The Wanderess (13 page)

The man at the desk was suspicious. I was too finely
dressed with my evening party suit and silk foulard to be seeking
a room in such a place. He asked for three nights in advance and I
paid them, collected the key, and since there were no porters, I
dragged my valises myself, and my case of wine, down the hall,
had a look at the scene, and came back.

Intolerable filth, insects buzzing in the stale air, and only
an old animal skin flopped on the floor to serve as a bed.
Bathroom down the hall.
This adventure put me in a foul mood.

Alone, I bolted the lock, tossed my valises on the floor,
looked out the tiny window at the street, and opened a bottle of
sparkling wine from the case; and, spilling the first sip on the
windowsill in honor of Dionysus—as it is my custom to pay
respect to this god when I drink, lest one day the holy grape cease
to grow—I toasted to myself: “Well, Saul, here’s a drink to
drinking during the waning moon. May the next moon bring
better lodgings.” I swilled the bubbling wine from the bottle, not
caring for how fast, or to what condition, it intoxicated me.

I sat down on the animal skin and drank more, and more.
With the first halos of inebriation, I thought about sweet little
Saskia… ‘It’s good that I gave her her bed back. She would never
have suggested that I leave on her own. She was too polite for
that. And all that nonsense about me ‘having to stay there’; and of
us ‘travelling together,’ and the worst of it… that phrase about my
sleeping in the road in fine clothes
, which got her worked-up to no
end, until she swore
I was meant to find her
—or
she was meant to
find me
… and that we needed to stick close to one another… all
that was either due to her madness, or else just the innocent
fantasies of a young adolescent girl’s mind.’ I drank more wine
and stopped thinking about her
.
I stopped thinking all together.
I drank one liter of wine after the other, trying to dim my eyes so
as not to look upon the wretchedness of my room. Soon I fell
asleep dead-drunk on the animal skin on the floor.

It was evening when I awoke with a terrible temper. The wine had
done me no good. I was claustrophobic in that little room. My
nerves were bad. But it wasn’t as simple as to go out and wander
the streets. Along with the claustrophobia, I was feeling that
famous
terror of the marketplace,
agoraphobia, which I recall only
experiencing after grave misadventures. It came like any
transitory madness and overwhelmed me with incredible anxiety
so that I didn’t know how to cure myself of the claustrophobic
feeling. I couldn’t go outside. Just the idea of being in Barcelona
filled me with terror. Going
out there
, to mingle with the crowds,
with them
—I had to avoid this at all costs! All of the life out there
in the streets was too tied in my poisoning experience of the week
before. I chattered my teeth; and to prevent myself from losing
my mind completely, I would have to wait for the hour of my boat
alone in my miserable room. To be in the streets was intolerable.
My hotel room was intolerable. Only sleep or alcohol offered to
hide me from my private hell. Such transitory madness is the
product of
travel and experience
, a fever which adventurers don’t
mention in their memoirs. Surely it was
travel and experience
, and
not my
folle conduite
¹
. I opened a new bottle of wine from the
case and began taking greedy swallows. It made me sick. Wine
during a waning moon leads to no good. I wanted to go outside to
find an opium den but the paranoia was too much. I stayed with
my bottles in that slum. I honestly tried to kill myself with that
wine, though I had no idea why.

Morning announced the third
day of my drunken frolic
through the daisies of depression. The sun woke me up. I was
gloomy at first until I remembered I had a boat to catch that day.
The thought of it chased the madness away. As if my old brain
had been replaced by a new instrument, I was fresh. Soon
Barcelona would be but a shameful memory. I was free of this
hotel room, free of other people. Time to leave Barcelona to the
frogs and dogs—adieu!

At ten in the morning, I walked down to the seaport to
check on the status of my boat. I showed my ticket to the
operator at the port authority and he informed me that the
paquebot
would leave that evening at the twenty-first hour. This
meant I had a whole morning, afternoon, and evening to waste
before departing for Florence.

I walked back to my room, shaved, got fresh clothes out of
my valise. Dressed for travel, I left around noon to stroll through
the town, to see if I could get any meaningful impressions of this
wicked city while I was sober and hungover.

The Barrio Gòtico is the most picturesque part of Barcelona I
found. Its mazes of bright, dilapidated streets fascinated me.
This is where my first hotel, the Sant Felip Neri, was. Everywhere
were colorful streamers, birds in cages, dancers, musicians
performing the
passacalle
, revelers and fire-blowers, meanderers
and riffraff. I turned one corner and heard the melody of a guitar.
I followed the sound until I came to an alley where a young man
sat playing. He had a deformed body and was perched on a pile of
wood, old guitar in his hands. He played beautifully and I
listened, though his grotesque body unnerved me. This was the
first time I thought of Saskia that day. Her music was beautiful,
her voice was beautiful, her body was beautiful. Even the dirty
little pads of her feet were beautiful. I cursed myself then. For
once, heaven had sent me Beauty in its most perfected form and I
abandoned it. She might not have been a girl after all but an
angel: a force to guide me on this hazardous path of life I hurry
down… How can life be hazardous if it can only end in death? But
she
was
life. She had nursed me and played majestic music and
sang with a voice that no mortal possessed. While I had been in
her bed, drinking her broth, I thought time and again of older
Spanish seductresses in cabarets and dens of ill-repute.

I continued through the Barrio Gòtico until I reached a
square where I was attracted to a solitary lemon tree that grew on
a berm caged in stones. This vibrant tree gave me solace. I sat on
the stoney edge of the berm beneath the arbor of my tree and
watched the people that passed: Three women came chattering in
the Catalan language, their breasts were large and their legs were
long and I saw in them all the filth of the world. I used to enjoy
such women. Now I saw them as vulgar.

Then came a young child in
a yellow peasant dress, she
pranced through the square chasing a cicada. I thought to offer
her a lemon to match her dress but resisted. She too was vulgar in
her naivety. She had not the knowledge of the world, of music, of
life alone in a messy room, and of copper poisoning, to interest
me. Was I falling in love with Saskia? I didn’t know, though her
memory stirred violence in my heart. An old woman passed the
square, wrinkled, withered, hunched-over. She was smiling at her
own thoughts though death was approaching her. She was like
me, I thought. When I was younger, I would cling to life because
life was at the top of the turning wheel. But like the song of my
gypsy-girl, the great wheel turns over and lands on a minor key. It
is then that you come of age and life means nothing to you. To
live, to die, to overdose, to fall in a coma in the street… it is all the
same. It is only in the peach innocence of youth, like the days in
Saskia’s possession, that life is at its crest on top of the wheel.
And there being
only
life, the young cling to it, they fear death…
And they should!
…For they are
in
life. Now that I had passed that
frightful episode of life:
Youth.
…Now that I was in the flower of
my age, I was more glorious than ever. I was a man. I didn’t fear
death because
I had already experienced life
—I’d lived it to the
core. So why did I miss this child who was in another world. Was
she the life that I so loved once upon a time?

I stayed beneath my lemon tree and a band of Romanian
gitanas
materialized in the center of the square. They had guitars
and crude instruments and wore rags. I would have forgiven
them that, had they played any of the songs that Saskia had
played on the night she found me lying in the street—
‘in fine
clothes,’
as she insisted on saying. But these gypsies played no
such harmonies. They played a raucous cacophony of stringed
disasters—every note off-key. So, alone in a square in Barcelona,
surrounded by an orchestra of diseased women serenading my
tree with broken instruments, I found myself ‘alone and lost.’
Their faces grew uglier and uglier as they played. My lemon tree
turned black as the sky grew dark with storms. Rain fell. This was
the hell that Dante found ‘midway through the journey of his life’:
she-wolves and jackals and gypsy wenches playing out-of-tune
guitars. And here I was, ‘in the 3—
^th
year of my stay on this, our
fruitful earth,’ and I was in Dante’s hell. And with my great age,
the only thing I knew was
, whether or not I was in love with Saskia
didn’t matter,
I had to find her!…

“I will find her!” I gasped and clasped my hands, and
turned on my heels. Then with hope in my heart, I raced down to
the promenade of Las Ramblas and crossed over into the
neighborhood of El Raval. I was doomed though. I should have
asked somebody for the road to the hospital. But that day I didn’t
remember this particular detail of the night of my misadventure.
It came back to me much later.

I walked a long road in the El Raval district, it was riddled
with balconies strewn with clotheslines and sheets hanging to dry.
All was silent except for the sounds of swearing and shouting
coming from the open doorways of taverns where drunken men
gathered. The balconies of the apartment houses all seemed
familiar and not at all right. ‘Where is Saskia’s balcony? Neither
this street, nor that…’ I searched the entire neighborhood and
never found the place where my angel sang and strummed and
danced on glass.

So, I walked, desperate and depressed, turning thoughts
over in my head: ‘If I don’t find Saskia, how can I bring myself to
leave Barcelona?’ In the space of a moment, she had become my
twin planet in this senseless orbit I was a part of, circling around
the sun, around the earth, onward towards frailty, senility, and
death. ‘Without Saskia,’ I thought, ‘the white-nights of Petersburg
will shine no light; and Florence will be the empty carcass of a
forgotten city.’ Was I deranged? Maybe. Yet, is it not
derangement that guides us to seek out those we want to love in
this world?

So cursing my fortune and the winding labyrinth, black as
death, they call Barcelona, I wandered back to Las Ramblas where
I hoped to find Saskia carrying provisions in the crowd. My
madness then took me once again to the Barrio Gòtico. It was
there I saw a familiar site: the Hotel Sant Felip Neri. And outside
the hotel, in its courtyard square, I stopped in horror… ‘What is
that? A dead body?!’

It was the corpse of a man lying face-down, naked on the stones.
Around him was a great commotion of people flailing their arms
and policemen jotting notes. A coroner approached the corpse
and checked it for signs of life; finding none, he covered it with a
sheet. Nearby, another sheet covered what was obviously the
body of another man. He lay under the window of the room that I
was given at the Hotel Sant Felip Neri.

The coroner and some policemen carted away the two
cadavers. Some more police remained to question people who
had witnessed the deaths. I passed through the crowd and
entered the lobby of the Hotel Sant Felip Neri. At the desk was
the same concierge as always, taking a noseful of snuff.

“Yes, well, ‘public death.’ It is a very common sight here in
Barcelona. Happens all the time. Always has.” Then he said with
a hint of condescension, “Oh yes, there was some…
person…
just
here looking for you, a couple of hours ago, a young lady carrying
a guitar case.”

“She was full of questions I couldn’t answer. I told her you
checked-out. She then asked if there was a room available here in
our hotel and I said that we were full. That was before the… uh…
accident
. Before two of our guests died. We seem to have a
couple of vacancies now.”

“It would appear that way.” Through the drapes in the
lobby I could see the coroner directing the passage for the two
cadavers to be carted away. All the while I trembled with rage
knowing this insect of a concierge could have told Saskia where I
was. “Why didn’t you tell her I had moved to the Urquinaona?”

No use in talking to such a creature. I got ready to go…
“The young lady with the guitar case… she didn’t leave a message
for me?”

“No. She just left,” he said, excusing himself to use the
toilet. While he was gone, mumbling, “The fool!” I started up the
stairs. I wanted to see what had come of my old suite in the hotel.

The door was wide open, and
an elderly maid was cleaning
the windows of the door out to the balcony. “Strange about the
two bodies lying in the square,” I said to her.

“A double suicide, apparently.” I contemplated the
relationship between the two men. The placement of one body
had been directly below my old suite’s balcony. The second body
had been below another window in an adjacent room.

“Possibly suicide,” said the maid, “both of ‘em died with
knives sticking in their chests. You see the blood stains on the
balcony railings. So they fell out of the windows
after
being
stabbed…
Or else they were pushed!
Seems both died at the same
time.”

“Damn, I don’t think that,” said the maid, “they sure
weren’t brothers. This one here’s been staying in this suite for an
entire week. He was a man from England, or from Ireland, or
something up there. He didn’t speak a word of Spanish, didn’t
know what he was up to. The other one, though. He was Spanish,
from Madrid. He was very kind to me and said that I was the only
one in the hotel he could talk to, seeing as how he only spoke
Spanish and me too. Pity he had to die. Don’t think it was
suicide. The man from Madrid was too happy of a man. The
Englishman too, he seemed all serious and oh-so-important about
everything. Can’t imagine someone like that just stabbing himself
and leaping out of a window. Nothing stolen that I could see.
The whole thing’s a mystery.”

“A mystery,” I repeated. That was enough to leave a bad
taste in my mouth. I said goodbye to the maid and walked down
the stairs, slipping between two detectives who were heading up.
This murder, as it seemed to me then, had no purpose other than
to make those two rooms vacant. I would soon learn the drama
that would create. Later, much later, all the pieces would come
together. I’ll come to that when it’s time.

I went down through the square and out into the sunshine
of the promenade of Las Ramblas. Down I walked, looking at the
Mediterranean Sea bristling blue with silver filets of sunlight in
my field of vision. When I came to the sea docks, I was informed
of yet another delay. Bad weather near Corsica. My
paquebot
scheduled for that evening wouldn’t sail until the following
morning at daybreak. I cursed aloud, annoyed at having to spend
another night in that roach-infested hotel at Urquinaona; I then
left the docks intent on having a drink to pass the last hour of
daylight.

The tavern where I stopped was at the base of Las Ramblas
where the promenade empties out into the thoroughfare of
seaboard comings-and-goings. It was a dim tavern. I ordered a
beer, not caring where the moon was or what time of year it was, I
just wanted to get to Florence and get this murderous city out of
my head. While I drained my beer, my ears perked-up to the
sound of a Spanish guitar strumming lightly in the background.
My chest tightened and I swung my head around picturing the
gypsy girl who’d taken possession of my thoughts, but there was
nothing in that dingy bar save for an old man playing a pinewood
instrument. His scabby fingers dialed the laments of ‘Recuerdos
de la Alhambra,’ and with that sad song, I hung my head down
and wept.

‘Why are you weeping, Saul?’ I asked myself. ‘Because of
her, and because of me, and because of all that I didn’t do and left
behind forever. Now it’s time to take your old miserable self out
of this bar and away to bed. Tomorrow you wake when the sky
begins to bleed blue into the ink of night. You will walk down to
the harbor and board the boat that will sail away with the gleam
of the rising sun.”

“You forgot something!” said a voice. There was someone
behind me. I set my empty cup down, turned around again, and
saw a ridiculous figure of a man grinning a toothless grin. He said
to me, “Hey-hey! I thought I saw you up by that hotel where the
two men killed themselves. You dropped your scarf up there.”

I didn’t own a scarf. Maybe he was talking about my silk
foulard? That, I was sure I had left back at the Urquinaona. I felt
around my neck. It was true, my foulard was gone, but I was sure
I left it back in my hotel room. The man didn’t know me, he
couldn’t have seen my foulard.

“You saw me up there?”
“I did! You dropped your scarf.”

Of course, if it was the memory of the sad Spanish song,
and the ridiculous notion that I
had
dropped my foulard up by the
Hotel Neri; of course it was these and not other things that caused
me to backtrack my steps and hurry back through the Barrio
Gòtico, back to the place I had wanted to leave behind me forever.