“I don’t believe you,” Sara said. “You could smell it.”
Izaskun sighed loudly.
We were going to have supper at Bob Earle’s house, and Dennis was carrying a big Tupperware container in a paper bag.
“I’ve made Mexican-style roast chicken. You’ll love it. And you’ll love this even more!”
He produced a D.V.D. from his raincoat pocket: “Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End”.
“It’s the new one!” Izaskun and Sara cried in unison.
Dennis gave them the thumbs-up, then turned to me:
“Before we go up to Bob’s house, we have to send an email to my brother. He insists on you sending him a text in Basque so that he can see how it looks in Menhart font. As I said, Jeff thinks only of fonts. Even on New Year’s Eve.”
I had completely forgotten about it. I hesitated.
“It will only take us a minute,” Earle said. “Just choose a text and that will be that.”
In the end, we sent him two texts: a page from the essay on Basque immigration that Ángela was writing, and the beginning of something I had written about Paulino Uzcudun.
SUPPER
The supper menu: to start, imported ham that Earle had bought in Tom’s Food Boutique, aubergine salad from Mary Lore and prawn croquettes prepared by C., Monique Laxalt’s friend. The main course: Dennis’s Mexican-style roast chicken and roast beef stuffed with Philadelphia cheese prepared by Mannix in Earle’s kitchen. For dessert: ice cream and the cake made by Izaskun and Sara. To drink: Californian wine, Sierra Nevada beer, Gatorade and water.
The dish that received the most plaudits was Mannix’s roast beef.
“There’s no mystery to it,” he said. “It’s the easiest thing in the world. First, take your cheese and mix it with mustard, parsley and black pepper. Then, make a few cuts in the meat – taking care not to slice right through it – and fill the cuts with the cheese mixture. Melt the butter in a frying pan to brown the meat a little, then stick it in a moderate oven, 150 or 160 degrees, and in less than half an hour it’s ready.”
“You’re an artist, Mannix,” Earle said. “Any time you want to use my oven, feel free!”
“All the ovens in the world are my friends.”
We raised our glasses for the first toast of the evening. Izaskun and Sara went to fetch C.’s dog, which was in her car, parked out front. He was a border collie, about four or five years old. His name was Blue and he was completely drenched.
“He didn’t want to come in at first and started running about all over the place, and then he started eating the snow,” Sara said.
C. went into the kitchen and returned with a bowl of water.
“He’s probably thirsty.”
Blue started drinking as soon as she put down the bowl.
“Bob, have you got an old towel I can use to dry Blue off?”
“Yes, take one from the bathroom.”
Five minutes later, Izaskun and Sara were lying on cushions in front of the television, watching “Pirates of the Caribbean 3”. Blue lay curled up between them. Mannix and Mary Lore’s daughters were having supper with their grandparents that night.
DESSERT
C. called Monique Laxalt to wish her a happy New Year and to ask how her brother Bruce was. Then we all had a quick word with her, although Earle and Mary Lore spoke to her for several minutes.
“It’s not so long ago that Bruce was playing squash with me. Now he can’t even raise a cup to his lips,” Earle said.
Mannix shook his head.
“It’s just terrible.”
C. chose a book from Earle’s library and went and sat on the sofa. It was a copy of Bruce’s Songs of Mourning and Worship.
“We have that book at home too,” I said.
C. was looking for a particular poem.
“It’s called ‘Christmas Letter’,” she said and began to read out loud:
“Where are you today, old friends still-living and this long year’s/New-wandering ghosts, as we pause to take our moment of rest?/ At Beth’s family’s table in Oregon you must be, David, far from/the Nevada pond where you scattered dear Helmi’s ashes in July.”
“I remembered the title and thought I might read the whole poem to you,” C said. “But it’s too sad. We can’t start the New Year with a poem like that.”
She continued reading silently
“But these last lines are perfect,” she added and passed us the book so that we could read it for ourselves.
“A squall hit the island a bit ago, one of the storms/That have mercifully broken the drought. The cisterns are all overflowing again,/The sky having given back purified the water it had taken from the sea.”
“Yes,” I said, “that link between time and water is really good. New Year, new water in the cisterns.”
Dennis was standing before us, holding two bags of popcorn. He said to Ángela:
“Shall I give these to Izaskun and Sara?”
“Go ahead,” Ángela said.
He went straight over to where the girls were watching the film. They both held out their hands to take the bags. Blue looked up expectantly, but immediately rejected the piece of popcorn Sara offered him.
VICTOR AND THE SNOW
(A MEMORY)
Ángela and I were driving from Bordeaux to Montpellier along a mountain road, when the engine started sputtering and losing power. Slowly and with some difficulty – not to mention anxiety – we managed to labour up a few more hills and round more bends before reaching the next village. We read its name on a rusty sign: SAINT-SERNIN-SUR-RANCE.
There was a garage at the entrance to the village, and we parked outside with what Ángela called “the engine’s last gasp”. Then, when I started explaining the problem to the mechanic and said the word “power”, he countered with the word “pistons”, as if this were some kind of question-and-answer session.
“It could also be the spark plugs. Anyway, come back in three hours,” he said.
He was a nice man. He glanced at the clock on the wall and asked if we wanted to spend the night in the village. If we did, he could recommend somewhere clean and reasonably priced. It was nearly four o’clock.
At the time, the autumn of 1992, Ángela and I were living about eighty miles from Montpellier in a village called Brissac, or, to be more precise, about four miles outside that village, in Mas de la Croix, a farmhouse with rooms for people who wanted a quiet place to work. Ángela was translating Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury into Basque, and I was writing my novel The Lone Man. If we set off at seven, we would be home by ten.
We said thank you, but, no, we wouldn’t be needing anywhere to stay and decided to go for a stroll around the village.
The late afternoon light, neither strong nor weak, made the shapes of the mountains stand out clearly against the unsettled sky, but the landscape itself was not particularly attractive. The woods thinned out around the village and a lot of the hillsides were thick with scrub. The only pretty houses were those in the older, possibly medieval quarter. Many of the roofs were tiled with dark grey slate.
We followed the road and came to a stone-and-brick monument that seemed to depict an animal. However, on closer examination, we saw that it wasn’t an animal at all, but a human being, a boy crouching on all fours, his hair like a mane. The plaque said: “Ici fût chassé l’enfant sauvage dit Victor de l’Aveyron.” “This is where the wild boy known as Victor de l’Aveyron was caught.” It gave a date too: 1799.
I was so moved by this discovery that I rushed to the local shop and bought a book of postcards and a small forty-page guide. Then I took photographs of the street in the old part of the village where the boy had been imprisoned; I even picked up a few pebbles from the street as souvenirs.
Ángela was surprised to see me behaving as if Saint-Sernin-sur-Rance were a place dear to my heart, and to be honest, it wasn’t. My excitement had to do with a book that had given me much food for thought, a book written by Dr Jean
Itard about the boy who had been “caught” in that village: Mémoire et rapport sur Victor de l’Aveyron.
Friends to whom I gave the book to read were hard pushed to understand why I thought it so important. I tried to explain by telling them about the school I went to as a child in Asteasu, not that any of my classmates had been wild children exactly, but there were what we called betizuak, “truants”, children who almost never went to school and who seemed quite different from us. Perhaps I associated the story of Victor de l’Aveyron with the betizuak of my childhood, and that was why it affected me so deeply. And yet I wasn’t sure that was the real explanation.
Victor de l’Aveyron: a boy who had grown up outside society and who shared certain characteristics with the animals. He couldn’t speak. He didn’t feel cold or heat as humans do, and was capable of going from a warm kitchen to the bank of a frozen pond and staying there for hours. He didn’t get ill and never caught a cold. He didn’t feel pain either. His senses were dulled.
Dr Itard’s attempts to educate the boy lasted for seven years. His aim was to teach him to speak and transform him into a human being through language, but Victor made no progress. He couldn’t learn the names of things. When he heard the word livre, “book”, he thought this meant a particular book, the one the doctor had used as an example; he couldn’t comprehend abstractions. He remained mostly inactive, sitting for hours on end by his bedroom window, rocking back and forth.
There was one exception to this.
“One winter morning,” Dr Jean Itard wrote in his diary, “after a heavy fall of snow in the night, he woke with a cry of joy, left his bed, ran to the window and then to the door, running from one to the other in a state of great impatience and excitement, until, still half-naked, he escaped into the garden; there he gave free rein to his joy, uttering loud, piercing shrieks, rolling about in the snow, gathering it up by the handful and finally eating it greedily until he could eat no more.”
Snow interrupts the wheel of time, it intervenes like some extraordinary event in the midst of a long series of very ordinary events; that is where it derives its power. We’re all aware of its impact, children especially. But Victor de l’Aveyron? Where did his euphoria come from? What lay behind his reaction? There was the snow on the one hand, and, on the other, a wild child, un enfant sauvage. And in between? Nothing. Not a single idea or influence, no associations with a Brueghel landscape or an ancient Chinese poem. No memories connecting snow with childhood Christmases or anything of the sort. Just two sides, two extremes: the snow in all its power, and the innocent and, if you like, empty spirit of Victor. And yet, he shrieked with joy.
I once heard the philosopher Agustín García Calvo say that emotion was impossible without some pre-existing idea, and that, for example, we would feel no strong emotion when confronted by the death of our father or our mother if we did not already understand the concepts of “father” and “mother”. However, Victor’s reaction to the snow casts doubt on the universality of such a statement.
JANUARY 6
DENNIS AND THE SWAN
The swan was idling about near the edge of the Manzanita Lake on campus. When it noticed us, it straightened its neck and put its head on one side, fixing us with watchful black eyes above an intensely orange beak; then it suddenly lost interest and paddled off to the opposite shore.
Apart from the swan gliding across the water, there was no other sign of life on the campus. No students, no police either, although one of their vehicles was parked nearby, beside the School of Mining. The ducks, thirty or forty of them, were sitting hunched on the grass, ready to go to sleep. It seemed extraordinarily quiet for six o’clock in the evening, but, as Ángela said, some days in Reno were like that.
“Look, there’s Dennis,” Sara said.
He was about twenty yards from us, wearing his red cap and raincoat.
“Where are you off to? The ice rink?” he asked, coming over to us.
“We went there the other day. Izaskun slipped and fell,” Sara said.
“He didn’t ask you that!” protested Izaskun.
Dennis spoke to Ángela.
“How about having another go?”
“Yes, why not? We have time.”
“I agree,” Izaskun said. “We’re not like those ducks, who go to bed at six o’clock in the evening.”
The open-air rink was on the bank of the Truckee river, near the monument to the Fallen Soldiers. We headed off down Virginia Street and, as we passed over the I-80, a trailer truck painted with the Stars and Stripes greeted us by honking its horn. It sounded as loud as the siren on an ocean liner.
“The spirit of Christmas is still alive!” Dennis cried.
“The trouble is we’ve got to go back to school on Monday,” Sara said.
JANUARY 7
A VISIT TO THE PAIUTE MUSEUM
We set off in our Ford Sedan and drove to Pyramid Lake via Highway 447. We reached Nixon and parked in front of the Paiute Tribe Museum & Visitors Center at the entrance to the town.
There wasn’t another soul to be seen. The only presence – a somewhat surly one – was the wind. It tousled our hair and battered the flag on the mast. The nearest desert peaks looked grey-brown in colour, while those further off were white.
The museum building itself was beautiful, made up of irregular geometric shapes and covering an area of no more than about 3,200 square feet. According to the sign, it was the work of the Hopi architect, Dennis Numkena.
Of all the documents and artefacts on display, I was particularly taken with two photographs. The first was of the warrior Numaga; the second of the educator Sarah Winnemucca, who was the author of the first book to be published in America by a Native American Indian (Life Among the Piutes, Boston, 1882), as well as being the leading advocate for the rights of the Paiutes.
In the display devoted to the twentieth century, several of the images seemed to have been taken from documentaries about the Second World War: a Paiute working a field radio; Paiute soldiers standing next to a road sign bearing the name NORMANDY; a larger group saluting the Stars and Stripes.
Before leaving the museum, we bought a copy of the latest edition of Sarah Winnemucca’s book. There was still no-one else around, and our Ford Sedan was still the only car in the car park.
“Nixon doesn’t seem like a very lively place,” Ángela said. “We’d be better off driving to Sutcliffe and having lunch at the Crosby Bar.”
I took the wheel and asked Ángela to read us a passage from the book.
“I was born somewhere near 1844, but am not sure of the precise time,” she began. It was wonderful to hear Sarah Winnemucca more than a century later speaking through Ángela, and to be there with Izaskun and Sara listening to her words as we looked out at the turquoise-blue lake and the ochre-and-white desert, the Paiute territory that Numaga had fought to defend.
“I was a very small child when the first white people came into our country. They came like a lion, yes, like a roaring lion, and have continued so ever since, and I have never forgotten their first coming. My people were scattered at that time over nearly all the territory now known as Nevada. My grandfather was chief of the entire Paiute nation, and was camped near Humboldt Lake, with a small portion of his tribe, when a party travelling eastward from California was seen coming. When the news was brought to my grandfather, he asked what they looked like? When told that they had hair on their faces, and were white, he jumped up and clasped his hands together, and cried aloud: “My white brothers – my long-looked-for white brothers have come at last!”
“I don’t want to hear this story,” Sara said.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because it will be sad,” she said.
Ángela looked at me. Sarah Winnemucca’s story probably would be sad.
We arrived in Sutcliffe and went into the Crosby Bar. The waitress from Idaho greeted us warmly. She was wearing a badge with Obama’s face on it.
“We’re definitely going to win!�
�� she said. “He’s going to be the next President of the United States!”
JANUARY 11
THE SOLDIER DAVID J. DRAKULICH
The news appeared in the Reno Gazette-Journal. A twenty-two-year-old soldier, David J. Drakulich, who had been in the army since 2004, had been killed in Afghanistan.
There were statements from members of his family. His father: “Four years ago, he said, ‘Dad, I’m going to be an airborne ranger.’ I was floored by that. He was fearless. He knew what he was doing.” His mother: “He loved his country, and joined in order to serve. We loved him very much.”
His sister: “He went straight to heaven. I know that.”
According to the same article, he was part of an extended Nevada family of lawyers, teachers and real-estate agents. He had planned to attend college when he returned from Afghanistan in April.
His father was shown holding a framed photograph. It was a montage. In the foreground was a picture of his son in dress uniform; in the background, the same boy coming down in a parachute.
JANUARY 12
THE LETTERS
“Bob, there’s a letter from Obama here. He’s going to visit Reno again and would like you to attend the meeting.”
“You keep it. I’ve got two more here, and another one from Hillary Clinton.”
JANUARY 14
BARACK OBAMA SPEAKS AGAIN
We went to the university basketball stadium to hear Barack Obama. His usual supporters, mostly under twenty-fives, were there again and also present was his main campaign slogan: Change! Change! Change! It was impossible to miss, because it was everywhere, not in every conceivable colour – the only acceptable political colours in America are the red, white and blue of the flag – but in every possible size, even obscuring the insignia of the Wolf Pack, the university basketball team. Change! Change! Change!
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