Country Girl: A Memoir (33 page)

After the main lights had been turned out, knowing I wouldn’t sleep, I simply sat and looked at fish in a tank, endlessly moving, the water rippling as they darted through it. They fought. Skirmishes of all kinds, then a brief truce as they landed on bits of bark or pebble, establishing their territory and regrouping for battle.

I gave them names. Saddam Hussein was striped and strutting. George Bush was a lackluster figure with his braggart cohorts. Vladimir Putin occupied a millionaire corner, with minions fencing around him. There was one angelic coral creature, its fins quivering, whom I called Emily Dickinson, trapped among the totalitarians.

Fasting led to lethargy and whiffs of hallucination. In the afternoons I would sit out of doors, my virgin notebooks on the
bench beside me and a copy of Thomas Mann’s
The Magic Mountain.
Some patients sat on folding chairs, others had retired after the frugal lunch of rice cake and savory spread to have a compress of warm chamomile flowers, while a few heroic ones set off on bicycles or cross-country skis. I sat before a fountain. From a stone gourd, a corolla of water rose, then plashed down the sides into a font that for a moment held the gift of melting moonstone rings. I was trying to meditate, to become one with the water, but instead I was hoarding a few impressions for some story or other that I might write.

Low borders of privet hedging enclosed squares of grass, and orange flowers, which I took to be dwarf marigolds, bloomed listlessly. There was one birch tree, onto which a whole forum of small brown birds would converge and linger, never once roused to song. The kitchen was to the rear of where I sat, and the smell of roast, of which I would not be partaking, was galling. Patients who remained on after the “cure” were given delicious meals, once the punishing regime had expired, but I could not wait to leave. Even Thomas Mann seemed ponderous.

One afternoon a young girl, whom I sat next to each morning at the sitz baths, was leaving for England and I waited with her outside until her taxi arrived. I inquired about the building across the street and learned to my mounting excitement that it was the bar and restaurant for members of the nearby golf club. My spirits rose. I would go there quietly at six-thirty and treat myself to one glass of wine, prior to the bowl of clear soup which that evening was being added to my diet. I confided my plot to her. She gripped my arm and said on no account must I risk it. A Russian oligarch and his party had been to the spa, had betaken themselves to the restaurant one evening, availing of steaks and champagne, only to find on their return that they were escorted to their rooms and made to pack immediately, since they had broken the rules of the clinic.

After she left, I looked at the flyleaf of my new notebook and saw where I had copied out a line of Joseph Brodsky’s: “The discarding of the superfluous is in itself the first cry of poetry.” By having written nothing at all, I was approaching poetry.

Some evenings a young man from the town came to see to the fish. He would clean the tank, scatter something in the water, and talk to them before covering them in for the night with a dark cloth. I would try to engage him. What did they eat? When did they mate? Did they sleep in the darkness? And he would simply smile and say, “My English no good.”

Yet on the morning that I was leaving, he left a handwritten letter, with the title “My Fish Family”:

My hopes buoyed when the invitation came to the villa in Mallorca. I had been to the island years before, in springtime, when the almond trees were in full flower, and my memory of it was of a flowering paradise, with windmills dotting the hilltops. A
young girl from Ghana, whom I called Ophelia, had got me the invitation, since she had done the interior decorating for the owner. She would come with me, staying for the weekend, and then I would be alone for twelve days to write.

From Palma airport we took a taxi, and as it fell dark, she began to fret about the directions once we left the motorway. Side roads became narrower and narrower, the countryside unfamiliar, with here and there a light from a house set far back in a field, little bumpy bridges, then narrower roads, more tracks, and after almost two hours of mounting suspense, she said, “Eureka, eureka,” as she sighted a hoarding with a huge picture of a wild cat.

“El gato, el gato,”
she said, and told the driver to make a left fork down a dirt road, which he did so hurriedly that we could hear the loose pebbles hopping off the bonnet. Then a third “Eureka” as we arrived at the green gates that led to the avenue and the
finca.

There were two entrances, but because of our luggage, she decided we would go by the courtyard entrance, and as she turned the big key in the lock and still more slowly pushed in a wooden door with its iron beveling, I recalled the erotic interiors of Luis Buñuel. An anteroom with a metal sink in one corner led to the salon itself, which was shadowy, high arches following one upon the other and stretching to a wrought-iron staircase beyond. She groped for lights. There were leather chairs and sofas and illustrated books and a long wooden table, where I could spread out my notes and get down to work. It was cold as a mausoleum. In the huge fireplace that skirted one wall, the bole of a tree had been placed on a bed of white ash, numerous small saplings jutting from it.

To get to the boiler we groped our way through a series of rooms, some lit, some not, and there was a Ping-Pong table, tennis racquets, brand-new motorcycles, and a boiler that seemed
to have expired. The pilot light was quenched. Beside it was a wooden olive press, the wrought-iron handle upright, like a compass without destination. Back in the living room, we rolled newspaper into balls and idiotically flung them on the top of the unbudgeable bole of wood, believing it would warm us. She found the wine cellar and returned, triumphant, with a bottle of vintage claret, which in a halfhearted manner we vowed to restore.

Before going up to bed I got out all my notebooks and glanced at the scattered things I had written, mere jottings that bore no relation whatsoever to the work I had come to do.

The bedroom was even icier than the downstairs. I kept saying “Ca’an D’Or” to myself as if it were a mantra and warming my hands on it. This was another villa belonging to the owner, where we could go the next day, as it had all the amenities: heat, light, and an electric stove that had actually been fitted. It took some doing to get the curtains to overlap, but enveloped in a white duvet, I got into bed and had a heart-to-heart talk with myself, debating whether or not I should leave with Ophelia on the Sunday.

A sort of milkiness gauzed the sky, and soon I got up and I went outside to survey my surroundings and watch the sun come up. Olive and lemon groves all around. The olive trees, bent and gnarled, warts and bulges on their limbs, yet their leaves, tapered and silvery, letting out little whispery rustles. The terraces that ran up the fields in tiers were perfectly husbanded, and beyond them the pine woods, dense and pathless, to the range of gray-white mountains, the sierras, whose summits glistened with snow. To the rear of the villa there were low stone walls, and crouched under one, as if it had just escaped from a Damien Hirst formaldehyde tank, was a sheep, stunned, silent, with not a bleat from it. This would be my companion.

Ophelia appeared, refreshed. She had rung the owner, who
was perfectly agreeable to my moving to Ca’an D’Or, and we would go to the estate office and get the keys. It turned out to be even more friendless. A square modern house, set down in the middle of a field, with no olive or lemon groves around it. The central heating did indeed come on at the press of a giant white switch, but the racket from several fans was such that it would preclude any possibility of writing. It was decided that I would stay in a
pensión
in the old town at night and each morning take a taxi back to the
finca
to work in solitude. In the one
pensión
that was open, the
patrón
gave us the keys to the two upstairs rooms, to choose which one I preferred. They were identical. One looked onto a square and the other onto a narrow street, which I settled for, thinking it would be quieter.

After Ophelia left to catch her plane, I saw crowds gather in the square and learned that the fiesta known as Calle di Calvari was happening that evening. It was for Sant Antoni, Saint Anthony, patron saint of farm animals, who had already been blessed in the farms earlier in the morning. There would be a pilgrimage, which entailed climbing 365 steps to a small chapel that nestled at the top. This was known as Calvary. Along the way there were beautiful homes, gardens, and even shops. I got halfway up to Calvary, but by then the first pilgrims were on the way down and breathless from the climb. I turned back with them down to the square. It was already lit with the lights of numerous paper lanterns, and loud drumbeats signaled the commencement of the revels. A witching night. A night of wine and wassail and a huge banner with black lettering that read
EVERYTHING LICIT IN THIS NIGHT OF FIRE.
Having done the penance of the climb, people were in high spirits as they trooped into the square for the bacchanalia. Harlequins and Columbines, their faces ghostly, danced about, and children danced with them and ran in mock horror from the devils, whose horns, fresh from the slaughterhouse, dripped with
blood. Youths were dragging a huge tree across to the steps of the church to set fire to it, and a woman who was closing her stall sold me a knitted shawl for half price, a grudging expression on her face.

Marcel Proust has described bells as being “resilient and ferruginous,” but in that small room in that
pensión,
on a narrow bed with the pale green band of light from the clock radio, they were bold and presumptuous, punctuating the wretched hours.

“Nobody sleeps at fiesta, madam,” the daughter of the house said, as I came down very early to give back the keys. The deposit I had to forgo, since, as she said, her father had arranged the best terms possible for me, and moreover, they could have let the room to an honorable person. The square in the early morning was deserted, the yellow sandstone of the church of Nostra Senyora dels Àngels drained of sunshine, as an elderly woman with a soft green broom swept the debris away. The church door was closed, but I recalled its interior, so ornate, figures of the Virgin, angels, and saints caparisoned in gold, their arms bedecked with it, gold crowns on their heads.

In the bodega I bought things that did not need cooking, picturing as I did the electric stove still in its wrapping inside the kitchen door of the villa. Almonds, tins of sardines, salt biscuits, and stuffed olives. On the way down the steep passageway, in the window of a shut boutique, the female dummies in fawn bast, with their little turrety breasts, were huddled in a heap, as if someone had vacated the place in high dudgeon. At the side window was the name and telephone number of a gentleman who did shiatsu massage, and I copied it down carefully.

On my way back I kept asking the taxi driver to go slowly.
“Lento lento,”
I would say, so that I could note some landmarks in order to give directions to the masseur. There was a roundabout, then a left turning, then a sculpture of a rooster, red-brown and
not very beautiful, then a belt of trees where the road got dark, a monastery on a hill, which he told me the name of, Puig de Santa Mar’a. He was in a hurry. The car bounced over the narrower roads and the bumpy stone bridges, and I barely had time to catch sight of the wild cat on the hoarding.

“El gato,”
I said.

“Salvaje,”
he said, and soon after swerved to the right, barely missing a tree, and onto the rough track that I saw in daylight to be sand-colored.

“Salvaje?”

He shrugged and said tourists were
“loco loco”
to go into the forest where the wild cats lived. He was annoyed at having to get out to open the green gates, and then it was on down past the olive groves and the vineyards to the villa, in which I was hostaged for eleven days.

There were heartening signs. The gardener had come. A fire blazed and crackled in the huge grate. The bole of wood had been pushed back and served as a sort of chimneypiece, and the tall logs had been placed pyramid-wise to allow for a draft. He had filled three wheelbarrows with wood, assuring me that I would have enough until he returned on the Thursday.
“Jueves. Jueves.”
On that day also, oil would be delivered. I inquired about the solitary sheep under the ruin, and all he said was
“Estúpido, estúpido.”
Seeing the books and the notebooks, he asked if I was a
“Profesora,”
and wanly I said I was not.