by John Elliott
As if on cue, Guillermina ordered the two girls to bring in the supper. Jacinta went with them. Rafael, ignoring the guests, discussed loudly how much diesel he needed to buy with Batiste, as though the night was like any other. Lupe brought him a cartwheel of bread, which he clasped to his chest and sawed into chunks with his knife. Gloria sat upright and rigid, staring in front of her, gathering every particle of resolve for the battle she sensed ahead.
Jacinta and Milagra returned with a tureen of chickpeas, a pile of plates, a bundle of assorted forks and a goatskin of wine for the men. Batiste asked for a glass for Thérèse. When it was fetched, he poured her some wine. He spoke with the accent of a native Llomeran. Fernando saw he handled the goatskin with ease, tilting it up and squeezing a thin stream of red wine into his upturned mouth, as if he had drunk from it every day with Rafael out in the fields.
He was smaller than Fernando had expected. The famous blond hair seemed darker than in other people’s descriptions, but that could be down to the shadows from the oil lamp. His eyes were greyish-green, like his mother’s. The cast of his jaw and the length of his face, though, were his father’s through and through. There was something boyish in his gestures as he ate, the way he glanced sideways at his parents for approval that he was eating all of his food without spilling any.
‘I’m Fernando Simon.’ At last, Fernando felt emboldened to speak.
All the other voices stilled. Milagra giggled and set Lupe off. Batiste gazed at him alone. ‘I know who you are. I am your father, and, as you say, you are your mother’s son. No one understands that better than I.’
Gloria shoved her plate aside, unable to contain herself any longer. She was on the verge of getting up and attacking Batiste physically. ‘You think you can come back after thirteen years, home to roost and have the fatted calf served up to you. But this child isn’t the fatted calf.’ She chewed on each word and spat them out in gobbets, as though she was priming hand grenades and lobbing them across the table. ‘Don’t worry. Don’t be frightened, darling,’ she whispered to Fernando. ‘I’m here to protect you.’
Batiste translated what she had said for Thérèse’s benefit. Gloria continued glowering at him, daring him to mention Antonetta or Iusebio, her late husband.
‘Have you had enough to eat?’ Batiste asked Fernando, then, looking straight at Gloria, went on, ‘Your aunt is an admirable woman. You can stay with her if that is what you want. I’ll give you some money before I go.’
‘For God’s sake, say what you’ve got to say,’ Gloria re-erupted. ‘We came here. We gave you that. Now get it over. The sooner we can leave.’
Rafael began to curse. Batiste said, ‘Don’t upset yourself, father. Gloria has right on her side. The thing is, Fernando, if you prefer, you can come with me to France. We’ll be gone tomorrow, early. There’s some danger in it. I won’t pretend there’s not.’
‘Your mad scheme will get the boy killed,’ Gloria shrieked. ‘Do you dare to say you love him more than I do? Everything he knows and holds dear is here.’
Thérèse shifted uncomfortably in her seat. She said something in French to Batiste. He shook his head. ‘They won’t hurt the boy, even if the worst happened. He’ll travel as Thérèse’s son. We’ve got the documents and a photo of a boy taken some years ago. I’ve got French papers and they’ve little reason to stop tourists.’
Gloria still looked aghast. ‘He’ll be taken to a reformatory. Is that what you want? If you love him at all as a father.’ She broke off.
‘Man, she’s right,’ Jacinta said, looking beseechingly at her brother. ‘Let him be for Tonetta’s sake.’
Batiste shrugged.
‘I’ll go,’ Fernando’s voice was clear and confident. Amid the vituperation and hubbub that greeted his declaration, he felt himself transported to a still, open space. He understood what his words meant. He understood that he was in the process of abandoning his home, abandoning all he knew and was familiar with, and that he was dealing his aunt’s love for him a blow from which it might never recover.
‘Batiste,’ she said quietly, ‘Batistet, I know Tonetta loved you and in your way you loved her. Enough people have died for your cause. Don’t you think by now any human life is worth a hundred times more than some futile dream that has slipped away, never mind your own son’s? I am asking you, on behalf of Iusebio and the others who won’t return, leave Fernando here.’
‘There’ll be strikes and demonstrations, you’ll see. When the time is right the workers and peasants will resist, but that’s not why I have come. Fernando, you’ve heard your aunt. I have nothing but respect for her and the memory of her husband. What do you want to do?’
‘Go with you.’
The die was irredeemably cast in spite of Gloria’s repeated entreaties. It would have been so easy to retract those three simple words, but the moment had passed. The chance had evaporated. The future now lay otherwise. In the years ahead, when questioned about his decision, Fernando either stated baldly, ‘I said, I’ll go’ or occasionally, when afflicted by a twinge of doubt or regret, ‘alas, I said, I’ll go.’
Agnes dropped the pages onto the carpet and closed her eyes. Llomera, Orias, Miranda. She resolved to buy a map to pinpoint their location, as well as one of Greenlea and its regions. She needed to find her own bearings.
*
Take your time.
Rest there, high up at the curve of the wall, and look at the night sky. Above you, the clouds are slow drifting. They reveal, pocket by pocket, stars which have gone from light to extinction and birth to light.
A swathe of the valley below appears under the moon’s faltering guidance. Its olive trees, unlike you, have aged unaffected by the virulent mishmash of history. Beyond them, the invisible mountain slopes, locked in their imperceptible geological shift, lead by their defiles and goat tracks to the cave where you, Vincenz and Tian sheltered in the oft repeated tale, the tale your son here begged for, over and over, until his childish sleep unpicked Rosario’s words, like Penelope’s stitches, in anticipation of the following night, when she retold them once again.
‘Really, I don’t remember it.’
Not your voice, but Sebastian’s, snipping through the threads of what you must have told your wife in your bygone days of intimacy.
‘Sure we roamed about as kids do. But we never went as far as the caves. As you know, they were a good half-day’s journey from Llomera, and we didn’t have transport. Anyway, the truth was Manolo was always timid and hanging back as a boy. He had to be coaxed along.’
A renewed flurry of snow stuck, then melted, on the outside of the tram window. Sonny returned from placing his father in a mythical Llomera to the reality of a winter’s evening in Greenlea. Why had he resurrected Tian’s jibe? What could it matter now? He raised his eyes as people began to file on board. Around those still waiting, the pavement glistened in reflected green and red neon splotches. A woman sat beside him. He leant over to give her room. After a perfunctory glance, she took out a newish-looking paperback from the small knapsack on her lap, opened it at the protruding bookmark and began to read.
There will always be another version, he thought, even if I wished it were mine alone. Copying his neighbour’s example, he slipped away from the here and now and returned to the imagined figure of his dead father whom he had deserted a moment ago.
Look down there on your left.
The approaching headlights of a car lit up the stretch of road that runs past the Cheto farm. It’s the road perhaps Batiste whispered about when he knelt beside you on the grassy escarpment over the border. The road whose every dip and bend and straight you once knew well, and, as he told about his tryst with his unnamed girl, you recognised the patch he meant at the twin pines and the slope between the rocks where the ground was sandy and dry. Words he whispered to you. Unknown words he whispered to his new-found love along this very road. Were they, ‘Wait for me, I will return?’ So different from the words you must have whispered in Rosari
o’s ear here in the village; ‘Go to Tian if the worst comes to the worst, he has always loved you.’ How did you rationalise it? Was it because, in the event of calamity, defeat and death, he was better placed to weather the storm? Was it because he had shown already, in his student days, how adeptly he could play the bohemian nihilist at night, whilst after lunch faking the romance of Mirandan soulfulness amid the Romeo y Julieta haze of those who appreciated a good cigar, but knew that foreign imports were only suited to the discerning few? Why did she not protest? Why did she not tell you your idea was monstrous, or was there some part of her, tired of your life together, which was eager to join her real lover under the camouflage of your approval? Confidences shared in other places. Batiste and you. Later, he would pick up your scraps of home, your family gleanings, and keep them for years before finally handing them over, each of you in turn a custodian of the other’s desires.
Bats swoop around your head and sheer away over the new Llomera spreading out beyond the old outskirts.
Listen, hesitant footsteps come your way. A slight, bowed figure rounds the bend. He pauses to catch his breath and, like you, gazes outwards over the wall into the night. A pungent whiff of antiseptic and ether assails your nostrils as he draws close. His wounds, however, are quite healed up. His face and limbs have been righted. His mind put at rest.
‘Nolo.’
‘Iusebio.’
‘What’s happening?’
‘Things, as ever.’
You walk together, as best you can, down the incline and through the archway into St Roch and then St Bartholomew. Some of the houses look familiar, almost as if they contained some connection with yourselves. Their doors and shutters are closed. Their inhabitants presumably asleep. A skinny black and white tomcat sprays before increasing its lope to flee your presence. Linger a moment. Iusebio turns and waits. Two old friends reunited on a night stroll. Two ghosts forced by one who persists into the prison of existence.
Paam! Ptock, Ptock. Paaam!
Round the corner, My Son is banging desultorily at a water pipe. His grey nightwatchman’s cap with its dirty-yellow band is tilted back on his grey, close-cropped hair. A quarter of a loaf of bread, a cold omelette and four anchovies in a tin lie on a bit of paper at his side. He drops his spanner and spits out the remnants of red wine he was swilling in his cheeks.
‘What?’
‘We’re on our way down.’
‘Eat!’
‘We have.’ Iusebio is eager to be off.
‘Wait a minute. You’ve time to spare. There’s no one else around and the night goes slowly. What do say, my sons?’
You say, ‘Why bother with this? Surely, there’s no need any more?’
My Son winks and picks up his spanner. Paam! Ptock. Ptock. ‘The old ways are the best, my son. It gives me something to do.’
The woman beside Sonny sighed, moved her bookmark forward, closed the book, returned it to her knapsack and got up. Her retreating figure balanced expertly with the lurches of the tram as it swayed round the corner then accelerated again. When it slowed at the next stop and she descended, he thought incongruously, for they were in no way alike, of his final glimpses of the woman he had spoken to at the office last evening before the lift door shut. He had felt then she might be the last person he would talk with in his whole life. ‘Hallie Briggs,’ he muttered to himself, Hallie Briggs who had only been aware of his existence by the state of his desk.
‘Where are you on the Wende affair?’ The man behind him cleared his throat and spoke for the first time.
‘It’s the same old rigmarole,’ another deeper male voice replied. ‘People are fed up with it. We should send them back to Benin, or whatever it’s called nowadays. Why should we get involved? Their politics are antediluvian and all TV does is show the same old footage over and over.’
Sonny blocked out the continued drone of their conversation. The clamour surrounding the detention of the fleeing warlord and his brother would no doubt subside and be forgotten. Wende’s name would disappear from the city’s graffiti lexicon. Greenlea, always on the verge of catching up with the cusp of fashion, was ceaselessly intent on reinventing its and others lapsed traditions while guilelessly effacing what only last year were its burning concerns. No sooner had the amusing bamboo wallpapers and lei-strewn dark pools of chic bars and night haunts gained the cultural ascendancy than they were judged quite Tikied-out, and those in the know moved on to faux-austere canteens designed for multi-tasking stakhanovites. Businessmen pinned ironic Soviet badges to the lapels of their safari suits. Ersatz Komolskaya Pravda posters, festooned with beaming youngsters in white shirts and red neckerchiefs, rejuvenated ailing brands of washing powder with new cleaning power. The ‘in word’ was ‘uncomfortable’. ‘Secluded’ and ‘busy’ were out. Choice was paramount everywhere, and, like Chance Company ‘identities’, everything was for sale that possibly could be for sale.
The snow was falling more heavily when the tram reached his stop. Sonny, with already tingling fingers, dragged his black leather cap out of his overcoat pocket and pulled it down hard over his head. In spite of the filthy weather, he remained set on going where he had been invited to go, seeing whatever it was that Jacob Kemmer had provided, being ineluctably present with the things of the world and walking along the necessary streets to get there.
They were different from Llomeran streets. There was no nightwatchman round this corner hitting an exposed water pipe and singing, ‘I don’t know how to understand the hearts of women’; the beginning of the second chorus of the ballad Albert had sung the previous evening. No familiar ghosts hove into sight when he glanced up and checked the name.
He was in Kefoin Street. A long street on the city map which he had never entered before. Lavell Place, the site of the Melo Gallery, lay off it. On either side, three-storey buildings converted into offices with steep steps down to basements stretched in front of him. Their ground-floor lighted windows revealed an assortment of empty, cramped workspaces, tables laden with computer screens and faded posters of Goan beaches and the Manhattan skyline by night affixed to the walls above rows of grey filing cabinets. Arrays of door plaques indicated a preponderance of solicitors, travel bureaux and insurance brokers interspersed with the occasional administrator of oaths, osteopath, dentist or chiropodist. Darkened windows were veiled in Venetian blinds or, in one case, by drawn curtains. Sonny let his gaze transfer freely amongst them, but in none of them was there a figure looking back nor a cleaner going unconcernedly about their task.
The snow was beginning to settle. It clung to the soles of his shoes as he walked. The offices now gave way to a parade of shops: a dry cleaner’s, a kosher butcher, a newsagent and a bicycle retailer. At the next corner, high up on a red-brick wall, a yellow neon arrow pointed to the right. Underneath it was the illuminated legend: Berengaria Hotel. So this was where it was, he thought. No doubt, Harvard would be already there, busily involved in meeting and greeting, puffing and pushing Chance Company products, yet unaware of Elizabeth Kerry’s message, which should have come his way.
Sonny crossed the intersection. Traffic was intermittent and he seemed the only pedestrian foolish enough to be abroad. The Rainbow Bar, Izzy’s Salt Beef, Autumn Moon Rendezvous, Casimir’s Kebabs, Keos Taverna, as he passed, all of them bore the forlorn air of enduring a long, unremitting evening of scant customers and too many counted moments.
The yellow sofa in their tiny seventh-floor flat on Rue Gasparin had been a kind of Dijon mustard yellow. The Berengaria Hotel arrow must have acted as a midwife, releasing its memory back to him. Mado lay on it with her feet tucked up beneath her haunches, while he paced the room, stopping from time to time to gaze out of the window at the early spring evening below.
‘Ah putain! Que sont tristes ces Mirandiens hors de leurs pays!’
A sofa, he thought, I can see a sofa, yet still I cannot reconstitute her face to my satisfaction. How he had clung to her independent being during those first months of e
xile! He had striven again and again to absorb her body into his. At times, he had penetrated her with an anger and fury he could not control; an anger and fury which later he had attempted clumsily to soften with tender endearments.
This street seemed to go on forever. He suddenly wanted to get off it and have a drink. Should he turn back to the Rainbow Bar or continue? He decided to carry on, but the block did not look promising. Apartment buildings now were shabbier than those before. They were no longer fronted by shops or restaurants. He was resigned in going straight to the gallery, as he had originally planned, when his eye caught a sign on the other side of the road saying DEMEL in black letters on a battleship-grey fascia. He crossed over to investigate. The front of the establishment gave no clue as to whether it was a bar, a restaurant or something else entirely. The window to the left of the doorway was curtained, betraying nothing of its interior. The one to the right was blind and covered in stone. He pulled the door open to get a better idea of the activity within. Three threadbare-carpeted steps at the end of the short hallway took him into an open room to his left, where he unexpectedly found himself back in Yokohama.
A small oak bar curved round the far corner. A hefty brunette in her late forties or early fifties stood behind it, the back of her head reflected in a tilted oblong mirror fringed with fairy lights. The glass display shelves held nothing but bottles of Scotch whisky. Sonny pointed to one at bar level and perched himself on a high stool. The woman set a small drinks mat in front of him and picked up the bottle.
‘Single or double?’
‘Double.’
