Fill Me In, Please

Daniel walked into the little café on Cervantes Square. It was pouring now, and as he ducked inside, he closed his black umbrella quickly, then gave it a deft shake to leave some rain outside. He deposited the umbrella in the overflowing rack to the left of the door

“How’s it going?” He greeted the barista, whose name, he knew, was Xana. 

“Great. What’ll you have?” asked Xana.

“Café con leite.” 

It only took a minute for the coffee, heavy on the milk, to be placed before him, along with a square of anise-tinged bica cake from Ourense. Daniel smiled at the server, then stared at the table. The wood bore the pock marks of pen and pencil points, but was varnished smooth and silky where there were no nicks, no reminders of previous patrons. This was one of his favorite spots in the city.

When Daniel had entered A Chabola, it had been crowded and the noise level had risen to the highest acceptable volume for a small space the size of the café. Voices competed with the espresso machine and the sharp clinking of cups and saucers. Everybody was splattered with the scent of rain. 

He didn’t mind.

Now, however, the café was empty. There had been no warning. Nobody had rushed out. There were simply no dampened people sitting at the wooden tables or on stools beside the well-washed bar any more. Nobody was sitting anywhere, not at any of the tiny tables. Nobody was standing, cup in hand, at the bar, reading one of the daily newspapers. And it wasn’t raining. And it was no longer morning. 

Daniel didn’t notice.

He had bits and pieces of old songs running through his head today, songs they used to play more than a decade ago at parties. He didn’t want to hum them out loud, though, because people might think he was a little odd. Daniel didn’t want anybody to look at him, except there wasn’t anybody around to look. 

Daniel didn’t realize that.

As soon as he had sat down, Daniel had slipped a small notebook - or it could have been a journal - out of his right pocket. He was starting to open it in order to read or jot something down, when he glanced out the window toward the statue of Cervantes. He saw that it was dark, but it was the subtle, the filtered kind of dark only late summer has. Street lights sent pale fingers of light slithering along the ancient stones of the city, making them glisten as if they were wet. It didn’t seem like there was much else outside except frail light and swaddling dark, moving in a simple confusion.

Daniel went out then, to see what was happening. First he stood where Preguntoiro Street ended, then turned left. He was alone in the street, alone except for the threads of light weaving white shadows beneath his feet. He knew Santiago de Compostela like the back of his hand, had studied history at the University. He knew he was not lost, but he had never seen streets in the city so empty. So weblike.

A slight breeze twirled and capered around him, ruffling his hair. His loose summer jacket rippled as if it had plans to go in the opposite direction to the wearer. Even though there were no people walking by, steps tapped the stones that were so rounded by time they seemed soft when one walked on them. Did the stones mold themselves to the feet or did the feet adapt their shapes to the granite? 

Daniel did not know.

So Santiago was now a ghost town? At the same time, the walls of the buildings were visible, but they had been chipped and cut and gouged out of a mammoth block of silence. The hewn blocks, so quietly placed where they had always been, had been aligned perfectly and were painted a dusky blue that echoed the last memory of sun. In the summer, in Compostela, that meant eleven o’clock in the evening.

“Where is everybody? Why is the city the color of the sky as it fades? Will everything disappear when it’s completely dark?” 

Daniel felt uneasy.

The windows of some of the buildings shivered at that moment; a couple of the windows which were closer to the eaves seemed to hum, as if trying to tell Daniel that while he might be too self-conscious to reveal the tunes in his head, they weren’t. He reached up, knowing the windows were too high, but his fingertips touched the dark blue velvet that was rapidly turning black.

“The sky is quite low tonight,” thought Daniel. “I wonder what’s causing that?”

In the utterly naked city, Daniel felt something was either very wrong or very right. The trouble was, there was nobody to ask, nobody to explain. That was what empty meant, after all. It meant: nothing. That loud, open, nothing-filled space with streets like the hard, scrubbed bones of a skeleton and more legends than it deserved, was his home. Now it seemed to have shed everything and was asking Daniel to reconstruct it. Well, maybe not all of it, but certain parts. 

Daniel wasn’t certain he knew how to do that.

This was his city, true, the city that had grown up around the discovery of a set of tombs - composita, responsible for the Compostela part of its name - one of which had been certified as belonging to Saint James. James, or Santiago, had been one of the twelve Apostles. This was a city that lived, breathed, and died by the chiming of the cathedral bells. The cathedral was firmly bound to the Swabian rocks beneath it, while its spires drilled holes in the blueness overhead. Daniel had rarely been to mass in the imposing temple, but like everybody else, on a few occasions he had stared, open-mouthed, at the huge silver botafumeiro with its cargo of incense, that inscribed a wide arc from one side of the beams to the other once a day. The incense alone was enough to make one giddy, not to mention the broad sweep of the silver censer flinging its sensual, pine-y smoke on the worshippers.

Daniel wasn’t thinking about that right now. He was too confused.

This city of Santiago, the Saint’s final resting place, had everything engraved and etched on its face permanently. Centuries ago. It was bound to the sky that surrounded it, or so it seemed, because it claimed its sunsets by writing with gargoyles in the last amber of the day. To know this was true and within its powers, all one had to do was to walk to one side of Obradoiro Square and look out toward Pico Sacro, the distant peak said to be inhabited by… something.

Compostela had its secrets, Daniel knew, but now, at this precise moment, it was keeping everything hidden, everything. He wasn’t prepared to rebuild it, but he was a historian and wanted to preserve what it had. Memory is so fragile, and both the unknown or the silenced as well as the monuments that drew visitors, had to be cared for. Tourists took it for granted, but then they didn’t live there and they of course had little knowledge of what lay beneath the surface.

Beneath what surface? Much of that seemed to have disappeared, washed away, perhaps, by centuries of rain. Except it wasn’t raining now and rain was no match for the sturdiness of stone.

Daniel had no idea where he was, but he would find out.

Walking in the direction of the Toural, another meeting point and center of city life, he thought he heard murmurs of voices. If there had been any sound, it quickly dissipated. There were no such things as ghosts, but there were memories. Everybody has memories, just like everybody has secrets. 

Daniel had more memories than he needed, perhaps.

Along Franco Street, the Rúa do Franco where faithful pilgrims had trudged the last few steps to the cathedral to give thanks for their safe arrival, there were no young women with lots of make-up trying to get visitors to try samples of the tarta de Santiago made from almond flour and dusted with powdered sugar. The window of the ageless lottery kiosk was shuttered. There were no starving artists offering to do portraits by the entrance to the post office.

It was definitely not raining, and the evening was warm. The buildings still exuded some of the day’s heat, accumulated during hours of sunshine and set free after dark. (In the winter, the process was different. The chill of the rain was captured and released to passersby, who sometimes recoiled from the pulse of the rough rock surfaces. They felt alive, hot or cold. They were alive.

Daniel searched in vain for sounds and faces, for street musicians and the clink of cups and saucers like he’d heard back in A Chabola. Nothing. He chided himself, speculating that he’d gotten too wrapped up in his current research project, which was mostly centered on the Quintana dos Mortos, the Square of the Dead. 

‘There is nothing strange about the Square,’ he told himself. ‘It was once the city cemetery but had to be moved, for health reasons’. That had been done over two hundred years ago. Now local lore reported that there were Roman tombs in the place that had been vacated. Daniel had been tracing the various usages of the large space behind the cathedral, the one facing the Porta Santa. The Porta was always shut, except for the years when July 25 came on Sunday.

Daniel had found other things in the course of his research, but he hadn’t said anything to anybody yet. Anyway, that had nothing to do with the bald, cavernous city that he saw now. What had happened to Santiago’s constant urge to flaunt its past? 

Daniel had nobody to ask. He kept walking. He had no choice. He needed answers.

All the little shops near the Toural were empty. They didn’t look like they had gone out of business. There was simply nobody in them - not customers, not shop owners. Such a lovely, soft night and yet nobody was around to enjoy it. Daniel shivered a little, not from cold, then turned back to the direction of the Quintana. He was now beginning to recall a few things from a distant past.

Except the past was relative, and a historian is less likely to term something that has happened only ten years ago as distant in time. He had never gotten over the feeling that something was moving beneath the slabs. Too much had happened in that space to have just up and floated away. 

Daniel tried to smile, but couldn’t.

In the far corner of the square, over by the steps that led up to it and almost under one of the arches of what was known as the Casa de Andrade, the structure created by the famous architect of that name, Daniel thought he glimpsed a figure. It was faded in color, but his eyes were still drawn to it, as if it were a flickering, magnetic shadow. It looked like someone he knew, or wanted to know. He kept walking, wondering if his own footsteps were silent as well.

The figure was facing him, watching. It seemed to be a woman, because he could make out that it had shoulder-length hair. She had a raincoat thrown over her left arm and an umbrella grasped in her fingers. She needed neither, given the perfection of the late August evening, but then people often went out with both, because if you waited five minutes, everything could change.

The figure was not walking, but it wasn’t hiding. It was definitely a woman, and she was definitely looking his way. She was the only soul around. (Odd, that he should use that term, Daniel thought, especially in the very place where so many souls had been laid to rest. Until they had been removed and laid to rest in the new site on the edge of town.)

Now it seemed like the figure - the woman, because obviously this was not a ghost - was talking, because her mouth was moving. A few more steps and Daniel could see that she was smiling, was about to start coming toward him. There was still nobody else around. He thought she looked familiar. He had spoken to her before. He remembered her.

Daniel felt he had to reach her. He was drawn to her, but that could have been his uneasiness. He had nothing to say to her, really. She, for her part, appeared to be moving in the slowest of motions, as if emerging from a wall of years, a blank wall, now the color of night. The mortos were rumbling ever so slightly beneath his feet, but the figure had not come from beneath the surface of the Quintana. She was real.

He said nothing, so as not to disturb the breeze that was still clinging to the sides of the faceless buildings, and went up the steps. (He’d never counted them, but guessed there were around twenty.) One of the step levels had gratings in it, as if to let air in to a person who might be using the tunnel that lay between the Holy Door and the convent. Daniel had planned to speak with the head nun of San Paio, or maybe he should speak to one of the head priests. It was hard to know who would be able to give him permission to look inside the passageway. Not that he wanted to go into it, tonight of all nights.

Daniel was not afraid, however.

Once he had traced a diagonal route from one corner to the other of the square, he was only a few steps away from Cervantes. Two minutes, at the most. That’s when he remembered that he’d left his umbrella and coffee in A Chabola. Had he also left his notebook? Fortunately, he’d put it in his pocket. That was a relief, but he hoped his table with the coffee and bica were still there. He wasn’t worried about the umbrella, because it was an old one. People rarely walked off with another person’s rain gear because everybody had their own. If they took the wrong umbrella, they brought it back and exchanged it for the right one.

Daniel sensed now that it was getting dark, except it wasn’t the dark of midnight. It was rainy dark, damp dark, chilly. He tugged his collar up around his ears and entered the little café. By then it was pouring rain and he was drenched, because he hadn’t taken his umbrella on his eerie stroll. He looked toward his table, saw that nobody had touched a thing, and shook his shoulders to throw off at least a few of the heaviest droplets, then sat down.

He took his notebook - or journal - out of the same pocket as before, noticing as he did how a drenching rain was washing away every possible view of the street. People were sloshing by, some with katiuska rain boots, others lamenting having inadequate footwear, their backs hunched beneath raincoats. Nobody had thrown a coat over an arm and nobody outside had an unopened umbrella gripped in one fist.

Daniel jotted down a few words, probably about some things regarding his Quintana research and where he could try to locate the sources he needed. He didn’t notice when Lavinia walked in, smiling despite the challenge of the downpour, dripping from every angle and slope of her clothing.

“Como che vai? How are you doing?” Her voice, oddly enough, had a lilt, like droplets falling from gargoyles or high, humming windows. It was a gentle voice, and she’d used it to speak to him in Galician. She hadn’t done that before.

“Ben! Ben!” was Daniel’s immediate response. He grinned.

This time Lavinia hadn’t stood him up, like she had a decade ago.