The Drifters (57 page)

When no one reacted to her theory, she lay back, looking at the heavens. ‘It’ll probably be the same with America. I think your men will get to the moon next month. But it won’t mean very much, because Americans are the Vikings of this age. Brave but stupid. You lack ideas … and there goes the moon. A hundred years from now somebody like the Japanese will follow you and take with them a tremendous vision, and they’ll be the ones who really discover the moon.’

Again no one spoke, but Britta surprised them by taking the hands of Gretchen and Cato and kissing them. ‘It’s quite honorable to be Vikings. Stupid, self-centered, without philosophy … but very brave. In the end it’s the brave who show the way.’

Without knowing it, she had touched a nerve so raw, so harshly painful that Cato leaped to his feet and threw his picnic plate into the fire, his knife and fork ricocheting through the embers. ‘That goddamned moon!’ he exploded. ‘I try to tell you cats and you won’t listen. You, goddammit, you!’ And he pointed his finger at Gretchen. ‘Today you had the nerve to ask me if I wasn’t oversensitive? Who the hell do you think you are, some grand lady from Boston who says like a judge, “Too much emotion”?’

‘What are you talking about?’ Gretchen asked. ‘That fucking moon! That’s what I’m talking about. And the brothers.’

‘Cato,’ Gretchen said, ‘you’re making no sense.’

‘You’re not listening. In a decade when America watches her cities go to hell—her blacks deteriorate, her schools fall apart—the only thing we do well is build highways. And what do we do then? We say to the cities and railroads and the blacks, “Not a nickel for you,” but we go on spending—like a hophead on Friday night—twenty-six billion dollars to put a man on the moon.’

‘Priorities are always difficult,’ Gretchen said defensively.

‘I’m not speaking of priorities,’ Cato snapped. ‘Haven’t you ever seen one of those television shots of the space center? Or the aircraft company that builds the gismos? Or any goddamned thing connected with the space program? The President comes in smiling. He’s met by a committee of sixteen, also smiling. And they go through the installation … thousands of desks … each one with a man smiling … and …’

He stopped, and in the flickering shadows of the fire, stared at each of us and concluded, ‘Not a lousy one of you knows what I’m talking about, do you?’

‘What’s your point?’ Joe asked.

‘In all those faces you don’t see one black. This whole program … billions of dollars … spent on something from which the blacks are excluded. The people who need help most right now …’ His voice had risen to a shout and seemed quite out of place in the quietness of southern Spain. Kicking at the fire, he said, ‘It’s not ridiculous to think that the United States decided to apply all of its riches to the space program because that was the one thing they could isolate—out of the thousand things they could have spent their money on—in which the blacks could not participate. It wasn’t easy to dream up the moon shot, but President Kennedy did it. Just like he did everything else to downgrade the blacks. Worst friend we ever had. Nixon’s twice as good, because you know where he stands.’

It was Britta who broke the spell of bitterness. She said, ‘We Vikings made one wrong choice after another and we vanished from history, leaving nothing behind us. If white America does the same, she’ll vanish too.’

She spoke with such tenseness that when it came time for bed, Gretchen took her aside and whispered, ‘Britt, if you want to sleep with Joe we’ll arrange it somehow,’
and Britta said, ‘Oh, no! I’ve decided not to use his bed any longer.’

‘Does he know?’

‘How could he? I just found out myself!’

But as Gretchen was preparing to climb into her bunk, Joe grabbed her wrist and pulled her down beside him on the formal bed. In a low whisper he said, ‘I think you ought to let Cato and Monica have the bed. They’re miserable the way they are,’ and Gretchen asked, ‘What about you and Britt?’ and Joe said very softly, ‘We’ve pretty well had it I mean, you were a smart gal to arrange the beds this way. I don’t think Britta and I …’ His voice trailed off, and Gretchen whispered, ‘We’ll keep things the way they are.’ And in the morning they passed over into Portugal.

Not far from the center of Alte was a wooded plaza bounded on the east by the tumbling cascade. It was a place of extraordinary beauty, for its rude simplicity, its tiny bandstand and brick-lined footpaths made it more like a large outdoor room than a public place, while the noisy water, rushing over boulders, provided a constant music, whether the band was in attendance or not.

The plaza was presided over by a rude statue of the town’s only native son to have achieved importance. In classical stone features marked by a long beard, Candido Guerreiro looked down upon the plaza he had loved; in his day it had had no paving. On a plaque below the tip of his beard was engraved:

A
MEMORIA
DO
GRANDE
POETA
ALTENSE

‘Because I was born at the foot of the four mountains Where the waters go singing by …’

One judged these to be the opening lines of his apostrophe to Alte; I heard them sung once to a tune more pitiful than a dirge, and concluded that if the old poet had lived a joyous life near this plaza, he had failed to catch that fact in his words.

It was not permitted to park the pop-top in the plaza. A pipe dropping down from one of the four mountains had been led underground to the mouth of a stone fountain
set into the same wall which held the poet, and to this fountain came all the women of Alte, lugging great clay pots which they filled with water. Thus the plaza was not only a place of recreation; it was also the essential center of the town, for this was the only water supply.

Gretchen asked a policeman where they might park, and he found them a wooded spot almost on the edge of the cascade, so that they lived within the sound of its music. Later, each of the six would tell me, at different times, ‘No matter where we go … I’ll remember Alte as the best part of the trip.’

One reason they would remember it with such affection was the band. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights musicians with time-battered instruments collected at the bandstand to give concerts. Since there was no television in the town, no cinema and only a few radios, this constituted the only source of entertainment, and at such times the plaza was jammed with people.

‘Where do they all come from?’ Gretchen asked, and she began making inquiries, and found that at least half the listeners had come from the surrounding countryside. ‘I don’t know whether I understood or not,’ she told the group one night as they were cooking their supper beside the waterfall, ‘but I’m sure they said that some of the women walk fourteen or fifteen miles.’

‘One way?’ Britta asked.

‘Fourteen here, fourteen back.’

Yigal whistled. Then, on Saturday night, they understood. When they reached the plaza for the band concert they found that the chairs which the townsmen brought with them were kept clear of a central paved area. When the band struck up a noisy number, the young country folk began dancing, and before long the plaza was a beautiful display of motion, swaying peasant dresses and the nodding of weathered faces as the old watched approvingly.

The steps were complicated but not difficult, and after the group had watched for some minutes, Yigal caught Gretchen’s hands and pulled her into the dancing area. He had learned folk dancing in Israel, and his performance drew applause from the Portuguese, while Gretchen, through her love for music, had a good sense of rhythm and made a fair stab at following the steps. When the next number began, Cato asked Britta to dance, and they made
a striking pair, for she knew the old Norwegian dances and easily adapted them to Alte, and Cato jitterbugged—and the Portuguese loudly showed their approval.

At the third dance the alcalde of the town asked Gretchen to accompany him, and in this way the solid introduction of the six young people into local life began. They were so young, so appealing in their directness that the working people of the town adopted them. They were invited to meals of brutal simplicity and overflowing generosity. They went to church with the townspeople, made tours with the local doctor, gave picnics in the hills, and each day climbed to the spot from which they could look down and see the whole town like a microcosm of an age long vanished. They lived, during those weeks, as people had lived in Europe five hundred years ago, and in return for the hospitality extended them, gave their own concerts on the nights when the band didn’t play.

Gretchen would bring her guitar, and sitting on a bench between the fountain and the poet, would play old ballads, which could have come, every one of them, from the daily life of these people. This fact was brought home to her on the first Thursday night as she was singing, for she saw along the edge of the crowd a very thin, gaunt-faced peasant woman who could have been in her seventies, except that she was accompanied by a most beautiful daughter of about sixteen or seventeen. They were barefooted and stood apart, listening to the music with obvious delight. The old woman kept time with her hands and seemed always about to burst into song.

As Gretchen wondered who the newcomers might be, a woman from the neighborhood moved close and said, ‘There’s one I told you about. She walked fourteen miles.’ So between songs Gretchen went to the woman and shook her hand, seeing to her astonishment that she was only in her forties. Gretchen spoke to the daughter also—in French, which the girl could not understand—and they stood thus for a while until someone came who could interpret.

‘Yes, my daughter and I live in the mountains …

‘Yes, we have walked fourteen miles …

‘Yes, we have shoes but we save them for the dancing …

‘Yes, I have a husband, but he works too hard to bother with music …

‘Yes, in the mountains it’s known that you are here.’

They were in the audience for the Friday concert, and on Saturday night the girl appeared in a lovely peasant costume, with ribbed stockings and high-heeled shoes. She was obviously the most beautiful girl among the peasants, a fact in which her mother took unashamed pride. Several Portuguese men asked her to dance, and toward the middle of the evening Yigal went to her, bowed and extended his hands. She looked at her mother, who frowned, but Yigal was already leading her to the dance.

They made a good pair, even though she was slightly taller than he, and now Joe asked to dance with her, then Cato. She told them her name was Maria Concepcião, and Gretchen later found that she could neither read nor write.

On Sunday night, after the last band concert, Maria and her mother carefully wrapped up their shoes and her good dress and started barefoot back to their mountain, but Gretchen interposed and said she would drive them home. The idea was so startling that Maria and her mother could not fully comprehend it until Joe appeared with the pop-top. Cato and Monica stayed behind, to make love in the woods, but the other four piled in with the two Portuguese and they set off for the twisting mountain roads.

It was late when they reached Maria Concepcião’s home, and the shock her father experienced at seeing his women coming home in a private car was only surpassed by the astonishment of the young people when they saw how these Portuguese lived. They had a one-room hut built of rocks, with an earthern floor, one window and an open fireplace that threw smoke into the room. Their bed was a paillasse resting upon boards a few inches from the floor; it seemed to Gretchen and Britta that the girl must sleep there with her parents.

The room was bare except for a rickety table and one small cupboard, obviously the place in which the three inhabitants kept their clothes, their eating utensils and whatever few possessions they had. It was remarkable that from such mean, almost nonexistent accommodations, Maria Concepcião could have appeared so beautifully dressed at the dance. Gretchen watched as the girl carefully placed her precious clothes in the cupboard, but Britta,
who knew something of poverty, looked away, for in her eyes there were tears.

Maria and her parents extended the full hospitality of their home. Having no chairs, they gestured to the low bed as a seating place for their guests. Having no tea, they poured out small portions of the world’s rawest red wine. Having no cakes, they passed small pieces of bread and hard cheese. Having no common language, they talked as one does in such circumstances, with gestures and smiles and shakes of the head, but Gretchen did get through to the two women the fact that next Thursday she and Joe would drive up to bring them into town. The three Portuguese nodded passively, as if this were something beyond their comprehension or control.

On Thursday Gretchen drove into the mountains to fetch Maria Concepcião, and of course Yigal went along. At the informal concerts, when Gretchen played, Yigal and Maria sat together. They did so at the Friday band concert too, and at the Saturday dance they appeared first in the middle of the floor. On the long ride home Yigal sat with Maria, and although they could not speak a word to each other, they held hands and communicated a universe of thoughts. When they reached the hut, Gretchen and Britta produced bottles of wine and little baskets of refreshment, which the father and mother accepted with humility and gratitude.

‘Some of the best meals I’ve had,’ Gretchen told me later, ‘were in that hut. For the rest of my life I’ll like wine and cheese.’ On what would prove to be the last visit to the hut, Gretchen happened to see the father scowl, and thought: He isn’t angry. He’s unhappy. But as she looked back over her shoulder she saw that Yigal was kissing Maria.

Two days later the village priest stopped by the pop-top as the group was at lunch. Obviously he wanted to tell them something, but first he joined them in some rough food. Later he said in French, ‘Maria Concepcião and her parents have asked that you not drive into the mountains any more.’

‘Why not?’ Gretchen asked. ‘Aren’t they coming to the dance?’

‘They’re coming,’ the priest said haltingly. ‘Yes, they’re coming.’ He chewed on an end of salted beef, then said,
‘But they want to come on foot.’ He hesitated again, then added, ‘And go back the same way.’