PART II
It’s an afternoon for planting in the Senra of Sernanselle. The weather is unsettled. It’s the turn for the field that has lain fallow to be used for the second harvest and it’s already been worked with a wooden plow, manure has been laid down, and it’s been planted. The intensive farming custom in that area has made for three types of fields, three types of corn: sweet or gabea, early or temperán, and second planting or restebo.
The sweet corn is always for ditch planting, but the hired workers from the hills who used to come down for a few pennies and food to plant it with huge hoes, hoes for use in ditches, nobody in Sernanselle hires them any more in an auction as if they were slaves, on Sundays in Padrón. They were pushed out by the B-50 N1 from Ajuria eta Aranzábal that Reboiriñas was the first to drive. After the corn, the hoed field produces several crops and types of grass for hay. It produces the best corn, it doesn’t need irrigation, and now the select hybrids from the Grange in Coruña and the Biological Mission in Pontevedra that the Agrarian Society of Dodro Vello or the Cooperative Union brought fill the carts in the cornfield, and fill hórreos and cabanas, the more primitive grain bins, with basketsful.
The fields of early corn have that variety one year and restebo or second-harvest corn the next. The plain of Sernanselle borders Tras de Rego. The early corn is planted after the sweet variety. The wooden plow isn’t used here either, but the native corn survives. After the corn, grass grows, first for harvesting and after that for grazing.
The second-planting cornfields are the ones used for the stubble, the ones for mowing with a sickle. After harvesting the wheat, barley, or the oats recently introduced as fodder, they plant a typical red corn, also a select variety, the last of the season. Afterward, they produce hay or more oats. The cycles alternate and every two years the same field produces corn and wheat, rye or oats, and maybe even another crop of oats.
Planting afternoon in Sernanselle, in the Senra. We’re in the early corn field that produces a second planting. It’s already been plowed, fertilized, and sown. The wooden plow for planting is the king of them all: first it scrapes the hard soil and then it digs the long furrow. Old Rosende labors in front of the yoked cows. At the rudder of the handles, with the mouldboard in the trench and the rudder raised, the blades sunk into the soil, is the woman, María’s mother. She controls the digging of the rows. María follows behind, hoeing the rows of furrows and covering the seeds.
“There’s something coming, near the big island, Vacariza.”
“What kind of sail does it have, Rosende?”
“It’s pretty small.”
“Is it flapping?”
“It must be!”
“It can’t be the only one.”
“Wait just a minute, until I stop. Probably more are coming. The tide’s rising.”
“Daughter, let your uncle and me finish hoeing. Hurry. Go to the house, grab a bucket and a basket of hay because Silvestre’s boat is coming. The sickle has been sharpened. Move along now. You can already see the shadows along Outeiro de Mos.”
“What should I get?”
“What should you get? Cockles from As Sinas and green grass from our marsh. To carry it, put more in the bucket than in the basket, girl. Don’t dawdle. We’re going to bake today.”
“You bake, mother. You do the baking. I’ve got the meeting of the Syndicate.”
“You have what I say you have.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“Well I never! And what if Silvestre doesn’t have any cockles?”
“Don’t wait for the boats from Porto to come. It’s getting late.”
María hurries anxiously toward the village. She’s glad to stop hoeing the meadow. It’s no short distance to the bank of the river and she has a lot to carry back, but María feels drawn to the wetlands. She grabs the sickle, the cord, the basket, the cloth that serves as a head cushion, and the pail.
“Amaro! Hey, Amaro!”
“Where are you going, María?”
“I’m going to the wetlands. Want to come with me?”
“Yes, of course I do.”
Amaro and María leave Cancela da Maceira and descend the slope of the road, go around through Emproas, Balteirón and Medeiros, take a shortcut down through Supomares, through Degareu, toward the village of Rial de Lagoa. They pass Valonovo and the road to Padrón toward Ribeira, leaving the machinery of the sawmill to the right.
Then suddenly, in Vesada, the world changes when they reach the flat region, the plain that’s always green, the wetlands of Laíño. They’re in the valley area now. They go along the path by the stream at Cabo de Valouta, the one in Sernanselle, tracing its curved line. At first they see some people spread about, with baskets or using a sickle or building a planned labyrinth of irrigation ditches, framed by little willow trees that have been cut to serve as boundary markers, lost in the immense center of the world. Afterwards they come to the large common square of Dodro Vello, where cars have never gone, and the shadow from the east draws curved shapes like waves over the grass, the tall and budding grass, and on the rozada, the cleared area that nobody ever painted. Nobody.
Silvestre’s horn blows into the wind. María and Amaro run toward the sea, or the river, and swirling winds from the tide that is rising and the taste of sea mist hit their faces. They fall on the reeds, they fall on the clover, they get up on the milkvetch. They hug, then fall again, they fall on the clover, they join together in an endless moan.
Unsettled weather. Silvestre’s horn sounds hoarse at Redondo, It’s echoing in the wind, the most famous horn along this shore, announcing he has his hatch full of cockles. He heads into Imo. Seated, María and Amaro watch the boat’s sail cutting sharply through the canes and reeds along the shore. Silvestre is a sailor from the village of Reboiras in Dodro Vello. He’s abandoned his dory de escarba, with its overlapping sideboards, that he’d made himself for this larger boat, the buceta that he navigates through the Tallós marsh to anchor it in the Seixo reservoir, near his village. He’d bought it second hand in Carril. María starts to gather grass on the shores of the river of Sernanselle. Amaro looks at the clouds of ducks landing here and there, the lapwings on the shore of the islands by Vilar, partridges, coots, crested grebes, fleeting marine crows. A royal heron, completely motionless, ascends gently, perching on a clump of grass, and goes upstream with the movement of the tide toward the pastures of Campaña. An otter roots in the Pinal irrigation ditch by Brañiña de Riasós. More sails arrive. They come along the starboard, running close to our shore, disembodied forms, crossing over reedbeds and cane breaks, the main and felucca sails, sails of a giant wooden sloop, wood from the woodsmen of Cesures at Ponte de Iria, that can’t compete with the easterly wind. They lower the sail, the sailors lower it and pull as hard as they can on the net tied high on the mast, leaping onto the marshy shore, forward toward the towrope.
Silvestre’s horn blows far up ahead of the baleiro fishermen. He reaches our marshy shore where some people have gathered, waiting with buckets and baskets. Yes, he’s got heart-shaped cockles from As Sinas, as big as fists. He arrives quickly, guiding the buceta with its full prows toward the Tallós marsh, trying to reach the field in the Lestrove pasture by daylight, where the full white sails, from San Xoán to San Martiño, travel in solitude amid the corn.
María has filled the bucket and continues gathering grass along the shore of the marsh. Amaro looks for one of the escovellas that are supposed to be in the wetland. They are bottomless pools that fill up and disappear with the tide, pools that he has never been able to find, the pools of the three mouras of Castro de Mouras, the Dark Ladies, awaiting their return. But he sees, like he has before, that the petroglyphs of Bouza Abadín are right on the stretch of field, twelve furrows between the marsh of Sernanselle and the top of the Castro, where the sun is now setting. The grass has a fragrance it has never had before. There is no light mist. The tide is rising. The ducklings are making noise in the water and on the grass.
“Can I help you lift the basket up?”
María’s basket is an oak branch fitted to a narrow board half a meter long, with an indentation at each end.
“Do you know how?”
Amaro grabs an armful of grass and puts it on the bottom of the basket. He grabs another. He tries to put it in. He tries to get it balanced correctly. The basket falls. Now the dories and the alalás of the baleiro fishermen from Porto are passing on, indifferent to all this. Aturuxos, high-pitched, happy shouts.
“I can’t do it!”
“Watch.”
María puts the bunches of grass together, interlocking them and weaving them onto the ring. She pushes the last ones into place hard… She slings the sickle and the cord over one shoulder.
“Did you find the escovellas?”
“Are there any?”
“Yes, come with me.”
Then back along the paths through the grass, taking turns in the chase, like two children. They startle ducklings, frighten herons and coots, cry out, run into water that’s flooding the grass, and they run deep into the wet area, in the deep marsh.
“The tide!” cries María.
The river is about to overflow, and María imagines the basket and pail drifting away in the marsh of Sernanselle. Almost. Amaro with the pail and María with the basket on her head start to run, frightened. The sea is rising. The marsh has already overflowed in some parts of the path, and the current has formed quite a river. Night is coming. At some points they can’t cross, but it could be worse if they stray from the path, a lot worse. They have to take off their shoes and roll up their sleeves. Night and tide are burying the wetland on María’s and Amaro’s heels. A flock of herons flies low along the stream above Sernanselle on the way to Bouza Boa.
Finally they reach the valley and stop, gasping, to rest at the Valonovo sawmill, whose machines are shut off. It’s completely dark.
“Do you know how to swim, Amaro?”
María sits on the warm stone of their resting spot.
“Yes.”
“I don’t. When are you going to take me to the baths at the Sea of Vigo?”
Amaro comes around in front of her and pulls María toward him by the waist.
“Whenever you want. Didn’t you go to Rianxo this year with the Roxo family?”
“I went, but you weren’t there.”
“There must have been others.”
“There were, but you weren’t there.”
They kiss slowly.
“It’s really late… it’s really late…”
For the return to Sernanselle they forego the shortcuts and there at Valonovo they choose the road that the City Council of A Coruña built not long ago, due to the political and economic pressures from Roiz and Camoiras. María with the basket and Amaro with the bucket go up the slope at Lameiriñas without stopping to rest at Arcai. They go on, with Tarrío on their right, with its abandoned manor house. Dogs are barking. At the crossing by Brañeiro they turn toward the slope near Chenlo. They hear a car. The headlights are visible as it goes toward Tarrío. It’s the Master, who passes them by, indifferent. The horse doesn’t snort or whinny on the climb.
They keep going. They go past the Capela do Leite, the Chapel of Milk, the one of the Virxe do Bo Parto e do Leite, the Virgin of Good Birth and Milk, through Suigrexa, Piñeirós, Fondo do Corgo, Costa do Covelo, Fontenlo, then catch sight of Sernanselle from Supomares. They come through Medeiros and Balteirón and just as they take the turn at Emproas, exhausted, they run into the lights of a car. It’s Camoiras’ 1932 Chevrolet. He stops alongside them without turning off the four-cylinder motor. Dressed in a gray suit, Camoiras gets out.
“Grass and cockles. What a mixture!”
He helps María put the basket on the ground.
“I’ve got to speak with you two. The electoral alliances are taking shape, as you know. We have to organize a meeting here in the village, plus others around Dodro Vello. María, when is your meeting with the Workers’ Society?”
“Today at eight in the school at Tallós. I’m already late.”
“Are you holding elections?”
“They want me to continue as president.”
“And the ones from the sawmill?”
“Nobody has spoken differently. They’ve changed their minds now that Ismael da Pedra became an anarchist and vegetarian. We’re all working together.”
Camoiras lights a cigarette and rests one foot on the front bumper of the Chevrolet. He adjusts the brim of his hat.
“And Carou, is he in the Workers’ Society?”
“He is. He’s acting as a day laborer. He says that in Dodro Vello’s Agrarian Society, and I don’t disagree. Very few have heard of Lenin. You know what he’s like.”
“I want both of you there. You, María, because of the Workers’ Society. You, Amaro, because of the Galician Youth Group. Or aren’t the members of the Galician Nationalist Party coming?”
“Two reactionary Catholics aren’t coming. Those of us in the Mocedades, the youth group, will be in the front line of the struggle against fascism and in support of a Galician Republic.”
“We need that. We all have to take part. We have to get rid of this bunch of caciques, priests, and military now.”
“Where are you going?” María asks.
“We local ‘bats’ have a meeting in Padrón.”
“Isn’t my father going with you?” asked Amaro.
“No, he says he can’t, that he doesn’t feel well… But I think it’s because he’s going to leave the Republican Leftist Party.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Let him tell you.”
“Camoiras, can you wait for me and take me to Tallós? I just need to go home and drop off the basket and the cockles.”
“And if you want we can set a time for me to bring you back. It’s not dark yet.”
Camoiras picks up María’s basket, gets into his Chevrolet Confederate and backs up as far as Cancela da Maceira. He turns the car off.
Raindrops are falling and greeting the Señorito’s palm trees, standing still, like black scarecrows. There are no good-byes. Amaro doesn’t even offer to carry María’s pail to her house, because she’s in such a hurry, and only manages to catch the scent of her cold sweat. He heads toward his doorway, downcast, and looks at the row of boxwood and the arched skeleton of the naked grape vine. He hears a creaking as Camoiras lowers the handle on the car window.
“I’m counting on you, Amaro.”
Amaro walks slowly toward the house. More raindrops fall, noisily. The fountain drips. From the door of the house he now hears Camoiras’ engine growl as he sees María coming, covered with a cloth sack. Crestfallen, he watches the car head out in the cold drizzle and the yellow lights disappearing around the bend at Emproas.
