L Finds R (aka The Haunted Journal)

Author’s Note:

This story should be read after the previous one, “The L Word.” If possible. Please.

*******

First there was that cloth square with her name embroidered on it. It had been among the contents of the box that was getting mysteriouser and mysteriouser, as Lewis Carroll might say. That had been such a coincidence that she thought it had been planned. She couldn’t prove it, however, and for that reason wasn’t going to confess her suspicions to anybody. Not yet, at least. And not to just anybody. Only her friend Pilar.

Now there was a new wrinkle. There was an additional resident in her bedsit that made her uneasy. The reason will be explained in a minute…

She had the oddest thing sitting before her now: a haunted diary. Ruth’s diary. Yet Ruth, photographer Ruth, had archived everything she did during her six decades at the Hispanic Society of America. She had been a superb archivist and ethnographer, neither of which she had been trained for when she took the position at the HSA. It was no surprise that she was such a good photographer, because that was something she had studied, in a very good school. Clarence White’s.

Lavinia was surprised at herself when this thought occurred to her. This couldn’t really be Ruth’s diary, shut away in the mammoth institution. It could only be something created as a joke, or a trick. 

Or a test.

She definitely did not believe in haunted anything and there was nothing supernatural or ghastly-ghostly about the hand-assembled diary. Most of the time people referred to a haunted house, so for a diary to be haunted was strange. Well, how the diary came into her possession was already extremely odd, she had to admit… Jokingly, she asked herself if maybe Ruth herself had put it there.

Impossible, of course, and Lavinia knew it. Ruth, who was in fact the writer - author? - of the diary, had died in 1983 or so, when she was ninety years old. She had traveled throughout her life, but her last trip to Spain had been - was it 1949? - even if that might not matter. Would she have lost or forgotten the diary? Would she have left it for safekeeping, in the hands of a friend? Thinking she would return, then couldn’t?

There was obviously no other way it could have gotten to Santiago. Unless it had found a way. But there was something else to be taken into consideration:

“A person can write a diary anywhere, any time in in her life,” thought Lavinia.

Where was the writing done and what span of time did it actually cover? A diary is something you write as or soon after, a day’s events take place. Usually the writer includes a date.

“That’s what diary means. Daily.”

This was what led Lavinia to wonder what the pages before her actually were. Were they a diary although there seemed to be no visible dates anywhere? Or were they a memoir? The memoir possibility was too much to hope for. An unpublished reflection by Ruth on events in her life would facilitate her research, yes, but there was something else happening as well.

Despite her desire to find answers, to calm her curiosity, Lavinia was reluctant to open the thick, hand-sewn book. It felt like prying, which was ridiculous, because she was in a foreign country with precisely the goal of prying into Ruth’s life. That was her job; as a professor: she had to do research in addition to teaching. Otherwise, no tenure or promotion. Ruth had done some amazing photography and her subjects had loved her, apparently. She was smart, skilled, and knew how to talk with people to get them to pose. Since she had been in a foreign country - the same one as Lavinia - she had had to work carefully to achieve the shots she had. No using a smartphone.

The reason for Lavinia’s reluctance to read what Ruth had written was directly related to how she had acquired it. (This is the detail we said we’d explain.) Which was the problem. The fact was, Lavinia had absolutely no idea of how the acquisition had occurred, why, nor who had done it. Had she found it or had she been given it as a gift? Maybe she had bought it by accident at an old paper vendor at the flea market near the Praza de Cervantes. Or it could have been left by accident or on her table or café chair. She might have grabbed it up by accident when retrieving her books from the library of the museum.

Wait. The museum…

Not knowing how she had acquired such a valuable document couldn’t help but prove worrisome to the normally rational academic. It made the haunting part seem reasonable. Were there some of those mythical biosbardos around after all?

Meanwhile, Ruth was waiting.

How could the diary possibly be haunted? Ruth herself would have none of that: she knew she did not appear to be a witch or a ghost. She had been a real person, skilled in her profession. Unless she had known the quality of her words could capture the ears of someone years later, just as her camera lens had captured vital rhythms of communities all over the Iberian Peninsula. The right reader would be able to ‘hear’ her telling her stories, which might make her think Ruth’s diary was haunted when it was not. 

The one hearing Ruth’s voice would have the ability to listen, and learn. Lavinia hadn’t opened the book.

Ruth

I feel that this is a sort of ‘life record’ even though it was supposed to be an academic essay. The President of the Society suggested that some of the things I was writing were too personal and didn’t belong in the narrative I was developing to accompany my photos. That’s why I made my own files to house what was deemed ‘too personal’ material. I kept them, too, didn’t burn them. 

There are two types of ‘personal’, however. The really personal parts are in these pages, where the President will never find them. I will decide who finds them…

[This part seems to be illegible but might be something that can be restored.]

You will notice I never married. You will not likely find any man, except my father, mentioned in a way not connected to the Hispanic Society of America. Women have remained unmarried since the remotest times. They chose, in other words. A convent or an archive, places that allowed them to think and do creative things. They decided. Between children and books, travel, photography? I didn’t choose children. 

Many of the colaboradoras where I worked never married. They had a profession and that was all they needed. We were all close friends, very close. How close is not important, but it might also be irrelevant. It’s totally irrelevant to my story, at least. Do you want to ask the President of the HSA why he got divorced, remarried, and never had any children? I thought not.

Back to working at the Society. (We were all women, you cannot forget.) Many of us traveled, over and over, doing important things like studying the cultures of Spanish, Portuguese, Galician. Jet-setters, perhaps, but with a purpose in life, not flimsy cocktail dresses. Some of us went to Latin America as well, and we carried out our assignments as instructed. That doesn’t mean we didn’t like wine, dancing, and good food. We just never reported on adventures not outlined in our assignments.

[Another large part here has become too hard to discern without special lighting.]

Let me say that traveling with a camera was a good thing. It didn’t take me too long to figure out that I didn’t need my father along as chaperone on my trips. Without him, traveling with another photographer, Frances, it was so much better. I discovered another important thing: Women with a camera in their hands could stare at everybody and everything, stand still, or take off on a run after a good shot. We could look straight on at people and not seem rude or be called unwelcome tourists. We could go anywhere, and we did. We took full advantage of it all, using our cameras as sabers and shields. 

We used the camera lens as our eyes and in return it protected us when we went out.

[Illegible, but a few words surface: slip, under the huge chestnut tree in Trasalba, behind the hórreo at Carnota, one of the largest… ]

One time we think we saw the Santa Compaña, the group of spirits that are said to announce a death in the near future. Now I can’t quite figure out how that fits with my being a Christian Scientist. Still, we…

[illegible]

There were two people I was especially fond of in my recurrent travels. However, that takes me from the ‘too personal’ to the ‘too too personal and I’m not able to write about that yet.

[illegible, of course]

I also cannot bring myself to tell the gifts I received or ‘found’ and that never reached the archives of the HSA. No need to take up space with those things. Some are safe in a place that’s written at the end of this.

[end pages missing]

*******

Lavinia realized she had dozed off while trying to make out the faded sections. It had given her a slight headache, straining her eyes to catch wisps of words. She had just rested for a moment, and then saw that close to an hour had passed when she checked her watch. 

That was when she realized the importance of what lay on the table before her. She also knew that it might prove impossible to verify. And she knew that if she were to show up at the grand Hispanic Society of America with the secret, too too personal thoughts of Ruth Matilda Anderson, she would not be able to leave the building with the papers. They would be confiscated and made part of Ruth’s legacy.

Except they might not be a part Ruth wanted to share with the great institution and its erudite scholars. 

Maybe these words composed by Ruth had another goal, another place to be. 

Maybe that was how Lavinia (not, perhaps Doctor Lavinia Rivers) had come to have them in her hands, on her table, in Santiago, at this moment. She had the opportunity to choose, just like Ruth and the other colaboradoras had had that opportunity.

Read and report?

Read and recover the for now illegible sections?

Read and burn?

Refuse?

Return to sender?