He went to 168 Rue de Vaugirard and tried to glimpse the sixth floor. He was tempted to climb the stairs and ask who was living in the dovecot, the garret that was their first home in exile. But he checked his detective’s instinct. Then, at midday, took a taxi and decided to visit the Rue Asseline.
He made a mistake.
He passed in front of her house. Thought he heard the sound of the news on television. But couldn’t see anything from the street. There was a window with a net curtain and a thicker cloth curtain behind. He could ring the doorbell, but he didn’t have the books with him. It’d been a furtive incursion, a strong wish to visit the Rue Asseline and see where 12 Panadeiras Street had got to, where the dramatic corridor of history led to. He’d left everything back in the hotel. It’d be ridiculous to turn up now and stammer out a story with nothing to support it. What would she think? She’d be suspicious of someone arriving out of the blue, stirring up the embers. A judge, son of a Francoist judge, who’d come to talk about extant books. Maybe not. Maybe she’d have a taste for such surprises. Someone who in her twenties had played Death in Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus and in her seventies still had it in her to play King Lear had to be brave.
He entered a Portuguese eating-house on the corner. Most of the customers were building labourers or mechanics, depending on their work clothes. He fancied eating in a place like this, wine served in a jug, not in a bottle, oilskin tablecloths. He sat down next to a window. And then saw her. Saw her approach the Portuguese restaurant. His mistake was not to stop looking. Most of the workers glanced at her when she came in. Some of them probably knew her. Though there was nothing about her to draw attention. Just herself. She was wearing ankle boots, trousers and a dark blue jersey. Hair cut short, grey. She entered with discretion, but her eyes came on stage. The presence of a woman it wasn’t necessary to ask if she was alone. A wild, roving look.
Which is why Gabriel Samos made the mistake of staring at her. Not deliberately. He simply didn’t realise. She did. She realised. Gave him a serious look while lighting a cigarette, perhaps so she wouldn’t have to address the ogler. He became embarrassed. Instead of taking a step forwards, tried to hide it. Without saying a word or moving a piece, opened the pit of the intruder.
The performance of The Tragedy of King Lear at Gennevilliers National Theatre was sold out for this night and the next. A woman, María Casares, was playing the legendary king. The reviews had been highly favourable. Talked of her energy, her hoarse voice, her face carved out on the stormy stage. She’d acted in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth. Lear was waiting. And now she was Lear, the king named after a Celtic sea-god. María always thought in terms of nature for a role. The sea was strong and melancholy, impulsive and sweet, brutal and loving. She found her ideal of mature beauty in the weather-beaten faces of those who inhabited Atlantic shores. Since she couldn’t be in Galicia, she was sorry not to live in Brittany. But the theatre itself was a Finisterre, a windy outcrop. In her early seventies, she’d finally acquired the look of an old sea lady.
The books her family had taken on their last trip from Coruña to Madrid, which had accompanied her into exile, included volumes of works by Shakespeare, Valle-Inclán, Manuel Curros Enríquez. This had been her father’s favourite poet. A memory that goes with her everywhere. Not a relentless ghost, but a place made of voice she returns to when necessary. The feeling is warm and strange. An exile within an exile. To send her to sleep, her father recites Galician Melody. Recites fragments from Curros’ Airs of My Land, verses he knows off by heart, which seem to come not from the memory that plays with elevated notes, but from another corner, a deep cave.
‘Another beakful?’
‘Go on then!’
He calls each stanza this, the amount of food a bird carries in its beak for its chicks. María thinks it’s the verses that remind her of him, of Santiago, as he murmurs them next to her bed in the twilight. When she was a girl, her father had periods of frenetic activity followed by bouts of illness. The Melody’s verses are like lines drawn on a face that takes shape as they’re spoken. Lines that contain the mystery of life: what’s hidden behind the eyes. As when she went with her mother to visit him in Madrid’s Modelo Prison. She was eight. He’d been arrested for participating in the clandestine Republican government during Berenguer’s regime, which supported the monarchy. She was horrified. What she saw was the ghost of her father. A bag of bones suffering from consumption and imprisonment. Everything had changed. There was no warm home. The only thing that remained was what was hidden behind the eyes. Which is why the Melody doesn’t rock her to sleep, it makes her more alert, keeps her company. The Melody remembers for her. Wherever she may be. In the dovecot on the Rue de Vaugirard. In La Vergne, her house in Charente. On the Rue Asseline. On all her artistic tours, in the loneliness that follows her artistic triumphs. She has photos, postcards, letters, small personal belongings she keeps like talismans or relics. But nothing like those verses that escaped the burning, the pillage. Something no murderous tyrant or governor can imagine. A Melody protected by the mouth’s dampness or, as her father, Santiago, would say, kept in a corner of the occipital ark. A Melody that talks of the siren (who has song), the snake (who has breath) and God (who has hell).
You have enough
with what is hidden
in those eyes of yours.
Shakespeare was fortunate to make that journey from Coruña to Madrid when her father was appointed minister. He stayed alive. Then accompanied them into exile. Was now on the main bookshelf in the house on the Rue Asseline. She needed to have those books always in sight, within reach. She liked the way they weighed like arks or flagstones. They contained all the others. All the deceased books from 12 Panadeiras Street. When she agreed to act the part of King Lear in her early seventies, she reread the play in one of the volumes that had been saved. Ran her finger along each line. In Madrid, her father had a secretary who read books she loved like this, churning up words with her long varnished fingernail. Her finger ploughed the furrow of words as if she were reading not only with her eyes, but also by touch. María had heard her father mention a captain in the army who learnt Braille so that he could read in the dark when on campaign. She felt darkly pleased when they suggested she represent King Lear. The same feeling she had during the end-of-summer storms, when the rafters of the sky over Paris gave way. Finally the clouds of the Atlantic carrying the sea were here. Écoute, Paris! She was carrying the storm on top of her head. The unsettling joy of the first downpour after the drought. It’d been more than fifty years since she left Madrid and went into exile. The first thing she did was pull down the volume and run her eyes along the rail of her index finger:
The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
María can see the faces in the audience, faces determined to believe in the truth of the legend, convinced that what’s been said has something to do with the times they live in.