Happiness
I was talking to this guy who came in the other day – German bloke, seemed nice enough – and he asked me why everyone seems so happy around here. Sounded to me as if he’d asked this question a few times before. Don’t know really, I replied, no reason not to be I guess. He had a few drinks and we talked a bit more and he left, none the wiser but smiling at least, and I started thinking a bit more about it.
What really makes me happy, like laugh out loud happy, is my boy Sean – I look down to see him smiling back up at me and it splits my face every time. He’s like a perfect combination of his mother’s features and mine – looking at him is like looking into one of those carnival mirrors - it’s my reflection, just twisted around a bit. In fact it’s almost as if some scientist took the constituent parts of the both of us, measured and combined them equally to the thousandth of … whatever it is you measure this stuff in. It’s amazing really – we couldn’t have got it so perfectly right if we kept trying for another 100 years.
Of course, I thought I was pretty happy before all of that. 2 years at Reuters and the dream job came through – a move to Barcelona. How the hell did I get so lucky? I get to live out the Hemmingway fantasy – the writer in Europe, the bullfights, the drinking, running Las Ramblas, out every night with my new mates (like the staff photographer James – a year younger, all Sarf Lahndan attitude, at least until a girl calls him on it), the writing (occasionally, and only if the carousing allowed), drinks on the balcony of my flat over by Parc Guell most days to watch the sunset and then on to have as much fun as the town can offer. And really – what more is there to life?
I soon found out. I was out with James in our usual wine bar by the food market in Valcarca, and we were dancing around to some cheesy Europop with a bottle of Rioja at our table when I turned around and there she was. Maybe you’ve had one of those moments too – do you know the feeling when it seems as if the dance floor parts like the Red Sea for Moses, the music tones down like a mute capping Miles’ trumpet and the lights, already low, dim to nothing everywhere but there so that all you can see is her staring back at you? Maybe not, but I couldn’t ignore a moment like this - who could? - particularly with half a bottle squared away. And against all precedent, against my better judgement (if that existed), I had the bottle in hand and was standing there pouring before I even realised what I was doing. “I noticed your glass was empty” I said, and she smiled, which was much more than the line deserved. But it got us talking, for which I can only be grateful.
James wingmanned superbly, to his credit, and within 30 minutes she and I were out and on the street and struggling through the crowd waiting there for a glimpse of the King’s Mercedes (he was in the Theatro de Catalunya on Las Ramblas which was hosting the opening of some new play or other and was expected to drive back this way on his way to the airport – the Spanish love their royal family like no other nation). We headed down to a small restaurant I knew which treated diners to an infrequent performance by the teacher of the local flamenco school and whoever she feels is worthy of partnering her, and we managed to squeeze onto a small table near the front. It’s always a performance of excellence when she dances – this woman has trained all the greats of the last forty years - but even so when Cortes glided through the door you could feel the air move as the whole place gasped as one – one night off from his world tour and he comes to this place to partner his old tutor. This couldn’t have been organised better if I had tried.
Flamenco is sex standing up, basically, and I defy anyone not to be stirred after a performance such as this. She was rapt, transfixed by the spectacle, and I drank in her features – those dark, sparkling eyes and high, majestic cheekbones; those bitable lips and a shower of unruly brown hair - and when she turned and caught me looking she stared me straight in the eyes and in that instant I knew. Still staring, she asked “are we going to sleep together?” and to my shame I blushed away and croaked back “I hope so”, but she laughed and reached across to my hand, pulling it like a plough horse back across the acreage of the table between us.
The next morning I woke well past my usual time in a sun flooded apartment (mine, somehow) in time to see her walk back to bed with coffee and with one of my work shirts on, undone and enveloping her tiny frame like the coat in that famous painting by Klimt, and it occurred that she owned me already – she rubbed herself against my shirt (and, later, against me) like a cat rubbing it’s smell onto it’s new host. And within a month she was living with me – some problem with her flatmate, she said, and it’s only temporary, although her smile betrayed what we both already knew – she was here to stay.
The constant sex was fantastic, of course – I came home for lunch and left with a sandwich to eat on the way back to the office (Spain being one of the more civilised nations in the world with it’s fiesta policy), and I would stop for chorizos on the way home for the energy I needed to walk, with her sudden extra weight, down the long hallway from our front door. Domesticity made easy – sex, then into the kitchen to throw something together (usually pasta or Thai food wokked in a few minutes – she got used to it pretty quickly for a food so foreign to her) if she hadn’t already organised a cold plate or tapas (or if her wonderful mother hadn’t delivered one of her amazing paellas. I had always considered it tourist food until I ate one of hers, washed down with some home made wine, on the night I met her parents for the first time – the perfect way to break the ice and make me feel welcome). Of course I didn’t see so much of James and the boys – the occasional drink after work or the odd night out if we had an assignment out of town – but he was single and I wasn’t, and that’s the way of the world – he would have done exactly the same thing if the roles were reversed.
And eventually we had our first holiday together, and we ended up in Croatia after talking to some guy in a punk band from Zagreb (they were traveling around Spain in a van for the summer under the guise of a tour). She invited them to sleep in our lounge room (she was always doing stuff like that) and, two bottles and a few joints later, it was settled – his parents have a house in Split with an apartment upstairs where he and his girlfriend live when they are in town, and we were staying there – that was that. And two weeks later we were sitting on a different balcony watching a different sunset over the islands off the Dalmatian coast. She loved it, of course (“imagine living there” became a constant catch phrase), and even tolerated my side trips to Sarajevo and Mostar (not as much to see as I had – secretly – hoped; one of the problems with being a journalist is you tend to dig into other peoples misery, and sometimes you want to look just to see something you’ve read about. Checking your sources, I guess. Thankfully enough time had passed in those towns for life to regain most of its normalcy, although the broken bridge at Mostar was difficult to look at).
He really is a beautiful kid though. Have I already told you this? I know every parent thinks their children are the best looking, most athletic, etc, but I’ve been stopped in the street by women wanting to look at him (babies are an aphrodisiac – women can’t stop themselves when they see a guy with a child, although it doesn’t make sense to me – surely a guy with a baby means he’s involved with somebody? In most cases, at least). He’s got her complexion and olive skin and lips – he even bites his lower lip like her – and my wavy brown hair and blue eyes. Actually they’re a different blue to mine – more the ice blue that my father used to have, the kind of eyes that seem to be peering into your soul. I remember before he was born she wanted to name him after her father, but one look at those eyes told us any Spanish name just wouldn’t fit. So abuelo got relegated to second place for Sean Pedro Buchanan.
That night still looms large in the memory banks though – I guess it’s the same for all parents. She was about 5 days late, and she usually ran like clockwork. I freaked out, predictably, but she was the picture of calm – remarkably so for an unwed Catholic girl, no matter how modern (or lapsed) – and we talked forever. We lay on the big lounge under the window until 4.00 – what do you want to do, would you want to keep him (he was always a him, even before he existed), am I ready for this, are you ready for this, what will your parents say, what do you want to do about us, do you want him – all of the questions that come in a situation like this. And we lay there, drinking a bottle and another, and we discovered yes we do want him, yes I am ready for him, yes I do want to be a father / mother, and then we went to bed and made love slowly, quietly, intensely until the sunrise which we watched from the comfort of our bed, the crumpled white sheets wrapped around our shoulders. And sometimes I think he was conceived there and then – everything else was foreplay to his conception.
And happy - well, why not? The future looked great, and I felt at peace – a beautiful girlfriend and a child on the way, and then work asked if I wanted to move to Berlin (Germany becoming increasingly the locomotive of Europe meant more news coverage was needed from there) which meant a raise and a chance to see life in yet another place, and life seemed better every day. Her parents wanted us to marry, of course, but never pushed the subject – they loved us both and were able to accept our decision not to tie the knot. Except that we did – a long weekend to see friends in London turned into a ten hour drive to Gretna Green to marry over the anvil, witnessed by 2 American tourists dragged from their coach tour for half an hour, who took more photographs than we did and tried not to look at her beautiful belly too much. And we never did tell anyone about it – the wedding was something for just the three of us.
The birth was fine (not that I had to do much more than be sympathetic, but her mother told me that an hour and a half labour was nothing compared to her seventeen – everything was tougher back in the day) and he was a perfect kid – quiet, slept most of the time, ate when he should – and I wrote into the night between feeds, shaping a novel that was fighting to get out. During the day I would work and then come home most nights to a dinner ready on the balcony (she took to motherhood as if born to it – the protective side of her coming to the fore – and she seemed to have no qualms at all about leaving her life as a legal assistant behind), and more often than not James and Rosa joined us (he was now going out with her cousin, and we saw them most nights now - women just love it when that stuff works out). And we prepared ourselves for the big move.
With a month to go James suggests a holiday, and so the four of us and our beautiful boy head up to Zaragoza – some fly fishing for us, shoe shopping for the women, and maybe up to Pamplona for the bulls later. How could I say no to that – it’s practically falling from Hemmingway’s pages? And so we check in to a small guest house and pick up supplies and get the girls to drop us near the river while they go into town. We walked along the half-mile or so of the dirt path under a watery sun until we find the spot the hotel patron told us about, dig up some bait and wade in. And when James tells me they’re expecting I laugh and run over to hug him but slip on the slick riverbed, splitting my stomach open on a rock below the surface in a cut from my navel to my old appendix scar.
And now I think I knew before Rosa told me. I can certainly picture it – it’s haunted my sleep (and my waking hours) ever since – it’s as if it was a movie which suddenly went to slo-mo awaiting the explosion – he drops his dummy and cries (a warning siren), she reaches around but can’t quite get there (quick panning shot), so she undoes her seatbelt and leans over to pick it up (the audience starts shifting in their seats, saying no to the screen), the car from nowhere with the driver fresh from the taverna (strings building to a crescendo), the glass shattering as she passes through (the explosion at last), the smell of burning rubber and smoke (start to fade), and then nothing (black).
And nothing is what I feel, and nothing is what touches me, and nothing is what I hear when they talk to me. I don’t understand, and no one can explain to me, where she is – I sit staring at the door waiting for her to return with the groceries, to come in and kiss me and hold me and make the darkness go away. And they lead me away and take me home, and I feel nothing. And Rosa stays and cooks and cleans and feeds him, and they put me in a suit and take me somewhere in the car and it’s a funeral and it’s her funeral and the pain comes and it’s ice cold and it feels like an icicle is being forced through my ribs and through my heart and out through my back inch by inch by inch and it melts away to destroy the weapon but leave a gaping hole and still I hear nothing and I realise that I am screaming and screaming and screaming.
And I want to die. I feel dead anyway, and I want to make it official. And James is talking to me. It’s a few days later, I think. And I can’t hear what he’s saying. And he says Sean’s name. And now I can hear. And I know that I have to leave. I can’t stay here – Barcelona stinks of her. And I can’t go to work – the world means less than nothing to me now, and no one wants to read someone write that. And I spend my time sitting on the lounge and staring at the walls while the others buzz around me. And at some stage I look at the shelves and see the photos and there’s one of the two of us framed there and suddenly I know what to do – Split.
Her parents give me some money, and even in this state I see the pain behind their masks – they are giving me money to allow me to take their only link to her away from them. And they help me pack the car and her mother holds me for what seems like forever, and I hold her father up when his legs give way, and I help him to the seat at the bus stop in front of the apartment block next door. And I strap Sean in and turn the key and start talking and talking and talking to him and I don’t stop.
And two days later we’re here. I knock on the door of my friend’s parent’s house, and they take a look at me and his mother helps me upstairs while his father brings Sean in. I sit on the balcony in time to watch the sunset and I think of her and, at last, I cry. His girlfriend’s cousin is given the job of looking after us, and slowly she manages to claw me back into the world. And when we are on one of our walks around town I notice the coffee shop a few doors down is looking for a buyer. She can see that maybe I’m finding my way back with this, and when I ask her if she’ll help me run it as a bar, she beams and says yes. Although help is the wrong word – she runs the bar, and I change the CDs and drink coffee and start writing what I hope will one day transform itself into a new novel.
And when James and Rosa come to visit it is excellent. I have loads of room in my new apartment, and I miss all of my friends from the past – there’s a large black hole in my heart, and they help me to fill it up - and I am full of joy to see them. Rosa is great with Sean – she’s a natural mother, and she holds him on her hip with that seven month belly in front of her, and she glows just like her cousin did not so long ago, and Sean starts pulling her hair and laughs, and we all do. And one drunken night when James and I are catching up on the bonding crap that guys do Rosa brings Sean in for me to kiss him goodnight, and when she tells me that they are naming their baby girl after his mother my eyes moisten and all I can do is smile.
(May 2000)
What really makes me happy, like laugh out loud happy, is my boy Sean – I look down to see him smiling back up at me and it splits my face every time. He’s like a perfect combination of his mother’s features and mine – looking at him is like looking into one of those carnival mirrors - it’s my reflection, just twisted around a bit. In fact it’s almost as if some scientist took the constituent parts of the both of us, measured and combined them equally to the thousandth of … whatever it is you measure this stuff in. It’s amazing really – we couldn’t have got it so perfectly right if we kept trying for another 100 years.
Of course, I thought I was pretty happy before all of that. 2 years at Reuters and the dream job came through – a move to Barcelona. How the hell did I get so lucky? I get to live out the Hemmingway fantasy – the writer in Europe, the bullfights, the drinking, running Las Ramblas, out every night with my new mates (like the staff photographer James – a year younger, all Sarf Lahndan attitude, at least until a girl calls him on it), the writing (occasionally, and only if the carousing allowed), drinks on the balcony of my flat over by Parc Guell most days to watch the sunset and then on to have as much fun as the town can offer. And really – what more is there to life?
I soon found out. I was out with James in our usual wine bar by the food market in Valcarca, and we were dancing around to some cheesy Europop with a bottle of Rioja at our table when I turned around and there she was. Maybe you’ve had one of those moments too – do you know the feeling when it seems as if the dance floor parts like the Red Sea for Moses, the music tones down like a mute capping Miles’ trumpet and the lights, already low, dim to nothing everywhere but there so that all you can see is her staring back at you? Maybe not, but I couldn’t ignore a moment like this - who could? - particularly with half a bottle squared away. And against all precedent, against my better judgement (if that existed), I had the bottle in hand and was standing there pouring before I even realised what I was doing. “I noticed your glass was empty” I said, and she smiled, which was much more than the line deserved. But it got us talking, for which I can only be grateful.
James wingmanned superbly, to his credit, and within 30 minutes she and I were out and on the street and struggling through the crowd waiting there for a glimpse of the King’s Mercedes (he was in the Theatro de Catalunya on Las Ramblas which was hosting the opening of some new play or other and was expected to drive back this way on his way to the airport – the Spanish love their royal family like no other nation). We headed down to a small restaurant I knew which treated diners to an infrequent performance by the teacher of the local flamenco school and whoever she feels is worthy of partnering her, and we managed to squeeze onto a small table near the front. It’s always a performance of excellence when she dances – this woman has trained all the greats of the last forty years - but even so when Cortes glided through the door you could feel the air move as the whole place gasped as one – one night off from his world tour and he comes to this place to partner his old tutor. This couldn’t have been organised better if I had tried.
Flamenco is sex standing up, basically, and I defy anyone not to be stirred after a performance such as this. She was rapt, transfixed by the spectacle, and I drank in her features – those dark, sparkling eyes and high, majestic cheekbones; those bitable lips and a shower of unruly brown hair - and when she turned and caught me looking she stared me straight in the eyes and in that instant I knew. Still staring, she asked “are we going to sleep together?” and to my shame I blushed away and croaked back “I hope so”, but she laughed and reached across to my hand, pulling it like a plough horse back across the acreage of the table between us.
The next morning I woke well past my usual time in a sun flooded apartment (mine, somehow) in time to see her walk back to bed with coffee and with one of my work shirts on, undone and enveloping her tiny frame like the coat in that famous painting by Klimt, and it occurred that she owned me already – she rubbed herself against my shirt (and, later, against me) like a cat rubbing it’s smell onto it’s new host. And within a month she was living with me – some problem with her flatmate, she said, and it’s only temporary, although her smile betrayed what we both already knew – she was here to stay.
The constant sex was fantastic, of course – I came home for lunch and left with a sandwich to eat on the way back to the office (Spain being one of the more civilised nations in the world with it’s fiesta policy), and I would stop for chorizos on the way home for the energy I needed to walk, with her sudden extra weight, down the long hallway from our front door. Domesticity made easy – sex, then into the kitchen to throw something together (usually pasta or Thai food wokked in a few minutes – she got used to it pretty quickly for a food so foreign to her) if she hadn’t already organised a cold plate or tapas (or if her wonderful mother hadn’t delivered one of her amazing paellas. I had always considered it tourist food until I ate one of hers, washed down with some home made wine, on the night I met her parents for the first time – the perfect way to break the ice and make me feel welcome). Of course I didn’t see so much of James and the boys – the occasional drink after work or the odd night out if we had an assignment out of town – but he was single and I wasn’t, and that’s the way of the world – he would have done exactly the same thing if the roles were reversed.
And eventually we had our first holiday together, and we ended up in Croatia after talking to some guy in a punk band from Zagreb (they were traveling around Spain in a van for the summer under the guise of a tour). She invited them to sleep in our lounge room (she was always doing stuff like that) and, two bottles and a few joints later, it was settled – his parents have a house in Split with an apartment upstairs where he and his girlfriend live when they are in town, and we were staying there – that was that. And two weeks later we were sitting on a different balcony watching a different sunset over the islands off the Dalmatian coast. She loved it, of course (“imagine living there” became a constant catch phrase), and even tolerated my side trips to Sarajevo and Mostar (not as much to see as I had – secretly – hoped; one of the problems with being a journalist is you tend to dig into other peoples misery, and sometimes you want to look just to see something you’ve read about. Checking your sources, I guess. Thankfully enough time had passed in those towns for life to regain most of its normalcy, although the broken bridge at Mostar was difficult to look at).
He really is a beautiful kid though. Have I already told you this? I know every parent thinks their children are the best looking, most athletic, etc, but I’ve been stopped in the street by women wanting to look at him (babies are an aphrodisiac – women can’t stop themselves when they see a guy with a child, although it doesn’t make sense to me – surely a guy with a baby means he’s involved with somebody? In most cases, at least). He’s got her complexion and olive skin and lips – he even bites his lower lip like her – and my wavy brown hair and blue eyes. Actually they’re a different blue to mine – more the ice blue that my father used to have, the kind of eyes that seem to be peering into your soul. I remember before he was born she wanted to name him after her father, but one look at those eyes told us any Spanish name just wouldn’t fit. So abuelo got relegated to second place for Sean Pedro Buchanan.
That night still looms large in the memory banks though – I guess it’s the same for all parents. She was about 5 days late, and she usually ran like clockwork. I freaked out, predictably, but she was the picture of calm – remarkably so for an unwed Catholic girl, no matter how modern (or lapsed) – and we talked forever. We lay on the big lounge under the window until 4.00 – what do you want to do, would you want to keep him (he was always a him, even before he existed), am I ready for this, are you ready for this, what will your parents say, what do you want to do about us, do you want him – all of the questions that come in a situation like this. And we lay there, drinking a bottle and another, and we discovered yes we do want him, yes I am ready for him, yes I do want to be a father / mother, and then we went to bed and made love slowly, quietly, intensely until the sunrise which we watched from the comfort of our bed, the crumpled white sheets wrapped around our shoulders. And sometimes I think he was conceived there and then – everything else was foreplay to his conception.
And happy - well, why not? The future looked great, and I felt at peace – a beautiful girlfriend and a child on the way, and then work asked if I wanted to move to Berlin (Germany becoming increasingly the locomotive of Europe meant more news coverage was needed from there) which meant a raise and a chance to see life in yet another place, and life seemed better every day. Her parents wanted us to marry, of course, but never pushed the subject – they loved us both and were able to accept our decision not to tie the knot. Except that we did – a long weekend to see friends in London turned into a ten hour drive to Gretna Green to marry over the anvil, witnessed by 2 American tourists dragged from their coach tour for half an hour, who took more photographs than we did and tried not to look at her beautiful belly too much. And we never did tell anyone about it – the wedding was something for just the three of us.
The birth was fine (not that I had to do much more than be sympathetic, but her mother told me that an hour and a half labour was nothing compared to her seventeen – everything was tougher back in the day) and he was a perfect kid – quiet, slept most of the time, ate when he should – and I wrote into the night between feeds, shaping a novel that was fighting to get out. During the day I would work and then come home most nights to a dinner ready on the balcony (she took to motherhood as if born to it – the protective side of her coming to the fore – and she seemed to have no qualms at all about leaving her life as a legal assistant behind), and more often than not James and Rosa joined us (he was now going out with her cousin, and we saw them most nights now - women just love it when that stuff works out). And we prepared ourselves for the big move.
With a month to go James suggests a holiday, and so the four of us and our beautiful boy head up to Zaragoza – some fly fishing for us, shoe shopping for the women, and maybe up to Pamplona for the bulls later. How could I say no to that – it’s practically falling from Hemmingway’s pages? And so we check in to a small guest house and pick up supplies and get the girls to drop us near the river while they go into town. We walked along the half-mile or so of the dirt path under a watery sun until we find the spot the hotel patron told us about, dig up some bait and wade in. And when James tells me they’re expecting I laugh and run over to hug him but slip on the slick riverbed, splitting my stomach open on a rock below the surface in a cut from my navel to my old appendix scar.
And now I think I knew before Rosa told me. I can certainly picture it – it’s haunted my sleep (and my waking hours) ever since – it’s as if it was a movie which suddenly went to slo-mo awaiting the explosion – he drops his dummy and cries (a warning siren), she reaches around but can’t quite get there (quick panning shot), so she undoes her seatbelt and leans over to pick it up (the audience starts shifting in their seats, saying no to the screen), the car from nowhere with the driver fresh from the taverna (strings building to a crescendo), the glass shattering as she passes through (the explosion at last), the smell of burning rubber and smoke (start to fade), and then nothing (black).
And nothing is what I feel, and nothing is what touches me, and nothing is what I hear when they talk to me. I don’t understand, and no one can explain to me, where she is – I sit staring at the door waiting for her to return with the groceries, to come in and kiss me and hold me and make the darkness go away. And they lead me away and take me home, and I feel nothing. And Rosa stays and cooks and cleans and feeds him, and they put me in a suit and take me somewhere in the car and it’s a funeral and it’s her funeral and the pain comes and it’s ice cold and it feels like an icicle is being forced through my ribs and through my heart and out through my back inch by inch by inch and it melts away to destroy the weapon but leave a gaping hole and still I hear nothing and I realise that I am screaming and screaming and screaming.
And I want to die. I feel dead anyway, and I want to make it official. And James is talking to me. It’s a few days later, I think. And I can’t hear what he’s saying. And he says Sean’s name. And now I can hear. And I know that I have to leave. I can’t stay here – Barcelona stinks of her. And I can’t go to work – the world means less than nothing to me now, and no one wants to read someone write that. And I spend my time sitting on the lounge and staring at the walls while the others buzz around me. And at some stage I look at the shelves and see the photos and there’s one of the two of us framed there and suddenly I know what to do – Split.
Her parents give me some money, and even in this state I see the pain behind their masks – they are giving me money to allow me to take their only link to her away from them. And they help me pack the car and her mother holds me for what seems like forever, and I hold her father up when his legs give way, and I help him to the seat at the bus stop in front of the apartment block next door. And I strap Sean in and turn the key and start talking and talking and talking to him and I don’t stop.
And two days later we’re here. I knock on the door of my friend’s parent’s house, and they take a look at me and his mother helps me upstairs while his father brings Sean in. I sit on the balcony in time to watch the sunset and I think of her and, at last, I cry. His girlfriend’s cousin is given the job of looking after us, and slowly she manages to claw me back into the world. And when we are on one of our walks around town I notice the coffee shop a few doors down is looking for a buyer. She can see that maybe I’m finding my way back with this, and when I ask her if she’ll help me run it as a bar, she beams and says yes. Although help is the wrong word – she runs the bar, and I change the CDs and drink coffee and start writing what I hope will one day transform itself into a new novel.
And when James and Rosa come to visit it is excellent. I have loads of room in my new apartment, and I miss all of my friends from the past – there’s a large black hole in my heart, and they help me to fill it up - and I am full of joy to see them. Rosa is great with Sean – she’s a natural mother, and she holds him on her hip with that seven month belly in front of her, and she glows just like her cousin did not so long ago, and Sean starts pulling her hair and laughs, and we all do. And one drunken night when James and I are catching up on the bonding crap that guys do Rosa brings Sean in for me to kiss him goodnight, and when she tells me that they are naming their baby girl after his mother my eyes moisten and all I can do is smile.
(May 2000)