Galiza Profunda (L2.4)

And so the papers that had been spread out on the other side of the bed when she went to sleep were gone when she woke up. There was no way that could have happened, yet it had. Lavinia knew she had to tell Pilar about the stolen artifacts, because at the moment she was convinced they had to be either stolen or forged. 

What am I getting myself into?

She knew she shouldn't get any deeper into the whole thing, which could be a very risky venture. After all, the appearance, out of the blue, of a whole collection of letters to Rosalía de Castro made no sense. She was, after all, a writer from the 1800s and all her papers, including unpublished manuscripts and correspondence, had either been published, archived, or destroyed long ago. Her husband might have had something to do with that, but nobody ever really said that, for some reason.

It could be nothing serious, but the fact that some of the letters and whatever else was among them had turned into smoke (not literally, she hoped) while she was sleeping, was obviously unsettling. Lavinia was more than a little uneasy at having had her small bedsit invaded during the night, as was to be expected. However, she didn't have time to worry about how that theft had happened and she certainly wasn’t about to contact the police. She had to go to someone who knew what she needed to do to get them back. 

She had to ask Pilar the Librarian. 

Pilar gave her what was a reasonable answer. That was:

"Go look for them." 

Only that and nothing more. 

(Stop haunting me, Poe, I don't have time for the rhyming and the chiming of your bells. Nevermore is not the answer to my dilemma.)

"Galiza profunda - Deep Galicia - that's where they are." Pilar clarified, and there was a hint of a smile at one corner of her mouth.

Although she understood the reference behind the phrase, Lavinia didn’t understand how it could be the answer to her predicament. Coming from her friend Pilar and Pilar the librarian, it could well be a metaphor. But a metaphor for what? Lavinia was extremely curious.

Laughing, Pilar explained, more or less:

"You need to find Deep Galicia. If you do, you'll either find the missing papers or you'll know where to look for them. Follow the threads. It doesn’t matter if they are red or some other color."

Pilar was not referring to the red bracelets worn by people of more than one religion for several reasons, one of which was to feel like they were not alone. It had been a popular thing for a long time, albeit not really obvious. You had to be looking for them on wrists and could go days without spying one in a wrist. Lavinia was not a wearer of thread bracelets, however, and didn't think she was supposed to take the comment about the color seriously. When she heard Pilar’s words, she thought more along the lines of the symbolism of Ariadne and the labyrinth, with the dangerous Minotaur lurking along the way. She knew that thread, following it, now meant using various methods to find a solution to a problem and following it meant finding the escape route to safety.

"But how does that connect to finding answers for the documents I have?" Lavinia felt like things were getting too tangled for her liking. Not only that; it was frustrating to hear such vague suggestions. This was a problem that went beyond ancient mythology. It was her problem, and it was in the present. Fake or not, she now had to try to recover the missing items. 

Pilar explained:

"Because you have the letters or whatever else is bound up with them."

(But I don't have all of them now. That's the point.)

  "You can read them and transcribe or digitize them. You have access to the information they contain." 

(Well, yes, but that's not the point. Some are missing and I need to get them back.)

"Now you have to dig deeper into the lives of the writers and what might have connected them to Galiza, to Galicia. Something in their lives or work tied them to this side of the Atlantic. What brought them here, maybe in person, maybe only by ship?"

(That's what I would be doing right now if somebody hadn't made off with them...)

"There are answers here, profound ones, although not in the sense that crazy judge from Málaga meant it when she took a child from its mother because they were living in what she termed Galiza profunda and the child would suffer from being brought up in a cultural wasteland."

(I read about that. The father was in Málaga and had protested that the mother would go back to her place of origin. Heaven forbid the mother would do such a thing. Child abuse?)

Lavinia had been appalled at the story when it had been reported. Nobody in their right mind would think Málaga, a city down south sold to the foreign tourist industry, would be superior to a village near Noia on the Galician coast, with all its history. Málaga, superficial now, a Mecca of sun and sand but not a lot more, couldn't hold a candle to the northern coast. Apparently superficial was better than deep. She wondered where the judge had gotten her law degree and all that prejudice against Galicia.

Pilar continued:

"But this search will only be important if the documents are authentic. If they are not, then you still may learn some interesting things through the forgeries."

(Galician as a back woods, no culture of any sort, just rocks and lichens, lots of trees, superstitions. Right.)  

Lavinia shook her head. A woman judge had ruled the village as inappropriate for a child's environment and the child's mother as cruel for trying to bring the child up there. The epitome of ignorant. Or worse. The judgment had been a very serious matter, in more ways than one.

Pilar nodded, pleased. She had read all the thoughts running through her friend's mind and knew the American was trying to unravel the matter, to find her way through the advice she was hearing and her concern at having been negligent in caring for the papers, whatever their origin. 

Lavinia was silent for a moment, then agreed her friend was right. And she thought again how arrogant she’d been to immediately think the solution was in her country. After all, the letters (the ones I've still got) were here, in Santiago. So she needed to start in situ. Of course. She thanked Pilar the Librarian and returned to her bedsit to look over some of the papers that were left. Fortunately, there was a good assortment remaining.

(I can do this.)

She pulled one letter out of its protective wrapper and read the name that was at the bottom of one very old sheet of paper: Anne Bradstreet. It was a name she recognized, but she didn’t recall any details except that she had been a pilgrim, or a Puritan, centuries ago.

Anne Bradstreet (1612 - 1672, as Lavinia had ascertained) turned out to be the author of a book titled The Tenth Muse, published in 1650. She had written a poem, probably tongue-in-cheek and maybe sarcastic, when she received a copy of her book, which had been spirited off to Britain and then returned to her. "The Author to Her Book" was intended to ward off critical comments regarding a woman’s bold attempt to write:

Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain, 

Who after birth didst by my side remain, 

Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true, 

Who thee abroad, expos’d to publick view, 

Made thee in raggs, halting to th’ press to trudge, 

Where errors were not lessened (all may judg). 

Lavinia was justifiably unhappy to see words like ‘feeble brain’ and ‘snatched’. Anne had written the poem in self-defense tinged with apology at having had a book published even though the initiative had not come from her. She had felt the need to disown it as being ‘unfit’.

At thy return my blushing was not small, 

My rambling brat (in print) should mother call, 

I cast thee by as one unfit for light, 

Thy Visage was so irksome in my sight; 

Yet being mine own, at length affection would 

Thy blemishes amend, if so I could: 

I wash’d thy face, but more defects I saw, 

And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw. 

The poem went on, but Lavinia was almost in tears, thinking about Bradstreet’s situation. She had been a writer despite everything. She had intentionally broken rules, but had been forced by social norms to deny her achievement. 

(It’s a miracle anything of hers has survived.)

Because this one had not been studied yet by the Paper Librarian, Lavinia was especially careful not to damage the paper in any way. The author of the poem she had found among the papers had been a seventeenth century writer in the American colonies. That meant she would have been incapable of writing a letter to Rosalía de Castro, who wasn’t born until 1837. All the writers Lavinia had searched for online to situate them in their correct time frame, had lived and died before 1837. Even 1850 would have been early for them to send papers to an unknown girl in another country.

Clearly this was a major reason for seeing the documents as forged.

Unless there had been a much earlier Rosalía…

The other names that appeared among the letters and miscellaneous papers were: Martha Wadsworth Brewster (1710 – 1757) . Elizabeth Singer Rowe (British but with ties to the US). Anne Hutchinson (1591 – 1643). Jane Turrell (1708 - 1735). Except for Hutchinson, they weren’t familiar to Lavinia, who was feeling uncomfortable at her ignorance.

Did the Paper Librarian have the ability to match older paper? That thought came to mind after Lavinia had searched for the dates for each woman whose name appeared in the papers that had not been stolen. Despite her own work in gender studies and library science, she had never given much thought to early women writers, thinking that most of what they had produced had been of a religious nature. After all, the colonial period had been all about finding religious freedom in America. Everybody had to believe in their freedom.

(Except there wasn’t much of it for the wives. They had duties and numerous children.)

Lavinia realized her thoughts were all over the map, which was rather ironic. She was in Santiago, in a language and culture other than her own, yet found herself in the midst of these women who wrote an English that also felt foreign and seemed to have no standard orthography.

Proving her right, that she was all over the map, not focused, her curiosity led her to stop at a Sargadelos ceramics window. There she saw a plate and a small figure that said herba de enamorar in the signature blue lettering of most of the pieces. The figure was a simple dove, designed by the brilliant artist Seoane, and there was a small lid that could be removed to store some of the plant. She bought the dove and was a bit sad that they sold it to her empty. 

(One never knows when it might be useful.)

Then curiosity kept pulling at Lavinia, as she walked and thought about Saint Andrew, Santo André, the one of Teixido to the north. She knew a little about the site and the traditions associated with it. The winds blew, the cliffs were steep, the entire are was sown with a vibrating solemnity she had never encountered in the US. Santo André had his share of songs and sayings, too. A quick search offered many, including:

Pasei a ponte do Porco,

paseille a man polo lombo,

meu divino San Andrés

o voso camiño é longo

[I crossed the Bridge of the Pig,

I ran my hand over its back,

My divine Saint Andrew

Your road is demanding.]

Instead of cluttering her head with rhymes, Lavinia decided to go buy a plant for her bedsit. It was an odd impulse, but it came from her stop at the ceramics store. She thought about armeria - sea pink, sea thrift - because of Sargadelos and Santo André. Armeria was the name for herba de namorar in English. The herb of love. She wasn't in the market for love, not at the moment, but nevertheless admired the hardiness of the simple plant and its flower. She would have liked to buy it in a pot, but it was for windy cliffs like those near Santo André de Teixido and would surely be stifled in her bedsit.

(There must be a thousand songs about it.)

A herba de namorar,

a herba namoradeira,

a herba de namorar,

tráiocha na faltriqueira.

Finding her will power at last, Lavinia refused to look up what Padre Sarmiento had written about the sanctuary and certain practices he thought were not befitting a site of worship. Nor would she try to locate a book by Otero Pedrayo, Peleriñaxes [Pilgrimages] written in 1929 and still read by many Galicians. She would distract herself with the self-imposed task of finding a houseplant to accompany her on the silent nights that she knew awaited her. And she heard…

(… want your help in finding the… and … works still missing from Galician literary history.)

(… can help because of your training… English. And because you gave up the jail of academe to … research. So do it! This is for the... )

Things were all jumbled up, out of sequence historically. Lavinia had seen that immediately, after finding the dates that matched the names on the fragile papers. There was an ambiguous ‘we’ in all of it. But was it ‘we women across the Atlantic’; or ‘we people who thought up this ruse to approach you’?

It was obviously impossible to find the freedom-loving armeria - sea pink, sea thrift, cliff rose, lady's cushion, lady's pin cushion, marsh daisy, sea gilliflower, sea grass and a hundred other names, perhaps - in a floral shop. Instead, Lavinia found only lithops - pebble plants, living stones, stone-face. She thought about how this had been the store recommended to her by Pilar.

(I might have known. It's always the same with me. Always a pebble in my shoe as a girl, always granite in my gaze now.)

She left the store with a collection of tiny buttons, hard, dull, looking like they would never grow. She had fallen in love with the little kernels of life, but wondered how the earlier talk about Deep Galicia had led her to buying lithops, the plant with a stone face? A living stone, like the living book that Anne Bradstreet had written to. Anne’s book had been stolen and published without her knowledge, until she received a printed copy. Her book, whose complete title was an entire paragraph:

The Tenth Muse, lately Sprung up in America, or Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning, Full of Delight, Wherein especially is Contained a Complete Discourse and Description of the Four Elements, Constitutions, Ages of Man, Seasons of the Year, together with an exact Epitome of the Four Monarchies, viz., The Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, Roman, Also a Dialogue between Old England and New, concerning the late troubles. With divers other pleasant and serious Poems, By a Gentlewoman in those parts.

Surely that was something worth remembering. Lavinia also remembered that Bradstreet’s poem had been among the papers she’d been given by a nameless person. Papers that supposedly were letters written to Rosalía. Impossible, when one compared the dates. Yes, the letters had to be forgeries. Lavinia felt enormous relief.

Until she realized something. There was another Rosalía or Rosalia, without an accent. It wasn't the name of a woman, however. The Rosalia was an ancient celebration, Roman, she thought. It included roses and other flowers - associated with rejuvenation, rebirth, and memory.

That was going to require a lot more time to sort out, but she would do it. She had to do it, even if it turned out to be a far more dangerous search than any she could do on the internet.

Lavinia was afraid she was beginning to know the answer. If she had to travel the map to make sure, so be it.