May 22, 2012
Esteiro de Muros
Saint Rita's Day

I spend the night washing clothes, a small pleasure. The machine takes two hours to wash, and things are still wet in the morning, so I pull out a pair of thermal underwear and put them on over yesterday's clothes, and hope the day will be relatively warm.

This evening I will attend the concert given by the local choir in the church over the bridge. Maruja will be singing, and the music will be Galician folk songs, which are pretty. It will be an opportunity to see a bit more of Esteiro and its environs.

I still have some family in the area: the daughter of my father's late first cousin, Rosa, has a daughter here, Maria, who lives with her husband Amado (a Madrid native), in a beautiful house with a fine view of the estuary. My parents visited Rosa, who was widowed quite young, on every visit to Spain. Rosa always reminded me of Katrina Paxinou, the Greek actress who played the stalwart Paca, leader of the Republican rebels, in the film with Gary Cooper of Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls. A big, strongly built woman, she raised four children all alone in the most difficult of times: the fifties, years of deprivation in Spain, due to several terrible winters and Franco's policy of isolation and theoretical self-sufficiency. During the fifties my mother would gather the clothes the hand-me-downs I wore, then my sister, and send them to Rosa for her children, to give an idea of the hardship.

The house Rosa and her children lived in in Lestelle, the tiny hamlet above Esteiro, was the house my father was raised in, which had no toilet, just a place in the attic over the barn where the cows lived. You pushed aside the board covering the hole and did what you had to do over a pile of straw below, then pushed the board back over the hole.

I contacted Maria and Amado before I left, but I have the feeling they do not want to see me. Urged by my cousin Socorro, I asked for Maria's help in trying to establish where some land inherited by my father, along with his brother, Socorro's father, lies. Socorro suggested that Maria might know something, because at one time Rosa held a power of attorney for my father, and that I might ask her in an e-mail, which turned out to be a bad idea: I received a testy e-mail from Maria in return, telling me that she knew nothing about any land, that she had not been to Lestelle (Maria lives in Esteiro) since Rosa's death a few years ago, and that she wanted to live out the years left to her in peace.

I callled Maria and Amado again this morning at 10:00 a.m.: Maria answered the phone: she was just getting up, she said. I suggested getting together for a coffee, and left it that Maria would send me a text message or call me about meeting.

Calling the widow of Ramiro, my father's first cousin, Rosa's brother, was a much more pleasant matter. My father and his brother Benito lost all their immediate family in the influenza pandemic in 1919: one set of grandparents, their parents and two uncles, all in one house, in one week. Among the relatives, it was only Rosa and Ramiro's mother, la Tia Maria, herself a widow, who took them in and raised them with her own. From these beginnings, Ramiro rose: he went to university and studied to become a teacher, achieveing the first place among all those taking the same examination the first year he presented himself. Notwithstanding, in Franco's Spain, getting a job was a matter of whom you knew, as much as how good your skills. Ramiro had no enchufe --he was not "plugged in" (the literal meaning of enchufe) to help him find a job, so he was left without for a year.

He studied to take the examination again the folliowing year and this time although ranked only among the top five, this time he had enchufe, and he found a job near Esteiro. He rose to become District Superintendent of Schools for the estuary area, which includes all the villages between Noya and Muros, including Esteito. Don Ramiro, as he was known, was well-liked, respected and the pride of the family. He died of prostate cancer a few years ago.

I call Sarita --whom I have not seen since the summer of 1965. She lives in a village an hour's walk away, freijo/Freixo.

"Who is it? --Ah, yes Marta! --Socorro told me you would be visiting. Come for lunch at midday. I am running out --the fish man is here, and I want to catch him before he leaves to get the fish for lunch."

The summer of 1965, at the beach with Sarita and her daughter, my sister Jazmin and I tried to teach her some English. She was especially interested, laughingly, in knowing how to say Callate la boca, Ramiro! --which translates as "Shut up, Ramiro!" to her distinguished husband.

***

I walk to Sarita's in Freijo/Freixo. She told me the house was #34, down a ways from the pharmacy. I find the pharmacy, and with the help of a gentleman leaving, locate Sarita's house. It is a large property with a gate. Sarita is in the garden, cutting flowers. She is little changed by the years, still lively, talkative, sharp and good humored. She asks me inside and proceeds to make me a five-course lunch: langostinos, merluza, roast chicken, salad and melon for dessert, followed by coffee.

We end up talking about the parcels of land in my father's estate. I brought the subject up thinking it would be of passing interest, but Sarita is thoroughly versed in the complexities of estabishing title to minifundio properties, because since Ramiro's death in 2009 she has been formalizing her right to them and her children's. She pulls out a large file box and shows me a variety of documents. When I tell her I have no documentation to establish my sister and myself as heirs, she is nonplussed.
"Let's call Francisco --he is my godson. If Rosa had your father's power of attorney, then he must have the papers."

I feel odd about this after my experience with Maria, Francisco's sister. Perhaps I will be viewed as the unwelcome distant relative come to claim land that has been appropriated by more needy relatives.


Sarita gets Francisco on the phone and talks to him. I have not seen Francisco in sixteen years, and when I saw him then, I cannot say that he made much of an impression. He had gone to New York with his brother Jose, but returned after a short time, while Jose stayed. He wore glasses and spoke little. He lived with his mother until she died and now lives in the house alone. He has never married, although I think he had a girlfriend when he was in New York.

Sarita speaks with him at length, inviting him to lunch and asking him to bring what papers he has. I have the impression that he is telling her he knows nothing of any papers, from which I assume that like his sister, he has better things to do than to indulge an American relative.

"He will come for coffee" Sarita says after she hangs up. We proceed to eat and talk for almost four hours.

I am checking my e-mails on her laptop when Francisco walks in. He is heavier now, quite tanned, taller than I remember and there are strands of grey in his black hair. He still wears glasses and at first impression, seems not quite all there. However, he pulls out a document attesting to all the parcels of property inherited by my father and his brother after their grandmother's death when they were children. As the boys were orphans, they inherited directly from their widowed grandmother what would otherwise have gone to their parents, Tomas and Maria. The document must be almost one hundred years old. It is written in cursive script and is called an hijuela, or cupo.

Sarita then hands me one of the documents from her file, a cedula, a listing of all the parcels belonging to Ramiro with their area and location.

"Here, you can have this. You need to obtain one of these based on the hijuela. To do that, you have to go to La Coruna, three hours away. There is a bus daily at 7:05 a.m. But perhaps you ought to see a notario first to have a certified copy of the hijuela made. You can go to Muros for that."

"I can show you some of the properties I remember the location of" says Francisco. "Finish your coffee and we'll go."

And indeed, Francisco takes me up to my father's hamlet and points out exactly where my father's property lines lie. He takes me up the mountain the hamlet sits on, Monte Tremuzo, and takes me into the woods to show me where other parcels lie. One parcel lies near but not on the road, another is a narrow strip thirty feet long, others are larger. There is also a parcel on the road in Esteiro on which a house could be built.

Francisco takes me to the top of the mountain, near the small wind farm. The view is spectacular: all of the estuary on one side, the mountains and the road to La Coruna and Santiago on the other. Down the mountain lives my father's godchild, Pepa. Would I like to see her?

I did not know my father had a godchild. She is now eighty-two, which means that my father was eleven years old when he baptized her.

"She will rail at me if I don't take you to see her. I know she would love to see you", says Francisco, so we go down the road a bit from the summit of the mountain to a gated house on the road, overlooking the estuary. A youthful-looking woman comes out from behind the gate to greet us. She is Lourdes, Pepa's daughter.

"Oh, my mother will be happy to see you! I met your sister when she was here five or six years ago, but never you. Come--"

As we reach the entrance, a tiny woman with sparkling eyes and a lovely smile comes out from behind the door.

"Mama, do you know who this is?" She doesn't guess, but when told she takes my face in her hands and looks at me closely, then kisses me on each cheek.

We spend about two hours talking about Spain (the situation is not good, no one wants to work any more), but more interestingly, my father.

"He was a great person. Then he went to America and he came back a few times, but then he didn't. I always thought he was wonderful, although his brother was better-looking."

By the time I leave, I have been invited to come back and meet Lourdes' two brothers, their wives and children, who will be driving from Santiago, as they always do, for the weekend.

Francisco is going to drive me to back to Esteiro, but he asks whether I would like to see where my father's brother Benito is buried on the way to Esteiro. Of course I would.


He takes me to a very old cemetery near a tiny chapel. In both the oldest part and the newest addition there are pantheones above-ground burial niches with triangular tops crowned with crosses --a Galician way of burial which keeps the damp out. Benito lies in the old part, a grey marble slab noting that he was fifty-one when he died in 1965. He died of throat cancer, for which he refused to be operated. He continued to work as a merchant seaman as the cancer advanced. Finally he had to abandon ship and come home to die. He walked from Esteiro to Lestelle, up the primitive road to the stone house and inside to die a few days later.

Francisco asks whether I want to see where his mother, who died three years ago is buried. I would. She lies in a niche in the new section of the cemetery. Francisco always calls her Le Vieja --the old woman.

"She had so many papers, and she would not let anyone touch them. She wanted to be buried with my father, but the priest would not permit it, because he wanted to close off the old cemetery so that he could make us buy pantheones in the new. My mother knew she had the right to be buried with my father, but she did not want to fight, so she bought here."

I realize that Francisco is a walking encyclopedia of family and local history. He could probably tell me where my father's parents are buried. He knows that when one of the wind machines fell down and sparked a fire that damaged several hectares of forest land on Monte Tremuzo the security guards living nearby were asleep. He knows that one of my cousins had a wedding banquet without actually marrying her innamorato. He remembers that as a boy, when he needed an operation to ease his deafness, my parents came up with two thousand dollars to make it possible. And when he invites me into his house to show me an ancient studio photo of his mother, Ramiro, Pepa's father, Benito and my father as teenagers, he is delighted that I recognize the framed wax angel from Mexico that I brought for his mother, which has been hanging on the wall since.

"I was not going to say anything, to see whether you recognized it. I remember that you came and you brought out the angel and you said to my mother 'Here, Rosa, I brought something for you --its not much, but I hope you like it.' I wanted to see if you recognized it, so I wasn't going to say anything."

Beneath that very quiet exterior, Francisco has been taking stock of everything, storing away facts and memories and impressions. He takes me back to Socorro's, apologizing for having to get back to look after his lambs and put the chickens away so the foxes don't get them. I should call him for anything I need.