The Sacred Beasts

by Bev Jafek

  “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.

  An intense silence had again fallen over the room, but every woman’s face was full of fascination. The unspoken question was present even more dramatically: who was she? Who was your mother? The women’s eyes passed from one woman to another. The next woman to speak was a senior in the university professor’s group, a political scientist.

  “My mother was a soldier for the anti-fascist resistance on the front lines during the Spanish Civil War. She was born in a province of Madrid, Villarejo de Salvanés. Her father was a toolmaker and owned a small shop. They weren’t rich, but they were never hungry, even during the war. My mother was barely into her teens when the war broke out, and she joined the young socialist’s alliance, hoping to fight like the men. When I was a child and my mother came to tell me a bedtime story, I always asked to hear about her life as a soldier. That was better than any fairytale to me, though I got excited rather than sleepy. My mother as a soldier fired my imagination, and I refused to hear about princesses, elves and magic toads. Consequently, I know a lot about that war.

  “My mother would never have been allowed to be a soldier but for the fact that she was in the socialist barracks when they were first fired on by the fascists. The men quickly showed her how to shoot a rifle, and she fired away. After that, she stayed with them as a soldier. Still, some of the men didn’t believe a woman was capable of being a soldier, and they gave her an assignment only given to the strongest men: the night watch on the front line parapet. You had to stand for more than eight hours, and everyone expected her to fail the first night. But, my mother knew she was being tested and was too proud to fail. She just shook herself whenever her eyes closed. She did it night after night, and she even gave an extra ten minutes sleep to her replacement, which no one else did.

  “The men were very impressed by this and gave her an even more dangerous job: she became a dy
namiter. The dynamiters worked in a small abandoned shack near the front lines. Their weapons were vastly inferior to those of the fascists. They had nothing but muskets and homemade bombs, not even a machine gun. So, they could only assemble their bombs using old condensed milk cans, into which they mixed nails, screws, bits of glass, used shrapnel and of course, dynamite. The director of the group was an old miner who was twenty years older than anyone else and had learned to use explosives in his many years of work in a mine.

  “One day, my mother was testing the fuses of the bombs to make sure they worked. It took incredible courage and nerves of steel. She had to squeeze the fuse with her thumbnail and then let the fuse out slowly as it burned, two fingers at a time. When there was just a fingernail left, you could throw it, no sooner. Throwing a bomb like that was more dangerous than being fired on, but it was all they had. That day, the bomb exploded in my mother’s hand, which was blown off entirely. Blood poured out of her wrist, and all the men fled in terror except the old miner. He had some presence of mind and pulled the straps from his sandals, making a tourniquet. Then he carried my mother to the road, where he flagged down a car and got her to the hospital.

  “My mother was too proud to die. She successfully battled gangrene and tetanus there and then was transferred to a hospital run by the Red Cross, where she recovered completely. One of the most famous poets of the time came to see her and wrote a poem praising her bravery, and her story was repeated throughout Spain. She was called Tomasita the Dynamiter for the rest of her life and though it impressed the men even more, my mother scorned their response to her fame. She knew the soldiers very well by then, and she always said that they fought the fascists by day and then went home and behaved just like fascists to their wives. She said all the women in the resistance found this to be true.

  “My mother could have stopped fighting then, since she no longer had a right hand, but she was too proud to give up. They gave her another very dangerous job: delivering mail to the front. It was more dangerous than fighting, because all the air and ground fire was aimed solely at things that moved. Well, that was my mother, delivering the mail. She was the only one not lying still with a gun. Once, the only way she could escape from a warplane was to hide under a blanket with four corpses. Still, the men thought the women were inferior, which enraged my mother. She always said that the women’s militias were as courageous and successful as the men’s were.

  “Finally, she was caught by the fascists and held for several years in six different prisons all over Spain. The circumstances of life there were so terrible that many women died and even more children did. But, my mother was too proud to die. There was mass starvation for all and torture for the majority of women, since they worked as clandestine agents. My mother had an advantage in having been a front-line soldier. She carried no secrets and could give them no information. Consequently, when she got out of jail, she was in better health than most of the other women.

  “After the war when she had me, she worked as an artist using her left hand. She lived in Madrid with her children and grandchildren for the rest of her life. She was too proud to die until the age of ninety-three. I remember when I first went off to the university: I saw my mother cry for the first time. She never cried when she was a soldier. But, she cried for me because they were tears of joy. She herself was illiterate, you see. She said the world had changed in so many ways that no one could have predicted, and that made her even more proud, since she had truly given her right hand for it.

  “Everyone always said that I’m a chip off the old block. I suppose it’s true, because sometimes I wonder when I will be humble enough to die. It won’t happen if I’m thinking about my mother the soldier and dynamiter, of whom I’m so very, very proud.”

  As another story finished, the women looked at one another with an increasingly intense curiosity and astonishment. In every mind, the same thought was working itself out: they had come to this house so many times and found excitement, delight, and enlightenment together; they had profoundly changed themselves and solved problems that had once seemed insurmountable. Yet incredibly, they had missed the heart of who they were: they were the daughters of these mothers. Finding Monserrat’s house had seemed partly a matter of luck, a development out of the many influences of a cosmopolitan city, even a matter of money, for everyone could see that Monserrat was wealthy. But, they were now convinced that it was much more than this. The house had not acted on them; it was they who had acted on it—the daughters of these mothers, these courageous, mysterious and magnificent mothers. It was their mothers who had lit the way to Monserrat’s door. Their daughters did not find it; they created it. They were the spirits of passion and play that haunted it. Now they would tell the stories of their mother’s lives; there was nothing more important. It was the heart of who they were.

  The room was silent again in awe. Then, slowly, the women began to look at one another’s faces in expectation again. Suddenly Alex coughed, and many eyes were upon her. Alex looked around desperately, blushed, and finally said, “Oh, no. Please! No. My mother was a pampered suburban housewife in America. She had the courage of a small rodent. You don’t want to hear about her, do you?”

  Everyone laughed and the room was animated again. A member of Mujeres Libres spoke up. “Compañera, we know you well. You are the only one who remembers all the words of our great women poets, who designs wonderful web sites, and who had the bad luck to be born in a crazy country. So, maybe your mother is crazy, too, but you are not. We know that. Just tell us about her.”

  “Oh, god,” said Alex. “My mother was and is no more than a housewife. She does things like going to a reading group once a month, having dinners and summer barbecues, tending her flower gardens and pulling weeds, doing flower arrangements with her friends who are all women, and stuff like that. I have no idea how they can stand each other; I would drop dead of boredom. She may not even go to a real reading group, because once it was held at our place and when I listened in, they were drinking wine and talking about oral sex. I guess the most unusual thing she does is exercising with her friends. They take bike rides in the countryside and sometimes stop at a tavern where they get seriously ripped and probably talk dirty. If she ever saw a women’s prison or a bomb, she’d scream. In fact, she’ll scream over nothing, basically. She once screamed when a light bulb blew out. She’s a wimp, but she’s my mother and I loved her terribly when I was a child. That’s really all there is.” By now, Alex had such a tragic expression on her face that everyone laughed again, including Sylvie.

  Then all eyes were on Sylvie, who only smiled. “Sure, I’ll tell you. My mother in Argentina isn’t any more interesting or courageous. She wanted to be a great artist and then just dropped it. She blew it, as far as I’m concerned. She was a well-kept housewife, and that’s what she sold out for. She screamed at the sight of a mouse. Once, she even screamed at a squirrel that accidentally ran into our house. It chased her all over the place and she screamed non-stop. That’s Mom.” Sylvie’s smile had a glint of defiance. Unlike Alex, she would never apologize.

  “It’s almost midnight,” someone said. The discussion broke up into smaller groups. The evening was ending, yet some women still sat, silent, aware that they had experienced a momentous event.

  A loud voice rose from the Mujeres Libres group. “Tomorrow night after the meetings, we should do this again. We’ll tell the story of our mothers, nothing else. OK?” There was suddenly cacophonous sound in the room, everyone agreeing at once. Yes! That’s what we want, they thought. Everyone started leaving, and Alex and Sylvie began to climb the stairs.

  “That’s one more thing we have in common,” Alex said. “Barcelona, older lovers, boring mothers, and out-of-this-world sex.”

  “That’s good enough for me,” Sylvie said, looking at Alex with a dazzling smile. It was after midnight, and her beauty was European again, Alex noted.

  RUTH AND MONSERRAT were up early driving to Cadaqués, both thinking, inev
itably, of the previous evening, full of the stories of mothers and daughters. “It’s a shame to leave that atmosphere,” Ruth said. “It’s becoming more festive now that Gay Pride Day is only two days off, and those stories about mothers are some of the most fascinating lives I’ve heard about here.”

  “We’ll only miss tonight,” Monserrat said. “The groups aren’t meeting for two days after that because a friend of mine who’s active in Basque politics will be staying at the house tomorrow night. We’ll have to cut our trip short so that I can return to see her. She has received constant death threats from ETA for her socialist views, and there have been many attempts to kill her. When she comes to Barcelona, she registers at a hotel, leaves by the rear exit, and then comes to our house, using a secret entrance my family built during the Spanish Civil War. We even have a lookout tower on the roof, and two women take turns during the night so that we know everything that’s going on in the street. She’s a wonderful person leading a strange and painful clandestine life, as you can see, and we do everything to keep her safe. Only a few women know that she stays with me. Not even Alex knows about it. It’s a closely kept secret since you never know who might have a tie to ETA. The real shame is that our trip will be so short. We’ll have to come back as soon as we can. The groups are also suspended on Gay Pride Day, since so many women will be celebrating all over the city. So, we’ll hear about mothers again on the night following Gay Pride Day.”