‘I say we don’t, Jamie.’ Again Eddie threw an arm around him, again he shifted away. ‘It’s not a place to get wasted. On the trip one of the lecturers became unwell. We didn’t know what to do to help him. He was beside himself. He rambled all the way home, reciting Shakespeare. In fact, I’ve been thinking I should call the people who looked after him, Refile, Texas, check how he’s doing.’
‘Babe, I don’t want you to phone those folks,’ Jamie caught the bartender’s eye, pointed to his empty glass. ‘Within minutes you’ll invite them over. You know how I hate it, socialising with your colleagues. If you want, you can do your calling and I can head off someplace else. Or I can get you another drink and you can put your phone back in your bag.’
~
When Bob Savage got home that evening, he left his car parked in the drive and went in to shower, pack and write two letters. The first letter was to his wife Sue, the second to Refile, his beloved. He took paper and pen from Sue’s desk, the top drawer neatly stacked with stationery. He left his overnight bag at the front door, ready to pick up as soon as his letters were written. He had booked himself into the Holiday Inn, the one across town, closer to the college, closer to where he guessed Refile lived.
As on most Fridays, Sue was out at a City Hall recital with two of her friends. She’d be back within a couple of hours, Bob knew, and he wanted to be open with her. He wanted to write a frank letter and let her know their life together was at an end, he could endure it no longer, this life out of touch with his true feelings, this rip-tide of love and desire now sweeping through his veins.
My dear Sue, he began. Please don’t be concerned. I am going away for a few days—
He stalled. There were no words for this fever that possessed him, this great heat coursing through his body. He could feel the skin on the side of his face that had been turned to the hot winter sun blistering. His group had left him sleeping in the shade beside the reedy vlei and he had awoken with his face in the sun, burning, but not only with the sun. For such a creature had come to him as he slept, such a divine vision with eyes aflame, cupping his shoulders in her hands, drawing his head into her lap—it was with her fever that he burned.
Bob turned now to the second letter and the pen in his scorched fingers moved again.
The opening lines he had chanted in his head all the way home in the coach, his beloved’s hand in his, her palm pressed to his palm.
My dear, my beloved, he wrote, I want your fire filling me. I want your flaming spirit living within me as it did in my dream. In my life I have taken many wrong paths but now I see the way. You showed me the way when I awoke in your lap and looked into your fiery eyes and saw that my dream was reality.
~
Refile cut up Bob’s letter immediately after reading it that Monday morning following the field trip. He had posted the letter in her college mailbox. She sliced the paper into thin strips, saving the strips that had the best lines. Then she put the filleted paper in the toilet and flushed till not a piece was left. She didn’t want anyone to find the letter yet some of these beautiful words she could not throw away. No one had ever written her such beautiful words.
Later, she stuck the strips into a scrapbook. When Texas moved in with her at the end of the winter, she hid the scrapbook in a shoebox in her college office, to keep them private. Bob was in enough trouble with the police without people finding out about the letter, too.
The night after the field trip Bob had been caught breaching college security, climbing over the front gate. He had worked his way through the razor wire across the top and forced the lock to the mailroom. He had left his blood on the gate, his fingerprints everywhere and his car slewed up on the concrete verge by the night guard’s hut. The guard had been out on his beat.
Hours later the guard found Bob wandering in the waste ground beyond the college, raving, his limbs swollen with sunburn. Even in the police car he went on talking about relish sweet and manna-dew and a most rare dream he’d had. I would sing it to you, lady, for you were in it, he told Refile on the phone from the police station. He begged her to come to him as she had come in his dream, in her yellow shirt, pillowing his head in her arms.
~
‘Great navel: Our trip to the volcano.’ Refile’s article in the college paper the following week was marked anonymous, but then so were most of the news stories the communications team produced. Everyone knew the likely author. The story opened with the same details of the weather that Ref had pinned up in the coach.
On Friday 3rd, a dry sunny winter’s day, 19oC/7oC, the story ran, the college set a new trend when eighteen students from several departments together with eight staff embarked on a field trip to visit a local site of geological interest, the extinct volcano on Ngona Plain. Dr Sid Duncan guided the student party into the crater and discussed various notable features including the onion-ring fracturing around the edge. Senior students carried out independent research by taking readings of the microclimate in the crater’s base.
The article concluded with thanks to Dr Sid for the guided tour and to Dr Bob, our expert on cultural icons, for suggesting the field trip in the first place, an excursion to perhaps one of the most iconic geological formations in the world, the volcano, which however had appeared on the day, to quote Dr Sid, as more like a great navel set into the landscape.
Directly below the story was a short notice.
Dr Robert Savage was unfortunately on sick leave as of this week. His classes were suspended until further notice. His dissertation students were forthwith transferred to Dr Eddie Adams in History.
~
Later, long after the police enquiry into Dr Savage’s break-in had presented its report, Refile sometimes read back through her newsletter article about the excursion to the volcano and shook her head over it. She was reading it tonight while Tex grilled minute steaks for their supper. She kept most of her articles in neat plastic folders here in this box-file. Discontentedly she riffled through it now. She was the communications officer, she prided herself on her skills, there were offers of promotion in her email inbox, but here in this article she had succeeded in communicating almost nothing—in fact less than nothing.
At the time she had thought the idea of the different stories would be effective—the groups bringing back different reports of the scrubland, the willows, the vlei. It was a catch-all device, it helped her summarise, give a picture of the party fanning out into the crater along different pathways, but it wasn’t true, it hadn’t happened, she had made it up. She had no idea where the different groups that day had gone. Everyone so quickly got separated. She herself soon lost her group. They had left her behind writing her notes, they had left Bob behind. The volcano might have been in her stamping ground but she had walked in the scrubland for what felt like hours, following disembodied voices and locating no one. She had found her way out only when she saw Sid’s group crossing the crater’s ridge.
‘But that’s the point, né, about your piece,’ Tex came in from the kitchen unscrewing a bottle of chilled Sauvignon Blanc. He stood it on the table. ‘It was just a story, a report, it wasn’t meant to say anything important.’
Ref put out her tongue at him, closed the box-file, pillowed her head on her arms. Her left eye was throbbing in a way that meant a migraine was brewing. She wished she could go to bed and skip Tex’s meal.
The lines she had cut out of Bob’s letter ran through her memory, they came without effort. They had been true, truer than her article.
You have lit a fire in my soul, my beloved. My heart is as a bed of molten lava. My love is strong as death, its flashes are flashes of fire.
To this day, she had not shown Bob’s letter, or what remained of it in her secret scrapbook, to a soul—not to the police, not even to Tex. It wasn’t just that the letter counted against Bob when so much already condemned him. It was that she loved his lines, she genuinely loved them. And they were hers. He had given them to her.
Something real h
ad happened to Bob that day at the volcano and he had found the words for it, words that rose from his heart. For this she admired him. You have lit a fire in my soul, he had said. Remembering, she felt her cheeks grow warm. Though it had ended badly for Bob—the sacking passed off as early retirement, the time spent in the psychiatric hospital on the coast—still he had found something true to say.
His wife Sue had at least stayed with him, Eddie had said so. Eddie had whispered the news to Tex over afternoon tea and cake. Around the tea trolley no one mentioned Bob’s name out loud but they missed Sue’s special coconut-ice slices. Bob and Sue had moved to a duplex development out of town, Eddie said. Some weekends she went to visit them.
As for her, Refile, she had written her article and yet the things that counted that day were missing from it, all of them—the dead still air and the still reeds where no birds sang and the man asleep on the vlei edge opening his eyes in wonderment, My beloved, I see you.
Something had come to her out there in the crater, Refile knew, it had brought on these migraines—she had never had them so fiercely before. But she had not captured it, this thing that had happened, and she had not understood it. A perception had come, there it was, drifting in the still air, slowly, slowly, within view, within earshot, but she was looking elsewhere, and, ah, it was gone, she had missed it. She had missed her moment.
O my love, let your love not come too late, Bob had written, for mine is a dark storm breaking out of season.
She lifted her head. She sensed Tex was looking at her. He came over now and put his hand to her forehead.
‘Eh, man, Ref,’ he twisted one of her braids around his fingers. ‘You need to start forgetting that old white guy. He belongs to another planet, another time. He’s not worth worrying about, not like this.’
‘He isn’t but he is,’ said Ref. ‘You see, I can’t lie, it was the things he said, I can’t forget them. Something crept into his head that day he slept in the crater and it changed his life. He gave way to it, he let it change him. Who else can say as much?’
‘It changed his life, sure. He lost his job, he lost his mind, he nearly went to jail.’
‘Maybe, but he said the most beautiful things. I wish I could say anything half so beautiful. I wish I could thank him properly for the beautiful things he said.’
Evelina
17.30
Evelina liked to hang around airports though, till today, she had never yet left one on an aeroplane. She liked to sit in the arrivals halls, in the coffee place close to the exit where families waited with balloons and smiles. She liked to absorb the ambiente. She was absorbing it now, though in departures not arrivals, in the café alongside the security gates, drinking her coffee and smiling as she watched the families smiling. It made her happy, that she could be included in their ambiente, though she wasn’t required to say a word.
Her airport hobby had started a few years ago—three or four, she couldn’t remember exactly, back in the old century—the day she said goodbye to her best friend Marta. After her marriage went bad Marta had decided to make a clean break. Evelina and Marta had sat here in the same café, Marta retouching her lipstick, peering with narrowed eyes into the clip-open lipstick case she always kept in her bag.
Evelina had watched Marta walk that day through the departure gates sobbing into a tissue but with a kind of skip of her left heel, a definite spring in her step. Watching Marta’s departing back, Evelina couldn’t help noticing the spring.
These days Marta was teaching languages in Spain, near Toledo. She was earning good money and seeing someone, she wrote, a nice teacher at the secondary school. Although she worried sometimes that he was so much shorter than herself, worried what their future children might think.
Their other friend, Teresa, mouthy Teresa, took the same exit route a year or so later. Again Evelina came to say goodbye. Again she bought a round of hot chocolate here in the café, and again stood with her face pressed to the security glass, watching Teresa sink down the long escalator to the departure gates, Teresa waving and smiling and then, as she stepped off the escalator, quite briskly tucking her tissues away in the side pouch of her bag.
Teresa had aimed to join Marta in the language school in Spain but then she had got talking to people, and people had talked nicely about her, so now she was working on cruise ships in the Caribbean. Everything had changed for her and was raised up to a new level, and now, Teresa wrote in her last birthday card, it should be Evelina’s turn. Now Evelina had her chance to go away like the others. She should grab the opportunity in both hands.
By the time Teresa left, Evelina was already in the habit of coming to the airport. She came perhaps once a month, especially on quiet weekdays, in the evening, sometimes still in her tour-guide uniform. The only person who knew about her habit was Jorge himself. She liked coming even without anyone to wave off, perhaps more so. She liked having time to watch the families, the kids in their Brazil-made chanclas running and chasing each other around the chairs and tables like these two little girls about six or seven here at the table beside hers. Round the table they chased, now one way, now the other, the smaller one giggling helplessly. She liked it so much she sometimes skipped going over to stand in the departure area, though she liked it there, too, watching the travellers being hugged.
But her best bit, secretly, was her own private regreso, coming back into the city after her airport coffee. This she liked the most. Sitting at the airport and then coming home again. She liked swooping her car into the fast lane, nearly empty at this hour, and then up the steep ramp and down her own avenida. She liked that feeling of coming back into her tiny flat, up the three flights of concrete steps that the janitor washed at five every evening, and opening the door onto her two neat rooms with everything standing exactly where she had left it. Even if that was just a few hours ago and no one could possibly have been in.
How grateful this journey made her for everything that she had here in this city. Which is why she couldn’t get enough of visiting the airport, that heady feeling that the trip back home gave her every time.
Her family didn’t know about this habit of enjoying the arrivals hall or they might have come along on this mild Saturday evening, to help her get away, to give her the push she needed.
Her parents lived up country now, in the campo. They had held their send-off last weekend in her flat—her parents, her older brother Enrico who was a small pets vet, a couple of cousins from her mother’s side. They had made the four-hour round trip together in Enrico’s car. She had served oozing facturas from the panadería downstairs, and black tea with lemon, plus stronger stuff for those who wanted it, and they had all talked about the repairs to Enrico’s new house and when he might start converting his extra garage into a practice. One of the cousins would be coming to stay for a while in Evelina’s flat, to have a long-expected holiday in the city, they said. They had talked only about solid things. As if by not saying much about Evelina’s leaving or about Jorge, the reason for her leaving, they could all pretend it wasn’t really taking place.
On the washed concrete steps they had said goodbye and their hugs had been dry and unfussy. They were immigrant people, a little Welsh, a little Irish, and a lot of Buenos Aires. They set their faces to the future, which is to say, the future that was here, now, and solid.
From the beginning Evelina’s father had refused to say Jorge’s name. He had refused at first to meet him and, when he finally did, he refused at first to shake his hand. But he had never paid any of her few boyfriends even a morsel of attention.
‘His eyes want to undress you,’ he said of the first, Luciano, all of seventeen, still at school at the time. ‘It’s disgusting, arrojalo, get rid of him.’
Evelina had, but none of the others she brought home later had fared any better. Papá said he wanted to hit them all. In another day and age, he swore, he’d have taken a sword to them, pure and simple.
So this afternoon it was Evelina’s turn to sit in th
e airport waiting for a plane, on her own, without her family, but this time with a ticket in her purse. It was her turn to begin a new phase, in North America, in New York, a new phase to go with the new century, a chance to explore a new life with Jorge her fiancé—her energetic, open-hearted Jorge who had gone on ahead to set things up.
Sitting in the departures coffee shop, smaller than the one downstairs, Evelina noticed for the first time the good view through the big window beside the check-in gates. Even from here she could see through the window a section of the runway and the lit-up planes criss-crossing like fireflies against the sky now darkening towards evening.
Next time she was here, she told herself, she would go over to the window to take a longer look. There was a shiny rail to lean on. There were people right now leaning on it, looking out, pointing, their dark profiles stamped on the glass. But then she remembered there wouldn’t be a next time and she had to put down her coffee, her hands trembled so.
The bag of toiletries and warm clothes she had packed stood beside her. She kept her leg pressed against the bag and her handbag pressed between her feet. Their box crates had gone ahead. For the air trip itself she hadn’t known what to pack. What do you pack when you are changing continents, setting out to make a new life in New York with your beloved, your prometido? You could pack everything, or you could pack only your most special things that you wouldn’t want to send in a crate.
When her alarm rang this morning, she couldn’t find anything special enough to take along, nothing anyway that was small enough to carry, so she packed just this compact bag and in the end put in the wind-up alarm clock itself, on top, wrapped in a hanky. Couldn’t do any harm to start a new life with a reliable alarm clock.
As for the box crates, filling them had been like filling bags for charity, piling in stuff you never expected to see again. Even now, a few weeks on, she could barely remember the contents—Jorge’s kitchenware, yes, with his special block of knives; a needlepoint picture of snowy mountains done by his late mother as a young woman; also a few old pieces of furniture, hand-me-down stuff dry and cracked from standing long years in the sunshine in relatives’ apartments.
To the Volcano Page 5