Celia’s Room
Kevin Booth
Copyright Kevin Booth 2012
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
First published by Poble Sec Books in 2011 (ISBN: 978-84-615-4097-6)
Copyright © Kevin Booth 2011
Cover design and layout: gira visual communication.
Cover photo © Joan Llarch Bertolí.
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ISBNs:
Kindle (.mobi): 978-84-615-5351-8
Epub: 978-84-615-5349-5
LIT: 978-84-615-5353-2
PDB: 978-84-615-5355-6
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
To Ria, John and Lesley
and to Evan
“Hire idiots to paint with cold light and hot shade.”
William Blake
Taking on the house in Barcelona was an idiot’s idea. Well, I knew that... as soon as I signed the contract. But there was that thing in me, a kind of niggling, or wilfulness… It was like I wanted to believe in it so strongly, as if taking on a place like that represented exactly who I wished I was…
It’s clear now that I’m not… that sort of a person. Or maybe it’s simply that the heart stuff, those things that define me… on the journey to the surface, they somehow get changed. See? Already I’m getting lost. Yet I know the only way I can do this is tell it like it happened… My version.
Nineteen-ninety was the year, though it started the November before. We were pruning the vines. It’s a time when the mountains, my serra—iron hills that flake and rust into the dried blood and dust of the Ebro valley—are godlike—as if I believed in that.
But the vines, I do believe in: twisted veins that crackle and pop, gold and red across hillsides; dead leaves shimmering; it’s early Cézanne, Monet’s cathedrals in autumn. And in the light, I believe: sky of ice, such a sharp blue it could cut you. I get so… Looking at the mountain range on such a day, it’s something in my bones, my veins, which shines out of my body’s sweat. If this is confessional, it has to be my own story.
Dad and I, cutting back to the rootstock. I am feeling all this, but he is blind. Doesn’t he love the land? When I’m this way, I can’t speak, my throat constricts. I hate anyone who could violate this… cathedral calm. But it doesn’t seem to affect him. He babbles as if he were frightened, running from the silence with words, any words, stupid words that spill from him and stain the air. Yellow sounds. Corroding into the rusty urine stains on a mattress. Yeah, I used to wet my bed. Till I was around twelve. Confessions. I’m not the son Dad wanted. But I’m the only one.
The words are twisting again. This is not what I want to talk about. My father has nothing to do with this. Nothing at all. He might as well be dead. I’m just trying to explain how, why, I came to Barcelona, how it all happened. Celia, Eduardo, Narcissus… and the house. If Dad is important (which he isn’t; every time I see him now, he’s smaller, sadder; I find it hard to believe I was so afraid; more and more, he’s just an old man). If Dad is important, it’s because I wanted to get away, from him, from the village.
* * *
A goddess. Reclining on pale pillows, her quotidian reality defies the viewer. A revolution in paint, broad plains of it, belligerently bi-dimensional. Spitting on what had gone before. Did she deserve such scratches? Those wounds? Scored through to her bare canvas bones. Her flesh, whipped into the blankness of cream, smeared on those titanium white sheets. A bracelet—brass—on one wrist, a hint of the classical odalisque yet a black string bow that reaffirms the fin du siècle. Her flat, frank stare, meeting your—or whose—intruding gaze? Does it challenge the flâneur, the executor? It represents an adventure, the faintly inhaled violence of the approaching century, the future.
Her look defines her. Auburn hair bound back and a hibiscus flower sprouting from one ear. That brow wide and serene. Naturally naked—scandal upon scandal as the artist’s whore plays goddess. The room behind her is velvet. Greens. Browns. Titania’s forest enchantment, or the wilfulness of a girl Puck? One single gold bar like sunrise, left of centre, divides the space and draws the eye down… to that hand. Pudgy, closing off her sex, saying: “No—I own this.” Controlling entry.
Eugeni Devineé, “The Art of Massacre” in Cultura y gente,
Autumn 1989, vol. 16.3, pp. 34-35.
* * *
Pruning, feeling all kinds of mixed-up things as we work, and that intense, throbbing force of nature around us that’s screaming to be expressed, or worshipped. A single bright day in the whole of eternity and that moment is worth more than everything he has ever said in his whole life, or will ever say. We work in parallel. He’s on one row. I’m on the next—we’re pacing each other. It gets the job done quicker, stops you slacking off. He’s talking. I’m trying not to listen, but his words—the statement—sound like they have shot from the ground like a missile, the way a bright-winged bird blasts soaring into the air; or how it gets shot down, falls bloody, thuds to the earth and creates a silence, just like that:
“Joaquim, you need to find yourself a girlfriend. People are starting to talk.”
People are starting to talk. People. Who? My father wants me to do what people want. They are more important than my father’s son. I would if I could, but I’m not going to do what I can’t. This was the problem.
I look at him. He concentrates on his work, unwilling to slack off. I stare at a particular vine, thinking about the old stock, new wood and which runners I want to leave on for next year. The twisted trunk is a puzzle I can’t work out. We were pacing each other, but Dad is ahead of me now. He doesn’t say anything else, has stopped talking, head down to his work. The air is clear again, fresh, no stains on it yet it tastes like stale nicotine to my lungs. I breathe it in like a smoker, straighten my back, look towards my battered serra. The range appears purple, like a bruise.
“Get a move on, or we’ll be late for lunch.”
And he begins again, blabbering, like before. Yet I know it has all changed. This land is dead. Nature has shut herself in the hills. Early winter. I feel hard sods under my feet, bend myself to the labour.
* * *
Narcissus and Álvaro had me clocked from the moment I bought them their first beer. I have that look about me, must do. I look in the mirror—though I hate them, am tired of them rather. I don’t care what I look like now. Yet I see this look. It must shine from kilometres away, saying “Going cheap: dumb idiot. Great chance for a swindle. Discount on social retards today.”
I don’t really look Iberian. Not typical. People think I’m a bit weird. I’ve always had a thin face, pale though I tan a little in summer. I don’t like the beach. Benissola—that’s my village—is more inland.
Biggish eyes, kind of googly, slightly Arabic in shape. I’m not saying Arabs have googly eyes; they don’t. But I have slightly Arabic eyes, and they look googly on me. I just want to be clear. My hair is black, but my eyes are blue—clear blue, shockingly blue. I’m about sixty-five kilos—not that that’s important—and when I came to Barcelona, I was nineteen, in nineteen-ninety. One—nine—one—nine—nine—zero. Barcelona was crucial. Think of all the things that happened: Barcelona, nineteen-ninety. Six years after nineteen-eighty-four. We were cynics. There must be some kind of numerological significance—I don’t know—all those ones and nines will work themselves out. They would add up to… One plus nine equals ten, which is one plus zero which is one, like in Tarot… the one is the fool. The idiot’s number. Me. If you went and asked one of those Tarot-dealers sitting at her folding table under Plaça Catalunya, that’s what she’d say: look me in the eye; large, gold-hoop earrings tangling in her curling hair, her lipstick so threatening, that curvaceous, steaming pink; she’d say, “yes, it’s you, Joaquim; it’s your number, the fool’s number, number one”.
* * *
So we came in from the vines and sat down. Mum’s serving. Chicken, roasted with pine nuts and prunes. She can feel it coming on, always knows. Dad’s silent. So am I. I take a drink of water. Only Dad drinks with his dinner. Mum hates him for it. The sentence, when it comes, floats easily out over the table, taking us all by surprise, but me most of all, so many times I’ve imagined saying it; and here it is:
“Dad, I want to go to Barcelona, to university.”
He begins to eat, chewing slowly. We all do, as if I had never said it. But his answer arrives with dessert: egg flan.
“I was down at the Marc de Set with Tomeu. You know what he said?”
“Tomeu’s a drunk. If you spent less time with him, we’d all be a lot better off.”
Mum is trying her best to avoid it, knows the storm is coming. Can she steer him off course? Dad ignores her. It’s an argument they’ve had out. He won’t be drawn, and continues:
“He said he thought the worst tragedy that could befall a man was to have a son who was a faggot.”
And if he’s your only son… Mum kind of squeals and goes to put the coffee on. I keep eating. It’s because I haven’t had any girlfriends. Dad used the word faggot, maricón! No, I haven’t had any girlfriends. I can’t talk to them. I can’t talk to anyone, boys either. That was what was so special about her: we talked. People say I find it hard to mix. That sounds like my school reports: ‘finds it hard to make friends / needs to socialise more’. I don’t need to socialise more. I just need to be left alone. I need them to stop trying to make me into something I’m not. I need to get on with what I want to do, make my own life.
“Dad, I want to go to university.”
“So you can become one of those poofter intellectuals? Things are bad enough as they are.”
“No. I want to study art.”
That gets a laugh out of him. He sits there until the coffee comes, eyes creased, tears streaming down his cheeks, laughing… laughing, laughing, laughing. Mum standing at the table with the scalding coffee pot:
“Shut up, Pere.”
He dries his eyes.
“Not with my money.”
He wants that to be the end of it, but it can’t be. He doesn’t see that I’m offering him a way out. If I’m so shameful to him, this is a way I can at least get out of his sight. I can’t remember if I was thinking that then, or if that was a thought that came later, the bitter solution, a way of camouflaging his anaemic son. But the buzzing is starting, the buzzing is real, when the world seems to hum, to tilt and to sing. My inner me, where things are real, draws in, draws up knees to his chest and wraps his arms tight about himself. The rest of me is floating on this singing rage, like on a magic carpet hovering in the silver air. Words rise up, tumble from my throat: a crystal stream, a vicious cataract. The two of us seem to dance around the dinner table. The words, the words. They glow ruddy, a net of heat ensnaring us, our anger keening, high-pitched around about. Within the whirlwind, he raises an arm, but I am striking out and feel a shuddering clout shake my body. Shadows dim my vision. My flailing arms are trying to reach those two shining points of black, his eyes, dark, that still seem to smirk, laugh at me, and to laugh again.
Then Mum’s soft bulk is between us like a bucket of ice water in the face. Her roar douses the fire. I turn and leave the house.
I don’t remember where I went. Though I have a memory of the heat of that blow throbbing against my cheek. It wasn’t the first, but I remember the tenderness of it. An aching pain extending through my left cheekbone right up to the hinge of my jaw, a ringing in my ears; it hurt to swallow; my skin glowed as if sandpaper had been rubbed across it. I must have walked, as I used to, up and down the hills, among the long tendrils of dry vines, blood throbbing in my cheek. Maybe I swore I would kill him; in fact, I’m sure I did, but doesn’t everyone swear some kind of bloodthirsty vengeance on their parents once in a while? It doesn’t mean anything, isn’t one of the real things.
So what does this have to do with Celia, with what happened? I’m coming to that, coming to Barcelona, the house and everything that happened that year: one—nine—nine—o—Fool’s year. My year.
“He who inhabits that bull’s hide stretched between the Júcar, Guadalete, Sil and Pisuerga rivers… hears it said with certain frequency: ‘This has real duende’.”
Federico García Lorca,
“The Duende: Theory and Divertissement”,
Havana, Cuba, 1934.
Dad used to say Spain was a woman you had to slap around a little before she’d give you her best. Those were other times. I prefer “that bull’s hide stretched”—not that I ever knew it. Never knew her real… duende. Good metaphor though. Spain is skin pegged under a harsh sun, bloodying the sand with gore, stripped from a bull brought to its knees by a quick thrust through its pumping heart. But Lorca was pushing deeper, for its essence, that “subtle bridge that links the five senses to that centre of living flesh, of a living cloud, of a wild sea, of love freed from time”—this is duende. Like everything great Spain is, everything that’s diseased in her. I arrived late. Damage done.
I reckon I’m a good person, more or less. Not that I’ve never done anything wrong, but I mean I prefer normal to weird, up not down, to be on the right side. Yet down among the friquis—a Spanglish term that’s a carry-all for every kind of hippy, fag or weirdo— down there, going into that Mansion in the Barrio Chino was…
An example: you’re looking at a painting, one of those Medieval ones. There’re all sorts of things going on … it seems innocent, people eating at a banquet, servants pouring pitchers of mead, dogs squabbling over bones in the rushes underfoot and kids playing at knights outside in the castle courtyard. It all looks normal, romantic even. Villagers washing clothes, cooking, making bread… a perfect school textbook reproduction.
Then you look closer: a worm is squirming out of an apple sitting on the table. More are infecting the pot roast. You realise the servant bringing the food has a goat’s tail, or is cloven-hoofed, the people sitting at the banquet have alligator claws, fish-heads, insect bodies… the entire scene is writhing with obscene mutation, as if nature had gone berserk. The dogs are really copulating and are, in fact, human, but bestial at the same time. How could you ever have thought they were animal? And those children… goblin types, are torturing some poor sod on a rack… In the distance, the burning sea of Hell frames the composition. It’s all been transformed… Yet it’s the same scene, you get me? It’s just you, who have changed the way, the intensity with which you’re looking at these things.
Is that the right idea? I don’t mean before and after, more simultaneous… It always felt weird at the Mansion. They had no clue, living as deep within a parody of Spain’s essence as kids dressing up in clothes that don’t fit. Revelling in degeneration, their parties were like some lost Dante’s underworld, divorced from reality outside. I wouldn’t have given a rat’s arse about them… if it weren’t—well, if it weren’t for Françoise—but if it weren’t that they breathed—that whole pack of politically correct misfits—breathed it in a way I never felt, even the night I heard el Cabrero singing true canto hondo in the evening shadow of Granada’s cathedral. Duende. It makes me want to crush something.
Maybe Barcelona was not where I should have been. Dad was a big flamenco man, Camerón de la Isla always on the tape deck. In Barcelona it’s hard to hear good music. Too full of bad garage rock and politically correct, pop-trash wankers floating around. I should have headed más al sur, to Granada, Cádiz… I was not in the right place, or arrived too late.
I’m not claiming I’m el Cabrero, but I reckon we all have it. It’s what gets you up in the morning, keeps your heart pumping, gives you the urge to fuck. That kind of pulse you can’t describe, it just boils up from your balls, the way you’re feeling, your soul… that is duende.
The whole situation here, the thing I want to get straight, is that I didn’t choose to mix with them. They are not my people. I represent a different kind of Spain. And so, what is my excuse? I define myself as a man. But it isn’t that simple. All these factors come into it… what you’ve been drinking, smoking… but other stuff—you know? Like a feeling in the air. The rhythm of the night.
So I was drawn to them. Which makes it sound premeditated… And I hated them.
I had been dating this babe for about a year—Françoise—electric black hair that spat its phosphorescent wake back though your fingers like dancing dolphins. Sensational. But this is not about her. This is the whole story of our nights… the night. An indefinable experience: a black bull endlessly bleeding, stamping and scattering its hot rubies uselessly.
* * *
In Calafranca, the shimmering day recedes to lilac as the evening fresca enters our flat bay. The cool slides past cables, clinking on mastheads, waking you up, taking you back: beach summer evenings of cheap rum and first sex on the sand. But I remember even earlier nights, free from guardians, roaming the rye. We were happy; happy just with beers bought at the supermarket, drunk warm among the ruins of the Roman fort as the sun set behind the hills. Or round the point at Can Isart. Isart had a blind right eye and couldn’t see we were underage, just knew we must be adults by the way his old till chuckled as it gulped our parents’ hard-earned pocket money, la paga semanal.
Sabrina. Ri. Closest thing I have to family here—real family, I mean. How to describe her—indescribable. In your face. In your dreams. Whatever you think first off, you’ll be wrong. Because she’s quiet. But tough. That’s her defining characteristic. And very cool. You have to be cool to know how to do coolness without making a scene. Before you ask, don’t go there. She’s like my sister. We both ran in the foreign brat pack of Calafranca de l’Empordà village—indifferent parents who let us loose on that not so defenceless seaside town every summer. Ri was the only one who could keep up with me… in loads of ways.
It’s summer. Back when we were about nineteen. Two in the morning is not late for Spain. We’re sitting on the beach and our debate is on how to fill the next few hours: “We can go round to mine if you want: crash… or just chill out, listen to music.”
“But your Mum…”
“They’re up in Figueres for the weekend… some arts thing.”
Theatre and percussion troupes have commandeered the castle for a charity fundraiser in aid of… Who could give a rat’s arse? But my Mum wanted to be there, which was fine by me. We could stay out of each other’s hair that way.
“Yeah, I’m actually pretty tired...”
Though I’d prefer to go to Ri’s, where there’ll be the maid laying on breakfast in the morning (as opposed to my folks who just stuff the freezer and leave extra cash in the commode. The downer is that her parents will be home. My place represents freedom. We’re talking about this as we leave the beach. On the esplanade we meet Cal, José and a few others, who have a bottle of Scotch and some hash they need help with. We decide on my place as the best option.
We’re heading up the hill from the village, the group of us, and we see this figure wobbling down the street. Swaying in her heels. I assume she’s drunk. We get closer, the guys start pissing themselves. It isn’t like I’m a saint, but my hackles rise.
“Hey gorgeous! How about a kiss?” and Cal grasps his paquete: “Luscious Lips! Come and suck on this!”
“Forget that little pito, baby boy. I’ll wait till you’re out of nappies.”
Cal gets angry: “Fucking animal! Freak!”
“Lay off, Cal! Take it easy.”
He turns on me: “You like that, do you? What are you?”
I laugh. “Get away!”
“You do!”
There’s like this flash in my brain and I feel my knuckles connect with something bony. My hand’s on fire, but I can’t show it. Cal’s on the ground. I’ve hit him.
“Bastard!”
“Fuck off! You’re drunk. Prick!”
I look around for the she-male, not quite sure what I’m going to do. I don’t want to have anything to do with it, but it’s lurched off—knew what was good for it, is already fifty metres down the street. Then it’s gone around a corner. What the fuck was that doing in our village?
Cal’s standing, panting, fists clenched. We’re squaring off, but it feels weird, like I’ve been trapped on the wrong side of a civil war.
“What the fuck was that?”
“I don’t know. Why’d you stand up for it?”
“I didn’t. I didn’t know what the fuck it was.”
“Okay, let’s go look for it, teach it not to hang around this town.”
I know Cal’s just acting like a kid, that he won’t, but I want to see how far he’ll go: “Sure then. Come on.”
But now we both know we won’t. The moment’s passed. Sabrina takes my arm as we turn to walk up the hill: “Don’t worry. That was cool.”
I can’t get my thoughts straight. But that thing floats through the haze… and a word. I’m confused. A drunk drag queen has nothing to do with el Cabrero. Yet my guts are all churned up, the striking out at Cal—a good punch though I’ve never boxed—
adrenalin getting messed up with a throbbing sense of… that’s what it is: some Hulk-like force pulled out of primeval slime; a basic, single-cell, grim will to live, a sense of survival—at the least. And that’s the chord linking the fag and flamenco, that same base
urgency to fuck or to kill. Duende. Or a misguided sense of Anglo-Saxon chivalry. Right.
“The beggar said, ‘A poet is the soul of his country.’”
Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940),
Penguin, 1971. p. 113.
There’s a painting, I don’t know which museum it’s in—the Prado, or the MoMA in New York. I saw a print when I was little and the impression it made in that split second expressed me exactly: my mind, the way the cogs go round in there. I see things in a very specific way. It’s a view of Toledo, painted about sixteen-something, early on, by Domenico Theotocopuli. The Greek. The amazing thing is the light—liquid, sub-aqueous—that buffets the whole scene. It wells from every pore and crevice. The city looks tiny, a drowned graveyard, its silver walls and towers like tombstones on the luminous expanse of an emerald hill. Trees glow vividly, fluid as kelp, while the manmade constructions have that bleached, abandoned quality of bones. A cathedral spikes the skyline bravely, but clouds billow dark in the sky beyond. Nature is gathering this storm. Its swirling heaviness dominates the whole top half of the painting, ready to crash down and sweep all that architectural flotsam into the gully below.
For some reason I always think of this painting when I remember coming to Barcelona, a feeling like impending doom, like night rushing down, even though my emotions were entirely contrary on that journey. Barcelona that year was a city at night. That’s how I see it, or maybe a city underwater. We were all swimming through this bubbly, twilit murk, an episode from Man from Atlantis. Daylight memories are sparse: chilly, late afternoon sunlight down at the port; the glimpse of a gold-neon sun rising above the Ramblas as I stumble home to bed.
Listening to this, it’s saying what I want. Why doesn’t this happen when I open my mouth? I was on my way into life, but Dad had won. I was leaving my village yet fulfilling his plans, no longer an embarrassment. Still, I think I was happy. Maybe I would paint. I might find a way.
“Barcelona! They tell me it’s some city, eh?” The old man smiles at me as his wife unpacks their lunch on the worn leather seat.
“Don’t know, I’ve never been there before.”
“Unbelievable! What an adventure!” She chips in:
“And you’re only nineteen! What does your mother think of that?”
“I’m not a kid. I’ll be two hours away on the train.”
“We went as far as Reus, didn’t we, Ignasi? That was plenty big enough for us: on our honeymoon… before the war…”
But we are rolling into Tarragona and they have gone pale and speechless, peering out the window at the size of this metropolis. After that provincial capital, the track closes in to the coast and the Mediterranean is revealed.
“Unbelievable!”
I realise this is a first for them. Their close accents mark them as from Gandesa, a few villages down from mine, where the widest body of water they’ll have seen is the Ebro River.
It throws more and more buildings up in your face. That coast makes you wish you could see its whole performance before all the houses were slammed down, wedged in among these rocks; before they blasted away the delicate pinnacles, concreted sand, bulldozed the pines. Each bay is now lashed tight, shackled between two cement arms, the Mediterranean barricaded behind breakwaters. Pre-poured concrete cliffs jostle, huddle around each curving corpse of bare-ribbed beach, ogling the naked sand, shouting it into acquiescence in a coarse babble of mismatching architecture—from the ancient Greeks to Franco’s developers and then Pujol’s cronies—the flotsam of empires encrusted onto a bleached skeletal coast. You know no-one will gaze on the naked flanks of this shore ever again.
Yet the sea is ecstatic in gold and azure glitter, clattering as happily among rococo promontories as between concrete-block borders. Effeminate. Natural. (Two words that are less opposite than you think.) I stare at the horizon as the tracks click-click me towards Barcelona.
I think of who I am. At what point did I stop being the son my father hoped for? I am—more than ever now—shockingly aware of what makes me different from him (I despise him, would detest to be him) yet I clearly remember my father’s love, am unaware of any signpost of transformation within myself. When did I start being the person I am now? When did I stop being the one he loved? When did he see it? Before I did? Was I that unaware? How does such a change take place—so slowly and unnoticeably, not betrayed by any single situation, yet inexorable, real, inescapable—when you awake one morning to discover who you are, that you are an outsider?
The couple leave me at Sitges, where they redeploy with their suitcases onto the platform and into her waiting sister’s arms.
“Have fun!”
“We’ll have to keep our wits about us here, lots of odd foreigners, they say!”
As the train pulls out, the water loses its lights, dulling to the same sharkskin as El Greco’s clouds, shadows condemning land and sky. I think about the ways you could achieve that light: brush or wash, oil or acrylic?
At Bellvitge, I stare at tower blocks thrust up against silver-edged cumulous formations. They are just house-crates stacked in piles against smoky billows, while an air of desolation rolls across the landscape. It’s intimidating. Dad and my village are now far behind. We approach Sants, our track joining others, both train and metro, until we become a river of silver rails, channelled into the dark canyon of the station. Then we are in darkness, a manmade catacombs, heavy pillars smirched with soot supporting who knows how many tonnes of concrete above our heads. Platform activity is intense, people climbing aboard while I struggle to heave my heavy suitcase out the door. A strong smell of railway friction burns my nostrils. It is an acrid taste of night that will become this city’s signature to me, far more than modernist churches or Mediterranean seascapes will be able.
My first days in the city—January. University proper didn’t start till September, but I would be doing a bridging course to prepare for the University Selection Exam. Dad had agreed to pay for Agricultural Engineering, refused to talk about Fine Arts: I had to think of the family. His pathetic dream. I would take over from him, give some meaning to his lifelong toil among the vines, the olive and the almond trees, make something of his concern. But his generosity went as far as paying my fees—a lump sum in an account with my name: Freedom. Still I needed to find some sort of a job fast. I’m not going to describe the mechanics of how I settled, the cousin of ours who put me up that first month. She wanted me gone as soon as humanly possible, which became my priority.
Meeting Narcissus and Álvaro now seems inevitable, but during that first period in freezing, smog-draped Barcelona, I traipsed the streets, exploring its different neighbourhoods, scuffed along curbs, kicked through crowds of pigeons in the plazas and wandered down shadowy alleyways. It didn’t seem as if I would ever make any friends in that giant dusty city. In Barcelona you couldn’t raise your head because of the dog and pigeon shit covering the cobbles.
Needing to escape one day, I pushed down through the Gothic quarter, crossed the main road—dodging diesel-farting lorries, cars, scooters and desperately wailing ambulances unable to advance—and walked down to Moll de la Fusta. On worn stone steps, I sat looking into the oily water, counted the dead rats floating belly-up. They call it the city with its back to the sea. For me it was the city with no work, no mountains, no place to live.
I was looking for a room, desperate for a job—that was my story. Really I think I was looking for a Life—my own or any—some substitute for my serra, which I couldn’t identify either in the buttress-like bulk of Montjüic hanging above, imagining defunct canons eerily ready to fire once more on the town, or in that righteous, religious monstrosity that crowned Tibidabo—church and fortress eternally wedded in a pact to press down hard on the struggling souls below. The city lacked the arid, open hillsides spaced with olive and almond trees that I craved. I was after… hoping to re-establish a private essence I was still unaware of missing. I was searching, so it was logical I should find something, even if Narcissus and Álvaro were not what I was thinking of.
“Everything that has black sounds has duende.”
Manuel Torres
—in Lorca’s words, “the man of greatest culture I have ever known”—
on listening to Falla play his own nocturne “En el Generalife”.
We were the elite. Superlative. Post-event I see my childhood like I was a blind kid jay-walking on the A-7. All that moving back and forth—plane trips, changing schools, sorting out languages, falling face-first into unknown peer groups, sussing out the gloating faces in the new class, who to befriend, who’s looking for a scrap… Looking back from here though—ripe old age of twenty-three—I can appreciate what I learnt: the diplomacy of a diplomat’s son.
Probably because we returned every summer to Calafranca—wherever else we lived that year—my Spanish was fluent from before I can remember. My sister and I—Ri too—we more or less grew up native. Like the rest of the crew who invaded the village from July to September—from different parts of Spain, France, the UK, Zara and I the only Aussies—most of us spoke at least a couple of languages. We knew how to behave—misbehave—almost anywhere. At fourteen I’d learnt what not to say in front of Dad’s diplomat mates. You could take us to meet Mum’s charity cases, or the publishing execs Ri’s parents hung out with; Cal’s Dad was a technician with el Español; José’s was in politics. By the time we were eighteen, we knew which fork to use plus half a dozen ways to do a line in a hotel bog.
* * *
One day Ri and I are sitting drinking horchata—most refreshing drink in the world, up at Plaza Calvo Sotelo—since renamed by Catalan politicos to Francesc Macià. They’ve changed everything like that since the Caudillo died, but my family still use their true names: Avenida del Generalísimo Francisco Franco and that.
We’re on a terrace. Autumn. Eighty-eight? Ri’s hair’s fluttering in the breeze—she wears it short, but it’s fine and blond, loves the wind. Always make me feel I want to grab her scalp between my fingers… I never do. She would freak. Two chicks are sitting nearby. I’d noticed them because they’re so obviously lezzos. Not that they’re screwing on the table or anything, but you can tell. This kind of indifference, or hardness, you know? I can just tell. I look at Ri. And it was the way she was not looking at those two that made it click: lightning bolt. I realise I’d always known.
“You should get yourself a girlfriend.”
She grows incredibly still, pale. Analyses the end of her straw with intensity. I’ve never seen her so angry. But I still push: “Why not?”
“Sorry?”
She remains absolutely calm, except for a sort of shudder. She looks at me. I think she’s about to break my nose: “I’ll make my own choices.”
“Just a suggestion.”
“Fuck off, Edu! Alright?”
There’s a pause before she asks: “Where did you get that idea? Doesn’t it gross you out?”
“Why should it?”
Then a really long silence.
“Not if I could watch.”
“What a dick you are!”
But we’ve lightened the mood. Like we’ve saved something. Or have we? I’m feeling like I’m on the wrong side of that civil war again.
“You want something tonight?”
Ri has a solid connection to the purest snow ever to leave Columbia’s tropical climes.
“Is that a question?”
Ri counts as family, more than my mother even—though that isn’t hard. We can say stuff like that and stay solid. Like the summers spent in Calafranca. A constant.
I was born in Tanzania, Zara in Canberra, because that’s where Dad was working, but we grew up in Melbourne. If I feel more Spanish than Australian, it’s because of our beach house. Those summers were a ritual. Zara and I would pack everything up and cross the world twice a year. Mum wanted to make sure we wouldn’t lose our heritage. She’s from Sant Just Desvern, outside Barcelona, though she met Dad in Zaragoza, where he was stationed. He was from Huesca, a town in the Pyrenees; military first, followed by the diplomatic service.
Then there was the black period. I was sent offshore till Mum got her marbles together. High school in Barcelona from fourteen to eighteen years old, living with my aunt Leo, Mum’s sister. Mum and I both had to find our way of going on. Anyway, everything’s fine now. Mum lives with Paco: he and I had our battles and made our peace a long time ago. It’s aigua al molí, or grist to the mill as the Catalans say.
I learnt Catalan at high school. No comment. Spain is Spain. I don’t have time for those separatist whiners. In Australia, we have different states but we’re all Australian—and proud of it. I started Uni in Melbourne, then returned here on an exchange programme. I decided to do my Masters at their business school. Private. Good place. That brings me to Barcelona, nineteen-ninety.
By that time Spain had pretty much lost any pride in herself which—whether you like him or not—the Caudillo had instilled. You talk to the old people: they say things worked better. By nineteen-ninety, the Socialists were giving you a grant to grow a blue pimple on your dick, so the country was getting deeper into debt all the time—their left-wing idea of solidarity with the third-world. F-ing A-place to party though.
“Why don’t we check out a lezzo bar?”
“What?”
“Come on, it’ll be fun. I love lesbians.”
Ri didn’t seem keen, but I could tell it was something she really wanted. She didn’t know any lesbians and wasn’t going to go alone. Cool. This was every guy’s fantasy.
* * *
It was off a side street on another side street off Gran de Gràcia. Discreet. Didn’t say “Lezzo Bar” on the door. Even had one of those keyhole shutters to check you out, decide whether you were their stuff, like an American speak-easy. Ri had to thrust her mug in front, bulldog-butch, though I think she’s more what they call a lipstick lesbian. They opened up. We’d decided I’d pretend to be gay: I was beyond gay, I was shitting my panties. These were dykes like you only read about in scary movies: heavy women—in more ways than one.
If you want it straight up, it was pretty gut-wrenching. But Ri and I know how to act in any situation, right? So I minced a bit, tried to pout around like that lispy one on Are you Being Served? I don’t think I got a single smile in the whole place, but then lesbians are not known for their sense of humour. Even the few bona fide gay boys looked at me like I needed a pre-frontal lobotomy for humanitarian reasons.
That’s okay, I wasn’t there for them. Just keeping Ri company. The things you do for your mates. About a cuba libre and a half later, I was calm enough to look around. The place was packed. You couldn’t even raise your cigarette to your lips yet it was thick with smoke. Shithouse DJ, but everybody dancing. It’s always the way.
I’m not taking the piss, but once we started talking to those girls… they were okay. Smart and fun. Though a proportion of them… you just didn’t want to scratch the surface because it would be scary what you might find. The energy, the aggression, so honed, like one of those old steel clock springs wound too tight, just waiting to be released and lash out with the violence peculiar to hardened steel and shrapnel and those things: blind rage that tears human flesh into slabs of meat. So we had a lot in common.
But it was my first ever experience of… just being the wrong sex… simply wrong.
Ri was in ecstasy. Well, kind of shy—I found out afterwards that was because of me—but she was connecting and getting seriously cruised. I think by closing, she was sorted about the lezzo scene.
“So, your name is Edoo, you are Australian and Spanish; not gay but you come here for your friend?”
It’s heading for three and I’m scrunched against the bar with this girl, her Kate-Bush-style hair pinioning me. Only the French wear black night and day from birth to oblivion and get away with it. My bar stool has become an electric chair, but I wouldn’t leave it for the world. She’s been asking for my deepest confessions on life. One fishnet-clad ankle is twisted around my calf:
“I ‘ave a confession.”
“Shoot.”
“I am not gay, but I am interested.”
I’m too drunk to decipher that; just take it to mean what I hope: “Wanna hear my confession?”
“Please, confess.”
“I am highly interested.”
The rest is history. That’s how I met Françoise. In a gay bar, pretending to be a fag, where I only went so my lesbian friend could pick up.
Ri met a girl that night. But it didn’t go anywhere. Though she started going back regularly. I wasn’t up to going there again. Quite soon after that, she met Marta, this short, kind of jolly chick, who was an artist, had her studio in an okupa, or squat house, which is where this story kind of takes off, that year, nineteen-ninety, in Barcelona.
“So tall with prophecy:
Dreaming of cities
Where often clouds shall lean their swan-white neck”.
Stephen Spender, “The Pylons”, 1933.
Narcissus is the one. Álvaro only has any definition in relation to his partner, so that’s where I’ll start.
His name’s pompous and bloated, but says it all. The Caribbean. A different way of using language, of naming your children: Ulysses, Hector, Virgil. History lived and carried along in the hot blood of new sons, along with its violence, aware of not-so-ancient slavery firing every breath, an intuition of casual cruelty—inflicted and suffered—in his gait. He was tall, nappy hair tied tightly back, skin pulled back, tight across his skull. For moments I could call him handsome, but those were like shadows flitting across his face. He had a stare that went beyond confidence—arrogant, insolent, unyielding. Two thick canines erupted like fangs from his mouth when he laughed, his face creasing back behind them, just his eyes visible: liquid crescents that kept a fix on you. Watching and observing. That was Narcissus’ way of life. He always wore a suit and tie—I rarely saw him more relaxed—formal wear as a foil to his blackness before police and authority.
“Red wine, a glass.”
“Fifty pesetas.”
Even the cheap bars are expensive in this city. I take my drink and sit down in a corner. When Narcissus and Álvaro come in, I think they have stepped out of the nineteen-thirties. Narcissus, in front, is dressed in his traditional brown tweed suit, set off by his camelhair overcoat on one arm and a silver-handled cane in his hand. Álvaro is wearing a knee-length leather coat and a wide-brimmed felt hat pulled forward over his eyes. Perhaps I am imagining these details, but this is the sense of them I remember. Narcissus’ presence is one I immediately feel. He looks at me and I feel that I, we all, are intensely alive, potent. That’s the feeling I get. His eyes kind of capture me, sweep me up in their regard, register and catalogue me while he takes in the whole bar, greets the owners, arranges himself at a table, his cane displayed across the marble top. I crouch a little more on my stool. I suddenly feel more vulnerable, yet special as well. That was the thing: in the few brief moments when he entered the bar, he made me feel special, as if I was the kind of person for whom all my dreams could suddenly become true. That’s why taking on the house… wasn’t silly, really. It might have been why I suddenly opened up to him, when I never tell anyone anything. With him, I felt like a real painter because he treated me like one.
They notice me, I register out of the corner of my eye. I think they’re making comments, but I can’t hear what. At one point I creep to the bar, ask for a refill. Then Álvaro is behind me, alongside, leaning casually on the counter, big and physically close. He orders more drinks, looks at me—wide face; pallid, spotted forehead; oval, green eyes.
“Hola,” he says.
“Aah, hola!”
I’m always kind of surprised when anyone speaks to me directly. It takes me a while to get over it. I don’t quite know what else to say. I look at my drink.
“Do you want to keep drinking alone, or would you prefer company?”
They have picked me out. Narcissus’ infallible instinct has told him I could be useful, or fun, I don’t know. Maybe I should have focussed less on Narcissus’ presence and more on other people’s reactions. Whatever. But I nod and come and sit at their table. We introduce ourselves.
At first I am acutely aware of Narcissus’ colour. Not that I’m a racist. I don’t think. Yet the truth is, I’d never met, or talked with such a really black man before. I don’t count the odd, monosyllabic exchanges I’ve had with the Moros, the North Africans, who come round every year for the harvest. I feel way out of my depth, dominated by his all-encompassing, fluid, loud, sophisticated, brash—I can’t describe it—exotic presence so close. I think he picks up something of that, is capable of reading my thoughts almost before I’ve even conceived them. I can’t get my jaw to work, to speak, can’t relax. Narcissus makes it worse by putting me immediately on the spot:
“I can see you’re from the HINterland, JoaQUIM.”
He rolls his words like pastry in his mouth, like chewing something, elaborately stressing HIN-ter-land as if it is some highly significant code word he wants me to pick up.
“Uh-huh. Uh, Benissola, below Reus… How did you know?”
“Because the weather is so CALM.”
I look at him, bewildered, and then gulp half a glass of wine. He smiles:
“It is OBVious you stay well aWAY from the sea. For if you went near it, the storms on the Mediterranean would never aBATE. The ocean would be consistently teMPESTuously jealous at not possessing such a miraculous colour as that BLUE in your eyes!”
He howls with laughter, long and triumphant. The whole bar takes notice. For thirty seconds we swelter under a spotlight of public regard. I smile self-consciously. I feel red-faced and stupid. I’m not used to such larger-than-life interaction.
“Didn’t you like my piROpo?”
“Uh, yes…um, thanks.”
“Aaaaaagggggh!” He expels his breath like a steam train. “These Catalans! These Catalans, you are so self-EFFAcing. The piropo, this witty, flirTAtious COMpliment, was inVENTed here in Spain, yet you have lost all ability to UTILise it in your conversation.”
His affirmation makes me boil. I’m not sure what annoys me most: the idea that we can’t give piropos, or his assumption that Catalonia and Spain are synonymous.
“Of course we can!” I blurt sharply, responding to the first.
“I don’t THINK so. Try me.” And he smiles sweetly.
I realise that now I have to come up with one, a piropo grand enough to defend the whole of Catalonia. My brain whirls. All I can focus on, the only element that registers to me at this moment is the colour of Narcissus’ skin, but I CAN’T, I think (subconsciously mimicking him). I can’t talk about his skin colour. I’ve got to find something else, but still my mind keeps on, stubbornly building phrases: as black as… as brown as… chocolate, mahogany, copper? Terracotta? Brick? Newly turned ground? I fix on his hands. Long and elegant. The tips, delicate. Not working hands like my own, hardened and scarred from earth and vines.
“Your hands…”
He kind of flutters them up between us, like a butterfly tripping across the table.
“You have the hands of a… you could be a piano-player.”
“Well, that will DO, but I think it proves my point about Catalan PIROPOVERTY.”
“Hands of a harpist which… for which David could kill a thousand… Turks… or, GOLIATHS.”
I feel foolish, can feel heat rushing up my neck into the roots of my hair.
“Ahh, now we are getting SOMEwhere. Thank you very much, YOUNG Joaquim. You have made me feel just like a Greek EPHEBUS in the full flush of his finest conquest!”
Álvaro raises an eyebrow. I have no idea what he is talking about, but know there is a sexual innuendo somewhere in there—the Greeks had a certain reputation… Domenico Theotocopuli, and all that. Narcissus just laughs and changes the subject.
“Do you see that PHOTOgraph?”
The walls of the bar are covered with framed photos, some new, most in sepia tones, fifty or sixty years old, older: street scenes with trams; people formally grouped on café terraces, in saloon-type bars, around upright pianos, and some music-hall scenes. However, the photo Narcissus points to, though black and white, and faded, is strikingly different. The composition holds only two figures, an adolescent boy and a Dalmatian dog. The dog lies on its haunches in the foreground, attentive to somebody above it, outside the left frame. The boy, alabaster skinned, standing to the right and dressed in a dark swimming costume, is drying his dishevelled, blond hair with a towel, looking down at the dog. Light muscle and defined bone structure create dark-bright contrasts up and down his body, counter-pointed by the dog’s dappled coat. Above, cloudless sky. Below, a calm bay ringed by sun-scorched hills. The photo breathes that hot midsummer serenity only existing in memory.
“That photographer was a man who KNEW how to give piropos, surprising for a German. They are such a CONSTRAINED people. There are so many contraDICtions.”
What I would give to be able to create such a composition… There is a slick, mechanical SCHLUCK.
“I’ve known some wonderfully unconstrained Germans on occasion.”
As Álvaro finishes speaking he slides his camera, a Canon, back under the table. Absorbed by Narcissus’ presence, I wasn’t aware of him focussing. Narcissus looks annoyed.
“You mean WULF? I wouldn’t call him unconstrained, more of a plain slut.”
Álvaro smiles.
“He is rather, isn’t he?”
“Then perhaps that is something the GERMANS have in common with the MURCIANS.”
There is an uncomfortable moment as I knock back more wine. At the same time that I locate Álvaro’s accent, I suspect that Narcissus did not want the conversation to head in the direction it has gone. I try to change the subject:
“Who’s the photographer?”
“A genius.” It is Álvaro. “Herbert List.”
Of course. Now I can locate that bay: Baltic Sea, summer of ‘29, Weimar Republic. That boy, now eighty, must be dead from old age, or killed in the war. Then suddenly I’m off, gushing, wanting to reveal my knowledge, proud that I know SOMEthing about SOMEone. Part of me stands back, shocked that I’m babbling like this in front of people I hardly know. But I can’t keep it in; this has always been my passion. The divine decadence: pre-war Berlin; Second Spanish Republic; the English in their universities—hypocritical yet so elegant; Josep Foix, my favourite poet. I notice my thoughts are starting to streak ahead of my words, that my words are failing, but I can’t stop because I have to get it out… And the idealism, the politics—fascism, Marxism, anarchism—so clear, so pure in their choices: right or wrong, good and bad, when you could pick a side and fight for it. I can see they’re getting edgy, their eyes shiny, but I have to finish… What it would have been like to live through that time—the misery… yet pulsating in a golden light, the epic halo of a single moment… These are my heroes. That look of complicity Narcissus and Álvaro exchange—I’m ignorant of its meaning—is lost on me… almost. Narcissus interrupts:
“WHY are you so interested in PAINTING?”
I stop. But I realise my words had already stopped. It’s happened again: inside, so clear yet the thoughts don’t make it to the surface. Bigmouth strikes again…
“Uh, It’s how… the way I express… what I feel, what I see…”
Narcissus gives a grunt that suggests he is only halfway satisfied by my answer, that there is something there he would like to dig up at a later stage. I don’t know whether to be irritated he has dismissed my earlier passion so easily, or thrilled he seems to find me INTERESTING in some small way.
“Our Catalan painter, notre petit Miró, pining for the good old days. RePUBlicans, all three. Álvaro and I are now off to a party. Would you like to acCOMPany us?”
A party. I’ve been in Barcelona only a few weeks. I’m being invited to a party! Part of me wants to mumble a negative, get up from my chair and escape out the door, avoid contact. Yet the real me inside is bursting with pride. Here I am, in this big city, doing it—I’m doing it! Living! Becoming the kind of person I believe I really am, should be.
When we go to pay, there is a small glitch. Both Narcissus and Álvaro realise they have left their money behind. Apparently, Narcissus thought Álvaro was carrying money and vice versa. I put money on the bar with an assurance I was ignorant of in myself, grateful to be able to show appreciation in some way for the friendship they are offering.
Out in the open air, it’s been raining and the cobbles are shiny and dark. I’m aware of us as a group, an impressive image: Caribbean boulevardier, Murcian photographer, Catalan painter (maybe). It’s like I see us from afar, the vignette we must cut, as if we embody the cultural icons of some mythical cosmopolis: Isherwood, Spender and List; Lorca, Dalí and Buñuel. Walking three abreast along Nou de la Rambla, Narcissus—camelhair coat flapping out to either side—leads, both walking and in conversation. He sweeps us along, even Álvaro, talking, talking about many things. I am relieved, feel freshly urban, part of a smug group, for the first time, an uplifting feeling that hints at confirmation of indefinable yearnings… to reach out, enact some legendary fiction.
“But still I’d rather be famous
Than righteous, or holy, any day, any day, any day.”
The Smiths, “Frankly, Mr Shankley”,
The Queen is Dead, 1986.
Till the thing with Zara and Dad, people used to think our life was a fairy tale. False. We’ve always had the ready; not rich, but enough. Fame is something else. People think they go together, but that isn’t true. Fame sucks. Without money it’s like alcohol-free beer—just an attack on your privacy. Zara, my sister, is the only one in our family who even got close. It didn’t help her though. Fame doesn’t make you immortal.
Though we’d never been famous… that didn’t stop my Mum from trying. From about six months old, my pudgy face started to appear on baby food adverts. By the age of three, I was the king of toddler’s fashion. There wasn’t a lolly, toy, or pom-pom hat down under for which I didn’t strut my pre-school stuff.
It all kind of faded away though. Not that I wasn’t good, but Zara, she was the best. In a few years, she had pretty much out-haloed my six-year-old expertise. Maybe I was getting a bit long in the tooth, bitter and twisted by the cruel world of fashion, but I remember that when Zara entered the room, it was like this rosewater light washed over everything. She was an absolute cherub, blond and rosy, chuckling, gurgling her way through every casting session. You couldn’t be jealous. You knew you were in the presence of a natural. I kept modelling till I was about… fourteen… but it was no longer the priority. She was. I made it my business to look after her. Being her big brother seemed a much more important role than my own life in the limelight.
From the age of three onwards, she didn’t stop. She went from doing baby clothes to glossy magazine ads. Her first TV appearance happened at seven, on a talent show called Kidz Bizz. She won it, dressed as a swanky Agnetha, lip-synching to Mamma Mia, which had made Abba’s name earlier that year with its airing on the music programme Countdown. Zara covered all the bases in cutsy schmaltz and scored herself a role in the children’s show Crackeroo Club, on Channel Nine, as Terry Bawdon’s little sister, Sally. It was the kind of bracket hosting show that introduced all the other programmes in the kids’ slot. She was great. They started her off with adults all around, organising, but soon she was the one asking the questions and calling the shots:
“I bet all our friends really wanna see ya, Terry, wearing your highland kilt, and doing a real Highland Fling! Don’t you, boys and girls?”
In the seventies, men didn’t dance. They wore Tom-Selleck moustaches, drove super-heated Holdens and drank beer. But when my eight-year-old sister asked, blond hair frizzing around her like a neon halo, away Terry would go, carousing his way into ridiculousness. It seemed like Zara was a dynamo, generating the light that kept ratings high. The whole of Australia was tuning in to watch, and it was this little blond angel they wanted to see.
* * *
That was Zara. Who’s now gone. And Ri’s become a lesbian. I met Françoise in a bollera bar. My women. Things happened in eighty-nine that are relevant. Françoise was like the eye of the hurricane—a dark, très-française, existentialist calm that ignited my passion, but kept me from burning up in the night. The lezzo bar happened in December eighty-eight, after Christmas and before New Year; the twenty-eighth, I think. I know it was before New Year’s because I remember being obsessed by Fra’s absent presence the whole night—a party up the coast in Roses—aware of not having her near me and wondering whether I would ever be able to see her again. That life-changing stuff.