Strange Pilgrims (16 page)

When we went out we paid no particular attention to the fact that the porter’s room was dark. But when we returned to the house, the air was as phosphorescent as the ocean and his room was still dark. I thought it odd
and knocked twice, and since there was no answer I pushed the door. I believe the children saw him before I did, and they screamed in horror. The old porter, the insignias of a distinguished mariner pinned to the lapel of his seaman’s jacket, was hanging by his neck from the middle rafter and still swaying in the final gust of the tramontana.

In the middle of our vacation, feeling an anticipatory nostalgia and an irrevocable determination never to return, we left the village earlier than planned. The tourists were back in the streets, and there was music in the square, where the veterans were almost too discouraged to bowl one ball against the other. Through the dusty windows of the Marítim bar we caught a glimpse of some friends who had survived and were beginning life again in the brilliant tramontana spring. But now all of that belonged to the past.

That was why, in the sad hours before dawn at Boccacio, no one understood as well as I the terror of someone who refused to return to Cadaqués because he was sure he would die. But there was no way to dissuade the Swedes, who dragged the boy away with the European intention of curing him by force of his African superstitions. To the applause and boos of a divided clientele, they pushed him kicking into a van filled with drunks who started out at that late hour on the long drive to Cadaqués.

The next morning the telephone woke me. I had forgotten to close the curtains when I came home from the party, and had no idea of the time, but the bedroom was
filled with brilliant summer light. The worried voice on the phone, which I did not recognize right away, pulled me out of sleep.

“Do you remember the boy they took to Cadaqués last night?”

I did not have to hear another word. Except that it was even more dramatic than I had imagined. The boy, terrified by his imminent return to Cadaqués, took advantage of a moment’s carelessness on the part of the demented Swedes, and in an effort to escape an ineluctable death, threw himself from the speeding van into the abyss.

JANUARY
1981

W
HEN WE CAME
back to the house in the afternoon, we found an enormous sea serpent nailed by the neck to the door frame. Black and phosphorescent, it looked like a Gypsy curse with its still-flashing eyes and its sawlike teeth in gaping jaws. I was about nine years old at the time, and at the sight of that vision out of a delirium I felt a terror so intense that I lost my voice. But my brother, who was two years younger, dropped the oxygen tanks, the masks, the fins, and fled, screaming in panic. Miss Forbes heard him from the tortuous stone steps that wound along the reefs from the dock to the house, and she ran to us, panting and livid, yet she had only to see the beast crucified on the door to understand the cause of our horror. She always said that when two
children were together they were both guilty of what each did alone, and so she scolded the two of us for my brother’s screams and continued to reprimand us for our lack of self-control. She spoke in German, not in the English stipulated in her tutor’s contract, perhaps because she too was frightened and refused to admit it. But as soon as she caught her breath she returned to her stony English and her pedagogical obsession.

“It is a
Muraena helena
,” she told us, “so called because it was an animal sacred to the ancient Greeks.”

All at once Oreste, the local boy who taught us how to swim in deep waters, appeared behind the agave plants. He was wearing his diving mask on his forehead, a minuscule bathing suit, and a leather belt that held six knives of different shapes and sizes, for he could conceive of no other way to hunt underwater than by engaging in hand-to-hand combat with his prey. He was about twenty years old and spent more time at the bottom of the sea than on solid ground, and with motor oil always smeared over his body he even looked like a sea animal. When she saw him for the first time, Miss Forbes told my parents that it was impossible to imagine a more beautiful human being. But his beauty could not save him from her severity: He too had to endure a reprimand, in Italian, for having hung the moray eel on the door, with no other possible reason than his desire to frighten the children. Then Miss Forbes ordered him to take it down with the respect due a mythical creature, and told us to dress for supper.

We did so without delay, trying not to commit a single error, because after two weeks under the regime of Miss
Forbes we had learned that nothing was more difficult than living. As we showered in the dim light of the bathroom, I knew that my brother was still thinking about the moray. “It had people’s eyes,” he said. I agreed, but made him think otherwise and managed to change the subject until I finished washing. Yet when I stepped out of the shower he asked me to stay and keep him company.

“It’s still daytime,” I said.

I opened the curtains. It was the middle of August, and through the window you could see the burning lunar plain all the way to the other side of the island, and the sun that had stopped in the sky.

“That’s not why,” my brother said. “I’m just scared of being scared.”

But when we came down to the table he seemed calm, and he had done everything with so much care that he earned special praise from Miss Forbes and two more points in the week’s good-conduct report. I, on the other hand, lost two of the five points I had already earned, because at the last minute I permitted myself to hurry and came into the dining room out of breath. Every fifty points entitled us to a double portion of dessert, but neither of us had earned more than fifteen. It was a shame, really, because we never again tasted any desserts as delicious as those made by Miss Forbes.

Before beginning supper we would stand and pray behind our empty plates. Miss Forbes was not Catholic, but her contract stipulated that she would have us pray six times a day, and she had learned our prayers in order to fulfill those terms. Then the three of us would sit down, and we held our breath while she scrutinized our deportment
down to the slightest detail, and only when everything seemed perfect would she ring the bell. Then the cook, Fulvia Flaminea, came in, carrying the eternal vermicelli soup of that abominable summer.

At first, when we were alone with our parents, meals were a fiesta. Fulvia Flaminea giggled all around the table as she served us, with a vocation for disorder that brought joy to our lives, and then sat down with us and ate a little bit from everyone’s plate. But ever since Miss Forbes had taken charge of our destiny, she served in such dark silence that we could hear the bubbling of the soup as it boiled in the tureen. We ate with our spines against the back of our chairs, chewing ten times on one side and ten times on the other, never taking our eyes off the iron, languid, autumnal woman who recited etiquette lessons by heart. It was just like Sunday Mass, but without the consolation of people singing.

On the day we found the moray eel hanging from the door, Miss Forbes spoke to us of our patriotic obligations. After the soup, Fulvia Flaminea, almost floating on the air rarefied by our tutor’s voice, served a broiled fillet of snowy flesh with an exquisite aroma. I have always preferred fish to any other food on land or in the sky, and that memory of our house in Guacamayal eased my heart. But my brother refused the dish without tasting it.

“I don’t like it,” he said.

Miss Forbes interrupted her lesson.

“You cannot know that,” she told him. “You have not even tasted it.”

She shot a warning glance at the cook, but it was too late.

“Moray is the finest fish in the world,
figlio mio
,” Fulvia Flaminea told him. “Try it and see.”

Miss Forbes remained calm. She told us, with her unmerciful methodology, that moray had been a delicacy of kings in antiquity and that warriors fought over its bile because it gave them supernatural courage. Then she repeated, as she had so often in so short a time, that good taste was not an innate faculty, nor was it taught at any particular age; rather, it was imposed from infancy. Therefore we had no valid reason not to eat. I had tasted the moray before I knew what it was, and remembered the contradiction forever after: It had a smooth, rather melancholy taste, yet the image of the serpent nailed to the door frame was more compelling than my appetite. My brother made a supreme effort with his first bite, but he could not bear it: He vomited.

“You will go to the bathroom,” Miss Forbes told him without losing her calm, “you will wash yourself with care, and you will come back to eat.”

I felt great anguish for him, because I knew how difficult he found it to cross the entire house in the early darkness and stay alone in the bathroom for the time he needed to wash. But he returned very soon in a clean shirt, pale and quivering with a hidden tremor, and he bore up very well under the rigorous inspection of his cleanliness. Then Miss Forbes sliced a piece of moray and ordered us to continue. I just managed a second bite. But my brother did not even pick up his knife and fork.

“I’m not going to eat it,” he said.

His determination was so obvious that Miss Forbes withdrew.

“All right,” she said, “but you will have no dessert.”

My brother’s relief filled me with his courage. I crossed my knife and fork on my plate, just as Miss Forbes had taught us to do when we were finished, and said:

“I won’t have dessert either.”

“And you will not watch television,” she replied.

“And we will not watch television,” I said.

Miss Forbes placed her napkin on the table, and the three of us stood to pray. Then she sent us to our bedroom, with the warning that we had to be asleep by the time she finished eating. All our good-conduct points were canceled, and only after we had earned twenty more would we again enjoy her cream cakes, her vanilla tarts, her exquisite plum pastries, the likes of which we would not taste again for the rest of our lives.

The break was bound to come sooner or later. For an entire year we had looked forward to a summer of freedom on the island of Pantelleria, at the far southern end of Sicily, and that is what it really had been for the first month, when our parents were with us. I still remember as if it were a dream the solar plain of volcanic rock, the eternal sea, the house painted with quicklime up to the brickwork; on windless nights you could see from its windows the luminous beams of lighthouses in Africa. Exploring the sleeping ocean floor around the island with our father, we had discovered a row of yellow torpedoes, half buried since the last war; we had brought up a Greek amphora almost a meter high, with petrified garlands and the dregs of an immemorial and poisonous wine in its depths; we had bathed in a steaming pool of waters so dense you almost could walk on them. But the most dazzling
revelation for us had been Fulvia Flaminea. She looked like a cheerful bishop and was always accompanied by a troop of sleepy cats who got in her way when she walked. But she said she put up with them not out of love but to keep from being devoured by rats. At night, while our parents watched programs for adults on television, Fulvia Flaminea took us to her house, less than a hundred meters from ours, and taught us to distinguish the remote babbling, the songs, the outbursts of weeping on the winds from Tunis. Her husband was a man too young for her, who worked in the summer at the tourist hotels on the far end of the island and came home only to sleep. Oreste lived a little farther away with his parents, and always appeared at night with strings of fish and baskets of fresh-caught lobster, which he hung in the kitchen so that Fulvia Flaminea’s husband could sell them the next day at the hotels. Then he would put his diving lantern back on his forehead and take us to catch the field rats as big as rabbits that lay in wait for kitchen scraps. Sometimes we came home after our parents had gone to bed, and it was hard for us to sleep with the racket the rats made as they fought over the garbage in the courtyards. But even that annoyance was a magical ingredient in our happy summer.

The decision to hire a German governess could have occurred only to my father, a writer from the Caribbean with more presumption than talent. Dazzled by the ashes of the glories of Europe, he always seemed too eager to excuse his origins, in his books as well as in real life, and he had succumbed to the fantasy that no vestige of his own past would remain in his children. My mother was
still as unassuming as she had been when she was an itinerant teacher in Alta Guajira, and she never imagined her husband could have an idea that was less than providential. And therefore they could not have asked themselves in their hearts what our lives would be like with a sergeant from Dortmund intent on inculcating in us by force the most ancient, stale habits of European society, while they and forty other fashionable writers participated in a five-week cultural encounter on the islands of the Aegean Sea.

Miss Forbes arrived on the last Saturday in July on the regular boat from Palermo, and from the moment we first saw her we knew the party was over. She arrived in that southern heat wearing combat boots, a dress with overlapping lapels, and hair cut like a man’s under her felt hat. She smelled of monkey urine. “That’s how every European smells, above all in summer,” our father told us. “It’s the smell of civilization.” But despite her military appearance, Miss Forbes was a poor creature who might have awakened a certain compassion in us if we had been older or if she had possessed any trace of tenderness. The world changed. Our six hours in the ocean, which from the beginning of the summer had been a continual exercise of our imagination, were turned into one identical hour repeated over and over again. When we were with our parents we had all the time we wanted to swim with Oreste and be astonished at the art and daring with which he confronted octopuses in their own environment murky with ink and blood, using no other weapons than his combat knives. He still arrived as always at eleven o’clock in his little outboard motorboat, but Miss Forbes
did not allow him to stay with us a minute longer than required for our lesson in deep-sea diving. She forbade us to go to Fulvia Flaminea’s house at night because she considered it excessive familiarity with servants, and we had to devote the hours we had once spent in the pleasurable hunting of rats to analytical readings of Shakespeare. Accustomed to stealing mangoes from courtyards and stoning dogs to death on the burning streets of Guacamayal, we could not imagine a crueler torture than that princely life.