The Color of a Dog Running Away

by Richard Gwyn

  She interrupted, “Do you know me?”

  The question had been somehow inverted, turning it into a request for information. She wasn’t angry. She meant it quite literally.

  “No. But I noticed you earlier and I thought perhaps we had an appointment.”

  She paused, assessing me. “You’ve been following me.”

  She spoke Spanish with the trace of a Catalan accent.

  “I thought you’d gone. I thought you were someone…”

  “Someone else?”

  “Yes. That is, I thought we were supposed to meet.”

  “You and me?”

  “Me and somebody. It might have been you.”

  She laughed. Some kind of understanding broke through. “You arranged to meet an unknown person in the Miró Foundation? And you thought I was she?”

  “I didn’t arrange to. They arranged it. But I don’t know who they are.”

  She laughed openly, quite unfazed. I managed to ease up a little.

  “Let me explain. I received a message, to meet by a particular painting. There was no one there.”

  This was not strictly true, of course.

  “So you thought the person you were looking for was me. Incredible!”

  “You could say that.”

  “Are you saying that?”

  “Look, I don’t know the answer to your question because I don’t know the reason for my being here, other than what I’ve told you. All I know is that somebody was expecting me to come here at eleven o’clock but I don’t know who, and I came. I saw you, and thought, better to say I hoped, that you were that person. You obviously aren’t, but what the hell, here we are anyway.”

  She took off her dark glasses and looked at me. Her face had a rare, dangerous quality, and a kind of self-possession that left me feeling quite inadequate. Doubly inadequate now that my floundering speech had been met by this lengthening silence. I needed to extract a semblance of control from the situation. But she rescued me.

  “I’m going for a drink. Would you like to join me? Tell me some more?”

  Of course, I agreed to that.

  We walked out of the Foundation and along the road. There was nothing promising nearby. I remembered a café in a little square with a fountain, near the bottom of the steps. It was quite a way, but my companion didn’t complain, or question. Either she trusted me, or else possessed an exquisite indifference. I asked her about herself. She told me, among other things, that her name was Nuria, that she lived in the Poble Sec barrio and that she was twenty-seven years old.

  We sat under a plane tree outside the café. I ordered two beers. When the drinks arrived I showed Nuria the postcard. She didn’t demonstrate any particular reaction. She behaved as though it was of no real consequence to her why I had approached her, but she was far too refined and subtle to say as much. She didn’t accuse me of lying, of contriving the whole thing, but then neither did she indicate that she believed me. She looked at the card, turned it over, and smiled. She was supremely non-commital.

  “Perhaps it is some kind of joke,” she said, leaving me to ponder whether she was referring to the postcard’s appearance under my door or my use of it as an introductory gambit. I asked Nuria more about herself. Apart from her native Catalan and Spanish, she spoke French and English. She came from a small town near the French border, where she had grown up, and had a younger brother. She had studied art history and now worked as a researcher for a Catalan television company.

  I told her a little of myself, of my father coming to Wales as a child refugee from the civil war in Spain and my own Welsh and Spanish upbringing in Carmarthenshire. Of travelling in Greece, Turkey and North Africa. How I’d come to Spain five years earlier and ended up working for a publisher, helping to compile an encyclopaedia, and freelancing as a translator and editor of literary texts. In other words, I gave her the briefest outline of a life, in return for hers, and as we sat there under the tree, I quickly re-invented the meaning of the postcard. To this new way of thinking, how it was planted under my door became less important, since because of it I had met Nuria. That I might have missed another appointment of consequence was rendered irrelevant by the meeting that had taken place instead. There was certainly little point in subjecting Nuria to a full-scale interrogation about her connection with the postcard. She had already laughed at me once, and politely tolerated my laborious explanation. A further inquiry would probably drive her away, and I didn’t want that at all.

  There was a familiarity about Nuria that would have been more disturbing had it been less pleasant. Her face, for a start, though I was certain we had not met before. Hers was not the kind of face you would easily forget. The hypnotic draw of those dark eyes and a smile that revealed small white teeth at unexpected moments—noticeably, I soon discovered, when I began to explain anything (my postcard story for the third time, perhaps) too earnestly. She was not, it occurred to me, laughing at the story, but at the strained sincerity of its telling, the rooted sense of an intrinsic connection between words and meanings, which most discourse takes for granted, but which for Nuria was apparently not so easily purchased. Her voice, when she did speak, curled around me like smoke from a brazier. There was a gratuitous sense of play about the way she used words. The effect was of a kind of chase: her words, sometimes hesitant, disappearing around corners halfway through a sentence to reappear as if surprised at themselves, or else dissolving into watery laughter.

  “Do you like seafood?”

  The question took me by surprise.

  “Yes, very much.”

  “Well, would you like to eat some?”

  She emphasized the last two words and smiled: the mouth conveying a perfect innocence, but the eyes laughing. I didn’t mind her laughing at me. On the contrary, it felt reassuring.

  “Sure. Shall we go to a restaurant?” I asked.

  “Not now. I have things to do. I was thinking, well, later perhaps.”

  What things? I wondered, but said instead, “I’d love to. How about Barceloneta?”

  “Barceloneta would be fine.”

  She mentioned a restaurant I’d heard of, but never visited. We agreed on a time, nine o’clock that evening.

  Then she got up, kissed me on both sides of the face, put on her dark glasses, and left. I watched her until she disappeared from view. She didn’t turn around.

  I found it hard to concentrate on anything for the rest of the afternoon. I wandered back towards the Ramblas, then up into the Gothic quarter. The shops were getting ready to close for the afternoon. I dropped in at my local grocery store, bought a chilled bottle of cava, some Serrano ham and olives, picking up a loaf from the bakery next door. Back in my apartment, I opened the olives, took one out, and sucked it between my teeth. I took off my shoes, slung my jacket over a chair and spat out the olive stone, aiming successfully for the waste-paper bin. Then I poured a full glass of cava and prepared some lunch. I took a plate with ham and olives, half the loaf, and a big slice of melon from the fridge, and went out onto the veranda. I returned inside and fetched the wine.

  The hammock on the veranda was tied to iron rings between the outer walls of the bedroom and the living space. It was the only shaded part at this time of day. I sat on the floor nearby and ate slowly, mulling over the events at the Miró museum. First, there was my pleasure in meeting Nuria. But the fact that I was flattered by her apparently warm feelings towards me did nothing to help any real understanding of the situation. As I sat on the veranda, I had to concede that the question of the postcard remained unresolved. I found it hard to believe that Nuria (who lived close to the Miró Foundation in Poble Sec) just happened to be visiting the museum at the time of my appointment there and walked away with me as though we had known each other for years. There was something else too: her impassiveness or indifference, which I had chosen to interpret as cool sophistication. She gave the impression of knowing me, as though, rather than being endowed with a sublime sense of detachment, she had simply
been briefed about me. If I was being paranoid, at least by going along to meet her this evening I had a chance to find out more. All this speculation left me vague and confused. Why didn’t the author of the postcard contact me directly? I tried to think who I might have crossed in the three years I had been in Barcelona, or who might pull a trick like this on me, but drew a blank.

  I had nearly finished the wine and was feeling sleepy. The hot afternoon air was dusty and rancid. I watched a lizard scuttle along the veranda wall. A city lizard on a dizzy city parapet. It stopped and blinked at me, watching and not watching. Or if it waited, it was waiting for nothing. The lizard had been blinking in the sun, watching and not watching, waiting and not waiting, for the past twenty million years. My memory too, according to some beliefs, was lodged inside the skin of this lizard. The reptilian brain. I spoke to it in English, a brief experiment in the alchemy of naming: “Lizard,” I said. It did not move. “Llangardaix,” I said, trying Catalan, and stressing the luxuriant final syllable: lian-gar-daysh. Drowsily, I clambered into the hammock, trailing a leg. My foot grazed the warm tiles with the swinging motion of the hammock. Then, for no reason other than the sound it made I contrived another word, “Languedoc,” teasing the word apart in three descending whispers. The lizard ran back along the wall the way it had come, shot down the wall, and crossed halfway over the red-tiled floor, before stopping still once again. It looked up, then made a little sprint across to my foot. “Llangardaix,” I whispered. Blessed be the creeping things, the slithering creatures of siesta hour. Blessed be the lizards of the blazing city sun, that crawl across the red tiles of a rooftop afternoon.

  3. JE SUIS LE PLUS BEAU DU MONDE

  The sun was quite low in the sky when I awoke, and realised that I had slept longer than I intended. Below, the streets were busy once again, but with the more restrained tempo of evening. Fruit in the market had matured in the course of the afternoon, and the air smelled dense and sweet. The couple in the top flat of the adjacent building, windows flung open, had begun a shrill exchange of insults in their southern Spanish. Curse followed condemnation, challenged by the blaring of a television and the hoarse intervening yelps of an attendant crone:

  HUSBAND: Call this food? I’ve eaten better in the slammer.

  CRONE: Aiee! Your words are honey.

  WIFE: Go back there then. Or get your puta to feed you.

  HUSBAND: I will. Like I did yesterday.

  CRONE: What man more brutish?

  WIFE: Swine. To think I ever let you touch me.

  HUSBAND: Let you? Five times a night was not sufficient for you!

  CRONE: I will die of shame in this place.

  WIFE: Filthy liar. You were an octopus: a wandering eye on every tentacle.

  (Obscure complaint of a teenage girl, shouting from an inner room.)

  WIFE: If only we had had condoms, like the young today.

  HUSBAND: Your damn Church would not permit it.

  WIFE: But at least your own atheist parents might have utilised them, to protect the rest of us from a vileness such as you.

  CRONE: May the Holy Mother have mercy!

  HUSBAND: Any man would leave this asylum.

  WIFE: Go then, shameless one. Go to your syphilitic whore. But do not approach me ever again, for anything. Not to sew a button on your shirt. Nothing.

  HUSBAND: Quiet, my sweet. Bring me coffee.

  WIFE: You want coffee, my life?

  HUSBAND: Yes!

  WIFE: Well then: (with particular venom) fetch it yourself! (Sound of something smashing, a child wailing.)

  And the night was yet to begin.

  Four floors down a posse of dogs trailed a lone bitch, around cars, in and out of doorways, circling lamp-posts. The male dogs sniffed one another and snarled, hackles raised, then busied away after the scent, tails erect. Always on the go.

  I went inside and put some flamenco on the tape-deck—the singer El Chocolate—and a song of especially mournful intensity began to thrum and heave through the apartment:

  No me quites la botella

  Que quiero emborracharme…

  I splashed water over my face and chest and changed into a white shirt, blue jeans, and black linen jacket, slipping barefoot into soft leather shoes. The guitar runs echoed around the whitewashed room like a wounded bird, battering blindly against walls, and competing with the heartbreaking finality of the singer’s croaking lyric, which implored the world to leave him to his bottle and solitary drunkenness. Closing the veranda door, I flicked the stereo switch, and went down onto Santa Caterina.

  The evening, if anything, seemed warmer than the day. I was too early for my meeting with Nuria, but wanted to be outside, to be a part of whatever the streets had to offer. I walked down the narrow alleyways in the direction of the sea. There was an edge of muted excitement in the air. Barcelona often seemed like that: a city on the brink, infatuated with its own improbability. I loved these twisting alleys, the syncopated snatches of music drifting out from open windows, the long shadows, even the perpetual odour of an antique drainage system overlaid with sand, cement and cheap cigar smoke.

  In a small square there was a café with chairs and tables outside. Nearby, a street performer had just arrived and was preparing to eat fire, talking raucously through his pre-performance. He was barefoot, wearing loose pink pantaloons and a flimsy purple waistcoat. His exposed chest displayed the prominent tattoo of a dragon, in dark green and red. The fire-eater’s face was smeared with black smudges, and his dirty-blond hair tied back in a tangle. The eyes were bloodshot and he moved with a limp. I had nearly an hour before I was due in Barceloneta, so sat down at an empty table to watch. A waiter appeared and I ordered a whisky.

  There were two cafés on the little square and about half of the seats outside the cafés were taken. Dwarf conifers in white boxes marked the division between the two businesses. The square, which was not open to traffic, was designed conveniently for a street performer, who could command the attention of both sets of clients.

  The fire-eater swayed as he introduced himself, in a cocktail of languages: “Buenas tardes, bonsoir, good night. En este jardín…Non…Pardon.” He faltered, looking around as though he had forgotten his lines, or even any sense of where he was, before taking a swig of filthy-looking liquid from a plastic bottle. He at once regained some manner of control. “Je suis le plus beau du monde,” he announced, with finality. Then: “I am ze man of foc,” punning on the Catalan word for fire. “El Foc Man,” he said, showing a shattered set of teeth, and clearly pleased with himself on account of the pun. The next utterance he bellowed with a stern theatricality: “Profession”—he paused—“vagabond.”

  This sounded familiar.

  A couple of street kids, around twelve years old, watched him closely from the far side of the square. The café clientele weren’t taking much notice. He cleared his throat and shouted hoarsely in an attempt to gain their attention. “Laydees and Jennulmen, Mesdames Messieurs, Señoras y Señores.” A few people looked up.

  I recognised him. I’d seen his act before, over four years earlier, in Granada. I remembered too how this inept fire-eater had prized himself on his psychic powers, and had given tarot readings. He claimed to be a Macedonian Greek, but his language was dominated by a variety of French. Yes, that was his pitch: “Profession, vagabond.” The particular lingo, the ragged pony-tail and the dental bomb-site. The limp was a new development. But I remembered the watching faces of some locals in the audience when I had last seen him eat fire in Granada, as they turned by stages from bemusement, to incredulity, to disgust. His exhibition had been sordid, a mockery of circus, more an act of self-abuse. He had swallowed quantities of petrol during the act, something that clearly had not killed him, since he was still doing it. His tarot readings likewise made no concession to the client, or victim; they were carried out with bad grace in bars or on pavements, where he would aim to insult or terrify whoever opted for a consultation.

  As the waiter pass
ed by, I ordered another whisky, and settled back in my chair.

  I didn’t particularly want to be recognised by the fire-eater, but there seemed little likelihood of that, considering the brain damage he must have endured in the intervening years from all that petrol-quaffing. I watched his pyromaniac display, with mouthfuls of flammable liquid being swilled and spilled, and blasts of random flame issuing around his head. A few more people were watching now, some of them evidently riveted by the grotesque parody of the performance. At one point a woman approached the fire-eater and tried to argue with him, gesticulating at the bottle of petrol and shaking her head from side to side. He ignored her. He made no attempt at presenting himself as an artist: he was entirely in his element with this death-wish variety of street performance.

  Yet I was strangely drawn to him. He produced a final volley of uninspired fire-breathing, and then, coughing and cursing, put down his fire-sticks, wiped his face with a dirty cloth, and approached the tables of the café with an outstretched woollen hat, collecting coins. He was moving quickly, dragging his bad leg, aware that one of the waiters might emerge from inside the café and shoo him away at any moment. He passed from table to table, hunched over, as though ducking unseen missiles.

  He arrived at my table last of all, raised his head and squinted towards me. His face was a mess: deeply and prematurely lined, marked with some impressive scar tissue, his wrists polka-dotted with cigarette burns. He gave a broken-toothed grin, and then spoke in a formulaic variety of international hippy patois.

  “Hey man, the show goes on.”

  “Apparently so.”

  He was holding out his hat. I dropped a coin into it. The fire-eater offered me a confidential wink and said: “Muchas gracias, amigo mio. For you a special dispensation. Ce soir.” Spittled laughter erupted as a postscript to his thanks.

  “Fuck off,” I said, without malice.

  The fire-eater looked at me in confusion, then glanced quickly to either side.