by Mathew Carr
Mata felt that the visit was not going well. “Of course. That’s why I came here to make sure. It seemed sensible to speak to you directly.”
Ugarte shrugged. “It would be more sensible to stay out of matters that don’t concern you.”
Ugarte glanced down at his magazine, and tapped on the young woman’s head. The conversation was clearly over, and Mata hauled himself out of the chair and went back out into the corridor. As soon as he felt the sun on his face he took a deep breath as if he had just come up from underwater. Even as the carriage returned to the city, the stink of the fortress seemed to cling to his clothes, and Ugarte’s mortuary eyes continued to haunt him. Below him his native city tumbled down like a giant’s stairway from the mountains into the sea. To the east he could see the factory towers of Poblenou overlooking the ocean, the mighty Church of Santa Maria del Mar, the spiked Gothic turrets of the cathedral, and between the sun-drenched buildings he could see the darker lines of crisscrossing streets and avenues whose names he knew, and the wide avenue of the Passeig de Gràcia passing through the open fields between Gràcia and the still recognizable pentagonal shape of the old city.
As always the sight of it filled him with hope and pride. One day, he thought, Barcelona would be the capital of an independent Catalan Republic and one of the great cities in Europe. Whatever had happened to Pau Tosets, it would be a better place when men like Ugarte no longer had any power over it. And even as the carriage rode back into the shantytown of Poble Sec and past the theaters, cafés, and music halls along the Parallelo, he could not shake off the nagging suspicion that Ugarte had not been telling the truth.
5
Do you know how long you’ll be in Barcelona, Harry?” Dr. Morris laid the stethoscope on his desk as Lawton put his shirt and jacket back on.
“Difficult to say. A week or two I expect.”
“When was the last time you had a seizure?”
“About a month ago. Only minor.”
Lawton knew he had no need to lie, and that Morris could not stop him going anywhere, but he still regarded doctors with something of the reverence and respect he had once reserved for priests, and he was reluctant to tell them anything that might arouse their disapproval.
“Well, you’re in fine physical shape,” said Morris. “But that’s not the problem, is it? Remember you need to avoid any mental or emotional strain.”
“It’s a straightforward job. More like a vacation.”
“Well, perhaps the sunshine will do you good. I’ll give you a month’s prescription just in case. Potassium bromide for the seizures. Nitroglycerin and amyl nitrate for headaches. Remember to take the bromide daily or it won’t work. And no drinking. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that.”
“No sir.” Lawton handed Morrison his fee. “Haven’t touched a drop in more than a year.”
“Good for you.” Morris was looking at him thoughtfully now. “You know, Harry, I was wondering, have you heard of Victor Horsley?”
Lawton had not, and Morris explained that Horsley was a surgeon at the National Hospital for Paralysis and Epilepsy, who had had some success on epileptic patients using surgical procedures.
“With respect, Doctor, I’ve seen too many field hospitals to allow anyone to look inside my skull,” Lawton said.
“Horsley’s not some army butcher, Harry. His team have actually stopped some patients from having fits. It’s just something to consider, that’s all—if things should deteriorate. Of course we both hope they won’t.”
Lawton gave a noncommittal grunt and Morris made out the prescription. He went directly to the apothecary to have it made up, and then made his way back along Commercial Street and into the warren of streets behind Brick Lane. On arriving back at the house he was disappointed to hear the widow Friedman remonstrating with one of the tenants in the kitchen. He had intended to pass by the café to give her the rent in order to avoid a scene, and he went quickly upstairs before she noticed him. He had nearly finished his packing when there was a discreet tap on the door and he went over to let her in. She was carrying a little basket, and she smiled the tentative, hopeful smile that always made him feel guilty.
“I brought you some blinis,” she said, as he shut the door behind her. Her smile immediately vanished at the sight of the battered leather suitcase on the bed. “You’re leaving?”
“Just for a fortnight. I’m going to Spain.”
“And you don’t tell me?”
“I was about to.” Lawton reached for his wallet and counted out six shillings. “Here’s three weeks rent—just in case.”
The widow had a pained look in her eyes now as she looked at his outstretched hand. “You don’t need to pay me now, Harry. I keep your room empty for you.”
“No, no, take it. Here.” Her eyes looked teary now as she took the coins. “I won’t be gone long,” he said in a softer tone.
“But you’re not well Harry. Vot if…”
Lawton immediately stiffened. “I have to go. My train leaves at four.”
The widow looked as if his imminent departure was one more disappointment in a life that had already produced too many of them. She insisted that he take the blinis, and Lawton fretted impatiently as she wrapped them in newspaper. He sensed that she wanted him to kiss her or make some pledge or promise, but he put on his mackintosh and hat and picked up his suitcase.
“I’ll see you soon,” he said.
“Alright Harry. You take care.”
Lawton smiled tensely and hurried away with a feeling of relief from this unwanted intimacy and all the unspoken feelings and obligations that it imposed on him. It was beginning to rain now, and as he dipped his hat against the drizzle and walked quickly toward the station, the East End seemed suddenly smaller and more claustrophobic than it should have been, and it did not seem like a bad thing at all to be getting out of it.
* * *
He arrived in Dover in the early evening and booked into a bed and breakfast overlooking the new port. The next morning he hired a motorized taxi to take him to the Everdale Asylum. It was a clear day and already the first day-trippers were arriving at Dover station as the taxi drove out into the countryside toward Folkestone. Fifteen minutes later he saw the familiar red buildings above the line of trees on the hill. He asked the taxi to wait for him at the entrance and walked into the grounds. Apart from the nurses, doctors, and orderlies, and the distracted-looking people wandering around the grounds under their watchful supervision, Everdale’s purpose was not immediately obvious.
Some of the patients were playing bowls and croquet, others were sitting on the lawn chatting as though they were having a day out in the park. The acute wards were a different matter, and he braced himself as he announced his arrival to the duty nurse and told her that he had come to collect Estela Lawton. He stood waiting in the corridor while she went off to fetch her, and looked at the portraits and photographs of Everdale’s directors lining the walls. They reached all the way back from the present to the late 18th century. To his surprise there was no photograph or portrait of Randolph Foulkes, even though Pickering had said that Foulkes worked there in the 1890s.
Lawton was still staring at the portraits when the nurse returned with his mother. As always the sight of her filled him with desolation and guilt. She was wearing the same green dress and bonnet that she had worn when he had brought her there, but now it seemed to hang off her as though she had shrunk inside it. Even when she was younger, his father had often taunted her that she belonged in a freak show or a human zoo. Now she looked frailer and madder than the last time he had seen her, as she peered at him suspiciously.
“I know you,” she said.
Lawton smiled patiently. “ ’Course you do Ma. Soy Harry, tu hijo.”
“I don’t have a son!”
“I’m afraid you do.” He winked at the nurse. “And he’s come to take you to the seaside.”
His mother looked suddenly frightened. “But I like it here.”
“You also like the sea,” Lawton reminded her. “And afterward we’ll come back here.”
Estela brightened now and let him take her arm. Lawton had forgotten how light and insubstantial she was, like a bird that could fly away at any moment.
“I have a question about one of your directors,” he said to the nurse. “A Dr. Randolph Foulkes. He worked here in the 1890s, but I don’t see his picture up on the walls. Just a three-year-gap between 1897 and 1900.”
“I wasn’t working here then,” the nurse replied. “But I can ask about him while you’re out.”
Lawton thanked her and walked away with his mother. No sooner had they left the building than she gripped his arm and looked at him with sudden intensity. “That woman,” she whispered, “would like to drink my blood.”
“I don’t think so,” said Lawton.
“She would!” His mother insisted. “She’s a peuchen.”
Lawton sighed. It was going to be a long day. “This isn’t Patagonia Ma. There are no monsters here.”
His mother looked unconvinced, but she had cheered up by the time they arrived in Folkestone, and the day passed more easily than he had anticipated. Much of the time all he had to do was nod and humor her more wayward thoughts and fixations, which she mostly expressed in Spanish with a smattering of Mapuche words, as they walked along the beach and promenade to the strains of a carousel and a military band on Victoria Pier. His mother tapped her feet in time to the music, and Lawton remembered the volunteers singing some of the same songs as they marched through Limehouse in 1990 on their way to fight the Boers.
Once those parades had inspired him to seek military glory. Now he found their gaiety jarring and dishonest. The spectators loved them, as civilians always did, because these tunes conjured up images of men in the saddle, of sabers, uniforms, and gallant cavalry charges. Lawton preferred the songs on the carousel like “Daisy,” “My Wild Irish Rose,” and “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” that he remembered from more innocent times. His mother liked everything she heard, and stared with childlike fascination at the families eating picnics, the children making sandcastles and riding donkeys, the young men in striped bathing suits and boaters lounging against the wooden windbreaks, while Lawton cast sneaking glances at the pretty young women splashing in the foamy sea with wet hair and their knee-length swimsuits.
All this seemed to revive his mother physically and mentally, so that it was almost possible to see traces of the beauty his father had brought back to Ireland and then to England like a rare tropical orchid more than thirty years ago. Age, madness, and poverty had twisted her face and hollowed out her eyes and cheekbones, but he could still remember the gentle woman who told him about the blood-drinking peuchen and the flesh-eating cherufe and the Mapuche warrior-hero Lautaro who had fought the Spanish. He and his sister had had her committed before the war. Even now she did not know that he had gone to South Africa or become a police officer, and there was no point in even telling her that he was going to Barcelona. By the time they returned to the asylum in the afternoon, she was beginning to look downcast and agitated once again.
“Everything will be alright, won’t it hijo?” she said, gripping his arm tightly.
“Why wouldn’t it be?” Lawton saw the taxi driver’s raised eyebrows in the mirror and he glared back at him till he looked away. On reaching the hospital he took his mother back to the ward, where the nurse smiled at them benignly. “Did you have a nice day Estela?” she asked.
His mother stared down at the ground.
“We did,” Lawton replied.
“I spoke to matron about Dr. Foulkes,” the nurse said. “She does remember him, but she said she didn’t know why his picture wasn’t up there.”
Lawton thanked her and handed his mother over. “Goodbye, Ma. I’ll see you again soon.”
His mother turned away without a word, and Lawton watched the nurse lead her out and wondered whether he ever would see her again. He walked back out toward the waiting taxi, past the men and women who were being led back into their wards. Once they had been out in the world, just like him, and one day he might find himself in a place like this. He would rather die first, and he wondered what his mother would have said if she had been presented with such a choice when they had had her committed. She had not been there when Foulkes was director, and now, as the taxi drove back toward Dover, he thought that it would not do any harm to call or send a telegram to Scotland Yard, and ask Maitland if he could find out why Randolph Foulkes had not received the honor that had been bestowed on his predecessors.
* * *
“Why do we kiss the hands of priests?”
Esperanza looked sternly around at the rows of children in their light blue smocks. All of them, including the girls, had had their heads shaven after the latest outbreak of lice. Some of them were dazed and drooping after the long day, but her favorite pupils still put their hands up as they always did whenever their favorite teacher asked them a question.
“Because priests are holy?” said Núria.
“Really?” Esperanza replied. “And what makes them holy?”
“God does!” Luis exclaimed.
“But who says God exists?” Esperanza asked. “The same men who ask us to kiss their hands!”
Luis looked crestfallen, and Esperanza immediately regretted her harsh tone. In a softer voice, she explained that priests were merely men, who deserved no more respect than anyone else. They told the poor to be content with their poverty, and promised them that they would be rewarded in heaven. But the Church was one of the richest landowners in Spain. Its convents and monasteries had grown rich at the people’s expense. So of course its priests expected the poor to kiss their hands to show respect, but what they really showed was that were slaves.
It was a strong speech, and some of the children looked shocked at her vehemence. Esperanza knew that she sounded more emotional than usual, which was not surprising after another night lying awake worrying about whether Pau was dead or alive. This was not something she could explain to her class. If she even mentioned his name aloud she knew that she might cry, and then she would upset the children. But if Pau’s disappearance had made her sad, it had also made her angry and even less inclined than usual to moderate her words in accordance with the director’s instructions. The Élisée Reclus Institute was one of the few rationalist schools still functioning in Barcelona after the crackdown that followed Ferrer’s trial. Most of the others had backed away from Ferrer’s methods and ideas, and had begun to reaffirm their patriotism and their commitment to the Catholic curriculum. Esperanza knew it would not be long before her school did the same. Already Director Vargas had hung a picture of the king in the canteen and obliged staff and children to sing the national anthem at morning assembly. It was only a matter of time before they would be studying the catechism once again.
“My mother says if you don’t kiss the priest’s hand you don’t go to heaven,” Núria insisted.
“There is no heaven!” Esperanza sighed impatiently. “There’s only this world and this life. And we are the ones who make it into heaven or hell—not the priests.”
Once again she knew she had spoken too harshly. She looked beyond the rows of benches toward the photograph of the geographer Reclus with his long white hair and beard, and his gentle, intelligent eyes that seemed to twinkle approvingly. There had been a time when she had also believed the same things she was telling her class not to believe, when she had taken it for granted that the world was exactly what her elders said it was and that it would always remain the same. As a child she had assumed that she would always go on living with her parents and her two younger brothers in the Calle Provenza, with her dollhouse and toys, her teachers and her friends and the daily walks to the Ciutadella Park. All that had come to an end on the morning of June 29, 1896, less than a week after her seventh birthday, when the officers from the Social Brigade had come to take her father away, while he was eating breakfast and reading his newspa
per in the gallery as he always did.
Even then, her father had been so calm and matter-of-fact as he put on his jacket and hat that she thought nothing of it. The next time she had seen him he had been lying in an open coffin. Now, more than a decade later, Spain was still a country where men could be taken away by police for no reason and with no explanation and there was nothing anyone could do to prevent it or get anyone to account for it. Mata had done all he could, and she was no longer sure what anyone else could do. Even now she thought of Pau, like her father, chained to a wall in the fortress, and she felt herself welling up.
Just then the bell rang out in the corridor and she turned away to compose herself, while the children queued up to hand in their slates, chalk, and smocks, which she stacked in the cupboard and hung on the rail. Afterward the children poured out of the classroom in a tumultuous flood, and Esperanza put on her hat and cloak, and gathered up her bag and her sheets of music. A part of her felt that it was frivolous to sing when Pau might be being tortured, but her mother had insisted, and she needed some distraction and consolation. She was about to leave when Director Vargas appeared in the doorway.
“Miss Claramunt,” he said, with a smile. “I was hoping to hear singing from your classroom today.”
“I’ve had too many other things to teach them, sir.”
“I couldn’t help noticing you didn’t sing the ‘Royal March’ this morning.” Vargas was not smiling now. “There’s not much point in asking the children to sing the national anthem if their own teachers don’t sing it, is there?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “But I don’t believe that national anthems of any kind are compatible with the rational education our schools were created to provide.”
Vargas looked pained. “There’s nothing reactionary about patriotism, Miss Claramunt. Times are changing and we have to change with them. I think you should reflect on that.”
