Stories From a Lost Anthology

by Rhys Hughes

  Rhiannon scratched her nose with her weapon. “Whatever the case, it means our immediate problem’s over. You’ve stopped reciting. Come up and have a bath and a snack. In fact, if you’re a baker, you can prepare our breakfast for us. No excuses now!”

  I helped our distraught guest to ascend the staircase. I gave him a tour of the kitchen, demonstrating the oven and toaster. After his bath, Rhiannon lent him one of my dressing gowns, without a belt, which parted like stormclouds above Cardigan Bay. The sun came up; the aroma of yeast filled our domicile. Hywel proved to be a highly skilled chef, though he had vowed never to caress a wooden spoon again. While my wife braved the morning, he told me all about Lladloh, a village so isolated that shirts were made from wattle and daub. To ease his homesickness, which was cool and dry, more like sunstroke than fever, I wound up the gramophone for a private Robert ap Huw performance.

  He clamped his palms over his ears. “Can’t stand that modern stuff! Brought up with pan-pipes, I was.”

  “Does your valley have a Roman character?”

  “Only in part. A legion was stranded there in ancient times. Didn’t mix with the locals. Passed traditions down to their children. They came to us for their laundry. My mother refused to wash and scrub for them. A deal of palaver, it caused. Battles and sieges, with armoured sheep. But she still wouldn’t toga the line.”

  I leaned forward like a conspirator. “We’ve kidnapped Dylan because civilisation is mirrored by language. The philosopher Mario Pei said so. Language peaked too early in Swansea, therefore civilisation stopped. We hope to knock the peak off again.”

  “Wfft! What sort of wonky scheme is that?”

  Rhiannon returned with an anxious expression. Having passed the bus station and lingered at the shuttle bay, she’d discovered the reason for the general lack of concern about Dylan’s absence. The transport company had bought an English replacement.

  “Saw it with my own eyes. The Clive of India.”

  I was shocked. “A foreign bus? An imperialist double decker? That’s not what we wanted! Better to endure our own crassness than any which is fostered on us! What can be done?”

  “We’ll have to let Dylan go.”

  A feeling of nausea swept through me, but I accepted this decision. Turning to my wife, I pleaded: “Give me a hand with the garage doors. We have to get him back immediately.”

  Hywel followed us down the staircase. I entered the vehicle, turned the keys in the ignition, but nothing happened. The fuel gauge rested at zero. Obviously I had punctured the tank while taking it up Constitution Hill. I jumped out, located the hole and plugged it with a handkerchief. Then I picked a plastic container.

  “I’ll borrow petrol from the neighbours.”

  “No, mun, don’t do that. The engine runs on alcohol.”

  “Very well. We have plenty in the house. Listen now, Hywel, why not go up and bake a fruitcake? I’ll need something to look forward to after returning the bus to the station.”

  He reluctantly obeyed and I rummaged among the green bottles at the rear of the garage for my supply of methanol. I assumed that Dylan would be grateful for this chance to resume his former occupation. But nothing happened to indicate he was even aware of his surroundings. Hywel’s tale had to be doubted; as you must doubt mine. Pouring a gallon of fuel into the tank, I had another attempt at turning the ignition. This time Dylan spluttered once, belched most uncouthly and fell silent with a grotesque finality. An invisible feather rose from the gearbox to tickle my cheek. Rhiannon was as perplexed as I. Though the bus was physically unchanged, it seemed stiffer, less vivacious.

  I called for the baker. He came down and dropped to his knees. “You have killed him. He’s dead again.”

  “How can an inanimate object die? I filled him up.”

  “With methanol? No, mun, that’s deadly poison. When I said alcohol, I meant beer. Brown ale or stout!”

  Shaking my head in rage, I stamped to the rear of the bus and threw open the engine cover. My intention was to embarrass the nude halfwit by exposing the network of pipes and valves which constitute a standard bus engine—to demonstrate that diesel is mightier than the pen. The brute misery which drove itself into my heart at that moment, and parked there for the rest of my life, is indescribable. I confronted not an oily mesh of mechanical parts, but an enormous steaming liver. It filled the whole engine compartment, and bile dripped in an annoying rhythm, slicking the floor. I probed the abnormal growth of connective tissue around the edge of the organ, frowning at my wife.

  Who saluted with her spear. “Cirrhosis!”

  I believe I went mad. Never the most equable of husbands, I ran from the garage, rushed out into Rhondda Street and down the hill to the station. Rhiannon pursued me, casting her weapon at least once, grazing my thigh, before retrieving it on the hoof. The loaded pistol nestled in my clutch like a clockwork beetle. For the English shuttle it was a running grave. My ideals were all gone on the heap and the city was left with less than the nothing it had before. It wasn’t supposed to be like this! The Clive of India awaited me, smug in its bay, lording it over the natives. Can’t the Welsh be allowed to make mistakes in our own way? Paused in front of it, aimed and pressed the trigger.

  The current flowed from battery to coil. The spring heated up. Soon it was glowing over the powder. I faced the headlamps of the imperialist vehicle, staring at precision arrogance. My hand trembled, yet my hatred would prevail. Then the priming flared. But the propellant didn’t catch. I tried again; the same thing occurred. The barrel remained silent. What can be added to total woe to deepen it? My third attempt: impotent also. By this time, Rhiannon had caught me up. She eased the gun from my grip, pointed it at the sky and fired it herself. The explosion rebounded from the station’s concrete walls and seconds later a bullet dropped onto the grassy verge. She nodded at Clive.

  “He must be destined for something big.”

  We strolled back together, arm in arm. No fruitcake in the kitchen. There wasn’t even an oven. Hywel had fled, taking the cooker with him, a strange way of repaying our generosity. He had carved a message into the wooden breadboard, in ogham script. Rhiannon, who is competent enough to deal with any implausibility an author can throw at her, even when I try to be dynamically awkward, deciphered it. The baker complained about his stay, but admitted it had given him a name for the pub he was determined to open—The Tall Story. If any readers out there ever see a naked man stalking the streets of Cardiff with a Leisure 2100 EL, please grill him thoroughly. Or else boil his head.

  Rhiannon felt queasy, not just because plot demanded it. She sat on the floor. “I think I’m pregnant.”

  “You refer to the night we made love?”

  I placed my ear against her stomach. A stirring that was unnatural. A voice? Too faint to be sure. The computer would know. I went down into the garage, to recover the microphone. The bus had already turned into a skeleton. Still recognisable as a bus, but there were no external layers of metal skin. It had a ribcage and spine, and the wheels were cartilage on enamel axles. An extinct beast, a Megatherium from the era when giant sloth was subsidised by the state. I left it in peace, rotating my eyes, whether in respect or exasperation is unknown. Holding the microphone at the level of my wife’s womb, we waited for the printer to decide. But we knew the truth before it finished.

  “Blank verse! Dylan Thomas has been reconceived.”

  “He’s our child, Glyn. A curly fetus.”

  “Must we raise him as a bus?”

  She laughed at my lack of imagination. “No, as a crystal tower! The glittering cityscape you’ve always wanted.”

  Then she winked thrice. “Come to bed.”

  Hark reader! Don’t go gentle into that goodnight!

  I was happy. I was glum. I was once below a time. We sat in the pub; she revealed a secret unwritten by myself. Culture is linked to progress. If one reaches an apex, the other halts. That’s just to recap what we know. But it also works the other way round. Murky
beer, foam on chin, as many ways of describing the vista as you choose. The purchase of the Clive of India wasn’t the major reason why the city forgot Dylan. There was still the issue of our parcels to the newspapers. The Evening Post had ignored us, and no other rag cared to interest themselves— Western Mail, Echo, Wales on Sunday, all had remained silent. Only the Morriston Net Curtain Twitcher spared a small paragraph.

  Rhiannon waited for me to finish my drink. “You thought nobody else could author this text, Glyn, but I hijacked it while you were capturing the bus. The readers out there, the ones who haven’t escaped by bursting out of an earlier paragraph, are my passengers, not yours. And I’m going to use them as slaves on my grand building project. They don’t even know it yet. When the story finishes, it means we’ve reached our destination. I’ll herd them out to start work. They won’t feel any different: they’ll still believe in freedom. But every action they perform, however simple, will be choreographed just by me.”

  “Won’t they notice and decide to down tools?”

  “No. They may assume they’re making a cup of tea, or taking the dog for a walk, but it’s a trick. Really they will be erecting emerald walls and topaz roofs, tightening spiderweb hawsers and weaving flowers into a tapestry to illustrate the tale of the future. Poor Glyn! You never knew there were two ways of erasing Dylan. Forcing technical progress forward means that he has to relinquish his position at the apex of the cultural pyramid anyway. His reputation had an inkling of this, and slid down for us. So the people of Swansea couldn’t miss him. Wait a moment! Seems our terminus is only a paradox ahead.”

  At last, the story lurched to a halt. The doors of the climax swung open. Too late to escape! Mind your head, reader, as you get up and step out. We need it in good condition.

  The Lute And The Lamp

  The town was in uproar, which was difficult, for the wind blew from the south and tumbled the shouts back down into the streets. The scent of the mountains came too, cool and lonely, and because the windows of the tall houses were open, it mistook rooms for gullies and filled them. Some people decided this was a relief and newspapers were read instead of waved like fans. It had been hot, and many kind looks had been lowered on ice, in drinks and dreams, but now the breeze took away the need for such expressions. Yet the sky was still the blue of steel, a colour which sharpens thirst and forgets the sea.

  The rumours had started themselves. A man was committing a crime, breaking the law in public. Was he an outsider? Was he ignorant of the rules in Córdoba? No, he did not have this excuse. Of mitigating factors there were none: he was a blatant minstrel. And his name and face were familiar to all the locals. He called himself Don Entrerrosca, by which it was surmised that he was of dubious parentage, or none at all, because the name has no basis in any meaning. He created himself, in a sense, by lisping instead of talking, for he thought he was a romantic. And so he was, but not a very good one.

  Fancy you asking me now about Eber Marcela Soler! She lived in the house with the most inaccessible balconies. This situation was not of her own choice. The senate and the chamber of deputies had decreed it, so that when a minstrel paused under her windows and looked up, he might be discouraged by the height and difficulty of angle. The aim of a song is too imprecise to be certain of reaching her ears up there, and if the minstrel was a fraction of a degree out, he might accidentally serenade an inappropriate target: a man or a room of furniture or an empty balcony, and then be forced to fight a duel for their honour. And fighting a duel for something you do not love, such as a chair, is a bad idea. You will not fight with any spirit and thus you will probably lose and not even care.

  The fair Señorita Soler had been causing enough trouble in Córdoba. Let us talk about obstruction of the highway! Before the authorities made it illegal, men travelled from all over Argentina to serenade her. Sometimes they came from much further, so far that they could not sing in Spanish. But she was fluent in many languages. Her hair was black and lustrous, darker than the worst bruises on the men who fought over her. And you, dear reader, would hope to win her too, if you could see her now. Her smile, her laughing eyes; no, I do not want to share her with you! Find your own southern beauty if you wish for a full description; but even so, she will not be so lovely as mine.

  Not that I possess her: that is just my idle wish. Eber Soler was not a prize to be won; she is a woman, and she, and you, should know what that means. Anyway, the congestion in her neighbourhood was considerable. The streets around her house were always so thick with troubadours that not a single vehicle might pass. Delays of this sort cost money. The authorities did not view such financially ruinous incidents with tolerant eyes. They grumbled about Argentina being a country of vast resources, and fated always to remain so, for nothing could ever be harnessed properly, and beautiful women who turned all working men into lovers were as much to blame for this as bribery and corruption. And Señorita Soler was the most gorgeous of all and thus synonymous with economic recession.

  They banned all suitors from her window and decreed an exclusion zone around her house with a radius the length of the echo of a plaintive note; later this was increased to that of a passionate chord. Transgression of this rule would be punished by forced eating of the instrument of melody, generally only with a light salad as an accompaniment, which explains why the few suitors who dared to woo the fair Eber after the passing of this law favoured the mandolin over the larger guitar, and never used a trumpet or bagpipes, as they do in Mexico and Scotland, but less in that latter country, on account of the climate. Plus it is easier to aim a mandolin.

  No guards were paid to ensure the keeping of the peace, because of the expense, but the authorities relied on Señorita Soler’s neighbours to crease the ambitions of her suitors, in a manner of squealing, by informing them on the telephone. The moment a hopeful young valiant, with his heart worn on his sleeve so often that the pin holding it there had rusted quite through, letting the organ drop into the hollow soundbox of his instrument, raised his voice to the window of his beloved— which was always Eber Soler, of course, and nobody else—the moment this happened, I repeat, some virtuous citizen, mostly a young lady herself, would call through to the authorities and cry into the mouthpiece: “Hurry! There is a serenade in progress! The sentimental content is very high!” And the police would fly to the scene of the chorus, with their sirens screaming WOO! WOO! so that everybody knew what was going on and who was going down and why this should be so. These young ladies must have studied alchemy in their spare time. How else did they convert their personal jealousy, which is a base mettle, into the pure goal of public duty?

  And so the adorable Eber remained unattached, though fiercely loved, and Córdoba went about its business without surplus traffic accidents. Until Don Entrerrosca appeared again from nowhere. Who was he? Imagine a Macbeth without a blasted heath, except on the heels of his shoes. Picture to yourself an Orpheus with a head which would not float in water or wine, but which could swim on the surface of a mirror. It is not that Entrerrosca was vain and loved his own reflection; no, but he knew every song of Carlos Gardel and Eduardo Arolas, and this gave him an excess of justified pride. He was famous for his odd ideas. He claimed that Astor Piazzolla wrote real tangos and that men and women should talk to each other at barbecues. Almost as outrageously, he believed that a stubborn donkey should be beaten with a carrot, and that the original colour of that vegetable was purple. He also theorised that the most effective lutes are carved in one piece from a whole tree. And now he was ready to prove it.

  Perhaps what followed has nothing to do with magic. It could be simply that his voice was very fine, and that the tips of his fingers were just soft and furious enough on the strings. Or maybe he really had discovered the lost songs of Orpheus, which can charm all living things. I am sorry to say that I have no mechanical explanation. The general view, which nobody else has bothered to question, is that he made his lute from a tree which was already a saturated sponge for love, and that hi
s playing merely squeezed these essences back out, all at once in a concentrated form. Certainly the bark was scarred with hearts and initials from long ages past. Some wounds had started to heal, others had faded altogether and were overlapped by newer hearts. But every message had a total meaning. “Yo soy el árbol, conmovido y triste; tu eres la niña que mi cuerpo hirió,” as the Cuban composer, Eusebio Delfín, puts it. Don Entrerrosca knew all the Cuban songs too. His repertoire was definitive.

  He had wandered Patagonia, playing to the wind and perfecting his style. At last he was confident enough to make an attempt on Eber’s heart.

  Let us discuss this heart! It was made of stone. That is a cliché, is it not? But it also happens to be true. Please do not accuse me of lazy writing. I am a faithful reporter of what actually happened. Metamorphic rock. It was marble, actually. In that case, how did it work? Well, it is true that the stunning Eber had been anaemic for some time after the petrification, but she had conquered that now and was better. Probably dancing the tango kept her circulation going, even though she had to dance it with her own shadow instead of a man. But no, that is silly. How could her shadow tap her on the back to give directions? The truth of the matter is that she had no use for her own heart because the hearts of so many men beat for her. That is the answer. A million other hearts, mine included; and soon, yours too.

  What are the exact circumstances surrounding the turning of her heart to stone? I shrug, because I really do not know. Some people say that a gorgon cast a glance at it. As proof, they cite that gorgons no longer take their vacations in Asia Minor and that Argentina may be a substitute destination. I call this evidence purely serpentstantial and therefore worthless. It is also gliglic: another invented word. But the gorgon connection is probably correct. I think the great Jorge Luis Borges had the solution. He wrote about the cockatrice, a mythical beast with a look which can kill. If the egg of a cockatrice was mistakenly hatched by a gorgon, the supernatural powers of the two beings might get mixed up. It is far more plausible to my mind that a cockatrice with a glance which can turn objects to stone must have caught sight of Eber’s heart. But why was her heart not tucked up safely inside her bosom? She must have taken her emotional armour off, exposing it. That is my best guess. What was the cockatrice doing in Argentina? It must have been touring the world. Others think that the turning of organs into stone is a calamity which could only have come from outside this planet, from the stars, and that it is a type of disease. This hypothesis seems awfully cryptic and occultist to me. Its supporters must be masons.