Audio version

Location

In front of the current IES Rosalía de Castro, near the entrance to Paseo dos Leóns of the Alameda (map)

All the references we found on travel books consulted by Ruth have in common their male authorship: George Borrow, Richard Ford, Huntington, Aubrey Bell… What works by women could she consult? Focusing on those who publish in English and close to Ruth in time, there is, for example, the American Katharine Lee Bates, for whom Galicia is rustic, ignorant and superstitious, thus in keeping with the majority opinion of nineteenth-century visitors. A more favourable opinion is expressed by the British Annette Meakin in Galicia. The Switzerland of Spain, who, by the way, visits here the private collection of Ricardo Blanco-Cicerón, full of artistic and archaeological objects, with an extensive library and photographic archive. In Compostela, Blanco-Cicerón is the closest thing to a Huntington! (Although, in this case, collecting almost ruined Ricardo.) The British feminist Catherine Gasquoine Hartley highlights the beauty of Santiago, and the North American Hispanist Georgiana Goddard King visits with the photographer Edith H. Lowber in 1913 and 1916, with funding from the Hispanic, and she will publish a book about the Camino de Santiago.

That book by Georgiana is the guide Edith Wharton uses on her pilgrimages. She is the author of The Age of Innocence and the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. Edith did the Camino twice in the 1920s. In 1925, she also stayed at the Hotel Suízo, which was ‘Rough, but not too bad. Food fairly good’, although it is in September, when Ruth prepares the second expedition in New York and Alfred recovers in Nebraska.

Months before Edith’s arrival, we find Ruth on a sunny morning in the hotel room, talking to Concha, an employee who forgets to bring her sugar and a spoon with her breakfast: she is distracted thinking that ‘It’s Thursday, and my sweetheart is coming with cattle to the fair!’. Ruth and Alfred have been waiting for a Thursday without rain for weeks, so they leave early and find

‘pigs, calves, heifers, cows, and oxen, accompanied by horses, donkeys, and humans, were converging upon the oak groves of Santa Susana within the Herradura.’

This is when she takes a photograph looking towards the current Rosalía de Castro Secondary School, and says that

‘First came a platoon of young pigs lustrously pink-white, marching on long, ridiculous puppy legs. The platoon’s commanders were two countrywomen, one at each side, carrying leafy switches and sparing no time for nonsense from these pigs or any others, plus four men at the rear, trusting not to switches but to superior vocabularies. Grunting, squealing, the platoon passed by, and we turned to have a last view of tails screwed and unscrewed bobbing into the grove. Next came two larger pigs, each governed with a leash to the hind leg. When their mistress stropped to reach into a pocket under her blue cotton skirt, they made desperate, three-legged attempts to leave her. The leashes held, however, and with tails unwound the pigs advanced as and when she willed.’

Before chasing after the pigs, they portray women resting after walking many kilometres to come to the fair.

Let’s go to our last stop, Santa Susana.