Caminos Page 6

  “And you,” the disembodied voice said from the darkness.

  Antonio stood there stiffly, pouch in one hand and unlit cigarette in the other.

  “Why don’t you light that, and take a seat here on the step, and roll one for me?” Mercedes said.

  Antonio fumbled for a match. His heavily moustached face was illuminated for an instant in the flash of the yellow flame. Then— just the orange glow of the cigarette tip in the black night—Mercedes scooted over to one side of the step, and he sat beside her. Antonio fished out a paper and another portion of tobacco.

  “I don’t smoke much,” Mercedes said, “but I figure, it’s Christmas. Why not indulge?”

  “I’m happy to take this little gift from the Americas frequently,” Antonio said. He handed the cigarette to Mercedes and proffered a light. “For a poor man like me, it’s one of the few pleasures at hand every day.”

  Mercedes exhaled a cloud of smoke and leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “I’m satisfied to make it a bit of an event. And I thank you for sharing your American treat with me.”

  “You’re welcome,” Antonio said.

  When Antonio added nothing further, Mercedes asked: “Did you enjoy your González family Christmas?”

  “I did, very much.” He paused, then added: “It was kind of your brother to invite me.”

  “If I may ask, Antonio,” Mercedes said somewhat reluctantly, “why didn’t you go home to Galicia for the fiesta?”

  “As I told your brother, I have no home to go to in Galicia.”

  “You have no family there?”

  “None I care to visit.” Antonio took a long drag from his cigarette.

  “I know how lonely that feels,” Mercedes said, sighing.

  “You?” Antonio said, turning toward her. “How could you, with such a gang of relatives?”

  She looked toward the ground. “For a long time, I wasn’t surrounded by such a loving family.” Mercedes told Antonio the story of Bernardo’s wrath and her exile from Las Cepas, and of her years toiling in house after house in the village.

  “Your father sounds like he was as much of an ass as my own,” Antonio said. “My mother also died after giving birth to my brother, when I was five years old.” Antonio never had spoken to anyone about his family or his childhood, but with Mercedes it flowed naturally. “He tried to send my brother away, too, but the priest told him he would burn in hell if he did it. Still, he made life so miserable for my poor brother that I think he would’ve been better off being sent away immediately.”

  “Trust me, nothing is worse than that,” Mercedes said. She crushed out the butt of her cigarette with the heel of her shoe. “It’s terrible beyond imagination to be cast away like a deformed calf and forced to live on the charity of others as your father goes on about his life as if you don’t exist.”

  Antonio had never considered that possibility.

  “Of course,” Mercedes continued, “I saw my father and one of my brothers often. They were at every festival, in the church in Naveces and at the market in Avilés, which just made it worse. My brother José—Antonio, Ramón and Manuel were off in Cuba—always came to me, sometimes bringing me little presents, but only when my father wasn’t around. He’d forbidden him to talk to me.”

  “I’m sorry, Mercedes,” Antonio said. It was an inadequate response, but it was all he could think to say.

  She turned and smiled at him in the darkness. “Thank you, Antonio.” She also never spoke of the past, but she felt unencumbered with him. “Fortunately, that’s all over now, thanks to my dear brother. And helping bring the babies into the world comforts me more than I can say.”

  “You’re a midwife?” Antonio asked.

  “I am,” Mercedes said. “I’d often helped the midwives prepare for the births in the houses where I was working when I was a girl, and the first time one let me stay in the room—I must have been about ten—I knew it was what I was supposed to do. Not long after I came to live here, I mentioned it to Antonio, and he arranged for me to apprentice with a midwife over in Santiago del Monte.”

  “That’s important work,” Antonio said. “The road to our farm was flooded when my mother had my brother, so the midwife didn’t arrive in time. I’ve always believed that’s why she died.”

  “Well, we’re not miracle workers,” Mercedes said, “and every midwife I know has lost at least one mother.” She remembered the three young women she had been unable to save. Each of their faces appeared clearly before her. When they died, and every time she recalled those three awful days, the thought of her own mother’s death intensified her agony and sense of failure.

  Mercedes pressed down the feelings of sadness and guilt, as she always did when they flared, and continued. “But usually it is beautiful beyond description, Antonio, to see that new life emerge into the world and experience the new mother’s joy. And every woman I help get through the birth alive makes me feel that I’ve compensated a little for killing my mother.”

  “Oh, Mercedes,” Antonio said softly. “You shouldn’t say that. You didn’t kill your mother any more than my brother killed mine. Nature is hard, and it can be cruel. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Well,” Mercedes muttered, unconvinced, “enough prattling on about me. What about you? How did you end up here in Asturias?” Her mood and voice brightened again as quickly as they had darkened. “And you could make another of those cigarettes for me as you tell me, if you don’t mind.”

  Antonio rolled one for each of them as he began. “My father died when I was twelve. Slipped and fell while repairing the barn roof. There were eight of us kids, and the land had already been divided between my grandfather and his brothers, and then my father and his. So, split eight more ways, there wasn’t much of a farm left. We agreed to let my oldest brother take it over and try to feed his family. The rest of us made our way however we could. My younger brother, who was seven then, went to live with some relations of my mother down in León.” He paused for half a minute, staring out into the dark. “I haven’t seen him, or much of the others, since. I spent the next ten years or so working on farms all around Galicia, and then on the docks in A Coruña, until I came here to work in the smelter. I lied and told them in Arnao that I’d worked the furnaces before. Otherwise, they’d have stuck me down in that terrible mine. I could never do that, no matter how hungry I got.”

  They sat quietly for a while, each enjoying the surprise of meeting a person with whom they could unburden themselves freely. Neither of them had appreciated until then, until they had spoken it aloud, the weight of carrying their stories around all by themselves. It was like lugging an invisible steamer trunk full of stones strapped to their backs.

  Mercedes broke the silence. “I think your life’s been even harder than mine, Antonio. I was often unhappy and confused when I was a girl, but at least I always felt I was at home here in these little valleys around Naveces.”

  “I don’t think of it much, but I suppose I do wish I could feel again that someplace is home,” Antonio said. “I haven’t felt that since the day I left the farm, eighteen years ago. I just figure wherever I lay my head is home, but it really isn’t the same.”

  “Here you are!” Antonio Primero said loudly, and tipsily, as he strode into the courtyard from the house. “I did not bring you here to disgrace my sister, Gallego!”

  Antonio Segundo leapt to his feet. “I … I … I didn’t … I know … I apologize, Antonio, for any—”

  “Oh, sit down, Segundo,” Primero said, laughing hard. “I am pleased you two had some time alone to chat. I hoped you would get on well tonight. I do not want my sister to live out her life as a spinster—we have enough of those in the family—and we could use another strong back on the farm.”

  “Well, I … uh … we … uh,” Segundo stammered.

  Mercedes rescued him. “Oh, brother. I believe you’ve gotten a little deeply into the anis bottle tonight. Leave our poor guest alone.”

  “Fair enough!
Fair enough!” Antonio Primero howled, throwing up his arms in mock surrender. “I merely will bid you both a Happy Christmas!”

  Chapter 7

  Las Cepas, Asturias

  July 1911

  It was a good year for onions. They needed every able-bodied member of the family to dig the fat, coppery-skinned bulbs from the ground. Even Antonio Segundo had volunteered to contribute this Sunday off from the smelter to help. Seven months had passed since that Christmas chat on the hórreo step, and Mercedes and Antonio were thankful for every encounter. This one necessitated donning the wooden clogs Asturians had worn for centuries to keep from sinking ankle-deep into their muddy fields. Now it was abnormally rainy, after the dry and sunny May and June which had produced the bumper onion crop. The saturated soil and cool days made a quick harvest essential.

  Sitting in the stout wooden chairs brought from the house into the little courtyard at Las Cepas, two unmarried aunts well into their eighties skillfully wove the onion stalks into long strands. The teenage boys came occasionally from the field, happy for a few moments of standing upright, to hoist the braided onions up onto pegs in the outer walls of the hórreo, sheltering them beneath the wide eaves.

  Mercedes and Antonio worked as a team in the field, with him hauling the big woven basket to the end of the row and pouring the onions into the burro-drawn wooden cart. “This is harder work than the smelter,” Antonio said to Mercedes as he returned with the empty basket. He wiped his brow with his shirtsleeve, stretched his back and rolled a cigarette.

  “In my brother’s imagination,” Mercedes said laughing, on her knees in the mud and caked nearly to the waist, “you’ll be doing a lot more of this one day.”

  “With the most respect for your brother, and all my fondness for you, I hated farm work when I was a boy, and it hasn’t grown on me over the years.”

  “Oh, Antonio,” Mercedes scoffed. “You can’t honestly say that you prefer being cooped up in that reeking, hot building in Arnao to this. Smell the fertile earth and the fresh air and the eucalyptus. Look up at the wide sky. Feel the cool breeze blowing away every care. This is as good as a workday can be!”

  Antonio had heard this paean to the farming life from Mercedes before. Many times. “There’s no mud in the smelter,” Antonio said, drawing on the cigarette pinched at the corner of his mouth as he knelt down and squishing his hands into the muck. “Asturias is as dry as La Mancha compared to Galicia, and I got enough mud there to last me a lifetime. Give me a furnace any day over this.”

  Mercedes shook her head. She had heard this paean to industrial work from Antonio before. Many times.

  “Mercedes! Segundo! Dinner is ready,” her brother shouted from the edge of the field. “We need to fortify ourselves or we will not survive the rest of the afternoon!”

  María had placed long planks across the tops of upright wine casks to serve as tables in the courtyard. The boards were covered with platters of cured meats and sausages, cheeses, loaves of warm bread and pots of fabada.

  Everyone ate lustfully as Antonio Primero held court at the head of the ersatz table. Antonio Segundo sat to his immediate right and Mercedes directly across. “I tell you, nothing good can come from this naval competition between England and Germany. Nothing good. They keep building more battleships and producing more armaments. And, from what I read in the papers, France is just itching for a war with Germany.”

  “What do you think, Segundo?” he asked, turning to Antonio Rivas and taking a deep drink of his red wine, cool from the cellar.

  “I don’t read the papers.”

  “Do not read the papers!” Antonio Primero exclaimed. “How? I could not live without them.”

  “Well, for one thing,” Antonio Segundo said flatly, without any shame, “I never learned to read. And if I had, I still don’t think I’d bother with the papers. I don’t see how all that has much to do with me.” He tucked into his bean stew. “Now, this fabada, María, if I had to learn to read to get a bowl of it, I’d race to the first teacher I could find and stay up nights learning. I don’t know what England, France and Germany are all worked up about, but they can have it, as long as I can keep coming here to your table every now and then for your cooking. All of it is the best I’ve ever eaten.”

  “Thank you, Antonio,” María said, embarrassed by the praise. “You’re welcome in this house whenever you can come.” Looking at her husband, and then leaning toward Antonio Segundo, she added: “We hope that one day, if I may be so forward, you’ll be more of a regular fixture around here.”

  Antonio Segundo simply nodded and said: “Many thanks, María. You and Primero—and Mercedes, of course—have been better to me than anybody in all my life.”

  “You are a good man, Segundo,” Primero said. He clasped Antonio Rivas’ hand, which was resting on the table, and squeezed it. “Solid. The kind of man I wish I’d had as a partner in Cuba, instead of that snake Paco. We could make this farm the best in Castrillón. Maybe buy up enough land and cattle to get out of that smelter. And the good Lord only knows what our sons could do with the place!”

  Now it was Mercedes’ turn to be embarrassed. She and Antonio had seen much of each other, and they knew well her brother’s plans for them. However, the Gallego always changed the topic when any conversation ventured to marriage and children. Mercedes, for so long the abandoned daughter and now twenty-six years old, was hungry for both. She would lie in her bed at night and imagine marrying Antonio at San Román Church in Naveces. She would picture building a little house at the bottom of the field, near the rushing stream she loved, up against the fragrant eucalyptus grove. Her brother had told her the spot was hers if she wished. Antonio Rivas was sweet and kind, in his unemotive way, but his reticence about marriage and children troubled her greatly.

  “Okay, okay, you two,” Mercedes said to her brother and sister-inlaw in a playful tone which masked her deeper angst. “That’s enough matchmaking. I believe it’s time for the rice pudding, and then back to the fields to get our onions out of the ground before they rot.”

  “My sister,” Antonio Primero said. “She ever is the practical one. María, do please bring out your divine arroz con leche.”

  María excused herself from the table. Antonio Primero turned back to Antonio Segundo. “Now, on this reading matter. It is not that difficult. Children can do it, for Heaven’s sake. I know you never had the chance to learn when you were a boy, but she and María would be happy to guide you.”

  Segundo teased out some tobacco from his leather pouch. “Well, I don’t—”

  Primero interrupted him, his enthusiasm swelling. “When I left for Cuba, I was an ignorant farm boy—not to suggest that you are ignorant, of course—but I was. So was nearly every other Asturian I knew who went there. But the atmosphere of Havana was unlike anything any of us had experienced. It inspired us to improve ourselves, to learn and absorb all we could. We became educated, cultured people. I discovered the great works of history and literature and philosophy there, and I became addicted to the newspapers. I may be a simple Asturian farmer again now, but those things are a permanent part of me. I still can be a man of the world thanks to them.” He downed the rest of his wine, plunked the empty cup on the table, and surveyed the dozen faces locked on his.

  “That’s certainly an inspiring story, Primero,” Segundo said, “and your offer to help me with the reading is very generous. But, honestly, I still don’t see any need for it, for me. I’m content as I am.”

  Antonio González Conde was disappointed by the response, but he did not wish to bully his friend about the issue. “Understood, understood,” he said. He poured a last splash of wine into both their cups. “But if you ever change your mind, the proposal stands. I cannot have my nieces and nephews outpacing their father—”

  “Antonio!” Mercedes nearly shouted. “Enough!”

  * * *

  The first thing Antonio Segundo noticed when he entered the Avilés market square was the cacophony of fa
rmers calling out to the shoppers. “Hola, Señor!” shouted a stout, elderly woman with thick ankles and meaty, strong hands. “Las fabes! Las fabes!” she added, gesticulating alternately toward Antonio and the open burlap sack of fat, white beans at her feet. Each seller tried his best to entice the milling buyers to purchase his fruits, vegetables, garlic heads, onions, dairy products, sausages and beans, which were identical to those being proffered by the farmer to the left and right.

  The second thing he noticed was that the builders of Plaza Nuevo had copied the style popular in the Galician city of A Coruña on the inward-facing façades. An uninterrupted band of tall, slightly arched paned windows ran around all four sides of the square on the single storey above the high arcade. The window frames were painted a bright white, as were the recessed panels below each window and the wide, dentilled entablature beneath the red-tiled roof sloping up to the blue sky.

  In such a square, fourteen years before, on such a brilliantly clear day with the white façades and panes of glass blindingly bright in the midday sun, Antonio’s heart was broken. She was the only person, prior to Mercedes, with whom he felt he could be himself without reservation. She was the daughter of a Madrid merchant who had tired of the capital and taken his money and his family to Galicia. He purchased a large farm from a group of Gallego brothers who could not agree on how to manage their patrimony together.

  The merchant-turned-cattleman hired Antonio to work on the farm. He thought highly of Antonio as an employee but would never have accepted him as a son-in-law. The daughter knew her father well, and on that summer day at a market square in A Coruña, she told Antonio that the affection they shared had no future. Antonio quit his job a week later, and he never set foot on a farm again, until Las Cepas on Christmas Eve 1910.

  Antonio had not recalled that day in a long time. He quickly crammed the memory back into its box at the rear of his mind.

  “Antonio!” Mercedes shouted, waving her arms. “Over here!”