A Single Swallow

by Horatio Clare

  ‘Good luck,’ he said.

  I took a train north to Zaragoza, on the Ebro River, a swallow highway in the autumn, and, I calculated, somewhere they were sure to be found in the spring. Spanish trains are as thoroughly protected as aeroplanes: boarding one in Atocha Station you cannot forget the massacre of commuters that took place here one morning in 2004. You pass through a security screen and X-ray machines. You are required to carry and produce your passport.

  Zaragoza was half a building site. African men were labouring on the roads: there were fewer of them and they had more machinery than their equivalents in Congo, but otherwise it was almost the same scene. Teams of northern Europeans were arriving at the station to supervise and complete the works, all in time for the Expo 2008. I walked into town; it was a cold bright evening and a well-to-do city; Zaragozans were taking what looked like their first evening promenade of the year, all done up in smart coats. Among them I fell into conversation with a young man from Senegal who was walking quickly, and shivering. He was thin and quick-eyed, he moved as if trying to take up as little space as possible and dropped his gaze when we passed townspeople; their glances slid rapidly off him. He was working with a friend as a decorator, he said. He could not have been more than twenty-five.

  ‘Spain is hard,’ he said. ‘They don’t like you here and it is incredibly expensive.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘With my friend, there are four of us there.’

  ‘And what is your plan?’

  ‘Save money if I can, until I can go north.’

  ‘Where do you want to go?’

  ‘France – or UK.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I have heard it is better . . .’

  ‘How did you get into Spain?’

  He smiled vaguely, shook his head and would not answer.

  The Ebro was a yellowy green which you shivered to look at; it ran hard and cold with snow-melt from the Pyrenees. The old town of Zaragoza lines its south bank and clusters around the cathedral, the Basilica de Nuestra Senora del Pilar, a heavily domed, turreted and dim-hearted thing built around a marble pillar on which the Virgin is supposed to have appeared in AD 40 in the middle of a sermon by St James – Santiago. Pilgrims come in busloads to kiss a portion of this pillar. Ignored, by comparison, is a miraculous building on the south side of town, near the bus station – the Aljaferia, once a Muslim palace, complete with a courtyard of interlocking arches and the remains of a mosque of stunning beauty, all incorporated, in the fifteenth century, into a palace for Fernando and Isabella. Despite being as beautiful, in miniature, as the Alhambra of Granada and one of the pinnacles of Hispano-Muslim art, the Aljaferia is almost bereft of visitors. The Catholic and Aragonese parts of the building are heavily signposted and supervised; the Islamic parts relatively empty. It is as though there is no room in modern, northern Spain for certain parts of its history, while others are preciously preserved. In the basilica two bombs hang from a pillar: they were dropped on the structure by the Republicans in the civil war, but failed to explode.

  I crossed the river as the evening came on, and there were swallows swooping under the bridge. Following a walkway along the river bank I came on a great commotion of police and ambulances: they were pulling a body out of the icy water.

  My Spanish was now much better; by beginning conversations with an apology for not speaking Spanish I found I was able to elicit help and understanding: this produced a cheap meal and a cheap room.

  Zaragoza went to work with a cold morning but a warm sun. By the Ebro, not far from the cathedral, I found an old lady leaning on a wall and staring down at a patch of sand on the river’s edge. She was watching swallows. It was the first time since Bloemfontein I had found anyone taking notice of the birds, and the first time I had seen them on the ground. They were drinking and dust-bathing, ruffling their feathers and twittering. They looked strange, out of their natural element, the air, little boat-shapes, like beached yachts on stands. The old lady and I did not understand each other, except for one word.

  ‘Golodrinas! Golondrinas!’ she kept saying, excitedly, and pointing. In Spanish mythology the golondrina, the swallow, is supposed to have tried to remove the thorns from Christ’s head as he hung on the cross and in so doing pricked itself, which explains the red patch on its throat and face. The same red patches are explained in parts of Russia by a story of swallows trying to remove the nails pinning Jesus to the cross, while in Sweden the bird is said to have sung a song of consolation to the dying man, and its name in Swedish, svala, also means ‘to console’. But it was surely the consolation of the turning seasons that excited the old woman. She pointed at the sun, and then at the birds, and smiled and chattered delightedly.

  I took a bus eastwards, paralleling the Ebro, to Barcelona. The comfort and cleanliness of the thing, its punctuality and space – one person one seat! – all seemed an amazing luxury, but my neighbour was miserable. He wore thin clothes, shrank in his seat and seemed to be hiding from the world beyond the window by manipulating the curtain. I asked him what was wrong. He was from Ivory Coast, he said. We were both delighted to find someone else who spoke French. He was going to Barcelona to stay with a friend and look for work and then he hoped to go north – it was the same story again. How had he got into Spain? He had flown from Morocco. Why was he so nervous, then? He said he was scared of the Spanish police – his friend had warned him to stay away from them. I believe his visa had expired.

  ‘The problem is,’ he said, ‘I do not have any money to reach my friend. He is outside the city, in Badalona . . .’

  I gave him 20 euros, which he stared at in disbelief, before kissing the note and crossing himself. He took my hand and hung onto it, pouring out thanks and bad breath.

  In the seat behind me was Vicente, a young Aragonese with a thin mournful face and long dark hair tied in a pony-tail. Vicente lives with his parents in Zaragoza and commutes to Barcelona to study composition – he is a guitarist – and to stay with his girlfriend. When I explained what I was doing he said, ‘Ah, so you are travelling in a permanent spring.’

  ‘Yes – it does feel like that.’

  ‘These are the first bright days we have had,’ he said, as the coach drove eastward through biscuit-coloured hills.

  ‘Here in Aragon we say the swallow is the bird which melts the snow.’

  He taught me a rhyme: ‘Hasta el cuarenta de Mayo, no te quites el sayo’, which means ‘Don’t take off your coat until the fortieth of May’, a reference to the way spring warmth drags its feet in the cool shadow of the Pyrenees. We passed a sign marking the Greenwich meridian. Ever since Morocco I had been confused about time: Morocco follows Greenwich Mean Time, putting it one hour behind continental Europe, despite the fact that most of the country lies east of the longitude of Lisbon. Here we were, crossing the meridian, theoretically moving forward an hour, though neither time nor the clocks distinguished between one side of the line and the other. Like birds, we take our cues from the seasons, from the phases of the moon and the movements of the sun. But we have formalised our calculations into a rigid but invisible web of grids, of time and of space, which theoretically tell us when and where we are. The problem is that though there are many repeating mathematical patterns in nature and cosmology, the rhythms of the earth fluctuate outside the calculations we have designed to contain it. A September day in northern Europe may well be hotter than one in July. We talk of early springs and late summers as though the seasons were somehow out of joint, while it would perhaps be more logical to consider that it is our neat calendar of hours, days and weeks, with their chain of ‘seasonal’ festivals, that is inaccurate. The attempt to unify human and natural time through a melding of Christianity and older, pagan myths is a common theme in the mythology of swallows. In many European countries it was believed that swallows arrived on the 25th of March, flying down from heaven on the feast of the Annunciation, bringing warmth to the world, a tradition that was particularly str
ong in southern Germany. Swallows were supposed to arrive on St George’s Day in Mecklenburg (23 April), on Palm Sunday in Saxony, on the feast of St Gregory in Bergamo, Italy (12 March), or if not, on St Joseph’s Day (19 March) or two days later, on the 21st of March, St Benedict’s Day.

  Travelling in a permanent spring, as Vicente put it, made me question the assumptions of orientation on which I had built my conception of the world. North, I learned in geography, is 0° on the compass, up the page. But these are mere impositions, commonly agreed, like the imposition of human time on time itself, which allow us to agree on the orientation of space. Swallows do no more fly up and down the world than do they pay heed to days of the week. Indeed, in the rhythm of their seasons, it makes more sense to imagine them flying on a line of latitude, or east–west, than it does to say they fly north–south. Born in high summer, they fly in late European summer towards early African summer, then repeat the trick in the other direction. In relation to the movement of the earth relative to the sun, their migration questions our very notions of stasis and travelling. In the terms of the universe, of space beyond our planet, swallows maintain a much more consistent distance from the sun than do we who stay at home. While the world turns under them, their vast journeys hold them much closer to a single point in space than the ‘fixed’ barns and outbuildings they nest in, which are conveyed thousands of miles to and fro by the elliptical motion of the earth around the sun, and the ‘wobble’ of the planet on its axis.

  CHAPTER 11

  South to North: Barcelona to Calais

  South to North: Barcelona to Calais

  THERE WERE TALL blonde Lithuanians behind bars, Gambian boys selling hash and cocaine on the waterfront, French girls loading up with alcohol in the supermarkets, Slovenes in the internet cafés, Moroccan and Brazilian men fighting outside a club on the beach, and men, women and their children of every nationality in Europe eddying down the Rambla and circling in and out of the little streets of the old town. Above the statue of Cristobal Colomba, Christopher Columbus, which points a commanding finger south-east to the sea, urging the young of Barcelona to go forth and seek their fortunes abroad, were swifts, gulls and parakeets. I only saw one swallow in the city: in the Plaza George Orwell, where the city governors, in a sardonic tribute, have erected a sign warning that the square is covered by CCTV.

  ‘This used to be a place for drugs,’ said Jake, a wryly smiling German architect I had known a little in London. ‘Lots of acid.’

  We looked for the cameras but saw none. There were a great many dealers by the port and on the Rambla. In Africa they would have been selling SIM cards, but entry level into the Spanish economy seemed to involve selling bad hash and cut cocaine.

  Jake had spent seven years in Barcelona, working in a glutted market. ‘There are so many architects here,’ he groaned. ‘They come from all over Europe – so they work for nothing.’ He had landed a job in London and was making preparations to leave, while lamenting Barcelona football club’s decision to sell their best players.

  ‘But if I had to get a mortgage perhaps I would get it here. It’s pleasant . . .’

  It looked delightful to me, as the lights came up around the port. ‘It’s perfect!’ I cried. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘The tourists,’ Jake grimaced, mourning the masses like the subject of an occupying power. We watched a line of them disgorging from the airport bus. ‘See, the Ryanair People,’ he said, grinning, ‘your beautiful countrymen.’

  Pallid, overweight, and over-burdened with baggage, they did look resoundingly British. Each one trailed a bag on wheels. The adoption of these devices means it is now universal practice among the peoples of the north and west to travel with more luggage than we can carry, as if we have become so attached to our possessions that we must take as many as possible with us, unable to contemplate existence without them, even for a holiday, like children who cannot leave home without a sack of toys.

  I sat there, smoking and smirking in an unattractively superior manner: I did not reflect that at least the travellers would not be mad or stupid enough to throw their suitcases into the sea; I conveniently forgot the weight of my own rucksack, when I began, and it never occurred to me to catch myself in that most Brit-abroad of snobberies: labelling fellow-countryment tourists, in contrast to oneself, who is, of course, a traveller.

  ‘And the regional thing,’ Jake went on. ‘They are so mad about identity here. There are no theatre productions in Spanish in Barcelona, only in Catalan. It makes it very provincial.’

  We ate in Barceloneta, a fragment of the city near the port which is still a fisherman’s and sailor’s quarter, then drank Dominican rum at the coach station, waiting for my bus to Perpignan. We said goodbye and I boarded. The bus was wild.

  Almost all the seats were taken, except at the back, which was the domain of a band of Kosovans. There were three men and four women, all commanded by the youngest of their party, a girl in her early twenties, pale-skinned, dark-haired, quick and full of a ferocious aggression. I had barely sat down when she demanded money. I refused, so she demanded water. She returned the bottle contemptuously and, deciding that she wanted more space than the single seat she occupied, opened a mobile phone and made it play music, loudly, until her neighbour complained. She stared him out and replayed the music until he got up, cursing, and went to seek another seat. Then she curled up like a cat and apparently fell instantly asleep.

  We crossed the frontier into a country I had thought I knew, but which in the light of what I had seen of its former empire I now saw afresh. A country which consistently tops polls of where Europeans would chose to emigrate to; the country which gave us the terms left and right, in which we still think of politics; the country which more than any other held the key to the continent’s direction after the Second World War; the country which has given the West its most radical and influential philosophies since the Enlightenment, from existentialism to deconstruction; the race whose sensibility and language is wonderfully revealed by terms which English cannot translate: savoir-faire, laissez-faire, hauteur, demi-monde, bon appétit . . . a language which constantly forces you to evaluate and avow your relationship with every interlocutor – tu or vous? A place in which all understand the invisible bounds which define a citizen’s place: I will never forget being frozen in my teenage tracks by the blistering distaste with which an elderly Parisienne addressed me: ‘Monsieur, vous n’avez pas le droit.’ (‘You do not have the right.’) I had not realised you were not allowed to walk on the grass.

  On the French side of the Pyrenees, where migrating swallows used to be trapped in nets for food, they have an expression, ‘Tu as les yeux en couilles d’hirondelle’: you have eyes like a swallow’s balls. This refers to dark shadows under your eyes, contrasting with a pale face: like the contrast with the white under-parts of a swallow, where it meets the dark of the tail. I think my eyes may have looked something like these couilles, at Perpignan Station at four in the morning.

  The town was abandoned to silence, except for a spill of light from the Hotel Terminus. The bar was officially closed, but they let me in: it was like walking onto the set of a play. Under a single dim bulb four figures were gathered around the bar. Bertrand, twice divorced, a ruddy-faced roue and rogue held forth to Christophe, Christophe’s girlfriend Hélène, and Xavier, the put-upon barman. Because they were ‘closed’ we could smoke.

  ‘The best stories are about love!’ Bertrand cried, as we all hit the Dominican rum. He and Christophe discussed the relative merits of women as Hélène drank and giggled and nodded along, adoringly attentive to everything Christophe said: old women versus young women, foreign women versus French, Parisians versus the English – ‘Damn the Parisians and the Foreigners!’ cried Bertrand, slapping me on the back. They fantasised about going upstairs and seducing the two Colombian girls who had taken a room and who were not that pretty but would do, it was decided. Xavier should go and wake them and bring them down. Xavier demurred,
was roundly abused, and more drinks were ordered.

  ‘Women are mad – they must be – two of them married me!’ Bertrand exclaimed.

  The town woke up quickly at dawn. Shutters went up, bread vans did the rounds, we were all shooed out of the bar while the new barman put the lights on, pulled the chairs off the tables and opened the doors to let the smoke out. Then we were allowed back in, for croissants and coffee.

  The first customer is a little old man in a blue blazer. He has a thick southern accent and his voice is a growl as he hails me.

  ‘Arrnglais?’

  ‘Oui – Gallois, alors, mais oui – Britannique.’

  ‘. . . ils sont coquilleurs . . .’ he said, with disgusted scorn, flipping his hand over and back, ‘coquilleurs . . .’ flip, flip. His name is Yves. I am intrigued by this antagonism and delighted by him, so happy to be able to speak, here, after Spain, where I was reduced to infancy by ignorance: Bertrand and Christophe kept using words just beyond me. They would explain, translating their argot into my French, but not Yves. He mimes. But why does he hate the English so much? What does it mean, ‘coquilleurs’? The gesture seems clear enough.

  ‘You can’t have confidence in them?’ I hazard.

  ‘Coquilleurs . . .’ He grimaces.

  ‘Listen,’ I say, with appropriate heat, ‘in my country – Wales – we have a real history with them. What is your history?’

  He touches the lower lid of one eye, pulls it down.

  ‘La guerre.’