Nineteen is Prime

Authors’s Note: 

This story is part of the Lavinia series, which is set in Santiago de Compostela, Galicia. Many of the related stories or chapters can be found elsewhere on this site.

***

Pilar and Lavinia were talking as they walked past the old Derby Café in the direction of the Porta de Mazarelos. They discovered that both were intrigued by the nineteenth century. This common passion - because it is more of a passion than simply feeling intrigued - had come up in their conversation for a simple reason. They had just passed the Banco Pastor by the traffic light that was a nuisance for both pedestrians and cars. 

A few steps more and the two women stopped and looked across the busy, narrow street toward Rúa de Concepción Arenal. The obscure passageway with its downward slope was a little street named after a very important Galician woman devoted to prison reform. Pilar mentioned that the Cine Numax, which was located on Concepción Arenal, was going to be showing a Portuguese film about Maria da Fonte. Maria had been a leader of the rebellion against the Carlist government in 1846. Her name was well-known in popular history, and for good reason.

Pilar started singing the popular Zêca Afonso song about the uprising, and Lavinia listened carefully, despite wondering why her companion was doing that while walking along a busy street:

As sete mulheres do Minho

mulheres de grande valor

Armadas de fuso e roca

correram com o regedor

Essa mulher lá do Minho

que da foice fez espada

há-de ter na lusa história

uma página doirada

Viva a Maria da Fonte

com as pistolas na mão

para matar os Cabrais

que são falsos à nação

[Gloss: Seven brave women from the Minho River region, armed with spindles and distaffs, ran the ruler out of town. One made her sickle into a sword and earned a golden page in Portuguese history: Maria da Fonte, pistols in her hands, planned to strike down the Cabral people, traitors to the nation.]

It was an instantly catchy, singable tune, Lavinia thought. 

When Pilar had finished, she added that 1846 was also important in Galicia, for the Mártires de Carral, the Martyrs of Carral massacre. Twelve had faced the firing squad of the dictatorship. Lavinia realized that nobody in her country even knew 1846 had existed, let alone rebelled and died for anything. People had already forgotten the Civil War, 1861-1865. She really respected the historical memory of the galegos.

[Perhaps readers here should have been warned that this story is a bit like a history lesson, but we are not going to apologize. Some things are just that important, right?]

Pilar, on seeing Lavinia’s keen interest in the events of the nineteenth century in Europe, and specifically those of Galicia and Portugal, continued talking. Too many people in her country, the US, had no knowledge of what happened before they were born. Some could barely track down things that were more than five years old. She didn’t say this to her American friend, because she sensed Lavinia was well aware of this sad fact. She was also not one of the ignorant, or she wouldn’t have come to Galicia to do research, wouldn’t have been learning Galician.

Pilar then explained why, from her perspective, that century was so important to her. 

First of all, and not unrelated to Carral - everything was linked - it was the century of the Rexurdimento, the Galician renaissance. This renaissance was an expression of local or regional culture, but it was also a protest against a Madrid, the capital that cared next to nothing for its peripheral colony. There were no trains to the outer regions of Iberia, because they were considered useless by Spaniards still running on the fumes of the Spanish empire, which was about to expire in 1898. Galicians were poor, most of them, and their land was only for the local governors to get rich off of it.

Then Pilar had to mention Rosalía de Castro. Rosalía always waited in the wings, offstage, her voice reminding people of the negra sombra, the black shadow she never defined.

“She wasn’t just a ‘little woman’ in a rural area, but rather the impetus to the exploration of Galician identity.”  

Lavinia smiled, sadly, of course.

“How could a woman responsible for that?” Pilar anticipated her friend’s question by asking her own question. She proceeded to answer it. (She was unaware that Lincoln had called Harriet Beecher Stowe the ‘little woman who started that great war’, but Lavinia was. That thought crossed her mind, too.)

“Emigration here was rampant, the same as for Ireland. Rural, undeveloped areas had no choice. Rosalía knew it was unjust, and London as well as Madrid were deaf to the colonies on the edge of the ‘known world’. It was as if they were Gog and Magog.” (Lavinia quickly saw this site in her mind, and recalled it was one of the places the Amazons had been thought to reside. That had been according to Sir John Mandeville, she thought.)

Pilar’s tone wasn’t exactly stiff now, but it was stern. Unfair treatment was just that - unfair. It was nothing new to some people, and in this case the periphery paid the price.

Pilar continued, and was far from done:

“Rosalía had addressed the Galician identity from several perspectives, but especially class and gender. She used the term slavery or slaves on more than one occasion.” This wasn’t a personal rant; critics had finally woken up to the political power of literature, and of literature written by women, even Galician ones. 

It had only taken about a century and a half.

Family reasons made the century even more important for Pilar. She didn’t bring them up right then, on the noisy street where numerous passersby jolted conversations as well as the people. She trusted Lavinia, even though she wasn’t a galega, and that was why Pilar decided to pursue the discussion at another time, over a good albariño. She could sing on the street, out in the open, but she wouldn’t divulge other things.

Lavinia looked very thoughtful. Her mouth was set in a firm line, and her expression was serious. She clearly was not oblivious to what her companion was telling her and wanted to know more. 

Then the researcher that she was decided to reply with a few examples.

“Once feminist criticism showed how secondary sources were important, I became interested in consulting and archiving them. This started to happen in the 1980s, and some of the most important sources for information about women’s lives were heretofore considered marginal, worthless. The nineteenth century was full of them. People began unearthing diaries, letters, cookbooks, and a lot more. Scraps, really. Documentation took many forms.” 

Lavinia could have mentioned how Emily Dickinson wrote on minor pieces of paper, but she didn’t. She already sounded pedantic and wasn’t happy about that. She opted to listen more, and looked even more thoughtful. Then her eyebrows raised, the corners of her mouth turned up, and she added:

“Now I teach library science and Gender Studies. I guess that as a student that criticism changed my life, gave me a path to follow.” 

Then Lavinia laughed, despite her by now wry expression, because she knew full well that she was having trouble staying on one path. That path was her official research topic, the photographer Ruth Matilda Anderson, who had come five times to Galicia before 1935. She had been straying from it and could be getting herself into trouble with her university.

“I also have been interested in what was termed regionalism in women’s writing. If women were very limited in their social activities, it seemed worthwhile to understand how they viewed those restricted surroundings.” 

Lavinia said this, but then realized how foolish it had been to assume such limitations for those writers. So foolish, that she felt ashamed at having accepted the idea. Regionalism was associated with local color, while realism had more far-reaching concerns. Regionalists were thought to be confined by observation of what was close at hand. Women were more likely to write like that, given their limited social mobility unless accompanied by father, brother, or husband. 

“The Seneca Falls women’s convention of 1848 is one of the major events for the U.S. in terms of women’s rights,” continued Lavinia. 

Seneca Falls had been "a convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman,” according to one source, but it didn’t emerge from a vacuum. There had been rumblings (a poor term, of course, but the protests were subdued, not rebellious) in the 1830s. After that early period of abolitionist thinking, the anti-slavery convention was held in London in 1840. Since then, there was no going back, no ignoring what was right. Seneca Falls confirmed that.

Lavinia was obviously thinking about the nineteenth century from her role of the academic, the researcher, the contemporary woman. The 1840 anti-slavery gathering had been important, because both women and men made the long journey, but only one sex had been allowed to participate, to speak. (Ironically, women had been voicing and distributing abolitionist ideas for years already.) That forced silence might have been the trigger.

The transatlantic communication between the two friends was not one of many years, but now it had dawned on them that they were involved in something that had been happening long before them and to a certain extent was still going on. Neither said this out loud; they simply sensed it.

‘It’ was about slavery and encoding, encrypting - hiding - information to survive. There had been slavery in America and slavery in Galicia as well. The causes and conditions might not be identical, but the nineteenth century had been when the stranglehold on many members of society had begun to loosen, just a little. Both Pilar and Lavinia knew there was much that was still to be learned, and both were hopeful that knowing more about the period would bring about further discoveries.

That was also when they both realized, at the very same moment, why the items in box were sent to Santiago in particular, and not, for example, to Madrid. Or to another country. They looked at each other, not breathing. Santiago had guardians of the Word. Not the Word in the religious sense, but in another sense. What Santiago received would be preserved, kept safe, it would survive indefinitely. The medieval city and its cathedral, so famous and full of old documents and treasures, were the perfect model. Pilgrims had been coming from around the world for centuries. There was a reason for that.

Pilar brought up a name out of the blue:

“Exeria!” she exclaimed.

“What? Who’s Exeria?” Lavinia did not know anything about the pilgrim and writer from the fourth century. 

The name belonged to a traveler who was Galician and whose account of her travels to the Holy Land had miraculously survived, slipped between the pages of other manuscripts. The point was that it was possible for women to both write and to escape from regionalism, even then. What else was still hidden, still waiting to be revealed? What else was still disguised and was it always necessary to conceal certain ideas?

So for Pilar, the intrigue if the nineteenth century was its historic and political significance. It helped that Rosalía de Castro had been the foremother of the use of Galician in public documents. Where had she gotten the vision to write in the language? Where had she gotten the courage, when the language was identified as rural vernacular, hardly capable of expressing sophisticated thought?

For Lavinia, the century in question was more about data, documents, and gender-related politics. It was about the gradual political awakening. Still, the awakening had a ways to go, she had to admit.

She said nothing. Her companion said nothing.

***

As a result of their conversation, which had been fairly brief, and as they neared the Rúa do Preguntoiro, Pilar realized Lavinia is right for the bigger project. Not that the American researcher, the academic, knew about the project. Nobody had told her anything, and she had not yet realized that she was being tested. And watched.

“We have work to do,” said Pilar and walked with Lavinia to see Pilar the Librarian. She didn’t ask, she more or less ordered. In three minutes they had reached the Biblioteca Xeral and entered, going directly to the office of the Directora. She seemed to know exactly where it was located within the old building.

“We want to look at the 19th century materials,” requests Pilar, after the traditional greeting with a kiss on each cheek had been completed. Lavinia thought she saw a look pass between both Pilars. Surely they weren’t conspiring.

Librarian Pilar disappeared for nearly fifteen minutes. When she returned, she brought them a printout of the requested holdings and handed it to the other Pilar. It was a very long set of pages that had been stapled together. Maybe twenty pages in all, maybe more. No, definitely more.

Amiga Pilar looked upset, and insisted they needed to consult the works, not just read a list of titles. (Lavinia called her Amiga Pilar in her mind, in order to distinguish from Librarian Pilar. It was her small joke, but was a useful way to distinguish between the two women with the same name.)

Had another look passed between the two women with the same name? Lavinia was becoming increasingly puzzled, because if the library’s holdings for the nineteenth century were that vast, of course they would not be brought into the room where researchers sat to consult the documents.

Librarian Pilar gestured for them to wait, went off again, but this time she returned in three minutes, holding a note. The paper was folded simply, just once. Then the librarian hustled the other two women away, acting as if she had to attend a meeting or something similar.

Amiga Pilar looked at the note, acting as if she didn’t know what was written there. However, her slightly pleased expression put Lavinia on guard. The note indicated that they needed to meet in a certain place at 11:00 that evening. No further explanation was provided. The note said something like the depósito. Both Pilars apparently knew what that was and where it was, but neither had felt it necessary to inform the American.

Lavinia decided to trust them, nevertheless. What else could she do? She had no way of locating the place on her own, nor did she want to. She quickly retraced the steps she had taken with her friend starting from the Derby. Had the conversation been planned? She was starting to think so. The path - there was that word again, there was that elusive route she had been trying to follow without a lot of success - from the old, now-closed café up and around the casco vello, the old part, circling back to the library, now almost seemed arranged.

***

The only ending to this story is almost too simple. It is likely to be a disappointment to the readers who are looking for a grand revelation or some shocking event. Yet nothing of the sort happened or is going to happen. Lavinia she doesn’t know yet that she’s going to meet the Graystockings.

That’s the big event. How big is something that will become obvious in the future. The near future, not a century from now.