Better Than Fiction

by Lonely Planet

  If we return in time.

  We buy a pen and a map, and draw a shaky line, following the motorway that runs alongside the Alps, and ends up in Salzburg. At that moment, I know only two things about Salzburg:

  - Mozart was born there

  - The Sound of Music was filmed there

  That’s it. I also have a suspicion that Austrians like sausages and beer, and I’m partial to those things too, so we hire a two-door Jolly Car from a rental company and buzz off, feeling tiny and tongue-tied in the shadows of the mountains.

  We drive all afternoon, stopping at a sparkling clean service station for a pork and Gouda sandwich, and find ourselves amidst the tall straight houses of the outskirts of Salzburg, crisscrossed with tramlines and power cables, just as the sun is setting. There is no music, no dresses made of old green curtains, no nunneries. People are striding, heads down, walking home after a long day at work, no doubt. The first drops of rain hit the windscreen. We move slowly in traffic, take a sudden turn, and find ourselves crossing over the Salzach River on an ornate iron bridge, the water high and choppy underneath. Above us, the castle rises up from the skyline: massive, morose. So Salzburg is not all Mozart and Maria von Trapp. I shiver at that brooding outline, and Ray turns up Jolly Car’s noisy heating and drives onwards, through quieter streets, until we find a likeable sign for a hotel.

  Hotel Jedermann is in the middle of a terrace, with a red front door flanked by mini fir trees. Inside, in the warm, a teenage girl with milky skin takes our one suitcase as if we are expected, and shows us to the third floor, and a bare, clean room with twin peach duvets.

  Breakfast is between seven and nine, she tells us, in a clear, strong voice. She must have grown up in the hotel business; how easy she finds it to herd strangers into rooms and demonstrate the shower. I envy her. Later, sitting side by side in the first brauhaus we find, I tell Ray that I wish I was more like that girl, or like Maria von Trapp. If only I had Salzburgian confidence in myself. How easy would it be to conquer one wedding, when I can walk over mountains?

  Maybe it springs from the beer and sausage, says Ray, so we order large amounts of both. The brauhaus makes its own wheat beer – Dunkelweiss, heavy and chewy and a delicious meal in itself, but when the sausages arrive we make a good job of them too. They’re pork sausages, split and filled with cheese, served with sauerkraut and heavy black bread; the long bench we occupy fills up with friendly locals eating the same thing. It seems there’s only one dish and one beer on the menu, but everyone wears the same calm smile, nodding as we all munch away.

  After an indeterminate amount of beer, we wobble back to the hotel, past a tribe of young men who are taking it in turns to breathe into the breathalyser machine on the wall and congratulate each other for their levels of inebriation. The rain is stronger, and it soaks us through, but the peach duvets are soft and warm, and the unadorned white walls spin round, drawing close, keeping us still and sleepy.

  Amazingly, we don’t have hangovers. We eat alone in the immaculate dining room: more black bread and a tough, nutty cheese. Then we head out, into the town, and walk around as if we have just woken up with amnesia, oohing and aahing over the normality of trimmed hedges and shop windows.

  In the centre of Salzburg, over one of the iron bridges, there are tiny crowded cafés and restaurants, piled on top of each other. In a cobbled square a string quartet wear penguin suits and play chamber music under a stripy tarpaulin tent.

  Mozart! I say to Ray with delight, and then we find, around a corner and down an alley, Mozart’s birthplace. The tour of the house takes an hour and thirty minutes, the guide speaking very slowly, in three languages, with that sureness of tone that means she thinks everyone is enthralled. The house is practically empty, apart from a portrait of Mozart’s father and a harpsichord that apparently Mozart never used. But still, I can feel his bullishness and brilliance stretch across the centuries to me, and back outside I begin to catch moments of his music everywhere: street singers, antique shops, supermarkets. And there are hundreds of small boutiques selling Mozartkugeln – chocolate balls filled with marzipan, with his face and signature stamped on the red and gold foil.

  I wish I was more like Mozart, I tell Ray. He smiles, and says he would not be marrying me if I was. He’s more of a Beethoven person.

  Are we really not going to go back for the wedding?

  He stares at the pyramids of Mozart’s beautiful balls. Let’s just do this, now. Let’s just do Salzburg, he says.

  So we do. We spend the next two and a half days exploring the Alpine zoo with the family of sleeping, snoring otters, knotted together like a rubber-band ball; the falconry display high in the mountains, with enormous eagles swooping down, so close to our heads that we flinch from their claws and laugh at each other; the Augustinian brewery, serving tankards of beer and thick slices of hot meat all day to the students who line the long benches and play cards; Salzburg Castle, dominating the town, with its maze of dark rooms filled with suits of armour, glass cases of swords and guns, and audio guides describing the rise and fall of the fortunes of the state; and the gold of the churches, and the steps down into the basement record shops, and the hill that leads up to the monastery where the rain turns to snow and all of Salzburg is below us, green roofs and white walls, domes and steeples.

  I’m in love with the place. Can we live here? I say to Ray. And he doesn’t say no. But we both know that’s not going to work. We’re going to have to go home at some point. The only question is when.

  On the morning of the day before our wedding we walk slowly into town, and decide to step into the art gallery opposite our favourite brauhaus. They are holding an exhibition – the work of Bernhard Vogel. We walk around the paintings, taking in the soaring skyscrapers of New York and the perfect arcs of the bridges of Venice, each scene textured with deliberate messiness that speaks of the gleeful unpredictability of travel. I want, at that moment, to keep travelling. I want to go with Ray, to see it together, to make sense of it through both sets of eyes, both tongues tasting. I realise it and speak it at the same time:

  I do want to get married. I just don’t want a wedding.

  I think of all the things back home that are going wrong: the dress that won’t fit, the people that can’t come.

  We wander back outside, and sit on a bench next to a hot-dog stand, in a mess of fine drizzle. We talk it through. Who cares if the dress doesn’t fit? I’ve probably put on half a stone through pork-munching and beer- guzzling, anyway. And flowers are just window dressing. As for the friends that can’t make it – well, we can send them a copy of the video. We can watch it together, one evening, and have a good laugh at our monumental case of nerves.

  I don’t have to be Mozart or Maria von Trapp to get through this. I don’t have to raise six kids or write a symphony. I just have to be there, in front of the registrar, for a few minutes. And then I can be anywhere, with him: New York, Paris, Rome, the Rockies, maybe even back to Salzburg. Wherever we want to go.

  We realise we’re sitting outside the Mirabell Gardens, where Maria danced with six kids in curtain clothes. So we dance too. We run around the fountain and jump up and down the stone steps, singing that song about female deer and drops of golden sun. Then Ray turns to me and says, Right. We can do this. Let’s go home and get married.

  So we do.

  When the day comes, I wear a white suit, picked off a rail at a chain store. I don’t carry flowers, or wear my hair in complicated knots. I walk down the aisle to Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, and I walk back up it, with Ray, to the sound of Maria Von Trapp Climbing Every Mountain. Later, we play the DVD to our friends who couldn’t make it, and we all sing along as we drink beer and eat sausages.

  I catch Ray’s eye and say, Why were we so nervous?

  He shrugs, and gives me a smile filled with sunshine. It was stupid, that much is certain. But a random line on a map took us to a place where we could find the courage we needed. And I’ve begun to understand the
purpose of travel; a few days of seeing the world in a different way gives us the confidence to face whatever waits for us at home. Even mountains.

  Who Wants a Girl?

  BY ISABEL ALLENDE

  The Isabel Allende Foundation (www.isabelallendefoundation.org) provides support to nonprofit groups that empower women and girls by providing healthcare, education and protection from violence, exploitation and discrimination.

  My daughter Paula died on December 6, 1992, of a rare blood disorder that nowadays should not be fatal, but there was negligence in the hospital, she was given the wrong medication, she fell into a coma and five months later, when the hospital finally gave her back to me, she was in a vegetative state. I brought her home and took care of her until she died, peacefully, in my arms. She was twenty- eight years old. She had been a smart and beautiful girl with a generous heart; her mantra was, ‘You only have what you give; it’s by giving that you become rich.’

  Grieving for the loss of Paula was like walking alone in a long and dark tunnel. It took me a few years to reach the end of the tunnel and see light again. Those were years of confusion and sadness; at times I felt a claw in my throat and I could barely breathe. Without even being aware of it, I dressed all in black. I tried to write, but it was a futile attempt: I would spend hours staring at my computer or pacing my studio, blocked. For someone who lives to write, an internal drought is terrifying. I summoned the muses in vain, for even the most bedraggled muse had abandoned me. After three years of emotional paralysis, my husband, Willie, and my friend Tabra decided that I needed to fill up my reservoirs and proposed a trip to India, because according to them, India is one of those experiences that mark you for life, a land of great contrasts, of appalling poverty and extraordinary beauty where surely I would find inspiration. I accepted, although I had no desire to travel and even less to India, the farthest possible point from our home before starting back around the other side of the planet.

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  Sirinder, our guide and driver in India, had the courage and expertise needed to navigate winding rural roads and crazy city traffic, dodging cars, buses, burros, bicycles and more than one starving cow. No one hurried – life is long – except the motorcycles zigzagging at the speed of torpedoes and with a family of five riding aboard. We didn’t have safety belts, we had karma: no one dies before his time. Sirinder was a man of few words and Tabra and I learned not to ask him any questions, because the only one he answered was Willie.

  One late afternoon, as we drove in the country, in a dusty and reddish landscape where the villages were far apart and the plains stretched forever, we saw a solitary tree, probably an acacia, and a group of four women and several children under its branches. We wondered what they were doing there, in the middle of nowhere, far from houses or a well. The sun was beginning to go and brushstrokes the color of fire streaked the sky. We asked Sirinder to stop, and Tabra and I walked toward the women. They started to back away, but their curiosity overcame their shyness and soon we were together beneath the acacia, surrounded by naked children.

  The women were wearing dusty, frayed saris. They were young, with long black hair, dry skin, sunken eyes made up with kohl. In India, as in most of the world, the concept of personal space we defend so fiercely in the West doesn’t exist. Lacking common language, we greeted each other with smiles and then they examined us with bold fingers, touching our clothing, our faces, Tabra’s red hair and the silver jewelry we had bought the day before. We took off the bracelets and offered them to the women, who put them on with delight. There were enough for everyone, two or three each.

  One of the women, who could have been Paula’s age, took my face in her hands and kissed me lightly on the forehead. I felt her parched lips, her warm breath, her smell. It was such an unexpected gesture, so intimate, that I couldn’t hold back the tears. The other women patted me in silence, disoriented by my reaction.

  From the road, a toot of the horn from Sirinder summoned us: it was time to leave. We bade the women good-bye and started back to the car, but one of them followed us. She touched my shoulder, I turned, and she held out a small package. I thought she meant to give me something in exchange for the bracelets and I tried to explain with signs that it wasn’t necessary, but she forced me to take it.

  It weighed almost nothing, it looked like a bundle of rags, but when I turned back the folds, I saw that it held a newborn baby, tiny and dark. Its eyes were closed and it smelled like no other child I have ever held, a pungent odor of ashes, dust, and excrement. I kissed its face, murmured a blessing and tried to return it to the mother, but she ran back to the others while I stood there, rocking the baby, not understanding what was happening.

  A minute later Sirinder came running and shouting. He snatched the baby from my arms and started toward the women, but they ran away, terrified at the man’s wrath. Then he bent down and laid the infant on the dry earth beneath the tree, while the women watched from a safe distance.

  By then Willie had come too, and he hustled me back to the car, nearly lifting me off the ground, followed by Tabra. Sirinder started the engine and we drove off, as I buried my face in my husband’s chest.

  ‘Why did that woman try to give away her baby?’ Willie murmured.

  ‘It was a girl. Who wants a girl?’ Sirinder replied with a shrug.

  There are stories that have the power to heal. What happened that day beneath the acacia tree loosened the knot that had been choking me, cleaned away the cobwebs of self-pity, and forced me to come back to the world and transform the loss of my daughter into action. I could not save that baby girl or her desperate mother or millions of women like her, but I could at least attempt to ease the lot in life of some of them. I had an account with untouched savings that I was planning to invest in something that would make Paula proud. In that moment I remembered that when she was alive I would often call her for advice – my life as a new immigrant in the US and as stepmother of Willie’s drug-addicted children was rather stressful – and her answer would always come in the form of a question: ‘Mother, what is the most generous thing to do in this case?’

  ‘Now I know what to do with my savings,’ I announced to Willie and Tabra. ‘I will start a foundation to help women and children.’

  And so I did as soon as we returned to California, never imagining that through the years, that seed would become a large tree, like the acacia.

  Into Unknown Climes

  BY NIKKI GEMMELL

  Nikki Gemmell has written six novels, Shiver, Cleave, Lovesong, The Bride Stripped Bare, The Book of Rapture and With My Body, as well as several nonfiction books. Her work has been critically acclaimed internationally and translated into many languages. In France she’s been described as a female Jack Kerouac, in Australia as one of the most original and engaging authors of her generation, and in the US as one of the few truly original voices to emerge in a long time.

  ‘It will change your life,’ the Antarctic old-timer proclaimed two days before I flew to Hobart to board the icebreaker Aurora Australis. The man’s expression was hard to read and I could not tell if his prophecy would be a good thing or a bad thing. All I knew was that he had a lot of living in his eyes and he never wanted to go back to the place. He would not say why.

  I was not wanting my life changed. A radio journalist too fond of wearing black, I was just doing my job on this trip, nothing else. And with all the righteous zeal of youth, I believed the journalist’s blazing function was to make trouble – with other people’s lives, not my own. I was the outsider, the observer, and when on a job I was never meant to get my hands mucky in the mess of life.

  The Australian government fully kitted us out army-style the day before sailing. Almost everything we were given, from thermal underwear to padded jumpsuit to steel-capped boots, was bloke-sized. I had little idea what I’d be getting myself into but these early signs weren’t promising.

  The hull of the Aurora Australis was flattened so it could ride
up on top of slabs of floating ice as big as Olympic pools and crack them with its hefty weight. ‘She’s great in the ice, but she bobs like a cork in the open water,’ said a seasoned expeditioner just before departure. This was not good because I’d been spectacularly seasick in the past, so within half an hour of sailing, a seasickness patch was firmly behind my ear. ‘It’s the last great sea voyage in the world,’ the captain told me with something akin to awe. ‘It’s to the wild side of Antarctica, the bit where no one can fly and land. And it’s across the Great Southern Ocean, the roughest ocean in the world.’ Oh God, I thought, oh God.

  Our ship was the first to reach the continent after the long, dark winter hibernation, the only one out of all the Antarctic nations so far south at that time. ‘No one else is as mad as the Australians,’ said Steve, a sailor. ‘All the rest of them wait til later in the season, but not us.’ Most of the people on board, apart from the crew, were scientists and trades people being dropped off at Australia’s bases for the summer. There were few women. There were a lot of beards. I set about my task of ferreting out narratives with the zeal of a forensic scientist. I had a job to do and I seized it.

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  ‘Antarctica,’ the prophesising veteran had told me, ‘is a place of vivid mateships.’ And so it was that I stumbled across Martin, a historical archaeologist sent down south to assess the heritage value of the buildings at Australia’s Mawson Station (established 1954) and Davis (1957). We both wore seasick patches, were both vaguely dissatisfied with our jobs, wanted to write books. We would stand on deck in the early hours of the morning and watch auroras like giant scribbles of moving light in the sky and talk endlessly of lives we didn’t lead, and most likely never would, of what we would do when we got back. How we’d finally have the courage to do what we really wanted to. It all seemed possible down there.