The Pole and Other Stories, page 4
6. She has no intention of going to Valldemossa to hear the Pole play. Let him come to her.
Plotting. Plotting.
7. The house outside Sóller was bought during the 1940s by her husband’s grandfather, who had made his fortune in shipping. At the time when he bought it, it was still the hub of a working farm, but over the years he sold off the farmland parcel by parcel, until he was left with only the big house and its outbuildings.
It was there that her husband spent his holidays as a child, and he still has a deep attachment to the place. He is deeply attached yet he visits less and less, she cannot understand why. She herself has come to love the old house, with its austere stonework and its high ceilings and its dim passages and the cool courtyard with its riot of plumbago and bougainvillea and the great old fig tree at its centre.
8. There is the question of conscience. Is her conscience going to plague her over her invitation to the Pole? Her conscience did not plague her over the young man at the gymnasium whom she allowed to flirt with her last year and who once cornered her and tried to kiss her (she yielded her neck, her throat, but not her lips). Is it a question of territory? Is the gymnasium neutral ground whereas the house in Sóller is her husband’s territory and the territory of his family going back two generations?
The Pole is in his seventies, in the evening of his years. The man at the gymnasium was in his twenties, with a vigorous male life stretching before him. The cases are hardly comparable. It would be forgivable if her husband were jealous of the man at the gymnasium but not if he were jealous of the Pole. A man of the Pole’s age should not give rise to jealousy, he does not have that power. In any event, she has no intention of sleeping with him. When he comes to Sóller he can share her domestic routines. He can accompany her to the supermarket and help carry the groceries. He can dredge leaves out of the swimming pool. There is a piano in one of the spare rooms, an old upright: he can fix it up and play for her. By the end of the week his romantic fantasies will have gone up in smoke. He will have seen her as she truly is. He can then return to his native land a sadder and a wiser man.
9. ‘Do you remember the Polish pianist who asked me to fly with him to Brazil?’ she says to her husband. ‘He is going to be in Mallorca at the same time as we are. He will be performing at the Chopin festival. Do you mind if I invite him to lunch?’
‘Of course not. But wouldn’t you rather see him by yourself?’
‘No, I think he should see me en famille. That should bring him down to earth. He has rather elevated notions about me.’
Plotting.
10. Her invitation to the Pole is couched in unusually specific terms. If he wishes to see her, he should plan to arrive on such-and-such a date and depart on such-and-such a date. He should catch the number 203 bus from Valldemossa to the bus station in Sóller. If he calls in advance and informs her of his time of arrival, she will pick him up. He will be housed not in the main residence but in a cottage on the grounds. The cottage has a fully equipped kitchen, in case he wishes to cook for himself. Otherwise he is welcome to share meals with her, Beatriz, his hostess, meals which will be prepared by the housekeeper. His time will be his own.
It reads, and is meant to read, like an invitation to a paying guest.
11. When the time comes, she and her husband travel to Sóller and enjoy a quiet week together. The weather is a little cool, a little windy, but nothing to complain about. The roads are empty, most of the tourists are gone. They drive to Banyalbufar, to Peguera, where she has a long, invigorating swim. They dine at a restaurant in Fornalutx that they have always been fond of.
12. ‘What has happened about the Polish musician?’ asks her husband. ‘I thought he was coming to lunch.’
‘The dates didn’t work out,’ she replies. ‘He isn’t free until next week, and you will be gone by then.’
‘What a pity,’ says her husband. ‘I would have liked to meet him.’
He smiles. She smiles. They have navigated tricky passages before, they will navigate this one.
13. Her husband leaves. The Pole arrives. She picks him up at the bus station in the little Suzuki that they keep in Sóller. Nearly a year has passed since Girona. He has noticeably aged. He is in fact an old man.
Of course it is natural that he should have aged. Why should he be proof against the ravages of time? Nevertheless she is disappointed—more than disappointed, dismayed.
She wonders what the audiences in Valldemossa thought of him. A spectre from the past—is that what they thought? But perhaps, for some, he assumes an aura of timeless authority when he sits down at the keyboard.
14. He kisses her on both cheeks. ‘So fresh you look, so beautiful,’ he murmurs. His lips are dry, his skin soft, babyish: the skin of an old man.
15. They drive to the house in silence. The road up the hill is pitted, but she is a good driver, better than most of the men she knows. When they are on the island her husband leaves the driving to her. ‘I know I am in safe hands,’ he says.
16. She shows the Pole to his cottage. ‘I will leave you to unpack and settle in. When lunch is ready Loreto will ring the bell.’
‘You are gracious,’ says the Pole.
Gracious: what an old-fashioned, bookish word. Does it have a meaning any longer? Ave Maria, gratia plena, ora pro nobis.
17. He responds promptly to the lunchtime bell. He has changed his clothes. He now wears sandals, cream-coloured slacks, a sky-blue shirt. He bears a Panama hat, ready for what the afternoon will bring.
She introduces him to Loreto. No habla español, she tells Loreto. He doesn’t speak Spanish. Loreto gives him a tight smile, a nod. Señor.
Loreto looks after this house and another, further down the valley, belonging to a Mexican. She arrives and leaves on a 125 cc moped. Her husband is an odd-job man and gardener. They have a son and a daughter, both grown up, both married, both living on the mainland.
Nothing about Loreto is surprising. That is to say, of what she knows about Loreto nothing surprises her, not even the moped. But of course Loreto has a life of her own, invisible to her employers, which may well be full of surprises. It may contain, for instance, Loreto’s equivalent of the Pole: a man who finds her, Loreto, to be full of grace and worth pursuing. It is only a matter of chance that the story being told is not about Loreto and her man but about her, Beatriz, and her Polish admirer. Another fall of the dice and the story would be about Loreto’s submerged life.
18. ‘I hope you are hungry. Loreto has made us old-style tumbet. Do you know it? Did they serve it in Valldemossa? In Catalonia we have a similar dish but we call it samfaina.’
She has always been a good hostess, skilled at putting guests at their ease. It is particularly important to put the Pole at his ease, to make him feel at home, so that when he leaves it will be with pleasant memories.
‘Your husband did not come?’ says the Pole.
‘My husband came, but then was called back to his office. He sends his regrets. He is sorry he could not meet you.’
‘He is a good man, your husband?’
What a strange question. ‘Yes, I believe he is a good man. It is not hard to be good, in our times.’
‘Yes? You think so?’
‘I do. We live in fortunate times. In fortunate times it is not hard to be good. Do you think otherwise?’
‘I do not live in fortunate times. But I try to be good.’
She does not see how the person sitting on one side of the table can live in fortunate times while the person on the other side of the table does not, but she lets it pass. ‘Tell me about your daughter the singer. She lives in Germany, I remember you saying. How is she getting on?’
‘I will show you.’ He takes out his phone and shows her a picture of a tall, serious-looking girl in her teens dressed all in white. ‘It is an old picture, from the old days, but I keep it. Now it is different. She is married, she lives in Berlin, she and her husband have a restaurant, a grand success, which brings them much money. The singing? That is in the past, I think. So: successful, yes, but not happy. Not blessed.’
Not blessed. It is sometimes hard to know what the man means, with his incomplete English. Is he saying something profound or is he simply hitting the wrong words, like a monkey sitting in front of a typewriter? Are people with much money truly not happy? She has much money and is happy, more or less. The Pole must have much money too, after all his concerts, and does not seem unhappy. Gloomy perhaps, but not miserable. Perhaps he means that the daughter in Berlin is discontented. Discontent is not uncommon. Discontent: not knowing what one wants.
‘Do you see her often? Do you and she get along together?’
The Pole raises his hands, palms upwards, in a gesture she cannot decode. Where she comes from it means Have courage, press on! but where he comes from it could mean something quite different—There is nothing to be done, for example.
‘We are civilized,’ says the Pole. ‘But she does not have my soul. She has her mother’s soul.’
Civilized. How to translate? We do not fly at each other’s throat? We do not yawn in each other’s face? We greet each other with a kiss on the cheek? Whatever the case, being civilized in each other’s company does not seem much of an achievement for a father and daughter.
‘Fortunately,’ she says, ‘my children and I share the same soul. The same dispositions. We have the same blood running in our veins.’
‘That is good,’ says the Pole.
‘Yes, it is good. I invited my elder son to join us here in Sóller. He is a serious person. You would like him. Unfortunately, he could not come. He and his wife have a new baby, and his wife finds it a strain to travel. One can understand.’
‘So you are a grandmother now.’
‘Yes. I will be fifty on my next birthday. Were you aware of that?’
‘A gentleman does not ask a lady’s age.’
He delivers this pronouncement with a straight face. Does he never smile? Does he have no sense of the ridiculous?
‘It sometimes happens,’ she says, ‘that what a gentleman does not ask of a lady turns out to be what the gentleman in question does not want to know about the lady. What the gentleman would find unpleasing to know. Because it would upset some of the ideas about the lady that the gentleman holds. Some of his preconceptions.’
The Pole breaks off a wedge of bread, dips it in the sauce, makes no reply. Loreto, in the far corner of the kitchen, pretends to be washing the pans, but her manner suggests that she is listening. Perhaps she knows more English than she lets on.
‘Have you finished?’ she says. ‘Have you had enough? Would you like coffee?’
19. Loreto serves them coffee in the living room, where the huge windows (an innovation of her husband’s) allow a view over the valley and its almond groves.
‘So, Witold, here you are at last, in sunny Mallorca in the company of your elusive lady friend. Are you happy at last?’
‘Dearest lady, I do not have the words. Not the words in English, not the words in any language. But gratitude, yes. Gratitude comes up from my heart, you can see it.’ With two hands he makes a strange, awkward gesture, as if opening his ribcage from the bottom and lifting out the contents.
‘I see it, I believe it. But your grand design still escapes me—your design, your plan. Why are you here, now that you are here? What do you want from your friend?’
‘Dear lady, perhaps we can be like normal people and do normal things—no? Without a plan. A normal man and a normal woman do not have a plan.’
‘Really? Do you think so? That is not my experience. In my experience normal men and normal women very often have plans relative to each other. Designs. But let us pretend we have no plan. Then let me ask: when you go back to Poland, and your friends say to you, “So you spent a week on the island of Mallorca with a lady friend! What was it like?” how will you reply? Will you say that it was okay, nothing out of the normal about it? That it was just like being in Poland except that the sun was shining?’
The Pole gives a laugh, a short, explosive burst. It is the first time she has heard him laugh. ‘Always you push me in a corner,’ he says. ‘You know I am not clever like you in the English language. If not normal, what is a better word in English?’
‘Normal is a good word. Nothing wrong with it.’
‘Ordinary,’ he says. ‘Maybe ordinary is better. I wish to live with you. That is the wish of my heart. I wish to live with you until I die. In an ordinary way. Side by side. So.’ He clasps his hands tightly together. ‘An ordinary life side by side—that is what I want. For always. The next life too, if there is another life. But if not, okay, I accept. If you say no, not for the rest of life, just for this week—okay, I accept that too. For just a day even. For just a minute. A minute is enough. What is time? Time is nothing. We have our memory. In memory there is no time. I will hold you in my memory. And you, maybe you will remember me too.’
‘Of course I will remember you, you strange man.’
She utters the words without forethought, hears them echo startlingly in her mind’s ear. What is she saying? How can she promise to remember him when she has every reason to believe that the episode of the Polish musician who paid her a visit in Sóller is going to fade and fade until on her deathbed it is less than a speck of dust?
The man seems to trust in the powers of memory. She would like to tell him about the powers of forgetting. How much has she not forgotten! And she is a normal person, an ordinary person, not an exception at all.
What has she forgotten? She has no idea. It is gone, has vanished from the face of the earth as if it had never existed.
20. She rouses herself. ‘Shall we go for a walk?’ she says. ‘Have you brought walking shoes? The wind picks up in the late afternoon, so if we want to go it is best we go now.’
The Pole changes his shoes and they go for their walk, following a track that will take them to the crest of the hill overlooking the town. He is slow but not as slow as she feared he might be.
‘What is Poland like?’ she says. ‘I have never been there, as you know.’
‘Poland is not beautiful like this. Poland is full of rubbish. Centuries of rubbish. We do not bury it. We do not hide it. To love Poland you must be born there. You will not love my country, if you come.’
‘But you love Poland.’
‘I love Poland and I hate Poland. This is not special. For many Poles it is true.’
‘Your master—Frédéric Chopin—left Poland and never went back. You could have done the same.’
‘Yes, I could say goodbye to Poland and buy an apartment in Valldemossa and wait for some French lady to arrive, some George Sand who is tired of French men with crude habits, who wants a gentle Pole to give her love to. Or I could find an apartment in Barcelona. But that would not be good for you, so I don’t do it. It is the truth—no?’
Indeed, indeed! Indeed it is the truth! It would indeed not be good for her to have this man hovering at her doorstep, casting his shadow over her. ‘I agree. It would be a very bad idea for you to be living in Barcelona. Bad for me and perhaps even worse for you.’
But why is he bringing up George Sand? Whatever he has in mind, she finds the thought distasteful: herself as his foreign mistress, his part-time nurse.
They have reached the crest. There they halt, gazing out over the coastline. Lovers would put their arms around each other. Lovers might even kiss. But not they.
‘About this evening,’ she says: ‘would you like to go out or shall I cook for us? There are one or two good restaurants in Sóller. Or we could drive further afield.’
‘The lady—Loreta is her name?—she does not cook for you?’
‘Loreto does not come in every day. Also, her working day ends at three. If we want her to come back in the evening I will have to make a special arrangement.’
‘Tonight I prefer we stay at home. Tomorrow I take you to a restaurant. But tonight we stay at home and I help you cook.’
‘Very well, we stay at home. I cook, but you do not help.’ She has a vision of the Pole in the kitchen, blundering around, knocking things over, getting in the way. ‘I cook and you take a rest.’ It is like talking to a child.
21. For supper she makes a big omelette with herbs from the garden, and a salad. She is determined that everything remain simple. If the man is still hungry there is always bread.
They have a good cellar here in Sóller. Stocking the cellar is her husband’s department. She does not drink much; the Pole drinks more.
‘I have a gift for you,’ says the Pole.
She unties the ribbon, lifts the lid of the little box. Inside is what appears to be a pine cone.
‘It is a rose,’ he explains.
It is indeed a rose, carved with considerable delicacy in a blond wood.
‘It’s very pretty,’ she says.
‘It is from the house of the Chopins, the parents of Frédéric. It is folk art in Poland. Mainly this folk art is for religion, for the altar in the church. But the parents of Frédéric were not religious, so this was in the house for décor, with other flowers. In their time it was painted, but the paint is gone, it is two hundred years in the past, and to me it is more beautiful with just the wood. I don’t know how you call the wood in English. In Polish it is s´wierk.’
So she is to become custodian of a relic of the sainted Chopin. Is she the right person for the job, who does not believe in God, much less in Chopin? ‘Thank you, Witold,’ she says. ‘It is beautiful. I will treasure it. But I am going to say goodnight now. I go to bed early. It is not a very Spanish habit, but for me it is so. You will have to retire too, I am afraid. I have to lock the house, I cannot sleep easily if the house is not locked. I will leave a light on outside. Goodnight.’ She presents her cheek to be kissed. ‘Sleep well.’
22. Usually she falls asleep at once. But not tonight. Has she made a mistake, inviting the Pole to Sóller? I want to live side by side with you like two clasped hands. In the next life too. What sentimental nonsense! You give me peace. And a rose from the home of his hero. For you! What a joke!
