“What shall I bring you back from Cuba, Tia Marta?” laughed Rodrigo.
“Yourself,” snapped the old woman, “with a grain of sense under your hair for something new.”
“And epaulets on my shoulders? I may return a general. Who knows?”
“Bah! Being a man I may come to be Pope. But many go out for wool and return shorn.”
Meanwhile Grandfather was strumming on his guitar and murmuring a riddle that neither of the children had heard before:
“An old woman gathering fig upon fig,
Nor heeds whether moist or dry,
Soft or hard or little or big,
A basketful for the sky.”
Before they could ask the answer, their father was pointing out to them the lovely cluster of stars that we call the Pleiades.
“Those are what shepherds know as the Seven Little Nanny Goats,” he said, “and that long river of twinkling light you see across the sky”—designating the Milky Way—“is the Road to Santiago. For Santiago, St. James the Apostle, was the Guardian Saint of all Spain in the centuries when the Moors and Christians were at war in the Peninsula, and the story goes that in one desperate battle, at sunrise, when the Christian cause was all but lost, there appeared at the head of their ranks an unknown knight gleaming in silver armor, as if he had ridden right out of the dawn, waving a snow-white banner stamped with a crimson cross. He charged full on the infidel army, his sword flashing through the air with such lightning force that his fierce white steed trampled the turbaned heads like pebbles beneath his hoofs. This was St. James—so the legend says—and from that time on he led the Christian hosts till the Moors were driven back to Africa. And up in Galicia, in the city of Santiago, where your Aunt Barbara lives, is his famous shrine, to which pilgrims used to flock from all over Europe, and they looked up at the heavens as they trudged along and named that beautiful stream of stars the Road to Santiago.”
Now information is amusing in the morning, and pleasant enough in the middle of the afternoon, when one’s brain has been refreshed by the siesta, but after a long day of dancing, walking, guests and feasting, information is good for little but to put one to sleep. Pilarica did not awaken even enough to know when her father and Big Brother kissed her good-night, but Rafael questioned with an enormous gape:
“Was Santiago’s horse as good as Bavieca?” and then his blinking eyes shut tight without waiting for the answer.