The SARAPHINA MOSEY Guest Writers Anthology

A Mosey on the Upper Duero River in Northern Spain

Written by R. Genn

On November the twenty-third I find the source of Rio Duero. It's a trickle, a sparkle of wet sunlight through a pine forest on the south slope of the Sierra de la Umbria, below the Picos de Urbion. The pass, directly above, and over which I've approached the spot, is 1758 meters in elevation and shrouded in clouds with occasional shards of light. There are glimpses of snowcapped peaks to the west. The streamlet Duero tumbles from sedimentary shelving across several meadows and into a narrow rocky defile above and past Duruelo de La Sierra where it's quickly joined by two other highland streams, the Triguera and the Lapadul. Below the village of Covaleda there is a steep and ancient bridge with a single Roman arch. A few kilometers further on I find the first attempt at control of the baby Duero. There are parts of an ancient flume, mossed over, long since abandoned, with a carved inscription like a tombstone, derelict locks, and rusted valves.

At the sunlit village of Salduero the Duero has entered a slightly wider valley and is graciously crossed by a multiple-arched bridge where an elderly Spaniard, humped like a Don in his greatcoat, watches the beginning river, while a bobbing bottle and a skein of white plastic circling like a dying fish moves under and out again on the other side. At Molinos de Duero there is the memory of mills. The river tumbles its hills, elbows its meadows and meanders its sheepy lowlands. Just before the village of Vinuesa there are the remains of a Roman bridge. One of its buttresses rests on a huge mid-stream boulder. The bridge is gray and perfect in the evening light, a blocky history lesson beside a modern bridge. All is silent on the high ground behind the bridge, and under the park-like pines in the nearby wood, it is as if legions had just marched.

Here the Duero slows its hurry and becomes greater in girth, and lazier. As if a river is a metaphor for something, a thing that, say, perhaps flows from smaller to greater, unlike, say, a thing that flows from greater to smaller. But there's a kind of altered vision here, a drunkenness of life, like these young Spaniards, students, man and woman, striding along with great black and red capes, their hair full of bull's ears; she, black legged; he, waving a thick leather thong.

There's a red faced, yellow-toothed shepherd in a blunt truck shunting his reluctant sheep between the high walls of a road on top of an abandoned hydro-electric dam. A costumed headwaiter of the river paradour stepping out and down onto the bottom step of the great curved frame of the doorway like a character in a Velasquez.

A toothless woman throwing open third-story shutters and wailing in Basque to some long lost love more fine in the imagination than the short, one-eyed, gray men who walk, pants-pressed, bowlegged, three abreast in the geriatric passao.

And the water is seeking somewhere always lower, bubbling, flowing, or lying apparently motionless with nowhere to go and nothing to do but hold up the trout for men in the guise of fishing.

In a dining room of an elegant Spanish paradour there is a woman, perhaps sixty years old, with a youthful fragile face and intelligent, transparent skin and a look away, a look away as if something is missed. Her eyes are soft blue, moist, and drifting with her look away. Her husband is at least seventy, with white hair standing up in memory, his glasses heavy and clouded like shells, his thick vernacular hands covering his aristocratic face. They tell each other that they are still interesting--and as she speaks, he listens--her whole body moves, her hands back and forth, in and out, clasped, unclasped, he's nodding, she's deadly fingered, suppliant, he's nodding earnestly.

The Maitre-d, loving his art, moves graciously for a man of large format, thoughtful, alert to the table needs of his client the Count, his friend. He gives special attention to his friend the Count and his friend's wife, the Countess. He helps their restless daughters into and out of their chairs. Then he boyishly steals for a minute a seat at his friend's great table, beside the Count, below the tapestry in the long renaissance room. The daughters dream and pay scant attention to the ritual. Wine is popped, sniffed, poured. Small wheels of escargot are turned and sampled.

The girl's eyes are full of horses. Young, cloven-hoofed men gallop down from the tapestry.

The river passes near the Palacio de Hurtada de Mendoza, a fine deed, deserted. Where have all the blood lines gone? The Palacio is lying low in the valley looking up at the remains of the castle of Hinojosa de la Sierra crowning the hill town beside it.

Garray is another sleepy town on a sleepy Sunday morning digesting its Saturday meal or privately pressing its pants. A priest waits in a doorway as if he has someone coming. A bowlegged man stares. A woman crosses over to the other side.

Numancia's a Roman ruin on a hill overlooking Garray. A few pillars and a cold dust blows for centuries from the freshly frosted hills. A man, not a Roman but a farmer, stands and stares, his legs wide apart as if he has always been there. His head moves slowly, watching the passage of the river.

At La Vid, below its ancient arch, another priest with a floppy black hat and a large widow-weeds cassock crosses, crossing himself. Pilgrims by the bus unload and gaggle--waiting for the portere to let them into the 16th century cloister. The sun glances the relief of the ancient arms. The impressive gate faces nowhere, and out in the freshly plowed field a pillory for heretics is currently not in use.

The river continues on into Portugal where little changes except its name, and that only slightly, from Duero to Duoro.