Starstruck

The evening is cool, but then most evenings are cool in Compostela, no matter how warm the day. Café Literarios is situated on the high end of the Praza da Quintana, Quintana dos Mortos, the Square of the Dead. Except most of the mortos were transferred elsewhere, outside of the city, in the eighteenth century. It was said the smell was unpleasant, or maybe unhealthy - not like plague unhealthy, but unhealthy just the same. Now only the long-dead are left, maybe Romans or others who didn’t matter enough to keep them in the heart of the city of Saint James.

The stars are lovely tonight, but they are noisy as hell. What’s their problem?

Lavinia is reading a book from time to time, when not looking at the rowdy sky… and from the way she’d reading, it’s probably a book of poetry. She stops after every page and looks upward.

Those stars are so loud. I can’t concentrate.

It isn’t stars that are moaning and crying, and it isn’t birds, even though sometimes swallows emerge at night.

I wonder why Pilar gave me this book? Manoel-Antonio is definitely not the type of poet one reads on a dark night. Or is he? In a way, I’m a sailor too, trying to stay afloat in this place, hard, stony, too full of its past, with streets that are talking to me every minute, reaching out their mica-ed hands, screaming to be… to be what? Remembered? Forgotten? Embraced? Damn, this is a place for the mad, for those who commit the sin of trying to remember, without knowing what’s been forgotten.

Please, another albariño. 

Lavinia looks up at the stars again, feeling like the duped pilgrim tourist who thinks Compostela means ‘field of stars’ when it really doesn’t. Still, it’s a nice invention, and has been quite profitable. Except tonight those stars are acting up, like they too want attention, the same as the streets, their stone archways, their little shops and bars. Everybody’s begging tonight. Why is everything so needy?

Manoel-Antonio. A sailor and a poet. The best thing for a sailor is to write poetry on long night watches. Watching the stars. Scrambling reason to make verses nobody will understand for another fifty years or so. Verses that stand the sky on its head and tie trees on shore to the masts of ships. Words trimmed from sails and bitten down by wind and loneliness, cut to fit the looming storm.

What does Manoel-Antonio have to say about stars? He must have noticed a few on those long, deep nights. I mean, that’s a lot of time to just watch and look up.

OS CÓBADOS NO BARANDAL

ATOPAMOS esta madrugada

na gaiola do mar

unha illa perdida (1)

Armaremos de novo a gaiola

Vai a saír o Sol

improvisado e desorientado

Xa temos tantas estrelas

e tantas lúas sumisas

que non caben no barco nin na noite

Xuntaremos paxaros sen xeografía

pra xogar coas distancias

das súas ás amplexadoras

E os adeuses das nubes

mudos e irremediábeis

E armaremos unha rede de ronseis

pra recobrar as saudades

coa súa viaxe feita

polos océanos do noso corazón.

(1) O mar adentro é unha illa de auga rodeada de ceo por todas partes.

Elbows on the Railing

Today at dawn

we found a lost island (1)

in the cage of the sea

We’ll put the sea together again

The Sun is about to rise

improvised and disoriented

We have so many stars now

and so many docile moons

they don’t fit in the ship or the night

We’ll join birds without geography

so we can play with the expanse

of their extending wings

And the mute, unrelenting

farewells of the clouds

And we’ll create a net of seawakes

to retrieve the longing

their voyage complete

through the oceans of our hearts.

(1) The open sea is an island of water surrounded on all sides by the sky.

Lavinia reads the poem, automatically translating it, perhaps so she can send it to her mother, with whom she hasn’t spoken for a while.

Those aren’t the stars that are screeching after all. They’re bats.

Thinking about the reason she’s come to Compostela, Lavinia decides to see what the photographer Ruth Matilda Anderson has to say about Rianxo, Manoel-Antonio’s birthplace. It’s a fishing village on the coast, on the Ría de Arousa and with its own little island weighted down by history. (Otherwise, it’d probably float away, thinks Lavinia. Everything here would float away if the centuries weren’t anchoring it down.)

The bats are telling me to go to Rianxo anyway.

Lavinia takes a Freire bus to the village, arriving in evening. She goes to the shore and looks out. The same stars are in the sky. Hell, maybe Compostela is that distant horizon the poet mentioned and so the Café Literarios is watching, the needy old streets are watching, the cats slinking around the fish vendors in the market are watching. She has brought her book of poems, which is the only reason she has to justify this distraction from her research. She opens the volume again, now wondering just how many hours and stars were used to write several books before Manoel-Antonio was thirty, when he died. Stars are all over the pages he wrote. She needs to find a place to sleep, because there’s work to be done. Why aren’t there many poems with bats in them? Stars don’t even make noise, so they can’t compete in that area.

The next day, Lavinia begins to walk through the streets. She’s looking for something that’s not in the sky.

I need paper, crochet thread, scissors - no, wait, I’ve got a pair in my purse. A crochet hook, too. It’s strange, but I usually carry one, like people carry things to write with. Most people don’t know that about me. I’m not sure it’s something I want them to know because it’s kind of like a good luck charm.

Here’s an art supplies store. Perfect.

Lavinia makes her purchases in a couple of stores, stopping for a café con leite and a croissant. She walks through all of Rianxo, as if imitating the poem, tying streets and shop windows together, sketching disjointed, angular forms with her steps, translating the gaze of Manoel-Antonio aboard his ship into landlocked verses. She’s not the writer, she’s not a poet. She’s only the instrument for the transferral from sea to land. 

Rianxo offers up its streets and stones, its sounds - screeching gulls that are not bats but could be. The stars are silent because it is not their time to speak. They are no competition for A Rianxeira, the song dedicated, not to a cute village lass but to the Virgin of Guadalupe, patroness of the village, or to Castelao (one of the four famous writers from Rianxo) when he arrived as an exile in Argentina.

Ondiñas veñen

ondiñas veñen e van

non te embarques rianxeira

que te vas a marear.

The waves come

the waves come and go

don’t sail away, lady from Rianxo,

you’ll suffer from the sea you know.

Lavinia is worried. She’s losing track of time and space. Everything is cut up, tangled up, not chronological or logical. The Pazo de Martelo, the church of Santa Comba, the Sea Museum, the House and Museum of Manoel-Antonio, Castelao Square, the Castle of the Moon, all the dolmens and menhirs - everything is beginning to claw at her.

I need to work faster. Lavinia sits down at a small iron table in one of the squares. She works quickly, yes, keeping an eye on the water’s edge. She has to be done by evening. The paper is painted blue, with some spots of white and sunny yellow, a dash here and there of coral at dusk, and then the thread begins its task. Nets are tied, pages start to sail narrow lanes as if out on the open sea, nostalgia sighs without fear, and she just watches.

By nightfall, Lavinia has a long accordion book assembled. It feels to her like she’s been doing that forever. A few people have stared at its maker, while others pay no attention to her. People sometimes choose what they want to see. The book’s hinges are strong, so it folds and opens without effort. By the end of the day, Lavinia can fold it up and carry it in her arms, or under one arm. She doesn’t know if she’s concealing it or protecting it, but she does know she’ll need to spend another night in Rianxo, because the last bus has passed through by now.

The Castelo da Lúa, Castle of the Moon. Really a fortress. Belonged to Paio Gómez Chariño, I think. It was immense. Built in the thirteenth century, I think. It wasn’t torn down when the first order came, but it was centuries later when there was no need for that. The canteiros and their obradoiros sure left their marks, as did the prisoners and lover who were before them. But later people stole the stones - a crime for sure - to build churches and what-have-you. Is there no respect for stones? So many try to tear them down, but I know they are indelible. You can’t erase what they write, ever. Towers and parapets, drawbridges shouting their angles and curves into the sky. People should still be able to read them inscribed there on that beautiful blue instead of being forced to dig in the dirt and rubble for meaning.

Lavinia knowsshe was lecturing to herself (like the self-proud educator she was) and tried to focus again so as not to look track of her plan. She allows herself to stand for a while looking at Santa Comba de Rianxo, from the fifteenth century. A real palimpsest of styles, kind of gauche and cranky-looking when you thought about it. Stark, unharmonious, harsh lines that make you want to weep.

I doubt many people have cried over this ugly little church.

Evening has arrived, at least the first page of it. Lavinia, maker of a book with blue pages, thread ties, and the length of a seawake, sees that her task is nearly complete. She stops in a small bar for a serving of tortilla, Spanish omelette, not the Mexican dish, and an albariño. Always the albariño, for reasons she never shares. Droves of dornas and gamelas, little dory-like boats, are cuddling the shore. They are about to drift off - that is, drift off in the sense of falling asleep, not drift away into the open sea. They are weary from hard work and the smell of fish. Lavinia knows this, because the little ones speak a language similar to the big ships.

I have to go now. It is time. Lavinia has just spent an entire day and night, twenty four hours, on watch. Her elbows have been resting on the railing of Rianxo and she knows she cannot leave without completing the translation of De catro a catro. From Four to Four. Is that 4 pm to 4 am, or 4 am to 4 pm, or is the 4 to 4 indicative of a twenty four hour span?

I think it’s the full twenty four hours. Otherwise, why have I spent an entire day here and why am I back by the docks? Oh, yes, the stars. But they are mute.

Emproáramos a meia noite……

A sotavento da nosa singradura 

vai decote unha nube desarbolada ......

.borrou para sempre o teu mudo perfil

.A alba nova sorprendeume……

cacheando entre os luceiros

unha despedida que se me perdeu.

We set out at midnight

downwind from our route

there’s always a wayward cloud

your silent profiles forever erased

The new dawn surprised me…

groping among the stars

for a farewell I’d lost.

Lavinia is suddenly uneasy. She doesn’t want anything to be erased. She wants to document it all, stones and sky and stars. She wants what is lost to be found. She needs islands and seas and little silver sardines. She also wants the screaming little bats that fly about the Square of the Dead in Compostela. She needs their high-pitched calls, like sirens calling to Ulysses, although she could never be Ulysses, she is Penelope and she weaves, writes, makes things, makes sense of her world and lives safely within her perfect shroud.

I’ll think about that tomorrow, perhaps. For now, I have this book. Our book.

Fomos ficando sos

o Mar o barco e mais nós

We became more and more alone

the Sea the ship and us

she reads aloud. 

The translation is unsummoned, but appears nevertheless.

One of the blue pages has the stylized angles of a bird in flight, like a scratch on its surface made with a hook used to pull up the nets of fish. But fish never speak, at least not to Lavinia and not in Rianxo. They can only glow and gasp.

Lavinia pulls her friend’s gift out of her bag, where she’s almost forgotten it. Except she hasn’t forgotten it at all. She has every line of the nineteen poems of De catro a catro humming loudly in her head. The published volume seems uneasy next to the translation of some of its fragments. She should leave well enough alone. She needs to return to Compostela, to get back to her study of the photographer who came to Galicia at just about the time the poet from Rianxo was writing his last poems before dying of tuberculosis. 

I’ll put it here and keep watch, from four to four if need be. Then I’ll take it to the House and Museum of Manoel-Antonio, which I didn’t visit today. Didn’t and couldn’t. Perhaps he’ll allow me o visit tomorrow. I like it here, by the dornas and gamelas, and think I’ve just heard a bat.

Bats. The animals that some people think can kill you or make you stronger. Lavinia doesn’t recall where she has heard or read it, but these words come to her before she too drifts off:

O morcego é um símbolo do desafío de abandonar o velho e criar o novo - morte e renascimento. Para muitos isso é angustiante, há muita negatividade em torno disso. Eles simbolizam o enfrentamento dos temores - de entrar no escuro, no caminho para a luz.

The bat is a symbol of the challenge of abandoning the old and creating the new - death and rebirth. For many it’s the cause of anguish, there’s much negativity associated with them. They symbolize the confrontation of two fears - of entering the dark, on the path to light.

Now asleep in her bed of anguish, Lavinia is unaware of this memory with words that hover, in the midst of a small group of Chiroptera that keep careful watch over the humanlike form drawn on the stones by a wharf in Rianxo or on those of Compostela with its Quintana.