Summer Doorways

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Summer Doorways Page 20

by W. S. Merwin


  Everyone was breathing hard, and there was a barny smell in the room. My friends who had brought me introduced me to another young man whose house it was, and that created a small, awkward hush around us as the others crowded closer to look at this stranger from somewhere that was only a name to them. I gave our host the bottle of wine, and he accepted it with a small formula of thanks, which I understood only in part, and then he offered me in turn a cupful of a sweet fortified wine—a variety of port. There seemed to be only a few cups, which were filled from a jug and passed around, and then someone stamped hard on the floor, a dance beat, and the instruments picked it up and the dance was off again.

  Some of my companions joined in picking girls for partners, and in the next pause they began urging me to do the same. I protested that I did not know how, and they insisted that I should dance anyway. It was plain that they did not believe I did not know how to dance their dances. It was like saying that I did not know how to walk. All I had to do, they insisted, was to keep time. The beat began. One of the girls, a pretty one, was looking at me, and one of my companions gave me a little shove in her direction. I looked at her, questioning, and she nodded and we joined hands and I tried to keep time with the music, around and around the room, and managed to, more or less. The next dance was better. The step began to seem inevitable—an illusion caused simply by keeping in time with the music. As the dance after that one was announced with a stamp on the floor, my companion who had urged me to dance with my first partner tapped me on the shoulder and, with one of his friends, drew me outside the front door. There, with a remarkable awkward grace that I recognized despite the darkness and my poor grasp of the language, they explained to me that the young woman with whom I had been dancing was the noiva (the fiancée) of one of the men there, and that it was fine, and indeed an honor, for me to dance with her once. Twice was permissible. But more than that would not be right and might make for trouble. I apologized, but they said no, it was all right as it was, and we went back in and I was happy to stand watching for the rest of the time we were there.

  The cups passed around between dances, and a few of the young men seemed to be showing the effects of it, but mostly it was the dancing itself that kindled the growing excitement in the room, which was in full fire when the young men I had come with suggested that perhaps it was time for us to start back. I thanked our host and we set out into the silence of the mountain path. After a bend or two we could hear the stream below us, then that sound was gone and we heard only our own footsteps. We had gone some distance when one of the men stopped suddenly, held up his hand for us to stop, put it over his mouth to signal to me to be quiet. I heard nothing, and then what sounded like quick breathing not far behind us. We stood listening. “Wolves,” the first man whispered. He reached down to pick up a stone, and signaled for us to walk on. As we went he told me in whispers that it was common for them to have wolves follow them when they were up there on the trails at night. They would not bother us. They were harmless. They were simply curious. If they got too close all he had to do was toss a stone back in their direction, and they would be gone. We kept on walking. He walked behind the rest of us. At one point he flipped the stone back over his shoulder, paused a moment, and then paid no further attention.

  The dances were always on Friday nights, and not every week. They would come by the quinta door in the afternoon and ask whether I would like to go with them, and we would start in the glow after sundown to walk for an hour or two across the mountains to another huddled flock of dark roofs, and the music and dancing, and once or twice more he put up his hand and said there were wolves behind us. I have never known whether it was a game they meant to play on the foreigner, or whether there really were wolves following us on those trails at night.

  34

  On the far side of the Ceira a cart track followed the rising bank upstream and wound on into the woods. Footpaths led off it. The only way to find out where they led was to follow them, and Dorothy and I did that, or sometimes I went alone, all the way to some remote building, perhaps a goatherd’s hut, or to where the track vanished in a stand of forest. We followed the cart road across the river farther and farther, one day starting earlier than usual. We came to a long rise, as though we were climbing out of the upper end of the valley. There were woods above us, a grove of mimosas. At a bend of the track there was a house standing by itself. It was not a peasant dwelling but a two-story structure, with chimneys at both ends, and long windows. When we got up to it we could see that it was set back from the road, on the edge of the rise, with a view far down the valley behind us, which we had begun to know, and over the ridge in the opposite direction into another valley that was full of shadow. The house looked bare but not neglected. Someone must have been taking care of it regularly. And as we stood in front of it we saw at the same time the way we had come, full of the long, late afternoon light, and the other valley and its shadow, reflected in the windows. I supposed that it must be the summer house of some family in Coimbra, or even farther away, who perhaps had just left it to go back to town after the season. I asked Maria Antonia who it belonged to, but she told me she did not know.

  Summer lasted late along the small valley. It was summer light that lingered in honeyed beams through the afternoons, over the small fields, and lit up the cart track across the river, the bronze hides of the oxen, the mud-caked cart wheels turning slowly and wailing, the wisps of mauve smoke climbing. But the nights were growing colder in the shadowed courtyard, and the house was cold in the mornings. The water in the hens’ drinking basin had ice on it at daybreak. Quitas left a fire laid in the bathroom woodstove, and I lit it first thing, before she came up the stairs with breakfast. By late morning the summer seemed to be back again, the season in which we had come, yet in my room over the courtyard the sun never shone, and I worked with one of the shaggy blankets over my legs.

  When Maria Antonia told us, before Christmas, that the Comte de Feijo had offered her his villa in Estoril, on the estuary west of Lisbon, and that she was planning to move there for the rest of the winter, it came as a blow to me. I had come to love the quinta. I was captivated by my glimpses of the life around it. Dorothy seemed to have settled happily into the quiet days there.

  I asked Maria Antonia whether we would come back later, and she could not say, and I was not sure whether she wanted to. She liked it, she said, but it was not really practical, for long. That sounded like something I had been unhappy to hear in my childhood.

  So we would move out of the farmhouse to Estoril, and a villa next door to the one belonging to the exiled King of Spain, and there Anthony would meet Juanito, who would one day be the King, and we would all play kick the can in the walled garden, and Dorothy and I would sit in the same small movie house with King Mark of Rumania and Umberto of Italy, both of whom lived nearby. We would have an apartment above the carriage house and stable, and I would go riding with the Comte’s head groom, up over the mountain to Sintra and its palace on the other side. We would explore Lisbon, and travel across Spain on milk trains, and I would visit Robert Graves on Mallorca, who would turn out to need a tutor for his son and would offer me the job.

  And indeed I would not go back to the Quinta Maria Mendes ever again, or learn more about it, or see the schoolmaster or the cabinetmaker or Quitas or the blind singer or any of the faces there. I would not go back to St. Jean Cap-Ferrat, either, and would not see Josephine or the Frataccis. I would not see Alan again. Effie Halsey told me on the telephone that Alan had died, around the time of our move to Estoril, when he was on the ship coming back from Europe. He fell down a companionway and struck his head. I would not see Alain Prévost either. After we lost touch, that last winter at Princeton, I tried to find an address for him in France, imagining that he must be somewhere around Paris, but by the time I managed to trace him, through Ralph Woodward, a former roommate of his, Alain had died several years earlier, suddenly, of a heart attack, on his farm in Normandy, when he was forty-
one years old. He had written six novels by then, one of them based on a summer at Princeton. I never saw his sister, Françoise, again either. By the time I learned what had happened to Alain, she too was dead.

  But when we left the quinta I had seen something that I was to come to in various forms before I was old enough to be able to look back and recognize it. The move away from the valley of the Ceira would lead through years in which, again and again, I would have the luck to discover, to glimpse, to touch for a moment, some ancient, measureless way of living, of being in the world, some fabric long taken for granted, never finished yet complete, at once fixed as though it would never change, and evanescent as a work of art, an entire age just before it was gone, like a summer.

 

 

 


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