Questions You Might Ask

Lavinia was having one of those days. A day where every step was a search of its own, a confusion, a stumble or trip-up that never quite happened. It was one of those days we all know are necessary, yet fear. One of those days we all have occasionally, when our thinking is invisible, when we feel just a bit invisible of body, yet are aware that we might be clunking through well-worn streets like an enslaved elephant. No elephant should be forced to live with chains around its feet, and no human is ever happy struggling to put one foot in front of the other.

There is a fine, minuscule line, between blunder and anomie, and this was a day for it, although Lavinia didn’t know that.

This day had its chains for the woman in need of answers to her questions. When she had first arrived, there hadn’t really been a lot of questions. Rather, there had been a plan for her research - such a pretty word, or so she had thought - and it had included the locating and cataloguing of Galicians’ response over the decades to the photographs taken of them by Ruth Matilda Anderson. Not so much questions and collecting their comments and organizing them. 

Why had nobody in the photographer’s own country ever noticed her? Why had no feminist scholars taken her into account when they studied women travelers? Etc. etc. A lot of people had gotten promoted by asking similar questions about other women.

While the first two sentences of the previous paragraph do indeed sound like questions, they weren’t part of the research plan that had earned Dr. Rivers her sabbatical leave. That part, the questions about Anderson’s having been forgotten in her own country, might come later, or maybe not. Lavinia was going to focus on Anderson and Galicia for her project. End of story.

That was before everything happened, things that subtly started to derail her nicely-made plans. The derailment began long before she noticed things were getting wobbly, as one might describe it. We will only try to give a partial description here.

On this day the sun was shining without conviction, but its disagreement with the passing patches of mousy clouds was not severe: illumination prevailed after each encounter. Santiago is like that. It thrives on its sky, whether hostile or brilliant. If a person spends enough time in the city, the chiaroscuro effect, that threat of downpour and promise of sun, both become precious. The weather shifts, but the stone walls and streets hold fast: take what you need of us, because we will always be here.

This did not happen in the States, although Lavinia liked Maine and wasn’t planning to move elsewhere. The coast was where she preferred to be, she had her job, and she was in Santiago as an interlude, nothing more. She was a woman with a plan, enthusiasm, and the intelligence to achieve her goal. However, none of these guaranteed she was in control of her - what should we call them? - thoughts, discoveries, sources of information. 

Something else was at work in the centuries-old city with its UNESCO recognition of its culture. It was something that didn’t come right out and trip Lavinia up or open doors wide so she could walk through. Absolutely not. As a result, the best-laid plans of the amiable scholar began to dissipate, like sugar crystals in a light shower or the muddied stream when you kick at the rocks and there is momentary turbulence. 

It was a mystery. As the plans’ form started to be disassembled, there remained a void and Lavinia realized she needed to rethink what she was doing, rethink it completely.

The only way to achieve this was to keep threading toes, soles, and heels along Rúa do Vilar, Rúa Novas, Xerusalén, as Algalias, Mazarelos, San Miguel dos Agros, and on and on. It was the repetition that mattered, the endless story of endless steps. Steps that definitely led somewhere. 

Then it happened, because it had to happen. Today was a day when Mary Oliver appeared again, to walk with Lavinia. Mary offered Lavinia some lines from her poem, “Some Questions You Might Ask.” The streets of the city were always redolent with words and yet it was unexpected for this writer to join her. That should have been a signal.

Walking with a woman from her own time and country was a different experience from the ones with Saint Scholastica and María Balteira, one a chaste religious figure of ancient times and the other a well-commented-upon courtesan of the Middle Ages. It was not expected that Lavinia wanted to know why you and why now?

Looking at some of Oliver’s lines, we might comprehend how Lavinia, walking beside the poet, would listen and begin to pose the questions herself...

Is the soul solid, like iron?

Lavinia liked the question, thought it deserved an answer. It didn’t matter that she didn’t believe souls existed. If they did, surely they were as strong as iron, a metal with myriad meanings. Maybe Santiago, with its imposing cathedral, its convents and churches, was more prone to have souls residing in it. Maine definitely did not conjure up thoughts of souls.

Or is it tender and breakable, like

the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?

No, if souls existed, they were by no means breakable. Still, Lavinia was beginning to sense that other things were, in fact, breakable, and that among these things were her ability to function like the academic who swoops down with owl-like beak to snatch bits of fluff, moth wings, maybe, to transport them to a curriculum vitae. ‘I spent several months in X studying Y and here are my Z results. Now give me tenure and promotion’.

It would be nice to find an answer to those two lines, but there was no way to formulate them into a question that anybody Lavinia knew in Santiago could answer.

Who has it, and who doesn’t?

I keep looking around me.

Mary is the author of this poem and these lines, but the one I keep looking around me? Well, her companion in Compostela, despite not being a poet herself, has just now clung to that I, looking around her, wanting to know. She thinks she has the answer, and wants the soul to be iron. It fits this place better. Both women are right, though, right to say I keep looking around me. That’s because if you look, you learn. Ask John Berger if you need a better source on looking and seeing.

One question leads to another.

One question, followed by another. Forward. One step leads to the next, and they - the questions, the steps - may never stop, Lavinia tells herself, although she is somewhat consoled by the line from Mary. She has been worried that she’s overthinking it all, being too curious about too many things she doesn’t quite understand and maybe shouldn’t. She is losing focus.

Does it have a shape, like an iceberg?

It might still refer to the soul for the author of the poem, but for the academic in her confusion, it is not so easy to identify. It is that thing that is distracting and tugging at her, whispering that it is immense and she must hurry, that all she’s seeing is really only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface - the worn stones aren’t enough, no - there is so much more. Lavinia has not found evidence of that ‘much more’. She asked a couple of times about what lies beneath the streets, and has gotten odd looks from people. Dirt, stones. Tunnels? Tombs? Shrugged shoulders. Maybe she hasn’t asked her questions correctly.

Like the eye of a hummingbird?

Maybe like the eye of a gargoyle or one of the gang of angels or saints in the Pórtico da Gloria of the cathedral. It would be hard to find a hummingbird in the center of the city, despite there being a few blooms here in there, like in the tiny little Praza da Fonseca. The eye of a gargoyle is something to behold. Once it sees you, it has you.

Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?

Lungs are for breathing and here the air is mineral and shiny, speckled like some hens. It is not inert. Something in the walls and street slabs rubs off on the oxygen and you drink it. One or two, as long as the breathing can take place, there’s no need to count the lungs. Mary probably wasn’t thinking of the scallop the way Lavinia was as she walked along with the poem. Scallops live in the water, in the sea, except when they live in Santiago - not by the sea - on certain buildings. Old scallops signifying the buildings around town that once belonged to the Church - and may still - because they signify the scallops on Saint James’ hat. Saint James - Santiago - who floated into Galicia in a stone boat. Vieiras in the Galician language, and there is no term for them in Spanish. 

What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?

Mary and Lavinia don’t disagree on this question, and they also know it’s not something you can ask anywhere other than in a poem. The little stones selected by the poet were probably in a rural area in the States, but even so, both women are familiar with the way they interact with moonlight. In Santiago, they are not so alone, they both say, and wonder how moonlight and stone can fuse so tightly, then stretch apart, marking the distance between them with a glow of nostalgia, of morriña.

Lavinia wants so much to ask people in Santiago if they think of their stones as being able to sit and if they are alone at night. Are they sad or is it a safe silence, a swaddling of stars, pleasurable for the stones? My friends would think I’m crazy if I asked, she realizes. She knows she can’t ask what they feel when they touch the air.

What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?

Mary asked, and so does Lavinia, who has been enchanted to see lemon trees mid-city, not to mention orange trees and others. Roses, they are a dime a dozen, but she knows it’s different when the bushes are growing in a public setting as opposed to private property. Everybody’s roses, thinks Lavinia, recalling the too-homely petunias set out then trashed every year by the town. Throw-aways. Not in Santiago. The gardens are for real, and might be forever. Here things are planted, and built, to last. Nobody has even heard the term ‘planned obsolescence’ here.

Leaves are everywhere, both in Maine and Santiago. However, One of these places does not have magnolias along the walks, or gardenia bushes or holly in the Alameda where people are always strolling. There may even be a stray yew with its glossy leaves, while Maine has none of those. Anyway, everything is washed so often, so thoroughly, by rain, that the shine is natural. Leaves reflect sun and moon and more.

What about the grass?

Mary ends her poem here, leading us from soul to soil, questioning every step of the moving eye. She often takes walks in her writing, then it is as if she stops, reassesses her place in the universe, then moves forward once more. Lavinia is not as much of a rover, but she is constantly measuring the green against the gray in Compostela. More than grass, she has been seeing the splotches of lime-green ‘leitugas’ (lettuces, the locals call it) on the cathedral facade and the couselos, little coily plants, on little rural churches. Couselos, tiny umbrellas, turned upside down and flattened, ready to be admired by someone who notices them. Hardy things, they deserve to be noticed, Lavinia believes.

Now that the poem - which is longer than shown here - is over, Mary Oliver, the great nature poet and dissector of the image into its juiciest portions, strides of in another direction. She is not being rude. She is not a ghost. She simply coincided with Lavinia in Santiago and that coincidence has come to an end. Mary doesn’t worry about taking her words with her, because she knows that is never what one should do with poetry. Whatever remains behind, it’s up to Lavinia what can be made of it.

Lavinia breathes the fresh, washed air, allowing it to both weight her down - like ballast - and buoy her up. It’s this pull that has been the problem all along. In defies out, up is only as up as down will allow, old marvels at renewed, faith revels in committing heresy. Nothing is visible, none of these face-offs can be detected, however, without what Louisa May Alcott might have termed a ‘long, fatal love chase’. The questions find no answers if they are ignored or repressed. Run after, or away, as the occasion requires.

Because Santiago will never give you anything, not a single kiss or historical fact, if you do not fall in love with it. Maybe it’s like the snake in the poem, slithering into you and along you, your veins, your mind. One day you fear it, the next day, you crave it. No sense planning out questions or trying to guide a conversation in a certain direction. Like Lavinia, none of us is in control. The centuries have the last word.

***

There are questions you might ask about why you are in this city, but you are not likely to get any answers, not for a long time. You are not Santiago’s first concern. 

If you want to know what permanent spell it is weaving, differently than Penelope’s temporary cloth, you will have to earn the answers. There will be more than one.