The Migration of Ghosts

by Pauline Melville

  She found herself pondering over Alba. As a young girl, Alba had sat giggling and squirming next to her on the benches of this very taberna. Now, heaven knows where she thought she was. Doña Rosita cast her mind back to her own wedding at which Alba had been chief bridesmaid, and then years later there was a picture of Alba as godmother, with Manuel holding their baby daughter and posing proudly for a photograph. And now here she was, sitting in the taberna alone, surrounded by young strangers who had their lives ahead of them. Rosita stared straight ahead, her square chin cupped in her left hand.

  She was thinking about her best black fan in the wardrobe at home. She had bought it when she knew she was going to marry. At that time, the fan had been her most beloved possession because it was invested with all her hopes. It held all the promise of the future. She imagined how she would carry it as a married woman to fiestas and christening teas, wedding feasts and funerals, dances and birthday parties. And now, all that future was already past. Rosita’s nose dripped and a tear fell on to her fingers as the guitar and the voice grew quieter and quieter until they finally stopped altogether.

  From the audience, there was a unanimous gasp and moans of pleasure as the song faded into silence.

  It occurred to Rosita that she must make sure her daughter had made proper plans for her burial, next to Manuel. Amidst the applause, yet another man took his place on the bench on the platform. He was a squat man of about thirty, his belly bursting over his jeans and with a face so fat that his eyes barely showed. He tuned his guitar a little and then launched into a beautiful, melancholy solea. The guitar unfolded bursts of heartbreaking melody alternating with a crashing, jangling tumult of chords.

  By now the crowd was dense with people standing between the tables. No one knew exactly how Doña Rosita squeezed to the front. She had the package under one arm and her bag in the other hand. The singer, immersed in his song, did not see her approach the stage. She climbed the three wooden steps on to the platform and stood there under the bright lights, never for a minute taking her attention from the singer, listening intently to every note. She put her belongings down on one side and walked slowly to the centre of the stage. The audience grew gradually quiet. In the background there was the clink of glasses being washed in the kitchen. The waiter, curious, stopped and leaned against the side wall, napkin over his arm, watching.

  The singer realised he had company. Sitting on the bench, he turned towards Doña Rosita, nodded in acknowledgement and began to address his song to her.

  She stood up straight, but with her head slightly lowered, entirely unaware of the audience, as if she were soaking in every word and note of the song through her skin. The stage was not large. The back wall against which she stood was built of plain limestone bricks. The bulky, but somehow humble, figure of Doña Rosita with her bow legs, in her black dress, not a silver hair out of place in the plaited knot at the back of her head, drew everyone’s gaze.

  Doña Rosita was clearly waiting. A feeling of anticipation gripped the spectators. She remained utterly still. The musician responded to the challenge of her stillness by making the chords of the guitar scream and slither down the scale until they were vibrating somewhere at the bottom. She did not move a muscle. The guitar tried to shake her into action, writhing, trembling, challenging, enticing her to break into motion. She remained immobile as if she had been there for centuries. Nothing happened. The musician sang another verse. She did not move. The crowd, which had been in an agony of suspense, thinking: Now, now, now she must move, became a little bored and then again thought: Now, now, it must be now, after which they lapsed into a sort of lull, as if they had joined her in this involuntary and timeless trance. The guitar music growled and grovelled and lapped at her feet trying to lure them into taking a step. The musician sang another couplet. Unexpectedly, the first, pale singer with the concave face stood up and repeated, in his lyrical alto voice, a single line of the same couplet.

  In a split second and too fast for anyone to see, Doña Rosita broke out of the endless expanse of time, raised her arms, threw back her head and stamped her foot on the floor.

  There was pandemonium. One man at a front table jumped to his feet to find that there were tears pouring down his face. He looked round:

  ‘The duende,’ he shouted, then pounded on the table and turned round to the audience with a gesture of triumph. ‘You must have felt it. I feel twenty years younger.’

  ‘The duende only appears at certain moments,’ whispered the young student who had been sitting at Doña Rosita’s table boasting to his girlfriend. He professed to know about such things. ‘It’s a gust of air, an irrepressible instant; a ghost suddenly appears and vanishes and the world is re-born.’ Others were in the same state, throwing their programmes in the air. A sort of madness took hold of everybody. Strangers hugged one another. There were yells and whistles and the stamping of feet on the wooden boards of the floor lasted a full five minutes.

  Doña Rosita went up, diffidently, to shake the hands of the judges and collect her prize money. With that one gesture she had won the Taberna Verde’s eighteenth dancing competition. The taberna was left in a furore.

  She walked all the way home, a huge yellow moon sailing in the sky over her head. The night was warm. She travelled the four miles, through village after village, as if she were floating. Occasionally, a dog barked as she passed. She kept the packaged roll of green cloth tucked firmly beneath her arm.

  When she reached her house, it was nearly midnight and her daughter and son-in-law stood outside with a knot of anxious neighbours.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Her daughter rushed towards her as Rosita slowly made her way up the hill towards their house. ‘You must always tell us where you are going. We thought you had been called to your death.’

  Rosita gave a grunting laugh.

  She wished the neighbours good evening and apologised for any worry she had caused. Then she went inside the house, sensing that they were not ready to give up the novelty of their midnight worrying just because she had returned safely.

  Behind the front door, she took off her shoes and felt, with relief, the cool tiles on her feet. She went upstairs and undressed. Before going to bed, she hid the prize money inside the roll of cloth on the top shelf of the wardrobe.

  Lucifer’s Shank

  Ellie arrived at about ten o’clock in the evening. I opened the door and she came in rolling her eyes and laughing with mock shivers at the extreme cold. Outside, a brisk wind blew. There were traces of frost on the neighbour’s fence against a dark sky. She looked astonishingly alive. Her eyes were lively, her skin clear and her bush of black curls wiry and strong.

  She had been reading Dante’s Inferno, following the pilgrim’s journey through the circles of Hell, with Virgil as his guide, and wanted to talk about it. Although she was absorbed in the work itself – reading a few cantos every night before going to sleep and finding it deeply satisfying – what had aroused her interest was the fact that this particular work of art had triggered off in her a series of powerful dreams. She had been trying to relate the different levels of the Inferno to her own dreams.

  In the kitchen, she sat at the table, warming her hands round a mug of wild blackcurrant tea, talking intently, then pausing and frowning a little as she struggled to remember some of the images.

  ‘There was something about fraud – the serpent becoming the man and vice versa. I can’t remember exactly.’

  She told me that, as the levels went lower and became hotter, she felt increasingly relaxed.

  It had been her counsellor’s idea that she should read some of the great works of literature. The woman had been quite specific in her recommendations and nearly all involved an epic journey of some sort. She had also suggested that Ellie visit an art gallery to look at one particular painting. I wish I could remember which one it was, but I’ve forgotten. What I do remember is Ellie returning from her visit to the gallery, excited and awestruck. It had been an inspired
suggestion on the counsellor’s part that such a secular and passionate woman as Ellie should turn for sustenance, at such a time, to literature and art.

  She took off her scarf and hung her rust-coloured cardigan over the back of the chair.

  ‘Have you got any honey to put in this tea?’

  Her diet had already been altered to what she felt would give her the most nourishment and strength. The spoon tinkled in the cup. She went on talking.

  ‘One of the “punishments” in the Inferno is to struggle against the wind.’

  Then she told me how a few nights back she had dreamed that she was being buffeted by a violent wind as she struggled up a hill, knowing that to reach home would be to attain safety. But the wind hit her with body blows. There were clusters of other people, not exactly hostile, but not involved with her struggle, and she had to fight to move onward and upward. As she spoke I could feel the richness of whatever was beginning to take place inside her. Then she giggled.

  ‘I’m farting a lot too with all this new diet of green stuff – so there’s wind on the inside as well.’

  We took our tea into the front room and sat on the floor as usual. Over the years, the floor had provided a magic carpet for the friendship. She was talking all the way. There had been another dream about her young son returning in a space capsule, his face white and waxen from the buffeting of re-entry. Someone pulled up his lids and looked in his eyes.

  ‘It’s all right, darling. You’re alive,’ she had said in the dream.

  ‘Perhaps I was addressing the child in myself,’ she commented.

  We chatted about books and dreams and how she wanted to paint again. She wanted to make the best use of an unaccustomed luxury – time off from her teaching job.

  ‘Oh, I know what,’ I said, going over to the book-shelf. I took down Is Nothing Sacred? by Salman Rushdie. ‘Let me read you some of this.’

  We read the parts where he suggests literature and art in general be used as substitutes for religion. We talked about people we knew and how religion had made a mess of their lives. We talked about our political and secular beliefs and the importance of literature and how lucky we were to have access to it. How enriched.

  ‘Yes. It’s wonderful.’ Ellie glowed with enthusiasm. We resolved to go and see some of the great theatre classics together. She said that she was going to read Moby Dick and then the Odyssey. And for some reason she wanted to visit Prague.

  She spoke about the treatments and the drugs and how, after three treatments, she felt well. But most of all, she felt deeply alive, as if something were opening up inside her. She slept well too, utterly relaxed, open to profound dreams. She felt well.

  Several years before, on a hot summer afternoon, we had gone to the cinema together in Notting Hill Gate. We were going to see an erotic Japanese film that we had both read about. I was greeted by her wild head of hair and broad grin as she waved through the window of my flat. She was wearing old blue jeans and a red T-shirt. Her Beetle car waited outside. She folded her long legs into the car, smacked the gears into place and drove off with her usual gusto.

  When the film was over, we emerged from the cinema into a sultry London afternoon, shrieking with laughter at what a turn-on the film had been and how we should both rush to the nearest telephone box to phone a lover. Ellie was bent double in the street, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes. A warm, gritty breeze blew litter round our feet as we strolled back to the car, discussing the film seriously, each so interested in what the other had to say.

  What can be better than going to the movies with a friend on a summer afternoon?

  One winter’s night years later, when she had had two children, it was firework night. I stood with Ellie and the kids on the edge of a crowd that had gathered to celebrate Guy Fawkes Night. A steely wind blew. The council had built a giant bonfire. Orange flames and sparks leapt into the black sky. For some reason those in charge had chosen ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ to blare out from crackling speakers. There was something eerie and ominous about the large, silent crowd drained of life, circling the bonfire, facing the flames. Suddenly, I had a premonition. Something terrible was going to happen.

  ‘This is horrible,’ I said to Ellie. ‘It’s like a warning.’ She was leaning down, pulling her little girl’s gloves on. I thought it was a warning about the holocaust; about the rise of racism in England; about empty and hypnotised crowds. I had a feeling of dread for the future.

  The trouble with premonitions is that they sometimes attach themselves to the wrong event.

  Why do we always try to cut people’s tears off?

  ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ I asked, as soon as I saw them welling up in her eyes. I ran with urgency through the hospital to a small canteen. A volunteer, an elderly woman with a sweet and vacant face, served me, too slowly, with a polystyrene cup full of watery tea.

  It was August. I had come with Ellie to the hospital and sat at the back of the crowded clinic waiting for her to come out of the doctor’s room. When she did come out, she looked like a different person, blind and not knowing where to go. She looked round in a daze. Suddenly, I realised that I would have to show her the way. She would need me to take her arm and be her guide. I got up and waved.

  She had been clubbed on the back of the head with the words: ‘It’s not good, I’m afraid. It doesn’t look good.’

  We sat down at one side of the clinic while she sipped the tea and blinked back tears. There was another doctor that she had to see. This time I went in with her.

  Dr Mackintosh was in his late thirties. His manner was quiet, firm and restrained as though he had been required to build up in himself an iron control against sorrow. Serious and attentive, he examined her and then explained in his soft Scots accent why he would recommend surgery immediately to remove her right breast. Yes, he nodded, she was welcome to come back when she had had time to register the news and he would answer any questions as best he could. No, it would not be wise to delay things for too long.

  As he said goodbye at the door, I noticed that his brown hair was almost imperceptibly greying, as though it were brushed through with the grief of telling so many women that they had cancer. He was a rational doctor who would undoubtedly have smiled and said that his greying hair was due to genetic factors, just as he had told Ellie that her cancer had a genetic component. She arranged to come back and see him in five days.

  ‘Dishy doctor,’ she said with a woeful grin as we left the hospital.

  Later that day at her house, drinking tea with the radio murmuring in the background, I was impressed by the speed with which she pulled herself together.

  ‘I’m a very practical person,’ she said as she fished around for scraps of paper on which she had written the addresses of self-help groups, alternative treatment centres, support groups, discussion groups, all given to her by the nurse at the hospital.

  ‘I’ll make some lists, just in case,’ she said. And behind that list lay years of organising, political lobbying, supporting causes, demonstrations, letters of protest, all the apparatus and experience of trying to badger the world into being a better place.

  I noticed, for the first time, that her wrists looked thin.

  * * *

  After the initial tears of shock, anxiety attacks, memories of her mother and the two purple holes of her mother’s radical mastectomies, surreptitiously glimpsed in the bathroom when she was young; after the frozen inability to absorb the doctor’s words, the fear of killing her mother with the news, concern about what to tell the children, talk of reconstruction, lymph glands, helplessly taking pamphlets about organisations, advice centres and drinking all that tea from polystyrene cups, she was worn out.

  One day, before the operation, she went for a walk in Clissold Park. She lay down on the grass and fell asleep, exhausted, warmed by the September sun. Not knowing how long she had been asleep, she sat up. A young man with two children had stopped and was smiling down at her.

  ‘Have y
ou had a good sleep?’ he asked.

  ‘Wonderful, thank you.’ She returned the smile. It was comforting. She felt that she was being watched over by a guardian angel.

  Inside Dr Mackintosh’s room once more, the window-blind flapped, obscuring the grimy hospital courtyard, as Ellie studied the list of questions she had prepared. She sat upright, her head inclined towards the paper in her hand, giving serious consideration to those questions which she thought most important to ask. A band of sunlight with motes of dust in it touched her fingers and the piece of paper. Something about her grace and dignity must have moved the doctor because he lowered his head for a moment before looking up and answering her question about the possibility of oedema after surgery.

  * * *

  We were in a side room of the ward when she showed me the scar. A bleak light came through the windows and fell on the sad, dark-green, plastic chairs. I was surprised and curious as she unwrapped herself and showed me the damage.

  ‘You lucky thing,’ I said. ‘You look like Peter Pan. You’ve half managed to become a child again.’ And it was true, the entirely flat side of her chest gave her that strange androgynous look of youth, as if time had been reversed. She laughed.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ she said. ‘I quite like it.’

  When I returned from abroad, she was halfway through her chemotherapy treatments.

  It was summer. Ellie was going through a bad patch. The treatment had finished and the cancer had been halted. She started a flurry of angry verbal attacks on her boyfriend and their children.

  The table was set in the garden. Douglas, her boyfriend, had put a bowl of African violets there which glimmered mauve in the dusk. All the rest of the garden flowers of that time of year, lupins, roses, wallflowers, sprawled unkempt and higgledy-piggledy in their beds or leaned out over the grass. We drank champagne. There were two other guests, a couple who lived down the road. Ellie felt mean and sour. Something deep and unstoppable made her niggle and push the knife in at every opportunity. The treatment was supposed to have eliminated the illness, but the anger went on.