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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781776561544 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Victoria University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2018 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 810 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
And now, at last, the island — after all those postcards, and the brochures and the books, and the photographs in the books and the words beside the photographs: here it is, growing in front of her. Around the ferry the roll of the sea flattens and blurs till it reaches the horizon and dissolves into the soft, pale turquoise at the ends of the earth: the island seems to lift above its shadow and its own quivering reflection, a little world rising into the air, turning slowly as it climbs, streaming rocks and clods and stones that make a coronet of splashes in the darkening sea beneath. Soon, she knows, she'll hear the distant bird-chatter of its people high above her, and look up, and see the island's adamantine base —
* * *
That first morning on the island she'd climbed partway up the hill above the lower wall of the Old Town, away from the salt-and-diesel smell of the port and up the slanting cobbles towards the light above her head and the vast blue sky with its wheeling, mewing gulls. She'd stopped and looked down on the ragged little town: at the glitter and sparkle of late morning sunlight, the small boats moored in the harbour and against the dock, and — surely not enough to have ferried anyone from Barcelona the night before — Virgen de África, now astonishingly white against the blue, purified by distance, translated, its rust and its stench all redeemed, and the night horror of its women's dormitory.
She tried to see down there the little hotel she'd just fled, with its cage elevator that had started and paused and started again and paused again while people stared in from the staircase around it: at Iola and the elderly botones, suspended side by side as if caught halfway to the flying island. And then the second-floor room he'd taken her to with its burnt-straw smell from the flat black grate of its fireplace, and what happened a couple of hours after that when another man burst in as she lay on the bed, another botones, younger, and she'd panicked and pushed at him — really pushed at him, she'd really meant it — and run down the stairs and clean out of the building and away along one paseo and up another, and through the portal in the ancient lower wall at a fast walk, almost a run, past the women at the market just inside and up along the flat wide cobbles beyond them: beginning to slow a little here but always pressing her way up the narrow tilting streets and towards the second wall, the upper wall, and the cathedral that loomed above it. From her first moment on the island it had seemed to beckon her, this Cathedral of the Lady of the Snows, as the guidebooks told her it was named: as if that was where it would all make sense for her in the end, if only she could get there, if only she could get to it.
She'd been dizzy back then, of course, from the tablets she'd taken not long after the ferry had set out, Mothersill's Travel Remedy, promising 'Relief as well as the Prevention of Seasickness'. She'd hardly eaten for the last two days: quite possibly she was seeing things as well. It had long overwhelmed her, the thought of what she'd been doing to herself, and she was astonished how far she'd got on the map. You must be crazy, she'd heard herself thinking when she set out from her home, all those months before. Do you really know what you're doing?
But that was a long time ago and it was too late to go back now, even though, in all truth, she still had barely any idea what it really was she was trying to do, and right now she was as frightened as she'd ever been in her life.
Her bags had gone missing, that was the thing. She'd tried not to think about it in those first days on the island. She'd put them onto the wrong trolley at the station, into the return trolley, she knew that, and there hadn't been time to sort it out afterwards. All she had now was her little clutch, and the pin-seal purse inside the clutch, and her passport in her purse. Nothing else. Not her clothes, not her typewriter, and (this was the worst bit) not a word of the novel she'd been working on for so long now. The Book in the Bag, she called it, which she'd begun to write in London: its words all gone now, every one of them, lost somewhere in France like (it had occurred to her on the train) a dead war poet — like his words, blown away and away, across the battlefields and gone. She could see them in her mind, she could make a picture of it, the little flecks of paper scattering in the wind. No, the picture made itself. It had become real through the thinking of it, like the rest of the world.
And it was when she'd turned away from the tangle of all this, from the boat and the dockside town and the endless, endless thinking — it was then that she saw the clump of dark little island pines and, under the branches, the two women, their faces intent on the ground. Their arms were full of gatherings, she could see that as she got closer, twigs and cones and litter from the trees which they were putting into a large wicker basket set down between them, placing the longer sticks carefully, deliberately, as if there was something to be made of them. Their heads lifted to her at the same moment in the way of grazing animals, the two women holding her gaze as she stepped through the long grass towards them with her slow, carefully assembled question:
Por favor, ¿sabes de algún alojamiento cerca?
She had nothing to show them she'd just arrived on the island or why, nothing plausible at all. It was as if she'd just made herself up in front of them — as if (come to that) she'd just made the two women up as well so that she could start her story. Standing there on the bronze glitter of the needles, the pair of them, and looking back at her from under the crouched Rumpelstiltskin pines that were so different from the big, rocking, talking pines back at home: looking at her and then at each other and then back at her as if to make sure she really was there, this sudden, strange young woman standing in front of them with nothing in her hand but a grip.
But: yes, it seemed they were agreeing, yes, they had something for her after all — was that what they were saying? ¿Alojamiento? Why, of course! We know the very place! Something like that. Lifting their basket of twigs and cones and litter between them and plodding off, two old mujeres taking her up in their wake, their big, slow behinds like the rumps of the donkeys she'd followed earlier that morning on the dock when she'd left the ferry: the woman on the left turning and gesturing at her — Come on,come on — and turning back and talking, all the time talking, both of them at once, to each other, at each other, past each other. She'd learned to get used to that in them, their endless talk, in the six months since then — yes: that was how long she'd been on the island now! Nearly as long as that.
* * *
Early the evening before when the ferry was well out to sea, floodlights had suddenly flicked on above her from the bridge, two lights that pooled on the deck as if night had been declared by the state and the scenery banished and the world turned simply into a now that was going to be officially inspected — the decking, and the men sprawled asleep against the bulkheads and the ventilators, and the improbable, impossible animals, all lit in every detail as if the light had only just created them, as pigs, and dogs, and goats, and sheep, and a couple of donkeys thrown in for good luck. How did you hide from this light? Where could you go?
She'd been told about this journey by someone who once had made it there and back: like a pilgrim trip to Jeddah, he'd said. All lit up like a circus when it's going past but I'll tell you, it's no circus if you're on board. Why do they keep lights on all night? Iola had asked him, and she remembered how her dinner companions had laughed when she asked that. ¡Concupiscencia! Lesley had told her, a man who'd travelled much and had dominated the table. It's a Catholic country, it's all Spain, it's Franco, for God's sake, there's no relaciones while the Caudillo's watching — ¡Qué indecente! Everyone had laughed at that, too, the friendly strangers she'd been forced upon by other well-meaning friends of friends: she, the lonely, gauche colonial girl who needed checking out and passing on like a package, Just a day and a night, she's terribly quiet, shouldn't be too much trouble — she could imagine the words, she could hear people saying them. A person being spoken of. A subject.
* * *
Everything had been different from what she'd expected, that was what she remembered — the ferry, of course, but before that the Channel crossing, and Paris with its vast, hideous marketplace, and then the train journey south and to the border and the wait to change to the new gauge, the long, terrifying city walks when she hadn't known how to get onto trams and buses. Worst of all were the times when she found herself caught up in a system she didn't understand — any system, anything controlled by someone else, anything controlled by them.
Passing through Customs was the worst, and the fear that they might find something on her. Even queuing for the ferry ticket she'd felt the terror and the panic almost dissolving her sense of who she was. Why had she taken the risk? Why had she left the safety of her home and everything she knew? Why had she ventured into this huge, terrifying monstrosity called the world?
Because everything is the world, and nowhere is really safe.
Because I wanted to leave myself behind.
Because there's nothing else to do.
Because I want the terror of it —
* * *
She'd wanted to get away from English, she knew that: not the people but the language and the way it was spoken around her. At first, when she'd just arrived Home — her parents called it that, they called it Home even though they'd never lived there — it had been exciting, thisEngland of ours: her own new world long longed for from so far, familiar enough through reading yet also different — not in ways that were strange and challenging and exciting but in a fusty, fubsy, rumpty sort of way she hadn't expected at all. Quite soon English accents stopped being exotic to her and their speakers came to seem no less happy-despairing than the folk she'd left behind at home, the home that had no capital letter but was where she'd come from all the same. Her own accent, the branding accent of the colonial, soon began to melt and fade until it was little more than a regional variation of the slop that was around her, more alphabet soup.
She'd been out looking for an electric fire, as they called them here at Home, when she came across the Linguaphone records in a second-hand shop in the local High Street: and there he was, the man who was to lure her to the Mediterranean. Learn Spanish the way he did! He was a bullfighter: or at least the figure on the cover of the disc represented a man in a gaudy Duke of Plaza-Toro outfit, the jacket and the cape and the impossible, clinging breeches, and then that ridiculous hat which toreros wore and the guardia wore and which she couldn't help thinking had something of the shape of a Cornish pasty. And there was a bull, too, of course, shown head-down behind the man and ready for business, brows knotted and steam at its nostrils. And then she had ¡Hola España! too, a Spanish phrasebook someone had given her, with a picture of an excited local woman on its cover greeting an excited family of tourists — ¡Hola! She'd sat in her Clapham boardinghouse each evening in front of her electric fire, trying to match words and phrases to the torero's rattling, lisping, buzzing Castilian Spanish:
No necesito los servicios de un portero.
Yo necesito refrescarme.
Urgente requiero los servicios de un dentista.
Por favor, ¿donde est¡ el baño?
* * *
And all the time on the island there'd been something she was looking for. She knew she had to keep this in mind, and that she'd know what it was when she found it. Whatever it proved to be.
Was this the moment, though, was it now — had she got there at last? Up here in her attic bedroom in the middle of the night, looking back, trying to remember these last six months, not quite six since she arrived on the island? With that varnishy smell drifting through the house from the African copal in the fireplace two floors below, lit to cover the smell of the dead man's body laid out on the dining room table?
* * *
The two women took her to a house that turned out to be no more than a street away and still below the old town's massive, fortified upper wall and its glimpse of the squared tower of the cathedral. Facing east of north, the house was, she decided after a few days there, something that made its light increasingly subtle as each day bloomed and withered. This was one of the things she knew she would have to take into account.
La Casa de las Liebres, it was called, the House of the Hares: a rectangular block of pale, hard, putty-coloured plaster like so many up and down the street and across the little town, yet at the same time slightly larger than any of these and (she thought) with a small sense of entitlement about it that others didn't have. Was that true or had she just been imagining it? Buff, scalloped windowsills, and, on the second floor, little juliet balconies in wrought iron: and then, above the front door, the small pediment — yes, yes, coming away from the plaster a little like part of an abandoned stage set, but something she couldn't see anywhere else in the tight little street. Someone once had lived there who had been somebody.
And maybe still did: these two women, perhaps, who seemed to take her under their wing straight away? Magdalena and Concepción, their names, as it turned out, and sisters — Iola guessed that straight away even though they didn't look especially alike. Concepción was the larger of the two and not as dark as Magdalena, and she could well have been the younger by as many as ten years. Iola was never sure: she'd found out soon enough that, here on the island, people's age was a hard thing to judge. She went along with the idea of it, though, and always took care, as she came to form her story of the women in the story of her life, to think of them as las dos hermanas.
Did they own la Casa de las Liebres, these two sisters, she wondered? No, they didn't, she slowly began to understand as she laboured out her first conversation with them under a glooming rack of pots and pans in the big dark kitchen off the alley at the back. La casa was owned by a doctor. He'd left very suddenly on Virgen de África exactly a week earlier, according to Magdalena — No, said Concepción, it had been Ciudad de Barcelona: and away the two of them went, arguing loudly and in a fluent, practised manner, as if argument was the only way they could talk to each other. Iola just couldn't keep up with them — it seemed they weren't even speaking Spanish anymore, and whatever it was they were speaking she couldn't get anywhere near it. While they fought it out at either side of the long kitchen table she looked around the poorly lit room with its heavy beams that pressed down and its big square, clean flagstones that pushed up, and across one end of the room the long black iron stove like an old-fashioned country cooker back at home, her real home. On which sat a large pumpkin straight out of a fairytale: golden and lime-green and a little pink as well in places — waiting, she decided, waiting for the story to start.
The sisters' fortress, this room, evidently, and a place where much seemed to get done: and with a particular smell, too, one Iola couldn't quite pin down at first but which she soon came to associate with the entire house, along with Ramón el Primer and Ramón el Segon, two drab blue birds perched glumly in separate cages up against the single kitchen window and named (the sisters eventually told her) after famous Catalan counts. One or the other of them would call out from time to time, always the same sad thing, the one to the other: Pa i oli. Pa i oli. There was a big, spare old yellow dog, too, whose only sound came from the drag of the log chained to his neck whenever he sought fresh sunlight to snooze in, out in the part of the callejón that ran behind the house. His eyes always ran with tears, as if they'd witnessed the sorrows of the world. Iberia, his name, apparently — Iberia!
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Salt Picnic"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Patrick Evans.
Excerpted by permission of Victoria University Press.
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