Close Encounters

«Nacín no Val do Mao, no concello do Incio, ao Sur de Lugo, e alí pasei os meus primeiros anos». 

[I was born in the Mao Valley, in the municipality of the Incio, south of Lugo, and I spent my first years there.]

~ Marica Campo, writer.

Readers might be interested in knowing the region cited by the author, so I’ll help a little:

O Incio, municipality of the province of Lugo and a comarca or local region (English actually has no accurate term for a comarca). It has more or less one thousand five hundred inhabitants. Its size? Less than a hundred fifty square kilometers. Where is the province of Lugo and where is the city by the same name?

I’d wager the geographical information is a complete mystery to many readers, who have never heard of the Roman-walled city in the highlands of northwestern Iberia despite it being the only remaining population with its impressive construction still intact and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. As such, they aren’t likely to know that Lugo is located along the Miño River that also descends to Portugal. Lugo may seem too remote to such people, but the truth is that many a writer, in many genres, has been born and bred in the city which is a challenge to sun-bathers.

Readers who are in the informed group will mostly be Galician and will not need to be given and details as to the geographical locations of the places Campo names. Small and rural, maybe; admired and with sentimental attachment features, definitely. Some of the familiarity comes from all the writers just mentioned, but some credit is due the land: high hills, rounded and green, flora growing scarce in other parts still abundant here. Even those who think of this area as primitive are drawn to its paisaxe [scenery] as well as its traditions for the best food and drink. There is nothing to scoff at and, as I’ll point out later, much to learn.

When I met her I recall exactly where we were, but not the reason we were there. And while I didn’t know even a twentieth of what I would come to know about the author and her place of origin, it was a start. My first and closest Galician friend, Pilar, said her friend wanted to meet me. I was surprised, because I wasn’t that visible, but we found ourselves in A Coruña after a cultural event. It was time for a meal and we went to an establishment on the main square, María Pita. There were several other people there, but I don’t recall names. Just Pilar and her friend.

I don’t think I had much to say, but I listened. I didn’t know a lot of the writer’s work at the time, either. I definitely felt out of my league; I should have trusted Pilar more.

So far it must seem disconnected to describe a part of the world you might not know and a writer you might not know either, but it’s not. Years later I began to realize the lesson Marica, Pilar’s friend, had been teaching me. Even now I am unable to comprehend all the knowledge that was placed within my reach, sometimes when it was happening so fast I didn’t come very close to understanding the world that she opened to me and pushed me through.

It’s tempting to list all the things we’ve done or said since that day in a glass enclosure in a big city square, but it wouldn’t convey what I’m describing any more than I could understand the place that gave birth to Marica until I went there. Going there wasn’t just an enormous meal at a table overlooking the valley; I had to really go there, see there. Zora Neale Hurston’s brilliant line from Their Eyes Were Watching God is what I learned: “You got ta go there ta know there.” Something like that.

And so the walled city of Lucus Augusti became a suburb of Marica’s birthplace, orbiting around a group of casas and rural roads, granite and shale, vineyards and couves [cabbages on tall stalks]. Her car became a ship on a sea of green meadows and woods that oscillated like waves, never seeming to stand still long enough for me to find and pin them down on a map. The valley all swirled about me, made me dizzy because I think slowly when I’m in a new place and wanted to stop every few meters, yet felt the need to keep going.

I felt guilty that I wasn’t retaining more on the drives and didn’t even know what questions to ask. We just seemed to drive on and on, Marica with a plan I never figured out. This happened more than once, more than one summer, and yet the sense of the Mao River Valley, while not organized in a conscious map in my head or notes, began to encircle me. We came and went, sometimes just the two of us, sometimes two more in the back. I feel the need to live near a big body of water - ocean or river - so often feel claustrophobic inland, but in this valley I don’t miss it. 

There are enough brooks and cascades to keep water lovers happy. With luck, there are legends attached to them. The Ferrería do Incio was once a spa for health treatment; its waters are bright orange due to the high iron (ferro) content in the area. Some say it’s a spot that’s good for fertility, but I was stunned by the solemnity with one room. Lives promised, lost, saved, forgotten. Rich rural culture in the artifacts made and lovingly, hopefully, desperately deposited near the ‘life-giving’ waters.

Do Galicians still believe? Only a few dozen people live in Ferrería, but we didn’t have the opportunity to ask. 

Along with the iron ore - and ores brought many a Roman to Gallaecia - there is the most beautiful, sensual, textural shale (or maybe it’s slate) in the world. It can be found in different areas of the home, such as sinks, or outside, as roof tiles. I wanted to ask about the shale industry when in Lóuzara - Santalla - on another occasion, but I was too busy. We were visiting the home of a deceased and interesting poet, there was a spectacular waterfall with a narrow wooden bridge, and the poet’s house, in custody of a sister. I doubt very few people who are from where I’m from have ever heard if the poet or the place he spent his life. Galicia is full of persons who have roots in places that no person from my country, unless it’s an indigenous person, ever has. 

What I am trying to tell you about Marica can be said about other Galicians, but she did it, taught me, in the most natural and convincing way. She took me to the tiny places, like a hole-in-the-wall bakery, introduced me briefly, and then there was a conversation that I had trouble following because I wasn’t familiar many of the places and certainly didn’t know anyone in the neighborhood. Size isn’t important in O Incio and the Mao Valley because everything is big: the sky, the trees, the fields, the open minds of people who don’t give a hoot about where you’re from, your name, your ethnicity, sexuality, religiosity… If you come with Marica or another known entity, you are immediately accepted.

There are places we ate that the food itself was an event and I refuse to name them. Three hours is the minimum when you’re with Marica, family, and friends. No place in my country can compare the the sheer joy of going somewhere in Lugo with the best guide in the world. The best because she knows where she is from, she writes about it, but it too writes her. Having been wrenched from my own childhood places, never to return, I look to this person to restore some of my faith in people (I have almost none left) and in the ability of the planet to avoid self-destruction. I watch Marica in San Eufrasio and listen to her count off family members in niches, knowing a space awaits her as well. She must also know that she will not be forgotten by the valley. Nobody in my country remembers back past their parents now.

There is nothing primitive about the world Marica has shown me; even San Salvador with the skulls spookily lodged in its roofed atrium and its population of around sixty souls doesn’t strike me as primitive. The entire setting, land, buildings, braided wooden balcony on solid old stone, the cats, one lone resident out in public, all of this is superior to any backwoods village in my country. The stories you can hear are cocoons of time for both teller and listener. I feel the urge to crawl inside and never leave. The sense of honor at entering these spaces is not false; these people know their life is good in the ways that count.

Before I went to Galicia or to Lugo, I had no idea how to read, meaning I was illiterate in paisaxe [scenery]. All I had were eyes and a camera to take photos. Now that Marica has shown me that eyes aren’t everything, that nose and ears and stomach matter as well, I don’t much need to return to my useless home town whose culture has been overshadowed by a powerful religious group. Home can exist other than in the place where we are born, and if you are fortunate enough, as I am, to return to a place where people wait with open arms (their words), then perhaps there’s something to be gained by shifting one’s geography, by making room for something bigger and better, like the Mao Valley, which seems to expand with every visit.