Her room, as beautiful as any bedroom in her own house, but cleaner and more orderly, faced the Serra de Tramuntana mountains. She fell asleep around the time that Laura and James were meeting at the Bowery Hotel bar that second night. When she awakened the following dawn, she opened the windows and looked for a good long while at the terraced landscape, bathed in salmon and violet hues, while smelling the air and giving thanks to whomever might be responsible for such a plethora of riches. After a bath and breakfast, she checked out and left her suitcase with reception. She walked to the local florestería and then continued on to the cemetery next to the church up on a hill where Robert and Beryl Graves and her daughter were buried.
The day was clear and ideal. The trek up to the church was arduous and she was soon too warm for the cardigan she wore. She rested on a stone bench in the shade and looked north. The village and the whole island had that off-season, cleaned-out, after-a-storm feeling that she cherished. It was the island as she had known it in her youth and much as she had imagined it when reading the scroll excerpt Laura had printed out for her.
She visited the tombstones of Graves and his wife first. Beryl’s was covered with dead leaves and the poet’s had a sad-looking bouquet of plastic roses resting on it that she tossed into the nearest trash receptacle. Then she distributed some of the flowers she brought with her and said a little prayer. Though she had stayed in touch with Graves in his waning years and visited them whenever she could, he had barely recognized her during his last decade. That, she thought, was something she must never allow herself to live through, or to put anyone caring for her through.
Then she made her way to Inmaculada’s tomb. Her husband’s family had pushed hard to have father and daughter buried together in their family plot near Barcelona. But she had not allowed it. She wanted her daughter there where she herself would be buried. Camilla’s mother and all their line were in cemeteries in Cornwall, and her father was in the Trevelyan pantheon in Ireland. This was her spot, a place for her and her little girl, protected from the Tramuntana winds by the green mountains, looking toward the Mediterranean, near palm trees, vineyards, and shaded earthen paths between stone houses she knew so well.
As she cleared the dust and bits of dried plants off the tombstone, and then laid new flowers about its perimeter, she recalled how she had looked at herself in the bath that morning. The air and the light entering through the window had been as radiant as always. The hotel towels folded nearby were thick and newly laundered. The soap had been organically made and unwrapped only minutes before. But the body in the water, this current version of herself, was old and grey. She remembered getting her first period and her mother being uncharacteristically gentle, and later that day realizing that Graves had been informed as well when he presented her with a crown made from honeysuckle vines. She remembered how exciting it had been to be naked in a shower or tub in her twenties, and how sexy and arousing her romantic life had occasionally been throughout her thirties, forties and fifties. But once the narcissistic disappointments began, they had continued unabated.
She did not miss sex. She did not miss her husband. She had enjoyed the play of flirtation when she was young and she had gone on about it with friends at school and at university as much as anyone, but trying to be honest with herself there at her daughter’s grave, she had to admit that she had not known a lot of passion nor the degree of sexual hunger that often went with it. Some of her friends had. Even her mother had. Perhaps it skipped a generation, for Inmaculada would have had it – for better or worse. It had been there already in the way the little girl had seduced her father into taking her on that damned little airplane. The closest thing to passion Camilla had ever felt was what she had felt for her daughter, who did not live long enough to get her period. When they fished her from the Mediterranean she had been as white as snow. She’d had no visible wounds nor broken bones. It was as if she had merely fallen asleep.
And James, she wondered, walking back down toward the village; was James a passionate boy – or man? To her he was always a boy. In the beginning with Carmensina the sparks had flown, but maybe most of the heat had come from her. She really did not know. Now he seemed anxious and elusive and saddled with the marriage – damned if he did and damned if he didn’t – all for the sake of his little girls, something no one could understand better than she. When Anna and Montse first came into the world Camilla had toyed for a while with a belief in reincarnation, hoping one or the other might prove to be Inmaculada come back for another try at life. But as they grew and began to reflect Carmensina’s vanities and her son’s equanimity, she had let that notion go.
The walk from the church to her house took almost an hour and by the time she reached it the excitement she felt at arriving was somewhat diluted by pangs of hunger and sharp pains in her right hip – an age-related lesion she had been ignoring for years. A good number of her contemporaries had had replacement surgeries performed as a matter of course, but she remained staunchly opposed to it. The keys were in their customary spot and though the house had been cleaned a week earlier, it had a cosy but slightly sorry feel to it. One really had to live in a place, she thought, and this was where she should be. Everything within her attested to it, and as she opened various pairs of shutters and windows filling the house with light and fresh air tinged with sea and blossoms – lemon trees, avocado trees, grapevines, boxwood, geraniums – the estate in Cornwall felt lugubrious to her in comparison. She said another prayer, there and then, begging – and the irony was not lost upon her – that Laura’s work might bring forth the sort of sum required so that she might come to James’s aide, while continuing to maintain the estate in a dignified fashion, and to still have this house, her sanctuary, for herself.
Neither the pain in her hip nor this stream of agitated thoughts dampened the pleasure she derived from opening the house. The only good thing about not living there permanently was the now decades-old thrill of returning to it like this, and especially at this time of the year. The closed-up smells did a slow, familiar and intoxicating dance – the old well-waxed floor tiles in the zaguán, the wicker patio furniture piled up in the ground floor guest bedroom that was never used anymore, her collection of summer hats hanging on pegs near the beautiful medieval wooden chest, the barqueño Graves had given her as a wedding gift. The bookshelves in the living room and the study lined with hundreds of fading Penguin editions arranged in no particular order, mixed with airport novels left behind by years of visitors. Two signed prints by Miró and some good family paintings. The coffee and tea canisters in the kitchen pantry, the packs of sugar and rice and flour and pasta, the liquor closet, the maid’s bathroom, the laundry room with its detergents and containers of bleach, the wooden basket filled with half-used, years old, suntan lotions.
She went outside and walked down to the swimming pool, pleased to see it had been properly emptied and covered. The state of the gardens and of the trees and shrubbery in general dismayed her, but this too formed part of the ritual. She went up to her bedroom to use the toilet and remembered she had still to collect her suitcase from the hotel and if she was going to stay for a few days she might as well go and do a bit of food shopping too. There were friends she could call for a touch of social life and she would have to phone the maid to make sure she would come the following day, but none of this appealed to her then. Wearier than she would like to be, she stepped out onto her bedroom terrace to survey her domain once again before going back inside for a nap. Naps had never really been her custom there as they were in Cornwall, and she hoped as she drifted off, that she was not coming down with something.
She awakened half an hour later, hungry and stiff and existentially challenged – mildly depressed – and then got angry with herself for feeling that way in a place she loved so much and which she had made such an effort to get to. As James and Laura were making love for the first time in New York she brushed her teeth with an old toothbrush, squeezing the last remnants from a twiste
d tube of dried toothpaste and then went down to the garage. Her old beige diesel-powered Santana started up on the first try, and she was feeling better already being back in her favourite vehicle that smelled of oil and summer sand and cracked leather.
Backing out onto the street without looking behind her with any degree of thoroughness, she was hit by a speeding Mercedes SUV driven by a thick-set, air charter executive from Dresden talking on his mobile phone. His attempt to brake and swerve out of her way came too late. The powerful, engine-heavy prow of his vehicle hit the passenger-side door of Camilla’s with brutal force. It propelled her halfway through the driver’s-side window, breaking her neck, and initiating a chain of biological events that, some five minutes later, stilled her heart. In her final moments of consciousness, oblivious to pain and to the hysterical man’s ranting in German, she saw her little girl again. She went to her, clasped her and smelled her, crying tears of joy.
Chapter 28
Red-eyed and numb, James got himself on a morning flight to London. Exhausted and distraught, he had to run to the departure gate at JFK for fear of missing the plane. He was booked on a connecting flight from Heathrow to Barcelona where he would pick up his family and then on another flight with them to Palma de Mallorca.
Halfway over the ocean he locked himself in one of the aircraft’s bathrooms and broke down. He’d been fifteen and far from Spain when his father and baby sister died, fifteen and already a rebellious teenager. He’d been too self-involved then to let it get to him too deeply. But Camilla was his life. Camilla was there always, like the sun coming up each morning. The various hits he’d taken thus far in his life had all been bearable knowing she was close by. They spoke on the phone at least once a day and only fought when one of them, for whatever reason, was in one of their moods. They’d had the great luxury of being able to take each other for granted. And though he knew she would surely pre-decease him someday, it was a day, even as she’d grown frailer these past few years, he’d kept way out in some undefined future. He looked at himself in the mirror, drying his eyes with a paper hand towel, thirty-six thousand feet over the Atlantic, trying to connect with the person staring back at him.
Laura had seen him off in the hotel corridor by the elevators, wrapped in a robe from his bathroom, her clothing gathered in her arms. Her flight back was not until the following afternoon. After she returned to her room, drew the curtains and got into her own bed, she tried to make sense of the news. She took a pill and slept another few hours. When she woke and ordered breakfast there were five messages, finally, from Nathan, begging at first for forgiveness before turning increasingly hostile. She ignored them.
She ate breakfast in the room, looking down at the noisy two-way street and across to a classic hodge-podge of Manhattan buildings, short and tall, old and new. Camilla, with all of her peculiarities, had come to be a kind of mother figure for her. Midway through her bowl of oatmeal she was finally able to cry. She took a bath in the dark until she was all cried out, trying to make some sense of it.
She dressed and went out for a walk, first to her apartment to water the plants on her terrace. The doorman told her that Nathan had been by on two occasions and that, as requested, was not allowed entry the second time, and that he had stalked off furious. This dissuaded her from meandering any further in the surrounding NYU neighbourhood, and so she headed north along Fifth Avenue until it met with Broadway at 23rd Street where she veered east and sat down on a bench in what was for her the unfamiliar Madison Square Park.
She was overwhelmed. Nathan’s betrayal. The shock of Camilla’s death. What had happened between her and James only hours before. The growing, explosive translation. What would happen now? What would happen with James? What would happen with the project? The project Camilla had hired her to bring to fruition. Camilla, with whom she had been out riding less than a week ago. Camilla with whom she had begun to feel such a special kinship, and who never would have gone to Mallorca if she hadn’t gone to New York.
Of one thing she was almost certain: the translation should remain a secret. Though it frustrated her to admit it, she knew deep down it was too volatile. It would provoke scandal and upheaval. And for what? Well, perhaps for the power of truth. She was not a believer in anything supernatural, and was convinced that Christ, Allah, the God of the Old Testament, and all of the gods and goddesses of all religions throughout time were human inventions, human myths created to control and to explain and to help people get through life’s difficulties. So why not expose the contents of the scroll and the codex? Would that not be a service and a lesson to everyone? Didn’t she owe it to her own belief in physics, chemistry, and reason? Didn’t she owe it to the testimony that Joseph of Arimathea had dictated to his scribe? And yet, she knew as well that the world was still a primitive place, that she pertained to a privileged minority, and that it would probably be just plain foolish to tempt the fates, to tempt the irrational fury of so many by releasing such a thing. She was overwhelmed.
While ordering an early dinner in the hotel lobby she got a text from James telling her she was in his thoughts. She answered in kind and then went up to her room and translated the next segment that overwhelmed her even more.
Chapter 29
Yeshua felt a strong attraction to Venusha, the younger of Athain’s two daughters. Canlia, to my surprise and gratitude, took a liking to me, and the four of us were married in a seaside ceremony followed by great amounts of food and drink.
Let it be known that Yeshua was a man like any other, with the good fortune of finding love in all its forms. They embraced each other with an energy only youth can know. They took long walks together and swam together. Yeshua worked with the tin streamers, and he worked the fields, he worked in the sea hauling fish, and he worked in the woods, stacking logs for winter. He became a rugged young man, a devoted son-in-law, and a beloved member of the community. He spoke no more of his Heavenly Father. Already advanced in age, I was too set in my ways to embrace this other culture so wholeheartedly.
We remained there a year, and then another, until the chaos of my business accounts demanded a voyage back home – home at that point being a relative term in everyone’s heart, save for Lucca and Octavius who never wavered in their allegiance to Tiberius and the Empire.
And then, as if ordained by one of the great Greek dramatists, it was this voyage back home, looming out ahead, that seemed to precipitate all the other events I am about to describe.
Yeshua became a father a year after marrying Venusha and shortly after she found herself with child a second time. Canlia had yet to conceive and they invited her into their bed. I was the only one that knew. Blessed with Yeshua’s seed she too found herself with child. Though piqued at first, I accepted it, for it improved my standing in the eyes of my business partners. I was not a very energetic man by then and Canlia never failed to attend to me when I wished it, so in truth I had little cause for complaint.
Then Lucca slipped and fell one day, wounding his leg. A man inured to all manner of physical suffering he paid it little mind. But the wound festered. Applications of local herbs and potions seemed to make it worse. He became feverish and Octavius decided to sever the limb. Yeshua took part in all of this and suffered – for he loved Lucca – and Lucca suffered greatly. Once the limb was cut and the stump cauterized with hot tar – a procedure I could not bear to watch but had no choice in hearing – the fever continued and the dear fellow, so beloved to all of us, died a raging death. It was the first time I had ever seen Octavius weep. I remember Canlia proclaiming this tragic event to be an omen of troubles to come. But Yeshua told her to hold her tongue. Both women were nervous about the journey awaiting them, one that would take them so far away from their land.
We decided to send Lucca off in a traditional manner and with help from some of the tin men including Lucca’s burly mate, we carried his body into the woods on a two-day journey north. There we felled some trees, constructed a proper pyre, piled a great mass o
f brush beneath it, and set it ablaze. We remained until it collapsed in an explosion of sparks. Through the stench and smoke and flame we could see the gleaming bones of our comrade. Both Yeshua and Octavius were very affected by it. I, who was older, and who am now so much older still, took it as yet another lesson in life’s fragility and fleetness. We built him a shrine of stones.
Upon our return we found the town in ruins. All of the dwellings had been put to the torch. Perhaps fifteen or twenty inhabitants remained alive, among them my dearest Canlia who had managed to run and hide. We found Venusha dead and disrobed with her unborn child cut from her womb. The other child, Yeshua’s baby daughter, had been run through with a wooden stake. Athain and many of the town’s leading men had been crudely hacked to pieces. It was, in brief, a vision of hell I shall waste no further ink describing. Yeshua cut locks of his daughter’s and of Venusha’s hair, and kept them with him until, fifteen years later he was stripped of his garments. He also found one of the marauders, wounded, trying to crawl away from this orgy of sin. He caught up to him and stabbed the fellow over and over, as I had once done to the man who slit my father’s throat. Octavius had to pull him away.
The Secret of Provence House Page 14
