The Sleepwalker

I was a child sleepwalker, as much an object of village suspicion and distrust as a black cat with intense yellow eyes or a woman picking herbs by moonlight.

Mother called on her favourite saints for help. Masses were said, candles lit, and a piglet raffled off for the church’s roof appeal. Then she appealed directly to Don Manuel, our grey-haired village priest. He recommended light dinners, special prayers, and rare scapulars for me to wear at night around my neck.

Grandma was next. On the advice of both Elvira, who was good with herb remedies, and the sacristan’s dark-eyed, toothless sister, who lived alone at the end of the village, Grandma cooked a concoction that no amount of honey could sweeten. The smell of it will forever remain in my memory.

I was feverish for several days. Grandpa was upset and told the women to go back to the stove and the thimble and the priest to go back to his church and leave the boy alone.

No one contradicted him, including my father. Even at the age of seventy-five Grandpa still had much energy, which quickly converted to fury when his authority was questioned.

A few months passed and it was time for the annual romería at Grandpa’s brother’s village, two hours’ walking distance from ours. For reasons that were obscure to me, contact between the two families was kept to a minimum. But the two brothers were close, and I liked going there. Some of my cousins were about my age, eleven, and fun to be with.

Grandpa and I left very early in the morning. The evening before, Mother had ironed two sets of clothes for me. I was to wear the Sunday clothes for the journey and in the house. My new shirt, shorts, socks and shoes were strictly for the Mass and the evening dance. She reminded me to chew my food properly and noiselessly with my mouth closed and to speak only when necessary.

Celestina, our mare, came with us, as always. Although she was very strong we rode her in turn. We took a shortcut up the narrow winding path of a steep hill, then down and across a deep gorge, thick with moss-covered paths, trees and silence. Then more hills and a fast-flowing river under a stone bridge built by the Romans two thousand years ago. It was spring and hot as though summer had come in early. I listened to the birdsong, watched bees in flowers. Grandpa pointed to a scurrying rabbit and the droppings of wolves threaded with wool that could not be digested. When a dog howled in a nearby village, Grandpa howled back.

He could distinguish the howl of a bored or a dying animal and could reproduce the calls of many animals and birds.

We stopped at an abandoned sawmill. Then we turned back and stopped again.

“Are we lost, Grandpa?”

“Sort of. I mean, we should have turned left after the milladoiro. We are not going to my brother’s house but to visit a friend of mine I have not seen for several years.”

“But why, Grandpa?”

“There is an old issue I have never mentioned to a living soul, a moment in my life that is forever echoing in my brain.”

“Like a secret, a bad secret?”

“Yes, like that. It was September 1930. Manuel, the man we are going to see, and I met in Pontevedra. We were both twenty. We had been called up for military service, a date in those days considered to be the crossing point from youth to manhood. We felt on top of the world. Can you imagine being away from village life, where each day is like the last, for one and half years? To see a bit of the world for once in our lifetime?

“We passed the health and intelligence checks on day one. We were rejected on day two because we were not tall enough to be soldiers. It was all over before it began. And so it was that two short men, sad and wounded, returned home even shorter. Do you understand what I mean?”

“That you were not good enough.”

“You got it right, my boy.”

We stopped at the top of a hill. I dismounted. Grandpa rolled a cigarette. Across the wide valley was Manuel’s village, sunlight glinting off its window panes.

“Anyway,” Grandpa said when we resumed walking, with me leading the mare by the reins, “the scheming of the women and the priest were getting to me. People with blind faith should not be trusted. But it was that nasty concoction they poured down your throat that made me see the connection between my military service and your sleepwalking. And a glimmer of hope for both of us, I should add.

“Manuel and I have met several times in the past fifty years, mostly at the ferias, but we never mention it. Then about a year ago I decided to act on his long-standing invitation to meet his family. It would give me a chance to talk about the military service humiliation, a personal issue I would very much like to come to terms with before I die.”

We walked for a while without speaking.

“When I was about fourteen or fifteen,” Grandpa resumed. “St Salustiano, the patron saint of a remote village on Lugo, gained a sudden reputation as a healer of everything that needed healing among those present on the last Sunday of May, the Saint’s Day.

“But if the morning had a religious theme, the evening entertainment turned into a carnival of sin. One year there was a knife fight, and a man was killed. The saint’s miracles were examined and deemed to be just an invention of the village innkeeper and his associates to draw people in. In any event, the church authorities quietly replaced St Salustiano with Our Lady of Sorrows as the village’s new patron saint.

“But the revelation came to me out of the blue about six months ago: the good saint and my good friend Manuel are both of the same village.

“For a while I was undecided. One part of me wanted to take this trip, while another part was saying to forget it. Then I asked myself, what if the saint were a true healer and his removal as the village patron was unjustified? And it is in this spirit that we shall ask him, respectfully, to help you with your sleepwalking.

“Now that you know the dual purpose of our trip, you can guess why I let them believe back home we were going to my brother’s place. It is by no means certain we will find what we both seek. Time alone will tell. In any case, it is an adventure for me, most likely my last, and something for you to remember me by.”

I wanted to say how excited I was and that I didn’t want him to speak about being old and dying, but I was unable to find the words for it.

We arrived at the house of Grandpa’s friend at noon. It was the last Sunday in May, the feast day of Our Lady of Sorrows. Many guests were already there for the two-day family reunion and romería. Grandpa was welcomed with much warmth by Manuel and his family, who knew of him but had never met him. My sleepwalking was discussed discreetly, and once again, I was placed under the supervision of women. I was instructed to wash my face and change my clothes. My hair was combed and my shoelaces redone, all with some urgency because it was time for High Mass and St Salustiano.

A tall, thin, white-haired woman dressed in black would temporarily replace my absent godmother and deliver the required supplication on my behalf. On the way to the church, which was at the other end of the village, she instructed me in slow and precise words in the process and the solemnity of the occasion. Devotion and concentration during Mass were essential.

The procession would follow Mass: St Salustiano, now relegated to second place, behind Our Lady of Sorrows, each on their individual platforms, dressed in their procession finery, and carried high on the shoulders of four men. I was to pass under the saint’s platform exactly six times, alternating from left to right and from right to left, as if tracing the line of a figure eight. I was not to stand in the way of the four pallbearers. Mistakes were not permitted.

The religious ceremonies were followed by lunch. I ate in the courtyard with a dozen boys and girls of various ages at a round stone table in the shade of an enormous fig tree. We were supervised by two older girls, maybe three or four years older than me. One ferried the food trays, and the other served. Both were very strict with manners. I thought Mother would like them. Some of my favourite dishes were there. Cakes too.

The afternoon was well advanced when we finished lunch. Some of us walked to a clear stream running at the bottom of the meadow near the house. The boy who had sat next to me at the table and I lay on our backs on the grassy slope, commenting on the fullness of our stomachs. Up above, scattered white clouds moved slowly across the sky. One passed over the sun.

A boy used a long stick to try to flush out the trout from their hiding places. Instead, a large green frog took to the air and landed on the head of a little girl, whose screams brought half a dozen adults running from the house. Their fears soon turned to laughter and then to anger towards all of us for allowing the little girl so close to the water. Then we were called for the family photo.

The sun had set behind the dark wooded hills, and it was time for the evening dance and fireworks. We boys took turns washing in the same large bathroom, with its coloured marble floor and walls. After I had changed into my best clothes again, an older girl I had not noticed before buttoned my shirt. Then she sprinkled my hair with nice-smelling water and mussed it gently and combed it back, but one of her cousins said I was too young for that style, and she mussed it again and combed it the way Mother did with a part on the side. All the while the sensation of her thin, long fingers on my scalp was new and exciting.

It was almost dark when cousins, aunts and uncles left for the field party in a nearby park. Huge oak trees were perfectly aligned no matter in which direction one looked. Two orchestras took turns on the stage. Clouds of orange dust rose and turned the air yellow above the hundreds of dancers whose feet and legs never tired.

The children were back home by eleven o’clock. There were more bodies than beds, and I slept with two other boys. I think the same arrangements applied to the adults, as I heard some friendly and funny remarks at breakfast, including one about a very serious-looking man who apparently had kept laughing in his sleep.

The children spent the morning searching for bird nests in the nearby woods. By the time we were back in the house it was time to wash and to change our clothes for the midday Mass. When someone suggested I should walk under the saint again, the tall, white-haired woman who acted as my absent godmother the previous day got very upset. “How dare you compare the saint’s abilities to a roofer who has to wait for rain to know his job is done,” she said.

In the afternoon, after lunch, we went to watch a game of football between the village team and a visiting one. The local priest was the referee. He was tall and young and ran well. But I think I heard him saying rude words more than once.

At the evening dance there was only one orchestra and less than half the number of dancers of the previous night. I was less shy and was able to learn some dancing steps without my palms sweating.

The remaining guests left after breakfast on the third day. While Grandpa and his friend Señor Manuel talked and smoked under the fig tree, Señor Manuel’s granddaughter, Ema, showed me around. We were both eleven years old, and she was also an only child. She had lovely green eyes. Her skin was pale, her hair the colour of hay and collected in two long braids. I would never forget that amazingly beautiful face, the most sublime thing I had ever seen. We had become instant friends two days earlier when, at the beginning of the procession, I became afraid, fear spreading fast from my legs to my brain, and she stepped beside me and took my hand and led me through the walking rituals.

There were large rooms and a kitchen on the ground floor, spacious bedrooms upstairs, heavy furniture. A small porch at the back, a larger one at the front. Meadows, fields of rye and corn, and groves of fruit trees surrounded the stone house and a small building nearby, once the chapel, now decommissioned and used for potato storage.

Afterwards we went to the dovecote, where little fuzzy birds were being fed by their parents. Ema was sad because her mother would soon cook them with rice and saffron for Sunday lunch. In a separate section in the stables half a dozen joyful baby lambs were only days away from being taken to the market, never to be seen again. Nearby, two-week-old brown calves, each with a white star between its eyes, tried to suck our fingers through the gaps between the planks of their pen. Attached to the rafters, the row of swallows’ nests would soon be refurbished by the little visitors from Africa. Eggs laid and hatched: near-naked babies going straight away to the school of flying so that the whole family could leave before winter.

We set out for home after lunch. Grandpa walked most of the way and was quieter than usual and I wondered if there was something wrong.

“Grandpa, you and Señor Manuel talked for a long time this morning.”

“He is a wise man, my boy.”

“And now you are wise too?”

“I don’t know about wise but certainly very happy.” A smile broke on his ancient face.

I do not know if there were expressions on my face. In my mind I was again with Ema. She was showing me her favourite bench in the shade of a cherry tree that she often shared with Sofia, one of the family dogs, and her favourite doll named Amelia, and her secret, a two-way traffic of tiny ants collecting the grains of sugar that she left for them behind a small potted plant on her bedroom windowsill. I would never see her again. Yet the memory of the magical and the exquisite calm I felt earlier in the day in her company, grandfather’s transformation, my release from sleepwalking, remain enduring mysteries in my life.

Notes:

Romería: popular festival of religious nature, similar to a fair or carnival.

Milladoiro: mound of small stones gathered over the centuries by pilgrims on the way to a religious sanctuary.

Feria: market days.