With James’s help, Anna embarked on a tour of all the antique shops on the coast, from Malaga down to Estepona. They must have visited fifty, before looking in the window of a shop near Puerto Banus, Anna saw a sixteenth-century bageño, a type of small chest with many drawers in it, that she recognised. ‘I posed as a spoiled bitch with money to burn, and talked to the woman, very cheap and her hair wasn’t good, and told her the type of furniture I wanted for my new home. All the time I was looking at everything, and recognised piece after piece. But what I was really looking for was a walnut table, a solid piece of walnut in a light yellowish-brown colour, that was used as the marriage table for Philip and Isabella, but there was no sign of it. I asked her whether they had further shops, and she said yes, in Granada and Sevilla. So she came with us when we drove up to Granada in the pouring rain, hoping for a sale. We got on fine – she told us her husband was having an affair – and we found another shop which was full of Carl’s paintings that I hadn’t seen for years, because normally he kept them in London. We used to have to pay forty pounds a month for the storage: I still have the receipts.’
She saw my interest.
‘I kept all the receipts for everything we bought together,’ she explained.
‘You really have to visit Roberto, the lawyer. He has told me he wants to see those divorce papers.’
‘Anyway,’ she deflected, ‘I’d rung my friend, Antonio, in the Guardia Civil, and reported to him what had happened. He told me to be very careful because I could end up cut into little pieces. We didn’t know who was behind the robbery: the Russian mafia, or the gitanos, or what criminal gang was involved. So he joined us up in Granada, and I said to the woman that he was my architect, and I identified many pieces that I pretended I wanted, but the walnut table wasn’t there. I decided to ask for an antique table, very special, for a room that I had, and the woman told us she also had a house in Granada, and that there were many items there. So we ended up in the mansion of Luisa, the Duchess of something or other, a beautiful woman, who obviously knew nothing about any of this. There, in a back kitchen leaning up against a wall, was the top of the walnut table.’ Anna’s eyes were dancing with excitement. ‘I was really worried that they were selling off the legs somewhere else. And there was a break-front cupboard there, English, from the early sixteenth century. I opened the door, and there were the hooks that I had put in. I asked the woman what she thought they were for, but she didn’t know. So I suggested that maybe they were for cups.’
We looked at each other, astounded at her effrontery in having updated an antique!
‘But I used it in the kitchen, Michael. Anyway, there was this garage, a big garage for about four cars, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that Carl’s paintings nearly fell out the door on top of us when it was opened. I told the woman that I wanted some pieces, including the table top, and she asked me for forty thousand euro. I told her I didn’t have that sort of money on me, but that I’d get her the money on the Tuesday, because Monday was a bank holiday. I borrowed three hundred from James, I didn’t let the woman see, and I had two hundred in my bag, so I left a deposit with her of five hundred euro.’
‘Your money, Anna.’
‘Yes. And poor Antonio had to sit in his car outside the palacio of the duchess for the whole of the weekend in case they moved any of the furniture. And with his colleagues in Malaga, Granada and Sevilla, he organised for raids to take place on all of the woman’s antique shops and on the mansion, to be done simultaneously on the Tuesday morning early.’
Anna’s brown eyes were alive. ‘You should have seen me!’ she said. ‘I was standing there in the rain on the Tuesday morning dressed in a yellow Guardia Civil overcoat, when the police vans pulled up at the mansion. I can tell you that all the señoras from the neighbourhood were out with their brooms sweeping the footpaths in the pouring rain!’ Her laughter echoed around the apartment. ‘The husband of the duchess was there, and he wanted to know what this was about. Antonio did the talking. The man said that he was into racehorses. A cousin of his ran the antique shops, and he promised us that he’d sort this out, and that Carl would get every piece of his furniture back. I was able to identify every piece, and the Guardia Civil photographed each one before loading it onto a lorry. Antonio knew all about the divorce from Carl, and he said I should take what I wanted, but all I took was a nineteenth-century Pontremoli rug which they didn’t photograph. It’s a beautiful piece, a part silk needlework rug, pale green, with birds and butterflies, signed JMP, London. And when I got it home and unrolled it, inside was my old Leica camera! It took the whole day up there. We’d spent about ten weeks altogether driving out every day!
‘I rang Carl from the police station in Ojen to say that we’d found all of his furniture, and I suggested that he give two thousand euro from the reward money to the Guardia Civil because they’d been so conscientious in getting his furniture back, but he wouldn’t hear of it, and he asked to speak with Antonio, so I passed him over the phone. Carl told him that I had been behind the robbery all along, and that he was going to sue me!’
I was shocked. ‘Anna, that’s not possible.’
‘Yes!’ she said, and her eyes were filling with tears. ‘Antonio was furious. He knew the amount of work that had gone into getting the furniture back, and he swore at him and put down the receiver. But Carl has sued me! He contacted the police station in Malaga, and now I’ve a denuncia hanging over my head, and I don’t know what to do about it.’
‘What does that mean, Anna?’ I asked her.
‘It means there’s a lien on everything: I can’t get a loan in the bank, that’s if you could get a loan in the bank in these days of austerity.’
We were talking about the Stefan Schmidt case to our solicitor, Roberto, in his office overlooking Church Square in Fuengirola, and he enquired after Anna. We told him about her heart complaint, which he was sorry to hear about, and we mentioned what Carl had accused her of.
‘But that’s a crime in Spain,’ he said, ‘to accuse someone in the wrong. Tell her to come in and see me. And get her to bring those divorce papers. I’ll have a look at them, and see whether there are grounds for an appeal. Let’s hit her former husband where it hurts!’
When eventually the electricity was turned on, and the empty fridges for the catering began to fill up once again, James didn’t move back in, and Anna regained the girlish, gamine look that had been absent from her personality over the past few years, as though a shadow had been lifted. Her former boyfriend moved from Richard’s house up to the apartment he’d bought with Linda in Alicante, and says he’ll come down to collect the rest of his belongings by the end of the summer: at the moment he’s occupied with visitors. Vicente drove down the road to the restaurant from his holiday home outside Malaga, and had a day-long business meeting with Anna, during which he again made no reference to what she says she’s owed. Instead, he informed her about the enormous mortgage he has on Restaurante Alborán. While the restaurant is thriving, he showed her that they needed to increase business fourfold in order to cover the mortgage as well! ‘Vicente complained about a bad smell in the restaurant, as if some food had gone off, really rank. It followed us everywhere, and I pretended not to notice.’
‘Do you know that “rank” once meant its opposite?’ I pointed out ‘Ranc is Old French for straight or noble.’
‘There’s a bad odour around my dealings with Vicente,’ Anna said emphatically.
Anna has received an appointment with a heart specialist in Madrid to see if they’ll replace at least one of the valves in her heart. She doesn’t know whether she’ll continue to work in the restaurant. ‘I might finish out the year. I realise that the mortgage on the restaurant isn’t my problem. My health must come first.’ She has yet to talk to Roberto, the lawyer, to revisit her divorce settlement with Carl. ‘I don’t have any time,’ she told us over the phone. ‘I had my hair cut at the restaurant with Bernard the other day,’ she said, ‘and I kept him
waiting for over an hour. He sends his regards, by the way.’
A further year on, and Anna was still working at the restaurant, although she’d cut back on the mad hours she used to work. She’s gained enormously in confidence and status from successfully running the business, and had made many important contacts. We attended the gala dinner as her special guests the night of her induction into the Marbella Lions, but still she insisted she wasn’t being paid properly. ‘I know Vicente doesn’t have it.’ was her excuse this time. Terry and I looked at each other, immediately hearing something else in her remark, but there was no point in labouring the point, because the hurt she was feeling was enormous. When Vicente texted a photograph of himself and two of his sons on a trip to Kiev to watch Spain play in the final of the World Cup, she was spittingly angry. ‘That was my money he used. And some of the proveedores that provision the restaurant have to wait for several months to be paid, and they have families to support: they can’t go to bloody Kiev!’ Anna worried about them, and about how to keep the restaurant going on a shoestring.
When she rang Vicente in Madrid on his return, he told her that if the proveedores were causing trouble, to get rid of them. He said they were lucky to work with his family, which had very many enterprises, not just the restaurant, and if they didn’t like the way he did business, then replacements could be found easily. ‘No one is indispensible, Anna!’ In the course of that conversation, he told her that he’d received money back from the revenue, and after she pleaded on behalf of the suppliers, he conceded to her that some of that money could go towards paying them, and settling the most outstanding bills. So Anna fully expected to get her own money when Vicente arrived down for another meeting with the accountant, Carlos, in the restaurant at Tuesday lunchtime, an appointment that he kept putting back from day to day, much to Anna’s exasperation.
It was late Friday evening before Vicente strode into the restaurant with Alejandra, demanding a table out on the terrace, although all the tables had been fully booked. A table was organised. Towards the end of their meal, he called Anna over, and for the first time in their relationship he attacked her. ‘I keep getting complaints in the office,’ he said, ‘that you’re constantly demanding the use of a plumber or electrician.’
Alejandra was concentrating on her mint tea.
‘Because you’re not investing in a new fridge for the kitchen and it keeps breaking down. We need new fridges, Vicente.’
‘All the money is going back into the restaurant,’ he said evenly. ‘Isn’t everyone now being paid?’
‘Except for me,’ Anna stated. And looking down at him, she said, ‘You owe me money!’
Alejandra appeared to be shocked, and she glanced around at the other diners in case they’d heard.
Vicente ignored what Anna had said. ‘You’re not managing the place properly; otherwise these constant breakdowns wouldn’t be happening.’
Alejandra moved slightly in her chair, but it didn’t appear she could leave the table out of loyalty to her husband.
Anna felt that Vicente was getting at her because of the difficulties being posed by her heart condition, of which he’d have been told, and she wondered whether he was now attempting to get rid of her. The anger boiled over suddenly. She raised her voice and became animated, even though the waiters could see and overhear the confrontation. ‘You play the grand seigneur and treat people like commodities,’ she said. ‘I’m the one in the front line trying to do my best by the suppliers who are owed money. They bring their complaints to me, their loyalty is to me, but you’re insulated up there in Madrid, and have no idea what’s really going on. Or maybe you do, and that’s where the underlying problem in this situation lies. Believe me, this is a thankless task, and it stresses me out. But I’m beginning to tell everyone here on the coast that you’re not paying me what I’m owed.’ And a flash of inspiration, she said, ‘The staff think that the only reason I work here is because I like the adventure.’ The word she used was ‘aventura’ which can also mean ‘an affair’ in Spanish. Alejandra looked at her squarely for the first time.
Anna turned on her heel, walked up the steps into the restaurant and collected her bag from behind the bar. She was sobbing with the emotion of the encounter by the time she’d sat alone into her car, and locked the door on the cruelty of the outside world. She sat there unmoving for half an hour because her heart was beating so violently. ‘I had a hole in my chest,’ she later told Terry.
Anna was clear that what she’d done was wrong, because there was no truth in her intimation of an affair with Vicente, and in a fury, she’d deliberately fed a doubt about his loyalty.
‘Alejandra came up to me in the restaurant the next day, and with the eyes of a deer … yes?
‘A doe?’
‘Bambi! She said that she had no idea I was in dispute with Vicente, and in the same breath she told me that they share everything: they have no secrets from each other! Vicente just ignored me. And when I went up to him and said “I want my money,” he waved me away with the back of his hand, and said “Later!”’
Over a breakfast in La Mairena, Anna shrugged, then ran her fingers through her damp hair, tousling and shaking out Bernard’s new cut. ‘He has no intention of paying me,’ she stated gloomily, ‘and Roberto, the lawyer, says it’s my word against his.’
‘In what way?’ I asked.
‘I just have an understanding, a verbal contract, if even that, because we never clearly discussed the terms of my employment. In a court of law, he has right on his side.’ She poured some Greek yoghurt over her fresh fruit salad, then, gaining in spirit, she turned towards me again, and explained with a wicked grin, flashing a glimpse of the old Anna that we loved: ‘Michael, in a man’s world, sometimes a woman has to do wrong, in order to be right!’
Part Ten
Conor
Portraiture is a mysterious art that has always fascinated me, because in that recognition by a great artist I can hear some paintin·gs speak. The calling voice is that of the sitter, so strong in communicating the person’s truth, that time collapses and space loses its characteristics. Through tracing a line on canvas and drawing forth the image of a person’s soul, I can intuit what a person is like from what the artist has brought out into the open. It’s a divine talent which I don’t possess, but in which I can share. The artist and I stand side by side listening to the voice of what the sitter wants to say, hearing at the same time what the sitter has tried to conceal, because the artist pulls back a veil so that emotional ambivalence is on display. My understanding of human nature is transformed, and it deepens at the sound.
In writing about a person, and using the pen to paint their portrait, courage is required. It’s a disposition I have sought unceasingly, to follow through on what I’ve learned about them, and to reveal the truth while preserving discretion, a word which goes both ways: writing in such a way as to avoid the person social embarrassment or distress, while continuing to uphold my own freedom to make judgements, and to act as I see fit. As a Producer/Director in RTÉ, I developed the ability to look at the monitors in the television control room, and in a big close-up instantly see what a person is like, because a television camera paints with light. The image is like an X-ray: when the sound is turned down, I’m able to see the truth speak through the individual’s eyes. It reverberates in harmony with the voice of my soul, supplying a commentary on what I see there, and directing with accuracy the calibration of the lens and the aim of my approach towards the protagonist, in the particular television programme I was making at the time. Despite any conscious intention on my part, the complexity of the truth when it emerged wasn’t always agreeable.
Conor, the photographer, has steady blue eyes. He uses them to look through as he does the viewfinder of a camera. They swivel slowly in their sockets, sometimes aided by the tilt of his head, so that when he talks to you, he’s sheltering behind them, coolly watching everyone on the other side, waiting in expectation. I can see him behave a
s a child would, scanning the room for a place of safety from the unpredictability of adults. And yet, he’s looking for the unguarded moment when a sitter is open: el momento de la verdad, the moment of truth. When he was photographing Terry on the balcony of La Mairena, there was a moment when Terry forgot the intrusive camera setup. He’d turned to me to enquire happily, ‘Well, Cook, how’s the barbeque doing?’ and then turned back to Conor.
Click, click, click: ‘Yes!’
Conor tries to capture through his lenses this revelation of being, a point in time which affords him a glimpse through to eternity. His quest for that connection is importunate, like a demanding child, although his speech is soothing and gentle, hesitant almost, delivered in an emotionless monotone, as if the expression of personal emotion were too dangerous an act. In a rare burst of opinion making, he pronounced from the passenger seat of the car: ‘We always bring our own prejudices to bear, be it middle-class, or liberal, or western.’ Chuckling to himself, he admitted, ‘I do have my own thoughts, like,’ rolling heavenwards those clear blue eyes in mock horror. Ultimately Conor’s demand is the simple one for love, which I could see that he paints with dancing, yellow sunlight into the photographs that he’d taken for me previously.
Conor had informed me of his plan for the new photographs in Dublin. ‘I won’t bring any lamps down,’ shifting uncomfortably in his chair, then reflectively, ‘just use the natural white light of Spain.’ His simple apprehension was a lure, a decoy that deflected from his probing photographer’s intelligence, for his artistic desire has many layers, and it’s driven by hope. I was taken aback to find that his favourite time for photographing turned out to be late evening just before sunset, when the light levels are low. It’s a soft, mellow time of magic and romance, when the stark contrasts generated by the blinding white light of Spain is obscured, and appears yellow. ‘More like the filtered light in Ireland,’ I muttered under my breath, apprehensive for our project of capturing in vibrant colour, the passionate arm gestures of the swirling, foot-stamping, extroverted soul of Spain. I’d in mind that Conor would emulate the treatment that the great cinematographer, Greg Toland, gave to the film Citizen Kane with Orson Welles: essentially, the harshly radical approach of the film noir. Conor chose to place me within a Spanish landscape at the end of the day, working in the briefest interval of time before the darkness takes over. Maybe he sensed that, as a writer, I was beginning a career too late, and this was his photographic commentary on autumn: he hoped to paint an elderly man with kinder light, perhaps?
The House of Pure Being Page 16