The old man was walking briskly now, skirting round the yoghurt pots and occasionally turning to me to tell me what each one contained.
“Here we keep the Koranic metaphors,” he said.
Immediately, a young man emerged from among the containers and began walking alongside the old man. He wore a turban and could have been a page boy. Without stopping, but gesturing theatrically, he began to recite:
“According to the Koran: ‘In Paradise there will be rivers of water incorruptible; rivers of milk of which the taste never changes; rivers of wine, a joy to those who drink; and rivers of honey pure and clear. In it there are for them all kinds of fruits; and Grace from their Lord.’”
The containers became houses, and the three of us – the old man, the page boy and I – walked along a very straight path towards an arch. We went through the arch and emerged onto an esplanade whose vast size and reddish colour reminded me of the Arizona desert. There were thousands of trucks, many of them stationary, but all with their engines running; others were constantly on the move, approaching, driving away, passing. On top of a strange-looking rock, above the esplanade, was a hoarding the size of a hundred cinema screens, on which was written: AREA FOR THE LOADING AND UNLOADING OF METAPHORS.
I went over to a man wearing fluorescent yellow overalls and who was going from truck to truck with a clipboard and a pen, and I asked him, just to be sure, what the trucks were carrying.
“You’re obviously not from around here,” he said, without even looking at me and all the while noting down the information given him by the driver of that particular truck. Then he added: “All the trucks parked here are transporting metaphors to the beyond. And to be honest, we’ve barely been able to cope lately. Apparently, an awful lot of people are dying.”
The man went over to the cab of a second truck and again noted down the information given. He seemed almost hyperactive. He spoke very quickly and was always on the move.
“Do you see that fleet of white trucks over there?” he said, pointing to a line of trucks painted in a colour, which, in real life, is usually reserved for spaceships. “They’re all carrying metaphors to do with reincarnation. Apparently, there’s more and more demand for them. Do you know what reincarnation is?”
He kept moving, going from truck to truck, cab to cab. I found it hard to keep up. I was beginning to get tired.
“Well, reincarnation is the theory that the soul leaps from one body to another, and thus never ceases to live. The other day, a truck driver was telling me the story of an American boy. Apparently, he had proof that he’d been a sailor in an earlier life and had died on the Titanic.”
He paused to light a cigarette, then went on:
“He also told me a story about General George Smith Patton. Apparently, an admirer said to him: ‘General George Smith Patton, you should have fought with Napoleon.’ And General George Smith Patton replied: ‘But I did. I fought beside him at Waterloo.’ Do you understand? He meant that General George Smith Patton had, in a previous life, been one of Napoleon’s soldiers.”
The man sat down on a stone bench. He took a long drag on his cigarette, exhaled the smoke, then exclaimed:
“You know, I really like that name: George Smith Patton!”
“You don’t say,” I said.
“From what I’ve read, he was a great general. They say he should have been given the Nobel War Prize,” he said.
I looked around, wondering where the old man had gone, the one who had read me those passages from the Bible and from the Iliad, and where the page boy had gone too, because they had both vanished.
I suddenly found myself, as if by magic, and quite unaware that I had risen up, on a high peak from which I could see part of the esplanade, the Area for the Loading and Unloading of Metaphors. This confirmed my first impression: what lay before me resembled the reddish desert with the strangely shaped rocks that I had driven through with Ángela, Izaskun and Sara. Except that it wasn’t a vast, empty space, but a vast space filled with trucks approaching, moving away, passing and sending up clouds of dust. How many trucks were there? How many tons of metaphors? One hundred thousand trucks? Two million tons of metaphors? I remembered that famous line: “I had not thought death had undone so many.”
The man in the yellow overalls was still smoking.
“If I ever marry and have a family,” he said, “I’d like one of my sons to be the reincarnation of George Smith Patton.”
Hoping to change the subject, I pointed to one of the loading bays. There were hundreds of pallets piled high with books ready to be transported. I looked more closely and saw that although there were many books, they were all the same.
“What book is it?” I asked.
I was hoping it would be an anthology that included one of my favourite John Donne poems: “Death be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so …”
“John Donne? The name doesn’t ring a bell, I’m afraid,” the man in the yellow overalls said. He was still smoking what seemed to be an interminable cigarette. “He must be in the old part of the dump, or perhaps in sector M7 for minority metaphors. Some people think it’s wrong that they should be kept in such an inaccessible place, but that’s the way it is. Stories like the one about General George Smith Patton are far more popular, and so, of course, they’re at the head of the queue.”
I felt in need of air and a desire to move and walk over to the desert, towards the horizon where the red earth and blue sky met, beyond all those trucks, beyond the Area for the Loading and Unloading of Metaphors. But I couldn’t.
“You asked me about the book on the pallets. Well, it’s called Life After Death. That’s where the story about the general comes from …”
“Oh, I see!” I said and leapt into the air. At last, I had recovered the power of movement.
“It certainly seems to sell well,” he went on. “Last month alone, it sold twenty thousand million copies. There’s another best-seller being loaded onto the trucks called The Fourth Dimension. Apparently, on the sixth day of the sixth month of 2006, a crystalline door opened up in the christic, metafactual consciousness, an intergalactic pathway along which the Great Energy began to flow …”
“Your cigarette seems to be never-ending,” I said, interrupting him.
“Yes, apparently it’s eternal,” he said, exhaling another cloud of smoke.
Apparently, apparently … Unable to bear any more repetition, I woke up.
What had begun as a dream – one of those confused digressions, part-image, part-thought, that surface when you’re only half-asleep – suddenly became a febrile vision, a nightmare.
I tried to find an explanation for those images.
“It’s that journey from Torrey to Kayenta,” I told myself. “The dream recreated the landscape we passed through, and then there was the news of L.’s death, because I spent hours trying to come up with metaphors so that I could write something to celebrate his life.”
While I was thinking, I had the impression that I was back in the Best Western Hotel in Kayenta. I looked out of the window and noticed that my computer was still on one of the tables in the foyer, along with a can of soft drink. I must have been dreaming, because my computer and the can of drink could not possibly still be there. It was equally impossible that I was in Kayenta, because we had come back to our house in College Drive over a month ago. Knowing this did not help though. The effort of thinking logically became too much and I again fell asleep.
The one-storey hotel in Kayenta had sixty rooms and was built in the shape of a U. Inside the U was a swimming pool surrounded by parasols and loungers all in turquoise blue, the Navajos’ favourite colour. For a moment, as if I had risen up into the air like a bird, I could see everything from above: the hotel, the swimming pool, the parasols, the loungers, and, about three or four hundred yards away, at the bottom of a hill, there was a green wood, the only one to be found near Kayenta.
I could hear my two daug
hters shrieking with laughter and imagined them splashing about in the pool, glad to be able to have somewhere to swim in a place as hot as Kayenta. I was glad too that all was well. We hadn’t had an accident and, more importantly, we hadn’t plunged off the edge of the terrifying road we’d had to drive down to reach Mexican Hat.
The girls’ shrieks grew still more jubilant. In General Patton mode, Izaskun shouted: “Attack,” and Sara burst out laughing. Ángela shouted something too, but only once, then I heard a splash.
“I can’t save you. That would be against the rules,” someone said.
That’s L.’s voice, I thought.
I had a feeling he and I had arranged to meet at the hotel, and that I had forgotten. Anyway, L. was obviously there already and I had to leave my room and go and find him.
I looked at my watch. It wasn’t eight or nine o’clock in the morning as I had thought, but a quarter to six in the evening.
Izaskun asked L. if he lived in Kayenta.
“No,” he said. “I live in the south of Arizona, in Tempe, near Phoenix.”
My daughter asked him what he did.
“I teach physics at the Arizona State University,” he said. “I specialise in optics.”
“Why is your nose so flat?” Sara asked suddenly.
“What’s that got to do with you?” Ángela said.
L. laughed.
“I was in a fight, or, rather, in twenty-three fights. For a time, I was a professional boxer. I called myself Lawrence.”
I knew the story well. It was during our time at Colegio La Salle. A fancy-dress party was held in Loyola, at the house behind the stables, and most of us got dressed up in wigs, garish shirts and dark glasses with mirror lenses, like our favourite singers of the time. At the end, something unusual happened: all the lights went out, and into the room came a figure dressed entirely in white and with his face half-covered. He looked every inch a Bedouin, and the white fabric – I found out later that it was impregnated with phosphorus – glowed and formed a kind of aura about him. We – Katia, Maribel, Cornélie, Luis, López, Vergara and everyone else who had been dancing – were mesmerised by this phosphorescent figure. Then Adrián appeared. He waited for the noise to die down before introducing the man in white: “Ladies and gentlemen, today is a special day. Lawrence of Arabia has agreed to honour us with his presence. Please pay homage to the hero of the desert.” Cornélie and the other girls joined in the game and began curtseying and bowing. However, the boys, once they had got over their initial surprise, became aggressive, and López, one of the cross-country team, tore away the cloth concealing the stranger’s face. We all saw that it was L., a boy with an English mother, who was Adrián’s best friend at La Salle. “You really can’t stand the girls to look at anyone else, can you?” Adrián said. López was dressed like Johnny Hallyday, with a curly blond wig, and by his side was a girl who resembled Sylvie Vartan. López pointed to her and said to L.: “You should have dressed like her, in a mini-skirt.” Someone turned on the lights. The record player started up again, with, oddly enough, a song by Sylvie Vartan. Adrián and L. left.
The following day, in the recreation area, López became even more insultingly insinuating. He minced over to L., calling him offensive names, saying, hello, sweetie, how’s your little arsehole. L. hurled himself at him, and we all assumed that López would beat him to a pulp, because he was nearly four inches taller and, being a cross-country runner, physically very fit. Instead, exactly the opposite happened; López didn’t land a single punch on L., who dodged every blow with just the slightest movement of his waist. L. then punched López hard, four times, twice in the stomach and twice in the face, one-two, one-two, and López fell flat on his back. He staggered groggily to his feet. The boys who had gathered round to watch the fight started applauding.
L.’s name boomed out over the tannoy, with an order to go at once to the Prefect’s office. And it was the Prefect himself speaking. He repeated the order several times.
Adrián and I, and a few other students, protested: why summon L. when it had all been López’s fault? L. didn’t deserve to be punished, because it was perfectly legitimate to respond to such grave insults with your fists. At that moment, we were sure he would be punished and would, at the very least, lose points for bad behaviour.
Ten minutes later, we saw L. heading for the door of the college carrying his files and books. “He’s been expelled!” Adrián cried. We ran over to him.
L. greeted us with a broad smile. He wasn’t going to be punished for the fight. On the contrary.
“The Prefect asked me where I learned to box,” he said. “I told him my uncle was a boxer in England, and that he coaches me in the holidays.”
This was news to Adrián and to me. All we knew was that his mother was English.
“The Prefect gave me permission to leave school early,” L. went on. “He wants me to go and see Paco Bueno and ask if I can train at his gym. He says Bueno has the best technique of any boxer in Spain and would be a good teacher for me.”
With that, he said goodbye and headed off downhill towards the bus stop.
At that moment, it all seemed like a joke, and yet L.’s visit to Paco Bueno proved to be a turning point. L. fought on the amateur circuit in Spain and, later, because he had British nationality, as a professional in the United Kingdom and in Europe. When he retired, the sports journalists said he had been just four inches short of being a champion. L. was only five foot three.
*
The wind got up a little, and the parasols around the swimming pool in Kayenta began to flutter. Izaskun, who had just taken part in a science project at Mount Rose School, asked L. about a subject that had been preoccupying her for the last few weeks: the origin of the human species. It seemed that there were many people in America who rejected the theory that we had evolved from monkeys. Izaskun’s teacher did not share this unscientific view and neither did she. What did he think?
The wind prevented me from hearing L.’s answer. What I did hear, though, because the wind suddenly dropped again, was my eldest daughter’s next question: Had he enjoyed the film “2001: A Space Odyssey”? She hadn’t quite understood the first part. In fact, she hadn’t really understood any of it, and the only part she had enjoyed had been the death of HAL 9000 while he sang “Daisy Bell”.
“I can sing that song. I learned it at school,” Sara said.
Not wanting to be ousted from the limelight, Izaskun continued talking. She was genuinely annoyed not to have understood what the director of “2001: A Space Odyssey” had been trying to say in the first part of the film, because it had to do with human evolution.
Sara started singing: “There is a flower within my heart, Daisy, Daisy. Planted one day …”
“That isn’t the bit the dying computer sings,” Izaskun said, interrupting. Then she hurriedly explained what it was that was worrying her.
In the film, you saw a few men who looked like monkeys, and one of them picked up a big bone from a skeleton in order to throw it at another man-monkey; then, suddenly, the bone whirled up and away and became a spaceship.
“With no evolution!” she exclaimed.
“There is a flower within my heart, Daisy, Daisy …” Sara continued to sing, although without much conviction now.
“I think the scene is very true to the facts,” L. said. “Compared with the time that elapsed between the monkey-monkeys and the moment when the semi-monkeys learned to use stones, sticks or bones as weapons, the next period of time, between that and spaceships, is a mere instant.”
“My birthday’s on 2nd July,” Sara said.
“But we have to be entirely true to the facts,” Izaskun said, ignoring her sister. “We would have to know what the difference is between the monkey-monkeys and the semi-monkeys.”
This seemed to me the moment to interrupt the meeting and say hello to L. I walked over to the turquoise-blue parasol where they were sitting. The sun was turning the Arizona sky yellow.
&
nbsp; We embraced and stood face to face, looking at each other. I hardly recognised him. He was very thin and was wearing glasses with coffee-coloured lenses that concealed the blue of his eyes. He was also holding a cigarette. L. had always gone around with the smokers at school, but had never been a smoker himself.
It was getting dark in the Arizona desert, and I found myself walking with L. towards the little wood a few hundred yards from the hotel. When we got there, I saw that the wood was actually in a canyon and that the trees were taller than I’d thought. Among the trees, in an area of pebbles and moss, was a spring, a pool of crystal-clear water.
“It’s like a garden,” L. said.
He was right, because as well as the moss and the trees, there were flowers too, white flowers and yellow flowers.
We went down a path towards that part of the canyon and saw, lying next to the spring, a dead mole. There was no sign of violence, but rather an impression of peace: a small animal who had succumbed to sleep when he went down to the water to drink. The breeze was gently stirring the leaves of the trees, apparently with the sole aim of helping the mole to sleep more soundly. L. took a puff on his cigarette and gently prodded the mole with the tip of his shoe. The mole did not move.
“He’s sleeping very deeply,” he said. “Let’s sit and watch over him.”
We sat down on a fallen tree trunk, a few feet from the mole, and watched him.
“He won’t come back to life again,” I said. “I expect there’s a book in the literary tradition of moles that tells of a mole called Lazarus, who died one day and then returned to life. And probably right now, in this very canyon, his family and friends will be listening to that story and others that are continually being distributed by the Area for the Loading and Unloading of Metaphors. However, metaphors can do little in the face of death. You might as well try and catch the moon in your hands.”
Nevada Days Page 33
