The Center´s Shifted

I get caught up in things here inside the walls of the Peaceable. I finished the novel, and am now considering my options, wondering where I can get a book-cover design that doesn´t make the story look like a lurid murder tale or soft-core pornography or do-it-yourself project. I need to negotiate with the publisher of another book, and get the spiders off the ceiling beams without meeting them personally or gassing myself. All that kind of stuff.

And then the bell rings at the front gate, and somebody brings me back to earth. Some bodies.

My office looks over the patio and a slice of street. I can see when someone is coming.

These days, with the Italian albergue closed for a while and the weather clear and warm, we see plenty of pilgrims – more than our average numbers. They come at the end of the afternoon, windblown, windburned, and smiling, mostly young, all of them very hungry.

Paddy and I came here to retire, not to write books. We wanted to help out pilgrims now and then. The pilgrims we see these days are reminders of the blessing the camino continues to be, and the direction, perhaps, we are heading into. We have had 14 pilgrims stay here with us since the turn of the year. They are what´s real about here. They keep me from drifting into full-blown hermit-hood.

Spanish men who do not leave their names. Koreans whose names we cannot decipher from the record book, as they are written in elegant script. Miguel, who claims his tendinitis was healed here, overnight. A worldly, handsome Dane, three apple-cheeked Italians from Bologne with a smart dog called “Porky,” and Camilo, a French boy from Brest walking backwards from Sevilla, on his way to Lourdes. They brought richness to our house, and sweetness and light and sometimes hassle, and all was swept away with them the following day.

Three of the 14 were hospitaleros, other hosts at other pilgrim hostels. Some were honored guests: a hospitalero trainer from British Columbia came for the weekend, and hiked with me up into the peaks of the Camino San Salvador, where we checked the snow conditions for some pilgrims on their way up there. We ate and drank and shmoozed, in English!

Others were more like boarders: a silent German girl, parting from a hospitalera gig of several months, unhappy and insular and traumatized, facing a winter on the road. She kept to herself. We left her alone. It was not a happy time for any of us. But I know she will be back. She lives on the camino, lives for it. We don´t do that. Not any more. We love our camino and our pilgrims, but we are not centered there. Our lives are rich and varied and rooted not on The Way, but in this extraordinary little town.

I have not been out and about much, Moratinos-wise, in the last weeks, I lost touch with the local gossip, the English lessons curtailed by work schedules and family feuds. I curled up inside our walls and just worked on books, traveled a bit to visit friends. 

At church this Sunday Milagros handed me a three-page flyer called “El Veladero,” a monthly newsletter from the Escuelas Campesinas program that she and Modesto and Raquel are part of – I have written about their meetings in blogs past. This month´s edition is a special one: it is all about Moratinos. Moratinos in the past six years, and how it is exceptional in the district, because it is so wide-open, progressive, and growing. Not just because of we foreigners coming in and starting things, but because the Milagros Boys are building a restaurant in the bodegas, and because Don Santiago and several local families have resurrected the Corpus Christi celebrations, November retirement dinners, the after-Mass vermut gathering. Because so many of the people here get along, and work together, set aside their differences and actually enjoy living in what might otherwise be a “nowhere” place.

It all is true, and now it is not just me and this blog saying so. It´s official!

And now I must get up and go outside these walls and ask Julia why she sent us over a bottle of cider this morning, and see if maybe she wants to take a paseo, hear what song Fran is singing today.

Ghosts

I went to Galicia, to the Costa da Morte, to a spit of land sticking out into the Atlantic, with waves smashing against rocks and gulls wheeling in the stiff wind. A church stood there on the point looking west, with waves splashing its face.

I went to a lighthouse on another spit of land, beyond the new lambs grazing in mazes of ancient dry-stone walls. The wind tried to knock me down, tried to tear my coat off my back. It whooped and whistled in my earrings. It blew all the clouds right out of the sky.

I went to a castro, the leavings of a tiny town built thousands of years ago out of stones on a hill. Circles made of stones, hardly houses, once with pointy raffia roofs, once with fire and water and iron tools, (seeing as it was the Iron Age), circles standing in a circle inside a tall wall, once full of some kind of people, lives lived, histories, stories, love and birth and fear and death, and now completely silent. But for the road passing by below, and the lowing eucalyptus woods, and the water in the stream, all is silent, all dead and gone and forgotten. Time has all but wiped them all away.

I saw a Dolmen, a megalith, a big half-buried booth of stone slabs that made a tomb about 3,700 BC. Somebody barely human painted the walls inside with what we´d term "grafitti," red and black and white. And over time the earth grew up around it, made it look like it erupted to us from somewhere lower down. There are dozens of dolmens and standing stones in this region, but this one is the biggest. So this one´s been dug out and charted, scrubbed, landscaped, roofed-over and Disneyfied. It´s got a turnstile and a security guard and charts and graphs. It ought to be humming with ghosts, but now it is truly dead. It needs the sky and wind to make it breathe again.

I saw a medieval church hunkered into a hillside, its door-jambs carved with crude Last Suppers, the edges worn fuzzy green and gray. A white rabbit stood and watched. It is very green there, daffodils bloom, farmers fill ox-carts with fragrant grass, fields are full of fuzzy donkeys and foals. It is beautiful, damp, and ancient.

I did not bring a camera. I have gone off cameras, they get in the way of seeing and being. But this place, these places, are all around Muxia. You can, I hope, go there yourself someday, take a long walk, see them yourself, hear the funeral bells ringing from way up the valley, smell violets underfoot, scratch the donkey´s gray face, walk among the tombs in the little graveyards, peek into the salon of the old rectory, a room now full of blackberry canes, its roof and floorboards long collapsed, its last occupant buried years ago under the stones there in the churchyard.    

Ghosts are everywhere in Galicia, quiet and benign. You´d expect that in a place called "the Coast of Death," but it´s not just the great amount of historic shipwrecks. I think it´s the sheer number of humans who´ve spent their lives on that land, for many thousands of years. Solitary as the big sky and crashing waves and abandoned beaches might feel, the map is peppered with villages and towns. Every other field has an old woman in it, swinging a hoe or examining some object on the ground. Every open barn or garage door has its man inside, pitching hay or shooting the breeze or mixing concrete. Every bit of land is planted, or harrowed, or built-on or grazed or forested. It is a lonely place, but it is not lonesome.

It is intensely human there.
I am glad I saw it, and felt it.
I am glad now to be home, too. It is not so historic here. Man has not left so many fascinating tracks out on the Meseta.
There are no stones. Our monuments are made of mud and sticks, they fade away with the rain. 
So our space is wider. Our ghosts have names, and their stories will die when we die.
We are not so civilized.   

Lazarus Dog

An update on the last post:
Today is a lovely resurrection-type day. Patrick walked our dogs this morning past the Milagros house, and up jumped Roldan AND Toby, yapping and barking their fool heads off, chasing Tim along the fence. (Tim hates Roldan.) I recall now that Jeffrey, a beloved dog from my past, was rolled under a car in New Brighton, Pennsylvania, and survived with just a bit of his fur scraped off. So this is not a miracle.
It´s just damn lucky.
I am thanking God anyway. And St. Francis, and whomever else keeps an eye on dogs, and heard my prayers yesterday. And maybe some of yours?

Paddy is in a great mood. I don´t feel so bad myself.
Thank you, whosoever you be.
From now on, Toby will be known to us as "Lazarus."

Struck Down

I´m driving up the dirt road from Fuente de San Martin, going into Moratinos the back way cause sometimes I see cool wildlife out there -- migratory geese, avutarda, hawks, and stupid quail that run up the road in front of me for a while before they realize flying might be a good idea.

I´m listening to Cameron singing "Volando Voy," always a wonderful thing. The sun is high, the sky is blue, I got what we needed in Palencia, and I got something I wanted, too -- an early lunch, a guilty pleasure, a döner kebap at the Café Istambul. Up at the Milagros farm I see the gate sliding open, one of the boys has been plowing, he´s pulling the tractor up into the yard. Must be lunchtime. They´re all out there, Milagros and Esteban, Estevinas and José, all in their work duds. I wave and smile, all of them wave and smile back, I see Roldan the bad-tempered, terminally-ill German Shepherd making a lunge for the open gate, I see José stepping toward the gate to shut it before the dog gets there, I see Toby, the yappy lap dog make a break for the gap, and then the car flies past the scene and the wheels hit the proper smooth pavement and I´m on Calle Ontanon, in Moratinos proper.

And in the rear-view mirror something is not right, José is shouting, dust is rising, I see him bending over something in the middle of the road outside the gate, and I realize...

Toby made it through the gate, just as I passed. He went under the car. I ran him over.

I don´t want to believe this. I think I will just keep driving and pretend I don´t know.
Then I think that would be awful, because I do know, and what if the dog needs to get to the veterinarian right away?
I stop the music, stop the car. I get out.

I hear Milagros voice, "Is he dead?"

Esteban shouts, "Dead?" 

And José picks up the furry body and strides to the gate, saying, "I think, yes. I think he´s dead."

Horrible, horrible. The last person they want to see just then is me, the person who made their little dog dead. But there I am. My hands are curved over my mouth. I have no idea what to say or do. "Go on. Go on home," José shouts up the street, his voice choked. "It´s just an accident. A dog."

Edu comes out his gate to see what´s happening. Roque, one of Toby´s many offspring, yaps at me from the patio. I tell Edu I just ran over José´s dog. Edu shrugs. "What a shame," he says. "It´s that way with animals."

I go home. I unload groceries from the car. I tell Paddy what just happened. I start to cry.

Not so much for Toby, whose muzzle had gone grey from lounging around town, scrounging scraps from pilgrims, chasing after bitches, fathering most of the lapdogs in the district. He´s had a good run. And he apparently did not suffer long.

I cried for José, though, and the Estebans. And Milagros. I know they are there with that little dog body, crying. You don´t see these people cuddling their yard dogs, but they enjoy canine company. Toby liked to tag along with his people. He wandered loose in the streets and slept on the pavement in summer, followed the tractors to the grain-scales, and somehow lived for years without getting under their many wheels. He was not a very friendly dog, but in the past couple of years he´s let me scratch him between the ears a time or two.

It would not have been so hard, accidentally killing our neighbors´ dog, if the neighbors had not been our friends, too. And if the entire family had not been standing right there when it happened. I cried some more, at the horror they must have felt. And for the way I would feel if that was me, watching my dog run under a car.

And then our doorbell rings, and our (very alive) dogs go ballistic. And there is José, smiling. No sign of sentimentality. He sees I have been crying, and it´s kinda embarrassing. I should calm myself, he says.

Because Toby isn´t dead. Not yet. "He was out cold, but now he´s awake. He´s moving all his legs, wagging his tail. Maybe in some pain. We´ll watch him. If he doesn´t get up by this evening, we´ll take him to the veterinarian. But we want you to be calm. Tranquilo. It´s a dog, an animal."

"Please, take him to the veterinarian. You must. Just to be sure he´s alright," Paddy says. "We will pay the bills." We gave them some dog anti-inflammatory medicine, with all the dosages written-out, from when Rosie was fixed. Same size dog. In case they decide to pass on the vet.

"He is up. He´s walking. He´s swollen-up, but he´s not dead," José said. "It´s nothing."

And maybe it is nothing. Nothing but a dog.

Sometimes I know I am not tough enough for this hard country.

I am just too damn soft.

Pictures, not words

Kim´s here, being a hermit-ess in the little house in Carrion de los Condes, and spending time here as well. Kim is a graphical kind of person. Unlike me, a wordsmith, she does not so much write about Moratinos and the Peaceable with words. Kim is a visual person. And instead of reading a bunch of words about Winter Here, you can just sit back and look at it. Here.




A video is worth a zillion words. Not that I am feeling any shortage..!

Lumberjacks and Timberjanets

The annual wood-chopping party took most of Saturday to happen, with most of the male population of Moratinos chopping, lopping, picking up, binding, sweeping, raking, shouting, and backhoe-wrangling. After everyone got cleaned up we reconvened in the Ayuntamiento Bar/classroom/meeting room for La Merienda, "refreshements:"  Veal ribeyes, barbecued over the grapevine fire outside, superb Cerrato cheese, and quince jam, and the grapey new wine to try, as well as a lineup of hair-raising moonshine.  It was manly food, slabs of hot meat eaten out of hand, cheese carved off the round with a shared knife, wine poured from a re-used plastic liter bottle into beer-logo bar glasses. 

I write "we," even though the Plaza Tree-Trimming this year was overwhelmingly male. Right up to the end I was the only woman there. While the men rode backhoe buckets and rickety ladders into the treetops and weilded blades and roaring chainsaws on high, I stuck to the girly-girl tasks of chopping out dead wood with a sickle, pruning the rose-trees, and raking out a foot of fallen leaves in the little flower garden in the middle of the plaza. (The actual growing of flowers is up to more experienced ladies like Milagros and Flor, Leandra and Angeles. Me? I wait til winter. I deal with the dead. We all have our place in the Circle of Life that is our municipal flowerbed.) 

The outcome of all this is a shockingly clean Plaza Mayor, where the tortured plane trees look like chickens planted head-down in buckled concrete. In summer they will make a leafy canopy over the plaza, but for now? Well. It is something very stark and Castilian. The other outcome is tons of wood trimmings, split up among the locals for use in their wood-burning furnaces and fireplaces.

This year the lads with the chainsaws also trimmed the decorative trees in our woodlot, a little triangle of unusable land right at the western entrance to Moratinos. The trees belong to the town, but the land belongs to us -- and so the wood on it is ours. (Or so I assume. It could be nobody else wants to bother with scrappy wood  way over in el Barrio Arriba, our end of town.) The men helped us drag the biggest, thickest branches up into our back patio, but several trees´ worth of wood still lie on the ground down there. And this is how Patrick and I are occupying our days this week. We are lumber-jacking all that wood into fuel for next winter.

It is hard physical labor. The sun is supposed to shine all this week, however, and Paddy seemed keen to tackle the job. 

Paddy wakes up early and walks the dogs a good four miles each morning, no matter the weather. He does his share of cleaning and cooking around the house, he eats healthfully and he gets plenty of sleep. He is not in bad condition, considering all the abuse heaped on his body over his almost-71 years. But this morning, dragging a tree trunk up to our back gate, he looked like a victim of Elder Abuse. He muttered something about an article this weekend in El Pais, the 10 Signs of Heart Attack. He has all of them, he said.

"Stop this then, you daft bastard," I said. "We´ll leave the wood. I bet Fran will be glad to take it. He loves collecting firewood."
"No way am I paying someone to bring us firewood in a truck, while we have all that perfectly good stuff just lying out there for free," Paddy panted. His eyes rolled up into his head.
"So then. You hatchet the twigs and limbs off the trunks and chop it up. There´s a brand-new blade on the chainsaw. I´ll do the hauling," I told him. I hiked down to the woodlot. The two little piles of branches the men left there Saturday had multiplied into the crudely-hacked remains of at least six trees. But I was valiant.

For many hours I lifted and hauled, lurched and swore. I left a trail of twigs behind me as I dragged branches up the steep incline onto the N120, made the sharp right onto the shoulder, and shlepped along the guardrail 100 meters or so to our back gate. Murphy Cat watched, scornful, from the horsetail trees.  Fran, the neighbor who collects firewood, came by to offer advice and comfort. Paddy chopped and stacked.

It went on for hours. We still are not finished. 

All day we ate leftovers cadged from the fridge, and a loaf of bread made overnight in the bread machine, spread with fabulously fresh peanut butter Philip hauled over in his baggage. We have some Cerrato cheese of our own, and some Cecina de Leon (the world´s finest dried beef). We have a bottle of past-its-due-date  Vega Sauco Toro wine, watered-down. The fire dances bright in the stove, and Rostropovich on the stereo, making his cello cry over something Brahms.

The dogs and cat are curled into Cs and Os in their beds, and soon we will sign off on our own consciousnesses in our own comfy places. Wood and good chilly air, hard labor for future comfort, and an early sunset.

The novels are not finished, but the woodpile is growing.
We are not youthful, but we are fine.

   

New Bee in Marrakech

Sundown from the roof terrace: Marrakech

I lay naked on wet concrete in a chamber of hot fog. The murk was broken only by a tiny skylight, way up on the half-arch ceiling. A thin beam of winter sun knifed through the mist and illuminated fleshy  bodies lined up on the floor. This is the Hammam, the public bath for women at Sidi bin Slimane, a working-class neighborhood of Marrakech, Morocco. I wondered if we maybe should have booked ourselves a deluxe Hammam and Aromatherapy session at one of the tourist spas, but I´d left this particular detail to my son Philip to handle. He´d opted for "taking a chance, going native, and saving 60 bucks apiece."

I am a woman of the world, well-traveled, confident in strange places, and this pushed my boundaries. I have been to public baths before, old Jewish schvitzes, in New York City and Detroit and Baden-Baden. In Madrid I´d taken Philip before to the deluxe faux-Moorish Hammam, great pools of hot and cold water, mint tea in misty rooms, everyone modestly attired in swimsuits, speaking in languages we understood, following a carefully-timed routine.

This was another country. Here in Sidi Bin Slimane, big women whispered to one another in a  strange language, trying not to stare at the winter-white carcass old Fatima was handling, over by the entryway -- the carcass was me, a stranger in their weekly ladies-only. There were no limpid pools or hydrotherapy showers or rose-petals. There was concrete, worn smooth by years of water. There were great pipes and faucets, and dozens of plastic buckets. Fatima folded me down to the floor before a lineup of buckets, and poured the tingling hot water from several over my head and shoulders, back and legs.

The old woman worked naked, wet and bulbous and black-skinned. She squeezed oily black soap from a plastic baggie and spread it across a mitt of scratchy cloth, which she rasped across every square inch of my skin. She moved my body and limbs up and aside as if I was a doll, across her lap and much too near to her rolls of skin and hair. Flecks of dark waxy stuff appeared on my surfaces -- I thought the scratchy mitt was shedding lint, or the soap was curdling in the heat. I saw a woman sitting near, peppered the same way, rubbing and rubbing, and I realized the spots were skin, peeled off and rolled-up the same way it did when I was six, in summertime, out on the curb scratching mosquito bites. Fatima was removing my outer layer.

I let myself relax there, face-down on the floor, my body stretched across the old woman´s knees. The only sound was the scrape and scratch of many hands moving, washing skin, exfoliating arms or ankles or the back of the person adjacent. The splash of many gallons striking cement, a groan of shock or release or pain, the feel of those waxy speckles vanishing into the liquid heat. Fatima´s powerful fingers found a knot in my neck. She leaned into it, rolled it under her knuckles, I and felt the ache and the air-miles, the language barrier and a chest-cold flow from my body and roll away across the concrete.

Finished, Fatima patted my knee and smiled the beatific smile of a midwife. I sat sprawled on the concrete for a little while, glowing white in the darkness, feeling myself the newest-born bee in this misty, humming hive beneath the street of the Medina. I am sure I have never been so clean, not since I was first born.  

Phil in our courtyard

tourists

Morocco -- or Marrakech at least --  was delicious and awful. Philip and I stayed at a "Riad," a done-over old courtyard-style house in the old Medina. Riad Dar Zaman is owned by an Englishman with a House-And-Garden decorating style, and the servants, mint tea, babbling fountain, and roof terrace overlooking the neighborhood would usually be outside our price-range but for a very positive currency exchange rate. The city reminded me very much of my three years of childhood in Turkey, what with donkey-carts and caleche carriages, trundling vendors´ carts, a souk and spice markets, dancing monkeys and a spectacular chorus of muzzeins singing live from the city´s many minarets five times every day. The old part of the city is a living museum of architecture, with even the corner shops somehow adorned in plasterwork or tiles or lacquer. Children are treated with great affection. Mosques are well-attended, but you can get usually get a beer with your sandwich if you want one. I bought a splendid wool and over-embroidered carpet for a very fair price. (I brought one of the Riad boys with me to help with the haggling business. Philip now repeats to me, at suitable moments, "Madame! You bargain like a Berber!") (I know, they say that to all the tourists.)

I could not have stayed longer than about four days, however. I was shouted-at by men, until I began walking with a hand on Philip´s elbow. Many women go about fully covered, in veils all the way over the eyes. I kept wondering which of those phantoms might be my hammam-sisters. The tiny streets are overrun with venomously smoky motorbikes, a noise level approaching "jackhammer," and more hustlers and cons and come-ons than a Damon Runyon story.

It is a city, and cities are noisy and polluted. I am a villager. I like my quiet. I was glad to come home.
Philip went home, back to New Hampshire and law school.
Kim came back, and is moving into the little "guitar house" in Carrion de los Condes as the first Artist in Residence of 2012. She is already making movies. She made up a new lot of blog-headers for me!
The first full read of the Zaida novel got a rather glowing review. At least the second half of it did.
Rosie dog has a terrible cut on her behind, we know not from where. Six stitches, and the hood in the photo above to keep her from messing with the wound.
Paddy still has a cold/flu. It is becoming tiresome. He looks done-in.
And so goes the first half of January.