by John Elliott
Back in the bedroom, he put on a navy-blue dressing gown and a pair of espadrilles. His letter to Veri rested against the bole of the table lamp. Above it, the moth was still there, motionless on the rim of the shade.
I am writing to you. [How pitiful his words had been! How inadequate if she really had read them!] This is by way of farewell. I’m sorry I haven’t seen or been with you and yours for a long time, but now you are all very much in my thoughts. Of course, you have the right to know and not to speculate. My reasons are manifold—
He tore it up carefully without taking it out of the envelope. Once downstairs, he dropped the pieces into the pedal bin on top of the wrapped wad of chewing gum. The scattered sheets of Elizabeth Kerry’s message lay on the table alongside Monse’s packet. He left them where they were and busied himself making tea. The time was already 9.12 a.m.
While he tested the warmth of the pot, cradling its brown earthenware between his cupped hands, prior to putting in the tea, he heard Pooley, the Jack Russell terrier from next door, set up yapping and yowling, no doubt at something which had strayed into its territory: a cat perhaps, like the one on the sugar lump paper. It brought to mind the deepening colour of Sylvia’s eyes as she became more and more engrossed in the telling of her story. Savouring the image, he swilled out the water and tipped in two spoonfuls of Japanese ‘ghost’ tea. Pooley, after a diminuendo of querulous, half-stifled growls, stopped barking. The cat, black, warning or otherwise, had presumably departed. ‘Happy,’ was what Sylvia had said. ‘Happy to be in Miranda. Happy to be in Greenlea.’
When the tea was brewed, he poured some out and sat down. The choice of two paths confronted him. Miranda with its past, which he could not change, and Greenlea with its possible present and future. The one shrouded within Monse’s large envelope lay to his left. The other, dispersed in cryptic references he did not understand, was spread before him. He picked up the nearest sheet. What if Elizabeth Kerry’s phone call had really been intended for him and not for Harvard? After all, she had not stopped speaking when he gave her his name. ‘So there is no misunderstanding between us,’ she had clearly said. Between us. Surely that must mean something? And he in turn, for whatever reason, had chosen not to leave what he had written and drawn on Harvard’s desk, but had carried it with him and brought it home: an action either fulfilling part of his ‘tidying away’ or else a subconscious reflex to provide divergence from his stated purpose, a possible self-betrayal through the vanity of needing to solve an inconsequential, chanced-upon mystery. Now, the invitation to puzzle was in his hand. Who was Fernando Cheto Simon, whose colleagues were looking forward to meeting him? Meeting where? Meeting when? He picked up another sheet. What was the significance of a Gallo Mart store in Panalquin? Their logo was a crowing cockerel. That much he knew, but he had never been inside one in all his time in Greenlea. In the pot, the ghost tea leaves had opened out in thick dark ribbons. There was ample liquid for another bowl. He set aside the Kerry sheets. Greenlea or Miranda? Neither or both? He lifted Monse’s envelope. The verifiable truth was, if she had not unearthed this, she would not have phoned him, and, in that case, he would now be lying in unconscious solitude upstairs. In its stupid way, whatever it held, it had led to his drinking this particular bowl of tea, his listening to Pooley’s whines, his seeing a moth clinging to the lampshade.
Typically, Monse’s envelope was crammed to bursting point with no slack to poke a thumbnail in. He took a sip of tea, got up and rummaged in the kitchen cabinet drawer to find a pair of small scissors. The sound of a car horn, repeating itself insistently, started Pooley off again on a chorus of challenging barks. People called their dogs by names which were often incomprehensible to strangers, Rusty not Polka Dot. An attempt to restore a degree of stereotypical dogginess? He eased the smaller blade of the scissors into the stuffed corner of the envelope and slit along the edge, revealing the tops of the photocopied pages. A further tear set them free.
They comprised of an old sixties newspaper article written by a journalist under the by-line ‘Man About Town’ for the Orias Sentinel. Monse’s handwritten addenda scrawled at the head of the first page identified the author as one Felix Guiterez Abarca. ‘Especially interesting for you, given your personal connections and the fact that he was a regular attendee of Tian’s circle at the Goldsmith Café.’ she had inserted in the margin. Sonny smiled. Monse’s enthusiasm was so palpable in the rush of her large, flowing script that it would be churlish not to at least look through her discovery. After all, time did not matter. He had nowhere in particular to go. The ghost leaves, as their name implied, would still provide several pots of tea. He began to read.
Another January! Time to consult my diary for up and coming events. None amongst them stirred my sentiments more than the eagerly awaited visit of the celebrated singer, Forest Mushroom, to our town. Jimmy Pilgrim, his erstwhile guitarist, had kindly let drop that the great man would be staying at the Colonial, and, through his further auspices, I was fortunately granted an interview.
Keen anticipation mingled with, I confess, a touch of melancholy accompanied me as I set out on Wednesday past’s cold, clear morning. For alas, as we all know, the Colonial nowadays wears a somewhat forlorn and dilapidated aspect. Largely shunned by our fellow citizens, it ekes out a precarious existence on the custom of a thin stream of travelling salesmen and market hucksters. Its human attractions, if truth be told, have also seen better days, but ’twas not always so. In happier times, the Museum Café across the street, now gutted and open to the elements after its disastrous fire, had been for three generations an outstanding venue for song. Musicians performing there always put up at the Colonial. This tradition was now nobly confirmed by Forest Mushroom.
I found him seated at a table, his back to the wall, in the farthest recess of the ground-floor room. A young person of female gender sat beside him on the bench. He was wrapped in a sombre black overcoat of a distinctly foreign cut with a silk paisley scarf protecting his throat. His hands were clad in grey woollen mittens. His companion blew into a tumbler of brandy steaming with hot water as I respectfully introduced myself. After testing the glass gingerly with her fingertips, she indicated that I should sit opposite them. She then passed Forest Mushroom the drink and watched as he drained it in two hearty gulps, clapping for another as soon as he had set it down.
I ventured to enquire how the maestro was, speaking warmly of his rich and lasting contribution to our national culture. Then, seeing my effusions elicit no response, I changed tack and essayed various snippets of gossip I had gleaned from hither and yon. To my chagrin, exactly the same ritual was enacted when the waiter arrived with the second tumbler. Readers, for an unsettling moment, in the ever-stretching silence that ensued, I began to feel myself the hapless victim of the hundred and one little noises that threatened to overtake my carefully prepared questions with their insidious creakings and susurrations. In the face of Forest Mushroom’s taciturnity and his companion’s total lack of concern, my mind slid perilously close to straining to identify their locus and purpose. Hurried footsteps, cries, the rasping of files, a ring of keys dropped and dropped again, a lorry rumbling past, all began to disturb me to such an extent that I nearly missed it when the great man finally spoke.
God, this gadfly was tiresome and at the same time obdurately faceless. Sonny stopped reading and tried to visualise the very few occasions on which he had been commanded to join Tian Marva’s famous circle. According to Monse, ‘Man About Town’ had been contributing to the Sentinel for over a decade and would have been there at the Goldsmith. Closing his eyes, he concentrated on trying to feel his hand resting on the bar of the double doors on his way into the café. Was it PUSH or PULL? PUSH. Now he could see the word in front of him, embossed in bronze curlicues.
The table, their reserved table, occupied the centre of the already crowded room, its position befitting their acknowledged status. A series of gilded rococo mirrors over on the far wall retained and multiplied the
ir reflections while they leant back in their upright chairs, shoulders shaking with laughter at some new manifestation of local eccentricity or misguided idealism.
An elderly, wizened waiter—the Goldsmith did not seem to employ anyone under fifty—repeated and took his muttered order. ‘A privileged visit thanks to the courtesy of you gentlemen.’ Tian’s voice, urbane as usual, purged of any trace of Llomeran accent, drew him a round of welcomes. Mouths opened in his direction, releasing breaths sanitised by eucalyptus and peppermint lozenges. He stammered out his acknowledgements. How gauche he sensed he was under their appraising gaze! The steady assault of acrid cigar smoke made his nostrils twitch, adding to his embarrassment. He tried desperately not to sneeze because he had forgotten to put a freshly laundered handkerchief in his pocket.
They were all men together; men of a certain class and age. There were no women or girls. It was not that sort of place. Schoolboy tales persisted, however, tales he had heard, of a legendary upstairs room in whose confines the more lurid sexual practices occurred. Therefore, while he sat and endured the inevitable questions about school, Rosario, Veri and what he was going to make of himself, he darted several surreptitious glances towards the staircase to the left of the bar, only to feel his cheeks burn and redden under Tian’s enquiring and ironic stare.
Now some recognisable features and body shapes were beginning to form in his memory as he pinpointed their individual gestures and heard again their pet phrases being confidentially declaimed: Luis Man something, the chemist, one of his schoolteachers, Enrique Perez, Oscar Ferrer, the little hunchback, who had an antiquarian bookshop on La Doctrina Street, Pepe Nuñez, bald with a prominent broken nose, renowned skirt chaser and cuckold, Blas Sanz, elderly and bespectacled, a local landowner reputed to have anarchist sympathies, but no ‘Man About Town’, no Felix Guiterez Abarca. He was not at the table. His image refused to put in an appearance. Come to that, now that he thought about it, he did not retain a clear mental picture of Forest Mushroom either. What he had read so far was too vague. It lacked physical detail. It would need another effort on his part to render flesh back on the singer’s ghost. Perhaps he would find a starting point further in the text. He returned to the article.
A soft crooning, a murmured snatch of song, joined my disconcerting noises. ‘Under the bridge, the laundresses are working, Amparo, ay Amparo! I am sick for you.’ His right hand moved in front of me. His fingers turned to the rhythm of the couplet. Encouraged, I reopened my notebook. Then, as if I had given him a prearranged cue, he looked me straight in the eye and said . . .
‘Young master, let me lean on you.’
Sonny sipped his lukewarm tea. Blas Sanz, of course, that was it, that was the link he had been looking for. It had been on a night at one of Sanz’s farms, a night when he was seventeen.
Guiterez was there with Tian and a crowd of others to carouse and listen to the singing. He had gone outside to take a breath of fresh air and be by himself in order to gaze at the shooting stars high in the clear sky over the fields. The Plough, the Little Bear, the Pleiades, his inventory had only begun when he heard the sound of someone retching, followed quickly by the splash of vomit on the ground. A few grunts relenting into a low whistle provided a brief descant to the muffled cries emanating from the farmhouse. He watched a figure emerge out of the darkness of the courtyard beyond the outline of a fig tree. The man, on catching sight of him, lurched determinedly in his direction, pausing to spit copiously and rub the resultant dribble from his jaws with his sleeve as he staggered and pitched onwards.
‘Young master, let me lean on you.’
Booze seeped out of every pore. Its powerful stench made his head swim as the man’s weight on his torso and shoulders forced him ever backwards. After an ungainly, shuffling dance, they both ended up hard against the stable wall; Forest Mushroom, for indeed it had been him, once loosened from his tenuous grasp, crumpled and slid to the earth. On an impulse, he joined him.
What had made him do it? He could so easily have left him there. He could have slipped back inside unnoticed and, he realised now, chatted to ‘Man About Town’ and got his perception of the famous singer, no doubt imbued with phrases of the ‘magic other’ which Tian hymned so constantly. The thought made him laugh out loud. Luck had truly been on his side that night.
After they had lain for what seemed like an age, he had reverted to his study of the heavens, unsure whether his companion had fallen asleep or not.
‘Little master.’
‘Don’t call me that.’
A keen glance scrutinised him. ‘Okay, young man. Will you be so kind to go inside and bring me some food? Drink as well. Tell,’ he paused as though searching for a name and not finding it, ‘the old woman to give me some of her stew. I wonder if she’s any tripe left. You,’ using the familiar, ‘have you eaten? Was it good? What did you have?’
‘Blood sausage, oxtail and beans.’
‘Some of those whores can cook when the spirit takes them, but, remember, be sure to get what the old woman prepared. Fuck it! We’ve got to get the best of things when we venture out into the world. Now I feel I’m going to be able to sing. I always wait till I’ve had a good spew at these shindigs. Then my body’s free, I can do justice to our art. Go on! Go inside. Get what you can and bring me some of the boss’s wine and a bottle of brandy while you’re at it.’
By the time he returned, Forest Mushroom had found a stool and was seated by the covered well shaft. ‘Food’s coming,’ he said as he passed over a flask of wine and laid a brandy bottle on the ground beside him. A sustained trajectory of liquid flowed downwards into the singer’s open gullet. When his turn came, he swigged as long a pull as he could muster.
Once the flask had switched between them several times, Forest Mushroom belched and said, ‘You don’t talk much, young man, unlike your papa, the professor.’
‘He’s not my father.’
‘Ah, you tell me.’ The singer’s attention turned to the brandy bottle, which he opened, sniffed and raised to his lips in an exploratory gulp. ‘You can never be sure it hasn’t been got at. This one, thanks to our host, is alright.’
‘He’s not solely a professor. He’s a composer, a famous one.’
Forest Mushroom laughed. ‘Tell me. Which one has he brought here tonight to hear me and Paco? The one to steal our music or the one to explain our own history to us? You see, I know how things work. For example, in the old days when the masters ordered our prison doors to be opened so that they could parade their holy pictures and relics in front of our eyes, some poor devil sang out, possessed by his misery. And every year after they came to expect the same, as if it were their due and at their decree. Listen, put yourself there! What do you do, lying there in your rags and chains, blinded by the unaccustomed light? Well, I’ll tell you what happens. Some sing in hope of amnesty. Others join in, but believe me the doors soon stay shut again. Your professor and others like to call it tradition, noble folklore. Bloody hell! How they’d love to know the name of that first poor wretch. They’d swear he was the greatest and purest of them all. Now today when I smell and see shit, I know it’s shit. I don’t try and make it something purely Mirandan.’
At that stage, he remembered he had begun to feel queasily light-headed. The wine and a couple of brandies on top of it had proved to be a dangerous alliance. He had tentatively asked, ‘Are you one of “nothing for us”?’
‘No, son, that’s for others to be. I am I. Where is your father? You see, I haven’t forgotten what you said.’
‘Dead. He died in France. Is it true that you only really sing for your own people, your own clan? That this, these dos where you’re paid, is just . . . ?’
‘Just what? A way of passing the time so I can haggle over money with lords or our host tonight and fuck impressionable girls? Who told you this? Ah, of course, I guess the professor. You think of your relatives. I’ll think of mine. You non-gypsies always want to believe we have something hidden, something w
e won’t show you. So you’re quick to devalue what I do give and, believe me, most of the time it is my all.’
Their conversation was interrupted by the advent of an old woman dressed in black, carrying a bowl of chickpea stew and half a round of bread. Forest Mushroom extricated his knife and clumsily hacked off two slices. ‘Eat! Eat!’ he said, not beginning himself until he saw Sonny scoop up a mouthful.
‘I’m going to leave Miranda.’
Forest Mushroom grinned and shook his head. ‘You won’t be able to. Sure you can wake up in Buenos Aires, explore foreign cunt, walk down the Boulevard des Italiens in Paris, get pissed on from above in Santiago do Chile, but none of us can leave, not even me, who didn’t ask to be born here. You’re too young, but you’ll learn, sooner or later, that Miranda is actually our paradise and we are lost and sad without it.’ He tipped up the bowl, wiped it clean with his last morsel of bread, got to his feet and swallowed a draught of wine. ‘Enough. Come inside now. I’m ready to sing. These other things are of little importance.’
It was time for a break. The memories of his own encounter with Forest Mushroom had intruded into the tittle-tattle of the article. Sonny boiled fresh water for a second pot of tea and, while it was infusing, went back upstairs and dressed. Miranda as paradise. Now there was a thought, but what then was Greenlea for an unsuccessful escapee like himself, the inner or outer circles of hell? I am I. Easy to say, yet every day people were paying Chance Company good money to be, at least for a short time, someone else, and he was paid to abet them.
