An Excerpt from Vangel Griffin
Downstairs, a cream Opel, one door open, motor running, stood at a sixty degree angle to the curb.
“How do you like it?”
“Very nice,” he said. “But we’re blocking the street.”
“I have a wonderful repairman. Always does a magnificent job.”
The first two times she tried to back out the car stalled. She smiled to give him confidence and worked the ignition key. “Once it gets going it’s fine.” She released the clutch too quickly. The car bounced backward in quick little jolts. “Whoops, whoops, whoops,” she said, in time with the engine’s fits. The motor caught, she ground the gears, got it going, turned to face him with a happy smile. The car ran ahead on its own.
“Watch the road!” He reached for the wheel. She cut away from an oncoming car, just missed clipping three parked to the right and stopped outside a café. The terrace tables were wet. They went inside for breakfast.
“Before anything else,” She raised her hands. “I apologize for last night. No matter whose fault it was.”
Whose fault it was? He sniffed. “I understand. You were upset.”
“You know what your big trouble is?”
“You know how many times you’ve asked me that and given me a different answer each time?’
“You think you understand everything. Why can’t you understand how much I hate to be understood?”
He stopped. Had he been a little suffocating? “I suppose it can get to be…”
“Jesus, Mary and Simon-called-Peter! He understands even that!”
“Wait a minute, Satry. I see things from other people’s point of view. Charity’s more than throwing someone a peseta. I can give my goods to feed the poor…”
She made a sarcastic sound. “The Bible!”
“Here we go again.”
“No! I apologize. I mean it. I was upset last night. Forgive me.”
“All right, I forgive you.”
“None of that saying you forgive me and making a face of not forgiving me.”
He tried glaring her down, but she smiled. Principle never stands a chance against charm. He shrugged. “All right. I forgive you.” He even moved his hands.
“Good!” She slapped his shoulder. “I’m temperamental, but you know where you stand. With you cold people, one always has to wonder. A woman can’t relax!”
“Don’t tell me I make you nervous.”
“You don’t make anyone nervous. That’s your biggest trouble! Keep me guessing! Don’t you want me to love you? Smack me, or something! Not too hard, though.”
“Would that make you love me?”
“Who knows?” She smiled again. “Try it.”
He shook his head. “Somebody might see.”
“Hopeless!” Her eyes jumped to the waiter as he brought coffee and olive oil cakes. “Have you slept with your landlady yet? Now there’s a woman you make nervous.”
“You’re the one who made her nervous.”
“Women don’t make other women nervous.”
“Sure they do. More than men.”
She cocked her head, active even when thinking. Ideas were wild game to hunt down. “You’re right!” She nodded. “Yes! You’re a sage about women!”
“We went through all that last night.”
“That’s true. I’d better watch my step. You’ll smack me yet. I’d melt!” She pointed to her coffee cup, jabbering right along. “Like that lump of sugar. But you wouldn’t know what to do with a melted woman. You’d feel embarrassed! Or maybe you let us melt ourselves. Trap us. Like fish in a net. I’ll call the police.”
“I’ll tell them you hit me with your car. They'll believe that. No matter what I say you hit with your car.”
“Then we’re friends again, right?”
“I love you too much not to be friends with you.”
“Good. This will be a good day. Avila has great spiritual significance.” She twisted the crinkly paper from the olive oil cakes. “We’ll go there for that!”
“Oh yes. You’re all spirit.”
She stopped twisting the paper. “I’d like to be. If you’d let me.”
He felt himself flicker. No, she'd awakened early, couldn’t get back to sleep, decided to dabble in penitence. Another ten minutes and she’d consider herself absolved.
“Coffee makes you sentimental.” He clapped for the waiter.
They ran into rain and the way she took the curves on the ancient road had him gripping the sides of his seat so hard the cramps in his forearms didn’t loosen until they were inside the cathedral.
She took his arm as they came out. “Let’s go up on the wall and look at the city.”
“Up on the wall?”
“It’s a beautiful view. Very romantic.”
The wall ran high above their heads and disappeared into the apse of the cathedral. “It’s too cloudy,” he said. “We won’t be able to see anything.”
“The sun’s coming out. We’ll be able to see the city. And the mountains.”
He looked up at the hard, gray, vertical pile of rock on top of rock and shook his head. “It’s too high. How can we get all the way up there?”
“This way. There’s a gate. With a stairway that goes all the way to the top.”
In spite of the weather and the time of the year, a string of photographers was sitting on the low wall beside the Puerta del Alcázar. Satry waved her finger when they offered to take their picture and walked straight to the iron door to the stairway that led to the top of the wall and to the tower that rose up above the wall.
“It’s closed,” a surly photographer grumbled.
“He says it’s closed,” Vangel said. “It’s closed, Satry. We can’t go up.”
“Why is it closed?” Satry asked the surly photographer.
“Why is it closed?” He raised his voice. “It’s closed because it’s closed.”
One of the other photographers, more genteel, got up and hurried over to explain. “The custodian of the key has gone to dinner. He will be back about four. Then you can return and climb to the top of the wall without difficulty.”
“We are going to the monastery of Santa Teresa at four,” Satry said. “We wish to climb the wall right now.”
“We can’t, Satry,” Vangel protested. “The door’s locked. The man with the key’s eating his dinner. Let’s forget about the wall. I don’t want to go up anyway.”
“In the case of those people in Avila only for the day,” said the genteel photographer, “the custodian of the key is sometimes willing to interrupt his dinner.”
Satry handed him a duro note. “Will you fetch him?”
“If you will accommodate yourself here…” The man rushed off holding the camera strung round his neck with one hand so it would not bounce against his chest.
“Why do you insist?” Vangel said. “I don’t want to go up.” He studied the rough stone steps that rose above his head. “In fact, I’ll wait down here.”
“The custodian of the key’s always having his dinner,” Satry explained. “That’s the way they work it. It’s a magnificent view. You’ll love it.”
“It’s been raining,” he said. “The steps are wet.” He rubbed his finger against one of the stones at the base of the wall. “They’re slippery.”
The little old man who was custodian of the key came shuffling toward them, pumping his arms to show he was moving as fast as he could. Vangel had been hoping he’d refuse to interrupt dinner to indulge two tourists. “You go, Satry. I’ll wait here.”
“Pardon the inconvenience, your Graces.” The old man bowed as he hurried past to insert a large iron key into the iron gate. “I hope the presence of clouds will not prevent the view from being beautiful as well as instructive.” He tugged back the iron gate to expose a steep flight of the same rough slippery stones as at the base of the wall.
“Thank you.” Satry started straight up. He had no choice. He followed.
The steps were slippery and there were puddles of water from the rain. The stones were rough cut oblongs of water-permeated rock, each oblong block higher than deep, the edges worn smooth by centuries of people’s shoes. No hand railing, no guard rail. It was built for pure functionality, with as little regard for the climber’s wellbeing as the commonest of ladders. And it was less safe than a ladder. One climbed it less cautiously and was unable to use one’s hands.
Satry reached the top and smiled down, waving her hand, urging him to hurry.
He remembered a song about one stouthearted man making ten thousand cowards bold. From what he’d seen, it was usually the reverse. A brave man’s boldness made you doubt yourself the more. Worse still, if the brave man was a woman.
“The stairway to the tower’s along here,” Satry said, when he reached the top. She turned sharply. He threw out a hand to steady himself, but there was nothing to grasp. To the left was the tower wall, above the steady clicking of Satry’s heels on the slippery, uneven stones and to his right and all behind him, nothing. After that there was a sixty or seventy foot drop to the hard stones of the street at the base of the ancient wall.
Who’d notice my grain among all the grains of sand in a truckload? And how many truckloads would it take to fill a beach? How many beaches to fill the Sahara? And how many Saharas to fill the world? And what is the world but a grain of sand among all the worlds in the universe? Yet what’s all that to me if I’m afraid of falling off a wall on a cloudy afternoon in some town I’d never heard of till this morning? If I screamed as I fell, not even everyone in Avila would hear my scream.
“What a view!” Satry called from the top.
“All right, I’m coming.” He was afraid she’d come back down to get him. A suicide pact didn’t even protect you against fear of death. Fear of falling was different from fear of death. How could you know that? You’d have to die many deaths of different kinds before you really knew.
Slowly, he reached the top of the tower, palms pressed flat against the tower wall, which ended level with the tower roof. For the last three steps, there was no wall to press his palms against. Satry’s back was turned. He dropped down to crawl the last three and edged his way toward her. She was leaning forward between two battlements staring straight down a hundred feet or more to the stones of the street at the base of the wall.
Fear was irrational. There was room on top of the tower to play a game of ping pong. He reminded himself of the many men who held jobs as steeplejacks, of women who rode bicycles across tightropes in time to circus music.
“Look, there’s my car!” Suddenly, she threw out her arm to point. He grabbed the battlement with both hands. Her very presence was a physical threat.
She pointed to the left. He clutched again. “There’s the cathedral. Where we just were. I told you the sun would come out!”
It wasn’t only looking down that did it. Looking out was just as bad. It was the sucking sense of nothing pulling at your knees.
She saw that his mouth was hanging open.
“What’s the matter? Do you feel sick?”
He shook his head and gazed to the far distance where the countryside came to eye-level. To the right it was green and brown; plains gathering themselves up into mountains, a silver river threading its way past stunted trees.
She turned sharply, making his knees sink. “Enough of tourism. Let’s eat lunch!”
He swallowed, nodded, willed his hands loose of the battlement, turned round carefully and shuffled after her toward the steep, narrow-stepped descent. He didn’t want to go down.
“You go first.” He swallowed his voice as he spoke. “Don’t wait for me.”
The stairway curled round the tower and led down the steep drop from the top of the tower to the top the wall. From the top of the tower, the top of the wall seemed six inches wide. After that six inches, was the second still steeper drop from the top of the wall down to the stones of the streets of Avila. Everything that had come before was as nothing. Now he truly was in danger. The stairway was full of humps and projections lying in wait for the unsuspecting foot. He thought of imperfections in the soles of his shoes that might catch in the slightest irregularity in the face of the stone. He thought of how the surface of the narrow stone steps varied from perilously rough, to worn perilously smooth by the shoes of people who had descended over the centuries.
On the way up he’d felt glad he was wearing shoes with rubber soles and heels. They’d be less slippery than leather. Starting down he realized that the peril was less from slipping than from tripping up and leaving a foot behind on the step above, while the rest of your body tumbled forward head over heels, all the way down the curling tower stairway in bounces, pausing momentarily at the width of the wall and then dropping the big drop down to the merciless stones of the streets of Avila.
He moved a step back from the stairway and again looked out to where the countryside was at eye level. When he did that, he was not afraid any more. If he could only descend like that. If there were only a banister or a balustrade to hold onto. If only the stairway were not free-standing. When he looked straight out to where the countryside was at eye level he felt almost confident—except for the nagging terror that he’d soon have to start the descent. There was no possible way to avoid it.
What if he froze? Construction workers working up high sometimes froze. He’d heard their fingers had to be pried from the girders before they could be rescued. He thought of the shuffling old man and the surly photographer prying his fingers loose and helping him down. He had no confidence in their strength. The thought of being in their hands frightened him even more. He backed away another step and concentrated on trying to relax, trying to imagine his body suspended in a slowly undulating fluid. It began to work. He began to feel lighter than air. Some power in the pavements seemed to levitate him softly from the surface of the tower floor. It floated him softly through the air like a zeppelin, drew him gently downward… He suddenly realized his danger, jerked with fright and took yet another step backward.
No! He was backing off the opposite edge. He stopped absolutely still, every muscle tensed, rigid with terror. It was impossible to breathe. The power in the pavement was sucking at his knees. He was afraid he would give in to it. It was a temptation. There was an irresistible hideousness in the way it slurped through his stomach and sucked with such abandon at his groin. The slightest breeze, the smallest slip would give it all the help it needed to pry him loose from the tower top, send him tumbling down the steps, sailing through the air like a scarecrow, arms spread wide, until he was squashed into a pulp of blood-splashed meat on the merciless stones below. He heard the smack of his body on the ground and turned to jelly.
“No!” he warned himself. “Don’t look down!”
He might look down by accident. A trick of fate might sweep him through the air. He decided to look down intentionally. To stop running away! To challenge it. To scrape his life together, squint his eyes, clench his teeth and howl like a Chinese soldier.
Below, Satry’s heels clicked down sharp and sure, never a pause, never a sound of hesitation. Half-crouched at the head of the stairway, the pull of it came again and he looked straight down into the heart of the fearful whirlpool and all of Avila reeled.
Satry reached the base of the tower and looked up, surprised he wasn’t just behind her. She saw him sitting down, a step from the top, hands behind him on the top step, feet resting two steps below, descending the stairway by cautiously lowering his buttocks one wet stone step at a time.
“What’s the matter?” She started back up.
“No! Don’t!” he cried. “Don’t come up! Leave me alone!”
She stopped in the middle of the flight.
“I’m all right,” he insisted, afraid she’d try to help him. “Let me do it myself.”
She returned to the bottom slowly and after he was down slowed her pace to his pace along the length of the wall and went slowly down the long flight of steps to the base of the wall and to the iron gate without looking back.
She gave the old man at the bottom some money and engaged him in conversation so that he wouldn’t see, and when Vangel arrived at the bottom, she took his arm, saying nothing about the way his arm was trembling, hugging his arm to her side, moving her thigh against his thigh as they walked away from the wall and through the gate and under the stone arch and into the plaza. The skin of her face glowed bronze in the weak afternoon sun, and though she was pretending it hadn’t occurred, it was crushing that it had and that she’d seen and understood, that the seat of his trousers and his undershorts were wet from the puddles of rainwater. That the miserable dampness made his disgrace all the more palpable.
They walked to a restaurant at the far end of the plaza and were shown to a table and handed menus. He didn’t speak except to ask what she wished to eat and which wine she wished to drink. She sat silent too, neither looking at him, nor not looking at him, staying close, ready to talk, ready to laugh, ready to pretend it hadn’t happened.
He finished a white bean dish and a salad and three glasses of wine. The waiter set roast lamb on the table. “I didn’t think it’d bother me that much.”
She answered like a bridge player. “It made you nervous.”
“I’m afraid of heights.”
“You didn’t want to go up. I was too stupid to understand.”
“I’ve always been afraid of heights.”
“It’s a thing of nature. Some are; some are not.”
“Some are afraid of water. Going to Japan we got into a typhoon. Everyone was afraid the ship would sink. I wasn’t afraid at all.”
Satry nodded. “I’ve heard of those who do tricks on the high trapeze without fear, and yet are so afraid of water they will not step into a bathtub.”
“I dive off high boards into the water without fear. Twenty feet,” he said.
She shook her head. “I like to swim, but I’m afraid to dive.”
“If you enter the water right you can’t get hurt.”
“It’s easy if you know how. Not if you don’t?”
“We’ll go swimming some day. I could teach you in ten minutes.”
“I’d like that,” she said. “Especially if you waited till summer.”
He smiled. She smiled back in a way that made him feel the sun had risen over the plaza and was shining straight down upon their table. After lunch and after coffee he pointed at the church in the corner of the plaza. “Is that San Vincente?”
“San Vincente’s outside the wall. That’s San Pedro or San Pablo, I forget which. It’s very old. Let’s visit it. It must be Gothic at least, if not even Romanesque.”
When they crossed the plaza they found the door locked. Two old women in black shawls told Satry she’d have to find the sacristan to enter.
“In Spain,” Satry explained, “Even God takes three hours for lunch.”
He smiled. The two old women crossed themselves. Satry went to find the sacristan. He came willingly, and opened the door to admit them, but made the two old women wait outside. Vangel passed through the door, feeling uncomfortable about the two old women. Satry paused at the door to tip the sacristan and tell him how long she wished to remain.
“Why didn’t he let those women in?”
“They’re not allowed in till four-thirty. He says they know that, but they come early every day even though the church is not open until four-thirty.”
“Why did he allow us in?”
“I said you wanted to study the interior, that you were writing a book and that you might put his church in it. Plus, I gave him a duro.”
“What did he say?”
Satry imitated the old man’s voice. “Let him study the interior all he desires, but do not let me catch him praying.”
He laughed. Disrespect inside the very House of God! Devout Spaniards are less awed by an ancient church than American atheists.
They walked toward the east end and she pointed at columns and arches and made droll remarks and did not bother to make the sign of the cross as they passed before the altar. On the way back to the entrance end, she stopped before the mouth of a chapel and pointed to a triptych. The figures were barely visible “The fellow on the right is St. Sebastian.”
“What’s his function?”
“You tell him what you want and he speaks to the One in the center for you.”
“Wouldn’t it save time to speak to the One in the center yourself?”
“There are some who try that,” she said. “But St Sebastian has proven himself. The One in the center takes what he says more seriously.”
“What’s the One in the center’s name?”
“Jesus,” Satry said. Then, very much to his surprise, she dropped to her knees and bowed her head. He smiled tentatively, but she wasn’t clowning. Her head was bowed. After more than a minute, she turned to him. “Kneel with me.”
“No.”
“Don’t be afraid.”
“I’m not afraid. But I don’t believe in it.”
“If you don’t believe in it, it can’t hurt you.”
“Other people believe in it. I don’t want to mock it.”
“There’s no one but me. Do it for me. Because I believe in it.”
She reached up and took his hand. Shaking his head, he knelt beside her. “Since when do you believe in it?” He spoke as though she’d betrayed him.
“Since always.”
“You joke about it.”
“God’s strong enough to take a joke. Not to you. You lack faith, so to you He’s not strong. But I do have faith. Don’t laugh, though. My faith is strong, but I’m not.”
“Do you go to church?”
“No.”
He watched Satry with her head bowed and thought of the whore of the night before. He watched for what seemed a long time. “Are you praying?”
“I’m finished now.” She smiled and stood up, still holding his hand.
“What did you pray for?”
“You’re not supposed to tell,” she said, joking again. “I’ll tell you, though. God, I said, take this poor fellow with his good heart and turn him into a man, because the world needs men with good hearts. Make him less afraid to do something wrong or he’ll never do anything right. Make him less afraid to hurt people, or he’ll never help them either. And when he’s afraid to go up on a wall, let him tell me before we go.”
He couldn’t speak. He felt tears rise inside his eyes. One ran down his cheek.
She took his arm, touching him the way he’d seen her touch Alonso.
It was too much. He jerked his arm away. “I’m leaving Madrid,” he said. “Next week! When school ends.”
She didn’t understand. “You’re asking me to come with you?”
“No!” he said. “No! I want to be alone! I want to think!”
“I thought you were leading up to asking me to come with you. In your subtle way.”
“No!” How did she get the self-confidence to ask that?
They left the church and walked toward the convent of Santa Teresa. As they walked, she hugged his arm to her side.
“You see? I ask God to make you not afraid to hurt people and two minutes later you tell me you’re abandoning me. How’s that for speed and efficiency? Even during the siesta. I think that God must be an American.