A Single Swallow (37 page)

‘
Golodrinas! Golondrinas!
' she kept saying, excitedly, and pointing. In Spanish mythology the
golondrina
, the swallow, is supposed to have tried to remove the thorns from Christ's head as he hung on the cross and in so doing pricked itself, which explains the red patch on its throat and face. The same red patches are explained in parts of Russia by a story of swallows trying to remove the nails pinning Jesus to the cross, while in Sweden the bird is said to have sung a song of consolation to the dying man, and its name in Swedish,
svala
, also means ‘to console'. But it was surely the consolation of the turning seasons that excited the old woman. She pointed at the sun, and then at the birds, and smiled and chattered delightedly.

I took a bus eastwards, paralleling the Ebro, to Barcelona. The comfort and cleanliness of the thing, its punctuality and space – one person one seat! – all seemed an amazing luxury, but my neighbour was miserable. He wore thin clothes, shrank in his seat and seemed to be hiding from the world beyond the window by manipulating the curtain. I asked him what was wrong. He was from Ivory Coast, he
said. We were both delighted to find someone else who spoke French. He was going to Barcelona to stay with a friend and look for work and then he hoped to go north – it was the same story again. How had he got into Spain? He had flown from Morocco. Why was he so nervous, then? He said he was scared of the Spanish police – his friend had warned him to stay away from them. I believe his visa had expired.

‘The problem is,' he said, ‘I do not have any money to reach my friend. He is outside the city, in Badalona . . .'

I gave him 20 euros, which he stared at in disbelief, before kissing the note and crossing himself. He took my hand and hung onto it, pouring out thanks and bad breath.

In the seat behind me was Vicente, a young Aragonese with a thin mournful face and long dark hair tied in a pony-tail. Vicente lives with his parents in Zaragoza and commutes to Barcelona to study composition – he is a guitarist – and to stay with his girlfriend. When I explained what I was doing he said, ‘Ah, so you are travelling in a permanent spring.'

‘Yes – it does feel like that.'

‘These are the first bright days we have had,' he said, as the coach drove eastward through biscuit-coloured hills.

‘Here in Aragon we say the swallow is the bird which melts the snow.'

He taught me a rhyme: ‘
Hasta el cuarenta de Mayo, no te quites el sayo
', which means ‘Don't take off your coat until the fortieth of May', a reference to the way spring warmth drags its feet in the cool shadow of the Pyrenees. We passed a sign marking the Greenwich meridian. Ever since Morocco I had been confused about time: Morocco follows Greenwich Mean Time, putting it one hour behind continental Europe, despite the fact that most of the country lies east of the longitude of Lisbon. Here we were, crossing the meridian, theoretically moving forward an hour, though neither time nor the clocks distinguished between one side of the line and the other. Like birds, we take our cues from the seasons, from the phases of the moon and the movements of the sun. But we have formalised our calculations into a rigid but invisible web of grids, of time and of space, which
theoretically tell us when and where we are. The problem is that though there are many repeating mathematical patterns in nature and cosmology, the rhythms of the earth fluctuate outside the calculations we have designed to contain it. A September day in northern Europe may well be hotter than one in July. We talk of early springs and late summers as though the seasons were somehow out of joint, while it would perhaps be more logical to consider that it is our neat calendar of hours, days and weeks, with their chain of ‘seasonal' festivals, that is inaccurate. The attempt to unify human and natural time through a melding of Christianity and older, pagan myths is a common theme in the mythology of swallows. In many European countries it was believed that swallows arrived on the 25th of March, flying down from heaven on the feast of the Annunciation, bringing warmth to the world, a tradition that was particularly strong in southern Germany. Swallows were supposed to arrive on St George's Day in Mecklenburg (23 April), on Palm Sunday in Saxony, on the feast of St Gregory in Bergamo, Italy (12 March), or if not, on St Joseph's Day (19 March) or two days later, on the 21st of March, St Benedict's Day.

Travelling in a permanent spring, as Vicente put it, made me question the assumptions of orientation on which I had built my conception of the world. North, I learned in geography, is 0° on the compass, up the page. But these are mere impositions, commonly agreed, like the imposition of human time on time itself, which allow us to agree on the orientation of space. Swallows do no more fly up and down the world than do they pay heed to days of the week. Indeed, in the rhythm of their seasons, it makes more sense to imagine them flying on a line of latitude, or east–west, than it does to say they fly north–south. Born in high summer, they fly in late European summer towards early African summer, then repeat the trick in the other direction. In relation to the movement of the earth relative to the sun, their migration questions our very notions of stasis and travelling. In the terms of the universe, of space beyond our planet, swallows maintain a much more consistent distance from the sun than do we who stay at home. While the world turns under
them, their vast journeys hold them much closer to a single point in space than the ‘fixed' barns and outbuildings they nest in, which are conveyed thousands of miles to and fro by the elliptical motion of the earth around the sun, and the ‘wobble' of the planet on its axis.

 

THERE WERE TALL
blonde Lithuanians behind bars, Gambian boys selling hash and cocaine on the waterfront, French girls loading up with alcohol in the supermarkets, Slovenes in the internet cafés, Moroccan and Brazilian men fighting outside a club on the beach, and men, women and their children of every nationality in Europe eddying down the Rambla and circling in and out of the little streets of the old town. Above the statue of Cristobal Colomba, Christopher Columbus, which points a commanding finger south-east to the sea, urging the young of Barcelona to go forth and seek their fortunes abroad, were swifts, gulls and parakeets. I only saw one swallow in the city: in the Plaza George Orwell, where the city governors, in a sardonic tribute, have erected a sign warning that the square is covered by CCTV.

‘This used to be a place for drugs,' said Jake, a wryly smiling German architect I had known a little in London. ‘Lots of acid.'

We looked for the cameras but saw none. There were a great many dealers by the port and on the Rambla. In Africa they would have been selling SIM cards, but entry level into the Spanish economy seemed to involve selling bad hash and cut cocaine.

Jake had spent seven years in Barcelona, working in a glutted market. ‘There are so many architects here,' he groaned. ‘They come from all over Europe – so they work for nothing.' He had landed a job in London and was making preparations to leave, while
lamenting Barcelona football club's decision to sell their best players.

‘But if I had to get a mortgage perhaps I would get it here. It's pleasant . . .'

It looked delightful to me, as the lights came up around the port. ‘It's perfect!' I cried. ‘What's wrong with it?'

‘The tourists,' Jake grimaced, mourning the masses like the subject of an occupying power. We watched a line of them disgorging from the airport bus. ‘See, the Ryanair People,' he said, grinning, ‘your beautiful countrymen.'

Pallid, overweight, and over-burdened with baggage, they did look resoundingly British. Each one trailed a bag on wheels. The adoption of these devices means it is now universal practice among the peoples of the north and west to travel with more luggage than we can carry, as if we have become so attached to our possessions that we must take as many as possible with us, unable to contemplate existence without them, even for a holiday, like children who cannot leave home without a sack of toys.

I sat there, smoking and smirking in an unattractively superior manner: I did not reflect that at least the travellers would not be mad or stupid enough to throw their suitcases into the sea; I conveniently forgot the weight of my own rucksack, when I began, and it never occurred to me to catch myself in that most Brit-abroad of snobberies: labelling fellow-countryment tourists, in contrast to oneself, who is, of course, a traveller.

‘And the regional thing,' Jake went on. ‘They are so mad about identity here. There are no theatre productions in Spanish in Barcelona, only in Catalan. It makes it very provincial.'

We ate in Barceloneta, a fragment of the city near the port which is still a fisherman's and sailor's quarter, then drank Dominican rum at the coach station, waiting for my bus to Perpignan. We said goodbye and I boarded. The bus was wild.

Almost all the seats were taken, except at the back, which was the domain of a band of Kosovans. There were three men and four women, all commanded by the youngest of their party, a girl in her
early twenties, pale-skinned, dark-haired, quick and full of a ferocious aggression. I had barely sat down when she demanded money. I refused, so she demanded water. She returned the bottle contemptuously and, deciding that she wanted more space than the single seat she occupied, opened a mobile phone and made it play music, loudly, until her neighbour complained. She stared him out and replayed the music until he got up, cursing, and went to seek another seat. Then she curled up like a cat and apparently fell instantly asleep.

We crossed the frontier into a country I had thought I knew, but which in the light of what I had seen of its former empire I now saw afresh. A country which consistently tops polls of where Europeans would chose to emigrate to; the country which gave us the terms left and right, in which we still think of politics; the country which more than any other held the key to the continent's direction after the Second World War; the country which has given the West its most radical and influential philosophies since the Enlightenment, from existentialism to deconstruction; the race whose sensibility and language is wonderfully revealed by terms which English cannot translate:
savoir-faire
,
laissez-faire
,
hauteur
,
demi-monde
,
bon appétit
. . . a language which constantly forces you to evaluate and avow your relationship with every interlocutor –
tu
or
vous
? A place in which all understand the invisible bounds which define a citizen's place: I will never forget being frozen in my teenage tracks by the blistering distaste with which an elderly Parisienne addressed me: ‘
Monsieur, vous n'avez pas le droit
.' (‘You do not have
the right
.') I had not realised you were not allowed to walk on the grass.

On the French side of the Pyrenees, where migrating swallows used to be trapped in nets for food, they have an expression, ‘
Tu as les yeux en couilles d'hirondelle
': you have eyes like a swallow's balls. This refers to dark shadows under your eyes, contrasting with a pale face: like the contrast with the white under-parts of a swallow, where it meets the dark of the tail. I think my eyes may have looked something like these
couilles
, at Perpignan Station at four in the morning.

The town was abandoned to silence, except for a spill of light from the Hotel Terminus. The bar was officially closed, but they let me in: it was like walking onto the set of a play. Under a single dim bulb four figures were gathered around the bar. Bertrand, twice divorced, a ruddy-faced roue and rogue held forth to Christophe, Christophe's girlfriend Hélène, and Xavier, the put-upon barman. Because they were ‘closed' we could smoke.

‘The best stories are about love!' Bertrand cried, as we all hit the Dominican rum. He and Christophe discussed the relative merits of women as Hélène drank and giggled and nodded along, adoringly attentive to everything Christophe said: old women versus young women, foreign women versus French, Parisians versus the English – ‘Damn the Parisians and the Foreigners!' cried Bertrand, slapping me on the back. They fantasised about going upstairs and seducing the two Colombian girls who had taken a room and who were not that pretty but would do, it was decided. Xavier should go and wake them and bring them down. Xavier demurred, was roundly abused, and more drinks were ordered.

‘Women are mad – they must be – two of them married me!' Bertrand exclaimed.

The town woke up quickly at dawn. Shutters went up, bread vans did the rounds, we were all shooed out of the bar while the new barman put the lights on, pulled the chairs off the tables and opened the doors to let the smoke out. Then we were allowed back in, for croissants and coffee.