We entered the small town of Avellaneda, famous for its three-hundred-year-old bull-ring, and Vivar the driver accelerated. ‘Town of thieves,’ he explained. ‘Bad medicine.’ The next settlement was Erasmo, a village smaller than Avellaneda, but substantial enough to boast a sizeable school building over whose doorway were inscribed the words Lectura – locura. I asked the driver if he could translate, and after some hesitations he found the words. ‘Reading, lectura. Lectura, reading,’ he said proudly.
‘And locura?’
‘Is madness, pardner.’
A woman in black, swathed in a rebozo, peered at us suspiciously as we bumped along Erasmo’s cobbled streets. Some sort of passionate meeting was taking place under a spreading tree in a square. Slogans and banners were everywhere. I copied several of them down. I had supposed them to be political utterances, but they turned out to be far more unusual. ‘Men are so necessarily mad that it would be crazy, through a further twist of madness, not to be mad oneself,’ said one banner. Another pronounced: ‘Everything in life is so diverse, so opposed, so obscure, that we cannot be certain of any truth.’ And a third, more pithily: ‘All is possible.’ It seemed that a philosophy class from a nearby university had conceived the notion of meeting in this village, because of its name, to discuss the radical, sceptical notions of Blaise Pascal, the old folly-praiser Erasmus himself, and Marsilio Ficino, among others. The frenzy and ardour of the philosophers was so great that it gathered crowds. The villagers of Erasmo enjoyed taking sides in the great debates. – Yes, the world was what the case was! – No, it wasn’t! – Yes, the cow was in the field when one did not regard it! – No, somebody could easily have left open the gate! – Item, personality was homogeneous and men were to be held responsible for their acts! – Quite the reverse: we were such contradictory entities that the concept of personality itself ceased, under close scrutiny, to have meaning! – God existed! – God was dead! – One might, indeed one was obliged to, speak confidently of the eternalness of eternal verities: of the absolute-ness of absolutes! – Good grief, but that was the purest drivel; relatively speaking, of course! – And in the matter of how a gentleman should arrange himself within his undergarments, all leading authorities have concluded that he must dress to the left. – Ridiculous! It is well known that, for the true philosopher, only the right will do. – The big end of the egg is best! – Absurd, sirrah! The little end, always! – ‘Up!’ I say. – But it is clear, my dear sir, that the only accurate statement is ‘Down.’ – Well, then, ‘In.’ – ‘Out!’ – ‘Out!’ – ‘In!’ …
‘Some kinda funny folks in thees ol’ burg,’ opined Vivar, as we left town.
According to my map Benengeli was the next village; but when we left Erasmo the road started heading down the hill instead of up and along. I gathered from Vivar that ever since the Franco period, when Erasmo had been for the republic and Benengeli for the Falange, an undimmed hatred had stood between the inhabitants of Erasmo and those of Benengeli, a hatred so deep that they had refused to permit a road to be built between the two villages. (When Franco died the people of Erasmo had held a party, but Benengeli’s folk had been plunged into deep mourning, except for the large community of ‘parasites’ or expatriates, who didn’t even know what had happened until they started receiving worried phone calls from friends abroad.)
So we had to drive a long way down Erasmo’s hill and a long way up the next one. At the place where the road from Erasmo met the much grander, four-lane highway to Benengeli there stood a large, gracious property ringed by pomegranate trees and jasmine in bloom. Hummingbirds hung in the gateway. In the distance you could hear the pleasing thwock of tennis balls. The sign over the arched gateway read Pancho Vialactada Campo de Tenis.
‘That Pancho, huh,’ said Vivar, jerking his thumb. ‘One major hombre.’
Vialactada, a Mexican by birth, was one of the greats from the pre-open era, playing with Hoad and Rosewall and Gonzalez on the pro circuit, and barred, therefore, from the Grand Slam events which he would surely have dominated. He had been a sort of glorious phantom, hovering at the edges of the limelight while lesser men held the great trophies aloft. He had died of stomach cancer several years ago.
So this is where he wound up, teaching serve-and-volley to rich matrons, I thought: another limbo. This was the end of his transglobal pilgrimage; what would be the end of mine?
Though I could hear the tennis balls, there was not a player to be seen on the red clay courts. There must be more courts out of our field of vision, I decided. ‘Who runs the club now?’ I asked Vivar, and he nodded fervently, smiling his monstrous smile.
‘Yes, Vialactada, of course,’ he insisted. ‘Ees Pancho’s spread. The same.’
I tried to imagine this landscape as it might have been when our remote ancestors had been here. There was not so much to subtract from the scenery – the road, the black silhouette of an Osborne bull watching me from a height, some electricity pylons and telephone poles, a few Seat cars and Renault vans. Benengeli, a ribbon of white walls and red roofs, lay above us on its hillside, looking much as it would have looked all those centuries ago. I am a Jew from Spain, like the philosopher Maimonides, I told myself, to see if the words rang true. They sounded hollow. Maimonides’s ghost laughed at me. I am like the Catholicised Córdoba mosque, I experimented. A piece of Eastern architecture with a Baroque cathedral stuck in the middle of it. That sounded wrong, too. I was a nobody from nowhere, like no-one, belonging to nothing. That sounded better. That felt true. All my ties had loosened. I had reached an anti-Jerusalem: not a home, but an away. A place that did not bind, but dissolved.
I saw Vasco’s folly, its red walls dominating the crest of the hill above the town. I was particularly struck by its high, high tower, which looked like something out of a fairy story. It was crowned by a gigantic heron’s nest, though I could not see any of those haughty, majestic birds. No doubt Vasco had bribed the local planning officers to allow him to build something so out of keeping with the low whitewashed coolness of the other houses in the area. The edifice was as high as the twin towers adorning the Benengeli church; Vasco had set himself up as God’s rival, and this, too, I learned, had made him many enemies in the town. I instructed Vivar the cabbie to take me to the ‘Little Alhambra’ and he made his way through the village’s winding streets, which were deserted, probably because it was the time of the siesta. However, the air was full of the noise of traffic and pedestrians – shouts, klaxons, the squeal of brakes. Round each corner I expected to find a bustle of people, or a traffic jam, or both. But we seemed by some chance to be avoiding that area of the village. Indeed, we were lost. When we had gone past a certain bar, La Gobernadora, for the third time, I decided to pay off the taxicab and make my way on foot, in spite of my weariness and the buzzing, achy ‘jet-lag’ disturbance in my head. The cabbie was annoyed to be dismissed so brusquely, and it is possible that in my ignorance of the local currency and customs I may have under-tipped.
‘May you never find what you seek,’ he shouted after me, in perfect English, making the sign of horns with his left hand. ‘May you stay lost in this infernal maze, in this village of the damned, for a thousand nights and a night.’
I went into La Gobernadora to ask directions. My eyes, which had been squinting against the razor-sharp brilliance of the light bouncing off Benengeli’s white walls, took a moment to adjust to the darkness inside the bar. A barman with a white apron was polishing a glass. There were a few shapes of old men near the back of the narrow, deep room. ‘Does anyone speak English?’ I asked. It was as if I had not spoken. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, going up to the bartender. He looked right through me and turned away. Had I become invisible? But no, obviously not, I had been visible enough to bad-tempered Vivar, and so had my money. I became irritable, and reached across the bar to tap the barman on the back. ‘House of Señor Miranda,’ I enunciated carefully. ‘What road?’
The man, a thick-waisted fellow sporting a white shirt, green wa
istcoat and slicked-back black hair, gave a sort of groan – contempt? laziness? disgust? – and came out from behind his bar. He stood in the doorway and pointed. Now I could see, opposite the bar’s entrance, a narrow lane passing between two houses, and, at the far end of the lane, many people moving quickly to and fro. That must be the throng I had been hearing; but how had I failed to notice this lane before? I was evidently in even worse shape than I had thought.
With my suitcase increasing in weight all the time, and pulling Jawaharlal along by his lead (his wheels clattering and bouncing over the uneven cobbles) I made my way down the little lane and found myself in a most un-Spanish thoroughfare, a ‘pedestrianised’ street full of non-Spaniards – the majority being somewhat elderly, though immaculately turned-out, and the minority young and calculatedly scruffy in the manner of the fashion-conscious classes – who plainly had no interest in the siesta or any other local customs. This thoroughfare, which, as I would discover, was known by the locals as the Street of Parasites, was flanked by a large number of expensive boutiques – Gucci, Hermès, Aquascutum, Cardin, Paloma Picasso – and also by eating-places ranging from Scandinavian meatball-vendors to a Stars-and-Stripes-liveried Chicago Rib Shack. I stood in the midst of a crowd that pushed past me in both directions, ignoring my presence completely in the manner of city-dwellers rather than village folk. I heard people speaking English, American, French, German, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and what might have been either Dutch or Afrikaans. But these were not visitors; they carried no cameras, and behaved as people do on their own territory. This denatured part of Benengeli had become theirs. There was not a single Spaniard to be seen. ‘Perhaps these expatriates are the new Moors,’ I thought. ‘And I am one of them, after all, arriving here in search of something that matters to nobody but myself, and staying, perhaps, to die. Perhaps, in another street, the locals are planning a reconquest, and it will all finish when, like our precursors, we are driven into ships at the port of Cádiz.’
‘Notice that, although the street is crowded, the eyes of those crowding it are empty,’ said a voice at my shoulder. ‘It may be hard for you to pity these lost souls in alligator shoes and sports-shirts with crocodiles over their nipples, but compassion is what is required here. Forgive them their sins, for these blood-suckers are already in Hell.’
The speaker was a tall, elegant, silver-haired gentleman wearing a cream linen suit and a permanently sardonic expression. The first thing I noticed about him was his enormous tongue, which his mouth seemed unable to contain. It was forever licking at his lips in a suspiciously satirical way. He had beautiful twinkling blue eyes that were certainly not empty; indeed, they seemed replete with all manner of knowledge and mischief. ‘You seem tired, sir,’ he said, formally. ‘Allow me to buy you a coffee and act, should you desire it, as your interlocutor and guide.’ His name was Gottfried Helsing, he spoke twelve languages – ‘oh, the usual dozen,’ he said airily, as if they were oysters – and though he had the manners of a German grandee I noted that he lacked the resources to have the stains cleaned off his suit. Wearily, I accepted his invitation.
‘It is hard to forgive life for the force with which the great machines of what-is bear down upon the souls of those-who-are,’ he said carelessly when we were seated at a parasol-shaded café table with strong black coffees and glasses of Fundador. ‘How to forgive the world for its beauty, which merely disguises its ugliness; for its gentleness, which merely cloaks its cruelty; for its illusion of continuing, seamlessly, as the night follows the day, so to speak – whereas in reality life is a series of brutal ruptures, falling upon our defenceless heads like the blows of a woodsman’s axe?’
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ I said, choosing my words so as not to give offence. ‘I see that you are a man given to the contemplative life. But I have made a long journey, and it is not yet complete; my present needs do not permit me the luxury of chewing the fat …’
Once again I had the sensation of non-existence. Helsing simply continued to speak, without giving the impression of having heard a word I had said. ‘Do you see that man?’ he said, pointing to an old and unexpectedly Spanish-looking fellow drinking beer at a bar across the street. ‘He used to be the mayor of Benengeli. During the Civil War, however, he took up the republican cause, alongside the men of Erasmo – do you know Erasmo?’ He did not wait for my reply. ‘After the war men like him, prominent citizens who had opposed Franco, were rounded up in the school at Erasmo, or in the bull-ring at Avellaneda, and shot. He decided to go into hiding. In his house there was a small alcove behind a wardrobe, and there he spent his days. At night his wife would shut the shutters and he would emerge. The only people who knew the secret were his wife, daughter and brother. His wife would walk all the way down the hid to buy food so that the locals did not see her buying enough for two. They were unable to make love because, being devout Catholics, they could not use contraceptives, and the consequences of her becoming pregnant would have been fatal for them both. This went on for thirty years, until the general amnesty.’
‘Thirty years in hiding!’ I burst out, gripped by the tale in spite of my fatigue. ‘What a torment that must have been!’
‘It was as nothing compared to what happened after he emerged,’ said Helsing. ‘For then his beloved Benengeli became the preserve of this international riff-raff; and, in addition, those of his generation who were still alive had all been Falangists, and refused to speak a single word to their old opponent. His wife died of influenza, his brother of a tumour, and his daughter married and moved away to Seville. In the end he was reduced to sitting here, among the Parasites, because there was no longer a place for him amongst his own people. So, you see, he has become a rootless foreigner, too. This is how his principles have been rewarded.’
There was a brief lull in Helsing’s soliloquy while he contempted the mayor’s tale, and I took advantage of it to ask him the way to Vasco Miranda’s home. He looked at me with a faint puzzlement in his eyes, as if he had not quite understood what I was saying, and then, with a light, dismissive shrug, picked up his own thread.
‘I, too, have had a similar reward,’ he mused. ‘I fled my country when the Nazis came to power and spent a number of years travelling in South America. I am a photographer by trade. In Bolivia I made a book showing the horrors of the tin mines. In Argentina, I photographed Eva Perón once in her lifetime and again after her death. I never returned to Germany because I felt too deeply the pollution of its culture by what had happened there. I felt the absence of the Jews like a great chasm; even though I am not a Jew.’
‘I am half a Jew,’ I said foolishly. Helsing paid me no heed.
‘Eventually, in reduced financial circumstances, I came to Benengeli, because here I could afford to live simply on my small pension. When the Parasites heard that I was a German who had been in South America they began to call me “the Nazi”. That is their name for me now. So my reward for a life in opposition to certain evil ideas is to have them hung round my neck in my old age. I no longer talk to the Parasites. I no longer talk to anyone. What a rare treat it is for me to have you, sir, to converse with! The old men here were once the middle-ranking evildoers of the earth: second-rate Mafia bosses, third-rate union-busters, fourth-rate racists. The women are of the type that is excited by jackboots and disappointed by the advent of democracy. The young people are trash: addicts, layabouts, plagiarists, whores. They are all dead, the old and the young, but because their pensions and allowances are still paying up they refuse to lie down in their graves. So they walk up and down this street and eat, and drink, and gossip about the hideous minutiae of their lives. Notice, please, that there are no mirrors to be seen here. If there were, none of these trapped shades would be reflected in them. When I understood that this was their Hell, as they are mine, I learned to feel sorry for them.
‘Such is Benengeli, my home.’
‘And Miranda …’ I repeated, faintly, thinking that it would be best if I did not tell Hels
ing too much about my own morally compromised life.
‘There is not the slightest chance that you will ever meet Señor Vasco Miranda, our greatest and most dreadful inhabitant,’ said Helsing, smiling softly. ‘I hoped you would take the hint I have been dropping by my refusal to answer your persistent questions, but since you have not I must tell you straight that you’re here on a wild-goose chase. As Don Quixote would say, you’re looking for this year’s birds in last year’s nests. Nobody sees Miranda from month to month, not even his servants. There was a woman asking for him recently – pretty little thing! – but she got nowhere and buggered off to God knows where. They say …’
‘What woman?’ I interrupted. ‘How long ago? How do you know she didn’t get in?’
‘Just a woman,’ he answered, licking his lips. ‘How long ago? – Not long. Just a while. – And she didn’t get in because nobody gets in. Aren’t you listening? They say that everything inside that house has grown stagnant; everything. They wind up the clocks but time doesn’t move. The great tower has been locked up for years. Nobody goes up there except, probably, the old madman himself. They say the dust in the tower rooms comes up to your knees because he won’t let the servants in to clean up. They say a whole wing of that huge palace has been invaded by the creosote bush, la gobernadora. They say … ’
‘I don’t care what they say,’ I cried, seeing that it was time for a firmer attitude. ‘It is imperative that I see him. I will use the telephone in the café.’