I Think We’re Alone Now

Amazing! Alone in her bedsit with Ruth, Lavinia was ecstatic.

She caresses the hard-covered book bound in red. She runs her hand along sheets of paper and down two pens, one with real ink.

She's glad she got a nice bottle of Albariño and a few other things that would be perfect supper, so she could eat while working.

It had been a while since they had been together, which upset Lavinia. 

“I think we’re alone now,” Lavinia was humming. 

She was almost dancing. Finally, she was going to be able to work on her research.

Children, behave

That's what they say when we're together

And watch how you play

They don't understand

And so we're

Running just as fast as we can

Holding on to one another's hand

Trying to get away into the night

"Tommy James & The Shondells, 1963," mused Lavinia. The song was before her time, but her work in library science had developed her visual memory to a phenomenal degree. She was good with phone numbers, too, if she first wrote them in her mind on file cards. Her recall ability had been her most useful in her profession, but it also made more than one person resentful. She was used to it.

The song mostly had come to mind because of the anticipation of being alone, which was different than being alone with Ruth Mathilda Anderson. Although in a sense she was, in fact, planning to be alone with the photographer whose career she was researching. 

Lavinia smiled, and thought how people would interpret that in different ways, trying to sexualize the life of an academic doing research. The true pleasure was in the search, and there was nothing more to be said or thought or written. Except to see the image of two adult woman, Ruth and herself, hand in hand, skipping to escape their parents (like the couple in the song), which made her recall a similar incident when she was five.

The focus of the research she was going to do this evening was the review of all the published commentaries about Ruth and her work, from her contemporaries until now. It meant going through all her notes, of which there were a lot, and making a list of them in chronological order, but cross-listing them with type of publication in which they appeared: journal, magazine, newspaper, etc. This wasn't Lavinia's favorite part of any research project, but it had to be done. Nobody was ever interested in hearing about this step, either.

Now that the comments or articles were in chronological order, Lavinia could see how many there actually were and look for any common threads. Did they seem surprised that a foreigner, a woman, had traveled so far to photograph them? Did anybody make observations about Ruth as a person (as opposed to a photographer)? In other words, had people liked her? Had they liked her enough to help her find good subjects to photograph? Did anybody have anything negative to say about her? Were any women publishing opinions or studies of Ruth?

Obviously this was more than Lavinia could hope to accomplish in one night, but she had to start somewhere. The data-gathering phase of her sabbatical had taken far longer than she'd anticipated. She had to work harder, focus more. 

There was a hard rap on the door. Lavinia was at first startled, then cautious. It was as safe a neighborhood as any, more than most, but it was an unannounced visitor and it was evening.

"What time is it anyway?" she wondered, glancing at her watch. She had been distracted getting things out for a light supper and, of course, with singing. 

"Oh, it's almost nine o'clock." She was a bit dismayed at having wasted time. Her academic future depended on her doing this research and she had been waltzing around Compostela with some mysterious box of things para a nosa biblioteca, for our library, according to indications in the box. Things written in English that had been found when a bar was undergoing renovations, so Lavinia had been called to sort things out a bit.

"Who is it?" she called out anyway, immediately sorry she had. Fortunately, the voice had been familiar when the person responded. It was Daniel, her friend.

"You need to come with me to a restaurant called the Bodeguilla de San Roque." Daniel insisted and also waited outside while Lavinia grabbed the things she wanted to take with her, She gave a rueful glance toward the copious notes spread out carefully over the table. It looked like tonight she would not be alone with Ruth after all.

The Bodeguilla de San Roque has a small, intimate garden in back and a partial canopy of grapevines. Lavinia had been there a few times, always for lunch, not for supper. It might get buggy at night, especially if it happened to be more humid, but mostly Lavinia had not gone at night because it wasn't in an area she usually went through when walking about the city.

The restaurant turns out to be only a five minute walk from Lavinia's bedsit, and Daniel barely has a chance to say anything more, since the walk is uphill and along a rough cobblestone street. Lovely, but getting dark now. Daniel drops Lavinia off, then leaves. He provides no explanation and has clearly been asked to serve as her guide, since they know each other. It remained to be seen why he had been the one to do it and not Pilar or another of the women she knew in Compostela.

The reason for having been brought here, suddenly comes into view, before Lavinia can start to feel afraid. When she first entered the Bodeguilla, she had gone through the bar area at the very front, then through the interior dining area, then - searching for someone she hoped would be meeting her and explaining the reason for the impromptu invitation - she came out into the grassy area of the patio. 

It was dark by now, but the dim lights revealed a black backdrop set against the wall that enclosed the patio. The blackness looked like velvet curtains, or maybe they were just black tarpaulins used to protect the furniture on blustery days. After a few moments, from being the black drapes emerged a few figures, dressed in seventeenth century garb. One placed a sign in front of the modest stage area. It read:

MARIA SOLIÑA

in gray letters on a blue background. Lavinia understood then that she was going to watch a presentation about the life of María Soliña. She might not have a clue why this was happening, but she did know a little about the life of María Soliña.

María Soliña has a story similar to that of other women, and not a good one, since she has been called a victim of the Holy Inquisition. Soliña had apparently risen from humble origin to having considerable wealth, through her fisherman husband's success. When she became a widow, the Inquisition targeted her property and charged her as a witch, and torturing her.

Another account says Soliña lost her mind from grief when her husband died defending coastal Cangas from Turkish pirates. She confessed to practicing witchcraft while in her grief-stricken state. Of course torture most likely helped aggravate the suffering she felt.

Some say the dates of her birth and death are dubious. Others say she was born in Cangas de Morrazo in 1551 and died some time after 1617, the year she became a widow, and depending how long it took the Church to claim her wealth.

María Soliña is also known as Soliño, Lavinia knows, but the meaning of her name she hadn't tracked down. Was Soliña a woman's name or was it Soliño, a surname?

"I hope somebody knows, because I can't possibly go looking for something like that," thought Lavinia. 

She did know the street named after the woman in A Coruña is Rúa de María Soliña. Maybe it was just a question of people wanting to make the two names agree. Or maybe María Soliña-Soliño had no precise name back then, even though she had gotten very wealthy, because she was a woman.

"Do people really believe such a woman could have moved so high up on the social and economic ladder?" Lavinia thought the story was rather doubtful, but even in her skepticism she could see how people could be jealous at her good fortune and begrudge her it. Maybe she married well because she was very pretty? That would also be a complication for a widow, except she was old by then.

The play was not more than thirty minutes long. Just a single act. There was not a lot of verbal dialogue, although the exchanges between the characters (there were about five, four plus the protagonist), along with their gestures and use of props did an excellent job of communicating the content.

"So María Soliña was probably not a witch? I could have told everybody that," Lavinia thought.

"And she wasn't mad," which was also possible. Sad, grief-stricken, yes, but not out of her mind. The play had presented her reaction to widowhood as serene, accepting. It had shown methods of torture used by the Inquisition against women, none of them pretty, judging from the very abstract stage movements employed to represent the application of machines and various utensils to inflict pain. Anybody, mail or female, can crack under that sort of treatment.

The question remaining was why single out one woman for this treatment? Except María Soliña was not singled out. There were a number of women from the same village, Cangas, they say nine in all, who had been accused of being witches, or meigas. (Although witch and meiga are not the same thing, but that can't be discussed here.)

For her trials and tribulations, Soliña has for some become symbol of the suffering of the people, and especially of the women with no means of defense. Even women who went to battle for good causes might be seen as acting in an unnatural way. The dramatic piece wants the memory of this woman to be preserved, but it also seems to use its ambiguity of movement on the stage to communicate a lack of knowledge of the true story of a woman from Cangas and those from other fishing towns.

Lavinia sees that the presentation is over and it is time to leave. Nobody is there to accompany her back to her bedsit, but she needs no directions and is not afraid. She moves off, silently.

She reaches her door on the Rúa do Medio, Middle Street or maybe the Street in Between, knowing it is too late now to work yet feeling that she has to write down a few brief thoughts. This happens to her far too often, she thinks. She just jots things down spontaneously, like some detective trying to solve a crime, but she doesn't have time to pursue those lines of investigation. She wasn't a detective, though, and she knew it. She was an academic researcher (there's that phrase again) and was supposed to control the topic of research in a professional, informed manner.

The theory about the Galicians' admiration of Ruth that she had planned to write about that evening now seemed to be the wrong angle wrong angle. Lavinia admitted it and knew it was also not very inspiring. Maybe it was not even interesting. Or totally boring.

She had a new theory now: the Galicians valued Ruth's subjects, their landscape, architecture, their work and tools. The country Ruth was from did not and mostly thought the area was populated by people with an eighteenth-century mindset. 

The U.S. also had a hard time taking a woman photographer seriously, especially when her focus was foreign country bumpkins. At least Sorolla, who had painted all those colorful costumes sitting in the Hispanic Society of America had been interesting. What could black-and-white photographs offer in comparison? 

Where had Ruth been doing all that photography, with a massive amount of equipment? In a foreign country? In a place called Galicia? Meaningless to everybody back home. So why did Lavinia care? Academic muscle-flexing. Ego material, except for the fact that they were forced to do it by their institutions as part of their job descriptions.

Lavinia's hopes for her project were beginning to disintegrate almost before her eyes. What was happening around her now was far more intriguing. Like the brief play she had just been obliged to see.

Why the play? And what about the other figures in the garden? Had they been invited as well or were they there for some other reason? Nobody had spoken to anybody. She looked to Ruth for answers, knowing that was a topic she could control, manipulate, put in order, interesting or not. She was good at jumping through those hoops. It was what you did when you wanted tenure and promotion.

There is a voice singing a line from the song Don’t you know? This one was way before Lavinia's time, 1959. A popular song, written by Bobby Worth, it became a hit record for singer Della Reese. The song was adapted from an aria ("Musetta's Waltz") from Puccini's La bohème. Della Reese was not her favorite, but it always seemed like people spoke the singer's name with awe. Of course those we different times, when segregation still existed, and had so many levels of meaning. Della would sing:

Don't you know

I have fallen in love with you

For the rest of my whole life through

Lavinia added lines of her own:

I am beginning to think I can never leave

I don’t want to leave don’t you know

I may have fallen in love

Della continues:

Don't you know

I was yours from the very day

That you happened to come my way

Lavinia countered with an early memory of the city:

It was just as a student, or maybe as a tourist

walking along O Franco, looking

the first day I came

Della:

Can't you see

I'm under your spell

Lavinia was staring at

Green hills, chortling brooks

Val do Mao, Santabaia, Cea

Roads with villages like many-colored beads

Della:

By the look in my eyes

Can't you tell, can't you tell

Now, don't you know

Every beat of my heart keeps crying out

I love you so

Don't you know

Della was singing the final lines, but she seemed to have gone from being a singer of blues to being an outstanding photographer in monochrome. She was Ruth, and the photographer was beginning to speak her mind, not sing. Lavinia has to listen, aware that in this case she cannot control the dialogue as she is used to doing.

Ruth does begin her own song, though, and Lavinia is beginning to regret ever walking around the bedsit with the silly "I think we're alone now." The words echo tthe "don't you know" of Della.

Ruth:

You don’t own me…

"You Don't Own Me" Madara and White, recorded by Lesley Gore in 1963, when Gore was seventeen. 

You don't own me

I'm not just one of your many toys

You don't own me...

.........

Don't tell me what to say

And please, when I go out with you

Don't put me on display 'cause

You don't own me

Lavinia is now appalled at the allusion. Ruth is telling her that she feels used, taken advantage of. By Lavinia, a feminist, a scholar, trying to do just the opposite, to get some deserved recognition for the forgotten photographer? 

Don't try to change me in any way

You don't own me

Don't tie me down 'cause I'd never stay

I don't tell you what to say

I don't tell you what to do

So just let me be myself

That's all I ask of you

By now Lavinia is in tears, because she suspects she is at least slightly guilty of using Ruth to benefit her career. She immediately thinks she should pull up stakes, return home, complete some little research piece and submit that. Nobody will look at it anyway. They will vote in her favor or against her according to whether they like her or not.

Ruth is not finished, though, even if she is no longer singing. With her "you don't own me" still echoing in Lavinia's head, she tells the researcher what she can do to fix things, explaining with infinite patience:

"Here’s what the critics have said about me, and remember you were focused on their views. I supposedly had great empathy and had been taught how to get along with all types of people. Thus, because I documented the customs impartially, my field work was so valuable, insightful. I could see the people I was photographing. See beyond their faces, homes, and tools." 

"My vision of the rural area had much to do with the influence of the women, who very special informants. I was drawn to the rural areas and crafts in the urban areas. I wanted to capture what was most genuine about Galician society."

"I took more than five thousand two hundred photographs. That is an incredible number, given the technology available then. I even attempted some use of color photography."

"I was demanding about the amount of time spent working. I had no need for physical comforts and would work weekends and holidays. People were impressed by my commitment, but I was on a mission."

"How could you own me? Really?"

“What are you saying?” Lavinia was thoroughly confused.

“I am saying that by taking my work apart you are dismembering me. Let me live. Follow me.”

Lavinia shivered. Her shoulders slumped. This had never been her intention.

She would have to let Ruth Matilda Anderson go, of course.