1. My Arequipeña

I’m thinking of a girl: the youngest daughter of the great-great-grandmother of my great-grandmother.

She was born in a house made of white stone blocks with balconies and studded doors, in Real Street, which at the time had a gutter running through it to carry Arequipa’s waste into the River Chilí. It had been quite some time since the hundred or so Spaniards returning from war had founded this city which would see so many priests, lawyers, revolts and conspiracies come and go. It was a city of straight paved roads, intimate squares, elegant houses and innumerable churches. They already called it ‘the white city’, as it had been built from the fire of volcanoes that cools into that docile stone in which every nuance of white is trapped, and which is used as the building blocks of the city’s homes and monuments. It was already the city it would later more fully become: Arequipa, beautiful, pious, unruly.

She had been brought up cosseted by a swarm of women — mother, grandmothers, aunts, neighbours, servants — and her most vivid memories of the years when she could barely utter a word were the family summer trips on the back of a mule — her own mule, like her mother’s and sisters’, had parasols — to a farm in Camaná. She had been a happy girl, with her round face and curious eyes peeping out from behind her bibs, blouses and knitted jackets festooned with woollen pompoms (one of which she once swallowed, to the consternation of the local physician, poet and orator, Dr Don Juan Gonzalo de Somocurcio y Ureta, who did his best to treat her indigestion and fever with a skilful blood-letting).

She had been a cheeky, vivacious girl forever running around, jumping up and down, hollering. She knew how to slip away from her two maids, Loreta and Dominga, when they played hide-and-seek. On feast days after eleven o’clock mass they would take her to watch the comedians in San Juan de Dios Square.

She knew her prayers, how to curtsy to grown-ups and give orders to the domestics, but had still not learned how to read or write when one afternoon, after a family celebration with cakes, caramel desserts topped with cream, pastries with sacrilegious names, and vanilla chocolate, they took her away to the convent, to become a bride of Christ. Ten servants carried her dowry through streets teeming with curiosity: the women of the neighbourhood came out to stare, bid their farewells and shed a tear. At the door of the monastery of Santa Catalina, a flurry of maids carried her chests into a small house built especially for her, in which, from that day, she would dwell for the rest of her life.

Loreta and Dominga remained with her in Santa Catalina, along with María Locumba, her cook’s young daughter, who would be her playmate in the first stages of her novitiate (while she was still considered a child).

She was never to leave Santa Catalina; she spent her life behind those thick walls. She was twelve on entering the convent, and she died three years short of her ninetieth birthday.

She was an exemplary nun: pious, hard-working, sweet and obliging. When the earthquake took place, a cornice from the famous ‘patio of oranges’ fell on her and broke her leg. From then on she walked with a limp. When the war filled the city with the wounded, the nuns and their servants spent three days between the refectory and the basement, amid the stench of gunpowder and a hellish singe. One could make out the red tongues of fire licking the sky, and hear the moans and curses of the victims, some of whom pounded the convent doors, pleading for assistance or food. My Arequipeña was the most courageous of them all. She encouraged the elderly, consoled the crying, and returned to their senses the bewildered who had been screaming, ‘They are coming to kill us!’ She was the one who most forcefully opposed the Bishop’s recommendation that the nuns evacuate the monastery until the conflict was over.

These two historical events — the earthquake and the war — were the extent of her civic life. The rest of her seventy-five cloistered years were spent praying, embroidering, hearing mass, confessing, making aprons for the poor and some of those sacrilegiously named pastries for the rich; and — of course — eating and sleeping (both of which she undertook avariciously). During the first ten years of monastery life she received family visits. Once every two months, one hour at a time, she spoke with her mother and sisters from behind the bars of the locutory. Each time they informed her of the family’s countless births and deaths. But after her mother died — how she regretted not having been able to attend her funeral, how she prayed that God would keep her with him — her sisters spread out the visits to only twice a year, then to once, until eventually they never returned. By then Loreta had died. Dominga held out a while longer, but she never got used to the enclosed existence and spent the last years of her life in silence. María Locumba’s daughter, the poor wretch, escaped before her twentieth birthday. One nun insisted that she had seen her jump over the walls of the vegetable patch, just as the sun was setting. Another — more than a touch troubled — swore that Satan had turned her into a frog and carried her away through the gutters.

Being alone with no one left to serve her didn’t bother Arequipeña. For the love of God some of her fellow nuns flagellated themselves and slept in scratchy cilices. She preferred to work hard, to use her hands, and to sweat from her toil. Exerting herself physically to the point of panting freed her from thinking, from being mired in the mundane, and from evoking the past.

She died from the paralysing stabs of pain in her back and lower belly that woke her, howling, in the middle of the night and kept her prostrate for fourteen days. The Mother Superior sent a novice with alabaster hands and coal-coloured eyes to keep her company day and night, to feed her soup and to clean her ca-ca. She was lucid until the end, and received the last sacrament laughing.

The same day she died an artist came, in accordance with the customs of Santa Catalina, to paint her portrait. Revolted by the stench of the already reeking body, he did a sloppy job and left as fast as he could. The portrait is still there, hanging on the wall of the southern-most house of the Santa Catalina monastery, that city within my city of Arequipa. Yes, this skeleton dressed in a nun’s habit, with blind eyes, lipless mouth, unsightly nose, and sorceress fingers, is my beloved Arequipeña, the youngest daughter of the great-great-grandmother of my great-grandmother. Each time I visit Santa Catalina, whose cemetery remains enclosed, I fling flowers over the adobe wall in the hope that they will fall near the earth once nourished by her worms.

He had been born in a small town in Brittany and (naturally) he must have had a mother and father, but I am sure that he did not know them or never remembered them. At some point he began to see himself as self-generated, a child of chance, like certain wild flowers that seem resistant to all adversity and yet are fragile. Although the translation of his name — P’tit Pierre — is Little Peter, in his case it should have been little stone (without the capital letters). Because when I knew him in Paris, that is what P’tit Pierre had been all his life: a pebble, a rolling, wandering stone, without a surname, a history or any ambition.

He had always lived around the Latin Quarter, with no known address, virtually at the mercy of the elements, earning his living as a bricoleur. The word fitted him perfectly: a man for any job, a one-man band who could clean out pipes and chimneys, tile halls, repair roofs, mend old things and turn dilapidated attics into elegant garçonnières. But he was also unpredictable and very much his own man. He fixed the price of his services according to whether or not he liked his customers, and would think nothing of disappearing without warning in the middle of a job if he got bored with what he was doing. He didn’t know the value of money, and never had any because everything he earned disappeared immediately, paying off the bills of his friends in a kind of potlatch. Getting rid of everything he had as quickly as possible was, for him, something of a religion.

I came to know him through my friend Nicole, a neighbour of mine. The built-in shower in my garret was falling to pieces, and in order to bathe I had to perform all manner of gymnastics and contortions every morning. Nicole said, ‘P’tit Pierre is the answer.’ She had met him recently and was delighted with his work. With extraordinary skill and ingenuity, P’tit Pierre had begun to transform her small bathroom magically into a sumptuous palace for ablutions and diverse pleasures. P’tit Pierre came to my garret, examined my shower and humanized it with a sentence that summed him up completely: ‘I’ll cure her.’

We became friends. He was thin, shabby, with long curly hair that had never seen a comb, and roving blue eyes. Nicole lived with a Spanish boy who was in the cinema world, as she was, and P’tit Pierre would wake them in the morning with crisp croissants fresh from the boulangerie around the corner. After working on their playful bathroom he would come to wake me up. We’d go down to Le Tournon for a sandwich, and I’d begin to learn about his carefree lifestyle, which consisted of sleeping wherever the night found him: on the landings, couches and cushions of his innumerable friends, in whose houses he also left strewn around the few clothes and tools which were his capital.

While I wrote, he resuscitated my shower or rummaged through my things quite unselfconsciously, or started doing sketches, which he’d then tear up. He’d sometimes disappear for many days or weeks, and when he reappeared, the same as ever, smiling and warm, I’d hear about his strange adventures, which he took for granted as the mere rituals of normal life. I found out that he had lived in a gypsy camp and that, on another occasion, he was locked up for swimming naked with a group of boys and girls who had formed a commune. But he was too much of an individualist for such promiscuous experiments, and did not stay with the group for long.

He sometimes had charitable affairs with the owners of the houses that he painted, ladies whose maternal instincts, it seemed, were kindled by his absent-minded nature. He went to bed with them out of sympathy or pity and not in any self-interested way, since, as I said earlier, P’tit Pierre was a curious mortal, completely devoid of greed or calculation. One day he appeared with a girl who looked fresh out of nursery. She was an old flame, so when P’tit Pierre seduced her, she must have been in nappies (I exaggerate a little). They had lived together for a while until she ran off with a Vietnamese boy. Now she was back with her parents, finishing school. P’tit Pierre took her out from time to time to get some air.

When, after several months, my shower was finally repaired, P’tit Pierre refused to charge me for the work. We continued to run into each other in the bistros of the Latin Quarter, sometimes with long gaps between meetings. One afternoon I bumped into Nicole in the street. She blushed on giving me her news: ‘Did you know that I am living with P’tit Pierre?’

I was not as surprised as others were, since I had always suspected that P’tit Pierre was in love with the magnificent Nicole. How had this change come about? How had P’tit Pierre moved from being the bearer of croissants to Nicole and her Spanish lover to becoming the lover himself? My theory was that the decisive factor had not been the buttery croissants but the bathroom, that marvel of marvels, a space of scarcely five square yards into which the imagination (and the love) of P’tit Pierre had concentrated mirrors, carpet squares, adornments, porcelain receptacles and cabinets, all with Babylonian refinement and Cartesian balance. My friends in the quartier were sure that the relationship between that cultured, bourgeois, prosperous woman and the semi-literate, dreamy artisan would not last long. With my incorrigible romantic imagination, I bet that it would.

I was wrong only in part, since I was correct in assuming that this love affair would be unexpected and dramatic rather than conventional. I heard news of them in snippets and, after a time, through hearsay, because I left Paris soon after Nicole and P’tit Pierre began to live together. I went back some years later, and it was when I was catching up with a friend that I found out that they were in the throes of tumultuous passion: they separated then made up, only to split up again. Someone, somewhere, sometime asked me, ‘Do you remember P’tit Pierre? Did you know that he’d gone mad? He’s been locked up for some time now in an asylum in Brittany.’

It was the part about being locked up — and his supposed violence — that didn’t ring true to me. Because if madness is a break with normality, P’tit Pierre had never been a sane man. Since before he’d reached the age of reason — like his ancestor, the urchin Gavroche in Les Misérables — he had not conformed with accepted behaviour, the dominant morality, dishonest values or probably even the law. But I could not conceive of him showing any trace of physical aggression towards another person. I had never known anyone more gentle, unselfish, helpful and kind-hearted than P’tit Pierre. No one would convince me that this man, for whom the lyrical Spanish word nefelibata — someone lost in the clouds — seemed to have been invented, could become a furious madman.

Several more years had passed without news of him when, in a stopover between flights at Madrid airport, a shadow blocked my path, spreading its arms wide. ‘Don’t you recognize me? I’m your neighbour from the Latin Quarter.’ It was the Spanish cineaste who had lived with Nicole. He was so rotund and greying that I found it difficult to equate him with the weedy boy from León who, fifteen years back, would explode like a Spanish chauvinist whenever his French girlfriend gestured to pay the bill. We embraced and went for a coffee.

He visited Paris from time to time, but wouldn’t live there again for anything in the world, because the city was now a shadow of its former self. And did he see Nicole? Yes, sometimes, they were still good friends. And how was she? Much better now, fully recovered. Had Nicole been ill? What, didn’t I know what had happened? No, I didn’t know a thing. It had been years since I’d heard any news of Nicole.

So he gave me the news of her and P’tit Pierre, against whom, he said, he had never harboured a grudge for taking his woman away. The story about the asylum was true, and also the rage. But not against others — P’tit Pierre was not capable of hurting anyone. But he was capable of hurting himself. He’d been locked up for some time in Brittany when Nicole was told that he’d got hold of an electric saw and had mutilated himself horribly with it. Nicole’s visits disturbed him and for that reason, until there was a marked improvement in him, the doctors forbade her to see him.

Weeks, months or years later, the clinic told Nicole that P’tit Pierre had disappeared. He could not be found. About that time, I suppose, Nicole had — as they say — got on with her life, found a better job, taken a new lover. I imagine that the day she decided to sell her flat in the Latin Quarter, P’tit Pierre would have been a distant memory. What happened was that one of the potential buyers decided to poke around in the huge attic above the bedroom, bathroom and kitchen of the apartment. Was it Nicole who saw it first? Was it the potential buyer? The body of P’tit Pierre was swaying among the spider’s webs and the dust, hanging from a beam. How did he manage to slip in without being seen? How long had he been dead? Hadn’t there been perhaps some smell that would have given the location of the body away?

The plane was about to leave, and I couldn’t ask the Spanish cineaste any of the questions that were pounding in my head. If I meet him again in some airport, I won’t ask him then, either. I don’t want to hear another word about P’tit Pierre, that little stone from the Latin Quarter who mended my shower. I am writing this story to see if, by doing so, I can free myself from the wretched shadow of a hanging man that sometimes wakes me in the night, sweating.

3. Fataumata’s Feet

I don’t know this woman, but her exotic name, Fataumata Touray, her country of origin, Gambia, and her current status as a resident of the Catalan city of Banyoles provide me with the elements necessary to reconstruct her story. It is, regrettably, the most common of stories, comparable to that of millions of women like Fataumata, who were born into poverty and will almost certainly die in poverty. It would be misleading to call what has happened to her tragic. Is there anything in this woman’s life that does not merit this dramatic designation? For Fataumata, and others like her, dying tragically is dying naturally.

I don’t need to go to the Josep Trueta Hospital in Girona — where they are now mending the ribs, wrists, bones and teeth she broke when jumping out of the second-floor window of her apartment building — to make out her dark, wrinkled skin; her snub nose; her thick lips; her teeth that would have been pearly white before they were broken; her ageless eyes; and her great gnarled feet, swollen from so much walking.

It is these enormous feet, which together form a creviced lunar landscape of hardened calluses, purplish nails, scabbed insteps and sturdy toes, that I find most worthy of admiration and respect in Fataumata Touray. They have been walking ever since she was born in far-off Gambia, a country that few people can locate on the map — because who in the world is interested, and what possible use could it be to know where Gambia is? It is thanks to the perpetual motion of these feet that Fataumata Touray is still alive, though it is difficult to gauge the extent to which she has benefited from such resilience. Out there, in Africa, even if she could run as a little girl, her feet would not have saved her from the practice of female circumcision performed so often by Muslim families on their adolescent girls, but they must have saved her from some beast or plague, or from a tattooed enemy intent on crushing anyone belonging to a different tribe for speaking different languages, worshipping other divinities, or practising different customs.

Here, in so-called ‘civilized’ Spain, in ancient Catalonia, these astute feet saved her from the flames in which other enemies, skinheads probably also sporting tattoos, wanted to burn her to a crisp along with other Gambian immigrants, convinced, like her African enemies, that Fataumata and her tribe have no right to exist, that ‘the world’ — meaning Europe, Spain, Catalonia — would be better off without their black presence. I am certain that in the hand-to-mouth existence she has lived since birth, Fataumata has not once wondered what horrendous crime her minuscule tribe, now on the verge of extinction, had ever committed to warrant such antagonism, to have provoked such homicidal ferocity.

I am also convinced that the journey of these formidable feet from Gambia to Banyoles is one as unusual and bold as Odysseus’s voyage from Troy to Ithaca (and perhaps more human). And what stirred this woman, whose peripatetic feet led her across forests, rivers and mountains, and crammed her into canoes, leaky boats and rat-infested shelters, was her desire to escape not from arrows, bullets or disease, but from hunger. Those lacerated feet have been fleeing from hunger ever since Fataumata was born (in a hammock, in a forest clearing or by the banks of a river), fleeing from hunger’s dizziness and cramps, from the anguish and rage at her want of food with which to nourish herself and those wide-eyed skin-and-bone creatures she gave birth to at some godforsaken moment.

Hunger engenders miracles, stimulates the imagination and emboldens men and women to launch, barefoot, into audacious endeavours. Thousands of Spaniards, who five centuries ago were as hungry as Fataumata, escaped from Extremadura, Andalusia, Galicia and Castile, and embarked on the violent epic of the conquest and colonization of the Americas. A foolhardy enterprise, no doubt. One which, along with so many others, my paternal ancestors, the starving Vargas from the dignified and famished lands of Trujillo, took part in. If they had eaten and drunk well, lived without worrying where tomorrow’s meal was coming from, they would not have crossed the Atlantic in toy boats, invaded massive empires, crossed the Andes, sacked a thousand temples and travelled the rivers of the Amazon; they would have stayed at home growing portly, wallowing in a life of plenty. Although it is perhaps not immediately obvious, Fataumata Touray — who some wanted to burn alive in Banyoles for having invaded other territories and for having a different skin colour, language and religion — is analogous to my own Spanish ancestors, and I feel an affinity with her.

Only forty years ago, another wave of thousands upon thousands of Spaniards — and it would not be stretching a point to imagine that these included some uncles, grandparents or even parents of the firebrands who torched Fataumata’s apartment building — spread out over half of Europe, hoping to find work, a better standard of living, some source of income that an impoverished Spain at that time (like Fataumata’s Gambia today) couldn’t offer. In Germany, Switzerland, France and Britain, they worked hard and sweated through endless humiliation, discrimination and contempt for being different — the blacks of whiter Europe. That’s now an old story. Spaniards no longer have to break their backs in a wealthier corner of Europe so that their families in Murcia or Andalusia can survive. They now cross the Pyrenees for tourism or business, to learn languages or take courses, and see themselves as decidedly European and modern. Spain has prospered considerably since those years when they exported human beings, as Gambia does today. And memory is so short, or perhaps so base, that a large number of Spaniards have already forgotten what it is to be hungry, and how respectable and admirable it is to want to escape it, crossing borders and travelling to other countries where it might be possible to find work. And they have the audacity to despise, or to discriminate against (or even to harm), the black immigrants whom they see as contaminating their urban landscape.

It requires no leap of the imagination to understand what Fataumata Touray did in Banyoles. She wasn’t there holidaying, enjoying the soft breezes of the Mediterranean or tasting the delicacies of Catalan cuisine. She was — and I repeat that this is the most worthy and just of all human aspirations — trying to feed herself by the sweat of her brow. That is, by cleaning floors, collecting rubbish, taking care of dogs, washing nappies or selling hairpins, brooches and pendants on street corners, offering her services from door to door, sometimes not even for money, but simply for a meal. This is what immigrants do when they lack education and do not know the language: the stultifying, badly paid jobs the locals refuse to take. It could not have been going so badly for Fataumata in Banyoles, when, like a number of other Gambians, she settled in that quaint place and rested her large feet. Did she think, perhaps, that her time of stillness had finally arrived?

A vain illusion. One early July morning she awoke to flames and fumes in her immigrants’ quarters on Pere Alsius Street. Her swift feet jumped out of bed to find the blaze had consumed the staircase — the arsonists knew what they were doing — and then propelled her out of a window into the void. Those feet saved her from a terrible death. What do the injuries, which have impaired the use of her hands and feet and impede her mouth from chewing, matter if the alternative was to be burned at the stake? In some senses one could even say that Fataumata is a lucky woman.

Unfortunately, this story is not exceptional. Attempts to burn alive immigrants of dark skin colour, of non-Western cultures or religions — Turks, blacks, gypsies, Arabs — are becoming a perverse sport of sorts, one practised in many European countries. To decry this outrage is seen by some as an expression of bad taste, paranoia, or as a politically motivated ploy.

It would be outrageous to follow the example of Mr Pere Bosch, the mayor of Banyoles, or of Mr Xavier Pomés, another prominent Catalonian politician. Both, with disquieting calm, have denied that what occurred was a racist attack. Mr Pomés has added, emphatically and in a somewhat injured tone, ‘We cannot talk of xenophobia in the capital of Pla de l’Estany.’ That’s fine, the prestige of this civilized place remains unblemished. But, if this were the case, how do we explain the fact that certain people, with premeditated gusto, set fire to the house where Fataumata and her compatriots were sleeping? The gentlemen insist that we are dealing here with an unfortunate prank, an act of hooliganism which was not racially motivated.

All right then. The young people who wanted to turn Fataumata Touray into a human torch are not racists or xenophobes. They are just bad-mannered, ill-bred louts. They got bored on a peaceful night in Pla de l’Estany and wanted to have a bit of fun, to try something new and exciting. Isn’t that what young people do, break the rules? They went too far, nobody can justify what they did, of course. But we should not blow the incident out of proportion. No one died, after all. This explanation, doubtless inspired by noble patriotism, has one flaw. Why didn’t these bored, non-racist young people organize a raid, with their petrol cans, on Mr Pomés’s house? Why did they choose Fataumata’s poor quarters? Perhaps it was pure chance, or because the immigrant houses are not made of stone but of cheaper, more flammable materials.

Will Fataumata Touray be reassured by such explanations? Will she bear her injuries and scarring with greater understanding, now that she knows the people who burned her are not racist or xenophobes but simply loutish kids? Everything is possible in this world, even that. But what I am sure of is that she will not want to live with her unknown arsonists in the capital of Pla de l’Estany. As soon as she leaves the hospital, her wise feet will set off again, without any clear destination, along the dangerous, fire-strewn roads of Europe, that cradle and model of Western civilization.

Image © Annie Spratt