The South (16 page)

Part II

BARCELONA: 1964

Miguel, five years dead, I am in Barcelona now. Last evening the swifts came back to the city. I remember how we sat one evening as the sky darkened and stared at them frantic in the air above Calle Carmen. We had been drinking. I remember it. The swifts frantic in the air.

I am watching them now, Miguel. They fly into the gaps in the stone of the houses in the Barrio Gótico. I am the woman at the window with the chair half out on the balcony, the cane chair with the footrest which I rescued from a rubbish heap on Calle Ancha.

The swifts criss-cross over Calle Condesa Sobradiel.

Every morning now I walk up to Plaza Regomir, just as the children are being led to school. I go to a café there. I sit looking out on to the plaza.

Miguel, I am in Barcelona now. At night the blare of the fog horn comes up here from the port. I sleep in the front room when I am low. I like the noise at night, the shouts in the street, the conversations going on beneath the window, a taxi roaring by. I often switch on the light and try to read but I can’t concentrate. At first light, five or maybe six—it depends—I dress and go out. I walk up to Calle Fernando and then to Plaza San Jaime. In the faded grey light I walk through the Barrio Gótico. I sit in Felipe Neri where we used to sit. I walk down Santa Eulalia to Baños Nuevos, into Plaza del Pino, along Petritxol to the Ramblas.

They are used to me in the markets. The men bringing in produce from the country don’t even comment now. Two of the bars there open early and I will drink coffee if I know that there is no chance of going back to sleep.

Once, it must have been in the back room of someone’s flat, we had been together some time, I’m not sure how long, but a year, it was certainly a year. It was not a familiar room, I woke to find your arms around me. It was as though we had been touching each other for a long time. We made love over and over for the rest of the night with small snatches of sleep in between. We were locked in each other’s arms. This had never happened before and would never happen again with such intensity.

Every night after you were killed I took sleeping pills. Two, I was told, never take more than two, be careful. And I did as they said. Never more than two.

Miguel, my battle now is with sleep. Now that I don’t want pills, I have no control over the tides of sleep which ebb and flow. For weeks I haunt the markets and Barrio Gótico. For weeks I lie in the dark in the front room of this flat in Calle Aviño and hear every noise. I can do nothing all day; I am weak and can’t concentrate.

And then it stops: the sleep wells up slowly like blood from a cut and I try to hold it. I move into the back room, into the thick air of the room with no window and I sleep all night.

Miguel, I am the woman who wanders about inside the port as the daylight goes, carrying a canvas, an easel and oils. This is my work now. As the day wanes I paint the port of Barcelona. I paint the sound of the fog horn and the fog. The warehouses, cranes, containers. I paint trade.

How could I explain to those two men in the port authority? The office was all polished wood and brass, full of the smell of old papers piled up everywhere: permits for goods
going to Valencia, Marseilles, Genoa, New York. And the two men listening to me at the other side of the desk and me showing them the catalogue of my exhibition and trying to explain why I wanted to paint the port.

They could see nothing there for a painter. They felt that I should go to the coast like Sunyer—they used his name—or to the mountains like Mir. A port was not for painting. A port was ugly, oily, smelly. I told them I had already been to the mountains and the sea. One of the Catalans was brown, with a small greying moustache. He frowned. I said you must let me, you can lose nothing. He nodded his head, the brown one.
“Bueno,”
he said,
“si vol vosté pintar el port . . .”
and shrugged his shoulders. I took it to be an agreement and thanked them both. I asked for a letter that would give me access to the port at all times.

I went at twilight to paint the light; the objects stayed in the background. Everything muted, faded, about to be subsumed into the night. It is the most mysterious place in the whole world. Cargoes arrive and are held for a day on the wharf or in a warehouse and then moved; ships dock and more goods are taken on and off; the port buildings are vast and beautiful. I paint what is transient as it pulses faintly in the light.

All the work has been dull recently: I have dulled every colour. Now I have started painting sections of the port on small square canvases.

*   *   *

Listen Miguel, Ramon Rogent is dead. I saw him every day when I came back here first. Ramon and Montserrat made me stay. Ramon was driving, he was a good driver. I don’t know why he was killed.

All my grief came back. I re-lived your death. I wondered how the next day would go, would I still have to brood for
hours, would I still want you back in the room now, want to make love, to go around the bars with you?

It is impossible, despite the fact that you have died and that I will die too, despite the fact that I often suffer from intense loneliness here, it is impossible not to consider the miracle of being alive, of watching the swifts skirting the air just before night falls, the old man moving up Calle Condesa Sobradiel—the gift of consciousness, the life still left in me.

I can turn my head now and gaze over at the painting I bought from Ramon Rogent—
The Hammock.
All the techniques he learned from Dufy and Matisse are there, but in the colours of the woman’s dress, the sheer luxury of the paint, there is Ramon. Ramon curling his lip to smile with his thin face. I have that painting as a symbol of joy in this room.

I work hard sometimes. I live with paint and delight in the pleasure it gives. It feels as though it were clay I was plastering across the canvas with the brush or with my fingers, it feels like some essential element. I leave the picture there to rest and settle and I return then to see how it looks when the experience of doing it is over, when it is merely what is left of a certain time, when it adds to the store of things.

There are friends: other lives to brush against. But there will be no new intimacies like the old ones. There will always be reservations, things one must leave out, events one can’t explain without handing over a full map of one’s life, unfolding it, making clear that all the lines and contours stand for long days and nights when things were bad, or good, or when things were too small to be described at all: when things just were. This is a life.

I go to the Palau de la Música. Sometimes when I walk into the hall and up the main stairs I see it again as I did that first year in Barcelona. The colours and the motifs distract from the music, it is overdone. But sometimes when the
lights go down and you watch the stage, you can sense the splendour of the whole building.

I go with a Catalan friend Maria Jover, whose eyes still fill with tears when she talks about the civil war. I like her softness and her prejudice. I go to her house on Saturday for lunch. Her daughter is there sometimes and they like to talk about culture: an exhibition, a concert, old Barcelona, books. Maria Jover was able to show me a catalogue for a show that you were in nearly twenty years ago.

It took me a while to tell her about you. At first I mentioned that I had known you and I saw her watching me and it was some weeks before she mentioned that she knew you had gone to the Pyrenees to live with
una anglesa
and I said yes that I had lived with you and that I was there when you were killed and that I had a daughter with you and she died in the accident as well and I was heartbroken at the loss of both of you.

We talk a lot about painters and paintings. She lives down by the side of Santa Maria del Mar. Her husband, too, was held after the civil war. She has not told me about what happened to him—yet I want to know why he was never able to work again. He did not die until recently. Maria gives the impression, however, that he died long ago. I have never asked her too many questions about it. Yet his presence and yours hang over our conversation. When we go to a concert together it is as though we should keep two seats vacant, one for you and one for her husband who was tortured after the civil war. For both of us reality rests in being reminded. For me the whole city of Barcelona, every street I use, every day, evokes memories of the years we were together.

Last week Maria and I came out after a concert in the Palau. We did not speak, we often stay silent as we walk out. We had been listening to Bach’s cello suites. There was just
the single instrument. I was moved by the music. Maria said she had heard Casals playing the Bach in Prades. The music had made me low. I could not face the night on my own trying to sleep.

I asked her to come for a drink. I don’t think she wanted to. I was tired of being alone. She said she would drink a cup of coffee but she sounded reluctant. I took her to the Meson del Café where you would go to wait for me and Michael Graves after the first half of a concert when you had finished looking at the stained glass on the ceiling and the Catalan girls. You had no time for the music then.

I sat there with her. I ordered a brandy with my coffee. She was uncomfortable in the bar. She doesn’t go to bars and she knows nothing of my life that I do not tell her. I talked about the last year of our life together. I told her about Carlos Puig.

I did not tell her how you died or how Isona died. I know that you were driving a jeep and the jeep reversed off the road just outside the village. I know Isona was in the front seat and I know she broke her neck. I am told, they tell me, that she died instantly. They tell me too that you were still alive when they got to you. No one has ever told me if you said anything and I have never asked. I have always presumed that you were too badly injured to talk but maybe you could open your eyes, maybe you could hear. I can’t fill in those bits. I do not know what you felt. I had ceased to understand what you felt sometime before.

There is one thing. I cannot contemplate what happened when the jeep went off the road, those moments. I must not contemplate what happened when the jeep went off the road. Did Isona scream? Miguel, what did she do, the poor child? Miguel, I am in Barcelona now. I cannot think about what happened. It is something I stop myself doing at all hours of the day and night.

I can feel you close.

I told Maria that I had to stop myself thinking about that. I did not tell her that you wanted to kill yourself and to kill the child. Nor did I imply it. I said it was an accident. I said you couldn’t drive. I said maybe you got into the wrong gear. I said the roads were bad. I said whatever I could. I told her the drop was sheer. I do not know what happened. I had lost touch with you. You had disappeared. I do not even know how you managed to start the jeep.

Maria also has a man to remember. I do not know what they did to him. I do not know which method they used to unnerve him. She knows what happened; it was public; she has the motives in her possession. I do not. I thus cannot judge. There are facts missing.

Don’t move. Hold still. I can feel you close.

It is late spring in Barcelona, nearly summer. The swifts are frantic in the air. I am the woman at the window with the chair half out on the balcony, the cane chair with the footrest that I rescued from a rubbish heap in Calle Ancha.

I am lingering here without knowing what to do. And Michael Graves still wants me after all this time. His failure in everything has become for him his failure with me. He has failed to persuade me to live with him, he has failed to make me believe that he can look after me.

I will not settle for him.

There are times when I have wanted to. I needed someone, I needed a set of domestic circumstances, someone to talk to, share meals with, make love to, go out to the bars with. I have never made love with him, although I have sometimes wanted to; even years ago when I was with you I wanted to. Maybe if I had made love with him then things would be different.

I didn’t make love with him then.

I doubt if sex matters to either of us any more.

Loneliness, the loss of energy, selfishness, insomnia, these are some of my problems. He drinks too much, he works too little, he needs me too badly for me to be able to take him. I am not in love with Michael Graves, that is the answer. I cannot live with him, I have nothing to offer him, I cannot look after him, I cannot be the focus of all his hope. I want him to go away. I want you back.

I want you back. That is what I want.

I see him as often as I can. He is still funny and good-humoured and he still loves Barcelona. It is a relief to see him. I must keep him at arm’s length.

He wants me to come back with him to Dublin. He says I cannot remain here forever brooding about you. He says I must move, even if to London or anywhere outside Spain. Maybe it is time I abandoned all this.

*   *   *

I went to Ireland with him last year. I did not go to Enniscorthy and I lived in fear that someone might recognise me. In the streets of Dublin I constantly saw people I thought I knew. I kept watching them and they would turn out to be someone else, someone I didn’t know.

We went to Hook Head for a week. We hired a car and drove from Dublin. We passed through Wexford as the April day was fading and drove towards the sea. There was a guarded pink light which covered everything. We drove towards the sea at dusk, Michael and I, gazing at the extraordinary light. Neither of us had ever seen it before, although we were both born just thirty miles away. It was like being in another country. When we came to the first inlet we stopped to watch. Everything was governed by this light. Everything was changed by it.

We were on Hook Head with the sea on three sides. This
is the Ireland I imagined you and me being furtive in. Staying in the small places as husband and wife. I almost loved Michael Graves that night.

I shall leave here; I shall give up longing for you. I must leave you dead, leave you buried in Alendo in the graveyard, the first bodies to be buried there in years, under the marble gravestone I brought up from Barcelona. You and Isona and poor Carlos Puig, whose body lies beside yours.