Then, for no reason I could discern, it all stopped. The officer spat something at me, spoke with the soldiers, and I was hustled to the barrier and pushed past it. I walked down the road very slowly. At the bottom was a roundabout where I stood with my thumb out for a while, until a man stopped. We did not understand each other but he drove me into La Linea again and put me out in front of a tall building, the Hotel Ibero-Star.
In normal circumstances this hotel might have seemed unremarkable but that evening, in that state, it was repulsive. It was the most modern building I had been into in weeks, equipped with everything today’s business traveller presumably expects. It was entirely devoid of personality. There was no sense that the staff could make any decision: their role was to operate the hotel like a machine, to apply the rules, to uphold the corporate image, to carry out the corporate function.
The cleanliness was inhuman: the whole place was biologically, forensically, hysterically clean. This fortress of sanitation seemed designed and determined to resist the grubbiness that is people – I was certainly the grubbiest it had allowed in for a long time. The manic, authoritarian air of hygiene frightened me; the bathroom was terrifying. A basket of toiletries sat on a ledge like a surreal sculpture of a crustacean. The facecloth had been coiled into a crescent, its corners forming claws: a shell of soaps and shower caps made a body and shampoo bottles with spherical caps protruded from the front like crab’s eyes on stalks. It was such a baroque, extravagant construction that I shrank from it. This must be policy; there must have been one in every room. The shower was so clean it seemed never to have been used. The entire room seemed to be wrapped in a layer of invisible cling-film. On television men in suits discussed something they called a worldwide financial crisis. The crisis did not seem to be hurting them: they laughed at it, shook their heads and shrugged in smiling disbelief. The glitz of television made it all entertainment, the rolling news channels rolling everything smoothly into the ad breaks. A card on the desk promised rewards for loyalty, trumpeting the virtues of the Ibero-Star chain. Where we spend, what we buy, to which corporations we are loyal – these things will displace passports, I thought, staring at it, corporate loyalty will define us more powerfully than the mere accident of where we are born, as long as we are born into the fortress.
Breakfast was the same in its extreme fecundity, a jewelled wealth of bright wrappers, gleaming pots, everything advertising itself, a banquet of edible marketing. Afterwards I stood on the pavement, at a loss. A man pulled up in a people-mover.
‘Are you waiting for me?’ he asked. He was English. He seemed friendly and assured.
‘I don’t know – who are you here for?’
‘I’m supposed to pick someone up and take him to Malaga.’
‘Yes,’ I said, for no reason.
We listened to Michael Bolton on his stereo.
‘As I’ve got older,’ he said, ‘I’ve come to appreciate this sort of music more – you know, just nice music, nice words . . .’
He dropped me off at the airport. I went in and bought a ticket to Madrid. As I passed through the scanners, at the point where you empty all your pockets into a tray I was struck by the impulse: with a British passport and a wallet full of plastic you can still go pretty well anywhere, replace pretty well anything, pay at any door until it opens. I walked away from the scanner without picking up my tray, abandoning everything to the X-ray machine. I landed at Madrid with a few euros and the clothes I was wearing. Of everything I had set out with, from my birth certificate upwards, nothing now remained.
It was a cold night in early April; the streets gleamed after rain. I hung around the bus station for a long time, keeping warm, then started to walk. Madrid seemed vast and empty, long pale boulevards rolled away, exhaustingly, in every direction. It all seemed so sudden, so established and indifferent that I felt I had fallen into a new world, deserted and austere. I asked a policeman if he knew anywhere cheap to stay. He asked me for my identification. I told him I had none. He said I must report the loss of my passport to a police station. What police station? He showed me on a map. I looked for an hour and I must have been close, at times, but I could not find it. A boy who was putting up posters gave me a lift in his van at one point. In the small hours of the morning I found the police station and was told to wait. A girl was waiting too; she was feverish with excitement.
‘I’m going to report him this time,’ she said, in English. ‘I’m going to get him arrested.’
‘Who?’
‘My neighbour, the bastard.’
‘Why?’
‘He won’t leave me alone! And this time he went too far.’
‘What did he do?’
‘He banged on my door, shouting that he loves me.’
‘You’re going to get him arrested because he loves you?’
‘Because the bastard bangs on my door!’
The police took my statement and gave me a form.
‘Now go,’ said the officer.
‘I have nowhere to go – may I stay here?’
He looked me over. ‘Two hours,’ he said, pointing at the bench in the waiting room. ‘You can stay for two hours, but don’t lie down.’
I closed my eyes. Immediately, it seemed, though two hours had passed, they shook me awake.
I walked through the streets as the sky lightened. The air was fresh and cold. There was a bewildering treasury of waste on the pavements. In one skip were jumpers, a bag, shoes, umbrellas, shirts, jeans, shorts and T-shirts. I re-equipped myself, because such riches seemed too good to pass up, but the weight of the bag was exhausting and I returned it to another skip. Madrid’s skips and recycling bins act as an exchange for street people: you trade in your rags for anything better you find. I counted my euros: five left. A café owner let me use his bathroom.
‘Do you want something?’ he asked, as I was leaving.
‘I have no money,’ I said. He shrugged, made me a coffee and presented me with a heart-shaped cake on a plate. His face was stern and unforgiving, but his kindness was amazing. He showed me the door as soon as I had finished and waved away my thanks, almost irritably.
People were going into a church for morning Mass. I joined them, took a seat and tried to stay awake. The Latin was soporific and I failed to keep my eyes open, awaking to a hand shaking my shoulder. A man stood over me, dressed in ragged clothes. His head was swollen and his eyes bulging. His breath came in loud, whistling snorts. He seemed to be the self-appointed guardian of the church and he was upset and angered by me. He chased me out with shooing gestures, huffing and whistling furiously. I walked through parks and down long streets; I huddled on benches. My head spun. At one point I went into a hospital but they did not understand what I wanted and were not interested in the cut on my head. I was neither tourist, nor traveller (whoever heard of a traveller without a bag?), nor worker, nor resident: I felt as though I had fallen through a grating into a kind of invisibility. Madrid seemed to divide into well-to-do quarters, where people looked through me, and bohemian areas, where entire squares were filled with colourful crowds of rockers, bikers, beggars and students – the anarchic and the bourgeois separating themselves like oil and water. The astonishing thing was the way this city, the European capital closest to Africa, did not refer to that continent at all. Instead, it was the tidal pull of another empire, another history, which was everywhere: South America. I gazed at Ecuadorian, Venezuelan and Peruvian faces, music and food. I saw some Moroccans, but their culture was comparatively invisible. I spent another euro on a coffee. Cigarettes were no problem; every ashtray was rich in butts. It began to get dark again and I joined the hurrying crowds, to keep going and keep warm, but also to feel part of the city by appearing to be, to keep its rhythm. Two euros. There was so much food in the cafés and shops but I could not work out where they threw it all away. I was desperate to sleep somewhere. Finally, I went into a hotel lobby, borrowed a phone book and found – miracles! – the name of the parents of a friend.
One euro went on that, and one on the metro ride to the station near their home, and that is all it took. One phone number, two euros, and the kindness of near-strangers.
I felt pathetic as I made that call; the equivalent of calling your parents, crying ‘Make it stop – help!’ As a privileged European it was, perhaps, rather feeble, but it was such a relief: I could have sobbed with gratitude when the telephone was answered. For a migrant, it would have been a God-send. As I discovered in the following days, the telephone number of someone in Spain is the one life-line possessed by many of the ‘clandestins’ – as they are called in Morocco – who make it across the Strait.
Judy, the lady of the house, came out to fetch me from the metro.
‘Where are your bags?’ she cried. ‘Have you lost them? Have you eaten?’
We had met before, fifteen years ago: I attended the same international school as her daughter, a close friend. Judy and her husband Denis had become used to various friends of their children turning up in various states, but Judy looked alarmed at the state of me. She fed me stew, took my clothes away for washing, lent me a T-shirt and jeans, and showed me to a room with a bed with clean sheets.
It is hard to understand how precious and wonderful are food, clean clothes, a bath and a bed until you have been given them, with such kindness, in such need.
The morning was as bright as sun on snow. The light was luminous, the sky a freezing blue; in the suburb where my friends live there were pine trees and occasional sudden views for miles.
‘It feels like the first day of spring,’ we said.
Denis and Judy seemed to take me in hand in a very gentle way. They looked closely at me, asked about the journey, interrogated me as to my plans and resources, gave me a telephone, making it clear that it was time I called my parents, and declared that I had not been eating enough.
There were swallows on the wires over the road and a wide open scent of cold freshness, like the air of the mountains, and in the lancing sunlight every leaf seemed distinct and every scent was strong: Madrid woke with coffee and tobacco and baking.
‘We had a swallow,’ Judy said. ‘A beautiful little thing, he fell out of his nest and we fed him; he used to drink from the pool. But all his family left and he couldn’t go with them. We took him to a vet but the vet said he wouldn’t survive and we had to put him down. It was terrible . . .’
Judy is Australian. She met her husband, Denis, an Irishman when they were young, in Rome. They have lived in Madrid since the 1970s; their house has long been a hub for visiting poets and playwrights, Denis having organised the Irish contribution to Expo world fairs. An actor, with a vast repertoire of one-man shows, he has become one of the most prolific and successful theatre directors in Spain. He is a quiet man, bearded and owl-eyed like a Shakespearean player.
‘Because I’m not Spanish, you know, they don’t ever review me,’ he said, sadly. ‘They review the actors all right, and at the bottom they just write “Directed by Denis Rafter”.’
He was rehearsing The Merchant of Venice and invited me to meet his cast and watch them work.
‘Believe me, sir, had I such ventures forth,
The better part of my affections would
Be with my hopes abroad. I would be still
Plucking the grass to know where sits the wind;
Peering in maps for ports, and piers, and roads;
And every object that might make me fear
Misfortune to my ventures, out of doubt
Would make me sad . . .’
This is Solanio, a friend of Antonio, diagnosing the causes of Antonio’s mysterious melancholy. Though Antonio denies it, Solanio surely has it right. Antonio has invested heavily in trading ships: his forture is all at sea. ‘That I have much ado to know myself’, Antonio ponders at the opening of the play, wondering at his sadness. I felt the journey had brought me closer to mystery, both beautiful and awful, than I had ever been. I felt as though, in casting everything off, I had lost the world but gained something of myself. My love of friends, and my work, and this strange, sudden, ignorant yet complete thing I felt for someone I did not know – these things could not be cast off and did not waver.
Shakespeare gives swallows a line in Antony and Cleopatra. His source is Plutarch, who reports that swallows nested under the prow of Cleopatra’s flagship before the battle of Actium. Plutarch writes that this was thought to be an omen of the disaster that followed. In ornithological terms it is certain that swallows would not build on a battleship that was much used: the implication is that Cleopatra’s flagship spent a lot of time tied up or anchored in port, which would suggest that neither it nor its crew were battle-ready. Shakespeare transplants the incident from Actium to the third and last of the three confrontations between Antony and Octavian.
SCARUS Swallows have built
In Cleopatra’s sails their nests. The augurs
Say they know not, they cannot tell, look grimly
And dare not speak their knowledge.
Augury was the Roman practice of studying the flights, habits, doings and entrails of birds as a means of foretelling the future. Our word ‘auspicious’ derives from this ancient method of divination. We still use augury, albeit in a very limited, almost unconscious way, part superstition, part empiricism. Children still recite ‘One for sorrow, two for joy . . .’ at the sight of magpies. The call of the first cuckoo invariably inspires someone to write to the newspapers with news that summer has arrived. Birds flying high herald good weather, gulls inland mean storms at sea, crows and ravens are still birds of ill-omen, the chinking of blackbirds signals the approach of evening, the arrivals of fieldfares, redwings and skeins of geese are sure signs of the coming of winter. Of all birds, though, the swallow carries perhaps the greatest weight of prophetic folklore. Long before the battle of Actium, Greek sooth-sayers saw the future in the behaviour of the birds. On the eve of his departure to fight a battle against the Medes in 334 BC, Antiochus, son of Pyrrhus, found a swallow had built a nest in his tent. It was believed to herald disaster, and indeed Antiochus lost the fight.
So much human effort, certainly the effort of the culture from which I come, is directed, and has been since the Enlightenment, into demystifying and explaining this phenomenon, the question of guidance, of fate; the question to which the answer would be the meaning of life itself. Once the answer was simple, or at least the region within which it lay was clear – religion. Since the fall of God from His primacy over western thought, science has set about unlacing the obscurity which surrounds what Hamlet calls the ‘divinity that shapes our ends’ by looking ever more closely at us: at our genes, our psychiatry. The idea that the determination of our fates lies outside us, outside our bodies, our histories and experience, remains the province of the devout. What happened to me as I followed the swallows across the boundary between two worlds, from Africa, where unseen and invisible powers beyond science are alive and central to many lives, to Europe, where unseen hands are always assumed to be human or technological, and all explanations must be rational, suggested to me that a belief in either system which dismisses the other is a misplaced and limited faith. Perhaps something similar would have happened whichever route I had taken; though there is no telling, I am certain of two things: first, the Zulus, in my case, were right. I did follow the swallows and in a way I did not come back. And I did find what I was really searching for. It may sound strange, but having chased them to the furthest south, then followed them north, travelling as they did, sometimes singly, sometimes in loose groups, and loitering in some places, as they did, plunging through and over others, it seemed to me a very natural miracle that in following them I should have come across one of my own kind.
‘I only really feel at home when I am a stranger,’ Rebecca had said: my feelings exactly.
The swallows and the girl were now the better part of my hopes abroad. To follow and find them I owed the authorities their pound of flesh.
There is an intriguing di
agram on the wall of the British Consulate in Madrid, produced by something called the Identity and Passport Service. It is a graph, on the horizontal axis of which is ‘Better security’, and on the vertical axis ‘Better technology’. The plot shows how British citizens have identified themselves over time, beginning with a passport, passing through computer readable passports and progressing to biometric passports and identity cards carrying chips bearing data unique to the holder. At the top of the plot, at the ends of the two scales, the diagram dissolves into nothingness, as if the designers have stopped short of the full implication of their model which is that complete security will only finally exist when perfected technology allows the merging of the citizen and the passport – when we become our passports, when we carry the chips implanted in us. Waiting in front of an armoured glass screen, taking turns to approach the counter, was a scattering of individuals, couples, single women, lone travellers and students who all fell woefully short of this ideal. We had no chips or passports; we were not computer-readable. It took two visits over two days, photographs, forms and money but remarkably little fuss, and I was issued with a sheet of paper, signed and stamped with a picture affixed, which proclaimed me to be a British citizen travelling on an emergency passport, issued in Madrid and valid for five days. Five days was the maximum allowed, an official explained. He would have preferred to issue it for twenty-four hours, to permit me to take a flight the next day, but if I insisted on travelling overland this was as much leeway as he could allow. I must be back in Britain by 19 April, he said; if I missed that date I would be in trouble – did I understand? Touchingly, since the armoured glass prevented us shaking hands, he took two of my fingers through the little slit by which documents could be exchanged and shook them.
A Single Swallow Page 27
