The Lakes of Covadonga
The road snakes up the mountainside above Covadonga towards the lakes of Enol and Ercina. A pair of eagles glide in slow synchrony against the infinite expanse of blue framed by the window of the bus. Access to the lakes is limited during much of the year, and private cars are not permitted during those times, which, given the precariousness of the road, might not be such a bad idea. A coach toppled off the road on 31 July this year causing serious injury to several of those on board (fortunately, no one died) when the vehicle made way for a passing car.
There is no way to avoid being a tourist on days like this: you buy your ticket and join the queue. There is no jostling for position. Most of the tourists are Spanish, as Covadonga is a site of national importance (see my last post) and as a rule, the Spaniards are respectful queuers. On the bus there is muted conversation as we climb and climb; some take photos of the scenery on their phones, others selfies with a scenic background; astonishing how, one way or another, almost all of us are in thrall to our phones until the signal dies, and beyond . . .
But once you have disembarked, and chosen a route to follow, the numbers thin out and there is plenty of space for everyone. Mrs Blanco and I decide on a modest five mile circumnavigation of the lakes that we find on the Wikiloc app, a walk that offers spectacular views without great exertion.
Everything falls into place. Up here, even the cattle are chilled. There is a majesty to the setting that puts a temporary halt to the racing of my monkey mind, and that is something. Although I try to curb the internal dialogue when I walk, it is still almost always there, babbling on like a tinkling brook. But up here, it quells itself and ebbs away for a couple of hours, and a kind of peace descends on us.
And in the confluence of sky and mountain it becomes apparent, if only for a while, that the world is an act of the imagination. Perhaps, for some of us, that is what meant by God.
Covadonga: a separate reality
Before visiting Asturias, I knew nothing of Covadonga, or the special place it holds in the religious, political and cultural mythology of Spain. But the friends we consulted ahead of our journey all mentioned it as a site of extraordinary beauty, so we booked into the Hotel Gran Pelayo — which had excellent reviews on booking.com — thinking it would be nice to end our trip somewhere a bit special. It was only when we got here that we realised we had stepped into a kind of parallel universe, based in large part on a myth.
For Covadonga is a place of pilgrimage, and the first week of September happens to be the time that the faithful gather in great numbers to celebrate La Santina, the ‘Mother of Spain’, and to remember the warlike deeds of King Pelayo, who led the resistance to the Muslim invasion of the country that would one day be called Spain, regarded by some as the first step towards the reconquest and christianisation of the peninsular, which was completed over seven hundred years later, in 1492.
In the first week of September, visitors to Covadonga can witness the build-up to the celebration of La Santina — and by implication, Pelayo’s victory over the ‘Moors’ — by attending daily mass and taking part in a variety of celebrations around a shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and in the Basilica. The celebrations culminate on 8th September with Asturias Day, and a procession of dignitaries — the great and the good — from the Basilica to the Holy Cave, accompanied by bagpipes.
So, we turned up, unwittingly, for the last two days of these festivities before Asturias Day, which provided a glimpse into aspects of Spanish cultural life with which neither Mrs Blanco nor I were particularly familiar. Growing up as a Catholic, with an Andalusian mother, my spouse has a better grasp of what all this means than I do, but even she admits to feeling a dense pall of gloom descend around her when confronted by the more baroque manifestations of the faith. At the same time, neither of us are immune to the fallout from the collective religious experience — something like bewilderment, something like joy — being shared by the hundreds of believers we witness on Thursday night as they carry an effigy of the Virgin from the church to the shrine, a ritual that will be repeated with some variations, and greater pomp, tonight.
So who was Pelayo? According to legend, he was an Asturian warlord who led a successful counter-offensive against the Muslim invaders, around 722 AD. Immediately before his unexpected victory at the Battle of Monte Auseba, he experienced some kind of religious communion with the Virgin, in her shrine at Covadonga, and this — accord to believers — ensured him of victory against the ‘Enemies of the Cross’.
However, the entry in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica puts it more sceptically:
The stories and relics of Pelayo associated with the nearby shrine of Covadonga, the preserved site of the first major victory against the Moors (722), belong to legend rather than to fact; it was, however, in this legendary guise that he became an important symbol of Christian resistance in medieval Spanish history and literature.
As outsiders it is hard to penetrate to the essence of a myth that holds such a powerful response for so many. But there are aspects of this story that are perplexing.
Consider this, for example, taken from an article in the online review ctxt:
‘When Santiago Abascal [the leader of the extreme right party, Vox] studied for his High School Baccalaureate, in the early nineties, he learned in his history class that the Battle of Covadonga – the supposed origin of Christian Spain – was a myth with little factual basis: an ideological construction put at the service of political interests. Almost 30 years later, in April 2019, he stood under the statue of Don Pelayo (and in front of the cameras) to recite the hymn of the Virgin of Covadonga, celebrate El Cid and “the great work of Hispanidad” in America, vilify the “silent and shameful politicians” in the face of affronts to national prestige, and warn that his party would never ask for “forgiveness for the works of our forebears across the centuries” and to offer “a guide to resistance and normal values, based on common sense.”
Did Abascal forget what they taught him at school? It is more likely that he remembered the practical part of the lesson: there are few weapons more powerful than national history turned into myth. And even more so in a country like Spain, where an element within public opinion believes that there are powerful enemies determined to make Spaniards ashamed of being Spaniards.’
This is pretty scary stuff when one considers the role that Vox has in several regional constituencies; but the topic cannot to be avoided, when we remember what Covadonga stands for in the patriotic mind. The faithful, following the plaster and paint image of the Virgin on Thursday evening from the Basilica to the holy cave might not have been Vox supporters, but the idea of the homeland proclaimed in various spots around the place has a special resonance in a nationalist ideology. Which is not to say, of course, that all, or even most Spaniards feel this way — that would be absurd — but as so often, a myth can skew perceptions.
For example, on the way into the sacred cave, a marble plaque reminds us that the Holy Virgin is like a mother to the nation, and that this place is the cradle of Christian Spain. Below the cave, on a huge engraved block of granite, we find the words celebrating ‘the great victory of Pelayo and his Faithful over the Enemies of the Cross’. And who, we might ask, are the ‘Enemies of the Cross’ today? No doubt, Santiago Abascal and Vox provide an answer to that, pursuing, as they do, Islamophobic policies, and more specifically, of halting immigration, most especially of Muslims from the Maghreb.
“Europe is what it is thanks to Spain—thanks to our contribution, ever since the Middle Ages, of stopping the spread and the expansion of Islam,” claims Iván Espinosa de los Monteros, until very recently Vox’s spokesman on international relations.
In a statement issued yesterday, in advance of Asturias Day, Vox announced that its deputies would not attend the presentation of the Medals of Asturias at the Oviedo Auditorium at 6:30 p.m. “due to the politicisation that has affected the awards that should be the pride of our region and that now only serve for Adrián Barbón (President of the Asturian regional government) to reward his own kind.”
However, the deputies affirm that they will attend all the Asturias Day events “that go hand in hand with Asturian and Spanish traditions, such as the Mass in the Basilica of Covadonga, followed by the procession to the Holy Cave accompanied by a band of pipers.”
By which time, as chance will have it, we will have moved on. Covadonga has been an education, and one which will no doubt furnish pleasant memories — which I will describe in another post — but it is also a place that resonates with a deeply troubling mythology, holding many Spaniards in its thrall.
Gaudí’s Folly
Comillas, on the Cantabrian coast, was for centuries a small fishing port of no great importance — whaling was the main industry — until in the mid nineteenth century, Antonio López y López, born into an upper class family fallen on hard times, decided to reverse the family fortunes and become a millionaire. Like so many before him, he set off to the Americas — in his case to Cuba — and returned a very rich man, while still relatively young. He made important friends, among them the king of Spain, Alfonso XII, who bestowed on him the title of Marquis of Comillas, and he built a palace on the hill in his home town. Because of his many shady dealings, he wanted his trusted lawyer near to hand, so on a vacant plot near to his palace, he installed Máximo Díaz de Quijano; and the young Antoni Gaudí — whom the Marquis had met through his Catalan connections (he was married to a Catalan) was commissioned to design the house. Máximo’s passions were nature and music, and these twin themes formed the basis for Gaudí’s architectural plan. As such, the house contains fastidious detail with regard to these two interests, including musical weights attached to the sash windows and representations of flora and fauna throughout the building — from sunflower tiles to butterflies and birds on the stained glass. Unfortunately the house was never completed. Máximo died a week after moving in, from cirrhosis — contracted, no doubt, by a love of rum acquired over long tropical nights in Cuba.
We visited the house, known as El Capricho de Gaudí — or Gaudí’s Folly — on a sunny afternoon, and were shown around by our excellent guide, Andrea, whose explanations of the social and political background, as well as the exquisite detail of Gaudí’s design, were filled with insight and humour.
The next morning we set off into Asturias, along a winding mountain road. In search of a picnic spot midway, we happened upon a medieval bridge called Puente La Vidre, which spans the diaphanous waters of the Río Cares. There was no one around and I took an icy swim. Next stop: the Picos de Europa and Covadonga.
Cave art in Cantabria
Over the past year or two we have visited various caves in Spain and France and wondered at the pictures made in them by Palaeolithic artists. It all began in March last year with a visit to Lascaux, which uncovered memories I had of visiting the cave as a six year old, the year before the cave was closed to the public for good, in 1963.
Revisiting the excellent reconstruction (Lascaux IV) six decades later aroused deeply submerged memories. In November last year Mrs Blanco and I visited La Pileta cave, an astonishing network of caves not far from Ronda, in southern Spain. In January we made a trip to Ardales, also near Ronda, and wondered at the designs left there by its occupants. It has only recently been acknowledged that the earliest artists of Ardales were, in fact, Neanderthals. You can read about them here.
I am trying to piece together parts of a puzzle: it is not only what I seem to recall from my visit to the Lascaux caves as a young boy, but also the answer to a question posed by the writer Helen Macdonald in her memoir The Hawk, when her childhood schoolteacher came out with the curious remark that ‘no one knew why prehistoric people drew animals.’
Macdonald’s schoolteacher’s statement led me to write, on this blog:
Of course we knew why people painted on the walls of their caves! Children, perhaps, more than anyone else: we know it in the very fibre of our being. We need to draw the animals, and to sing the songs of the animals and dance their dances in our rituals, for a very simple reason: we recognise them as both ourselves and as other, a simultaneous perception of identification and of othering; the elemental you and I, perceiver and perceived; the subject and object of all encounters. The essential paradox of being.
Our ancestors were not only fascinated by these creatures who lived their lives in parallel with their own, and with whom they had a pact of sorts. They also loved them. This love is visible in the paintings so tenderly crafted, which in a modern-day observer stirs a sense of a forgotten intimacy, of profound loss.
So cave art has been on our minds for a while now, and this is what brought us to Cantabria this week. Specifically, we wanted to visit Altamira, which, along with Lascaux, holds the most complete collection of palaeolithic painting yet discovered. The cave was made famous by local landowner Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, whose eight year old daughter Maria first spotted the images of bison on the ceiling of the cave in 1879. The story of Sautola’s attempts to celebrate the discovery, and his rejection by the (mainly French) archaeological authorities of the day, who ridiculed his findings and even accused him of forgery, form the storyline of the 2016 Hugh Hudson movie Finding Altamira (starring Antonio Banderas). Although the film is spoiled by a ridiculous subplot involving Sautola’s wife and a vicious local priest (played by Rupert Everett), it has its moments, and gives a good idea of the local landscape — including scenes shot in Santillana del Mar (see yesterday’s post).
Sautuola died before his hypothesis of Altamira’s cave artists became accepted, and celebrated by the likes of Picasso, who, after visiting the cave, is supposed to have declared (somewhat self-defeatingly) ‘Después de Altamira, todo es decadencia’ — which might be loosely translated as ‘After Altamira, it’s all been downhill’. However, as Paul Bahn has pointed out in his article ‘A Lot of Bull? Pablo Picasso and Ice Age cave art’, there is no evidence that Picasso actually said this, any more than he said ‘We have invented nothing’ after a visit to Lascaux. But the fact that the quotes exist, however fallacious they might be, is revealing in itself. We have a gut reaction to this art; it touches deep emotions and feeds the imagination in ways that are hard to pin down. It reflects, perhaps, a sense of belonging within a natural landscape which we have lost forever, and for which we can only long, overcome by some elemental nostalgia.
We set out in bright midday sunshine, the storms of last night blown away by the clean Atlantic breeze, and after visiting the museum complex, waited our turn to join the guided tour. Compared with the layout of the Lascaux replica — which copies the descent through the cave in every detail — the Altamira version was spoiled somewhat by the modern gangways and the crowding of one group upon another of visitors. But once we reached them, after a short descent, the effect of the paintings themselves was exhilarating. The ceiling of the reproduction cave is quite low and, of course, we were free to photograph them. I caught a selection of images.
A plaque in the entrance hall of the museum that holds the replica cave quotes lines from the Spanish poet Rafael Albertí, who visited the cave in 1928, and later wrote in his memoir La arboleda perdida (The Lost Grove):
Parecía que las rocas bramaban. Allí, en rojo y negro, amontonados, lustrosos por las filtraciones de agua, estaban los bisontes, enfurecidos o en reposo. Un temblor milenario estremecía la sala. Era como el primer chiquero español, abarrotado de reses bravas pugnando por salir. Ni vaqueros ni mayorales se veían por los muros. Mugían solas, barbadas y terribles bajo aquella oscuridad de siglos. Abandoné la cueva cargado de ángeles, que solté ya en la luz, viéndolos remontarse entre la lluvia, rabiosas las pupilas
It seemed as if the rocks were roaring. There, in red and black, huddled together, lustrous from leaking water, were the bison, enraged or at rest. An ancient tremor shook the room. It was like the first Spanish cowshed, packed with wild cattle struggling to get out. No cowboys or herders could be seen on the walls. The animals roared alone, bearded and terrible under that darkness of centuries. I left the cave laden down with angels, which I released into the light, watching them ascend through the rain, their eyes wild.
But if one image stays with me from the visit, it is perhaps the single modest hand print that I photographed in the shadows of the cave. I remembered from my visits to other caves, in the south of Spain, how powerfully that image had shaken me. Neanderthals, as well as our human forebears, are known to have made the images of a hand on the walls of their dwelling places, either by placing their palms, sticky with red ochre, on the wall itself, or else spraying the paint over the outline of the hand, as a kind of stencil. It is the image of that hand planted against the rock that haunts me, the earliest creative gesture of a human being that we have on record. A statement of creative intent: here I am.
Driving to Cantabria
We take a trip, ostensibly to visit rock art in Cantabria and Asturias. But to get there we need to cross the great plain of Aragon, and the territory that comprises southern Navarra, northern Leon and Rioja. Much of the way is dotted with strange, irregular mountain ranges; while still in Catalunya, near Lleida, these consist of jagged formations that resemble stalactites, but deeper into Aragon there are flat-topped pyramidical shapes, below which stand enormous livestock factories for the production of pig-meat (‘farming’ is too kind a term to apply to this harvesting of the pig on a vast, industrial scale). In 2017, Aragon overtook Catalunya as the biggest producer of pork in Spain. Currently over 15% of the region’s workforce is employed in the industry, accounting for 11,000 jobs. The conditions under which these animals are kept are unimaginably bleak, as this article by an animal rights group explains. These sinister death camps litter the countryside for miles on end, and make me seriously re-evaluate the merits of a bacon sandwich.
Into Rioja, as one might expect, porcine production is replaced by cultivation of the grape, and the road sweeps through endless vineyards. As we drive into the greener landscape of Cantabria, and leave the dreary motorway to climb through the sierras of this green land, it all begins to look a bit like home, assuming that ‘home’ is anything more than an illusion, a fleeting vision cast down in childhood and sustained for lack of any better word. The weather changes, too, and grey clouds begin to gather, promising a storm that will arrive later in the day, once we arrive at our destination, near the shores of the Atlantic.
We stop off for a picnic, in the car, because it doesn’t look too inviting out there. ‘Out there’ is the Embalse del Ebro, a natural reservoir formed by the river Ebro a few miles downstream from its source, and a place where it gathers its resources for a 900 kilometre journey to the sea, slicing through northern Spain, before forming a spidery delta in the province of Tarragona, and eventually discharging into the Mediterranean. The river gives its name, via Greek and Latin to the Iberi, or Iberians — the name by which the people of the peninsular were once known. Its name has also gone down in history as providing the setting for the deciding battle of the Spanish Civil War.
Arriving at Santillana del Mar, a small medieval town, turned into an extended tourist walkway, the long awaited deluge finally arrives. We hide out in our ancient hotel and wait for the storm to pass before setting out into the village, which features in the 2016 movie, Finding Altamira — in which Antonio Banderas stars as Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, who found the Altamira cave in 1879, but whose discovery was rejected by the leading archaeologists of the day as a fake.
The town of Santillana del Mar is supposedly nicknamed ‘The Town of Three Lies’ because it is neither sainted (Sant), nor flat (llana) nor is it by the sea (del Mar).
The light of early evening, following the storm, casts the sandstone building of the Colegiata in resplendent light. In La Nausée (Nausea) Jean-Paul Sartre refers to Santillana as ‘le plus joli village d’Espagne’ (the prettiest village in Spain) which seems at the very least an exaggeration, if not actually a lie.
With Malcolm Lowry in Cuernavaca
The following is an extract from my as yet unpublished travel memoir, Ambassador of Nowhere. It concerns a trip to Mexico in 2014.
Caminar en esta zona no le recomiendo: es muy peligroso, said the security guard on the graveyard shift at my hotel in Cuernavaca, as I set out for a midnight stroll. ‘I don’t recommend walking in this area: it’s very dangerous’. I am staying at the Hacienda Cortés, a sugar mill built in 1530 by the conquistador, Hernán Cortés, for the son he had with his mistress, La Malinche, and worked by the family – or rather, their slaves – until it fell into disuse and was, much later, reinvented as a hotel. Guests are housed in small bungalows, each with its own tiny patio garden.
Earlier there was a storm, rocking the trees outside my room, which shed leaves like thin leathery hands and a quantity of other solid matter, along with a downpour of such intensity that I put off heading downtown, settling instead for the more local comforts of the hotel restaurant.
On the latest leg of my Mexican journey, I have just spent a day and a night in Mexico City, returning to the capital from Veracruz to attend a tertulia, a literary discussion group organised by the poet Fabio Morábito and friends. Afterwards I visited the barrio of Mixcoac, passing Octavio Paz’s family home en route, before returning to the more familiar territory of Condesa, and dinner at Luigi’s with Pedro Serrano and Carlos López Beltrán.
Back on the bus to Cuernavaca, the perennial Mexican bus, we pass through the sprawling shanty outskirts of southern Mexico City and into the mist again. Daily travel awakens in the traveller a sense of permanent dislocation, which is of course what the word means; displacement, an absence of locus. I am drawn to Cuernavaca, not only for its alleged splendour, lying as it does, under the volcano – “plumed with emerald snow and drenched with brilliance” – and the setting for Malcolm Lowry’s magnificent, terrible novel of that name, but also because my friend, Peter, who died destitute on the streets of Athens thirty years ago, came here sometime in the 1970s in search of Lowry’s ghost, and to drink mescal.
The night before, I broke the journey from Veracruz by stopping off at the town of Puebla, where I had made vague plans to meet up with yet another poet. There, I witnessed an incident, insignificant in itself, which I could not shake off. As I was walking into town, an Indian woman – ‘Indian’ is not considered to be an offensive term in Mexico and Central America – utterly bedraggled, with long grey hair and dressed in rags, came running past me, chasing after a huge SUV, crying out, at volume and with some distress ‘Don Roberto, Don Roberto . . .’ She carried on at pace up the street calling out Don Robé . . . Don Robé . . . for an entire block, and I followed her until I could see the vehicle turning at the next set of lights. When I got to the junction, she had stopped, and was resting, hands on knees, her crevassed face fallen into a state of resigned torment. She seemed elderly, although poverty and stress and struggle probably added twenty years to her features. I asked her if she needed help, but she seemed not to see me. I asked again, are you all right? And she stared at me as if I were mad, as though the question – estás bien? – were so idiotic as to defy rational consideration. I cannot imagine what her story was, or what she felt she was owed by the object of her chase, the cruel, oblivious Don Roberto. Quite possibly, of course, she was delusional, and there was no ‘Don Roberto’ in the car that had driven away, only a random stranger, but the quality of her distress convinced me that some terrible injustice had been committed against her. The scenario was timeless, and her gasping of the honorific ‘Don’, as her spindly legs carried her in desperate pursuit somehow epitomized the gulf between want and privilege; his status and her subjugation. The image stayed with me as I rode the bus to Mexico City the following day, the massive form of Popocatépetl to my left caught fuzzily on my phone camera above the misty woodlands and broad meadows that gather around its base. The journey impressed on me the extraordinary diversity of the landscape; that within a few hours one can pass from the coast, across prairie, forest and the high sierra. The only constant is the truly terrible music being played full volume wherever you go.
I plan to read Under the Volcano in its proper setting, and I take my copy along with me to the dining room. Within an hour or so I am just as astonished – more so perhaps, because better able to acknowledge the scope of the achievement – by Lowry’s novel as I was the first time I read it, half a lifetime ago. I digest Michael Schmidt’s Introduction along with the chicken consommé, intrigued to discover that Schmidt grew up in the same streets that backdrop the story; and so I proceed to consume the first few chapters with my steak, nopales and avocado, washed down with a bottle of Chilean red, and I linger over dessert (fig tartlet and pistachio ice cream), then order coffee and a tequila. I have not eaten so much in months, and certainly not since my arrival in Mexico. By eleven, I have been reading for over three hours, having forgotten enough of the story for it to read like new.
In Lowry’s novel, we accompany the ex-Consul, Geoffrey Firmin, as he lives out the last day of his life – which also happens to be the Day of the Dead, November 2nd, 1938 – in Cuernavaca, which Lowry calls by its Nahuatl name, Quauhnahuac. Much of the novel is recounted in a stream of consciousness, describing the lurid visions of a man in the throes of alcoholic meltdown. The novel also narrates the events of the day in the external or material world, in which Geoffrey’s estranged wife, Yvonne, returns to him after a separation of several months. Others present – for at least a part of the Consul’s final day – are his half-brother Hugh, who has been intimately involved with Yvonne in the past, and is still attracted to her, the film director Laruelle (another of Yvonne’s ex-lovers), and a cast of minor characters who inhabit the actual town, as well as the infernal multitudes that populate Geoffrey Firmin’s increasingly haunted imagination as the story unfolds with steadily measured suspense – but with all the digressions of a mind in the throes of disintegration – towards its hallucinatory and terrifying climax. This duality, between the inner and the outer, between the spectacular writhing of Firmin’s tortured soul and the quotidian events that need to be negotiated if he is to have a function as a human being – an ‘animal with ideas’ – lies at the heart of the novel, and reflects a fundamental paradox in the life of the Consul, a tortuous, self-loathing self-portrait of his creator. ‘Function’ – not at all incidentally – is a word that is uttered with sinister insistence in the closing chapter by the police officer who will kill the Consul.
The novel has attained mythic stature for readers, its fans including numerous writers from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, as well as from the English-speaking world, since its publication in 1947, after a strenuous, decade-long gestation.
Despite filmic potential – as a classical tragedy set against a dramatic landscape – it has only made it to the cinema once, in one of John Huston’s last ventures, and although Albert Finney’s Consul is superb, the film fails to convince in its portrayal of the other lead characters, Yvonne and Hugh, perhaps for the very reasons that the novel fails: they are really not that interesting. Essentially, Lowry was only concerned with character: the Consul, Geoffrey Firmin.
*
Foiled in my plans for a late night constitutional by the watchman’s warning – I tend to err on the side of caution these days – I return to my room. I am a long-term insomniac, and although optimistically convinced that at some point I will ‘catch up’ on all the sleep I have missed, that rarely happens, and I suspect I will remain in a state of lack for the rest of my days. Instead, I read, drifting in and out of slumber on occasion, a rhythm that especially suits the reading of this book.
At one point, quite early in the novel, the Consul insists, with typical grandiosity, that he is involved in a ‘great battle’, although he is, at that moment, doing nothing more than discussing whether to go on a visit to the bullfight in a neighbouring town or to stay at home with Yvonne. That notion of ‘the battle’, the sense of carrying a massive burden, of suffering this great responsibility to ‘come through’ in a struggle for survival, is drawn upon by the Consul when he resists the opportunity of going home, of calling off the trip, of simply spending some time with poor, exhausted Yvonne. Laruelle, his friend, reminds him: ‘you’ve got her back . . . you’ve got this chance”, to which the Consul replies, with magnificent self-importance, “You are interfering with my great battle” – and again, rhetorically: “You deny the greatness of my battle?” At the end of this passage the Consul continues speaking, taking Laruelle’s part in the conversation as well as his own: “even the suffering you do is largely unnecessary. Actually spurious.” But Laruelle isn’t there anymore. The Consul is talking to himself. For much of the book, if he is not talking to himself, he is addressing one of his inner demons or ‘familiars’, which amounts to the same thing.
One of the best examples of the Consul’s mind at battle with his familiars appears in Chapter Five, when he leaves Yvonne sleeping inside the house – or so he thinks (in fact Hugh has taken her riding) – in order to venture into the garden and retrieve a bottle of tequila he has kept hidden in the shrubbery. The chapter picks up on some of the novel’s main themes or ‘useful debris’, in which we find references to film and to cabalistic philosophy, varieties or brands of alcohol, the local geography, horses, flora and fauna, and we meet with dogs, which, in different forms, appear fifty-eight times over the course of the novel. The passage is worth citing in its entirety:
‘We warned you, we told you so, but now that in spite of all our pleas you have got yourself into this deplorable – .’ He recognised the tone of one of his familiars, faint among the other voices as he crashed on through the metamorphoses of dying and reborn hallucinations, like a man who does not know he has been shot from behind. ‘ – condition,’ the voice went on severely, ‘you have to do something about it. Therefore we are leading you towards the accomplishment of this something.’ ‘I’m not going to drink,’ the Consul said, halting suddenly. ‘Or am I? Not mescal anyway.’ ‘Of course not, the bottle’s just there, behind that bush. Pick it up.’ ‘I can’t,’ he objected – ‘That’s right, take just one drink, just the necessary, the therapeutic drink: perhaps two drinks.’ ‘God,’ the Consul said. ‘Ah, Good. God. Christ.’ ‘Then you can say it doesn’t count.’ ‘It doesn’t. It isn’t mescal.’ ‘Of course not, it’s tequila. You might have another.’ ‘Thanks, I will.’ The Consul palsiedly readjusted the bottle to his lips. ‘Bliss. Jesus. Sanctuary . . . Horror,’ he added. ‘ – Stop. Put that bottle down, Geoffrey Firmin, what are you doing to yourself?’ another voice said in his ear so loudly he turned around. On the path before him a little snake he had thought a twig was rustling off into the bushes and he watched it a moment through his dark glasses, fascinated. It was a real snake all right. Not that he was bothered by anything so simple as snakes, he reflected with a degree of pride, gazing straight into the eyes of a dog. It was a pariah dog and disturbingly familiar. ‘Perro,’ he repeated, as it still stood there – but had not this incident occurred, was it not now, as it were, occurring an hour ago, he thought in a flash. Strange. He dropped the bottle which was of white corrugated glass – Tequila Añejo de Jalisco, it said on the label – out of sight into the undergrowth, looking about him. All seemed normal again. Anyway, both snake and dog had gone. And the voices had ceased . . .’
The familiar speaks to the Consul amid the din of other voices ‘as he crashed on through the metamorphoses of dying and reborn hallucinations, like a man who does not know he has been shot from behind.’ This arresting image presents the Consul as a man awash in a sea of phantasmagoria, the idea of ‘being shot from behind’ heavily foreshadowing the novel’s ending. Moreover, the brisk discussion being carried out by the Consul with his familiar carries a toxic, comic – or toxically comical – element that will persist over several such scenes. Its insistent, hectoring tone both incites the Consul to drink (‘Pick it up’; ‘You might have another’) and at the same time to back off (‘horror’ . . . ‘Stop. Put that bottle down’), an argument that the Consul has with himself throughout the first half of the book, after which he is too drunk to care. The snake, cunningly disguised as a twig, appears as a symbol both of the Fall, and of man beguiled by woman. Not, of course, that the Consul was concerned ‘by anything so simple’ as snakes – and here again we are confronted by the man’s grandiosity; he, who has stared into the very mouth of hell (the book has close parallels with Dante’s Inferno), is not concerned by a mere serpent, and on this account he feels pride, before ‘gazing straight into the eyes of a dog,’ which recalls the ancient Mexican belief that these animals acted as guides to the underworld. The dog is ‘disturbingly familiar’, which is not surprising as we met this very dog a few pages earlier, when the Consul and Yvonne entered their property on Calle Nicaragua, and its ‘familiarity’ has an explicit double meaning also. The Consul’s reaction to it, too, is identical to the previous encounter, and he utters the word ‘perro’ (dog) as much in recognition as in description, thus iterating one of the central themes of the novel, that of perpetual repetition, or endless return.
I am not sure if the proliferation of animals in Under the Volcano has been given full critical treatment but it strikes me as one of the central features of the novel. One writer who has paid attention is Javier Marías. There is a section in his Written Lives in which Marías lists some of the disasters of Lowry’s own life as recounted by Lowry himself. The strange thing is that the three stories he tells all concern animals: (i) a pair of elephants allegedly spotted by Lowry and his friend John Sommerfield hanging out on a street corner in Fitzrovia in the 1930s; (ii) the occasion when Lowry, convinced that a passing horse had snorted at him ‘derisively’, punched the poor creature so hard (just below the ear) that it ‘quivered and sank to its knees’; and (iii) the time that Lowry, stroking a pet rabbit with his ‘small, clumsy hands’ accidentally broke the animal’s neck, only to be consumed by remorse, and ‘wandered the streets of London for two days carrying the corpse . . . consumed by self-loathing’.
In Under the Volcano, it is when the Consul is at his most lubricated and fluent that the animals begin to pile up in abundance, as in Chapter Five. If this is the case, it reflects that the mind – especially, perhaps, the alcoholic mind – thinks in terms of animals because animals provide a natural metaphoric filter. Animals, as Claude Lévi-Strauss insisted, are good to think with.
The references to animals are almost too many to name, but it is interesting to reflect on the peculiar term the Consul employs to refer to animals: ‘people without ideas’ (in contrast to his term for humans as ‘animals with ideas’). ‘Earlier it had been the insects; now these were closing in on him again, these animals, these people without ideas.’ They include a pariah dog with three legs ‘with the appearance of having lately been skinned’ (clearly a xolo), as well as, in Chapter Five alone, ponies, a snake, a tiger, scorpions, leafcutter ants, Quincey, his neighbour’s, cat; (pink) elephants, a lizard, humming-birds, butterflies, ants with petals or scarlet bloom, an unnamed insect (caught by Quincey’s cat); a snake in the grass and ‘a procession of thought like little elderly animals’; various birds, a bull, three black vultures, a caterpillar, a large cricket (with a face like a cat); a scorpion and some ‘murdered mosquitoes’. Indeed, ‘the whole insect world had somehow moved nearer and now was closing, rushing in upon him.’ Throughout the book flutter a host of birds, in their capacity as omens: in Chapter One alone we encounter ‘sleepy vultures’; ‘small, black, ugly birds, something like monstrous insects’; ‘a frantic hen’; ‘fowl roosting in apple trees’, and another vulture for good measure. In the book as a whole, I counted 153 references to mammals, insects and birds, and no doubt missed a few.
Lowry’s own ‘great battle’ with alcohol has been well documented, and not least through critical analysis of his masterpiece. He was never able to replicate the success of his singular, most powerful novel, and the reason is clear: he was too drunk, too much of the time. One of the best studies of Lowry and his writing is by the American writer and rock musician, David Ryan. In his intimate, exacting essay, Ryan says that Lowry, like most addicts, never developed a healthy self-identity, remaining wrapped in a state of infantile narcissism. Drawing on Lacanian theory, he claims that Lowry’s behaviour as an adult, his mammoth drinking binges and voluntary disappearances suggested an inability to distinguish between himself and the world around him, resulting in chaos with every misconceived utterance and histrionic gesture. That would certainly be true of his Consul, Geoffrey Firmin. And the ‘mirror’ theme is supported by a couple of instances recorded by those who knew Lowry.
One of Lowry’s biographers, Douglas Day, provides an anecdote from an old friend of the author, James Stern, who ‘recalled how fascinated he [Lowry] was with mirrors’, and recounts one episode at a party when Lowry disappeared, and Stern found him in the bathroom, in front of the mirror, snorting blood from his nose, which he caught in his hands and ‘thrust up to the ceiling , so that the whole place was red and white’, all the while staring at himself in the mirror and laughing. Lowry’s French translator, Clarisse Francillon, remembered his ‘habit of slyly watching for audience reaction whenever he was behaving outrageously’.
Among the many photographs of the writer posing, glass or bottle in hand, one shows him holding a mirror, reflecting his own image as he is being photographed; and this inevitably leads to the question: why do so many of the photos of Lowry – including those on the dust jackets of books about him – show the writer shirtless, dressed in bathing shorts, staring at the camera in a manner at once glazed and pompous, trying to make an impression with his meagre moustache and his chest pushed out like a bantam cock, as in the often-reproduced photo of Lowry at Burrard Inlet? Why so many photos of a half-naked Lowry? And when we get past the bared torso and the chest hair and the focus on the face – the one on the back cover of the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Under the Volcano – there is something both arrogant and vapid and fearful in those cold, clear eyes. The gaze is, we might surmise, intended to be piercing and riveting, but our attention is distracted by the sparse filaments of the faint moustache, the suggestion of vulnerability in the chin and the plump cheeks, a vaguely satyric pointedness to the ears; in fact what the portrait suggests more than anything else is that the sitter knows that he is meant to be there, but is unfortunately elsewhere, unobtainable, or more likely nowhere, waiting for this to be over with so he can go get another gin. More gin, buckets-full if at all possible, rivers-full, oceans-full of gin. This fantasy, which I am attributing to Lowry, originates in the Consul’s delirious outburst in Under the Volcano, when he attempts to recall an earlier life in Granada, Spain:
How many bottles since then? In how many bottles had he hidden himself, since then alone? Suddenly he saw them, the bottles of aguardiente, of anís, of jerez, of Highland Queen, the glasses, a babel of glasses – towering, like the smoke from the train that day – built to the sky, then falling, the glasses toppling and crashing, falling downhill . . . bottles of Calvados dropped and broken, or bursting into smithereens, tossed into garbage heaps, flung into the sea, the Mediterranean, the Caspian, the Caribbean . . . the bottles, the bottles, the beautiful bottles of tequila, and the gourds, gourds, gourds, the millions of gourds of beautiful mescal . . . How indeed could he hope to find himself to begin again when, somewhere, perhaps, in one of those lost or broken bottles, in one of those glasses, lay, for ever, the solitary clue to his identity?
Oh, that beautiful tequila and beautiful mescal! The simplicity of the descriptor reminds me of Hemingway’s choice of adjectives when writing to his friend Archie MacLeish in June 1957. Having been restricted by his doctor to a single glass of wine per day with his evening meal, he looks forward, with euphoric anticipation, to ‘a nice good lovely glass of Marques de Riscal’. This is an impossible utterance in the mouth of anyone except a crazed devotee, but as expressed by a writer who avowed a parsimonious approach to adjectives, the collocation of ‘nice’, ‘good’ and ‘lovely’ must be regarded with deep suspicion.
Malcolm Lowry’s grotesque diminution, his descent into the wretched, querulous, occasionally violent individual who choked to death on his own vomit in a rented house in Hove, England – a place epitomising parochial English decorum – represents a pathetic shadow death compared to the Consul’s fictional passing, flung down a Mexican ravine after his drunken debacle in the El Faro bar, followed by a dead dog that someone throws after him.
*
It always seemed to me that what literature and alcohol had in common was that they both allowed, momentarily, the ability to watch the world from a place of enhanced perception, or even to provide the illusion that you were really engaging with the stuff of life at a heightened level. Lowry summarises this clairvoyant state perfectly in Under the Volcano, when the Consul attempts to explain to his wife, Yvonne, why he is the way he is:
‘But if you look at that sunlight there, ah, then perhaps you’ll get the answer, see, look at the way it falls through the window: what beauty can compare to that of a cantina in the early morning? . . . for not even the gates of heaven, opening wide to receive me, could fill me with such celestial complicated and hopeless joy as the iron screen that rolls up with a crash, as the unpadlocked jostling jalousies which admit those whose souls tremble with the drinks they carry unsteadily to their lips. All mystery, all hope, all disappointment, yes, all disaster, is here, beyond those swinging doors.’
And a little further on: ‘how, unless you drink as I do, can you hope to understand the beauty of an old woman from Tarasco who plays dominoes at seven o’clock in the morning?’
I am tempted to compare this passage with Ronnie Duncan’s account of a visit to Crete with the Scottish poet W.S. Graham, in which Graham expresses an idea that would be familiar to Lowry’s Consul. Duncan is trying to get Graham to come out for a walk, to visit a museum, rather than continuing to drinking himself into oblivion – as he has done every day of the trip thus far – on the balcony of his hotel room:
So I held on like a terrier and eventually he gestured around the balcony – at the sea, mountains, beach and the tumble of houses on either side – and said that his task was to turn all these into words. ‘It is all’, he said, ‘better than I could ever have hoped’ – reminding me that he’d said this on arrival. And then it came to me that there was really nothing else he wanted or needed: this one experience of a Cretan setting, supplemented by visits to some all-Cretan tavernas, was all he could encompass or wished to encompass.
Lowry and his early morning cantinas, just as Graham and his Cretan tavernas; both of them are relaying an idea that promotes a kind of epiphany – what alcoholics are reputed to call ‘a moment of clarity.’ Compare ‘not even the gates of heaven, opening wide to receive me, could fill me with such celestial complicated and hopeless joy’ with ‘all he [Graham] could encompass or wished to encompass.’ And again, consider this eulogy to Lowry, written by his close friend Earle Birney, and cited in Schmidt’s Introduction: ‘. . . his whole life was a slow drowning in great lonely seas of alcohol and guilt. It was all one sea, and all his own. He sank in it a thousand times and struggled back up to reveal the creatures that swam around him under his glowing reefs and in his black abysses.’ Both Lowry and Graham shared the conviction that alcohol might open the gates of perception. How extraordinary that so much can be invested in an alcohol-enhanced vision of this kind, in which you are – or else believe you are – seeing more sharply, engaging more profoundly, empathising more absolutely, feeling more deeply; in other words, it might be said, replicating the aims of great literature.
How well I recognise this joyous, delusional state. During the most intense periods of my own drinking career this was all I wished for: to watch it all, to bathe in it, to sink into the sun-dappled splendour of the world. Perhaps – eventually – to turn it into words. I started serious early morning drinking while living in Hania, Crete, in my early twenties. It had always been taboo, I guess – recalling the story from my schooldays of a boy whose mother slept with a bottle of Scotch at her bedside – but once I started round-the-clock drinking, the chips were in; even I understood what it signified. And for my friend Peter, who lived in a tin shack next door, but who had once lived in Cuernavaca, intoxicated absorption in the beauty of the moment was his creative mission; but long ago he had lost the impetus that originally drove him – to turn it into paintings – and now the drinking was simply an everyday necessity, and he had stopped painting, working instead as a comedic or parodic waiter at the once notorious To Diporto fish restaurant in Odos Skridlov, the street of leather, until he was too dissolute even for that place, whereupon I took over the job. How pervasive is this terrible myth among the artists I grew up amongst, the ones I read and admired, the ones whose pictures I watched being made in the Slade School of Art when I was an undergraduate in London and where I spent more of my social time than among my fellow-students at the LSE; how prevalent this delusion that drink and drugs would somehow help us experience life more ‘deeply’. Those rakimornings with Peter, when the morning sun flooded the ramshackle square in the Splanziaquarter, where we lived, with its pots of red geraniums and the sheets hanging out over the railings of the brothel next door, the sounds of the town waking, the glorious sense of detachment too – to be a part of it and yet apart from it – these are the things I felt in regard to both my Cretan and, much later, my Mexican sojourns, until a final, catastrophic visit to Guadalajara put an end to this bright and beguiling fiction . . .
I am so comfortable in my whitewashed room that I don’t want to sleep, and I read almost until dawn, completing the first half of the book, before drifting into fitful slumber. I wake at nine, utterly distressed and worn out, the fan above my head whirring insistently with a regular click at each revolution. Outside there is absurdly loud birdsong, and the sun is struggling to break through thick rainclouds. I drink a coffee, smoke a cigarette, and order a taxi into town, where I have arranged to meet up with the poet Pura López Cólome, Seamus Heaney’s Spanish translator, who will be my guide to Cuernavaca for the day, and we will visit Cortés’ palace to see the Diego Rivera murals, and walk the streets that furnish Lowry’s novel. But already I am less concerned with the reality of Cuernavaca than I am with the one conjured by Lowry in his parallel city of Quauhnahuac. The actual place has been spoiled for me by its fictional double.
First published in PN Review 255, Sept-Oct 2020
The Welsh language might cause your plane to crash
A recent article by travel writer Simon Calder has launched a small blaze of controversy about the use of the Welsh language on aircraft landing in Wales. The offending piece begins: “In the unlikely event you find yourself aboard a plane flying to Wales before the end of April, you should discover the Welsh terms for “a new continuous cough, a high temperature or a loss of, or change in, normal sense of taste or smell”.
Strangely enough, around the world, announcements are frequently made in languages other than English. Mr Calder, a seasoned traveller himself, must surely have noticed this. For example, English persons on flights landing in Spain might be inconvenienced by announcements in Spanish; likewise in France, China, Ukraine – anywhere in fact where commercial flights land, there are announcements made in the language of that country.
For Calder, however, Welsh doesn’t count. He writes that its abandonment would unlikely cause any harm and suggests that burdening the sensitive ears of passengers and crew with “guff” is not only pointless, but might well contribute to one’s plane meeting with a serious accident. This notion is backed up with a story about an Air Canada flight from Toronto to San Francisco in which garbled instructions from airport control nearly caused the pilot to collide with a packed Philippines Airlines plane, a salutary tale, no doubt, but one that bore no relation to announcements made to passengers in a language other than English. It makes one wonders what the target of Calder’s complaint really is. And it would appear that his real problem is with that pesky irrelevance, the Welsh language.
Gareth Ceidiog Hughes, writing for the news site Nation Cymru, suggests that indeed, this appears to be the case, and goes on to say: ‘Implicit in such tropes is that the Welsh language is inferior, and that it can therefore be casually disregarded. Unlike ‘real’ or ‘proper’ languages, it is not essential. It is characterised as merely an indulgence, not as something fundamental to the lives of those who speak it. Instead, it is a ‘waste’ of resources or as Calder puts it, a “burden”.’
Interesting, to say the least, that someone dedicated to travel and travel writing should show such astonishing lack of cultural awareness, or even basic intelligence. His attitude doesn’t seem to be any different from that of so many Brits abroad who moan about the inconvenience of having to put up with those irritating natives who have the gall to speak their own languages rather than English.
Faded passport
When I check in for my flight to Santiago at Buenos Aires aeroparque, the young woman at the Aerolineas Argentinas desk, who I assume must be new to the job, stares long and hard at the cover of my passport. She screws up her face. I can tell she doesn’t like what she sees. Immediately three possibilities come to mind: she believes the Malvinas belongs to Argentina and disapproves of my passport on principle; she disapproves of its faded state, the extremely faint image of the lion and unicorn, not to mention the words accompanying them; she disapproves of me. Or a combination of these. She asks her colleague – as though I’m not there – whether the bearer of such a document (which she waves beneath the other’s nose) requires a visa to travel to Chile. Her colleague shakes her head. The first woman seems disappointed, but checks in my luggage and dismisses me. Haughtily.
I am beginning to think about the state of my passport as a metaphor of some kind. Following on from Alastair Reid’s theory of ‘Being a Stranger’ (see selected previous posts), I start wondering whether whatever is happening to my passport can be made to happen to me, so that I too – my identity, that is – might gradually fade to a point of being barely discernible, thus achieving the ideal state of the stranger: of not belonging to anywhere. Which reminds me – though I would rather not be reminded – of Teresa May’s comment that “if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.”
I cannot, at this moment, with all the shit that is going down around the globe, think of an statement with which I agree less, or a mindset capable of producing such an utterance with which I could feel more at odds.
Medialunas
For any visitor to Buenos Aires, the first thing to address is the breakfast medialunas issue. These delightful creations (like croissants, but sweeter and more doughy) are placed in front of you, or find a way of leaping onto your plate – accompanied by an individual portion of dulce de leche – and they look so innocent and appetising. Surely one won’t do any harm. And to be sure, one probably doesn’t. The problem, as with so many things in life, is sticking at one.
Returning to the city at the end of winter, or what passes for winter here – in the high teens celsius, but dropping to around 8 at night – I am struck by what can only be described as a strange melancholy, a vague sense of nostalgia that has been written about peerlessly by Borges in the early poems, and in countless blogs by awestruck visitors in relation to smoky tango bars, the flowering of the jacaranda trees in springtime or the ghostly deserted summer streets; but I was not expecting it last night, as Andy drove us – Jorge, Carlos and me – on a drive from Palermo around the city centre and back again – taking in Belgrano, Recoleta, Plaza de Mayo, the Casa Rosada, en route. There was a light drizzle in the air and it seemed that nearly everyone had decided to stay in, the streets around the centre, usually gridlocked, were practically empty. Where was everyone?
On our return to the apartment, there was an electricity cut, so my friends were unable to cook an evening meal. We set out on the streets again, in what seemed, to me at least, an even more melancholic mood – maybe I was just jet-lagged, having only arrived from Heathrow at eight o’clock in the morning – until we found a friendly parrilla, La Popular de Soho, and were served platefuls of grilled meat, including glands from somewhere on the beast which I didn’t know it had, and perhaps would rather not know. Vegetables, needless to say, are something of a rarity in these parts, but you can’t really criticise a place for something it doesn’t set out to do . . .
We are all immigrants
I have always had a thing for borders; grew up on one, and chose eventually to live on another. So it was no surprise that Kapka Kassabova’s account of lives in the Strandja forest – yes, half the size of Wales – which straddles Bulgaria and Turkey, stirred something in me that I have often sensed but sometimes struggled to articulate.
My borders, however, are both ‘soft’ now, and the borders in Kassabova’s book have in their time been – and for some travellers continue to be – as hard as they come.
A border, as someone once said, is an idea wedded to a geography; and borders, more specifically, are places where the dead not only outnumber, but outlive the living.
Kassabova’s border has more than its fair share of ghosts, and she introduces us to them intermittently, until they crowd the pages of her book: the ghosts of Zeus and Europa; the ghosts of pagan fire dancers whose descendants still attend ceremonies in the forest night; Soviet-era ghosts gunned down or captured, tortured and disappeared while attempting to escape the alarmed barbed wire fence – klyon in the argot of the border guards – between Bulgaria and the NATO states of Turkey or Greece; the ghosts of Greek andartes, partisan fighters holed out in the Rhodope Mountains at the end of their country’s attritional civil war and, finally, the apprentice ghosts of Syrian refugees, many of them children, pouring across the border from Turkey into Bulgaria or Greece, seeking the dream of a better life in Germany or Great Britain (fat chance of that).
Kassabova’s skilful interweaving of her own story – two years spent travelling along the borders and their environs – and the stories that she found along the way, is a triumph of synthesis; and yet there is no false sense of completion, of a circle having been squared; no temporarily satisfying but ultimately flawed notion of telos. She knows there are no easy fixes for the devastating mess that is our present tense, and as we struggle with new-found or resurgent nationalisms, new walls, and old lies dressed up as new truths, that – in her words – ‘[n]ew borders will fail just as old borders failed. In the wretched meantime, they will not make our world freer or fairer. Only harder, costlier, and more haunted.’
In an article that was published to coincide with her book’s publication, Kassabova wrote:
“When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate,” said Carl Jung of the psyche. This is the principle of hauntings, time warps and tragedies. In this remotest of border mountains, a poignant form of tourism is practised by the three border nations: ancestral tourism. More than 100 years after the Balkan wars of 1912 to 13 and the politely phrased and brutally executed “exchange of populations” that followed, the Greek, Turkish and Bulgarian grandchildren of the displaced still travel to their ancestors’ villages in Thrace, to the ruined houses, the blackened kitchens where pots and pans were abandoned as people ran for their lives across new borders. It is here that the locals have, for generations, claimed to see a mysterious ball of fire. It may be a freakish phenomenon of light, but it is richly imagined in legends of flying dragons. It appears in liminal spaces – at the entrance of old mines, over the border river, near curative springs – and always after dark, at the witching hour, the hour of the border and its inevitable transgression.
I loved this book, and the way in which its story, although fixed in multiple pasts, kept returning the reader to the present, and the plight of those refugees now desperate to make the journey in the opposite journey to those Soviet-era refuseniks.
A quotation from Neal Ascherson prefaces the middle section of the book: ‘All human populations are in some sense immigrants’. In these strange times it is worth remembering that.
More notes on being a foreigner (III)
Valparaíso skyline
More translation – literary and the other, everyday kind – and more thoughts on being a foreigner: “Foreigners are, if you like, curable romantics” writes Alastair Reid. “The illusion they retain, perhaps left over from their mysterious childhood epiphanies, is that there might be a place – and a self – instantly recognisable, into which they will be able to sink with a single, timeless, contented sigh. In the curious region between that illusion and the faint terror of being utterly nowhere and anonymous, foreigners live. From there, if they are lucky, they smuggle back occasional undaunted notes, like messages in a bottle, or glimmers from the other side of the mirror.”
He wonders whether Valaparaíso might be that place into which he could “sink with a single, timeless, contented sigh”. He suspects it might be. And yet.
The foreigner walks for an hour in the vicinity of the bus station looking for a comfortable place to sit and scribble: something like a café, or a clean well-lighted place that might offer up a drink and a sandwich, one of those sandwiches that contain a variety of colourful food: a completo or an italiano.
He does not much care for his current state of mind. He has returned to Valparaíso, after a brief visit to the capital. In Santiago the temperature was 35 degrees centigrade; here it has dropped to around 19, and is overcast. He came dressed for the sun, and looks ridiculous. To make matters worse, he has a suitcase, albeit a small one, which he does not wish to lug around. He wonders if he should check into a hotel, but it is a weekend in high summer, and the two he has called are full (and expensive). He has killed the first hour in pointless perambulation, so leaves his case at the left luggage office of the bus station and tries again to orient himself, calmly. He sets off towards a covered market, often useful places for one in search of food, but the stalls are shutting up and the little shacks selling food also, and the place has the forlorn aspect of closing time, and the street outside smells of fish, urine and rotting fruit.
He continues further out of his way before finding a more promising street and following it. Something about the open-fronted shops selling herbs and fruit and meat reminds him of Greece, specifically the smell of Chania market. He tries to identify precisely what the smell is, and fails to name it, the ingredient tantalisingly out of memory’s reach. It is a smell that combines thyme, coffee and something else, something that will not be recalled. He begins to feel nostalgia for people and places he will never recover, but that too fades. Eventually he spots a likely café and crosses the road. He takes a table half way down the room. When he orders, the waitress turns her head to one side, as some people do when confronted by a foreigner, as though the presumption of their foreignness will necessarily involve not understanding them. When she realises that there are no imminent communication issues, she smiles. Despite his command of the language, he is still a foreigner, and perhaps she feels a degree of pity, or something approximating it to it. He has seen the other waitress carrying a plate with the kind of sandwich he requires: meat, tomato, avocado, mayonnaise. He requests the same. It doesn’t take long to clock the fact that not only is he the only non-Chilean in the place; he seems also to be the only person not personally known to the staff. The sandwich arrives. It is pretty much what it sets out to be, and settles threateningly in his stomach.
The following night, by which time he has shed the tourist garb of shorts and brightly coloured shirt and put on a disguise of tracksuit trousers, black tee shirt and cardigan, he goes downtown with his friend, Enrique, who remarks afterwards that to any onlooker they might just have appeared to be father and son, taking a turn out to the bar together. His foreigner identity has briefly been supplanted – to the outside world, at least – by another. He wonders how much longer it would take for his identity to be usurped forever. He thinks, probably, never. But he suspects there is always another, his other, or his other’s other, in waiting, biding its time.
But that thing about the place into which he could sink with a single, timeless, contented sigh? That has receded again; that, he fears, will always be an illusion.
Cerro Alegre, with sea
Chilean writer Enrique Winter
