Stand Still So I Can Look at You

It was while she was working on her sabbatical research in the medieval city of Santiago de Compostela. Just for the record, the city was originally - some say - Compostela de Santiago. However, the history of the place can be left for another time. It would be necessary to discuss the true meaning of that special word ‘Compostela’ and the true story behind how the Apostle Saint James made his way to Galician shores in a stone boat. However, the city’s name isn’t the point here, so we won’t go into any more detail.

The point is actually the mysterious or strange figure Lavinia had thought she had glimpsed more than once during her months there. The impression had been gauzy, tenuous, fragile, but never had she felt it was a ghost. A ghost is different and ghosts don’t exist, except in some imaginations. They are usually wispy and drifting, definitely intangible, yet seeming to have a purpose, to be searching for something. The figure she had caught sight of had none of these characteristics.

Was the figure strange? Was it mysterious? 

Define those qualities. She said that to nobody in particular.

Lavinia was an academic, after all. She was used to thinking things through, as she liked to say. 

I don’t make things like that up. She also had said that to nobody in particular.

They aren’t the same, she also thought. A person or a place can be very mysterious but not be strange in the least bit. One source defines the first adjective as ‘difficult or impossible to understand, explain, or identify’. The emphasis is on not understanding, so

the mystery is our inability to define it. 

The academic is right. If one questions what an academic is or knows, it’s somebody who both teaches and does research for a living. These people try very hard not to be wrong. Sometimes their reputations rest on it. All of this just means that Lavinia doesn’t have an overactive imagination. She definitely does not believe in ghosts.

Male or female? That was a question that Lavinia had. A woman who is not accompanied and is in a culture that is not her own does stop to assess the situation. She might be missing cultural cues or clues. She might be adding interpretations of her own, being as she was a foreigner. 

What is going on? There had been a couple of mishaps in Santiago, one of which had landed her in the hospital overnight. (That too is another story, which has been told elsewhere.)

Lavinia recalled that the figure had been visible at what was a relatively lull time for foot traffic, when fewer than usual people were walking through the old streets. That meant - and this is only approximate - around four or eight in the afternoon. It could also be at one or two in the morning. All that had ever been visible was a liminal figure, like the famous and not real Amazons, existing just beyond the edge of the known world. Anybody could have noticed. It wasn’t just something a foreigner might notice.

Nobody has brought it up, though.

No, nobody had ever mentioned a mysterious figure, at least not a real one, in Compostela. There were legends, like the one about the shadow, apparently a pilgrim, that would cross the square called A Quintana dos Mortos (the Square of the Dead) on the side of the Catedral that faced the mammoth convent of Sampaio with its dozen or so nuns rattling around inside. Apparently it was a lovesick fellow who kept the faith, drawn eternally to the Holy Door, the Porta Santa. It was the door that was only opened on years when the Day of Santiago, July 25, fell on Sunday.

Lavinia figured she was just spooked by her knowledge of unsafe streets back in her country. Muggings everywhere. Even in. The daytime. Drive-by shootings. One never gets used to things like that. Yet she hadn’t been frightened by the figure sliding along the granite blocks of the casco vello, the old part of the city, turning a corner as if trying to conceal a front view. She was simply curious. However, she never dared ask her friends, who might have a perfectly obvious explanation. It would have made her feel so uninformed of local culture.

It still would have been nice to know if it was a male or a female. Not that knowing the sex of the figure would have made her feel more at ease. She had simply been curious. Not afraid. Just curious.

*****

Months later, Lavinia was back in her country and the spotting of an individual who was certainly not a ghost had happened again . The first encounter with a stranger where she lived on the coast of Maine has also been described in another story and does not need to be included here, except to note that on that occasion she had approached the person - if, in fact, it was a person she had seen on the town square - and there things had stopped. Lavinia and her image/person/figure had become something else. 

If that sounds mysterious, perhaps it is, but it wasn’t to Lavinia. Use your imagination. This sounds out of the ordinary to us, but we weren’t there. We hadn’t been in Santiago with Lavinia as she tried so hard to figure out where things were going. We’re not in Maine, either. Either way, it’s her story, not ours.

So now a figure has appeared in Brunswick. Lavinia recalls their first encounter, which at the time she had not deemed strange nor mysterious. She now says aloud:

Define those qualities, strange and mysterious. They aren’t the same. 

And she is right. On that other occasion, in Maine, she had only thought of the unidentifiable figure, its appearance and how it had come toward her. She hadn’t been able to define its apparel then, but that was irrelevant. Had the figure been wearing blue boots or ones of a different color? Or a totally different type of footwear? She had suspended all pretense to academic impulses to define and know, and had just accepted the presence.

Male or female? There’s that question again. When we see a stranger we don’t recognize, do we immediately assign a gender to it? Lavinia had not done that, but only saw a human shape in the midst of a public space: the farmers’ market. It had been morning, not like with the figure in Santiago. Two very different things, one observed from a distance, on the periphery of her vision. The other folding into her, as if she were dressing herself in the stranger’s form. Puzzlement in the first case, but also fascination. In the second case, no thoughts, just a blending, like the painter does with colors on a canvas.

So what does the unknown figure mean in each case? Lavinia watches the first figure. She melds with the second. Both actions or relationships must define her in some way. Although we have stated that this is her story, not ours, it might be our responsibility to make some sense of it. Certainly she is not losing her mind.

How does this end? You may be asking that. We can offer only a little information, gathered from bits and pieces of conversation, like pieces of torn paper we must collage into something that makes sense. After all, spotting a mysterious figure in two different countries must have some significance.

We have thus pieced together some fragments and added a few suppositions of our own.

Lavinia had locked the doors to her house and entered her study. It was late, but she wasn’t sleepy and instead sat at her desk thinking she would write. Something. In a journal. Or just on a legal pad. Try to sort out the two images and whether or not they were linked.

Once upon a midnight dreary… she should have known she would conjure up Poe and anybody else who wanted to come along for the ride. She often imagined herself to be the I in that poem. She expected to have to wrestle with her demons again, like Stephen King’s protagonist does in his novel The Dark Half. She half expected to see the sparrows from the novel fly in along with the famous raven. She sees clouds or shadows of the film The Birds. The film had never scared her. She was more like the King novel’s character, thinking about the ancient mythological meaning of the birds. The sparrows who were harbingers of something tragic that was approaching.

This is all we know. We have Lavinia in her study, accompanied by numerous birds, one of which is different, but she is unafraid. 

What is the point of this story? If there is no fear and no danger, perhaps there is no point. Perhaps we only have a character with a good imagination. Or one who is slipping into an unstable psychological state. She sees things, strangers who may not even be there. Yet she’s supposedly a serious person who looks for answers to questions. She makes her living doing that. She’s an a academic. She has to know what she’s doing.

That carries no weight here. Nobody cares what Lavinia does for a living. Even she has been doubting what she’s been doing for the past few years. 

I don’t know where I am. Where I want to be. The only thing that has meaning for me right now is the stranger. First in Santiago and now in Maine.

Which does Lavinia want? Is it the stranger she needs to figure out or is it herself?

*******

The pair looked up, each grinning, confident.

She’s going to choose me. I’m certain of it.

You’re very mistaken. I am the one she will choose. That’s extremely clear.

How do you know that? She watched me and never ran. It was as if she trusted me.

Oh, really? You have quite the imagination. On the other hand, she let me come really close, as if we were one person. That speaks volumes.

But she watched me. She trusted me. She took me seriously. Quite an accomplishment, since she was in a new culture and might have felt insecure. She was fine having me walk in and out of her life.

But you never spoke. You never came close. You never tried to touch her. I did. I was successful that way.

I have more to offer. I move about, I encouraged her to follow me, to learn things that were new to her. All you did was to stand close, to reaffirm what she was, in a sense. 

You never revealed your identity to her. What good could you possibly do?

You didn’t either, you know. Neither of us spoke to her. We both let her decide for herself.

And she chose me. Right out in the open, at the farmers’ market in the town where she lives.

She chose to watch me, to follow where I went. I was a stranger in her strange land. She sensed our connection was deep. That means she chose me.

********

And so the two mysterious strangers each continued to argue their positions, long into the night and long after Lavinia had turned out the light to her study and gone to bed, accompanied by a book and a cat or two. She had a busy day tomorrow and a looming deadline to submit a report on something or other. The type of task she hated with a passion but that had increasingly become part of her job.

We still don’t know if Lavinia prefers the unknown, the place where she can wander the most historic streets in the world every day, where new things will pop out of the old stones and remind her of her good fortune. Or if she prefers to stay with what is more familiar and stable, something that doesn’t ask as much of her, although she can trust it will not betray her, boring or otherwise.

We still don’t know if Lavinia will ever make up her mind. If she will look one of the two figures in the eyes and say

“I want you. I need you.”