Salt Picnic

By Patrick Evans

All the time on the island there had been something she was looking for. She knew she had to keep this in mind, and that she'd know what it was when she found it. Whatever it proved to be.It's 1956 and Iola arrives on the island of Ibiza, on the fringes of Franco's Spain, with little more than a Spanish phrasebook. Soon she meets a fascinating American photographer who falls in and out of focus: is he really a photographer, and who exactly is the German doctor he keeps asking her about? The mysterious doctor, when he appears, takes Iola for a picnic on a salt island, where she learns how easily the world can be obscured.Salt Picnic is about mistranslation, fantasy and the historical echoes of ideology, by the author of Gifted and The Back of His Head.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Victoria University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781776561544

Book preview

Salt Picnic

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Victoria University of Wellington

PO Box 600 Wellington

vup.victoria.ac.nz

Copyright © Patrick Evans

First published 2017

ISBN 9781-77656-169-8 (print)

ISBN 9781-77656-154-4 (EPUB)

ISBN 9781-77656-155-1 (Kindle)

This book is copyright. Apart from

any fair dealing for the purpose of private study,

research, criticism or review, as permitted under the

Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any

process without the permission of

the publishers.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the

National Library of New Zealand.

Published with the assistance of a grant from

Ebook conversion 2018 by meBooks

In memory of

Richard Patrick Corballis

1946–2016

Dear friend and colleague

and for

Serena Grace Evans Ortiz

Señorita Subway Sandwich

Ibiza is: Nothing. Nevermore. Only a dream.

—Raoul Hausmann

Contents

Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Part 2

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Part 3

Part 4

Author's Note

I

1

And now, at last, the island—after all those postcards, and the brochures and the books, and the photographs in the books and the words beside the photographs: here it is, growing in front of her. Around the ferry the roll of the sea flattens and blurs till it reaches the horizon and dissolves into the soft, pale turquoise at the ends of the earth: the island seems to lift above its shadow and its own quivering reflection, a little world rising into the air, turning slowly as it climbs, streaming rocks and clods and stones that make a coronet of splashes in the darkening sea beneath. Soon, she knows, she’ll hear the distant bird-chatter of its people high above her, and look up, and see the island’s adamantine base—

*

That first morning on the island she’d climbed partway up the hill above the lower wall of the Old Town, away from the salt-and-diesel smell of the port and up the slanting cobbles towards the light above her head and the vast blue sky with its wheeling, mewing gulls. She’d stopped and looked down on the ragged little town: at the glitter and sparkle of late morning sunlight, the small boats moored in the harbour and against the dock, and—surely not enough to have ferried anyone from Barcelona the night before—Virgen de África, now astonishingly white against the blue, purified by distance, translated, its rust and its stench all redeemed, and the night horror of its women’s dormitory.

She tried to see down there the little hotel she’d just fled, with its cage elevator that had started and paused and started again and paused again while people stared in from the staircase around it: at Iola and the elderly botones, suspended side by side as if caught halfway to the flying island. And then the second-floor room he’d taken her to with its burnt-straw smell from the flat black grate of its fireplace, and what happened a couple of hours after that when another man burst in as she lay on the bed, another botones, younger, and she’d panicked and pushed at him—really pushed at him, she’d really meant it—and run down the stairs and clean out of the building and away along one paseo and up another, and through the portal in the ancient lower wall at a fast walk, almost a run, past the women at the market just inside and up along the flat wide cobbles beyond them: beginning to slow a little here but always pressing her way up the narrow tilting streets and towards the second wall, the upper wall, and the cathedral that loomed above it. From her first moment on the island it had seemed to beckon her, this Cathedral of the Lady of the Snows, as the guidebooks told her it was named: as if that was where it would all make sense for her in the end, if only she could get there, if only she could get to it.

She’d been dizzy back then, of course, from the tablets she’d taken not long after the ferry had set out, Mothersill’s Travel Remedy, promising ‘Relief as well as the Prevention of Seasickness’. She’d hardly eaten for the last two days: quite possibly she was seeing things as well. It had long overwhelmed her, the thought of what she’d been doing to herself, and she was astonished how far she’d got on the map. You must be crazy, she’d heard herself thinking when she set out from her home, all those months before. Do you really know what you’re doing?

But that was a long time ago and it was too late to go back now, even though, in all truth, she still had barely any idea what it really was she was trying to do, and right now she was as frightened as she’d ever been in her life.

Her bags had gone missing, that was the thing. She’d tried not to think about it in those first days on the island. She’d put them onto the wrong trolley at the station, into the return trolley, she knew that, and there hadn’t been time to sort it out afterwards. All she had now was her little clutch, and the pin-seal purse inside the clutch, and her passport in her purse. Nothing else. Not her clothes, not her typewriter, and (this was the worst bit) not a word of the novel she’d been working on for so long now. The Book in the Bag, she called it, which she’d begun to write in London: its words all gone now, every one of them, lost somewhere in France like (it had occurred to her on the train) a dead war poet—like his words, blown away and away, across the battlefields and gone. She could see them in her mind, she could make a picture of it, the little flecks of paper scattering in the wind. No, the picture made itself. It had become real through the thinking of it, like the rest of the world.

And it was when she’d turned away from the tangle of all this, from the boat and the dockside town and the endless, endless thinking—it was then that she saw the clump of dark little island pines and, under the branches, the two women, their faces intent on the ground. Their arms were full of gatherings, she could see that as she got closer, twigs and cones and litter from the trees which they were putting into a large wicker basket set down between them, placing the longer sticks carefully, deliberately, as if there was something to be made of them. Their heads lifted to her at the same moment in the way of grazing animals, the two women holding her gaze as she stepped through the long grass towards them with her slow, carefully assembled question:

Por favor, ¿sabes de algún alojamiento cerca?

She had nothing to show them she’d just arrived on the island or why, nothing plausible at all. It was as if she’d just made herself up in front of them—as if (come to that) she’d just made the two women up as well so that she could start her story. Standing there on the bronze glitter of the needles, the pair of them, and looking back at her from under the crouched Rumpelstiltskin pines that were so different from the big, rocking, talking pines back at home: looking at her and then at each other and then back at her as if to make sure she really was there, this sudden, strange young woman standing in front of them with nothing in her hand but a grip.

But: yes, it seemed they were agreeing, yes, they had something for her after all—was that what they were saying? ¿Alojamiento? Why, of course! We know the very place! Something like that. Lifting their basket of twigs and cones and litter between them and plodding off, two old mujeres taking her up in their wake, their big, slow behinds like the rumps of the donkeys she’d followed earlier that morning on the dock when she’d left the ferry: the woman on the left turning and gesturing at her—Come on, come on—and turning back and talking, all the time talking, both of them at once, to each other, at each other, past each other. She’d learned to get used to that in them, their endless talk, in the six months since then—yes: that was how long she’d been on the island now! Nearly as long as that.

*

Early the evening before when the ferry was well out to sea, floodlights had suddenly flicked on above her from the bridge, two lights that pooled on the deck as if night had been declared by the state and the scenery banished and the world turned simply into a now that was going to be officially inspected—the decking, and the men sprawled asleep against the bulkheads and the ventilators, and the improbable, impossible animals, all lit in every detail as if the light had only just created them, as pigs, and dogs, and goats, and sheep, and a couple of donkeys thrown in for good luck. How did you hide from this light? Where could you go?

She’d been told about this journey by someone who once had made it there and back: like a pilgrim trip to Jeddah, he’d said. All lit up like a circus when it’s going past but I’ll tell you, it’s no circus if you’re on board. Why do they keep lights on all night? Iola had asked him, and she remembered how her dinner companions had laughed when she asked that. ¡Concupiscencia! Lesley had told her, a man who’d travelled much and had dominated the table. It’s a Catholic country, it’s all Spain, it’s Franco, for God’s sake, there’s no relacioneswhile the Caudillo’s watching—¡Qué indecente! Everyone had laughed at that, too, the friendly strangers she’d been forced upon by other well-meaning friends of friends: she, the lonely, gauche colonial girl who needed checking out and passing on like a package, Just a day and a night, she’s terribly quiet, shouldn’t be too much trouble—she could imagine the words, she could hear people saying them. A person being spoken of. A subject.

*

Everything had been different from what she’d expected, that was what she remembered—the ferry, of course, but before that the Channel crossing, and Paris with its vast, hideous marketplace, and then the train journey south and to the border and the wait to change to the new gauge, the long, terrifying city walks when she hadn’t known how to get onto trams and buses. Worst of all were the times when she found herself caught up in a system she didn’t understand—any system, anything controlled by someone else, anything controlled by them.

Passing through Customs was the worst, and the fear that they might find something on her. Even queuing for the ferry ticket she’d felt the terror and the panic almost dissolving her sense of who she was. Why had she taken the risk? Why had she left the safety of her home and everything she knew? Why had she ventured into this huge, terrifying monstrosity called the world?

Because everything is the world, and nowhere is really safe.

Because I wanted to leave myself behind.

Because there’s nothing else to do.

Because I want the terror of it—

*

She’d wanted to get away from English, she knew that: not the people but the language and the way it was spoken around her. At first, when she’d just arrived Home—her parents called it that, they called it Home even though they’d never lived there—it had been exciting,this England of ours: her own new world long longed for from so far, familiar enough through reading yet also different—not in ways that were strange and challenging and exciting but in a fusty, fubsy, rumpty sort of way she hadn’t expected at all. Quite soon English accents stopped being exotic to her and their speakers came to seem no less happy-despairing than the folk she’d left behind at home, the home that had no capital letter but was where she’d come from all the same. Her own accent, the branding accent of the colonial, soon began to melt and fade until it was little more than a regional variation of the slop that was around her, more alphabet soup.

She’d been out looking for an electric fire, as they called them here at Home, when she came across the Linguaphone records in a second-hand shop in the local High Street: and there he was, the man who was to lure her to the Mediterranean. Learn Spanish the way he did! He was a bullfighter: or at least the figure on the cover of the disc represented a man in a gaudy Duke of Plaza-Toro outfit, the jacket and the cape and the impossible, clinging breeches, and then that ridiculous hat which toreros wore and the guardia wore and which she couldn’t help thinking had something of the shape of a Cornish pasty. And there was a bull, too, of course, shown head-down behind the man and ready for business, brows knotted and steam at its nostrils. And then she had ¡Hola España! too, a Spanish phrasebook someone had given her, with a picture of an excited local woman on its cover greeting an excited family of tourists—¡Hola! She’d sat in her Clapham boarding-house each evening in front of her electric fire, trying to match words and phrases to the torero’s rattling, lisping, buzzing Castilian Spanish:

No necesito los servicios de un portero.

Yo necesito refrescarme.

Urgente requiero los servicios de un dentista.

Por favor, ¿donde está el baño?

*

And all the time on the island there’d been something she was looking for. She knew she had to keep this in mind, and that she’d know what it was when she found it. Whatever it proved to be.

Was this the moment, though, was it now—had she got there at last? Up here in her attic bedroom in the middle of the night, looking back, trying to remember these last six months, not quite six since she arrived on the island? With that varnishy smell drifting through the house from the African copal in the fireplace two floors below, lit to cover the smell of the dead man’s body laid out on the dining room table?

*

The two women took her to a house that turned out to be no more than a street away and still below the old town’s massive, fortified upper wall and its glimpse of the squared tower of the cathedral. Facing east of north, the house was, she decided after a few days there, something that made its light increasingly subtle as each day bloomed and withered. This was one of the things she knew she would have to take into account.

La Casa de las Liebres, it was called, the House of the Hares: a rectangular block of pale, hard, putty-coloured plaster like so many up and down the street and across the little town, yet at the same time slightly larger than any of these and (she thought) with a small sense of entitlement about it that others didn’t have. Was that true or had she just been imagining it? Buff, scalloped windowsills, and, on the second floor, little juliet balconies in wrought iron: and then, above the front door, the small pediment—yes, yes, coming away from the plaster a little like part of an abandoned stage set, but something she couldn’t see anywhere else in the tight little street. Someone once had lived there who had been somebody.

And maybe still did: these two women, perhaps, who seemed to take her under their wing straight away? Magdalena and Concepción, their names, as it turned out, and sisters—Iola guessed that straight away even though they didn’t look especially alike. Concepción was the larger of the two and not as dark as Magdalena, and she could well have been the younger by as many as ten years. Iola was never sure: she’d found out soon enough that, here on the island, people’s age was a hard thing to judge. She went along with the idea of it, though, and always took care, as she came to form her story of the women in the story of her life, to think of them as las dos hermanas.

Did they own la Casa de las Liebres, these two sisters, she wondered? No, they didn’t, she slowly began to understand as she laboured out her first conversation with them under a glooming rack of pots and pans in the big dark kitchen off the alley at the back. La casawas owned by a doctor. He’d left very suddenly on Virgen de África exactly a week earlier, according to Magdalena—No, said Concepción, it had been Ciudad de Barcelona: and away the two of them went, arguing loudly and in a fluent, practised manner, as if argument was the only way they could talk to each other. Iola just couldn’t keep up with them—it seemed they weren’t even speaking Spanish anymore, and whatever it was they were speaking she couldn’t get anywhere near it. While they fought it out at either side of the long kitchen table she looked around the poorly lit room with its heavy beams that pressed down and its big square, clean flagstones that pushed up, and across one end of the room the long black iron stove like an old-fashioned country cooker back at home, her real home. On which sat a large pumpkin straight out of a fairytale: golden and lime-green and a little pink as well in places—waiting, she decided, waiting for the story to start.

The sisters’ fortress, this room, evidently, and a place where much seemed to get done: and with a particular smell, too, one Iola couldn’t quite pin down at first but which she soon came to associate with the entire house, along with Ramón el Primer and Ramón el Segon, two drab blue birds perched glumly in separate cages up against the single kitchen window and named (the sisters eventually told her) after famous Catalan counts. One or the other of them would call out from time to time, always the same sad thing, the one to the other: Pa i oli. Pa i oli. There was a big, spare old yellow dog, too, whose only sound came from the drag of the log chained to his neck whenever he sought fresh sunlight to snooze in, out in the part of the callejón that ran behind the house. His eyes always ran with tears, as if they’d witnessed the sorrows of the world. Iberia, his name, apparently—Iberia!

Her room, she found, was up a quite grand staircase that began in a tiled entrance hall whose front door she came to find was hardly ever opened. The escalera went through a right angle to a second-floor passage that had a half dozen doors, three on either side, each one suggesting hidden life or secrets whenever she passed them in the next few weeks: at the end of this was a second staircase, less grand, and, at the very top of the building, the attic of the house and a door which Magdalena shouldered open for her: Iola’s alojamiento. It had been built across the corner of a gable in such a way that the floor and the three walls made triangles. Iola hadn’t taken in the full meaning of this until Magdalena dragged shut the door behind her as she left, with a little backward look that Iola was sure had something to do with her lack of any luggage to put down on the foot of the big, gun-carriage bedstead which, besides two windows, offered the only squared shape in the room. Oh, and a big, looming wardrobe as well.

The bed was high like a hospital bed and looked plump but wasn’t. She put her clutch on its quilt and her Spanish phrasebook on the clutch and tried the front window. This opened inward, she found, not easily, and let in something of the salt-and-oil smell of the sea and the dock. Beneath, below her window, a sprawl of roofs fell away in sunlight north and northwest: beyond these, the lower fortress wall and the rest of the town below that, and then the docks and the harbour and, finally and naturally, the deep blue sea. Each time she looked out, over the next few days and weeks, she found movement in this declension and in the clutter of houses seen from above, the fans of pantiled roofs revealing the odd shapes of buildings, rhomboid or, like la Casa de las Liebres, triangular at the corners, with none of them quite proper and nothing quite square.

Pleasing, the clutter of it, the way the houses below seemed to topple against each other as if drawn together by the terracotta of their tiles: and also (when she began to notice it) the rhyme of the blues, one with another. There was the never-failing blue of the sea beyond, of course, but then there was the same blue on the woodwork of some of the buildings, on doors and windows, and blue again in the awnings here and there, too—even in the washing strung up in some of the outdoor areas she could see cut into the roofs below, tones that went from a pale white-blue to a blue deeper than the sea itself, and then back to something in between. She shut her eyes, that first time, and opened them: was this a trick, was she seeing what she wanted to see or was she seeing what was there? And what did there mean?

When she’d first seen it from near the station at Portbou the colour of this sea had shocked her. Expect deep blue, friends had told her. But it was something more than that. Indigo, almost, like a dye: as soon as she saw it she wanted to dip her hand in to see if it stained her, like an experience you could never forget or a memory that never left you, or as if her whole new world had been painted and she could enter the painting at last. But that was true of all the colours she could see around her. As the ferry had begun to slip away along the southern Barcelona coast every colour she could see had been more intense, more lurid, than any she’d ever known. Ahead of her, she remembered, above the water, beyond the bow, a great tower of cumulus rose on itself, up and up and up for thousands of feet: as she’d watched it had begun to turn purple and gold at the bottom while the top boiled higher and higher till its whiteness became blank against the blue, became absolute. As if she’d broken in on an old, lost perfection. As if a cataract on her seeing had been removed.

*

Back in Barcelona in the hours before Virgen de África departed she’d found the art museum she’d wanted in an old artillery building beside a vast dry military park full of ancient cannon. She walked there across what seemed half the city—hot, terrified, panicking at each crossing, ¡Hola España! in one hand and her map clutched in the other, looking (she was sure) like a lost child and prey to anyone up to no good. I do not require the services of a porter. I require refreshment. I urgently require the services of a dentist—

Por favor, ¿donde está el baño?

Inside the cool, intimidating old building, she’d found almost straight away the painting she’d come for, the one she knew she was required to see. She didn’t realise that till she saw it, in the second salón and abruptly: a large image of a horse being ridden, no more than that. In the corner of her eye the horse’s head seemed to move, and to still when she confronted it. She looked away again and the horse moved again, just the eye this time, and she sat down with her back against a pillar and composed herself in front of the painting to try to catch it once more. She knew she was self-consciously before the thing, confronting it, determined to have it out with the animal and its rider, and with the man (always a man) who’d put both of them there in front of her. She knew she was looking at art—at Art, in fact. But why, and why did she seem to find it necessary to compose herself like this in order to see?

The painting was magnificent, she knew that, its sheer size made sure it was magnificent, that and all the implicit hours of dogged brushwork needed just to complete the lesser patches ‘behind’ the horse and the rider, the mass of the hills ‘behind’ them both, the shadow of the rider’s cloak, the movement of this and the movement of that: these things were magnificent, too. And then there was the way the artist seemed to have arrested the entire headlong flight of the horse and its man just for the moment of the viewing, so that in another moment it might start suddenly into life again and continue its dash, bursting clear of the frame and down into the gallery, clattering off across the parquet tiles of the floor and scattering its mierda left and right. So lifelike! So magnificent!

But was that really what she thought? Or was it just what she wanted of the painting, was it how she wanted Art to be? The more she confronted the single wild eye of the horse, the more it settled back into its paint. Under her gaze the man’s single eye flattened, too, and seemed to withdraw from the fierce, challenging contact it seemed originally to offer. They’d flattened, both animals, back into the effects they’d been made of: the more she looked at them the more they seemed to pull apart, the more the whole painting seemed to fall into its fragments —a forest, a hill, a man, a horse, some clouds. And, after that, into brush-strokes, the glimpses of canvas between the brush-strokes, the simple fact of paint.

She’d looked away, she’d sat with her eyes closed for a moment in the pose of someone too moved to go on—and snapped them open again to surprise the painting into the fleeting, interrupted capture of life she’d glimpsed a few moments before. But had it ever been there in the first place? The painting had died in front of her, and finally become oil and wax and lead and resin, the charcoal sketch beneath that and the canvas beneath the sketch, the contrivance and work that had enabled them, the tricks and wheezes the artist had brought to the easel each day —and, then, beyond that, the itch on his scalp, the sting of his troubled left eye, his difficulties with his eldest son and the surprise of his love for his wife. As a work it was a series of problems that had been solved. As a painting, it had disappeared.

She stood and looked around. I’ve killed it. She’d tiptoed away, across the tiny click-clack of the parquet floor. No one else seemed to have trouble seeing—near her, a man and a woman sat entranced before another painting, the woman’s guía held up like a fan, the couple’s faces caught in grateful amazement, their bodies stilled, themselves turned into art by Art. But what was it they saw? And why have I stopped seeing it? she wondered. Why have I stopped seeing it when seeing is exactly what I’ve come here to do? What else was there to do here in this Old World where everything was finished, everything had already taken place, all the work had been done? What else but to look at it, what else to do but see?

*

Whatever it was that had been happening to her on the island, this strange sequence of episodes, she knew it started at the Louvre a few days before Barcelona. Even before she’d arrived all talk had been of what had just happened: the attack on the most famous painting in the world! She’d been half aware of the disaster as she was half aware of so many of the things that other people just seemed to know.

In the queue at the Louvre there’d been an American who was telling everyone the story as if he owned it, telling everyone and no one: how a young Dutchman—Deutsche, Deutsche, someone called out from the back of the crowd—had flung acid at the painting in some kind of hectic, muddled protest, and how as a result the painting had been taken away for repair. No one knew why the man had done it—He was crazy! —and no one knew how long it would be gone—maybe forever, the American said with what sounded like real grief in his voice.

Gone: and yet, once they were inside, the crowd had pressed along nonetheless, carrying her with it in a vast ruck of frottage that took her past the high, secret images of enormous paintings ranked two- and sometimes three-deep on the walls and through the arches that separated skylit salón from skylit salón and towards the absence that (it seemed to her as she was milled and ground relentlessly forward in the crowd) gave everyone so much to talk about.

Until, at last, it was before them, the thing they’d all, it seemed, come to see. By now there were perhaps fifty people around her, against her, but as she looked up her usual body-panic began to drift away. Where was it, this wonder? Yes, over there, on the left wall, halfway up: that was where everyone was turning now. And now she, too, could see it, what everyone had come for: the space where the Mona Lisa had been.

She gazed at it—all of them did, all the worshippers. There it was, the pale telltale outline where the painting had hung, the ghost of the painting, that magnificent, articulate lack, pushing itself at the crowd, offering itself to them, to her: especially to her. She gaped at the thing which—it had just begun to seem possible to her—was even greater than the painting, even greater than Art itself: the exposed wall, the overwhelming, wrenching eloquence of the place where once the Art had been. Pale, anonymous plaster which had lost any gloss it might have had in its years behind the suspended portrait and was bared to her now as if here was where all meaning lived, the thing that had been waiting for her all her life. Here, right in front of her. Here—

2

By six each morning the birds in the eaves would begin to waken her. She’d lie in the big high bed while the room filled with a crystalline light from the fortress wall up behind la Casa de las Liebres and off the walls of the cathedral just above that. The birds’ angry domestic chatter, and the flutter and clump of their wings inside the eaves and under the tiles of the roof: she remembered the children she’d seen that first morning on the island—they’d made much the same noise. She remembered the tug pushing the ferry in towards the dock and the sound of the hull swirling through the water, nothing else, the engine cut, and her not believing there could be so much shouting started up around her on the boat or such excitement down there as the wharf got closer. How could so many people have turned themselves out as early as this? How long had these people been apart?

And then the children—boys, urchins, ten or a dozen of them, the noise of them, their bird-chatter once the ferry had docked and she’d come down the pasarela and was standing there with the feel of the boat beneath her still, while the tip of a crane wrote absolutely nothing at all against the blue above her head and she had not the slightest idea what to do next. Fizzing around her, these pilluelos, as she’d learned to call them, children who chattered like birds and flapped and fled when somebody shouted at them and seemed to climb into the sky and away and away and away. Nobody owned them: they didn’t seem to belong to anyone or anything, not even to themselves. They came from another reality. Sometimes in the next few days she’d see them in the distance or when she came around a corner of the little town, and they’d scatter and shriek and fly off as if they hadn’t really been there in the first place. Who were they? Where did they belong?

*

Sometimes