by Michael Foss
Beyond the suburbs finally, in a huddle of roadside shacks, we saw a weak light in an early labourers’ bar and stopped for coffee and quick shots of anis seco. Outside, two patient mules snuffled at hay and scraped pensive hoofs on the gravel of the lay-by.
It was my turn to drive. The sun was struggling up, looking smudged and watery but for us the life-giving star that rescued us from night. The road ran straight south, like a thin scar across the full abdomen of Spain. The two passengers, hunched in awkward shapes, were at last rocked into sleep. I too was tired. The unvarying line of the road dragged at my eyelids. The murmur of the engine and the quiet drumming of the tyres made a lullaby. My head dropped, then shot up again with a monstrous charge of adrenalin jolting through my body. For a few seconds I had drifted into sleep and the car had slipped down the slight camber of the road into the wide, shallow ditch on the right. At 50 mph we jarred into the bottom of the ditch, bouncing over stones and rough ground, and then I was fully conscious again, wrestling the bucking steering-wheel to pull us back onto the road. In this hectic moment I over-compensated. The car spurted out of the dirt, a back wheel spinning, then gripped and dashed at an angle across the tarmac onto the wrong side of the road. In a second or two I regained control and had it straight, but when I looked up I saw, directly in my pathway at a distance of about two hundred yards, a big Pegaso truck charging upon us. I flicked the wheel to the right and accelerated. I saw the truck-driver in the high cab, his face a rictus of panic, standing on the brakes. Then the mudguard of the truck seemed to pass over our left shoulder and the truck went by with a roar of engine and a blast of air-horn that sounded like a dam breaking. In a few seconds we were clear and alone in an empty winter morning.
As soon as I could pull off onto level ground I stopped and we all climbed out warily, leaving the doors open. The car-owner had some solicitous looks for his vehicle, then swung himself under the chassis to check for damage. The Irishman, looking bemused, was about to say something but thought better of it and lit a cigarette. I walked apart to urinate. Then I got into the back seat and lay down and we drove off without a word. I dozed for some time, only becoming fully awake when we stopped on the apron of a sharp new roadside restaurant, all blue-patterned tiles and Moorish arches and a long sloping red roof. Peeping in we saw it was closed and deserted, so we strolled in the mild sunlight and someone tried a joke about our memory of momentary horror.
Ahead, a broken line of hills, like a faint wash on a watercolour was just visible, and somewhere beyond that were the pewter seas of the Mediterranean. We gazed that way and I think the same thought was in each of our minds: ‘Despite bad omens the gods are with us so far. Fingers crossed that we get to the sea.’
*
We got there, of course. In the hill village it was cold, the wind snapping suddenly round the corners of steep cobbled streets. I felt the lassitude that comes after bad times and danger. My companions were stiff from the long cramps of the ride and chilled from weather and aftershock. In those December days the village closed early, battened into darkness soon after the Angelus bell, with only a few lights and an open bar by the main square. Reluctant to face the empty, unheated house too soon we went to the Bar Espejo for a dish of tough chicken and stayed there within reach of the butano heater, ordering rounds of ciento-tres, Malaga dulce, raw local wine and stuff that was even worse. We talked of this and that, with long silences, but no one cared to mention the whiff of death that we had caught that morning. At about eleven we stumbled up the rough black street, a little bit drunk, and went to bed in a house of bitter discomfort and almost no furniture. I had a sleeping-bag spread on a floor of sloping flagstones.
Next morning, I found the Irishman pacing the kitchen, stroking his beard.
‘How you feeling?’ he said, giving me a leery look.
‘OK,’ I replied, ‘all things considered.’
‘Weird night, what?’
‘Was it? I slept pretty well.’
‘No funny stuff, then?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Let me tell you a story,’ he said, pouring hot water over grains of instant coffee.
He had woken suddenly in the night, jerked from sleep by the sense of someone prowling in the room. In the poor light he had seen a figure and after a few moments had recognized it as me. He was about to speak to me when something in the obsessive shuffling steps made him stop. The motions were those of dreams, and then it came to the Irishman that I was sleepwalking. Face to the wall I began to rearrange some shoes lined up on the floor, pushing them about like toy boats in a child’s bath. And all the time I was talking, low-pitched words that had the stamp of coherence and organization. The sound of this language seemed oddly familiar, and in a while he had placed it. It was the sound of an Indian tongue, such as he had heard among the Indians of the newsagents and small grocery shops in his part of North London. Afraid to wake me, the Irishman sat up in bed wondering what to do. After a while I abandoned the shoes and sidled out of the bedroom, closing the door carefully behind me.
Awake and conscious, I have now no memory of Hindi, apart from a few mispronounced numbers and some broken sentences of the kind that the Raj would address to servants. All my conscious effort, in fact, has been given to another linguistic task, to try to get on good terms with English, a process I expect to last the rest of my life.
So I conclude that the ‘I’ of my waking mind is somehow less than the whole person. Like icebergs, we are supported by a hidden subliminal level which, again like icebergs, may be weightier than all that’s seen.
I am more than I know myself to be. Out of my childhood emerges a cloaked figure, Western genes grafted to Indian environment. We pull back the cloak. Light falls on the whole person, a completed and manifest history. I rub my eyes in astonishment: I wonder, where am I now?