Porto Lúa

Porto Lúa

David Green

atmosphere press 2022

© 2022 David Green

Published by Atmosphere Press

Cover design by Ronaldo Alves

No part of this book may be reproduced without permission from the author except in brief quotations and in reviews. This is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to real places, persons, or events is entirely coincidental.

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Also by David Green

Atchley

The Garden of Love

gli uomini del mondo fanciullo, per natura, furono sublimi poeti

Vico

Centaury with your staunch bloom

you there alder beech you fern,

midsummer closeness my far home,

fresh traces of lost origin.

Paul Celan rendered by Geoffrey Hill

I was born in the Casa das Flores. Jasmine and wisteria were the elemental breath of my bed, and the sweetness of night I took for the scent of my mother. Sometimes I would waken to that scent thinking she was near only to discover I was alone and had to wait until morning before I could see her again. As I listened to closing doors and quiet conversations, I revisited the evening ritual of my exile where I kissed my father and grandparents goodnight, took my mother’s hand, and climbed the stairs to my room. She helped me undress and tucked me in and, when the night was mild, opened the windows before she left. The sea lay just beyond the roofs of the town, and I could hear the sound of waves washing over the pebble shore and feel the salt air enter my room, stirring my hair and cooling the linen sheet where I pressed my face. On clear summer nights, a glassy light of pale mauve lingered on the horizon, and, when stars emerged from the depths of the sky, deities of night rose from the darkened corners of the room. Following the shadow of the earth, they brought their forgeries of fear and desire to haunt my sinking consciousness and rule my restless sleep.

On those nights when I woke and lay unaware of the hour, I moved in and out of dreams like one making his way across tenebrous gulfs on vanishing islands of light. Sometimes, if the sky was clear, I would sit beneath the eastern window and gaze at the bright array of stars rising over the silhouette of the mountain behind our house like a city shining on the shore of a dark sea. Drawn by a desire to know what lay beyond the neighboring fields and wooded lanes, I imagined climbing the stone paths of the mountain to reach the stars and drift far from this world into the blue and white fires that burned like the dying love of ancestral souls—for even then I had some notion of the mysteries of the night. When clouds obscured the sky, I passed the time by naming the objects in my room, carefully recalling as many as I could to ensure their presence when the light returned, or by considering each unfamiliar sound in order to identify its source: the footsteps of a neighbor returning home or the branches of a tree brushing against the barn. And some nights, as I listened to drops of rain falling from the roof, I felt the bed and floor and ground give way beneath me as if I were falling down a well, rushing past layers of earth and stone, disappearing into the darkness, into the night of another world, through banks of clouds and mists of mountain forests, though shadows of valley depths, opening onto yet other worlds, blue tunnels beneath a sea of ice, white petals in a dark rain, elusive dreams in the fall of sleep.

The scented night, the whispers of the sea, give way to summer mornings: a basket of red geraniums, a whitewashed wall, a yellow strip of sunlight on a gray wooden floor. The air is cool from the chill of the sea, and through a window framed by jasmine, the sky is clear and blue. Beyond the garden wall, white smoke rises from a smoldering fire. Like incense on the moist air, it drifts through the garden where carmine bougainvillea and blue clematis contend for light. In the shadow of the barn, the mossy crust of a midden heap—ashes piled with dry ordure—is breached by blue thistles and bristling nettles. Blackberries and ivy grow along the walls, and yellow-tipped fennel surrounds the pillars of a stone granary crowned with a finial on one end and a cross on the other—hedging our bets with the harvest gods. Lined with burdock and alder trees, the lane behind the house borders dry-stone walls centuries old that climb the slopes of Mount Aracelo, enclosing a legacy of ruin and misery. Thin lines rising for hundreds of yards, they reach as far as the granite boulders that mark the edge of a forest called Caos.

As the sun clears the mountain, it first strikes the clouds above the sea, then the orange roofs of Porto Lúa and the tallest trees in the alameda, and finally the narrow lanes leading down to the quay. Paving stones shimmer with soapy water tossed from stoops, and on cool mornings, steam rises above the reflections of sunlight. As the air warms, it yields its odors of moss and stony must, urine and bleach. In the port where father anchors his boat, gulls skid sideways on the wind, as if glancing off a solid sky. Others roost on the masts of red and green and blue boats that rock back and forth with the swells. On the quay women wearing straw hats are repairing nets and stacking lobster traps to dry in the sun. The motor of a fishing boat, the barking of a dog, and the bells of Nosa Señora do Mar fade into the blue sky overhead. While father speaks to his friends on the launch, I sit between two iron rings on the edge of the quay hanging my feet over the water, framing the reflections of clouds between them. Below me bright green beards of algae cling to the granite blocks of the wall. Half-hearted waves roll in lazily from the open water and gently slap the stones. A few dead hake are lying broadside, flashing silver in the sun, while cockles, sand, and shingle stones shift in the currents, and the tentacles of anemones rise swirling like the arms of dancing maenads.

On afternoons in midsummer, clouds gather and move up the coast on the southern breeze. Boiling slowly in the distant heat, they darken the silver water of the bay with blue shadows. Strengthening winds chafe the surface of the sea as fishermen take in their sails. Honeysuckle and wild roses hanging over the walls in back lanes and alleyways sway abruptly, fitfully. Shutters bang in the street. Suddenly rain hits the windows like a spray of pebbles. And stops. And starts again. Glass panes tremble in the wind. Doors rattle at their latches. In the street, damp gusts stir the dust and sand as raindrops patter flatly on the stone. Soon the roofs of houses are wet in the rush of rain passing with the freshened scent of earth and stone. People stand in doorways as the eaves shed beaded curtains of runoff that pours into the streets and descends the slopes in liquid fans. Within minutes the storm passes, and the clouds break up in wraith-like dissolution, exposing the blue sky beyond. The arms of women swing open a series of shutters, and granite outcrops on the mountain gleam in the sunlight.

There were three houses beyond ours in Rúa dos Loureiros, and for many years the street ended in a muddy lane that wound through a thicket of broom toward a fragrant pasture called Campo da Graza. Like the other houses, ours was separated from the street by a dry-stone wall of brown schist. A small wooden gate opened into the front yard where the walk was bordered on both sides by violet buddleia and pink and white roses. My great-grandfather had planted four camellias in the yard, two on each side of the walk, and privet hedges marked the end of our property to the north and south. The only other trees were a large palm that towered over the street and an old fig that grew beside the kitchen window. Next to it was a rain barrel where grandmother would draw a bucket of water in the morning to wash her face. She believed there was no time in heaven, and if she washed with rainwater, the aging of her skin would slow. The house was built of fitted granite stones embossed with gray and yellow lichens. Beside the door, white tiles with blue letters spelled Casa das Flores. To the right was a large kitchen. Against the facing wall was a black iron stove with brass hinges and handles, a sink cut from granite, and a sideboard where we kept the Pickman china salvaged from the John Tennant. At the back of the kitchen, separated by a half wall, was a storage area where there was a tall wooden cabinet and a zinc tub for baths and washing clothes. The room to the left of the front door had once been the stable, but for as long as I could remember had housed old barrels, a broken windlass, a wooden plow, the wheels and tongue of an oxcart, tin lanterns, and some old netting and rope. Everything was covered by a layer of dust older than I was.

The stairs to the second floor were worn by generations of boots and pocked by woodworms. As they rose, they narrowed, and each was a little higher than the last. The walls were cold, chalky plaster bowed with age. On the second floor, a long hallway traversed the length of the house. There were four modest rooms. Those of my parents and grandparents were in the front, and my room and a guest room were in the back. At both ends of the hall was a small window and a flowering plant on a pedestal table. On the wall between my room and the guest room was a silver mirror that had been draped with black linen since the death of my great-grandmother. On the opposite wall was a photograph of my great-grandparents. Sepia-toned and cracked, they stood aging in their youth before long curtains printed with an oriental motif. In the bottom right-hand corner were the words Valmonde, Astorga. I never discovered what they were doing there. Perhaps it was their honeymoon. Next to the photograph was a framed telegram dated September 26, 1917, reading, Got drunk. Not Drowned. As a young man, grandfather had boarded a steamship in Coruña to look for work in America. The day after he arrived in Havana, he was booked to take another ship to Buenos Aires, but that night he got drunk and missed his departure. The ship went down in a hurricane off the coast of Cuba. From the southern side of my room, I could look down the coast and see part of the harbor and Illa da Luz, but I preferred the rooms on the western side of the house where full-length doors opened onto the balcony, and evening light entered soft and warm like the touch of grandmother’s hands. The window frames were painted blue to guard against witches, and there were small holes in the mortar that opened to spaces in the walls where bees could build their hives. Trap doors in the bedrooms allowed us to harvest the honey, and being stung was a small price to pay for the sweet brown liquid.

In the sullen, persistent rains of late winter, father shoveled loads of straw and dung over the thin soil of the fields to sooth the wounds of the plow and produce our meager harvests of corn, kale, potatoes, and wheat, which we ground in a watermill on the river and sewed in meal bags that hung from the storeroom ceiling. On the southern edge of the property were two small orchards, one of orange and lemon trees, and one of apples. Running between them were several rows of grapevines supported by heavy wires resting on granite posts.

We had chickens for eggs, an ox to pull the hay cart, and two donkeys in a small field behind the barn. And every spring we bought a young pig and raised it as a member of the family. Our neighbors to the south named theirs after the great philosophers and those across the street after the Bourbon kings, but we adhered to no particular theme. At the end of the year, it was customary for the men in the neighborhood to gather at each house to slaughter that family’s animal. For two weeks during the waxing moon of November, one could hear the squeals of death on the street as first one house and then another dispatched its family pet. And for those two weeks, one might hear a neighbor calling out Democritus or Alfonso and see a fugitive pig trotting down the street after a daring escape involving injury and profanity. But it was a short reprieve.

We hung the carcasses from a granite post in the garden to drain the blood and preserve the meat. Then mother and grandmother separated the cuts to make chitterlings, bacon, serrano, fried rind, and lard, which was used for both cooking and soap. Over the winter months and into spring, we consumed the flesh and several organs, but saved the bladder, which was dried and used to store olive oil. Because of its central role in the economy of our family, the health of the pig was of critical importance and a topic of conversation second only to the weather. One year a creature named Romeo grew ill and died from an undetermined cause. Whether the result of enchantment or disease, its demise had been puzzling and gruesome, and the animal was therefore unfit for consumption. We buried it quickly and relied on a diet of fish and vegetables through the winter and spring.

Though we produced most of our own food, the money we needed to buy tools, household goods, and clothes came from the sardines and mackerel that father caught. At first light, summer or winter, he sailed out beyond the cape and returned later in the day with his catch packed in wooden crates of ice. Before coming home, he carted them across the quay to the market where mother sold them in a stall we rented from the town. Dating from the end of the nineteenth century, the building resembled a church with a peaked tile roof, clerestory windows, and large, trefoil openings at both ends where sparrows flew in and out. There was one long corridor with stalls on both sides. On one end, the women sold produce, cheese, and meat. The rest sold fish and shellfish. They were dour creatures for the most part who wore white aprons, rubber gloves, and nets to cover their hair. They watched the shoppers with discerning eyes and shouted their specials of the day in cadences approaching song. A stall consisted of a space roughly eight feet wide and ten feet deep fronted by a slightly tilted granite slab with a ridge at the lower end and a small hole where the ice melt and blood ran out onto the cobbled paving. As lobsters stretched their legs in a slow dance of death, mackerel, hake, sea bass, congers, sardines, white tuna, and shrimp lay in a glittering landscape of crushed ice staring vacantly with their black button eyes upward at the hell of air that poisoned them with emptiness. When a customer decided on a particular fish, mother cut off its head, slit its belly, and dug out its guts with the precision of a surgeon. Scales that had once reflected the dim light of ocean depths covered everything, and the odor of the sea, born in those depths, clung to shoes and clothes, satchels and hands.

While my parents were working, grandmother kept the house and garden: she washed the clothes and cooked and made jam, and several times a week met with the ladies of the lacemakers’ guild in an old chocolate factory. Built by a Colombian immigrant in the 1890s, the building was a large room with pebbled windows, a pressed tin ceiling, and green wooden doors. I spent many afternoons there sitting on a wooden bench beneath a glowing light bulb listening to gossip and inhaling the odor of waxed tiles as the bobbins clacked. My grandfather’s principal occupation was sitting in the shade of a chestnut tree smoking cigarettes. Sometimes, when it wasn’t too hot or too cold or too wet, he tucked his pant legs into a pair of boots and took a hoe to the vegetable garden behind the house. After scraping the earth a few times, he would complain about his back and seek the shelter of the chestnut. If I was around, he would direct me to pick up the loose stones in the yard and reward me with a spoonful of honey on a wedge of bread. When he was feeling particularly good, the two of us would gather firewood on the mountain or harness the ox and haul seaweed up from the beach. And when I was a little older, he showed me how to make salmon putchers from willow branches and where to place them on the river.

At this time in my life, the mountain, like the clouds that stretched across the western horizon, was a place of enchantment. In the afternoon sun, the sea-mist turned its peaks into a fabled land far from the cold fields and damp stones of our few acres. Bathed in that light and creased with shadows, its colors changing as quickly as emotions, the granite massif was like a living presence in our lives. It was our ancestral home and our history, and for generations it had protected us from the rest of the world, but at the same time, it had blocked our horizons to the east and pressed us to survive on the shores of an unpredictable sea. We called the two peaks on the summit the portals of heaven. Between them lie the ruins of Onde se Adora and the headwaters of the Deva, a mountain river that rushes to the sea through a deep canyon cut in the pink granite. Listening to these waters cascading down the valley, Roman slaves shifted boulders to build a road through forests of oak and pine in order to extend an empire to the edge of the world. Before the Romans, the Phoenicians came up from the south on African breezes, and the Celts came down from the north beneath rays of stormy light. And before them were the twilight people, mystics and saints of forgotten faiths, who sought the western shores in order to know the infinite in this life. They followed the stars over mountains and plains and wasteland moors in order to worship the setting sun. Some returned to their homes dreaming of paradise. Some died along the way and were buried in granite cairns with their halberds and daggers. And some stayed to farm the slopes of the mountain and fish the sea.

My mother’s side of the family came from Casa Sagrada, a village on the northern face of the mountain below the summit where there is a cave associated with the birth of Santa Lupa. Most of the houses in the village have been abandoned, but once a year people return to celebrate the saint and leave offerings of flowers and candles. My father’s family came from Lonxe do Sol. Although people there share our name, we have lived in Porto Lúa for four generations. The village rests on a rocky outcrop in the gorge of the Deva where the air is filled with a perpetual mist, and because the light is indirect for much of the year, there is a sense of being in a place outside time. Like my family, most of the people in Porto Lúa came from the mountain, and even the name of the town is thought to have originated there.

Before I was old enough to have any idea of the world at large, father decided he and I would climb the mountain so I could learn the ways of the past.

At his age he won’t remember anything, mother said.

He will, father replied.

He won’t. He’s too young.

But believing I was more impressionable at an early age, father was not to be deterred. So on a spring morning when the shadow of the mountain was still on the sea, we set out along the cart path behind our house provisioned with warm blankets and enough food for three days. As we approached the Deva, we turned left onto the Roman road and began to climb its crooked bed of stones rutted by the ironshod wheels of oxcarts. In places our progress was partially impeded by rocks that had tumbled down from the earthen embankments where the roots of pine saplings and clumps of gorse clung to thin soil. During heavy rains, parts of the road had become a channel for the water that coursed down the slope piling up dead leaves and pine needles and depositing a powdery mica sand in the natural craters and cups of stone before merging with one of the several streams that crossed the road and dropped into the gorge of the Deva. As we passed through tunnels of overhanging trees, the air was cool and seasoned with the odors of pine and moss. Every now and then we turned to look down at the sea and fields below us but didn’t stop until we came to a clearing where a stream ran alongside a group of boulders. We drank from a shallow pool, and I filled the bottle I carried in a bag over my shoulder. In the shade beside the stream, we ate a lunch of broiled sardines and apples and then climbed the boulders for a view of the coast. The wind was blowing hard, and far out at sea passing clouds left indigo shadows on the sparkling surface. In a glance we could see all the world I had ever known. Among the tesserae of walled fields, father pointed out landmarks and geographical features. After identifying a large expanse of brilliant green as Campo da Graza, we found our street and house, and then Nosa Señora do Mar, the alameda, and the market. On the headland, we located the lighthouse and beyond that, faintly through the sea-mist, the gray silhouette of Illa da Luz.

After eating, we continued through the oak and pine forest above the Deva, but hadn’t gone far when we came upon two old women dressed in black walking down the mountain toward us. They told us they had come from a village near Santiago and had been traveling for five days. They were taking the souls of their late husbands to Porto Lúa, they said. Father gave them some bread and a few pesetas and wrote down the name of the street where they might find accommodations. They called upon God to bless us and proceeded on their way.

We left the Roman road late in the afternoon as sunlight poured through the forest in bright yellow rays and made our way along a path cut from a granite cliff toward Lonxe do Sol. Two hundred feet below us, the rushing waters of the Deva echoed off the walls of the gorge to drown out the sound of the wind in the trees. In places, the trail was overgrown with gorse and ferns, brambles and broom, and winter rains had washed out stones along the edge of the precipice and brought down others from above, making the passage more dangerous than father had remembered. At that time, Lonxe do Sol was a village of two dozen houses clinging to a pier of granite that jutted into the mists of the canyon. Its location must have been chosen for defensive purposes in the past as there were few natural amenities, and the air was cold and damp as the winds rising from the sea condensed into a rolling fog just below the houses. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the place was the pink granite of the valley that created a pale aura of light in the swirling mists and the white smoke that rose from several chimneys. We walked down a muddy street littered with straw and manure as dogs, like the companions of Cerberus, barked from the darkness of sheds and stone barns. Father knocked on the door of the last house and called for my grandfather’s cousin. An old woman across the street leaned out her door to inform us the man was dead, but his son was working in the fields near the church. She spoke in a way that was difficult for me to understand, and I was surprised when father answered her in the same way.

We returned to the entrance of the village, but rather than go back the way we had come, we took a path that led north across a fertile plain where the residents of Lonxe farmed dozens of small plots of potatoes, corn, and kale enclosed by stone walls. Outside the walls, grazing in an open pasture, were herds of goats and sheep. We found Xosé, the son of grandfather’s cousin, plowing one of the fields behind a large black ox. He stopped working and greeted father by his name. They spoke about his father’s death and the old family house, and then we crossed the Roman road to a small church surrounded by a grove of oak trees. Xosé pointed out several stones in the yard inscribed with the name of our family. One rested at the head of the man we had come to see. The mound of earth was still fresh, and flowers lay scattered here and there around the grave. As they conversed about our relatives, we walked down to the edge of the cemetery where a stream had washed away a grave whose headstone lay half submerged in the roots of a white willow. Another, from the distant past, had been used in the foundation of the church. Over time, fieldstones had become headstones, and headstones had become hearthstones or found their way into the walls and floors of houses as the monuments of the dead provided shelter for the living. The unadorned church had a low-pitched gable roof and an obelisk finial at its peak rather than a cross. Inside, the air was close and musty. There were no benches and the walls and floor were cold stone. I imagined my ancestors kneeling on that floor praying for their simple needs.

We said goodbye to Xosé as it began to grow dark and continued up through the oaks in a gathering fog. Not far from the church, standing in a yard uncluttered by human activity, was an isolated stone house. Father opened the wooden door with a brass key and lit a candle as we entered. The windows and roof were intact, but dampness and worms were working through the rafters that held the roof in place. I had a distinct feeling of having been there before. There was no furniture, so we rested our bags on the floor beside a granite hearth in the kitchen and started a fire. As the stone walls began to warm, we walked through the rest of the house. There were six rooms altogether, and though moisture had taken its toll on much of the wood and plaster, the floor was mostly solid, and there was still a hand-carved banister going up the stairs. On the second floor, we found an antique cradle and hand-painted porcelain bowls from a shipwreck.

My grandfather’s grandfather built this house by hand.

That was a long time ago.

Your family lived in this village for many years before that. Your great-grandfather was born here in the room above the kitchen. When I was your age, my father brought me here. At that time his aunt was living in the house. When she died, it was abandoned, and the trees grew up in the yard. Before that, you could see much of the coast from here and Illa da Luz.

I tried to picture the man who had built these walls, who had gathered the stones and fitted them. Who had cut and milled the wood to build the floors and stairs and ceilings. People had been born in this house, and they had died in this house. And now there was no one left to maintain it. Slowly it would return to the earth. The stones would disperse as they fell, and the wood would rot, and one day a patch of ivy would be all that was left to mark the site. We went outside and sat on the threshing floor under rusting arbor wires and grapevines that had run wild. The fog had cleared, and the stars shone like glassy grains of sand in a black stream. They seemed brighter than they appeared at home, and I wondered how close they were. We ate the rolls we had brought with us thickly spread with lard and drank the water I had collected from the stream. In the starlight, the remnants of a wall that had once enclosed the yard resembled a jawbone of broken teeth. Father reached over and picked up a handful of dirt and let it run through his fingers.

This was once the garden that fed your family. Remember this. Remember everything you see because one day you’ll be the only one who does.

I will.

That night we slept on the floor of the room where great-grandfather had been born. Winds from far off over the sea shook the casements on their hinges, and the floor creaked as the kitchen below it cooled. The house seemed to breathe the night air with lungs of damp stone. As I lay between sleep and wakefulness, I saw my ancestors walking through the rooms and hallways as they did when they were still alive. Their faces were white like the moon, and their clothes were tattered like a bed of leaves. I wondered if they too had grieved over a dead pig. Then I heard a woman ask, Will he recognize us? Will he know who we are? I called out, yes, but she continued speaking as if I wasn’t there.

In the morning, heavy rain beat against the windows and filled the yard with standing water. As we waited for it to stop, father took me into the living room where the wooden floor was stained with rot, and cobwebs laden with dust canopied the corners of the ceiling. He slipped the blade of his pocketknife into a crack in the wall beside the fireplace and, with a back-and-forth motion of the blade, removed a chip of stone. From the hollow where the stone had been, he retrieved a small dark object, which he polished on his shirt and handed to me. I studied the smudge of metal carefully. It was a silver medallion. Years later I would learn its origin was Roman.

Your great-grandfather found this when he was digging in the garden. Put it in your pocket and fasten the button. Don’t lose it. There is no point in leaving it here.

When the rain stopped, silver shafts of light pierced the probing mists that rose among the trees. Scattered randomly across the yard, wild irises and daffodils bloomed purple and yellow against a gray and green background of stone and forest. As we returned to the road and continued our climb toward the summit, the clouds moved away to the north. The light seemed purer, the sky a deeper blue.

The morning air, stirred by the spring wind, carried the scent of vernal grass, of eucalyptus, of moss and wild onions. These distant, cloudy peaks were not as I had imagined them from our gardens and fields, but were rather a hard and rugged place where the gorse was thick and the mud was deep. When we stopped to rest, I watched the random play of sun and shadow in the pines and felt the fresh wind on my skin. Overhead, a green light shone through the new leaves of a horse chestnut where the delicate branches were like the leaden cames of a stained glass window, and for a moment I was in a sanctuary of light, a place sacred to the presiding spirits of the mountain.

At midday we reached Porto Ventoso where the road passes through a natural palisade of granite columns. At the entrance of the opening was a rusty iron gate that had been mortared into the rock decades, if not centuries, earlier to prevent people from reaching the summit. But one of its hinges was broken and someone had pulled it to one side. We passed through a narrow canyon of immense boulders and then through the rubble of three stone walls to enter the forest of Agro Vello. A cool wind rushed through the birches and acacias that were still dripping from the morning rain. Below them, the ground was covered by a gravel of pink granite, brown acacia leaves, mountain lilies, ferns, and wind flowers.

We emerged from the forest, still ascending, through a landscape of stone where only a few trees and bushes were able to withstand the Atlantic winds. The road finally leveled off in a saddle pass between the portals of heaven, two granite peaks hung with vines and small trees like the gardens of ancient temples. Where the road from the east first came within sight of the sea was a statue of St. Peter holding the keys of heaven, and at the foot of the northern portal were the ruins of Onde se Adora: broken outlines of foundations and piles of stone engulfed by ivy. On the edge of this ground, overlooking the Atlantic, was a tall monolith of smooth, pale granite known as A Noiva do Ceo. At the base of the stone, pilgrims had carved crosses to advance their passage to the next world, and on the flat stones around it were cupmarks where oils once burned to illuminate the path at night. Father explained that people used to come here every summer on the morning of the solstice because they believed the shadow of the stone pointed the way to paradise. We walked through a field of boulders to a granite ledge that looked over the top of a coniferous forest toward the sea. The sun had already passed into the western sky, and the wind was blowing hard enough to drive the hawks back that were hanging in the air overhead. From this height, Porto Lúa was a small cluster of orange roofs between the bay and the green fields surrounding the town. South, beyond the headland, the coast was visible past a series of capes interspersed with thin white beaches until it disappeared in the sea haze over the ría at Louro. The surface of the sea was as smooth as hammered tin, and reflected the sun with a dull shine. Like spilled cream thinning out across blue marble, high clouds extended toward the distant horizon at the edge of the world where to my imagination there was the promise of a place yet unknown.

We returned to the road and crossed a single-arch keystone bridge over a brackish slough where the headwaters of the Deva trickled through the bog grass and formed a narrow ravine that passed the southern portal and dropped into the gorge to the south. At the base of this peak, carved out of a natural cave, was a chapel so old that the cruciform figures etched on its walls in the distant past had largely been worn away by penitents touching them as relics. We entered a round door cut from the rock as a group of pilgrims dressed in black were coming out. Two women sat on a stone bench along a wall. One was holding a heather besom, and the other was resting with her eyes closed. They appeared to be waiting for us to leave. The altar was a narrow ledge of stone at the back of the cave where green algae covered the walls. In an alcove to the right were sarcophagi carved into the stone floor as if molded from soft mud. Candles were burning in small pots in niches along the wall. Father lit one at the request of grandmother, and we went back into the sunlight.

We left the road and followed a path along the stream as it cut a deep gash through the brown turf exposing the granite bedrock below. Spongy clumps of peat clung to the side of the gash staining the rocks with acidic runoff. As the stream descended, it gathered volume from small tributaries that seeped down through the rocks, and one could hear the low roar of a waterfall echoing off the cliffs of the deepening gorge. As we approached the level of the clouds, the wind subsided, and the blue smoke of burning wood rose to greet us. Cutting back and forth along the path, we reached a series of watermills and a small settlement of round stone buildings. In a field nearby were several horses and a dry-stone pen full of sheep. Several dogs lying in the grass outside the building where the fire was burning lifted their muzzles to sniff the air and barked a series of alerts. A short man with the shadow of a beard came out and quieted the dogs. He greeted father and shook his hand, studying it for a moment.

A fisherman.

Our people are from Lonxe.

Many people have left the mountain.

I brought the boy up to show him the old ways.

As the man looked at father’s hand, I looked at his. It was reddish-brown from the stain of blood, and his nails were purple. He invited us inside where we found several hunters smoking the carcasses of wild boars. Without rising from their rough stools, they nodded a greeting and offered father a cup of wine.

It’s strong enough to reveal the secrets of the earth, one of them said.

The walls of the building were blackened by generations of smoke, and the men seemed inured to its presence. The legs of the stools where they sat were fashioned from saplings, and the seats were woven from strips of bark. They were all older and worn by life. None had a complete set of teeth. They lived in a village on the eastern slope of the mountain, and because their ancestors had lived in Onde se Adora, they considered the summit of the mountain to be their home. Several times a year they brought their animals to graze in the high pastures and camped for a week or two to hunt while the women cleaned the chapel at Onde se Adora and tended the graves of their ancestors.

Father asked the man who had greeted us if he could tell us more about the history of the mountain and the local names of its landmarks. As the dogs ran before us, we walked back up to the path until we were once again above the clouds and crossed the ravine of the Deva to reach the edge of a cliff where we climbed a large boulder to survey the landscape without obstructions.

What is the name of the hollow below us? father asked.

That is called the pit of forgetfulness where people throw away the things that cause them sorrow. Like the possessions of the dead.

Pointing to little stone walls in the crevices of the southern portal where eons of heat and frost had split niches in the seams of rock, he asked, What are those walls for?

That’s where the bones of our ancestors are buried. They were put there so they wouldn’t pollute the fields.

Do you remember those times?

No, no. That was in the time of the Celts, he said, meaning pagans.

And the peak itself? What is it called?

It has many names.

What do people commonly call it?

Each calls it according to his own view of it. In truth, it changes with each name it is given. So I suggest you give it your own, and you will never fail to recognize it.

If we give places different names, how will we ever know we are talking about the same place?

How can we ever talk about the same place if it is always changing?

What do you call it?

I call it the southern port, but my wife calls it the port of the sun. Other people call it the gate of false dreams.

What about its counterpart across the way?

That’s the northern port, which my wife calls the port of the moon, or of true dreams. I knew a man once who called it the gate of Capricorn.

Why Capricorn?

Because the souls go up through Capricorn.

It was already early afternoon, and if we wanted to avoid spending the night on the summit, we needed to begin our journey down the mountain. When father asked the man if we could get to Lonxe do Sol without returning to Agro Vello, he told us to follow him back to the encampment where he showed us a trail through the trees that ran along the cliffs above the Deva. At this height, sheltered from the north wind and warmed by the sun, the southern face of the mountain was covered with heavy vegetation. The cool air that rose from the shadows of the canyon entered the forest in ghostly rags of fog, and for hundreds of yards, the path was like an underground passage through dense foliage, twisted black boughs, glistening ferns, and grasping tangles of briar. Fallen trees and boulders became banks of moss among bowers of ilex and ivy, and the living bark of oaks was encrusted with delicate fans of blue lichens. The roar of water falling below was more noticeable as we left the cover of the trees and looked out over the sheer walls of granite where pines and gorse were clinging precariously to narrow fissures in the stone. As we continued our descent and dropped into the shadow of the ridge on the other side of the valley, the air grew cooler. We reached Lonxe in daylight, and, after spending another night in the family house, arrived home late in the afternoon of the third day of our trip.

I returned tired and hungry, and my feet were battered and bleeding. Because mother viewed me as a willing accomplice to father’s adventure, and therefore deserving no sympathy, I was left in the care of grandmother who prepared a warm bath for me and a bowl of hot caldo. In the days immediately following our return, it rained incessantly, and in the semidarkness of those spring showers, when the morning light and the afternoon light were indistinguishable, I tried with little success to recall the faces of the men I had seen and the canyon walls and the stones of the forest path. At best these impressions were weak and fleeting like the reflections in windows we pass in the street. But when the sun returned, and the moisture in the air evaporated, and the gray stones of the walls and houses brightened, I began to dream in concert with the emergent light—waking dreams—memories conveyed on the warm spring air. I could see the kitchen in the house at Lonxe, the boars hanging in the dark hut, and the headstone half submerged among the roots. One morning as grandfather was smoking beneath the chestnut tree, I sat on the grass beside him and, looking up into the green canopy overhead, I lost any sense of where I was and returned to the sun shining through the leaves of the chestnut on the mountain. However insignificant such moments may seem, they have stayed with me and lent themselves to the character of my life. Not so much to the person I appear to be, but to the life that lies within.

Sometimes at night when I was unable to sleep, my thoughts turned to the lives of the people buried in the niches on the mountain and to my forbearers who had lived in the house in Lonxe. They were now somewhere in a place apart, somewhere I vaguely associated with the stars. One night I dreamt I was lying in the house at Lonxe when I heard the dull roar of fire. Following the sound, I opened the door to another room where blue flames swirled in the darkness and ghostly bodies flew back and forth seeking an opening into the night. I woke crying and was comforted by grandmother who sat with me until I could fall asleep again.

I have spent many nights in that house, she said.

Were you frightened?

No. It’s a good place. I was glad to be there. When I was first married to your grandfather, I used to load the oxcart with wooden crates of cockles and sardines wrapped in leaves of kale and drive it over the mountain. He had cousins living in the house then, and I would stop and spend the night with them. The next morning I set off for the villages to the east. The people of the interior were not fond of shellfish, but they ground up the cockles and spread the powder over their yards to strengthen the shells of their chickens. I did this because we needed the money. Sometimes when people couldn’t pay, I brought back tools or bags of wheat, which we sold in the market or to passing ships.

You weren’t afraid to be alone?

I was afraid of wild animals. But I was mostly afraid of the spirits who dwell in the forests and caves.

What would they do?

Well, they might wrap you up in a fog and cause you to lose your way.

Did that ever happen to you?

Oh, yes. Sometimes the clouds would close in, and you couldn’t see your own boots. And sometimes I encountered a wild pig or a vicious dog. But I had a conch shell I used to announce my presence in the villages, and if I ever had any trouble, I would blow on it. There were more people living on the mountain in those days and people traveling on foot, so sooner or later someone would hear me and come to help.

She was a small woman with gray and white hair pulled back in a bun, black eyebrows, and gentle, blue eyes. I told her about Xosé and the wild boars and the pilgrims we met, and asked her why there was a gate across the path at Porto Ventoso.

Many years ago the church tried to keep people from going to the summit by putting in that gate. There’s one on the eastern side too.

Why did they want to keep people from going to the summit?

Because of the old beliefs.

What kind of beliefs?

Things from the past.

Is that why we lit a candle?

Yes.

And that’s why there are pilgrims? And people buried on the mountain?

Many years ago when people lived on the summit of the mountain, the moon was much closer than it is today. Before crossing the western sky and descending beyond the horizon, it passed just above the portals of heaven. Its white mountain peaks stood out against the black sky like shards of broken porcelain, and it lit the earth with a soft milky light. It was so bright people could work in their fields at night, and sometimes they would see the dust of its cold plains falling over their houses and fields. Even today people believe that when a person dies, the next full moon receives his soul and carries it through the stars to the heaven of light. For thousands of years people have come to Porto Lúa so that when they die their souls will know the way to heaven.

As a result of the strenuous climb of the previous week or the subsequent cold rains, or both, I contracted an aggressive fever and chills. Doctor Romalde was called. He examined me carefully, poking at my gut and inspecting my tongue, and declared that I had a case of Chinese flu and should rest and drink plenty of water. Thinking the doctor might reconsider his diagnosis, mother asked how I could catch an illness from China when I had never left Porto Lúa.

It’s from pigs.

But our pig is from Curra.

Alarmed at the possibility of losing another pig, she lavished an inordinate amount of attention on the beast, which by all appearances was perfectly healthy, and the task of looking after me fell once again to grandmother who fed me cloves of raw garlic and applied a poultice of herbs to my forehead. When the fever and chills worsened, and I was passing in and out of consciousness, she appeared to doubt my recovery, and rather than reassure me that the illness would pass, tried to comfort me with descriptions of the world to come.

The souls of some children go to the eastern sky, she said, and the souls of others go to the western sky; the former dwell among fresh gardens and flowers and greet the rising sun, and the latter dwell at the edge of the stars where the setting sun fills them with nostalgia for all things past. To the north are empty plains of blue and to the south lies a green sea covered by soft white mists.

Where will I go?

You, child, have a western soul. You will dwell in the fading colors of the western sky.

How far is that from Porto Lúa?

Very, very far. Long ago, when people still worshipped on the mountain, a great king asked his advisors the same question, but none could answer him. So, seeking the burial place of the gods, he went to the sea and built a boat and set out to find evidence of their presence, the light they had left in their passing. He sailed farther than anyone had sailed before. To the south he saw the Hesperides hanging over their island paradise, and to the east, the moon rising over the dark land, carrying the souls of the dead. As he sailed on beneath the coursing dead, the sea filled with glowing forms of life and small white mountains of ice. Far from all that he had known, he continued westward through days of blue emptiness and nights of dark origins, seeking the land of the dead. A gentle wind from the east carried the boat over rolling swells and falling troughs until he reached the edge of time where he found the haunt of the old gods who lingered in the green and yellow dusk of their extinction. And then, passing through the final curtains of light, the king came to the realm of death. The sky was a pale gray, like an ancient wall of stone, and the ivory moon descended into the sea. The souls of children and kings, of mothers and saints, gathered over the dark water like white blossoms on a spring night. In the faint glow of the afterlight, he heard their sighs and whispers, and wept at the sight of so many faces. ‘Take us back to the sweet land of our birth,’ they said, ‘back beyond the river of forgetfulness where we left our lives in the dust.’ But there was nothing he could do. Their place had been appointed since birth. With the answer to his question, the king returned to his people, and since that time they have passed down his story and wondered at the beauty of the evening light and at all those souls languishing beyond the horizon yearning for their lives.

After the worst of the fever had passed and I was well enough to walk, grandmother took me to the tree of evil. One morning she waited at the top of the stairs until my mother and father had left the house, and then wrapped me in one of father’s old jackets and placed a leather cord bearing a small jet amulet around my neck. She took two clean white rags from a drawer in the kitchen, folded them neatly, and tucked them into the pocket of her overcoat. We went out in a soft rain and crossed the orchard to the gate in the far wall. Huddled beneath a black umbrella, we followed the same path I had taken with father down to the Deva and then turned left and climbed the slippery stones of the Roman road. The clouds brightened as the glancing rain slit the fog that bloomed cold and white among the pines and freshened the rugs of moss that covered stones and logs. As we went higher, the rain diminished, but the fog persisted, approaching and retreating, like a curious animal following our progress through the dripping woods. After climbing for more than an hour, we left the road and took a narrow path along a stream lined with ferns and brambles through an old growth of pine and eucalyptus trees.

I must have been quite feverish still because as we proceeded, I could sense the vital presence in everything I saw, and felt that it supported and sustained me, even welcomed me, not as in a dream, but in a more vivid reality. The light, the air, the sight and sound of every object provided a sense of comfort, assuring and complete. The drops of mist falling on twisted scraps of bark were articulate and clear, intent like a voice. Even the blue glimpsed briefly in the eastern sky seemed aware of my presence.

We passed through the woods to an open field where the bracken and calamint beside the stream had been pressed close to the ground. Spirit swept, grandmother said. They come at night to bathe in the water and leave before the dawn. Just beyond the point where two trees cross above the stream, a spring pours out of the rocks into a blue granite pool like the pure blood of the earth welling up from deep veins. Vapors rose over the surface of the pool the way steam rises over water about to boil, and through the heavy air, I saw a woman standing above us on a cliff.

There’s someone watching us, I said.

Grandmother glanced up at the woman. Mother Ambages. We’ll have good luck.

There were offerings of candles and carnations on the bank of the stream, and on the slope behind us was a laurel tree with dozens of white rags tied to its branches. As the wind stirred, the rags swayed with the rhythms of the air like a flock of white birds waiting for the fog to lift. Grandmother took the rags from her pocket and, leaning over the edge of the pool, soaked them in the water that came from the depths of the earth. She told me to take off my jacket and shirt and then she pressed one of the rags to my chest and one to my head. As I stood shivering in the cold, wet air, she rubbed the rags over me and uttered a strange prayer. I felt sacrificial, a small gift to an unknown god. Then she tied the rags to the tree. Over time they would disintegrate in the wind and rain, and, as they did, the darkness removed from my body would be dispersed up the slopes and into the sky or down through the valleys of the mountain—wherever the wind might carry it.

I was sick for another two weeks. To the point where mother was afraid I had pneumonia. But at least the evil was gone. When I finally recovered, I emerged from the dark agitation of my fever into the sunlight of warming days. But wherever I went, the thought of those rags still hanging on that tree worried me. Perhaps the malevolence might follow the streams of air that poured down over the rocks of the mountain and find me again. To take my mind off this fear, or perhaps because she shared it, grandmother asked me to accompany her to the headland to gather yellow blossoms of gorse to make her summer spirits. We crossed the Deva on the Roman bridge south of the quay and walked out a stone path through isolated fields of kale until we came to a wild terrain of the tough, spiny plants that grew where past fires had burnt a forest of pines and left a dusty, insipid soil. We pushed our way through the scrub that rose several feet above me picking the flowers from as high as we could reach and placing them in the cloth satchel grandmother carried over her shoulder. We did this every morning for a week, breathing the fresh sea air as we followed the paths of wild horses over worn ridges that crested like storm waves bearing a flotsam of yellow flowers. The vertical light of the noon sun seemed to darken the landscape with its intensity as we worked our way down to coves of riven granite where the foaming sea-wash boiled and the gorse grew with perverse tenacity.

After a night of heavy rain, grandmother declared the malevolence absterged from my body had been washed away, and I no longer needed to fear its presence. But I must still be wary of the mountain, she said, because of its power to alter our perceptions and make us the fools of its mysteries. She cautioned me not to stray too far up the slopes behind our house, but as children will, I wandered. Knowing nothing of boundaries, I explored back stables and kitchen gardens, fresh streams and forests, and the caves inhabited by shepherds and the mountain dwellers who sold wild berries and firewood in the market. Sometimes when the sun was low over the Atlantic and the crowns of trees were red above the haze like embers glowing in an ash pit, or when the grasses were silver in the moonlight and the song of the thrush poured out of the orchard, I felt I was no longer in this world, but had stumbled unexpectedly through an opening into those mysteries.

On the morning of Palm Sunday, grandmother removed a belt containing a sachet of elderflowers and a ribbon of cloth embroidered with the phrase qui in tribulatione salvus erit whose purpose was to guard against the maledictions of her enemies.

I won’t be needing this anymore.

Why not? I asked.

A light has entered my heart and replaced the world of things.

What kind of light?

"Last night I dreamt there were blackbirds in the fig tree discussing the nature of God’s kingdom. When I called to them, one of the birds flew down and perched on the window sill.

"‘How do you know these things?’ I asked.

"‘Because we fly into the light,’ it said. ‘People believe they are different because they build houses of stone, but they can’t fly, and they die like every other living thing.’

"‘Why are you here?’

"‘We come from your mother.’

"‘God rest her soul.’

‘She is waiting for you.’

Grandmother sat quietly during Mass wearing an expression of contentedness, thinking, no doubt, more about her conversation with the