Daughter of Catalonia

by Jane MacKenzie

  ‘Well, I may have said I’d wait for you at the café,’ he said, ‘but even I couldn’t make a chess game last that long! Where have you been? Fishing? Any good booty?’

  He handed Madeleine ashore and raised an eyebrow in query. She smiled at him.

  ‘It’s been amazing, Uncle Bernard,’ she reassured him. ‘We didn’t catch much, but I think that was my fault. I wasn’t that good, but it was excellent fun.’

  Daniel had finished tying up the launch and jumped ashore. He seemed to have recovered his assurance, and greeted Bernard calmly.

  ‘She’s actually pretty talented,’ he told Bernard. ‘We’ll go out again another day, if you’d like to come with us, sir?’

  Bernard took Madeleine’s arm, and prepared to saunter off towards the hotel, further along the quay. It was quite funny, thought Madeleine, but also vaguely irritating to have a gentleman like Bernard treating her again like a young lady needing protection, after all she’d been through on her own.

  Bernard thanked Daniel on her behalf, of all things, and went to move away. She freed her arm and moved back to Daniel.

  ‘Thank you, Daniel,’ she said, touching his hand. ‘I’ve had a great afternoon. And you helped me a lot. Thank you for your friendship.’

  He looked her straight in the face again at last.

  ‘Don’t thank me, Madeleine, and I won’t thank you. We’ll just get on with making the best of things, all right? That’s all there seems to be left.’

  There was bitterness again in his voice, but Madeleine chose not to notice it.

  ‘It’s a deal, and we’ll go fishing again one day and see if I can do better. I’m sorry I didn’t catch anything worthwhile.’

  He looked down into the bucket at the four fish. ‘It’s not so bad!’ he countered. ‘My father will have some good fish for his lunch tomorrow. Will we see you tomorrow?’

  ‘Maybe. I’m waiting for news from home, from Robert. I’m hoping he’s going to come over here.’

  Daniel made an unfathomable gesture. ‘You certainly have reinforcements,’ he remarked. ‘I’ll look forward to meeting your brother.’

  My other brother, she was tempted to say, wanting suddenly to laugh, and then to cry.

  ‘Goodnight, Daniel. Better fishing tonight,’ was all she said. And then she turned to safe, comfortable Bernard, and Daniel disappeared up the street with his catch in his hand.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  It seemed Bernard had made himself quite at home at the Café de Catalogne. He had talked politics and the state of the country with Philippe, and then they had ventured into talking about the past. Philippe had asked for Tante Louise, remembering her visit to Vermeilla, and remembering also the daughter Solange as a Parisian beauty who had terrified the Vermeilla men with her chic ways. Bernard, who loved his wife, had quite naturally found Philippe highly intelligent, and forgave him for winning at chess.

  Bernard had also met Colette, and young Martin. Of Colette he was less flattering, calling her ‘basic’ and ‘mediocre’, and ‘one of those women who age really badly’.

  ‘Colette is beautiful,’ Madeleine found herself protesting. ‘If we worked like she does we’d look tired too.’

  And Martin? The boy was well enough, obviously bright, Bernard commented, but just a boy, after all. Seen through Bernard’s childless, middle-aged eyes, Madeleine suspected all young people below the age of adulthood must seem like a foreign species.

  Philippe, though, had talked at length about Martin, and how it was time for him to know about his real father. Philippe argued that with Jean-Pierre Perrens becoming more and more unstable, he was capable of blurting something out at any time, and the young boy was too bright not to pick up on any small snippets he overheard.

  ‘Did Philippe talk about Daniel as well?’ Madeleine asked.

  ‘To say that he needs to move on – that he’s been repressing his own needs all this time, and now needs help to find out who he really is. The only one Philippe doesn’t seem to be worried about is you, my dear! He says you have solid feet!’

  ‘How very nice of him.’ Madeleine’s voice was subdued.

  ‘But it all leaves me feeling rather uneasy, in truth. More than uneasy. There seems to me to be so much repression and unfinished business here that I can’t somehow share Philippe’s optimism for everyone’s future. And I can’t see, either, where you are going to fit in here, Madeleine. You’re not exactly going to move in with the “family” are you? It’s all terribly incestuous, if you’ll forgive me saying so.’

  Madeleine found herself nodding. ‘I know. We keep taking those unknown steps down an unknown road, but it feels to me as if the road is blocked here in Vermeilla. I don’t know what we’re all going to do, or where on earth I’m going. It’s such a mess, and so many people are hurting, and there’s still more misery to come, I’m sure.

  ‘But I’ll tell you one thing,’ she said more aggressively, ‘the road won’t lead me back to Forsham! I’ve escaped from there and I’m never going back.’

  Robert phoned the hotel that evening. Standing in the hotel reception, mercifully empty, Madeleine’s voice broke as she told him about their father, and he went very quiet on the other end of the line.

  ‘I’m in London right now. I headed up here after the exam this afternoon, and I’m staying with Cousin Cicely, before heading off tomorrow morning,’ he finally told her. ‘Solange and I agreed that I get an early train from London to Paris, and she is arranging a ticket for me on the first possible train south. I suppose I’ll have to stop off somewhere on the way, and I’ll get to you sometime on Saturday. If you speak to Solange tomorrow evening she’ll be able to tell you where I am.’

  A Robert who casually travelled up to London and stayed overnight with his fashionable cousin, before jumping on a train for Paris. Things were certainly changing. The static world of Forsham before their mother’s death now seemed like a lifetime away.

  ‘We’ll be waiting for you,’ Madeleine said. ‘I’m so glad you’re coming.’

  ‘Yeah, well maybe by the time I reach you I’ll have understood what you’ve just told me. I just want to thump someone. Tell me, who do I thump?’

  ‘No one, Robert. Sadly there’s no one left to thump. No one fit to thump, anyway.’

  Madeleine felt incredibly depressed. No one to blame, no one to thump. Just an unholy mess and a taste of ashes in the mouth.

  Robert’s voice came back, sounding a long way away. ‘And how about you, Madeleine? Are you all right?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘Bearing up,’ was all she could say. ‘But hurry up and get here.’

  ‘On my way,’ he assured her, and sounded more positive.

  Bernard then phoned Solange, and Madeleine escaped onto the quayside to breathe the mellowed evening air, in time to watch the fishermen pushing their boats down the beach, heading out to sea. Daniel would be there, and she hoped the night of physical labour would help soothe the wound they had reopened in his soul.

  ‘What’s for tomorrow?’ Bernard asked her later. ‘Do you have any plan of campaign?’

  ‘There’s nothing to campaign about. Nothing we can do, is there? I want to wait for Robert before I see any of them again.’

  ‘So what would you like to do tomorrow? Go for a drive? Philippe has offered me his car.’

  Suddenly a road opened up in front of Madeleine, and she knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to see Jordi. A surge of pleasure went through her at the idea of seeing him, in his chaotic studio, surrounded by his bulls and his angry, sensual figures. He felt like an ally, a comrade-in-arms, far from the compromised life of Vermeilla. In Jordi’s life there was not much compromise.

  Would Bernard take her? It seemed he would, with a smile on his face that made her think she must be very transparent.

  ‘If you take me, then Jordi will bring me back on his motorcycle,’ she said, hoping it was true.

  ‘Or I can come back for you. The day will be yours, child, and you
can just phone when you want and I will be here for your call.’

  So the following day saw her driving out with Bernard, on the same road through the plane trees, leading them from one little Roussillon village to another, on the way to Céret and the Pyrenees beyond. The day was sunny for now, but there was a strong wind whipping up the sea which apparently promised rain. The locals were happy. It had been an exceptionally dry spring, it seemed, and the ground needed the rain. Mme Curelée paid lip service to the needs of the vineyards at the same time as she bemoaned what rain might do to custom at the hotel over the weekend.

  But for now it wasn’t raining, and the cool, rather humid breeze was welcome in the car. Canigou, the Catalans’ very own, friendly mountain, stood before them all on its own, still peaked with snow and seeming to float on the misty blue of the horizon, the blue of the foothills, the Vallespir. Early fruits, as yet unripened, packed the peach trees which stretched to either side of the car as it made its slow way past the farms and gardens of the Roussillon plains, past Le Boulou and on towards Céret. The journey seemed longer than four days before, when Madeleine had headed up to the Vallespir with Philippe, thinking only that she was going to see her father’s grave. She had known nothing then about all the betrayals which had burst upon her in the last few days. She had been on such an innocent quest, and it seemed incredible that so short a time could have changed her life so much.

  Today’s seemingly interminable journey at last reached its end as they drove between the yellow stone buildings of Céret, and past the Musée d’Art Moderne. Bernard wouldn’t come inside Jordi’s gallery, insisting that he would just park outside the museum for fifteen minutes, so that if Madeleine found it wasn’t a good time to call she could come away quietly and he would be there. The soul of discretion! Had Philippe told him about Jordi’s edgy character, she wondered?

  But at the point of going into the gallery she felt all of Bernard’s qualms and more. What was she doing? This was the man who had held the world at bay for years. Why should he want to see her? But he had told her to come. Told her he would be there. She opened the door and went inside.

  A little bell above the door brought Jordi from the rear of the shop. He froze when he saw her, and then made a sudden move forward.

  ‘Madeleine.’

  The single word burst from him, and then he stopped, physically, in the middle of the shop floor, surrounded by his ceramics and sculptures. A silence followed, and Madeleine thought, I haven’t got any words, I don’t know what to say, I don’t have any experience of this. And as she looked at him, the thought came to her, comforting and reassuring, that neither did he. They were two young people who had never before ventured down these paths, and they would have to invent the words as they went, taking steps down Machado’s unknown road.

  ‘You said to come,’ she ventured at last.

  He smiled at last, and a smile which lit his deep brown eyes. ‘Come in. I’m glad you’re here.’

  He led her into the back room, where a huge, half-painted vase stood waiting for him on the work table. A woman’s face emerged from a dark background, her hair tossed back as though by a storm, and her eyes blazing with what might have been anger or passion. She was beautiful, but crudely finished, with hard edges, and Madeleine wondered whether Jordi planned to soften her. Probably not, she thought, wishing she knew more about art, and could identify the genre he was following. All she could do was sense it, and it hit her with a force that surprised her that this woman was in love but not happy. There was a loneliness and a hunger in the image which disturbed her.

  ‘You were working. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m not. It’s all right. You can stand by the vase and it will help me paint. You have the same lines in your face. She could be you, you know.’

  Madeleine looked at the impassioned face and felt small and inadequate.

  ‘I’ve never felt like that. I don’t even know how. I’m just ordinary.’

  ‘We’re all ordinary. But we are Catalans. Look at her face, and see those bones. She’s a Catalan too. And she knows how to yearn, how to dream.’

  ‘I’ve never known how to dream. I was brought up English, remember. I don’t even speak any Catalan.’ Madeleine was surprised at the bitter intensity in her own voice. What was she doing, speaking like this to a man she’d met four days ago?

  But Jordi answered as though it was normal, picking up her words, responding instantly with a challenge.

  ‘You can learn Catalan. Anyone can who wants to. And you can learn to live by feel, to stretch out and breathe the world. You’ve got that capacity in you, if you let yourself grow.’

  ‘You make me sound like a stunted tree!’

  ‘No. You’re not stunted, you’re just half grown. When Philippe asked me to show you the camp the other day, I thought you were some English girl coming her to feed her curiosity – to gape, if you like. But there was such a sense of longing about you, like you were looking for your life, for someone to be. Like you were just half a person.’

  Half a person. It sounded so inadequate. She repeated it mechanically, and Jordi’s voice softened as he continued.

  ‘Oh, there’s plenty to you, Madeleine, I’m not trying to belittle you. There’s a part of you that feels so grounded I want to grab hold of it to keep me steady. It’s more like you’re a tree with great roots but you need feeding to grow. You’ve got your roots, but you’ve been deprived of knowing them.’

  ‘So I am a stunted tree, after all!’

  ‘No, you’re a tree learning to grow. It’s me that’s the stunted tree.’

  Madeleine shook her head, and traced her finger slowly around the face on the vase.

  ‘You’re not stunted, Jordi.’ She hesitated, then continued, straining to bring back words she had heard and which touched her memory. ‘Tu ets molt gran, amic meu.’ My friend, you are truly big.

  Jordi laughed, a shout of pure delight. ‘A Catalan after all!’ he crowed. The smile in his eyes caught her own, he reached out to her, and she placed her hand in his.

  As his fingers closed around hers, the front door of the shop opened and seconds later they heard the ringing of the bell and an exchange of voices.

  ‘Merde!’ cursed Jordi, and went through to the shop. Madeleine stood breathless, holding the edge of the work table with one hand. She was still there when Jordi returned a few moments later.

  ‘These people want to browse,’ he told her. ‘We can leave them for a moment. And then when they’ve finished I’m going to shut up shop and have a holiday. I want to show you Céret. But I’ll tell you what you should do meantime – go to the Musée d’Art Moderne, and as soon as I get through here I’ll come and join you there. If you haven’t seen it you should do, and it’s often better seen and felt on your own.’

  Madeleine smiled, and found some words. ‘I’ll see if I can learn to live by feel, then, and meanwhile you’d better make a sale here if you’re going to take the rest of the day off!’

  She touched her cheek to his in what could have been a sisterly gesture, and left the shop by the back door.

  The museum was busy with tourists, couples from all over France strolling through its simple white rooms. Madeleine slipped through them, just looking, not stopping yet to read about any of the artists. Learn to live by feel – well, so she would. She recognised Picasso and Matisse, but others she didn’t know, and a lot of what she saw she didn’t understand. But she knew she was seeing a special grouping of paintings, and knew that many of the artists had lived here at the same time in Céret, calling each other together in artistic alliance. A portrait by the Catalan artist Manolo caught her eye, and a rich avenue of trees by a Hungarian painter, but she finally came to a halt in front of a painting so crude that it almost seemed to have been painted by a child. A village street, figures with guns, and a dead body spreadeagled in the centre – barbarous because it was intimate, not the battlefields of large-scale warfare, but the close-up massacre of life. She didn’
t like the painting, or even admire it, but it held her attention, and she couldn’t move on. She sat on a bench some paces away while couples passed by in front of her, and Jordi found her there, a knot of creases on her forehead, her hands clasped almost impatiently on her lap.

  He sat beside her. ‘Chagall,’ he said, looking to see what had caught her imagination. ‘A Russian painter. He was Jewish, and had to flee France to escape the Germans during the war. He loved his village life, though it has been rather badly shaken up in this picture, don’t you think?’

  ‘It isn’t even realistic,’ Madeleine responded.

  ‘No. But is that the point? Picasso once said that when Matisse died, Chagall would be the only painter left who understood what colour was. Does it disturb you?’

  ‘I don’t know. It made me stop. I thought it could have been my father.’

  ‘Shot in his village? I suppose he was, in a way, but that’s not for now, Madeleine. Come with me, and I’ll show you Picasso’s ceramics.’

  There was a whole series of painted ceramic ware by Picasso, all depicting bullfights. Was this what Jordi had followed, in choosing to paint bulls so often on his pottery? But Picasso’s bulls were analytical compared with Jordi’s hot, animalistic images.

  ‘You paint bulls too,’ she murmured.

  ‘They’re part of life here,’ was his simple reply. ‘And they have balls.’

  His crudity shocked her for a moment, then she checked herself. What Jordi expressed was always visual, she thought, and always powerful. What would he say about her new-found brother, she wondered, and suddenly wanted to tell him.

  People were leaving the museum, heading for lunch, and Jordi and Madeleine made their way with them, out into the sunshine, where the fresh breeze had reached even inside the narrow streets of Céret. They ate at a little table on a pavement in a central square, gracious with old stone buildings, grouped around an ancient fountain with nine jets of water. Jordi told her how the lion’s head on the fountain had been set facing Spain, but that when France had annexed this part of Catalonia they had turned the head round to face north.