Lavinia Returns to Compostela (2/2) (L2.20)

Should I try to pick up the pieces?

Tie up loose ends?

Patch things up?

Put the pieces of the puzzle together?

Mend the broken pieces of something else that is not a puzzle at all?

The questions rolled over her like frouma,like seafoam on the beach at the tiny town called Tal, near Esteiro. They insisted and their voices were that white noise she despised.

On her first night back in the soft, stony bed, Lavinia knew she couldn’t sleep. It was something other than jet lag, however. It was all those questions, expanding and contracting, dashing her against the cons, the big rocks of a shore about thirty minutes away. She knew she needed to walk. A life-giving walk through the streets of Santiago, the “cementerio de vivos” as Rosalía had called it in her poem to Santa Escolástica that had captivated Lavinia from the first time she read it, even though it wasn’t in Galician. Lavinia had taken the leather bound volume of her complete works and tried to follow the path of the speaker, the I who hurries alone through the streets, following an urgent need.

So Lavinia grabbed a jacket and an umbrella because it was Compostela after all, and walked. While she was heading along the street that runs from the Praza de Galiza underground parking garage toward the Museo do Pobo, she hurried to get away from the cars still pushing past in the evening, too close for comfort. She turned to ascend the little Tránsito dos Gramáticos and was almost at the top by the Porta de Mazarelos when Emma Pedreira’s poem planted itself firmly into her path. She knew right away that she was going to have to do what the speaker in Emma’s poem had: wander, flee, beckon, run her fingers through the stones and over the hard water. There was an urgency in that poem and Lavinia breathed in that urgency, thirsty and fearful.

Her route doesn’t matter, but she went to some of the places in the poem, seeing how layers and layers and layers of lives - some now dead, others not - filled the streets yet hollowed them out, made them bigger, wider, darker, softer. She couldn’t stop until she found the thread, her thread, not Ariadne’s, not red, not any color except the one the rain had when it runs down the medieval slabs of mineral time. At some point Lavinia knew she wasn’t alone.

Images appeared in the narrowness of the Agalias or the Rúa de Xerusalén. They weren’t ghosts, which is a childish thought, and were really not visible. They were figures yet they had no form or color. Lavinia felt like she was looking at her thoughts, and everyone knows thoughts are invisible. Still, she knew she had company and, pulling her jacket a bit closer, allowed the thoughts to identify themselves. There was no sound, but there in one doorway she Rosalía. A few doors down, on a corner by a steeply sloped street, was Luz. She had met Luz, the only one of the entities she would encounter. María Mariño was next, Lavinia knew, and wanted to ask her a question about the word chao, but knew it wasn’t the right moment. Words were all around them, but were not to be spoken.

Xohana was next, and Lavinia again resisted the temptation to tell her what some of her poems had meant, but it was for the best. Xela was rather indistinct and yet Lavinia felt rather than saw the welcoming look on her face. Xela, who had been bold, almost brazen, in her work, and who had left far too soon. 

Luisa was the last, and Lavinia had learned enough about her to be in awe of her skill as a writer and musician. She couldn’t open her mouth, though, which (as noted) was fortunate.

Then there was a street where Lavinia had to stop and breathe in the mica of its walls. She knew there were other thought women she might encounter, but was a bit unhappy that she could never speak to any she met because they had gone as well. 

At that moment came Marica and Emma, who were still more than colorless thoughts. They weren’t strangers to Lavinia, but they should be in those somber old streets so late at night. There still could be no greeting, no conversation, but both were definitely in the Obradoiro, the Rúa das Hortas, San Clemente, o Franco, and of course A Raíña, absolute monarch of streets.

Yes, there were shards and slivers of living and dead in Compostela on this first night back after months of absence. The strange thing was that they weren’t hard, sharp edges of time that cut cut the skin and make it bleed. Knowing this made everything fall into place.Those other parts, pieces, fragments of Lavinia were nothing more than a patchwork, a crazy quilt, a memory blanket. She saw that she had left them strewn about like Luis Goytisolo’s cubist novel, waiting to be stitched together. Not glued or hammered, but stitched or woven. Even though it was impossible to separate the fiber from the mineral.

Now Lavinia knew she had help in reaching a decision, from the taciturn women whose faces she knew but which she was not seeing as she walked. From the city without skin as Emma called while simultaneously wrapping it in a dermis of verses.

For the patchwork, the quilt, Lavinia saw there was a long, wide bed of granite - so much softer than roses - that needed to be sown. Or sewn. In English, the words were homonyms. It didn’t matter. The cemetery of the living deserved to be wrapped up and kept warm.

The decisions came, gradually.

Lavinia would work with the Graystockings again. There was so much to do. In helping with their project she would be learning why the love affair with a city she had rather despised years ago had gained in strength, why the stones and the tunnels they formed beneath the surface of the old city spoke so insistently. She now believed that her own ‘project’ did not have to be a one-woman show, about her story. Rather, she could translate the city and culture who had given birth to her, since before Compostela - B.C. to use a familiar abbreviation - she was a pretty lost person. Academic degrees were nothing because no classroom would hold a discussion on what she had seen her first night back. She was foolish, perhaps, to think she could make the rest of the world learn what Galicia really was, and certainly not so they would come in droves as hungry tourists. It was a place where people ‘from away’ could find the home they had lost. 

Lavinia then remembered an old poster she’d seen in Turismo: “La Coruña, ciudad en la que nadie es estranjero”. [Coruña, city in which nobody is a foreigner.] It sounded so odd now, with the Spanish and not Galician. She realized that she no longer spoke Spanish and didn’t need it. In fact, when she tried to speak it, the words only stumbled out and tripped over the old stones. 

Compostela, cidade na que xa non son estranxeira. [Compostela, city in which I am not a foreigner.]

Thought Lavinia, in Galician, and went back to her room to think.

[Author’s Note: This story is a draft of what will be a much longer one. I hope the reader will be forgiving, as there is much more to it. That will come, and soon.]