by W. S. Merwin
The police station in Burgos was like a dingy hotel, the walls painted a swampy green some time before the Spanish Civil War, but despite her lack of either money or documents of any kind, and the fact that she knew almost no Spanish, and Portuguese was not a reliable substitute, she seemed to have no trouble convincing the senior police officers of her identity and what she was doing in Burgos. Apparently there had been some publicity about the family of the pretender to the throne of Portugal being allowed to return to their country after years of exile. The officers were respectful, deferential, said they would dispatch a car immediately to where the bag had been left, and would report to the hotel. They telephoned the hotel to explain what had happened. We went over to register and they were waiting for us, as though the mishap conferred additional eminence on the princess and her party, and we were shown to our rooms. It was around ten o’clock by then. We had expected dinner to be over by that hour, especially as we had heard that a new law about meal hours had just been passed in Spain. Spanish meal hours, the government had decided, were ridiculous, and in the interest of efficiency or of conformity with the habits of visitors whom they hoped to have, the evening meal in public places was to start no later than eight or nine o’clock, I forget which. Apparently the edict had passed like a small cloud. No one seemed to take it seriously. We were invited down to dinner, and as we entered the dining room army officers and their families were being seated at the same time.
Before dinner was over the headwaiter came to the table with a message for Maria Antonia, and when she stood up we saw the chief of police waiting in the doorway. They had found her handbag and wanted her to verify its contents. A peasant walking along the road had picked it up, probably only a few minutes after we had left, in the twilight, and had hailed the police car when it came along. Two other officers were waiting with it, out at the desk. Nothing in it had been touched. Maria Antonia changed some money at the desk, put several bills and a note of thanks into an envelope, and asked the police officers to promise to give it to the man who had found and returned the bag, and to be sure to tell him who she was, and repeat her thanks. She thanked them in turn, and they responded with bows and clicking of heels and sweeping of hats. It would be a local legend for a while.
I would have loved to see something of Burgos, the Burgos of the Cid, but Maria Antonia wanted to get to Portugal, and we headed west early the next morning, across the broad landscape. She planned to spend that night in a government parador in Ciudad Rodrigo. The paradores were a new provision for the tourism the regime hoped was coming, now that the country’s borders were open again. Ancient, noble buildings, castles and great houses, had been carefully restored and converted into handsome, comfortable, impeccably run hotels, sacrificing as little as possible of their ancient grandeur.
Ciudad Rodrigo, until then, had been simply a name for me, a key point in the border wars between Spain and Portugal, and between shifting alliances in wars of succession between brothers who were heirs, or claimed to be heirs, of the kingdoms of Castille and Portugal. I read more, as we approached it, of the bitter feeling that still lingered there, almost a century and a half after the Napoleonic occupation of the peninsula: memories of cavalry stabled in churches, of horrors such as those commemorated by Goya. I learned that greyhounds were considered indigenous to the town and wandered through it freely, some of them belonging to no one, and fed, haphazardly, by the inhabitants, as mascots of the town. I suspected cruelties behind that fairy tale, but I would not learn the truth of it—dogs dying of abuse and starvation, dogs hanged from trees—until years later.
It was a small town out on the upland, facing the mountains. In some respects it looked as though it must have changed little since the army of Napoleon left. The outskirts were walled compounds with open space, greens, stretching between them, through which the band of bare road had been worn by ancient use. Across the greens greyhounds roamed singly or in twos and threes, shadowy, elegant, neither wild nor domesticated, from no age. The greens narrowed to cobbled streets and a town scarcely bigger than a village, without any of the scars, deformities, and visual cacophony of the industrial age, no billboards, signs, cement, or machinery. We reached the parador, an ancient fortress, in mid-afternoon, walking in through the tunnel-like entrance in the massive wall, at the top of a rise that may have been part of the fortifications in earlier centuries. Inside, the stone and plastered walls, and the light reflected from them, were cool, and the building was full of echoes.
We had time, before dinner, to wander through the streets of Ciudad Rodrigo and gaze at the large, ancient, stone houses, none of which seemed to have been built later than the sixteenth century, many of them bearing, at their corners, huge stone heraldic blazons, the crests of their families. Each was a small palace. There were ancient churches in the town, and others, some of them empty and in ruins, standing in greens at the edge of it. The whole site held something of the atmosphere, the distance in the present, of a museum, and it was not easy to tell how much of that quality was due to recent restorations, and how much to the town’s remoteness, its worn antiquity. It must have been a summer retreat for a few ancient families, for generations. Out on the green, voices reverberated from behind walls, the sounds drifting with the scent of burning charcoal, out of the unknown past.
The next morning we drove on toward the mountains, the Portuguese border. There it seemed to me that Maria Antonia, upon showing her passport, was received with a mixture of careful formality and hesitant deference, as though the head officials were not sure whether it was a good thing to let the royal family back into the regime of Salazar, their employer. They waved us on, to Guarda and the wooded mountains of Portugal, the Sa da Estrela. Johannes and Mafalda kept correcting each other’s English, without recourse to those of us for whom it was our native language. “Oh look,” Mafalda said, as we climbed through the forests. “Veelets.” “They are not veelets,” Johannes said. “They are wyelets.” Here and there the forests appeared to be ancient, magnificent remnants. Sights of gorges, mountain streams, low at the end of summer. For Maria Antonia it was increasingly familiar ground.
31
The afternoon was growing late when we came to the valley of the Ceira, east of Louzá. As we made our way along the valley Maria Antonia grumbled about the eucalyptus trees that had been planted there a generation earlier. They were a fire hazard, she said, and they had replaced the original forest and now nothing else would grow around them. There were groves of them here and there on the slopes just above the road, but there were mimosas along the stream, and the scent of their flowers drifted through the long bronzed light in the valley. As we turned at the bends of the road we could see the small river flashing over rapids. A narrow bridge, and then the village of Serpins, tacked along both sides of the road. There were people on foot, some of them barefoot, oxcarts with solid wooden wheels screaming out as though in pain as they turned on the axles. A train station with a small train waiting. Green locomotive and passenger cars, with polished brass trimmings, from the first years of the century. Stacks of firewood along the tracks to fuel the locomotive. Then the road out of the village, up the river.
The valley widened to include small fields and orchards, an irregular patchwork hemmed with old walls, a few figures out in them, dark cows and sheep moving slowly, and their shadows reaching across the low amber crops. We came around a corner and saw, far up the valley, a farmhouse set just below the road, to the left of it, and below it the roofs of other farm buildings, and beyond them a tall water wheel, turning slowly like a ferris wheel at a carnival, all of them shining, bathed in the westering light.
To my surprise Maria Antonia stopped the car so that we could look at it from there. That house below the road was the one where Dorothy and I would be living, she said. It was the old farmhouse of the Quinta Maria Mendes (pronounced Minj). Somebody produced a camera and took a picture, and then we drove on and stopped in the road, four steps above the front door.
From the way the road passed the house it was apparent that it must have been simply a track for oxcarts, until recently when it had been graded and widened for use by logging trucks going up and down the valley with loads of pine trunks from the government plantations on some of the slopes. The trucks, as we would learn, went by infrequently—one or two a day, and sometimes none. I unlashed the baggage in the trailer, and as I did, a sharp-featured young woman in a black dress and a black-and-white checked apron opened the front door below us and came up the steps, and a young man in a green livery jacket and chauffeur’s cap followed her.
She curtsied to Maria Antonia and said, in a high, shy voice, barely audible, that she was Quitas. “Oh yes,” Maria Antonia said, and turned to tell me that Quitas would be taking care of us and of the house, and she introduced us. The young man, Martin, was her chauffeur, and they had been expecting us. Martin insisted on carrying our footlocker trunks into the house to the bedroom. Maria Antonia showed us through the rooms.
It would be hard to guess the age of the farmhouse. It must have been patched, repaired, added to, altered, for centuries. Some parts of it may have been there, along the Ceira, since the age of Henry the Navigator. It was part of the estates of the Comte de Feijo, a prominent monarchist with large cotton interests in Angola, who had lent the quinta to Maria Antonia for as long as she wanted to stay there. She would be over at the new house, which he had built across the river. We could just see it, up among the mimosas. I was happy to be down at the old farmhouse.
The front door opened into a main room, with a new brick fireplace on the wall facing the door, and a window in the deep wall to the left, with shutters folded on the sides and a window seat below it. Another room off it to the right overlooked a farm courtyard with a well in the middle, stalls for animals on the ground level, and storerooms off a wide porch on two sides of the courtyard, above them. The courtyard led out through a deep tile-roofed arch, its massive doors standing open.
Beyond the front rooms, another main room, with a dining table and chairs and another new brick fireplace, and a bedroom off to the right, and then a hall with more bedrooms on either side, and at the end the rudimentary bathroom, with an iron woodstove, and a window looking down to an outer barnyard, an orange grove beyond it, low barns, and a small but massive building by the river that I would discover was a mill. The kitchen was one flight of stairs down from the dining room, on the ground floor, off the courtyard, and I saw that in the warm months some of the cooking had been done on charcoal braziers outside, but Maria Antonia told us that Quitas would bring us our meals from the main house, across the river.
Maria Antonia and the others drove on around the farm compound and over the bridge, and we explored the house and unpacked. To me the building seemed palatial. The recently rebuilt fireplaces had semicircular hearths extending out over the broad, cupped, and cracked floorboards. Otherwise everything in the house was of indeterminate age. All the windows, set in the deep walls, had window seats, and heavy shutters above them. The furniture dated from at least a century earlier, the time of Eça de Queiroz perhaps. The beds were great solid plateaus, and the bedclothes were coarse linen, under the hairy striped blankets that I would see in the markets. They were covered with white crocheted bedspreads. Looking down into the courtyard from the room off the living room, or the bedroom, was like looking down into the Globe Theatre, with the whitewashed porches and storerooms around two sides of it, like galleries. Bunches of drying beans and strings of garlic and onions hung from the outer beams of the porches. There were no attempts at adornment, except perhaps for the huge flattened heads of the studs on the heavy doors in the roofed entrance. Almost nothing in any of the rooms, on any wall or patch of sunlight on the cracked plaster, spoke of a particular moment in the current of time that had flowed through them. My life had had no part in any of it, I had never set eyes on it, I knew only a few words of the language, one of the languages, that had been spoken there, and yet standing there, walking from room to shadowy room, sitting in a hard chair listening to the house, felt like a homecoming.
As Dorothy unpacked and settled in I went downstairs to the kitchen. There was a vast old black woodstove, and by the door there were deep laundry sinks. Even in the warm September afternoon that was still part of the wide margin of summer it was already sunless and dank down there, with a chill to it, and to the courtyard outside. I went out through the open door. The place was still a working farm, as I would discover in the days to come. Feathers of chickens and ducks, and their droppings, and those of sheep and goats, littered the courtyard and the cobbled area outside it. A tall basket of potatoes was leaning against a post. A wooden bucket stood upside-down on the rim of the well. A lamb’s fleece hung drying on the balcony like a small child’s garment. No one was around.
I walked out through the arch into the open barnyard. Over hatch doors in a nearby shed I could see the heads of cows, sheep in another. I peered into the mill door and listened to the rush of the millrace somewhere below, stepped in and saw the thick beam that was the axle of the millstone, broad as a big table. It was an immense log carved and shaped, the center of the press. A smell of jute, of crushed olives and fermentation, and of dashing water. Two men in dark clothes and black hats were in the courtyard when I came out, on their way to the cowshed. They nodded, touched their hat brims, mumbled monosyllabic greetings, and were gone, as though they saw me there every day. I walked down into the orange grove along the river. Turkeys were wandering in the glowing, late, dappled light that made the oranges blaze like signals. Through the trees came the rushing sound of the river on its stones, and the scream of the tall water wheel turning, upstream from the bridge, and the bubbling gossip of the turkeys, a hen announcing herself somewhere, the mumbles of the men in the shed, and a silence of evening coming on.
Of course I wanted to have the whole language of that place revealed to me, the history of the farm, of the house, the occupants, those who had worked the mill and planted the orange trees and tended the animals and built the water wheel. I wanted to be able to converse with those who were living there. I had felt repeatedly, as we had driven across western Spain and the Sa da Estrela, along old walls and the outskirts of peasant villages, an intimation of the profound continuity of the peasant world, which I caught sight of chiefly in the structures that had been evolved by it, for its physical purposes, by hands and lives that had long since vanished. Remnants of walls, stone steps, shelters for animals represented a current of existence that was older than any of the chronicles, or any of the great names of the ruling families. The current was still around me, and there again at the quinta I felt it, like the passage of a migrant bird.
Quitas came down across the bridge bringing us lanterns. I strained and tormented my few words of Portuguese to try to talk with her. She wanted to show us how to use the lanterns. They were beautifully made of cut tin, with four glass windows set behind curved tin arcs. One of the glass panels, in its tin frame, opened on hinges like a door, and inside it a round tin container the size and shape of a biscuit held a wick that led down into the olive oil inside. She told me that a man in the village made them, and he sold them, besides, in the fairs. We should have these here, she said, and they would give us others besides when we came back down from the new house after dinner. She had come to show us the way.
I managed to gather these scraps of information from Quitas with some difficulty and many mistakes, punctuated by her occasional smothered giggles, with her apron stuffed into her mouth. She was as baffled by us, of course, as we were by her. She was shy, merry, somber—generally somber—and inscrutable by turns, like a small merry-go-round, her sharp, thin face with its long nose and high cheekbones lighting up, then darkening and returning to a fixed melancholy, her eyes seldom meeting mine. She seemed even more suspicious of Dorothy than of me. I could not guess whether that was a result of personal chemistry or because she was used to turning to men as figures of authority.
Sh
e led us out, not through the kitchen door, downstairs, and across the courtyard—the way she came and went, herself—but through the front door and up the steps to the road, and along to the recently graded turn toward the river, over the broad cement bridge that could not have been there for more than a few years, and up to the main house that appeared to be about the same age, so that I was led to wonder whether the Comte de Feijo had actually had the bridge built so that he could build the house, or whether he had used his influence with the government to get it built where it would be most convenient for him. Quitas led us to the front door and then disappeared around the house. Maria Antonia told me later that Quitas worked in the kitchen, and that she had come that summer from a peasant family up in the mountains, and had never worked indoors before.
Maria Antonia wanted to know whether we really liked the house, and she had some presents for us, to put into it: tablecloths and napkins, and some local pottery. Candlesticks, a set of rough black coffee cups and saucers made locally. She introduced us to a young woman named Annalisa, a cousin from Austria, who was fluent in Portuguese, and in English and French, and was there to serve as her secretary. In the big main room of the house, with a row of windows onto a glassed terrace and the river below, a long table had been set. There were tall candles burning on it and large vases of flowers for a dinner to celebrate our arrival. The cooks and servers had prepared a feast, and Maria Antonia seemed pleased to be pouring Portuguese wines, a variety of them, some sent by the Comte himself for the occasion. We all talked of the trip. Annalisa and Maria Antonia went over details of the house, speaking in Portuguese and German. Annalisa and a housekeeper had been there for several weeks putting things in order. Annalisa’s father was in Lisbon and was due to return in a few days. (I met him then: a frail, gentle old prince, whom everyone regarded as something of a saint. He had been a hero of those Catholics who had opposed the Nazis in Austria, and had spent several years in a prison camp, where he had not been expected to survive. His self-effacement in the prison, in his efforts to help other prisoners, had become legendary.) Maria Antonia and Annalisa talked about him at dinner and afterward, as we sat smoking cigars, watching the night deepen over the river and the roofs of the farm and the steep pine-covered mountainside beyond it. We sat there by candlelight, and then the servants brought in kerosene lamps. There was electricity, supplied by a generator, but they used it only when they really needed it, and all of the servants were country people used to living with lamps and lanterns at night.