Daniel Martin (43 page)

‘You can’t agree with her.’

‘I understand the feeling. If not quite Jane’s answer to it.’

‘Well so do we. No one expects society to go backwards.’

Still Jane smiled faintly and stared into the fire; not to be tempted. Andrew gave a little snort in his sleep.

Nell said to her, ‘All right. But just as long as you know I think you’re the most horrid slippery eel that ever was.’

The petulance of her voice, the spoilt-child resentment that didn’t quite manage to hide an affection, took me back very sharply to our earlier days together to when Nell had often played this role in our arguments… the youngest of four, the indulged in part, the conscious clown. Yet paradoxically, behind this superficial semblance, their real relationship had changed. Emotionally and psychologically Jane was somehow now the younger sister; the greener, the less certain. And almost as if to hide it, she suddenly put her feet to the ground, moved across and knelt beside Nell, bent and kissed her cheek briefly, then stood again.

‘It was a lovely evening. I’m going to bed.’

Nell gave her a dark look up.

‘That won’t get you anywhere.’

But she stood herself with a kind of chiding forgiveness, and pressed Jane’s hand a moment before she turned to Andrew and shook him till he woke from his slumbers. A brief look passed between Jane and myself: a diffident little grimace on her side, as if she was embarrassed to have me the spectator of such behaviour; and especially hated whatever sympathy she detected in me towards it.

When I went to New Mexico, just after Miriam and Marjory walked out on me, I had plenty of free time. My director was busy with the Western he was shooting, and our script discussions had to be in the evening. The unit was based on Santa Fe—for once they were giving the butte landscapes a miss and shooting mainly in those last southern outriders of the Rockies that stretch down over the desert into the state. It was my first visit, and like many people before me, most famously D. H. Lawrence, of course I fell for the area almost on sight.

Along with San Francisco and New Orleans, Santa Fe is one of the most humane of all American cities; by some miracle it has so far managed to ban the skyscraper, and the literal low profile there extends to other things. I think it was Lewis Mumford who pointed out that most American downtown architecture is an attempt to create distance between people to crush ordinary humanity and all its proper scales out of sight. Perhaps because it has opted out of the high-rise rat race, and has attracted a huge art-and-crafts colony, Santa Fe is noticeably relaxed; provincial, perhaps, but proud of it. The Spanish Colonial adobe buildings with their pretty patios, the sweet-pungent incense of the piñon logs that pervades every New Mexican dusk, the marvellous light and air of the high desert, the cottonwoods, the old colonnaded shops round the sleepy central plaza, the cathedral bells chiming through the night, it’s not at all the America of the European myth, and I liked it very much the first time, and have not changed my mind since.

But Santa Fe could have been a far less attractive town than it is without seriously damaging my regard for the surrounding landscapes. There are more spectacular ones in the United States, but none has quite the pure balance, the classical perfection and nobility, almost the Greekness of the ranges that border the Rio Grande between Santa Fe and Taos fifty miles to the north. Some skylines will not be forgotten; one from my childhood, of the southern edge of Dartmoor, is like that. It has always haunted my dreams; and the secret template of its contours still inhabits outwardly quite different vistas. The Rio Grande valley here is also one of the great Pueblo Indian centres; and though I wasn’t much taken by their modern villages down in the valley reservations, I fell in love with the abandoned ‘medieval’ mesa sites on the outliers of the Jemez Mountains that face Santa Fe across the rift.

Their atmosphere is paradoxically very European, to be precise, Etruscan and Minoan… that is, they are haunted by loss and mystery, by a sense of some magical relationship, glimpsed both in the art and what little is known of their inhabitants’ way of life, between man and nature. This must have been what so attracted Lawrence. Then they are magnificently placed, each village acropolis pedestalled on its cliffs of pink volcanic tufa over the endless green pine-forests and vast plains. Their horizons are ringed with mountains, whose basal conifers dissolve into the amber-grey of the higher aspen-woods, then the snow and the dustless azure of the sky. The views are infinite, of a kind most city-dwellers have forgotten exist; of another gentler and nobler, as yet unvitiated, planet. The nearest European equivalent I know is Phaestos in Crete.

I took Jenny there, very briefly. She had a two-day break and talked me into it, since I had already been rather dewy-eyed to her about my attachment. So we caught a jet out of Los Angeles to Albuquerque one evening and drove up to Santa Fe by night. It was all a little naughty, since only superstars are allowed to put themselves, and shooting schedules, at risk like that; and fun. She had her first Mexican food, and liked the casual old posanda I had booked us into; the bitter night air, the aroma of piñon smoke, the endless Indian-trader shops with their folk-pottery and rugs and jewellery, the playing truant.

I took her the next day to see Puye and the Frijoles Canyon in the Bandelier National Park, under the hidden shadow of Los Alamos. At Puye she scrambled enthusiastically up and down the serried rows of cliff-dwellings, tried to coax the chipmunks, asked endless questions, wandered over the acropolis; was shown a towhee and a flicker and various other mesa birds; kept kissing me, like a schoolgirl, I was so kind to bring her to such a fantastic place, and so clever to know about it. All this went on again at Bandelier, which is a rather different site, secret la bonne vaux turned museum in a canyon bottom; asleep and wooded and in-turned, and as remote from our stock picture of ‘Red Indians’ as can be imagined, a timid planter-culture protopolis not very far removed from the Garden of Eden. All their still-present plants, the yuccas and the cylindrical prickly pears, the medicine herbs and the dyeing weeds, seem to have a kind of numen, an equal status, all that the young Restif once felt on the other side of the world. It’s almost a smile, said Jenny, they’re saying look we’ve lasted longer here than you mouldy old human beings.

We drove east back down to Santa Fe in the splendid evening air, all roses and ochres and greens, with the tree-covered folds in the mountains behind the town lying like a gigantic crumpled velvet rug; a limpid and cloudless winter sky above, a light no camera has ever captured, or ever will, since its essence is in its depths, not its colours or vertical planes. We wandered round the old town again before dinner. I bought her a silver and turquoise bracelet in one of the tourist shops that stayed open late; we sipped margaritas, we had a meal, we made love; and it had been a flawless day.

All of which Jenny was to describe from her own point of view, since those two snatched days were the basis of her last ‘contribution’, whose real arrival was to come later; whose writing I now recast (but as she granted I might, at the beginning); and whose drift was why, despite her third and still-to-be-inserted contribution, she would not ‘give me up’. In Los Angeles, she was to write, we were always ‘in brackets’; and for a few hours, in New Mexico, our one escape, outside them.

What I have to describe, why I cannot use her version, is cruel, and she can’t be blamed for it in any way. She wanted to do more shopping the next morning, we would drive out and see one more ancient Indian site, and then straight from there down to the highway to Albuquerque for our evening plane back to California. The site was a place called Tsankawi, archaeologically less famous then Puve and the one at Bandelier; but it was the one I had always liked best, my trump card, the quintessence of the whole region. I had returned to it several times on my first visit, and twice again since then.

I have never quite understood why some places exert this deep personal attraction, why at them one’s past seems in some mysterious way to meet one’s future, one was somehow always to be there as well as being there in reality. It is a feeling I had very strongly when I bought Thorncombe that my real need for the place came from the depths of my unconscious, and only secondarily from the various conscious reasons I found. There were, with Thorncombe, quite conscious reasons of an emotional and nostalgic kind, so the analogy isn’t quite true; but the more apparent absurdity of comparing a Devon farm and a place like Tsankawi is not quite so silly as it must seem. In some way, the mesa transcended all place and frontier; it had the haunting and mysterious personal familiarity I mentioned just now, but a simpler human familiarity as well, belonging not just to some obscure and forgotten Indian tribe, but to all similar moments of supreme harmony in human culture; to certain buildings, paintings, musics, passages of great poetry. It validated, that was it; it was enough to explain all the rest, the blindness of evolution, its appalling wastage, indifference, cruelty, futility. There was a sense in which it was a secret place, a literal retreat, an analogue of what had always obsessed my mind; but it also stood in triumphant opposition, and this was what finally, for me, distinguished Tsankawi from the other sites: in them there was a sadness, the vanished past, the cultural loss; but Tsankawi defeated time, all deaths. Its deserted silence was like a sustained high note, unconquerable.

On my last visit, some three years before, I had persuaded Abe and Mildred to come along; perhaps to see if the place could withstand the sort of reality they—or at least Abe represented. I didn’t forewarn them in any way that they were treading on slightly holy ground, and we climbed the half-mile or so from the road to the top of the mesa against a flood of lugubrious wisecracks from Abe, who is not a foot-orientated American. Was I sure the local St Bernards carried a good brand of tequila, why did all Englishmen, it was rather cold—think they were Captain Scott, he loved Indians in movies, but could he please cancel the reservation… and then, when we were standing before a particularly dense honeycomb of cave-dwellings, he said, This must have been the garment district. He did finally, at the top, concede it was a great view; but still couldn’t resist asking which lot it was I wanted them to buy. Mildred, astute soul that she is, saw I was less and less amused, and took me off: Abe was an agoraphobe, space and solitude like this secretly terrified him. Then she told me about a wood near a house where she had spent childhood holidays in Florida, its belonging for ever to its vanished Seminoles, how you never entered it without feeling you trespassed. She said, Like you broke some law. She felt the same here. A beautiful, beautiful place.

She meant it kindly, to set up a little Anglo-American conspiracy against Abe’s ‘crassness’; but rather overdid it as we wandered back to the car, demanding to know why he was such a misery, why he couldn’t leave the ghetto behind, how he had the nerve to call her a puritan… and so on. It wasn’t fair, historically or presently, since he actually took a rather un-Jewish pride and interest in his rambling Bel Air garden. When we got into the car he made a sudden move to get out again.

‘Hold it. I think I left my scalp back on the trail.’

All of which should have warned me that I could not expect other people to share my feelings; it was not only an English obsession, but a very personal one, and I compounded it by a childish failure to see that one can’t expect even the most sensitive first visitors to have the reactions one has oneself acquired only by repeated knowledge. Because for me the place was a little bit beyond words, I foolishly demanded an immediate awed silence in everyone else.

Jenny and I arrived at Tsankawi just after noon. It was another peerless day, almost summer-warm out of the light wind. We parked beside a woolly forest of rabbit brush, and at once there seemed a good augury: a loose flock of bluebirds, gorgeous in the sun, like passerine kingfishers, flying from pine to pine away from us. Again, I had not warned Jenny that she was about to undergo a test. We walked hand-in-hand up the first slope to where a huge rock platform, a kind of natural apron stage, jutted out from the first low cliff. It immediately pleased the actress in Jenny, she walked away to the end, struck a Sarah Siddons pose, grinned back at me. She was in blue that day, pale chinos and shirt, a pink headscarf, the freckles more conspicuous than usual; her most innocent self. We went on up a slope to the second brick-coloured tier of cliffs, pitted and pocked with cave-dwellings; following the old Indian trail, where countless generations of bare and moccasined feet had worn a furrow, a foot or more deep in places, across the gentle bulges of the soft tufa… beautiful abstract graffito curves made by some patient giant; and all around, below us, the sea of pines, the broken valley plains, the distant snow-capped mountains.

We wandered along the foot of the upper cliffs and I showed her the petroglyphs beside each cave entrance, the Jungian mandalas and the trail sentinels, oddly majestic though kindergarten-simple, men with one raised and forbidding arm, scratched in the rock; then further on, a plumed serpent incised round the blackened wall of a shallow ceremonial cave. Then we collected some piñon cones and shook out the seeds and cracked the cases, the soft kernel is edible and got our fingers coated in the aromatic resin; sat and smoked for a while in the lee of a great rock, her back against my shoulder, staring out over the landscape at our feet. It was very warm there out of the wind, and Jenny took off her coat; then a little later unbuttoned her shirt, and let it fall apart, aired her breasts in. the sun. We sat in silence for a minute, my hand on her bare waist, almost asleep in the warmth.

‘I wish I could take all my clothes off. And be had.’

‘Right here!’

‘There’s no one around.’

‘You had your ration last night.’

She gave a nudge back against my shoulder. ‘All those caves.’

‘You must ask me to tell you about a spider called the Brown Recluse. To say nothing of scorpions, tarantulas, Black Widows, vampires, rattlesnakes, outraged Indian ghosts.’

‘Fink.’

‘I shall treasure the idea.’

‘You’re just lazy. No imagination.’

I chucked her waist. ‘Too much.’

She turned her head a little against my shoulder. ‘Tomorrow. Horrid old pretending again. Sitting here will be a thousand years away already. It won’t seem real.’

‘One can come back to places.’

‘Not for the first time. Its never the same.’

‘And sex would alter that?

She said nothing for a moment.

‘Only knowing one would always be together would alter that.’

Then she twisted her head up, kissed me quickly on the chin and sat away. She began buttoning up her shirt, stood to tuck it in, grinned down. ‘Now let’s be happy sexless tourists again.’ And she reached out a hand to pull me up.

We drifted a further few hundred yards along the foot of the cliffs, then found a place where we could scramble up to the top of the mesa. The central pueblo there has eroded away to little more than a circular wall of earth. It was probably founded in the twelfth century, but no one knows why since there is no evidence that these were warlike cultures or at that time threatened by any, it was built so inconveniently high above the valley bottoms where the crops were grown. Its position puzzles anyone especially an American anyone who seeks a pragmatic explanation for everything; yet it seemed very clear to me that the departed Indians wanted, perhaps for some religious reason, to be poised between heaven and earth, in a perfect balance.