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  CAMINOS

  GUERNICA WORLD EDITIONS 4

  CAMINOS

  Scott Walker

  Copyright © 2018, Scott Walker and Guernica Editions Inc.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication,

  reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,

  mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a

  retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an

  infringement of the copyright law.

  Michael Mirolla, general editor

  Julie Roorda, editor

  Cover design: Errol Richardson

  Interior layout: Jill Ronsley, Sun Editing & Book Design

  Cover Image: Letter from Mercedes González Conde

  to her brother, Antonio González Conde, c. 1930

  Guernica Editions Inc.

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  Distributors:

  University of Toronto Press Distribution,

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  First edition.

  Printed in Canada.

  Legal Deposit—First Quarter

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2017960396

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Walker, Scott, 1968-, authorCaminos / Scott Walker. -- First edition.

  (Guernica world editions ; 4)Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77183-312-7 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77183-313-4 (EPUB).--

  ISBN 978-1-77183-314-1 (Kindle)

  I. Title.

  PS3623.A412C36

  2018813’.6C2017-907300-1C2017-907301-X

  For Annette, who always believed.

  Asturias, Spain

  September 1885

  CASILDA WAS JUST two hours dead, but Bernardo had already banished the baby from the farmhouse overlooking the Cantabrian Sea.

  Hunched like a troll on the short stool he used every morning when dressing, Bernardo sat beside their bed, unable to look away from Casilda’s face or turn loose her cool hand. The candle on the single bedside table, and another perched on the sill of the room’s only window, cast a morose, yellow glow.

  The big, oak bed nearly filled the little space. Bernardo had scrimped for a decade to buy it for his wife from a craftsman in the village. She had nestled for just three years among the carved triskeles, circular fans, four-pointed stars, six-petal flor galanas—Asturias is Celtic Spain—and the pair of griffins which stood guard from the center of the headboard. Now, Bernardo thought bitterly, that girl has killed her.

  When she was young, Casilda had often dreamed of becoming a nun and joining the Order of Our Lady of Mercies—in Spanish, la Orden de Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes. Casilda saw the Mercederian nuns for the first time when she was four. She had gone with her parents to the nearby town of Avilés for the weekly market. As they came around a corner into the square before the hulking stone-walled convent, the nuns filed out through the dark portal into the drab street. Their white habits glowed in the sun and the wind whipped up their wimples like wings. Casilda thought they were angels. The image stuck in her mind, and she felt a strong emotional attachment to the Order, even after she had given up the idea of joining its ranks. Casilda always saved her few spare pesetas throughout the year to make an offering at the convent on the Virgin’s feast day in September.

  Lying on the bed at the farmhouse, Casilda had prayed for the Virgin of Mercies to watch over her daughter when she was gone. And she had named the baby Mercedes.

  * * *

  Ohio, USA

  June 1983

  The dinner dishes cleared away, Pilar came back to the kitchen table carrying a large cardboard file box. “Ahhh, the archive,” her son Harry said. “This is when I go out back for a smoke.” His brother-in-law Tom did not smoke, but he also had little interest in the stacks of old pictures. He followed Harry outside to continue their conversation about the US Open. They were both fanatical golfers. Pilar’s niece Brenda, and Brenda’s son Robert, could not wait to dig into the box.

  “Oh, this is a nice one,” Pilar said, “one of my favourites.” She withdrew a slightly creased and faded black and white Kodak Brownie photograph and handed it to Brenda: Mercedes, gaunt and wrinkled, in a pale summer dress and an apron, her arms hanging loosely at her side; Antonio, robust and suntanned, in dark trousers, vest and a white band-collar shirt open at the neck, his hands stuffed into his pockets and a self-rolled cigarette pinched in the corner of his mouth; Pilar standing between them in a black robe and mortar-board hat, smiling shyly. “Me and Mom and Dad on the day I graduated from high school in June of 1943.”

  The image captivated fourteen-year-old Robert, though he thought his great-grandparents inscrutable as they stared sternly into the camera in turn of the century style. Robert wanted to know everything about these people.

  Chapter 1

  Bernardo’s sister bundled up the newborn and started for home. Her brother’s cows were bulky silhouettes in the pasture beyond the vine-covered wall beside the road. Two of the big, blonde animals, sucking at the crisp air with their moist snouts, caught her scent and came clomping toward the dirt lane. They lowed urgently. No one had thought of the cattle all day as Casilda lay dying.

  “They will have to be milked,” Carmen said to herself. She hoped one of her nephews would remember. She pulled the baby closer to herself, trying to block the damp, cold wind gusting off the Atlantic.

  “He did what?” Carmen’s husband Anselmo thundered when she came into the house with the bundle.

  “Anselmo … the baby! Keep your voice down,” she ordered.

  “That brother of yours is a miserable, soulless dog,” Anselmo hissed.

  “Anselmo, please.”

  Her husband loomed in the center of the squat, lime-plastered room. His head nearly brushed one of the rafters, which were fashioned from tree trunks with only the bark and branches removed. Ignoring his wife, the stocky Asturian farmer continued. “No, that’s an insult to a dog. Even a bitch cares for its pups!”

  “Anselmo, calm down,” she pleaded again, placing her free hand lightly on the side of the baby’s head to cover one of her ears while pressing the other against her chest.

  “No, he’s gone too far this time. Entirely too far,” Anselmo insisted, his voice rising again. “We can’t allow him to do this.”

  Carmen was too tired to have this argument now, and to tamp down Anselmo’s flaming indignation, no matter how justified his outburst. She felt she was outside her body, spent physically and emotionally. Casilda. Dead. The day seemed like an endless, terrible dream.

  “The family … the village … the … the Church must stand up to him! Yes! Go get the priest!” Anselmo shouted.

  Mercedes began to cry. “Oh, Anselmo,” Carmen sighed. “Now you’ve woken the baby.” She stroked Mercedes’ little arm and tiny clenched fist, rhythmically rocking her up and down. “Shhh. Shhh, little one. Shhh.”

  Carmen returned her attention to her husband. “There’s nothing to be done, not tonight anyway,” she reproached. “Perhaps tomorrow, after some hours for his anger to cool, Bernardo will see the rashness of his actions.”

  “Your brother? Recognize the rashness of his actions? That will take centuries, not hours. I’ve watched him be rash, foolhardy, stupid and mean for more than forty years.” Anselmo had known Bernardo all his life. The pastures of their family farms abutted. The two men grew up in these farmhouses where they were now raising their own familie
s, as the long chain of their ancestors had for centuries.

  Anselmo so loathed Bernardo that, for a while when they were young, he had even tried to harden his heart against Carmen, despite the deep affection he felt for her. He eventually surrendered to his love, though it meant that the sweetness of life with Carmen would be laced with the rancidness of Bernardo’s regular presence. “The Blessed Virgin is more likely to appear in this room,” Anselmo fumed, “than your worthless brother is to feel a second of remorse or show a drop of devotion to this child.”

  “Anselmo!” Carmen crossed herself with her free arm. “Bernardo’s wretchedness doesn’t justify blasphemy from you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Anselmo said quickly, chastened by his wife’s rebuke. “That was wrong.” He rolled back his fury. “Here,” he said, reaching out for Mercedes, “give her to me. You’re still dressed for the road.” Carmen gently handed over the baby, who had fallen back to sleep as quickly as she had awoken.

  Carmen removed her woolen cloak and hung it on a peg in the wall by the heavy, iron-studded oak door. Her hand lingered on the undyed homespun. It could just as easily have been a horse blanket. She closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead, trying to erase the memory of this wretched day.

  Casilda’s contractions had begun before sunrise. Bernardo sent one of their sons to fetch Carmen to midwife. She could tell her sister-in-law already was in distress when she arrived. The birth was arduous, the labor going on for hours. To Carmen’s surprise, after a pregnancy which had been difficult from the beginning, the baby emerged healthy and strong. Casilda was overjoyed to have a daughter at last, after giving birth to four boys. Carmen nearly had to wrench the girl from her mother’s arms when the hemorrhaging continued.

  The baby was moved to another room. Bernardo alternately knelt and stood by the bed, clenching his wife’s hand while his sister fought to save her. There was not much she could do. A bit of pressure here, a balled packing of cotton fabric there. As with new mothers for millennia, only Nature would decide whether Casilda survived the creation of this new life. Bernardo would not allow their sons to enter the bedroom, despite the women’s entreaties, as his wife grew inexorably weaker. Until she drew her last, shallow breath, he insisted that God would not take Casilda from him.

  As Carmen stood in her kitchen, motionless except for the rhythmic rubbing on her forehead, Anselmo cradled Mercedes in his arms and eased himself down onto one of the benches by the long dining table. He knew it was best to give his wife the time and space she needed.

  As always, Anselmo was pleased with his carpentry and felt a rush of pride when the bench took his weight without the slightest groan or wobble. The chestnut tree had towered behind their shallow-roofed, limestone farmhouse for as long as anyone could recall. Anselmo loved to climb it when he was a boy. Generations of his family had roasted and feasted on its nuts every autumn. When the tree came down in a fierce spring storm, Anselmo fashioned the thick table and heavy benches from its wood.

  Carmen opened her eyes. She turned and looked at her husband holding the baby in his burly arms and managed a weak smile. She gazed across the room. It was windowless, but for a small, unglazed, iron-barred and shuttered square over the washbasin. The room served as entranceway, kitchen, dining hall and cannery. Coal from the pile heaped in the adjacent dirt-floored cellar smouldered in the fire grate of the cooking chimney opposite the door. Carmen crossed the room, patting Anselmo tenderly on the shoulder as she passed, and stood before the undulating orange and gold embers to warm herself.

  After a bit, Anselmo said, looking down at the sleeping child: “We’ll make a place for her in our family. What did you say is her name?”

  Casilda broke her gaze from the embers. “Mercedes.”

  “We’ll make a place for little Mercedes to sleep in our bed. It’s good that you’re still nursing Jorge.”

  Carmen stepped back over to Anselmo and touched Mercedes’ fat cheek. Employing an oft-used term of endearment, Carmen said: “Yes. We’ll welcome this little rabbit into the world properly, and we’ll sort out this absurdity with Bernardo tomorrow. Surely he’ll come to his senses.”

  Anselmo rolled his eyes. “Yes, tomorrow,” he said without additional commentary.

  * * *

  The mourners filled San Román Church in the village of Naveces, and they spilled out of the Neo-Romanesque building into the forecourt under the giant, old oak tree. As loathed as Bernardo was by nearly all who knew him, Casilda was beloved. But on this day, most hearts softened a little for Bernardo. He was clearly devastated by his wife’s death. He sat weeping in the front pew through the entire mass.

  Carmen sat near the back of the church. She still felt numb. Mercedes slept in her arms. As Anselmo expected, there had been no reasoning with Bernardo about her exile. Carmen was disobeying her brother by bringing Mercedes to her mother’s funeral. His anger even stronger than his grief, Bernardo glared at his sister as he followed his wife’s coffin, hoisted on the shoulders of her kinsmen, out of the church after the mass ended and the procession to the cold, wet tomb in the graveyard began.

  One of the mourners, standing in the vestibule of the church and wiping away tears with the back of his hand, was a young man named Julio, though everyone always had called him Chus. The Spanish love nicknames. He was six when he first talked to Casilda, but Chus had seen her visiting his mother and working in the fields for as long as he could remember.

  His parents had nine children. Chus was the youngest. Their farm near Naveces was too small to fill so many mouths; his parents and grandparents were still alive and his two older brothers with their wives and children all lived on the ancestral land. So, after he married, Chus had moved to the farm of his wife’s family, on the other side of the municipal district of Castrillón. He walked all night after hearing of Casilda’s death. He arrived soaked from the steady rain and covered in mud to his knees, just as the priest stepped to the altar.

  One of Bernardo’s typically nasty acts had brought Casilda and Chus together when he was a boy. Bernardo’s farm dog had gone into heat one summer, and he locked her in an outbuilding to keep the neighboring dogs away from her. All he needed was more damned pups to drown in the stream.

  Chus’s dog could not resist Nature’s call. One morning when Bernardo opened the door of the outbuilding, he was shocked to see two dogs inside. Bernardo grabbed a thick plank which was leaning against the wall, closed the door behind him, and in the semi-darkness beat Chus’s dog to death. He dragged the bloody corpse into the woods. Chus sat up all night waiting for his dog to return home.

  Bernardo made no attempt to hide his actions from his family that evening at dinner. He stood proudly in the center of the room, theatrically reenacting the blows. “Bernardo, that is enough,” Casilda finally said. “This is hardly a tale for the table or a good example for the boys.”

  “When I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it,” Bernardo snapped. To his sons, he added: “Listen to none of that from your mother. It’s just women’s weakness. You have to stand up for what is yours—every damned day.” The boys nodded, their eyes cast down on their bowls of smoked pork and garbanzos, but they were unconvinced. They had experienced their father’s rage and their mother’s kindness enough times to learn which was preferable.

  As she lay awake that night beside snoring Bernardo, Casilda remembered that she had heard of a woman in the village who was trying to give away some pups. The next morning, after the boys and Bernardo had eaten their breakfast and were hoeing in the corn crop, Casilda walked into Naveces and traded the old woman a sack of their fabes beans and a few lengths of her chorizo sausage for a wiggling, licking, female puppy.

  Casilda headed back the way she came, alternately through the cool of the forest and in the sweltering sun when the road ran through the pastures and fields, past her farm, and on another mile. She saw six-year-old Chus sitting under a tree on the side of the road up ahead, forlorn and poking around in the dirt with a stick. He was
slow to look up when she stopped in front of him.

  “Hello, good morning,” Casilda said. “You’re Chus? Sara’s boy?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I am,” Chus replied, and then he went back to his poking around with the stick.

  “Look up here, Chus,” Casilda said. Her voice was soft but firm. He obeyed. “I heard that your dog went missing.”

  Looking at the ground again, stifling his urge to cry, Chus mumbled: “Yes, ma’am. He has.” He looked up at her, and his exasperation poured out. “I’ve looked everywhere for him for two days, everywhere, but nobody’s seen him. It’s not like him just to run off like that. He stays away sometimes the whole day, but he’s always out there at the door before I go to bed, waiting for his dinner. I can’t find him!”

  For what was not the first time, Casilda thought, How did I end up with such a man? “Well,” she said to the boy, pulling the puppy from the basket in which she had carried her beans and sausages to the old woman, “just this morning, I was down in Naveces, and I saw a lady who had some pups.”

  Chus’s eyes widened when he saw the chocolate-brown dog struggling to escape Casilda’s grasp.

  “I told her I’d heard about a boy whose dog had gone missing. And she told me to give him this one.” She added, after a second: “In case his has gotten lost in the woods and has to live with another boy on another farm now.”

  “You think that’s what happened … it’s for me?” Chus was having difficulty digesting these two threads of Casilda’s conversation at the same time.

  “Yes, this pup is for you,” Casilda said. She handed him the dog, which immediately began licking Chus’s face enthusiastically as he hugged it to himself with both arms. “And I do believe that is what happened to your dog. The same thing happened to me when I was a girl,” she said, lying. “I had a little dog who was my constant companion, my best friend”—which was true. “And one day, she never came home”—which was not.