The Walrus

I am he

As you are he

As you are me

And we are all together

See how they run,

Like pigs from a gun,

See how they fly.

I'm crying.

~ The Beatles

Rough diamonds may sometimes be mistaken for worthless pebbles.

~ Thomas Browne

Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.

~ Jane Austen

Lavinia knew there was trouble ahead for her in Compostela. She had tried so hard to fit in, to keep from speaking when it wasn't necessary, and to refrain from talking about certain topics with certain people. She thought she'd been fairly successful, given the short time she'd been living in the old city. She'd made friends and had progressed with the Galician language so quickly that even she was surprised. Still, it took more than a few months to settle into a new place, if that was what she was trying to do. She was still making up her mind about that, because moving to another country is never easy after a certain age. She knew many people who had tried to adapt but had failed and returned home.

Today, when she could have been taking a nap after a meal of bacalhau con natas with honey-drenched chestnuts for dessert, Lavinia lounged on her sofa and thought about the things that made her doubt her tentative decision to stay in the City of the Saint, things that had not been as evident to her as they might have been to others. She knew herself to be headstrong when she made up her mind, and that meant she tended to overlook drawbacks, faults, miscues - things like that. Yet the old saying 'where there's a will there's a way' might not always be true. She began to run through the comments and speculations of some of the city's residents. Some she had overheard, others had been passed on to her by persons she hoped were friends, still others had been in the looks afforded her as she walked the old streets.

"They've asked me if I'm a journalist, but I don't know why. Maybe it's the fact that I sometimes go around with an iPad and sit in cafés writing. I ask a lot of questions, about local customs, history, architecture, things like that." It wasn't a good enough explanation, in her mind.

She was right in that most tourists only ask questions about how to get to one place or another, and where the best place to eat is. Some of them are incredibly stupid, like the woman who insisted there were two cathedrals in Santiago, and shouted at a woman who had been born and raised there that there were most definitely two. It turned out she thought the Pórtico da Gloria and the door that faces the Quintana were two different buildings. Another was also unaware of the size of a medieval temple, and picked out a tiny chapel - or maybe a kiosk selling lottery tickets - as her cathedral. Still and all, it wasn't enough that she carried an iPad around to see her as a journalist. True, she didn't dress like a tourist, but instead wore casual clothes that to some might have seemed appropriate to appear as a reporter on assignment. Did people think she also walked around with an invisible microphone?

"Sometimes I'm stared at when I'm crossing the Quintana," Lavinia thought to herself. They stare when they think I'm not looking and then drop their eyes to the stones of the square. They think I haven't heard them call me "seeker of tunnels." It's my fault, because when I first got here I asked about them. I only spoke with two or three people, but now I feel watched. Even if I really did believe in the existence of a set of underground passageways, I wouldn't be the only person who asks if it's true or a legend." She was quite unhappy.

She was right. Certainly there have been and are many invisible escape routes and subterranean bunkers for heads of state, but Lavinia wasn't the head of any state and she might have dishonest reasons for finding out the truth or fiction of a local belief. People didn't need to know the facts and they certainly didn't want someone from away to meddle in what had existed - or not - for centuries. What could the nosy woman want with the tunnels anyway? It wasn't like she could buy them and take them back to her country to display in a museum. 

"If I found any tunnels - but I'm not looking for them - I wouldn't be trying to buy them and rake them back to the States to display in a museum." It was as if Lavinia were channeling the thoughts of the most conservative residents, who most likely preferred the noisy, hungry tourists to her.

Some older women, including the beatas or women whose social life was going to church daily, went so far as to make a sound that could not have been but still sounded like tsk tsk tsk. They didn't understand how a woman could still be single at her age - Lavinia was over thirty and did not seem interested in attracting men. She didn't seem interested in getting married because she didn't dress up much nor did she apply much makeup. These attitudes, while old and weary and wrong, really did remain in the city. Was it possible that she was a Corrupter of young women…? Did she want to lure them away from their families? Did she have a coven of bruxas? How many women had she actually been seen with and where? When did they meet up? "I can't help thinking of María Soliño," murmured Lavinia, who had read about the rich widow from Cangas who was tried for witchcraft and had seen the recent film. It had made her very unhappy, to say the least. So much injustice.

"Sometimes get the feeling I haven't taken a single step here in Compostela without being sighted, tracked, followed, or otherwise pursued, by someone who doesn't want me here."

She could have told herself she was letting her imagination run wild, except she wasn't. On a couple of occasions, when ordering a coffee or a glass of wine on a terrace, the server asked how things were going, and made a head gesture toward the women who were frowning in her direction. The server suggested: 'It's because of your work with the girls, maybe'. Lavinia responded, 'What girls?' and the response was a complicity wink.

Another opinion held by a decent number of Compostelans was that Lavinia was on the payroll of a huge American company, that because it was so big and so American was certainly up to no good. It didn't matter what kind of company it was; it was not one people want to see move in. Look at McDonald's with its ugly arches. Maybe modern construction was prohibited in the casco vello or old town, but a lot of mayors have been bought off by construction companies, so prohibitions meant nothing. That really aggravated her.

There was also the stigma of the foreigner who might be a thief of local treasures, like others before her. Too many people posed as researchers, pilgrims, art lovers or connoisseurs, but then they made off with valuable items from the altars of rural churches, with codices from a library, folk art from abandoned rural houses. Galicians usually knew they had cultural goods many visitors would sell their souls to have. When they were ignorant of the value of the artifacts, they almost paid the foreigner to cart them away.

"I am different," Lavinia heard herself say out loud. "I didn't come here to eat, drink, and be merry, nor do I want to steal a culture's artifacts just to put them in a museum nobody in the US would visit. I'm not like that." Her blood pressure was rising.

She heard herself say all these things, give all these arguments, over and over. She knew she was getting frustrated, because she had gotten a trembling feeling in her shoulders that extended to her hands. She had begun to sweat and to lose her way. She didn't quite know where she was in the city, even though she had been through that narrow passageway countless times. She got more and more anxious, unable to quiet the voices in her head and surrounding her. If they didn't want her there, she would leave. She was afraid to stay, yet also mad as a hornet..

When she awoke, Lavinia was in fact drenched in sweat. She checked her watch, changed her nightshirt for a dry one, then fell back in bed, knowing she had to do something. She decided she would dress as her male alter-ego the next day, and spend time observing the people, trying to elicit comments. Not unlike a reporter or journalist. She would call on her friends for help, which meant bringing a number of women together. Not unlike a woman trying to convoke a meeting of women, many of them younger. (Was a gathering of women really a coven?) She'd bring up the topic of tunnels in a few bars and café, but would be asking out of disbelief, not out of curiosity. She hadn't worked out what she could do, while wearing men's apparel, to find out exactly how the rumors of her relationship with a big American company had surfaced. All she could do was to casually ask if any new businesses were coming into the region.

The last topic bored her as much as it probably bores anybody reading this, so she decided not to bother with it. That was her being hard-headed. The problem was, she did not know that her habit of secretly dressing as a man had also been discovered. 

Her ignorance would turn out to be fatal, but she did not know it then. For now, she was simply frustrated. And very, very angry,’ and it was the anger that was driving her to act, that she did know. She was no walrus and would show them all who she really was.