by Colm Toibin
Several hours passed before the jeep pulled up outside the door. Michael Graves had fallen asleep in the corner, but Katherine had no urge to sleep. She no longer felt even hungry. She woke Michael when she heard the noise of the engine. The driver of the jeep had returned, without Miguel.
Where was he? Katherine asked. The driver was not inclined to answer, but she persisted and he told her that there were problems with the police. However it was not important and would be sorted out in the morning. She asked him where exactly Miguel was and he said in the police station, in Llavorsi—there had been problems.
“Que pasa con la policía?” Michael Graves asked. The man was already unloading boxes from the back of the jeep. He repeated that Miguel would be back up in the morning.
Katherine carried a box of candles into the house. There were sheets and blankets in other boxes, as well as food, and mattresses in the back of the jeep. They could not persuade the driver to say anything more about why Miguel was being held in the police station in Llavorsi. When he left they lit candles and sorted out the bedclothes. She took a candle upstairs to the attic room and Michael helped her carry a mattress up to the bed. He made his own bed in the room beside the kitchen. All night the sound of water rushing from the small hills above them down into the valley kept her awake; all night until just before dawn when the birdsong started and she knew she would have no sleep at all. She went down to the bathroom and washed in cold water. Michael Graves was fast asleep when she glanced into his room.
The sun had not yet risen; there was still a grey shadow over the world below. She walked along a track away from the village; the grass at the side was drenched with dew. As she walked, it grew lighter and she noticed more and more how the colour of the stone in the houses matched the colour of the rock almost exactly. Even the slates on each roof found a match in some shade of the stone behind. The houses could have been caves, so closely were they related to the surrounding rock.
Miguel did not come back that day. The driver brought them enough food to keep hunger at bay: a huge round of rubbery white bread, oil and tomatoes, lettuce, some tins of tuna fish. Michael Graves found more wood for the fire and as evening fell they lit candles. Michael had brought some books which he put on a shelf in the kitchen.
She tried to read but found the flickering of the candle irritating; after a few pages she put the book aside and went to the door. There were lights in a house below, and the sound that Michael Graves had noticed too, of mountain streams in the distance.
In the morning she heard footsteps in the hall downstairs. She had slept soundly and dreamlessly during the night and yet when she heard him in the hall, it was as though she had thought of nothing else since she had seen him last, as though everything had been suspended between the time he left and the time he came back.
She stood in her nightdress at the bottom of the stairs and looked at him. She didn’t say anything. He seemed tired and was carrying a few days’ growth of beard. Michael Graves came out of the front room wearing only his trousers and immediately began to roar at him and they both started a mock fight with their fists raised, laughing. She rested her shoulder against the wall. She wished Michael Graves would leave them alone.
They did not make love when they went to bed but lay together holding each other.
She lay with her back to him while he explained what had happened. He spoke to her slowly and seemed to choose each word carefully so that she would understand.
Four of them, including Miguel, had stayed in this house in the months after the civil war, he said. Carlos Puig was their leader—Carlos was still in prison in Burgos, although there were rumours now they were going to let him out. Did she understand? That was more than ten years ago. He himself was an anarchist in the province of Lerida. He had burnt the church and the police station in almost every town in Lerida.
Miguel asked her if she understood what he was telling her and she said she did. He had been with Carlos Puig. He wanted her, Katherine, to know they had killed people, including women and children, during the war. And later, when the divisions between them and the other political groups in the war became too great, four of them came here to Pallosa and they attacked from here; they knew how to make bombs and they used them against the police.
He wanted her to know everything—did she understand that he wanted her to know everything? Yes, she told him, she did. They had bombed a policeman’s house and they had burnt his wife and children to death. He stopped for a moment and held her. This was more than ten years ago and there was a war on, she must remember that, he whispered. He sighed then, and told her that once they had shot a child who had tried to leave the house. He put his arms around her; there was sweat on his hands.
The war was well over when the police arrested them, he said. He was in Barcelona and they were not sure whether he had been involved with Carlos Puig. They caught the others in the house here in the village with the bombs and everything else. They beat them so badly that one of them, Robert Samaranch, died.
He stopped talking and when he resumed he was almost in tears. He was caught in Barcelona and held for two years, he said; most of the time he was in solitary confinement. Did she understand what that meant? She said she did. The police in Llavorsi now wanted to know why he had come back to the mountains and to this house. They knew who he was. They told him that. But he didn’t think there would be any more trouble. Did she understand that? Was it all right?
When he got out of bed to go downstairs she noticed bruises and cuts on his back. She called him then and asked him what had happened. He returned and lay down again, and told her that they had hit him, but not much.
His story stayed with her for days, as though she had eaten something strange and strong, but vaguely familiar.
She kept away from both him and Michael Graves, went walking on her own, went to bed early, sat apart from them on the small balcony in Michael Graves’s room smoking and looking out towards the high mountains to the north. An image came to her constantly of a child running for help, running for her life, being run through with bullets, while the thunderous sound of a fire roared in the background.
A LETTER FROM PALLOSA
Pallosa
Lerida
Spain
30.5.1952
Dear Mother,
I received your telegram. It frightened me to death when it came. I sat at the table with it in my hand. I was hardly able to open it. I am sorry for not writing and I am sorry, too, that there is not enough news in my letters. I am sorry that you don’t know enough about me and I know that you’re paying for this and, yes, the money is coming in on time and I am grateful. Does that help?
I will try to write to you. The days go by; there are things to do and things to consider. It is hard, maybe you will understand this, it is hard to do something new now that everything has become habit.
I have thrown in my lot with a man called Miguel whom I met in Barcelona. It is difficult to write about him. There is a solidity about him. I don’t know if you know what I mean. He is self-contained. He has been out all day cutting wood; wood, as you can imagine, is important.
But that is not why he is out cutting wood today. Certain things preoccupy him. Our private life, waking to find him wrapped around me, that is what is most real to us. I don’t know if you have experienced that. During the day sometimes he hardly notices me. We find things to do. I do not know how long this will last. Maybe you understand why I haven’t written about this before. It is not the sort of thing which we talk about normally, is it?
If he ever finds someone who lived here in the past, before the war, the Spanish civil war, he becomes tense. He will seek them out, try and get them on their own, and go over the same things again and again. The same words. I know them now. How there were crops grown here before the war; how there was a mill in Tirvia; which families were fascist and with Franco during the war; what they did in the village after the war.
I am bored by his obses
sion with the war. I leave him alone when the war comes up. He has found a woodcutter to talk about life before the war, during the war, after the war and he’s even paying him to talk. There will be no wood cut. I know there will be no wood cut.
Our neighbours are not the sort of people you could borrow wood from if you ran out of wood in the winter. Most of the houses in the village are empty and have been since the civil war. Ghosts live in them; old family photos go yellow on the walls; bits and pieces of broken crockery and delft lie broken or chipped in presses. But they are still intact, the twenty or so empty houses, and I have only been in one or two of them. Some day, a long time from now, they will all fall down and no one will care because no one will ever come back here. The people from here live in Barcelona now, or Lerida, or Gerona.
Three of the houses are occupied, candles burn in them at night. There is Fuster and his wife, quiet and watchful both of them, but intelligent and kind when you need them to be kind. They have children in Barcelona, they have a telephone. We go there sometimes at night and talk to them.
There is no talking to the other two. There is Lidia, who owns the cows, constantly on the look-out for some infringement of her rights which has occurred in the past or is about to occur in the future, constantly urging us to tell her where we married and when. She waters the milk she sells us and some day I will water the money we pay her as well.
I cannot pass her without a conversation. She waylays me, even when I think she is far away and I can escape for a stroll down the village without an interrogation into my past, my present and my future, with constant references to the Virgin Mary, and various other members of the heavenly household, dear to the hearts of Spanish RCs, even when I’ve watched her moving away, I suddenly find that she has returned to haunt me.
Where did I buy my clothes? Where exactly is Ireland? When am I going to Barcelona next? Why do I have no children? Days go by when I pretend not to know what she’s saying.
Her old mother is half her size, permanently encased in black robes. She squawks at me like an old turkey when I meet her. She speaks only Catalan. Luckily, I don’t know a word of it, but I am starting to learn, so soon I may be able to relay to you the wit and wisdom of Lidia’s mother. I cannot imagine what it would be like to have lived all your life up here.
There is also a brother, who is a bit soft and visits us every evening before dinner. He met a woman once, Mayte or something was her name, and he was going to marry her. He tells us this each evening. He is funny. He does no work. Lidia does everything. When she gets old she will have nobody and this place will be even more forsaken than it is now. Her brother will be no use to her anyway. I have fantasies of her starving to death some winter. I mustn’t be too hard on her. It is not easy.
We don’t speak to the other family at all. I think Miguel has been rude to them. They are the Matarós. Their house is the biggest house and they own a jeep. There is a family with one daughter aged about twenty-five and an older woman who is a sister of either the husband or wife. A few months went by in the winter when we didn’t see the sister at all and I have a feeling that there are others inside the house whom we haven’t seen yet, just like in Jane Eyre, and Miguel thinks I am probably right. We wait patiently for some of them to appear and I will let you know as soon as this happens.
There is something else that has been on my mind and I will say it to you now. We were burned out during the Troubles in Ireland. You and I have never talked of this, which is odd, as we have spoken frankly about other things. We were burned out during the Troubles. I put it bluntly down now and I hope that you’re still reading. This is how I put it. But it isn’t exactly what happened, is it?
We weren’t burned out, because we didn’t leave, we built a new house which still stands and we built it fast. But you were burned out because you left then and you’ve never been back; no matter what my father said about how safe we were, you stayed in London. I am your only child. I saw you for holidays and we never talked about what happened that night in all the years.
The locals turned on us. That’s what happened. That’s what the Troubles were for us. The time the locals turned on us. That’s what happened in Ireland in 1920. I don’t remember a fire, but I remember a sound, like a big wind, and being carried. I don’t remember seeing the fire, I must have been three years old. I remember staying in Bennett’s Hotel in Enniscorthy. I’ll never forget the sound of the wind. What do you remember? Please tell me what happened. How did you get out? How did I get out? How many of them came? Why did you leave and never come back?
I always believed that what happened to us was an act of evil, something vicious done, that when tension was high it was us they would go after—they would round on us, the locals. No good came of it. Did it? I want to know about it, so I can think about it. It has become important. If you want me to write to you, I’m afraid you’ll have to take me seriously. It’s not easy to write like this.
Yours with love as always,
Katherine
THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
Calm, quiet days in the Pyrenees. The sharp chill of winter yielding to the subtle movements of spring. The foresters were at work in the hills above the village. She watched the elaborate ritual of felling a tree, the long preparations, the shouting, the resting periods. She was intrigued by the unsettling of nature at its source, the disturbed insect life, bird life, wildlife. And what was left behind resembled a battle scene: stumps of trees, blocks of wood, loose briars, brambles, a shorn world still wrapped in by the forest, an oasis of hurt.
She followed the foresters with oil and board and a small easel and she painted the felling of trees, the havoc. She was fascinated by the new colours of dead wood, of wounded stumps by the small clearing in the forest breathing in freely while it could.
The foresters started at dawn. She got up and left Miguel sleeping, his warm body in the bed. It was always freezing and it was too cold to wash. She put her clothes on as quickly as she could, layer after layer of vests and pullovers. She made a flask of coffee, put bread and cheese into a bag which she carried on her back as she did the easel and canvas. Covering herself with a huge rug, she set off in the early morning to the place where the foresters were working a mile or two away. She wore a woollen scarf on her head.
The foresters were already at work clearing the pine trees from the skirting of a small side road. She could place herself far back and paint the devastation they had caused. She mixed colours carefully: the oily brown, fresh green, withered yellow mingling with the flat, cold blue of the sky, the remnants of frost and snow and the beginnings of spring when the world starts to open up.
She had seen an exhibition in London of paintings from the First World War, pictures of landscape as wreck, as a place where men died brutally and cruelly. She had in mind a number of pictures, she could not remember by whom, in which nature itself was the subject, the battlefield as a mutation, as a perversity, in which the violence was done to the natural order, to animals, to birds and insects, to fields and flowers. It was just such a sense of the world and its order and disorder that she wanted for these paintings.
Music came to her all morning as she worked, snatches of tunes listened to the night before, whole arias, or just the feeling in a piece that she had listened to. Michael Graves had brought them the music. He came and went: sometimes they had no idea where he went, but mostly he went back to Barcelona and made what money he could teaching and drawing. She missed him; she had become close to him. Once or twice he had arrived in a state of dejection: ill, broke, quiet, going for walks on his own or staying in bed and not getting up until the evening. But his spirits were usually high, he generally wanted to stay up all night talking. Each time he came he brought them presents.
He came with an old record player he had bought in Barcelona with a handle to wind it up and replacement needles. It worked perfectly. He brought a big box of records and each time thereafter he added to the collection. At first she thought she would ne
ver get to hear them all, there were so many. Michael put himself in charge of the record player. He selected everything and introduced every piece of music, sometimes not telling them what it was until it was over. Miguel was familiar with some of the operas and could sing along and recognise tunes; but Michael knew everything, even the Italian or French words. He had heard it all before in Enniscorthy, he said. Katherine had heard nothing before. She didn’t believe him about Enniscorthy.
Symphonies, songs, chamber music, opera arias, sacred music, sonatas, concertos. The records consisted mostly of excerpts. Michael told her the story of Madame Butterfly and she listened as he put the needle down and the static came loud and clear followed by the voice: Un bel di Vedremo. He played her Claudia Muzio singing the great aria from Tosca: “I have lived for art, I have lived for love.” He sang it himself before he put it on and told her how poor Tosca had done nothing to deserve her fate. He sang it again. Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore. He put the needle down and the magic happened. He played her arias from the great French operas: Gigli singing from Samson et Dalila; the tenor and baritone duet from The Pearl Fishers; the soldiers’ prayer from Gounod’s Faust.
Long nights in the Pyrenees. Darkness fell at four in the deep days of winter. They lit candles and stoked up the fire in the kitchen. She tried to learn Catalan from Miguel. She tried to imitate the guttural clipped accent he used when he spoke Catalan. At first she spoke it as a joke, using just the phrases she knew, trying to put nouns and verbs together to form sentences. When she went for the milk every day down in the village she talked to the peasants in Catalan, but had immense difficulty understanding anything they said.
Slowly it became a language they used between themselves, not replacing Spanish which they still spoke when it was vital that what they said was understood. Slowly it became like the record player on the shelf in the kitchen or the fierce cold of winter, slowly it became another pattern in the fabric they had woven for themselves.