The Night My Brother Made Grappa Ice and I Fathered My Nephew

Right after Luca asked me to get Sophia pregnant, I had to leave for Struga Poetry Evenings, an international festival in Macedonia. Larssen wasn’t coming with me. He and his wife were sailing the Mediterranean, not far from where Shelley had drowned with Keats’s poems in his pockets. Xenia accompanied me instead. It was the first time she came along to a festival abroad.

The director of Struga Poetry Evenings came to pick us up from the airport in Skopje. A fat man in a tight suit, the buttons of his jacket undone, he stood at the bottom of the escalator bringing down the passengers and gave me a firm handshake. ‘How many poets have died at your festival?’ It was the first thing he asked me.

A poet from Nigeria got lost in the city once and didn’t resurface until three days later. A Polish poet had been too drunk to read. A female poet from Chile never arrived. But no poet had ever died in Rotterdam.

In his chauffeur-driven car, the director told us that he’d had to accompany two coffins back to Russia. Poets who had disembarked too early from the boat cruising Lake Ohrid. ‘Russian poets love drinking,’ he said, ‘but they’re not good at swimming.’ Xenia wasn’t amused.

The festival’s programming was peculiar, to put it mildly. Every year the director invited twenty Russian poets. Usually these were the same group of boozers, with the occasional new poet in their midst. The Russians were invited because the director received funding for it from his friends. The independence that the World Poetry Festival prided itself on was conspicuous by its absence in Struga, but there was compensation in the form of ten leading international poets invited by a programmer. His name was Clive Farrow. He taught English at the university and had been working for the festival for many, many years, a dinosaur surrounded by books. He was said to live like a hermit, but on opening night he walked up the Cultural Centre’s illuminated stairs with a gorgeous woman on his arm. He had brought them all to Struga: W.H. Auden, Ginsberg, Enzensberger, Neruda, Hughes.

The twenty Russians didn’t mingle with the other poets. They moved differently around the festival, like something of an autonomous element. A stray caravan of poets, battered and dirty, always thirsty.

That very first evening, Xenia got harassed. After a shower, she had come down in a long gown. It revealed little more than her ankles and a hint of her calves, but still, her legs were bare. The Russians were smitten. They closed in on her and fought for her attention.

Most of the poets had arrived in Struga in the course of the afternoon and met in the bar of Hotel Drim. One or two were due to arrive the following morning, the day of the opening ceremony. Having shaken everybody’s hand, the director was now surrounded by a group of men who looked like they might be the festival sponsors: heavy-set guys who were chain-smoking cigarettes. Parked outside was a line of cars, some with tinted windows.

I got talking to the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, who was the festival’s guest of honour and the recipient of the Golden Wreath, a prize first handed out in 1966. The guests of honour at Struga Poetry Evenings were also honoured with a memorial stone in the Park of Poetry and given the opportunity to plant a tree there. Yehuda Amichai had travelled here with his wife, yet another privilege not extended to the other poets: only the guest of honour’s partner had their plane ticket paid for.

Amichai’s wife was a head taller than, and very attentive to, her husband. She fetched his drinks and sometimes even answered a question I asked him. It’s something I was familiar with from my festival. The wives of internationally renowned male poets were extremely dedicated. They did everything for their husbands, allowing them to concentrate exclusively on their poetry, on the sacred. The women paved the way, they walked in front. To the hotel reception, to the buffet, to the presenter in the room where the reading was to be held.

So it was too in Struga. At one point the guest of honour’s wife started making her way to the elevator. Tomorrow would be a busy day, she said. The poet left without a word, to be swallowed up by the telescopic door a little later.

‘I told them you’re my fiancé,’ Xenia said to me. She had put her hand on my shoulder. I felt her upper body against mine, but more than that I felt the hot breath of twenty drunken Russian poets. They stared at me with glassy eyes. They had raised their voices, I noticed.

‘They’d give their life for you, if you ask me.’

‘You have to protect me.’

‘There’s twenty of them.’

‘My boyfriend wouldn’t be scared.’

The guy with the black hands, the car mechanic. Xenia had told me that when they were in the pub he had to keep the other men at bay. On one occasion he had pulled a wrench out of his overalls and threatened a man with it. All I had in my bag was a book of poetry.

‘Can’t you say you’ll spend the night with the strongest?’

‘I told them I’m spending the night with you.’

‘They’ll lynch me.’

‘No, they won’t.’

‘They’re Russians,’ I said. ‘And they’ve been drinking.’

‘I don’t think Russian poets are violent. The only one that springs to mind right now is Sukhovo-Kobylin, but he was a playwright.’

‘What did he do?’

‘Murdered his mistress.’

That failed to reassure me. The Russians at the bar kept staring. Hungry like wolves. They had a view of Xenia’s back, of the dress that fit snugly around her hips.

‘It’s a lot more common the other way around,’ Xenia said. ‘The list of murdered writers is long. The same is true for poets who committed suicide.’ She raised her wine glass to her lips. ‘Only the list of Russians who step into a lake and go home in a coffin is short,’ she said. ‘To date, anyway.’

By now most of the poets had gone upstairs, to their hotel room. Likewise, the director’s entourage had halved.

‘Shall we go?’ I suggested.

‘Oh, yes. We’re spending the night together.’

We were alone in the lift, but didn’t say a word. There was the silence that fills most lifts, alongside the usual phone and a mirrored back wall. The lift at Hotel Rinno in Vilnius has a vase with plastic lilies, and at the Hotel Jianguo in Beijing, saccharine music pours from invisible speakers. The lift at the Ramada Hotel in Berlin smells of apples.

Just before the doors opened with a ping, Xenia threw me a sideways glance. We walked down the corridor, which looked like any other hotel corridor. The thick carpet absorbed all sound, making Xenia’s high heels inaudible. She was an elegant and fast-moving hind. The rooms in this wing overlooked Lake Ohrid. In the morning the sun would bathe the balconies in bright light and there would be ripples on the water’s surface.

‘Shall we have a quick listen?’ I said.

‘A listen to what?’

‘To the poets in the night.’

It was something Richard Heiman had done for years, he confessed to me once. When everybody was in bed, he would stroll up and down the long corridors of the Rotterdam Hilton and eavesdrop. With his ear to the doors, he had heard them coughing and snoring, tossing and muttering, in their sleep. Then there were the poets who lay awake half the night; the sound of the television filled their room, or else they’d be on the phone to the home front, a wife in Romania complaining about bills that needed paying and children who wouldn’t get out of bed.

I pressed my ear against a door.

‘Well?’ Xenia asked.

‘Nothing.’

She walked to the next room and listened. ‘An ox,’ she giggled. ‘Or is it a bear?’

I stood behind her, but there was no need to press my ear against the door. ‘Jesus, listen to that.’

‘Who could it be?’

‘Perhaps it’s Yehuda Amichai.’

‘Or his wife.’

Richard Heiman probably knew who slept in which room and which sounds belonged to which poets. Who received nocturnal visits.

‘Sleep well,’ I said when we were both in front of our respective doors.

‘Sleep well, fiancé.’

She gave me a mischievous smile, the smile of a woman who knows she’s in control. Not wanting to be rejected, I didn’t respond with a countermove. But less than a minute later there was a knock on the door — not the door opening out onto the corridor, but another one, in the room’s internal wall. I had to unlock it. Behind it was Xenia.

‘A secret passage,’ she said, and walked straight into my room.

This wasn’t the first time I had slept in connecting hotel rooms, but I had never bothered knocking on the door. I always considered the chance of a young, blonde woman who knew everything about poetry walking into my room to be nil.

‘There’s a bottle of vodka in the minibar,’ Xenia said.

I opened the small, square fridge and spotted a few mixers and half a litre of vodka. The glasses were on the desk beside the kettle.

Xenia slid open the balcony doors and sat down on one of the plastic chairs. She kicked off her heels and rested her feet on the balcony railing. Her long dress ended up around her knees.

We sipped from our glasses and looked at the dark lake. Over by the quay the shoreline was visible, but further down it was all one big black smudge. It was a warm August night, with music playing somewhere.

‘Nice,’ Xenia said.

‘Yes.’

She wasn’t really trying to get a conversation going. Perhaps she thought it was my job, or perhaps she was happy to just sit here after the long day, outside, with her bare feet on the railing and a cold glass of vodka in her hands.

‘What did the Russian poets ask you?’ I said after a while.

‘Oh, the usual,’ she replied. ‘The thing men always want to know when they’ve been drinking.’

‘Were they that brazen?’

‘First they asked me where I was from. Then, one by one, they tried to impress me with Russian poets. The big names — Pushkin, Lermontov, Tjutcev — as well as twentieth-century poets. They thought I was just a silly little girl. They cited poems and wanted me to say who’d written them. Classic lines by Blok and Bunin. You’ll find them in any anthology. I hit back with a poem by Sergei Yesenin, a poet who was sober for barely an hour a day towards the end of his life, but still managed to write brilliant poetry in that one hour. He wrote his final poem with his own blood, because he’d run out of ink.’

‘Did you recite that one?’

‘I was sure they didn’t know it. They carried on drinking, but I’d clearly showed them up.’ She rubbed one leg against the other, calf against shin. ‘Then one of them asked how many men I’d slept with. His friends all laughed at that.’

‘What did you tell them?’

‘At first they all came up with a figure themselves. Of course several poets claimed I was still a virgin. I told them the number equalled the number of volumes Boris Pasternak published during his lifetime.’

I didn’t have the faintest idea how many volumes of poetry Pasternak had written. Not many, I would have thought. Poets didn’t publish a lot in those days.

‘Eight,’ Xenia said. ‘But I didn’t tell them that. I let them rack their brains over it first.’

We were silent. I looked at her white ankles, at the toenails which she had painted purple, the colour of her dress. She finished her drink before me and poured herself another. ‘And what do women want to know when they’ve been drinking?’ she asked casually.

‘Everything.’

And after a large mouthful, ‘Well, how many?’

‘I don’t know,’ I answered.

‘Have you lost count?’

‘No, I never kept count. It’s not important to me.’

‘Pushkin married his one-hundred-and-thirteenth lover. That’s what he claimed, anyway.’

‘There haven’t been that many, nowhere near. I’m only thirty.’

‘So was Pushkin when he got married.’

She looked at my glass and gave me a top-up.

‘I reckon you’re the kind of man who’ll never marry and have kids,’ she said then.

‘That sounds like a disqualification.’

‘I don’t mean it like that,’ she clarified. ‘But it strikes me as a bit … dull.’ It sounded as if she’d had to pick from a number of words — lonely and superficial among them — and had opted for the least awkward one.

It was something I often sensed. If there was no partner, people thought you had no story to your name. No life.

‘I can’t really imagine you doing any of that, anyway,’ Xenia said. ‘You’re always travelling, and whenever you get the chance you hide behind a collection of poetry.’

I couldn’t imagine it either, and yet it was about to happen. Not marriage, but a child. If I wasn’t also infertile like Luca, that is.

‘Where does it come from?’

‘Where does what come from?’

‘All the travelling, the love of poetry.’

‘Not from my family. Although my great-grandfather once got on a boat to America. He was involved in the construction of a skyscraper and hunted buffalo. But whether he read poems too? I doubt it.’

‘Pushkin’s great-grandfather was Czar Peter the Great’s adopted son. He’d been presented to him as a gift, a little Ethiopian boy. He wasn’t even ten years old.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Pushkin’s passionate nature has been ascribed to this swarthy ancestor.’

It sounded made up, like a fairytale, set in a distant period, in a time of palaces and silk-brocade suits, of carriages and pristine white horses, a tale distorted, embellished, and inflated by each new generation. A tale about a Moor, a czar, and the greatest poet of all.

The story behind a name.

Two days after the closing ceremony had taken place and more than two thousand people had listened to the poets reading on the wooden bridge across the Drim, I was supposed to get Sophia pregnant. By then, Yehuda Amichai had planted a tree, ‘the way Russian astronauts do before they go into space’, as Xenia put it. His wife had helped. A stone had been placed during a formal ceremony in the Park of Poetry and we had taken a small boat to the island just off Struga. The island was home to an ancient monastery, and a well that produced an eternal murmur. One by one, the festival poets leaned over the edge and listened to it, as though it were the well of Castalia from which the poets of Parnassus derived their inspiration. Although the Russians had been drinking, nobody disembarked too early. Everybody flew back home, alive and well.

At Schiphol Airport, Xenia was met by her boyfriend. She offered me a lift, but I decided to take the train. The guy with the oil-stained hands looked at me with misgivings, the way men look at someone who has just spent a couple of days with their woman. (On the balcony, during another night, drinking from a new bottle, Xenia had confessed to cheating once. ‘Does that mean Pasternak has nine volumes to his name?’ I asked. ‘Some claim there are ten,’ she replied with a naughty smile.)

On the train to Rotterdam I read Charles Simic’s prose poems, which Clive Farrow had given to me in Struga. Despite winning the Pulitzer Prize, the Serbo-American poet was reviled by literary critics. Not everybody was enamoured of poetry in prose form, even though the genre had been practised by some of the greats: Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Rimbaud.

As we approached Delft, I turned a page and read, ‘I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole me right back. Then the gypsies stole me again. This went on for some time.’ One day the child drank from the dark breast of his new mother; the next he was sitting at a long table, eating breakfast from a silver spoon. ‘It was the first day of spring. One of my fathers was singing in the bathtub; the other was painting a live sparrow the colors of a tropical bird.’

It was a short poem, two paragraphs, but I didn’t resurface from the lines until the train had long since come to a halt at Rotterdam Central Station and the compartment was empty.

I joined the mass of people walking into the city, past the hundreds of parked bikes and the jingling trams. Back then there was an old pontoon bridge opposite the station where a boys’ choir used to rehearse. Walking past, you would sometimes hear the high voices of the young boys in sailor’s outfits. O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig. Am Stamm des Kreuzes geschlachtet.

I knew every street and every stone, but the city was under constant development. You might come back from South Africa and find an entire building gone, a building you always used to look at while cycling past. New towers sprang up, squares were transformed, railway lines disappeared underground. This had been my second visit to Struga, but despite the six years separating the two occasions I hadn’t seen any major changes. No shiny new flats had been thrown up. The city felt familiar. The only thing familiar in Rotterdam was the pounding of pile drivers.

On the kitchen table I found a couple of envelopes. The cleaner had been round: the sink was spotless and the counter empty. In hotels I always lay down on the bed for a while, with my shoes on the covers, looking at the wallpaper pattern, the fly droppings on the ceiling light. I had to fight the urge to do the same in my own apartment.

That evening I sauntered over towards the ice-cream parlour, but turned on my heels when I got to the street corner. There was a long queue. Maybe it would be better to pop round the following day. On the plane I had heard it was going to get colder, it was going to rain. Tourists flying home are just as obsessed with the weather as ice-cream makers.

It turned out to be the last fine day of summer. When I walked over to the ice-cream parlour the following evening, the street was full of large puddles. It was nearly ten and quiet. My mother was alone behind the ice-cream, while my father lingered beside the espresso machine. Three Somali men sat at a table. They were regulars, drinking coffee and talking in their mother tongue about subjects we could only guess at. Luca was in the kitchen. He was making ice-cream, of course.

I greeted my parents and walked past the displays and round the back of the till, through the door leading to the stairs I hadn’t climbed in months. Nobody asked me anything, neither Beppi, nor my mother. It was as though they were expecting me, as though they knew what I was about to do. When I questioned Luca about it years later and accused him of telling them everything, he reacted furiously. ‘Yes, I told them you were coming!’ he exclaimed. ‘And no, of course I didn’t tell them you came to go to bed with Sophia. How could you think such a thing?! I’m not stupid, you know!’ He told them I was going to read her poetry, in the hope it would make her feel better, cheer her up a bit. My mother hadn’t said a word, but my father had shaken his head. ‘I won’t be surprised if she never got out of bed again.’

I had expected it to be dark and musty in the attic, with Sophia under the covers with her eyes closed, not saying a word. I thought she wouldn’t have washed and would be looking tired, exhausted. I was expecting a sad face, bone-dry lips, and bags under her eyes, the strands of her long hair spread across the pillow like the tentacles of an octopus. But Sophia had opened the door before I had even taken the final step and welcomed me with braided hair and rosy cheeks. She looked enchanting, in a dress with a peony pattern in pink, purple, and white.

For a moment we faced each other without a word. Then, ‘Hello, brother-in-law,’ she said with a smile. Just like she did when I first saw her in the ice-cream parlour, with a mop in her hands. It had been unbelievable, yet perfectly natural at the same time. That’s what we were aiming for now — unbelievable and natural in equal measure.

As I planted a kiss on her cheek, I felt her take my hand. She didn’t lead me to the beds in which Luca and I had once slept — which had been since pushed together to make a double bed — but to the middle of the attic, to a rug under the small, square skylight. Had the sky been clear, we might have kissed under the stars. Instead, our lips drew near under colossal blue clouds. Her eyes closed and she gently squeezed my hand, pressing her body against mine. I looked at her straw-like eyebrows and the blemishes on her skin, the pigmentation, the small dents in her forehead.

Her lips disengaged from mine. ‘Giovanni,’ she whispered. ‘Close your eyes.’

I closed my eyes and felt her hand on my face — her soft hand, the round pillows of her fingers. She slid them across my cheeks, across my lips. She kissed my ear without a sound.

My right hand was guided to her lower back. ‘Touch me,’ she said softly and kissed me on the mouth again. Her lips parted. I thought of snow, of innumerable flakes, millions of ice crystals. I also thought of my brother — of Luca as a boy, and how enchanted we had been by the girl who stuck her long, narrow pink tongue into the cold air.

She smelled lovely. She had showered, but not especially for me. Her hair wasn’t wet and I could smell her body, the body I had never been allowed to touch or see. The sheen, the dappled light on her skin. Her cleavage.

I had dreamed of her breasts, had fantasised about them hundreds of times. They were perfect and fit neatly into my hands. Her nipples were girlish, light and small, practically transparent. But none of this I had ever actually seen. The light never reached that far; the fantasy always stopped, however much she leaned over and smiled.

I heard the floorboards creak as we made our way to the beds. I thought everybody could hear — Beppi and my mother two floors down, Luca in the kitchen, the Somali men at their table. Everybody knew.

Now we had reached the bed. Now it was about to happen.

Sophia turned round and lifted her braid. Dimples appeared in her shoulders. And so she stood for a while, like an artist’s model. I didn’t know what she wanted, what she wanted me to do.

‘My zip,’ she said, and giggled.

It was like the first time: the same insecurity, the same clumsiness.

I took the cold fastener and pulled it all the way down. Her hips were white as milk. She dropped her dress on the floor and stepped out of the peonies around her feet. She lay down on the bed, on her side, resting her head on her hand.

‘Come here,’ she said.

‘Don’t you think it’s weird?’

‘A little.’

‘Just a little?’

Her chest rose and fell. ‘Yes, a little.’

She sat up and unbuttoned my shirt. My clothes fell to the floor beside her dress. I felt her hands on the fabric of my boxer shorts and then her fingers behind the elastic. She planted a kiss on my prick.

‘You don’t taste of broccoli at all,’ she said. ‘And Luca doesn’t taste of strawberry mousse.’ She laughed out loud.

How could she be so light-hearted about it? This beautiful young woman who had grown sad and sombre, who could be silent for days — the woman who got tears in her eyes when a little boy ordered ice-cream from her. Had she somehow found a passage to the past within this darkness, back to the enchanting young girl she had been, the one who could touch the tip of her nose with her tongue?

She began caressing me again, and I let my hands wander across her skin, too. Her silky soft calves, her wonderfully warm thighs. Why all the tenderness? Shouldn’t we just do it? Fast and hard. Sophia on her stomach, me behind her, thrusting like a stallion.

Instead we kissed as if time hadn’t made a giant leap and we were still young and innocent. I unhooked her bra. Her breasts, which would get bigger, nipples which would get darker, right now were small and pink.

The light-heartedness was gone. We were making love; bodies not yet used to each other, but keen to know everything there is to know. Every nook and cranny, every millimetre of skin.

She took off her knickers herself. Her skin was paler underneath, her pubic hair curly. My fingers went down there instinctively. Neither white petals nor snails have skin so fine, the poet Federico García Lorca wrote, nor moonlit crystals shine with her brilliance.

‘Use your thumb,’ she whispered. ‘I want to feel your thumb.’

I didn’t know what she meant, not immediately, not when she first whispered it. But when she repeated it, effectively ordered me to, I did as I was told. I touched her with my smooth, perfect thumb. Not the calloused ice-cream maker’s thumb, but the thumb that had turned countless pages of poetry. The thumb Luca didn’t have.

She moaned and writhed, as though a shock passed through her body. Only then did I notice just how sallow her skin was and how dull and dark her hair. I saw my brother’s wife. Unhappy, deprived of sunlight. The colour on her cheeks was blusher.

‘Go on,’ she said.

‘We mustn’t.’

‘He’s fine with it.’

‘But it’s not okay.’

She put her finger on my mouth. ‘He won’t come up here, he’s making ice-cream.’

For a split second I could picture him, in the white-tiled kitchen. The ice-cream machines churning, murmuring in his ear. The next day, I would hear what flavour he had made while I slept with his wife. Everybody would be talking about it. It was the first time Luca had ice made from an alcoholic beverage in the display. Grappa, barrel-aged, forty-three per cent. The trickiest ice to make.

Despite the rain, people queued. The regulars of the pub across the street. They had gotten wind of the new flavour and ordered grappa sorbet after grappa sorbet. The structure was amazing, which was a miracle in itself. Alcohol lowers the freezing point; the higher the percentage, the faster the ice crystallises. It becomes granular, slushy. But Luca had pulled it off; it was perfect. Perhaps he had spent all night on it — who knows, perhaps he had gone through ten bottles. When I peered through my office window in the morning, I saw him leaning on the counter, looking for all the world as if he had a terrible hangover.

But Sophia smiled and beamed and fluttered around the ice-cream parlour like a butterfly. They say some women are so familiar with their body they can actually feel the fertilisation of an egg-cell. Sophia had felt it and was blissfully happy.

In the attic, she kissed me. The fresh taste of her mouth yanked me out of my thoughts. Her hands slid across my legs, my groin, my balls. She was giving me a hand job.

‘Shall I use some oil?’

Before I had a chance to reply, Sophia reached for the bedside cabinet and pulled out a small bottle. She dripped some oil into the palm of her hand and started massaging me. Her right hand moved slowly up and down and enclosed the tip of my prick in her fist.

‘Nice?’

Yes, bloody nice. This really wasn’t right.

‘Any other requests?’

She laughed and continued the massage. She was using two hands, her fingers entwined. It was a particular technique, an undulating movement. I felt a continuous pressure on my prick. It was divine.

‘Don’t come just yet,’ she said and squeezed my penis hard.

My eyes opened. You wouldn’t believe what your eye can alight on. I saw the flaking paint of the frame. Luca’s bed. We were in his bed. As a boy, Luca had scratched the paint off when he was angry because we weren’t allowed to go out and play. I remember it well.

Why had I not booked a hotel? The executive rooms at the Bilderberg Park Hotel were spacious and light. It’s where, in recent years, we’d accommodated the poets invited to the World Poetry Festival. The views across the centre of town were gorgeous.

Her hands were everywhere. Her whole body, in fact; her legs, her mouth, her hair. Everything was spinning around me — the sheets, the pillow, her bare feet. Or was it the thought of my brother, who was making ice-cream? Churn, churn, churn.

I felt her nails in my back. Now she was sitting on top of me. As she looked down at me she began to move slowly. She found her rhythm, controlled, infinitely patient.

‘Giovanni,’ I heard her say at some point. ‘Where’s your mind?’

‘Nowhere.’

‘That’s not true.’

I was in Venas di Cadore the day of their wedding.

She stopped moving.

‘Don’t stop,’ I said.

‘You men tend to bottle it all up.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You and your brother. Your whole family.’ She stopped those wonderful movements of her cunt around my prick.

I had slept with her mother. I had seduced her after the wedding party. Her husband had already gone home. She’d had too much to drink and we left without saying goodbye. We did it in the street, standing up, in the small square behind the bakery. Her fur stole around her shoulders, her dark-blue skirt hiked up to her waist. Her hands against the plaster wall.

In one fell swoop I rolled Sophia over, onto her stomach. She looked over her shoulder, obviously startled, but she soon relaxed when I ran my fingers across her back. Her white buttocks, her curvy hips — she was immaculate. I entered her and began thrusting, in and out, harder and harder. I supported myself with my hands. She bit my fingers.

I had to stop thinking about my brother, stop thinking about the ice-cream churning in the machines. I had to stop thinking about the flaky paint of the bed we were lying in. I had to stop thinking about her mother. Lines of poetry spun around in my head; they plunged into my mind like water from a great height, and purged everything.

And so it felt as if that night, like in Lorca’s poem, I rode the pick of the roads, on a mother-of-pearl mare without bridle or stirrups.