Niar

‘Chove en Santiago, meu doce amor’

(Madrigal á cibdá de Santiago.)

Federico García Lorca, Seis poemas galegos.

The year the above line appeared in print was 1935, although Lorca had been to Santiago years earlier. Friends invited friends to the old city. Lovers invited lovers. 

There were others. Visitors of a certain type were puzzled about where they could find the ‘place with all the face on the wall’. Puzzled as they walked in the opposite direction and because ‘the place with all the faces on the wall) was the Catedral de Santiago de Compostela with its Pórtico da Gloria and the (as many believe) final resting place of Santiago, Saint James, the patron saint of Spain.

Lorca might have been encouraged to visit by a lover or because he knew of the Galician lyrical tradition. It doesn’t matter. Just three years after his six poems written in the language of medieval troubadours were published, he would be assassinated by fascist forces under Franco. There are at least three theories as to the motive for Lorca’s killing, but there might even be a fourth.

She had loved the story when it was told in her literature classes by professors. It made her think how the visit to Santiago by the poet from the south had actually come about, what had really motivated the use of galego by him, a nonspeaker of the language. She had memorized the poem but now felt an odd compulsion to hear it in English…

Chove en Santiago

It’s raining in Santiago

Meu doce amor

My sweet love

Camelia branca do ar

The air’s white camellia 

Brila entebrecida ao sol.

Glistens, shaded from the sun.

Chove en Santiago

It’s raining in Santiago 

Na noite escura.

Its night so dark.

Herbas de prata e sono

Herbs of silver and sleep

Cobren a valeira lúa.

Block the empty moon.

Olla a choiva pola rúa

It peers at the rain in the street

Laio de pedra e cristal.

A wail of stone and crystal.

Olla no vento esvaido

It studies the faded wind

Soma e cinza do teu mar.

Shadow and ash of your sea.

Soma e cinza do teu mar

Shadow and ash of your sea

Santiago, lonxe do sol;

Santiago, far from the sun;

Agoa da mañán anterga

Water from an ancient morning

Trema no meu corazón.

Ripples in my heart.

The verses trembled like raindrops poised on the bar of a wrought iron railing. They flowed through her memories with their many currents, echoing the songs of the thirteenth century that continue to entice modern readers. Lorca the poet knew how to enter the lanes and fields of those who sang before him. Just as importantly, he heard the songs in the ever-there rains of Compostela. 

The six Galician poems were nothing like the lofty eulogy to Compostela de la Iglesia in Gerardo Diego’s Angeles de Compostela from 1940, after the fascists had won the civil war and Santiago was more about saints than about songs song by minstrels. Galician, the language, was prohibited and would be for many years.

The poem to Santiago the City understands and distills the tie between rain and love, water and amour. She knew the poem, had drunk its words and after etching them in the granite of her mind, she found her etching move toward the melody of a group known as Luar na Lubre. The group sang a song titled “Chove en Santiago”… yes, using the poem as the lyrics. The song reminded her of many hours spent on the second floor of a research center, one many will recall even now. There had been a souvenir store just across the narrow street that insisted on playing the albums of the same three folk music groups over and over.

Now that time had ebbed away, but the river refused to run dry. The research library’s current use was a mystery to most people, and its holdings were never announced as having been transferred to an appropriate library. The music never ceased, however, and it mingles with rain where that be in Santiago or a town on Maine. The library was more than research; she inhaled the wood, stone, iron gratings and the air itself in the form of images, scents, silent movement. 

It was all, all still there and also here, with her. The time in the old library had evaporated along with the company kept there. Two of the forms that had occupied the hallways had proven traitorous. However, that had not been sufficient to wash away the river running through her, through every water-filled cell of her. Dark shadows meant nothing, because she had the recollection of all those words on old paper, the archives only she cared about, the world outside moving in patterns she was coming to know.

Rain, that love-ly (spelling here is no accident) rain needed to be the only celebration that would be life-sustaining. Because now she found herself with very little attachment to her usual activities, the holidays she used to celebrate. She’d learned everything as a little girl and had repeated everything faithfully until there was nobody left but her. She laughed at first, saying people are always looking for meaning and symbolism. After all, lots of symbolism. Even if they learned how to discover it on YouTube.

She did not want symbolism. She knew it required better focus. New ritual, based on experience, not superstition. She decided there was an element the was definitive for her: water. She hesitated, though, to get too theoretical, because water conjures up: Cleanse - Birth/rebirth - Cyclical/eternal. All she wanted was real precipitation, real rain, if you will. Nothing metaphysical.

Now she was not unaware of the irony that rain had driven her away, once. It had not been her fault. Forty days and forty nights were a long time for the Ark, and she’d had to endure a stretch of rain the rivaled the old Maine winters of the fifties.

Now there is an ocean that separacts them - the term is not a misspelling because she had created it - and that is part of the objective. To help things flow back into shape, perhaps into a shape similar to that of the past. She knows this requires water and setting new courses. To this purpose, she set aside customs of holiday dishes, decorations, games and music - everything she had learned and passed on. There were a lot of old objects that might need to be disposed of as well, sad as it was. They were bent, tattered, torn, and scratched, and looked too forlorn to ever be of use again for a festive occasion.

Knowing this need to cleanse her world and to find her way back to the one in her memories, she decided to make all the traditional celebrations into the same celebration and to do it through rain, or at least fresh water. She was going to perform a rain ritual instead of doing anything familiar to her or traditional. Valentine’s Day; Easter; Mother’s Day; Memorial Day; Father’s Day; July 4; Labor Day; Halloween; Thanksgiving; Christmas. Those had been her holidays and they might not fit the customs of everybody, but it was the list she began with. She didn’t include her own birthday on purpose.

The fundamental idea was to become familiar with new forms of art based on rain. The rain could be in a poem, like Lorca’s Madrigal á cibdá de Compostela. Or in a song or a painting. If all the first examples were from poems, there was no problem, however. Perhaps it’s there music that’s responsible.

She had to begin by reciting and learning by heart the most famous rain poem in all of Galicia literature:

Cómo chove miudiño

How softly it’s raining

Cómo chove miudiño,

How softly it’s raining

cómo miudiño chove;

It’s raining so softly

cómo chove miudiño

How softly it’s raining 

pola banda de Laíño,

In Laíño, over here,

pola banda de Lestrove.

In Lestrove, over there.

In addition to the numerous verses of this poem by Rosalía de Castro, she promised to consult a map to locate all the place names. She would also look for the origins of the toponyms. She would compare average rainfall for every fifty years. She would also start learning the hundreds of words in galego to describe different aspects of the water around them.

She also just wanted to watch the rain strike the rocks of the city and other places. She wanted to enter her loneliness and emerge with others who knew her. She would have to prepare everything well, to be respectful. Even as she went through all the possible steps, she never stopped being cautious. To describe her process of entering the ‘area of rain’, among the droplets or inside them would require a whole other story and a very different focus.

She asked herself a few questions as she was constructing her bridge of rain. Why do people try to avoid getting rained on? It’s just water. She was beginning to see it had the power to make her transparent. Why don’t we stop to look in puddles when we grow up? Does water stop reflecting things once we turn thirty? What does a rain-flavored smoothie taste like? Like water or like air?

Reflects, like a mirror. Rain reflects, makes us glow if it appears at night. Our shadow sparkles over the old stone slabs. By day we recede, but we never disappear.

Niar. That was who she was, no, who she is, now. The strong swimmer. Back and forth. long, measured strokes. Long distance. Flight. 

Mirroring itself, once drove her out, now her vehicle back to him she would swim she could swim she would drown no she chose not to she felt strong now rain was her ally and comrade.

The new practice or ritual, the erasure of the old ballast, provided immediate results. The heavy, detailed holidays from her beginnings had been dispersed into a thousand droplets, as the tired description goes. With the disposal of old habits much dead weight had been eliminated and, much less money was spent.

Simpler truly is better.

Especially if we are lucky and it rains.