Follow Me, She Said (L2.9)

A nail had once been driven

Into my very heart…

That had been Annette Meakins’ 1909 translation of the first lines of the famous poem by Rosalía de Castro. Lavinia thought it wasn’t bad, but for the original - 

Unha vez tiven un cravo 

cravado no meu corazón 

- she would have preferred

Once I had a spike

Piercing my heart

It was the cravo cravado  that was a challenge to translate. Maybe a nail nailed into the heart sounded better? Except cravo had two syllables, the verb cravar repeated the root crav- and thus sounded more painful. Skewer had two, but any intelligent person would see why that didn’t work. However, maybe only translators were concerned about such insignificant details of language.

In any event, finding a solution would take more time than Lavinia had at the moment. She had somewhere she needed to be and didn’t want to be late. Even if nobody else cared when she arrived at the appointed place, she wanted to be there on time.

At that very instant, after crossing her beloved Quintana dos Mortos, she went up the steps to the Quintana dos Vivos and her gaze rested on the menacing verxa [grating] of the great catedral. Like almost everything in Compostela, there were explanations of its purpose. The iron spikes were immense and extremely sharp. Most tourists probably never noticed them. They pierced the blue sky when approached from the Quintana dos Vivos and today they stopped Lavinia dead in her tracks. Dead being just a turn of phrase, of course.

One of the best explanations for the placement of the aggressive metal grating like a crown of thorns on that small portion of the cathedral exterior belonged to a translator friend, Rocío. Rocío said she’d been told it was to keep suitors from reaching their sweethearts. Except what sweethearts were to be found inside the cathedral, even after scaling the lower part of the roof to get inside? That was another story altogether. At just a few feet above the heads of passersby, the spikes would dissuade anybody from trying to scale the wall onto the roof.

Hmmmf! Thought Lavinia. A set of blade-like iron rods to keep out thieves and lovers, strong men that they were. Women only had to be told they weren’t allowed in, and that was that! If they didn’t obey, they were eliminated, their lives silenced. No wonder the Graystockings had been so cautious about guarding their library, their knowledge. Months ago she hadn’t understood why the secrecy of the group of women, hadn’t even understood the reason for the stony color of their garments. The explanation was finally coming to her. Still, she didn’t know yet why she had been allowed or invited to learn what they were doing. What they had been doing for many, many years. Their strange ways were becoming clearer, nevertheless.

Lavinia shivered a bit as she passed beneath the iron warning to behave, but she still wandered, thoughtwise, to Santa Catalina, Catarina, Catherine. The important saint from Alexandria in Egypt had been subjected to torture on a spiked wheel. The wheel had not worked, however. Not until the young woman had chosen her own path.

The saint was associated, among several groups and patronages, with libraries, poets, and students. She also had a chapel, a capela, in the Catedral de Santiago de Compostela. It wasn’t that well known and in fact was somewhat forgotten. Apparently her spot had once been planned to hold the Panteón dos Reis Galegos. That project had been stymied by authorities who hadn’t wanted Galicia to become full of itself as a kingdom with its own pantheon of monarchs. Spain had to have a central monarchy, with no regionalistic upstarts.

Then Lavinia thought more about Saint Catherine and the wheel that was her symbol. Instead of recalling the attempted torture, did it actually mean she was condemned to rodar, not stay in one place? Was mobility a sign of her strength? She was also the patron saint of libraries, a feature that could lead to much speculation. Certainly for her, since when Lavinia had still been at the university, she had taught library science and gender studies.

Hypatia was part of Catherine’s story. Not a saint although also from Egypt, Hypatia had been an intellectual, a brilliant mathematician and philosopher. She was not Christian, and some resented her intelligence. She was said to have been attacked by people carrying sharp objects - shells or shards of pottery - and slaughtered for daring to think. Did anyone remember her now? A few did. Lavinia had had to do some searching online herself. She only knew of a journal with that name. History sure was fast becoming a forgotten field of study. A dangerous path for everyone, male or female. 

Unexpectedly, Santa Bríxida, Saint Brigid came to life in Lavinia’s thoughts, looking shadowy and saying nothing. Yet the same Brigid had been revered in cultures perhaps not Christian as the goddess of poetry. Women and writing? And books? 

Lavinia thought about this some more. Was there a pattern? Catherine had been a devoted scholar from her early years. This was all beginning to sound like a class that could have been taught in Gender Studies 301. Gaelic mythology was not Catholic theology, so this woman had been put to rest after being retired to second place following Saint Patrick. Not many knew she had had accidentally been ordained as a bishop in Ireland. That would never do, Lavinia thought.

From Brigid or Bride or whichever of the many names used to refer to the woman who had many followers in her country yet few in Galicia, Portugal, or Spain, it was but a few short steps to cross paths with A Moura, known to each and every Galician, at least. No relation to a Mora, as Lavinia knew many visitors mistakenly thought - including the photographer Ruth Matilda Anderson she had come to study - the Moura was kin to the Celtic Cailleachs.

And so the path continued. A Cailleach was a hag or crone with blue skin, a frightful thing. Yet she was also strong and could create stony landscapes. Some carried boulders on their heads, others in something slung over an arm, and they were adept at spinning. Both were said to arrange their hair with golden combs. Both had attributes of shapeshifters, neither was a monster, but one had to beware around them because of their powers. Some thought the Cailleach was Brigid's counterpart, similar to Demeter and Persephone, summer and winter, earthly harvest and sunless underworld. Both a part of the life cycle.

It really was about whose story one chose to believe, whose culture told it, and whether or not the figures were allowed to tell it themselves. The Graystockings are very wise, thought Lavinia again. Finding the ties between one story and another was a slow process and it was easy to get distracted by people, both ill- and well-meaning. It took a lot of listening and looking. She had been learning to do both in her time in Galicia, away from the classroom where she had been rsponsible for filling the space with her own knowledge.

How little I really know, she thought.

As she left the Catedral with the rather overlooked and not especially elegant chapel to Saint Catherine, Lavinia thought once again about Santa Escolástica, the Saint Scholastica from Nursia in what is now central Italy. She had already met Escolástica through the poema by Rosalía de Castro set in Santiago. The saint had a statue in San Martiño and a pair of portraits in the little-visited religious museum tended to by the few nuns in the convent of Sampaio, right behind the cathedral.

Escolástica was a rather low-key figure, only known through her twin brother, founder of the Benedictine Order. She became the patron of cloistered nuns, which also left little to be admired. Still, there was her name. That alone was a mystery. And the statue that had lured Rosalía to cross the entire city when it seemed most everybody was sleeping. Something is missing, thought the former professor, and she wasn't thinking about things related to faith.

Movement and silence, study and violent treatment for having used one's mind. This was beginning to sound like a treatise on women's issues, which wasn't at all Lavinia's intention. She wanted to be free from theory and discourse on injustice, just wanted to follow her own path. Sometimes people, male and female, talk too much.

Santa Susana, or Saint Susanna of Rome, crossed Lavinia's path at that moment. It was inevitable, because her unplanned walk had taken a turn toward the edge of the city where the little church from the twelfth century was nestled in an oak grove in a slightly elevated area. It was a place to sit and look outward over Santiago de Compostela, see how it was laid out in an area near a prehistoric castro or hillfort. It was where one could slip off some of the cloak of official religion and contemplate how a population had come together and expanded over the centuries. It was especially a place where there were no crowds, almost none of the maddening conglomerations created by the tourist industry that the internet had spawned.

Known for her intelligence and commentaries on religious writings, Susana also paid for using her mind by her death. Brought to the site of Compostela from Braga (Portugal) by the mighty Xelmírez, she was actually co-founder of the city, although rarely recognized as such. Nobody ever talked about Susana de Compostela, of course. Her lovely Romanesque-Gothic church is only open on special days. The morning had grown into afternoon and the afternoon into a fog heavy with a wetness more like stone than water. Oddly enough, that was not a bad thing.

The only thing left was to follow in the footsteps that led up the slight incline from the Porta Faxeira to the Alameda that curved, horseshoe-like, around the medieval city. As Lavinia walked, she noticed it was beginning to rain, but not aggressively. The rain insisted, however, and as it came down, it created shadows on the uneven stones. Then the steps became footprints of whispering water. 

Lavinia wasn't conscious of what was occurring, but she knew it wasn't a nightmare nor was she in danger. She tried to listen more carfully, because the drops were more than what normally fell. She felt the need to gather up the voices that came from the footsteps. It was a simple thing to do: listen, then gather. She didn't think about how to do it, but the bag that hung from her wrist was full to the brim. She, however, did not feel soaked, or even slightly wet. That was because this rain was different.

Finally, slightly out of breath, Lavinia stopped in front of the little old church, wishing she could enter, and turned around toward the old city. Santiago was still there, of course, and this was not a dream. However, when she looked down at the steps, they were silent.

Follow us, they had said, had been saying. Now all that was behind her was black, wet, and wordless. There wan't a story anywhere, whether it was myth or history. Lavinia's first impression was that it had hardly been fair to be asked to walk all day, even until now, when luscofusco, dusk, was fast approaching. She felt weary, as if she had walked much further than a kilometer and a half around the old part of town, through the cathedral, across the quintanas, the one of the living and the one of the dead. 

She had no explanation for the weight of the water she carried.

Nevertheless, the thorn, or spike, the nail or the sword, the other pain described by Rosalía, had been set in its proper place. Lavinia would continue to look for it. A final image came to mind:

Anchored, not in place, not to a place. To place.

If the image did not make sense right now, she knew it would at some point. She also thought that when she discovered its meaning, it would not be painful.