Chapter 8

Las Cepas, Asturias

April 1912

The rain poured and poured. Mercedes had not seen the sun in more than a week, nor Antonio for nearly a month. She despised this season of the deluges. This year the Semana Santa penitents got no respite from the raw weather. Spring refused to arrive. The cold, soggy, windy days stretched on and on. Mercedes’ mood matched the heavy skies.

There had been much discussion recently that the strike could be settled soon. She worried what that would mean for Antonio Rivas. The Real Compañía brought the Gallegos in to replace the striking Asturians. What would happen when the Asturian workers came back to the smelter? Neither her brother, nor anyone else she asked, seemed to know. Antonio Segundo would just shrug his shoulders and roll a cigarette when she asked his opinion. She loved him, but he could be a difficult man.

“Why are you sitting here, staring out the window?” María asked as she came into the little parlour. “You know it doesn’t help to ruminate when that darkness comes over you.”

“I know, María.”

“So why do you sit there, your hands unoccupied but your mind and spirit clearly burdened?” her sister-in-law asked.

“I’m just ready for the sun, and the blossoms of spring. This winter has dragged on for long enough.”

“It’s far better,” María said, placing a hand lightly on Mercedes’ shoulder, “to take each day as it is, and be thankful for it.”

“Mmmn,” Mercedes grunted.

“So what, other than the rain, is troubling you?”

“I don’t want to lose Antonio,” Mercedes said without shifting her gaze from the rain.

“Why should you lose him, rabbit? I know that he often keeps to himself, but why would you lose him?”

“It’s all this talk about the strike being settled,” Mercedes said. She turned from the window. “I can feel it, in my heart and in my stomach, that he’ll lose his job in the smelter, and then he’ll leave and go to America.”

“Or, perhaps, he’ll be glad, at last, to be rid of that miserable toiling at the retorts every day and join us here at Las Cepas. We could use a man around full time.”

“You know he’ll never do that,” Mercedes said dismissively.

María suspected this was true, though she did not want to admit it to herself, her always enthusiastic husband or her frequently melancholy sister-in-law.

“He hates farm life,” Mercedes continued, exasperated. “I can’t understand why he prefers the smelter work, and why he doesn’t want me or a family. But he doesn’t, and I should just accept it.”

“Oh, Mercedes, that’s putting it a bit strongly, don’t you think?” María said. “It’s simply part of the Gallego character. You know how they are, God love them. Constantly keeping one eye open for the chance they may miss and agonizingly slow ever to make a definitive decision about anything.”

Mercedes considered María’s observation. “Yes, I suppose,” she said. The cold rain beat against the window in waves with the gusts of wind. “It’s just so frustrating. After all these years alone, I have to go and fall in love with such a man.”

“But he’s a good man!” María insisted. “He is one of the gentlest, kindest men I’ve ever known. He’s been so much help around here when we needed him, and he’s such a pleasure to have at our table. And clearly, he is smitten with you.”

“But what good does that do me, if he never proposes marriage and is always looking out to the sea, as if something is out there waiting for him?”

For those questions, María had no good answer. “I believe Antonio came here for a reason, Mercedes. We may not comprehend at the moment what it is, but the two of you meeting when you did was not mere coincidence. Of that I’m certain. Have some faith, rabbit. It all will be clear in good time.”

“But I don’t want it to be clear in good time!” Mercedes said, rising in her chair. “I want to know it now! If Antonio is going, then I just want him to go. I’m tired of waiting and wishing!”

“I know, dear. I know,” María said. She reached over and patted Mercedes on the forearm. “But be patient for a short time longer. Antonio will have to make up his mind soon. All the women are saying the strike will end in a matter of months, and I suspect the result will not be good for the Gallegos.”

Mercedes frowned and looked back out the window. The oak trees across the pasture sagged under the weight of the downpour.

“It’s terribly unfair,” María continued. “Except for us and a few— very few—of your brother’s friends, there’s no sympathy for them, even though the smelter and mine have stayed open only thanks to their labor. Most people despise them for replacing the striking workers, and the Real Compañía always has considered them temporary help. Their fates are in the wind.”

* * *

Arnao, Asturias

August 1912

As Mercedes crested the high bluff on the footpath from the village of Santa María del Mar, she saw Antonio Rivas standing motionless up ahead, his back toward her. He was looking across the small bay toward Arnao. The wind blew steadily and hard off the Atlantic.

Antonio put his arm around Mercedes’ narrow waist when she stepped close beside him. “Windy today,” he said.

“Yes. And it smells like rain.”

“Yes.”

They were silent for a long while, watching the waves crash against the cape where the smelter stood and roll into the pebble covered beach. A group of miners slowly trudged toward the castillete below them.

“You know I can’t go down there,” Antonio said. His eyes were fixed on the miners. “Now that the strike is settled, all the Gallegos they’re not firing are being transferred to the mine.”

“I know,” Mercedes said. Her voice was flat and cold. “My brother told me yesterday.”

“I don’t mind the smelter work,” Antonio said distantly. “I even enjoy it sometimes. And it’s always warm and dry in the winter. Those poor men,” he added as he waved a hand toward the miners, who now were filing into the castillete. “They spend ten hours a day down there in the coal dust and wet and cold of those tunnels under the sea. It’s a death sentence.”

“I know, Antonio,” Mercedes replied. Irritation and empathy mixed in her voice.

He rolled a cigarette for each of them, and they stood silent again, smoking and staring. Antonio was in agony. From the moment his affection for Mercedes had slid into love, he knew he would be confronted with this choice. He viewed his options as equally bad. He could stay in Asturias and become a farmer, slopping around in the muck, living on Mercedes’ land for the remainder of his life. He would wrestle with the restlessness every day and blame her and the children for his inability to leave and quiet it. Or he could return to his completely solitary life, this time in faraway America, in hopes that steady work and a house of his own would free him from the restlessness, once and for all.

“So, what will you do?” Mercedes finally asked. As on that afternoon in Avilés, it was a question to which she actually did not want an answer.

“For now, I’ll go down to Oviedo,” Antonio said. He took a last deep drag on the cigarette and flicked the butt into the wind. “I have a cousin who works in one of the factories there, and he’ll try to get me on. But there are so many of us looking for jobs now. And most of my experience is working with the zinc, and they only do that here.”

“And in America.”

After a lengthy pause, Antonio added: “Yes, and in America.”

Mercedes was unable to restrain her emotions any longer. She cried out: “Oh, Antonio!” Tears streamed down her face. “I don’t want you to go to America. You can’t go. You must stay here with us, with me.” She grasped him tightly on both his arms. “Please, please, Antonio. Come to Las Cepas. Work with us on the farm. Make a life with me here. It’ll be a good life, I promise. I know you don’t like the farm work, but we’ll be happy. You’ll see.”

Antonio’s body was rigid and his expression opaque. The old chill which had nothing to do with the wind surged through him, as if he had been injected with Arctic seawater. “For now, I’ll go to Oviedo. I’m sorry, Mercedes. But that’s what I must do.”

Mercedes whipped from weeping to fury. “Damn, you, Antonio Rivas! And damn your stupid, Gallego pig-headedness! You can have a good life and home with my family and me. Why? Why, do you persist in this ceaseless drifting, like some ship out there in the sea with tattered sails and a broken rudder?”

“I’m sorry, Mercedes,” he said, barely above a whisper. His throat suddenly was thick and dry. “I don’t understand it fully myself. But I know I have to find stable work and some solution for this restlessness. And I know I can’t stay here now and live on the farm. I just can’t. I feel suffocated when I even think about it.”

“Suffocated? Suffocated?” she yelled. Mercedes had stepped away from him. She towered over him as she stood fully erect, clenched fists on her hips. “You feel suffocated by people who love you and value you and want you to be happy?”

Antonio shrugged his shoulders and shook his head, but he did not know what more to say.

“You and your damned Gallego shrug. I’m sick of it, Antonio. I’m sick of waiting and hoping. Fine. If you want to go, then go. Go and slave away in whatever factory will take you, and live alone in those company boarding house rooms. I’ve had enough!” She turned and stormed off down the footpath toward Santa María del Mar without a single glance back in his direction.

Antonio sat down on a rock. He pulled a rolling paper and bit of tobacco from his leather pouch, and watched her go.

* * *

In a month, Antonio was gone to America. As he suspected, there was no job for him in Oviedo. Though he was nearly as disappointed as Mercedes by Antonio’s decision not to join them at Las Cepas, Antonio González Conde had wished his friend well and telegrammed his brother Ramón in St. Louis.

There were zinc smelters in more than twenty towns and cities across the northeast and mid-west United States, with clusters around St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Clarksburg, West Virginia. Ramón had advanced to the most senior floor position in the smelter where he worked in St. Louis. He maintained the fires and managed the crews which shoveled the ore, prepared the retorts and collected the zinc for an entire seventy-five-yard-long furnace.

The U.S. companies were hungry for Asturians and Gallegos. They performed in the terrible conditions better than any other workers, immigrant or domestic. It was easy for Ramón to arrange a position for Antonio with the Grasselli Chemical Company’s zinc smelter in Grasselli, West Virginia.

Mercedes could not bear to see Antonio when he came to Las Cepas for a farewell feast on the eve of his departure from Asturias. She spent the evening with the pair of spinster aunts who lived in a cottage down the road. Antonio was sad she was not there, but he understood and was a bit relieved. The decision to emigrate had been excruciating, and feeling her fury and watching her march away that afternoon on the bluff above Arnao was the worst moment in his life. Mercedes’ presence would have drained every ounce of pleasure from the dinner. Antonio already felt apprehensive enough about going. America was so far away and so alien. He did not need another emotional blow.

“Be well, my friend,” Antonio González Conde told him, embracing Antonio Rivas and kissing him once on each cheek. “Go with God. And know that you always are welcome here when you tire of the furnaces and America. I fully appreciate why you must go. I had my own nineteen years in Cuba, as you know. There is something irresistible about that tug of the New World. But, I assure you, life here in the old one is better. Do not hesitate to return when this American fever has run its course.”

After a short sail to Liverpool, Antonio Rivas boarded the Cunard steamer Carmania for New York. Like more than twenty million other immigrants between 1892 and 1924, Antonio was processed into the United States through the crowded Great Hall at Ellis Island on October 2, 1912. As he slowly advanced through the long line under the high, arched ceiling of the vast room, Antonio felt mostly numb.

He was surrounded by a Babel of languages and the smells of hundreds of wool-clad people emerging from a week packed in the poorly ventilated lower decks of transatlantic liners. When he finally stepped to one of the tall, wooden registration desks, the uniformed immigration officer changed the spelling of his last name to “Ribas,” because that was how Antonio pronounced it.

An agent for the Grasselli Company met him at the ferry dock in lower Manhattan and guided him through streets nearly as crowded as third-class steerage on the Carmania had been. Antonio would not have believed that such a city could exist had he not seen it with his own eyes. It was a different universe from any place he knew. With his one small suitcase and fourteen dollars in his pocket, Antonio caught a train at Penn Station and headed off to his new life in the hills of northern West Virginia.

Mercedes sat in her room at Las Cepas. She wept harder and longer than she had at any time since her brother José was killed in Cuba when she was a girl.