Now, Janus, my friend, I am going to Spain for a winter month in Andalucía. Andalucía, land of the orange and the olive tree. Land of passionate poets and flamenco dancers and late-night dinners with guitar music in jasmine-scented gardens.
Ed flew to Italy a week ago because, as always, we have some complicated building project in progress. En route to Spain, he has detoured to Bramasole, our house in Cortona, to see about the drilling of a well for a nine-hundred-year-old house we have bought in the mountains. We want to accomplish a historic restoration on this stone house built by hermit monks who followed Saint Francis of Assisi. When I last talked to him, the dowser had felt his stick bend in exactly the spot where I did not want a well and had drilled down a hundred meters without finding a drop. We are planning to meet in Madrid.
From San Francisco, I board a flight to Paris and am happy to see my seatmate take out a book instead of a computer. No white aura and tap-tapping for the ten-hour flight. She looks as if she could have been one of my colleagues at the university. Is she going to Europe to research a fresco cycle or to join an archaeological team at a Roman villa excavation? I take out my own book, ready to escape into silence for the duration. She smiles and asks, “What are you reading?”
“A biography of Federico García Lorca—getting ready for Spain. What are you reading?”
“Oh, a book on John three thirteen.”
“Three thirteen. I don’t know that verse. We used to sing ‘John three sixteen, John three sixteen’ in rounds at Methodist Sunday school.”
The flight attendant comes by with champagne and orange juice. “Just water,” my seatmate and I say in unison. We begin to talk about travel and books, chatting easily, though I am, at first, waiting for a chance to retreat. We know nothing of each other and will part when the scramble to exit at Charles de Gaulle begins.
She asks a lot of questions. I tell her I am a former university teacher, now a full-time writer. I tell her about living part of the year in Italy, and that Italy has given me several books, written with joy. She probes. Are my books published? Are they popular? And if so, do I know why? What do I try to accomplish with my writing? How do I feel about people’s responses to my books? On and on. I tell her that I’m embarking on the first of many travels and that I hope to write a book about my experiences. Why? What will I be looking for? I am drawn into lengthy explanations. I say I’m interested in the idea and fact of home. I’m going to places where I have dreamed of living and will try to settle down in each, read the literature, look at the gardens, shop for what’s in season, try to feel at home. I’m talking more openly than usual with a stranger. Is she a psychiatrist?
“And you’ve never felt God’s hand on yours?” She looks quizzically at me.
“No. I’ve felt lucky, though.”
“Maybe you are bringing happiness to people through the will of God. Maybe.” She smiles.
She answers my own questions evasively. She is holding something back, even in the basic exchanges, such as whether she is on vacation, that simple opening into conversation. Our little equation is out of balance. Finally, I ask bluntly, “What do you do?”
“I . . . I guess you could say I’m a speaker.”
“On what subjects?”
Silence. She is gazing out the window. She is a very still person. “I’m part of a foundation. We try to help in communities with severe problems.”
Vague. She sees my questioning look. She frowns. “We’re involved in education, and orphanages, and churches.”
“Oh, so it’s a religious foundation? What religion are you?” I assume she is a Presbyterian or Methodist, a good volunteer for good works, or is involved in Catholic charities.
“I know this is strange, but I have a strong sense about you. I’ll just tell you my journey.” She then describes the surprise of her conversion, her subsequent adoption of six children from all over the world, her work in Africa and Russia. Her husband, a prominent lawyer, eventually had his own revelation and joins her in her missions. Dinner is served and we talk on.
“You’ve probably never met anyone like me, anyone who hears the voice of God.”
“I think I haven’t. You hear the voice of God?” Oh, mamma mia, I think.
“Yes, he’s talking to me right now, all the time.”
“What does he sound like?” I wonder if she is speaking metaphorically, living out a grand as if.
She laughs. “He’s funny sometimes. Sometimes we dance. He’s telling me about you, but I don’t want you to think I’m a psychic with a neon sign in the window!”
I start to ask sarcastically if he is a good dancer and what kind of dances he leads her in—rhumba? But I don’t. As a doubter with strong spiritual interests, I’m tantalized by her big holy spirit visitations. I imagine it feels like a mewling kitten being lifted in the jaws of an enormous mother cat and taken to safety. I’m ready myself but have never felt the slightest inkling that anything out there in the void is the least bit interested in the hairs on my head or the feathers of small sparrows. “If God is talking about me, I’d like to hear what he says because I’ve never heard from him before tonight.” Where’s the flight attendant? I’d like a big glass of wine. This is getting surreal. I’m thirty-five thousand feet above terra firma with someone who dances with God.
“Well, I will tell you that He says you have the gift of divine humility. How did you get that? It’s so rare.”
“Maybe it’s a lack of confidence!”
“No, I’ve seen it in one priest, someone I consulted when I felt the urge to prophesy.”
Whoa! Prophesy? “Oh, you’re a prophet?” I toss this off casually, as though it were Oh, you’re from Memphis.
She looks out the window. Sighs. “I know how it sounds. It’s so simple.” I see her struggling to explain. “I just wait to speak. I wait for God. Sometimes it’s just sounds.”
“Glossolalia?” She nods. “I’ve seen that. My friends and I used to peer in the windows at the holy roller and snake-handling churches way down in South Georgia.” I don’t say that those people fell to the floor writhing and drooling. That we ran away, scared out of our socks. This woman in her Dana Buchman suit and good haircut seems as sane as the United pilot of this plane.
“Have you ever heard of a Charismatic Prophet? That’s my calling. I knew I was going to sit beside someone on this flight who would change my life. I always wanted to write. Now I hear how you do it and it frees me to try. God put me beside you. Someone, he says, with a holy approach to writing.”
Now I’m really fascinated. Someone who not only hears the voice of God but speaks in the tongues of angels and knows what’s coming toward us. And I like hearing God’s perception that my approach to writing is holy. No one ever has talked to me about the nature of my involvement with words. I’ve heard plenty about the words themselves but not about the vocation I have. Turbulence starts to shake the overhead compartments. A queasy flyer, I begin to wonder if maybe she is an angel sent to accompany me to the afterlife when the plane spirals down into the Atlantic. But soon the seat belt light flicks off, and the long flight across the waters, black, then leaden, then streaked with sterling light, continues.
As we start our descent into the rainy skies of Paris, she says, “I don’t do this. I don’t like to debase my gift, but I will tell you something. You are travelling with three angels. One is ministering, one is protecting, and I don’t know what the other one is for.”
“Oh, no,” I say, instantly pessimistic. “Angel of death.”
She laughs. “God tells me you are too fatalistic. The third angel is something very good.”
Maybe it’s the skipping across time zones or the cabin pressure or the lack of sleep, but I willingly close my eyes and try to sense the presence of three angels. Privately, I’m shaken because when I first went to Italy and bought my house, I had a dream that the house held one hundred angels and that I would discover them one by one. Metaphorically, that came true. Starting my trav
els, I have been given by a stranger three angels to go with me. Without a shred of belief, I can’t deny that I am touched.
I give her a list of books I’ve mentioned and a card with my first name printed on it. I start to write my address but decide that if she wants to reach me, God will direct her.
Madrid. All the connections worked. I find Ed waiting in baggage claim. He looks forlorn—he has arrived with a sinus infection, exacerbated by the changes in pressure while landing. I touch his forehead and find him hot and clammy.
“When I left Bramasole, I was feverish but determined to go. I had to—you’d be waiting. At the ticket counter in Rome, I discovered I’d left my passport at the house. I wanted to climb into a luggage cart and go to sleep. I couldn’t face a two-hour drive up to Cortona and two hours back—besides, Giorgio had dropped me at the curb. I asked about the next flight and it was in three hours. I was totally screwed. Then—I don’t know why—the woman handed me a paper to sign. And she said, ‘You’re going on this flight.’ ”
“You mean. You flew. Out of Italy. Without a passport?” I’m so shocked I can’t utter a whole sentence. This seems impossible, but here he is, his steady eyes smiling at the thought that he slipped freely across international boundaries. We’re waiting for my bag, but the remaining ones looping around the claim belt are fewer and fewer.
“Scary, isn’t it?”
“After September 11 they let a man on a plane with no papers.”
“Maybe it was because I was wearing an Italian suit. Another guy, badly dressed, was trying to get on, and they didn’t let him.”
My bag has definitely stayed behind in San Francisco or Paris. And I can’t find the envelope with the claim check tacked on. Where’s my damn ministering angel? I have been travelling twenty hours. We queue with a dozen others. Because I changed carriers in Paris, the pouty-mouthed Air France clerk assures me they have no responsibility for my lost bag, especially since I have no proof that I even checked a bag. A big Spanish man with a Zapata mustache takes my side, and two Australian boys start chanting “Air Chance, Air Chance.” Finally, Miss Cool decides she’ll take my hotel number and send out a tracer. As our taxi spins out of the airport on two wheels, Ed says, “Not for nothing is that etymological connection between travel and travail.” The rain looks sooty falling on lead-gray buildings. Suddenly the driver swings around a circle with an enormous fountain; then we’re on a tree-lined street along an esplanade lined with one grand building after another. Ah, Madrid. The hotel lights, blurry in the rain, look festive and welcoming. In our room we find a chilled cava, Spanish sparkling wine, sent by Lina, a thoughtful Italian friend.
Ed falls into bed after stoking himself with various antihistamines. I pop open the cava, pour a glass, empty both little bottles of bubble bath into the tub, and immerse myself. Since dinner is late in Spain, we planned to drift out at ten-thirty, but we’re exhausted and instead decide to order room service. Ed feels dizzy. At eleven, the miracle of my suitcase occurs—there it is, wet, dirty, but delivered. I want comfort food. My first meal in Spain: spaghetti with Bolognese sauce. I sink into the down pillows and begin reading Winter in Majorca:
The wind howled down the ravine, the rain lashed our windows, the thunderclaps sounded through our thick walls and interjected a lugubrious note into the children’s laughter and games. The eagles and hawks, emboldened by the mist, came down and snatched away our poor sparrows from the pomegranate tree right in front of my very window. The stormy sea kept the boats in the harbor; we felt like prisoners, far away from all intelligent help and any kind of proper friendliness.
George Sand’s memoir of a horrid season spent with Frédéric Chopin in Majorca makes me long for California, where the hills are greening with the winter rains and already the daffodils are blowing their yellow trumpets in the new grass. Count this as an inauspicious arrival, Janus. In Scarlet’s immortal words, tomorrow is another day.
But as I turn off the light, I invite Madrid to come into my dreams.
Madrid on a bracing January Thursday. Wind cleared the air. I’m out early, stopping for churros, those sweet fritters—a short rope of dough fastened into a circle—just made to dip into hot chocolate on a winter morning. Ed would love them if he weren’t in bed with his sinus tightening like a vise, his throat flaming. I circle the Neptune fountain, then head for the Plaza Mayor. A side street looks more intriguing than the big-city business street I’m on, so I turn and soon am rambling among small cafés, bodegas, and food shops. Seven degrees (42° Fahrenheit). The sky looks colder than it feels. Or maybe the neighborhood just seems warmer. In the window of the Santeria La Milagrosa I see a black magic altar, little bags of dust, snake skins, geodes, and belts. Wonderful! A ju-ju shop. I go in, breathing in strange aromas of wax, powders, roots. There are tarots, conch shells, coin conjures, little fetish dolls, and special pins for pricking them. I buy soaps that protect one against the evil eye and a wish-fulfillment candle to light for Ed to get well. One of the wish candles is a big pink penis, another a dollar sign. I find everything I need to attract what I want, repel what I don’t, cure what ails me, and destroy gossip, too.
I stop at a café on the splendid Plaza Mayor for a fried pastry, the famous buñuelos de viento, puffs of wind, and buy El País, a Madrid newspaper, an excellent prop for feeling like a native. With a long-ago summer of study in San Miguel de Allende coming to my aid, I make out that Camilo José Cela, eighty-five, died yesterday. Preparing for this trip I read Journey to Alcarria and years ago the novels The Family of Pascual Duarte, The Hive, and some stories. The paper lists poetry, drama, many other novels. He was a totally literary animal who dipped into every genre. A man of contradictions, he began as a young Franco soldier; later he became vehemently antifascist. Blunt, prolific, curious, a high-living bon vivant, he turned Spanish writing away from lyric roots toward a dark and brutal realism. His own life was tumultuous. He abandoned his wife of thirty years and took off with a young woman. He was alienated from his only son. Even as he died, he was involved in a lawsuit, the nature of which I can’t make out. Odd to think he was dying as we landed. His last words—what consciousness at the end—were to his wife of many years, “Marina, I love you.” And then, more astonishingly, he said, “Viva Iria Flavia,” which is the small town in Galicia where he was born, the town where an Englishman had arrived in 1880 to build a railroad and whose destiny was to become the grandfather of this writer, Don Camilo José Mañuel Juan Ramon Francisco de Jerónimo Cela-Trulock. How jarring, that last tacked-on Anglo-Saxon Trulock.
So his last thought turned back to the place of origin, the region where he was shaped. As one formed by black swamp water and red clay and baked in the Georgia sun, I too feel the metabolic correspondence with a taproot. I’ve never said his name aloud but do now. Tha lah, the Ce- undergoing an unlikely transformation.
Ed is up when I return before lunch. He has lurched to the window and looks down at the street with longing. “The Prado,” he whispers. “We’re in Madrid. I want to go to the Prado.” Soon I hear the shower and the buzz of his electric razor. In the black suit that earned him passage senza passaporta, he emerges a new man. Downstairs under the stained-glass dome of the lobby, among the poshly dressed Madrilenians, we have a quick bite. The hard January light through the yellow glass softens and pours in like vino blanco, fluid and translucent. In the late morning sun, the wooden supports and buttresses behind the dome are visible through the panels, flowers, and leaves. I wish I hadn’t noticed because I’m distracted by the structure. Ed, instead, is staring at his tortilla de verdura with garlic sauce. He pushes it toward me, and because I have walked all morning and am starving, I eat his and mine while he sips tepid water.
“Are you sure you want to go out?”
“It’s just across the street. Let’s vamos.”
Poor Velázquez. So many portraits of the royals. Those were some plug-ugly people. Wouldn’t Velázquez rather have painted crocuses instead of staring into rheumy
Hapsburg eyes? Imagine him searching for a shade of puce to plump up lumpy Bourbon faces. I’m sure he did his best to flatter them. I think again of Camilo José Cela, dead yesterday. His serious realistic style was known as tremendismo, and in all the literary criticism I’ve read, his tremendismo is posited as a counter to Spanish lyricism. A friend in Cortona, when his son is just too much, says, “Andrea is tremendo.” Intense, persistent, overwrought, headstrong.
Cela’s The Hive indicts Franco’s fascist rule by depicting characters driven into poverty. Who has more zeal than the convert? Looking at these tortured painters, I think Cela must have taken his instructions from them, the exaggerated realism of El Greco, the dark lonely stares of the Goya portraits, all this black and gray paint. These are Cela characters, a few generations removed. His travel narrative, Journey to Alcarria, shows a different strain in his aesthetic. He moves closer to the Don Quixote tradition. His amiable wanderer through the countryside encounters others, picks up and leaves off, unhurriedly observing and moving on. This wanderer exhibits the spirit shown in the quote Cela said he wanted as his epitaph: Here lies someone who tried to screw his fellow man as little as possible. The abandoned wife might disagree.
The Prado has nearly nine thousand paintings, though they display only a fraction. La Maja of Goya, the reclining, languorous nude, looks so much like my college roommate that we buy a card to send to her. We find an Annunciation by our friend Fra Angelico, who lived in Cortona for thirteen years, amid a glorious cache of Italian works by Titian, Botticelli, Raphael, Messina, Mantegna. Then we come upon Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights and so many other world treasures, long familiar but never seen. The Prado’s still lifes dazzle. I would like to touch the chocolate-brown background against which Zurbarán painted his four incandescent vessels in shades of ochre and gray. For years I had a poster hanging in my Palo Alto kitchen of his still life of citrus fruits, against the same rich brown, with the lemon trees outside my window echoing the light those fruits can gather into themselves.
A Year in the World Page 2
