Lavinia and Faísca (L2.16)

Lavinia had met Faísca in Quintana dos Mortos square in Santiago. It had been when all was pitch black because something had caused all the lights in the city to go out. Faísca might or might not have been real, although pretty much everything becomes real if we believe in it enough. There was no proof that she didn’t exist, but no evidence that she did. Lavinia thought the mysterious creature was more than a creation of her mind, although she admitted she shared one characteristic with Alonso Quijano - that of reading too much.

Now Faísca was back, but there were some unanswered questions. In the first place, it wasn’t entirely clear what color she had been on that first occasion. The circumstances had obscured her then. Lavinia pondered for a while, unsure as to whether the gatipedro had been black or white, dark or light, or maybe some altogether different color. 

Did it matter? Perhaps not.

The uncertainty was not due only to the dearth of light that evening. Lavinia had been guided almost entirely by the moonlight. Some said the gatipedro as seen by its creator Álvaro Cunqueiro, was white. Still, the feline being that had been in the silent, empty square had been a gatipedra, hadn’t it? There was a strong temptation to identify it strictly according to its creator, the great writer from Mondoñedo. 

Lavinia was looking now at a gatipedra, which was not the same thing, although it was potentially related. This time the creature was not displaying an overly long tongue and did not look mischievous. Perhaps only the gatipedro climbed into bed with little children and made them wet it. Lavinia thought her creature was better than that.

She liked its name better, too. It seemed as if Faísca, whose tongue did not loll about outside her mouth like the gatipedro’s did, was gray, albeit a mottled ashen tone like many pedras were.

“This cat will illuminate me,” she had suspected then and had said as much. Because she didn’t understand Faísca’s purpose in appearing, she thought it better to wait and see. She had waited for quite awhile that night of the blackout, but nothing had happened. Faísca, whose name meant Spark in Galician, had disappeared. Perhaps that was because the outage had finally concluded and electricity had seeped back into the city or dawn had come. 

In any event, Spark was invisible. A brief light, maybe a bit of hope, was gone.

Until now…

Lavinia had thought the small figure with a near strut was a stray. When she realized, however, that it was the gatipedra, Faísca, she suddenly felt very happy. 

“Something important is going to happen, and I know Faísca will lead me to it. I wish I knew what that will be, though.” Lavinia was puzzled, but not afraid. She thought she would call to the shadowy creature, who seemed to be a lovely misty - smoky color this time around.

“Here kitty kitty kitty!” She coaxed, realizing as she did that it wasn’t really an ordinary cat she was addressing and she hoped she hadn’t offended it. Kitty was just a habit. So much so that she sometimes forgot and used it to call a dog.

What color was the gatipedra this time? It looked ashen, sooty, so it was probably gray. Like the stones it was gliding over, like the gray pedras that were the city’s heart and whose beating could be felt. Did the color of its fur matter? Green Faísca or Blue Faísca. Red Faísca or Yellow Faísca. It conjured up memories of Dr. Seuss.

Then Lavinia realized that the grayness exhibited by Faísca (aka Spark) was the color of the woad-dyed organic scarves they sell in Toulouse. The most beautiful blue in the world, because it had a range of shades from pale to potent, like the sky or the bottled-up water of a ría, or a waterfall (fervenza). All the shades were full of the history of the woad trade, much more a part of French history than the poor woad cousins classified as invasive species and condemned to eradication in some states back where Lavinia was from.

Worlds apart. The plant had a history and it was useful. What in the US was scorned and eliminated, the the area around Toulouse was considered to be a source of wealth.

“Blue is my favorite color,” murmured Lavinia, to nobody in particular.

She then realized she was supposed to follow Faísca. It was obvious. The creature was stopping to check every few seconds to make sure the human she was leading had not gotten lost or distracted. Humans sometimes did that. Still, on this occasion both animal and woman were proceeding in the same direction. They were heading toward Conxo, although Lavinia had no way of knowing that quite yet.

Conxo wasn’t unfamiliar to Lavinia, and she knew something about the area, which was more or less a neighborhood on the perimeter of Santiago. One crossed that road whose name she didn’t recall, and there it was. There was a sign indicating the road to Vigo, she thought, but wasn’t sure.

There was one upsetting thing about Conxo: o barullo. The nerve wracking noise of cars and other vehicles that battered nondescript buildings on nondescript streets. It was almost impossible to escape from the whizzing and braking, so Conxo was not a place for a pleasant stroll no matter what the hour.

“But its history is so important,” thought Lavinia as if she were trying to make an excuse for the noisy streets. She knew about the Banquete de Conxo of 1856, an event of a single day that was imprinted on Galicians’ collective memory. On March 2 of that year, intellectuals, workers, students had gathered, thinking of possible social reforms, and their hopes were not lost. A nearby oak tree almost won tree of the year status in Europe. Everybody knew about these things. After all, 1856 was quite recent.

Conxo was also the site of the novel by Rosalía de Castro El primer loco was from 1880-something and was her last. While not her best according to most readers, it had some significant ideas embedded in the plot. Who was the ‘first madman’ of the title? Why had the lovely little church come to house an asylum for those deemed different from the normal population? 

Lavinia thought about Rosalía and her novel for a fleeting moment, then gave a start. She had heard the lines from one of her poems, repeated so often although they were in Spanish rather than the Galician that had won her the hearts and minds of the people:

Dicen que no hablan las plantas, ni las fuentes, ni los pájaros,

ni el onda con sus rumores, ni con su brillo los astros,

lo dicen, pero no es cierto, pues siempre cuando yo paso

de mí murmuran y exclaman:

Ahí va la loca soñando

They say plants do not speak, nor do fountains or birds,

nor the waves with its murmuring, nor the stars that shine,

they say this, but it isn’t true, because when I go by they always

whisper things about me and cry out:

There she goes, the crazy woman with her dreams.

The poem had nothing to do with Conxo, although in its verses the author had called herself mad, loca. It sounded better in Galician: a tola… 

Lavinia was fast becoming uneasy, because Faísca was nowhere to be seen now. She was neither gray nor blue; she was only the color of invisible. Had the creature been leading her on? Was this always going to happen to the outsider who thought she could come to this land so late in its history and expect to out down roots? With all those pedras, granite, schist, slate, sand? All the lugares (hamlets), castros, drystone walls that seemed to have simply grown out of the ground centuries ago, had too much of a head start for a newcomer to ever catch up.

“Who do I think I am?” She thought this and felt sad. She would never be able to learn all she needed to know about the place she had begun to hope might become her home; she felt lost, overwhelmed, almost as if she were grieving what she’d never had, was never going to have.

Walking back toward the perimeter street, wide and also very noisy, she thought of the sign that said A Rocha and remembered a jumbled story about its construction in the thirteenth century, about some high-level figure in the Church named Berenguel de Landoira. (He might have been an archbishop. They were always up in arms about something.) There was a family called the Churuchaos, whose very name had made them worthy of going down in history, plus the irmandiños who had fought against the traditionally bad treatment of the people by the nobility. 

Lavinia knew she needed to go to A Rocha and explore the castle that had lasted little more than two hundred years, into the second half of the fifteenth century. It, like the Banquete around three hundred years later, was also engraved in the collective memory. She wondered how many residents of Santiago had actually visited the site.

“I have to go there,” she said, and knew it was true. Faísca had led her to Conxo because she had unfinished business with that appendix to Santiago. Yes, she’d heard people say “Vaiche na misa do Conxo” [You’d have to go all the way to Conxo to attend mass] when they refer to something as a waste of time, but she didn’t know its origin. It made no sense at first glance. History, however, was a negra sombra, a dark shadow, lurking everywhere. She would have to find out what gave rise to the expression. After she located the castle, that was.

The castelo, A Rocha Forte, was not that hard to spot. Lavinia wondered why it was still in ruins after more than twenty years of excavations. Memory was so heavy in the minds of Galicians, which might be the reason no hurry was felt to revive the old walls, awaken them and invite visitors. The Camiño de Santiago was apparently focused on getting the silver casket inside the catedral and had little need for more minor tourist attractions.

All Lavinia could do was stand and stare from a distance, rebuilding walls and turrets in her thoughts as she kept an eye on Faísca. If it hadn’t been for the feline, she would never have gone to Conxo, never thought about how Rosalía had been born in Cornes (a part of Conxo), never thought about the psychiatric hospital founded there in 1885, never figured out that a lot of brambles hid the Castriño de Conxo with its pre-Roman elaborately carved rock that has never been studied.

A pedra. There was always a stone of some sort - a petroglyph, the crumbling base of a defensive tower, arcades in the most Compostela part of Santiago - anchoring things in place but allowing them to move about in memory.

Lavinia was unsure of herself now, unsure of her intentions. A person doesn’t usually run into a creature everyone knows isn’t real and then follows it to a distant part of the city just to contemplate stones and madness. Yet she had, because she not only liked cats - any kind - but she also needed to know more about Cunqueiro’s creature. 

No, Lavinia, not Cunqueiro’s. This is not a gatipedro you’ve been following. You made up the gatipedra and you’ll have to accept your responsibility.

“Now on to Bastavales, only eleven minutes away. Or to Padrón,” which is about the same distance.” The voice purred. 

Maybe it was all about Rosalía, Lavinia thought.

Her feet felt so heavy.