A House Divided (L2.7)

They were neighbors, close neighbors, and they didn’t get along at all. Actually, the not getting along part was mostly one-sided. He resented her living next door, and she tried to remain pretty much oblivious to him. She simply wanted to live in peace, but he wasn’t willing to let that happen. It all had to do with how they had become neighbors…

Daniel was telling Lavinia the story, and she could see it was very upsetting to him. As a result, she listened attentively, with as much respect as she could muster for people she didn’t know and would never know. She wasn’t being insensitive, but the events seemed rather foreign and distant, although in the end that would all change.

This is the story her friend Daniel felt compelled to tell her.

They were neighbors, each living in half of an old stone house in Trasulfe, province of Pontevedra. Perhaps each of them had inherited the house’s feelings and history. That was all very important, because a stone building from the eighteenth century was never without those things.

He (Daniel called him Pedro, although that wasn’t his real name) was the angry one. Pedro felt she (let’s call her Rosa) did not belong there, even though she had every right to reside in the half of the house that was rightfully hers, having purchased it legally, with all the proper documentation and for a reasonable price.

The house was divided, but not like a condominium. It was divided like the country had been, decades ago, by a military uprising that had split it down the middle, painfully, with far too much blood. The current division went back to that war. The house - almost a pazo or country manor, had once belonged to a single family. When the owner passed away, he had left it to his children, but custom and the law said his son, who was also the vinculeiro or first-born, had the true right to ownership. His sisters, and there were three, were secondary in their father’s mind. Most likely they resented that and their older brother, but they had the obligation to accept the preference for the only son.

Then came the war, the civil war that split families down the middle and put bullets in many heads. The son, despite being the vinculeiro, was forced to seek safety in exile, leaving his resentful sisters in charge of the strong, masterful house. However, even with the ideology of the newly-implanted dictatorship behind them, they weren’t able to wrest the entire house from their absent brother. Along with the house, there were many fields that went begging for a true owner.

The solution had been to divide the house in half, as if it were a country, leaving the quarters for the servants and livestock to the absent brother, whom they never expected to see again. (Never wanted to see again.) Pedro was the son of Rosaura, the oldest daughter, and she considered herself to be the rightful owner.

Daniel explained this slowly and sadly. Lavinia nodded, her gaze directed toward his hands, which gripped the book lying on the table in front of him. He swallowed and continued.

The brother did return, years later and to the immense surprise of everyone. His heart broke when he discovered he only had the right to the stable and part of the eira or open-air threshing floor. He did his best to live with the sad anger this caused him, and tried to rebuild what remained, at the same time as he was trying to recover the lost years of his exile. The only thing he really achieved, given that the war had taken almost every possession he’d left behind in Trasulfe, was to retain the right to half of his house. When he died (some say of a broken heart, of course), that half was sold, the money going for a purpose nobody would ever know. 

“How could that happen?” queried Lavinia, but Daniel didn’t hear her or possibly didn’t know the answer, so he said nothing. Then he went on to explain what happened with the house divided.

A very nice woman, Rosaura, bought the half that had been Natalio’s, and even then she was concerned about Pedro’s reaction. Pedro, according to Daniel, was the son of Herminia, the oldest daughter. The reaction wasn’t long in coming. Pedro wanted no outsiders in his house, in his Trasulfe, and he wasted little time in letting Rosaura know by threatening a lawsuit. It concerned the right to the irrigation waters for two of the leiras or fields. There had been close to thirty such fields when the house had been whole, although Pedro had left half a dozen fallow because he couldn’t care less about growing patacas or cenouras or anything else. (It was much less work to buy potatoes and carrots in the store.) He just wanted to make poor Rosaura miserable enough to leave.

“Rosaura was a kind woman, although she was rather naive,” said Daniel, looking strangely sad. “Everybody has his or her limits, though. She was certainly displeased by the lawsuit idea and wanted to stop it.” Then he went on to explain what she did in response.

Rosaura was an excellent cook and would leave really delicious things for Pedro that must have been eaten, because the plates were always left beside the dividing line, empty and clean. Among the peace offerings, for that was what they were, had been an empanada, Galician style, of tuna and onion, its homemade curst as flaky as had ever been made. The amount of salt was perfect. There was also a hearty bowl of ensaladilla rusa, which was essentially a potato salad with carrots and peas, a small amount of homemade mayonnaise, and the right dash of wine vinegar. There was a clay casserole of chourizo sausage baked in wine with black peppercorns that was not so hard to prepare but did require a good eye for selecting the meat so it was solid, spicy enough, and not full of fat. The slices were tender and tasty. The hake had been a mouth-watering dish with just the right amount of oil, garlic, and one hot cayenne pepper to give an edge to the flavor. The desserts were numerous and ingredients included cream, chestnuts from nearby trees, apples from the orchard growing on Rosaura’s property, walnuts she’d harvested and hulled, thick honey from a local beekeeper…

“You’re making me hungry,” Lavinia responded. “Pedro was definitely a lucky neighbor.”

“Yes, but the lawsuit did not go away,” Daniel informed her, shaking his head more. Then he described the gifts from Rosaura that did not include food, because that list was very long.

She brought him back a stunning pitcher and serving tray from Coimbra, carefully wrapped in a cutwork tablecloth from Viana do Castelo to protect them from being damaged by the stones of the old courtyard. The items disappeared inside the other half of the house. There was a set of carved wooden cups from Vigo and a spectacular ceramic mask from the Sargadelos factory to hang on a wall. It was large and bright - white, Prussian blue, rusty red, golden yellow. An expensive item many would have longed to have gracing their homes.

“I take it these items weren’t successful either,” observed Daniel’s listener, and her suspicion was confirmed by the look on his face. He went on.

The tactics Rosaura employed were changed to pruning the pear tree in his part of the garden and trimming his side of the myrtle hedge that separated them. She even swept the stones of his patio free of fallen leaves and pine cones. Then she resorted to playing music of different sorts. The list was long and included all varieties, all tasteful, from jazz to folk to classical. They were all selected with care and played near the dividing line, not too loudly. The Portuguese fados should have had some effect, but none was ever apparent. If the savage breast, or beast, was assuaged in any way, she could never tell. All she could do was to hope that one day there would be a letter, if not a personal visit, informing her that the lawsuit had been cancelled, or whatever happens in cases where the accuser drops the demand.

Still, the gifts to Pedro continued, and the hope of their becoming friends in the tiny village of Trasulfe where even a single enemy was a burden was a constant frustration. Rosaura’s efforts had no effect, apparently. Letters on official-looking stationery continued to arrive. She was running out of ideas and was running out of patience. Pedro had no reason to make her life so difficult. Still, she resisted going to a lawyer herself. Perhaps there was still a chance the music would work…

Then one day Pedro’s son came up the flagstone path to Rosaura’s side of the house divided. The narrow way wound through the shady garden with its tall, majestic oaks and resilient hydrangeas - they had the bluest of blue blossoms despite the large patches of shade. Still, there was no denying that the two neighbors had waged a civil war of their own. Well, Pedro had, anyway, and the house didn’t deserve another one after the bloody conflict that had been started in 1936. Certainly, Antón, who was Pedro’s son, had never crossed over into Rosaura’s half. He knocked on the heavy oak door and when she opened it, she saw he held an envelope in his hand. He gave it to her without a word. She opened it while he stood there, saying nothing. Inside was a handwritten letter. She read:

Dear Rosaura:

You have been killing me with your music and your kind gestures. Don’t think I haven’t noticed. Well, you have finally won. When you read this letter, which I directed my son Antón to deliver to you in person, I will have found another place. As they say in Galician, I will have gone to another potato field, the one where people go and never return.

As my assassin - and you are a very skilled assassin at that, as you must realize - I can only repay you by leaving you my half of the house. You are welcome to live with it and should enjoy it. Don’t worry about the irrigation paths to my fields - the ones that I alone had the right to use. I don’t need them any more.

My son has promised to leave you alone. I hope he will do that.

Yours,

Pedro Ledesma Moure

Daniel sounded as if he had memorized the letter. He fell silent, his eyes even more fixed on the space in front of him. It seemed that story was complete, even if his reason for telling Lavinia in the first place was still far from clear. Nevertheless, she knew better than to ask for more information. 

Some wars are just too painful and run too deep for people to comprehend. All those wars can do is to remain in the bloodied memory of a person - or a house - with a reason to remember.