Portbou
For years Charlie blamed Walter Benjamin for the death of her mother. To some extent God, real or not, and the beatniks from the cave were also guilty. And she too must share some part of the responsibility for orphaning herself: how large a part depended on how you looked at it - how mystical or self-centred you were. No way would she hold the simple laws of physics responsible; the dumb realities of kinetics and colliding forces. Yet with time she came to despise the yellow Datsun Cherry and its dead driver. She’d like to resurrect him in order to kill him again. With her vengefulness properly channelled in this way, Portbou still refused to sit in its proper perspective. The best epitaph it could hope for was as a before and after story, all about a fall from grace and with an unhappy ending, like the one about Eden and the apple.
*
A gauzy, abstract mauve quivered on the horizon. The boats were dark shapes on the pale mass of water, buttery soft, the same colour as the clouds that, like muslin clogged with curds, the sun was strained through. It hurt to look. And the rocky bay was too confined, too containing of the sweep of the eye. Gazing out to sea Pearl sighed aloud, without meaning to. The mist and heat were a disappointment.
A nameless mood stole over her. Familiar since girlhood the sensation, both fleeting and intense, was a recipe for negativity with changing ingredients – this time a visceral sense of entrapment, almost of living burial, mainly that, but some thwarted anger too, guilt and a measure of uselessness, together with a clotted, abject sensation at the back of the throat. A frown flickered over her forehead before settling into the crease her mother had warned would one day bisect her brow. Her mother had been right; it was indelible now. But Pearl was otherwise well preserved, like a pickled egg or cucumber. That her vanity should survive into retirement was a fact that would have surprised her younger self. Of course, its aspirations were not so immodest these days. Now rather than kid herself she could be the fairest of them all, she’d settle for any qualification - the assurance she was not actually unattractive, not bad for her age. It was very hard to watch the gradual erosion of your charms in the bathroom mirror each day, even harder to believe its irreversibility.
‘ Pass me the paper, sweetheart.’
‘ Which bit do you want? Or you could have a whole one to yourself.’
She took the copy of Libération, scanned the headlines. Squinting, she fished her sunglasses from the beach bag. Since when had deciphering foreign print become a chore rather than a challenge? Her French was rusty and her interest in world affairs diminishing, though this wasn’t something she’d admit to. She brandished the newspaper in an act of defiance, pulling it taut as a sail, so advertising her political affiliations to the entire beach whilst disguising her nationality - as though anybody was watching her, as though they could have cared less.
‘ I’m a poseur,’ she thought, with wry amusement, ‘all this time, and still a poseur.’
The croissants were sweating inside their bag, large grease spots soaking through the paper.
‘ Look, I got you an almond one,’ said Eric, holding the bag out.
Pearl shook her head and continued to read the paper, although he suspected that she might be dozing behind the blackout lenses of her sunglasses. Feeling rejected and somehow foolish for having offered, Eric stood up.
‘ I’ll call Charlie,’ he said, ‘she’s bound to want one.’
‘ She won’t hear you Eric. She’s underwater.’
‘ Then I’ll swim out to her,’ said Eric. ‘In a minute.’
He sat down heavily, taking a croissant that he didn’t feel like eating out of the bag, breaking off its crab arm. Croissants and elaborate anniversary treats – all the trouble he went to, and for what? Pearl’s birthday was coming up. This holiday, a long planned pilgrimage to the last haunt of Walter Benjamin, was also an early birthday present to Pearl, the whole thing on his credit card. He’d arranged a surprise party for her too, to which sixty of her oldest friends and comrades has been invited, one for each passing year.
A young woman jogged across his field of vision. She’d been for a swim and was heading back to her towel. You could see her nipples through the crocheted fabric of her bikini. Wetness shone on her skin. Her hair, pinned at the nape of her neck, fell in slick black fronds around her face. The thought of her shaking herself dry all over him, like a dog, was too much to bear. The kick of lust was sudden as the caffeine in his morning coffee. He rolled over onto his front.
The beach ended as abruptly as the town began, with hardly a frontier between the two. There was a steep ascent up a flight of tricky steps that led from the seafront to a large viewing terrace at the top. Portbou was described as one, yet was too sophisticated to be a village, a puzzle of alleyways and imposing grey stone townhouses. The train station was of metropolitan dimensions and loomed over everything, its immense structure dwarfing the entire landscape from its vantage point halfway up the hill. What a horrible portent it must have seemed to Benjamin, of flight and of deportations.
Portbou was layered, stacked on shelves that were cut into the hillside, the tableau in three dimensions like a diorama, as much a treat for the gaze as the complex beauty of Vietnamese rice farming.
Pearl had taken early retirement but Eric still had four years to go. Without her, the brick-walled corridors of the department had become strangely impersonal. Where once they led nowhere in particular, a warren of familiar cul-de-sacs mapped by friendly names on doors, they now seemed unpredictable, peopled by strangers, labyrinthine, with intriguing corners around which trouble or adventure surely lurked. Perhaps he could be a sort of Minotaur. For the first time in his working life, he was free – free to teach and publish ideas that weren’t sanctioned within the marriage, free even to have an affair, something he had always censured in colleagues. He rolled onto his side and using his hand as a visor against the glare, looked over at the woman in the bikini, hugging her knees now as she chatted to a youth in Speedos. She was probably younger than his daughter. He clicked his tongue with self-disgust. Jane would be in Turin by now. With Richard, the latest heartbreaker, a live-in one this time, who would never be trustworthy no matter how he tried (three years and counting). The only positive thing to come out of any of his daughter’s feckless associations, as far as Eric could see, was Charlie, perfect fatherless Charlie. Right now, just a pair of wobbly feet sticking out of the Mediterranean. He heaved himself up once more and walked towards the water.
Practicing handstands, it was hard to know whether your legs were straight or not. Much easier in deeper water and without a snorkel. Coming up for air, Charlie emptied the saltwater from her mask, rinsing it to clear the fog. Richard said you should spit into it to clean it, but that was disgusting. The water here was only waist high. All the good fish were further out. Maybe some bad ones too. The summer she was last in Spain had been practically ruined by the poster for Jaws - “don’t go in the water”. Luckily it was an X certificate, or she’d have had to dare herself to watch it. But the poster was bad enough, making a menace out of every shadow. Even the toilet had become a dangerous place. Maybe the shark couldn’t actually rise out of the loo to bite you on the privates, but you could easily imagine it doing so. To keep it, or thoughts of it at bay, you had to perform a series of rituals – only wash in cold water (sharks like warm water) and run out of the room before the flush ended.
There was Gramps, wading out. He was waving at her. Better pretend she hadn’t seen him, or he’d make her come in. Charlie adjusted her mask and swam out towards the deep end of the sea. Almost immediately the fish got interesting. The contrast of light and shade along the seabed was because of the rocks and sand, not any prowling shark. The water was navy blue in places, turquoise in others, the same colour as the minty stripe in toothpaste. Below her, a shoal of shiny fish dithered about which direction to take. She swam facedown, breathing through the snorkel, taking no stock of her whereabouts. Plunging down to touch the Med’s tidy floor, she was confronted by a catfish, at first mistaking it for a walrus. Pale brown and pockmarked, it had a very wide, ugly face, shaped like a flying saucer but with little tusks and whiskers. It hovered, staring insolently in through the mask at her. She’d have to surface before screaming, but by then she’d realised her mistake anyway. Underwater things looked bigger. Anyone might’ve taken it for a walrus.
Treading water, she got her bearings. All the other swimmers were too chicken, hanging around the aprons of the beach. The waves were choppier out here. Wooden fishing boats bobbed, straining against their moorings. Further out, beyond the buoys, clean white sailboats were having fun, cheeking the wind to slap them about. To her left a high, ridged path eased its way past the bulging cliff face. It looked unmanageable on foot. And here was a cave - what a find! Invisible from the beach, but a real proper cave. How come it wasn’t in the guidebook? Perhaps it had never been discovered till now.
But how were you meant to reach it? You’d have to haul yourself up the rock-face further down and edge your way along it, hugging the cliff. She did this, but it looked easier than it was. Using her elbows to lever herself out of the water, she scraped her knee on the rock. Blood coursed impressively down her shin. The cave was a bit stinky, with a salty smell of fish and yeast. It was cool and dank in there. She shivered, wishing for her towel. Some broken brown glass at the entrance but otherwise no sign of human habitation. Charlie stepped gingerly into the cave. Stagnant water had pooled inside deep fissures in the rock. A raised ledge skirting the wall formed natural seating. On the floor were the charred remains of a fire or barbecue, perhaps several millennia old and preserved by some weird substance in the rock.
The cave was almost exactly on the border between France and Spain. When did one place become another? Where? The exact spot. If she swam around the cove to France, would she have to take her passport? The cave breathed a spooky kind of magic.
Grassy green stuff slimed the tops of the walls, but there were no stalactites. Enough light filtered through the entrance to illuminate the miracle she must always have been destined to find. There, towards the back of the cave she stood, her finger tracing patterns in the air. If only someone else was present to witness it. For once in her life, fantasy had deigned to merge with fact. Her future career as an archaeologist stroke explorer seemed certain as she studied the dark and ancient shapes that galloped across the cave wall.
*
Ankle deep in brine, Eric watched his granddaughter swim away from him. Little mermaid. So curious and independent - so unlike her mother. Proceed with caution, he warned himself - yet another bourgeois trap, this focus on family. The phallocentric desire to leave one’s stamp, children as possessions, etc. But still. Hadn’t they taught Jane to think dialectically? To think for herself, in other words? For no, it hadn’t been a question of them imposing their ideas on her blank slate of a mind, of her rejecting these with the independence of adulthood. Of course not – they’d fought various forms of totalitarianism all their lives; never joined the Party, let alone towed its line. They had merely given her the tools for critical thinking; the rest was up to her. She hadn’t turned out a Tory or policewoman, but yes, if they were honest, something of a disappointment. Or, as Pearl tactfully put it, as having “yet to fulfill her potential”. But the unsaid truth, which neither wanted the responsibility for owning, was that Jane was not an intellectual and didn’t have the conceptual apparatus, motivation or articulacy to coherently refuse the telescope, the Weltanschauung they had encouraged her to look through. Her rejection of their way of viewing the world was unexplained - driven by biology not reason, it was only a part of the wholesale revolt that propelled young people out of the nest and into the all-consuming anomie of modern life. For Jane, seizing her future meant rejecting their politics in the same way that she rejected their choice of curtain fabric - her rejection was purely stylistic, and worse, she wore her anti-intellectualism proudly, like a badge. There was no consolation prize either - they wouldn’t get any impassioned dinner party conversation out of her, defending her position. Baiting her, she’d only shrugged, dismissing them as cranks. “The masses are the opiate of the irreligious,” she’d said. Perhaps it was the natural course of things, but what was nature in any case? Surely just another determinism to take up arms against.
Irritated with the predictable path his reasoning had taken, Eric headed back up the beach. His thinking had become less subtle lately. Self-justifying but with a whingeing moral edge, always up for appraisal by some invisible jury, and forever dealing in the unverifiable; metaphysical absolutes like ‘truth’ and ‘responsibility’. He was bored, in short, with being himself.
‘ There you are,’ said Pearl. ‘Now where’s that child got to?’
‘ Eloped with Jacques Cousteau.’
‘ Weren’t you going to bring her back?’
‘ She ignored me. I waved.’
‘ Not waving, but drowning,’ she muttered, turning her back on her husband.
Pearl was wilting. She fanned herself with the newspaper and closed her eyes. Ten minutes later Charlie flopped down onto her towel between them, oblivious to the devastation she caused. Pearl sat up, brushing the sand from her legs.
‘ You seem excited about something… Stop jiggling your feet sweetheart, sand’s getting everywhere. So come on then, out with it. What have you been up to?’
‘ Nothing. Oh, I saw a catfish but I thought it was a walrus.’
Charlie studied her legs. Wet sand clung to them in brown streaks. That was how you made cement. Perhaps it would set giving her permanent shin pads.
‘ Well,’ said Gramps, ‘you can’t afford to make that sort of error if you’re serious about becoming an oceanographer.’
‘ Not any more,’ said Charlie, ‘I’m going to be an archaeologist stroke explorer.’
Grammy snorted, quickly recovering herself to ask what had brought on the sudden change in plan. But the secret of the cave was saved when Gramps interrupted:
‘ But one day you may have to correctly identify the remains of a special catfish dinner inside the stomach of a thousand year old human sacrifice found buried in the sand. It wouldn’t do at all to confuse his last meal with a walrus dish.’
‘ Don’t know what you mean, Gramps.’
‘ Nobody does, darling,’ said Pearl.
‘ I’ll bury you in the sand if you like.’
‘ No thanks Gramps.’
‘ Anyway, time we were getting back,’ said Pearl.
‘ Come on Charlie, Grammy’s right. Mad dogs and all that.’
They returned to their rooms for lunch and a siesta. Mounting the steps from the beach, their hotel could be spotted, swankily modern, a slash of garish peach amidst the muted palette of stones and slates - a blot on the landscape if only it had the room to be.
On arriving, they’d booked into what had seemed an elegant hotel: tall and aged with its tiled hallway and gracious staircase, the beautiful spine of the building sweeping up to the skylight in a mollusc’s spiral. The lift was broken so they carried their luggage up, warning Charlie not to even lean on the rickety wrought iron banisters she so much wanted to slide down. On their way up they passed a middle-aged woman coming down, perhaps a long-stay resident for she was cradling a poodle in each arm. She was to become the culprit by association when, the following day on their way to breakfast, they were disgusted by the sight of a coiled dog shit on the first floor landing.
Pearl marched up to the front desk. She wouldn’t speak to the desk clerk, which the clerk evidently took as a sleight on his ability to deal with the situation, but which Pearl would’ve argued was a gesture of solidarity with the poorly waged and powerless who were not to blame for the failures of the system, in this case the hotel. She’d spoken to the manager instead, in her imperious French, clearly relishing the outrage.
‘ Là-haut sur le palier. Une crotte de chien!’
The manager begged her to lower her tone.
‘ Are they called poodles because they poo everywhere?’
Charlie tugged Eric’s sleeve, insistently repeating the question. He shushed her, attempting to follow the ping-pong of the dispute, the upshot of which was they were reimbursed, ate breakfast in town and had their things out by midday. They moved into the Hotel Molinar, which was regrettably inelegant but clean.
After a short sleep, they showered and dressed for lunch. They walked to the restaurant with a tree growing inside it and took their usual table by the window. The waitress came to take their order.
‘ Una Fanta naranja, por favor,’ said Charlie.
‘ That fascist drink – you can’t have that,’ said Grammy, explaining nothing.
‘ Where did you learn to ask for that?’ asked Gramps.
He didn’t sound impressed. Anyone would think she’d thrown up on the table. She’d been saving this phrase up for days.
‘ I have been to Spain before, you know,’ she told them. ‘We went there once to a hot place. I can’t remember the name.’
They grilled her about dates and were shocked to discover she’d been seven at the time. Gramps counted backwards on his fingers.
‘ Nineteen seventy-five!’ he was practically shouting. ‘Has your mother no shame?’
Charlie scraped back her chair and stood staring at him, her breath coming in gulps.
‘ Look darling,’ said Grammy, patting her hand, ‘there are things you don’t understand. Why don’t you go and have a look at the fish?’
Returning from the toilet, Charlie ignored the aquarium of colourful tropical fish that had drawn them back here meal after meal, and stared instead into the drab dinner tank, which contained only grumpy lobsters with taped up claws. She watched them for a long while, leaving her grandparents to stew in their wrongness. The lobsters were so belligerent that even without the use of their pincers they sidled around karate-chopping one another.
When she got back, tables had been pushed together to make room for a family of brand new acquaintance who were joining them for lunch, it seemed. A large earthenware dish of yellow paella stood on the table. Although Grammy would later explain all about Franco and why she and Gramps spoke only French (they couldn’t speak Catalan and didn’t want to offend the locals), they now seemed perfectly happy to talk Spanish to a bunch of strangers. The family had a child Charlie’s age, Mercedes. The girls smiled shyly at each other across the table but when they met on the beach later that afternoon, leaving both camps of adults to sleep off the wine, the lack of a shared language soon took the shine off the friendship. They sat dutifully doing one another’s hair until Mercedes spotted some Spanish kids and went off to play with them instead. Charlie continued plaiting her own hair several feet away from a family of her own compatriots, ear-wigging on their conversation. ‘Hey I’m English too,’ she wanted to shout. Perhaps she could give them a visual clue instead – maybe the manner of her braiding somehow conveyed the essence of her Englishness. It was funny, because hearing them talk produced such a feeling of happy relief (which let her know she was a bit homesick), yet Grammy and Gramps spent their whole time avoiding other Brits. Even now, they were actually shifting their camp further down the beach.
All was quiet. Charlie got her camera from Grammy’s bag, sealing it inside two plastic bags. If she had a diver’s belt things would be easier. As it was she had to swim practically single-handed out to the cave. The water was cold and she worried about the state of the camera. At the exit rock she threw the camera up and onto the path, where it made a sickening thunk. She hauled herself up, unwrapped the protective sheathing - both bags were dripping wet - and examined it. Its lens was cracked. She felt her way along the cliff wall.
The cave’s secret was out. It was full of people, about ten of them. They must’ve discovered it too after seeing her go in. They laughed when they saw her dripping in the entrance and invited her in, first in Spanish, then English. There were four men, a woman and someone sleeping on the ground. They wore cut-off jeans and t-shirts. Someone had a guitar. They sat there smoking and looking at her. They’d made a little fire and were cooking stuff on it. She felt exposed and silly in her swimsuit and nervously pinched some of its fabric between her fingers, letting it ping back against her skin. They were dangerous people, drunken pirates or rebels. Their laughter and their invitation were probably fake and sarcastic. The broken beer bottles were probably theirs. Maybe she hadn’t discovered the cave after all. Maybe people had always known about it. These people had probably drawn those cave paintings for a joke.
Charlie dropped the camera, useless now, onto the cave floor, turned and sprang directly into the sea without checking for jutting rocks, executing a near perfect fluke of a dive. When she emerged one of the rebels was leaning against the entrance of the cave to cheer her performance. He held up his beer bottle in salute.
*
Charlie spent the rest of the afternoon close to her grandparents.
‘ I’m bored. I’ve got nothing to read.’
‘ That’s the problem with your generation,’ said Eric. ‘You lack inner resources.’
What an old fart he was becoming. Pearl suspected that this remark was not directed at Charlie’s so much as her mother’s generation, or more precisely, at Jane herself.
‘ You could have a go at reading this,’ said Pearl passing her the battered copy of Animal Farm Eric had been teaching to his first years for several years running now.
‘ Way above her head,’ said Eric.
‘ Pay no attention to Gramps sweet pea. It’s a story about some animals who overthrow the farmer and run the farm for themselves. You might enjoy it.’
‘ Pete’s sake, Pearl, it’s an allegory. Explain that to her.’
Charlie, who had been reading the back blurb, put the book down.
‘ Can you keep a secret?’
‘ Of course we can,’ said Pearl.
‘ You know earlier when I told you about that catfish? Well, what I was really excited about was this hidden cave. There were paintings on the wall of buffaloes and things. Then when I swam back to take some photos, there were all these people in there. They were smoking and drinking beer.’
‘ Oh yes, those beatniks. I saw them earlier,’ said Pearl. ‘They were mucking about on a pedalo.’
‘ What are beatniks?’
‘ They dress in black and iron their hair.’
‘ They say things like hep cat and daddy-o.’
Was this true? Grammy winked at Gramps.
‘ What do you mean?’
‘ And recite bad poetry,’ said Eric.
Charlie hated it when adults did this, showing how clever they were at her expense, pretending to talk to her but ignoring her, either showing off to other nearby adults, or sharing an in-joke. At least this was something Mum never did.
Anyway they were probably wrong. Maybe the people in the cave weren’t beatniks at all. They looked more like the type of people Mum and Richard hung about with, people whose hair was effortlessly long, no ironing required. Those people didn’t say any of the things her grandparents claimed for the beatnik poets.
No one would ever guess Mum had grown up with Grammy and Gramps because she set down opposite rules. With Mum you could slurp your soup, leaning over the bowl to prevent a spill. With Grammy you mustn’t slurp your soup but had to take quiet, straight-backed sips of it, the spoon wobbling its way up to your mouth. The many differences between adults were quite surprising. What sort of an adult would she be? Would she have to deal with the dull things they always complained of, like tax, bills or a mortgage? It seemed unlikely. Equally improbable was the idea she’d ever enjoy cooking, take an interest in folk music, gardening or in listening to people talk on the radio.
Mum was more laid back. On the other hand, her grandparents had masses of time for her. “Water baby” they called her. They noticed the things she liked, for example, red patent leather shoes. Ridiculous shoes, Grammy called them, but she bought them anyway, whereas Mum wouldn’t have called the shoes ridiculous, or worried about them endangering Charlie’s ankles. Mum would’ve said that the shoes were lovely, but would never have actually bought them. 'Come on,' she would have said, 'We’re only window-shopping'.
'Come on,' said Pearl, 'I think we should make a move. We promised to call Mummy.'
*
On the way to the phone-box they passed a billboard advertising sun-cream. The picture was of a dog pulling down a little girl’s pants. How humiliating for the child. It was embarrassing for Charlie in any case. Perhaps her grandparents would mentally compare her to the little girl in the picture. Would she feel embarrassed to see this advert with Mum? No. Yet sometimes she wished she could live with her grandparents forever. They took her ambitions seriously. She slipped her hand into her grandmother’s.
Charlie’s little hand was hot in hers. Pearl wanted to pick her up and twizzle her around, coming to a giddy stop with a kiss on the nose, but Charlie was at that awkward age, still very much a child but with an easily bruised dignity. She was chattering on, something about the discovery of ancient civilisations. Her snub nose, visible under the sunhat, was blotched with freckles. So like her mother at that age. A physical ache – broodiness and loss. Love. Pearl reached down and hooked a stray lock of her sun-bleached hair behind the child’s ear.
Although this was a rare chance to spend time with their beloved granddaughter, would Eric resist the temptation to remind Jane that they were babysitting, doing her a favour? Probably not. He was so critical, always judging her by the yardstick of his politics, surely code for some other gripe - that she had grown up and moved out? And as for revolutionary politics – did what you think ever actually count? What went on in your head, isolated and without proof of action, did it matter? Could theory exist in a vacuum, independent of practice, and be equally valued? Was teaching just thinking aloud or was it a kind of action? If not, then they’d both led dissipated lives. Eric had missed the red brigades and pen-pushed during the war. Perhaps guilt was at the source of his anger with Jane.
Pearl sat on the low crazy-paved wall watching him, with Charlie beside her, swinging her legs. A see-through plastic bubble shielded him like the hairdryers women her age sat under with rollers in.
Inside the booth, Eric stared at the hot dashboard behind the telephone, its serious black plastic - the perforations suggestive of sportswear or an assassin’s gloves.
‘ No please, signor, you must to telephone in Inglaterra. To the house of Mr and Mrs Bird.’
‘ But I don’t understand. It’s my daughter I want to speak to.’
‘ I am sorry but you must call the number of Mr and Mrs Bird. They will discuss arrangements with you.’
‘ Arrangements? What the hell are you talking about?’
Eric thumped the phone directory. He was fumbling for more coins. Perhaps he’d been cut off.
‘ Grammy, you know how we came here for Walter Benjamin, well what did he do again?’
‘ He thought about things.’
‘ Gramps is taking a very long time. Shall we tell him to hurry up?”
'In a minute,' said Pearl, distractedly.
'No I’m not sitting down,' shouted Eric. 'Tell me!'
It was like a mushroom cloud, almost beautiful. The excitement and the numbness: no hint of the devastation to follow. There was a delay, a period of soundless grace and Charlie moved through it as though underwater.
-Polly Tuckett
Back