Note: I took all these photos on actual holidays in the real-world version of Xadac. Some of what ‘I’ relate below is an account of things that actually happened (some characters are composites; some names have been changed). Other parts, and characters, are pure fiction, and any resemblance to real persons living or dead is, as they say, purely coincidental.
It’s also, in part, a response to Mary Gaitskill’s recent couple of posts concerning the Alice Munro affair and her response to it and specifically the way it made her feel about writing: “I had absurd thoughts or rather thought-like strings of words such as: ‘beautiful writing is artificial, in its nature deceptive and actually evil.’” It’s a horrifying thought, especially for a writer who aspires to write beautiful horror stories. It resonated strongly with what I was trying to bring into focus as I turned over the following stories and pictures in my mind…
1.
According to the handy new nature ID button on my phone, this is an Egyptian locust. I found him crouching in the leaf-choked corner of the sunken patio at our AirBnB, a shady and inconspicuous spot. He was big – so big that my daughters, who usually fight over who gets to hold any insect we can catch, were a little shy of picking him up. Sharing their fascination to hold live things, and lacking their squeamishness, I went in for the grab, expecting him to leap out of reach at the last minute. As the more observant will have realised, this wasn’t an option for him. He crawled weakly a few steps and then submitted to capture, and it was only then that I noticed that someone or something had removed his rear legs, very neatly and symmetrically, plucking them out at the socket.
I felt sorry for the poor fellow, but that didn’t stop me from taking the opportunity for some crisp close-ups (pretty good, no?). After that, my humane instincts reasserted themselves: inspired by a vague idea of insects loving heat, plus images of fields and gardens stripped bare by this particular species, I moved him up to a sunny slate walltop strewn with appetising greenery. Here, I hoped, he could live out the remainder of his crippled life in something approaching comfort.
We’ll come back to him later.
***
2.
Sometime in the early 1980s, a recently divorced, one-legged cellist sits on the beach in front of the Plaça del Passió, a five-minute walk away from where I’m sitting now. I’m not sure if my informant gave the time of year when telling me this story, but I picture it as late February, the bleakest time of year in Xadac (I’ve only been here then once, for a funeral). The town is empty of tourists, even the little bump around Christmas and Epiphany having died down by now; everywhere is closed; the residual fishing economy is all that’s really going on, and those of the small ex-pat community who can afford it are probably somewhere else.
The amputation is more recent than the divorce, and the cellist hasn’t learned to sit well with his lopsided lower half (events will, as it turns out, render this moot before too long). He hasn’t, either, learned to think of himself as an ex-cellist, but that is what he is now: the right leg is gone above the knee, there’s no way he can get the necessary purchase on the instrument, and in any case he sold his Guarneri in order to buy his flat here. He got to know Xadac through the music festival – came here each summer from the late ’60s, fell in love with the place and decided to retire here – Xadac in August in its Bohemian heyday, all sun and music and laughter. This is not that. The stony beach digs into his tailbone and he can’t find a comfortable balance, but he’s too depressed to try and solve the problem. The pain in his arse is incidental. The doctors have told him if he carries on smoking he will lose the other leg, but he has never been so lonely in his life and he craves a cigarette like the ocean craves the rocks.
He hears footsteps behind him, tinkle-clink across the shingle, coming around the side of the shuttered Bar Maritim. They stop a few yards away, and a familiar voice calls his name.
***
3.
‘This is the great-grandchild of Terence Weil!’
My wife was taken aback by these words, delivered by a kindly-faced elderly gentleman, in April 2018, with the twinkling-eyed flourish of a conjuror unveiling the upshot of his favourite trick. He was bang on the money, but she had never seen him before in her life, and surely the six-week-old mite in the pram she was wheeling past Bar Maritim (doing a lively Easter trade, striped awnings fluttering in the stiff Tramontana) had not had time to develop any very striking resemblance to her great-grandfather, Terence Weil, at one time known in Baroque music circles as ‘the Continuo King’ and at another, in Xadac, as ‘El Capitano.’
Felipe was taking quite a risk: all he had to go on was a report, from his girlfriend Mette, that she’d overheard a young woman – this woman – calling my name (first name only, and abbreviated at that) in a voice and accent that reminded her of my family, the day before. But then again, what retired literature professor in his late seventies would not jump at the chance to announce himself to a beautiful stranger in such astounding fashion? Felipe carped the diem; she was duly astounded; and by the time I found them she was sitting at a table outside Bar Maritim with Felipe, Mette and our baby, chatting away over a trio of cortados. Felipe chuckled his way through the account of his dramatic entrance, and we settled down to reminiscences of Terence – ‘my best friend,’ as he put it, his eyes misting up a little.
***
4.
Three days ago, my daughters prompted me to go and check on the locust. I wasn’t expecting him to still be there but he was: his glossy, sundried corpse had barely moved from the spot where I’d left him.
My first thought was: maybe it’s the sun that killed him. Maybe the open sockets of his back legs – his crowning glory, his most fleshy part – were fatal sources of evaporation. Maybe he’d sought out the shady corner where I first found him for this very reason, and my putting him in the sun had condemned him to a lingering death, drying out slowly in the August heat. It wouldn’t be the first time that a well-meant intervention backfired.
He did make a beautiful corpse, and a captive subject; so I went and got my camera. While I was getting the macro zoom set up, a wasp alighted on his back and began to feed. I wasn’t able to focus in time before it flew off; so this next is not quite the money shot it should have been:
Once the wasp had gone, my younger daughter became fascinated with the body, and insisted on carrying it around with her for the rest of the day. It struck me that an immense dead locust would make a prestigious entry for show-and-tell, and get her off to a good start at her new school; so, once she finally relinquished it, I put it on the kitchen mantelpiece of our AirBnB for safe keeping. Yesterday I noticed a column of tiny brown ants questing across the kitchen floor and up the wall beside the mantelpiece. Following their trail, I found the locust corpse. The ants were seething in and out of it through a crack in the lower thorax. I picked it up between finger and thumb, ants spilling thick over my hand as I walked quickly across the kitchen, and put it outside. Already it was little more than a husk, and today when I checked (hoping the ants would have cleaned the body and then moved out, in the manner that nineteenth-century surgeons used maggots to clean wounds of putrefaction) the head had fallen off.
Anyway, what’s keeping me awake tonight isn’t the thought that I might have killed the locust – its days were surely numbered – nor even the thought of its agony, either at the moment its legs were removed or afterwards. I just can’t stop wondering who or what could have done such a thing.
A bird? A bird would eat a locust, but not so selectively: a bird wouldn’t eat just the back legs, then let it go. A bird would gobble it all up as fast as possible.
A cat would do it. There are plenty of cats here, despite an ongoing programme to eradicate the once-rampant feral population. But I can’t imagine a cat having the ability to pluck out those back legs so neatly.
A chimp or orang-utan could do it, and this I can picture: the absent-minded expression in those dark, wet eyes, the locust trapped under a dextrous foot, leathery hand coming down to pull off the tastiest parts, lips working silently. Torture inflicted in leisurely innocence, somewhere in the uncanny valley of the higher primates.
As far as I know, there are no chimps or orang-utans here in Xadac.
My daughters will cheerfully murder ants, flies and wasps. I find it a little much sometimes, and have tried to put a dampener on their more wanton sprees. They favour a clean kill, however. I can’t picture them holding the writhing and to them immense insect while they draw out its back legs. But I can picture the child that would do it.
***
5.
I remembered Felipe as a name often referred to in relation to Grandad, and as a face among the gallery of his cronies who would gather in the beach bars over beer and berberechos, cigarettes and backgammon. (Far more vividly imprinted on my childhood memory was his son Perico, a godlike figure six years my senior, who taught me how to snatch up limpets from the rocks in the loosened instant after a wave washed over them, and eat them alive straight out of the shell.) They were a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, garrulous crew. They played backgammon and poker for high stakes. They took polemical positions on music and art, defending and assailing them with passion and derision. Torrentius was still alive for some of this time – after Grandad’s death I discovered a painting with his signature, a seated woman with dark bobbed hair, almost certainly a fake, in the back of the wardrobe in his spare bedroom – and they batted him to and fro with the freedom of small-town gossips. Torrentius was a fraud; Torrentius was a genius; Torrentius was sleeping with the chief of police’s wife, or was it his son?
I thought they were cool – better than cool – would disdain cool as beneath their notice. They were a dying breed. They were characters. I lapped them up, worshipped them discreetly, treasured up their slightest attention. Grandad, cruising along the seafront in his electric wheelchair in empty-legged pyjama trousers and a fisherman’s cap and jersey, chain-smoking Chesterfields, was a Xadac character par excellence. Everyone knew him. Even now, thirty years after his death, I’ll bump into people who remember him. Terry: ‘El Capitano.’
‘Everyone loved him.’ I can’t remember if I said it, or Felipe. Either way, he nodded, slowly, not denying it but working up to add something more.
‘Some of them took advantage of him, you know.’
‘Trent Wheeler,’ I said, with a knowing look. Trent – a wiry octogenarian with piercing blue eyes who claimed, almost certainly falsely, to be the authentic Clyde Barrow (miraculously surviving his bullet-riddled Bonnie) – had parlayed his gift of the gab and unflagging energy into marriage to a Norwegian billion-heiress forty years his junior and a sun-kissed retirement in Xadac (cut short by his mysterious death around the turn of the millennium, falling or pushed by his wife and her lover from the cliffs abutting their villa complex). At the time of Grandad’s death, Trent owed him around thirty thousand pounds in, I had always believed, backgammon losses: Grandad’s friend Christof Knipperdolling discovered him going through his papers the day after he died, trying to find and destroy the record of the debt.
‘Trent was one, yes,’ Felipe replied. ‘The trouble was, Terence wanted to think he was good at games.’
‘Wasn’t he?’ I had always thought he was supremely good at games: it was a small but significant part of his legend. Had he not been offered a place in both Aston Villa football club and the Surrey cricket team, but decided on music instead? This I was pretty sure of; his status as a chess grandmaster was perhaps not as official as my childhood memory suggested, but he’d been an intimidating opponent. To a twelve-year-old with no special gift for the game. Who had in fact beaten him on one memorable occasion. I paused: reflected.
‘It was important to him.’ Felipe sipped his coffee. ‘I had to start losing to him at Scrabble, you know. Although we always played in English.’
I countered that Trent Wheeler – something of a player himself – had lost all that money to Grandad at backgammon. But no, it turned out: the thirty thousand was a straight loan, wheedled out of Grandad after Trent had fleeced him at backgammon so many times that Grandad got sick of it.
‘But yes – a player – that was it, that was how Terence wanted to think himself. Really, though, he was not. An innocent, in some ways. Everyone loved him, yes. But this place, those people… they can love someone but not treat them with respect. They took advantage. Not all. But Wheeler was not the only one.’ Felipe looked out across the glittering bay, smiling slowly. ‘He was a real shit, though: a Number One shit. I remember seeing him one day, he had bought a speedboat with his wife’s money but could not operate it. He fell out, but was still attached to the steering…’
‘The rudder.’
‘Correct. Tangled up somehow. So the rudder is hard over, the speedboat going round and round, quite fast, in diminishing circles… Wheeler attached. I watched for some little time, with pleasure, considering the possibility, should I perhaps let nature take its course?... before I summon help.’ Felipe nodded, eyes narrowed, savouring the memory.
‘But he was happy here. I mean, I always had this picture of him, being happy. Terence, I mean.’
‘Yeees,’ Felipe said. ‘In the end. When he first came here, it was not what he was expecting.’ He pointed to a spot on the beach about thirty yards away. ‘His first winter here, I found him sitting right there. Alone. I’ve never seen anyone look so sad. He told me he didn’t want to live anymore.’
***
6.
Some thoughts on Torrentius. Everyone knows those distorted, pulled-plasticine figures rendered in pitiless photorealistic detail under the light of an alien sun; the weird juxtapositions – Madonna attended by towering crabs in place of angels, Sebastian the Martyr pierced by gaily-patterned cocktail umbrellas – the most famous images repeated again and again on posters and postcards and coffee mugs the world over.
I mostly find his paintings leave me cold. His life – which he claimed was his greatest artwork of all – is harder to dismiss.
Item: his custom, as a young man, of promenading the boulevards of Barcelona and, later, Paris, with a live lobster on a leash.
Item: the tiny wicker cage in the bedroom of his house here in Xadac (preserved since his death as a museum), where he would keep a single grasshopper imprisoned at all times because he liked to hear its song.
Item: his practice, in his later years, of painting using live octopuses, splatting them about on enormous canvases while they ejaculated ink in intermittent raptures of terror.
Isn’t there something disturbing about the levels of pain and distress required, in all these cases, for Torrentius to live his beautiful life, cut a dash, accumulate notoriety? Il faut souffrir pour être beau – but Torrentius never saw himself in the role of sufferer: the man always did just what he pleased as far as his means allowed. I sometimes wonder whether his shallow, brilliant, sardonic paintings were actually all part of the act – a joke played on every collector who forked out millions for a canvas, every trippy undergraduate who ever blu-tacked a poster of Time’s Treacle to his dorm room wall, blathering on about genius while all they were really doing was keeping Torrentius in fine wines, live octopuses, cocaine and taxidermy and boys and cigars and ambergris moustache wax.
It all caught up with him in the end of course. The sword duel at Cala Nans – the calculated mockery of elusive footwork and exquisitely dosed flesh wounds, doubly impressive given his age by then – the enraged police chief, goaded beyond endurance, throwing his foil to one side and bulling them both over the cliffs to their deaths.
The story is well-known. Those cliffs, though. There is something about those cliffs, and the rock formations of Xadac in general, that does give me pause.
All this part of the coastline is volcanic slate, some of the oldest volcanic rock in the world, heaved up out of the planet’s mantle however many thousands of millennia ago, and then scoured by the winds that vary in intensity from zephyr to screaming lunacy but never much at all in direction. In and out of the bay, up and down the mountain, over and over again. Mistral, Levante and Tramontana. The soft slate cliffs suffering them for millions of years before humans ever gave them names. They are surreal and beautiful, those rocks, and there is a stretched-out fluidity to their wounds that calls the distortions of Torrentius (and Münch, and H. R. Giger) to mind. Never mind the light: it was the wind that fascinated him, the wind and the rock and the shapes they made together. And what beauty of the natural world does not arise from something similar – millions of years of suffering, to sculpt the mountainside, the sand dunes, the speckled camouflage of a moth’s wing – the logos crucified and left nailed up there forever, in the hills, in the windswept rocks, in the generations of slowly drifting chromosomes?
Maybe Torrentius was onto something: beauty as a function of pain; the artist as microcosm of a pitiless vivisectionist Creator.
It’s late, and Xadac has got its hooks into me. Grandad, and the locust, and Torrentius and the rocks. Even that poor old grifter Trent Wheeler. Something insists that they all fit together, and won’t let me rest until I pin it all down and bend it into shape.
Too tired for that now, though. It’s so late that even Bar Lovento has stopped blasting out its usual playlist of late twentieth century rock, spanning the three decades from the Stones to Nirvana. The excitable chatter of the drinkers is gone, and someone – I picture a mop being pushed – has put on the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby, featuring, alongside the voices of the Fab Four, a quartet of session musicians, including cello. Easy money and nothing to boast of, for the Continuo King. I always liked the song though.
***
7.
‘I’ve lost everything. Even the fags, Felipe. They’ve told me I’ll lose the other leg if I keep them up. Jesus, I could to with one now though. I’ve lost my marriage, I’ve lost my music…’
When listening to music, his mobile, simian face would twist into an ecstasy of anguish, his hands clutching at some invisible, slowly revolving thing in the space in front of him. As if there was something inside that was too big, that could only be released by the music, wrenching him in its labour to get out. This is the look I see on him now, forcing out his troubles to his friend on the blue-grey shingle.
Felipe looks out to sea. He has seen his friend shed tears before – to music – but this is different and he is afraid they will both regret his witnessing it. He does not offer comfort: it’s all true. He hears the stones shift in an awkward movement. Terry takes a harsh, ragged breath, steadying himself. The famous Xadac light is in abeyance at this time of year, water and clouded sky the colour of lead and ashes.
‘I could just walk out into that, you know. Ha. Or hop. Hop it, Terence. Wouldn’t take long. Bugger all left for me here.’ A long outward breath, then a long pause before he breathes in again. ‘I’d murder for a fag.’
‘Don’t move,’ says Felipe. ‘Promise me. I’ll be back in five minutes.’
Terry nods.
‘Promise me.’
‘All right, all right.’ He waves, irritably, and the wave and the irascible note in his voice convince Felipe that it’s safe to go, but still as soon as he’s off the beach he breaks into a run. The Tabac isn’t far, but he’s out of breath by the time he arrives there. He buys two packs of Chesterfields, and then has to double back across the Plaça del Passió to buy a lighter, a fat and cheerful-looking orange Bic.
At Bar Maritim he stops to catch his breath, then sets out across the shingle at a steady walk. Terry is still there, still slumped in the same heart-breaking lopsided posture. But he checks his watch as Felipe draws level with him. ‘On the dot, Felipe.’
Felipe doesn’t smoke as a rule, but he takes out two cigarettes and lights them both; stoops down without a word and hands one to Terry, who likewise doesn’t reply, but takes a long, long drag and blows out the dusty slate blue smoke in a long, thin stream. They stay like that for a while, the two men, one standing one sitting, smoking together on the deserted beach. In due course, Felipe helps his friend up and they make their way across the stones to the Plaça, to Bar Lovento, which has a backgammon board and has just opened for the evening. In due course, Terence will fly back to London to have his other leg amputated, convalescing on a sofa bed in my childhood home, an object of fascination to my brothers and me. In due course he will die of bronchitis in a hospital bed in Girona. In due course, Felipe will sit sipping coffee at a table outside Bar Maritim with his friend’s grandson and great-grand-daughter, and tell the story of the time he saved his life.
“Retired from any mortal sight” (From King Richard the Second). Purcell. Alfred Deller —Countertenor. Harpsichord: Basil Lam. Cello: Terence Weil (Continuo arrangement by Lam). HMV C.4247 (1953).
Lovely! My godfather taught me backgammon, and i spent some time in the costa brava (im guessing that's where xadac is?) in the winter, occasionally with ailing old people. So very evocative for me. And all very personal for you too -- so thanks for sharing!