by Richard Gwyn
Manu stared at the end of his bed. He was washed out from the excitement and painkillers. “You know the worst of it?” he went on, after a while. “They wouldn’t even hear me out properly, in the court. They kept cautioning me for using disrespectful language and blasphemy. Can you imagine? ‘Respect?’ I said, ‘You want my respect? What kind of respect have you shown me? I was only exercising the rights of the Spaniard to keep rabbits.’
“They kept going on about hygiene and health and safety. ‘Your honour,’ I said, ‘why do the drains in Barcelona smell so bad?’ He waved his hand at me, the jerk. One of those superior little waves. ‘I’ll tell you why they stink, the drains of Barcelona,’ I said. ‘HUMAN SHIT,’ I said. ‘The shit that is shat every day. My shit and yours. I assume, your honour, that you shit also. Everyone shits. Not just my rabbits.’ He banged on the desk then. Contempt of court. I got this massive fine. One fine for refusal to comply, another for contempt. Two fines. They said the City would remove the rabbits within twenty-four hours. So I got home, changed, went to get you, but you weren’t at home. Managed to get the rabbits in the van before the death squad came. Only rabbit killing today is going to be done by me, I thought.”
He stopped, evidently exhausted by the effort of giving his account. “Listen, hombre, I’m going to get a kip. Remember to tell my wife, huh?”
I got up to leave.
“Okay, Manu. You just take it easy now.”
He looked up at me through half-closed eyes.
“Don’t worry. That’s exactly what I’m going to do. Hasta luego.”
“Hasta la próxima.”
The Baron followed me out. The policeman at the door went back inside as we left, wearing a rather downcast expression. I told the Baron I would find my own way back to Santa Caterina, and we shook hands. I needed to be alone. I bought a bottle of Fundador and went back home, stopping off at Manu’s flat on the way. His wife was in, and threw her arms up in despair on hearing of Manu’s situation. She muttered something about divorce, and I carried on upstairs.
In the flat I pulled on a jersey and put the radio on. They were playing Mahler. I went onto my veranda, uncorked the brandy, and lay back in the hammock. The night was clear and cold, but I hardly felt the chill with the brandy racing through my bloodstream like a bush-fire. I stared at the stars and felt the emptiness flood over me.
21. HOW MUCH DEATH WORKS
I awoke in the small hours with a dream of Nuria’s lips on mine. The terrace door was banging against its frame, and with each thud I felt as if my lungs were being scraped out by an icy metal claw. I had fallen asleep with the half-empty bottle of brandy cradled in my arms, but surfacing into full consciousness, I could see it on the low table next to the hammock. A blanket was draped over my body, but again, I could not remember having fetched one from the bedroom. Manoeuvring stiffly out of the hammock, I shuffled indoors. My body was shivering, but my mind was ablaze. Crazy thoughts and images clamoured for brain-space, piling in after each other in a chaotic stream. The clock by my bedside stood at 3.30. Crossing the living room to my desk, still wrapped in the blanket, I opened an old notebook and started to write a few words, but my hand sprawled and slid across the page in the cold. I dropped the blanket and searched in the cupboard next to the bathroom, pulling out an electric fire that I had stored away in April. I set it down near the desk and took my old Olivetti typewriter from its case. Although I used a personal computer for my editorial work, I still reverted to the Olivetti from time to time. It was like a trusted friend. Feeding the paper and turning the scroll produced those comforting clicks that always suggested something akin to alchemy. I rubbed my hands and took a slug of brandy straight from the bottle, realising as I did so that the action indicated a sad state of aesthetic and moral bankruptcy. Shaking, I lit a Camel. I was down to the basic gestures now. The upturned bottle, the filling ashtray. I had to write something down, and the certainty with which I had brought myself to the task suggested that the words had already begun to filter through to consciousness, but once seated and ready, I forgot entirely what it was I had wanted to write.
No words came.
The room was quiet. Outside too, there was total silence.
I lit another cigarette, stared some more at the blank piece of paper, then got up and went to the kitchen to fetch a glass. I poured some brandy, took another drink.
My feet were cold. I went into the bedroom, opened a drawer and found a pair of thick woollen socks. Two socks as soft as rabbits. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I pulled them on and wriggled my toes. Everything about my body suddenly felt oddly distant. I could see the movement of my toes, for instance, but could not really feel them move. I put this down to the cold. But the cold seemed to be inside my body, rather than on the outside, coming in.
Back in the living space I put some music on the stereo, quietly. The old troubadour songs that Pontneuf had known about. The song “La Trystesse de la Dona Marie” was the first track. It pained me to hear it, and as the heartrending drone of the Galician pipes broke in on the serene lyric, my eyes filled. There was an almost unbearable nostalgia to the music that was compounded now by its association with my time at the Refuge, and by thoughts of Nuria. At the same time as experiencing a profound sadness, I realised that the music was merely feeding the wound. But what of it? I felt entitled to this moment of corrosive self-immersion. At the end of the song, I removed the disk from the player, went over to the typewriter, and ripped out the blank sheet of paper, crumpling it into a ball and tossing it in the wastebasket. I returned to the bedroom, leaving the connecting door open. Lying on the bed, I gradually drifted off into a restless sleep.
When I awoke, it was midday. The physical dislocation that had set in the night before was not gone, but I took a shower and dressed anyway. I couldn’t bring myself to shave as my hands were shaking too badly, and decided that I would attend to that later. Decided, in fact, that many things needed attending to later, including the state, for want of a better word, of my soul. What I needed, I determined, was some sudden and profound spiritual experience. That would do the trick. I laughed out loud as I got into my jeans, standing on one leg and very nearly falling over, saved only by the proximity of a wall. No, on second thoughts, what I needed now was a drink. In another location. Somewhere with a view.
But first I needed coffee, and filled the small espresso pot. When it was done I poured half a cupful, stirred in sugar, then added a generous helping of Fundador. The carajillo breakfast gave me a physical jolt. I drank it quickly, pulled on a sweater, then, realising I was too warm, took it off again. I grabbed my leather jacket off the hook behind the door and went downstairs.
So began an afternoon of wandering in circles around the Gothic quarter. I dropped in on a disconsolate Igbar Zoff and we went to Santiago’s bar in Neu de Sant Cugat, making a slight detour to stand outside the ex-convent, with me half-expecting the fire-eater to materialise on the steps, hand outstretched.
“What are we waiting here for?” asked Igbar, shuffling his feet in the cold. He was yellow-skinned and gaunt.
“An apparition, perhaps.”
“You haven’t given up?”
“No.”
Igbar Zoff yawned.
“Maybe you should. Oh, I don’t doubt the veracity of your tale, old chap. I just wonder at your tenacity in the act of obsessive return.”
“I see.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“You’re like a dog with a bone. Won’t let go. But in a way I’m pleased for you, Lucas. At least you’ll recognise your own doppelganger when you meet him. Damned if I will. I’ve been chasing him around for years now.”
“No one seeks out his doppelganger. It’s the other way around. He looks for you.”
“Is that so? Things must be worse than I’d thought. I’m waiting for no one. Never have.”
“How about Sean?” I asked, without conviction.
“Sean cares only for himself. He�
�s a cunt.”
“That’s harsh.”
“Life, forgive the platitude, is harsh. The city of marvels is a brothel, after all. You get what your fantasy dictates.”
He looked up at me. The whites of his eyes were jaundiced and his gaze unfocussed.
“Who was it,” he asked, “said, ‘something’s boring me: I think it must be me’ or similar?”
“Dylan Thomas?”
“Dylan bloody Thomas. That would follow. Another vitriolic dwarf. Except the something in my case isn’t precisely me, nor is it anybody else. And besides, boredom isn’t the word. It’s to do with the opposite: losing the gift of spontaneous perception. Fatal for a painter, don’t you think? I’ve become the kind of person who looks in mirrors and sees what isn’t necessarily there.”
The bar was quiet: it was early for lunch. As we entered, Santiago lifted his head from his newspaper with what in anyone else would be called a scowl but might, for him, have passed for a smile, a black cigar trembling on his lip, and let out a grunt of acknowledgement. “Oy,” he said to me, “I thought you were dead,” and then, without waiting for a reply, re-immersed himself in his paper. I had not been back there since the incident with the fire-eater.
Igbar Zoff refused the offer of lunch, picking instead at a saucerful of tired-looking anchovies, and barely perking up after a bottle of red. He was at that stage of drinking when the physical effect of alcohol is dulled, and the drink serves only to provide occasional, despairing insights into a chasm of despondency. He was intent on starting some new work, he said, as though trying to convince himself of this intention, rather than me. He planned a series of paintings describing a visual narrative of all the most run-down bodegas in the barrio. He had made this chronicling of low drinking dives the focus of his life work, like the brothels of Lautrec, Degas and Picasso. But his talk of plans sounded weak, half-hearted, as though he were simply filling empty space, preoccupied with a wider, bleaker vision; perhaps the vision of his own death a year later.
I walked with Igbar back towards his flat, embraced him, and left him there, then continued up Carders, across Laietana, and over to the Ramblas. The evening was already drawing in. I must have spent longer with Igbar than I had thought. But I was in no hurry, settling instead into a kind of waiting game. Something, I was certain, was going to happen today. On the way down Ferrán I bought a Havana cigar, and at the bottom of the street took a right and went to the Café de l’Opera on the Ramblas. Here was a place with a view, one that in the past had given me hours of pleasure, people-watching. There was a spare table in the front part of the café, so I sat and smoked and ordered a coffee and a brandy. The usual parade of dramatically weathered old queens, self-consciously artistic types, voluble Catalan theatre-goers, enthusiastic young Americans, and voyeurs (like myself) were attended in turn by the efficient and indifferent waiters. A parodic rendition of a vanished café society.
Before long I tired of the posing, the overloud declamations of a persistent and highly camp social observer at the next table, the laughter of the American students, and the taste of my cigar. I was sweating inside my shirt, and felt sticky and uncomfortable. So I paid and left, crossed the Ramblas, and sought out more modest, shadowy company in the cheap dives of the Barrio Chino. After all, as Igbar had reminded me, the city of marvels had something to offer for each occasion, every mood, did it not? The cold hit me in shivery gusts as I walked. I visited several bars that I knew, and some that I didn’t, but never stayed for more than one drink.
I was impatient now, seeking something that I could not locate in either my imagination or my memory. The Raval held no interest for me, and I ignored the predictable invitations from the street-girls as I moved between bars. Then, tiring of the locale, and seeing the same faces in different drinking-holes once too often, I backtracked, and again walked over the Ramblas and up through the maze of alleys to take a drink at an Andalusian bar whose regular clientele consisted almost entirely of inebriate senior citizens, mostly women, one of whom was prone to burst into mournful song whenever the cash-register trilled. From there I ambled up to a bodega I knew between Palma de Sant Just and Avinyó, where I ordered a carafe of red wine and a portion of patatas bravas. I poked at the food, but couldn’t bring myself to eat. The rough red wine went down easily enough, but had no effect. I ordered another carafe. A man wearing a cowboy hat, with a scar running from his ear to the corner of his lip, attempted to engage me in conversation. I heard him clearly enough but felt no compulsion to acknowledge him. On my failing to respond, he cursed me and turned away. I let him be.
Although not perceptibly drunk, that strange displacement from the physical world that I had begun to feel the night before had returned. If not an actual ghost, I was at the very least a sleepwalker. So I slept as I walked, and I walked down to Plaça Reial, where both sleepwalkers and ghosts are invariably drawn. Creatures of the night were rousing themselves now, and as I entered the square, I knew that I had come to the right place. As usual, a police van was parked at the far end, ready to weigh in on any overtly illegal activity and to collect the casualties of overdosing, or even of inhaling too sharply the rank air. There were benches around the circumference. I settled myself down on one of these, and lay on my back.
I don’t know how long I had been lying there when I first noticed an excruciating pain in my side. With a great deal of effort, I tried to move, but it proved too much. I allowed myself a rest before trying again, and was about to close my eyes when the figure of a policeman moved between me and the nearest street-lamp, casting a shadow across my face. Another cop stood behind him.
“You okay?”
I replied in the negative.
“What’s the problem? Drugs?”
“No,” I said. “I can’t move.”
“Stand up please.” He obviously didn’t believe me.
With a superhuman effort I swung my legs off the bench, and, leaning hard on its metal frame, attempted to push myself into a standing position. I was almost vertical when my knees buckled under me and I slid to the ground. The first policeman leaned towards me and, with a firm hand under my armpit, heaved me up, while the second helped steady me from behind. I was now standing, with assistance, but remained very wobbly.
“Can you get me an ambulance?” I asked, and added redundantly, “I think I’m ill.”
“Takes too long, an ambulance. You got insurance?”
“No.”
“Well then, come with us.”
The cop steered me towards a waiting car and helped me into the back seat. On the way to the hospital he tried asking me questions, while the other policeman drove. By now my teeth were chattering and my body shaking uncontrollably. I felt inside my jacket and fumbled for an identity card. He copied the name onto a notepad. Then I blacked out, and the next thing I knew I was in a brightly lit hospital room, surrounded by medical staff dressed in green. I was gasping for air, and somebody placed an oxygen mask over my face. I was trolleyed down seemingly endless corridors and lifted into a bed with clean, crisp sheets. I dimly remember being told to keep the mask on my face, a nurse saying there was an elastic strap attached to the mask for this purpose. She lifted my hand behind my head to demonstrate this. Then I was left alone.
I knew that I was dying. Something that resided in my body was trying to lift itself upward, outward. Something weightless and ethereal. I had read about this in accounts of near-death experiences, but had never attached much significance to it. Now it was my sole reality. Whatever counted as me was trying to leave. It raised itself above the body and hovered there awhile. My body retrieved it, not ready to relinquish this vagrant, fleeing element. Now that it was happening, I was disappointed by my own lack of any sense of occasion, and while recognising that death had come before My Time, I failed in any significant way to fight it. The body was willing to embrace death, and the mind did not respond so much as heave a sigh of resignation. I had not expected to face death in so unceremonious a manner. A
ll I could register was sorrow.
That night I struggled with personal extinction. At times I managed to visualize Death, to make of him a person. He was not a cloaked Angel, nor a horned messenger from Hell: he appeared more as a weary, grey-faced tax-collector. He told me that my number was up, that it was nothing personal, but that I had thrown away my single chance at life and now my nemesis had come as a thing of little consequence. What else could I expect? I found this of little comfort, rather like being told that I had failed to attend school regularly, or been unpunctual at work, and must therefore be expelled, or sacked.
I imagined Death imparting these notices of dismissal in different guises. Death helping out by silently folding sheets in the hospital laundry; Death as caretaker of a park where children play, unaware of his custodial gaze; Death as the face reflected in the shop window when you pass by on a rainy day and do not recognise yourself. Death as a return to the warehouse of personal memory. And with that possibility, the images piled in. An onrush of faces, moments, fleeting instances dredged upward and into consciousness from the sludge of recall. Sitting in a puddle of warm sand and water on a Pembrokeshire beach, my mother in dark glasses, which made me stare into those refracting lenses, questing after the eyes that lay behind them. A black spaniel dog; a white lighthouse at midday and a jade sea. Watching a boy in the schoolyard burning an ant with his magnifying glass; leaning on the railings of a Greek ferry as it entered an island harbour at nightfall. The passage of years filtered through random iconic moments: here the bent back of my Welsh tad-cu, there the thick brilliantined black hair of my Spanish father, as he turned his dark eyes on me and told me that freedom must be wrung from the hands of the oppressors.
A spasm of shame grew inside me. I had died for nothing. I believed in nothing.
But Death stayed away; all that night and the following day and night I lay there, fighting for breath, sweating profusely, catching snatches of drug-induced slumber, monstrous nightmares, visions. I began to dream the same frenzied dreams around the clock, of pursuit, and of crawling through an oxygen-starved marshland. The air was so dense that even the strange creatures I encountered there were too lugubrious to do more than slaver and drool, though I was terrified of their jaws snapping at my heels as I heaved myself from puddle to puddle across this immense quagmire.