by Richard Gwyn
“Hey,” he said. “I know you, man. Watch out. They’re everywhere. But you know about them already, yuh?”
“Who’s that?”
“The orchestrators.” He slurred this, with a French enunciation.
“The castrators?”
“Ha ha ha! Very good. They are that, too. But they plan and scheme and play the tunes as well as doing the snip snip snip.” He cut the air with invisible scissors.
“You seem to know a lot about them.”
“I see far. I read the cards, report only what I find.”
“I know what you do. You predict catastrophe.”
He peered at me as though seeing me for the first time.
“I know what you do,” he mimicked, “too.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. You watch people. You lust”—he drew the word out, making it rhyme with burst, and rolled his eyes lasciviously—“after what you cannot know, above all in the feminine form. You are a voyeur, and filthy son of a putain.”
“You know all this?”
“I remember the future, tu sais?”
“All too clearly.”
He looked around again, then seated himself nervously at my side.
“I read your cards.”
“Thanks but no thanks.”
“Of course.”
Undeterred, he produced a tattered tarot deck from the inside pocket of his waistcoat.
“Okay. No full reading. No time. Te ayudo, nada más. I simply offer my assistance to your present, qu’est-ce qu’on peut dire…situation.”
I remained impassive.
“Cut the deck,” he ordered.
“Not interested.”
The fire-eater sighed, as though dealing with a recalcitrant child.
“Blah blah blah,” he countered, releasing an elastic band from his pack of cards. “Here.” He held out the deck towards me. “Cut the cards.”
I folded my arms and stared at him.
He tutted and grimaced, attempted to impersonate someone staring fixedly into the middle distance, and then began to shuffle the cards.
“Come on. Not a full reading. A single card to indicate the, er, the eventual dénouement of your current situation.”
“I have no situation,” I said, mimicking him in turn, “to speak of.”
“You lie. Menteur. Ta situation est très grave, mon frère.”
I remained impassive, in spite of his absurdly assured suggestion. I was curious to know how he would resolve the impasse between us. He chose to interpret my silence as uncertainty.
“Pues, okay. I select for you a card.”
“In which case it will be your card, not mine.”
He did not respond, but continued shuffling the cards, and laid the deck on the table between us.
“You choose one card, which will be mine. I choose another, which will be yours. Our questions need not be stated. But we both know our own question, n’est-ce pas? My variation on the yes-no tarot reading, using only major arcana cards.”
I sighed, but was now only feigning indifference.
“All right. But I pick your card first.”
“D’accord.”
I pulled out a card, placing it in front of him. It was the Moon. It showed a face on a crescent moon looking down implacably between two towers. In the foreground a dog and a wolf were baying at the moon while a red lobster crawled unnoticed out of a pond behind them.
He looked troubled.
“That card. Merde.”
He muttered beneath his breath for a while, as though reciting a secret mantra.
“So?”
“The worse for me. I want the Star and she send me this. Confusion. Delusion. Sickness. But why she send me this? The treacherous girl.” Then he added, in a sad clown’s voice, “I would not betray her.”
I shrugged. “Who she? You been dipping your wick in illicit zones? Someone out to settle a score, payback?”
He remained quiet, concerned. “C’est pas une affaire de rigolade. Is not a matter for make fun. Something’s wrong.”
“Sans blague,” I said. “You’re not bloody joking.”
“Now you,” he said, evidently keen to move on to my prognosis. “I pick.”
He drew a card, and placed it in front of me. The card was reversed, or upside down. A priestly figure held a triple cross in one hand and raised the other in apparent benediction. At his feet sat two acolytes, a pair of crossed keys between them. The card was the High Priest.
“This means nothing to me,” I said. “You’d better explain.”
“Huh. I better explain, yeah.”
He scratched at his hair vigorously.
“Card says you’re a fucking idiota. Un connard. A, er…wanger.” He broke off into self-congratulatory laughter. “Arrogance and impotence. Weakness. Failure. Evasion. Susceptibilité. You think you know it all. But you don’t. You coming to a big fall, my friend. You better watch your stepping.”
“I thought you might say that.”
“Oh yeah?” He grinned his grin. “Then I think I make my first point already, no?”
Before I had a chance to respond to this, the waiter came out of the café to serve a nearby table. The fire-eater grabbed my new whisky, which I had barely touched, and drained it in one gulp, then limped rapidly away, head averted.
I remained at the table, and signalled the waiter for the bill. One of the two boys who had earlier been watching the spectacle was poking around in the fire-eater’s bag when he returned to his spot. The other held a plastic dog’s head mask in his hand and was stretching it over his face and leering at his companion. The fire-eater swore at them and they backed off, afraid of him, yet intrigued. Picking up the bottle of petrol, he offered it to the boy with the dog’s head, lifting his outstretched thumb to his mouth in a drinking gesture with his free hand. Then he snatched the dog-mask from the boy and reached for a large pebble on the ground, making as if to throw it at them. The boys turned away and one of them paused to light a half-smoked cigarette, which he then passed to the other. From a distance, they stared back at the fire-eater and laughed.
I went inside to use the toilet, and by the time I returned outside to the patio the fire-eater had taken his fire-eating baggage and his dog-mask and left.
Taking my time, I set off on my way towards the sea. I had never considered myself to be especially superstitious but was bothered by this unexpected visitation. I had been spared too many encounters with individuals I’d rather forget about, but then the Gothic quarter was rich with phantoms, and according to a Spanish proverb, such sightings usually boded some kind of ill-fortune. I found myself almost believing that I had invoked the fire-eater, conjuring him back from an earlier life. And there was the irritating possibility—more the likelihood, in spite of his mashed brain—that he had recognised me. Something else occurred to me as well. As he had leaned across my table, I had seen for the first time how his dragon tattoo was an essential fixture of his self-proclaimed identity. The fire-eater was a destructive force, an embodiment of chaos.
Something was in the air. I had been touched by a succession of seemingly unrelated events within less than twenty-four hours. The mugging, the Miró postcard, Nuria, the fire-eater—all of them now prompting in me the disconcerting possibility that the material world and the inner workings of the mind somehow operated in conjunction; that they brushed against each other and were indivisible, one taking up where the other left off.
Keep your eyes open, I told myself. It’s that simple, isn’t it? You coming to a big fall…. You better watch your stepping.
The Mediterranean was straight ahead of me now, and I began to walk along the marina that follows the seaboard north. Yachts were lined along the quay. There was a large wooden sailing ship, of the kind used long ago. Its red sails were furled around the masthead; slashes of uncompromising crimson against the rich varnished brown of the ship’s timber, all of this framed against the blue of sea and sky. Why red sails? What forces w
ere being explored when seafarers decided to use red sails? When they were wrapped close to the wood in that way they seemed to have such restrained energy, a concealed erotic intent. And when they billowed out in the full sea, the ship riding the waves like a great red rose in bloom, what a sight they must have been for any landlubber peasant who happened to be looking up from tying his beans, or weeding between his rows of cabbage. What sentiments of untold weirdness and forgotten longing lay in the vision of a crimson ship coursing through a wild blue sea?
4. IN BARCELONETA
I found the restaurant without much difficulty. Nine o’clock was early for dinner, especially on a Saturday night, so there was no problem securing a table for two. I chose to sit outside, looking towards the sea. There were a few evening promenaders. A cluster of gulls competed for scraps of bread, which were being distributed methodically by a silver-haired man in a pale green suit. He talked to the birds quietly as he fed them, chiding them when one or another became too eager or aggressive. The walk along the waterfront, and the pristine sea air, had me feeling buoyant, almost visionary. I ordered a beer and waited for Nuria.
She arrived shortly after nine, wearing a short white cotton dress and an emboridered grey cardigan. She seemed taller than I remembered from the morning. Her skin was a rich olive, offset by the whiteness of her dress. She wore a plain silver necklace and her dark brown hair was combed straight back and tied with a red cord. I stood to greet her and she kissed me lightly on both cheeks. A formality. She sat down.
“Were you followed?” she asked, in English.
“No. But I saw a dragon.”
“Here in Barcelona? Did it follow you from your misty wet Wales? Tell me about it. You can trust me.” She did all this deadpan.
“He was someone I knew from a few years ago. A vagabond.” I uttered the word with peculiar relish. “He used to do tarot readings. One night in Granada I heard him predict a gruesome accident for an Italian girl called Pia. New Age, a bit daft. The next day she was knocked down by a nun on a moped. Broke a few bones. The dragon left town, but not before this Pia’s boyfriend beat him up.”
“Beat up the dragon?”
“That’s right. But what I remember most about that evening was the look on his face as the boyfriend punched and kicked him senseless. He was enjoying it.”
“Un masoquista?”
“Precisely. Part of his thrill, it seems, is to make these terrible prognoses, and then sit back and take the consequences. Of course, he breathes fire too. That’s his big thing. This evening he was just breathing fire. And he remembered me too, I think.”
I decided not to tell her of my own abbreviated tarot session.
“How well did you know him?”
“Oh, hardly at all. I bumped into him on a few occasions though. Granada, Almería, Cabo de Gata.”
“Cabo de Gata? Where the hippies hang out for winter. Were you one of them?”
“I would hardly call myself a hippy. I travelled for a while, before living here.”
“I remember. You said. Why did you stop? No, hang on a second: why did you start?” Her laughter was infectious. Close-up, I noticed that her eyes were very dark, as near to black as I had ever seen. The whites were slightly bloodshot. I guessed she’d been smoking something other than tobacco.
“You want the long version or the short?”
“Hmm, let’s see. Tell me the long version first. Then, if we’ve time, I’ll hear the shorter one.”
She settled back and lit a cigarette.
“I studied music in London, but because of a trip I made to Greece when I was eighteen or so, I wanted to learn the bouzouki. I already played the guitar, but the bouzouki opens up another world. So I went back to Greece and found a teacher, travelling the islands with him in the summer. The winters picking oranges or olives, or working the press in an olive oil factory. Then later, I worked a season as a fisherman.”
“On a boat? A trailer?”
“Trawler. No. A smallish boat, using nets and sometimes dynamite.”
“Is that legal?”
“Definitely not. But it was only an occasional necessity. Then after three years or so I left, tired not so much of Greece, but of what was happening to it. Travelled around France for nearly two years, working at odd jobs; planting trees in Savoie, the vendange in Roussillon, making Armagnac in the Gers. Then ended up in Spain. So you could say my travels have taken me in a westerly direction. Coming to Spain was a natural choice, since I spoke the language. Have done, though not very well, since I was a kid. I just took some time getting here.”
“Your Spanish is good,” said Nuria. “But if you don’t mind, I like speaking English with you. It gives me an opportunity not to speak Spanish, or Catalan for that matter.”
“Don’t you like speaking Catalan?”
“Of course I do. It’s my first language. But sometimes, especially with somebody new, I like to speak Castilian. Or English. In a way it’s, uh, preferable for me. Not so, how would you say, laden? Comes with baggage for me, Catalan. And French I find a bit…de trop.” She trailed off into laughter, not offering any explanation, before continuing her interrogation.
“Why did you come here, not to the North? You must have relatives there. Asturias, Euskadi; where did you say your father was from?”
“I guess I do, though most of the old ones got killed or dispersed during the civil war. My father didn’t keep in touch. He was that sort of man. He lived in the present, only read about the past. He had a great love of literature. And he encouraged me to read also.”
A waiter came and took our order. We ordered a suquet, a rich fish soup with potatoes, as the main course. We had servings of grilled octopus for starters, Gallego style, and a dry white wine. Nuria tasted the wine and stretched, looking around the restaurant terrace and then out towards the sea.
“Tell me about you,” I said.
“Oh, there’s not a lot to tell. School, study. A year in Paris, which I didn’t enjoy, and two in London, which I did. Then back here. A small town in the Pyrenees. Rows at home. My father left my mother when I was a kid. Headaches. Migraines. For a while I was”—her index fingers framed imaginary speech-marks—“depressed. A brief desire that I might one day learn to fly an aeroplane. Other normal crazy stuff not worth mentioning. I went to a convent school over the border in France, although my mother never was particularly religious. After my trips to France and England, what happened?” she mused aloud, flicking the cigarette lighter on and off. “I suppose, a lucky break. Some would call it lucky anyway, working in television. Except that I absolutely hate the bloody television. Never watch it. Funny, isn’t it?”
She did being vague with a sort of unpredictability that made you wonder if it was her own life she was describing or some stranger’s. She chewed nonchalantly on a piece of bread. Her dark eyes scanned me restlessly, even while she spoke in these tones of affected detachment. Sometimes—who can know how often in a human life?—you have the feeling of walking out into a new and strange landscape, where the colours are shocking and the light is not what it should be. Messages flash too quickly to be read, and unfamiliar birds crowd the overhead wires. The stories that you hold in stock do not correspond with any of this. They have no relevance, no place here. The rules are different. This is how I felt with Nuria. I didn’t want to spoil things, to hear myself tell the story of my life as though it were the prelude to some inevitable romance. I didn’t want to be “interesting” for her, nor her to be for me. I simply wanted to enjoy the strangeness of our meeting up like this, without it having to signify anything.
The octopus came, and in spite of my earlier decision to probe her on the apparent coincidence of our separate visits to the Miró Foundation that morning, I did not bring up the subject of the postcard again. I had become more and more convinced that Nuria had no direct part to play in its delivery to my apartment. She, meanwhile, smoked, drew animal cartoons on the serviettes, and then, waiting for the main course, started
talking about Wales, giving an account of a camping holiday in Snowdonia with an English boyfriend who climbed mountains, an affair which fizzled away after a few days of waiting in pubs for the rain to stop.
“I suffered a bad case of culture shock,” she explained. “But so, I think, did he, the mountaineer. He was caught between me and my English, which was not so good at the time, on the one hand, and the local people, on the other.” She went on. “I liked England. London, anyway. Apart from the weather, which was horrible. But I even enjoyed the rain for the first six months. You can sit at home by a fire and read novels and eat that weird chocolate. Varieties of weird chocolate. Drink muddy tea. I liked that sense of darkness and firelight and the rain pounding at the windows. It was for me—you might think this funny, but—well, exotic. But only for so long. Then I missed Spain and the Pyrenees and the sunshine and the fresh fruit. All fruit tasted the same in England. Like dry cotton wool.
“I shared a house in Finsbury Park with other Spanish and Latinos, and worked as a waitress in an Islington wine bar, off Upper Street; you know the kind of trendy place? Regulation black miniskirt and white shirt. Very chic. And I witnessed for the first time the drinking habits of the English. The way they descend from cold priggishness to semi-conscious porquería—uh, piggery. I learned to ward off the attentions of these drooling idiots, and began to wonder at a basic flaw in British manhood that rendered any kind of meaningful conversation quite beyond their repertoire without huge quantities of alcohol.”
“So, what did you like about London?”
“Oh, the sense of being where things were happening, like Barcelona, but more so. Barcelona has style and diversity, but London has breadth, scope, volume. I liked the sense of being in the middle of something so large, like a sprawling monster. I also liked taking walks on Hampstead Heath, and exploring alone, on foot, areas of London where I knew nobody, or nothing of the location. So I would take a Tube to, say, Bethnal Green, and walk for two or three hours, until eventually I arrived at some place I had never heard of, find a bus stop or a Tube station, and go home to Finsbury Park. I enjoyed the randomness of this kind of adventure. The anonymity.”