Strange Pilgrims (15 page)

The priest, who had ordered a
grappa
at her expense along with the coffee, tried to make her see the superficiality of her opinion. For during the war they had established a very efficient service for rescuing, identifying, and burying in holy ground the many drowning victims found floating in the Bay of Naples.

“Centuries ago,” the priest concluded, “the Italians learned that there is only one life, and they try to live it the best they can. This has made them calculating and talkative, but it has also cured them of cruelty.”

“They didn’t even stop the ship,” she said.

“What they do is radio the port authorities,” said the priest. “By now they’ve picked him up and buried him in the name of God.”

The discussion changed both their moods. Señora Prudencia Linero had finished eating, and only then did she realize that all the tables were occupied. At the ones close by, almost naked tourists sat eating in silence, among them a few couples who kissed and did not eat. At the tables in the rear, near the bar, neighborhood people played at dice and drank a colorless wine. Señora Prudencia Linero understood that she had only one reason for being in that unsavory country.

“Do you think it will be very difficult to see the Pope?” she asked.

The priest replied that nothing was easier in the summer. The Pope was on vacation in Castel Gandolfo, and on Wednesday afternoons he held a public audience for
pilgrims from all over the world. The entrance fee was very cheap: twenty lire.

“And how much does he charge to hear a person’s confession?” she asked.

“The Holy Father does not hear confessions,” said the priest, somewhat scandalized, “except for those of kings, of course.”

“I don’t see why he would refuse that favor to a poor woman who’s come so far,” she said.

“And some kings, even though they’re kings, have died waiting,” said the priest. “But tell me: Yours must be an awful sin if you made such a journey all alone just to confess to the Holy Father.”

Señora Prudencia Linero thought for a moment, and the priest saw her smile for the first time.

“Mother of God!” she said. “I’d be satisfied just to see him.” And she added, with a sigh that seemed to come from her soul: “It’s been my lifelong dream!”

The truth was that she still felt frightened and sad, and all she wanted was to leave the restaurant, as well as Italy, without delay. The priest must have thought he had gotten all he could from the deluded woman, and so he wished her good luck and went to another table to ask in the name of charity that they buy him a cup of coffee.

When she walked out of the restaurant, Señora Prudencia Linero found a changed city. She was surprised by the sunlight at nine o’clock, and frightened by the raucous throng that had invaded the streets to find relief in the evening breeze. The backfiring of so many crazed Vespas made life impossible. Driven by bare-chested men whose beautiful women sat behind them, hugging them
around the waist, they moved in fits and starts, weaving in and out among hanging pigs and tables covered with melons.

It was a carnival atmosphere, but it seemed a catastrophe to Señora Prudencia Linero. She lost her way, and all at once found herself in an infelicitous street where taciturn women sat in the doorways of identical houses whose blinking red lights made her shiver with terror. A well-dressed man wearing a heavy gold ring and a diamond in his tie followed her for several blocks saying something in Italian, and then in English and French. When he received no reply, he showed her a postcard from a pack he took out of his pocket, and one glance was all she needed to feel that she was walking through hell.

She fled in utter terror, and at the end of the street she found the twilight sea again and the same stink of rotting shellfish as in the port of Riohacha, and her heart returned to its rightful place. She recognized the painted hotels along the deserted beach, the funereal taxis, the diamond of the first star in the immense sky. At the far end of the bay, solitary and enormous at the pier, its lights blazing on every deck, she recognized the ship on which she had sailed, and realized it no longer had anything to do with her life. She turned left at the corner but could not go on because of a crowd being held back by a squad of
carabinieri
. A row of ambulances waited with open doors outside her hotel building.

Standing on tiptoe and peering over the shoulders of the onlookers, Señora Prudencia Linero saw the English tourists again. They were being carried out on stretchers,
one by one, and all of them were motionless and dignified and still seemed like one man repeated many times in the more formal clothing they had put on for supper: flannel trousers, diagonally striped ties, and dark jackets with the Trinity College coat of arms embroidered on the breast pocket. As they were brought out, the neighbors watching from their balconies, and the people held back on the street, counted them in chorus as if they were in a stadium. There were seventeen. They were put in the ambulances two by two and driven away to the wail of war sirens.

Dazed by so many stupefying events, Señora Prudencia Linero rode up in the elevator packed with guests from the other hotels who spoke in hermetic languages. They got off at every floor except the third, which was open and lit, but no one was at the counter or in the easy chairs in the foyer where she had seen the pink knees of the seventeen sleeping Englishmen. The owner on the fifth floor commented on the disaster with uncontrolled excitement.

“They’re all dead,” she told Señora Prudencia Linero in Spanish. “They were poisoned by the oyster soup at supper. Just imagine, oysters in August!”

She handed her the key to her room, and paid no further attention to her as she said to the other guests in her own dialect, “Since there’s no dining room here, everyone who goes to sleep wakes up alive!” With another knot of tears in her throat, Señora Prudencia Linero bolted the locks in her room. After that she pushed the little writing table and the easy chair and her trunk against the door to form an impassable barricade against the horror of a
country where so many things happened at the same time. Then she put on her widow’s nightgown, lay down in the bed on her back, and said seventeen Rosaries for the eternal rest of the souls of the seventeen poisoned Englishmen.

APRIL
1980

I
SAW HIM
only once at Boccacio, the popular Barcelona club, a few hours before his miserable death. It was two in the morning and he was being pursued by a gang of young Swedes attempting to take him away with them to finish the party in Cadaqués. There were eleven Swedes, and it was difficult to tell one from another because all of them, men and women, looked the same: beautiful, with narrow hips and long golden hair. He could not have been older than twenty. His head was covered with blue-black curls, and he had the smooth, sallow skin of Caribbeans whose mothers had trained them to walk in the shade, and Arab eyes that were enough to drive the Swedish girls mad, and perhaps a few of the boys as well. They had seated him on the bar, like a ventriloquist’s dummy, and were serenading him with popular songs to the accompaniment of their clapping hands as they tried to persuade him to go with them.

In terror he attempted to explain his reasons. Someone intervened, shouting that they ought to leave him alone, and one of the Swedes, weak with laughter, confronted him.

“He’s ours,” he yelled. “We found him in the garbage can.”

I had come in just a short while before with a group of friends, after attending David Oistrakh’s final concert in the Palau de la Música, and my skin crawled at the skepticism of the Swedes. For the boy’s reasons were sacred. He had lived in Cadaqués, where he had been hired to sing Antillean songs in a fashionable bar, until the previous summer, when the tramontana defeated him. He managed to escape on the second day, resolved never to return, with or without the tramontana, and certain that if he ever went back, death would be waiting for him. It was a Caribbean certainty that could not be understood by a band of Scandinavian rationalists aflame with summer and the hard Catalan wines of those days, which sowed wild ideas in the heart.

I understood him better than anyone. Cadaqués was one of the most beautiful towns along the Costa Brava, and one of the best preserved. This was due in part to the fact that its narrow access highway twisted at the edge of a bottomless abyss, and one needed a very steady soul to drive more than fifty kilometers an hour. The older houses were white and low, in the traditional style of Mediterranean fishing villages. The new ones had been built by famous architects who respected the original harmony. In summer, when the heat seemed to come from
African deserts on the other side of the street, Cadaqués turned into a hellish Babel, where for three months tourists from every corner of Europe vied with the natives, and with the foreigners who had been lucky enough to buy a house at a low price when that was still possible, for control of paradise. But in spring and fall, the seasons when Cadaqués seemed most attractive, no one could escape the terrifying thought of the tramontana, a harsh, tenacious land wind that carries in it the seeds of madness, according to the natives and certain writers who have learned their lesson.

Until the tramontana crossed our lives some fifteen years ago, I was one of the town’s most faithful visitors. One Sunday at siesta time, with the unexplainable presentiment that something was about to happen, I sensed the wind before it arrived. My spirits plummeted, I felt sad for no reason, and I had the impression that my children, who were then both under ten years old, were following me around the house with hostile stares. Not long afterward the porter came in with a toolbox and some marine lines to secure the doors and windows, and he was not surprised at my dejection.

“It’s the tramontana,” he said. “It’ll be here in less than an hour.”

He was a very old man, a former seaman who still had the waterproof jacket of his trade, the cap and pipe, and a skin scorched by the salts of the world. In his free hours he would play bowls in the square with veterans of several lost wars, and drink aperitifs with tourists in the taverns along the beach, for with his artilleryman’s Catalan
he had the virtue of making himself understood in any language. He prided himself on knowing all the ports of the planet, but no inland city. “Not even Paris, France, as famous as it is,” he would say. For he had no faith in any vehicle that did not sail.

In the last few years his aging had been drastic, and he had not gone back to the street. He spent most of his time in the porter’s room, alone in spirit, as he had always lived. He cooked his own food in a can over an alcohol lamp, but that was all he needed to delight us with the delicacies of an illustrious cuisine. At dawn he would begin tending to the tenants, floor by floor, and he was one of the most accommodating men I have ever met, with the involuntary generosity and rough tenderness of the Catalonians. He spoke very little, but his style was direct and to the point. When he had nothing else to do, he spent hours filling out forms that predicted the outcome of soccer games, but he did not mail them in very often.

That day, as he secured the doors and windows in anticipation of the disaster, he spoke to us of the tramontana as if it were a hateful woman, but one without whom his life would lose its meaning. It surprised me that a sailor would pay such homage to a land wind.

“This is one of the old ones,” he said.

He gave the impression that his year was not divided into days and months, but into the number of times the tramontana blew. “Last year, about three days after the second tramontana, I had an attack of colitis,” he once told me. Perhaps this explained his belief that one aged several years after each tramontana. His obsession was so
great that he filled us with a longing to get to know it, as if it were a fatal, seductive visitor.

We did not have long to wait. As soon as the porter left, we heard a whistling that little by little became sharper and more intense and dissolved into the thunder of an earthquake. Then the wind began. First in intermittent gusts that became more frequent until one of them remained, unmoving, without pause, without relief, with an intensity and cruelty that seemed supernatural. Contrary to Caribbean custom, our apartment faced the mountains, perhaps because of that peculiar preference of old-fashioned Catalonians who love the sea but do not care to look at it. And so the wind hit us head-on and threatened to blow away the ropes that moored the windows.

What intrigued me most was that the weather still had an unrepeatable beauty, with its golden sun and undaunted sky. So much so that I decided to take the children out to the street to have a look at the ocean. After all, they had been raised among Mexican earthquakes and Caribbean hurricanes, and one wind more or less did not seem anything to worry about. We tiptoed past the porter’s room and saw him transfixed before a plate of beans and sausage, watching the wind through the window. He did not see us go out.

We managed to walk as long as we were on the lee side of the house, but when we reached the exposed corner we had to hold on to a lamppost in order not to be blown away by the force of the wind. And there we stayed, amazed at the motionless, clear ocean in the midst of the
cataclysm, until the porter, with the help of some neighbors, came to our rescue. Then, at last, we were convinced that the only rational course of action was to remain in the house until God willed otherwise. And no one had the slightest idea when that would be.

At the end of two days we had the impression that the fearful wind was not a natural phenomenon but a personal affront aimed by someone at us, and us alone. The porter visited several times a day, concerned for our state of mind, and he brought fruits in season and candies for the children. At lunch on Tuesday he regaled us with rabbit and snails, the masterpiece of Catalonian cookery, which he had prepared in his kitchen tin. It was a party in the midst of horror.

Wednesday, when nothing happened except the wind, was the longest day of my life. But it must have been something like the dark before the dawn, because after midnight we all awoke at the same time, overwhelmed by an absolute stillness that could only be the silence of death. Not a leaf moved on the trees that faced the mountain. And so we went out to the street, before the light was on in the porter’s room, and relished the predawn sky with all its stars shining, and the phosphorescent sea. Although it was not yet five o’clock, many tourists were celebrating their relief on the rocky beach, and sailboats were being rigged after three days of penance.