The South (8 page)

PALLOSA

After eight hours on the bus they arrived. Over and over Katherine had asked Miguel if they were nearly there. The bus had turned another bend in the interminable, steep climb and her ears had popped; and a few minutes later Michael Graves had turned round to say that his ears had popped as well.

The air was cold in Llavorsi, even though it was early afternoon. It was as though ice had been added to the air. And there was the sound, a sound which was to become abiding, day after day, the sound of water rushing, falling against rock. Llavorsi was as high as they could go; impossible that there could be anything beyond, she felt.

They rested against a low wall while Miguel went to find the man he hoped would rent him the house. They shivered with the cold.

“We are going to have to buy winter clothes,” Katherine said to Michael Graves.

“It’s a wonderful cold,” he said. “There’s no dampness here. It’s crisp. It’s good for your lungs.”

“Do you know where this house is?”

“I think it’s a good distance away from here. Higher up.”

“That means it’s going to be even colder.”

“I think it’s very remote,” Michael said.

“Are you going to stay?” Katherine asked.

“Until my welcome runs out and then I’ll go back to Barcelona.”

“That’s a good excuse. When do you expect your welcome to run out?”

“You’re very difficult to deal with. I don’t know if you understand that. Your husband is much simpler,” he said, and they both laughed as she immediately retorted: “He’s not my husband.”

“What will you do in Barcelona?” she asked.

“I’ve been promised work as a teacher. I used to be a teacher in Ireland.”

“Why did you leave Ireland?”

“I was sick,” he said. “I was sick of Ireland,” he laughed.

“Seriously, Michael.”

“Seriously, if you knew anything about the country you wouldn’t ask me why I left.”

*   *   *

A jeep came around the corner with a local man driving and Miguel in the front seat. The driver didn’t move while Miguel got out and opened the doors at the back so they could put their bags in. Between his thumb and forefinger he dangled a ring of keys, several of which were large and rusty. Michael and Katherine sat on facing seats in the back of the jeep. Miguel grinned at them as the jeep started.

The road was narrow. There was a small river down a steep bank and there was a sense everywhere of luxuriant green growth, of the damp earth of the Pyrenees springing into life. Michael Graves knelt on the floor looking out of the window, his elbows resting on the seat. She knelt beside him.

They began to climb again. The road became a dirt track cut into the rock. Down below was a valley of fields and forests. Once they had passed through the first village it seemed once more impossible that there could be any habitation higher up. The jeep was having real difficulty with the track and stalled several times.

She had a real sense now of how high they were: not just because of the cold, but also because of the shape of the rock and the sheer drop into the valley beneath, even the mountains in the distance seemed to be lower down. Michael Graves constantly pointed things out to her: the brown rock of the mountain, the deep blue of the sky, the patches of snow on ridges in the distance, the light green of the pasture and the darker green of the trees that peppered the fields or stood in long rows.

Suddenly Miguel pointed at something just above the jeep and Michael Graves roared: “Look, it’s an eagle,” and caught Katherine’s hand in excitement. The eagle hovered; huge, black and grey, holding itself maybe thirty feet out from the track as the jeep turned the corner. Michael Graves and Katherine looked back and saw the eagle hanging like a piece of paper in the high air.

Michael Graves asked Miguel if he had been here before. Miguel answered that he had spent several months in Pallosa, ten years ago. After the civil war.

“El pueblo está abandonado,”
he said. Now there were only three or four families and about thirty houses, all of them in good repair. Their house had running water but no electricity.
“Es grande la casa que hemos alquilado?”
Katherine asked him. Yes, it was big. He would have to go back down with the driver to collect supplies such as candles, food, blankets and some furniture, and would be back up later. He told them he had paid a year’s rent for the house.

He asked her if she was going to stay with him for a year. The driver and Michael Graves listened. She could not answer. She looked out of the window: they were passing through another, smaller village. He repeated the question. She was not sure if he was mocking.

“Vas a quedarte conmigo un año?”
She looked at him plainly.
“Si,”
she said.

They were still climbing. The road twisted less and less. Instead of rock now, there was tufted grass to the left and the drop down into the valley on the other side was gentler. It was as though they had come to the end of the earth, the landscape had played itself out, and this was the quiet top of the world.

“Está muy lejos?”
she asked him and he said no, it was not far, they were almost there. They had now been travelling for over nine hours; the sun was low and mellow in the sky.

The village was sheltered below the summit in a small dip; it stretched out beyond a stone church and a narrow street of houses towards a valley. The houses had been built from the yellow-brown stone of the mountains and the rock behind the village was bare so that it was difficult at first to make out some of the houses. A woman leading cows through the village turned and looked when she saw the jeep and then walked on. The jeep moved slowly behind her. When Katherine asked Miguel which house was theirs, he pointed towards the end of the street.

*   *   *

The house looked extremely small with just a door, one window and a balcony. It seemed to be the smallest and shabbiest in the village; some of the others had three and four storeys and huge windows. Inside, however, it was much larger. There was a bedroom with a balcony and a kitchen after that. At the end of the corridor there was a long room with two windows which looked out to the valley. Off that there was a toilet and another bedroom.

They walked through the house without speaking. It was Michael Graves who discovered the long room at the end of the corridor and took her down to look at it. She went into the toilet and pulled the chain. “It works,” she said. “The house is wonderful.” She pulled back the shutters on one of the windows and walked out on to the small balcony.

The church lay over to the right. Beyond the long valley were snow-covered mountains; the valley was darkening as evening came down. The small hills to the left were capped by a pine forest. She stood there and gripped the railings. The others had gone back inside. She looked down on the valley, trying to register it carefully as though she was preparing an inventory of each shade in the valley and the hills, as though she wanted to be able, at some time in the future, to remember exactly what this felt like.

She was disturbed by Michael Graves, asking her, “Have you been upstairs?”

“What? Is there an upstairs?”

“Yes, there’s a bedroom up there. Come on I’ll show you.”

He led her to another door off the corridor. Up narrow wooden stairs and into an attic room which had walls of varnished pine, and a small dormer window which looked out on to the mountains and the valley. There was a double bed but no mattress.

“Miguel has gone back down,” Michael Graves said. “He says he has to get the things now. It’ll take him a few hours.”

“I hope he’s going to bring a mattress and intends to get some food. We should have got food down below.”

“There’s another floor beneath the kitchen where animals and wood can be kept,” he said.

They walked back down to the ground floor and into the front room. They took chairs out on to the balcony. Katherine lit a cigarette.

“What are you going to do?” Michael Graves asked.

“I’m going to stay,” she said.

“Are you in love with Miguel?”

“I love him, yes.”

“But you’re not sure?”

“Of course I’m not sure,” she said.

“Why are you doing this?”

“I’m trusting my luck. I have made up my mind I’m going to stay.”

“You did that today, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know when I did it. Give me a few minutes—to be quiet.”

They sat in silence as the housemartins swarmed about the village. They listened to the water flowing fast down from the hills above. After a while she spoke again.

“I always feel you live a double life in Barcelona. I think we’re just a small part of what you do there.”

“Are you jealous? Do you want me all to yourself?” Michael asked her.

“No, I’m curious. I don’t know anything about you.”

“And how eager you are to learn things!”

“Can’t we talk directly without you twisting the conversation?”

“You want me to answer your questions?”

“Yes. What sort of teaching will you do in Barcelona?”

“To be straight, I have a job in a school from September teaching English, the language of my forefathers, to adults.”

“So you’re going to stay in Spain?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ll be able to come and visit us.”

“I’ve enjoyed meeting you. I like you,” he said, and then he grinned. “In fact, I almost love you.”

“Every time you start to be serious you make a joke,” she said.

“You grasp things quickly, don’t you? You grasped the differences between us more quickly than I did.”

“That wasn’t hard, was it?”

“I think you thought that I was the one who burned your
house down. I think you thought I’d come back to burn it again. The peasants are revolting,” he laughed.

“How did you know about our house, and how can you make jokes about it?”

“What else can we do? Sing laments?”

“Think about it, perhaps.”

“Or stop thinking about it,” he said and went to the window.

“So is it a joke then in your little town, the Deacons whose house we burned to the ground one night when they were defenceless . . .”

“Hardly defenceless.”

“I was defenceless.”

“I am so glad to be away from it,” he said. “I am so glad to be away from it.”

*   *   *

The sun went blood-red over the mountains in the far distance. Michael Graves lit a fire in the kitchen with some kindling that lay about. Katherine sat on the balcony looking down on the valley feeling the cold encroaching as the night came down. And as the hours went by, as they grew anxious waiting for Miguel, hunger and tiredness made them irritable and silent. They sat in the darkness of the kitchen with the firelight casting bleak shadows on the walls.

*   *   *

Several hours passed before the jeep pulled up outside the door. Michael Graves had fallen asleep in the corner, but Katherine had no urge to sleep. She no longer felt even hungry. She woke Michael when she heard the noise of the engine. The driver of the jeep had returned, without Miguel.

Where was he? Katherine asked. The driver was not inclined to answer, but she persisted and he told her that there
were problems with the police. However it was not important and would be sorted out in the morning. She asked him where exactly Miguel was and he said in the police station, in Llavorsi—there had been problems.

“Que pasa con la policía?”
Michael Graves asked. The man was already unloading boxes from the back of the jeep. He repeated that Miguel would be back up in the morning.

Katherine carried a box of candles into the house. There were sheets and blankets in other boxes, as well as food, and mattresses in the back of the jeep. They could not persuade the driver to say anything more about why Miguel was being held in the police station in Llavorsi. When he left they lit candles and sorted out the bedclothes. She took a candle upstairs to the attic room and Michael helped her carry a mattress up to the bed. He made his own bed in the room beside the kitchen. All night the sound of water rushing from the small hills above them down into the valley kept her awake; all night until just before dawn when the birdsong started and she knew she would have no sleep at all. She went down to the bathroom and washed in cold water. Michael Graves was fast asleep when she glanced into his room.

The sun had not yet risen; there was still a grey shadow over the world below. She walked along a track away from the village; the grass at the side was drenched with dew. As she walked, it grew lighter and she noticed more and more how the colour of the stone in the houses matched the colour of the rock almost exactly. Even the slates on each roof found a match in some shade of the stone behind. The houses could have been caves, so closely were they related to the surrounding rock.

Miguel did not come back that day. The driver brought them enough food to keep hunger at bay: a huge round of rubbery white bread, oil and tomatoes, lettuce, some tins of
tuna fish. Michael Graves found more wood for the fire and as evening fell they lit candles. Michael had brought some books which he put on a shelf in the kitchen.

She tried to read but found the flickering of the candle irritating; after a few pages she put the book aside and went to the door. There were lights in a house below, and the sound that Michael Graves had noticed too, of mountain streams in the distance.

In the morning she heard footsteps in the hall downstairs. She had slept soundly and dreamlessly during the night and yet when she heard him in the hall, it was as though she had thought of nothing else since she had seen him last, as though everything had been suspended between the time he left and the time he came back.

She stood in her nightdress at the bottom of the stairs and looked at him. She didn’t say anything. He seemed tired and was carrying a few days’ growth of beard. Michael Graves came out of the front room wearing only his trousers and immediately began to roar at him and they both started a mock fight with their fists raised, laughing. She rested her shoulder against the wall. She wished Michael Graves would leave them alone.