The L Word

Author’s Note:

This story should be read before reading “L meets R,” if at all possible and if you decide to read both stories. It might make more sense that way. Also, both this story and the next are incomplete. It is not easy to disentangle what has lain quietly for far too long.

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There it was, lying on the table, only her eyes on it. A simple square of linen (or some hand-crafted fabric) with one word - Lavinia - embroidered on it. 

Bobbin lace edging. That must be what the elegant fiber sculpture was. It was on all four sides. It was singular, lovely, intricate, delicate, aged. The thread that might once have been white was at this point far past ecru. It was distinguished now because of this process, the one that happens somewhere between new and vintage. Between light and darkened. A simple square, nonetheless. Resistant. Somehow Lavinia knew that. She didn’t know a lot more. For now, at least.

She kept looking at it, too, trying to learn its story. In the end, after trying for a long time, Lavinia had decided that, because of its apparent age and style, the square had crossed the ocean at least twice, but maybe more than that. She had also theorized that the fabric and thread themselves had been produced on separate shores, using separate skills. The basis for the theory would be hard to prove, but she felt her assessment was accurate. The data are going to be reserved for another story, when it is time for those details.

Her theory had begun with the weave of the fabric, which was a bit coarse and thereby called attention to the threads used to create it. It was not the slimmed-down, flattened material made of plastic that comes from sweatshops nowadays. (Although there were sweatshops before, too, with mostly women manning the machines and fibers.) Polyester or something worse. Dead threads, no life to them. 

The square in Lavinia’s hands had a surface you wanted to run your fingertips along, wanted to look at, and made you think about the machines and bodies that had made the fabric come together. It was almost possible to hear the clack-clicking of huge bobbins on noisy machines and the nick of a needle against a thimble. The bobbins’ song as they produce lace like an arañeira, a spider web, streaming down a pillow in a thousand directions.

Complex, yes.

That wasn’t all of it. The flat-but-tightly-woven fabric was also the backdrop for another gush of thread along its surface, letters in a flowing, confusing cursive. Was the writing supposed to indicate the owner or was it like the name you scribble in large characters on a card when you give someone a gift? Did this square have an owner? Had it ever had one?

[The repetition of these questions might be annoying, but it does show Lavinia’s need to find answers.]

Was this, had this, been a square belonging to another Lavinia, or was it meant for the Lavinia namesake who was in Santiago de Compostela looking at it? (A very difficult thing to believe.) Or was it both? If it was both, meaning there had been a minimum of two Lavinias and perhaps more, how had it reached its current location? 

What should the finder - the new Lavinia - do with it? How was she supposed to interpret the much-traveled piece of cloth? It needed a context. Most contexts, if they involved women, were hard to decipher. Scholars know this. It shouldn’t be that way, Lavinia knew.

The little square, which could have been 8” x 8” or a bit more, had too many layers to be recent. The embroidery was not done with polyester thread. Each letter in the name was about three quarters of an inch tall. The letters had been etched in an ancient blue that could have come from woad or indigo. The handwriting, making the most of its stitches, still was moving like a small stream. It moved even when no hand or wind was touching the cloth.

Weaving the sea. 

It was another unexpected phrase. Like somebody was pouring words into her head. A traveling square with its word for company. Creating as it went the only possible handrail linking the shores. The handrail that Rosalía de Castro had wished for in the poem (from her book of 1863) that lamented: 

Si o mar tivera barandas,

fórate ver ao Brasil;

mais o mar non ten barandas,

amor meu, ¿por dónde hei de ir?

Yes, in the past the widows of the living, the ones whose men had emigrated, perhaps never to return, those widows would wish for the sea to have a handrail, for their feet were the only transportation they had. People were always crossing the sea. Since she had been in Santiago, in Galicia, Lavinia had become much more aware of this. So many loves truncated, lives spent in financial exile.

[The baranda or handrail is one I have wished for in poems.] [However, this is not my story.]

Clearly this crossing phenomenon was not unlike the Golden Cables of Sympathy that since the nineteenth century had linked feminists around the world. This was demonstrated perfectly in the book, written by Margaret McFadden. Even though it had been published some years ago, in 1999, Lavinia often referred to it when teaching. 

Women did have a lot of global connections. It wasn’t just a theory. There were artifacts of all sorts to prove that and clearly the Atlantic Ocean had been crossed an infinite number of times by an infinite number of people. If the sea had had them, the traveler could go to Brazil to see her love. But the sea was not equipped that way, and so the speaker of the old poem was at a loss.

There was one presentation of McFadden’s Golden Cables that made Lavinia stop. She had needed to find the exact publication year, and had used her phone to look it up. She came across a jacket blurb summary. She read it and then read it again:

An intricate network of contacts developed among women in Europe and North America over the course of the nineteenth century. These women created virtual communities through communication, support, and a shared ideology. Forged across boundaries of nationality, language, ethnic origin, and even class, these connections laid the foundation for the 1888 International Council of Women and formed the beginnings of an international women's movement.

That was it! Things were beginning to fall into place. There was a plan. 

Lavinia didn’t know exactly what that plan was, but she sensed she wasn’t sitting on the sidelines in Santiago as it unfolded, that the excuse for not being enticed by the situation, by its signs and silences, could not be that she was a forasteira, an outsider, and didn’t understand it so she didn’t dare participate. The only valid excuse was the truth: she was uneasy. Or…

Afraid. Leary. She didn’t like to overstep the rules of propriety in Santiago, however, and knew she was feeling flattered - no, that wasn’t it - was feeling fortunate that people had thought to include her in whatever it was they were doing. She hadn’t figured out what it was yet, but she recognized that those involved were dead serious about their task. It was not an invitation to be taken lightly.

There was something going on.

Lavinia didn’t know at that moment that what was going on around her was related to the mysterious box discovered during renovations of the modest little A Tertulia café. She hadn’t noticed the deeper connections, the ones that were never spoken. How could she? Plus, she had not come to Santiago, city of the Saint, to be overly social and entertain herself with thoughts of leaving academe to become a sleuth. That she had not done.

That said, Lavinia was (and always had been) an extremely curious person, always drawn to new and strange things. Becoming an academic was a natural result of poking around in the things that crossed her path, and she had instinctively followed a path. After finishing college, she was prepared to teach both gender and library studies. It wasn’t an odd combination and she knew others who were in the same situation.

Among Lavinia’s (Dr. Rivers’) favorite courses to teach was Archiving, which had a very complex content. Another course was a more advanced topic and was called Archiving Women. In this course which she could examine ways women’s lives were arranged for them and where they found ways to say what they knew and felt. She never got tired of the topic. It had, of course, led her to the current sabbatical in Santiago, where she was looking at the path of a forgotten photographer. Her story had been told by virtually nobody.

In a moment it all became clear. She did have something to offer them after all. (Who they were didn’t matter.) She was aware that they had their areas of expertise, and so did she. You might say hers was rearranging the official stories with the right sources and data. Shift the analysis to a feminist view. Give names to the forgotten or never known. Look at the details, the quality of work done by hand, catalogue it, educate the world (if possible). A complex task, to be sure, but it needed doing.

Suddenly the almost-anonymous square dropped to the table as Lavinia asked herself:

“Can’t objects cross the sea many times? People do, some of them at least.”

 Surely it was easier for things to do the crossing over and over than for people to do it. Lives have a limit and run out - of money, desire, or time. And that statement about the McFadden book was exactly what Lavinia had been thinking - hoping - for a while. Why couldn’t women communicate across the Atlantic (or any ocean, for that matter)? They could do it quite seriously, drawn to the other side because they had something to say or do. You didn’t make a trip like that on a whim, a spur-of-the-moment decision. You had to plan.

It was that very planning that held her thoughts.

“How did they plan, and what did they plan for, these people who crossed the Atlantic in the past?”

[I think she was also wondering if there had been other Lavinias, on both sides of the ocean.]

“Has this tie, all the ties that must have existed if we can find them, been nurtured for generations?” Lavinia was more than curious now. She was desperate to know. She didn’t care what it made her look like. She also wanted to stop talking like that first sentence, “Has this tie, all the ties that must have existed if we can find them, been nurtured for generations?” (It was completely stilted, unnatural.)

“Not likely.” She was trying to talk herself out of the idea of a plan that was so unusual it could only be conceived of in a world beyond the ordinary.

“Is this piece of fabric with my name on it a coincidence, since my name is not common?” 

[Not any more. Not for a century or so.]

“Have they been waiting for me?” An esperpento of a question, given that Lavinia’s next question was:

“Who were they? Why me? Or am I just an innocent passerby?”

[This is not a fantasy novel or science fiction. However, it’s also not clear if this story is fiction or nonfiction. As the author, I can pretty much guarantee that.]

Of course Lavinia, even in her role as academic researcher and professor, was going to feel disoriented, even if she could not resist the puzzle. What was she supposed to do with this one-page ‘book’ she was holding in her hands, having first deposited it on a clean sheet of paper to move and lift it.

“Define book… define write…” she was muttering. There was nothing that served to classify the square in all its vintage beauty as a book, yet it was asking to be read.

“Define reading…” 

Nothing was working as usual.

Book… libro.

Read… ler.