Measuring Time, Finding Place

Today Lavinia was especially drawn to the lace fragments that were included in the little box that had appeared during the remodeling of the old bar into the new A Tertulia. She put aside her interest in the literary texts to look at the threads that had been twisted and tied into tiny, almost weightless treasures, their designs planned rather than haphazard. As she looked, she thought that maybe they weren't fragments at all, but rather had been deliberately begun and completed, like a poem. They weren't remnants of a garment or an adornment for a home, like a delicate crocheted tablecloth from her great grandmother's generation; they were like pages in a book or journal, meant to be read, deciphered.

Lavinia thought this, because the threads had been gathered up and finished off, with no hanging portions. She had counted at least five designs, all similar in size to a hard-cover book, which was less than a standard 8 1/2 by 11 inches sheet of paper. The lace pieces would each fit nicely onto a piece of paper that size, with room for writing, if needed. She knew she was fortunate in being able to identify the small works of art - for they truly were that - because her mother, who was an archivist, had talked about them. Otherwise, few people in the US would ever recognize, much less value the weblike structures, the way they were made, and even fewer would know anything about the origins of the complex handiwork, for which there were both historical and mythical explanations.

Nobody made lace like that any more in the US, and perhaps the creation of the lace, which was different than tatting or crocheting, never had been common. Some of it may have come out of convents in Canada, where the technoque had arrived via Flanders or similar regions, at some moment lost in time. Yet these lace samples - well, perhaps not samples, but pieces in their own right - had seemingly come from the western shore of the Atlantic, along with the written pages. Lavinia knew she would have to learn more about the old technique of making the artifacts, and she happened to mention it to her friend Pilar. That was all she needed to do.

Pilar immediately pointed her American friend to a coastal village, which every Galician recognizes as the central region for what bears its name: encaixe de Camariñas.

"Is it far from here?" Lavinia asked her.

"It's not a bad drive, if you have a car. Getting there and getting around the area is a lot more difficult if you're relying on public transportation," was the reply.

Fortunately, a car was not a problem. The village of fisherfolk was on what Galicians call a Costa da Morte, the Coast of Death, where many ships had been wrecked. Cabo Vilán has a famous lighthouse, but even so it hadn't saved the travelers that had crashed so often on the treacherous rocks. Then Pilar added:

"You know, there's a museum of bobbin lace in town there. You might enjoy visiting it. Whether or not you learn anything that's relevant to your research" - research?, wondered Lavinia, who was supposedly working on a photographer from the 20s and 30s, not on lace - "you'll enjoy the exhibits. You'll also enjoy the scenery. Plus, it's an area with a great deal of megaliths and Castros, petroglyphs." Pilar seemed to forget at times that her friend hadn't come to Santiago to play tourist around the whole of Galicia. Or maybe she didn't forget, and was fulfilling her role as gentle guide, helping the foreigner 'learn the ropes', so to speak.

That was how Dr. Rivers consulted the museum schedule and started off to Camariñas a few days later, uncertain if she was allowing herself to get even more dustracted from her original, and real, research project, or if she was doing something she was supposed to be doing. She had decided to go by herself, and to go and return the same day. It would take around an hour and a quarter to drive the approximately 80 kilometers. That was all just an approximation, she knew, since many things could happen along Galician roads. She would start early, in case - just in case - something else turned up along the way and she felt like stopping.

Camariñas isn't the only site where the women - called palilleiras - work, of course, but it is the best known and has the best museum, other than the Museu de Rendas of Vila do Conde in northern Portugal. The museum is pretty recent, from 1996, but that didn't deter Lavinia, who was looking for the history of the craft, which wasn't really a craft but rather an art of incredible detail.

Looking around, she saw many samples and learned some aspects of the encaixe's history, but was slightly saddened by the fact that there were no palilladas in progress, the sessions of several females, young to old, working the palillos or bobbins into a clacking frenzy. She wasn't able to locate a real group of women plying their skills as they once did, but there was one woman on an upper floor of the museum who was indeed clacking up a storm all by herself. The speed with which her fingers flew, never tanging the threads attached to the slender pieces of wood, was amazing. All Lavinia could do was stare, feeling guilty about doing so. The gray-haired woman didn't mind in the least. She was very willing to talk and it never disturbed her rhythm or caused her to confuse the overlapping of the zillions of linen threads. However, the foreigner was at a loss as to what to ask.

"How can you work so fast?"

A smile and a look as if the skill that resembled one of a machine, yet was so human in its incessant, pleasant clicking of wood.

"How can you keep the twisting straight in your head?"

Another smile, accompanied by the click-clack with a rhythm of its own.

"How do you keep the threads from getting all tangled up?"

The smile was never-ending, but this time, there was an answer.

"I started when I was four years old. All of us, all the little girls, did it. We sat on the floor or the ground outside, and learned. I got blisters on my ankles from sitting with my legs bent."

That sounded cruel to Lavinia, like child abuse or something, but the woman with the wavy gray hair explained:

"We knew we had to do it. There was no money and we had to help out the family. Everybody did what they could. We needed to eat."

Lavinia did some quick calculation and thought this might have been in the 1950s. She knew it was indeed a grim period for many families, after the Civil War was over, and living under the dictator Franco. Big families were rewarded, since many children meant a woman was doing her wifely duty, but each one had a mouth and needed feeding. She shook her head. Meanwhile, the click-clacking never stopped and the friendly conversation kept moving, like the little bobbins, small but powerful, that were weaving the most beautiful lace in the world. Unfortunately, the conversation dwindled as the lace piece grew, and the foreigner simply watched. She wished she could sit beside the woman and learn the old art that technology could never replicate no matter how hard it tried.

As she completed her tour of the museum, Lavinia thought about visiting at least one site in the area, in what was called the Terra de Soneira. Pilar had been correct - it was a part of Galicia that was full of memories, many of them Neolithic, which meant that they were tied by threads of human activities and beliefs to the stones, the many stones, that had been deliberately arranged in dolmens or castros. She chose the Dolmen de Pedra Cuberta, the Covered Stone dolmen that had been discovered by German archaeologists and the 1930s and was unique because it had still contained painted designs of red and black on white. 

The burial chamber was near the road, but not easy to spot. Lavinia contemplated the megalithic grouping, now somewhat in disarray. On large stone was upright, there were smaller ones in vertical position, and the surrounding area had been partially cleared. Apparently the town of FVimianzo had 'acquired' the rock formation, if it could actually be said that any person or entity should be allowed to own it. At least the portion that presumibly had been built as a corridor to enter the chamber had been made presentable, and the extension of the dolmen could be seen. She did nothing but walk around and peer into shadowy crevices, careful not to disturb the smallest bit of soil. As Lavinia reached her fingers out, she sensed something odd, but still touched the rock. It was loud, she thought as she moved away, realizing how strange that idea was. Still, I liked the sound.

The only other place Lavinia had time to visit was the Pedra da Arca in Baíños, Vimianzo. It was from approximately 3000 B.C.E. Like other megalithic sites, the stones were massive, the lid being about twelve by six feet. One site she'd read said the mouras who had been the architects of the arrangement were women who lived under the water or underground, combing their tresses with golden combs. Something in the grouping resembled a growth of massive mushrooms that were still in the process of popping up and spurting toward the sky, as fungi will do. They looked in a hurry.

Lavinia felt the old urge to walk up to the huge granitic masses and slip inside them - not just inside the spaces they circumscribed, but inside the stones themselves. It was what she had begun to feel in Santiago when looking up at some of the medieval structures or walking along the cobblestone streets. She felt as if she had been there when the dolmens were built.

Each of the two groupings had drawn the woman from far away, from another world, directly in. It was painful to move away, to feel the air between her and the mammoth stones. She was less interested in the physics of how they had been positioned and more in what many people said: that they had been built by mouras, females who had carried the weight of millennia on their heads while spinning on a distaff. The mouras, of a time before memory, who built things that seemed to last forever and left them for modern society to decipher their history. 

Lavinia wasn't a believer in mytths, but she knew that something had happened in all those sites that could not and should not be forgotten. She considered how women had been credited with the construction and how those women had borne their work with fibers along with the huge stones. The concept of these women continued to draw people to their chambers, even as the original slabs had been left to receive wind, rain, and sun. The knowledge that the stones existed was sufficient testimony.

"Why do people mention the mouras and laugh?" she asked herself. "A distaff, linen thread, and granite are tied together in some way." 

Lavinia was not ready to believe the explanations that considered these imaginary women to be associated with Moorish women who had once occupied parts of Iberia, during the Muslim invasion and empire. They had a different identity in the northwestern part of the peninsula. She was not about to speculate on the origin of the term moura, but felt there was something to the idea that it was similar to the moiras of Greek mythology. After all, they spun, measured, and cut the cloth of human destiny, didn't they?

"Why does any of this matter now?" Wondered Lavinia, as she began the final ssection of the d rive back to Santiago, her head full of rocks and distaffs, mineral and flax, past and present. Souls inside stones. Terra de Soneira, perhaps the land of the Nerii, a Celtic tribe. Casa das Mouras. She didn't know that the Nerii worshipped gods like Lugus, who was three-headed. We have to wonder if Lugus was actually a woman, or three woman, who controlled human destiny...

That evening, in a midnight stroll through the silent Santiago streets, Lavinia felt a sense of loss, as if she had left something behind in the Terra de Soneira, in Camariñas, at the dolmens built by women. There was something that felt like a strong cord, emerging from the center of her body. Something was weaving the night around her, click-clacking and not threatening. She wondered if she had a moura-fiandeira as a roommate. As she fell asleep, she began to see a woman, or several women, clutching something gray in their hands, like wool or stone, soft and sturdy. The grayness was being strung out in long strands and wrapped skillfully around a distaff. There was something ethereal as well as indestructible about the thread, which was gradually easing into the creamy shade of the lace that had been emerging from the busy fingers of the woman in the museum in Camariñas.

"I only drove an hour and a quarter to the northwest. I visited a town of about five thousand people (she had checked), and then two places with ancient but ragged memories affixed to them. That's all I did." 

Lavinia spoke to her listening self, in her dream. "I didn't travel all that far." Nevertheless, the distance covered was beyond her comprehension. All she really knew was that the threads she had seen, the art she had watched being born and growing, the survival of the fittest that she had witnessed in two fields outside Camariñas, in the Land of the Nerii, could never be duplicated by any type of technology. Time machines did not exist, and cold, hard, mechanical contraptions couldn't hold a candle to the miniscule threads that were held in place by sewing pins with round tops in different colors. Held in place until the proper number of twists and turns had been made and the filigree appeared, perfect and durable, as always. Strong enough, perhaps, to lift a rock twelve feet long and six feet wide, in order to form a shelter for a person, or a treasure.

Did Pilar know all of this when she sent her friend from the States to visit the little museum of wonders on the Coast of Death, a Costa da Morte where, despite the fatalities of the past, everything seems to survive? 

"Pilar always seems to know more than she lets on," thought Lavinia. 

She felt a pleasant shiver run through her, up her back and then down her arms to her fingertips. Then she picked up the book her friend had given her, saying she might find something useful for her research in it. Lavinia doubted that, because it was Leria, a set of essays by Vicente Risco, who might have known a lot of things, but didn't know anything about the photographer she was supposed to be studying for her sabbatical. The book was about sixty years old and said nothing about photography, for one thing.

That did not matter.

Now concerned that her increasing knowledge of the language was creating problems instead of helping her conduct proper academic research, Lavinia began to read from a random page of Risco's book. When she came to this part, she dropped it onto the table. She was in serious trouble.

«Ti dis Galicia é ben pequena. Eu dígoche: Galicia é un mundo. Cada terra é coma se fose un mundo enteiro. Poderala andar en pouco tempo do norte para o sur, do leste para u oeste noutro tanto; poderala andar outra vez, mais non a has dar andado. E de cada vez que a andes, has atopar cousas novas e outras has botar de menos.

You say Galicia is very small. I say Galicia is an entire world. Each terra or part of it is like an entire world. You can traverse it quickly from north to south, or from east to west in another brief moment, but you'll never cover it all. And every time you travel through it, you'll find new things and you'll miss, you'll long for, others.