‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Helsing. ‘He had the phone cut off years ago.’
Two handsome, fortyish Spanish women wearing white aprons over black dresses had somehow appeared at my elbow. ‘We couldn’t help overhearing your conversation,’ said the first waitress, in excellent English. ‘And, if you will excuse the interruption, I am obliged to point out that this Nazi is quite incorrect. Vasco maintains both a phone line, with an answering machine attached, and a fax line as well, though he answers none of his messages. However, the proprietor here, a mean-spirited Dane called Olé, does not permit the café’s guests to use the telephone for any reason.’
‘Hellcats! Vampires!’ shouted Helsing, in sudden fury. ‘Stakes should be driven through both your hearts!’
‘You really should not spend any more time with this old confidence man and cretin,’ said the second waitress, whose English was, if anything, even purer than her companion’s, and whose features, too, were a little more refined. ‘He is well known to us all as a bitter, twisted fantasist, a lifelong fascist who now pretends to have been an opponent of fascism, and an importuner of women, who invariably reject him, and on whom he heaps insults at every opportunity thereafter. He will no doubt have spun you all sorts of yarns, both about himself and our beautiful village. If you wish, you can come with us; we’re just going off duty and can correct the false impression you will have gained from him. Alas, many fantasists have settled in Benengeli, wrapping themselves in lies as if they were winter shawls.’
‘My name is Felicitas Larios, and she is my half-sister Renegada,’ said the first waitress. ‘If it is Vasco Miranda you’re after, you should know that we have been his housekeepers ever since he first came to town. We do not really wait table at Olé’s bar; today, we were just doing him a favour, because his regular girls were sick. Nobody can tell you more about Vasco Miranda than we.’
‘Sows! Vixens!’ cried Helsing. ‘They’re taking you for quite a ride, you know. They have worked here for pittances these many years, bowing and scraping, washing and sweeping, and the owner, by the way, is not a Dane called Olé, but a retired bargee from the Danube, named Uli.’
I had had enough of Helsing. Vasco’s women had removed their aprons and put them into the large straw baskets they carried; they were plainly eager to be off. I rose and made my excuses. ‘And has all my work on your behalf been worth so little to you?’ said the wretched fellow. ‘I have been your mentor, and this is how you repay me.’
‘Give him nothing,’ advised Renegada Larios. ‘He is always trying to wheedle money out of strangers, like a common beggar.’
‘I will pay for our drinks, at least,’ I said, and set down a note.
‘They will chew up your heart and imprison your soul in a glass bottle,’ warned Helsing, wildly. ‘Never say you were not warned. Vasco Miranda is an evil spirit, and these are his familiars. Beware! I have seen them metamorphose into bats …’
Although he was speaking loudly, nobody in that crowded street was paying the slightest attention to Gottfried Helsing. ‘We are used to him here,’ said Felicitas. ‘We let him rant, and pass by on the other side. Every so often the Sargento of the Guardia Civil, Salvador Medina, locks him up for a night, and that cools him off.’
I must admit that Jawaharlal the stuffed dog had seen better times. Since I began carting him around he had lost most of one ear and there were a couple of missing teeth. Nevertheless, Renegada, the finer-boned of my two new acquaintances, was effusive in her praise for him, and found ways of touching me often, on the arm or shoulder, to underline her sentiments. Felicitas Larios held her peace, but I had the impression that she disapproved of these moments of physical contact.
We entered a small two-storey row house on a sharply sloping street which bore the name of Calle de Miradores even though the buildings on it were far too humble to boast the glassed-in balconies from which it took its unlikely name. However, the street-sign (white letters on a royal blue ground) remained unrepentant. It was further evidence that Benengeli was a place of dreamers as well as secrets. In the distance, at the very top of the road, I could make out the outlines of a large and hideous fountain. ‘That is the Place of the Elephants,’ said Renegada, affectionately. ‘The main gate to the Miranda residence is up there.’
‘But there is no point in knocking or ringing, for no-one will answer,’ broke in Felicitas, with a worried frown. ‘It will be better if you come in and rest. You have the look of a tired and, excuse me, also an unwell man.’
‘Please,’ said Renegada, ‘take off your shoes.’ I did not understand this rather religious request, but complied, and she showed me into a tiny room whose floor, ceilings and walls were covered in ceramic tiles, on which, in Delft blue, a host of tiny scenes were depicted. ‘No two are identical,’ said Renegada proudly. ‘It is said that they are all that remains of the ancient Jewish synagogue of Benengeli, which was demolished after the final expulsions. It is said that they have the power to show you the future, if you have the eyes to see it.’
‘Stuff and nonsense,’ laughed Felicitas, who as well as being the more heavily built and coarser-looking of the two, with a large, unfortunate mole on her chin, was also the less romantic. ‘The tiles are two-a-penny, not old at all; this same Dutchy blue has been in use locally for a long time. And as for fortune-telling, that’s a lot of hogwash. So stop your hocus-pocus, dear Renegada, and let the tired gentleman get some sleep.’
I needed no further invitation to rest – insomnia, even at the worst of times, had never been my problem! – and threw myself down, fully clothed, upon the tiled room’s narrow cot. In the few instants before I fell asleep my eyes chanced to fall on a certain tile near my head, and there was my mother’s portrait staring back at me, giving a saucy smile. Dizziness claimed me, and I lost consciousness.
When I awoke I had been undressed, and a long nightshirt had been slipped over my head. Beneath this nightshirt I was completely naked. The two housekeepers were a bold pair, I thought; and how deeply I must have been sleeping! – A moment later I remembered the miracle of the tile, but try as I might I could find nothing that even remotely resembled the picture I was sure I had seen before nodding off. ‘The mind plays strange tricks when sinking towards sleep,’ I reminded myself, and got out of bed. It was daylight, and from the main room of the small house there came a strong, irresistible aroma of lentil soup. Felicitas and Renegada were at table, and there was a third place, at which a large steaming bowl had already been placed. They watched approvingly as I gulped down spoonful after spoonful.
‘How long have I been asleep?’ I asked them, and they gave each other a little look.
‘A whole day,’ said Renegada. ‘Now it’s tomorrow.’
‘Nonsense,’ Felicitas disagreed. ‘You were just snoozing for a few hours. It’s still today.’
‘My half-sister is teasing,’ said Renegada. ‘Actually, I didn’t want to shock you, and that is why I understated the case. The truth is that you have slept for forty-eight hours at least.’
‘Forty-eight winks, more like,’ said Felicitas. ‘Renegada, don’t confuse the poor man.’
‘We have cleaned and pressed your clothes,’ her half-sister said, changing the subject. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’
The effects of the journey had not worn off, even after my rest. If I really had snored my way into the day after tomorrow, though, a certain disorientation was to be expected. I turned my thoughts to business.
‘Ladies, I am most grateful to you,’ I said politely. ‘But now I must ask you for some urgent advice. Vasco Miranda is an old friend of the family, and I need to see him on important family business. Permit me to introduce myself. Moraes Zogoiby, of Bombay, India, at your service.’
They gasped.
‘Zogoiby!’ muttered Felicitas, shaking her head in disbelief.
‘I never thought to hear from another’s lips that hated, hated name,’ said Renegada Larios, colouring brightly as she spoke.
This was the stor
y I managed to coax out of them.
When Vasco Miranda first came to Benengeli, as a painter with a world-wide reputation, the half-sisters (at that time young women in their mid-twenties) had offered him their services, and been employed at once. ‘He said he was pleased by our command of English, our domestic skills, but most of all by our family tree,’ said Renegada, surprisingly. ‘Our father Juan Larios was a sailor, and Felicitas’s mother was Moroccan, while mine hailed from Palestine. So Felicitas is half-Arab, and I am Jewish on my mother’s side.’
‘Then you and I have something in common,’ I told her. ‘For I, too, am fifty per cent in that direction.’ Renegada looked inordinately pleased.
Vasco had told them they would renew, in his ‘Little Alhambra’, the fabulous multiple culture of ancient al-Andalus. They would be more like a family than master and servants. ‘We thought he was a little crazy, of course,’ said Felicitas, ‘but all artists are, isn’t that so, and the money he offered was well above the rate.’ Renegada nodded. ‘And anyhow it was just a pipe-dream. Just words. It was always boss and workers between us. And then he got more and more insane, dressing up like an old-time Sultan, and behaving even worse than one of those absolutist, infidel despots of Moors.’ Now they went in every morning and cleaned the place as best they could. The gardeners had been dismissed and the water-garden, once a jewel-like miniature Generalife, was almost dead. The kitchen staff were long departed and Vasco would leave the Larios women shopping lists and money. ‘Cheeses, sausages, wines, cakes,’ said Felicitas. ‘I do not think so much as an egg has been cooked in that house this year.’
Ever since the day of Salvador Medina’s insult over five years ago, Vasco had been retreating. He spent his days locked in his high tower apartment into which they were not permitted to venture, on pain of instant dismissal. Renegada said she had seen a couple of canvases in his studio, blasphemous works in which Judas took the place of Christ upon the cross; but these ‘Judas Christ’ paintings had been there for months, half-finished, apparently abandoned. He did not seem to be working on anything else. Nor did he travel any more, as he once had, to execute murals to commission for the airport departure halls and hotel lobbies of the earth. ‘He has bought a lot of high-technology equipment,’ she confided. ‘Recording machines, and even one of those X-ray gadgets. With the recording machines he makes strange tapes, a screeches and bangs, shouts and thumps. Avant-garde rubbish. He plays it at top volume in his tower and it has scared the herons away from their nest.’ And the X-ray machine? ‘That I don’t know. Maybe he will make art from those see-through photos.’
‘It isn’t healthy,’ said Felicitas. ‘He sees nobody, nobody.’
Neither Felicitas nor Renegada had seen their employer for more than a year. But sometimes, on a moonlit night, his cloaked figure could be seen from the village, walking the high battlements of his folly, like a slow, fat ghost.
‘And what’s this about my “hated name”?’ I asked.
‘There was a woman,’ said Renegada finally. ‘Excuse me. Maybe your aunt?’
‘My mother,’ I said. ‘A painter. Now deceased.’
‘May she rest,’ Felicitas interjected.
‘Vasco Miranda is very bitter about this woman,’ Renegada said in a rush, as if that were the only way she could bring herself to speak of it. ‘I think he has loved her very much, no?’
I said nothing.
‘I am sorry. I see it is hard for you. It is a hard thing. A son, a mother. You cannot betray her. But I think he has been, has been her, her, her.’
‘Her lover,’ said Felicitas, harshly. Renegada blushed.
‘I am sorry if you don’t know it,’ she said, putting her hand on my left arm.
‘Please go on,’ I answered.
‘Then she was brutal with him, and flung him away. Since then a kind of resentment has grown in him. I have seen it more and more. It is a possession.’
‘It isn’t healthy,’ said Felicitas, again. ‘Hatred burns up the soul.’
‘And now you,’ said Renegada. ‘I think he will never agree to meet your mother’s son. I believe the name you carry will be too much for him to bear.’
‘He painted cartoon animals and super-heroes on my nursery wall,’ I said. ‘He must see me. And he will.’
Felicitas and Renegada looked at each other again; a knowing, I-give-up look.
‘Ladies,’ I said. ‘I also have a story to tell.’
‘There was a package some time ago,’ said Renegada when I had finished. ‘Maybe it was one painting. I don’t know. Maybe it was the picture with your mother’s picture underneath. He must have taken it up into the tower. But four big pictures? No, nothing of that sort has come.’
‘It is too soon, perhaps,’ I said. ‘The burglary was very recent. You must watch for me. And as things stand, I now perceive, I should not present myself at his door in a hurry. It would scare him into keeping the pictures away from here. So you must watch, please, and I must wait.’
‘If you wish to lodge in this house,’ conceded Felicitas, ‘we can come to an arrangement. If you wish.’ At which Renegada turned her face away.
‘You have come on a great pilgrimage,’ she said, without turning back. ‘A son in search of his lost mother’s treasures, in search of healing and peace. It is our duty as women to help such a man find what he seeks.’
I remained under their roof for over a month. During this time I was well cared for, and enjoyed their company; but I learned very little more about their lives. Their parents were apparently dead, but they were disinclined to discuss the matter, so naturally I let it lie. They appeared to have neither siblings nor friends. There were no lovers. Yet they seemed perfectly, inseparably happy. They left for work in the mornings holding hands, and returned together, too. There were days when in my loneliness I entertained a half-formed lust for Renegada Larios, but there was no single occasion on which I was alone in her company, so I was unable to take matters any further. Each night, after supper, the half-sisters would retire upstairs to the bed they shared, and I would hear their murmurings, and the shiftings of their bodies, continuing late into the night; yet they would always be up before I stirred.
Finally curiosity got the better of me, and I asked them at supper why they had never married. ‘Because all the men in these parts are dead from the neck up,’ Renegada shot back, giving her sister a fierce look. ‘And from the neck down, as well.’
‘My half-sister is too fanciful, as usual,’ said Felicitas. ‘But it is true that we are not like the people round here. None of us was, in our family. The others are dead now, and we do not wish to lose each other to mere husbands. Ours is a closer bond. You see, our attitudes are not easily understood by most folk in Benengeli. For example, we are glad about the end of the Franco régime and the return of democracy. Also, to speak more personally, we do not like tobacco or babies, and around here everyone is crazy about both. Smokers are always going on about the social joys to be had from their packets of Fortuna or Ducados, about the intimate sensuality of lighting a friend’s cigarette; but we detest waking up with that cloying smell on our clothes, or going to sleep with stale smoke clouding our hair. As to children, you’re supposed to think you can never have too many of them, but we have no desire to be trapped by a brood of bouncing, squealing little jailers. And, if I may say so, we like your pet precisely because he is stuffed and therefore needs no attention from us.’
‘Yet you have looked after me royally,’ I argued.
‘That is business,’ Felicitas rejoined. ‘You are a paying guest.’
‘Surely there must be men who would love you for yourselves, without wanting to raise families,’ I persevered. ‘And if the men in Benengeli have the wrong politics, why not go across to Erasmo, for example? I hear they are different there.’
‘Since you are so forward as to demand an answer,’ replied Felicitas, ‘I have never met a man who could see a woman as herself. And as to Erasmo: there is no road to Erasmo fr
om here.’
I caught an odd expression in Renegada’s eye. Perhaps she did not agree with everything her sister had said. After that conversation I would allow myself to imagine, during my solitary nights, that at any moment the door might open and Renegada Larios might slip in beside me in my cot, naked below her long white nightdress … but it never happened. I lay by myself, listening to the shifts and murmurs just above my unsleeping head.
During my month of waiting I wandered the streets of Benengeli – sometimes trundling Jawaharlal behind me, but more often by myself – in the grip of a numbing tedium that somehow made it impossible for me to dwell on the past. I wondered if I had acquired the same empty-eyed look that characterised so many of the so-called Parasites, who seemed to spend all their days crowding and jostling up and down ‘their’ Street, buying clothes, eating in restaurants and drinking in bars, talking furiously all the time, with a curious absentness of manner that suggested their utter indifference to the topics of their conversations. However, Benengeli was apparently capable of weaving its spell even on those who were not dull of eye, because whenever I chanced to pass that old slobberer Gottfried Helsing he twinkled at me brightly, gave me a cheery wave and cried, with a knowing wink, ‘We really must have another of our excellent conversations some time soon!’ as if we were the best of friends. I surmised that I had arrived at a place to which people came to forget themselves – or, more accurately, to lose themselves in themselves, to live in a kind of dream of what they might have been, or preferred to be – or, having mislaid what once they were, to absent themselves quietly from what they had become. Thus they could either be liars, like Helsing, or near-catatonics, like the ‘honorary Parasite’, the ex-mayor, who sat motionless on an outdoor bar stool from morning to night, and never spoke a word; as if he were still lingering in the shaded solitude of an alcove concealed behind a large wooden almirah in the house of his dead wife. And the air of mystery surrounding the place was in fact an atmosphere of unknowing; what seemed like an enigma was in fact a void. These uprooted drifters had become, by their own choice, human automata. They could simulate human life, but were no longer able to live it.