Down down down, travelling with Molly from Dublin, down from Paris and Bordeaux and Biarritz where the doomed U-boats slid and hid and the German troops swam and drowned in the big surf. Now goofy-foot surfers flying down a wave’s glass lip, flipping over the bodies and rising beds of weeds past the topless beach.
Down Europe’s body: slip down into Basque territory, ETA (Basque Homeland and Freedom) bombs going off, smoke curling in the car park, wheat holding up the sky, mayors assassinated, et cetera, et cetera. Europe-Land slightly off the rails.
Pass through the frontier into Spain and change trains at Irun, a portal of dank steps, dark and sombre, reminding you of refugees fleeing firing squads and bombers and machine guns. Don’t they know mildew can cause depression? I am reminded of crossing into Mexico, but this is more serious, harder, more violence is implied (Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges).
Earlier this year an attempted military coup, people edgy, dark eyes in steep treed valleys: Which side are you on, boys? The guards with the Mickey Mouse tricorne hats, and machine guns they pass to each other like women’s purses with long straps.
I must consult my phrase book. How do you say, Señor, don’t pop a cap in my ass, por favor.
In France, we couldn’t get out of the City of Light, we were prisoners, me a sweating madman galloping down train aisles, looking desperately for two open seats. So fucking hot. Bank holiday, all trains sold out in advance. Everyone knows this but us. Paris eating into my travellers’ cheques, eating into my brain. Must leave and can’t get out—a strange feeling. Will die here (must see Paris before I die). No one tells you of these scenes when they say how GREAT their trip to Europe was.
Maybe they do and I don’t hear (I’m no more bitter than your average bitter person). All trains full, nearly midnight and life is the slowest ever pie in my face. Moments when I can’t believe I chose this, paid big bucks to come to this grief. No one tells you.
A train to Bordeaux, two seats, we will take it, life is possible. From there we can move on to Madrid, Portugal, later Italy, perhaps cooler Switzerland, look up that Swiss woman I met months before in Hampstead. Perhaps Greece, far cheaper than the City of Light. O to move, O the optimism of a Eurail pass, O the young traveller on a first trip to Fortress Europe.
Molly saves our seats in a sweltering compartment, and I sprint back to our locker before the train pulls out without me, yank both our big packs from said locker and run and run as fast as I can up stairs and down the platforms with the double weight, bashing through overheated holiday crowds, rich sweat falling from me like money.
Our arrangement: we left Dublin to travel illicitly to the continent, boarding the same DART at different train stops to travel down to the Irish port of Rosslare. I met Molly through a cousin in Dublin. No one must know we are together.
Molly told her parents she is travelling with a group of female friends. Molly has been seeing a policeman or guard or peeler and she is saving herself for marriage. This is over two decades ago; the old order still has some power in Ireland. The big white boat crossing the channel, shaking itself like a dog, the two of us necking and drinking on the deck at night, aware of engines and screws announcing that she can’t go all the way. A calm sea for the crossing, lights of boats strung in a blue evening, pieces moved on a flat board game, an industry serving us, a new Operation Overlord serving me oysters, all the old battles here, all the ghost voyages, Conrad to Africa, the Spanish Armada on its way to wreckage, to a laundromat in Galway.
Bordeaux: something very heady in its mix of summer air and salt water surf, and French wine and cafés—craving congress constantly, rooster madness, blood up, nothing will satisfy me here (nothing will come of nothing).
Molly the virgin tries to help, does what she can. In a French bed she rolls on her stomach. I gather I am allowed to move against her, move over her like a tourist, but not in her. Why can’t we just talk about this subject? We can’t. Her nipples glisten where I linger. We come to our solution, we improvise like jazz musicians and I can’t stop, necessity the mute mother of invention amid the terrible fear of motherhood, fear of pregnancy, yet neither of us is really getting laid, though we do our best (isn’t it pretty to think so). It just has to be near, she says, and it’s near her all the time, and she soon convinces me that she may be or likely will be pregnant, even though we’re not even doing anything.
Perhaps this is similar to a kind of surface travel: skim like a bug, there but not there, moving across a country but not allowed to penetrate (only connect), can see but not let in, learn and not learn a thing, sleep with her and don’t sleep with her.
I remember the story of my sublime old buddy F. Scott Fitzgerald taking a saw to the roof of his rental car in France so he could have a convertible. I want to saw the roof off something. Continental breakfast my ass: a roll that’d break a window if I threw it.
And everything stolen from me while we sleep on a night train between San Sebastián and Madrid. I squeezed Molly’s backpack up on the crowded overhead rack. No room for mine. I am being chivalrous, careless, leave my pack on the floor just outside our compartment. During the night someone climbs off the train with my pack. Many stops in the night. I am a careless person.
How often I joked: I wish someone would steal this damn thing. Like a mother I carried it every day for months, grew to hate it. As your mother warns you, be careful what you wish. Your mother should know.
Molly shaking me awake, we check washrooms, running up and down the confined train. All my rolls of film from London, Holyhead, Dublin, Dingle, Galway, the Aran Islands, Le Havre, Cherbourg, Paris, Arcachon, San Sebastián, my film blistering in the desert plateau, my handwritten journals gone with the newspaper clippings and pub coasters, and my favourite Ramones T-shirt. Who wears that T-shirt now?
My psychobilly forty-fives—hours poring through used record racks in London and Dublin—and coil journals tossed to rot in the blank Spanish sun. What I value so highly is worthless to those who steal from me.
On a bed in Madrid, heat an affront, a weapon aimed at you, sapped by heat, the old Moorish city Mayrit makes it known you’re close to North Africa, cruel blinding sunlight and dark hallways, a giant ant colony, an ancient hotel shelled during the Spanish Civil War, home now to my immutable irritability.
I hit the wall, fell in the apples, succumbed to Weary Blues—on the road for months. Now I just want to stop the bloody carnival. My middle-class failings, my guilt: I have to enjoy travel, it’s my duty, I must love Madrid’s secret tabernas and alcazars, must keep up with the Joneses and Lady Brett, but I have to stop moving. I’m failing the legacy, letting down the side.
A hubcap rolls downhill from a small car. I chase the hubcap on its wobbly wanderings and carry it like an errant baby back to the castizo owner coming down the hill on foot.
Gracias, he says.
De nada, I mutter shyly, secretly thrilled to be able to say something, however inexpertly, in this beautiful language.
God is in the details, the stunning details, the palace gardens, the Gran Via, the Museo del Prado, the statues and horses, the tapestries and Toledo marble, the debris and bric-a-brac at the centre of an empire of gold and silver, all this moving sunlight, gold from the Incas, and two Madrileno guitarists on the cobbled street, gypsy fingers flailing on gut-strings, a haunting foreign voice travelling dark roads, dark chords, frenetic strumming in an alien lane.
El Corte Ingles department store, Molly with me as I buy T-shirts and one pair of pants to replace those stolen. Why is one item a pair?
Molly and I travel room to room, drink to drink, Raphael to Rubens to Goya, insane art and traffic, the strange history of this country, churches and thieves, Old World women in black shawls looking on new sin, the new young skin everywhere in the streets that have always been there.
I can’t look. Bourbon buildings so perfect, Hapsburg, art deco, soaring Moorish arches—these all sound so beautiful, but I have lost my eyes, my curiosity;
it was exhausted, stolen like a backpack.
The mandarin in the police building with such beautiful writing. Is he alive now? He takes down the details. The backpack, the train. It’s cooler inside this office on the Puerta del Sol. More machine guns and the beautiful handwriting. Colonel Tejero of the Guardia Civil held the parliament at gunpoint while on camera, trying to trigger a coup on television. The revolution will be televised. I’m reporting the crime. We all know it’s futile. This wouldn’t have happened when Franco was alive.
The mandarin writes and I find myself thinking back fondly to Bordeaux and a nearby beach town. Lie on a topless beach, French women stretching on all sides, lovely breakfasts at the Lion d’Or hotel, cold golden beer in afternoons under umbrellas, jump in the sea anytime, drink anytime, morning or night. Men playing bocce above the sea. A simple easy life—just want to stop somewhere for a while, get to know something of a place and not be uprooted each day.
Molly is agreeable; we like each other and we hate each other, our crush, our civil war, our puppy love transmuting into something more complicated and fine, for travel makes for strange bedfellows. We decide: back to the Lion d’Or, our clean well-lighted place.
I will return, come back, make amends to Madrid, take a hacksaw to my Hertz, join the First of October Antifascist Resistance Group, partake in stunning stinking sheep cheeses and bandilleras and spicy chorizo, yell hi to Dos Passos and Papa Hemingway at the next iron table. I’ll have more energy when I’m old and in the way. Right now I’m young and I just want to sit around and do nothing.
The train rocking in the long tunnel, our train completely dark, under the Pyrenees, a mole pushing through a mountain, the River Ebro crossed, leaving sunny Spain, travelling north in the dark, her lithe white Irish hand travelling south.
Her hand opens a zipper on newly purchased Spanish pantalones, she is game despite her vow of chastity, she likes to pay attention to it, it’s hers, she has it in hand, going north, up, going up the country, she is Molly Bloom at la frontera, yes, up, moving up the map, Molly’s bloom opening with honey inside her lightless tunnel (wish you were here).
We are in the dark and then the Moorish man lights his etched czarist lighter and we are illuminated, we see the light and cover up as best we can and pretend nothing is amiss, just Cassio and Desdemona caught in the act, just your average North American shrinking-violet bozo and the Irish woman he should be nicer to and will never see again (she cries at the station in London, but she never answers his letters), just your average retreat from Moscow.
Mark Anthony Jarman is the author of Ireland’s Eye; 19 Knives; New Orleans Is Sinking; Salvage King, Ya!; Dancing Nightly in the Tavern; and a poetry collection, Killing the Swan. Jarman has won the MacLean-Hunter Endowment Award for Literary Non-Fiction, a National Magazine Award, and the ReLit Short Fiction Award. His stories and essays have been shortlisted for the Journey Prize, the Pushcart Prize, Best American Essays, and the O. Henry Award. He teaches at the University of New Brunswick.
Writer at work in a Yukon hotel.
011Destination: Canada
THE DRUNKEN BOAT
Steven Heighton
Steven Heighton is the author of seven books, including the story collection Flight Paths of the Emperor and a novel, The Shadow Boxer, which was a bestseller in Canada, and in the U.S. was a Publishers Weekly Book of the Year for 2002. His work has been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Trillium Award, the Journey Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and Britain’s WH Smith Award (best book of the year). He has received the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, a gold medal for fiction in the National Magazine Awards, the Air Canada Award and the 2002 Petra Kenney Prize (UK).
012Destination: Brazil
A LESSON IN DANCE
Gillian Meiklem
Theresa is a gossiping gypsy who sells cakes up on main street. She possesses the kind of beauty that seems to better itself with each passing year. She is ten years older than I am and ten times as notable. I count each turn she makes on my fingers as I watch her dance. If she were an ugly woman, all that prancing might look tasteless—lifting her skirt while she twists to the floor, teasing some imagined spirit into chasing her to all four corners, until he succumbs to her and lays her breathless. But Theresa is bringing the dead back to life, making the coy girls feel plain and making me get unbearably high to keep up. Theresa and her tiny nephew Leo live beside my pousada in a town built on sand. At low tide it’s possible to walk fifteen minutes out to sea without getting your hair wet. By way of laziness and practicality I’ve learned to swim in two feet of water, with Leo beside me, diving into the shallows in a flail of crazed laughter that gets lost in the wind.
It is said that this same wind will carry away the two-hundred-foot dune that shields the oasis and governs the town of Jericoacoara in less than five years. It makes me feel sentimental to shake it out of my pant cuffs onto the floor and sweep it outside to the fence I share with Theresa. Leo is usually there, pushing a toilet paper roll on the end of a metal rod over dumps of shit and through the laundry of the yelling woman who hosts the cockfights. She’s an intimidating figure and much more captivating to watch than those tortured roosters. For the past six weeks that I’ve stayed here, her yard has become my Sunday matinee. We’ve never spoken to one another, but I’ve studied her for hours—her black-soled feet, the slip she wears as a dress, the way she shifts her weight and sneers to harangue both the winners and losers. Eventually the men wave for me to join the betting, and jest with great grins that Leo is my son. I’ve never been certain if they’re making fun of Leo or me or whether the whole notion of me as a mother is hilarious. It’s particularly hurtful on the days I’m practising to be one. When I finally asked Theresa where Leo’s mother was, she simply said she had gone away.
Early each evening, when Theresa has combed her hair and Leo has agreed to play with other kids, she and I amble through streets, ankle-high in sand, toward the beach. By then the night’s capoeira has reached a frenzy, outlined by a trio of torches, a half-lit moon and a gallery of admirers. There are congregations like this all over northern Brazil. Capoeira is a sport as popular here as soccer is in Spain or how we like to think hockey is back home. It is an ancient dance and a martial art—a great spectacle of warriors set to ballet. One pair at a time enters the circle, the victor staying until he’s outshone. The rest of the athletes wait their turn. To get in the ring, one must also make music: anthems and rhythms and beautiful chaos pounds from voices and drums. I have seen these same men in the honesty of day and noted that they are five feet tall and as mortal as I, as earthbound and predictable as any other, but here in the hour after dusk they soar. I envy them so much my chest hurts and I lose feeling in my feet.
Theresa is tall enough to take a position in the back of the crowd, but on this night as in most, she grabs me by the elbow and drags me to the front. I hate the first row. I have been landed on twice, tripped, kicked and asked to play the cymbal. How this happens to me, inches from Theresa while she sambas untouched, is a perpetual mystery. She has vowed to protect me tonight and watch for the little man who refuses to be appeased. She points him out across the crowd. “There’s your boyfriend,” she teases. The truth is that this man wants to get me in the ring. I had met him on my first night in town. I was with Stacey, an American girl who wanted to listen to un-American music, a depressingly difficult request. Out of the dozen bars in town we were left with only two to choose from; she picked the quieter one, intent on learning how to dance to forro with the smallest number of people looking on. Forro is a traditional, popular music meant for couples. If the pair is experienced it can be a very sensual thing; if not it’s little more than a dirty polka. Now, while women may indeed outnumber men in the rest of the world, in this little town the ratios are reversed, and in this particular bar the numbers were appalling. Among the thirty or so patrons, there were four women, including the girl serving drinks and an unconscious lady, both of whom were excused from
dancing. Stacey and I were very popular.
WHILE WOMEN MAY INDEED OUTNUMBER MEN IN THE REST OF THE WORLD, IN THIS LITTLE TOWN THE RATIOS ARE REVERSED, AND IN THIS PARTICULAR BAR THE NUMBERS WERE APPALLING. AMONG THE THIRTY OR SO PATRONS, THERE WERE FOUR WOMEN, INCLUDING THE GIRL SERVING DRINKS AND AN UNCONSCIOUS LADY, BOTH OF WHOM WERE EXCUSED FROM DANCING. STACEY AND I WERE VERY POPULAR.
The first two men to approach us were the little man and a lanky fellow named Tomas. The little man was a good foot shorter than his friend but much thicker. He had a boxer’s build and strutted like a champion, crowned in a silk cap and wearing a matching vest. I have since learned the little man’s name but because it also doubles as a term of endearment and because we’ve become sworn enemies, I refuse to say it. But on that first night, six weeks ago, the little man was trying to court me. He asked me to dance. We had been talking for an hour or two and he seemed jovial enough. He understood my patchwork Portuguese and had taken it upon himself to get us rather drunk. I ordered one more to get up the nerve to dance.
I didn’t want him to know I was uncomfortable; insecurity is often misread as snobbery. It wasn’t the dancing nor the partner so much as his height that made me feel ungainly. It was a gruelling embrace, holding him there, chest-high to me. We danced six songs in a row until he conceded that nature was against us. Stacey, to my chagrin, was a natural, leaving my companion and me to drink alone. The spectacle of us had sobered me, and I abandoned beer altogether. The little man drank four more tall bottles before Stacey joined us with her latest partner, an immaculate-looking man who had fallen in love with her in the hour or two that I hadn’t been watching.
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