Judge Not, Lest…

Author’s Note:

This story is part of the Lavinia series. Apologies for not supplying all the stories that shed light on some of the details here. Someday soon, everything should be tucked into a single package which might be a novel. This story reveals how Lavinia and Dany met, but didn’t. How they were worlds apart. What happened to those worlds is part of another story.

Vin had just met Dany and thought the dark-haired Galician woman quite attractive because of her outgoing personality, her easy laugh, her way of observing the surroundings, and her greenish-gold eyes. She hoped there would be more opportunities to get together with Dany. They seemed to have a lot in common.

Dany, for her part, had gotten a totally opposite impression when the two had been introduced. She already sized up the foreigner and mentally deposited - well, tossed - her in the trash container near the little praza where the group had stopped to talk before continuing to their destination. 

The people who had gathered in the usual amorphous bubble were all friends, although often a stray outsider might show up, then join the group on a regular basis or disappear. 

Vin had come to accept the go and stop and go pace when several people were out together. Too many people knew too many other people. Kind of like walking through a bog (no offense to that lovely feature of Gaelic countrysides). She liked it now, because she had learned that it was unavoidable. Everybody did the same thing in Santiago. 

If you wanted to get from one point to another in the city, you literally had to tuck in your chin and stare at something written on a mysterious paper in your hand, or glue your eyes to the old stone slabs of the medieval streets. That was because running errands, making it to appointments on time, and keeping a regular research or work schedule were a daily challenge. You risked being stopped by somebody with a need to chat.

After some trial and error, Vin had found stone-staring, or as she called it, stone-studying, to be a perfect way to elude conversation if she had something on her mind. It had to be done naturally, surreptitiously, with the air of an tourist-in-awe. She knew now how to strike a conscious pose as tourist and foreigner, or as foreigner-tourist, revealing to any passerby that she was inaccessible, so enraptured was she by the colors, textures, glints, speckles, palette of grays, plagues, offal, history and so forth that adorned said stones. 

The rapture could have a beguiling aspect, sort of enticing local residents to offer assistance. How to get to the Catedral, for example. Every visitor had to see that, right? Vin liked to call it her dumbed-down pose and it almost always worked when she assumed it. She knew her face looked innocent, had often used that to her advantage. Nobody ever questioned her or made her open her luggage at customs, for example. 

Rapture could also be of the erudite sort, and Vin was not adverse to being seen as an intelligent woman. No, it was not vanity on her part; hers was a reaction to her mother’s 1950s housewife. Vin liked looking smart, meaning looking like she was taking notes and photos for her research. (It didn’t matter that her work on the photographer Ruth Matilda Anderson didn’t require that sort of close observation. Not the kind where you study the cracks and carvings in the Santiago granite. Still, she used the trick.)

It always worked! 

Vin clearly had no idea she was being placed, quite quickly and uncharitably, in the poubelle by Dany, who knew next to nothing about her. Among the cigarette butts, grimy napkins from pastry eaters, the who-knows-what-all. The detritus of the day. That’s where Vin had landed. Good riddance to bad rubbish. She saw no hint, even, that the other woman - whom she’d merely thought of as a potential friend while in this foreign country - had classified her and eliminated her, along with other despicable things in her life. All she saw was a friendly, intelligent woman who spoke Galician clearly, using a broad vocabulary. Vin knew she could learn from Dany. Hoped she could.

Dany also liked discussing women’s issues, especially domestic violence. There was going to be a large demonstration in Vigo in a couple of days, according to her. Lilith Bookstore in Santiago was holding an event in solidarity, a poetry and music session. She demanded people in the little cluster in the little praza all go. She made it sound like a test of their friendship. There would be a local band called As Violetas, The Violets, who pounded on handmade instruments and created surprisingly good tunes

There is more than one way to be a feminist, but Dany it seemed hadn’t found one any better than the one she had chosen. Dany was out and loud: out in the streets and loud in her protests. No one ever doubted her sincerity and good intentions, however. People need a strong commitment to something in their lives. Strong is often the appearance when voices are heard above the rest. Like Dany’s. Sometimes seen as leaders, sometimes not. Vin imagined Dany must be a leader of something. Wonder if she’s in local politics? Vin wondered. Or in a union? She was impressed and more than a little curious.

As a foreigner, a non-Galician and thus the minority, Vin was necessarily different to the eyes of the people around her. She was often quiet (too quiet, in Dany’s opinion) about how she felt about various issues. Nobody asked her how she acted back home, either. Not that it mattered, but perhaps Vin preferred to take a back seat in a foreign country. Foreign for her. Galiza was not what she had come to research, but she was rapidly losing her original objectives as she walked (somewhat obsessively now) the streets of centuries. The streets of the centuries that were extending glimmers and graininess toward her face, reading there the fact the Vin was trying to read them.

Oh what a tangled web we weave when we make our threads of stone. Who had said that?

None of these thoughts showed in Vin’s face when she wished to hide them, which she still did. Nobody would understand, they might think the obsession childish or worse. It was not, but it did not yet have a name.

Dany didn’t exactly ignore Vin, but neither did she make any effort to include her in the group’s conversation as the evening went on. (Evenings could start around eight p.m. and last until two a.m.) It wasn’t hard, although Vin seemed to be trying too hard to hear what she, Dany, was saying. It was obvious, the way she leaned forward a lot, across the table. Too far across the table. That made her nervous.

Maybe Dany wasn’t the only one in the group to ask what the foreigner would know about those things. Repeated beatings and killings happening in the four provinces because social norms among certain groups allowed it. Did she think every Galician, especially the men, was violent? (That was definitely not true.) In any event, they weren’t going to explain it to Vin. She would have to ask.

Then again - this was Dany’s thinking, unspoken - why should this Vin person care about another case of violence against a woman? She did something with libraries, didn’t she? That’s what Dany had heard, although it hadn’t been firsthand. She was probably a librarian on vacation, poking her nose into things just to be able to say she had. Vin’s library would have little to no use for what bookstores sold in Galicia. And Dany didn’t even like the idea of Galician books being taken away from their birthplace to be dropped in the midst of a sea of ignorant Yankee readers. It was irrational of her, but that was how she felt. Yankees - that is, English speakers, monolingual ones, are ignorant. Even the ones that read.

Because it certainly was not the case that Dany had anything against librarians. It was just the foreign ones, like Vin, who was from the worst country possible, except for a few things she knew about that were yet to be revealed. She was not alone in her thinking, certainly not.

Dany’s thoughts wandered.

There was Pilar who was Director of the Biblioteca Xeral, the main library to the prestigious Universidade. Hundreds of years of learning and wisdom. Of stories told and stories untold but waiting. Oh, Pilar, a true hero or heroine, a woman who led double yet very intertwined lives. Who had trained carefully, with the best teachers. Who would give her life for the things and people she believed in. Who had already risked her life in the now and in other places. The ones that were somehow related to the Pilar most people saw. 

Working with Pilar was a great fortune. Vin couldn’t reach the top of Pilar’s boots, as the old saying used to go. Had she come to show Pilar a bibliotecaria how smart she was? That was never going to happen. Vin was never going to find out the whole story. No foreigner ever did. It was better that way, too.

Plus, now Vin the English speaker, the foreigner, was in the group and was hanging on her every word. Did she have some hidden goal? Dany hoped it wasn’t a crush, because she’d had to defend herself more than once from things like that. She thought a bit more about Pilar’s double life, her sacrifices and kindness.

There was the library everybody knew and many visited, and then there was the other library. Pilar saw to that one as well, but her efforts were invisible to the vast majority. The other library, yet to be given a name, was known simply as a nosa biblioteca. Vin was light years away from finding out about that.

It might be worthwhile drawing Vin out a little, see what business she really had with books. We’ve all seen what bibliophiles and researchers can do if not under proper surveillance and in the presence of valuable documents, thought Dany, ruefully. Thieves everywhere. They want our culture, so they steal it. She turned to smile at the one person who was not Galician and asked her why she’d really come to Santiago, what she was really looking for.

She was already betting on what the answer was.

Vin hardly knew what to say. She didn’t know what to say because as yet she had no idea what the screen of Dany’s mind was projecting. She couldn’t say much because there were things that she still hadn’t done or learned, that hadn’t happen to her. She wasn’t at all like Dany thought she was, but she was totally misled by the smile, the wit, the intelligence. She hoped to learn things during her stay? Was that such a bad thing?

Vin was a long way from knowing how to read faces correctly, how to ask the right questions at the right time. Dany was a long way from finding out what might redeem Vin from all her supposed (in Dany’s eyes) faults. 

Neither one was going to walk those old streets. Not yet. And definitely not tonight.