XI
I had little strength left. Thankfully our destination was, indeed, but a short walk away. No one could have guessed that here lay the entrance to the Spaniard’s cave. Using branches as makeshift shields, we forced our way through a dense thicket of thornbushes, which the Spaniard himself had planted several years previously. Once through this first barrier, I watched him lever to one side the boulder, which concealed a narrow slit in the rock face. Taking out a tinderbox from his basket, he proceeded to disappear, arms first, into the cave, contorting his body to squeeze through the opening. It would be much easier for me, he’d said. The entrance was fringed with hart’s tongue ferns that shone, emerald green, in the twilight. Striped snails, ivory and golden brown, clung to the rock in a line that marked the position where the boulder had been. The Spaniard’s distorted call echoed through the cave: “Jean-Pierre! Follow my voice!”
I took a deep breath and crawled in after the Spaniard, brushing away quantities of trailing cobwebs that stuck to my face and hair. There was an immediate drop in temperature, but the cave was well ventilated and its walls were dry to the touch. I could smell fresh wood ash. Tunnel-like at first, it opened out into a yawning space of perfect darkness so that it was my ears, rather than my eyes, that grasped its scale. Soon a yellow glow appeared in front of me. The Spaniard had plunged several tallow candles into the ground while others were spiked on makeshift holders wedged into crevices in the rock. Once he had lit them all, I saw that the cave was comparable in size to a small ship, and once that comparison had struck me, I took a fancy to the idea that we were sailing into the night, gliding on calm, black waters. There was a natural vent in the cave’s ceiling and the Spaniard had constructed a rudimentary stone grate directly beneath it. He made a fire in it, and placed a blanket on the ground next to it; I lay there, slowly roasting, mesmerized by the tongues of pale flame that licked the crackling logs, and by the fire’s glowing heart that seemed to pulse in a current of air. I slept. At some point he took hold of the edges of the blanket and slid me over the rough ground, farther back into the cooler shadows. I drifted in and out of sleep. I watched trails of blue smoke rise in a neat column toward the vent, some ten or twelve feet above, where it was sucked away, through deep layers of rock, into the outside world. Every now and then I was aware of the Spaniard tossing handfuls of aromatic herbs onto the flames. As their juices boiled, they hissed and whined, and the cave was filled with their scent.
I lay there, heavy-limbed and staring into the middle distance, present and absent at the same time. It was as if the Spaniard had cast a spell on me, preparing me in some way for the story that, after long years, he was finally on the brink of telling me: a story that would cause the earth in which my life was rooted to shift, and fall away, like a landslip down a gently crumbling slope.
“Are you awake, Jean-Pierre?”
I became conscious of the smell of roasting meat, and my mouth started to water. I nodded, blinking, and pushed myself up on my elbows. “Yes, Signor. I am awake.”
“See what I have caught for our supper. If you want to hunt rabbit, sunset is the best time.”
“It’s a fat one,” I agreed. “As big as a hare.”
“I can see a little more blood in your cheeks. Are you hungry?”
“Very hungry. Is it day or night, Signor? I cannot tell in this cave.”
“Night. Your wolf is howling at the moon.”
The rabbit was not quite cooked, but I stole a large morsel anyway, and ate it greedily, blowing on my burning fingers. The Spaniard started to talk to me about his childhood, a subject that he had never broached before. I found it impossible to picture him as anything but a strong, barrel-chested man in his middle years. He told me that, in fact, he had been a delicate child.
“I was often ill. When I should have been playing with my brothers, I spent my days studying instead. Languages came easily to me—I was better able to defend myself with my tongue than with my fists. Then, when I was eleven, my father took me to see a man of letters who had agreed to instruct me in the classics. His name was Juan Pedro de Atenas, and he was attached to the court of Philip IV in Madrid. It was a very great honor, although I did not appreciate this at the time.
“My father was devoted to Juan Pedro. He spoke of his self-mastery, his grace, his insights into the human heart. Unlike many clever men, he never used his wits to belittle others. What is more, he always spoke the truth—whereas most men say what they want to hear, or what they think others want them to say. Juan Pedro was an extraordinary man, and for twenty-two years—until his death—I was a Friend to him, just as my father had been, and his father before him.”
“Twenty-two years! Why haven’t you talked to me about him before?” I asked.
“Let us say that the time was not right to speak of him.”
Warm, and with my hunger sated, I pressed the Spaniard to tell me more.
“What distinguished Juan Pedro de Atenas from other men only became apparent over the course of time. He passed from childhood to adolescence to manhood in a wholly unremarkable manner. However, once he was an adult, the years did not mark him as they did his peers. Indeed, when Juan Pedro was fifty he still looked twenty; at one hundred he had barely reached middle age; at two hundred he was past his prime but still full of vigor. Alas, he died before his time, otherwise who knows how long he might have lived. Yet he was neither immortal nor a magician. Nor was he the devil himself—a repeated accusation that drove him into hiding. No, Juan Pedro was a man like any other except in this one single respect: Once he had attained maturity, he aged exceptionally slowly.
“His father, whose name was Alfonso, had always predicted this fate for him, insisting that he and Juan Pedro were the last survivors of a remarkable, long-lived line. For a great many years, however, Juan Pedro remained unconvinced, dismissing his father’s claims as flights of fancy—”
I had been lying on my side, basking in front of the flames. Now I sat up, all attention, and demanded: “So how old were Juan Pedro and Alfonso?”
The Spaniard answered that Alfonso had lived to an enormous age but had refused to keep count of his years, being persuaded that it did him no good to dwell on such matters. Juan Pedro too felt that the delicate matter of his age was not a subject for discussion. Nevertheless, the Spaniard was certain that Juan Pedro was more than two hundred and twenty-five years old at the time of his death.
“How wonderful to live to such a great age!” I said. “To be able to plant an acorn and outlive the tree!”
The Spaniard was not so sure. Alfonso, he said, viewed his longevity with a kind of humble acceptance, but his son suffered greatly before coming to terms with what most would regard as a blessing.
“A long life exacts its own payment. A sempervivens will inevitably endure loneliness and loss.”
“Sempervivens?”
“ ‘Sempervivens’ is the name Juan Pedro used for his own kind. It means ‘always living,’ and although not strictly accurate, it is a word to which I am accustomed and shall continue to use.”
I remember repeating the word to myself so that I would not forget it. And now, in these pages, I teach it to you. I doubt that you will have difficulty remembering it. The Spaniard also spoke to me about Alfonso’s theories about the sempervivens: that only a union between two long-lived parents could produce a long-lived child, whereas a mixed union never produced long-lived offspring. Alfonso himself had survived three brothers (they had all perished in combat), and all of them were sempervivens. Curiously, however, his only sister did not inherit the trait of longevity, but grew old like the rest of humanity.
It was only after the still youthful Juan Pedro had witnessed the death of two wives, eight children, and countless friends that he was finally forced to accept that his father had told him the truth. The Spaniard never forgot Juan Pedro confiding in him that he seemed to have spent his entire life dreaming about the dead.
After Alfonso’s death—Juan Pedro wa
s then more than a century old—he abandoned his home in the mountains, as well as the many graves he tended, and took to wandering from place to place, never settling, nursing the lonely ache in his soul. Having rejected his father’s advice as a young man, Juan Pedro now found himself shaping his life in ways that Alfonso had suggested. He moved on frequently to avoid arousing suspicion and, at the same time, began to study in earnest, recording what he had witnessed on his travels and writing about the lives of remarkable individuals and significant events. Most importantly, he wrote down everything his father had told him about the sempervivens, and began a lifelong search for other members of his dying race.
* * *
To be entrusted with such a secret! That night in the Spaniard’s cave, by the orange glow of the fire, my teacher held me in his thrall. I did not care to dwell on this darker side of the fate of a sempervivens but pictured, instead, the riches and knowledge such a person could acquire in a single lifetime. Gradually, however, like the flicker of a stranger’s shadow passing in front of a doorway, a sense of dread stole over me. Why was the Spaniard telling me this now? Perhaps my anxiety merely mirrored that of the Spaniard himself, whose jaw was set tight, and who was plainly ill at ease, even though he was trying hard to disguise it. I watched him turn the rabbit on his makeshift spit, for one side was beginning to char. The juices were running freely now, and dripping fat spat and sizzled, filling the cave with blue smoke. He wiped his greasy hands on a handkerchief.
“What happened to Juan Pedro, Signor?” I asked. “Had he found happiness when you knew him in Madrid?”
“Juan Pedro spent many years traveling across Europe in search of other sempervivens. He all but despaired of ever finding a companion. You can imagine what an impossible task it was—any sempervivens would soon learn the need for secrecy—”
“So he never found anyone?”
“Finally, he did. I had the honor of being present when Juan Pedro returned from a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela with a wife. His prayers had been answered. He saw her, quite by chance, standing in front of the cathedral, a lone figure, and he sensed an immediate connection. Even though Juan Pedro’s health was failing by then, he returned ablaze with joy. Never had I seen him so happy. Her name was Berthe and she originated from France. She was spirited and full of life; Juan Pedro called her his gift from God.”
“So you knew her?”
“I knew her well.”
“Did they have children?”
“Berthe died giving birth to her first child. A boy.”
“No—”
“Alas, five days later I discovered Juan Pedro dead outside his own house. It is possible that he stumbled on account of his illness, but it is also possible that someone wanted him dead. It was a blow to the head that killed him.”
“And the baby, Signor? Did the baby survive?”
“Yes, by the grace of God, the boy survived. And I have to tell you—”
“What is it, Signor?”
The Spaniard’s chest heaved with emotion and he could not look at me but stared, instead, into the glowing heart of the fire. Then I knew why he had brought me to his cave and I guessed what he was about to say.
“Jean-Pierre, you are not who you think yourself to be. You know that your mother departed this world the same moment that you entered it. But it was Berthe who died giving birth to you. Juan Pedro was your father.”
In the silence that followed the Spaniard’s revelation, I felt nothing. “That is not possible, Signor, for you know who my father is. He is your friend!”
“He is my friend, and he brought you up as his own because you were born on the same night in the same city that he lost his own wife and child. Fate brought us together in Madrid.”
The Spaniard read the disbelief in my face. “He loves you as his own, but you are not related in any way to the man you know as your father.”
“If this is true, why didn’t he tell me?” I cried. And at that moment, I realized that he already had. You are no longer my own.
I stared at the fire, at the glistening flesh of the rabbit, at its once-twitching muscles now contracting in the flames. The fire crackled, the fat spat, the world continued to turn, and nothing was the same.
The Spaniard took hold of my hand. “You understand that it is more likely than not that you are a sempervivens?”
I withdrew my hand and stood up. “You are mistaken!” I shouted. I was scarcely aware of crashing the flat of my foot onto the spit, causing a shower of golden sparks to rise into the air, and of kicking the burning logs, scattering them, along with our supper, over the floor of the cave. The Spaniard made no reaction apart from calmly beating out the glowing cinders that burned into his britches. I fled, crawling on my hands and knees through the darkness and slipping out of the narrow entrance into the night air. The Spaniard called out after me:
“I swore on your father’s grave that I would keep you safe! It is possible that you hold within you an eternal legacy!”
XII
I ran into the night under a sky rinsed clean of clouds and awash with stars. I ran blindly through the woods, tripping over roots and kicking up drifts of leaves. I ran until I could run no more. When I reached a clearing, I surprised a fox. Here moonlight poured down in a wash of blue, so that the animal was silhouetted, pin-sharp, in front of clumps of swaying ferns. I stood still, catching my breath. All the while we studied each other, fellow travelers, equals, and presently he sloped off to resume his business, ears pricked, tail held rigid behind him, a perfect horizontal.
The wind had not let up; if anything, it blew stronger than before. The tree canopy creaked and groaned like a ship’s rigging. I was glad to be out of the Spaniard’s cave, and here, in this wild wood, where I could be alone with my thoughts.
It is not an easy thing to discover that you are not who you thought you were. The Spaniard’s story had crashed into the life I thought I owned, shattering it into countless shards, too sharp to pick up, impossible to repair. Now my brothers’ words drummed an accusing rhythm in my head: Cuckoo! Cuckoo! They had been right all along. I was the cuckoo in their nest. Had they sensed my difference, or had one of the servants let slip the secret? They were not my brothers. Their father was not my father. Their mother was not my mother. Now I grasped the meaning of my father’s words: He was handing me back. So many lies, over so many years, to conceal my true parentage! I added my cries to the howling wind. Lies!
While the Spaniard spoke of the sempervivens, I had hung on to his every word, convinced and entranced. Now I questioned the truth of it. Men don’t live for centuries. The Spaniard’s devotion to Juan Pedro had made him gullible. It was a tall tale and I would not demean myself by believing it. Even so, as I reeled from the shock of the Spaniard’s revelations on that fateful night above the Tarn, a small part of me recognized that he had told me the truth. Already I grasped that the certainties that, my whole life long, had told me who I was, and what I was, and where I belonged, had gone: They had been cut away at a stroke, with all the benign violence of a surgeon’s knife.
* * *
“Jean-Pierre!”
The yellow glow of a lantern blinked as the Spaniard moved through the trees. I was tempted to remain silent but after he had called out three more times, I answered. After causing me such pain it would have pleased him to comfort me with word or gesture but I held myself back and would not give him the satisfaction. And so, guiding me with one hand on my shoulder, he led me back through the wood. We did not speak. Once more in the cave, I saw that he had mended the fire, jointed the rabbit, and placed it on a pewter dish. I would not eat. Presently the Spaniard picked up a candle and gestured for me to follow him to the side of the cave farthest from the entrance. When he lowered the flickering flame, the entrance to a smaller inner chamber was revealed. The Spaniard stepped back to allow me to enter first. Its roof was too low to make standing upright possible. I was struck by the way he gestured, rather grandly, with his hand—as if I
should be awed in some way by the contents of this cave. But all that I saw, barely visible in the semidarkness, were some scrolls—perhaps two dozen—and a great many piles of books stacked on bare wooden shelves. I looked on, unimpressed. The Spaniard fetched his pannier and started to unload its contents, passing them to me through the small entrance hole. He asked me to place them on the empty shelf nearest to me.
“Aren’t these your journals, Signor?” I had often seen him write in them, though the quantity of them surprised me. “Is this the secret you wanted to show me?”
“Did you hope for something else? Caskets of gold, perhaps?”
“No,” I lied. “I did not know what to expect.”
The Spaniard knew me too well and a half smile formed on his lips despite the uneasiness that had grown between us.
“All the books bound in red leather are the journals of Juan Pedro. The few bound in green are my own. Though not sempervivens, I wished to record something in the intervening years—”
“The intervening years? What do you mean?”
“Until you were old enough to—”
“What? Contribute to them myself?”
“It is too soon to speak of such a thing, though it is something your father would have wished. The scrolls you see in the far corner were written by Alfonso—your grandfather—”
“The man you say was my grandfather—”
“There is no doubt, Jean-Pierre. I stood in the adjoining room the night you were born. I heard your first cry. When you were barely one week old—and already an orphan—it was I who placed you in the arms of the man who was to bring you up, a man distraught after the death of his own wife and newborn child. It was I who gave you your name.”
“You did!”
“Juan Pedro was inconsolable after your mother’s death. And he was not a well man. He had succumbed to a disease of the nerves. It started with his hands. . . .”