Caminos Page 11

  “At least the King has had the good sense to keep Spain out of it,” Mercedes said.

  “A little evidence that he’s not a complete idiot, anyway,” Antonio added. “But enough of that ridiculousness. What should we call the baby?”

  Mercedes was delighted by how much interest Antonio had taken in the baby over the days since her announcement. “If it’s a girl, I’d like to call her Julia.”

  “Julia,” Antonio said noncommittally.

  “Yes. One of the books my brother used to teach me to read was The Lives of the Saints—”

  “Of course,” Antonio interjected.

  “Don’t be mean,” Mercedes said.

  “I’m not being mean,” Antonio said, laughing, “just making a logical observation. Primero would approve.”

  “Anyway,” Mercedes said. “I read about St. Julia of Corsica in the book, and I’ve always felt close to her because she was a slave girl, and I know how that feels.”

  “Julia it should be, then,” Antonio said.

  “And you, if it’s a boy?” Mercedes asked.

  “I’d like to call him Luís, after my uncle,” he said after a minute. “He treated me better than anybody I knew after my mother died. And whenever my father was drunk and looking for somebody to beat, I always could slip out the window and run down to his farm, and he would feed me and let me sleep there for the night. He was a good man.”

  “As you are, Antonio,” Mercedes said. “I honestly don’t know how you managed to be, after all you went through.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Gallegos are as tough as the bark of an old tree. That can cut either way, I suppose. I was lucky I had my mother around until I was five.” Antonio fell silent, a distant look in his eyes. “I wish you could have known her, and she could’ve known you,” he added after a bit.

  “I wish that too, Antonio.”

  Chapter 13

  Although the United States is “a nation of immigrants”—as every elementary school pupil learns—new arrivals have always suffered a degree of hostility from those who migrated earlier. Even Thomas Jefferson expressed concern about the Germans coming to the new generally-Anglo country because they hailed from places which did not inculcate democratic mores.

  The Asturian Indianos were an exception—with their desire to make their fortunes in the New World and return to their homeland— but generally, the tens of millions of people who crossed the Atlantic in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries came to stay and build new lives. The discrimination they faced affected where and how they lived and the nature of their integration into American society.

  The Irish and Italians, for example, came in enormous numbers: 3.6 million Irish between 1840 and 1900, 4 million Italians between 1880 and 1924. Often they settled in nearly homogeneous neighborhoods and towns, as the “Little Italys” in major eastern US cities still attest. As they slowly integrated, many also maintained their hyphenated identities, and for Irish-Americans such as former Vice President Joe Biden, it remains an important cultural dichotomy to this day.

  However, many later immigrants such as Antonio and Mercedes found themselves living in different circumstances. Shunted inland from the great coastal cities to new industrial towns, they still experienced discrimination and lived in municipalities whose residents were primarily immigrants—or the decendants of former slaves—but they were not exclusively of one national origin. Anmoore had a large population of

  Asturians, but also many Italians, Poles and African-Americans. This mixing—as well as the tectonic cultural effects of the Great Depression, New Deal, and Second World War—more rapidly diminished the emotional connection to their nations of origin and hastened their adoption of American identity.

  * * *

  Anmoore, West Virginia

  April 1927

  Thirteen years. As many as Mercedes had lived with her brother and his family at Las Cepas. Thirteen years since she had arrived in America. Months vanished barely without notice. The seasons came and went. Years melted away. She still missed Asturias. But her love for Antonio had ripened, and she was grateful for their home, even if it was just this little wooden house across the street from the smelter.

  Luis was born in September 1915, and Julia came along in January 1918. She was followed two Januaries later by another son, Manuel, and by Antonio Jr. in the spring of 1922. Though the midwife trade was brisk among the immigrant families, Mercedes sometimes felt during those years that she was having as many babies as she was delivering.

  The demands of their expanding family made her often wish that she had a Mercedes of her own to lend an extra hand. She thought several times about bringing Pilar over, but her brother Antonio was always cool—or non-responsive—to the idea when Mercedes mentioned it in her letters.

  She wrote often to her brother. It made her feel as if her life in the US was not so far removed from theirs at Las Cepas. Antonio González Conde’s responses were voluminous and filled with detail, but his commentary about her niece generally went no further than some version of “that girl is a mystery to me.” In truth, Pilar was increasingly unwell. The panic attacks worsened the older she got, as did the duration and depth of her depression. But she still clutched Mercedes’ stone every day and waited hopefully for her aunt’s return.

  Antonio Ribas, on the other hand, was doing very well with the Grasselli Chemical Company. The conditions and labor troubles of the American zinc industry were not significantly better than in Asturias. Only the pay was, and then, only for the workers willing to endure their neighbors’ ire and break the frequent strikes.

  Without a family to feed, Antonio would have felt no more solidarity than he did with the strikers in Arnao. With a wife and children to support, he had even less of an inclination to respect the picket lines. He never was absent from his post at the retorts. “A scab’s always a scab,” another of the Asturians who remembered him from Arnao once sneered as they passed in the street, loudly enough for Antonio to hear. Antonio merely nodded and sauntered on.

  The Ribases had become the picture of a prosperous immigrant family, and Antonio was putting every spare dollar into the booming stock market. He still could neither read nor write, but Luis and Julia had taught him to sign his name. That was enough for him to join the national frenzy of stock buying. He understood absolutely nothing about it, other than the fact it was making him wealthier than he ever dreamed he would become. At least once a month, Mercedes would tell her brother in a letter that she hoped their swelling account with the stockbroker would hasten their return to Spain. When she broached the topic with her husband, he would shrug his Gallego shrug and roll a cigarette.

  On this morning, Mercedes was wrangling the children and getting them dressed in their best clothes to sit for the family’s third studio photograph. Twelve-year-old Luis, complaining, had donned his charcoal grey confirmation suit. Nine-year-old Julia—protesting only slightly less than Luis—was in her new cream coloured linen dress with lace around the neck and hem.

  “And put on that necklace your father gave you for Christmas,” Mercedes shouted into the bedroom. Julia did like the gold necklace, with its little filigreed locket, very much. It was worth the aggravation of wearing the dress and the uncomfortable patent leather shoes for the chance to put the glittering chain around her neck. She was allowed to wear it only on special occasions.

  As Mercedes buttoned the black suede ankle boots on her squirming youngest child, three year-old Pilar, she heard a crash from the dining room. Manuel and Antonio Jr. were wrestling on the floor, in their matching white sailor suits with navy blue piping.

  “Don’t make me come in there!” Mercedes yelled at them. “Stop that right now!”

  Her husband came strolling out of their bedroom, struggling to fasten the button of his high collar. “Is this really necessary?” he said to Mercedes. “It feels like we’re at the photographer’s every other month.”

  “We haven’t been in five years,” Mercedes
scoffed, “and we don’t have a portrait that includes little Pilar here. Don’t you want one with her?”

  Antonio grunted and continued to fumble with the collar button. “You know how much I dislike putting on this stuff.”

  “Oh, Antonio,” she said, setting the successfully shoed Pilar on the living room carpet. “You look dashing in your suit. I don’t know why you complain about it so much.”

  “I look like an undertaker. And I never can get this fastened around my neck. What’s the sense of these impractical clothes? Only the lazy upper class could create such a thing.”

  “Yes, yes,” Mercedes said. She fastened his collar button for him and then tied his necktie. “There. If we were in Avilés, people in the street would confuse you for the Marquis of Ferrera.”

  “If we were in Avilés,” he retorted, “I wouldn’t have two pennies to rub together, let alone this suit.”

  “You are living proof that some things never change,” Mercedes said with a smile and went off to gather the children to catch the streetcar for their appointment with the photographer in Clarksburg.

  * * *

  “It’ll be okay,” Antonio assured Mercedes, though he did not sound so convinced himself. “I can sell some of the stocks, and we can live off that until I find another job.”

  Five months after they sat for the photograph—which was framed in mahogany and hanging prominently in the parlour alongside their wedding portrait and their first family picture—the Grasselli Chemical Company closed its smelter in Anmoore. Some of the workers were moved to the nearby Grasselli smelter in the town of Spelter, but Antonio was let go. He had worked through every strike, but the reticent Gallego never became close to any of the furnace bosses, who recommended their friends and relatives for the few positions in the other smelter.

  “Factories are booming all over the place here,” Antonio said. He slurped his café con leche and rolled a cigarette at the kitchen table he had purchased when they moved into the house. “I’m only fortyeight, and I have a good reputation with the company, even if they didn’t take me on at Spelter. I’ll get something before too long.”

  “But what if you don’t?” Mercedes asked. Desperation sucked at her like a strong undertow trying to pull her out to sea. “We have five children to feed.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Antonio snapped. He never snapped at anybody. “I’m sorry, Mercedes. I’m sorry,” he added quickly. He took her hand. “I promise, it’ll be okay. I’ve always taken care of you and the children, haven’t I?”

  “Yes, you have, Antonio.” Mercedes forced a thin smile despite her agonizing apprehension. “I know you’ll find something.” They sat in silence and finished their coffees. Antonio could not believe he was facing yawning uncertainty again, after all these years of stability.

  As usual, Mercedes broke the silence. “Why don’t we sell all the stock, and the house, and go back to Asturias? Or to Galicia?”

  Antonio sighed. “First, who would buy the house now, with the smelter closing? And, second, what would I do for work in Spain? It’s not as if we can move in with your brother on the farm.”

  “Why can’t we?” Mercedes asked, exasperation seeping into her voice. “Why can’t we go back to Las Cepas? We have enough money to buy back my share of the farm, purchase some additional land and build a house there.”

  “That’s really no solution. We can’t live off what we could grow on the farm, and I won’t have a job there.”

  “You don’t have a job here anymore, Antonio! And you don’t know that you can’t find one there. It’s not 1912 anymore. Even Asturias has changed. And, besides, we could live off what we could raise on the land we could afford to buy.”

  Antonio’s face was a frozen mask.

  “It’s just your damned Gallego pig-headedness that keeps us from going.” She was on her feet, slamming coffee cups and saucers into the sink. “You haven’t changed a single bit in all these years. You make me crazy, Antonio! Why must you always be like this? How is it better to be here struggling to find some other stupid factory job than to go home?”

  “This is home,” Antonio said without emotion.

  “This is home? This is home?” Mercedes was fuming. “No, Antonio, this is an American company town where they don’t care if you live or die. Why can’t you see that? Home is in Spain, with our families, where people care about us.”

  “I don’t have any family there, Mercedes.”

  “And enough of that orphan garbage, Antonio!” She returned to where he was sitting at the table and towered over him. “You have family there, but you choose not to recognize it. And my family— Antonio and María especially—love you as if you were our own flesh and blood! They’d be overjoyed if we returned. My brother still wants nothing more than to build up the farm with you and the boys.”

  “That’s your dream,” Antonio shouted, rising to his feet. “Yours, Mercedes, and Primero’s. It’s not mine, and it certainly isn’t our boys’. For God’s sake, Mercedes, they’re Americans, not Asturian villagers! They speak English, and they’ve lived their whole lives here. How can we drag them off to some country they don’t know and drop them into farm life?”

  “They speak Spanish, too, Antonio,” Mercedes shouted. She was shocked by his outburst—Antonio never raised his voice—but his anger also fed her own. “You know I only allow them to speak English at school and in the street.”

  “That’s because you just don’t want them saying things you don’t understand,” Antonio said, forcing himself back down to a less confrontational volume. He had learned passable English at the smelter, but Mercedes had defiantly refused to learn a word of it. It was bad enough that she had to go by “Martha” all these years with their Anglo neighbors because they could not understand the pronunciation of Mercedes, with its Castilian “c” said like “th”.

  “Damn you, Antonio Ribas!” His moderated tone did not lessen the sting of his comment. “That’s completely unfair. You know I never bothered with English because I always believed we’d go home.”

  “America is home now, Mercedes,” Antonio said slowly and firmly. “You must accept that. We are not going back. Ever.”

  Mercedes sank into the hard kitchen chair, put her face into her hands, and wept. When Antonio came over to her and put his hand on her shoulder, she threw it off. “I never wanted this, Antonio,” she said in a fierce, rasping whisper. “I came here because I loved you, and because I wanted to make a family with you. But I never wanted to live here. I never wanted to stay here. I keep it to myself, but I still miss Asturias every day. I miss my family every day. I want to go home every day. This place may be home to you, but it never will be for me.”

  “I’m sorry, Mercedes,” Antonio said. It was all the comfort he could give.

  * * *

  Mercedes wrote to Antonio and María a month after that soul crushing conversation with her husband. She could not bring herself to write earlier. It was a struggle even now.

  Anmoore

  November 1927

  My dear brother and sister-in-law,

  I hope you and the children are healthy and happy, and that your sales at the market have continued to be good. I miss working the market with you and our afternoons in Avilés.

  Unfortunately, I write with bad news. The smelter here in Anmoore has closed, and Antonio lost his job. Do not worry. We are fine, because he has sold some of the stocks, but I hope we will not be forced to deplete all our savings before he finds a new position. But it is not easy with so many of the other workers also searching.

  I told Antonio we should sell all the stocks and return to Las Cepas, but he will not hear of it. He will not leave America. He says that it would be too hard on the children. I understand his concern. It would be a hard adjustment for them, because they are so American. However, I believe Antonio uses it mostly as an excuse. He simply does not want to leave. He says this is home now, but it never will feel that way for me. Home will always be ther
e in Asturias with you. I do not know how I will live the remainder of my life here. But it appears that may well be the case now.

  All is not doom and gloom. The children are well. School started this week, and most of them are happy about it. It is so good to see them growing big and strong and smart and being happy with their lives. Julia is difficult about school, as she is with everything else. Sometimes, she is like having a wild animal loose in the house. I do not know what to do with her. Antonio says she will grow out of it, but I am not so confident. Still, she has a good heart and is very loving—when she is not a complete terror—and I hope that part of her will come to rule the other.

  I am sorry to trouble you with my burdens. Perhaps I will be able to write with better news soon. If Antonio gets desperate enough, maybe he will reconsider and agree to come home. I doubt it, but I still cling to the chance. Please give my love to the children, dear Pilar especially.

  Mercedes González Conde.

  * * *

  Las Cepas, Asturias

  June 1928

  María realized, as the sun dropped behind the hill across the valley, that she had not seen Pilar since before noon. Antonio and the boys were at a neighboring farm to help renovate a granary, and she was certain their daughter had not gone with them. Pilar often took long walks in the woods alone—even more frequently over the months since they had received Mercedes’ letter—but she always told María before going out. María checked every room in the house. Perhaps Pilar was sitting somewhere in the twilight. She had also been doing that more than usual.

  There was no sign of Pilar inside, so María went out into the courtyard and called to her. Nothing. She checked in the granary and in the cellar. Nothing. She crossed the lane to the field and walked down to the barn. She could not imagine that Pilar had gone there, but she was running out of places to look.

  María unlatched the door, pushed it open and called into the near darkness, “Pilar? Pilar, dear, are you in there?” Nothing. She was getting frustrated. “Pilar, if you are in there, you need to come out this minute. I don’t like this hiding.” Nothing.