Queens of All the Earth (9 page)

Or Sophie’s hand in Marc’s hair, mountains, beggars; Miranda very close to Lenny, shafts of moonlight; Mr. Brown in the Plaça Catalunya, with Ana and Chas, on the other side of a pane of glass, and farther and farther away from them she is borne on a wave of anxious discontent, and she swims against it, and she breaks through—

Greg on the roof of the Cathedral. Greg in the sun and the wind’s hand in his hair. Greg’s hand around her hand. Lilies.

love is the whole and more than all

T
he next morning, Miranda found Olivia in the chair in the corner, a blanket spread across her shoulders. Only a few other guests had crept out very, very quietly, very much earlier that morning, and they had made every attempt to let the girl sleep. The book had been pulled from under her resting palms, closed neatly, and set on the windowsill, without waking her.

From the time when Olivia could still fit neatly in a ball between the armrests, Miranda had seen her little baby sister curled in chairs with forgotten books.

She took Olivia’s hand and gently squeezed it, until Olivia’s eyes drifted open like globes of a rising sun.

“Why’d you sleep out here?” Miranda asked.

“I guess I just drifted off,” Olivia said.

“Did you sleep well?”

“I don’t remember waking up at all,” Olivia said, groaning softly as she leaned forward. She stretched her arms above her head and felt a satisfying pop.

Olivia couldn’t remember her dreams, except in smudges of confusion,
and by the time her pupils adjusted to the light, her mind was clear, like waves of morning air. Across her shoulders was a blanket, warm and soft and smelling like old wool and dryer sheets, but she didn’t wonder who had draped it there. She only enjoyed the feeling of being taken care of. The dreams, she knew, had come from a line in a poem, and the book caught her eye. In the pragmatic light of morning, she reached for the book and stroked its cover, unafraid.

“Watch it, Olivia’s gotten into the E. E. C.,” Lenny grumbled as she entered the room. Olivia rose. “She’ll be fragmentary all day.”

“Olivia!” Miranda exclaimed. “Is that Mr. Brown’s book? Were you reading it last night? What if he wanted it? What if he was looking for it?”

“I didn’t think he’d mind,” Olivia said, noting that while the book had returned to the windowsill, the pastor’s glasses had vanished. Olivia creaked toward the hall and bathroom, finding feeling in her knees and ankles again and wishing she hadn’t.

“Aren’t you going to have some breakfast?” Miranda said.

“I’m taking a shower.”

“Don’t forget breakfast!”

Breakfast slid from Olivia’s mind as she slid out of her clothes and into the water. There were two stalls in the shared ladies’ room, and one was occupied, so Olivia took the other one, with a broken shower fixture that wouldn’t stay clipped to the wall. She turned it on and held the showerhead by its handle over herself. The water was shockingly cold at first, and she flinched away, a stab of irritation waking her. Then the warm water came, and she sprayed it over herself until her face molded upward into a close-lipped smile.

Olivia knew she should be polite and conserve the water, but other impulses ruled. She recalled afternoons as a child when she’d move and look at each finger and toe individually, totaling twenty distinct, minute actions and inspections—and the evenings when, refusing to turn on the
lamp until the last shred of daylight had faded, she would sit immersed in the shifting tide of twilight’s blue and gray. With one hand on the showerhead, she used the other to examine every part of her that she could see or reach, even the parts she tried not to think about. She was short, not thin but healthily soft, and, since the age of thirteen, accustomed to ignoring everything below her chin with steady resignation.

In the shower in Barcelona, she extended one arm, and then the other, and flexed her fingers, and peered up along the length of each limb until it looked like a long, fleshy willow branch. She cleaned herself until all the dull parts glowed and the light seemed to come from inside, and she no longer felt her face to be separate from her naked body.

And then she turned the water on her hair, which was long and knotty and wild. It took a few seconds for the steady stream to soak through, and when it did, she leaned her head back and felt her hair’s weight pulling her chin up.

Water ran into her ears—she shivered. It streamed in round, galloping rivers down her back, and she curled her toes. The warmth spread across the nape of her neck. When her arms became tired from holding the shower over herself, she turned it off and, hearing silence in the bathroom outside, wrapped her towel on her head and stepped boldly out.

That was a miscalculation. Sophie was there, in front of the mirror, braiding her stick-straight blond hair. Olivia ran back into the shower before she could even blush. Hearing the door open and close, she breathed deeply. But after it opened and closed again, footsteps approached, and when a pale shape lurked on the other side of the frosted doors, Olivia panicked until, with a
thwap
, a second towel, white (the color of lilies), was flung over the top of the stall.

After her eventual exit from the bathroom, she slipped back into the clothes of a sensible, safe traveler, laced on her battered sneakers, and wiggled into her extra sweater, though she knew it would soon be tied
around her waist in the trademark style of tourists and five year olds. She girded herself with a spacious water bottle and divided her cash among several pockets. There was a rhythm to these things Miranda had taught her to do.

She even ate breakfast, though it was awkward, because Miranda insisted on snatching the blow dryer from the bathroom and plugging it into a socket in the common room, wielding it against her sister while Olivia ate. Toast crumbs were dashed away into obscure corners, to be discovered some loveless day in the future when the building came down in ruins.

Marc, meanwhile, sat sedately on one of the couches, listening to Lenny describe Lima to him after having asked him what it was like.

“Lenny works for the magazine
Lonely Planisphere
,” Miranda said as she tugged away at Olivia’s hair with a wide-toothed, but still unforgiving, comb. “She knows exactly how to visit places. It’s her job.”

“What does she do on her vacations?” Olivia asked. “Stay at home?”

“Lenny is a very experienced traveler,” Miranda said. “You should listen to what she says. Except when she invites you to do something unsafe. Did you use conditioner?”

“I couldn’t take it with me on the plane.”

“Well, at least you don’t have to wash this pile every day. Put it up and no one will notice what a mess it is.”

Olivia did so obediently, fingers finding their places on the back of her head. She concentrated fiercely on mentally cataloguing all she knew about Gaudí, and was so absorbed that they reached the bottom step, and were out the door before she even thought to ask what they’d see first.

“We’ll start far and work our way in,” Lenny said. “It saves time and you feel more energized by the end. That was in my first column. So we’ll hit the Sagrada Familia, then head to the Casa Milá, and end on the Casa Batlló, since it’s right around the corner.”

“If you don’t mind, I might stay behind to visit some of the museums inside,” Marc said. “But if it holds you back, you can go ahead without me.”

“Oh, we’ll be visiting the museums too,” Lenny said. “We’ll have time for everything.”

They turned left and headed north into Barcelona’s calm, orderly nineteenth-century district. Olivia thought it was pacific, to be swept along with others’ plans.

They marched along in unacknowledged and uncomfortable silence until it became gradually evident that, in a city sector renowned for its orderly grid, they had managed to lose their way. It wasn’t really a surprise, considering that the more they pretended to be watching for important turns, the less attention they were actually paying to anything they saw.

Miranda pulled out a map. “Oh no,” Lenny said, snatching it away. “How do you think you’re ever going to learn a city if you’re always resorting to a map? You have to wander a little. You have to get lost! You drift until you find your way again.”

They chewed on this for another half hour until Marc unobtrusively pulled his own map out of his pocket and, unfolding it inconspicuously, pinpointed the Sagrada Familia, and then their current location, and—most impressive of all—connected the two with an easily discernable route. Even Lenny couldn’t argue with that logic, especially because she was also adhering to her rule of never stopping at a café until her destination was in sight, and breakfast was wearing off a little.

But past the orderly blocks of homes with shops built into the bottoms, past the large buildings cut clean with precise filigree details and bulging iron balconies, and past the color patterns of flowers and women, delicate and regular as if they were papered on the outside, the spires rose. If yesterday’s cathedral had melted and stretched itself more gelatinously toward the sky, Olivia would have been looking at these towers instead,
and she would not have been in the Gothic Quarter at all, and the accordion player would have played without her.

Antoni Gaudí’s buildings were Art Nouveau, constructed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of his most famous works were scattered throughout Barcelona. They resembled not homes and churches, but sandcastles brought to full size and mosaics taken to the third dimension. Olivia knew this from all she’d read the evening before, and as they gazed upon the towering work of art, Olivia saw it was true. Lenny ran into the nearby gas station for a sandwich, and Miranda followed to use the bathroom. Marc tried to make the case that they might as well get an early lunch, but Lenny insisted that food in any area near a major tourist site was embarrassingly overpriced. “Only tourists eat near a tourist attraction,” she said.

On the second approach, they entered the church, and everyone, including Lenny, handed over seven grudging euro to explore Gaudí’s unfinished temple. Construction of the Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia had begun in 1882, and it was still being built today, over a hundred years later, funded entirely by donations and alms. Twelve bell towers, a soaring interior, and eye-numbingly complex façades of unique sculpture were all molded into Gaudí’s surreal, oozing style. Tourists were allowed into certain mostly complete sections of the church, but its wide-open interior allowed glimpses of the ongoing work as well.

Olivia stood under the contorted, fibrous, yawning stone mouth of the main door, newer by construction but older by design than the dense clockwork of the gothic cathedral. It was primordial, gaping, almost horrifying in its thick-set power. It reminded her of the monsters in her books, and she felt the heroes’ fear—an empathy that had faded long ago once she’d learned the end of every adventure.

“Come on,” Miranda said in her ear. “We don’t have time to stand around. Let’s go inside.”

After taking the same picture on three cameras, they walked inside, into a forest only Olivia could see. Among the solemn oaks of the Cathedral of Barcelona, she had felt like a girl among ancient monoliths. Here she felt like an ant or a beetle buried deep between the stalks of fertile lotuses. Unfinished as the church was, the scaffolding which filled it became a part of the artwork and caught the colored light of two stained-glass windows—red, blue, green—like spider webs at dawn. The spiders, in bright yellow reflective vests, climbed up and down them.

Marc thought of the streets where he had grown up, the yawning buildings a giant mouth penning him in, tendons stretching to swallow him whole, and rendering the sky insignificant. He had had terrible claustrophobia as a child. Sometimes his bedroom seemed too small, like a shoe that would never fit.

Now, in the cavernous church, he didn’t see the vast spaces—only the walls. He thought about the things his mother had done to help him escape his fears—games of imagining he was somewhere else, games of imagining he was some
one
else, some little boy who wasn’t afraid.

Lenny saw a sea cave she had once visited with a local guide in Greece. There with three other travelers, she was the last to scramble out of the boat and onto a ledge to explore. As the guide reached up to help her out, his hand slid lower down her back.

He was old, with chipped yellow teeth that framed the holes in his smile. She felt a wave of disgust, and suddenly wished she were home, back in the house her parents had finally bought in Colorado after she’d gone away to college, once her dad had retired. It was the first time she had realized she couldn’t remember what the bookshelves in her Chicago apartment looked like, or the other houses on the street where her family had lived when she was in middle school.

But the moment had been fleeting. At every new sight, the other tourists loved asking her what it was like to be a travel writer, so Lenny
had no choice but to be one.

Miranda didn’t see much at all. She didn’t really like modern architecture.

As they skirted the interior, looking up silently and separately, their imaginations moved to complete its construction. They passed right by the large signs describing the building’s history.

Without conversing, they planted themselves neatly at the end of the line for visiting the roof. There was only one elevator, which took tourists up to the top of a bell tower with a spectacular view.

“The sign says the wait is an hour,” Olivia said quietly to her sister.

“But it’s on the list,” Miranda said. “I think you’d regret not going. The guidebook says it’s one of the best ways to see the whole city.”

Olivia recalled the Cathedral roof and Greg, and her conversation with Mr. Brown.

“Okay,” she murmured. “Sounds nice.”

She stood by her sister’s elbow for a few more minutes before she tapped Miranda’s shoulder again and said, “Can you hold my place in line? I want to look around some more.”

“If you don’t mind, I think I’ll go with her,” Marc said, smiling.