A memorable location, and on television its silent dead would speak.
Ivor was sometimes surprised by what Bennett remembered. He was sure he would have forgotten their visit to the dull and quiet little town of Gran Tarajal, with its walled cemetery on the hillside and the plain marble plaques recording the nameless dead. It was some years ago now, and Bennett still remembers.
DEP Immigrante 12.12.2001
DEP Immigrante 11.7.2002
DEP Immigrante 6.7.2002
Ivor wonders how many more deaths will by now have been recorded and added to the roll call that they saw.
Descanse en Paz.
Rest in Peace
Ivor found that phrase deeply touching. Sometimes he longed to rest in peace, and reflected, not without bitterness, that he wouldn’t have merited much more than these nameless ones by way of an inscription of his exploits.
He saw all the nameless dead as handsome young Senegalese and Mauritanians.
Who, he wondered, would deck Ivor’s monument with little vases of weatherproof, unnatural artificial dark orange and purple roses? Who would push Uncle Ivor’s wheelchair when the time came? Who would write his obituary?
Christopher and Ivor and Bennett had discovered, as they gossiped in Las Caletas, that they had an acquaintance in common, a friend less bland and more surprising than the man in the Foreign Office who had originally suggested Bennett as a contact. The name of Simon Aguilera had once been notorious and was still newsworthy, although he had long ago taken refuge in peaceful unadventurous Fuerteventura, in flight from the publicity and hostility that had pursued him ever since the scandal that had undone him, and in search, like Bennett, of a calm dry climate.
In search of redemption and eternal peace.
Son of a once-admired Spanish Republican émigré intellectual, the precocious and many-gifted Aguilera had made his name very young in the avant-garde theatre in Paris in the 1960s, an enfant terrible, and had seemed set for every kind of success. But he had been undermined by the creeping revisionism that had slowly destroyed his father’s reputation (what exactly had happened, and to whom, and at whose prompting, in 1936 in Alicante?) and then had undone himself utterly by killing his wife. It had been an international cause célèbre. He’d got off lightly because the French are soft on crimes passionnels, or so the British press had been pleased to comment.
But he had killed her, for all that. With an axe.
Knowing a murderer was a bond, more of a bond than being acquainted with a middle-ranking diplomat from a minor public school.
Christopher had met Simon Aguilera in London at a show of Contemporary Italian Art at Christie’s, where they had fallen into conversation before a de Chirico that Simon was intending to buy. Simon had recognised Christopher from his TV show (always flattering) and they had adjourned to a nearby fish restaurant for one of those lunches that prolong themselves, over the second bottle, into the afternoon. They had told each other much, and forgotten most of what they had told. Only the flavour of the conversation remained, along with the flavour of the oysters and the turbot poached in Pernod. This had been before the days of Sara, and they had not kept closely in touch since then, although they had exchanged an occasional message about auction prices and false attributions in sales rooms.
Christopher had not mentioned him to Sara before this visit. He had felt uneasy about the murdered wife.
But the three of them had spoken well of Simon Aguilera and his exploits, at Las Caletas, over the bite-resistant rubbery garlic-reinforced limpets. (‘Quite like snails,’ Sara had commented, ‘but not as nice.’) Sara had listened with interest, without an air of judgment. Simon had recently adopted a Senegalese immigrant, Sara should go and speak to him, he’s very photogenic, said Bennett with his louche old-world chuckle.
But Sara hadn’t had time to go across the narrow strait to Fuerteventura. She’d intended to go there, she’d had a contact in the Red Cross at Puerto del Rosario, who was eager to speak to her about the protection of immigrant minors. She’d done her research. It’s a pity it will all have been wasted.
Ivor Walters sits on the balcony in the evening sun, waiting for Christopher, who is flying back from London to Arrecife even now. He will be here in an hour or so. The chartered planes are in a perpetual peaceful descending and ascending convoy, bringing hither and taking hence. In one of these Christopher would soon be listening to the landing instructions. In five minutes, Ivor will rejoin his car and drive to the airport to meet him, to collect him and take him back to La Suerte and Bennett and an evening meal.
Distances are small and manageable on the island. It’s easy to time journeys to the airport.
When Christopher disembarks, he will no longer see the woman from the Western Sahara sitting on her carpet in the departure lounge, for she has been transferred to a hospital on the Spanish mainland, and is recuperating, to fight again another day. Her vigil, at least for now, is over. They will be pumping liquids into her, reviving her.
Ivor wonders what will happen to Sara’s prestige project. It will probably never be made. It will die with Sara. The Libyan cameraman had managed to record Sara briefly interviewing Namarome, but would that sequence ever reach mainstream television? Now Sara was gone, nobody in the English-speaking world apart from a few Arabists and human rights professionals would be interested in it or try to push it through. There was one Labour MP in an outer London constituency who bangs on about it, but nobody takes him very seriously. It will be stored, as everything these days is stored, in case history changes its mind, but it won’t reach out. Even if Namarome dies, it won’t reach out. It would take more than one death in the Western Sahara to interest the Western media, when so much of the rest of North Africa, further to the east, is brewing up a different and worse kind of turmoil. The Western Sahara is a dull and empty quarter, when you compare it with Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran or Egypt, which are in the process of fomenting greater and greater cataclysms and atrocities and migrations on a scale that will make the Canarian voyages seem tame and domestic. These new waves of migration will obsess the media and ruin and rescue lives for years, perhaps decades, perhaps a century to come. Images of flight and desperation comparable to and perhaps in time exceeding those of the Second World War will fill our screens, but Sara is dead and will never see them, although perhaps Ivor and Christopher sense the dark flood that approaches.
Immigrants arriving by boat to the Canaries from Africa will remain a story, with a tourist perspective, but the British are very wary of it. They will be more concerned with the siege of Calais, with the Syrians at the gate, with babies drowned on the shores of the isles of Greece.
But for now, in the present, Ivor is looking forward, perhaps too much and unwisely, to seeing Christopher Stubbs again and to renewing their acquaintance. Christopher is going to stay with them at La Suerte, while he sorts out the health insurance difficulties and winds up one or two other matters to do with car rentals and local suppliers left unresolved on their sudden departure. Ivor and Bennett have offered hospitality and succour and Christopher had been surprisingly keen to accept them. Ivor had wondered if the island would hold too bad a memory for him, but he seemed to have had a very different reaction to the prospect of his return. He wanted to revisit, to expunge or exorcise.
Maybe Christopher’s relationship with Sara had not been all that it seemed. Ivor had caught a glance or two, even in the surreptitiously smoky murk of Las Caletas. Maybe Sara had been a bit too much of a challenge.
Christopher has an ex-wife somewhere, and children. His relationship with Sara had not been unencumbered.
It is true, as Ivor had encouragingly and truthfully pointed out to Christopher in various friendly emails, that life on Lanzarote was, in most ways, astonishingly stress-free. Good weather, good roads, reasonable food, as yet reasonably stable euros, great calm. No politics, no beggars, nothing of extremity. Nothing much going on at all, really. It was a good place to recuperate from emotional shock.
A man could die even here.
Sara had nearly died here, but she had gone home to die.
Ivor wonders whether he also will go home to die. Who will push Uncle Ivor’s wheelchair?
Christopher, Ivor fancied or fantasised, had responded to Ivor’s friendliness in a friendly way.
Ivor can tell that Bennett too is pleased at the prospect of having someone new and so much younger to talk to for a few days. He had been speaking with some excitement about the things he was going to show Christopher, the people he’d like him to meet, as though unaware that their guest might not be in sightseeing or party mood.
Bennett is bored with Ivor’s unfailingly reliable, dutiful and high-minded devotion, and with the geriatric round of occasionally peevish neighbours that composes most of their social life. Sometimes he breaks out in an ominous burst of anger against Ivor, shouting that he hadn’t meant to spend his whole life stuck with him, that he didn’t want to die at the mercy of someone who’d been battening on him for fifty years.
Feeble, volcanic old man’s eruptions, followed by the great cool spent peace of the wide evening sky.
Ivor sometimes thinks he feels the spirit of the Lord watching over him on this island. It’s probably a trick of the light, or of the landscape. He has started, secretly, to visit the plain silent unfrequented little white chapel on the hillside, where he kneels down and prays. His prayers don’t have any words. No one is ever there, but the chapel is never locked.
Bennett, the old-style rationalist-atheist-humanist intellectual, wouldn’t approve of that at all. Ivor doesn’t really know why he’s doing it, but it is a solace. It takes him into another dimension of living and dying, it uplifts him. It may be a false solace, but there’s more truth in it than in the endless discussions about doctors, diets, symptoms and medications, about dwindling royalties and bad reviews by old enemies, about the menace of e-books and the demise of booksellers and the new historiography.
Ivor had once tried to read Unamuno’s most famous work, The Tragic Sense of Life, attracted to it by its title, but had found it to be incomprehensible gibberish. He’s not clever enough to know whether this is because it is incomprehensible gibberish or whether it’s because he, Ivor Walters, is too ill-educated and too stupid to understand it. There had been a time, there had been a solid stretch of some years of time, when he would have been able to cross-question Bennett in some depth about these distinctions, and have enjoyed discussing them, but that time has now passed. Ivor has resigned himself to the once inadmissible knowledge that living most of his life with a man so much cleverer, so much better educated than himself has not been easy, and may not have been good for his character and his immortal soul.
It must have been pretty annoying for Bennett, too, at times.
The elderly Unamuno had survived his short exile in Fuerteventura, and had returned to Spain. But a decade or so later he had come to a sad end. Although something of a Nationalist fellow traveller, according to Bennett, he had been compelled to speak out against Franco and was driven out of his own University of Salamanca at gunpoint by a Fascist general shouting, ‘Death to intelligence! And long live Death! Viva la Muerte¡’
Franco’s wife had given the old man her arm, as he left the Ceremonial Hall, but whether in support or derision is still disputed. Some issues are never settled, in Spain.
When Unamuno went to his club that evening, his friends turned on him and called him a traitor. He had a heart attack, and died a week or so later.
Bennett had sometimes fancied he had been getting a bit of the cold shoulder at his London club, but nothing on this scale. Nobody had ever shouted at him, or pointed a gun at him. But he had thought he could hear them laughing at him.
Ivor waits for Christopher.
Christopher, when the plane lands, switches on his mobile while waiting for the seat belt sign to be turned off, in case there is a message or an update on arrangements from Ivor. Ivor had seemed to him from their brief acquaintance to be very dependable, if something of a worrier, maybe very dependable because something of a worrier, and Christopher is certain he will be there at Arrivals, waiting.
There isn’t anything from Ivor, but there is a text from his mother Fran. HOPE ALL WELL AM ON WAY HOME FROM WEST BROM FX. Like most of Fran’s messages, this seems superfluous and irrelevant, and yet he does find it comforting, as he is no doubt meant to do. It’s nice that she thinks about him. He assumes that she thinks about him more than he thinks about her, because that is the way of things. He is fond of his mother, though increasingly puzzled by her. She hasn’t been a very useful mother of late. When he and his sister were little, she was there because she had to be, but she’d been fairly hopeless and absent and inattentive as a granny, and hadn’t really got on with his wife Ella, because she’d never tried hard enough to get to know her. And although she had seemed proud enough of his TV career, she wasn’t very interested in it. Once, she even admitted, not wholly as a joke, that she hated arts and culture programmes. Arts and Culture, she had said, what words, what words! And now she seemed unable to settle down to being elderly, she was forever on the move, as though in perpetual flight, in a restless panic. She’d sold the lease of the nice 1920s flat in leafy Highgate where she’d lived comfortably with that nice Hamish, and moved to a tower block. Why on earth had she done that? At her age?
It was none of his business, she could look after herself, and if she killed herself on the motorway, that was her choice.
He hopes she doesn’t kill anyone else, or find herself convicted of drunken driving. That would be embarrassing. She is a drinker, but he thinks she doesn’t drink at the wheel. She didn’t when they were children, although of course she didn’t drive much then as Claude monopolised the car, but she did drink on the premises when they were in bed. She used to shout and scream too, all by herself downstairs there in Romley. It had been frightening, but not very frightening. He wonders if she still screams to herself, or whether she’s got over all of that. She used to yell I want I want I want, or Can nobody help me, can nobody help me, but he and his little sister Poppet had never let on that they could hear her. They stayed upstairs, out of harm’s way.
Fran’s Cantor Hill tower block with its dank and stalling lifts and its dangerous basement garage was a stupid idea, but Bennett and Ivor had seemed, in contrast, to have found the perfect retirement home. On the level slopes, in the warmth of the day and in the shade of the evening. He thinks of it with a curious kind of longing, as though it offers even to him, to a bereft stranger, some kind of peace. An image of peace.
His father Claude was also a drinker, although he has to take it a bit easy now. Claude is surprisingly keen to stay alive, and is a surprisingly good patient, stuck up there in his Kensington apartment with his fat cat Cyrus, attended upon intermittently by his energetic first wife and daily by the glamorous Persephone. After a self-destructive trajectory, he seemed to have discovered a secret source of resilience, a late-flowering will to live.
Christopher is a drinker himself, a committed and semi-secret drinker. He’s got a large brutally oblong plastic bottle of airport vodka concealed in his baggage, as he doesn’t trust his hosts to supply enough or indeed any hard liquor. They are wine drinkers, he suspects, not serious drinkers.
So, a couple of hours later, previously primed in the privacy of his spacious terracotta-tiled white-walled emerald-green-shuttered bedroom, Christopher sits on the terrace with Bennett and Ivor overlooking the many paved levels of the cactus and euphorbia garden of La Suerte. He can sip slowly and calmly and moderately at his cool Spanish wine. He doesn’t need to gulp. As Bennett sets himself out to be entertaining, Ivor, watchful, proffers from time to time soft little denture-friendly smoked salmon and cream cheese squares, ready to intervene if Bennett seems to be straying into unsuitable territory. Fortunately, Bennett does now seem to be aware that Christopher is here for a solemn purpose, and he does not make irrelevant jokes or irreverent allusions. He ch
atters pleasantly on, about Omar Sharif and José Saramago and the King of Spain’s daughter, about Chatto and Windus and Thames and Hudson, about the hot craters of Timanfaya and the salt pans of Janubio, about the local skills in viniculture, about Columbus and the Von Humboldt brothers, about Iris Murdoch and César Manrique, about the reclusive but seductive Simon Aguilera.
The night sky seems, to the slightly drunken Christopher, to be unusually bright and star-studded and vast. There is no wind, but the palm trees of the garden’s eastern slope seem to be managing a very slight sway and rattle.
Otherwise the flat peace of the still air is terminal. But pleasantly, soothingly so.
It is better here than at that clinic in Switzerland.
Sara had struggled horribly, until knocked out by morphine. On the plane home, stuck full of unsightly and alarming tubes, she had slipped into a coma from which she had never fully emerged. That was another way of ending. It had the merit of being short. It had seemed long, to Christopher, but he knew it had been short. The flight had been a nightmare beyond all imaginings of death. That had been the worst, and the worst was over.
Indoors, an hour later, over seafood risotto and tomato salad, Ivor feels safe enough to enquire about the likely fate of Sara’s project. As he had suspected, Christopher thinks it will almost certainly be shelved by the parent company. She had been the driving force behind it, and without her energy and charm there is nobody to push it through. Money has been lost, and nobody wants to throw good money after bad. You can only run so far with an international human rights story, a black immigrant story. And Namarome has given up her hunger strike, she isn’t going to provide the media with a martyr.
The Dark Flood Rises Page 8