The South (6 page)

“Your mother? Is your mother here as well?”

“This is my mother’s house. I’m her daughter.” It suddenly struck her that she had not been introduced to these people as her mother’s daughter, nor had she used the word “mother” in their presence.

“You’re her daughter? I didn’t know she had any children.”

“Here she is now. Ask her.”

As they stood in the kitchen when the guests had gone, Katherine asked her mother why she had told her friends that she had no children.

“I put all that behind me.”

“It feels funny being written off like that.”

“Yes, like walking out of the cinema, leaving it all behind, the big picture.”

“Don’t make jokes.”

“Katherine, don’t tell me what to do.”

“Did I ever exist for you?”

“I got out of that place, and I put it behind me. It’s what you’re going to do, isn’t it. Your father wouldn’t come. I don’t think you’ve consulted your spouse. Incidentally, he telephoned twice today.”

“Tom?”

“He’ll telephone again tomorrow. I told him I had been in touch with you and I would tell you.”

“Tell him I’ve left,” she said, and turned away.

BARCELONA:
A PORTRAIT OF FRANCO

“We should call this exile’s corner,” Michael Graves said, as the waiter poured more sherry into his glass. “We should put a sign up. Do you know the Irish word for exile?”

“Please tell me,” she said.

“Deoraí.”

“How very interesting.”

“Maybe so, but do you know what it means?”

“No.”

“
Deor
means a tear and
deoraí
means one who has known tears.”

“I see no deep furrows on your cheeks,” she said.

“That’s because, like you, I’m not really an exile, but an émigré. Delighted to get out. A great country to emigrate from is ours. ‘And after this our exile . . .’” he began to intone.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a prayer. ‘Hail Holy Queen Mother of Mercy, Hail Our Life Our Sweetness and Our Hope, to Thee do we send up our sighs mourning and weeping in this valley of tears . . .’ You say it at the end of the Rosary. Do you know what the Rosary is?”

“A prayer.”

“Too true. It’s a prayer.”

He spoke to her with a mocking ease she had not come across before; he insisted on a familiarity she still found disconcerting.
Even now as he talked to her and half jeered her, she could not rule out the possibility that this Michael Graves might go away and leave them alone, and that she would greet his departure with mixed feelings. She had become used to his face, yellow and sunken like an apple left out in the sun. Miguel too had warmed to him. He liked foreigners, he told her once, adding so would she, if she had lived in Barcelona for ten years. She had tried to tell him that there were other foreigners available should he tire of the ones he was with now, but he had missed her point.

“How many drinks did you have with Miguel before I met you this evening?” she asked Michael Graves.

“Five,” he said.

“Five what?”

“Five drinks.”

“What was in them?” she asked.

“Miguel ordered them. Miguel paid for them. I am the innocent party.”

Miguel’s paintings covered the walls. He had been working hard for weeks finishing off paintings that he had previously cast aside, trying to recover paintings he had done years before and beginning new work. These last weeks he had painted all night in a corner of Ramon Rogent’s studio in Puertaferrisa. His eyes glazed over, Katherine noticed, when anything except his exhibition was mentioned. She had watched Michael Graves become Miguel’s friend and adviser, telling him in broken Spanish what he should do with his paintings, how he should frame them, whether he should varnish them and which he should discard.

At some point in every day Michael Graves would turn up. If he came in the late afternoon he would stay drinking and talking as long as there was company; but sometimes he arrived in the morning and disappeared by lunchtime. He
lived in a
pensión
in the Barrio Chino. It was cheap, he said, and he enjoyed the atmosphere. They knew nothing about him: they did not know why he was there, nor how long he intended to stay, nor what he did with his time. His head was full of information from books he had read and people he had met. One day he brought them a pile of his drawings of scenes in the Barrio Chino. All the students were impressed. Ramon Rogent wanted to buy one of them.

That afternoon she took him to one of the bars in the market off the Ramblas. He seemed nervous and overwrought.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have brought those drawings in,” he said.

“Everybody thinks they’re very good,” Katherine replied.

“I have a basic competence, that’s what Rogent liked, the native thing, the thing you’re born with. I don’t know how much I should charge for the drawings. I need the money.”

“He’s not rich.”

“I need to sell more than one of those drawings. I have no money. Otherwise I’d keep them myself.”

“Didn’t you have money before you came here?” she asked.

“I did but I spent it. I need a few commissions.”

“Do you want a loan of money?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“This much plus a bit more.” He put his
pensión
bill on the table. It was not high.

“I can give you that tomorrow,” she said.

“I need it today. They have my passport in the
pensión
and if they don’t get paid today they’re going to call the police.”

“Let’s go to the bank.”

“I’ll give it back to you,” he said. She was surprised at how calm he was.

*   *   *

In the week before the exhibition, a small man appeared once a day at Ramon Rogent’s studio and took away the paintings that were ready. Rogent and Miguel called him Jordi Gil. Michael Graves, who disliked him, called him Shylock and did imitations of him rubbing his hands gleefully at the sight of money. Michael went to the British Institute and joined the library in order to borrow
The Complete Shakespeare
from which he made Katherine read
The Merchant of Venice.
He cast her in the role of Jessica, Shylock’s daughter. “Sit Jessica,” he would say at any opportunity, “look how the floor of heaven is thick inlaid with patterns of bright gold.”

Sometimes he bored her. She thought his dislike of Jordi Gil was irrational. She returned to her grammar book and her
pensión
window, to her walks around the Barrio Gótico, her solitary meals in the restaurant in Hotel Colón, her visits to Plaza San Felipe Neri.

The painting classes with Ramon Rogent gave her a focus. She went for a meal or a drink with anyone who was free; but Miguel was preoccupied with his exhibition, he was not preoccupied with her.

The exhibition was important. There would be a big opening in the gallery with colour reproductions in the catalogue. The prices would be high, the gallery was good. Jordi Gil had given Miguel an advance and if enough paintings were sold Miguel said he wanted to go and live in the Pyrenees. She was lying in bed one morning in the room he kept in a friend’s flat in Gracia. She thought he had gone out for the day. She lay in the darkened room worried about being pregnant: they had made love during the night without using a contraceptive. They had taken the risk. She would soon have to make a decision about Miguel.

He came back into the room and stood at the foot of the
bed with his hands on the iron rail.
“Quieres venir conmigo para vivir en un pueblo del pirineo?”
She translated it to herself in a whisper.
Do you want to come and live with me in a village in the Pyrenees?
She curled up in the bed for a moment and turned her head towards the wall. She let the silence continue. After a while she sat up in bed and looked at him. His hands still clutched the rail.

“Si,”
she said. His lip curled as though he were amused. He went out. She reminded herself that she could leave at any time she wanted.

*   *   *

Ramon Rogent taught her to use black for delineation as though the paint-brush were a pencil. He taught her to draw the painting first using the black oil paint. From then on the problems were weight and texture. He taught her that light was a form of weight. He showed her how Picasso made painting seem like sculpture, giving each colour a weight in its application, as though it were mass. He showed her reproductions of Matisse and Dufy and illustrated how they had used black paint to draw the lines and then colour to fix the weight and the texture. She came back every day and worked on this.

Rogent was working on a big painting called
The Rocking Chair
, using a model in an elaborate floral dress sitting in a rocking chair with a window open on to a balcony. He showed her the sketches he had made for the painting, how he had planned the same pink to appear on the face and arms of the woman, on a building in the background outside and as dots on the woman’s dress. But the force of the painting would arise from the use of black to make lines and shadows. Over and over Rogent worked on the black. He taught her how to use black.

Michael Graves remained uneasy about what she was learning. She should learn to draw with a pencil, he maintained,
not to make fake marks with black oil and fake textures with fake colours. He took his sketch book one day when they went to Tibidabo and she spent the afternoon watching him draw Barcelona down below with the sea beyond. He drew with a fluency she had never imagined possible. He was a much better draughtsman than either Miguel or Rogent.

“Where did you learn to draw like that?”

“I always knew. I just practised it and developed it. I worked at it. You should work at it too, instead of learning how to put daubs on canvas.”

“What did you do before you came here?”

“Very little. I was a teacher. I worked in a hospital.”

“What part of Enniscorthy are you from?” She had tried to ask him this before but he had evaded the question. This time he answered freely.

“Do you know Frank Roche’s house, Slaney Lodge?”

“Yes, of course I do.”

“There are four houses in a terrace just opposite that. I was born in one of those.”

“They’re very small.”

“Yes, to you they would be very small.” He looked at her with his big green eyes. She noted the mockery, the bitterness, the irony. She lit a cigarette.

“Why don’t you smoke?” she asked him.

“My lungs,” he said.

“What’s wrong with your lungs?”

“They’re in bad shape.”

“Why?”

“TB,” he said.

“How long did you have TB?”

“Years.”

“Were you in hospital?”

“I was in hospital.”

“For how long?”

“Have you ever read a book called
The Magic Mountain
?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“It was like
The Magic Mountain
except more people died. Almost everybody died. I didn’t die.”

He held her hand for a moment and moved closer to where she sat on the grass. He rested his head on her shoulder. “How long did you have TB?” she asked. He didn’t answer. Gently he put his hand on her breast and held it there.

“Michael, Michael,” she whispered. He didn’t move.

“I want to go,” she said. “Please don’t.” She pulled his hand back and held it. They walked in silence to the tram in the warm afternoon.

*   *   *

She expected to see nothing familiar in this strange city so that when she glanced into the gallery and saw Miguel’s paintings hung on the walls she was shocked. It was like visiting home for an instant, or like seeing someone’s handwriting in a new context. She stopped in the street and it was a full instant before she knew what she was looking at. She had forgotten the frenetic preparations for the exhibition.

When she went in she was disappointed as she knew she would be. She had liked only the academic work she had seen of Miguel’s—the still lifes, the portraits. This, she felt, was too surrealist: there were too many images, too many statements. Prison bars turned into snakes, men’s arms turned into rifles; there were coffins.

She had heard Miguel’s arguments with Rogent about painting and she had observed the difference between them. Rogent talked about colour and form, he talked about beauty, he spoke about using paint almost for its own sake. Miguel believed that paintings should state something, should tell
the truth, should be assertive. Miguel admired Goya for his
Third of May
; Ramon admired Goya for his court portraits as well. Their views were so clear-cut and far apart that Katherine had no difficulty understanding them. Nor had she any difficulty siding with Ramon Rogent. She felt this sharply as she moved about the gallery.

*   *   *

There had been tension all that week over Miguel’s portrait of Franco which he had begun several years before. He disappeared for a day with the canvas and when he came back to Rogent’s studio he wouldn’t allow anyone to see it. He cleared a space in the corner and worked all night, making sure that no one could catch a glimpse of what he was doing. Katherine understood the tension, knew why the students were standing around and why Rogent was so nervous. Miguel was painting Franco.

Rogent’s wife Montserrat was in the studio that night and tried to explain the problem to Katherine further, but she couldn’t understand what Montserrat was saying; she just nodded. Eventually, Rosa, who seemed to work as Rogent’s assistant, came back and Katherine was able to ask her what the problem was.

“His painting wishes to insult the Franco,” Rosa replied.

“Is that why everyone is so worried?” she asked.

“If the police find it he will be arrested.”

“Miguel?”

“Yes, and if the police find it here in the studio of Rogent, they will arrest Rogent also.”

“But is the painting not for the exhibition?” she asked.

“Miguel want it for the exhibition but . . .” Rosa made a sign as if to cut her throat.

In the morning Rogent was still there. A blonde stubble stood out on his thin face. Montserrat had gone, but Michael
Graves had turned up and was standing beside Miguel at the easel. Only Michael Graves had been allowed to look at the painting. When he saw her he came running down the studio. “He’s a genius, your husband. I know he’s not your husband, but he’s a genius.”