Lorvão

Coimbra, Portugal. It had been almost twenty-five years since Pilar had first been to the beautiful city known as the second home to fado music and more than a little academic as well as literary history. That meant it had an important library, the Biblioteca Joanina, built in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Other than its architecture and its holdings, the library was also known for being one of only two in the world where book-eating insects were kept under control by tiny little bats. 

The amazing library bats, only about an inch long, emerged at night and flew about in pursuit of their feast. There was a method the staff follows for keeping the building clean, too, and Pilar thought such a creative detail of daily procedures was so Portuguese. Creative, low-cost, environmentally sound. All that, but so much more when added to the long list of things that made for a country few appreciate properly. A profound country, one to be taken seriously. 

Portugal, land of navigators, ceramics both folk and elaborate, expert in preparing bacalhau do bom, good salted cod, bobbin lace of incredible intricacy, stamps for philatelists. Coimbra was in the center of all that, even though it was further north than Porto and Lisbon.

Pilar always knew she would return to Coimbra and its history more than once. The adoquins, the cobblestones, had insisted on that from the start. The streets and praças were never still. Even with no cars or pedestrians, the stones clacked and rumbled, making the mind of the listener stumble and draw nearer to see the sounds. She was no exception. The city trapped visitors, taught them to use all five senses, then released them back into the wild, knowing the majority would need to return. Coimbra, a city of unfinished business.

Despite the lure of the city that forced visitors to return, Coimbra was not like Santo André de Teixido in Galicia, where they say if you don’t go when you’re alive, you’ll head there when you’re dead. O que non vai de vivo, vai de morto. That’s Galician humor, and sometimes one hears o que non vai de morto vai de vivo. If you don’t go when you’re dead, you’ll have to go when you’re alive. Retranca pura. Galician irony at its best, its most tongue-in-cheek, most straight-faced.

What is this thing about places that embrace and refuse to release?

In comparison, the Portuguese have seemed to be much more serious about their religion, which means Catholic and no other. This may be why their humor can be so dry it makes you thirsty to laugh out loud, even if everybody else looks unamused. Miniature jokes, a twist of the shoulders, an ocular gleam. It takes some practice to understand them. They are very much like Galicians, just a bit more subtle. They also are a bit better at fending off the threats from Spain.

Peninsular politics aren’t part of the plot of this story, but they aren’t irrelevant. 

Now Pilar had come to Portugal with a slightly different objective than seeing the library. She planned to visit the Mosteiro at Lorvão, near Coimbra. Eventually dedicated to Our Lady, it was a monastery founded in the sixth century, according to some, but in the late ninth century according to others. Like San Paio de Antealtares in Santiago de Compostela, Lorvão had first housed monks, and later it had been home to nuns. The monks had belonged to the Order of Saint Benedict, and the nuns had been Cistercian. They had arrived in 1206. All this must be written down in documents that are preserved somewhere, since there is so much detail about the site.

After the religious orders lost their status in the nineteenth century, the monastery became a psychiatric hospital. Pilar could not help thinking about Conxo, which had later become a psychiatric hospital, just like Lorvão. She did not know who was admitted to the hospital in Portugal, but Conxo had taken in not only the mentally unstable, but also professors and people with radical ideas. Was there some connection between being cloistered and being crazy, or did religion serve as a shelter for those who were somehow troubled by the goings-on of the external world?

Sometimes we just need to find a safe place to be, if we want to survive.

Pilar didn’t like hearing herself say this, even if there was nobody around to hear her. It sounded defeatist, and that did not suit her. She knew what needed to be done and was more than prepared to do it.

In addition to what she needed to accomplish while in Lorvão, Pilar was interested in the history of the site, the connection to the hermit Pelagius, and its illuminated manuscripts from the twelfth century. Pelagius, after all, was Paio, and he was the hermit who had found Santiago’s grave in the ninth century. O Livro das Aves (The Book of Birds) and Apocalipse do Lorvão were the most valuable volumes, but Pilar had been informed by a reliable source that there were other documents in the Scriptorium that were likely to be of importance to certain groups. 

The latter was the reason for Pilar’s ‘pilgrimage’. She needed to see the documents and to copy them so she could share the information with the others back in Santiago.

These documents were as good as destroyed, however. Guarded by the nuns, their titles, content, and physical characteristics had never been revealed. Maybe they were just hearsay after all, but Pilar still had to look for them. She had been sent to gather information as well as to observe how it was being preserved. 

Is secrecy really the only way to ensure these items survive? Pilar frowned at the thought, a thought of additional centuries of inner exile and self-imposed silence. She knew it was wrong.

The Monastery of Lorvão had had a workshop that in the twelfth century, just before the nuns replaced the monks, had been renowned for the illuminated manuscripts it produced. The nuns, the new residents of the abbey, had been Cistercian, but that order was actually return to Benedictine law. 

The nuns in San Paio, in Compostela, were Benedictine. Pure coincidence, most likely. In San Paio there was a plethora of documents, legal and religious. They were not consulted frequently, but they lay quietly behind the walls of the convent. Some were eight centuries old, which made them older than the most ancient of the nuns in the cloister. Sleeping on shelves and in boxes, hopefully acid-free. Nobody knew exactly what the archives held. 

It was just a collection of useless old papers or, rather, parchments. 

But what sorts of documents am I looking for? 

Pilar was uncertain, concerned that she would not know what to ask for nor would she recognize what she needed when she saw it. She decided the documents or artifacts would have to be very unique, something more than the run-of-the-mill religious tracts. Well, at least she hoped there would be something unique. 

She was not disappointed. She had a goal.

I need to find more compelling connections with San Paio’s nuns and the ones here. We need to know if the two convents were in contact and if they had a common goal.

The mosteiro was now, in its most recent stage of evolution, a museum. While the two best-known and most valuable volumes had been removed, there was an assortment of other texts and envelopes containing items that nobody had taken the time to inspect, apparently. These artifacts existed deep inside the oblivion that was the museum’s vault. An airless, armored yet compact space, designed to store things that were best forgotten. Or so it seemed.

Que deseja a senhora?

Portuguese and Galician are dialectal variants of the same Romance language, so Pilar had no trouble communicating. 

She knew how to inquire for the hoped-for items. This was not a matter of bridging the minuscule gap between Portuguese and Galician accents. It was the way she referred to the items she had been told to look for. Aldara (current leader of the Graystockings) and Pilar the Librarian had instructed her carefully. They had both insisted that she use the name Pilar Gris upon arriving, and that she specifically ask about ‘little boxes, old letters, personal prayer books, and anything made of thread’. 

Generalities can sometimes glean more from a field.

Still, the ‘anything made out of thread’, the last part, sounded odd. Even though she knew what it meant, Pilar feared she wouldn’t be taken seriously if she mentioned it in such an unprofessional, vague manner. Still, she had agreed to do as she was told, and she did it. And then everything came tumbling out.

Fiction written by the nuns was the first to appear in the boxes the museum staff brought to her in the corner where she sat at one of the patrons’ desks with their low-hanging, dim lights. 

Fiction! Stories and perhaps a novel or two, she saw, yet Cervantes was supposedly the father of the modern novel. Fifteenth century, seventeenth, eighteenth. There was another item - printed pages like photocopies - that was obviously very recent. Yet the last nun had died in the 1880s. Pilar put this aside to look at later, perplexed.

There were poems in the file folders as well, along with countless letters. They can’t be reproduced here, but the content was more than a little surprising. A lot of it was also very definitely not religious. It could even have been called explicit, which is another way of saying erotic. Not that there hadn’t been famous love letters published in the past…

Pilar was of course familiar with the Letters of a Portuguese Nun, published in the seventeenth century in French. Likewise, she knew that there were conflicting theories as to whether the nun, Mariana Alcoforado, had ever existed. The passionate epistles made for great popularity, and there had already been forty printings in the century of its publication, in fact, in less than forty years. People knew about the nun in love, and loved her, whether or not the letters were real or fiction. Sor Mariana remained in popular memory, as seen by The New Portuguese Letters, written by three contemporary women.

Nobody nowadays believes women are incapable of erotic thoughts, but the documents still tell us things we need to know. Pilar was very clear on that point.

Obviously, neither the first set of letters nor the contemporary ones composed by a trio of women, were just the recordings of intimate thoughts. If Mariana Alcoforado symbolized unrequited love in a cloistered existence, the modern Marias expressed rage against the cloister and state a different case for women. It sounded like an unending struggle, but that would not last forever. The Graystockings were going to ensure that the appearance of silence was shattered. They were going to display what had yet to be acknowledged.

The world was definitely going to change, soon. For the better.

There is more.

There is more because then Pilar discovered there was writing by other nuns, but it was in English. At least she assumed they were nuns, because otherwise how would the documents enter a monastery or convent? She put all of those items aside as well, stifling the desire to see the signatures, but knowing she did not have a lot of time to be in the museum. She sent off a big stack of things to be photocopied, but took pictures with her iPhone of others while the staff person was tending to her request in another room. She had to get her sentinels out of the room if she wanted to get photos of what she really wanted.

One author had accompanied other pilgrims on their pious journeys, and another appeared to have come from America in the 1700s. (Not an easy feat by any means.) Yet another testified, in what should have been a legal document but was not, to all the perils faced by female travelers throughout even the more civilized regions of Europe. 

In short, there were affidavits, simple statements with signatures, confessions, accusations, and many more written versions of events. They were all pertaining to or written by women. This wasn’t so unusual, considering the archives had been managed by nuns for about six centuries. They were preserving information of use to women.

Outside the walls of the monastery there were events like Carnaval with the Entrudos disguised in many ways and meaning many things.

Inside the museum, in its center, Pilar was entering new territory, but it was worth it. She felt perplexed, and afraid. Still, it was worth it. She did not know what she was looking for, but trusted that the process would become clear to her. That made it all worth it. Even if she got lost, it would be worth it.

That was all that mattered: knowing that everything that was on the verge of unfolding, that was about to burst open, was going to be well worth it.

***

This story can obviously not be considered complete. We do not know everything that Pilar has found. We do not know how the other members of the Graystockings will react when they see the artifacts. We do not have the slightest idea as to what they will do with the things she has discovered in Lorvão.

We only hope they will do the right thing. We have been waiting fo so long.