For us – although perhaps not for the inhabitants of six hundred thousand years ago – the physical world is always, or so it seems, something secondary, a mere support, the surface we need in order to sow corn or plant potatoes or to supply an industry or, seen from a very different angle, a ductile material that changes according to our moods, becoming sad when we are sad – O grey sky! – or happy when we are happy – O ray of sun! But that vision, which is there in the myth – “Adam, you are the centre of creation” – and which you find in the gentler landscapes of Europe, is untenable in Nevada, where the mountains and the deserts proudly proclaim their power: “Here we are, violent beings; we are not at your mercy, you are at ours.” Perhaps that is why the Paiute and the Washoe Indians call nature Manitou, considering it to be a god, something remote and alien.
We became aware of the sheer force of the Sierra Nevada as soon as the I-80 began to climb, but for some miles we were aware, too, of the protection afforded us by the road. We were on one side, along with the other cars and trucks; the precipices, rocks, snow, steep slopes and mountain peaks were on the other, kept at bay by the metal fences.
That feeling of safety, of being protected, only lasted until we reached Truckee. From that point on – where some vehicles took the exit for the town and others took the exit heading for Lake Tahoe – the precipices, rocks, snow, steep slopes and mountain peaks installed themselves firmly in the car and in our minds, leaving no room for anything else. We all fell silent, even Izaskun and Sara, who, up until then, had been pestering us to let them watch a film.
At an altitude of six and a half thousand feet, every stretch of the road was different. First it turned to the left, then to the right, then to the left again, went down, rose up, and so on and on. It was flanked on both sides by rows of pine trees, most of them damaged in some way; quite a few lay fallen on the snow. In the distance we saw dozens of gleaming white mountains. Further off still lay the open sky and a great bright space: the Pacific Ocean.
“In 1856, a group of more than a hundred people, the Donner Party, tried to follow this route, hoping to reach California, but they met with terrible weather and lost their way.”
Ángela was talking to us about the history of the Sierra Nevada, but it seemed to me that it was the Mountain itself speaking through her.
“Forty-three people died of cold and hunger. Did you see the sign for the Donner Pass a moment ago? It’s there because of those people who lost their lives.”
An eagle glided across the clear blue sky.
“In 1956, two Basque shepherds died in this same area. They got caught in a snowstorm and couldn’t escape. They were found dead alongside the corpses of the two thousand sheep they were tending, who had also frozen to death. A real feast for the vultures!”
The Mountain was sending Ángela ever more sombre messages. “The stories of some of the Basque shepherds who worked here are truly remarkable. Dominique Laxalt, the Barinaga brothers, the Bidarts, the Eiguerens … Not all of them had such luck though. The other day, in the microfilm archive, I found a report published in 1914 in the San Francisco Star. It was about three Basque shepherds who returned to France to fight in the Great War. They almost certainly ended up being gassed at Verdun.”
“What a dumb thing to do!” Izaskun said in English from the back seat. After just four months at Mount Rose School, she spoke English fluently.
“Some priest probably persuaded them to go back,” I said.
I had in mind a play by Piarres Lafitte, “Egiazko argia”, “The True Light”, written as an attack on those who fled across the Pyrenees into Spain to avoid being sent to Verdun or Salonika during the First World War. The protagonist, who has left his dying wife to go to the front, and who, once there, loses his sight after being gassed, suffers a crisis of faith. In despair, he tries to commit suicide and, not content with that, he has the audacity to criticise God, France and, worst of all, the priesthood! In the end, though, thanks to a seminarian called Domingo and his own desire not to deprive a son of his first communion, he regains his faith and, sobbing, makes a statement that deserves to be included in an anthology of the stupidest things ever said in literature: “I am blind, Domingo, but, like all Basques, what illumines me is the true light, the light of faith.”
We started to descend, gently at first, then faster, losing more than three hundred feet a minute. Along the sides of the road, poplars had replaced pine trees.
“Yes, it probably was the fault of the priests,” Ángela said. “They put pressure on the young emigrants, making them feel guilty for having abandoned their mothers in the villages where they were born, and urging them to go back. Not always in order to send them to war, of course. Many small villages in the Basque Country were left with almost no young men, and they wanted to put that right.”
“They had another reason too,” Izaskun said. “The priests were terrified of sex, and thought that, in America, the young men would get a taste for visiting brothels.”
Children may not have the keen hearing of dogs, but they’re not far off. What Izaskun had just said was a fragment of a conversation Ángela and I had once had in the kitchen at College Drive while Izaskun and Sara were sitting out on the garden porch reading.
The bends in the road seemed more like ramps now, and suddenly, after descending another few hundred feet, the Mountain finally released us. The precipices, rocks and snow, the steep slopes and mountain peaks left the car. Our minds could begin to think about other things.
“When are we going to watch the film?” Sara asked, trying to make the most of the new situation.
There was a service area by the roadside, with a gas station and a restaurant. Ángela drove in.
“First, we’re going to stop and have a sandwich.”
From the car park, we could see the plain of Sacramento. I was thirsty and took out a bottle of water from the car boot before going into the restaurant. I couldn’t drink it, though, because the water had turned to ice. A souvenir of the Sierra Nevada.
SAN FRANCISCO
The walls of the corridors in the Hotel Rex were adorned with literary quotes. The one in the space between the doors of our two rooms was by Jack London: “I would rather be ashes than dust! […] I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist …”
“I like it,” Izaskun said.
“I don’t,” I said as best I could, trying to manhandle our heaviest suitcase into the room.
CHRISTMAS EVE
The thermometer in the hotel read 61 degrees F, about 16 degrees C. There was only the gentlest of breezes. The sky was blue. The sun was clear and undimmed by mist. We took a tourist boat around the bay and passed under the Golden Gate Bridge.
“The first European ship to cross this strait was the San Carlos, in 1775,” said Ángela, who had been reading up about the first men to explore California. “The captain was Juan Manuel de Ayala; the pilot was Juan Bautista Aguirre; and the chaplain was Vicente de Santa María. All of them Basques.”
“How cool!” Izaskun said.
“In the diary kept by Vicente de Santa María, he recorded some words from the language spoken by the natives of the bay. They called the sky carac. The sun gismen.”
Carac was as blue as it had been first thing in the morning; the rays of gismen glittered on the mirrors of the cars crossing the Golden Gate Bridge.
TELEPHONE CALL TO MY MOTHER
The signal in the hotel was excellent, and I could hear my mother’s voice as clearly as if she were in the next room. She sounded very cheerful.
“I’m phoning you from San Francisco,” I said. “We’ve come to spend Christmas here. What about you? How is everyone? How was Christmas Eve?”
“Well, what can I say? Your brothers prepared a lovely supper. First, we ate … oh now, hang on, what was it? Ah yes, croquettes, first, croquettes, then prawns, then pâté, and then …”
/> “Sounds delicious. We didn’t bother with a special meal.”
“And asparagus! We ate asparagus too. And then …”
“Was it fish perhaps?”
“Wait, now what was it?”
When the silence went on for too long, I began talking:
“We’ve just had breakfast and we’re about to go for a walk. Yesterday, we visited Chinatown. We were really surprised to hear everyone speaking Chinese. We went into one shop and couldn’t make ourselves understood at all. They only spoke Chinese. A very strange place. Sara and Izaskun found it a bit frightening.”
“Where did you say you are? In China? I thought you were somewhere else.”
“Listen, the girls are calling me. They want to go on a tram.”
“Fish stew!” my mother exclaimed. “That’s it, we ate fish stew!”
“Good.”
“Oh, it was good, but I went to bed immediately afterwards. Besides, those brothers of yours are always talking about politics. I tell them politics is a dirty word, but it’s no use, they won’t stop. It’s so boring.”
OUT AND ABOUT
In the morning, we went to Sausalito, but found it rather dull. There was no-one in the streets and no-one to be seen on the yachts in the harbour either. At two o’clock, we caught the Golden Gate ferry back to San Francisco.
In front of the bench where Sara and I sat down, there were two serious-looking, middle-aged men.
“The way people write about literature nowadays is completely metafactual,” I heard one of them say. “It depends almost exclusively on biographical or anecdotal details.”
They were wearing black jackets and white shirts with Mao collars, and they were Spanish. I imagined they taught at some college in California.
“What do people remember about Raymond Chandler? That he always used to stock up on whisky before starting a novel. And Allen Ginsberg? That he wrote ‘Howl’ when he was high on marihuana, Benzedrine and who knows what else. With Kerouac it’s more or less the same. Plus the fact that he wrote On the Road on a roll of paper, not on separate sheets.”
“That’s what they used to say about Juan Benet. That roll of paper caused great consternation in literary circles in Madrid.”
Ángela and Izaskun were standing at the prow of the ship, beckoning to us to join them. We didn’t hesitate.
In the afternoon, we strolled along the Embarcadero and visited the aquarium: squid, sharks, jellyfish, turtles and fish, thousands of fish. Outside, at Pier 39, we saw sea lions dozing and lolling about in the sun. Occasionally, they would roll casually, lazily into the water. The tourists would laugh and take photographs, thousands of photographs.
As we were leaving the pier, we passed the two Spanish teachers again.
“To give another example: what do people know about Borges, apart from the fact that Perón appointed him a chicken inspector?”
I didn’t hear the answer, but I imagined it would be “Nothing”.
ALCATRAZ ISLAND
Izaskun tapped Ángela on the arm when the voice on the headphones explained that the island of Alcatraz was given its name by Captain Juan Manuel de Ayala, “the first European to cross the strait now known as the Golden Gate’. She remained in the same ebullient mood while we were visiting the other parts of the prison too: “Oh, I know who Al Capone was. I read about him in a book.” “Ah, yes, I know that story about the prisoner who kept birds.” Sara, on the other hand, seemed frightened. She held on to my hand as we walked past the rows of cells.
“Is this where they’ve put the man they arrested in Reno?” she asked. There were mannequins in some of the cells, and she eyed them warily.
“Who do you mean?”
As I suspected, she answered: “The fat man with the round head. The one who was in Tacos.”
She wasn’t wearing headphones, and I took mine off.
“This prison is a museum,” I explained. “There haven’t been any actual prisoners here for ages.”
This wasn’t quite true. I had just found out, through my headphones, that Robert Kennedy only closed the prison in 1961. Not that long ago really. Sara seemed reassured though. She still clung on to my hand, but not quite so tightly.
I remember L. telling me once that, during his time in prison, he found everything unbearable, but worst of all was the noise: people rattling the bars, the footsteps of the prison guards, the prisoners’ shouts, the sirens, the warnings over the loudspeakers, the shrill whistles … That day in Alcatraz, all that could be heard were the tourists’ murmured comments. A snob would have said that this was no better than all those other prison noises, but I found them infinitely preferable.
We walked along a gallery to one of the biggest attractions, the cell of prisoner AZ85, Al Capone. Above the door were two photographs of the Mafia boss, full face and in profile.
“Paulino Uzcudun’s friend,” I said, but Ángela and Izaskun still had their headphones on and didn’t hear me.
“I’m bored! When are we going to leave?” Sara asked.
“Five more minutes and we’re done,” I said. I was beginning to get bored too.
“What is completely unacceptable is him manipulating half the department staff just to give a job to one of his cronies,” I heard someone say behind me. It was the two Spanish teachers again. They had changed the subject, but not their tone of voice.
“The trouble is there are lots of people in the department who don’t have tenure yet, so they’re not going to do anything to stop him. They couldn’t care less who he brings in, his best buddy or the Holy Mother herself.”
Heading for the exit, we found the souvenir shop and went in to buy some postcards. One of them, an old sepia photograph, showed a group of prisoners. The caption read: “Hopi prisoners on the Rock.” On the display table there was a book bearing the same image. The back cover explained that the Hopis were opposed to the cultural changes being forced on them by Washington and they refused to allow the government agents to take their children to remote white schools; to settle the matter, nineteen chiefs were arrested and imprisoned in Alcatraz for a year.
RETURN TO RENO
In the mountains, the snow came down as far as the edge of the road and was so blindingly white that we all had to wear dark glasses. The music we’d been listening to until then, the compilations of songs by Jefferson Airplane and the Mamas and the Papas that we had bought in San Francisco, seemed incompatible with the new landscape and, in the end, we turned it off. The mountain was silent, the snow was silent, and we had to respond to that silence with our own.
We stopped in Truckee and walked down the main street, which was full of shops selling winter sports gear. We went into a stationery shop and, as usual, bought some postcards, one of which showed a railway tunnel, one of several that cross the Sierra Nevada.
“The sixth tunnel was the most difficult to build,” the note on the back of the card said. “It took more than two thousand Chinese workers eighteen months to dig, from 1866 to 1867.”
I leafed through the magazine of the Truckee-Donner Historical Society. According to the heading on one article, Truckee had one of the biggest Chinatowns in the West, but this was completely destroyed during the violent anti-Chinese riots that took place towards the end of the nineteenth century.
When we went back to the car park, I saw a rather faded poster on the noticeboard. It showed a photograph of Charles “Coogan” Kelly, the snowboarding champion murdered in Reno at Halloween; it was announcing a celebration of his life that had taken place a month before.
DECEMBER 31
BACK IN COLLEGE DRIVE
At around ten in the morning, heavy snow began to fall in Reno. Izaskun and Sara set about making a cake; Ángela decided to transfer all our San Francisco photographs onto the computer; and I started reading the books we had bought at City Lights just before we left. Ginsberg’s Howl and other Poems, Kerouac’s On the Road, and an autobiography by Bob Dylan, in which he praised Kerouac for mentioning unfamiliar
places with strange names, like Truckee.
Around eleven o’clock, attracted perhaps by the smell of the cake in the oven, the raccoon came and perched on the kitchen windowsill, and, for a moment, we all stopped what we were doing to take a closer look. It was part-dog, part-cat, but its eyes were colder, wilder.
TELEPHONE CALL TO MY MOTHER
“Another year over.”
“I know. I can’t believe it,” my mother said.
“Yes, time passes so quickly, we hardly notice it. Here we are at the end of 2007.”
“I know. I can’t believe it.”
“What are you having for supper tonight? What have my brothers cooked for you?”
“Oh, something or other. And your other brother, you know, your older brother, he bought me a huge bunch of flowers. I’ve put it in the kitchen. I don’t know what kind of flowers they are, but they’re almost every colour under the sun: white, pink, yellow, red, speckled …”
“Ángela wants to speak to you, and so do Izaskun and Sara.”
“There are purple ones, pink ones, yellow ones … It’s just incredible how many colours there are in that one bunch. He’s got a real thing about flowers, your brother. Incredible really. I dread to think how much he spends on them!”
NEW YEAR’S EVE
Around seven o’clock in the evening, we heard someone stamping his feet on the porch to shake the snow off his boots. We opened the door, and there was Dennis. He was wearing a waterproof red cap and a very nice raincoat the same colour.
“I’ve come to eat cake,” he said.
“Just like the raccoon,” Sara said.
“Yes, he’s the one who told me about it. It’s true, you know. I talk to the raccoons. It’s telepathy.”
Nevada Days Page 20