Southern Seas (14 page)

‘Wait till you taste it, idiot,’ replied Fuster, bending like an alchemist over his retort vials.

‘A few snails to add the final touch. That’s what’s missing. Pepe, today you’ll have a real paella from its homeland, the one they used to make before fishermen corrupted it by drowning the fish in roux.’

‘It’s a good thing you eat it yourself.’

‘It’s because I’m studying anthropology.’

They put the paella on the kitchen table, and Carvalho prepared to eat it country-style, without plates, simply demarcating a portion of territory within the container. In theory it was a paella for five people, whose only effort would be to keep themselves well lubricated. They finished the five-litre bottle of wine, and
began another. Then Beser brought out a bottle of Mistela de Alcalá de Chisvert for the
flaons
.

‘Before you can no longer tell a sonnet from a piece of the telephone directory, you must solve the problem my detective friend wants to consult you about. By the way, I still haven’t introduced you. On my right, Sergio Beser, a mean, red-haired son of a bitch weighing in at seventy-eight kilos. On my left, Pepe Carvalho. How much do you weigh? Sergio’s the man who knows more about Clarín than anyone. So much so that if Clarín came back to life, he’d slaughter him. Nothing literary is beyond him. What he doesn’t know, I do. “Robust slaves, sweating from the kitchen fires, left the first-course delicacies on the table, on huge plates of red Sagunto terracotta …” Who’s that by?’

‘
Sónnica the Courtesan
, by Blasco Ibáñez,’ said Beser petulantly.

‘How do you know?’

‘When we’re going to get drunk, you recite Pemán’s ode to paella; and when you are drunk, you come out with the banquet that Sónnica organized in Sagunto for Acteon of Athens.’

‘ “Each diner had a slave in attendance behind him, and from the crater they filled the cups for the first libation.” ’ While Fuster continued with his solitary recitation, Carvalho produced the sheets of paper on which he had typed Stuart Pedrell’s literary hieroglyph. Beser suddenly assumed the gravity of a diamond specialist, and his diabolic ruddy eyebrows rose, bristling, to the challenge. Fuster stopped to fill his mouth with the last
flaon
. Beser rose to his feet and walked round his guests twice. He drank his Mistela, and Fuster refilled his glass. The professor recited in a low voice, as if trying to memorize the lines of verse. Then he returned to his chair and left the paper on the table. His voice was as cool as if he had been drinking iced water all evening, and as he spoke he rolled himself a cigarette of light Virginia tobacco.

‘The first line is no problem. It comes from T.S.Eliot’s
Waste Land
. My favourite line in the poem is: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” But that’s not got a lot to do with the business of going south. I don’t want to bore you, but I should say that the myth of the south, as a symbol of warmth and light, of life and the rebirth of time, is a very common theme in literature—particularly once the Americans discovered it as a cheap place to spend their holiday dollars.

‘The second fragment is also rather obvious. It’s from
The South Seas
—the first poem published by Pavese, an Italian poet much influenced by American literature. He never actually went to the South Seas, and he wrote this poem under the influence of reading Melville. Have you read Melville? Don’t give me that book-burner’s look! Reading is a solitary and perfectly harmless vice. In this poem, Pavese writes of an adolescent’s fascination with a sailor relative who had travelled halfway round the world. When the relative returns, the boy asks him about his travels in the South Seas, but the sailor’s answers are full of disillusionment. For the boy, the South Seas are a paradise; for the sailor, they’re just another landscape marked by the daily routine of work. In my opinion, poets are a disagreeable bunch. They’re like women. They trap you and leave you not knowing where you are. They’re prick-teasers.

‘As for the third fragment, it’s difficult to say where it’s from. It’s a perfect hendecasyllabic, and could have been written by any Italian poet since the sixteenth century. But that nostalgia for the south gives it a more modern ring. Maybe it’s by a poet from the Italian south, and maybe he’s referring to Sicily or Naples.
Più nessuno mi porterà nel sud
. Something tells me I know it.
Più nessuno mi porterà nel sud
. In any case, the three fragments suggest a full cycle of disenchantment: the intellectual’s self-image of
reading all night and then going south in the winter, so as to cheat coldness and death; then the fear that this mythical south might turn out to be just more routine and disenchantment; and finally, total disillusionment … No more will anyone carry me south.’

‘But he put together these three fragments when he’d decided to go south. When he even had the tickets bought, and the hotels booked.’

‘Which south, though? Maybe he discovered that although he was in the south, he would never actually reach the south. As García Lorca once wrote: “Although I know the road, I shall never reach Córdoba.” Do you understand? Poets like to play tricks on us, and on themselves. Did you hear that, Enric? The little pansy knows the road, but doesn’t go to Córdoba. Poets really are the dregs. Like his compatriot, Alberti, who says he’ll never go to Granada. He took it into his head to punish the city. I myself have a different conception of poetry: it should be didactic and historical. Do you know my scenic poem on El Cid’s campaign through the kingdom of Valencia? Enric and I will act you a little extract from it, when we’ve drunk a few more bottles and Enric is willing to play the fool.
Più nessuno mi porterà nel sud
. I’m going to go and read the spine of every poetry book on those shelves, and then I’m sure it’ll come to me.’

He climbed up a little library ladder and began to look down the shelves. Every now and then he took a book down, leafed through it, and occasionally exclaimed in surprise: ‘I didn’t even know I had this book!’ Fuster, meanwhile, was listening mournfully to a record of Gregorian chant that he had put on for his own pleasure. ‘Getting warm! Warmer!’ Sergio Beser was now actually perched on a bookshelf, looking for all the world like a pirate in a boarding party. ‘Can’t you two smell the South Seas? I can hear the surf.’ He pulled out a slim, tattered volume. First he flicked through it, barely pausing to read. Then he swooped on one of the pages.

‘I’ve got it! Here it is!’

Fuster and Carvalho jumped to their feet, excited at the prospect of a revelation now so close to hand. All the warmth of the food and alcohol rose with them, and through clouds of emotion, they saw Sergio standing at the masthead, with the missal between his hands. He had the solemn face of someone about to unveil a dramatic denouement.

‘
Lamento per il sud
, by Salvatore Quasimodo.
La luna rossa, il vento, il tuo cuore di donna del Nord, la distesa di nave
 … It’s like Vendrell’s
L’Emigrant
or Juanito Valderrama’s
El Emigrante
, but with a Nobel Prize attached. Here it is:
Ma l’uomo grida la sorte d’una patria. Più nessuno mi porterà nel sud
.’

With an audible cracking of much-abused knee-joints, he jumped down from the bookcase and handed the little book to Carvalho.
La vita non è sogno
, by Salvatore Quasimodo. ‘Life is not a dream.’ Carvalho read the poem. The lament of a southerner who realizes that he is powerless to return south. His heart has remained in the green fields and overcast waters of Lombardy.

‘It’s almost a social poem. Very little ambiguity. Not very polysemic, as
Tel Quel
would say. This collection was published shortly after the war, at the height of critical neo-realism. Just think: “The south is tired of carting round corpses … tired of loneliness, of chains … tired of the blasphemies of those whose shouts of death have echoed in its wells, who have drunk the blood from its heart.” There is also an amorous counterpoint to the poem: in revealing his sadness as an uprooted southerner, he is speaking to the woman he loves … Is all this of any use to you?’

Carvalho re-read Stuart Pedrell’s sheet of paper.

‘Just literature, in other words.’

A drop of contemptuous spittle flicked from his lip.

‘Yes, I would say so. Just literature. It’s amazing the obsession that people have about the south. Maybe it meant something before the days of tour operators and charter flights, but now the south no longer exists. The Americans have built a literary mythology out of nothing, and the south owes its very existence
to them. The word “south” has a primal meaning for every North American. It’s their accursed place, their vanquished territory in a land of conquerors; the only defunct white civilization in the United States—the Deep South. Everything else follows from that … Do you really not know our Valencian theatre cycle? In a moment, Enric and I will perform it for you. You’ll see the difference between a literature of posed sentiment and a genuine popular literature. I’ll be El Cid, and you, Enric, the King of the Moors.’

‘You always take the best parts.’

‘Not another word! I shall now set the scene. Here is El Cid—although some people say that he wasn’t actually the Cid. Anyway, here is the lord of Morella at the city gates, and he sees the approach of the Moorish troops. He goes to the Moor commander and says:

Beser and Fuster began singing and jigging around:

When they finally came to rest in front of Carvalho, he clapped until his hands hurt. The professor and the manager bowed gravely.

‘That first piece could be called “The Defence of Morella”. The next one takes place before the gates of Valencia.’

Fuster went on all fours, and Beser sat on top of him.

‘I’m El Cid, riding on his horse Babieca. A Moor, whom you will have to imagine, exclaims:

‘That’s it,’ said Beser, dismounting.

‘Popular theatre is always short. Do you know
David and the Harp
?’

Just as Carvalho was saying no, a hot belch came up from his liver. Beser rolled another cigarette. Fuster was dozing, face down, on the kitchen table.

‘You have to imagine the palace of Jerusalem. David is furious with Solomon for reasons we don’t need to go into. But he is clearly furious. Imagine all the Asiatic luxury you can, and whatever kind of harp you like. Have you ever seen a harp?’

Carvalho drew the form of a harp in the air. Beser examined it with a critical eye.

‘More or less. Anyway, David is furious with Solomon for reasons we don’t need to go into. Solomon says: “David, play the harp.” David looks at him, and frowns. He takes the harp and throws it in the river. That’s all. What do you think of it?’

Carvalho stood up to applaud. Beser gave the half-smile of a victorious toreador feigning modesty. Fuster lifted himself off the table and tried to clap, but had difficulty making his hands meet.

Then the little light remaining in Carvalho’s head went out. He felt himself being dragged into a car, and amid false images and memories, he found himself heaped with Enric Fuster in the rear seat of a car that was neither his nor Fuster’s. The professor’s ruddy face extended into the glowing tip of a lighted cigarette
which helped him to see the road down which the car was travelling in an attempt to prove that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points.

He pictured his liver as some kind of animal half consumed by sulphuric acid. A purée of shit and blood. His head and legs felt slow and heavy, and he had a Saharan thirst. Water. The thirst swelled from his mouth and took over his chest. As he groped for the refrigerator in the dark, he patted his liver in an attempt to gain its indulgence and calm its fury. Never again. Never again. Why did he do these things? One drinks in the hope or expectation of that click that will open ever-closed doors. He picked up the bottle of ice-cold mineral water and filled his mouth, letting the liquid dribble down his pyjama front. Then he looked for a particular crystal-cut glass which he used only for bottles of champagne costing over five hundred pesetas. He filled it with the same cold water that had just served him as a shower. This, he decided, would be his early morning champagne.