Chapter 22: The Lady in Red

Yes, that lady. Also: a suck-o-matic milk tether, San Quentin, snow angels, downed biplanes, naked people, walking backwards, the rain in Spain, and three-legged dogs. Which of these does not belong?

The whole town is Sergio Leone quiet, by which I mean that anybody who’s ever seen a movie can tell you this entire village, at any moment, every last hen house door, is going to erupt in red-pepper gunfire and exploding roof tile. A thousand Mexican bandits and villagers in ponchos will flood out of old wooden doors and slide down roofs on one hip, firing in random directions. Injured men will cartwheel into water barrels. This town is Spain imagined by Quentin Tarentino, the whole place piñata pregnant, ready to blow apart.

But not yet…

Not for a moment…

Because we are still in the opening credits, just coming into town, and everything is rolling in at long, languid intervals. Every time you think the credits must surely be over, there’s a new title fading in again. It is like the director is nodding off in the afternoon heat, or he’s on a very long drive, veering into the breakdown lane, bumping every now and again and struggling to stay awake.

There is just nobody in this town anywhere. The streets are quiet. Dead quiet. I hear the creak of broken wind vanes, the scrape of black crows adjusting their wings. There is a stream of wasps buzzing out of the wall of the church. Suddenly, I hear that little gear thing turning on the back of somebody’s spurs, but when I check if the spur noise came from behind me there’s nobody there. There’s just my boot dust hanging in the air like a trail of underwater footprints. Somewhere off-screen I hear the waltz of a three-legged dog limping to safety.

It is ten degrees hotter in the square than it was outside town.

It is twenty-five degrees hotter on the steps of Our Lady of the Gargoyle.

San Quentin Tarentino.

I think I’ll keep moving.

*

Turns out Spain is hot.

Very, very hot.

I have walked some crazy distance. I left a Brooklyn friend at a café table three, four hours back in San Quentin. “Fuck it, I’m done,” he told me, raising his hands in surrender and ordering a third beer. “Too goddamn hot.” But I have kept plodding on. Something obstinate and crazy has gotten into me.

And, apparently, only me.

This whole long afternoon there hasn’t been another soul out here on the white gravel road. There’s just been blue sky and yellow mustard plants and a handful of exhausted red poppies baking to death in the wheat fields. From time to time, way, way out in the distance, I see an abandoned mid-day tractor, and sometimes a small cluster of buildings. They might be a farmer’s storage sheds. You sure wouldn’t risk heading towards them looking for water, and, believe me, I’ve thought about it.

When I stop for a break, I put my pack in the middle of the road and just sit on it, daring anyone to run me over. Because there are no people, no cars, no bikes, no nothing out here. I am alone. I can take a nap in the road. I can spread my legs as far apart left and right that they can go, like floppy, spread-legged Raggedy Ann or make a dusty snow angel in the boiling hot middle of summer. I can block the whole path off. Zero risk. I am on Planet Nobody.

 The road is straight and endless. I don’t even need to pay attention to where I’m going. I just need to move forward. Probably for eternity. I have begun experiments seeing how far I can walk backwards and with my eyes closed. I am amazed at my ability to walk great distances in a straight line backwards and with my eyes closed. I wonder how many other pilgrims over the last thousand years have walked along backwards with their eyes closed and tried to set personal bests. I am sure that there have been others, but nobody talks about it. It isn’t in any of the guide books.

Just for the record, I have walked with my eyes shut as far as two football fields, only occasionally touching the grassy verge with my toe and gently recalibrating towards the center.

I am very thirsty.

I start to think how incredibly, side-splittingly funny it would be if I sang Lady in Red at the top of my lungs. I think how especially funny the escalating over-the-top key modulations towards the end might be. I can’t think of a more absurdly operatic piece of popular music. I imagine outraged lovers popping up from hiding places in the wheat fields and yelling out “shut up” and throwing shoes at me. I imagine a milk cow miles and miles away, raising a single rear hoof and cramping in pain from my singing, running dry on her suck-o-matic milk tether. I don’t know why these images are so funny, but they make me laugh.

Out loud.

Hmmm.

I realize that I am both very, very thirsty and laughing out loud. Some tiny inner voice warns me this is not a great combination. I wonder if I am becoming like somebody whose biplane has crashed in the middle of the Sahara, some 1940’s Hollywood star who curses and throws his empty canteen at the sand dune, Errol Flynn wandering in three-mile circles following another guy’s footprints. No, wait! His biplane was shot down, too! What a coincidence! I must follow his footsteps and find him.

Very thirsty.

Now I actually do start singing Lady in Red out loud, and as loudly as I can, but I am roughly sobered up by my singing voice. Terrible singing was funnier as an idea than when I hear it for real. I can’t believe that in the one place in the world where nobody can hear me, where I should have zero out-loud-singing stage fright that I can’t do better. I always thought if I could get more volume behind my voice, I might turn out to be an incredible singer. I had this little fantasy germ of an ugly duckling idea that deep down I have an incredible voice, but it can only be liberated at side-splitting volumes. My secret voice is that powerful, which explains why it is totally ineffective at room singing volume. This, I now know, is not the case, and almost at once I am again reminded that I am growing very, very tired and very, very thirsty.

Other than a melted, half-kilo chocolate bar dripping into my backpack side pockets, I am out of liquids.

I must try to pick up my spirits!

Stay strong, man!

I start repeating “the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain” in all sorts of different accents I’ve heard along the way, mostly Spanish because I’m going through a phase where I like pronouncing things with a Castellan lisp, but there are also some Chinese abacus merchants and adolescent Japanese girls. This is very funny until I realize can’t stop doing it. I have been gripped by an accent possession, those-a times-a when-a you-a can’t-a stop-a talkin in-a some-a kind-a ax-a-cent-a.

This is more than a little worrying, especially when the accent involves nationalities you can’t even pretend to claim as your own. Accent possessions are like attacks of the hiccups: you have absolutely no idea how long they will last. I think about the girl who hiccupped for like seventy-three days. Later on, I read somewhere, she got arrested for armed robbery. What does it all mean? My inner voice repeats: Confucius says they ah like heekups. You haf no ay-dee-a how long lasting they aah. Fotty-seben yuan, plu-eese. The pronunciation of yuan slides an octave and a half like a guitar string being slackened.

I hope this wears off before I get to town.

I drink the last of my chocolate bar and take out my Michelin Compostela guide. I have just passed the dry, unmarked drainage ditch symbol at 47 kilometers, so I must be very, very close now. Somewhere around kilometer fifty-four, I will come to a small town marked with two helpful, tiny black icons, the first icon is a little bed, the second, a crisscrossed knife and fork. That’s what I’m looking for: a bed, and a knife, and a fork. Maybe even a tiny water faucet icon. Now-a thats-a gonna be-a my-a kind-a villagio. I’m-now-a-some-a-kind-of-Italiano-paysano-frombolli-spaghettios-sfoli-gotoli-olio.

I hardly kno-o-o-w zis fraulien by my side...

When I sing really out loud mit mein German accent I am zee teenzy, veenzy bit better.

Ja.

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