We took Highway 50 heading for Reno, and Earle continued telling me about Fallon. It was always sunny there, clear blue skies every day. There were a lot of deserted, empty places in America, but none of them had the right climate for pilots being trained to drop bombs on specific ground targets.
“In planes like those ones over there,” he said, pointing to one side of the road.
“Those ones over there” were black flies against a mineral-blue sky.
The sun was already going down, and to the west, above the horizon, the sky was tinged with red. The black flies grew to the size of birds; gradually, the birds became metallic objects and the metallic objects became helicopters. They crossed the road in front of us. Three of them, then ten seconds later, another three. The second group flew very low, making the sand on either side of the road swirl about.
“Our Berlin tourists stood no chance of escaping anyway,” Earle said.
He hadn’t forgotten them. Neither had I.
On the radio, Nancy Sinatra was singing. “Bang Bang, My Baby Shot Me Down”.
Even though I didn’t have any cigarettes, I thought I would have wound down the window on the Chevrolet Avalanche to speak to the prisoner with the beard, and would have said a few friendly words to him, saying – guiltily aware that my words were purely rhetorical – how sorry I was, how I pitied him and his companions, wasting their lives in that way, clearing rocks from a road that was barely usable. A memory accompanied that thought. Around 1980, I was in a café in Gold Street in New York, and the waiter took me for a fellow Latino and said to me in Spanish: “How come they’re so rich and we’re so poor? How can God allow that?” His eyes filled with tears. He was so depressed that he didn’t even mind showing his feelings to a complete stranger. It was a small café, but very luxurious. He was wearing an extremely elegant uniform: maroon jacket and bow tie, white shirt. He himself was handsome, with dark, curly hair. I asked how much he earned. “These people pay nothing,” he answered. “Their hearts are made of stone. They are jackals.” His words did not shatter any of the shop windows in that street of gold; they did not even reach the ceiling of the café. They affected me though. After that day, I could never go to America without seeing, in every other suffering face, the face of that exploited waiter. And now in the face of that prisoner. “Could you give me a couple of cigarettes, one for me and one for my friend here?” I would have said: “I’m sorry, but I don’t have any.” “Never mind. Thanks anyway.” “Why are you in prison?” “I was accused of strangling a girl, but it’s a lie. I’m innocent.”
I felt confused. Thoughts and memories kept getting mixed up in my head.
On the radio’s small screen another song came up. Dolly Parton. “I Will Always Love You”
Earle was driving along with his eyes narrowed. Perhaps he was looking for antelopes, as he had been at the beginning of the trip or, more likely, he was finding it hard to see the road. The sun was about to vanish, the shadows were becoming ever more numerous. The sagebrush on either side of the road was not green any more, but black.
Earle’s response to the prisoner was, doubtless, the right one, and perhaps the fairer one too. He couldn’t have spoken to the prisoner in a friendly manner, not even a prisoner who was easy to intimidate and keep at bay, as was the case then. A nine-year-old child, our daughter Sara, could feel sorry for King Kong or for a drug trafficker arrested in Tacos, but a grown-up? I wasn’t sure what the answer was. The tear-filled eyes of the waiter in New York’s street of gold stood in the way.
The Rolling Stones. “Angie”.
Night was falling. In the sky, it was hard to tell blue from black.
Earle slowed the car almost to a halt. Before us we saw what remained of a gas station. The pumps were all blackened, the trash cans a twisted mass of plastic. A fire.
“It used to be a brothel,” Earle said, turning off the radio. “The women who worked the pumps didn’t wear many clothes. And inside, they didn’t wear any at all.”
Another half-smile.
An hour later, we reached the junction of Highways 50 and 80. Suddenly, we were driving among trucks. From the other direction too it was mostly trucks, many of them with extra lights on the cabin, like the cars on carousels. We were driving home, and I felt as if I had been away for a whole month. Time was different in the desert.
“Nevada!” Earle exclaimed. He sounded almost elegiac. I could nearly smell the scent of sagebrush that word gave off.
“This is a state that flourished thanks to four things,” he said. “Divorce, gambling, prostitution and mining for gold and silver.”
And the highway, I thought, looking at the trucks. But I said nothing.
“Most of the mines were mined out years ago,” Earle went on. “There are still a few in Virginia City and in Tonopah, but not many. And divorce isn’t what it was in the days of Vanderbilt, because people can get divorced anywhere now. Fortunately, the other two mines are still active, and I shouldn’t think they’ll ever be exhausted.”
“Although that depends on the Indians,” I said. I had read in the Reno Gazette-Journal that the casinos owned by the Chumash and the Mission Indians in California were giving Reno and Las Vegas a lot of competition.
“Well, we all have to live,” he said with a smile.
We came round a long bend and, suddenly, the lights of Reno appeared, as if they had just been turned on.
THE SHEPHERD AND THE DESERT
Ángela brought back from the C.B.S. archives a copy of National Geographic, containing an interview that the writer Robert Laxalt had made with his father Dominique. His father was talking about his experiences in the desert during his years as a shepherd.
“If a man was unlucky enough to be sent there when he first came, it was a terrible shock.
“I remember how it was for me. I wasn’t much more than sixteen years old, you know. And they sent me into the desert with a dog and three thousand sheep.
“I can remember waking up in the morning, and, as far as I could see in any direction, there were only sagebrushes and rocks and runted little junipers. Though the Basques are used to being alone, these deserts were something else. In the first months, how many times I cried in my camp bed at night – remembering my home, remembering the beautiful green Basque Country.
“In the summer, the desert burned your lungs, and every day you had a scare with rattlesnakes and scorpions. In the winter, the blizzards tore at you and soaked you so that you were wet and freezing day and night.
“Those first few months, you thought you would go insane. Then, suddenly, your mind turned the corner and you were used to it, and you didn’t care if you ever saw people again.”
MESSAGE TO MY FRIEND L.
RENO, SEPTEMBER 18, 2007
Two days ago, my neighbour, Bob Earle, drove me into the desert in his Chevrolet Avalanche. We drove through Churchill County and visited a ghost town called Berlin.
Initially, I kept looking for a kind of “Lawrence of Arabia” landscape, because that was the image I’d expected after seeing that film forty or so years ago. But the Nevada desert, the part I saw anyway, is different. It isn’t a sandy desert. Parts of it are covered in trees and shrubs; other parts are a succession of trapezoid mountains and piles of rocks in an area that extends for hundreds of square miles.
Seeing those trapezoid mountains in the distance, I got quite confused. I lost all sense of time and space. If someone had told me that I was travelling in the Discovery space shuttle rather than in Earle’s Chevrolet Avalanche, that we were crossing outer space and not the Nevada desert, I would have believed them. Just as I would have believed that we were back in the days when pterodactyls were still flying about and ichthyosaurs were swimming in the sea, and not in the year 2007. Looking at those mountains – far, far, far away, so far away that the most distant ones looked like mere maquettes – I was keenly aware of the world’s utter indifference to us. This wasn’t just an idea either, but something more physical, mo
re emotional, which troubled me and made me feel like crying. I understood then that the mountains were in a different place entirely. They weren’t just distant from me in the way a bird in Sicily is distant from a tree in Nevada, but, as I said, in a different place entirely. In another dimension? That’s what I would say if I were just chatting to a friend. But the word “dimension” doesn’t include the important element of indifference. Those trapezoid mountains have been in the desert for millions of years. They are nothing to do with us, they are nothing to do with life, and it’s hard to imagine why they are there, or why we even occupy the same physical space.
As you see, I’ve gone all Byronic and highfalutin. I will come back down to earth now.
Bob Earle is very used to being in the desert, and he broke the spell I was under by making jokes about the whereabouts of Steve Fossett, who was into extreme sports and spent his life beating world records in endurance and speed. He disappeared some weeks ago.
Leaving the desert had its moments too. In Berlin, we saw a group of prisoners clearing the road, and a fossil ichthyosaurus.
BUYING BOOKS IN BORDERS
The bookshop was light and spacious and a really pleasant place to be. We used to visit it often, normally on a Friday. Izaskun and Sara would spend several hours lying on the carpet in the children’s section, reading picture books, while Ángela and I, sitting in the café, would leaf through the books and magazines we had picked from the shelves.
The first books we took to our table in the café on Friday, September 19 were written by various members of the Laxalt family: a special edition of Sweet Promised Land by Robert Laxalt, The Deep Blue Memory by Monique Laxalt Urza – which we had only read before in the Basque translation – and a book of poems by Bruce Laxalt, which we didn’t even know existed. Then, from the table of new books, we chose Dempsey in Nevada by Guy Clifton, and a catalogue of photographs taken on the set of John Huston’s “The Misfits”, which included a long interview with Arthur Miller.
We intended to buy the Laxalt books, and so spent our time looking at the other two. Individually, the photographs in the catalogue were really good – Huston and Marilyn at a gaming table in Reno, a wild horse galloping through the desert, Clark Gable smiling, Clark Gable looking tired, Montgomery Clift looking thoughtful – but perhaps because the photographs were the work of different photographers, seeing them all together jarred somehow. And the interview with Arthur Miller was uncomfortable to read. The print was faint and the typeface ugly and the spacing too big.
“I wouldn’t buy it,” Ángela said. And I agreed.
The Guy Clifton book included photographs too: Dempsey and Willard fighting in the ring, the fight between Dempsey and Carpentier in front of thousands of people, Dempsey with his mother, Dempsey with a hippopotamus at a circus that visited Reno in 1931 … To our surprise, Paulino Uzcudun appeared in one of the photographs. The caption said: “Actor and wrestler Bull Montana, Paolino Uzcudun and Dempsey pose at Uzcudun’s camp at Steamboat Springs, 1931.”
There were more photographs of Uzcudun, several with Max Baer; there was also a panoramic shot of the Dempsey Arena in Reno on the day of the fight. According to the book, there were more than 15,000 spectators.
My father was born a few miles from Uzcudun’s house and had a lot of things to say about him, none of them good. I found him an interesting character.
“I’d love to find that training camp, Steamboat Springs,” I said to Ángela.
A man who looked like a tramp was sitting nearby, and he suddenly snatched up the Guy Clifton book and started studying the back cover, then read out loud: “My God, that’s when men were men!” It was part of the publicity puff Angelo Dundee had written.
“Totally agree!” the tramp exclaimed, handing the book back.
THE SPIDER IS STILL ALIVE
I met Dennis in the university library while I was looking for a copy of Nabokov’s Lolita. I asked him about the black widow spider he had imprisoned in a bottle.
“It’s exactly as it was on the first day,” he said, and his face lit up like a child’s face.
“Really?”
“Would you like to see it?”
I looked doubtful.
“What’s the book you’re looking for?” he asked.
“Lolita.”
“And the author’s name?”
“Nabokov.”
“Na-bo-kov,” he repeated, as he searched the shelves, quickly running his fingers over the spines of the books. A few seconds later, he had two different editions of Lolita in his hands, in Spanish and English. I took the Spanish and he took the English.
We went over to the library counter to have the books stamped, and went from there to his office.
The spider was sitting motionless in the bottle. It really did seem perfectly healthy: its back had the same metallic sheen as when I saw it the first time, unblemished and undulled.
Dennis tapped the bottle, and the spider moved its legs. Then he shook the bottle, and the spider raced from the bottom to the top and from the top to the bottom. Just as it had the first time.
“It’s been in there quite a few days, hasn’t it?” I said.
“Nineteen.”
“That’s incredible.”
“Fascinating,” Dennis said.
EXCURSION TO PYRAMID LAKE
Pyramid Lake, a Paiute Indian reservation, is 35 miles north-east of Reno, in a remote desert area south of Washoe County. It is 15 miles long and 11 miles wide. In 1993, the population was 1,603. Guidebook to Nevada
I was sitting on the lake shore, and Sara and Izaskun were pointing at the white pelicans flying towards us from the pyramid-shaped rock, but my mind wouldn’t fix on that place – Pyramid Lake, Washoe County, Nevada – or on that moment – Sunday, September 23, 2007, a cold, blue day – and was instead recalling what had happened to two boys I knew when I was a child; it focused in on them like eyes homing in on a particular object.
They were twin brothers, Carmelo and José Manuel. Their father worked in Madrid, and so they lived there and only came to the village, to Asteasu, for the summer, and then they would hang out with us boys, who were the same age as them. We would go down to the river or up into the hills, or we would cycle to some nearby cinema.
One of those summers, towards the end of August, José Manuel went back to Madrid to prepare to re-sit an exam he had failed. Shortly afterwards, I realised that his brother, Carmelo, was missing and I assumed that he had left too. But he was still in the village, confined to the house because he was ill.
“He’s got a bad headache,” a cousin of his said.
That same night, I heard my mother talking to a neighbour in our kitchen.
“They say he’s in a really bad way,” the neighbour said.
I thought she meant Carmelo, but they were talking about José Manuel. Apparently, there had just been a telephone call from Madrid to warn the family.
The woman’s voice dropped to a whisper.
“They’re afraid he might have meningitis.”
Her tone of voice seemed in keeping with the grave state the patient was in, and I adopted the same tone to give them my news: that afternoon, José Manuel’s twin brother, Carmelo, had come down with a bad headache and was lying in the dark in his room, unable to get out of bed.
I had invented the business about the dark room, driven to exaggerate by my excitement.
My mother and the neighbour listened to me intently.
“That’s all we need – for them both to get ill,” my mother said.
After supper, my two brothers and I used to sit in the living room, reading comic books about Red Ryder and Hopalong Cassidy. I mentioned that José Manuel was ill, adding information gleaned from my mother’s conversation with the neighbour. Meningitis gave you a fever of forty degrees. And the back of your neck went as hard as a stone. But, despite the seriousness of the illness, we shouldn’t worry, because the hospitals in Madrid were very good.
My two brothers
moved their heads up and down. Easy enough. I did the same. The backs of our necks were not as hard as a stone. We were fine.
We carried on reading, but I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t rid myself of an idea that was going round and round in my head.
“It’s really strange,” I said to my brothers. “Carmelo started to get a really bad headache here in Asteasu at precisely the same time José Manuel fell ill in Madrid. Or the other way round. José Manuel fell ill in Madrid, and Carmelo got a really bad headache here. Both at the same time.”
I was hungry for mystery, and I started to adorn the facts with invented details. No-one knew the exact moment when the twins had fallen ill.
“It’s as if they were telepathic,” I explained, not entirely sure what the word “telepathic” meant.
My two brothers continued reading their comics and showed not the slightest interest.
The following morning, I met Carmelo in the baker’s. He didn’t seem ill, but he was quieter than usual. When the shop assistant asked about his brother, he simply shrugged. When he left, he didn’t even say goodbye.
“It all depends on how advanced the illness is,” a young woman waiting to be served said. It seemed that no-one was talking about anything else in the village.
The two women and a third who came into the shop shortly afterwards went over the various cases of meningitis that had happened locally, and I was surprised to find it was so common, but the biggest surprise came when I heard the name of a cousin of mine. I couldn’t remember her ever being ill. Besides, my cousin was still alive.
That day, we went down to a pool in the river, and the older boys tried to show us a new way of diving in. At first, Carmelo didn’t want to join us, but then he cheered up and stayed in the water until it was getting dark. I never took my eyes off him. I wanted to see if he showed any sign of having a headache, but I saw nothing. He just seemed more silent than usual, as he had in the baker’s, and he kept away from the rest of us when we started noisily splashing about in the water and fighting.
Nevada Days Page 5