“No. I don’t know him. I saw only Bechet and Johnson.”
He smoothed his red hair, flaming even in low-wattage Spanish light. “Back home is where the action is. History has ordained it.” He laughed.
“But what do you think of Spain, now that you’ve been here a couple of days?”
“Bad feel, Cate. Very bad feel, even though I haven’t seen much. A lot of cops and soldiers around, and the people don’t look—well, as though they have options. Ah, well. Tomorrow, France.” He peered around and said, “Will you bring them back with you?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I see.”
“What do you see?”
“To tell you the truth, Cate, I don’t know completely. But I do see something, or I am beginning to. Money okay?”
“Yes, but let me know when you see everything clearly, will you?”
He laughed again, softly. “Forgive me. I do these things with the writers I work with.” He gripped my shoulder and rose from his chair. It was time for bed. Our hours of walking along the beach, of strolling from one restaurant or café to others, were over. By the same time tomorrow, he would be gone, and it would not be many months later when I, too, would be leaving. The galleys he had brought were giving me an itch to smell, feel and walk through New York.
And Monica realized it, peering through those long silences to pinion me right after Rupert left. I hugged her and held her hand, but couldn’t say what I suspected she wished me to say … and I knew that she was, in her lithe, dark way, far too proud to say it herself.
At dusk one day, while she prepared dinner in the small, tiled kitchen, I said, “I’m at a place in my work where I can stop. And the money for those interviews I told you about has come.”
She sipped from her glass of sherry, looked over its rim at me, her eyes still mildly accusing.
“So let’s take a trip,” I said.
That was wrong. Her eyes flashed, golden lightning sharp with possibility, and she seemed to be holding her breath.
“Around Spain,” I said. “I’d like to see more of the country, wouldn’t you?”
She recovered neatly. “And why not? How? Where would we go?”
“Maybe Yanez would rent us his car. He’s not doing much taxi business.” Yanez lived with his wife down the block in a hotel that was closed for the winter. During the summer he managed the hotel and dressed every day in suit and tie, but now he wore a beret, a canvas jacket and baggy old pants. He spent most of his time these days sitting in his Seat in the plaza waiting for fares. He never got more than two or three a day, all for short trips. His fares were all Spanish and did not tip as well as the foreigners. It was a good thing he and his wife had no children. “I think we could go for a week,” I said. “Maybe a little more.”
“We’d stay at hotels?”
“Sure, where else?” I put my arms around her. “Would you like that, Monica?”
“And Federico?”
“He’d go with us, of course.”
She smiled and hugged me back. “All right, Cate. Let’s do it. I would like it.”
Yanez tried to hire himself on as the driver, but I told him that I couldn’t afford his meals and hotels, and he didn’t want to pay for his own.
His wife, padding around in those Spanish flannel slippers, rubber-soled by Pirelli, in their room off the half-darkened kitchen, barked at him in Catalan. He scowled at her, and she barked again. She was, like most Catalan women of her generation, short and extremely sturdy without being fat. I met women like her in the markets; they destroyed you, if you were not quick and strong.
We made a deal and he cleaned out the car. His wife put up a bag of candies for Federico, and we left the next morning, heading south. At Tarragona, we turned inland to Teruel, where I stopped and climbed the mountains while Monica fed Federico. We arrived in Valencia long after dark and found a hotel. We slept late and then at breakfast savored the attention paid to us. We enjoyed the expressions on the faces of the waiters when we snapped at them in Spanish—Monica especially, with her Catalan accent. Then, the car streaming blue fumes, we left the coast and went back inland, to Albacete and from there to Jaén and on down to Malaga, bumping over the roads, looking silently at the hard, sad land, its bare brown mountains, and those small memorials in the driveways of the homes set back from godforsaken dirt roads:
JUAN ALFREDO GUILLERMOS
MURIÓ 5TH DICIEMBRE, 1937
Guardia Civil haunted the entrances and exits to the small villages. They wore heavy, brown leather jackets and rode big motorcycles, or were green shadows in patent leather hats in the stillnesses between stone houses, those streets stamped theirs by the Falangist five red arrows. We came down through the Sierra Nevadas to Granada, bereft now of its Moors, and mingled with their descendants. Federico toddled down walks his namesake must have known, and behind him I strolled with his mother and she told me of Lorca and Canciones, Romancero gitano, Yerma and La Casa de Bernardo Alba. We held hands. Then I carried Federico through the Court of the Lions and told him about the people who’d built this place. He laughed and played on my face.
At Málaga, before turning north, we walked to the deserted beach, and through air filled with flying sand I pointed toward Africa. “Africa,” I said. “Where your father came from. And me. And you, and Federico and millions of people who no longer show it.”
Then we drove on through Sevilla and Córdoba, Toledo and Madrid. At Guadalajara, I stopped once again and walked. This time when I returned, Monica said, “Battlefield.” She gave me a long oblique glance, a chilling wind suddenly rising and gaining speed over a wide, flat place. “My father told me about the war. Barcelona was in the Red Zone. The soldiers and people going to France came through Barcelona. I know.”
“Yes,” I said. “In nineteen thirty-six, in Geneva, a little black man warned the world what could happen if the world did nothing to remove the aggressors from his country. Selassie. No one listened and then your war started and then the big one. But even here, even here, if the Republicans had won, the world would be different. Right here that was possible.”
“Shhh!” she said to Federico. He was getting fretful. The movement of the car soothed him; motionlessness disturbed him.
“Were you a soldier during the war?” Monica asked.
“Yes.” And I knew she was going to ask it.
“Did you kill people?”
Federico looked at me. It was a small person’s clear look, taking on the concentric circles of porridge when stirred.
“Yes. I had to.”
She sighed. For a second it sounded like the wind outside. She crossed herself.
The final night of our trip back we spent in a converted monastery. Five waiters, all in tuxedos, served us. Monica was gracious in her Paseo de Gracia dress and jewelry, her dark face beaming amusement and tolerance for the provincial folk who had never seen black people and who were peering out of the kitchen and from behind every available door to marvel at the trio of Moros.
We made love long that night, hard and tenderly, and once I thought I felt something wet on her face but I didn’t ask about it, for the wine had long since reached its crest and substituted sleep for passion.
After our return to Sitges, the weeks seemed to race in on us. The winds chopping through the mountains were no longer very cold at all. The first Europeans—Swedes, Danes and Germans—began to appear. Merchants became cheerful. Landlords were visible on weekends, puttering about the houses they soon would rent, and mine was already talking about the usual summer increase.
Monica, who had filled out during the winter so that I no longer felt her ribs pushing against her skin when we made love, became more quiet but less accusatory. I lingered longer with Federico García Lorca Jones, building sand castles on the beach and buying him ice cream while the Spanish women smiled their dark approvals. I would start to worry about his life after I’d gone, and then, angrily, stop.
One day I went into
Barcelona to arrange with the landlord for Monica and Federico to stay in the house through the summer. It was the same day I bought my plane ticket. Sailing would take too long. I wanted to be overwhelmed quickly by things I knew back in New York and not have to spend days thinking about them or her. I got a stack of pesetas to leave behind, and then I returned home, cradling the bottle of brandy I would drink while telling her that I had to leave, that I had a book being published and that all my life I think I wanted to be a writer and now I was.
The front door was closed. Normally, it would have been open and the screen door closed; normally, there would be wash on the line, some little thing of Monica’s or Federico’s or mine; normally, they would be in the garden or in the dirt road that ran straight down to the beach; normally, she smiled and waved, and Federico came charging up like a baby bull.
I didn’t see them outside. I unlocked the door and walked into the chilly house. I called, and my voice bounced off the tile floors and plaster walls. I called again and started down the hall. Federico’s room, across from ours, looked strange. I walked in. His clothes were gone, his toys, bottles. In our room her dresser drawers were empty and there was a note on the bed. The room smelled faintly of Joy; I’d gotten it from one of the black-market operators. I sat down on the bed with its bad springs. With the doors closed, the old Spanish smell of sweet decay, which always made me think of Melville and Benito Cereno’s San Dominick, tapped at my brain, hung in my nostrils.
I opened the brandy and, drinking from the bottle, read the note. I drank again and then went to see Yanez and his wife. They did not know she’d gone, and his wife said, slapping her own infertile belly, “She is two months pregnant. She said so in the market.”
Her note had not said that. I went back to the place where I’d met her and asked the musicians if they’d seen her; they had not. I walked or rode to the places where she might have been, but she was not in any of them. And I had to leave. It was time.
5
It’s the returning to familiar places that after a time takes its toll. I didn’t know that then. I was ignorant. How could I have known that even the sun had grown tired of its fiery, familiar journey and so on occasion had reversed itself? I didn’t know that the moon, too, had wearied of rolling through predetermined cycles and had forsaken for a time its task of tinting the dark with its silver. Such drastic alteration means cataclysm. I had not then met anyone, save Selena, who in protest against the embrace of the familiar had wrought upon himself interior disasters.
It took time for me to discover the old rhythms, to enjoy what I’d enjoyed before. Every impulse within me screamed for me to leave again as soon as I could, to shuck off the noise and dirt and the attitudes of New York, to forsake this whore with the steel and concrete vagina and tongue like glass shards. How could I rest easily after having strolled graceful Ramblas, plazas, avenidas and beaches and mountains, all of which, like enciphered stone, still bore the marks of the Phoenicians, Romans and Moors?
“But America is only an extension of Europe,” Rupert was saying. We sat blissfully in a midtown air-conditioned restaurant whose walls were covered with sketches of Montmartre. The table was “his,” reserved for him whenever he came in. “America is like a Greek colony belonging to Rome. It happens all the time, and then the daughter, for one reason or another, blurs her relationship with her mother.”
I would settle back in soon, he was sure, and the memories of Spain would become less sharp. I would even forget about Monica, he suggested, with a smile. I had not told him she was pregnant. In any case, he reminded me, it was in America that I had to make my reputation.
And that reputation was just about ready for launching. He was solicitous and professional during our frequent talks and lunches, and I loved calling for him at his office and being recognized by the secretaries and editors. My dust jacket was already in the lobby showcase, my name in large enough type below the title of the book.
“Ah, yes, Mr. Douglass.” Smile. And, almost as if on cue, one editor after another would pass through the lobby, smiling, hand outstretched, floating like soap bubbles little literary chitchat.
Often, the publicity people lunched with us, framing their questions with smiles, dropping the names of reviewers like benevolent spring rain. Chief among these was Maxine Culp, the publicity director. Smiling and touching, stroking and murmuring, she endowed the four syllables in publicity with magical and sexual qualities having nothing to do with her, but much to do with the process of building the reputation of a new author. (Later I would know that there was indeed a sexual connotation to all of this, and that it could be defined simply as an arrangement mutually agreed upon, or otherwise, between the fucker and the fuckee.)
There had not been, Maxine told me, while Rupert’s fingers made rapidly closing trenches through his hair, any “negative” advance reviews, only “selling” and “positive” reviews. I did not understand, but it sounded good, as though some specially endowed, faceless legion of supporters was set to wave magic typewriters and produce, voilà! a new American writer, piping hot and done to a rich, dark brown turn.
Rupert tended to be reserved at these luncheons, and pulled the reins gently: “Well, it is a first novel, and good, yes. But I look for more in his next—” Whether it was with the publicity people or the book crowd, Rupert looked ahead.
I had been living in the Hotel Albert on Tenth Street during these days, and looking for an apartment, which was not very easy if you wanted to live downtown. I felt a strange lack of urgency to renew old ties, except for my son, Glenn. I sensed that old friendships would renew themselves in due course, the way an unconnected but plugged-in electric cord always edges toward metal and spontaneous combustion. I did think of Paul. I even looked glancingly for him along the streets and in restaurants. I had not, though, in truth, called or written to Catherine about Glenn.
I was lucky with the apartment. An old Italian man, who wore a threadbare suit, a spotted tie and a white shirt with a frayed collar, rented me the top floor of a brownstone he had just renovated. He wore a medal on his suit and walked with a cane. He asked if I’d been a soldier during the war, and when I said yes, he rented me the place and told me that he had been a soldier during World War I, serving in the Alps, fighting the Austrians.
“The rats,” he said. “Oh, the rats; they were as big as dogs, eating what they ate. Some days they did a lot of eating. It was terrible.” He fingered the medal. “When I sleep, I still dream of it. I dream the rats are eating me, that I lie unburied, half-covered with snow, and they are eating me.”
Then, for the first time in a long while, I thought of my own dream, of the man trying to get into my foxhole, his motions framed by the stars of the Southern Cross, but I did not want to lose my grip and so said nothing.
“I don’t sleep nights,” Mr. Storto said. “Then they can’t get me. I sleep only during the day. In the daytime they don’t come.”
I was settling into the new apartment. I had not straightened it out, and was between a dazzling drinking lunch at the Italian Pavillion with Rupert, and a dinner that night with Alex Samuels at the Argenteuil. I was on a Door Store couch, sweating, wondering if the writing life would always be so laced with alcohol, and worrying that I’d never last if it was. I heard on the gray, wooden stairs, which Mr. Storto had not yet covered with asphalt tiles, footsteps, light, clever, and then a voice.
“Hey, Cate! Cate!”
I opened the door to Amos Bookbinder. The sharp angles of his face had vanished; twin pouches of fat on either side had taken their place. I didn’t know that the change had been, and still was being, caused by booze and credit-card lunches and dinners in three-star French restaurants.
“How’d you find me?” Spoken, the words revealed to me that I had been hiding. I did not yet know from what.
But Amos was smiling. He strode through the place trailing a sharp cologne. He sat down upon an unpacked crate and through vibrant waves of Beefeater gin asked, “
Why didn’t you let me know you were back? You’re not drinking with another crowd already, are you?” He laughed and slapped his thigh. “Ain’t that what that—what Poode always says?”
I shrugged. Habit, glimmerings of Monica. “I wanted to get a few things straightened out before I hit the streets.”
“You need more than a month, man?” He studied me with that severe yet approving glance older brothers and grandfathers have. “Y’ look good. I been readin’ the advance reviews. They’re good.” He nodded. Between thumb and forefinger on each hand he pinched the creases of his pants and hiked them high enough to reveal the neat ribbing of his Supp-Hose.
“But listen,” he said. “When you get tired of your publisher—or even for your next book—talk to me. I’ll give you a good contract.”
My response, mild surprise, came too slowly.
“What’s the matter, whatsa matta,” he exploded in a fragmenting iron-gray fury, “you don’t think a Negro editor’s good enough for you?”
“I—”
He spun on his heel and stopped, his back to me. “Fuck it. Let’s go get a drink to celebrate your book.”
“I have to get dressed.” I was not accustomed to the fury.
“That’s all right,” Amos said, his voice soft and somehow curled at the ends. “I’ll wait. Where’s the booze?”
Moving down the street with Amos was like cruising beside a deluxe model of a Cadillac car, yet I moved with him, connected in ways obvious and not, and thought of Selena, whom I would ask after when we stopped. But he got to his questions first.
“How was the pussy over there?”
“Okay,” I said. “What little of it I had.”
He did not believe me, but, then, black people seldom have believed each other for reasons that are as complex as fine-woven Sardinian weave, and so symptomatic of what we have been and what we have become that psychiatrists will not even begin to sense the boundaries of that existence for another millennium.
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