A Strange Country Read online

  Sandro was cut out to live on the other side of the bridge, just as Petrus was on human earth, and these permutations of desire are all that can revive the worlds. The first bridge of the mists had once regenerated a world that was stagnating, its mutation by the painter elf had seen to it a second time, and the elves of the last alliance saw that their role was to reinforce the footbridges between the two sides.

  The bridge, that icebreaker—as much conquest as metaphor.

  RUIN

  1938

  PREAMBLE

  In four days, the elves of the final alliance made a long series of discoveries and deductions.

  The gray tea fulfilled the desires expressed in the pavilion.

  Twenty millennia earlier, someone—probably the guardian—had infused leaves attained by noble rot, then built a bridge between the two worlds.

  Twenty millennia later, through the same process, the guardian’s son had succeeded in transforming the bridge and crossed forever into the world of humans.

  How had they discovered the power of gray tea? No doubt it was by chance, as are all the great stanzas in the history of the living.

  Four more centuries and the traitor, one of Tagore’s assistants, offered Aelius the opportunity to come to Nanzen in secret and create a pavilion and a bridge that would be hidden from view, then the power of the fungus in the tea plant was revealed to the members of the last alliance and they were able to see them—golden, arrogant, and deadly—in the absence of Ryoan’s mist.

  Gray tea was produced by exposing tea plants to constant humidity for twenty-four hours. Prior to this, elves used to burn the leaves decomposed by rainy weather. In Ryoan, they were now being grown in entire fields.

  Gray tea enabled humans to cross into the mists and come back out again. Whether through some flippancy or magnanimity on the part of fate, it also made drunkards sober.

  Gray tea was dangerous. It left no trace. It figured in no archives. It was careful not to be seen. It edified, then disappeared, so much so that it is easy to understand why Nanzen and Katsura took so long to comprehend the role it played.

  One way or another, gray tea had something to do with ink. No one knew the role of the single brushstroke, but they were pleased that Sandro was one of them.

  Finally, if the gray notebook had fallen into Petrus’s hands, perhaps it was because the spirits of Yepes had chosen their camp and an unknown authority in Extremadura had sided with the last alliance—but it is hard to know such things for sure, for despite all their qualities, stories are known to be unpredictable and mischievous, and we never know their conclusion in advance.

  ARE WE DEAD ARE WE ALIVE

  Nanzen, year six of the war. We left the community of the last alliance at the time when the bell was tolling for the tea, and we must now round out the tale with everything that has happened between the intention and its consequences: so many events, so many reversals, so much uncertainty, made forever true by death, in fact, and now that the last battle has been fought, the ruins of what were our worlds, and their legacy, and their tragedies.

  How could the elves imagine destroying the foundation of their universe? What despair leads to such a radical path? Katsura was losing the war, and the mists were growing weaker; every time the bond between humans and elves was strengthened, they had regenerated; but the gray tea represented a threat that compelled them to change the configuration of the footbridges. The enemy’s bridges and the pavilions would disappear, but Nanzen, which was not built upon tea, would hold.

  “We will destroy the tea plantations,” said Tagore. “All of them, right down to the last one, at dawn on the coming day.”

  “But without tea, your world will collapse,” said Alejandro.

  Tagore shared the vision of the two infants taken in that snowy night and everyone followed the events, great or trivial, of their magical lives, grannies and piano included, up to the first battle of the war. When the vision filled with the fury of Aelius’s storm, Alejandro and Jesús placed their hands upon their hearts. Then their hearts stopped beating when detachments of elfin fighters poured from the sky as it opened above the fields. Before long came the meeting between the two girls, in the courtyard of a farm amid verdant hills before years of fleeing while total war raged. And, in the end, as if through some chemical precipitation of time, some sort of accelerated acquaintance when, ordinarily, one must share years together, the young girls were as familiar to Alejandro and Jesús as if they had grown up with them. Finally, Tagore projected the image of Petrus confronting the former Head of the Council with a book in his hand. Behind them an old plum tree was visible against a background of moss and a wooden veranda.

  “What are you reading?” asked Gustavo.

  “A prophecy,” said Petrus.

  And in the calm, late autumn evening he read out loud.

  the rebirth of the mist

  through two children of snow and November

  the rootless, the last alliance

  “Maria and Clara are the children of snow and November,” Tagore said to Alejandro. “We have consented to the fall of tea because we have faith in the prophecy. Fate did not bring us all together by chance, and ever since we found the gray notebook, we have been trying to picture its role in the last battle. There must be a reason why we have a priest and a painter with us, just as you are here because of the pull of Yepes. That is where the son of the former guardian went for the first time, and where we believe the first bridge of the worlds was built. It is no accident, either, that the heir to the castillo is a member of the high command of the League, nor is the fact that he comes from a harsh, poetic land like all those in this tale.”

  A new landscape unfolded before their mind’s eye. The last battle was about to begin, and the first phase would be fought on the battlefields of this world. The tea plants of Ryoan and Inari shone gently in the uncertain night. At the edge of the plantations, along lengthy esplanades, leaves were drying, before they would be crushed on long wooden tables. Beyond the esplanades were barns without a facade, and under their roofs of bark, bundles of canvas hung in the air. Slightly to one side of the storage lofts stood the pavilions where the most remarkable vintages of tea were ageing.

  The fields at Inari would be burned with no adverse effect, but those in Ryoan were dotted with elves on the lookout, posted in force around the perimeter—for the most part bears and wild boars armed with spears and bows which to humans seemed gigantic. The zone would have to be evacuated before it was set on fire, and in spite of the advantage of surprise, it was not easy to strategize for such an unequal contest. Moreover, they were working against the clock, for there was only one full day left before the empathy of ordinary tea would wear off for most of the elves, and three for the tea the company had drunk in Nanzen. An hour earlier, the Wild Grasses had destroyed their entire stock—it will come as no surprise to you to learn that, of all the authorities in the mists, only the house of Hanase had permission to stockpile dried leaves. The elves collect their daily allotment at their neighborhood lodge, which is supplied every day through the channels or by air—eagle, albatross, and seagull elves. Sometimes, raptors or seabirds would come to offer their services, but elves do not like to take advantage of the labor of other living species. While the dolphins of the mists did work together with the boatman in the Southern Marches, it was more out of friendship than necessity, because the channels allowed for a closeness between them and this relieved their labor of its alienating burden.

  “I’m in charge of the tea destruction commando,” Petrus told Alejandro and Jesús. “I intend to surprise the enemy with an unusual strategy, and I could use two humans for the task.”

  Then Tagore offered the hospitality of his dwelling for the rest of the night.

  There was an indefinable fragrance in the air of the pavilion.

  Of solitude and mind, thought Alejandro.

  A
moment later, they found themselves under an awning on a wooden veranda that looked out onto the forest. The moonlit trees were tall and straight, an orderly row reaching for the sky. At the center of the clearing, the windows of the guardian’s residence, which was lower and more spacious than the Pavilion of the Mists, were covered with light veils that floated in the night air. Next to the door, camellias had been placed in a little bamboo vase hanging on the wall. Everyone fell silent and took in the gentle murmur of ancient trees. Clara and Alejandro sat apart in one corner of the veranda, Jesús and Maria did likewise, off to one side. Petrus, Marcus, Paulus, Sandro, and Father François deliberated amongst themselves. Tagore and Solon went inside.

  Time rustling, like tissue paper.

  “We might be dead tomorrow,” Clara said to Alejandro.

  She smiled and he understood why he thought she was beautiful. Her brow was too big, her neck was too long, and her eyes were too light, but there was something about her smile that made him feel as if he were embracing the waters of a dream. Not a word was exchanged, but, through their gazes, despite the absence of intimacy to which war condemned them, they concentrated in one hastily-snatched hour all the days of a lifetime of love. It happened in the order everyone is familiar with, and thus they experienced those first gazes where they drowned in the headiness of adoration and temptation; then, after the magic of the early days, they slowly came to reality; after having construed love, they elevated it to its authentic life. After the luxuriant dawns and wild storms, they saw their true faces; he sat at the hearth, tired and worn, and she knew what sort of man he was. When at last they fell asleep, exhausted and happy, they had known their fill of lovemaking, of every parting and every joyful meeting, of every tempest and every wonder ever known to mind and body, through the sharing of tea and the song of ancient trees, and afterwards when they woke, they were a man and a woman enriched by every moment of transport, every transfiguration of love. Just before waking, they shared the dream of a chilly late afternoon on the farm on the plateau in the Aveyron, while clouds of crows whirled and shrieked overhead, gathering under a storm on the horizon. The lovers were hurrying to take shelter when a solitary snowflake appeared, light and fluffy among the birds, that all on its own caused the storm to recede—and though the storm was wild with rage, other fat snowflakes, soft and dumb as feathers, fell tenderly to hide a land of newfound peace.

  At the far end of the veranda, Maria was talking to Jesús with the same silent, tea-induced affinity.

  She was telling him about the trees in the countryside where she’d grown up, the tall elms and riverbank willows, but also the oaks by the field next to the farm, their quivering branches leaving etchings on the air. She told him about the hill, to the east of the village, that they could reach by a winding trail until it merged into an undergrowth of poplars, where every family was permitted to gather wood and where they would come for their share by first snowfall—and then she described the towpaths of the six cantons, their lakes of emerald and rushes, Eugénie’s vegetable garden, her artemisia, marjoram, and mints. The faces of her grannies, wrinkled like autumn apples, went through their shared vision until there was only the smallest of the four faces, cheerful and stubborn beneath her cap with its ribbons the color of forget-me-nots.

  “Eugénie,” said Maria.

  In the tiny, boundless space that divides loving hearts, Jesús felt her sorrow and mourning as if they were his own. In turn, he told her of his arid land, the dried lake of his childhood, the pain of staying and the wrenching loss of going, but also, some days at dawn, the beauty of the water in a calligraphy of dark mist.

  “We were innocent,” she said, with a pang of sadness.

  He went on telling her about Extremadura, its plains and desolate forts, the onslaught of sunlight, the cruel rocks and his amazement at the way the stones in the mists turned liquid.

  Her gaze was full of distress, like that of a wounded child.

  “What did Eugénie say to you before she died?” he asked.

  She told him how her auntie had lost all desire to live when her son died in the war, how she came to hate violets when the innocent fell in battle, and how she was horrified by the transparent skies above the carnage—then one day she recovered from her grief by healing Marcel. In the end, she had come to Maria’s little room, to sit on the edge of her bed, and she said, You have healed me, my love.

  Jesús took her hand. Her palm was like the skin of a lovely peach, her fingers so fine and slender he could have wept.

  She shared one last scene where the old granny was speaking to her and smiling—a new scene, that was neither a memory nor a premonition, just the effect of the tea and the redemptions of a night of love.

  “Look,” said the auntie, smiling with astonishment and cheer. “Look,” she said again, “what I couldn’t tell you that night. Oh, he has his ways, the good Lord! Are we dead, are we alive? It doesn’t matter, look what you gave me, my love.”

  She showed them a garden, where two long tables were set and decorated with solstice irises. In the soft evening air, she was smiling at a young man—my son, she thought with amazement, who died in the war, but I was able to tell him how much I loved him. And from this, the gladness of a dialogue between the living and the dead had engulfed the old peasant woman’s heart, and she felt such intense happiness that dying no longer mattered to her.

  “A dead woman talking about her dead,” she said, amused.

  Turning one last time to her beloved little girl, she said:

  “Don’t forget to pick the hawthorn.”

  Maria drew closer to Jesús and buried her face in his chest.

  He put a hand in her hair, savoring the timelessness of hours of love.

  Not far from there, looking out onto the trees in the play of light and shadow, Petrus had opened a few bottles he’d appropriated from Alejandro’s cellar. Everyone was saying they might all be dead tomorrow, and they all knew the one thing a living being can know about death.

  “It always comes too soon,” said Father François.

  “It always comes too soon,” said Petrus.

  They could drink the wine from Yepes.

  “When I think I might have to give this up,” Petrus said.

  With a wrenching sigh, he added:

  “And women. Woe is me.”

  Just before dawn the company, along with Solon, Gustavo, and Tagore, gathered in the middle of the veranda, which was bathed in darkness and moonlight.

  “Now the time has come for us to say farewell to our culture,” said the Head of the Council.

  Petrus took one last sip of amarone and opened another bottle. In their glasses, pale gold sparkled faintly in the moonlight.

  “A Loire wine—this alliance of modesty and refinement drives me crazy,” he said.

  “Almost nothing,” murmured Alejandro, raising the glass to his nose.

  On the palate, the wine had the crystalline texture of soft stone turning to white flowers, with a faintly sweet touch of pear.

  “Stones and flowers,” said Clara, tenderly.

  In front of everyone, she placed her lips briefly on Alejandro’s.

  Petrus raised his glass and said:

  “When I arrived in Katsura for the first time, one hundred and thirty-eight years ago (Marcus and Paulus chuckled over a certain memory of that event—he ignored them), I had no idea of the destiny that lay in store for me there. For a long time, I wondered what was expected of an insignificant squirrel who was constantly out of his mists. Then I realized that it was precisely these qualities that made me the instrument of fate, which uses intelligent men to carry out its plans, but needs an idiot to bring them all together at the appointed time.”

  “I really wonder what an idiot might be,” said Father François.

  “An alcoholic who believes in the truth of dreams,” answered Paulus.

&n
bsp; “What a fantastic gospel,” said the priest.

  They honored in silence the last of the wine before Paulus gave each of them the sobering flask, and then the strange troop headed back to Nanzen.

  The valley of trees rustled with unfamiliar sounds and the moon flooded the path with black stones. Silent and motionless in the hour before dawn, in battle order outside the pavilion, the general staff of the army of mists awaited them.

  Are we dead are we alive

  Book of Prayers

  STYLE

  Petrus loved stories and fables for the power they had, like wine, to open the freedom of dreams in waking time, but, in addition to the intoxication from the story, he was just as sensitive to the way they were crafted as he was to the refinement of different varietals. A beautiful story with no style is like a petrus in a trough, he liked to say to Paulus and Marcus (who couldn’t give a damn).

  What was more, he had a weakness for the French language, its earthy power and courtly coquetterie, because roots and elegance are to the text what taste is to wine, with that added grace which comes from a passion for what is unnecessary, and that added significance which, always, is born of beauty.

  STRATEGY

  Petrus felt deeply human and, dare I say it, French. While he did value the art, light, and food of Italy, his heart beat resolutely for the slapdash panache of France.