Summer Doorways

by W. S. Merwin

  We repeated the visit, with the same good intentions and helpless stiffness, at the quinta. Quitas brought us yellow cake too, for the occasion, and we poured wine, and aguardente in our black crockery coffee cups, and conversed like novices at chess, with tense pauses. After that we met on the road and went on with the slow stroll that was intended to distinguish us, I could see, from the steady, purposeful plodding of the men coming from the fields, or the flowing, barefoot grace of the women carrying heavy water jars balanced on coils of cloth on top of their heads. His pace, like his fingernail, signified his freedom from physical work, the higher level of his concerns, his serious leisure. His wife always walked behind, in peasant fashion, which made me uncomfortable. After a few of those awkward ambles she stayed in the house when we left, and Dorothy chose to stay at home too. Then he was likely to walk a bit more normally, and we would go into Serpins together, where he introduced me to friends of his, all of them men, of course, and artisans.

  He took me to meet the maker of the tin lanterns, and I watched the man finish an elaborate one for hanging in the middle of a room. And to a cabinetmaker with a local reputation for his furniture, made to order. That man made tables and cabinets from fruit wood, and chairs of various kinds, but his real pride and pleasure was in making musical instruments. He had made guitars, violins, lutes, zithers, and he could play them all. The schoolmaster assured me that he was famous for miles around. His favorite instrument was the mandolin. He loved to make mandolins and to play them. At the schoolmaster’s urging he picked up his own mandolin, one of his own making. It was ornate, the polished wood lustrous from long, loving attention. He tuned it for a moment, conspiring with it, and began to play, long tumbling arpeggios and complex chords, melodies floating through them. It sounded like an ancient music that perhaps had evolved in those mountains. Its sources could have been as distant as the music of the Cancioneiro da Ajuda, and before that, the zagals, the love songs of Moorish Spain. Passersby gathered outside on the road to listen, and the concert went on as the afternoon light deepened behind them.

  As we walked back I told the schoolmaster that I would like to go there again and wondered whether that would be all right, and he assured me that it would. I took a bottle of wine the next time as a present, and the concert seemed even more elaborate. The schoolmaster asked me whether I would like to have a mandolin. I said I would, though I could not play it. The cabinetmaker, when he was told that, picked up a small, simple one, on a shelf by his head, that he said he had made that summer, and handed it to me. He was shy when I asked about the price. He said he wanted it to be a present, but I explained as well as I could that he was a professional artisan, and an artist, and should be rewarded for his work, and that I wanted to contribute to his art. He told me at last what he was used to receiving for a mandolin such as this one, and it seemed to me very little. The schoolmaster said that everyone in the valley who could play a mandolin had one from the cabinetmaker. I never learned to play mine.

  The oxcarts wailed and moaned all day along the rutted track on the other side of the Ceira. Sometimes I, or we, walked into Serpins that way. Though it was longer, the view of the valley across the small fields, and the play of light, was more beautiful from over there. I learned that the tiny chapel in the middle of the valley was opened only for a few feast days every year, and for the weddings and funerals of peasant families living near it. It was so small that on these occasions only the priest and a handful of others could stand or kneel inside it. The rest gathered around the door, out in the day. I watched a procession approach it, one weekday morning, all in Sunday clothes, and assemble in a flock around the door.

  The small house built against one wall of the chapel was the home of a woman of some education who worked for Maria Antonia as a housekeeper, and of her mother, a figure of unimaginable age whom I had seen out in the long honeyed light, feeding the chickens, and stooping in the cabbage plot. One day the younger woman saw us walking on the cart track and invited us in. The house was not as tiny inside as it appeared to be from a distance, but it consisted of a single room. The floor was of beaten earth, on ground level. The smoke that I saw rising through the roof tiles came from a small hearth against the chapel wall, which it had blackened up to the beams, and the beams too were black, and the undersides of the tiles. Drying flax was hanging in curtains, like laundry, across the room. There was a small field of flax outside the door, beyond the vegetable plot, and the woman we knew from the main house was proud of it. She said her mother still spun the flax, and she pointed to a distaff in the corner. She herself was attractive, but well past the age when most peasant girls were married. She had gone on in school longer than was usual around there and had wanted to be a schoolteacher. She said that Maria Antonia was going to help her continue her education.

  When Maria Antonia’s elder sister, Filippa, came to stay for a few days at the main house, both of them went to visit the small house built against the wall of the chapel. Filippa was shorter than Maria Antonia, gaunt and drawn and somewhat severe in manner, a director at heart, sharp, thin-lipped, and determined. She was concerned at once about the old woman, who in fact seemed quite content, happy with her house and garden and chickens. Filippa arranged for the daughter to take more food home from the main house. She wondered about how the old woman could keep warm when the winter came and the water froze. The daughter assured her that they had always managed, and were used to it. Most of all Filippa was worried about hygiene. Some aspects of it, she admitted, were better left unmentioned, but both she and Maria Antonia were startled when they found out that the old woman had never had a bath in her life. Filippa was aghast, and insisted that something must be done about it. The daughter was dubious, really opposed to the idea, but afraid to try to forbid it. That was the way her mother had grown up, she said, and it had done her no harm. She was old, indeed, but she was perfectly healthy. And her mother, when the idea of a bath was proposed to her, recoiled in horror. Maria Antonia and Filippa laughed about it, but Filippa said it was shocking, and that she had made up her mind.

  Her daughter was very unhappy, but she believed she was helpless. Women from the main house, Quitas among them, carried a galvanized washtub and a pile of towels along to the lean-to house, and heated water in a circle of stone and ashes outside the door. I saw a procession of them heading along the cart track toward the chapel, but of course I did not see the rest.

  When I had met the old woman she had not spoken at all but had smiled and nodded, and wandered away. I imagine that when Filippa and Maria Antonia approached her, and when she realized what they had in mind for her, she became rigid with refusal, her toothless jaw set, tears running down her face. Maria Antonia and Filippa no doubt tried to soothe her, telling her a lot of things that she did not understand or want to, and no doubt she turned her face away and stiffened as they began to unfasten her clothes, and felt humiliated but could not fight them off. They would have swathed her in towels and carried her like a white statue to the wash tub in the middle of the floor, and stood her in the hot water, urged her to sit down in it, and then, whether she was standing or sitting, washed her all over.

  She died of pneumonia within a week, and the next gathering I saw at the chapel was for her funeral.

  33

  For some reason women carrying water jars or baskets or basins of laundry on their heads seemed to meet on the road just above our front door and stand there, barefoot, carrying on long conversations in loud, high-pitched voices as though they were calling to each other from a distance, while turning slowly in place, around and back, under their burdens. In the days after the old woman’s death they stood there longer than usual. I could not understand much of what I overheard through the door, but I knew they were talking about her.

  Many afternoons Dorothy and I walked along the road, or the cart tracks into the mountains, or the footpaths, or simply went up the steep slopes under the stands of tall pitch pine trees that had been planted where the
mixed forests had stood earlier in the century. Each of the pines had a blaze cut deep into the bark at waist level or lower, and a tapered terra cotta bowl hanging under it to catch the pitch. The bowls were collected periodically and taken away to make turpentine. Arbutus bushes and wild flowers that may have been indigenous had survived the destruction of the original growth here and there. When we walked under the pines we took string bags and picked up big dried pinecones to burn in the fireplace, for the scent they gave the house.

  The unpaved road by the front door of the farmhouse led on past walled fields between the road and the river. The fields were a few steps down from the road and were entered by stone gateways, carefully made, the steps worn with use. Beyond the fields, by the river, the tall, groaning wooden water wheel, built by hand, was turned by the current in a channel that had been cut in from the river. It lifted the water from the Ceira into a narrow wooden flume at the edge of the field. The wooden cogs of the wheel reached out from the rim like paddles, turning it with its buckets, which filled one by one, and rose, spilling all the way, to empty at the top into the wooden flume made of hewn planks and held up on rows of stilts. The flume ran, leaking along its whole length, to the upper edge of the fields, where it poured out into an irrigation ditch. The whole system, powered by the river from which the water was drawn, played its complaining tune day and night.

  The road climbed from the fields onto low bluffs, then to the edge of a small gorge through which the river came rushing over big rocks. At the top of the gorge, set back from the road along the cliff’s edge, another chapel stood—one more local habitation of feminine divinity. The front door was always locked when we passed, but occasionally on Mondays there were trampled flowers and signs that the chapel had been frequented the day before. We looked through broken panes in the door into a small nave filled with sunlight, to the altar, and the small window in the apse above it. Some silent trust that had made the place was still living there.

  Some days I took notebooks and books out onto a terrace under fruit trees, beside the house, and tried to write out there. A turkey from the barnyard below regarded my presence as an intrusion upon his domain, and he campaigned repeatedly to dislodge me. He strutted along the bottom terrace, three or four terraces below me, and delivered himself of lengthy, elaborate, inflated threats aimed in my direction. When I seemed to pay no attention to those, he stumped to the far end of the low terrace, out behind me, and flew up to the next one, a little nearer to me, and drummed along the whole length of it, back and forth several times, repeating his performance and imprecations. Still no result, so he made his way, behind me, up one more terrace, and then another, until he was on the same one where I was sitting, in an armchair, with a board and a book on my knees. From the end of the terrace in back of me he heaved himself forward squawking untranslatable battle cries. The first time it happened, I got up at that point and waved my arms in a little dance at him, and he unpeeled a woeful shout and flung himself off the edge of the terrace to flap and flail all the way to the bottom, and start over again, in dudgeon. After that, rather than have to get up every time, I took an umbrella out with me, and when he began his final charge toward me along the terrace I raised it and opened it toward him, which sent him into his fit of consternation and flight. We played the game for days, apparently without change, but then he seemed to grow absent-minded or acquiescent—I could not tell which—and days would pass without him coming to stalk me, until I began to miss him, and hope that he had not been undone once and for all. But as long as the warm days lasted, sooner or later he might turn up, catch sight of me from below, and unpack his exasperation, and we would go through our game, which had become a ritual for us both, something that he did not have to carry out more than once a day, to make his point, and assert his indignity.

  I got to know the men who worked in the barns and storage sheds and orange grove and mill, and I tried hard to keep up conversations with them, to use the Portuguese words and phrases that I was memorizing from books and learning by listening. I was beginning to acquire a labored, floundering stick-drawing of the language. I was unreasonably impatient with it for not being Spanish—my first love—and impatient with myself because of that. But limited as it was, my grasp of textbook Portuguese permitted simple exchanges, which seemed like calling across a canyon, with the men on the farm. I could not tell how they were organized, how they were related, but they showed me the olive mill, opened the hatch door in the loud roaring lower room to reveal the ladder down into the mill race and the water wheel turning, pointed out the gears carved on the heavy axle beams, slapped the piled round sacks for the olives, offered me their own harsh black wine, and laughed when nothing I said or asked made sense to them. Maria Antonia consoled me slightly by explaining that their Portuguese was not even the language I had been trying to learn, but a local, peasant variant of it—what is regularly referred to, in a distant, patronizing way, as a dialect—which she too found hard to understand some of the time.

  There were still minstrels in the mountains, men who wandered, with musical instruments, a sack, and a shepherd’s blanket. The quinta courtyard had been one of their stopping places, since some period in the past of which I knew nothing, a time that I hoped the schoolmaster or somebody might be able to tell me about. A singer, or several musicians, would appear in the barnyard, shouting an announcement, and then walk into the courtyard and stand by the well, knowing the place. The one who came most often was a tall, old, blind man with a beard, who put his hand on the rim of the well and stood looking upward. He had a large, beautiful zither, which he played with great delicacy, and sang songs of longing and mourning. Sometimes I did not see him arrive. At the sound of his playing I would rush to the window over the courtyard and look down to see his open mouth singing, and the song, the notes, the words were as impossible to grasp or retain as filaments of mist. Someone from the farm would bring him, or whatever musicians came and performed there, a jug of wine, slices of corn broa and white cheese, a tin plate piled with boiled potatoes and salt cod, bacalao, which the visitors would cut off in strips with pocketknives and manage to chew somehow, though there were not many teeth left among them. Quitas knew them all. She was not sure, at first, how we felt about them, and seemed a little embarrassed by them because we were there, but she stopped whatever she was doing to stand listening to them. She watched without expression as I took them money—my only way of thanking them and encouraging them to go on playing and singing and to return.

  Something in my efforts to talk with the men on the farm must have got across to them, or encouraged their own curiosity, because one day several of those of my own age met me on the bridge and asked whether I would like to go with them that evening—it was a Friday—to a dance in one of the hamlets up in the mountains. I accepted at once. Should I bring Dorothy? They seemed dubious about that, and when I told her she said that she would rather stay home anyway, as she often did. The young men knocked at the front door after sunset, carrying lanterns. I lit one from the house, took a bottle of wine, and we left.

  We crossed the river and went up along the ridge above the new house into the forest. The mixed growth had not been replaced by pines there. We climbed as the light faded around us under the trees. I could hear a stream splashing in a gorge below us. We stopped to light the lanterns, and walked on with the shadows dancing and leaping around us as though we were at sea, catching on black trunks and limbs, and waving on the path. Up on the mountain the night was turning cold. We walked for an hour or so. Then the trail dipped and turned and I saw lighted windows—soft lights, from lamps—and a partly open doorway, and heard music. Mandolins, an accordion or concertina, singing, the beat of dancing. Shadows crossed the light from the doorway. We walked down toward the house and found ourselves in a cluster of buildings in a hollow of the slope. At the house, my friends pushed the door open to a single room already crowded with young people of both sexes, most of them dancing to a fast beat, a whirling, high
-stepping dance akin to a jig or a reel, which I would learn had variants in the mountain villages all the way across southern Europe. This was the first time I had seen it, but to those caught up in it in that room, so close together that every movement seemed to be transmitted through all the rest of them, out to the walls and back to the spinning dancers like a ripple on a pool, it was simply what dancing meant. The room was filled with the heat of bodies, the faces were red and shining. They shouted and stamped with the beat. The floor and the walls shook. The jugs on the one sideboard shuddered and jingled, and the dance went on and on and suddenly stopped with a last stamping of feet.