The Color of a Dog Running Away

by Richard Gwyn

  “The seventh story that he heard told of a ruler who spurns his lover and casts her out into the forest to live among the ferns and the wild beasts. She is found by a merchant, who takes good care of her, but all the while she is still in love with the man who cast her out. On questioning, the storyteller reveals that he in fact knows Diliramma, and that she is still loyal to Beramo in spite of his cruelty.

  “The Emperor sends for Diliramma, they are reunited, and presumably, live happily ever after.

  “I should add,” said Susie, hurriedly, “that I consider this story quite absurd, and, in fact, nothing to do with serendipity at all, more with the scheming of the wretched princes of Serendip.”

  “That’s the spirit,” said Igbar. “But question the storyteller, not the story. If all stories are equally true, it’s their telling and their interpretation that lends them any significance. We make of them what we will, like a reading of the I Ching, or the Tarot pack. The stories of the princes of Serendip only reinforce our intuitions about the haphazard workings of the universe.”

  The young American leaned further over the sofa’s back, took a long drag of the circulating joint and said, “Like, er, you never know what’s around the corner, huh?”

  Igbar Zoff snorted, and then answered wearily, “Yes, old fruit; something like that.”

  By ten o’clock, Nuria and I left the party, the clattering music, the increasingly befuddled guests. It was a warm evening. We returned to my apartment and my bed, the world outside diminishing into irrelevance, a mere abstraction compared to the immediate demands of sight and touch and sound between us.

  The next day was Monday, and Nuria left early, in order to get changed for work at her own place. She stank, she said happily, like an old goat.

  6. LIKE A DETECTIVE STORY

  In the two weeks that followed, Nuria and I spent every free moment with each other. We ate together, slept together, phoned each other when she was at work, and lived for the evenings and the nights. Sometimes we met at lunchtime in a small square near the Ramblas, where there was the gesture of some greenery, and a circular path on which were situated three or four benches. Although the square was relatively quiet, it contained the usual traffic of hustlers, bums, and winos. At lunchtime however, some of these (those who were awake, and could still take solids) dispersed to eat at a nearby soup kitchen. Their places were sometimes taken by office workers and the occasional tourist, though the latter never stayed around for long once they realised that the low hedges and rockeries of the little park concealed the prostrate forms of slumbering street-life: a pair of legs protruding from under an otherwise innocent-looking bush, or a hand outstretched, demanding the rental of the bench.

  But one bench, our bench, was always miraculously unoccupied, over five or six visits. On the one occasion that a couple had been sitting there when we came into the square, they had upped and left by the time we reached it. This confirmed our shared belief that the bench had a negative effect on other people, and preferred us to sit on it.

  One lunchtime I was already on the bench, having spent some time there reading over proofs in the morning sun with a bottle of cold beer. Nuria arrived, exuberant, flushed. She was wearing white jeans and trainers, a red cotton top. She moved my papers and sat astride me, straddling me, heels pulled tight into the small of my back. She kissed me deeply for what seemed like a very long time, then lifted her head, shaking the hair from her face. Her eyes were brimming with tears, and everything about her seemed to be encapsulated for a moment in those overflowing eyes: desire, incomprehension, and something akin to fear. She began to talk slowly, her voice uncertain.

  “When I’m at work I know that I am going to meet you and yet it’s only a few hours since I last saw you, touched your face. But I burn up inside with the thought of seeing you again, and by the time I step onto the street, walk down the Ramblas, I want to…I want to drown you. I want to everything you. It can’t be this good, I keep telling myself. Something really shit has to happen. And why do I think that? I hate myself for thinking that. I feel like a monster too, as though I wanted to consume you; no, to drown you, like I said, or better still to drown with you. Drowning you and drowning with you and drowned by you…” She had spoken softly throughout, and then had run out of words.

  I stroked her hair and smoothed her forehead, my thumbs gently massaging her temples. Everything that she had said I understood, and felt something similar. Yet we never talked about being incomplete without each other: that was just a silly myth, a trick of the psyche. Both of us were self-sufficient: but together we created a new and subtle alchemy. It showed in our talk and in the way we stood and walked and slept and breathed. She startled me, and my astonishment extended into our erotic life. I had discovered that she could come to the brink of orgasm by my tongue tip-tracing the contours of her ear, or by simply feeling the current of my breath between the soft of her thighs. Her physical effect on me was likewise cataclysmic, and yet she learned to hold me back, to restrain me, to help me take my time.

  But it wasn’t just in bed that things synchronised so well. Her knowledge about, and liking for, certain music and writers and artists mapped onto my own uncannily. And yet she could, and would, out-argue me on almost any subject. She was maddeningly concise about what she believed and what she didn’t. She was bafflingly contradictory and argumentative at times. She loved good food, but denied that she could cook well, saying that she preferred me cooking for her. Once she phoned me from work, saying she wanted to eat a particular kind of fish that she had bought in the market early that morning, and proceeded to give me precise instructions for the complicated sauce by telephone as I wandered around the kitchen, handset clutched between cheek and shoulder, following her directives, chopping herbs, mixing and stirring. She arrived just as the dish was ready to eat, as she had planned, clutching champagne and a surprise gift: a beautifully bound first edition of Lorca’s Romancero Gitano.

  Sometimes, when she spoke, I struggled to keep up with the stream of her thoughts, the constant backtracking and introspection, the complex self-reflection. And then there were the times that she retreated into a corner of herself that I did not know, and I learned early not to question, although, paradoxically, on occasion, questioning was just what she required, and she needed me to intuit when the one and when the other. And at other times, on the contrary, I almost felt as though I were insulting her with any assumptions I might be making about the way she was, or what she thought.

  But here, in this emotional limbo, in a winos’ park, with the sun burning down on our shoulders, I held her in my arms and I felt once again the welling tearfulness that had almost overtaken me the first time we made love, this sense of recognition, of precognition. How could we have arrived this far, this fast?

  She leaned over and scooped up the beer that had been standing in the dwindling shadow to my left.

  “It’s not too cold,” I said.

  “That’s okay.” She took a long swig, wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, then brushed the remaining tears from her cheeks.

  “It does me good to cry,” she said. “I’ve needed to cry for at least twenty-four hours now.”

  She laughed, re-circled her arms around my neck and kissed my cheeks. She leaned her face closer to mine and whispered, “I am wracked with lust.”

  “Me too. Absofuckinglutely wracked.”

  “But it’s good to hold on, too.”

  “To hold on too. To hold onto. Yes.” I kissed her in return, on the throat, the neck, towards the danger zone of the ears.

  She pulled away. “You’d better stop that. I might disgrace us.”

  She took some more beer, swilled it around her mouth, then spat it out.

  “True,” she said. “Beer’s getting warm. Let’s go for a cold drink, or a coffee.”

  We walked down a couple of streets and turned into the Ramblas. The Café de l’Opera was quiet and cool. Its fin-de-siècle décor and cavernous interior provided a we
lcome contrast from the glare of the early afternoon sunshine. The window seat was free for once, so we sat and ordered coffee. Outside everything was normal. Human statues, birds in cages, bemused tourists, the occasional piece of human wreckage stumbling past.

  “There was once a girl, quite an ordinary girl,” Nuria started, staring at me, “who woke up one morning to find she had grown another face on the back of her head.”

  She hesitated while the waiter delivered our drinks.

  “It was the face of a boy, or a man. The girl could see this other face by standing in front of the mirror and holding a second mirror behind her head, parting the hair with her free hand. The face behaved badly. It poked its tongue out at her, attempted to wolf-whistle, glugged its lips like a fish.”

  She imitated the labial movements of a fish in water.

  “The girl was horrified, of course. Overnight she had turned into a freak. For the first day, she refused to leave her room. She lived alone, so it didn’t matter too much. At least the face didn’t speak, though it sighed, and made chuckling sounds. In fact, it chuckled at particular moments, and of course the girl realised that this other face was laughing at her thoughts. A few days went past, and sooner or later she was going to have to confront the world. She put on a headscarf. It was a sunny summer’s day. She had made an appointment at her doctor’s surgery for eleven o’clock, and she arrived as close to eleven as she could, to avoid having to spend time in the waiting room, in case her new, unwelcome face made some obscene sound. She was lucky. She barely had to wait two minutes before the receptionist called her name.

  “The doctor was in his fifties, a real gentleman. She had known him since childhood. He was kindly and discreet. When she took off her scarf to show him the face, he parted the hair and then exclaimed quietly: ‘Caramba! I’ve never seen anything like this before. Does it hurt?’ ‘No, not exactly,’ she replied, ‘if by hurt you mean actual physical pain. But it hurts my soul and makes me want to die. I don’t want another face, certainly not this evil thing. Can you make it go away?’

  “The doctor was sympathetic but not very helpful. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but it looks as though you’re going to have to live with this face. You never know, you might get used to it.’ The face had been on its best behaviour throughout the examination. But as she left the doctor’s surgery and stepped onto the street, it sighed, made a sound like a fart, and then chuckled intermittently all the way to the supermarket, where the girl had intended to buy groceries. She didn’t hang around. Once she saw the rows of food on the shelves, the bright advertisements for special offers, the customers chatting happily with the check-out staff, she realised that she no longer belonged to the same world as them. She went home, ran a bath and waited for the tub to fill. If she lay in the bathtub long enough the face might drown. And if that failed, she would simply stay at home until she starved to death. She wouldn’t open the door to anyone.

  “When the bath was full she got undressed and, naked, was unable to resist a quick look in the two mirrors. The face had been quiet for a while, but when she looked closely, she noticed that it bore a strong resemblance to her. This made her feel terrible. The face was smiling faintly, and then began to make its fish-face, with big eyes and a glug-glug-glugging. It knew what she was thinking. It knew everything that she knew. She stepped into the bath, lying full-length. She lay there like a Bonnard nude. The sun went down. She didn’t bother to add more hot water. She fell asleep.”

  Nuria stopped, looked out of the window for a moment, then drained the last of her coffee.

  “And?” I asked.

  “And nothing. I don’t know the rest. Some stories just end, you know, without explanation.” Then she added, very softly, “You, of all people, should know that.”

  She took one of my hands in both of hers and leaned over to kiss me.

  “I have to go,” she said. “See you later. Adéu.”

  On the Friday of our second week together I took the afternoon off work and went to see my friend Eugenia. We stood on the veranda of her flat, drinking an infusion of mint tea, and I told her what had happened since our chance encounter in the sauna; about the meeting with Nuria, and our sudden and intense romance. She listened attentively.

  “It’s like a detective story,” she said. “But in fact it contains only one element of mystery. The rest of it is simply boy meets girl. What you are trying to do is link the mysterious element with the non-mysterious element in order to make your meeting with this girl appear utterly synchronistic, a meaningful coincidence. Or somehow preordained. Which of course it might be. But not necessarily in the way you think it is.”

  Leaning on the cast-iron railing of her veranda, beside a large pot from which sprouted a prolific and exuberant specimen of plant-life, Eugenia adjusted her steel-rimmed glasses and continued staring down into the street, three storeys below.

  “You are certain you did not post this card to yourself?” she asked, an apparently serious question. “Perhaps to remind yourself of something which you have now forgotten? You can be a very silly boy.”

  I was accustomed to Eugenia’s condescending epithets, and considered her suggestion without taking offence. It was not as fantastic as it sounded. The consumption of drugs and drink had, in the past, as Eugenia knew, propelled me to actions for which I afterwards held no rational explanation. And then there was the issue of the green ink. The message on the postcard had been written in green—the same green I always used in my fountain pen. The notion of posting messages to myself for unfathomable reasons appealed to me. Perhaps I was slowly turning into someone else. I played along with her idea.

  “I think I would have remembered by now,” I answered. “And I’m not as devious as all that. After all, why would I post it to myself? Why not leave the message out on the kitchen table?”

  “Because, let’s say, you had already left the apartment and couldn’t be bothered to go back in. Or you couldn’t find your key. You had already written the card, and were holding it in your hand. So you slid it under the door.”

  “No, that’s ridiculous. Besides, this was written in a tidy, measured hand. Unlike mine.”

  “You wrote it in an exceptional moment of lucidity. The lux divina passed into your fingers.”

  She was playing games now. Again, I didn’t mind: it was part of her conversational repertoire to improvise along provocative lines.

  “Pure speculation. My mind doesn’t work like that.”

  “No? How would you know how your so-called mind works? You should have someone video you sometime. Perhaps I’ll do it myself, out of love and compassion, of course. You’d receive an education about your ‘mind’ then.”

  “Love and compassion. I’ll remind you. Thanks.”

  “De nada.”

  Eugenia probably understood me better than anyone I knew, family members included. It was, in part, my friendship with her that had led me to Catalunya in the first instance, and I had spent a week at her apartment when I first arrived in Barcelona. While she had been a source of sustained friendship and support to me, demonstrating a kindly tolerance—love and compassion—for some of my excesses where others might have lost patience, the details of her own life often seemed obscured by acts of wilful mystification. She was a lesbian, and had been in several relationships with women whom I had met only briefly, and who were rarely, if ever, to be seen in her apartment. Not that she was recalcitrant about her sexuality: she discussed aspects of her past quite openly, but simply avoided talking about her present affairs. She was wary of explicit self-disclosure. She had lovers, but liked to live alone.

  In many ways she was typical of a sophisticated barcelonesa, but having grown up in the Franco years had seen a lot of changes in the city of her birth. Barcelona was a world capital for human marginalia, a sanctuary for transsexuals, cross-dressers, fetishists and sadomasochists. It was now openly what it always had been beneath the suave exterior: a centre for all the things that Franco had most detest
ed—Catalans (of course), anarchists and queers. But the abiding attraction of Barcelona lies in its relentless powers of reinvention, a ruthless creativity that rubs off on people after the briefest visit. It was no accident that Picasso, who endlessly reinvented himself through his work, began his metamorphoses here. Moreover, Barcelona is a port, and if a city is a sedentary place fixed in a specific geography, then a port is always less so, due to the constant flux and interaction that seafarers and rough trade bring with them. A port might be regarded as a city infiltrated by nomads; sailors and immigrants foremost among them. In this respect, we lived in the most nomadic of European cities, and Eugenia was herself a nomad, taking off for long solitary walks in the Pyrenees, travelling for months in the Andes, the Himalayas, the Australian outback. Big mountains and wide open spaces. And whenever it was feasible, she travelled alone.

  Eugenia’s sculptures and drawings described semi-abstract narratives of shadowy men and women attempting to avoid the impact of imminent catastrophe, and yet incapable of movement, of unfreezing themselves from the context in which they had momentarily been detained. A favourite ink drawing of mine displayed two ambiguous figures, one most definitely a man, the other an androgynous human with a dog’s head, stranded on top of a Corinthian column; caught, like cartoon characters, in a freeze-framed microsecond of flight from a monstrous fire-breathing dragon, itself immobilized on the summit of a high pillar. The canine ears, pinned back against the imaginary wind, added to the helplessness of their attempted flight. Those ears seemed to suggest that however fast you might run, escape from the dragon was ultimately impossible. Her sculptures too captured figures in strained postures, turning, as though avoiding too bright a light, too direct a gaze. They almost all were exhibited as unfinished. Everything was only ever a work in progress. But she was happy to let them go, and people paid large sums of money for them. Other than in her work, however, and even there only obliquely, Eugenia’s demons, or dragons, were not for public consumption.