The Sacred Beasts (34 page)

Like the other women, Sylvie had been listening in fascination to
Pilar’s story. So many images came into her mind that she decided to paint a
whole series of canvases devoted to Malena and her life with Pilar. Suddenly
she wondered if the painters who had studios there were listening to the story,
too. She was in the back of the room and could silently and almost invisibly
walk into the painting room. There, she found that the women were listening
with the same rapt attention, in fact with even greater intensity and
concentration, since they were also painting. She continued to watch in
fascination and saw that bright oranges, reds and ochres had begun to appear on
the canvases and would probably define them. She smiled and thought that I can
understand, and returned to the room with Pilar.

“My father, who I never knew, was a strange gypsy,” Pilar was
saying. “He spent most of his time reading and writing. My aunt, his sister who
lived with us, was a big reader, too. There were books all over the walls, and
a number of his stories about gypsy life had been published. He earned a small
income teaching other gypsies to read and write, though he taught them for
nothing if they couldn’t pay. He sang flamenco, too, but he wasn’t the
professional my mother was. According to my mother, he was very gentle but
prone to intense and uncontrollable depressions, so eventually he became a drug
addict like so many other gypsy men.

“When he went to prison for the first time, my mother visited him
as much as she could. They would sing flamenco together through the bars in
their low, throaty voices and they always set the place on fire. There were so
many gypsy prisoners thumping out rhythms and crying out, they had a full
juerga every time. The whole prison loved my mother’s visits. My mother and
father made love there, too; there were separate rooms they could use. I always
wondered what my mother sounded like when she made love; maybe something like
the sound of her singing. My father couldn’t tolerate prison at all, though,
and died of a drug overdose shortly after being incarcerated. My mother had
tried to keep him alive with music, but she could not erase so much despair.
She always said that he was a great man in his way, and she very much respected
him, but he was not strong enough to live the life of a gypsy. My mother never
took drugs, she said, because she had her music and me, and no amount of sorrow
could take them away.

“Later, when she had more money, we moved to Cerro Blanco, another
crumbling gypsy barrio but much more pleasant than Las Tres Mil Viviendas. All
those books went with us, because I was an avid reader by then and wanted to be
a writer like my father, though I had never known him. We were happy there, but
my mother developed cancer and died. I always wondered what might have been in
the river when it overflowed and in the soil at Las Tres Mil Viviendas, but how
can you ever know a thing like that? I eventually sold the house, went to the
university and graduated, which would have made my mother fiercely proud. I
would give anything to hear the song she would have sung about it!

“When I think of my mother now, I see her face surrounded by vivid
sounds, music, floating colors, strangely beautiful lights that haunt me. I
don’t know why I always see her that way; my mind just creates it. But in this
world, there has never been a color or a light or a sound as vivid as my
mother.”

The women were perfectly silent. No one moved.
They did not expect Pilar to end her story so abruptly, but it was over.
Several women thought they had just witnessed a one-woman juerga. Monserrat’s
eyes were full of tears, and she went to Pilar, kissed her cheeks, embraced
her, squeezed her hand, said a few soft words, and returned to Ruth. Everyone
knew that Monserrat loved the gypsy girl like a daughter. Sylvie thought of the
colors, sounds and lights and was astonished to realize that this was much how
she conceptualized painting Malena. But
floating
colors! That she had
not imagined. She felt a prickling of her skin, looked down and saw the hair
rising on her arm. She smiled and thought, thank you, Malena and Pilar.

Alex was finally the one to break the silence. “Oh Pilar, you’ve
got to write about her! What a story!” She thought but did not say, and if
you’re not going to become a writer, please let me have it.

“I will write about her,” Pilar said firmly, “but not now. She is
still too close to me. The music, the colors and lights are too bright.”

Amen, that one is yours, Alex thought. She felt a brief but
intense shame that she had wanted to write the story herself.

There was silence again in the room. There would be no casual
group conversation that night. The women who stayed behind had always thought
they knew Pilar very well, but her story astonished them. They realized that
they had missed what was perhaps the most important part of her identity. A
critical piece of each woman’s self had always been invisible until this
moment, when Pilar revealed it to them. The women looked at one another in
surprise and fascination. The expression on every face said, who was she? Who
was your mother?

The next woman who spoke was from the healthcare professionals
group, a doctor who specialized in pediatrics. “My mother and I are from
Galicia, the village of Santa Marta named after our local saint, who in the
folklore was believed to be the sister of Lazarus. It was hardly a village at
all then—just some farmhouses on hills overlooking the River Mino and our
famous church of the saint. But, the area, like all of Galicia, was a lovely
arcadia of winding country roads, misty eucalyptus forests, a mountain I
regularly climbed with my mother and an extremely rocky coastline covered with
mist called the Sea of Death for the three thousand shipwrecks that occurred
there in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I remember most vividly the
sharply sweet odor of eucalyptus forests and the tangy odor of octopus cooked
in vats of olive oil and spices for the annual fiesta honoring Santa Marta.
Today, it’s full of wind farms and the coast is better known for drug smuggling
than death, but I love to drive the winding roads back there to see my mother.

“I grew up with all the myth, magic and folklore of the region; it
was a powerful atmosphere for a child. I was always walking through the
eucalyptus forests and looking into the mists to find all the supernatural
beings described by my mother and grandmother as well as the other
villagers—werewolves, good and bad witches, mouros or spirits hiding treasure
beneath the ruins of ancient fortresses (for there were remnants of Iron Age
villages built before all the invaders came, even before Christ), owls who
announced your imminent death, mermaids lounging on the coasts, and cold hands
that could touch you in the dark, believed to be those of souls wandering
through purgatory. The mists always seemed to be full of such spirits; and
though I never saw them, the unseen was a great power in our lives; and their
silent presence turned my childhood into a dark and mysterious ecstasy.

“Galicia is matriarchal. Women have a strong position in marriage,
business and family life there. Franco was from Galicia, and I think that his
dictatorship was so oppressive to women because he had seen evidence of their
power and greatly feared it. I grew up well-loved by my mother and grandmother,
though my father died early, and I have often felt there is a deep mystery in
my life as a doctor, attempting to heal in a world of birth, disease and death;
and its paradoxical beginning in a child’s ecstasy in the presence of love,
looking into the mists and forests for spirits that inhabit a universe of
strangeness and beauty. The only conclusion I can draw is that love and the
freedom to imagine may be the finest natural armor in fighting disease, or
indeed in pursuing any other difficult mission.

“You see, both my mother and grandmother were meigas, good witches
practicing herbal remedies for the villagers in addition to their other work.
Much of the region’s folklore concerns the curing of disease. Our local saint,
Santa Marta, was believed to cure illness above all else and participated in
Christ’s miraculous bringing of her brother, Lazarus, back from the dead. On
our living-room mantle were stones from my grandmother’s village of Muxia on
the coast, believed to be the petrified remains of a schooner sailed by the
Virgin Mary and to have magical curative powers.

“We were neither rich nor poor; we worked on our small farm that
grew grapes for Galician wine as well as some maize and grain. Our house was
very large, since it incorporated a store in which we stored and sold our
grain; on our roof was a cross to protect us from all of those mysterious
spirits in the misty forests. Our lives were, however, far more comfortable and
prosperous than my grandmother’s had been. Her home village of Muxia is on the
bleak coastline of Northern Spain, where she worked as part of a women’s gang
who brought seafood to market in backbreaking labor. They kept rows of rafts on
the coastline that had hanging rope cords to which clams, oysters, mussels,
scallops, cockles and winkles attached themselves. My grandmother wore high
boots, walked out to the rafts, and carried back buckets of sea creatures when
the tide ran out. She had constantly to bend double over her work, and her back
was wracked with painful arthritis in old age. She lived with us then, since
her pain and frailty would otherwise have overwhelmed her. Though her back was
terribly bent, her eyes were a gleaming black, quick and alert. She told
marvelous stories and was always said to be a powerful meiga.

“I was an excellent student, and it seemed natural to me to be a
meiga of the modern world. I entered medical school, and when I left Santa
Marta, my mother packed several of our stones from Muxia so that my study would
be blessed by direct remnants of the Virgin Mary. My mother was and is fiercely
proud of me. When I graduated and received my license to practice, she
celebrated my achievement by performing the village’s annual religious ritual
in the fiesta of the Church of Santa Marta de Ribartene, whose participants
gave thanks for cures of their illnesses during the year. The ritual begins in the
church and turns into a procession of open coffins containing each villager
celebrating a cure. My mother was one of them, though she was celebrating my
becoming a doctor and a modern meiga and not the cure of a disease.

“She wore the traditional white tunic of netting in which a corpse
was wrapped, and she carried an immense religious candle. In the church, she
stood beside the other villagers who burned a wax model of the body part that
had been cured. But, she carried only a photo of me as her candle burned
brightly in the summer heat. As the others touched their handkerchiefs to the
statue of Santa Marta and then to their own faces, my mother did so as well,
also touching the handkerchief to my face in the photo. No one but my
grandmother knew that she was celebrating my graduation and licensing as a
doctor and not a cure, but we felt a great satisfaction in her performance of
the rite. It seemed to us that we were honoring the ancient spirits of our
village and the meigas that had gone before us.

“I have two photos of my mother, both taken that day by my
grandmother. In one, she is smiling in her netting beside her coffin, the
candle in hand and burning. The other shows her coffin being carried by the
procession out of the church. Just for me, she sat up, smiling, in the coffin
and touched her handkerchief to my photo so that I could see her according me
the honor of Santa Marta’s power to cure disease. I always carry these two
photos of my mother, since they are part of my spirit manifesting itself in my
work.”

The pediatrician gave the two photos to the group of women, and
they were passed around. The women saw a small plump woman, very dark, with a
huge smile, standing beside her coffin and then another shot of her sitting up,
with a smile even more brilliant, in her coffin that was carried on the
shoulders of the village men, displaying the photo of her daughter touched by a
handkerchief that was blessed by the saint. Yes, they thought, this is a mother
of fierce pride; and even from her coffin, she exudes joy and pride to her
daughter who had become a doctor and thus the most powerful meiga of all the
women in her family line.

Espana profundo, they call it, Sylvie thought. I see her at the
portal between birth, life and death, healing with her heart as well as her
science, a shaman more than a witch, a traveler between worlds, like an artist.
For her, it is a misty forest, a rocky coastline, and the love of her mothers,
both physical and spiritual. There she stands, extending her hands that can
heal, and they touch a newborn child, a proud new mother, the cold hand of a
sufferer in purgatory, the tongue and breath of a man-wolf, and the hands of
all the women healers who have gone before her. Who is she, then? She is a
doctor born of witches, working with her mind and dreaming with her ancient
spirits. Where does she go? Her path is that of the traveler of worlds; here a
misty forest, there a star and the sea, then back to the living and the dead.
Now the painting lives: The sky is the dark ecstasy of her childhood, clouds
and thunder over a dangerous coastline, shot through with the sacred light of
transformation. The colors are horizontal streams of white surrounded by hills
of pure sable, twinkling blue overhead, great chunks of gray, and a robe of purple
with fountains of orange in the center. Thus a meiga becomes a doctor; a mother
becomes a liberator. How well I know you both. Your spirits have spoken, and
that is how I must paint you.