There Your Heart Lies

by Mary Gordon

  What was her fantasy? Meeting Pepe and his grandmother so nearly fit it exactly. A romance with a young Spaniard, an elder opening the shut doors of the past, inviting her into the history that she had come to take her part in. But Pepe’s grandmother shut the door with the fixed purpose of someone who is trying to keep out a thief. Her look seemed hunted. Did Amelia have to understand herself now as the hunter? She has always disliked the idea of hunting, men dressed for the kill, the prey so drastically overmatched. Is that who she is? The hunter? The thief?

  “I’ll be twenty minutes at the most,” Pepe says. “I’ll just give my grandmother a light supper and see that she’s tucked into bed. Perhaps you’d like to go upstairs onto our roof? You can see the sea from there; you’ll be just in time for the sunset.” He hands her the bottle of wine and her glass. “Please,” he says. “Enjoy yourself.”

  She climbs the narrow stairs onto the roof. In fact, she’s missed the sunset. The sky is smoky; deep violet clouds are solid globes, disappearing before her eyes into a darkness that creeps up, allowing her only a glimpse of the dark sea. The chorus of birds grows incrementally silent; she wonders which species go silent first and how each knows when to be quiet. Swallows wheel and dive, then disappear, absorbed into the growing darkness.

  Then, timidly, two stars appear, and she becomes conscious of a three-quarter moon, reflected in the water that has, newly lit, become newly visible. She sits back on the white plastic chair, the same chair she has seen on every sidewalk in front of every restaurant and café she has seen in every city she has been to in America. A soft breeze blows the curls that have escaped from the tortoiseshell clip she’s caught her hair in. She pulls her scarf more closely around her shoulders. A light winks—is it a lighthouse? How has she not seen it before? She sips her wine, holding it against the moonlight, looking through the gold to the dark evening air.

  She hears Pepe’s light step. “I hope you’ve been happy on your own here. I have the feeling that you understand the kinds of things that must be done when one has, as we have, a grandmother.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “This isn’t the easiest house for an old woman who has trouble getting around. The kitchen is in the basement and my grandmother’s room is upstairs. Sometimes I have to carry her downstairs because she doesn’t want to give up cooking. In many ways, it makes no sense. But she loves her house, she’s lived here since she was a young bride, and if you just don’t think about it in terms of what’s sensible, it’s a good arrangement, certainly good for me, and for her as well, even if it means I have to carry her up and down the stairs rather than her having to give up the house she loves.”

  “It’s a lovely house,” she says, “and you’re so kind to invite me. But I seem to have upset your grandmother, I’m very sorry. What was the accident your grandmother referred to? I gathered she didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “The accident? Oh, that’s what my grandmother’s generation calls the civil war. As if it was no one’s fault, it just happened. For years, no one would talk about it at all. You must remember that when you and I were born, Franco had only been dead ten years. It’s only recently that people would talk about it.”

  “What side was your grandmother on?”

  “My grandmother is as political as a grapefruit. But the town was divided, I gather, half Falangist, half Republican. My grandmother probably did whatever her family did, but I have no idea, as I said, she never talks about it. My grandmother is not an educated woman, and she dislikes any kind of discord. Also, she is not particularly adventurous. It was my parents who left the town; no one had for generations.”

  “She’s a delightful woman. I’m sorry that I distressed her.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing. I will tell her stories about how kind you are to your grandmother—you can give me facts, or I can easily make them up—and tell her you are a tender, young girl who inspires tenderness in me, and she will love you and forget all about it. She’s very good at forgetting unpleasantness.”

  He pours them each another glass of wine. They are sitting on a bench attached to the white wall. He puts his arm around her. She inclines her head toward him so he knows she wants to be kissed.

  Perfect, she thinks, this is perfect, to kiss this lovely man with his warm skin, and his glossy hair, and his wonderful, huge eyes, and his smell of soap that might be sage or rosemary, who carries his grandmother up and down stairs. But she knows he’s wrong, that his grandmother has not forgotten the unpleasantness, and that, like Amelia, he’s been raised not to be part of the darkness of the past. But he is not like her, because her father’s illness and death made the darkness impossible not to fear. He’s someone who doesn’t fear it, because he hasn’t yet met it. He’s devoted to pleasure, not only his own, but the pleasure of everyone. And he is not like her because she has something in her that he does not, a kind of force that made her grandmother tell the story of her past.

  This is who he is; this is who he will be to her. Not a part of her mission: a part of her holiday. The breeze cools their skin; they kiss and kiss, as if it were the only activity open to them as a man and a woman. She has never enjoyed kissing so much; it’s not a prelude to anything, not just something to be got through, but a delightful activity valuable for its own sake.

  “Perhaps tomorrow we can spend more time together,” he says, and she knows what he means. “Right now, I feel it is best to do nothing that might disturb my grandmother.”

  His decorousness arouses her as mere ardor would not. He leans against the white wall, brilliant in the darkness, and she leans against him. What a great pleasure it is: this light leaning. Something, she thinks, like getting into a hammock and letting yourself be supported by something as light as woven cords, the air beneath you, you’re not on the ground but not far from it, and you feel safe, safe enough to fall easily asleep. But she can’t fall asleep. She needs his help to find her uncle. She must have a clear enough brain to invent another lie. She knows she’s getting better at it, but she’s not quite expert. She wonders when lying will come easily to her, another skill grown automatic, like ice-skating or crochet.

  “I actually haven’t come to Altea for pleasure. I’m here to look for someone who’s a relative, related, actually, to the man my grandmother was married to when she lived here.”

  It’s not really a lie, she tells herself; nothing she has said could be counted as a pure untruth. She understands that this kind of calculation is what could easily be called the “slippery slope.” The slippery slope that lands you right in the waterfall of automatic deceit.

  “How thrilling,” Pepe says. “A search for your roots. What’s his name?”

  “Ignacio Ortiz.”

  Pepe whistles. “Well, as they say in England, you might just find a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. Señor Ortiz is very wealthy. A very prominent businessman. Of course, I’ve never met him. He sells expensive cars to people who don’t really live here.”

  Amelia shivers, excited by the discovery, and he feels her shiver and puts his arm more tightly around her. She imagines this is what it’s like when a detective finds his—what, his prey?

  She hates having to use these hunting terms. And she doesn’t want to use the pronoun “he.” She is the girl detective, Nancy Drew, from the books she devoured in the summers spent with Meme in the attic room that is hers again, where everything important to her now is kept.

  They are both reluctant to move. She tells him she’s actually too tired for supper, the tapas were enough. He apologizes, but she says, “No, actually I prefer to eat lightly at night,” which is, miraculously, not a lie.

  The square is bustling with young people. Rock music blares from the bars; boys and girls their age stand, holding full glasses, swaying—and smoking, Amelia is surprised to see, as if no one ever told them this might not be good for their future health. Everyone greets Pepe, and he greets them but doesn’t stop to talk. She hopes there’ll be more kissing at the doo
r of the hotel.

  In front of the cathedral there is a temporary wooden structure, a kind of castle. The young people lean against it; there’s a doorway that only a very small person would be able to enter.

  “What’s that?” she asks Pepe.

  “Oh, that was for the festival. The festival of the Christians and the Moors. The children dress up, some as Spaniards at the time of Isabella and some as Moors, and they reenact the Battle of Granada. The children who are playing the Spaniards chase the Moors from the street, wielding their swords. The Moorish children are carrying scimitars.”

  Amelia doesn’t know how to respond. She doesn’t know how to understand that Pepe is speaking of this as if it were normal, acceptable.

  “Don’t you think that might be offensive to Muslims?”

  Pepe looks at her with genuine puzzlement. “But there are no Muslims here. And besides, the part of the Moors is the coveted part. All the children want to be Moors. The costumes are much better, and the scimitars are much more fun.”

  She knows there’s something dreadful about all this, but she doesn’t want to spoil the night by arguing about it. He sees nothing wrong with it, and it is his home. She was right not to tell him the whole story of Meme’s time here. He would be the wrong person to tell it to; there would be no category for it in his understanding of the world. She leans back into the arm that Pepe has put around her and enjoys a voluptuous yawn.

  —

  She sleeps dreamlessly, but lightly, with the lightness she associates with Pepe, and she wakes rested. She has breakfast on the hotel terrace, tostadas and café con leche, which seems to her the perfect thing to be eating for breakfast on an October morning looking at the Mediterranean. Pepe has told her that he must work today, that she must go for a swim without him, but that she should come to the shop at about five, and he will take her to meet her uncle.

  She knows that the time here is unreal, that it can’t be said to serve as a model for what ordinary life might be. But, having learned to turn her back on the recent horrors imposed on the town, like a bad haircut on a beauty, she has seen the pleasures of daily life here: the white walls, the ornamental gates, the climbing flowers, the kindness of the waiters and waitresses, the children playing late at night, surrounded by their parents, their grandparents, people living in the benevolent outdoors, enjoying each other publicly, strolling arm in arm: all this is impossible in the chilly North or in car-infested California. She allows herself to imagine what it might be like to live here for a little while; she could get some kind of job—perhaps in a bakery, though she hasn’t seen any bakeries, but it doesn’t matter, she’s sure she could find some kind of job, she isn’t very choosy or demanding about what work, in her imagination, she might do. She would perfect her Spanish. She would read about the history of Spain. She allows herself to imagine that she would be living with her uncle Ignacio. Every morning she would shop, sometimes in the covered market, on Tuesdays and Saturdays in the open market. She would cook only fresh, seasonal food; she would learn more about cooking fish; she would learn to clean a fish. She would help Pepe with his grandmother: it would be a real service when the abuelita became more crippled. Amelia wouldn’t mind helping her bathe. It would be a simple, unhurried life, but every act would have a finished, a polished quality.

  Then she remembers: to live here, she would have to be far from Meme. But soon Meme will not be in the world, and what had seemed only minutes before a desirable lightness now seems not desirable at all but dangerous. Without Meme in the world, how will she attach? She will fly off into a space that is intolerable in its lack of boundaries. There is, of course, her mother, but her mother presses down: too much gravity. Meme’s touch is light; she holds but does not press. Amelia begins to weep, and she allows herself a childish, a ridiculous gesture: she opens her arms and cries Meme, Meme, like a child running for comfort. But there is no comfort to be found.

  She knows what Meme would say: Go for a swim, it will restore you. But restore her to what? To a living body, a young body that will live in the world long after her grandmother is no longer a part of it. And that is what Meme would want, for her to live happily ever after.

  Without Pepe, she is in a different relationship to the sea. She can plunge right in and swim without a goal for as long as she likes. The salt of the sea becomes indistinguishable from the salt of her tears, and she feels free to weep there for her beloved grandmother, who taught her to swim, with whom she has been happy swimming. She opens her eyes under the water; looks at the ribs of rippling sand, spies a few scant, silver fish who hurry to be away from her. She rolls over on her back, focuses on the rock formations. On her right side, an emerald hill; on her left, its cousin, bare rock, barren. And she wonders how these two can be so different and so near. This, she thinks, is the kind of thing Meme would inquire about and find an answer for. And she knows that she will not.

  She showers and walks back to lunch at the café l’Espril, and the waitress greets her like a regular, points her to what is understood now as “her table.” Again, she orders the tortilla and some grilled vegetables. A glass (one only) of white wine. The vegetables are not, as she imagined, simply grilled, but breaded, and she enjoys a transgressive pleasure in what is surely not grilled but fried, although the meal lies heavy on her stomach, and she wants a nap. She allows herself another shower and lies naked on her bed, enjoying the warm breeze on her nakedness, and she allows herself to think of Pepe and what, she is sure, is in store for them tonight.

  She wakes at three and walks along the esplanade. Pepe has told her she must have a horchata, the iced almond drink that is a Valencian specialty, at the café of a friend of his, who makes a very good one. She mentions Pepe’s name and the owner, a slight, elegant sixty-year-old man in grey trousers and a short-sleeved blue-and-white-striped shirt, serves her seriously, formally. He seems not depressed but worried, or perhaps only congenitally fatalistic, as if he had a secret knowledge that he is making the last horchata in the history of the world but must keep that information quiet. It is a cliché about the Spaniards: that they are fatalistic. She doesn’t believe in sentences that begin with “The Spanish people…,” but she can only see fatalism as he turns to the refrigerator and then presses the buttons on a machine that makes a drink that is nothing but delightful, suggesting nothing but that life is pleasant, nourishing, and sweet.

  She enjoys the sound of her sandals on the stone steps, the clean light on the white buildings. She stops midway up the hill to savor the view of the seashore stretching out from the uneven levels of the reddish-brown tile roofs. She takes her hair out of her clip, shakes it out, and clips it again. Tonight she will be with Pepe.

  She finds his shop easily; it is on a small side street closer to Pepe’s grandmother’s house than to the esplanade. The metal sign that hangs out into the street has an orange-yellow sun and underneath it, in English, “House of Sunshine.”

  Pepe is behind the counter, engaging a woman in her fifties in a conversation centered around which of three silver bracelets she might buy. Amelia wouldn’t dream of interrupting him. He suggests to the woman that she buy all three, and this seems like a good idea to her. He concludes the purchase by leaning—it’s more of a jump—over the counter and kissing the woman’s cheek.

  Amelia smiles when she catches Pepe’s eye, but she knows she must wait till the customers are gone before she approaches him. A German couple seems to be buying something that Amelia can’t see. She looks at the earrings in the display case; they’re unremarkable. She can imagine herself buying any of ten pairs and not being distressed if they were lost. She walks into the next room. All pleasure drains from her body.

  There are a series of figurines on glass shelves; they seem to be wizards and dragons. The dragon’s eyes are startling red and green stones; the fire breathed from his mouth is a violent orange; his outsized tail is encrusted with vaguely leaf-shaped, metallic plates of an even more violent green. One dragon is approxim
ately the size, she thinks, of a two-year-old. All the wizards seem to have what is supposed to be natural hair, wheat-colored wisps that fall down to their midnight-blue capes with patterning of metallic stars. They range in size, but the largest matches the size of the largest dragon. She can’t imagine who would desire such things; she can’t imagine why Pepe would sell them.

  There are pictures of bullfighters and Gypsies painted on wood, and a large oil painting of a buxom señorita in a peasant outfit. On the far wall there is more of the cheap Indian clothing that, in America, only stoners wear; she can smell, as she approaches them, that combination of fish and motor oil, with an overlay of ink. The wall beside the Indian clothing is devoted to clocks; a quarter hour strikes, and she hears the Bobby McFerrin tune: “Don’t worry. Be happy.” As she comes closer, she sees that on each side of the pendulum is a white square shaped like a traffic sign. One says “Don’t worry.” The other says “Be happy.”

  Her body is uncomfortable in this room. I ate too heavily, she tells herself, but she knows that isn’t it. It’s the ugliness, the cheapness of everything in Pepe’s store, and she can’t stop her physical reaction to it. She tells herself that it isn’t important, that Pepe is a wonderful person, kind to his grandmother, tender and attentive to her as a woman, but her eye falls on the picture of the bullfighter and her heart contracts.

  Two customers enter the store, a father and a son. At first, Amelia thinks they’re American, but then she realizes they’re English. The boy, who is very blond, is wearing shorts that reveal, worryingly for Amelia, his thin, milk-white legs. “It’s here, Daddy, this is the one I want.” He pulls his father over to the shelf of wizards and dragons.