by Tim Weed
They climbed until they came to a stone footbridge, an old Moorish arch spanning a deep-cut ravine. The only sound was the chatter of a streamlet from the shadows under the bridge. Soledad stopped halfway across and sat on the waist-high stone railing, flipping the skirts of her gypsy dress so that a fold of it draped playfully over the edge.
He sat beside her on the wall, his heart pounding, a cool rivulet of sweat running down his chest. They kissed. Her lips were soft and yielding, pleasantly spicy with clove, and when he lifted up the dress she did not protest, but giggled into his mouth, and then she began to moan softly as he made love to her against the railing.
Afterwards he held her close, one hand resting on her narrow waist and the other luxuriating behind her neck among the silken curls of her hair.
“Do you adore me?” she asked softly, the words just audible over the gurgle of the streamlet beneath the bridge.
“Of course I do,” he replied. “I practically worship you.”
She put her hands on his shoulders and shoved him back, then slapped him hard across the face. “What the hell?” he exclaimed in English. “Why did you do that?”
“What the hell? Why did you do that?” she mocked, the exaggerated syllables echoing up and down the ravine.
And in the next moment, she was gone.
In a state of shock and growing anger, he made his way back to the tavern. Eusebio was standing at the bar in conversation with three cronies. “Where is she?” James asked.
“Where is who?” Eusebio looked annoyed at the interruption. The other men stared calmly.
“You know very well who I mean. Soledad, the woman I’ve been spending so much time with for the last few nights.”
“I don’t remember you with a woman. Usually, you sit alone at the bar.” Eusebio glanced at one of the other elders, who smiled thinly and inclined his well-groomed, white-haired head.
“Come on. You must have noticed her. She has beautiful eyes, like a cat.”
Eusebio gestured dismissively and turned back to his companions. James was infuriated by this rude treatment; the old man seemed to have thrown aside even the pretense of friendship.
He caught the barman’s eye and signaled for his usual sherry, and when the drink was delivered, he asked if the barman had seen the woman he’d been talking to. The man gave him a funny look. “I don’t remember you with a woman. Usually, you sit alone.”
James quaffed the sherry. It was acrid. “So you’re in on it, too, then,” he said. “What’s it all about? Why me?”
The barman raised his brows and shrugged. James slammed the tumbler down and walked out, furious. He sensed all eyes on his back as he pulled open the heavy door and exited to the street. He wandered for hours through the filthy unlit alleyways of the Sacromonte, not returning to his apartment until well after dawn.
After sleeping into the late afternoon, he walked up to the Alhambra to shoot a few rolls of film. At the keyhole entry arch he hesitated; it seemed important to go in, but he felt shaky and nauseated, and in the end he just couldn’t make himself do it. It was as if a truth awaited him inside the palace, and it was a truth he wasn’t ready to confront; a truth that filled him with sickening fear. So he made his way downhill on the network of cobbled paths, hunting in vain for the footbridge where he’d made love to Soledad.
Back in his apartment, he waited until well past midnight for Eusebio, and when he was sure the old man wasn’t coming, he walked down to the wine bar by himself. Standing in the recessed stairwell, he stared at the riveted oak door for a moment, breathing in and out to calm his racing heart. When he pushed the door open, the tastefully lit interior was gone, replaced by shiny modern décor and harsh fluorescent lighting. Rows of video slot machines lined one wall, and a jukebox played American top-forty music. A scattering of customers sat on polished chrome barstools: there were no familiar faces. Even the barman was a stranger.
He fell into a numbing haze of despair. The days ground on in a colorless routine. He carried his camera wherever he went but it always remained zipped up in its case; the darkroom gathered dust. He went back to the wine bar several times, but the old décor never returned. There were no tapas, no suspended hams, and the new barman didn’t seem to know how to keep his sherry properly chilled. James came to believe that the whole thing had been an elaborate fantasy concocted by his tortured imagination, as a lonely child peoples his nursery with imaginary friends.
Above all, he yearned for Soledad. Every night, he wandered the narrow streets and steep alleyways of the Sacromonte—a dangerous practice, he knew, despite what she’d said—but he couldn’t help it. His only goal was to catch a glimpse of her.
One night in mid-May, he thought he spotted her ducking into a doorway near where he remembered—but, of course, had been unable to precisely locate—her cave. Inside, he found himself in the midst of a boisterous crowd of red-faced German tourists. They were all shouting and clapping at a middle-aged woman in a black flamenco dress who’d just stepped out onto a low stage at the back of the cave. Off to one side, a fat gypsy sat on a stool, plucking a twelve-string guitar and crooning in an ugly, high-pitched quaver. Reeling, James fled, cracking his forehead against the lintel as he hurried out the door.
He wandered aimlessly through the maze of cobbled alleyways, relying on the numbing rhythm of his stride to keep the dread that dwelled deep within him at bay. It was an increasing strain. How much longer could he fend it off?
At a certain point—it could have been moments or hours later—he became aware of footsteps echoing on the cobbles behind him. His scalp prickled and he quickened his pace, glancing nervously over his shoulder. As far as he could make out, there were four or five figures trailing him. They kept to the shadows, and seemed to hang back at a constant distance. He saw, or imagined that he saw, a flash of white teeth—a quick, feline grin. Ducking into a tight-walled side alley, he glanced back over his shoulder again. The shadowy figures had gathered at the alley mouth as if to block his exit. With a surge of panic, he broke into a run; behind him, a sudden clatter of footsteps rang out on the cobbles, and it became a full-fledged chase.
At the next alley he cornered right, uphill toward the ancient wall that marked the upper limits of the city. His heart raced with a strange mix of terror and exhilaration. Behind him his pursuers were fanning out, hooting and whistling to each other, commando-style. Beyond the wall, he knew there was an open hillside overgrown with yucca and prickly pear. If he could just make it over the wall, he thought, he might be able to lose them.
The alley narrowed and steepened to a staircase; James was amazed that his lungs weren’t bursting with the effort of running so fast, but he didn’t even feel tired. Ahead loomed the broad, black mass of the wall. He sprinted toward it, reaching out with his hands to feel in the darkness for a gap or a chink that would give him the leverage to climb up and over.
Almost there, he stumbled, and the next thing he knew, he was being hoisted roughly and shoved against the wall. His assailants were panting for breath, and there was a long pause before anyone spoke. The stone felt cool and abrasive against his back, and the texture of it was oddly soothing. If anything, he felt a sense of impending closure and relief.
One of the men—a gypsy with a quick feline grin, the shape of which James could now see was the result of a pronounced harelip—pulled a knife from his belt and held it up to James’s neck while one of the others turned his pockets inside out.
“Go ahead,” James said helpfully. “Take it all, please. Take everything I have.”
The gypsy scowled. His breath was spiced with clove.
“Did Soledad send you?” James asked.
One of the other gypsies barked out a short laugh. The harelip narrowed his eyes and pressed the knife harder against the skin of James’s throat. James held still. The blade was a cool bar of pressure against his Adam’s apple. He supposed that they were about to murder him. The thought should have filled him with panic, but it did n
ot. The simple truth that had been lurking in the depths of his mind finally burst to the surface. “You can’t kill me,” he said. “I’m already dead.”
When the harelip drew the blade across his throat he could tell that it was only an illusion, an echo from a previous life that he could only remember in vague flashes, as in a dream, or a loop of an old film montage playing with the sound turned off. There had been a trip to Granada, maybe various trips. He had been a photographer, and he had shot a Holy Week procession, or maybe more than one. He’d also shot a wall of Renaissance grotesques, where one figure in particular had attracted his attention, a face that appeared again and again on the wall—a self-portrait of the sculptor himself, perhaps. He’d gone to a candlelit tapas bar; he’d lounged on a private terrace in the sun. He’d walked across a footbridge on the vine-choked hillside below the Alhambra. He retained the memory of a sunset hour within the palace itself, with a camera, shooting the fountains; the city view; the high, airy Moorish ceilings. There was a woman—not Soledad, but a blond stranger—and she was laughing at him, and her face became worried as he climbed through a lacy Moorish window to a narrow balcony with the city behind and far below him . . .
Back in the Sacromonte, his view of the late-night alley had locked up, as a stopped film frame becomes a still photo. The shadows in the photo were bleeding toward each other across the frame, gradually closing in to a uniform, black nothingness.
He shook his head, and the shadows froze. He stamped his feet, and the shadows receded, reopening his view of the night scene at the wall. The gypsies were still there, gathered around him in a menacing knot and pressing him up against the wall. “What do you want from me?” he asked.
The harelip’s face blurred and was replaced by that of Eusebio, with his slicked-back white hair and noble, hawklike nose. “My dear boy,” he said softly. “We only want you to see the truth.”
“But I do see the truth. It’s that I’m dead, right? I’ve been dead this whole time?”
The old man smiled sadly. “That’s part of the truth. But there’s more.”
James shook his head. Whatever it was, he didn’t want to know. He glanced around desperately, looking for a handhold, a crack, a protruding stone, anything he might use to escape, get over the wall, resume his flight. But it was no good.
“What about Soledad?” he asked, with a faint stirring of hope. “Isn’t she involved with this?”
“See for yourself, James.” The old man stepped back, and a hooded figure stepped forward from the group to replace him.
“Is that Soledad?” James asked. The figure was silent, and he hesitated, but then he stepped forward, grasped the top of the hood, and tore it off. He shrank back in horror. There was no face, only an escaping spiral of flickering light, and the robe collapsed on the ground.
“Damn you,” he said. He turned to Eusebio, but he and all the others were gone, their clothes crumpled like shadows on the ground. Bodies of diffuse light flickered around the wall for a few moments and then coalesced in a single, achingly bright column that pulsated, hummed, and began to move toward him. He pressed his back against the wall again, but it was no good. Finally, he understood. There could be no escape. The only thing left was to embrace it.
KEEPERS
ELLIOT MADE SLOW PROGRESS along the tier of black ballast rocks jutting into the harbor, pausing at the wider gaps between the tumbled boulders to search for footholds. A stiff northwesterly breeze whipped brine over his wading shoes and up around his bare shins, occasionally splashing his shorts and the mesh-bottomed stripping basket belted around his waist. It was the last day of his annual September break—the last fly fishing of the season for him—and although the ocean was warm, the air had gone cold, as if to emphasize the end of summer. The light too had gained a new clarity, swept in by the wind to suffuse the rocks and water with the cold glint of Atlantic winter. But there were other fishermen out, or at least one, a burly local in brown neoprene waders standing on a high rock several hundred yards from the beach.
“Any sign of life?” Elliot shouted into the wind.
“Nah.” The islander spoke without looking up.
“I got a keeper a few days ago,” Elliot offered. “A little further out from shore.” The Nantucketer nodded and reeled in his line, his bearded face reflecting the green tint of the ocean. He lifted his rod tip and plucked the fly out of the wind—a chartreuse Clouser minnow, Elliot noticed—and hitched it to the fly-clip above the reel. Only then did he look up, his eyes flickering over Elliot’s canvas wading shoes and bare legs before settling on his face. “Better be careful out here. Rocks’ll be underwater with the high tide.”
“Don’t worry. This isn’t my first time out here.”
What the man had said was true. The exposed tips of the ballast rocks were already wet from the douse and suck of the swells, and the tide was coming in fast. But Elliot knew that the jetty was negotiable even when fully submerged. You just had to look under the surface for the bone-colored patches of barnacle, which were abrasive enough to give your felt-soled wading shoes a reliable grip. So he continued, his free hand outstretched for balance, stepping carefully so as not to lose his footing on the rust-colored fronds of kelp at the waterline. He could sense the islander’s eyes on his back, a slight prickling among the fine hairs at the base of his neck.
His progress was delayed along the middle section of the jetty, because he had to wait for the swells to go down before he could see the barnacles. Then it was a question of summoning the faith that the bone-colored patches were indeed stationary beneath the surface, which shifted back and forth to create the illusion that the underlying rocks were also shifting. He stopped on an exposed rock to tie on his own chartreuse Clouser, poking the tippet through the eye of the hook and looping the line back over itself, twisting five times and threading the loop before spitting on the line to wet it and pulling the knot tight into a compact monofilament noose. The Clouser looked terrified, with its bugged-out barbell eyes and flume of chartreuse hair sweeping back over the hook.
He began to cast, bending the graphite rod to form the line into long, quickly unrolling loops, then letting it straighten and drop to the water. He counted to ten slowly, allowing the line to sink beneath the windtossed surface and into the stripers’ feeding zone. In clear water you could sometimes see them, schools of three or more fish patrolling the submerged edges of the rocks, fin-tips glowing green against the eel grass, or profiled against the sandy bottom like the shadows of fast-moving clouds. For Elliot, these fly-fishing excursions were like pilgrimages into a sacred realm of wind and tide and current. Out here good instincts were the only important quality. Freedom was absolute, and the bewildering complexities of life receded before the absorbed mindlessness of a hunter stalking prey.
He stripped the line slowly—pause, strip, pause, strip—the fly imitating a wounded baitfish.
This morning he’d awakened with a breeze coming in through the screen window like cool breath on his face. Sarah had lain on her stomach beside him, snoring lightly. He’d slid carefully out from under the sheet so as not to wake her, and tiptoed over the creaking pinewood floor to the small bathroom. It was the worst feature of the old rental cottage, a cramped space with awkward angles and a slanted ceiling, so that standing over the toilet, you either had to crouch or lean back, limbo-style.
On his way downstairs to go over his fishing gear, he’d heard Zoe stirring in her room. Unable to resist tip-toeing up to peer in through her cracked door, he’d found her wide awake, lying on her side with her arms around her pillow and her eyes open, a characteristically solemn expression on her face as though she were pondering some deep philosophical question. All parents are love-blind, and Elliot knew it, but he couldn’t help but wonder at the miracle of this small creature he and Sarah had created. She was an exceptional two-year-old: wise, sweet-tempered, and patient.
When he pushed open the door, her hazel eyes swung around to meet his—almost reluctantly,
he thought—but when his presence registered, her face lit up in a broad smile. He came in and sat on the bed, and they grinned at each other for a moment in conspiratorial silence. He took her in his arms, her head reassuringly heavy on his shoulder as he carried her over the floorboards into the master bedroom. He pulled back the sheet and placed her on the bed next to her sleeping mother, gave her an exaggerated wink, and pressed his finger to his mouth. Zoe nodded to show that she understood, and Elliot tousled her downy hair, imagining Sarah’s moment of confusion as she awoke to find her husband’s bulk replaced by the tiny form of their daughter. Zoe would see the joke and giggle delightedly, and it was likely that Sarah would go straight into tickling mode. As far as family life went, he could conceive of nothing to surpass it: a whole morning spent laughing in bed with beloved, newly awakened females in their warm cotton nightshirts.
He wasn’t going to be able to stick around for that, though—not today. The sooner he cooked breakfast, the sooner they could start packing. The sooner they packed, the more family time they would have. And the more family time they had, the more predisposed Sarah would be to grant him a few hours of fishing time before the ferry. On the walk down the hill from the rental cottage the harbor had looked like hammered steel, but now that he was standing out on the jetty, it looked molten: the slate-green surface glinting and swelling and nettled with sea foam. The wind etched capricious fingerprints that moved to and fro across the swells with alarming speed, and peeled hissing plumes off the tops of the waves . Casting in these conditions was difficult. There was no sign of fish, and Elliot made up his mind to turn back. It would be nice to give Sarah—who hated cutting things close—the pleasant surprise of an early arrival at the ferry dock. One more cast, he decided, and he would head in, buy them each an ice cream cone, and take their smiles as consolation for the looming reality of his beckoning daily life: gridlock traffic, computer screens, marketing meetings.