Queens of All the Earth (10 page)

Olivia was a little disappointed, but she thought there was a better chance of shaking Marc than Lenny or Miranda. In fact, she suspected Marc just wanted to get away from them, too.

Sure enough, they parted immediately, each exiting the church a different way. Olivia let her gaze drift, sipping slowly what she had gulped in before. She felt a slight tension, as if she were looking for something.

While she took in the beauty and variety of the church, the image of Miranda waiting in line rose in Olivia’s mind. Olivia wished Miranda would enjoy herself more. Miranda hadn’t seemed to enjoy anything wholeheartedly for years now.

There had been a time when Miranda had seemed open. When she
was in high school and Olivia in elementary school, she used to curl up on Olivia’s bed and tell her about boys who had looked at her in the hall. She used to make social life, grown-up life, sound like stories of adventure like the ones Olivia loved to read. One night, flouncing home from a high school dance, she crept into Olivia’s bedroom, knowing she’d find Olivia up past her bedtime reading with a flashlight, and took the book out of Olivia’s hands and told her to live a little.

Now, Miranda was the stern chaperone, and Olivia was afraid it was because she, like everyone else, was expected to eventually grow out of affection and excitement.

After a little time spent looking around and following their own thoughts, Olivia and Marc managed to wander back to the same façade, smiling first, then drifting closer until they were simply waiting for the other to break the silence.

Marc sat down on a balustrade and crossed his legs, waiting for Olivia to join him, which she did, sheepishly.

“Aren’t the pictures stories?” she asked, pointing lazily up at the rippling façade, from which rounded faces and supplicant bodies emerged in a chaotic tangle. “Do you know what any of them are?”

“I can’t tell,” he said, then cleared his throat. “Some of them look less than pleasant.”

Olivia turned and looked at the street beyond the church.

“There’s a park there,” she said. “With palm trees. And a green pond. The paths are made of dirt.”

Marc turned and looked as well.

“Look, they’ve got some Scottish people there, too,” he said, pointing out the cluster of blue jerseys. “I was trying to look this up. Are the palm trees indigenous to this area, or do you think they just planted them there to make the city more beachy and tropical?”

“They look perfect in that park,” Olivia said. “I think I just saw a green
bird flying away from there.”

“Probably the sheen on a pigeon. Though maybe, when they brought the palm trees, they also brought tropical birds.”

“Maybe it escaped from one of the street stalls,” Olivia said.

“A satisfactory conclusion. I couldn’t have put it better myself.” Marc laughed. “Thank you for saving me from my own cynicism.”

Olivia smiled.

“Do you and your sister travel together a lot?” Marc asked.

“This is my first time out of the U.S., actually. She’s done more. She’s already been to—”

“Madrid. She told me.”

Olivia laughed.

“Well,” she said, “I deferred my freshman year of college, and I—I wasn’t doing much of anything, and Miranda said I should go out and get some culture. I think she sees it more like a super-concentrated precollege study abroad than a vacation.”

Olivia sighed. She had felt the strain of Miranda’s expectations, especially because Miranda had paid for her own half of the trip herself, while their mother was paying for Olivia, pocket money and all. Olivia felt she owed it to them both to make an effort to learn and be grown-up.

“Do you have any other siblings?”

“No.” She paused uncomfortably when she realized she was on the verge of saying they barely had a mother.

Olivia’s silence terminated the conversation. They turned together to look again at the incomplete church.

“How long has it been?” Olivia asked when it seemed to be long enough.

“We can go in and see where they are,” Marc said.

Lenny and Miranda weren’t far from where they had been before, but several noisy families had accumulated behind them in line, so at
least they felt they’d made some progress. As Marc and Olivia slid up the winding maze of the rope barriers, the noisy families escalated their volume, and a few of the more alert children wailed. Apparently, it was unfair to cut in such a slow line, even if someone had been legitimately holding a place for them.

Marc and Olivia decided to retreat, agreeing to meet Lenny and Miranda outside, near the entrance where they’d all come in.

Together, Olivia and Marc drifted down the undulating steps of the church and out into the street. There were souvenir shops to be examined and the park to explore—but not, it turned out, to linger in. For in addition to palm trees and green pigeons, it was home to the rich scent of sewage, which began with the public water closets dominating the far corner.

After walking until they were hollow with hunger and footsore enough to mar anything new they might see, Olivia and Marc agreed to break Lenny’s rule and get food. They searched until they found the perfect café—that is, the one exactly like every other café they had passed, and within easy sight of the agreed-upon meeting point, that being the booth where they had first entered the Sagrada Familia. The café was a cross between a coffee shop and a diner, with vinyl-padded seats, shiny black and white tiles, and an exotic menu. While they waited for their food, they watched, mildly bemused, as the waiters gently deflected wandering beggars from the outdoor seating.

A man with a clarinet and another on tenor sax set up by the bench on the other side of the pavement, and Olivia and Marc sat back to watch the scene for another hour. Their growing concern for the others was offset by their growing irritation and boredom. What had started as light chattiness ran dry and lapsed into companionable silence, but even that began to sour as the wait grew longer.

At last, Lenny and Miranda emerged from the church courtyard and swayed toward their waiting friends. After getting to the top, Lenny had
suggested they take the spiral stairs down the spire so they wouldn’t have to pay the elevator fee again. (To prevent congestion on the narrow stairs, the church’s managers forbade tourists from climbing
up
them.) Besides, they’d get to look through all the little windows on the way. Miranda, whose vertigo had practically overwhelmed her at the top, stopped on every landing to close her eyes.

They were ready for lunch, overpriced or not, and they didn’t mind that Olivia and Marc would have to wait a while longer. Miranda sat next to her sister and, sensing her restlessness, squeezed her hand under the table. It grounded her. Soon, Olivia discovered a fresh wave of hunger in time to join in on their greasy, messy, chattering meal.

After another hour, they set off, having crossed out the museum at the top of the Casa Milá due to the loss of time at the Sagrada Familia, which Marc had anticipated all along. They stayed just long enough at Milá to snap a dozen digital pictures, but from the street level, the complex looked a bit bland and malformed—“like a gray plastic house left in front of a radiator,” according to Marc, and they all agreed. They moved on to the Casa Batlló.

The Casa Battló was just around the corner from their hostel. Olivia’s guidebooks told her that the embellishments of the building, with its vertebrae balconies and scaled roof, depicted St. George defeating the dragon. Olivia looked forward to finding the story in its molten folds.

Olivia remembered playing with Miranda in the backyard when she was very, very small, sitting on the lowest branches of the tree they called a tower and pretending the neighbor’s dog was a dragon. While Miranda, who always insisted on being the queen, shouted orders to an imaginary army of knights below, never waiting to be saved, Olivia, the princess, had thought how nice it would be to languish, as long as she had a steady supply of books and food. Miranda would tease her for it, then dare her to run into the neighbor’s yard.

(When Olivia had told their mother about the games, their mother had said something cryptic about eating up the patriarchal myths of the Romantic era and told her to instead pretend to be an archeologist leading her own expedition.)

So Olivia had looked forward to the Casa Battló, but by the time they arrived, their visit was limited to a neck-snapping stare at the exterior, thanks to impossibly long lines and an early closing hour.

They tried to enjoy that for a while, crossed the street to see if they could catch a glimpse of the tiled roof from that angle (they couldn’t), and then ducked in front of people who had just finished taking a picture and walked blindly in front of those who were just about to.

“And that’s how you do Gaudí in a day,” Lenny croaked triumphantly as they shuffled toward Casa Joven, each person uniquely disappointed.

“Now we know,” Marc said.

Olivia remembered seeing water from the top of the Cathedral of Barcelona yesterday. She remembered the streaming air up there, and the transformation that had occurred below while she’d waited, floating, above. Reaching for Miranda’s hand, she said, “Let’s go to the beach. I haven’t seen the beach yet.”

“It’s been a long day,” Miranda said, extricating her hand. She was afraid of Olivia’s tone, which had the desperate excitement that had preceded her dives into fantastic waking dreams.

“But you can’t say you’ve been to Barcelona without seeing the Mediterranean,” Lenny said. “I could use a good drink in a beach bar somewhere.”

“It’s only a few stops away,” Marc said. “We can take the Metro.”

“Well.” Miranda sighed. The enthusiasm of the others eased her concern. “I like listening to the waves. It could be relaxing. And it shouldn’t be too crowded in the off-season.”

They walked past their hostel and down a few more blocks to the Plaça
Catalunya Metro, where they were swallowed by its bareness and the hot scent of metal and oil. A guitarist in the tile-paved tunnel played songs by the Police.

“I only give them change if they sing in Spanish,” Lenny said, the only comment made as they waited on the platform.

The ride of five stops was agonizing, and so was the strenuous walk from the closest stop to the beach, toward the twin high-rises that towered over the sand. Perplexing curvaceous artwork and blocky hotels shot up around them, crested, and ebbed away, and Olivia broke into a jog, charged with a childlike impatience, until she was stopped by the pavement railing that overlooked the beach and the sea.

She waited there until the others caught up, but as soon as they did, Olivia dashed off again, down along the rail and past an advertisement asking swimmers if they were thirsty, and tripped down the slide of sandy dirt and stringy grass to the beach, warm, glowing, and alive.

A green bird flew from a tree.

The water was blue and white.

The air smelled like fish.

Black and brown rocks neatly cut the coast into groomed partitions.

A thickset woman in a forest-green bikini sunned herself on the sand, alone, while passing walkers laughed at her or pretended to ignore her.

Olivia threw herself down the beach, gathering up with swaying arms every gift thrown to her—like the wind that blew off the water and made her clothing mold against her body, shift, and cling again, and made her cheeks bright and her eyes fill. She felt the sea throwing swells toward her that billowed and fell and grew again to crash as waves and cast out shy, quiet, shallow washes, eaten again by the following waves. She stumbled
out of her shoes, leaving them somewhere upside-down behind her on the sand.

She felt the water beating against her hips, under her feet, under the palms of her hands, encircling her waist, sliding down the taut muscles of her legs, smoothing over the curves of her waving arms. It created something: a solid body that arose from the waves, panting and smiling, alive. He rolled toward her, legs awash, dripping with the many rivulets that composed his body, blue and white, green and brown and black. The sun struck him and made him real.

“Olivia! Olivia!” he yelled. The form that had emerged from the waves was Greg Brown.

“Olivia! I will wade out!” Wade out? He was already out. He spoke too soon; the sea tossed another wave up at him and knocked at his knees, and he fell into the water, dissolving and resolving, standing, laughing, his mouth full of laughter, while she crept slowly into the water toward him.

“Olivia! I will wade out, ’til my thighs are steeped in burning flowers!” he called to her. He emerged again from the water after another dunk. “I will take the sun in my mouth.”

Now, his feet encrusted with sand and water streaming down his slicked masses of hair, his eyes were filled with the sea and the sun and with her. He leaned toward her. His smiling mouth spoke.

“I waded out, ’til my thighs were steeped in burning flowers. I took the sun in my mouth, and I leaped into the ripe air.”

Alive
, the sea answered.
With closed eyes.

To dash against darkness,
the green bird said.

In the sleeping curves of my body
, Olivia’s skin sang.