Gaudi Afternoon (22 page)

In every city I find an anchor. Sometimes it’s a café, sometimes a street, sometimes a painting in a museum. It’s what I claim as mine, what I visit when I pass through, what makes me feel at home. In Amsterdam it’s a pub on the corner of two canals, where the sun strikes a worn walnut tabletop in an elegiac way on late afternoons in autumn. In Mexico City it’s Frida Kahlo’s blue house. In Bangkok it’s the Chao Phraya River with its network of brackish canals and spicy floating markets.

In Vienna, my anchor is very small. She’s a reddish-brown statue less than five inches tall, though photographs make her look enormous and overwhelming, with her pendulous breasts and ample belly. She lives in a glass case in a room next to gigantic dinosaur skeletons in the Museum of Natural History. I’m not sure why I like her so much, or why I find her so powerful. The Venus of Willendorf is thirty thousand years old, the oldest thing, besides the dinosaur bones, that I have ever seen.

It satisfied something in me to visit her again, and afterwards I stayed in a good mood for a long time, drifting around the wet streets of the inner city. Eventually I rediscovered the Café Museum, with its marble-topped tables and sills of potted plants, its lace-draped windows against which the rain streamed down. I ordered soup with liver dumplings and began to read Elias Canetti’s memoir of the twenties. From time to time I looked up and saw myself in a large mirror with a Jugendstil frame: a tall, restless woman, middle-aged, in a black beret and a leather bomber jacket, a scarf muffling her neck and chin, freckles that had never quite faded, hazel-green eyes and a nose that seemed to grow ever more prominent.

I began to relax, to feel my mind and my senses wake up. I was on the road, moving again, traveling light, ripe for adventure. And just in time. Since the past November, I’d been cooped up in London, translating from Spanish a series of research papers for an environmental group, Save the Amazon Basin. Publishers weren’t taking many chances on the literary work that had previously been my bread and butter. The luxuriously overdone magic realism of Gloria de los Angeles continued to sell, of course, but other authors of mine—the recondite, manic-depressive Uruguayan Luisa Montiflores, for instance—were out of favor and out of print.

The winter dragged on; I grew gloomier. My love life was non-existent, and my friends were in sour moods, talking of emigrating, of suicide, of getting jobs in Brussels. The flu season came on and I felt wearier and older every day. I reminded myself often that I didn’t live in London—it was only one of my bases, just as Oakland was another—nevertheless, I kept having terrible fantasies of ending up in some lonely little bed-sit in Wood Green, not having gotten out in time.

As March came whistling through and the days grew longer, I became restive and longed to be off somewhere. The travel section at Foyle’s beckoned every time I got off the tube at Tottenham Court Road to walk to the SAB office in Soho. I found myself spending long half-hours staring at maps of Madagascar and atlases of Antarctica. I needed to go somewhere, anywhere, but preferably somewhere vast and strange and as far away from Charing Cross Road as possible.

The crisis came when SAB offered me a permanent part-time position. My dear friend Nicola, the prominent bassoonist, whose hospitality I had availed myself of pretty much continuously for the last twenty-five years, said sternly, “Well, now perhaps you’ll settle down and make a contribution to the world.”

Two days later, I was on the train to China, by way of Budapest.

At seven I went to the Wien-Süd train station and continued my journey into the heart of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. I was the only one in my compartment of time-softened maroon corduroy seats and slightly dusty drapes. What luxury to sit alone and gaze out at the darkening, rain-soaked landscape, reading Canetti’s account of Vienna in the twenties, when anguished, voluble, oversexed poets and painters sat around talking psychoanalysis and avant-garde art. If I had lived then, my companion certainly would have been a woman called Anna, her father an architect of the International School, her mother a concert pianist with tuberculosis. Anna herself designed one-of-a-kind books; she wore men’s clothing and used a cigarette holder. We would have lived in a modern flat with nothing comfortable to sit on, analyzed ourselves relentlessly and drunk only champagne, in spite of being ardent socialists.

“Evening,” a voice boomed. “Mind if we join you?”

I looked up from my book as the glass door to the compartment slid heavily open. An American woman in her seventies, wearing twill slacks, an appliquéd Western shirt, and a bolo tie in the shape of two raspberry-colored dice, hoisted a backpack onto the overhead rack. Her white hair was cut severely; she had a sharp, fine nose, reading glasses slung around her neck and, I thought, dentures.

“My pleasure,” I said, steeling myself for company.

“This way, Bree,” she called down the corridor.

She dragged another bag inside, so it almost blocked the door, and began to distribute a variety of possessions around the compartment. Soon, all I had for myself was my seat by the window.

She settled herself across from me and leaned forward with an outstretched hand. “Gladys Bentwhistle. Coyote’s Pet-n-Wash. Tucson, Arizona.”

I shook her hand. “Cassandra Reilly. Romance Translator. No Fixed Address.”

“On your way to Budapest, hon? Me too. It’ll be my ninth or tenth country this trip. I’ve been traveling alone for two months now, but my granddaughter just caught up with me. We’re going to Romania, going to stay in a spa. I’ll tell you, I’m going to be ready for a spa by then!”

“Gram, I
wish
you wouldn’t rush off like that!” A young woman, not yet twenty, slipped into the compartment. She was wearing a full, flowered skirt over leggings, red Doc Marten boots, and a Queer Nation tee-shirt under a black leather jacket. Her hair was dyed black and fell tangled to her shoulders. She had a nose ring and pale freckles, the color of weak chocolate milk, scattered over her soft, pretty face. She was carrying a camcorder and a state-of-the-art backpack, suitable for climbing Mount Everest.

The train whistle sounded its haunting farewell and we slid smoothly off into the twilight. More latecomers were bumping and pushing and staggering their way through the corridor, but they kept passing our door.

“I learned this from a gal in Spain,” said Gladys. “You don’t lie. If someone opens the door and asks
frei
or
libre
or something, you say
ja
or
oui,
but if you spread enough stuff out, they won’t bother to ask.”

“I can see you’re a seasoned traveler,” I said.

“It’s my first trip to Europe,” Gladys said. “I always planned to come sooner, with my friend Evelyn, but we never got around to it. Evelyn was in bad health for a couple of years and last year she passed away.” Gladys paused. “Well, you get old. I’m working on a way around it, but so far, no luck.”

“Here are three places, Dad,” said another American voice out in the corridor. “Hurry up, Emma, come on.”

I put Elias Canetti away.

An adolescent girl, rangy and awkward in Levis and a sweatshirt with the mournful profile of Virginia Woolf screened upon it, barged through the door to our compartment and, ignoring Gladys’s denim jacket on one seat, her
Herald Tribune
on another, and her string bag of fruit and crackers on a third, shoved a big suitcase inside and called again, “Hurry up, Emma. Dad, where are you?”

Gladys gathered up her items and immediately switched into a welcoming tone. “Going to Budapest, hon?”

“Yes.” The girl stuck out her lower lip. She had a strong nose pushing its way out of childish features, and blue eyes half-hidden under thick bangs of darkening blond hair. Fourteen, I guessed, maybe fifteen.

“Hello, everybody!” A man with a tan, soft felt hat pushed back from a good-natured, perhaps overzealous face was shepherding a small girl of about four into the compartment and dragging a large suitcase behind him. Compact and muscular in a sports jacket that strained a bit at the shoulders, he looked like a Little League coach or something equally athletic and wholesome.

“I’m Archie Snapp,” he said, shaking everyone’s hand. “And this is little Emma. And you’ve met my other daughter Cathy.”

“Hi,” Cathy said expressionlessly. She opened her backpack and took out a thick paperback edition of
The Magic Mountain.
Although the compartment had eight seats, suddenly it seemed much too small. Only Gladys and Archie seemed truly enthusiastic about our chance proximity; they obviously belonged to that gregarious American sub-group: people-people.

“Sit down, Emma,” said Cathy from behind her book. “You’re kicking me.”

The little girl had on a pastel-pink cardigan, jeans and sneakers with white socks, and her black curly hair was tied by a pink ribbon. She had plump, downy cheeks and dark, uncommunicative eyes. The small case she was holding close to her chest was shaped like a violin.

“Hello, Emma,” said Gladys. “Is this your first trip to Europe?”

There was no answer. Emma put her thumb in her mouth and her father quickly pulled it out again.

“Our Emma’s not much of a talker,” said Archie hastily. “But it’s not her first trip to Europe by any means. You could say that …”

“Emma, I’m going to peel you an orange,” Cathy interrupted, and proceeded to do so. The sharp, sweet tang of citrus bloomed around us.

“I’m Gladys,” the dog-washer persevered. “Coyote’s Pet-n-Wash in Tucson, that’s my business, had it for thirty years, my assistant is running it while I’m gone. This is my granddaughter Bree. It’s her first trip to Europe, too. She’s a college student at Berkeley, majoring in Film Studies, whatever the heck that is. Mostly sounds like it’s a lot of sitting around watching old movies that you could see on late night television anyway.”

Bree tossed back her tangled black hair. “Hi,” she said to the compartment, making sure not to make eye contact with Cathy. The five years that separated them was an enormous gulf of time and experience, and she needed to make sure everyone knew that.

“And this is Cassandra Reilly,” Gladys said. “I don’t know where she’s from.”

“Kalamazoo, Michigan is where I started out.”

“That’s not too far from us,” Archie said, warming to thoughts of the Midwest. “We live just outside Ann Arbor. My wife Lynn is in the physics department at the university, though right now she’s in Munich at the Max Planck Institute, that’s why we’re over here for a few months. Back home, I’m the editor of a small newspaper.”

That explained the felt hat then. I knew I’d seen Archie before—in a film from the thirties about a small-town reporter on an important assignment to save Western Civilization. All that was missing was the cigarette dangling from his lip as he leaned forward with his steno pad and said …

“It’s a local kind of thing,
The Washtenaw Weekly Gleaner.
Mostly advertising, but I manage to fill it up with whatever strikes me. Interviews, opinion pieces, human interest kind of stuff. Fresh angles on the same-old same old.”

Behind
The Magic Mountain
there was an audibly rude sigh.

We were traveling through the last suburbs of Vienna. The rain was falling faster. It was dark now, and our compartment seemed small and bright and close. I felt as if we were hurtling through the universe in a booth at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant. In truth, it wasn’t that unpleasant. Even a hardened expat like myself gets a longing for her countrymen and women from time to time. For the flat midwestern accents of some Snapps, for the western bluffness of a Gladys, even for the sulky rebellion of over-indulged children dragged to Europe to accompany their relatives.

A conductor bustled his way in and asked to see our tickets and passports. The blue ones came out along with my burgundy one. The conductor gave the blues a cursory glance but looked carefully at mine.

“Oh, very good. Ireland,” he said, and he quoted from Yeats:

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone

It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

He departed with a bow.

“I thought you came from Kalamazoo?” said Archie, sensing a story.

“I travel a lot and an Irish passport is often more useful than an American one. It’s saved me a couple of times. In fact the only place I have trouble is Heathrow.”

“But that’s fascinating,” said Archie. “Are you married to an Irishman?”

“I got it through my grandparents. The Irish government doesn’t consider that a family has left home until a couple of generations have passed. My grandparents were born in County Cork, so I was eligible for citizenship.”

“You said you were a translator,” Gladys remembered. “From what to what?”

“Mostly I translate from Spanish to English, but I’ve also taken stabs at French-English, Italian-English, and even (this was not entirely successful, though friends in Lisbon assured me it was quite amusing), English-Portuguese.”

“Do you speak Romanian?” Bree wanted to know.

“Some,” I said. “Poti să dai drumul la caldura?”

“What’s that mean?”

“Can you turn on the heat?”
I added, “It doesn’t always work.”

Gladys rummaged in her bag and thrust several brochures into my hands. “Here’s the spa we’re going to. It’s in the Carpathians, in the Transylvanian part of Romania. Evelyn and I were going together. She heard about this place from a friend in Tucson. The doctors do all kinds of things here, they have some treatments you can’t get anywhere else. Ionvital, it’s kind of an anti-aging drug, they say it works. And if not, the mud packs should at least help my rheumatism.”

The brochures were printed on thin paper in colors that managed to be lurid and faded at the same time. They showed happy spa-goers in bellbottoms and sideburns strolling in front of large hotels, and women in bathing suits and shower caps receiving various forms of treatment, including “galvanic baths,” “mud wrappings” and “medical gymnastics.”

I read aloud:

On the shores of these famous heliothermal lakes rises a complexity of hotels and spa which is one of the very most popular in all Europe. Well-situated on a salt massif, Arcata is known since antiquity times for many healing possibilities in its mineral-rich waters and fresh, healthful air. Under the directorship of Dr. Ion Pustulescu, Discoverer of Ionvital, a drug known widely to slow or even stop the aging process, Arcata has become the premiere destination for people everywhere suffering from rheumatological, gynecological and geriatric complaints.