by Richard Gwyn
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Map
Prologue
PART ONE
1. A postcard
2. Woman in the Night
3. Je suis le plus beau du monde
4. In Barceloneta
5. A freak show
6. Like a detective story
7. The man in the green suit
8. We move about the rooftops
9. Incident at Sitges
10. Dying with your eyes open
PART TWO
11. The city ghostly in the heat of summer
12. Dualistic drop-outs and the eagle’s dive
13. Pontneuf’s perfect pitch
14. Kataskapos
15. Solitaire
16. In which the “past” closes in
PART THREE
17. The art of descent
18. The fire-eater
19. Meeting with an angel
20. La caza del conejo
21. How much death works
22. The art of ascent
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
ROSE
PROLOGUE
The sun has just gone down over the western plain. I stood watching it from a rock beyond the tower, smelling the woodsmoke from my chimney, then returned inside and piled more olive logs onto the fire. The dog is curled in the shadows at my feet.
Last winter I invested in a laptop computer and this fine oak table. An extravagance, but well worth it.
These little things, they make such a difference.
The seasons have passed by, unhurriedly. Spring was torrential, summer hot and dry. My almond tree produced its first full harvest of fruit. It is now October, and the autumn rains have just begun.
And the wind.
This wind, the mountain wind, infiltrates every corner like a spinning incubus, growing inside each perception, every mundane act, taking them over utterly. Eventually you become aware only of the immediate and hallucinatory impact of whatever stands before you: the silent apparition of the dog waiting expectantly in the doorway, a dead sheep lying beside a roadside elm. The wind sucks out everything from you, leaving you exhausted and chastened. People have been known to commit murder on account of the mountain wind, or else go slowly insane over several seasons.
The tower is built on the crest of a hill, a sheer and isolated out-crop in a landscape of wooded hills. Nothing distracted its architect from the principle of the straight line. In the distance, if the light allows, you can see the jagged peaks of high mountains, granite-grey in summer, snow-capped from November through till June. There are three storeys, connected by a spiral stone stairway. A final staircase connects the third floor with the flat, turreted roof. I rarely stray beyond the ground floor, for it provides me with everything I need: an open fire, a window, a place to write and cook and sleep.
Much of the year it is a cold place to live, but the cold doesn’t bother me. I wrap up warm. Sometimes I sit in this chair and look out through the window over the valley, and the white road which twists and threads between the tree-covered slopes. In the walls of the tower’s upper storeys are slits through which defenders might once have fired arrows at their enemies. However, I doubt whether anyone ever tried to take this tower. There is nothing to defend, and there never was. It was built, I was told, in the thirteenth century, with the single purpose of confining the last surviving heir of an unwanted lineage. He was incarcerated here, on the third floor. That is why there are two rooms on the third floor: one for the prisoner, the other for his gaoler.
Below the tower the land falls away through gullies and ravines and dramatic cliffs to the plateau, a thousand metres or more below. These are the flatlands, which stretch westward beyond the nearest town, and south, towards the city. The landscape which the prisoner looked out on has probably not changed much since the days when he was locked up here, with only his guard for company. I am the guardian now, but there is nobody to guard, just as there is nothing for me to protect from my enemies.
My job is to look after the grounds, and there is a plot of land where I grow vegetables. Nobody comes up here except the owner, who claims to be a Baron and lives in the city, and his visits are rare. He never stays for long. He walks about the grounds for a while, or climbs to the top of the tower to inspect the lightning conductor, and he gives me money.
Sometimes I don’t see the Baron for a month or more, and then I have to visit his office in the city, a hundred kilometres away. I set out early since it’s a morning’s walk to the nearest town and its railway station. The train journey takes about an hour and a half. In the city I collect money from his secretary in a brown envelope with nothing written on it. This is not because the Baron does not know my name: it is simply a convention we have arrived at, like any other.
In the daytime I spend hours walking in the nearby beech woods, with Filos, a tawny mountain sheepdog. Filos is my sole companion here. We rise early and look for mushrooms, then just walk for the pleasure of it. At present the paths are water-logged and muddy after the autumn rain. Evenings I stay in and cook a simple meal: beans, potatoes, bread. Then, beside the fire, I sit and write my story. Last October I gave myself a year to do this. One cycle of seasons. I’ve tried to remember the story as it happened, rather than in a way I would have liked it to have happened, or have even convinced myself that it did happen. But I can never be entirely sure. A story is only ever the version that presents itself at any particular moment. And it is subject to change, since our lives are composed of countless such moments, leading from a vaguely remembered past through a sequence of events towards some equally ill-defined concluding moment. But they are all we have, these moments. They constitute the fabric of memory. We go over them again and again, with countless revisions and substitutions, until we arrive at a version that suits us, and we call it our story. Even then the story is not truly ours, since it refers to the people we once were, or believed we were; or more usually, the people we aspired to become.
I’m grateful for the little tasks I have to carry out, the daily routine I am expected to pursue. Like checking the meteorological instruments, which are kept in a squat white beehive behind the tower. The Baron has not told me why he requires such a service to be carried out, and I have never asked him. It has occurred to me to ask, but I have desisted. My suspicion is that it either reflects an aspect of his character that demands attention to the minutiae of things, or else he requests it simply in order to justify paying me a caretaker’s wage.
This morning, while closing the door of the weather station, I noticed a hare grazing in the meadow at twenty metres’ distance. Filos and the hare also spotted each other at precisely the same moment. Man, dog and hare were freeze-framed for an instant, then Filos darted away, taking great bounds to clear the scrub of brambles, and the hare took flight. It was a buck, hind legs pounding the grass, his thickening winter coat making him appear a giant among hares. His scut bobbed frantically as he plunged into autumnal undergrowth. Filos pursued, the colour of a dog running away.
In the language here this idiom refers to something of an indeterminate or vague and shadowy appearance, perhaps suggesting a fugitive reality. It seems to fit, somehow. Both the episode with Filos, and with the story I am writing.
I wanted to write of the events that took place one summer in the last decade of the twentieth century, which now seem like sequences from a movie that is already ended, but whose returning images will give no peace. When you leave the cinema, you stand in the foyer, with all the other people emerging, and you are touched by a sense of grief and loss for a life not lived, a path no
t chosen. Something has brushed against your mortality, perhaps an incident in the film, or a phrase spoken; or more generally, the intractable sense of longing evoked by a particular character. This is the way any story might begin: an elusive nostalgia for something distant but intimately known, that for a moment flashes before you, and then is gone.
La Torre de Vilaferran
PART ONE
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
MILAN KUNDERA
1. A POSTCARD
One evening in May as I was walking home, I witnessed a mugging, and did nothing to prevent it. I could see what was going to happen. It was in the Gothic quarter of the city, just off the Ramblas. Ornate lamps lined the street, reminders of a more grandiose era, and narrow lanes led off into labyrinths unvisited by daylight. As I passed the entrance to one such lane, I noticed a pale young man standing there, reptile eyes scanning the human traffic. I slowed my pace.
I had gone barely ten strides when I heard a woman’s voice, shouting a single word in shrill English. The man had pounced, and was trying to wrest the shoulder bag from an ash-blonde, sunburnt woman who wore a short pink dress. The bag’s strap had become twisted around the woman’s arm. The thief kept pulling, the woman stumbled, and as she fell into the road, the bag slipped free. The thief ran back across the street and up the alley, clutching his prize tight against his chest.
This all happened in an instant. I couldn’t move.
The woman stayed in the gutter for a few seconds, the pink dress up around her hips. Lying there, half on the sidewalk, half in the road, she looked sad and vulnerable. She was heavily built and her legs were red. Clumsily, she got to her feet, shouting, “Stop the bastard!”
She was looking straight at me.
Fortunately, there was a helpful citizen nearby, quite close to the alleyway. He was youngish, dressed in a lightweight blue suit. He turned and gave chase, disappearing into the darkness, before returning a few seconds later, his arms spread in the Latin gesture of hopeless endeavour. He commiserated briefly with the woman, who understood nothing he said, then shrugged and went on his way.
The woman dusted off her dress with a few angry brushes of the hand. She looked as though she were about to cry. I still hadn’t moved. Several other people, who had stopped briefly at the time of the theft in the hope of some excitement, had begun to move on. I was wondering, among other things, what might have been in the bag.
“You could have stopped him. Bastard!” She spewed out the first vowel of that word, as though gagging on a lump of gristle.
It was clear that she was addressing me, but I was unwilling to look up and face her, to respond to this accusation. She was probably right. Had I been able to move, I was the person best placed to detain the thief. I was bigger than he was. I could have tackled him as he sped into the alleyway. Alternatively, I could have tripped him, sent him flying, then strode up and placed my boot on his neck, spat insults in his ear, pummelled him with feet and fists. I could have humiliated and thrashed him, and come away a hero, to be blessed with the gratitude of the sunburnt tourist, the applause of passers-by. The pink woman would have invited me to dinner in her hotel, confiding in me the squalid details of an unhappy marriage, an unsatisfactory job, her decision to strike out on her own, her now-thriving little business in the south-east of England, her trips to what she would call “the Continent.” As the evening wore on, the prospect of some drunken sex would have arisen, or worse, become reality. The calm of my life would have been shattered. And for what? A few American Express cheques, a passport, a ticket, a hotel key, a powder puff, a lipstick. Suntan lotion of an overoptimistic factor. Besides, the junkie needed the money more than she did. You just had to look into his eyes.
I stared at the woman in front of me, and to my relief was unable to summon a trace of compassion. My feet came to life and I continued on my way. I did not look back. I continued up Carrer Ferrán, past the City Hall, with its ornamental pots of greenery and its air of abandoned colonial glory. Over the cobblestones and past the solitary policeman and a huddle of beggars. Across Via Laietana and the noisy traffic.
Choosing a familiar bar near Santa Caterina Square, I sat down at the counter, next to the espresso machine. I ordered a beer and a brandy; sank the beer, and nursed the brandy. A pimp was arguing with one of his girls further down the bar. They left soon after I came in. The place was quiet. I was shaken up by my experience on Ferrán. And yet I saw such things almost daily. Why, this time, had it affected me? Because the woman had looked at me and spoken, in English. “Bastard,” she had said, three times. The final one was definitely for me. I hadn’t lifted a finger to help.
I told the barman, Enrique, about the mugging. I glorified my own inaction and exaggerated the awfulness of the victim. Enrique laughed, unamused, and in retaliation told me about a knifing that had taken place in the bar the month before. I had heard the story twice already, and I wasn’t listening. I drained the brandy and left.
My apartment was on Santa Caterina Square. It was the ático, the top floor, up eight flights of steep steps. The place was small, and draughty in winter. The best thing about it was the rooftop veranda. Sitting on the veranda I was slightly higher than most of the neighbouring rooftops. I could sit and watch the lights of Tibidabo, a spectral funfair in the night sky. Or I could look down on the dirty glass roof of the old Santa Caterina market, sprawling beneath me like an empty railway station. Mostly though, I could lie back on my hammock and look at the stars, while listening to the sounds of the city below.
When I opened the door of the flat there was a picture postcard lying in the hallway. It showed a reproduction of a painting by Joan Miró. I turned the card over. Neatly written, in green ink, was what appeared to be a date and a time: 20 May–11.00. There was no explanatory message, no indication of who had written the card. The printed details told me that the reproduction was entitled Dona en la Nit in Catalan, or Woman in the Night. The painting could be found at the Miró Foundation. May 20 was the next day.
Mail delivered to my flat never came upstairs. It stayed down in the letter box by the front door for me to collect. Whoever slid this under my door had let themselves into the building, or else was a resident. Quickly discounting all the occupants as possible authors, I decided to call on Manu, my Andalusian neighbour, to see if he could supply a clue. Manu lived on the third floor with his wife and teenage daughter. He kept rabbits on the flat roof, behind my kitchen. In the evenings he would sit on the roof near the rabbit hutches and drink white Córdoba wine. I sometimes joined him on the rooftop patio. Our friendship manifested itself in this undemonstrative evening ritual. We enjoyed each other’s company. From our vantage point on the roof we sustained a laconic commentary on the neighbourhood and world affairs. If Manu was lonely he would knock at my door, or tap on my kitchen window (which looked out onto our shared rooftop with the rabbit hutches, a table and some chairs) and ask me out for a glass or two. He worked as a warehouseman at the docks. Manu came to the door, eating. We greeted each other.
“Oy, Manu, did I have a visitor this evening?”
He wiped his mouth with a dirty napkin.
“Coño, how would I know?”
“I’ve been out. Someone’s put a card under my door.”
“I haven’t heard anyone. Wait.”
He shouted to his wife and daughter. They both called back in the negative.
Manu was wearing a white vest, and had a round belly. He smelled of wine.
“Come in. Have a drink. Something to eat.”
“Thanks, no.”
“As you wish. Hey, don’t worry.”
“What?”
“Maybe they’ll come back.”
“Who?”
“Whoever called. Your visitor.”
“Possibly.”
“You seem preoccupied.”
“I can’t understand
it. What I can’t understand preoccupies me.”
Manu thought about this, visibly.
“You know what preoccupies me? My rabbits. Rabbits should screw. Those rabbits don’t do any screwing.”
This was contrary to the truth. Manu’s rabbits fornicated and reproduced at a formidable rate.
“Perhaps your bunnies are consumed by higher thoughts. The life of the spirit. Barcelona Football Club. The local elections. Or they have a different sexual orientation.”
“You think this hadn’t occurred to me also?”
“Of course. See you tomorrow.”
“Until then.”
I went back upstairs and looked at the card again, unable to think of where to begin. An unsigned note with no message, only an instruction, or an invitation, or both.
I walked onto the rooftop veranda with the card in my hand and smoked a cigarette, the red tiles still warm under my bare feet. Lights were on all over the city. A warm breeze blew in from the sea, carrying the smell of salt and the promise of summer. I stood there a long time, leaning on the parapet, listening to the night sounds start up: taxis, dogs, a couple screaming at each other through the open shutters across the way. I decided to take a shower and have an early night.
At five o’clock the next morning the sound of trucks woke me, as they began unloading at the market. This happened most days, and it suited me: I liked rising early. The bedroom adjoined the veranda, and I slept with the window wide open. The fresh fruit and vegetables were piled steeply in boxes on the cobblestones below, along with flowers and other indoor plants that were sold at the market. The air smelled good on a morning in May.
I was thirty-three years old. I suffered occasional liver pains and vague yearnings for domesticity, a steady income, children greeting me on my return home. The yearnings often came along with the pains. Three years before, after a bout of prolonged drinking and vindictive liver pains, I had gone to see an acupuncturist in Maragall, a district in the north of the city. The acupuncturist was a young woman called Fina Mendes. She attended to her craft enthusiastically while I suffered multiple impalations with a grinning masochism. My liver pains got better and I started seeing Fina in a non-professional capacity. She followed a macrobiotic diet and smoked Winston cigarettes. She encouraged me to eat quantities of brown rice and fresh green vegetables. She had jet-black hair, surprising blue eyes, and drove a sporty Volkswagen Golf at dangerous speeds. She had graduated in biochemistry at the Autónoma University, enjoyed loud rock music, and believed in an impending invasion by extraterrestrials. We became lovers and I moved into her apartment.
