Dear Ben,
I almost doubt. I almost believe that I lay down to sleep on the Naugahyde benches of Colón and dreamed until, through, past, this stumbling, heel-wrenching, wheel-snagging chase down the crumbling alley below the Villa Gabirol.
La Subida. The name on the still-shadowed alley sign. The Rise. Yet, I drop. I fall. I read from right to left. Neither steps nor street, neither inhabited nor deserted. No lights, no glass, knotted clotheslines, many cats, the smell of human droppings, the sound of flies. And far below, every wave of her long-maned head drifting her farther away—Isabella, my daughter, Isabella.
Here is the story:
I occupied the larger part of the autumn and winter of 1977–78 in the company of our mutual friend, Hook. During the day, he worked for me, or more specifically, worked in my office on assignment from our American affiliate. Between the hours of six p.m. and midnight, between the days of Monday and Saturday, between the months of October and February, he pitched tent in my front parlour. Dinner, drinks, and Sandor were the programme. No furtive kisses, no subterranean exploration. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
So you can imagine my surprise when, one frozen February Monday, I walked into my GP on suspicion of the flu and walked out with the news I was pregnant.
I drove at unsafe speed to the Cromwell Hospital, where, one year before, as a still-married woman, I had been diagnosed as irretrievably infertile. This was the rosy-fingered dawn of British obstetrics, the Moon Shot Morning of In Vitro Fertilization, when the obstetricians of the Realm rose to the invigorating strains of “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Test-Tube Daughter.” Though British dentistry, surgery, oncology, and gastroenterology were the laughingstock of the Third World, the Cromwell boasted a baker’s dozen of the finest Tube and Womb men in the Universe. I marched into Obstetrics, past a sputtering duty-nurse, and into the first hi-tech examining room. Three bearded doctors turned around.
“Three months,” said the first.
“Fifteen weeks from conception,” said the second.
“Where did you buy that jumpsuit?” asked the third.
“John Lewis,” I said.
“Fourteen weeks, then.” All protest was useless.
“Fertility is a strange and wonderful thing,” the first called. I was already in the lift.
Fucked by a cliché, I thought. Because you have to understand, Ben, I had last slept with a man, I had last had sexual intercourse with a man—my ex-husband, to be precise—on September 1, 1977, over five months earlier. And I had never—to the envy of my friends, and the shame of my adolescence—never, ever menstruated.
But I could still do simple maths. One hour later, parked across the street from my house, I calculated back fourteen weeks. Early November. I rummaged for last year’s Economist diary, still note-pocked and rubber-banded in the silty bottom of my shoulder bag. November 8th, a Tuesday, my first day back at work—a form of penetration, but not a satisfactory explanation. November 7th, a recital at St. John’s Smith Square with Liaden. The sixth a blank. November 5th.
Remember, remember, the fifth of November. Certainly you, a cosmopolitan Yank, must know the rhyme. Guy Fawkes Day. Gunpowder and Roman Catholics, a seventeenth-century plot to blow up Parliament, a twentieth-century celebration for shopkeeper, yuppie, and skinhead, a chance to forget the C. of E. and go Druid around a bonfire.
I stared out the driver’s window of my Volvo, past the withered grass and blasted plane trees of the Heath, through the dull February afternoon, to that November Saturday. Hook rang my doorbell—must have rung my doorbell—at six o’clock. I cooked him dinner, God remembers what. We talked, we always talked, most probably we talked about my inescapable return to the Beeb. We had just settled down in the front parlour for our evening ritual of Sambuca and Sandor when I noticed a crowd gathering on the far side of my window, on the far side of the street. I insisted, far too strongly, that we delay custom, that Hook join me and experience our quaint British bonfire, touch a happy moment of childhood.
A crowd of small huddles were scattered about the meadow, greeting acquaintances at a visibility of ten feet. The sulphur light of the streetlamps, the weak pub lanterns of Jack Straw’s Castle at the top of the rise, travelled only to the frontiers of the camp. At the center, in vague silhouette, a ten-foot pile of broken doors, bits of shed, scrap lumber, claw-fingered branches, and a growing boneyard of hand-stitched effigies of Guy Fawkes squatted at the junction of the random bicycle paths that stumbled out of the wood. Each new committee brought its own Guy—pillowcases stuffed with newspaper, burlap sacks filled with woodchips, charcoaled and rouged grimaces, amateur, crude victims—as English as Christmas Panto and Cumberland Sauce.
The stroke of ten from the bell at Ivor Heath rang its instructions. We became coherent. We became a circle. As the numbers grew, we stepped back from the center to accommodate. I held Hook’s long fingers with my left hand, the fatty paw of a schoolboy with my right. At the farthest arc, the circle broke, and a figure emerged from the wood bearing a flaming torch. The torch shone through the warm breath of the man, shone over the scattered limbs of the Guys, spread-eagled, upside-down, twisted, on the pyre. We all breathed in. Silence.
With a whup, all was ablaze, the flames fifteen, twenty feet above the highest Guy. The pop of sap, the roar of burnt autumn air. Otherwise, not a sound, not a movement, no rustle of trees, no traffic behind, no whispers around, nothing but the heat of the fire and the two hands. Hook shifted. I shook him to be still, never questioning the orthodoxy of our British ritual. His shifting continued. The schoolboy’s family muttered in a way only the English can, and frankly, I agreed with them.
Hook disappeared. One moment there—the next, the hand of my Pakistani greengrocer. I stayed for another moment, and then another. It could well have been half an hour before I crossed back over the far side, to find Hook drinking in the dark, curtains drawn, an A-minor scale of Sandor.
I said nothing. I curled my feet up under me on the sofa. For the first time, the music lulled me into a daze—or perhaps merely fortified the light hypnosis of the bonfire—to a point where I was conscious of sound, yet as paralyzed as in my deepest sleep. As always, the music stirred a cauldron between my thighs, this time with even greater force and heat. From the driver’s seat of my Volvo, three months later, I could almost convince myself that Hook had scaled the sofa and made delicate, yet effective, love to me that night. But as I looked out the window to the Heath, the ashes of Guy Fawkes Day three-months blown from Primrose Hill to Golders Green, I could almost convince myself that one, and perhaps more, of those faceless, poorly stitched De Chirico Guys had floated on fire and smoke across the road, through a keyhole, into my parlour. Almost.
It was nearly five o’clock of that February afternoon when I climbed out of the Volvo and into a hot, but not too hot, bath in preparation for a serious chat with our friend Hook. My perfect new body gave up few clues, not even the merest hint of the active volcano ruminating beneath the surface. The unsought, the unhoped, was too new to frighten, excite, upset, affect. I pulled on a blouse and a pair of woollen trousers with no need to adjust belt or buttons. I brewed a pot of rose-hip tea.
At 6.01 I panicked. At 6.05 I began to cry. At seven o’clock I phoned the police, at eight, the hospitals, at nine, the morgues. From ten p.m. until the seven a.m. sunrise I sat by the phone and listened to the ticking of the kitchen clock and the entire repertoire of the possibilities of time. By noon, it was clear that Hook had disappeared.
When I ran to Liaden in Granada two days later, I was as lost as on the morning after my divorce. I needed guidance, someone to explain the children business, the love business, to me. The thought of abortion never crossed my mind, but neither did the thought of carrying the pregnancy to term. Physically, I was walking, flinging my arms about, feeding myself. Emotionally, I was in traction.
The Beeb was relieved by my sabbatical and resisted any explanation. The police likewise. The gentle winter, the easy Granadine life, built a fence around my belly. My perfect body became perfectly pregnant. I read Elizabeth Bowen, Lorca in translation, a secondhand copy of Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra rescued from a kitchen cupboard. I walked whole days away, through the alleys of the Albaicín, up the hill of the Alhambra. I purchased a secondhand guitar. Sammy L., after a day out working the tourist trade, brought home cheese and fruit, lamb and shellfish. I cooked, we ate—sometimes together, more often not.
I didn’t twig, until it was too late for action, that I too was part of the tourist trade, and that Sammy L. had quite subtly assumed the job of tour guide and was leading me to a gentle Andalusian birth. Our lives ran on such independent planes, in different time zones that twisted into only the most occasional intersection. There was a morning coffee on the tiny Plaza of San Miguel de Bajo. There was the evening at La Bulería. And there was the business at the Carmen de San Francisco.
It was August, close to the end. I was large, very large, and very hot. I walked only to the shops and only in the first hours of morning or after the sun had cast the Albaicín in shadows. I passed entire days under an electric fan, decorating my fantasies with floral advertisements from magazines and catalogues. My Hampstead dressing room could be wallpapered and draped for my tiny new friend. The guest room, without alteration, would delight the most discriminating au pair, should I return to a Beeb that seemed the height of tedium at the moment. Career anxieties had been pushed into the same crowded corner that now held my stomach, bladder, and intestines—acting up, now and again, but small and lethargic in comparison with the impatient baby.
At eleven that morning, Sammy L. drove me to my final examination with the midwife at the Convento Santa Isabel. I stepped like a queen from the air-conditioned comfort of his Renault 4 into the gentle shadows of the arcades of the convent, secure in Sammy L.’s promise to wait. Sor Juana reached gently inside me, assured me that, large as I was, my cervix was well effaced—she would see me within the week, it would be an easy delivery. I walked out past the crumbling murals and looked up at the green-shuttered balconies of the maternity cloister—quiet, peaceful, my midsummer hotel.
There was a message at the gate. Apologies from Sammy L.—an emergency. An invitation to dinner—ten p.m., the Carmen de San Francisco, a tourist, a client he wanted me to meet. Fine. I was in no rush to go home. The fastest route, in fact, was not by Sammy L.’s taxi, which had to run the circumference of the ancient Moorish fortifications, but downhill, down steps, down alleys. One of the sisters guided my belly home through the maze, on her way to teach geography at the boys’ school on the Sacromonte, past the caves of the gypsies. I invited her in for a cup of tea. She begged off, with a blessing I understood only much later: “You are truly a vessel sent from God.”
I slept much of the afternoon and evening. I had been spared the morning sickness, varicose veins, constipation, and moodiness that Liaden had reported in pregnancies past. My only symptoms were growth and fatigue.
At sunset, I bathed carefully, dressed in a local cotton tent, and rang for a taxi. It was fully dark as we drove up the hill of the Alhambra, up the narrow Cuesta de Gomerez, the gift shops and guitar garages shuttered against the night. Groups of fives and sevens strolled through the Alameda, past the Puerta de las Granadas, the battlements of the Alhambra illuminated for midsummer assignations. A regiment of German school-children sat under a plane tree—Eurorock on a boombox.
The taxi dropped me at the purple keep of the Hotel Alhambra Palace. From the entrance of the hotel, the city dropped away into the precinct of the Catholic God, the domes and spires of Santo Domingo, the Catedral, the Capilla Real, the ornate restaurants of the archbishop and his minions. The heights were reserved for Moorish nostalgia and unreconstructed skepticism. I had been lunched at the Carmen de San Francisco on several occasions by admirers who struck up conversations in the Patio de Lindaraja of the Alhambra. University professors, begranted artists, jacket-and-tie bohemians who climbed the hill on the backs of their patron saints, Lorca and de Falla. I would listen attentively, ask questions designed to flatter. In return, food, company. These were the dark days, Ben, before success.
The Carmen was tucked one hundred yards down a narrow-walled alley. The parking guard at the hotel stared without embarrassment—I thought of asking him to walk me but couldn’t think of the Spanish words to make the request legitimate. The lanterns that gripped the walls of the alley lit the jagged shards of glass along the top of the private edge and dropped insignificant puddles into the darkness on the public side—no protection from gypsies and muggers, real or imagined. Small light, high drama—Sammy L.’s typical Spain. I was frightened, excited. My journalistic curiosity hadn’t entirely run down the plughole of my placenta. Sammy L. never spoke of individual clients, only genus and specie. This might be my only opportunity to observe him in action. Once the baby was born, I’d fly back to England, the opportunity would be lost.
The Carmen de San Francisco showed only a small wooden door onto the alley. Inside, a vineyard of candlelit rooms draped the side of the hill into the lights of downtown Granada. The client was waiting for me at a windowside table.
“You are exquisite,” he said, by way of introduction, staring deep into my belly.
“I am due this week,” I explained. You never know how much you need to explain to men. He looked up into my face for the first time. Kind eyes, a small moustache, long fingers stroking, hiding a weak chin, a wedding band. An American. I had dined with worse.
We were sitting at a table for four, but there were no jackets, wraps, purses, or disarranged cutlery to indicate any other companions. I had expected Sammy L., had expected, perhaps, a wife, a girlfriend, that I was making up a four, not a three, certainly not a two. He offered the pertinent details—forty-eight years old, married, for the second time, a photo of a Subaru, a golden retriever. He was a professor of Medical Ethics attached to a minor hospital outside New York. He ordered a bottle of Sanz while we waited, drank it alone. And when it was clear that Sammy L. had failed to join us, ordered a meal for himself, a simple consommé for me.
We ate in silence, his choice, I assumed. My thoughts revolved so completely around my active center that there was little room, at the time, for annoyance at Sammy L.’s desertion. The American was pleasant enough, didn’t slurp or belch. The meal would be over soon, he would deposit me in a taxi. I would be in bed by midnight.
“Sammy L. told you about my wife?” The American wiped the thin corners of his moustache with an edge of linen.
“Sammy L. told me absolutely nothing,” I answered, hoping that he was one of those Americans who can’t drink coffee after noon.
“A year ago this month, my wife and I were on vacation, right here, at the Alhambra Palace. She was in her eighth month, but the doctor told her it was okay to travel. We took it easy—taxis, siestas.”
“I’m very sorry,” I said, guessing at the rest, wanting to break off the line of conversation immediately.
“I miss her very much.” He called for the bill.
“Your first wife?”
“My second, and current. She’s fine, fine.” He patted my hand. “Thanks for the concern.” We waited. He paid. We stood, walked to the door. “She’ll never know your joy, that’s all.”
Outside the air was fresher, the sky darker. From behind the wall, the rinsing of dishes in the kitchen, the opening theme from Dallas. The American seemed in cheerful spirits, in spite of his confession, and suggested a walk through the lamplit gardens of the Alhambra. I had asked Sammy L. once, without success, to drive me up to the fortress at night, to see the moon over the trellised walls—the moon that figured so large in the folktales Washington Irving had collected during the summer he passed in the governor’s apartment above the Patio de la Reja. I wanted, before I left Granada, to see the moon in the alabaster fountain, where the teenage virgin Jacinta was given the magical silver lute by the phantom of the Princess Zorahayda.
The Lute of Zorahayda. The Lute of Kima. Ben, that story of Esau’s—it’s in the Irving collection. Irving leaves out the Jews, as far as I can remember, but otherwise tells much the same story. Could Irving be a descendant of Esau? Could Esau be a descendant of Irving? Did both men retell ancient folktales or create history?
I took the American’s arm to guide him along the northern wall to the Torre de las Infantas, where Zorahayda last saw her sisters flee down the ravine with their Catholic—according to Irving—Catholic cavaliers. We leaned over the narrow parapet, gazing out to the Sacromonte, where the gypsy caves were beginning to glow with the tourist trade.
“You’re very nice to come out like this.” The American turned to me. I smiled with a raise of the eyebrows and pointed out the small palace of the Generalife, across a tiny bridge.
Suddenly the American was trying to kiss me, reaching up with one long-fingered hand for my chin, reaching down with the other to caress my belly.
“Please,” I said, pushing him gently away. “Your wife—” The most effective tranquillizer I know.
“I thought Sammy L. told you,” he said, immediately disengaging.
“Told me what?” And where was Sammy L., after all?
“Oh, please!” I could see he was embarrassed in his academic way.
“I think”—I tried to put it kindly—“we have both been taken for a ride.” But I wondered what Sammy L. had told the American about me, my physical, my emotional state. I began to walk along the parapet away from the tower, but the path was blocked by a wheelbarrow and a ribbon barrier—“Junta Andalucía.”
“Holland!” His voice. I turned. It was August in Granada, but the call, the single name—September, the Heath, Hook. But where Hook’s voice had warmed me back across the road into my house and mystery, the American’s call struck only icy dread into my belly—the reverse, the opposite, the evil.
He reached, I recoiled, both of us kicked, but I had to do the running. Under the ribbon, sliding down loose gravel and ancient bricks to the grass channel ten feet below. A hole in the wall barely large enough for my belly. Down, steeper than this Subida, if less fragrant, not stopping to look around until I reached the dirt path through the ravine and across the Darro. This time, no ancestors of Esau, no itinerant musicians to pick me up, melt me down, and carry me back to Córdoba.
Half an hour, an hour, ten minutes later, Sor Margarita answered my ringing. I was shaking, crying. Yet I had my handbag, I had my shoes. I was unscratched, unbruised, as if some unseen hand—Mohammed el-Hayzari, Kima, Zorahayda?—had picked me up and tossed me gently, with love and regret, from the ramparts of the Alhambra to the river Darro.
I was led to a bed, undressed, and bathed. Sor Juana closed the door gently and gave me her hand.
“When did your contractions begin?” I hadn’t noticed. “It will be soon,” she said. “Try to get some rest.”
The room was filled with portraits of female saints. I felt strong, protected, impervious to all men. Jesus, it seemed, was even barred from the room, the bare crucifix on the wall protected only by a philosophical Virgin. The walls were cool stone, bare of whitewash, clean, not sanitized. The low ceiling was comforting, the single shuttered window peaceful. A young novice sat by the door saying her rosary. Every bead or so, she glanced quickly up at me.
“Are you praying for me?” I asked.
“For your baby.”
I closed my eyes and thought of my sister’s phone number. Three days in the convent, I thought. Enough time for her to wire me the plane fare back to England. I could leave Spain without having to see Sammy L.
“Can you tell me one thing?”
I opened my eyes. I had forgotten the novice. She stood and approached my bed.
“I shouldn’t be bothering you, Señora, but I don’t understand,” she said.
“What is it?” She looked down at the floor.
“I know that the Bible, the Old Testament of the Jews, tells that the Pharaoh of Egypt decreed that all male Jews be killed at birth. I know that the mother of Moses gave up her son into the care of another woman in order to save his life. That was in Egypt, thousands of years ago. There are no such laws in Spain today. I cannot imagine that your country requires such practices.”
I reached a hand gently up to hers. “What is your name?”
“María.” She blushed.
“María,” I said, lifting her chin, “I don’t have the slightest idea what you are talking about.”
She looked up, pleased, I thought, but surprised. In a moment she was at the window, spreading apart the slats of the shutters the merest crack.
“Those two men,” she whispered, “in the cloister.” I swung my legs over the side of the bed and waddled over to the window. The light was bad, a few bare bulbs hanging under the arcade, but there was no doubt. Sammy L. and the American, talking quietly. I took María by the shoulders.
“What do you know about those men?”
“I only know that your husband told Sor Juana that you were giving over the child to an American professor, that you were unable to care for the child, that you did not even want to see the child when it was born, but let it have a good, new life with a loving family.”
I feel more panic now, Ben, searching for Isabella in the early dawn, than I did that desperate night in the Convento Santa Isabel. I think the barefoot run down the ravine and up the Albaicín had callused me to whatever pain the night could possibly muster. Sor Juana walked in on the two of us. Once I had told her that Sammy L. was neither husband nor father but merely storyteller par excellence, she was in total solidarity with her large, fertile sister.
I never discovered what happened to the men. Isabella was born at dawn, a full head of golden curls, eyes already searching, clear and open, grey as the Ocean Sea. I named her after the patron saint of the convent. We stayed on for three months, my daughter and I, in a beautiful corner room with a painting of Santa Isabel on the ceiling and the music of a fountain through the window. We were fed, fussed over, petted, spoiled. I arrived back in England on Guy Fawkes Day, a year after.
Alone.
Why lie to you, Ben? Forget about the three months. I gave her up. I left her. As fast as this older, independent Isabella is running from me, I ran faster. Not three months later, not after an Eden of baby clothes and breast-feeding. That night, the moment she was born.
The reason? Sammy L.’s fiction was not entirely unattractive. Below, in the cloister, stood a plausible ending to my Andalusian folktale, a needy man to solve my ambivalence. I hesitated.
I was willing to leave her—I didn’t deserve to keep her. The moment of doubt was the moment she was no longer mine.
The truth? Have you ever felt as if your entire body were being ripped apart, not in the proverbial two neat halves, but in jagged shreds, flesh, bone, hanging, stinging, pain so engulfing that you don’t know which part of your body that tiny devil is going to leap from? The noise of pain, as strong as the violin, as strong as the jet fighters that smashed the windows of the Santa María, tearing an “Ayyyy” from deeper circles than the deepest flamenco has ever plumbed? The lies you will tell under torture, the curses you will sing, the loves you will disavow, the nods, the yeses, the papers you will sign?
At the moment of birth, the moment of decision, something in me retreated, something got small.
The truth? Three years later, when my biological statistic writ itself large and I went actively in search of a babymaker, I found only limp members and Zen aphorisms. My letters to Hook, my letters to the Convento Santa Isabel la Real went unanswered, were returned.
The truth? I never wrote.
The truth? Why not ask Hook?
La Subida is relentless, Ben, the greater the light, the more horrible the stench.
The truth? I have become wildly successful. Why capture Isabella? Why catch my heel? Why Carnegie Hall?