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Overview
When New Yorker Alex Nadal inherits his aunt's farm near Barcelona he is more than intrigued. First, because his aunt appears to have died twice - once at the end of the Spanish Civil War and again sixty years later - and secondly because he is curious about his Catalan roots, about which his father has always maintained a stony silence.
But his arrival on Spanish soil is not a prodigal's return; indeed he is made to feel very unwelcome. He asks too many questions which are met with either hostility or silence, until Alex begins to understand that in this sun-baked and ancient land the past is not history but merely unfinished business. And in the end it's a simple ultimatum: finish it or it will finish him.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781472127372 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Little, Brown Book Group |
| Publication date: | 07/06/2017 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 969 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Walking the Lions
By Stephen Burgen
CARROLL & GRAF PUBLISHERS
Copyright © 2002 Stephen Burgen.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0786710241
Chapter One
The engine note dropped as the plane banked before making its final approach. Alex looked out the window. From the air the city looked trapped, like a grey lava flow stopped by the sea and the surrounding hills. It hunched into itself, the way old cities do; it didn't reach for the sky like New York. A stewardess came down the aisle with a bowl of boiled sweets. Her pink lipstick was fresh, ready for landing and the crew's ritual goodbye at the cabin door. It was curiously old fashioned, like the way the pilots still dressed as naval officers. She reminded Alex of a Sondheim song, a simple duet between an air hostess — who has to leave for work — and her lover:
'"Where you going?"'
'"Barcelona."'
'"Oh."'
'"Do you have to?"'
'"Yes, I have to."'
'"So."'
He didn't want a sweet but he took one anyway. Something about air travel made him compliant, afraid perhaps that any sort of non-cooperation might jeopardize the flight, that the black box flight recorder might reveal how, moments before the plane plunged into the hillside, the passenger in 26B had said no to both tea and coffee. In that respect at least he was like his father, who made a virtue of assimilation, of fitting in and avoiding the immigrant trap of living in one place while dreaming of another. His father was honest, scrupulously honest, or so Alex had always believed; obdurate as a string of mules, but honest. Which was what made it so hard to believe that all his life he'd lied about his sister being dead. Why? His father was quite specific: he didn't say she disappeared or they lost touch, he said she died of TB at the end of the Civil War. But Alex had a letter in his pocket which said she died six months ago, nearly sixty years later, and furthermore that he, Alex Nadal, was the sole heir to her farm. Why pretend she was dead? What could a girl of sixteen have done that was so terrible it made his father pretend she no longer existed? For Alex that was question number one. Number two was what to do with this farm. What did he know about farming? Absolutely nothing.
Chapter Two
Alex's point of contact in Barcelona was Miguel Montero, the lawyer who had executed his Aunt Anna's will. Montero sent a brief letter explaining that Anna Nadal i Sunyer, sister of his late father Ignasi, had bequeathed him Can Castanyer, a twenty-five-acre farm south of Barcelona, near the village of Sant Martí dels Moixoness. On the phone the lawyer said it would be best if Alex didn't go to the farm alone and should come and see him first.
'Why's that?' Alex said.
'There's a slight complication. I'll explain when you get here.'
Alex intended to comply with Montero's request but the moment the plane landed he decided to go straight there, just to take a look. He was wheeling his bags over to a car hire office when he heard over the PA: 'Alex Nadal, just arrived from New York, please go to information.' First in Spanish, then in English. But no one knew he was coming; more to the point, there was no one to know, except the lawyer, and even he didn't know which flight Alex was on. He scanned the terminal for the information desk. The woman behind the desk had wide-apart brown eyes and dyed blonde hair tied back in a short pony-tail. She wore full make-up, the way women in the airline business always seem to. A big, well-dressed man with bulbous, sad fish-eyes leaned against the far end of the desk.
'Alex Nadal,' Alex said, raising one eyebrow.
The information woman's face said: 'And what of it?'
'Alex Nadal,'' he repeated. 'You paged me.'
The fish-eyed man went outside and stood smoking with his back to the glass wall of the terminal.
The information woman looked puzzled. She turned to her companion, another brown-eyed assisted blonde.
'I'm sorry, there doesn't appear to be any message,' the second blonde said. 'We received a phone call, asking us to page you. That's all. Is someone expecting you, sir?'
Alex looked through the glass wall but the fish-eyed man was gone.
'Not that I know of,' he said.
The woman in the car hire office wore a small gold badge with the name Reyes stamped on it. She had pale skin and black hair and spoke with a slight lisp. Next to the Visa machine there was a little blue flag with the words Felicidades, Felicitats, Zorionak printed on it.
'What's that for?' Alex asked, pointing at the flag.
'The royal wedding,' Reyes said, swiping Alex's card through the machine. 'The Infanta Cristina, the king's daughter, she's getting married next month. Here in the cathedral in Barcelona. To a Basque. That's Basque for congratulations,' she added pointing to the word zorionak and laughing. 'It's the only Basque I know. Everyone's very excited; it's the first royal wedding in the city for seven hundred years, they say.'
Alex liked the matter-of-fact way she said that: seven hundred years. Seven hundred years ago the Cheyenne and Pawnee and the Aztecs and the Incas still had three or four centuries of relative peace and quiet ahead of them before the white man arrived in America. But here you could talk about a royal wedding in Barcelona cathedral seven hundred years ago, as if it was seventy years or seven thousand or last week, it didn't much matter. He liked that; the idea that, compared to America, what Europe lacked in space it made up for in time.
Outside the terminal building, the heat took him by surprise. He hadn't expected it this late in September and wished he'd asked for an air-conditioned car. He took the slow road down the coast, through Castelldefels and Sitges. After the Atlantic, the Mediterranean was placid, a house-trained sea, and the sky was closer and smaller than the American sky. Alex told himself not to make comparisons, not to anticipate. As usual, his mother had done her best to fill him with dread. She believed in misfortune the way other people believe in God or reincarnation. Misfortune was everywhere, invisible, but more like a virus you tried not to catch than a god you strove to placate. Misfortune was the natural order of things, the norm: anything else was extraordinary good luck.
'Alex, I wish you wouldn't go,' she said after he received the letter from Montero. 'I have a bad feeling. There's nothing there but bitterness and bad blood.'
After they found his father she went a little crazy. She came home from the morgue and opened her wardrobe and said, 'Whose clothes are these? Who put these hideous clothes in my closet?' And the next day gave every stitch of her clothing to a charity shop. But when Alex took her out to buy new outfits, the things she chose were indistinguishable from what she'd thrown out. Also from that day she stopped speaking English. She always spoke Spanish at home but now she spoke it to everyone, even the next door neighbours, who were Vietnamese, and the building superintendent, a Ukrainian Jew. When the letter came about the farm she said she didn't want Alex to go, but she did. So did Pepa, his sister, although she tried to dissuade him. They said don't go but they meant the opposite. No one in his family ever said what they meant. Before he left he had lunch with Pepa in Chinatown. She drank green tea, he drank Tiger beer. Pepa didn't drink or smoke or take drugs, ever. 'I just don't see the point,' she said, missing the point. She inhabited a Pepacentric universe in which the world was understood only in the way it affected her. If eating, say, pig's feet, disgusted her, then it was disgusting, not just to her but per se. Or if someone related some unpleasant story to her, what happened to the protagonists in the story was less significant than the effect the story had on her. So when a boyfriend persuaded her to go with him to see Schindler's List she was upset — by the film, of course — but more that her boyfriend had deliberately taken her to see something so distressing, he didn't last long.
If Pepa was a bit of a control freak, she did at least have one gap in her defences, a very big gap indeed. The name of the gap was Greg. Alex could never decide whether it was perverse or inevitable that his sister — who imposed on her world as much order as was humanly possible, whose home, despite a full-time job and two children under ten, was as immaculate as a show house — should fall, and fall is the mot juste, for a waster like Greg. Greg couldn't have survived in a world without women. Only women, with their propensity to mistake promises for promise in a man, would give houseroom to a man as useless as Greg. It wasn't that he was bad or violent or dishonest or a drinker. He was just useless. And this uselessness was rooted in the conviction that he was made for finer things than getting up in the morning and going to work. He was constantly coming up with schemes — not even scams, scam implies a degree of success — which would generate a large amount of money in return for an immeasurably tiny amount of effort. The most interesting thing about Greg was that he was prepared, driven even, to put so much effort into avoiding something of which he had no experience — work.
And yet Pepa, who herself embodied more work ethic than South Korea, believed in Greg, she had faith in him. She let him live in her house and sleep in her bed; she bore his children and worked hard so that he didn't have to. And she defended him: against her mother's dismay and her father's silence and her brother's contempt and against a world that didn't see the Greg she saw, a world blind to his potential. But all good things must come to an end, even for the Gregs of...
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Walking the Lions by Stephen Burgen. Copyright © 2002 by Stephen Burgen. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.