The Map

by T. S. Learner

  Over the next hour he inked up the first chapter of the chronicle, until he felt he had enough comprehensible pages at least to get a grasp of the book. Tired of the painstaking process and eager to immerse himself in the actual translation, he clipped the pages together in order so that he had a mirror of the chronicle itself, then turned back to the first page. There would be time to translate the rest of the chronicle over the next few days, he consoled himself.

  It appeared to be a diary, beginning with Shimon Ruiz de Luna’s own introduction and account of his expulsion from his hometown of Córdoba. The diarist was prolific, his thoughts tumbled on to the page, and August skipped forward, rapt. Later on in the chapter the tone seemed to change as Ruiz de Luna started to record his search for a secret place, somewhere in the Basque country. This new urgency of the author began to take over his writing. Intrigued, August stopped to wonder how the chronicle related to the family of La Leona, turning the date over and over in his mind – there was something strangely familiar about it.

  Suddenly, he remembered. He went to a pile of books stacked in the corner of the room below a bookshelf groaning with papers and hardbacks. Crouching, he found the reference book he was looking for – one he’d purchased in an old bookshop in Barcelona in 1938, on one of his rare R & R breaks from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The title of the book was embossed neatly into the plain cloth cover: Brujas y la Inquisición. He flicked through and found the chapter on auto de fe. There it was – the auto de fe of Logroño took place on the 7th of November 1610.

  There is an argument that many of the old pagan beliefs of the Basques could be conveniently interpreted as witchcraft when seen through a Christian paradigm. Indeed there is a mountain god – Basajaun – described as a hairy man who lives on the forested slope of the mountains and sometimes depicted as a half-man, half-goat – very much in the style of Pan or Satan himself. There is also Sugaar – a snake god who is the sometime companion to Mari, the supreme female goddess in the Basque pantheon. Mari herself is rumoured to manifest in a ball of fire and is seen shooting through the sky from mountain top to mountain top. In the hysteria of the Inquisition and its propensity for witch-hunting, it was easy for the Spanish to equate Basque pantheism with sorcery – especially as the animosity between the Spanish and the Basque peoples was centuries old, and many of the isolated village communities spoke only Euskara, giving great scope for misunderstanding between them and the Inquisition forces. The auto de fe of Logroño was initiated by the return of a peasant, a Maria de Ximildegi, to her tiny remote mountain village, Zugarramurdi. Whatever motivated the young girl to voluntarily confess she had become a witch, the results were both fatal and disastrous for the tiny community.

  The first to be arrested was a twenty-two-year-old Maria de Juretegia and her husband who Ximildegi accused of participating in the sabbath, a kind of mass orgy. Juretegia denied it but Ximildegi’s graphic descriptions of sexual congress with a goat, of women smearing their chests with herbal paste and flying to the field where the sabbath took place were so convincing that she was believed. To save herself, Juretegia in turn denounced her aunt and her aunt’s eighty-year-old sister – described as the queen witch of the village. At this point the matter would have been resolved if the Inquisition had not been informed. But a year later the Inquisition arrested four supposed witches and a Euskara translator. Many other arrests followed and the confessions (given under torture) were as graphic and extreme as the accuseds’ imaginations – sorcery that enabled them to pass through walls and small holes, orgies, cannibalism and extraordinary rituals involving witches’ familiars. By the time of the auto de fe in 1610, within Logroño a total of thirty-one witches were accused (only nine had confessed and already thirteen had perished in jail), and the rest who refused to confess would be burned at the stake. But the Inquisition had also condemned a further twenty-two for heresy – six of Judaism, one of Islam, one of Lutheranism, twelve of heretical utterances and two of impersonating agents of the Inquisition.

  The crack of an icicle breaking off outside broke August’s concentration. He was suddenly acutely aware of being observed. Had Jimmy’s paranoia infected him? If it was true the US government wanted to suppress all knowledge of Operation Lizard and the massacre at the village, Jimmy would still be on their radar, but would they have really sent an assassin to kill him – a female one at that? August picked up the pendant Jimmy had thrown onto the coffee table. The design of the strange copper star was familiar. He studied it under the lamplight. It was a six-pointed star that if drawn would not be made of two triangles, but rather one continuous line. Abruptly, it came to August – it was a unicursal hexagram, a design that had occult connections, a curious choice for a CIA assassin, he noted. Either way, weakened by illness, Jimmy was an easy target. Had August been naive in letting him stay? He had his own secrets to hide.

  He glanced up towards the window, at the band still visible running below the edge of the pulled blind. Just then something travelled across that band, a flicker of movement. He sprung up and pulled the blind open.

  A large raven was perched on the sill outside, its beady eye to one side as it stared into the room. For a moment man and bird confronted each other, then in a whirl of feathers it was gone. August swung back to face Jimmy, still sleeping, one arm now flung across his face, oblivious to the world around him. Was the musician deluded? One thing was for sure, the chronicle he’d kept for all those years would be perceived as being invaluable to the right collector. That alone made it a dangerous artefact. But there was the moral issue of returning it. Jimmy had made a promise to La Leona and he had also saved August’s life – after the murder and betrayal of Leona and her men, returning the chronicle was the least he could do. Suddenly, August knew he had to get it back to Spain. With a shiver, he realised that the apartment was freezing. He threw on an old cardigan over his dressing gown and went into the bathroom.

  The bathroom, although small, also functioned as a darkroom. August used photography as a way of archiving his visual research – especially his fieldwork. A wide wooden board lay propped across the rickety chipped bath, upon which August stored his developing trays and chemicals. Overhead slung from wall to wall were lengths of cord from which he would peg the drying photographs and wet rolls of negatives. The enlarger – a machine that looked a little like a large microscope and a vertical projector – was tucked up against the side of the toilet. And an infrared light bulb – which when switched on would plunge the room into a subterranean dimly lit netherworld – hung down next to the normal light fitting on the ceiling. A stop clock was perched on top of the white tank of the toilet, the position of which had never failed to amuse Cecily.

  August caught sight of himself in the cabinet mirror. He looked drawn. ‘What do you expect after a collision with the past, four hours sleep and being left,’ he told his reflection as he rubbed the two-day stubble on his chin. With a sigh he opened the cabinet, revealing an old bottle of cologne, a row of plastic canisters containing undeveloped film, a packet of French letters, a badger-hair shaving brush and a round bar of shaving soap. He filled the sink with the last of the hot water and began lathering up. The least he could do was shave. He was interrupted by the sharp ringing of his alarm clock – it was midday already and time to wake Jimmy.

  3

  Damien Tyson stared out of the hotel room in the Madrid Ritz hotel that had served as his office for the past few months. A view devoid of people, a panorama of rectangles, horizontals and verticals, of shuttered windows, rooftops and ornate ironwork, it created a mathematical grid, a rhythm in his head he found soothing. It took him away, allowing him to focus all his intelligence into one searing point, as precise as a weapon. The CIA operative had much to think about. First there were the secret negotiations he’d been setting up – the careful courtship and angling of the Spanish generals, even of Generalissimo Franco himself, on behalf of his country. Then there was the security issue. As an agent who’d had extensive
experience in the region, he’d been sent to oversee and facilitate secret talks between the US and Spanish military personnel. It was now late April, the US general – yet to be named – was due to arrive in July and Tyson had nearly all the parts in place. There was to be a deal – a military pact – one that would finance Franco’s regime and benefit the US for decades to come. The fact that such a deal would be breaking a UN embargo imposed on fascist Spain did not concern Tyson. For him there was no morality, just opportunity and a cold fascination with power – one he’d had his whole life. He glanced down at the page of parchment he held in his hand, a gift from one of the Spanish generals, Cesar Molivio, an old friend who shared a couple of propensities – apart from a love of a certain violence. The parchment was a sixteenth-century letter from a Jewish kabbalist in Cadiz to a Dutch occultist in Leyden – you couldn’t accuse the general of lacking taste, whatever you might think of his sadistic tendencies, Tyson observed, amused. Hidden in a paragraph was a sentence that he found himself returning to again and again:

  In relation to your query about ‘Los ojos de Dios’, the original document is rumoured to be in possession of an old family in Córdoba, conversos, who guard it like it is a great treasure, which, in the right hands, it would indeed prove to be …

  He was interrupted by the sound of the telex machine in the corner whirling into action as it punched out a message. After carefully slipping the parchment back into its folder and locking it in a desk drawer, he walked over to the machine and tore off the telex that had appeared.

  ‘Long-standing suspect on list Jimmy van Peters has resurfaced in England, passport number reported in Dover two days ago. Request command. Repeat request command.’

  He smiled, marvelling at the synchronicity of two seemingly unlinked events – the letter and now this, an old foe re-emerging. A slow burn began to unfurl at the pit of his stomach, it was like a hunger – a gnawing excitement that made him feel gloriously sharp, gloriously predatory again. After tearing the telex into indiscernible pieces, he picked up the telephone and booked a flight to London.

  The engine was dead, so August pushed the heavy Triumph Trophy down onto the tarmac and began running the motorcycle down the tree-lined street. As it putted into spluttering life, he swung himself onto the seat and roared off, the cold air swirling around his goggles and face. Calculating the amount of petrol he had left, he reasoned he had enough to get to the library at London University situated at the back of Russell Square Gardens. He’d seen Jimmy off earlier that day, in an emotional farewell, with the musician’s illness hanging over them like a cloud. Nevertheless Jimmy had made August promise to visit him in Paris after returning the chronicle, saying August could always find him at the jazz cellar he used to play in the Latin Quarter. But August sensed neither of them believed they would see each other again. A verse from a song the International Brigade would sing about the Battle of Jarama kept sounding out in his head:

  There’s a valley in Spain called Jarama,

  It’s a place that we all know so well,

  For ’tis there that we wasted our manhood,

  And most of our old age as well.

  From this valley they tell us we’re leaving,

  But don’t hasten to bid us adieu …

  Adieu. Looming out of the fog the lampposts flew past August like sentries guarding their posts. Sometimes it was like he was still there, hiding in some mud-filled foxhole waiting for the mist to lift from a field, waiting for death. Did I ever really come back from Spain? Or is this whole existence some imagined projection taking place in the time it has taken for a fascist bayonet to pierce my heart? Sometimes it was hard for him to believe he survived, to keep a grip on reality. ‘The whole world a dream beamed into my mind by a malicious demon’ – Descartes’ quote was his favourite as a student. Then he’d found it liberating, now he yearned for a simpler mind, a simpler life. Damn you, Jimmy, what have you begun?

  He passed a bus and wove his way west through Kensington. There were still gaping holes between the buildings, many of which remained boarded up – bombed-out vacant lots, the legacy of the war, playgrounds of ragged-trousered children shouting wildly and pelting each other with snowballs.

  August swerved around a cart and horse as a rag and bone man in a battered cap and overcoat atop yelled, ‘Any old iron!’ optimistically.

  Britain was on its knees, reeling from an economy that had failed to redefine itself after the industry of the Second World War, a nation now deep in debt to the United States and a power that had yet to admit its hold on the colonial world was rapidly becoming symbolic – Britannia was floundering on the rocks. Churchill had been re-elected in 1951, swing bands had returned to the concert halls and the Festival of Britain had been opened on South Bank for the last eighteen months, offering some respite to the frugality and grimness of the last decade, but in reality little had changed since the war. Itinerant tribes of the unemployed – the returned soldiers – wandered the city streets. You could still see these men walking in threadbare overcoats, trying to conceal the newspaper in their shoes, looking hopefully at every corner shop notice board, perplexity and disappointment marking their faces – was this the utopia they fought to defend? It was not the world they fantasised returning to, on the ships, in the air, in the trenches, not remotely. Everything was drab, the clothes, the shops, the grocery shelves with their rows of canned rationed food: Spam, sardines, powdered milk, broken only by the occasional locally grown tomato or apple. Only in Mayfair and Piccadilly was it possible to see imported luxury items brightening up store displays, on New Bond Street, like Christmas lights, outrageously overpriced for most. The last time August could remember attending a large party full of brightly dressed people unmarked by anxiety and fear was in the late 1930s upon his return from the Spanish Civil War. Beaten and demoralised from witnessing the ravages of both Franco and Hitler, he’d been flabbergasted by the naivety and optimism of his peers, as well as Chamberlain’s vacillating diplomacy. But now, after all the bloodshed and conflict, when everyone had expected a miraculous return to prosperity and hope but instead found themselves facing more rationing, more grim governance, August had secretly begun to yearn for the colour and heat of the old Spain, even the glittering jangle of the New York he remembered as a child, anything to break the relentless monotone of London. Perhaps shadows from the past had begun to claw him back.

  August hadn’t seen his parents and sister in America since before the war. Then it had been a question of principle, now he wasn’t so sure. Was it possible for a man to divorce himself from his childhood completely, from what formed him? He used to think so, but after nine years of reinvention, the construct he’d made of himself – this benign apolitical academic whose only weakness seemed to be hedonism and rare books – had begun to fragment. The monster was pushing through. August felt it more and more – in his nightmares, when he stared into the mirror, in inexplicable emotions and rages that swept through him. Jimmy was right – he had to go back to be freed.

  The imposingly tall art deco block of Senate House appeared above the mist, a monolithic white stone building that looked like it belonged more in Washington or some futuristic version of ancient Rome than here. The fact that August conducted his research in the same building that the Ministry of Information had been set up in during the war amused the American. He had given lectures at the London University and had an honorary membership to the library, and it had become his intellectual safe house. Turning the throttle, he raced towards it, hoping the searing wind might blast away the rising sense of loss he felt, despite the intrigue of the manuscript. So he had loved Cecily after all.

  The reading section of the University of London library was a long rectangular auditorium filled with benches and desks, lined by dark wooden walls. The space felt older than the building itself, as if the hours of study that had occurred within its four walls had imbued it with an antiquity. The gallery above was lined with full-length windows and bookcases, w
hile the main bulk of the library ran off the reading room in annexes of bookshelves. The large windows allowed a great pool of natural light to cascade gently down onto the leather-topped reading desks, tranquil and still. It was the kind of atmosphere August loved to work in, the hushed silence creating a timelessness in which it was possible to lay hands on a book and become submerged in the era depicted between the pages. It was seductive, and August used the library as a sanctuary.

  The American was known to many of the librarians, who were happy to put aside any sixteenth-and seventeenth-century botanical texts for him. His favourite librarian, a willowy spinster in her middle thirties, who always wore the same black long-sleeved dress with padded shoulders and a narrow belt, a single strand of pearls defining her class as aspiring, sat behind the information desk.

  ‘Mr Winthrop.’ She looked up in undisguised pleasure then smiled, the pink powder on her cheeks cracking in a fragile prettiness. ‘Is it botanical today? We were just bequeathed an extraordinary collection of prints – some of very rare herbs indeed.’

  ‘Actually, I was after some information about an individual – turn of the seventeenth century, Kathleen. It’s a long shot, he was a Spaniard. A Shimon Ruiz de Luna. He describes himself as both physic and alchemist, which is a conceit, alchemists naturally being of an earlier era.’

  ‘Indeed, let me look under his name first.’ She pulled out a small metal drawer and began sifting through the index cards.

  ‘Ruiz …?’

  ‘… de Luna, as in “of the moon”.’

  ‘Aha, found him – a court report of a trial – 2nd of September, 1612.’