The river is the river

by Buckley, Jonathan;

  Driving towards a town that they had not yet explored, with miles of new road ahead of him, liberated from the house of Jorge and Cintía, her father became a different man, she remembers. Kate sees him as she writes: one hand is holding the steering wheel lightly, while the other dangles in the rushing air, or rests on his wife’s hand, as it never did when he was driving in England. Gazing along an empty road, he smiled as though the tarmac were a splendid river. The family drove to Tomar and Viseu and to the coast; they drove to Porto, Braga, Barcelos, and on occasion even further. One day they drove to Fátima.

  A scene presents itself.

  Several dozen pilgrims were scattered across the plaza in front of the basilica. The plaza – grey and smooth and gently curved – put Kate in mind of the deck of an aircraft carrier. In the sunlight the basilica gleamed like lard. Later that day, in her diary, Kate wrote a description of the building. She was fourteen years old; her sister was thus twelve. It was a cool afternoon; it had been raining all morning. Long streaks of water lay on the pavement, and Kate saw, close to a streak that was as wide as a lane, a man whom she took to be a dwarf, walking hand in hand with a much taller woman. The woman wore a large and shapeless brown hat and a brown coat – an ensemble that made her look like a mushroom. Her companion, however, was dressed lightly for the weather; he wore a short-sleeved shirt, Kate recalls.

  She took note of the mushroom attire and the short-sleeved shirt before realising that the man was not a dwarf: he was walking on his knees, and the woman – his wife, she assumed – was strolling beside him, her eyes browsing to left and right and up to the sky, as if there were nothing at all peculiar about what they were doing. They appeared to be heading for the column in the centre of the plaza; a golden figure of Jesus stood on top of it. Through the wide track of rainwater the man advanced; he emerged on the other side, leaving a trail of dampness behind him, like a gigantic snail; the woman released him and he toppled forward onto his palms, then spread his hands to bring his forehead into contact with the pavement.

  Having told their parents that they wanted to take a look at the statue, Kate and Naomi walked towards the prostrate man and his wife. The sisters passed in front of the two pilgrims, at an unobtrusive distance. The man was weeping, and his mouth moved as if something gummy and disgusting were sticking his jaws together; the knees of his trousers were ripped. He reached for his wife’s hand, and they moved on. Another man, Kate now noticed, was traversing the plaza from a different angle, also on his knees, with his eyes fixed on the basilica. Unlike the first, this man was moving quickly, hammering the ground with his kneecaps like a furious amputee; he had the face of someone maddened by thirst in the desert, hurrying towards an oasis in the desperate hope that it was not a mirage.

  Their mother had not warned them that they might see such things. Fátima would be interesting, she had said; she had been to Fátima several times when she was young; she told them the story of the three young shepherds and the Miracle of the Sun, but said nothing about people walking on their knees and weeping. Kate found these people terrifying, and could not bear to watch them any more; but Naomi, standing below the golden Jesus, seemed transfixed by these lunatics, as if observing some rare wildlife.

  Close to the column stood the chapel that had been built on the spot where the children had seen the Virgin. It was as busy as a weekend supermarket, and thirty or forty visitors – a coachload, all wearing yellow anoraks with a large red flower on the back – were taking photographs of the oak tree outside it. Kate, the designated custodian of the guidebook, read a sentence aloud, loudly enough to be overheard by the anoraks: this tree, she read, with heavily insincere regret, was a replacement for the original oak, which had been stripped bare by relic hunters many years ago. Her father, watching the deluded photographers, received this information with a small wry smile; her mother was walking towards the chapel, hand in hand with Naomi. Kate had another entertaining fact: the Second Secret of Fátima – a prediction of a great war – was not made public until 1941. ‘So not much of a prediction,’ she suggested, linking arms with her father.

  Inside the basilica, he wandered off; this was what generally happened in churches and museums. With his head tilted upwards slightly and hands clasped behind his back, he scrutinised the building as if he were its architect, checking that everything had been carried out as planned. This church did not smell like a church should smell, thought Kate, she remembers. It lacked the fragrance of ritual and mystery, and was too bright and new. It had as little charisma as a sports hall.

  She sat with her mother and sister, by one of the high arches. Small paintings were attached to the walls that separated these arches, one to each wall. At the end of a nearby pew, in front of a picture, a woman of her mother’s age was praying. She was weeping too, but she was smiling as she cried. After a couple of minutes she stood up and then, as if a stopwatch were running, she hurried to the next painting, where she sat down and resumed her praying, and her crying, and her smiling. Kate wanted to leave; Naomi did not.

  ‘What’s that woman doing?’ Naomi asked. Her mother explained what might have been going on in the woman’s mind, and what might have been going in the minds of the men as they crawled across the plaza on their knees. Why, Kate wondered, did these people think it necessary to come to this specific church to show that they were sorry, if God could see them wherever they were in the world? Her mother endeavoured to make sense of it, as she had previously tried, to as little effect, to make sense of how Jesus could be both God and a man, and how He had washed away our sins by being nailed to a cross, including the sins of all the people who had conducted themselves decently, and all the millions of sins that had not happened yet.

  For a few moments Naomi pondered; her face assumed its expression of precocious solemnity. She had a question: ‘And what does this make you think?’

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ her mother replied.

  ‘This,’ said Naomi, indicating everything.

  Kate knew what their grandparents thought about this place: miracles had occurred here, and the site was sacred. Waving the family off for the day, her grandmother had smiled as if she thought the girls might return as converts. Something in her mother’s face when Cíntia was talking about Fátima, however, had shown Kate that her mother did not regard the story of the miracles in quite the same light.

  ‘The rolling sun and all that stuff,’ Naomi clarified. ‘What do you think about that? What do you think happened?’

  ‘They saw something very unusual,’ said her mother.

  ‘But do you think the Virgin Mary was here?’

  ‘I don’t think the children made it up,’ her mother answered.

  The weeping-smiling woman had become even more agitated now; her hands went up to her face, and the fingers writhed like a nest of small snakes. ‘I’m off,’ announced Kate, unable to bear the sight of the woman’s convulsions any longer. Her mother followed. Nearing the door, they looked back for Naomi. She had stayed in her seat, and was staring at the woman. She frowned with concentration. Then a smile appeared for a moment, and it was not a smile of amusement, as Kate remembers it.

  22.

  In the last light of the afternoon the sisters take a walk through the town and down to the river. ‘We have a lot of ground to cover,’ says Naomi, like a lecturer talking to a student in the corridor, on her way to the lecture theatre; she seems to be relishing the prospect.

  About six months after Naomi’s invitation to Bernát’s house, and not long before she and Gabriel decided, as she says, to ‘reassess their arrangement’, she began to notice a change in Bernát. Gatherings were still held at his house, but sometimes, after the music, he would leave the room and not be seen for an hour. As before, he made a point of contributing to every conversation, but his contributions were becoming briefer. Other than Naomi, it seemed that the guest he found most congenial was Connor. Bernát was often to be found in the farthest niche of the garden, listening to
what Connor had to say this week. Connor was a changed man, says Naomi. He had moved into a place of his own, and had not been in a fight for several months. Violence, he had come to understand, is the blight of humanity; it diminishes both the one who suffers it and the one who inflicts it. There had been too much violence in his life, he saw, and sometimes it had been his master. Amy, much taken with the new Connor, would often linger in the doorway, awaiting her opportunity.

  One week, at short notice, the gathering was cancelled. Returning from a lesson, Naomi took a call from Bernát. This in itself was a surprise: like all of his guests, she had received messages from him, but never before had he spoken to her on the phone. Lizzie Vidal was very ill, he told her. ‘In fact, Lizzie was dying,’ says Naomi, dolorously, as if Lizzie has been established as a person whose demise should rouse a particular pity. More than a month passed before Bernát reappeared; in the interim, Lizzie had died, with Bernát at her bedside. It had been a good death, an exemplary death, Bernát told Naomi. Lizzie didn’t believe that she was going to a better place, he said; she knew that this was the end of everything, and she was determined to depart in dignity, which she did. Until the penultimate morning, Lizzie was lucid; she was as bright and as fragile as a Christmas tree ball, said Bernát, and in her last hours she had said some remarkable things. But it would not be appropriate to share these things, not yet, he apologised.

  It was after a concert that the death of Lizzie was recounted. Bernát had phoned Naomi and asked if she might be interested in going to a performance of Messiaen’s quartet; this is when he told her that Lizzie had died, but he was not appealing for sympathy, says Naomi; he simply wanted to see her, he told her; and this also was something new. During the concert, his thoughts were elsewhere, it appeared. His calmness was unusual; he sat perfectly still, with the demeanour of a man hearing a pure silence rather than sounds. That night, Naomi stayed at Bernát’s house. They did not sleep together; she has never slept with Bernát, Naomi tells her sister yet again. For hours they talked, and what Bernát talked about most, as Naomi remembers, was friendship. There were to be no more gatherings at the house, Bernát announced. He could no longer pretend that they were not, in large part, a manifestation of vanity. He had set out to obtain a circle of friends, and he had cultivated those friends, he admitted. They were people he liked and found interesting; he admired many of them, some of them immensely. But they had been acquired; the friendships had not arisen of themselves – they had been solicited. He had wished to augment himself, to divert himself, to entertain himself, as they in turn had wished to be entertained. ‘To desire friendship is a fault,’ Bernát pronounced. It could be said, of course, that the friendship with Naomi had been solicited; he had, after all, approached her. The friendship had developed in circumstances that he had brought about. But with Naomi, he insisted, it was not a recruitment. Rather, it was as if, encountering her again, he had known that it was necessary to speak; as he had said before, it was a recognition that he had experienced when he had first observed her, at the bookshop, a recognition that was confirmed at the concert; the third encounter, he had sensed, was an opportunity that demanded action.

  ‘Love at first sight,’ Kate remarks; no unkindness was intended, but she thinks she hears it.

  ‘In a way,’ Naomi concedes, almost bashfully. ‘But without the element of romance.’ Bernát had told her that he loved her; after Lizzie’s death he had said this. ‘But he did not have designs on me,’ she says. When a man tells a woman that he loves her, Naomi tells her sister, it’s nearly always to make her serve his pleasure, to put the woman in a place that he wants her to occupy.

  Such as a shack in the middle of nowhere, Kate hears.

  What Bernát meant by ‘love’, by contrast, was the ‘ultimate form of friendship, if you like,’ says Naomi. The word had become debased, said Bernát. Once, in Scotland, he had said something that had really made her think. ‘“To love someone truly is to consent to distance,”’ she quotes, like a disciple.

  So many words have become debased, said Bernát. Our minds have become clogged with polluted language. A person is valued according to the number of his ‘friends’, a label that now can signify people he has never met and never will. It is not sufficient to have an interest in something – one must have a ‘passion’ for it. Being upset is inadequate – one must be ‘devastated’ in order to be noticed. We are no longer citizens: we are ‘customers’ and ‘consumers’ in all things; even music and literature have become things we consume, Bernát lamented.

  He found the city unbearable, he admitted, Naomi reports. To walk through the West End was to battle against a blizzard of inanity. On every street one was bludgeoned by advertising; it was impossible to get through a minute without hearing someone swearing loudly into a phone. Over and over again he heard the same words and phrases: to be perfectly honest with you … at the end of the day … he’s taking the piss … no problem … absolutely … fuck off … unbelievable. They repeated in his head, uncontrollably: ‘No problem, no problem, no problem, no problem, no problem, no problem,’ Naomi recites, with glassy eyes and rigid jaw, like a ventriloquist’s doll. Bernát’s problem was one of which she had some experience, she reminds her sister superfluously.

  There was too much noise for Bernát, she goes on, and his own voice had become a portion of that noise. He was tired of himself and tired of talking. Silence was what he needed – true silence, not the mere suppression of noise that could be produced by closing his door. He had bought a place in Scotland, he revealed one evening. Formerly a farmhouse, it was basic but inhabitable, and there was no other house within sight. He had decided to live there for a while; if the experiment proved to be successful, he might sell the London house. Some repairs were necessary, so Connor had gone there to do the work. This would take another month or so, and then Bernát would be leaving London. He showed her photographs of a plain block of a house, standing against an unspectacular hill. Inside, a bare wooden staircase rose to a landing where the walls, whitewashed, had lost large quantities of plaster. Doors opened on each side of the landing. One of the rooms to the left could be hers, should she wish to spend any time there, said Bernát. He had a picture of the room: it was spacious, with a large fireplace, and a narrow iron bedstead, and a large window in which the glass was broken; in the centre of the room was a long dark slot, where the boards had collapsed. The accommodation would not be luxurious, but neither would it be punitive, Bernát told her. He had installed a generator and solar panels, and water came from a spring above the house. Heat would come from the fireplaces and the kitchen range; there were ample supplies of firewood. Furnishing would be minimal, but there would be a library, ‘as in any decent monastery’. He envisaged spending most of the day alone, either in his room or out on the hills; should she wish to join him, they would eat together, and talk in the evenings. Perhaps they could play music; he thought he would install a piano.

  ‘An offer no girl could refuse,’ Kate has to interject, deleting the words in her right mind as they arise.

  Such facetiousness is inappropriate, says Naomi’s glance. What Kate has to understand, she tells her, is that the offer was accepted not because Bernát’s absence would have been hard for her – though she admits that he would have been missed – but because the retreat was what she needed. Had he offered her the use of the house for a month, on her own, she would have said yes, she claims. By the same token, had Bernát invited her to accompany him to New York, she would have stayed at home.

  Connor had not travelled to Scotland alone. He had taken Amy with him, but she departed the day after Naomi and Bernát arrived. There was some shouting in the night, mainly from Amy, and at five o’clock in the morning she drove away. ‘That girl is weird,’ Connor told them, as he packed his bag; he deemed it necessary to follow her; there was no telling what she might do. The implication was that the full extent of Amy’s weirdness had become apparent only when she’d been released into the wild
. She was the neediest women he had ever met, said Connor; her father, evidently, had been a creep; there were issues, he said. And the farm had been too spartan for her – at the very least, she had to have curtains on her window. At night the moon was like a spotlight in the room, and she had felt unsafe. There were inexplicable noises, at all hours.

  For Naomi it was a joy to awake with the sun every morning. She would get out of bed to watch it rise above a saddle in the hills, and at the end of the day she would watch it fall; these became observances, she tells Kate. It was ‘the right kind of routine’, a regularity that was not monotony. No two dawns are the same, when you can see them properly, Naomi informs her sister. At first, Naomi admits, she had wondered, intermittently, how she would cope with the empty days ahead. The landscape around the farm offered no obvious excitements: there were no cliffs, ravines, waterfalls or torrents. It was a benign terrain, and it took time to become attuned to it, to see it in itself. When one looks and listens with true attention, every moment is full of sustenance: the slow passage of sunlight across grassland becomes enthralling; the sounds within the silence – a distant whirr of wings, the soft jostling of leaves – have an inexhaustible richness, says Naomi, as if bringing enlightenment to the benighted. At night she sat for hours outside, just looking. Below the farm there was a small loch, which looked like a pavement of perfect granite in the moonlight; the trees were like old silver; it was entrancing.

  In the middle of the first week, Bernát told her that he was going to write a book, Naomi tells her sister.