The Ribbons Are for Fearlessness

by Catrina Davies

  After the fourth time he was breathalyzed, Pierre gave up. He bought a sack of oranges from a stall on the side of a steep road and pulled into an empty, dirty lay-by.

  “Welcome home,” he said, handing me an orange.

  I felt like a newly released prisoner, sitting there on the back step and staring at a long view of mountains, only this time they were dry and dusty, with orange trees that smelled of jasmine and skinny goats with bells on scratching themselves on piles of old stones that must have been houses once, and olive groves and a hazy sky stretching out over sweeping valleys and the sun spilling over the mountaintops and warming our faces. I closed my eyes. There was the sweet smell of manure.

  “The best thing about being a hippie,” I said, opening my eyes again, “is the view.”

  37

  Perhaps it was because Pierre was expected back at the hospital in six days’ time and was already booked on to a flight from Málaga, while I was responsible for getting this rattling old yellow van back to England, a journey some thousand kilometers in the opposite direction. Or perhaps it was the fresh goat’s cheese wrapped in paper and spread on the warm flatbread we bought from the same men who sold oranges by the side of the road. Whatever the reason, I decided to sleep with Pierre, and this time I didn’t regret it.

  We traveled slowly over the dusty mountains. We had sex by lazy rivers. We sat in shady bars in tiny squares and ate chorizo and olives. We drank jugs of sangria in the middle of the day and had sex on the roof of the van. We wandered hand in hand through tiny whitewashed villages, and in the long, warm evenings Pierre played soft, warm music on Francis Philippe’s ancient guitar and, because he made me, I began to play my cello again.

  It was hard. At first I couldn’t get my fingers to grip the bow properly. I kept dropping it. I wanted to cry with frustration. Pierre showed me some exercises I could do to build up the muscles in my hand, and I did them obsessively, whenever we were driving, drumming my fingers on the dashboard and squeezing the gear stick over and over. I tried to play all the things I used to busk, but they sounded terrible, and reaching the end was an effort of will that left me tense and shaking. Pierre massaged my shoulders.

  “Let’s play together.”

  He picked up the guitar and strummed a few easy chords. I put down the bow and used my wasted fingers to pluck the strings instead. I found the bass notes of the chords, closed my eyes, wrapped my arms around the cello, and tried to get lost in it.

  “That’s better,” said Pierre.

  “Only because you were playing, too.”

  After that I gave up trying to play the old stuff. It was too depressing. Instead I began trying to work out the John Coltrane tune called “In a Sentimental Mood” that I had listened to so much at La Soleiade. I couldn’t listen to it anymore, so I had to shut my eyes and try to remember it, hearing the phrases in my head, one by one, and linking them together like a jigsaw (or making bits up when I couldn’t remember), and because each phrase was new I didn’t mind playing it over and over again, which was easier for my hand than trying to play the whole of “Vocalise,” say, and not being able to get to the end. And in any case, this particular tune didn’t seem to be about getting to the end. It was more like a dream. You could dip in and out of it, and it was just sweet and lazy and sounded beautiful. As the days passed and I kept on trying, I began to notice an improvement. My hand got stronger. I could play for longer. I could play faster. I stopped dropping the bow. But it was a long, slow process, and I was dreading the day Pierre got on that flight from Málaga and I had to busk again.

  At the bottom of the Sierra Nevada we found the Costa del Sol. Everyone knows the Costa del Sol is a ruined place. Ruined by the electric-gated concrete mansions and the high-rise hotels, the golf courses and the orange tans and the beer-vomit on the beaches. I had expected all that. What I had not expected were the wild places that still exist in between the sprawling suburbs. It wasn’t quite the snaking rivers and empty mountains of Scandinavia, but we did find empty beaches with no paths to them, where we could swim in clear water and have sex on hot, white sand. And on the steep climb back up to where the van was parked in an empty roadside lay-by, we picked armfuls of wild thyme. We played music on the clifftop and fell asleep listening to the sound of the sea. Admittedly we were invariably woken in the middle of the night by gangs of noisy youths on mopeds, who used the lay-by as meeting place for all manner of illegal activity in which the police invariably thought we were involved. But Pierre was a doctor and I had a cello, two things that never failed to reassure them that we were respectable citizens and not drug smugglers, after all.

  One morning towards the end of our week together Pierre made me play the cello for him. He made me play for twenty minutes, as if I was busking. He used his watch to time me and lay on the ground listening, his hat pulled down over his face. I got through it. I played “Autumn Leaves” and “Bruca Maniguá” and Sergio’s “Kasbah Tango,” and I finished with the John Coltrane.

  “Good,” he said, at the end of it. “You are ready.”

  “It still sounds awful. And my hand hurts.”

  He made me stretch my fingers out and then make a fist and then do this quickly, twenty times.

  “It is okay. You will live.”

  “You really think I’m ready for the street.”

  “I do not think the street is ready for you, ma chérie.”

  38

  We reached Granada on 8 April, forty-eight hours before Pierre was due to fly home from Málaga. I drove that last leg. I hadn’t wanted to drive. It was easier to be a passenger. To let Pierre decide where we went, and how fast, and where we stopped. But Pierre insisted. I had to climb back into the driver’s seat and grip the steering wheel and take charge of my own destiny again.

  I drove slowly and it felt surprisingly good to be driving my big old van again. Like meeting up with an old friend after a long break. While I drove, Pierre read out loud from his French guidebook. He wanted me to know about the Alhambra, which was an ancient Moorish palace “overgrown with wildflowers and grass in spring.”

  “I like the sound of that,” I said, stroking Pierre’s leg. “Sounds like the Pyrenees.”

  “Watch the road!”

  Pierre continued reading, “The Alhambra was built as a paradise on earth, but the reconquista forced the Moor kings out of Spain and the Christians took it.”

  The Alhambra was not a paradise on earth. The car park cost fourteen euros and the queue stretched a mile. After three hours even Pierre had had enough. He left the guidebook in the van and we walked arm in arm through the gardens to the town, listening to the nightingales.

  “It is your fault,” said Pierre.

  “How is it my fault?”

  “You make me lose my plan.”

  “You said you wanted to be a hippie. Hippies don’t have plans. They go with the flow.”

  We spent the afternoon wandering Granada’s narrow streets, which heaved with tourists. It was Good Friday and Granada was the scene of a huge religious procession. To escape it, we walked away from the center and found ourselves in a wide tree-lined square at the top of a steep hill. The square was filled with old stone benches. The whole city was laid out beneath us, like a three-dimensional map. Pierre pointed at clouds gathering over the mountains.

  “Thunder,” he said.

  I sat down on one of the old stone benches.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Pierre.

  “Nothing.”

  “Something.”

  “You know my friend who died.”

  “Andrew.”

  “He died just before Easter. He’s been dead for exactly a year.”

  Pierre pulled my head onto his shoulder. “Not really, Easter moves.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I got up and went to lean over the stone wall that ran around the edge of the square. Pierre had been right. I could hear thunder rolling around in the mountains to the north. A flash of lightning ri
pped the sky apart, followed by another low rumble. Pierre came and leaned over the railings beside me. I could smell the sweet smell of rain falling on hot tarmac.

  “There were so many things he was going to do before he died.”

  “Like busking from Norway to Portugal,” said Pierre, who liked the word busking. There is no such word in French.

  “Yes, like that.”

  “So why do you go back to England?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why don’t you busk to Portugal?”

  “You can’t really busk from Norway to Portugal. It’s ridiculous. It was bad enough just getting to the midnight sun. Especially now. God knows how long it’s going to take me to get back to Brittany. I can only play my cello for about ten minutes at a time and it sounds totally hideous.”

  I really didn’t want to think about busking. Pierre grabbed my hands and pulled me up off the bench.

  “But ma chérie, you are nearly there. It is only one thousand kilometers to Sagres.”

  “Only a thousand kilometers!”

  “Do you know how far you have come? How many kilometers?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  There was another bolt of lightning, this time followed by a massive crash, followed by the sound of clouds breaking and dumping several tons of water on our heads. Pierre grabbed my hand.

  “Come on!”

  When we had changed into dry clothes Pierre opened a bottle of wine and filled two mugs. I lay beside him on the bed, resting my head on his shoulder. He was so solid and comforting. He was staring at a map he had bought just after we left Salagou. A road map of Europe. He had been horrified that I didn’t already have one.

  “How didn’t you get lost?”

  “You can’t get lost if you don’t know where you’re going.”

  Pierre just shook his head and asked me if I had any paper. I pulled some pages out of an old notebook and lay back down on the bed, eyes closed. I didn’t even ask why he wanted it. The day after tomorrow Pierre would be gone. I would be on my own again.

  Pierre wouldn’t let up. He made me tell him all the places I had been, every town I had busked. Eventually I sat up, curious to see what he was doing. He was sketching, making these little hand-drawn maps, one for each section of the journey. And on each map he was marking the places I had busked and the distances between them, which he worked out using the edge of a piece of paper, just like we used to do at school in geography lessons. He finally reached Granada.

  “Fourteen thousand kilometers.”

  I drained my mug of wine and stared at him. “Fourteen thousand kilometers?”

  “Yes. Look.”

  He stuck the maps on to the tongue and groove with toothpaste, side by side, and traced my route with his finger.

  “Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, Spain. Nine countries. Nine countries and fourteen thousand kilometers. Approximately.”

  I was genuinely shocked.

  “I didn’t really do the whole thing busking though. You paid for me to get here, and to Marseille from the Alps. And Francis Philippe fed me for two months.”

  Pierre rubbed his chin. “I think it is the same. I do all this because you play with Sergio and Kevine with your eyes closed. It is because you play your cello that I fall in love with you.”

  “You what?”

  “It does not matter. You have come fourteen thousand kilometers and you have one thousand left. You must not give up. You must go to Portugal and find the Cabo San Vicente and say good-bye to your friend.”

  He raised his mug. Eventually I raised mine, too.

  39

  I wept when I said good-bye to Pierre at Málaga’s tiny airport.

  “Bonne chance, ma chérie.”

  He stroked my face one last time. I wanted to grab hold of his shirt and never let go, but he walked briskly through the barrier and I couldn’t touch him. All I could do was watch him get smaller and smaller until he disappeared.

  I wept again when I got back to the van. Pierre had left me with a cupboard full of food, a tank full of diesel, his road map of Europe, and all the little maps he had drawn with the places I had been marked on them. He had even drawn little pictures based on the stories I had told him. There were strange-looking musk oxen in Trondheim, and a thin girl with huge eyes sitting cross-legged at Knivskjellodden. There were surfers at Unstad, Danish forests, German truckers, and his little cottage in Les Torches. There was Collioure and the Alhambra. And there was a new map that he must have done in the night, while I slept. It was of what lay ahead of me, blank, apart from the distance, a thousand kilometers, and a picture of a lighthouse at the end of it. I poured some cold water into a mug, leaned out of the back door, and splashed my face. I had to pull myself together. I climbed into the driver’s seat, put “Bruca Maniguá” in the tape player, and set out to finish my journey.

  Of all the ten countries I traveled through, Spain was the only one I didn’t busk in. I had been planning to stop in Seville, but the traffic jams into the city were so bad the van overheated and I had to sit for hours on the hard shoulder waiting for it to cool down. I tried to distract myself by playing Francis Philippe’s guitar and singing my song about Hanna:

  You said you wrapped me up in light that day,

  You said you’d show me how to find my way …

  It was evening by the time I reached the border. There were half a dozen border police wearing a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish uniforms. The police were waving most of the cars through, not even stopping them to check passports. My rusty old van was another matter. Three of them flagged me down. I handed over my passport, my registration document, and my invalid insurance certificate. The policemen frowned at them, shook their heads, kicked a few tires, and told me to open up the back.

  It was the Tyneside tunnel all over again. Except it wasn’t. That time the van resembled a disused sauna, with mold all over the ceiling. This time it looked like a home. The red tin teapot and two mugs were stacked in the washing-up bowl that was also a sink. Sunlight fell on Francis Philippe’s ancient guitar, which was lying on the bed. The ceiling was free from mold, washed even cleaner by the ice. Hanna’s book lay on the piece of sawn-off plywood. My embarrassing pairs of underwear were drying on a piece of string that Pierre had nailed to the tongue and groove. They looked like prayer flags. One of the policemen asked me to open up the cupboard. He even made me open the old, beaten up case. Then he laughed, gave me back my papers, winked, slapped me on the shoulder, and let me go.

  I traveled slowly along the Algarve. At first it reminded me of the Costa del Sol, carved up by golf courses and sprawling concrete complexes, purpose-built for tourists. But the old towns were still old, and the beaches were mainly empty, and even in Faro fishermen went to sea in colorful wooden boats.

  I spent the night on the top of a cliff and the following day I busked in Portimão. In the evening I called Pierre from a pay phone. It was strange hearing his voice. I told him that busking was all right after all. The Portuguese were not rich like the Norwegians had been, but they were not mean like the French. They liked buskers. I told Pierre that I had set up outside a café and one of the waiters had brought me an orange juice on a tray, as if they had hired me to be there.

  I called Pierre every day that first week. I told him about the old men who got drunk and sang Fado at night on the street. I told him that Fado was the saddest music I had ever heard, and how it made me feel better about playing “Vocalise,” only what I mainly played was “In a Sentimental Mood.” I didn’t tell him this was because it reminded me of him. Neither did I tell him that now that I was in Portugal, every time I saw a tall blond man my head would spin and my knees would go weak and I’d have to sit down. Not that Jack would be in some big, dusty town in the Algarve.

  I had given up trying to make sense of it all. Life was far too confusing.

  Instead I studied Karen’s Stormrider surf guide. I was heading to Sagres
. This was where Andrew’s lighthouse was. There were beaches there where you could surf. And there were more beaches all the way up the west coast. I was nervous. I had almost forgotten all about surfing.

  After a week in Lagos, the last of the big Algarve towns, busking every day for crowds of Easter tourists, I tipped the contents of the biscuit tin out onto the bed and counted my money. I had about two hundred euros. It was time for the final leg of my 9,300-mile journey.

  40

  I left that afternoon, driving west, on and on, past Vila do Bispo and then out along the flat, straight road to Sagres. It was a bit like the road to Knivskjellodden. Not quite as empty, of course, but wild and with the same feeling of driving right out to the edge of the world. For it was another edge. The southwestern tip of Europe, with nothing on the other side of it but thousands of miles of empty ocean. Sagres felt like a frontier town, too. The trees were bent double from the wind and half the roads were dirt tracks. There were surf shops on the main street and signs to half a dozen beaches. There were plenty of signs to Cabo San Vicente, right out at the end of the empty, straight road, with high cliffs on one side dropping down to the ocean, and scrub on the other.

  There were vans like mine in the car park. Rusty vans with wetsuits hanging off broken wing mirrors, surfboards stacked on roofs, scruffy-looking dogs. I could see the lighthouse clinging to the land for all it was worth.

  I climbed out of the van and stood on the tarmac. The sun was sinking and the wind was cold. I shivered in my torn and faded shorts. I opened the back doors and pulled on my red duck down coat. On an impulse I went back into the front and picked Hanna’s ribbons off the rearview mirror. I stuffed them in my pocket. I didn’t bother with shoes. I walked barefoot toward the white-washed lighthouse and the end of the story.