would write.

         Grandpa Valeriano of Ponte Tea handed me a few silver pesetas. Grandpa Xoaquín of Capela gave me the following advice:

         ‘You’d do better to stay here and train to be a railwayman or border guard, hunger doesn’t dare go knocking on the doors of people in those professions.’

         Feliciano went with me to the rock in Picada where we used to gaze at the Miño valley and shared with me his ideas:

         ‘If you read carefully all those books they won’t let us read, you’ll see that Christianity is not what the priests make it out to be. Christians were the same as Communists say they want to be. They contributed everything to their community. However much you ask me, I won’t be able to travel to Vigo because my father needs me. You’re there, however, and can tell those Protestants to come here. Bear in mind,’ he said, jabbing at me with his index finger, ‘people are getting fed up of the clergy. The neighbours of Oleiros are sick of their priest and are thinking of sending word to the Protestants in Marín.’

         I remained silent. At this point in time, the village of Oleiros reminded me only of evenings by the hearth, oil lamps, women with their distaffs, their art of spitting and agile fingers, the songs of girls with tambourines and the odd amorous glance.

         And yet Oleiros would alter the direction of our lives and contribute to Feliciano’s terrible death.

         Enough. The first term of the 1931-32 academic year passed like an exhalation, as did the time allotted to that Republic of the three-coloured flag, which would be betrayed by all those uniformed and plain-clothes Judases.

         I carried on following news outside the school. Whenever I could, I listened in to conversations between Adrio the teacher and his colleagues. Sometimes I talked to him as well. In this way, I found out that in Spain there was going to be a secular, decentralized regime which would abolish the death penalty, that revolting brutality of garrottes and firing squads, broken necks and chests full of holes.

         ‘Freedom of worship is guaranteed,’ he told me. ‘So your friends on Pi y Margall Street can rest at ease,’ he avoided looking at me and I was frightened by the thought that somebody had given me away. I was wondering how my visits there could have become public knowledge when Adrio said something else about the Evangelicals, ‘Protestants here have always relied on the prestige of their English pastors. Mr Berkley, who’s in charge of your church, is a real aristocrat and well received in the houses of shipowners. Businessmen in Vigo never cared what the Bishop of Tui has to say. The Royal Mail is an important company and pastors are British citizens, though their Vigo parishioners won’t be needing foreign protection now.’

         I don’t know how much criticism lay in this amateur astronomer’s words, but what he said made me refrain from dealing too closely with the members of Vigo’s Evangelical community. I had been betrayed, albeit unwittingly. Somebody must have wondered who that boy was, sitting in one of the back pews, who used to leave before the end of the service. It didn’t require much sleuth work. A few simple questions to someone polite like Adrio and they’d find out I studied at the Mezquita college.

         This made me feel unwell and I didn’t go back to church.

Text © Xavier Alcalá

Translation © Jonathan Dunne