The Map

by T. S. Learner

  The church bells began their mournful pealing again, and August, legs straining, accelerated towards the centre. Then the narrow lane widened and around a corner the streaking sky yawned over the small plaza, gathering storm clouds like a frown. August skidded to a halt and leaned the bike up against an old stone tethering post. A group of women in black dresses and headscarves, their shawls wrapped over their shoulders like ravens’ wings, were congregating under the portico of the church. They turned as one animal to stare across at August in brazen hostility. Other villagers were filing solemnly in and out of the open church doors. A police motorcycle with sidecar sat at the kerb, obvious, defiant and oppressive, an indifferent policeman leaning against it smoking and watching the villagers as he chatted to a companion. As August stood, a man in his fifties, with hunting rifle and a string of rabbits slung over his back, walked by.

  ‘Excuse me, friend, but who has died?’ August asked. The man stopped, and after silently assessing August’s working jacket, his beret and abarkak, seemed to decide to trust him.

  ‘The alcalde, the mayor, dropped dead in the night. Heart attack. But if you ask me, it was the Devil coming to take back what was his in the first place.’

  ‘And what might that be?’

  The hunter glanced at the police then stepped closer.

  ‘The soul he sold to him sixty years ago,’ he murmured, without smiling. ‘But still we are obliged to give our respects. In fact,’ – he nodded, barely at all, towards the patrolmen – ‘it will be noted if we don’t. After all, the mayor was a famous man. I mean, how many men get to have a police escort at their funeral – to protect the corpse from the mourners?’

  ‘Would you like company, friend? There is safety in numbers,’ August offered, wryly.

  ‘When it comes to this village, nothing is safe nor sacred for that matter, but if you fancy seeing evil in repose, come, be my guest.’

  At which August fell in beside him and they walked across the square, running the gauntlet of whispering condemnation from the old women to step into the church. It was dim inside, the perpetual twilight broken only by the large lighted candles that stood in the four corners of the long nave. At the front, which had been cleared of pews, sat an open coffin on a simple wooden plinth. People were slowly filing around the casket, placing flowers or wreaths, then kneeling in silent prayer, crossing themselves to move on. The air was thick with burning incense, and the shuffling atmosphere took August back to the services he attended as a small boy at Trinity Episcopal Church in Back Bay, Boston. Then, as now, he was filled with the same sense of claustrophobia. In the low light he could see the priest standing at the altar, his face a mask of studied neutrality. The hunter fell into line, dragging his heels across the flagstones, and August followed closely, curiosity having won over caution.

  When it came the turn of the woman in front of them, she dipped into a curtsey at the altar, crossed herself then placed a lily at the foot of the coffin. Behind her, August leaned forward to look into the casket. The mayor, corpulent and presidential in a suit that looked like it had been bought especially for the occasion, resembled a rouged waxwork, his lips and cheeks crudely made-up. The man was probably in his early sixties and there was a faint expression of aggrieved surprise the undertaker hadn’t succeeded in erasing. The dead mayor, for all the talk of evil, appeared utterly benign. The woman gave a furtive glance towards the priest, who at that moment was turned away, then quick as a flash she spat at the face of the corpse, a healthy wad of spittle hitting the top of one cheek, then beginning a slow slide down the face like some abhorrent teardrop. Shocked, August glanced around. No one reacted. The villagers just continued with their rituals closed-faced, while the woman, now transformed back into a demure middle-aged widow, stepped away.

  ‘He betrayed her husband in thirty-six,’ the hunter whispered to August, as they stood in front of the ebony box. Dutifully, the hunter crossed himself and plucked one of the small furry corpses from the string of rabbits still around his neck. Kneeling, he laid the dead animal next to the small pile of wreaths and flowers.

  ‘Because he was as slippery as a rabbit,’ he said out loud, in Euskara, as he rose from the floor. Several of the nearby mourners laughed.

  Outside, the crowd was growing as others arrived from the surrounding hills. August glanced over at the tall tower rising up beside the main body of the church. It would be impossible to climb to the top now without attracting too much attention. Plus there were the patrolmen to worry about.

  Stepping away from the mourners, he noticed that one of the two cafés gracing the plaza had under its red, white and green awnings framed and hung proudly on the wall a series of panoramic photographs; obviously the work of a talented amateur. Curious, August walked up to the café window and studied the pictures, which were of the village and the plaza. There were also several of the valley: two from the town itself and three from what looked like vantage points at the tops of the three mountains. The tables outside were deserted and the café appeared empty. Through the window he could see the owner, a short thin man, standing behind the counter polishing glasses. August went in and approached the counter.

  ‘Nice photos. You do them yourself?’

  ‘Naturally. I’m the best photographer in Irumendi. Actually, I’m the only photographer in Irumendi. I also do weddings, christenings, communions and funerals, but not that one.’ He gestured towards the church and placed a glass of frothing cider in front of August.

  ‘It’s on the house, today we celebrate.’ He waited for August to taste the cider.

  ‘It’s good.’

  ‘Of course it’s good, it’s from my own orchard.’

  ‘You must be the only person not in church filing around that coffin,’ August remarked.

  ‘I’m an atheist, third generation. My grandfather gave up on God when the government confiscated his land.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘Although, now with the mayor dropping dead, I might break family tradition and start believing again. But it would have to be Catholic of course. Did you hear it on the radio?’

  August looked blank. He’d heard nothing.

  ‘Pius finally recognised Franco. The Pope will be granting a concordat in Rome accepting him as the official ruler of Spain and institutionalising Catholicism as Spain’s only legal religion. So maybe it’s lucky I’m an atheist after all – if I was a witch, Jew or Communist, I’d be screwed.’

  ‘I gather the mayor wasn’t popular?’

  ‘He was hated.’ Mateo reached for a dish of salted sardines and placed them in front of August. ‘When we lost the war it was him who went to Guardia Militar and betrayed half the families in Irumendi. For that honourable service they made him mayor. Tomorrow they will bury him and we will have a funeral procession around the village that everyone must attend. If you don’t, they …’ – here he pointed to the police outside the church – ‘… will be taking notes. They watch us like hawks. So the whole village will be there, even me, shuffling behind that coffin like chained prisoners.’ He poured himself a glass of wine and held it up towards the church. ‘To Judas.’

  ‘What goes around comes around.’

  ‘In my country we have another saying: La palabra del Alaves es como una llave de Madera – “The words of a person from Alava are like a wooden key.”’

  August laughed. There wasn’t much love between the different provinces. ‘Alava is beautiful,’ he retorted, diplomatically. ‘And so is Biscay.’

  ‘One of the best, but then it’s the only one I know. I left once to Madrid but I got homesick and they all speak funny,’ he joked, then downed his wine and poured himself another. The mayor’s death had made everyone tense, August guessed. No doubt they would be facing a whole new power struggle with his absence. ‘You’re the historian staying with Widow Aznar, aren’t you?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Now that’s a family with secrets. Once there were seven of them – now there are only two, and who knows who the father
of the boy was. They say they never saw her pregnant. But that family, they’ve always been different.’

  ‘Different, how?’

  ‘You’ll find out.’ The owner closed up as quickly as he had opened. August felt he had to re-establish the intimacy between them. He glanced back up at the photographs that also lined the walls inside.

  ‘You know I take photographs too, for my research.’

  ‘You do? What equipment do you have?’

  ‘I’m travelling with a Rolleiflex – with a Leica lens.’

  The café owner whistled. ‘What I’d do to get my hands on one of those. It’s hard to buy anything here, it’s all by mail order and takes months. Also it’s so expensive.’

  ‘I could help you out.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I need access to a darkroom. I’ll be happy to rent yours while I’m here.’

  ‘It’s very primitive.’

  ‘All I need is an enlarger and the development tanks.’

  ‘I have those. I’d love to look through the Leica lens.’

  ‘It would be my honour, a talented photographer like yourself.’

  The man studied him then grinned. ‘It’s a deal. My name is Mateo, by the way.’

  ‘Kaixo, Mateo.’ August welcomed him using one of the few Basque words he knew. ‘There’s another thing I need, a good map – one with real details.’

  ‘A map!’ The owner laughed, displaying four gold teeth on his bottom row. ‘There is one, but this village isn’t marked on it. Which is good and bad. Good when you don’t want to be found and bad when you want friends to visit. No, my friend, maps will not teach you about these valleys and these mountains. To know Irumendi you have to breathe, eat and shit the air. Irumendi is not a whore, she doesn’t just lie down for one night. People come here to get lost, they don’t come here to find maps.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I need one.’

  Mateo threw his hands up. ‘I trust you, fuck knows why, but you smell honest and my nose never lies. There is a map, an old map, inside the town hall. If you ask, they will let you look at it.’

  ‘Thank you.’ August poured Mateo another cider. ‘This one I’m paying for.’

  ‘Salud. Be careful of Widow Aznar, she is sorgina – and a witch, like all the women in her clan. You should be careful, but why should you worry? You’re probably an atheist too. We don’t believe in such things, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  Mateo clinked his glass against August’s.

  ‘But I’d watch my back. Those kinds of women, they either want to fuck you or …’ He drew a line dramatically across his neck. ‘Either way you want to wake up with your head on your shoulders in the morning. Otherwise, my friend, you are screwed.’ He concluded, philosophically, ‘Go back to the farmhouse, tell her the mayor has died. She should be there tomorrow for the funeral, her and her son. They have to go, they are already noticed. As for the darkroom, come whenever you like, I live above the café. But let’s keep this between you and me. Here everyone talks, and I, for one, haven’t lived this long to be shot as a spy.’

  August glanced back through the café window, across the plaza: the patrolmen were still there. He had no choice – he would be seen immediately if he went up the tower with all the mourners milling around. He’d have to put it off until the next day. He thanked Mateo and left using a side door.

  He went straight to the town hall, where he found an old woman sitting behind an austere oak table in the small reception room that doubled as the library. The woman, unimpressed by August’s charms, claimed to be the wife of the town clerk, who was at the funeral, and that she couldn’t help him without her husband’s permission. It was only after August promised to take a photograph and a message back to England for a long-lost son who’d fled Franco that she presented the map. After ushering him over to a glass-topped reading table (the only other piece of furniture in the room), she rolled the manuscript out dramatically. It appeared to be a detailed seventeenth-century etching with nineteenth-century additions written carefully over the top – the original template of the map was in Spanish and Latin, and from the topographical and religious emphasis, August assumed it could have quite possibly served as a guide to the guards of the Inquisition. The newer additions were marked in inked calligraphy and written in Euskara. Running his finger down the landmarks, August recognised the town plaza and the church – although one of its wings appeared to have been a late addition to the original medieval construction. There were only a cluster of dwellings around the plaza and the outskirts of the village panned out into small allotments and farms. A building situated right next to the church caught his eye: a jail, and behind it an armoury, an unusual construction for such a small village. Had this been some kind of military centre for the region, some secret fortress? It was hard to imagine. The residential dwellings had their owners’ names written carefully underneath the small neat topographical drawings. As far as August could tell most of the families had been living there for centuries, each generation inheriting the homestead from the next in a continuous flow. No wonder the community was so tight knit – the intimacy and policing of each other must have been extremely claustrophobic, August noted, reflecting on his own displaced nature and wanderlust. He ran his gaze to above the town and the edge of the mountains, as he tried looking for something marking the Aznar villa. To his shock, the name ‘Widow of Ruiz de Luna’ was written in Spanish beside the symbol for the dwelling. Ruiz de Luna. The same name as the alchemist. Was it possible this had been Uxue’s house, Shimon Ruiz de Luna’s widow, and that Señora Aznar had deliberately hidden the true identity of the family from him? It made a kind of perfect sense, especially if she was La Leona’s sister – such a relationship would mean instant arrest and there would be some in Irumendi who would guard her identity as if it were sacrosanct; and there would also be some ready to betray her. Which would make it understandable that the family trusted no one.

  It seemed extraordinary. The suffocating sense of predestination swept through him like vertigo. He glanced down at the bottom corner of the map. There were two dates: 1630, obviously the date of the original etching, and, written above it, 1890. August sat back, calculating – if the alchemist had been executed in 1613 and Uxue, his wife, had escaped England and somehow returned to Spain, it was possible that she could have settled back here. So in 1630 it would also be possible for Uxue to have only been in her early fifties. Could Izarra Aznar be a direct relative or had she inherited the property some indirect way? He pointed to the mark on the map.

  ‘Widow Aznar?’ he asked the old woman, who looked at him suspiciously, then answered, haltingly.

  ‘Si, Widow Aznar is from the Ruiz de Luna clan. Aznar was her husband’s name, she adopted it to honour him, but her father’s family was Ruiz de Luna.’

  August’s mind spun with the implications. He looked back at the map for the area of forest he’d sighted from the mountaintop the day before. He found it immediately, labelled in bold seventeenth-century Latin with the ominous statement, ‘Non-consecrated land: Pagan.’ August stared at it, slowly processing the implications. He’d never seen anything written like it on any other old map he’d studied before – all land was non-consecrated outside of the churchyard, so why make a special point of marking it as such? It was like a warning.

  Olivia sat on the harbour wall and looked back at the square of Louis XIV, the pretty heart of the old port. She watched a small gang of children play around the bandstand in the middle, as their parents sipped their first aperitifs of the afternoon at the café tables. She had been in Saint Jean de Luc now for three days trying to retrace August’s movements with no success. It was like he’d instantly vanished or had never been there at all. First, she couldn’t track where he’d stayed and second, he’d managed to leave without a soul noticing. The American certainly hadn’t used the train and it was impossible to hire a car in the small town, as she herself was discovering.

  A young boy chasing a small
dog ran past, narrowly missing her. The whole domestic panorama unnerved her, knowing as she did the political undercurrents of the border town – the Basque refugees from the Spanish Civil War who had flooded the port in 1936, the Nazi occupation less than a decade later, the valour of the Basque resistance. Then she had an epiphany – perhaps that was August’s connection to the place. He must have had friends in the tight-knit community, she decided; someone who chose to protect him, someone powerful within the town. She could tell by the manner with which the townsfolk reacted when she started asking questions – a stoic sullenness. One that suggested they’d been instructed to say nothing. But there was the other issue, the fact that she herself now had a tail – one of the few men she had ever found truly terrifying. And they were both chasing the same rabbit down the same hole. She had to find a way of finding August without betraying him to her nemesis – a man who could really destroy her. It was going to be difficult.

  She had only one clue: a small tobacconist on the promenade remembered August for the distinctive brand of cigarette he’d bought there three days earlier and the fact that he’d put a branded matchbox on the shop counter while paying. The matchbox came from a café called La Baleine Échouée.

  Bernadette, Joseba’s daughter, was busy polishing the cutlery. It was after lunch and the café was finally quiet again. It would be until the evening regulars started to come in. The young girl was tired, she’d been on her feet since five that morning and she was looking forward to the evening beach ride on her boyfriend’s Vespa. The blonde glanced up as the tall middle-aged woman entered. Despite her awkward gait – a kind of heavy-limbed clumsiness the young girl associated with the English – the woman looked friendly and well-heeled enough to give a decent tip. Bernadette perked up.

  ‘Can I help you, Madame?’ she asked, putting down the silver spoons.

  The woman walked up to the counter and settled her ample backside onto one of the high stools.