By Liz Gallagher
Memory’s Unruly Nature
Deborah Levy’s quote on memory struck a chord in me: “As much as I try to make the past keep still and mind its manners, it moves and murmurs with me through every day.”
Memory is never as obedient as we’d like. It’s unwilling to sit quietly where we left it. Sometimes, it’s a comfort. Sometimes, it’s a house full of unreliable ghosts — frequently dramatic, often mischievous, mostly overstaying their welcome. They barge in, dragging with them old embarrassments and past loves. Grand events remain, but so too does that moment my swirly skirt slipped down to my ankles while entering work through the back door. Meanwhile, entire years of less eventful existence vanish like they were never there.
My father had the memory of an archivist, or perhaps a ghost-whisperer — calling forth names, dates, and long-lost details with the accuracy of a clockmaker — methodical, and slightly unsettling. He could summon the past as if it stood just beyond a thin veil. He carried the past for the rest of us, knowing that one day it would slip from our grasp. Without him, ghosts run riot. Facts are fuzzier. Timelines wobbly. There are gaps where his voice used to be, absences where whole stories of births, weddings, The Big Wind, the mundane, and the momentous, once stood.
The way my father’s memory zoomed out, holding entire decades, filled me with pride. He’d sit there, humbly grinning, his eyes drifting beyond the present, his fingers interlocking and unlocking, as though clicking puzzle pieces of the past back into place.
My earliest toddler memory is of reversing backwards and falling into a mop bucket of dirty water, while meaning to walk forward towards my mother’s outstretched arms. It exists as a slow-motion shot somewhere in the back of my head. Even the feeling of plop and yucky wetness is there, alongside the sounds of ooooh! and aaaah! and bubbles of unhinged laughter rising from the pits of stomachs of the adults present, which must have happened once I was safely out of the mop bucket. I, nor no one else present, can remember a single micro-second of afterwards, and what ensued.
Momentum & Change of Plans
I’ve always been a planner, a sort of ‘plotter,’ not in the underhand sense of a plotter, but in the way an astronomer might plot the stars, if the stars hadn’t already existed, and needed to exist.
When an email arrived that read like a telegram, it changed everything. My plans unraveled in an instant:
“Please don’t come to Southern India as planned. Stop. Heat is too much here. Stop. Sudden heat. Stop. We are asking all volunteers to postpone. Stop. We do not have enough water for the volunteers. Stop. Postpone till August. Stop. Sorry. Stop.”
The imaginary ‘stops’ inserted while reading helped me see the email for what it was — an urgent warning. My carefully laid plans were gone. The ‘stops’ kickstarted me into thinking on my feet.
I’d been due in Mumbai the following week. The pressing question was what do alone in stopover Mumbai?
My plan had been to fly in, and fly out, and not delay in any shape or form in Mumbai. Go South was the plan. Go South to Ayurvedic country. To hang out with an Ayurvedic doctor and his wife and pound herbs for them and wash beakers in their science lab. And greet patients coming for Ayurvedic herb-pounding treatments.
Google revealed Mumbai extremities—cinematic Mumbai experiences, hectic streets, swarming masses & sky-high prices. Avoiding loneliness in one of the most peopled places on earth came at a steep price.
The great stars above, and luck, drew around me. The whole Universe schemed to put a stop to my going to Mumbai.
The next day, a Jet Airways newsflash shot up on the TV screen announcing they were ceasing operations. When the stars gather, they sure know how to put their Galactic feet down to say “No!”
Meanwhile, a finger-click decision was needed. I didn’t want to dwell on, rule out, nor rule in, make lists, nor wonder about yes, no and maybes. I wanted a gut feeling. And I got it. That was how I found myself alone in Finisterre, sitting near the lighthouse, looking out to sea.
Arrival & The Pilgrim’s Edge
Finisterre—’the Edge of the Earth’—was not unfamiliar. Thirty years earlier, I had lived in Galicia, not far from here. And yet, arriving felt like stepping into something uncharted.
It was April. I was fresh out of an Irish winter. Fresh makes me sound like lettuce. Shiny and green. Lettuce sheds itself in careful layers. I, too, was shedding something. Though I wasn’t quite as fresh as a daisy…yet!
Daisies are said to be amongst the freshest and best-rested flowers. Come sunset, daises close their petals and open again, come morning. The daisy’s habit of opening their eyes during the day gave the flower its name — daeges eage, ‘day’s eye’.
A multitude of open daisies circled the lighthouse. Flags snapped in the wind, scuffed walking boots lay abandoned on the cliffs near the lighthouse, their pilgrim’s journey having reached a true end. The lighthouse wall bore messages scrawled to mark the end of the ‘camino’ — the pilgrim’s walk. Some were barely legible, two stood out — Spread Your Wings! Be Here Now! Nearby, names were etched sideways, defying order — Fraguas & Zanahorio. Fran. Burgos…
David Whyte, the poet, said that after finishing the walk, people go to Finesterre to eat scallops. Scallops symbolise absorbing one’s journey, internalising the experience in order to finish, or begin, a new experience.
Later that evening, in the Mirador restaurant, I ate scallops, oblivious to how the scallop’s adductor muscle once opened and closed the scallop’s shell to propel it through the North Atlantic.
No matter how ideal the scallop shell is to scoop water out of the fountains along the Camino, no matter how much the scallop shell resembles the setting sun, alongside resembling the protective curvature of the womb…the fact is, the scallop itself, like we, ourselves, is never still, reshaping with every movement, every detour, every change of heart.
With 200 brilliant blue eyes — the scallop doesn’t drift aimlessly; it watches, it waits, it plots. Some are hermaphrodites, putting the scallop in a different league entirely.
Scallops begin as planktonic wanderers, cut loose and free-swimming, then they settle down, latching, with silk-like threads onto the seafloor. Some can live up to 20 years — an amazing feat! I’d acted on my feet, in the land of free-swimming scallops, devoured by free-walking pilgrims.
Mysticism & Ritual
In Finisterre, the beat of an Easter Religious parade in the distance was deliberately mournful. Hooded figures in red robes, and men in white shirts, were putting one foot in front of the other, as they carried a throne bearing the weight of the Virgin Mary and Christ on their shoulders.
Their destination, and my destination, was A Galería Bar where we would drink queimada, a punch made from a spirit distilled from the rests of winemaking and flavoured with cloves, sugar, lemon and orange peel, cinnamon sticks and coffee beans.
A Galería bar owner, dressed as a wizard, was preparing the punch (queimada) inside a clay pot while reciting a spell to ward off evil spirits, and to confer special powers to the queimada, and to all drinking the queimada. He set the queimada alight, stirring it as it slowly burned. The people gathered around waiting for their bowls of the potion.
Settling into a quiet corner, I let the queimada and the atmosphere envelop me. The fiery potion was working its charm.
Where Ghosts Gather
Before dusk, small white boats of tourists would sail out to the horizon, advancing towards the setting sun, to a place where with one wrong move, a person could fall over the Earth’s edge and hang out with monsters, demons and ghosts of shipwrecked pirates and Napoleonic War heroes, and villains, alike.
Ghosts shift like loose snow in the wind, stacking up around us. Ghosts sometimes hang out above our heads, bitching over each other, until one day, we too become ghosts, blanketed in a hail of memory. If ghosts had been my thing back then, I would’ve had them there in spades.
Liz is Irish and works in Adult Education on Gran Canary Island, Spain. She’s a ‘wholeness’ coach and facilitator. She’s a published and prize-winning writer of short stories & poems. She also writes travel & wellness articles.
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