Читать книгу: «The Other Half of Augusta Hope», страница 5
Parfait
The soldiers, when they felt like it, broke into our hut and broke my sisters’ bodies as if they were clay jars with nothing inside them.
Although we were broken, I thought, we would fly away to Spain, and I pictured us all up above the clouds like grey-crowned cranes, or angels, with white-feathered wings. Oh yes, please send angels to swoop down and rescue Douce and Gloria, right now this minute, I prayed.
But failing that, and in the absence of angels, I would take them to Spain where no man could touch them, and I’d build them all a little white stone house down by the water, and I’d tie each one of them a hammock between two palm trees, and they could lie there, swinging, and I’d go fishing in the blue sea, and when I came home, we’d all sit around the fire barbecuing fish and reading Spanish poetry.
Augusta
My mother and father wanted Julia and me to go on with French. But for the first year ever in our new school, Hedley Heights, we could choose Spanish in Year 9, or, if you were in the top set, you could do French and Spanish together.
Julia was not in the top set, and she chose to carry on with French. She didn’t really want to because she was in love with Diego at number 13, as I was too, but she did French (which she was awful at) because she always liked to do what my parents wanted.
‘It hurts me when they look disappointed,’ she said.
‘They’re manipulating you,’ I said.
If you wanted, as an extra, at Hedley Heights, you could also do Latin at lunchtimes. I put my name down in the first week of Year 7, which meant I would miss Cookery Club, one of its most significant attractions. In the beginning. Before I loved everything else about it.
My mother had signed us both up for Cookery Club, cooking being her thing. I’d spotted that some people assumed cooking would be my thing, by dint of me being a girl, and the best way, it seemed, to destroy that assumption would be never to learn to cook. Either in Cookery Club or in the many invitations made to me by my mother in the kitchen at number 1.
‘Oh, Augusta,’ said my mother. ‘What good will Latin be to you later on?’
‘Perhaps I will be a professor at Cambridge University,’ I said.
‘Professors at Cambridge University still need to cook,’ said my mother.
Which was a perfect example of the knack she had of entirely missing the point.
‘I don’t know what you’re planning to do with all these words you’re so keen on,’ said my mother.
‘You wait and see,’ I said.
Here I was, alone in Spanish, in Year 9, with España dancing on the air around my head, light as a fairy-sprite, like a butterfly, like the feeling of spring.
Before I could stop myself, I put up my hand and asked the teacher what the word was for sprite in Spanish. Because I couldn’t stop myself. And I didn’t want to know how to say I am called Augusta, which was clearly where we were heading.
‘Fairy or sprite – hada,’ said the teacher, but his mouth was all soft like a bean bag when he said it. I wondered if I could do that with my own mouth, soften the d to the point of collapse.
‘Or duende, I suppose,’ said the teacher, ‘which actually means spirit, except it’s untranslatable.’
Untranslatable, my ears pricked up – what a lovely, complicated thought. I saved it away for later, hoping that I was untranslatable, myself.
‘A book has just come out called Duende,’ said the teacher. ‘A book by Jason Webster – you may want to read it.’
Duende – I tried the word out on my tongue, imitating the teacher.
‘Duende,’ said the teacher, ‘is that …’
He hesitated.
‘That …’
We stared at him.
‘That moment of ecstasy.’
He stopped.
I thought of how much I wanted to find it, that thing I couldn’t find, whatever it was.
Parfait
I knew where to find it, the thing I couldn’t find. It was up there, to the north – I just knew it was.
I headed up the hill to see Víctor, who was out in the vegetable garden, digging. Because I’d decided.
‘We have a Hutu president again, Parfait,’ he said. ‘They really are sharing power – and maybe peace is in sight!’
I watched him pull the big flappy leaves off a broccoli stalk, putting them in one basket, the little tree-like head in the other, and I thought, I’m not interested in the new president.
The chickens went on clucking about in the mud, beside the pen, and Víctor’s band of blind children were in the yard, swinging their white sticks, chanting: ‘Left foot out, stick to the right, right foot out, stick to the left.’
‘I’ve made up my mind, Víctor,’ I said. ‘I’m going to travel to your country and set up home there.’
‘Are you now?’ said Víctor, kneeling back with his buttocks resting on his heels, winking at me.
‘What’s the point of staying here?’ I said.
‘Well, it sounds a great plan, Parfait,’ said Víctor. ‘But it might be a bit ambitious for your first trip. After all, Spain is eight thousand kilometres away.’
‘We can go one step at a time,’ I said, furious at Víctor’s patronising tone, at not being taken seriously, ‘and it doesn’t matter how long it takes. There’s nothing to keep us here.’
‘You do know that there’s a sea between Africa and Spain?’ said Víctor, as if I was an idiot.
‘But it’s a very small sea,’ I said, not smiling. ‘I’ve looked on the map in my atlas, and it’s more like a river. We can cross by boat from Tangier. Have you ever been to Tangier?’
‘As a matter of fact, I have,’ said Víctor.
‘When did you go?’
‘Before I came here, at the start of my little road trip through Africa.’
‘What did you do there?’
‘I stayed with my friend – he’s a priest and he lives in the port …’
Víctor stopped talking, and he closed his eyes for a second.
‘But it can be quite dangerous at night, Parfait, thugs about, you wouldn’t want to be out late, or there at all on your own, to be frank—’
‘So your friend’s still there?’ I said.
‘I believe so,’ he said.
‘You believe or you know?’ I said, because I could see what he was up to, trying to put me off.
Víctor fiddled with the broccoli leaves.
‘Don’t say you’re not sure because you want to stop me going,’ I said. ‘I feel like your friend would be willing to help us, wouldn’t he? If I say I know you.’
Víctor creased up his eyes.
‘Maybe I just don’t want to lose you,’ said Víctor. ‘After all, I’ve only just got you helping up here, driving the van for me …’
His voice petered out.
‘You will give me his name and number, Víctor, won’t you?’ I said. ‘It feels like the whole plan is coming together.’
‘Well,’ said Víctor, ‘maybe our first job is to teach you Spanish. You’ve got English under your belt already …’
‘That was my father,’ I said. ‘And the Baptists …’
‘And Spanish is pretty similar to French …’ said Víctor.
‘So can we start now?’ I said.
‘We’ll start with the verbs,’ said Víctor.
‘Pa said I learnt quickly,’ I said. ‘He said I was like a sponge.’
This was true – if I set my mind to it, I could keep going for hours, and if I kept on repeating things, they seemed to stick.
The chickens went on clucking, and Víctor went on gardening, and the blind children went on swinging their sticks in the yard, and I sat under a eucalyptus tree, with hope in my heart, saying, ‘Hablo, hablas, habla, hablamos, habláis, hablan.’
Augusta
Mr Sánchez gathered himself together.
‘In a performance of flamenco, duende happens when all the conditions are right – the guitar, the voice and the dance somehow melt into the clapping of the audience and the heat of the night and, sometimes for a moment, like a firework almost, except better, there is an intoxicating energy, and the atmosphere changes. And somebody near you might very quietly, under cover of dark, from inside the spell, murmur Olé.’
I thought duende had possibly come through the grey walls of the classroom, or under the door. The atmosphere had changed, and everyone was dead silent. We sat staring at Mr Sánchez as if we were in a trance.
The silence drained away, and the tiniest whisper of noise came back, like butterflies’ wings.
I put up my hand.
‘And the word for butterfly?’
But my voice had gone funny.
All I could think about was duende.
‘Butterfly – mariposa,’ said Mr Sánchez.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
Because if you say mariposa – try it – you will find that a butterfly has flown out of your mouth.
‘Let’s all say it,’ said Mr Sánchez.
Mariposa mariposa mariposa.
Butterflies flew around the classroom like thrown confetti.
‘What’s the Spanish for spring?’ I said.
‘Spring?’ said Mr Sánchez. ‘Primavera.’
Primavera primavera primavera.
I liked making up Latin sentences, and in fact I was trying to write some of my diary in Latin. I didn’t tell anyone in the family as they all thought I was mad enough already.
Primavera.
I could hear Latin underneath the word.
Primum – first.
Verum – truth.
I put up my hand.
‘Mr Sánchez,’ I said. ‘The word for spring sounds like first truth.’
Around me people got that expression they always got around me.
But Mr Sánchez nodded.
His face looked so thoughtful and sad and I wondered why.
‘Spring,’ he said, with his eyes as doleful as that sad cow the Hendersons kept in their field for no reason. ‘Spring – the first truth. Yes, yes, probably.’
Again, the classroom went silent.
As if duende had come back.
Mr Sánchez was the only teacher I’d ever had who could make silence out of his own silence. Most teachers had to wave their arms around and shout and make threats.
‘Spring,’ he said again. ‘The first truth.’
It seemed impossible but the bell went.
Mr Sánchez jolted.
I later found out that he’d lost his wife, who was called Leonor like the wife of the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado. She’d died in the spring. As she lay bald and fading to nothing in the English hospice, the apple blossom fell past her window and rotted in the grass.
‘We must have spent a long time handing all the books out at the beginning,’ said Mr Sánchez. ‘I can’t think where the time went.’
‘Where it always goes, Mr Sánchez,’ I said.
He laughed.
Then he stopped and looked as if he was about to cry.
‘So where is all that time, Augusta?’ he said.
‘Perhaps we’ll find it in heaven,’ I said, which was a surprising thing to say, and came out of my mouth without me thinking about it.
‘Or would it be hell?’ said Mr Sánchez. ‘If you found the past, all piled up by the side of the road. All the things you’d ever said. All the things you’d ever thought. All the things you’d ever done.’
That was one of those questions that Mr Sánchez asked that made you stop dead, as if the question had shot you through the heart.
As we all stood up to leave our first ever Spanish lesson, Mr Sánchez said, ‘Of course, Spanish is the language of Miguel de Cervantes, Federico García Lorca, Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, not to mention Picasso, Dalí and Velázquez.’
The sounds of their names!
That’s my heaven.
All of them sitting together under an eternal palm tree discussing important things forever, in gorgeous Spanish, like gunfire and joy mixed up together.
We all filed out of the room, but I stopped and said, ‘Thank you so much, Mr Sánchez. That was the best lesson I’ve ever had – and please may I borrow your book on Duende?’
He nodded and stroked his beard as if he had just had a great shock, and all I could think of was how desperately I had to get to Spain.
To España.
Parfait
I told Víctor I was planning to be a teacher or a doctor, an artist or a poet once I made it to Spain.
‘Well let’s start with the art,’ he said. ‘I can help you with the art.’
He went and got an old easel and a case of mucky paints and sketching pencils from a store cupboard out at the back of his little house.
I started off copying great Spanish artists from his History of Art book in pencil. We moved on to pastel. Then we tried some paint.
Looking through Víctor’s book about living European artists, I found an artist called Sami Terre who had skin the same colour as mine and wore his black hair in lots of long plaits. He’d been born in what he called a shithole on the outskirts of Brussels and started out making graffiti.
‘Can you make my hair like this?’ I asked Gloria and Douce, pointing to his photograph.
‘Who are you getting yourself so handsome for?’ said Gloria.
I shook my head.
They got to work on my hair, with Amie Santiana who lived on the homestead next to us and knew all about hairdressing.
As I walked out of the hut the next day, I found I was standing a little taller. Because, if Sami Terre was raised in a shithole but went on to be famous and written about in books, it could happen to anyone. It could even happen to me.
The African mourning doves were calling in the acacia tree opposite the hut – krrrrrrr, oo-OO-oo – as I took the photograph of my parents’ wedding out of the Memory Box. In it I found the little card my father had given my mother on their wedding night.
‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,’ it said. ‘The courage to change the things I can. And the wisdom to know the difference.’
It made my mind up.
This was something I could change.
The place we lived.
I did have the courage, I knew I did.
I began to paint a portrait of my parents, falling into each other on their wedding day, my father in a dark suit and my mother in the shiny wedding dress lent to her by the Baptists.
‘Tell me I’m right to go,’ I said to my father’s photograph, but it didn’t answer.
I worked at the painting hour after hour, covering it with an old mat, telling everyone they mustn’t look at it, not yet.
Even when my arms ached from banana-picking, I still painted.
Then it was finished.
Víctor came down on his bike, and the rest of them gathered around, and, feeling suddenly shy, I took off the mat to reveal the painting.
‘You’re a genius,’ said Víctor. ‘A total natural! Stay here and you’ll become a famous Burundian artist.’
The rest of them stared at our mother and father, perhaps hoping that they might walk off the page and come and live with us in the hut again.
‘This is how we’ll earn money as we go,’ I said to them all. ‘By painting portraits.’
‘I’m not coming,’ said Pierre. ‘I’m going to stay here and fight.’
‘Fight?’ I said. ‘Fight as in struggle?’
‘Fight as in anything it takes,’ said Pierre.
My father’s twinkly eyes and his cheek, his turning-the-other-cheek, stared out at us from the easel and stopped twinkling for a second.
‘What would Pa say?’ I said.
‘And what good did it do him? Refusing to retaliate? Breaking the chain?’ said Pierre.
Wilfred sat staring.
The girls looked sad.
Víctor said nothing.
‘When are we leaving?’ said Zion.
Then, one by one, we all walked quietly away from the easel where my mother and father stayed laughing love into each other’s eyes.
‘Patience, Little Bro,’ I said, and I tried to cheer myself up by dancing about with him, the way I imagined flamenco dancers might dance, though, looking back, it was some other way altogether.
‘Come and join in!’ I said to the girls. ‘You sway your hips like this, and you lift your arms and twist around – and the girls wear bright-coloured dresses like butterflies.’
‘You can shout out Olé whenever you feel like it!’ said Zion.
But Gloria said, ‘You dance, boys. I like watching.’
Douce nodded.
Whenever Zion and I found ourselves alone together, we’d say Olé and do our special up-down high-five as a way of believing in the journey we would make.
‘Olé Olé Olé Olé.’
Augusta
My mother was starting to circle possible destinations for the summer of 2004 in red biro, and I asked Mr Sánchez whether Spain would be a good place for a holiday.
‘I’d avoid the Costa del Sol, Augusta,’ said Mr Sánchez. ‘It’s full of English people!’
Then we both laughed like conspirators, as if we knew how boring English people were, and I started to wonder if I were actually Spanish and the stork (ha ha) had dropped me in the wrong place. I obviously knew quite a bit about sex by now – and not only from the scenes in An Instant in the Wind. No, the internet had arrived – at other people’s houses. My parents continued to favour paper. My mother had bought us a book on sex, and she threw it into our hands, keeping the focus on how special it was to have babies, a great privilege for every woman, she kept saying.
‘Not for every woman,’ I said. ‘Some women can’t have children.’
She gave me the you’re-being-difficult look so I didn’t bother to bring up the way the privilege could also be suffering, or the way Barbara Cook loved and suffered every day of being a mother so that the two things became one. I didn’t bother to talk about the fact that love might be the hugest word there is in the world and that we would never, across a whole lifetime, work out what it meant. I didn’t say that if we put love on one side of the weighing scales and suffering on the other, we might change our minds and decide suffering was bigger. Then I found myself wondering if actually love and suffering were on the same side of the scales. And you couldn’t have the one without the other. Then I couldn’t decide what was on the other side of the weighing scales. But I didn’t say any of this aloud, and my mother went on running through her list of warnings against the use of tampons, in particular the risk of toxic shock syndrome.
‘But, quite apart from that,’ she said, ‘they can be extremely painful when you put them in your. Put them in your. Put them in your.’
She never found the word.
‘Vagina,’ I said.
My mother squeezed the new packet of extra-thin sanitary towels she was holding in her hand at the shock of the word said aloud, and she started to talk about holidays instead, putting down the sanitary towels and picking up her holiday spiral notepad.
‘Spain is supposed to be very safe,’ I said. ‘And I would also be able to practise my Spanish like we practised French in Brittany.’
Spain, my mother wrote, underlining it twice.
The Alvárez family’s Spanish house wasn’t on the Costa del Sol, but on the Costa de la Luz, I told my mother. In a village by the beach, called La Higuera. Which means fig tree. Higos are figs and you don’t pronounce the h.
The next year, in August, Diego’s family would be going to Argentina for a family wedding so we could (possibly) rent their holiday house with fig trees in the garden for a much-reduced price. They’d be going at Christmas for the special festivals.
My father said, ‘It’s all very different out there. Apparently, Lola sunbathes without a swimsuit on in the garden. They probably all do that sort of thing over there. And it’s jolly hot, you know, in summer. Sweltering. It may not suit us.’
He was right.
It didn’t suit him.
Yet we plotted and persuaded to get him there.
I look around me as I write, here in La Higuera, thirteen years after we first came. How I love its fig trees and its palms, its warm air and wild winds.
There we were, innocent and dreamy.
So excited.
‘Two months to go,’ I said to Julia, crossing off another day on the chart we’d stuck to the back of the wardrobe door.
‘Will we be different when we come back?’ said Julia.
‘Course we will,’ I said, smiling.
I remember us packing for Spain, suitcases open on the bed and the sun coming through the bedroom window and landing in that little pool, over in the corner, where there was, where there is, one of those triangular-shaped stands, made to fit in corners. On it are our awards – all my academic cups, made of fake silver, and my one riding rosette clipped to the top, and Julia’s dancing trophies in the shape of gold ballet shoes. I remember specks of dust falling through the sheet of light, bits of our own skin.
I’m looking down at my hand, brown from the sun because I live here now.
The skin of my hand.
Mano in Spanish.
Mano mano mano – man-o – man-oeuvre – man-overboard – man-o-tee, but I think it’s manatee actually.
They are sometimes called sea cows – dolphin things with rounded noses. Like the pilot whales we saw from the boat out in the Straits of Gibraltar, heading off from the port at Tarifa.
That day.
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