by Roman Payne
1 KLEOS: (Greek: κλέος): Eternal fame, renown and glory. A Greek concept, preliterate in origin, that stresses that one’s life has meaning if their name is “sung” for generations yet unborn to hear. Along with timé (earthly possessions, bounty), kleos is the central theme to a hero’s purpose in Homeric myth.
The man at the desk was suspicious. I was too finely dressed with my evening party suit and silk foulard to be seeking a room in such a place. He asked for three nights in advance and I paid them, collected the key, and since there were no porters, I dragged my valises myself, and my case of wine, down the hall, had a look at the scene, and came back.
“Can you give me a better room? Or two adjoining?” “We’ve got what we’ve got,” he frowned, “And nothing adjoining. We are a poor hostelry.”
Intolerable filth, insects buzzing in the stale air, and only an old animal skin flopped on the floor to serve as a bed. Bathroom down the hall. This adventure put me in a foul mood.
Alone, I bolted the lock, tossed my valises on the floor, looked out the tiny window at the street, and opened a bottle of sparkling wine from the case; and, spilling the first sip on the windowsill in honor of Dionysus—as it is my custom to pay respect to this god when I drink, lest one day the holy grape cease to grow—I toasted to myself: “Well, Saul, here’s a drink to drinking during the waning moon. May the next moon bring better lodgings.” I swilled the bubbling wine from the bottle, not caring for how fast, or to what condition, it intoxicated me.
I sat down on the animal skin and drank more, and more. With the first halos of inebriation, I thought about sweet little Saskia… ‘It’s good that I gave her her bed back. She would never have suggested that I leave on her own. She was too polite for that. And all that nonsense about me ‘having to stay there’; and of us ‘travelling together,’ and the worst of it… that phrase about my sleeping in the road in fine clothes, which got her worked-up to no end, until she swore I was meant to find her—or she was meant to find me… and that we needed to stick close to one another… all that was either due to her madness, or else just the innocent fantasies of a young adolescent girl’s mind.’ I drank more wine and stopped thinking about her. I stopped thinking all together. I drank one liter of wine after the other, trying to dim my eyes so as not to look upon the wretchedness of my room. Soon I fell asleep dead-drunk on the animal skin on the floor.
Chapter Seventeen
Déjeuner chez Madame Dépression…
It was evening when I awoke with a terrible temper. The wine had done me no good. I was claustrophobic in that little room. My nerves were bad. But it wasn’t as simple as to go out and wander the streets. Along with the claustrophobia, I was feeling that famous terror of the marketplace, agoraphobia, which I recall only experiencing after grave misadventures. It came like any transitory madness and overwhelmed me with incredible anxiety so that I didn’t know how to cure myself of the claustrophobic feeling. I couldn’t go outside. Just the idea of being in Barcelona filled me with terror. Going out there, to mingle with the crowds, with them—I had to avoid this at all costs! All of the life out there in the streets was too tied in my poisoning experience of the week before. I chattered my teeth; and to prevent myself from losing my mind completely, I would have to wait for the hour of my boat alone in my miserable room. To be in the streets was intolerable. My hotel room was intolerable. Only sleep or alcohol offered to hide me from my private hell. Such transitory madness is the product of travel and experience, a fever which adventurers don’t mention in their memoirs. Surely it was travel and experience, and not my folle conduite1. I opened a new bottle of wine from the case and began taking greedy swallows. It made me sick. Wine during a waning moon leads to no good. I wanted to go outside to find an opium den but the paranoia was too much. I stayed with my bottles in that slum. I honestly tried to kill myself with that wine, though I had no idea why.
Morning announced the third day of my drunken frolic through the daisies of depression. The sun woke me up. I was gloomy at first until I remembered I had a boat to catch that day. The thought of it chased the madness away. As if my old brain had been replaced by a new instrument, I was fresh. Soon Barcelona would be but a shameful memory. I was free of this hotel room, free of other people. Time to leave Barcelona to the frogs and dogs—adieu!
1 FOLLE CONDUITE: (Fr) “Reckless behavior.”
At ten in the morning, I walked down to the seaport to check on the status of my boat. I showed my ticket to the operator at the port authority and he informed me that the paquebot would leave that evening at the twenty-first hour. This meant I had a whole morning, afternoon, and evening to waste before departing for Florence.
I walked back to my room, shaved, got fresh clothes out of my valise. Dressed for travel, I left around noon to stroll through the town, to see if I could get any meaningful impressions of this wicked city while I was sober and hungover.
The Barrio Gòtico is the most picturesque part of Barcelona I found. Its mazes of bright, dilapidated streets fascinated me. This is where my first hotel, the Sant Felip Neri, was. Everywhere were colorful streamers, birds in cages, dancers, musicians performing the passacalle, revelers and fire-blowers, meanderers and riffraff. I turned one corner and heard the melody of a guitar. I followed the sound until I came to an alley where a young man sat playing. He had a deformed body and was perched on a pile of wood, old guitar in his hands. He played beautifully and I listened, though his grotesque body unnerved me. This was the first time I thought of Saskia that day. Her music was beautiful, her voice was beautiful, her body was beautiful. Even the dirty little pads of her feet were beautiful. I cursed myself then. For once, heaven had sent me Beauty in its most perfected form and I abandoned it. She might not have been a girl after all but an angel: a force to guide me on this hazardous path of life I hurry down… How can life be hazardous if it can only end in death? But she was life. She had nursed me and played majestic music and sang with a voice that no mortal possessed. While I had been in her bed, drinking her broth, I thought time and again of older Spanish seductresses in cabarets and dens of ill-repute.
I continued through the Barrio Gòtico until I reached a square where I was attracted to a solitary lemon tree that grew on a berm caged in stones. This vibrant tree gave me solace. I sat on the stoney edge of the berm beneath the arbor of my tree and watched the people that passed: Three women came chattering in the Catalan language, their breasts were large and their legs were long and I saw in them all the filth of the world. I used to enjoy such women. Now I saw them as vulgar.
Then came a young child in a yellow peasant dress, she pranced through the square chasing a cicada. I thought to offer her a lemon to match her dress but resisted. She too was vulgar in her naivety. She had not the knowledge of the world, of music, of life alone in a messy room, and of copper poisoning, to interest me. Was I falling in love with Saskia? I didn’t know, though her memory stirred violence in my heart. An old woman passed the square, wrinkled, withered, hunched-over. She was smiling at her own thoughts though death was approaching her. She was like me, I thought. When I was younger, I would cling to life because life was at the top of the turning wheel. But like the song of my gypsy-girl, the great wheel turns over and lands on a minor key. It is then that you come of age and life means nothing to you. To live, to die, to overdose, to fall in a coma in the street… it is all the same. It is only in the peach innocence of youth, like the days in Saskia’s possession, that life is at its crest on top of the wheel. And there being only life, the young cling to it, they fear death… And they should! …For they are in life. Now that I had passed that frightful episode of life: Youth. …Now that I was in the flower of my age, I was more glorious than ever. I was a man. I didn’t fear death because I had already experienced life—I’d lived it to the core. So why did I miss this child who was in another world. Was she the life that I so loved once upon a time?
I stayed beneath my lemon tree and a band of Romanian gitanas materialized
in the center of the square. They had guitars and crude instruments and wore rags. I would have forgiven them that, had they played any of the songs that Saskia had played on the night she found me lying in the street—‘in fine clothes,’ as she insisted on saying. But these gypsies played no such harmonies. They played a raucous cacophony of stringed disasters—every note off-key. So, alone in a square in Barcelona, surrounded by an orchestra of diseased women serenading my tree with broken instruments, I found myself ‘alone and lost.’ Their faces grew uglier and uglier as they played. My lemon tree turned black as the sky grew dark with storms. Rain fell. This was the hell that Dante found ‘midway through the journey of his life’: she-wolves and jackals and gypsy wenches playing out-of-tune guitars. And here I was, ‘in the 3—th year of my stay on this, our fruitful earth,’ and I was in Dante’s hell. And with my great age, the only thing I knew was, whether or not I was in love with Saskia didn’t matter, I had to find her!…
“I will find her!” I gasped and clasped my hands, and turned on my heels. Then with hope in my heart, I raced down to the promenade of Las Ramblas and crossed over into the neighborhood of El Raval. I was doomed though. I should have asked somebody for the road to the hospital. But that day I didn’t remember this particular detail of the night of my misadventure. It came back to me much later.
I walked a long road in the El Raval district, it was riddled with balconies strewn with clotheslines and sheets hanging to dry. All was silent except for the sounds of swearing and shouting coming from the open doorways of taverns where drunken men gathered. The balconies of the apartment houses all seemed familiar and not at all right. ‘Where is Saskia’s balcony? Neither this street, nor that…’ I searched the entire neighborhood and never found the place where my angel sang and strummed and danced on glass.
So, I walked, desperate and depressed, turning thoughts over in my head: ‘If I don’t find Saskia, how can I bring myself to leave Barcelona?’ In the space of a moment, she had become my twin planet in this senseless orbit I was a part of, circling around the sun, around the earth, onward towards frailty, senility, and death. ‘Without Saskia,’ I thought, ‘the white-nights of Petersburg will shine no light; and Florence will be the empty carcass of a forgotten city.’ Was I deranged? Maybe. Yet, is it not derangement that guides us to seek out those we want to love in this world?
So cursing my fortune and the winding labyrinth, black as death, they call Barcelona, I wandered back to Las Ramblas where I hoped to find Saskia carrying provisions in the crowd. My madness then took me once again to the Barrio Gòtico. It was there I saw a familiar site: the Hotel Sant Felip Neri. And outside the hotel, in its courtyard square, I stopped in horror… ‘What is that? A dead body?!’
Chapter Eighteen
Death in Barcelona…
It was the corpse of a man lying face-down, naked on the stones. Around him was a great commotion of people flailing their arms and policemen jotting notes. A coroner approached the corpse and checked it for signs of life; finding none, he covered it with a sheet. Nearby, another sheet covered what was obviously the body of another man. He lay under the window of the room that I was given at the Hotel Sant Felip Neri.
The coroner and some policemen carted away the two cadavers. Some more police remained to question people who had witnessed the deaths. I passed through the crowd and entered the lobby of the Hotel Sant Felip Neri. At the desk was the same concierge as always, taking a noseful of snuff.
“Oh, it’s you…” he said dryly, “I have…” But before he could finish, I interrupted…
“Interesting event about those two dead bodies lying on the street beneath the windows of your hotel.”
“Yes, well, ‘public death.’ It is a very common sight here in Barcelona. Happens all the time. Always has.” Then he said with a hint of condescension, “Oh yes, there was some… person… just here looking for you, a couple of hours ago, a young lady carrying a guitar case.”
“A guitar case?” The thought of it made my heart tingle. “What did you say to her?”
“She was full of questions I couldn’t answer. I told her you checked-out. She then asked if there was a room available here in our hotel and I said that we were full. That was before the… uh… accident. Before two of our guests died. We seem to have a couple of vacancies now.”
“It would appear that way.” Through the drapes in the lobby I could see the coroner directing the passage for the two cadavers to be carted away. All the while I trembled with rage knowing this insect of a concierge could have told Saskia where I was. “Why didn’t you tell her I had moved to the Urquinaona?”
“Is that where you moved to? I had no idea… she just left after that.”
No use in talking to such a creature. I got ready to go… “The young lady with the guitar case… she didn’t leave a message for me?”
“No. She just left,” he said, excusing himself to use the toilet. While he was gone, mumbling, “The fool!” I started up the stairs. I wanted to see what had come of my old suite in the hotel.
The door was wide open, and an elderly maid was cleaning the windows of the door out to the balcony. “Strange about the two bodies lying in the square,” I said to her.
“I’ll say it’s strange… I can’t understand how it could have happened!”
“A double suicide, apparently.” I contemplated the relationship between the two men. The placement of one body had been directly below my old suite’s balcony. The second body had been below another window in an adjacent room.
“Possibly suicide,” said the maid, “both of ‘em died with knives sticking in their chests. You see the blood stains on the balcony railings. So they fell out of the windows after being stabbed… Or else they were pushed! Seems both died at the same time.”
“You don’t think they planned it together?” I made a slight grin, “A little brotherly pact of suicide?”
“Damn, I don’t think that,” said the maid, “they sure weren’t brothers. This one here’s been staying in this suite for an entire week. He was a man from England, or from Ireland, or something up there. He didn’t speak a word of Spanish, didn’t know what he was up to. The other one, though. He was Spanish, from Madrid. He was very kind to me and said that I was the only one in the hotel he could talk to, seeing as how he only spoke Spanish and me too. Pity he had to die. Don’t think it was suicide. The man from Madrid was too happy of a man. The Englishman too, he seemed all serious and oh-so-important about everything. Can’t imagine someone like that just stabbing himself and leaping out of a window. Nothing stolen that I could see. The whole thing’s a mystery.”
“A mystery,” I repeated. That was enough to leave a bad taste in my mouth. I said goodbye to the maid and walked down the stairs, slipping between two detectives who were heading up. This murder, as it seemed to me then, had no purpose other than to make those two rooms vacant. I would soon learn the drama that would create. Later, much later, all the pieces would come together. I’ll come to that when it’s time.
I went down through the square and out into the sunshine of the promenade of Las Ramblas. Down I walked, looking at the Mediterranean Sea bristling blue with silver filets of sunlight in my field of vision. When I came to the sea docks, I was informed of yet another delay. Bad weather near Corsica. My paquebot scheduled for that evening wouldn’t sail until the following morning at daybreak. I cursed aloud, annoyed at having to spend another night in that roach-infested hotel at Urquinaona; I then left the docks intent on having a drink to pass the last hour of daylight.
The tavern where I stopped was at the base of Las Ramblas where the promenade empties out into the thoroughfare of seaboard comings-and-goings. It was a dim tavern. I ordered a beer, not caring where the moon was or what time of year it was, I just wanted to get to Florence and get this murderous city out of my head. While I drained my beer, my ears perked-up to the sound of a Spanish guitar strumming lightly in the background. My chest tightened and I swung my head around pi
cturing the gypsy girl who’d taken possession of my thoughts, but there was nothing in that dingy bar save for an old man playing a pinewood instrument. His scabby fingers dialed the laments of ‘Recuerdos de la Alhambra,’ and with that sad song, I hung my head down and wept.
‘Why are you weeping, Saul?’ I asked myself. ‘Because of her, and because of me, and because of all that I didn’t do and left behind forever. Now it’s time to take your old miserable self out of this bar and away to bed. Tomorrow you wake when the sky begins to bleed blue into the ink of night. You will walk down to the harbor and board the boat that will sail away with the gleam of the rising sun.”
“You forgot something!” said a voice. There was someone behind me. I set my empty cup down, turned around again, and saw a ridiculous figure of a man grinning a toothless grin. He said to me, “Hey-hey! I thought I saw you up by that hotel where the two men killed themselves. You dropped your scarf up there.”
I didn’t own a scarf. Maybe he was talking about my silk foulard? That, I was sure I had left back at the Urquinaona. I felt around my neck. It was true, my foulard was gone, but I was sure I left it back in my hotel room. The man didn’t know me, he couldn’t have seen my foulard.
“You saw me up there?”
“I did! You dropped your scarf.”
‘Nonsense,’ I thought, disgusted with the situation. I paid for my beer and left the bar without another word to anyone.
Of course, if it was the memory of the sad Spanish song, and the ridiculous notion that I had dropped my foulard up by the Hotel Neri; of course it was these and not other things that caused me to backtrack my steps and hurry back through the Barrio Gòtico, back to the place I had wanted to leave behind me forever.