Following the Sun (29 page)

On my way back to the hotel after sharing a glass with my guide I noticed that there was a decided chill in the air and the next morning, for the first time since I had landed, I felt the presence of a true English spring, as opposed to the English spring of song and verse—that is, a low gray sky, the smell of damp air, cloddy earth, and wet grass. I set out for the Saverndale Forest nonetheless and rode slowly through the rolling country, to Shelbourne and Ham. Just before the town of Newbury the sky opened and the dank cold rain that had been threatening all day finally released.

I had by this time on the trip developed an elaborate theory on the physical relationship between atmospheric conditions and the tensile quality of modern rubber. This theory, in its simplest form, holds that if it rains heavily, the likelihood of experiencing a flat tire increases one hundred fold. For this reason, I was not surprised when I experienced the familiar swerving lack of control and felt my rear tire go flat. I pulled off, carried the bicycle up into a field, unhitched my panniers, turned the bicycle upside down, and began rummaging through my tool kit for the proper equipment. By the time I was finished I was soaked.

Alternate theories on the relationship between the proximity to cities and rain, or the proximity to cities and flat tires, might also be proposed. Looking at the map, I realized I was only forty-five minutes or so by train from Londontown.

Throughout this trip, I had been tempted by London, partly because I had friends there and partly because I felt that somehow, since I was thinking about the sun, and thoughts on the sun beget thoughts on time and the measurement of time, and the center of Western Time is Greenwich Observatory, that I should perhaps undertake a profane sort of pilgrimage to this important scientific site.

I pedaled on into Newbury, thinking over my plans, found a tea shop, changed my clothes in the clean, well-lit, heated bathroom, and drank a pot of hot tea and savored scones with strawberry jam, served by two nice ladies in frilly aprons who wrung their hands when they heard my story.

“Oh my, Dottie,” one of them called out, “come all the way from Cádiz, he did, riding that bicycle all the way. You must come and meet the man.”

Whereupon Dottie trotted out from the back room and wrung her hands. “… All the way from Cádiz is it? You must be tired, poor boy. Give ‘im another scone, Mildred.” And Mildred, bless her English heart, brought out another scone, which I dutifully consumed. And then, having topped up, I pushed back my chair, crossed my legs, took a sip of my tea, and began to expound: “A hard coming I had of it,” I told them, “and the mountains cold, and the natives unfriendly.…” And all the while, as I told my tale, I kept my eyes on the mullioned window to watch the progress of the rain outside.

It only got worse.

“Would either of you know, perhaps,” I asked, “where the train station might be located. I've a mind to go to London to further my adventures.”

“Oh my Dottie, now he's going up to London,” Mildred said.

“Don't do it boy. It's a dangerous unhealthful city. And there's crime.”

“And Pakis.”

“Filled with Pakis, now. You mustn't go.”

“But, actually, I want to see my friend, the vicar.”

“You know a vicar in London?”

“I do.”

I didn't, of course.

“Well the train is just two blocks on, off to the right.”

“Regular schedule, now, I'm afraid. We're getting a new type out here now. Bankers and such like.”

By 3:48 that afternoon, I was on the commuter train to Paddington Station.

Eleven

The Last of the Sun Gods

One of my friends in London was an aspiring American actress named Billy, who had tried to make her way in New York, had failed, and then fled to London to try her luck. She and I and a woman named Nancy used to spend a lot of time together in New York, mostly up in Central Park, where we would all head to come up for air. This Billy had a fine mop of black hair, cut in a bowl style, with long thick bangs that fell below her eyebrows, giving her the look of a blue-eyed sheep dog. She and Nancy sometimes would lock arms on Fifth Avenue and go sashaying down the sidewalk singing—shouting really—a little ditty set to the tune of the Old Grey Mare:

The bells of Hell go ding a ling a ling a ling
.

Oh death where is thy sting a ling a ling a ling?

I considered staying with Billy in London, but knowing her financial status, I decided to call some other London friends, an older and decidedly better appointed couple whom I had befriended in Corsica. They had stayed at the
auberge
where I worked, and had insisted I visit them in London the following autumn, which I had. They owned an airy apartment near Regency Park with many interesting artifacts and they had energetic, lively minded intellectual friends. So I called them and secured an invitation.

Peter and Magda were in their forties and had led adventurous, exploratory lives. He was a painter, who had been a wanderer before he took up the brush. He had motorcycled through India, traveled in the South Pacific and in sub-Saharan Africa, snuck into Tibet, and lived for a while on a houseboat in Srinagar in Kashmir. The only place he had never been was the United States.

“I saw it once from Mexico,” he told me. “But I was afraid to cross the border, too dangerous.”

Magda taught English at the London School of Economics and was a quieter, more stay at home sort, as well she might be. She had grown up in Poland during the war and had seen things that still gave her nightmares. Some nights in Corsica I would hear her cry out from her room. She filled her days with beautiful objects by way of forgetting, flowers, Chinese vases, old books of verse, the poetry of John Keats—which she adored—and a little lapdog named Poufty, a Brussels griffon, one of the most bizarre creatures I had ever seen.

I was given my old guest room, a book-lined study with tall French windows that gave onto a green court. And here I stayed, waiting out the rain.

One day Magda took me up to Keats's house near Hampstead Heath, a small, formerly rural cottage where the possessions of the poet were preserved in the manner of sacred icons, which Magda surreptitiously laid her hands upon lightly, as if touching the relics of the saints.

“He was so good a man,” she said reverently. “So feeling and tragic.”

“Was he not also a worshipper of the sun?” I asked.

“No, you are thinking of William Blake, who used to bask naked in his garden—to the horror of his neighbors.”

I asked this because Magda herself was a confirmed nudist. I used to come upon her sprawled flat out on the red rocks of the Corsican coast on my afternoon ramblings. It was as if she was attempting to bake out all memory of the Polish winters and the war. Peter had something of the sun worshiper in his soul as well. He was an obsessive spear fisherman but would sometimes crawl out of the water like some primordial sea lizard and join Magda on the rocks. She was small and blond, he was a lanky Englishman, but browned like an Arab. In fact he had been born in Tunisia to English parents and was trilingual. He told me once that he had befriended a white-eyed
sanyatsi
in Gujarat who had gone blind from staring directly at the sun.

Magda and I poked through the quiet rooms of the John Keats house, and then went out into the rainy garden, where the lilacs were blooming. Sparrows were fluttering about in the lower limbs, the leaves were dripping, and the stone benches were cold and damp.

“Not much change here since the 1800s,” I suggested.

She looked over at me sadly.

“Many changes, I'm afraid.”

John Keats died at the age of twenty-six. The rainy, indoor English climate, or, as some say, the stresses of critical reviews and an off-again on-again relationship with Fanny Brawn, got the better of him and he suffered periodic bouts of tuberculosis. Finally, his doctors recommended the ultimate and only known cure—a sunny climate—so he fled south to Rome, where he lived in an upstairs apartment just off the Spanish Steps. He died there in 1821.

One of the longer poems in his substantial body of work was a blank-verse epic called
Hyperion
. The story dealt with the Titan Hyperion (“Blazing Hyperion on his orbed fire”)—who was an early god of the sun, overthrown by Apollo, one of the new generation of Hellenic gods whose chief figure was the sky god Zeus. Hyperion, like Apollo after him, lived in a high palace “Bastion'd with pyramids of glowing gold” and wore flaming robes that streamed out behind his heels.

Keats was not the first Romantic poet to flee southward to the supposedly sunny climate of Italy. Lord Byron and Shelley were already spending time around Leghorn (as the English called Ligorno) before Keats went to Rome. In fact they encouraged him to join them. The idea of the south, of warm air, light, and a vibrant, colorful peasantry, began attracting northern Europeans around the turn of the nineteenth century, and still attracts them today, as anyone who has spent any time on Capri or Positano or for that matter Majorca will attest.

Some fifty years after his death, Keats's apartment on the Spanish Steps was taken over by another northern sun follower, the Swedish doctor Axel Munthe, who made a name for himself among the rich and famous expatriate community, and eventually fled even farther south to Anacapri, where he restored—more or less—the former villa of the emperor Tiberius. By this time, half of the well-heeled patronage of northern Europe were spending at least part of the winter season in Italy it seems, and Munthe managed to make himself a favored physician for them all.

Italy was so popular with the British that there were English churches and English newspapers and journals in Rome and especially in Florence—which in my experience is not much warmer than London in winter. Be that as it may, the northerners flocked there, and as late as the Second World War still formed a permanent community. In the postwar years they were still coming, although for shorter stays, and by the 1970s they were beginning to crowd onto some of the then unspoiled coasts of Europe, the isles of Greece where Byron sang, the Moor-haunted coast of southern Spain—the newly named “Costa del Sol”—and, most densely populated of all, the Côte d'Azur. The quieter, more contemplative sun lovers were forced to seek ever more obscure coves, islands, and undiscovered crescent beaches. It was here, in a little
auberge
on the northeastern coast of Corsica, that I had first met Magda and Peter.

One night in London, Magda and Peter held a dinner party to which they graciously invited my friend Billy. She came dressed in black with a Spanish lace shawl knotted around her hips and wore silver hooped earrings and many spangles and baubles and black eye shadow. I caught Peter eyeing her favorably at one point.

There was another couple there who had recently returned from Peru. As do most tourists, Peruvian and foreign alike, they had made the ascent to Machu Picchu, a site Peter had visited years earlier. This led quite naturally to a discussion of the Inca and the brutal Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro and his hometown of Trujillo in Estremadura, where a statue of the brave man is displayed on the town square aloft on his heroic horse. Ultimately, at my prodding, we even managed a little analysis of the role of the sun in Inca society, about which Peter knew a thing or two.

Peter, in fact, knew a thing or two about almost any subject, especially exotic distant cultures. He was in the habit of collecting images such as mandalas and the round, wheel-like solar symbol of Ashoka that you see all over India and would work these into his obscure paintings. He knew all about Moche pottery and Nazca lines and soon we were launched into a seemingly interminable and heated discussion of the relationship between culture and altitude.

Billy had remained uncharacteristically silent during most of this dinner, but at one point during all this Peru talk, during a rare pause in the stories, she spoke.

“I've been to Peru,” she said quietly, “to a place called Chavín something.”

All eyes turned to her, waiting for more. But she held her silence.

“That's very interesting,” one of the guests said, a degenerate sort of fellow named Robert who had just come back from Peru.

“Rather,” said his wife, Patricia. “Did you get terribly sick?”

“No. Why would I get sick?”

“Doesn't everyone who goes to Peru?”

“I don't know, perhaps.”

People waited for more. I had heard a little about this trip earlier; she had been traveling with an American ethnobotanist.

“Is that when you were traveling with what's his name?” I asked, trying to draw her out.

“Right.”

“Wasn't it a lovely trip?” Magda asked. They all wanted to hear more from this exotic-looking figure.

“Well, actually, it was quite a trip.”

I alone knew what she meant. The man she was traveling with was researching hallucinogenic plants.

“Rather,” said Patricia. “For us too. We got sick as dogs in Machu Picchu. Partly the altitude though.”

“This Chavín,” Peter asked. “Do you mean Chavín de Huántar? There's a pyramid there, isn't there?”

“Actually it's not only a pyramid,” Billy said finally. “It's a whole series of passages and stone columns. There is a monolith or whatever you call it and I think there are images of birds and a rare plant there or something. Shamans used to eat this plant, a cactus I think, and travel to the sun and on into outer space.”

Within a few minutes, the old theatrical Billy emerged, throwing her arms akimbo and relating histrionic tales of her travels with this Charlie, from the Amazonian lowland tropical forests to the heights of the Andes in search of hallucinogenic plants, any and all of which Charlie would consume, sometimes after enduring daylong rituals with crazed shamans who would pierce his skin with thorns and sharp stems of grasses.