Caminos Read online

  “But you like chocolate, do you not?”

  “I like it very much. You know that.”

  “And pistachios?”

  “They’re my favourites, as you also know.”

  “And what is today?”

  “Oh, Antonio, what’s this game?”

  Farmers in rough, hand-made clothes and townspeople dressed in the latest fashions squeezed by on the narrow sidewalk, pressing them closer to the window.

  “What is today?” Antonio asked more insistently.

  “It’s Monday.” Mercedes paused to think what Monday it could be. It was not a saint’s day. It was not the first day of any month or season. She shrugged her shoulders.

  “For Heaven’s sake, Mercedes,” Antonio said. “It is your birthday!”

  Mercedes never made a point of remembering her birthday, let alone celebrating it. For most of her life, she tried to forget it. On that day, she had killed her mother.

  “You wait here,” Antonio ordered. He left her side and entered the shop. Mercedes was shocked, and a bit annoyed, as she watched her brother point to the chocolate-pistachio cake. It does look delicious, she thought. She was dumbfounded when the shop assistant did not cut a slice, but put the entire torte into a box and wrapped it for the road.

  Antonio was beaming when he emerged from the confitería. A cigar clenched in his teeth, he said: “Happy Birthday, Mercedes,” handing her the box. “We may not be the Marquis and Marquess, but they will not eat a finer dessert this evening!”

  For the remainder of their shopping excursion in Avilés, and all the way home to Las Cepas, Mercedes clutched the cake box as if she had been entrusted with a holy relic.

  As they walked the dusty roads, flanking the plodding horse, with the sea popping into view when they crested the hills and then disappearing when they descended into the forest, Mercedes felt deeply content. Her brother was such a good man, and Las Cepas had become home in a way that she long believed she would never know. She enjoyed the rhythm of her life: the farm work, caring for her niece and nephews, helping María prepare the meals, the weekly journey to Avilés.

  Still, her life felt incomplete. The desire for a home and family of her own lurked around the periphery of her thoughts and her sense of satisfaction. She shook it off and focused on appreciating the life she had, this day, and the magnificent cake she cradled in her arms.

  Chapter 6

  The daily lives of most Asturians in 1800 were not dramatically different at their core from those of their ancient ancestors. Families clustered on individual farms and in small farming villages. They tilled their fields with plows nearly identical to the ones the Romans had with them when Caesar Augustus finally brought the Celtic Astures to heel in 19 B.C. The Asturians survived on what they could grow from the ground or haul from the rivers and sea.

  This agrarian world endured for nearly two millennia, but its end came swiftly in the mid-nineteenth century. Coal mining turned farmers into industrial laborers. Generations of inheritance had reduced many individual farm plots to patches of ground insufficient to feed the large families who lived on them, and tens of thousands of men and boys welcomed the chance to earn a wage, however meagre and whatever the physical toll. Most families who had farms maintained them. The women and children worked the land, and the men joined them whenever they were free.

  In 1815, the Real Compañía Asturiana de Minas de Carbón sunk Spain’s first vertical coal mine on a high bluff above the Cantabrian sea. Rather than dig horizontally into a hillside coal seam as the companies did at the mines proliferating in the Asturian interior, the Real Compañía dug a shaft down to the coal, lowered the miners in a lift, and sent them burrowing out under the seabed. It was magnificently successful, even attracting the approving eye of the King. They called their new village Arnao. The Real Compañía vaulted into international trade forty years later, when it added a smelter in Arnao and began making zinc out of calamite ore from northeastern Spain and the coal mined a few hundred yards away.

  The conditions for workers at Arnao were harsh, but one of the Real Compañía’s founders, a Belgian named Nicolás Maximilien Lesoinne, had infused the operation with the paternalistic ideal embraced by industrialists in his homeland. Real Compañía workers enjoyed a higher quality of life than many other industrial workers, though the corporate generosity came at a price.

  The workers’ lives were completely intertwined with their employer’s. They lived in the company’s houses and shopped at the company’s store. The company doctor treated them when they were ill, and their children received their high quality, free education at the company school—as long as their father kept his job with the Real Compañía. There was no public school for them to attend if he did not. The company organized entertainment for the workers and their families and sports for the employees’ children.

  Still, the Real Compañía was battered by the same labor unrest which festered and erupted in the early twentieth century. Workers across Asturias launched strikes regularly starting in 1900, with varying degrees of intensity. The most serious began in 1910 and lasted until 1912. So many of the Asturian workers participated during those two years that the Real Compañía recruited strike breakers from the neighboring province of Galicia to keep the coal coming out of the ground and the zinc pouring from the smelter’s retorts.

  The Gallegos—as people from Galicia are called—had suffered a difficult few centuries since the heyday of the Way of St. James during the Middle Ages. Then, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from every corner of Europe clambered across Galicia each year to venerate the purported remains of the saint at Santiago de Compostela in the far west of the province. The pilgrims had been good business, but they were centuries gone.

  Galicia remained rich in natural beauty, with lichen covered granite farmhouses and villages and magnificent medieval churches dotting the lush countryside. But the economy ground weaker and weaker with each generation. Hundreds of thousands of Gallegos emigrated to Argentina alone in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, so many that Argentinians began to call anyone who came from Spain “Gallegos.” The Asturian strikes provided an opportunity for survival closer to home.

  * * *

  Arnao, Asturias

  December 1910

  Antonio González Conde and his brother Manuel together owned eight acres of land. On such a small holding, they could not feed their families and produce enough to sell for cash at the Avilés market. In 1902, a few months after his return from Cuba, Antonio took a job with the Real Compañía at the zinc smelter in Arnao to earn hard cash. Manuel joined him later that year. They were paid a peseta a day, about 30 modern eurocents.

  Laboring among the smelter’s furnaces was brutally hard and hot. The smelter men typically got every other day off. It took that long to recover from the heat, fumes and shoveling. Working the mines, which stretched out for more than a mile under the seabed from the village, was worse. Antonio always said a prayer for those poor wretches he saw trudging toward the castillete de la mina, the structure containing the lift which lowered them into the dark, dank galleries. The castillete’s tall, zinc-clad wheelhouse, Antonio often thought, looked perversely like the bell tower of an industrialized chapel.

  Like the others, Antonio chafed under the working conditions. However, he could not abide the communism many of his compatriots were embracing and the labor radicals’ antipathy toward the King and the Church. Antonio earnestly believed that those two institutions had been the only civilizing forces on the Iberian penninsula for centuries. For him, the communists offered only anarchy and destruction, cloaked in the promise of better pay and shorter hours.

  “Those bastards,” Antonio said to Manuel as they passed the ragged cluster of strikers outside the smelter gate on a day shortly after the big strike began. “They will dynamite every church, burn down every business, take every farm and rape our wives and daughters if they ever get their way.” To him, all strikers and labor organizers were
communists, anarchists and atheists, whether they declared such tendencies or not.

  One frigid morning, when Antonio and Manuel arrived for their shift, there were several new faces in the room where they donned their work clothes and prepared to smelt that day’s quota of zinc. “Gallegos,” Antonio said to Manuel, “brought in to fill the jobs our hungry Asturians choose to forego.”

  Relishing the final deep breaths of crisp December air, before entering the poisonous atmosphere of the sweltering smelter, the fresh crew walked from the changing house toward the smelter’s open door. Antonio spied the hand-pushed railcar waiting for them inside. It was heaped with the first of many loads of yellow calamite ore they would spend the next four hours shoveling into the clay retorts which ran the length of the long furnace. Antonio stuck out his hand to a new man. “Antonio González Conde, of Las Cepas.”

  The Gallego eyed him warily. He grasped Antonio’s outstretched hand firmly and replied: “Antonio Rivas, of nowhere you’d know.” He took a drag on his self-rolled cigarette and sauntered on in silence.

  Antonio Rivas’ taciturn response merely spurred Antonio González Conde’s curiosity, which had not been the Gallego’s intention.

  “There are not too many places I would not care to know, Mr. Rivas, so you should try me,” the Asturian said. “From where do you come? I presume some place in Galicia.”

  The cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, Antonio Rivas said only: “Portomarín.”

  “Portomarín!” Antonio González Conde exclaimed. “Why, that is in the heart of the French Way, on the Camino de Santiago.” Four hundred years had passed since anyone thought much about, let alone walked, the Camino. But Antonio was deeply devout, and his love for the traditions and history of the medieval Church ran deep. He turned to Manuel and added as they tromped into the smelter: “I have not seen it myself, but I hear there is an impressive fortress church there, built by Templar knights in the twelfth century!”

  “Yes, there’s a church,” Antonio Rivas said. “There’s a lot of them in Galicia. If we could eat church stones, none of us would be here working in Asturian smelters and mines.”

  Antonio González Conde laughed heartily. Antonio Rivas was not joking.

  “You stick with us, Gallego, and we will make you glad the good Lord brought you to our fair Asturias, the land of sidra and fabada. They will make you turn your back forever on your native octopus and grape-mash liquor!”

  Antonio Rivas had heard all his life that the Asturians took an almost obsessive pride in their sidra—fermented apple cider—and fabada—faba bean stew with sausages, bacon and ham. He curled up one corner of his mouth, a typically furtive Gallego smile, picked up his shovel, jammed it into the rail car’s heap of coal, and started the long morning of feeding the retorts.

  Their job was the first and most physically demanding step in the smelting process. For loading the calamite, the bulbous retorts were pulled away from the fifty-yard-long furnace, exposing the men to the three-thousand-degree heat as they shoveled. When they emptied a car, boys would push it back down the rails and bring up another, over and over. Behind them as they progressed up the line, the men called embuchadores would affix the conical cap on the filled retorts, pack them with the pulverized coal that helped fuel the roasting of the ore, and attach the condensing coils. The retorts then could be pushed into place against the furnaces for the ore to melt and release the gaseous zinc. The workers called tiradores took over on the later shift, scooping out the molten zinc from the water-filled condensation trays beneath the retorts. With long-handled spoons, they carefully poured the liquid metal into racks of waiting moulds.

  * * *

  “So, will you go home to Portomarín to visit your family for the Christmas holy days, Antonio Segundo?” Antonio González Conde asked Antonio Rivas two weeks later as they shoveled, stripped to the waist and slathered in sweat despite the icy temperature outside. Their black moustaches were coated yellow from the calamite dust.

  They had quickly tired of the confusion caused by two Antonios working side by side and agreed on referring to the Asturian Antonio González Conde as “Antonio Primero” and the Gallego Antonio Rivas as “Antonio Segundo.” Already, the entire smelter had started using the shorthand.

  “I don’t have any family in Portomarín to visit,” Antonio Segundo said, “or anyplace else for that matter. I’m an orphan.”

  “You mean to say you have no family at all?” Antonio Primero asked. He was mystified. Everybody he knew had enormous families, with most of the relatives living clustered on the same patch of ground. “Surely you must know of some relation somewhere in Galicia?”

  “Not really.”

  “Why … why, I find that hard to believe … hard to believe,” Antonio Primero sputtered, and he was not one for sputtering.

  “Well, believe what you want, but it’s the truth,” Antonio Segundo said. He chucked another heaping shovel-load of calamite into the retort.

  “No family at all?”

  “None I have any contact with.”

  “You have no wife or children. What do you do at Christmas and Easter? Where do you go?” Primero asked as he scraped his shovel along the bottom of the rail car.

  “I don’t go anywhere,” Segundo replied languidly.

  “You do not go anywhere? How do you celebrate the major feasts of our Lord?”

  “I don’t.”

  “You do not!” Primero nearly shouted. “I thought you said were a Christian?”

  “Well, I am,” Segundo said. “I was baptized and confirmed, like everybody else, and I go to the masses when I have to. But I don’t have any family, and I live in the room they rent me wherever I’m working at the time. So, I don’t make the kind of big fiesta like I guess you do.”

  “That we do indeed,” Primero declared, excited by the recollection of fiestas past. “For Christmas and Easter, my house at Las Cepas is packed to the rafters with family, from babes in arms to my ninety-six-year-old spinster aunt.”

  Antonio Segundo nodded and dug his shovel into the yellow pile filling the fresh car the boys had pushed up beside them.

  “And this year,” Antonio Primero added, “the revelers will include a Gallego orphan. I insist that you join us.” The idea had only occurred to him at that moment, but that did not diminish his fervor. “There is no way under Heaven that I will allow you to spend the festival of the birth of our Savior sitting alone in that room over there at the company boarding house.”

  Antonio Segundo considered protesting. He treasured his quiet holidays alone. He knew, however, after these two weeks of acquaintance, the futility of attempting to dissuade Antonio González Conde when he had set his mind.

  “Thanks, Primero,” Segundo said. “It’ll be good to have some hot food and company for a change.”

  “Very good!” the Asturian said, putting his shovel on the ground for long enough to tap the Gallego lightly on the back. “That is the spirit! I promise you, it will be a Christmas you will remember.”

  * * *

  The house was packed with Christmas revelers as Antonio Primero had promised, though filling it did not require many visitors. His was a basic little Asturian farmhouse, nearly a perfect cube with its two stories of plastered stone and shallow, red barrel-tiled roof. An hórreo—the ubiquitous elevated Asturian granary—sat directly beside it. A low, stone wall ran along the upper side of the house and granary, separating them from a pasture sloping gradually up the hill to the forest of oak pine trees. The chattering crowd spilled out of the house and filled the modest courtyard enclosed by the wall. It was a balmy Christmas Eve with no wind and a clear black sky full of winking stars.

  Antonio the host introduced Antonio the guest to all his relatives who had gathered for the evening. There were at least four dozen people. Antonio Segundo struggled to remember a third of their names. It helped, or did not, that several each were called Antonio, Manuel, José, María or Marina. There were two Covadongas. The on
e name and face he did not have difficulty remembering was that of Antonio Primero’s sister. To each person he met, Segundo gave the traditional introductory greeting of Encantado—enchanted—but to Mercedes, he meant it.

  Mercedes stood nearly a head taller than the compact Antonio Rivas. She was not beautiful. Mercedes was lean as a greyhound, and her twenty-five-year-old skin was weathered from the long days of farm work in the sun. But her black eyes were like velvet, and in them Antonio saw a blend of melancholy and resilience he understood well. He had a hard time moving on to the next introduction. Casting about for glimpses of her over the course of the evening, Antonio got the sense that Mercedes lived mostly within herself, separate from the crowd even when crushed within it, which appealed to the solitary Gallego.

  Arroz con leche—creamy, sweet rice pudding, with a crust of caramelized cinnamon sugar—capped the hours-long Christmas feast at four o’clock in the morning. After the dessert, the guests began shuffling home. More than a few focused diligently to put one foot ahead of the other, their balance challenged by the endless green bottles of hard cider the revelers had consumed. While they departed, Antonio Segundo took the opportunity to venture out into the deserted courtyard for a smoke.

  As he pulled a portion of tobacco from his leather pouch and began working it expertly into a cigarette paper, Mercedes said from where she was sitting in the dark on the top step of the hórreo: “Feliz Navidad.”

  She so startled Antonio that he dropped his cigarette and tobacco pouch to the limestone pavers. Mercedes giggled lightly and said: “I’m sorry, Antonio. I didn’t realize you hadn’t seen me sitting here.”

  Sweeping together his scattered tobacco with one hand and recovering the cigarette with the other, Antonio mumbled: “No matter, no matter. I have it all.” Standing up, he added: “It’s, ah, a nice surprise to find you here.”