‘Nichts gut,’ Willy says, as he sits opposite me at a table in the hostel. He is holding an orange which he is peeling with a penknife. He nods disapprovingly in the direction of the other Germans who are talking loudly at another table.
Suddenly, as the Germans rise, his face becomes contorted and looks like it’s going to explode. I’m not sure whether it is due to desperation on his part in trying to communicate to me (something which is obviously of paramount importance to him), or to an anger generated as his fellow countrymen approach. The stocky one called Klaus hits against him with his elbow (apparently deliberately), striking the hollow between Willy’s broad shoulder blades. Willy springs up out of his chair, pressing the knife so hard between his fingers that the blood shows through his veins. Klaus, standing his ground, looks disdainfully at him and says, ‘Versuchen Sie es,’ and Willy, surrendering, sits down again.
I want to say something to the forlorn Willy, to sympathise with him, but I have not the words.
He sighs and rises slowly from the table. It’s all like a three act play being synopsised into the span of a few moments. He closes the penknife which he had been holding open all the time and, with a sad smile, places it in my right hand, encircling my fingers around it.
‘Auf Wiedersehen mein Freund’
***
A full moon shines through the hostel window. Does the moon have memory? Does it remember me, its insomniac boy? I put my Spanish grammar away and lie under blankets shivering, ironically chilled by the effects of the sun. I think of my mother back home. Is she managing on her own? She has moved to her apartment. Not quite in the Liberties, where she wanted to go of course, but near enough. Off the South Circular Road in fact, near where the new Coombe maternity hospital now stands. There is a caretaker to keep an eye on things. She will be safe there. She will be looked after at least as well as I was looked after in boarding school. I’m free now, free of that institution anyway. And she can stew for a while. I don’t care.
‘The money is good in the bloodbank,’ an American hosteller whispers from a lower bunk, which makes me think of my resources.
***
There are several people on the morning queue for the bloodbank, all poor-looking, all native. An emaciated and haggard-looking man is complaining that he is only allowed to sell his blood once every two months. How does one make a living as a blood salesman? I understand his Spanish. His vocabulary is simple. Muchos niños – many small children. How is he to support his large family with such infrequent visits?
‘Los ricos,’ he rambles on, ‘they don’t like parting with their blood. They are afraid of a pinprick – un alfilerazo. That is why they pay the poor to do so.’
The man’s voice is too be weak to be angry. ‘It is not justo,’ he says, mopping the sweat off his brow with a polkadot kerchief.
I eat a complimentary hot dog and drink a beer as I count my pesetas. ‘Rare,’ the nurse says. ‘You get more pesetas.’
‘And the thin man?’ I say
‘What thin man?’
‘Outside. The one mopping his brow?’
She looks out through a slit in the door.
‘Is his rare?’
‘No,’ she says, ‘his is very common.’
Water is streaming from the eyes of the haggard-looking man. It loosens the grip on the pesetas I’m holding. I place the money in skeletal hands. ‘Para los niños.’
***
I’m sitting in the backseat on the leather upholstery of the Daimler, travelling to the beach. Passing by other hostellers, who are trekking on foot, instils a guilt in me. I am still thinking of Willy and unarticulated things. I’m hot in the car and about to roll the window down when Klaus snaps, ‘Don’t touch.’ They speak of Barcelona in their own language. They say ‘geschlecht’-something or other a few times, and each time they say it they guffaw, making me feel uncomfortable. Perhaps they are laughing at my sunburn. Klaus asks me if I have noticed the bromide in the coffee in the hostel, and Lothar, the fair-haired one, gives me a copy of The Damned which he has just finished reading in English.
‘Did you hear there are peasants in the hostel who are selling their blood?’ says Klaus.
Lothar laughs.
Lothar laughs very loudly.
***
I see a man pushing a bicycle along the seafront. He walks barefooted and blows small pipes which make a haunting sound like leaves soughing in the wind. And in between blasts on the pipes, he shouts in a guttural and semi-incantatory fashion something I cannot decipher, like the unintelligible shout of a newspaper vendor or some primitive proclaiming his existence to the early morning.
Two Irish girls on the beach are on the last day of their holiday. They know Sinéad Ní Shúileabháin from college. ‘She’s so dedicated,’ one of them says. ‘Dedicated?’ I say. ‘To our country. An inspiration for all of us.’ We speak in Irish, and it sounds so natural far away from home, far away from navel gazing. We talk about other nationalities. We talk about Franco and the guardias civiles, small, tough-looking, smileless figures who patrol about in three cornered hats with rifles and pistols, and with moustaches so thick that it makes me feel that what I’m trying to grow under my nose is just a little piece of ginger down. And I find myself visualising these guardias of a previous generation, their fathers or grandfathers perhaps, leering at my mother on the Cantabrian coast. They had ordered young people off the beach at rifle point the previous night. Some were hostellers who sleep on the beach because the hostel is sometimes full. Others were hippies with guitars who wear cutaway jeans with threads hanging loose. And we say it is a disgrace that girls are being prodded with rifle butts for being dressed ‘indecently’, and we laugh at the old women in black shawls on the seafront who wag their fingers and shout ‘sinvergüenzas’at scantily clad females. But the Irish girls are well covered and they keep tugging at their ample swimsuits for fear of revelation. I ask them if they saw the man who played the small pipes. And they tell me that they are the panpipes and that he is the knife grinder announcing his presence. And we laugh again when a group of young Englishmen lend ear to our speech, and conclude that it is ‘obvious’ that we are ‘nattering away’ in Greek. ‘Would you believe it, our nearest neighbour?’ one of the girls exclaims.
***
I walk up the drive to a modest chalet with a veranda covered in bougainvillaea (an address from Patrick’s diaries). On the lintel over the front door an iron triangle hangs on a rusty nail. An old woman with squinted eyes is sitting in a wicker chair in a shady corner of the veranda, embroidering lace.
‘Ah yes,’ she says, somewhat to my surprise when I enquire in Spanish if this is the home of Javier Jiménez. I was half expecting to hear he was dead or had moved to some other address. ‘He has just come back from Barcelona. Business, you know? Javier is a businessman. He owns property in the city,’ she says proudly. ‘You also are a man of business?’
‘No,’ I say, ‘well sort of. I want to talk to him.’
‘You are not of the police?’
‘Oh no,’ I say.
Satisfied, she summons Javier in a weak voice.
A middleaged man, very low in stature with a huge moustache obliterating his mouth, appears in the doorway, his belly bulging through a navy T-shirt.
‘What is it you want?’ he says curtly.
I tell him I’m looking for information on the late Patrick Foley.
‘Heeem,’ he sneers in a strong Spanish drawl, ‘you want to know about heeem?’
By his tone I’m expecting him to close the door on my face, but he pauses and starts looking me up and down, and then offers me a Chesterfield cigarette which I politely refuse.
‘One moment,’ he says, and he goes indoors and returns carrying a towel.
‘I am going to the playa,’ he says. ‘You can come along with me and I will tell you all you want to know about el chulo, Foley. Hasta luego, Mama.’ He plants a kiss on his mother’s cheek. The old woman looks up from her embroidery
and gives her senescent son a toothless smile.
We walk down the sloping road towards the sea, the same road I travelled in the Daimler, but when we get to the turn for the main beach, he points the opposite way towards the lighthouse, which stands isolated at the end of a long promontory of rocks. I hesitate for a moment before venturing on.
He strips to his skimpy togs, bidding me to do the same, and pokes about in the water, wading through the shallows, turning up rocks, looking for limpets or similar kinds of shellfish, exposing them, removing them from their covers and popping them into his mouth. He offers some to me, but I decline. I press him about Foley but, rather gruffly, he says, ‘Mañana’.
He comes towards me. He asks me would I like to make ‘mucho dinero’.
‘Where?’ I say.
‘In Barcelona.’
‘Doing what?’
‘This,’ he says, pulling down his togs.
***
A lone peasant stands, a dot in the vastness of the charred earth, as the train trundles into the interior. My mind loses itself in the rolling countryside: the arid plains, spare parched shrubbery pleading for mercy under an unrelenting sun, occasional goats and sheep, emaciated cattle, and then a more orderly terrain of serried ranks of olive and orange groves and vineyards sweeping past.
Basque separatists have just exploded a bomb in Calle de O’Donnellin the centre of Madrid. People are fleeing in all directions, pushing past me among the rubble of stone buildings and plate glass and the wailing of sirens. And I think: funny, the Irish name under attack. And then I see Franco. Yes, fleetingly in an armed cavalcade passing along the street to the blaring of horns. Someone shouts, ‘El Caudillo’, and points at a little pristine uniform shining with medals through which protrudes a bald brown head like a polished chestnut.
I call to the apartment of señora Angela Martínez. The ama de llaves, a tiny, spindly woman, informs me that yes, señora Martínez still lives at this address, but she is not in at the moment. She will be back in a short while – un rato.
I feel the sun burning me in the street, so I go into the Prado art gallery where I look at Goya’s paintings: his Saturn devouring his Son (reminding me of Pug devouring my Jelly Baby), and La Nevada – The Snowstorm – the original of Patrick’s painting. But I don’t linger. I fear (illogically – but then all trepidation is illogical) that at any moment Javier Jiménez is going to jump out at me from some corner.
When I return to the apartment, an elderly lady with an enormous bosom opens the door. I tell her where I am from, and that I am a relative of Patrick Foley, and was given her address to look up when I came to Spain.
‘Ah, how nice,’ she says. ‘Come in, come in. Isn’t it terrible, these explosions? It’s not safe to go out. And who was it gave you the address exactly?’
‘Martha Foley,’ I lie.
‘Ah, Martha. Such a long time. She is well?’
‘Not very well, I’m afraid.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
She seats me in a divan near a huge urn with artificial flowers, as she sets out cups.
‘Señor Foley, ah yes,’ she says, ‘he also had poor health. He was simpático, a kind man. I remember he always bought Christmas presents for the children of the embassy staff: big boxes of sweets.’
Large globules of sweat appear on her forehead, which she chooses to ignore, and they proceed to trickle down both sides of her face.
‘There was a baby.’
‘Yes,’ I say hesitantly, ‘that... that was me.’
‘Ah.’ She pauses to reflect for a moment. ‘So you are the son of Martha, how estrange life is. Let me look at you, yes you are like her, the blue eyes. Ah yes.’
‘I’m here to find out something,’ I say.
Perhaps it is a maternal quality about her that attracts me. Perhaps it is her big bosom or her openness, or maybe it is desperation on my part. Diaries after all are only words written in ink, silent recorders. I want to hear a human voice confirm or negate my fears.
‘I came to find out if Patrick Foley was... I mean apart from the name…’
‘Your mother never told you?’
‘She was always too ill. I was afraid …I’m sorry, I feel a little… ’
She sighs. ‘Martha was like that. She made life more difficult for herself by keeping so much inside.’
She pours coffee into the china cups. They are so delicate, the coffee, viscous-like, seems too heavy for them to bear. ‘It was a strange country for Patricio to be in. I sometimes called him Patricio, but of course not in the eh… embajada?’
‘I know, the embassy.’
‘I am forgetting my English. How could I forget such a word? All the years I spent there. But Espain for Patricio, it must have been estrange.’
‘Why strange?’
‘Pues, in Espain families were encouraged to have lots of children. General Franco, he made rewards to husbands. It is funny, he gave nothing to the mothers. Patricio was a lonely man, don’t you know.’
I think of the phrase, don’t you know? Could she have learned it from my mother – was it possible? – as both women sat side by side in a Madrid patio on warm evenings, when words and lace were embroidered together into a fabric of lies.
Conflicting feelings whirl around in my head. Her voice, though gentle, is like a frontal assault on the shards of my family.
‘I don’t know if I should say this, but Martha, I don’t think she...’
‘My mother was not promiscuous.’ I say.
She notices the emotion rising in my voice.
‘Oh Derek, niño,’ she says embracing me.
‘I think my mother was …coerced,’ I say, my voice almost breaking.
‘Coerced?’
‘Forced against her will.’
‘Claro,’ she says, squeezing me into her bosom; but I know she is really saying that a son must always find an excuse for an errant mother.
‘There was someone who came to her,’ I say, releasing myself from her embrace (feeling self-conscious now). ‘He had control over her. He used our house.’
‘You should not think on things like that, Derek. They are things of the past. You must find peace with yourself. And you came all this voyage. Have you money?’
Like my aunt Peg who was forever giving to me as a child, she dips into a leather handbag and, ignoring my protestations, stuffs money into my pocket.
‘Will you be all right, niño?’
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘thank you.’
‘Be careful out there; those explosions.’
As I am going out the door, she says, ‘There was one thing that nobody knew about Patricio.’
‘What was that?’ I say.
‘What he did on Thursday nights.’
‘Youknew?’
‘Yes. I knew.’
She pauses and looks at me. ‘I don’t know if I should tell you.’ Her voice is deadly serious, but I can’t help feeling that she is teasing me a little at the same time.
‘It’s all right,’ I say.
‘He used to visit someone in Barcelona, in the barrio chino.’
‘The barrio chino?’’
‘Near the Ramblas. He knew a woman. Well she would be a woman now. Then she was only a young girl. Her name was Luisa. Of course she may not be there anymore. It was a long time ago.’
***
When I get off the train in the Catalan capital, I book into a pensión. I feel affluent – I hadn’t realised until I came away from señora Martínez that she had given me such a large sum of money. I go to the post office and post a card to Mam. The postmistress gives me sweets as change instead of céntimos. ‘Everything is fine,’ I write to Mam (I had quickly learned in boarding school the futility of expressing to her epistolary emotions). I sit at a café and study some Spanish from my book, but I am restless. I can’t concentrate. The words barrio chino keep ringing in my ears. A group of hippies whom I recognise from Cuadro come and sit nearby. They smoke and strum guitars, and some of
them are still complaining about being ordered off the beach by ‘fascist pigs’. I ask them if they had seen Willy, and I describe him. But they shake their heads except for one long-haired guy who says he thought he saw someone who looked like Willy heading down the coast. ‘Yeah, a way-out man with hair oil,’ he says. ‘They’re all hitching down south, all the way down to Africa. It’s like a human chain, man, you know, and all the women getting laid.’
***
I hear the sound of bells. Sunday. I follow the sound which brings me to a side-street church. In the crevice of one of its outside pillars is the mould of a hand. People, before going into the building, place their hand into the stone indentation, meticulously splaying their fingers to fit the mould, and hold their hand there for a few seconds as if to receive some vibes or spirit from it. Others kiss the stone. I can hear the sound coming from inside. It is a Mass in Catalan. I enter in an attempt to hear the Word in a different grammar. Perhaps it will afford me new insights apart from providing a temporary lull from loneliness. But it has the contrary effect: it exacerbates my feeling of remove from closely-knit families, well-dressed with the spit and polish of Sunday. They colonise entire pews: mothers and maiden aunts in mantillas, scented fathers, supplicating grandparents and pristine children in their immaculate brightly coloured suits and dresses. They leave no room for an individual; act as stiff as statues when I try to push in, and blow me away with the swish of their fans. La familia – a monolith, casting a self-satisfied glance at the unworthy one who has to crouch down in the back of the church, confirming that his problem with the Word is not of a linguistic nature.
I come away and wander up and down the Ramblas amid the bustle of the stalls and the bright colours of the vendors’ flowers. I watch young, courting couples with their chaperons walking behind at a distance, de paseo. And at the end of the Ramblas: the sea and Columbus’ Santa Maríawith promises of a new world.
Several ragged children approach me aggressively demanding céntimos. ‘Por Dios, señor…’ they shout. I throw the sweets and some change towards them and I watch them scramble and vie with each other, not for the sweets, but for the feel of a coin, the feel of capital, like Liberties’ children in a grush.
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