A Single Swallow (36 page)

I felt pathetic as I made that call; the equivalent of calling your parents, crying ‘Make it stop – help!' As a privileged European it was, perhaps, rather feeble, but it was such a relief: I could have sobbed with gratitude when the telephone was answered. For a migrant, it would have been a God-send. As I discovered in the following days, the telephone number of someone in Spain is the one life-line possessed by many of the ‘clandestins' – as they are called in Morocco – who make it across the Strait.

Judy, the lady of the house, came out to fetch me from the metro.

‘Where are your bags?' she cried. ‘Have you lost them? Have you eaten?'

We had met before, fifteen years ago: I attended the same international school as her daughter, a close friend. Judy and her husband Denis had become used to various friends of their children turning up in various states, but Judy looked alarmed at the state of me. She fed me stew, took my clothes away for washing, lent me a T-shirt and jeans, and showed me to a room with a bed with clean sheets.

It is hard to understand how precious and wonderful are food, clean
clothes, a bath and a bed until you have been given them, with such kindness, in such need.

The morning was as bright as sun on snow. The light was luminous, the sky a freezing blue; in the suburb where my friends live there were pine trees and occasional sudden views for miles.

‘It feels like the first day of spring,' we said.

Denis and Judy seemed to take me in hand in a very gentle way. They looked closely at me, asked about the journey, interrogated me as to my plans and resources, gave me a telephone, making it clear that it was time I called my parents, and declared that I had not been eating enough.

There were swallows on the wires over the road and a wide open scent of cold freshness, like the air of the mountains, and in the lancing sunlight every leaf seemed distinct and every scent was strong: Madrid woke with coffee and tobacco and baking.

‘We had a swallow,' Judy said. ‘A beautiful little thing, he fell out of his nest and we fed him; he used to drink from the pool. But all his family left and he couldn't go with them. We took him to a vet but the vet said he wouldn't survive and we had to put him down. It was terrible . . .'

Judy is Australian. She met her husband, Denis, an Irishman when they were young, in Rome. They have lived in Madrid since the 1970s; their house has long been a hub for visiting poets and playwrights, Denis having organised the Irish contribution to Expo world fairs. An actor, with a vast repertoire of one-man shows, he has become one of the most prolific and successful theatre directors in Spain. He is a quiet man, bearded and owl-eyed like a Shakespearean player.

‘Because I'm not Spanish, you know, they don't ever review me,' he said, sadly. ‘They review the actors all right, and at the bottom they just write “Directed by Denis Rafter”.'

He was rehearsing
The Merchant of Venice
and invited me to meet his cast and watch them work.

This is Solanio, a friend of Antonio, diagnosing the causes of Antonio's mysterious melancholy. Though Antonio denies it, Solanio surely has it right. Antonio has invested heavily in trading ships: his forture is all at sea. ‘That I have much ado to know myself', Antonio ponders at the opening of the play, wondering at his sadness. I felt the journey had brought me closer to mystery, both beautiful and awful, than I had ever been. I felt as though, in casting everything off, I had lost the world but gained something of myself. My love of friends, and my work, and this strange, sudden, ignorant yet complete thing I felt for someone I did not know – these things could not be cast off and did not waver.

Shakespeare gives swallows a line in
Antony and Cleopatra
. His source is Plutarch, who reports that swallows nested under the prow of Cleopatra's flagship before the battle of Actium. Plutarch writes that this was thought to be an omen of the disaster that followed. In ornithological terms it is certain that swallows would not build on a battleship that was much used: the implication is that Cleopatra's flagship spent a lot of time tied up or anchored in port, which would suggest that neither it nor its crew were battle-ready. Shakespeare transplants the incident from Actium to the third and last of the three confrontations between Antony and Octavian.

 

Augury was the Roman practice of studying the flights, habits, doings and entrails of birds as a means of foretelling the future. Our word ‘auspicious' derives from this ancient method of divination. We still use augury, albeit in a very limited, almost unconscious way, part superstition, part empiricism. Children still recite ‘One for sorrow, two for joy . . .' at the sight of magpies. The call of the first cuckoo invariably inspires someone to write to the newspapers with news that summer has arrived. Birds flying high herald good weather, gulls inland mean storms at sea, crows and ravens are still birds of ill-omen, the chinking of blackbirds signals the approach of evening, the arrivals of fieldfares, redwings and skeins of geese are sure signs of the coming of winter. Of all birds, though, the swallow carries perhaps the greatest weight of prophetic folklore. Long before the battle of Actium, Greek sooth-sayers saw the future in the behaviour of the birds. On the eve of his departure to fight a battle against the Medes in 334
BC,
Antiochus, son of Pyrrhus, found a swallow had built a nest in his tent. It was believed to herald disaster, and indeed Antiochus lost the fight.

So much human effort, certainly the effort of the culture from which I come, is directed, and has been since the Enlightenment, into demystifying and explaining this phenomenon, the question of guidance, of fate; the question to which the answer would be the meaning of life itself. Once the answer was simple, or at least the region within which it lay was clear – religion. Since the fall of God from His primacy over western thought, science has set about unlacing the obscurity which surrounds what Hamlet calls the ‘divinity that shapes our ends' by looking ever more closely at us: at our genes, our psychiatry. The idea that the determination of our fates lies outside us, outside our bodies, our histories and experience, remains the province of the devout. What happened to me as I followed the swallows across the boundary between two worlds, from Africa, where unseen and invisible powers beyond science are alive and central to many lives, to Europe, where unseen hands are always assumed to be human or technological, and all explanations must be rational, suggested to me that a belief in either system which dismisses
the other is a misplaced and limited faith. Perhaps something similar would have happened whichever route I had taken; though there is no telling, I am certain of two things: first, the Zulus, in my case, were right. I did follow the swallows and in a way I did not come back. And I did find what I was really searching for. It may sound strange, but having chased them to the furthest south, then followed them north, travelling as they did, sometimes singly, sometimes in loose groups, and loitering in some places, as they did, plunging through and over others, it seemed to me a very natural miracle that in following them I should have come across one of my own kind.

‘I only really feel at home when I am a stranger,' Rebecca had said: my feelings exactly.

The swallows and the girl were now the better part of my hopes abroad. To follow and find them I owed the authorities their pound of flesh.

There is an intriguing diagram on the wall of the British Consulate in Madrid, produced by something called the Identity and Passport Service. It is a graph, on the horizontal axis of which is ‘Better security', and on the vertical axis ‘Better technology'. The plot shows how British citizens have identified themselves over time, beginning with a passport, passing through computer readable passports and progressing to biometric passports and identity cards carrying chips bearing data unique to the holder. At the top of the plot, at the ends of the two scales, the diagram dissolves into nothingness, as if the designers have stopped short of the full implication of their model which is that complete security will only finally exist when perfected technology allows the merging of the citizen and the passport – when we become our passports, when we carry the chips implanted in us. Waiting in front of an armoured glass screen, taking turns to approach the counter, was a scattering of individuals, couples, single women, lone travellers and students who all fell woefully short of this ideal. We had no chips or passports; we were not computer-readable. It took two visits over two days, photographs, forms and money but
remarkably little fuss, and I was issued with a sheet of paper, signed and stamped with a picture affixed, which proclaimed me to be a British citizen travelling on an emergency passport, issued in Madrid and valid for five days. Five days was the maximum allowed, an official explained. He would have preferred to issue it for twenty-four hours, to permit me to take a flight the next day, but if I insisted on travelling overland this was as much leeway as he could allow. I must be back in Britain by 19 April, he said; if I missed that date I would be in trouble – did I understand? Touchingly, since the armoured glass prevented us shaking hands, he took two of my fingers through the little slit by which documents could be exchanged and shook them.

‘Good luck,' he said.

I took a train north to Zaragoza, on the Ebro River, a swallow highway in the autumn, and, I calculated, somewhere they were sure to be found in the spring. Spanish trains are as thoroughly protected as aeroplanes: boarding one in Atocha Station you cannot forget the massacre of commuters that took place here one morning in 2004. You pass through a security screen and X-ray machines. You are required to carry and produce your passport.

Zaragoza was half a building site. African men were labouring on the roads: there were fewer of them and they had more machinery than their equivalents in Congo, but otherwise it was almost the same scene. Teams of northern Europeans were arriving at the station to supervise and complete the works, all in time for the Expo 2008. I walked into town; it was a cold bright evening and a well-to-do city; Zaragozans were taking what looked like their first evening promenade of the year, all done up in smart coats. Among them I fell into conversation with a young man from Senegal who was walking quickly, and shivering. He was thin and quick-eyed, he moved as if trying to take up as little space as possible and dropped his gaze when we passed townspeople; their glances slid rapidly off him. He was working with a friend as a decorator, he said. He could not have been more than twenty-five.

‘Spain is hard,' he said. ‘They don't like you here and it is incredibly expensive.'

‘Where do you live?'

‘With my friend, there are four of us there.'

‘And what is your plan?'

‘Save money if I can, until I can go north.'

‘Where do you want to go?'

‘France – or UK.'

‘Why?'

‘I have heard it is better . . .'

‘How did you get into Spain?'

He smiled vaguely, shook his head and would not answer.

The Ebro was a yellowy green which you shivered to look at; it ran hard and cold with snow-melt from the Pyrenees. The old town of Zaragoza lines its south bank and clusters around the cathedral, the Basilica de Nuestra Senora del Pilar, a heavily domed, turreted and dim-hearted thing built around a marble pillar on which the Virgin is supposed to have appeared in
AD
40 in the middle of a sermon by St James – Santiago. Pilgrims come in busloads to kiss a portion of this pillar. Ignored, by comparison, is a miraculous building on the south side of town, near the bus station – the Aljaferia, once a Muslim palace, complete with a courtyard of interlocking arches and the remains of a mosque of stunning beauty, all incorporated, in the fifteenth century, into a palace for Fernando and Isabella. Despite being as beautiful, in miniature, as the Alhambra of Granada and one of the pinnacles of Hispano-Muslim art, the Aljaferia is almost bereft of visitors. The Catholic and Aragonese parts of the building are heavily signposted and supervised; the Islamic parts relatively empty. It is as though there is no room in modern, northern Spain for certain parts of its history, while others are preciously preserved. In the basilica two bombs hang from a pillar: they were dropped on the structure by the Republicans in the civil war, but failed to explode.

I crossed the river as the evening came on, and there were swallows
swooping under the bridge. Following a walkway along the river bank I came on a great commotion of police and ambulances: they were pulling a body out of the icy water.

My Spanish was now much better; by beginning conversations with an apology for not speaking Spanish I found I was able to elicit help and understanding: this produced a cheap meal and a cheap room.

Zaragoza went to work with a cold morning but a warm sun. By the Ebro, not far from the cathedral, I found an old lady leaning on a wall and staring down at a patch of sand on the river's edge. She was watching swallows. It was the first time since Bloemfontein I had found anyone taking notice of the birds, and the first time I had seen them on the ground. They were drinking and dust-bathing, ruffling their feathers and twittering. They looked strange, out of their natural element, the air, little boat-shapes, like beached yachts on stands. The old lady and I did not understand each other, except for one word.