Whose? (R)

Intro to the story:

These were the instructions, the prompt. I tried to do as told: “Tell a story in the form of a police report, news article, or journal entry about an incredible (or impossible) event.”

The story:

Lavinia took a new journal with a deep reddish, berry wine cover from her bookshelf, admired the hand-embossed cover for a moment and opened it for the first time. It was from one of the street vendors from the casco vello, the old part, of Santiago. She didn’t buy often from the stalls, but enjoyed the probably unhealthy scent of the tanned leather hanging from the displays. She’d chosen this journal, thinking she’d wait a while before using it. She’d waited eight months. Long enough.

Before she started, she wrote down the date at the top of the first pristine page, breaking its magic shell, yet opening it as well. Next, she took out a very old document from a canvas bag beside her chair, her hands encased in gloves to protect the object, and began to read over the pages of another diary, this one wriiten long ago, more than 160 years ago perhaps

Her diary. The one that would come to shed a blazing light on cultural studies of Galiza because its author asserted she had witnessed and participated in the gathering described in its pages. What she had been part of would be the first of several gatherings in which women in a group had come to the area and organized public discussions. Discussions about things that mattered to them. A lot of times that meant reading, writing, even translating. Meant finding things to read, materials to write with, ways to communicate with with others like themselves, doing the same thing. Discussions that only went where they were wanted. It wasn’t safe to do otherwise.

Those discussions were not something the persons involved in could know then - certainly nobody was trying to see into the future - that they would have an effect on lives to come, lives from two centuries later. They were trying to make the ideas known immediately. The ideas weren’t to the liking of many who prefer the status quo because of - naturally - their own status. Plus, some ideas, like seed, are slower to take root. And have bigger hurdles.

Lavinia began to copy the old diary into the bound pages of the new diary, a blank book waiting for her to have her will with those words written by Rosalía de Castro some time between 1850 and 1870. Words that were so old, so stolen - only here in an old diary nobody else but she (Lavinia) knows exists.

So why copy it now and why write it out by hand? She could photocopy it, scan it, take digital shots of all the pages, which are housed in a loose binder or folder. Both written pages and the cover folder appear to be recycled paper, which often occurred back then, especially when it was girls who were doing the writing, the important recording of dailiness.

Here is the original, in any case. Or so we’ve been told. (Facsimile is everything these days, or maybe that’s AI.) Please don’t ask how we got this information or why; there’s no time. We need to determine if these meetings ever took place and what came out of them. If they took place, then we’ve got an authentic diary, a historical document that opens more areas for research. If they didn’t, then we’ve got literature to thank for the diversion from current reality.

The diary

They’ve arrived! Several came by the port of Vigo, and others arrived via A Coruña. We have been able to meet them all and they have good places to stay in Padrón. We have plans to go to Noia and Rianxo for certain, before going to the bigger cities. We have so much to talk about and hope we can spend a lot of time together. We’re trying to make sure there’s always somebody to interpret if one of the americanas doesn’t know Galician, because probably none does.

We want them to tell us in detail what they’re doing and if it’s working. We want them to tell us about what they’re doing read and about their own writing. We want to tell them about what we’ve written, but mostly I suspect it’ll be what we want to write. We know the challenges we face in rural areas. We know there are some people who would prevent us from becoming literate, like the mother of the Grimké sisters, who tried to forbid her daughter to teach her slave, just a girl, to read.

Reading isn’t for the fields, people think, but we want to explain that we share stories and verses while doing planting and harvesting, then take them home to write up. The words have been polished over days of backbreaking work and they come out perfectly because we don’t have any paper to spare. If people only knew what we’ve written through the centuries!

My plan is to speak with as many of my friends as possible, in order to make a list of anybody, any woman, who has published anything. It might be a challenge if a pseudonym was used and it looks like a man wrote it. (I hope someday what I’m writing here sounds trite or childish or both, but I can’t predict the future.) I’ll need copies of all the pieces. We’ll need to look over the topics that appear most frequently. How do we explain our lives (and deaths) to the escritoras americanas so we can make points of collaboration?

What collaboration can we possibly have? There are so many barriers? What can we do? Some have talked about the library or a museum of our accomplishments, and others have insisted on creating a publishing house that would publish things in more than one language. That sounds was too futuristic for us to try to do, but maybe some people, some day, will find a way to connect better.

It’s late now and my candle is reaching the end. Tomorrow I’ll make a list of all that has to be done and will find a time for our group here to meet.

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There’s nothing more. Except for the next part, in which Lavinia continues copying Rosalía’s (stolen?) diary into her own diary.

Something isn’t right.