Lime's Photograph

by Leif Davidsen

  “Out with it, Lime,” said Gloria.

  “Over the years, I’ve put aside some negatives and prints and kept them separate from the rest.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Some people write diaries. My photographs are my diary. Some people collect stamps. I collect moments in time.”

  “What kind of photographs?”

  “Professional, personal, important, inconsequential, ugly, beautiful. My photographs.”

  “You mean Lime’s photographs? The Jacqueline Kennedy negative, for instance?” she asked.

  “For instance.”

  “It won’t stand up in court. That one alone is worth a million. Where are they? I want them valued.”

  “Out of the question.”

  “Peter!”

  “Forget it. It’s not important.”

  “Where are they?”

  “I’m saying it doesn’t matter!”

  “You’re making things difficult, Peter.”

  “Then drop the case.”

  “Certainly not. We’ve got every chance to screw those arrogant men in their tight-fisted insurance companies.”

  It was the battle. It was the brawl. It was the chance to take arrogant men down a peg or two that motivated her, and not really the money at all. I didn’t say anything and we stood in awkward silence, which was unusual for us. Tobacco is a saviour, so we each lit a cigarette and blew the smoke away from one another, managing to break eye contact without making it too conspicuous, but Oscar could sense the tension in the air when he came back into the office.

  “Well, well,” he said. “And which angel might have passed through here while I was out?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I can tell you later,” said Gloria. “Go on your trip, Peter. We’ll talk again when you come home. Nothing will happen before October at the earliest, anyway. Go on your trip on that infernal machine of yours. Get the shit out of your system.”

  Oscar seemed to want to say more, but Gloria’s look silenced him, and they went through the ritual, saying that all three of us should go out for lunch, and that they could clear their diaries. But I released them from their torment, letting them go to one of their American-style power lunches or perhaps a rendezvous with a lover, while I drove in the midday heat to the Danish Embassy, where I picked up my new passport, and then home to say goodbye to Don Alfonzo. Madrid suddenly felt like a straitjacket that threatened to suffocate me. The buildings leant in over the congested streets like gravestones, as if they were about to topple, making my head swim.

  Gloria and Oscar had seen me out with cheerful talk of holiday plans. Madrid’s unbearable August was knocking on the door. Gloria wanted to go to her beloved London. Oscar wanted to spend a couple of weeks playing golf in cool Ireland and then meet up with Gloria in London. I sort of promised to join them at some point. Business and pleasure. If we were going to meet in London, we might as well check up on our British operation which, like everything else Gloria and Oscar touched, purred like a fat cat skimming off the cream. But I got the feeling that what they really wanted more than anything was to have their old friend Peter Lime back, and for the incident never to have happened, or at least be forgotten.

  Don Alfonzo wasn’t home. He had left a note saying he had gone to the city and anticipated staying in a hotel for a couple of days while he looked over our case, he wrote, and he wished me good luck on my trip. He had put one of his most beautiful orchids in a small blue glass vase next to the note. I understood, because while he knew that I found no comfort in visiting the cemetery, he was encouraging me to say goodbye.

  I often forgot to eat, but Doña Carmen had made a salad with serrano ham that I ate in the shade on the veranda while I watched the shimmering heat over the mountains. I felt empty and miserable, as usual, and I missed my wife and my child with a force and pain that was physical, and which I wouldn’t have imagined possible. I missed them constantly. Day and night. At regular intervals the monster raised its head with a force so painful that I thought I would go out of my mind.

  I made some coffee and then packed a rucksack with a change of clothes and strapped it onto the motorbike. The air vibrated with the droning buzz of the grasshoppers. The smell of dust and tomato plants and a gentle coolness drifted across from Don Alfonzo’s garden, which he had undoubtedly watered before he left. I locked up the house, swung my leg over the Honda and drove slowly to the cemetery, the orchid resting in my lap.

  The white crosses and tall marble headstones were beginning to redden in the early evening sun. We had chosen a simple stone with their names and their two decisive dates: birth and death. And that was all. Don Alfonzo’s orchid was on the right. I put mine to the left of his and then rested on one knee for a while, wishing with all my heart that I could pray or weep, but nothing ever came. There were no voices, no God, no revelation, no transfiguration, no inner conversation with the bereaved. There was just a gnawing guilt and a smouldering, irrational rage at them for leaving me, for leaving me alone and lonely. It should have been rage directed at their murderers, but that wasn’t how I felt that day.

  I followed the traffic round Madrid and opened the throttle when I reached the old main road north. I chose it in preference to the motorway. It was as familiar as an old glove. I had driven along it hundreds of times. As photojournalist on my way to the big Basque demonstrations for autonomy at the end of the 1970s, and with Amelia and Maria Luisa on our way to the holiday cottage near San Sebastián.

  Evening fell, and the sun sank on my left in a profusion of reds which crept down over the mountains and across the plain in a slow red tide. It was always a thrilling and strange feeling to leave a big Spanish city and get out into the countryside. In the middle of Madrid you could forget that Spain is a big empty country where the horizon is constantly pulled further and further into the distance and ends in mountains or undulating hills and parched fields. The traffic thinned out. It consisted mainly of small cars and reeking, old lorries whose drivers didn’t want to pay the motorway tolls, but the Honda purred its way past them in smooth curves. The sun set, and I felt an increasingly pleasant, cool wind on my face as the blush of the sun turned into a deep crimson fire, making me feel as if I was driving through an ocean of blood.

  8

  I drove through the gentle, warm darkness, stopping only when I needed to fill up the tank. Driving at night is a journey in stillness, with the monotonous rumbling of the motor in your ears, and a loneliness shared with pale, young men in hushed petrol stations, wordlessly pushing coffee across the counter. If one wasn’t preoccupied with one’s own wretched life, one could invent all sorts of tales from their monosyllabic replies to a request for coffee, a soft drink, or 18 litres of high-octane petrol. Perhaps they were here in the solitude of the night because they had gone through a divorce, couldn’t find any other job, couldn’t sleep, had a broken heart. But I didn’t think about them. I just drove on. I became one with the Honda. It hummed between my legs, first sending my buttocks to sleep and then making them ache. I put on my helmet after midnight when the starry night sky began to absorb the warmth of the earth. My only company were the belching old lorries, a holiday-maker who had got lost, speeding north with snorkel and beach towels in the back window, and a few other solitary night travellers who for God knows what reason chose the old, free main road instead of the anonymous, deserted and efficient motorway. I was exhausted and therefore extra vigilant, and I was actually sorry when, 20 kilometres or so before San Sebastián, I had to turn off the main road and the motorbike carried me up and up along the gently curving mountain road to my and Amelia’s little refuge. The journey was the most important thing, movement. The destination was rather a disappointment.

  The house was bathed in a morning haze, as if we had said goodbye to it together only a week before. The mountains in the distance arched massively like the backs of elephants in the glimmering dawn. Our house was up on a ridge, but the green hills were more reminiscent of Austrian summer
pasture. It was an old stone house that had once belonged to a medium-sized Basque sheep farm, but the times had taken their toll on both the farmer and his life’s work. I had bought it in a fit of passion at the beginning of the 1980s, but had never done anything to it. Amelia fell for it on sight, at a time when I still wasn’t quite sure that she loved me. She came from the town and therefore loved the countryside. I came from the countryside and loved the anonymity and rhythm of big cities.

  She had left the solid, rectangular outer walls of grey-beige Basque granite standing, but had ripped out most of the interior; only the old kitchen range had been allowed to remain. Then she had rebuilt the inside and created a home, with an open-plan kitchen as the natural focal point and enough rooms to put up 20 people. Running water was installed, electricity and heating, but everything was kept in rustic, natural materials. Oscar had said it was the kind of house every Madrid architect dreamt of showing off in Hola or some other magazine, and we were happy in it. We had created it together. It was up in the hills and you looked down through the valley to the Bay of Biscay, the mountains behind providing shelter when the winds came from that direction. It had two storeys and a generous cellar for wine and cheese. But when just the three of us were staying, we used only the ground floor and lived more or less in the kitchen, the reassuring presence of the big black range radiating warmth in the cold Basque winter or the unreliable summer when the heat of the sun was smothered by a chilly mist if the wind brought in a sea fog from the Atlantic.

  I was worn out as I drove the last few hundred metres up to the house, the gravel crunching loudly under the tyres. The neighbouring house, where a Basque sheep farmer called Arregui lived, was a couple of kilometres further on up the mountain. In defiance of every EU resolution, regulation and efficiency measure, he went on tending his sheep, made his cheese from their milk, cured meat and made enough to live on. He would have earned more if he let the whole place lie fallow and rented out his farmhouse to summer holidaymakers, but sheep had been his way of life for 60 years, along with the Basque cause, and he would die for them both. He had started as a shepherd at the age of ten and that same year one of his uncles had been shot in a clash with the Guardia Civil. Sheep and nationalism went hand in hand for him. I sent him an envelope every month, money for watching over the house, making sure there was dry firewood and keeping robbers away. He would have done it without payment, but I got him to take it by saying that I could claim it against tax and thereby cheat the central authorities out of a bit of revenue. He saw it as being free for me and expensive for the Castilians, and so he was happy. He was Catholic, a conservative and ardent Basque nationalist and spoke Spanish only when absolutely necessary. But since I was a foreigner, and he’d fallen for Amelia and later for Maria Luisa in a big way, he accepted that we would never learn Basque. He was an anachronism in modern-day Europe – a dinosaur who still, despite his years, lifted boulders, split logs and played pelota with bare fists at the annual summer contests. His elder son had been garrotted in 1972 by the state authorities under Franco. His other son, Tómas, who had become my friend, spent three years on death row before the amnesty of 1977. His daughter, the youngest child, was serving a life sentence in a prison south of Seville, convicted for the murder of a captain in the Guardia Civil five years earlier. Arregui thought that he had bred good Basque children who had done him credit. It was hardly surprising that the Basque issue continued unresolved.

  I parked the motorbike and got off with stiff legs and a burning backside, not unlike the early sun that was creeping up in the humid, misty morning. The clicking hiss of the engine as it began to cool was the only sound in the growing morning light, the mist lying like a grey rug over the reaped pastures. The key was in its usual place under the pot by the back door, and I let myself in. The house was still warm from the heat of the day. In the silence I thought I could smell Amelia and Maria Luisa. There was some knitting on the kitchen table. As if Amelia had just popped upstairs or walked over to visit Arregui. Maria Luisa’s doll’s house was in the corner and a pile of children’s books lay on the table by the fireplace. I could see their raincoats and favourite umbrellas and the calendar that Amelia used to make a note of birthdays and other anniversaries. There were postcards, notes, one of Maria Luisa’s drawings and a photograph of her best friend in Madrid fixed onto the fridge door by little magnets with animal faces. We had bought them in a kiosk down in San Sebastián last summer.

  I went outside again, got my sleeping bag from the motorbike and unrolled it on the wooden veranda that we had built right around the house. I fell asleep at once, my mind full of loss and the dark country road and the labouring motorbike, as relentless as a chain saw in a condemned forest.

  I woke in the middle of a nightmare in which Amelia and I lay next to one another, like silver spoons in a cutlery case, and her soft, warm body slowly turned into a liquid skeleton, but I couldn’t make myself take my arms away, even though I was terrified.

  Arregui was squatting in front of me. One of his big, shaggy sheep dogs was sitting next to him. The other one was looking after the flock grazing up on the hillside. I could hear the tinkling of the rams’ bells. Arregui had a broad, almost square face, criss-crossed with fine wrinkles. His skin was leather-brown and his hair was white, thick and cut short. His eyes were completely black, as were his teeth, which were discoloured by the hand-rolled cigarettes he smoked all day long.

  “Hola! Pedro,” he said in his deep, rasping voice.

  “Buenos días, Arregui,” I replied, sitting up. I was still dazed by the dream.

  “There aren’t any ghosts in that house,” he said.

  “Maybe.”

  “The dead don’t harm anyone. I kept vigil in the house one night. Their souls, thanks be to God, are at peace.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Let’s have coffee,” he said and went into the house, where I could hear him lighting up the stove. We had an electric kettle, but he was an old-fashioned man. The dog came up to me and I scratched absent-mindedly behind its ears, as I watched the sun rise above the highest mountain tops and cast a warm, golden glow down over the black and white sheep grazing so peacefully. The dew twinkled on the Honda’s chrome and lay like tiny pearls on the grass.

  He brought out coffee with sugar and hot milk in two big mugs, and some bread with his own sheep’s milk cheese, and we ate while he talked about his animals and the weather which was never quite how he would like it to be. Farmer’s chat that calmed me and soothed my frayed nerves. I asked after Tómas and his daughter in prison. They lived, as he said, the life that God had chosen for them. One had fought his battle, and he accepted that he would fight no longer. His daughter was just one martyr among many in the struggle for Euskadi’s freedom. I had never discussed the issue with him, and didn’t intend to start now. Both children, he said, were fit and healthy, and with patience and God’s will he would have them both at his side again. He bid me a dignified farewell and picked up the rucksack that he had left on the veranda. It contained bread, wine and cheese, and I assumed that he would be sleeping higher up the mountain as he often did when he let the sheep and dogs move on to fresh pasture. With a whistle to the dogs, he was gone. I remained sitting, watching them shrink into small dots high up on the green mountainside which led up into the huge massifs of the Pyrenees.

  Then I burnt all the mementoes on a bonfire in the garden. Amelia and Maria Luisa’s clothes, the photographs of them, the calendar, the knitting, the toys, the doll’s house, the photograph of the friend. I couldn’t burn the scent or the memories of them, but I couldn’t bear the thought of sleeping in a house so full of physical reminders. I didn’t care what Arregui said. He was wrong. There were ghosts in that house.

  I drove down to San Sebastián, on the La Concha bay, to meet Tómas. The town disappeared and reappeared as I swung through the bends at a leisurely pace. It was a hot day and the esplanade and beach were full of people. It was a white, lovely town and I was very f
ond of it. The Basque Country was going through a recession because of the terrorism, but there were no outward signs of this in San Sebastián. People were well dressed, and the bars and restaurants in the town centre were buzzing with life. Basque people love food, and the sea supplies them with an extensive cuisine which combines the French and the Spanish.

  Tómas hadn’t arrived yet, so I stood at the bar and ate tapas and drank a cola. Pieces of squid, prawns with egg, sardines and slices of ham were served on small chunks of freshly baked bread. I stood at the corner of the bar, near the open door, and caught sight of Tómas before he saw me. He was only a little younger than I was, but the years had been kind to him. He always said that it was good for the health to do time in prison. You got lots of exercise, a low-fat diet and no alcohol. He had his father’s broad face, but his body was slim, and his hands were elegant and long. There were touches of grey in his short, thick hair, and the smart, titanium frames of his glasses made him look like a polished, well-to-do banker. In fact, he earned his money as a computer programmer for finance companies and large businesses. The same brain which during the 1970s had made him ETA’s pre-eminent tactician now provided him with a good income as a troubleshooter. Tómas could always see the bigger picture and was often three or four moves ahead of everyone else. I had met him in 1972, a few years before he went to prison, and the Franco dictatorship sentenced him to death for terrorist activities. We had met by chance on the street in San Sebastián and the chemistry had been instant. He was a good source of information, but I hadn’t been aware of his deep involvement with ETA until I read about his arrest. I visited him several times in prison and helped him when he was granted amnesty along with other political prisoners.

  We had been friends ever since. He had witnessed my ups and downs. His broad face lit up in a smile when he saw me and we gave each other a big hug before going into the back of the restaurant to eat a late lunch.