Caminos Page 8

  “But I don’t want it to be clear in good time!” Mercedes said, rising in her chair. “I want to know it now! If Antonio is going, then I just want him to go. I’m tired of waiting and wishing!”

  “I know, dear. I know,” María said. She reached over and patted Mercedes on the forearm. “But be patient for a short time longer. Antonio will have to make up his mind soon. All the women are saying the strike will end in a matter of months, and I suspect the result will not be good for the Gallegos.”

  Mercedes frowned and looked back out the window. The oak trees across the pasture sagged under the weight of the downpour.

  “It’s terribly unfair,” María continued. “Except for us and a few— very few—of your brother’s friends, there’s no sympathy for them, even though the smelter and mine have stayed open only thanks to their labor. Most people despise them for replacing the striking workers, and the Real Compañía always has considered them temporary help. Their fates are in the wind.”

  * * *

  Arnao, Asturias

  August 1912

  As Mercedes crested the high bluff on the footpath from the village of Santa María del Mar, she saw Antonio Rivas standing motionless up ahead, his back toward her. He was looking across the small bay toward Arnao. The wind blew steadily and hard off the Atlantic.

  Antonio put his arm around Mercedes’ narrow waist when she stepped close beside him. “Windy today,” he said.

  “Yes. And it smells like rain.”

  “Yes.”

  They were silent for a long while, watching the waves crash against the cape where the smelter stood and roll into the pebble covered beach. A group of miners slowly trudged toward the castillete below them.

  “You know I can’t go down there,” Antonio said. His eyes were fixed on the miners. “Now that the strike is settled, all the Gallegos they’re not firing are being transferred to the mine.”

  “I know,” Mercedes said. Her voice was flat and cold. “My brother told me yesterday.”

  “I don’t mind the smelter work,” Antonio said distantly. “I even enjoy it sometimes. And it’s always warm and dry in the winter. Those poor men,” he added as he waved a hand toward the miners, who now were filing into the castillete. “They spend ten hours a day down there in the coal dust and wet and cold of those tunnels under the sea. It’s a death sentence.”

  “I know, Antonio,” Mercedes replied. Irritation and empathy mixed in her voice.

  He rolled a cigarette for each of them, and they stood silent again, smoking and staring. Antonio was in agony. From the moment his affection for Mercedes had slid into love, he knew he would be confronted with this choice. He viewed his options as equally bad. He could stay in Asturias and become a farmer, slopping around in the muck, living on Mercedes’ land for the remainder of his life. He would wrestle with the restlessness every day and blame her and the children for his inability to leave and quiet it. Or he could return to his completely solitary life, this time in faraway America, in hopes that steady work and a house of his own would free him from the restlessness, once and for all.

  “So, what will you do?” Mercedes finally asked. As on that afternoon in Avilés, it was a question to which she actually did not want an answer.

  “For now, I’ll go down to Oviedo,” Antonio said. He took a last deep drag on the cigarette and flicked the butt into the wind. “I have a cousin who works in one of the factories there, and he’ll try to get me on. But there are so many of us looking for jobs now. And most of my experience is working with the zinc, and they only do that here.”

  “And in America.”

  After a lengthy pause, Antonio added: “Yes, and in America.”

  Mercedes was unable to restrain her emotions any longer. She cried out: “Oh, Antonio!” Tears streamed down her face. “I don’t want you to go to America. You can’t go. You must stay here with us, with me.” She grasped him tightly on both his arms. “Please, please, Antonio. Come to Las Cepas. Work with us on the farm. Make a life with me here. It’ll be a good life, I promise. I know you don’t like the farm work, but we’ll be happy. You’ll see.”

  Antonio’s body was rigid and his expression opaque. The old chill which had nothing to do with the wind surged through him, as if he had been injected with Arctic seawater. “For now, I’ll go to Oviedo. I’m sorry, Mercedes. But that’s what I must do.”

  Mercedes whipped from weeping to fury. “Damn, you, Antonio Rivas! And damn your stupid, Gallego pig-headedness! You can have a good life and home with my family and me. Why? Why, do you persist in this ceaseless drifting, like some ship out there in the sea with tattered sails and a broken rudder?”

  “I’m sorry, Mercedes,” he said, barely above a whisper. His throat suddenly was thick and dry. “I don’t understand it fully myself. But I know I have to find stable work and some solution for this restlessness. And I know I can’t stay here now and live on the farm. I just can’t. I feel suffocated when I even think about it.”

  “Suffocated? Suffocated?” she yelled. Mercedes had stepped away from him. She towered over him as she stood fully erect, clenched fists on her hips. “You feel suffocated by people who love you and value you and want you to be happy?”

  Antonio shrugged his shoulders and shook his head, but he did not know what more to say.

  “You and your damned Gallego shrug. I’m sick of it, Antonio. I’m sick of waiting and hoping. Fine. If you want to go, then go. Go and slave away in whatever factory will take you, and live alone in those company boarding house rooms. I’ve had enough!” She turned and stormed off down the footpath toward Santa María del Mar without a single glance back in his direction.

  Antonio sat down on a rock. He pulled a rolling paper and bit of tobacco from his leather pouch, and watched her go.

  * * *

  In a month, Antonio was gone to America. As he suspected, there was no job for him in Oviedo. Though he was nearly as disappointed as Mercedes by Antonio’s decision not to join them at Las Cepas, Antonio González Conde had wished his friend well and telegrammed his brother Ramón in St. Louis.

  There were zinc smelters in more than twenty towns and cities across the northeast and mid-west United States, with clusters around St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Clarksburg, West Virginia. Ramón had advanced to the most senior floor position in the smelter where he worked in St. Louis. He maintained the fires and managed the crews which shoveled the ore, prepared the retorts and collected the zinc for an entire seventy-five-yard-long furnace.

  The U.S. companies were hungry for Asturians and Gallegos. They performed in the terrible conditions better than any other workers, immigrant or domestic. It was easy for Ramón to arrange a position for Antonio with the Grasselli Chemical Company’s zinc smelter in Grasselli, West Virginia.

  Mercedes could not bear to see Antonio when he came to Las Cepas for a farewell feast on the eve of his departure from Asturias. She spent the evening with the pair of spinster aunts who lived in a cottage down the road. Antonio was sad she was not there, but he understood and was a bit relieved. The decision to emigrate had been excruciating, and feeling her fury and watching her march away that afternoon on the bluff above Arnao was the worst moment in his life. Mercedes’ presence would have drained every ounce of pleasure from the dinner. Antonio already felt apprehensive enough about going. America was so far away and so alien. He did not need another emotional blow.

  “Be well, my friend,” Antonio González Conde told him, embracing Antonio Rivas and kissing him once on each cheek. “Go with God. And know that you always are welcome here when you tire of the furnaces and America. I fully appreciate why you must go. I had my own nineteen years in Cuba, as you know. There is something irresistible about that tug of the New World. But, I assure you, life here in the old one is better. Do not hesitate to return when this American fever has run its course.”

  After a short sail to Liverpool, Antonio Rivas boarded the Cunard steamer Carmania for New York. Like more than twenty million
other immigrants between 1892 and 1924, Antonio was processed into the United States through the crowded Great Hall at Ellis Island on October 2, 1912. As he slowly advanced through the long line under the high, arched ceiling of the vast room, Antonio felt mostly numb.

  He was surrounded by a Babel of languages and the smells of hundreds of wool-clad people emerging from a week packed in the poorly ventilated lower decks of transatlantic liners. When he finally stepped to one of the tall, wooden registration desks, the uniformed immigration officer changed the spelling of his last name to “Ribas,” because that was how Antonio pronounced it.

  An agent for the Grasselli Company met him at the ferry dock in lower Manhattan and guided him through streets nearly as crowded as third-class steerage on the Carmania had been. Antonio would not have believed that such a city could exist had he not seen it with his own eyes. It was a different universe from any place he knew. With his one small suitcase and fourteen dollars in his pocket, Antonio caught a train at Penn Station and headed off to his new life in the hills of northern West Virginia.

  Mercedes sat in her room at Las Cepas. She wept harder and longer than she had at any time since her brother José was killed in Cuba when she was a girl.

  Chapter 9

  Las Cepas, Asturias

  April 1913

  As nature slept through the bone chilling, rainy winter, Mercedes felt less burdened by Antonio’s absence, little by little. Still, seven months after his departure, a sight or scent or slant of the sunlight would cause the tears to come unexpectedly. A day or two would grind by before she recovered from the feelings of loss and abandonment.

  On this spring market Monday, María accompanied Mercedes and Antonio to Avilés. She needed a break from the farm and wanted to replenish her sewing basket. She was also worried about Mercedes and hoped that the two of them spending a relaxed afternoon in the town might help improve her sister-in-law’s mood. Nothing else María had tried over the past seven months had given Mercedes much relief.

  As they strolled up Calle San Francisco, Mercedes was morose and lost in the memory of walking there with Antonio Rivas the summer before. A cluster of nuns in snow-white habits emerged from the cloister at San Nicolás de Bari. They passed Mercedes and María and walked briskly down toward the Plaza de España.

  “Maybe I should take holy orders,” Mercedes said as she watched them go.

  “Perhaps you should, rabbit,” María said. “But not now. Not in your current frame of mind. You want to marry Antonio, not the Church. Christ can’t be reduced to the role of default suitor.”

  Mercedes sighed. She knew she no more wanted to be a nun than a laborer in the smelter at Arnao. “As always, you’re right, María.”

  Fat raindrops, driven by a sudden stiff wind, began to smack against them, and the two women took shelter under the arcade along Calle Galiana. It was the longest covered walkway in Avilés, ascending and bending toward the livestock market at Plaza de Carbayedo. Mercedes adored this street.

  The wending line of narrow, two- and three-storey houses had changed little since they were built three hundred years before. Mercedes always wondered about the lives of the generations of families who had lived out their days there, more on this street than any other in town. The floor of houses’ extended upper storey façades—supported on the street side by weathered, battered sandstone columns, some Doric, some Ionic and most looking as if they had been feasted upon by stone-eating termites—formed the ceiling of the arcade. The structural arrangement created a feeling of intimacy with the people who resided above the pedestrians’ heads. And Mercedes was always amused by the arcade’s pavement: granite slabs on the inner half for the people, bulbous beach-rock cobbles on the outer half for the cows headed up to the market.

  “Why does everything have to be so hard for me, María?” Mercedes asked as they neared the end of the arcade, the momentary distraction of her favourite street ended.

  “I have no answer for that, dear,” María said. “Life certainly has given you more than your share of troubles. Perhaps it will be that you’ve paid in advance for a long time of happiness to come. You’re only twenty-eight, and we all seem to live well into our nineties in this family. You’re still just getting started.”

  Mercedes was skeptical. “Oh, María, I’m nearly a spinster, and you know it,” she said. “How many women in all of Castrillón have you known to get an offer of marriage and start a family at my age? My mother was twenty when she married my father. And you? You were, what? Nineteen?”

  “Eighteen,” María replied reluctantly.

  “Eighteen,” Mercedes repeated to emphasize her point. “I’m a twenty-eight-year-old woman with no money and a quarter-interest in a small farm that I never would sell even if I could. I’m not beautiful. Midwifery is not a skill men appreciate thirty seconds after they see their wife has given them a healthy baby. And with my dark moods, I don’t even like being around myself half the time. It’s no wonder Antonio left. No man could want me.”

  “Oh, Mercedes,” María huffed. “Don’t always look at everything so blackly.” She softened her tone and added: “All I can say is that you must have faith. We don’t know where our paths will lead. All those years on your own, you never expected to be with us at Las Cepas, did you?”

  “No,” Mercedes said, still sullen.

  “Nor to meet Antonio Rivas, and fall in love?”

  “No. But that may not be the best example you could’ve chosen,” Mercedes said, cracking a smile.

  “I couldn’t disagree more,” María said. “Have you fallen in love with another since he left?”

  “No.”

  “And has he, with someone else, in America?”

  “Not that I’ve heard, no.”

  “I would say, then, that your paths are clear to merge again,” María said.

  “He could come back,” Mercedes admitted, though she did not feel it to be true. “I suppose it’s not impossible.”

  “It certainly is not,” María insisted. “How can he not get enough of that smelter in America, so far from the sea and Spain, no matter how much money he is earning?”

  “But if he doesn’t?” Mercedes asked.

  “Well, then he’s more foolish than I imagined,” María said, waving a hand as if she were shooing away gnats. “But if he does decide to stay, for whatever reason, why could you not join him in America?”

  In her months of suffering, Mercedes had never considered that option. She pondered it and felt a flicker of possibility. “I suppose I could,” she said. She pursed her lips and nodded slowly. She had stopped walking without realizing it. “Yes, I could. I could.” Then her thoughts skipped immediately to what such a move would mean. “But, María, to leave you and my brother and the children, and Las Cepas, and Asturias?” That was nearly too painful to contemplate, perhaps worse than losing the man she loved. “I’m not some wandering soul like Antonio. This land is my home. It’s part of me, and I’m part of it. I can’t even imagine leaving here.”

  María had faced that same dilemma once. She and Antonio González Conde had known each other as children, and they corresponded frequently during his years in Cuba. When he was repatriated in 1899, they decided to marry. María believed he was home for good. They were wed in San Román Church just before Antonio went back to Havana.

  She stayed in Asturias, hoping that Antonio’s new Cuban adventure would be short. He left hoping that his absence would cause María to reconsider and join him. But she only grew more determined never to leave her homeland. One of the many blessings which came from Bernardo’s death was her husband’s swift and permanent return.

  If Mercedes were forced to make such a choice, it would be much more difficult. She would not be going to Cuba, which had been a distant piece of Spain for four centuries. She would be going to that strange, Anglo land of the United States.

  Chapter 10

  Graselli, West Virginia

  May 1913

  In Graselli, An
tonio was surprised to learn that good chorizo and Spanish ham actually were available, as was just about every other taste of the peninsula he desired. So many Spanish workers had settled there that other enterprising Iberian immigrants opened shops and imported goods from Spain, catering to the culinary longings of their fellow expatriates. He heard Spanish being spoken in the streets more frequently than English, and he met several men from Avilés and Castrillón who knew Las Cepas and Antonio González Conde. These encounters made Antonio miss Mercedes intensely and to question the wisdom of his decision to leave. It was not much of an improvement to replace restlessness with self-doubt.

  The spring after he arrived, Antonio recognized three men sitting outside a café, sipping beers and playing dominoes. They were Asturians, striking workers who had returned to the Arnao smelter shortly before he quit. For his two years in Arnao, Antonio spent little time with the other workers. He preferred his solitude, and he had presumed from the day he arrived at the Real Compañía that when the strike ended he would be dismissed. He saw no reason to get close to men with whom he could part company forever at any time.

  The returning Asturians were even less inclined to associate with Antonio and the other strike-breakers than Antonio was with them. They had cursed the replacement workers every day, blaming them— not without some justification—for the strike’s two-year duration. Antonio nodded at the three men outside the café in Graselli as he strolled by. They nodded back, unenthusiastically. “I see Grasselli has no qualms about hiring Gallego scabs here,” one grumbled to the others.

  Other than missing Mercedes, Graselli was Spanish enough to inoculate Antonio against any homesickness. He had not felt at home anywhere since he was a boy in Portomarín anyway, so this town was as good as any other. Here, at least, Antonio believed he had the chance to make a real life for himself and that he was adequately compensated for the back-breaking work. These West Virginia hills had not become home, he thought, but perhaps they could be one day.