Chapter Six — Queimada

By the time Jon had finished with Lucas at the plane and walked up the long slope from the strip to the terrace, his father and the woman his father had brought for him were already three minutes into a conversation Jon was not a part of.

Jesus had one hand on Maribel's shoulder — not a gripping hand, the hand of a man performing welcome in front of a woman who was going to be staying in his house — and the other held the glass he had been holding since the plane had come over the hillside. He had taken Maribel's bag from her. The bag was on the terrace tile between them.

Jon climbed the last three steps.

"Jon," Jesus said.

"Papá."

"A good flight."

"A good flight," Jon said.

"She is not afraid," Jesus said, smiling down at Maribel.

"She is not," Jon said.

"Good."

Maribel looked at Jon once and then at the terrace, as a person does who has been delivered safely to a doorstep and is waiting to be told which door.

"Rafa is inside," Jesus said. "Encarna is doing what Encarna is doing. Your other friends are not yet here. They have phoned from Santiago. The driver lost the road for a while. They will be an hour, perhaps a little more."

"Abraham lost the road."

"Abraham did not drive. Abraham has never driven a Spanish country lane in his life, hijo, and it is good that the driver was not him."

"Pecas knows the road."

"Pecas has been silent. Pecas is tired. Pecas is home."

Jesus turned to Maribel.

"Come," he said. "I will show you your room."

He picked up the bag. Maribel followed him into the house. Jon stayed a moment at the terrace rail. The slope went down the long hillside to the strip, and the strip went to the tree line, and the tree line went to the Atlantic. The Atlantic was not grey now; it was the evening grey of an April sky at seven. Far off, a freighter. Closer, a field of something his family had grown in his grandfather's time and had not grown in a long time, and a stone wall he had climbed as a boy and had climbed less as a man, and the small old chapel at the corner of the property which had been boarded shut for three of the five years Jon had been in Asia and had now, he saw, been unshuttered again.

He put his hand on the rail. The granite was warmer than the air.

He went in.

#

Inside, Rafa was on the sofa with a book he had been reading for six years, which was to say the same book, which was to say the one Rafa kept in this house because Rafa had known, for a long time, that he would sit in this room four times a year and that no book followed one across four appearances better than an old one. He looked up as Jon came in.

"Primo."

"Primo," Jon said.

"Alive."

"Alive," Jon said.

"Your father took her to the second bedroom."

"So I saw."

"Encarna is in the kitchen."

"So I heard."

Rafa looked at Jon. Rafa was the same Rafa — dry, attentive, at home in the room the way an older cat is at home. He did not stand. He did not need to.

"Nando called," Rafa said. "He is bringing the doctor."

Jon stopped.

"She is coming."

"She is coming," Rafa said.

"Okay."

"Jon—"

"Rafa."

"Nando asked me. I said it would be all right."

"It is all right."

"Is it."

"It is going to have to be," Jon said.

Rafa nodded. He turned the page of his book. He did not look at Jon again until Jon had left the room.

#

Dinner was in the small dining room, not the great one, because the great one was being held for Saturday, and because Jesus had said, simply, that nobody had wanted to eat in the great room on a Friday for forty years. Encarna had laid eight places. Four of them would be filled.

Jesus sat at the head. Jon sat on his right. Maribel sat across from Jon. Rafa sat at the far end. Encarna brought the caldo in a tureen the size of a small dog and set it down without ceremony and ladled it out into four wide shallow bowls.

"Big soup," Jesus said.

"Big soup, señor."

"Encarna," Jon said, "this is Maribel."

"I know," Encarna said.

Encarna put a bowl in front of Maribel. She filled the bowl with more caldo than anyone else's. She put a piece of bread beside the bowl and then, after a consideration, a second piece.

"Eat," Encarna said to Maribel. "You are thin."

Maribel looked at the bowl.

"Thank you," she said.

Encarna did not answer. She was already at the sideboard, pouring the wine. The wine was the wine. Maribel watched her move and did not speak.

They ate. Rafa asked Jesus about a neighbour's vineyard. Jesus answered. Jesus asked Rafa how his work was going in Hong Kong. Rafa said it was going. He did not elaborate, because Rafa did not elaborate when Jesus asked the question, and Jesus did not mind. Jesus turned to Maribel.

"Maribel."

"Don Jesús."

"Jesús."

"Don Jesús."

Jesus smiled. He had, Jon saw, been waiting for her to say Don Jesús exactly once at this table. It was a small private gift he had given himself.

"Where in Brazil," Jesus said, "did you grow up."

"In the south," Maribel said. "Near the coast."

"Whereabouts."

"Near a small city."

"Which."

She said the name of a small city. It was not the small city she had grown up in. It was a small city in the south, near the coast, that she had passed through once on a bus when she had been eleven years old, and she had decided, on the bus, that it would be her answer when men in countries she did not yet live in asked her where she had grown up.

Jesus nodded. He did not know it was a lie. Rafa, Jon saw, was watching Jesus not know. Rafa said nothing.

Jon said nothing.

"Encarna," Jesus said. "More bread."

#

After the caldo, Encarna brought the fish. The fish was a whole fish, its eye clouded, its skin silver. Jesus carved it. He did a competent job that Jon had watched him do at this table for thirty years and had seen decline, in the last five, by exactly the small increments a son notices and does not say.

"Hijo," Jesus said, as he handed Maribel her plate, "when Jon was nine he refused to eat fish. For a year. He said it was because the fish looked at him."

"Papá."

"He did. I am telling the young lady."

"You have told the young lady."

"The young lady," Jesus said, and lifted his own glass at Maribel, "should know these things about you. The young lady is a person who is going to be around you for one evening or seven decades, and either way she should know that you are a man who used to refuse to eat a fish because it looked at him."

Maribel lifted her glass back.

"Thank you," she said.

"De nada," Jesus said.

Rafa, at the far end, coughed into his napkin.

#

Rafa and Jesus finished the wine between them. Jon drank less than he usually drank at his father's table. Maribel drank a single glass — the one she had been poured — and then placed her hand over the top of her glass when Jesus reached for the bottle a second time, and said, carefully, Not tonight, Don Jesús. I am going to stay.

Jesus paused. He understood. He set the bottle down.

"Good," he said. "Stay."

#

They were on the terrace when Abraham and Pecas came up the drive.

The two of them came up together, out of a car that had been driven by a stranger, with a single bag between them, the way Abraham and Pecas had arrived at nearly every house Jon had invited them to in the last decade. Abraham wore a coat that was wrong for Galicia in April. Pecas wore a coat that was right and had been right, by the look of it, since she was twelve.

They came up the terrace steps.

"Hermano," Abraham said. "I am never flying again."

"You just flew."

"Then I am never flying with that airline again."

"That is reasonable."

Pecas did not speak. She walked past Jon and past Maribel and embraced Encarna, who had come out from the kitchen to meet them, and said something into Encarna's ear in a language Maribel did not know, and Encarna laughed and replied in the same language, and the two of them stood there for the particular length of time Galician women stand together when one of them has come home.

Pecas turned. She looked at Maribel.

"Hello," Pecas said.

"Hello," Maribel said.

Pecas looked at her for a count of three. Then Pecas smiled. It was not a warm smile and it was not a cold smile. It was the smile of a woman who had just seen something and was choosing, provisionally, not to say what.

"Come inside," Pecas said, to Maribel, as if Maribel were the host. "Encarna has bread."

#

Jon and Abraham stayed on the terrace. Abraham lit a cigarette he had not lit in three years, inhaled, looked at it, and put it out on the terrace rail.

"Pecas," Abraham said.

"I know."

"Pecas is tired."

"I know."

"Your girl—"

"She is not my girl."

"Your girl," Abraham said, "is not tired. Your girl is wide awake. Your girl is the only wide-awake person in this house and I have been here eleven minutes."

"I know."

The terrace door opened.

Pecas came out carrying the large ceramic jug that had stood empty on a shelf above the kitchen sideboard since before Jon was born, and that came down from the shelf once a year. The jug was empty. Her coat was still on.

"Abraham."

"Pecas."

"Where is the aguardiente."

Abraham did not answer immediately.

"Where is the aguardiente, Abraham."

"Pecas. The hat—"

"I do not want to hear about the hat. I have heard about the hat for four hours and fourteen minutes, which is a flight from Gatwick and a car from Santiago, and I am not hearing about it again. Where is the aguardiente."

"Pecas—"

"You did not stop."

"I did not stop."

Pecas looked at Jon.

Jon looked at Abraham. Abraham looked at the terrace tile.

"The car is in the outbuilding," Jon said.

"Thirty minutes," Pecas said.

"Thirty minutes."

She put the jug into Abraham's hands and went back into the house.

#

The car was Jesus's old one, the yellow one, the one Jesus had bought the year Jon had passed his test. It was in the outbuilding. They wheeled it out by hand because Abraham enjoyed wheeling things out by hand. They got in. Abraham drove.

The road to the bridge was a country lane that had been, in Jon's lifetime, the site of two serious accidents and four funny ones. Abraham drove it at eighty kilometres an hour. Jon's hand was on the door handle.

"Abraham."

"Hermano."

"Slow down."

"I am going the normal speed."

"You are going the speed you used to go when we were twenty-six."

"I am twenty-six," Abraham said, "when I am at the wheel of this car."

Jon laughed in spite of himself. The headlights went through the first bend of the lane, the one they called the elbow, and the lane opened up into the pine straight, and Abraham did the thing that had made Abraham Abraham since they had been boys, which was to push the pedal a little further and look at Jon sideways to see what Jon did.

Jon did not do anything.

Abraham pushed further.

At the top of the pine straight, where the lane curved back around the south edge of the property, a tractor was sitting with its lights off in the middle of the road.

#

Abraham braked.

The brake was not, Jon could tell from the particular note in the tyres, a brake that had been serviced at the same regular interval as the engine. The car went straight for a long beat before the tyres bit. The tyres bit. The car slewed. Abraham corrected. The back end came around perhaps fifteen degrees. Abraham corrected again. The car passed the tractor on the verge at two metres per second, with the verge wet and the tractor's left wheel at exactly the distance from Abraham's window that Jon had thought, ten seconds earlier, would be the last distance he measured in his life.

They stopped.

Abraham sat with both hands on the wheel and did not speak for a count of ten.

"Jon," Abraham said, finally.

"What."

"I have not lived that long. I have not had that much."

"I know."

"I want to live longer than that."

"Yes."

"I am not," Abraham said, "going to drive us back to the house."

"I will drive us back to the house."

They swapped. Jon drove. The tractor was, in fact, a tractor, with a farmer walking back from a field on the far side of the road who had not heard them and would not know, later, that he had been an inch from ruining two men's lives. Jon drove slowly. Abraham did not light a second cigarette. They crossed the bridge. On the other side of the bridge, half a kilometre up a track, was the farmhouse of the old man who made the aguardiente — the fire-water he distilled in a shed behind the house from the skins and pips the local vineyards had finished with — and had made it for Jon's grandfather, had made it for Jon's father, had been saying for twenty years that the next year would be the year he stopped, and had never stopped. He came to the door in his slippers. He recognised Abraham. He filled the jug without speaking. Abraham paid him in cash from a wallet Pecas had pressed into his hand on the terrace. They thanked him. They got back in the car.

They sat by the bridge for five minutes.

"Jon," Abraham said.

"What."

"The doctor is coming tomorrow."

"I know."

"Nando told me when I landed."

"Okay."

"She asked him if it would be all right. Nando said he thought it would be all right. It is going to be all right."

"Yes."

"Jon."

"What."

"I am happy you came home."

"Yes."

They got back into the car. Jon drove them to the house. He drove slowly the whole way. He thought, on the way, about the doctor he had dated, about Maribel back at the house, about the particular distance a wet verge could turn fifteen degrees of slew into, and about a feeling he had never had in his life before, which was that he did not want to die yet.

That was new.

#

The house was bright when they got back. Encarna had moved the whole household into the stone courtyard at the back, where the queimada pot was set up on a low table in the centre of the flagstones and a circle of low chairs had been arranged around it. Perhaps a dozen people were there by then — Nando had arrived with the doctor, two of Jon's childhood friends had come up from Pontevedra, a cousin of Rafa's had turned up uninvited, as cousins of Rafa's did. They had glasses in their hands. They were talking at the volume friends of thirty years' standing talk in a room they are used to.

Jesus was on the far side of the courtyard. Maribel was sitting on a chair beside Pecas. Pecas was showing Maribel a pebble from her coat pocket.

Jon put the jug of aguardiente on the low table next to the pot.

Pecas looked up.

"Ah," she said. "The important thing."

#

Pecas stood. She had changed, in the last half-hour, out of her London clothes into a grey wool dress that had been her mother's and that she wore in this house. She was, Jon saw again after the three years he had not seen her in Spain, a different person here from the person she was in London. In London she was quiet. Here she was quiet in the way a thing is quiet because it belongs where it is.

She walked to the pot. She poured the sugar, and the lemon peel, and the coffee beans. She did not speak while she did this. She poured the aguardiente over the sugar. She took a long-handled ladle from Encarna. She lit the surface of the aguardiente.

The flame was blue. It was always blue. In the stone courtyard, at ten-forty on a Friday in April, in the dark, the blue of a queimada flame was the only blue colour Jon ever saw in his life. It was as blue as a colour could be. It came out of the pot and made the faces around the pot into faces you would not recognise on a street, and into faces you would have loved, at a glance, if you had not recognised them.

Pecas dipped the ladle. She lifted the ladle. She let a thin blue stream of burning aguardiente pour back into the pot from a height of perhaps forty centimetres, and the flame held in the falling stream, and the courtyard held its breath, and Pecas began.

#

"Mouchos, curuxas, sapos e bruxas," Pecas said, in the voice of a woman who had said the words every one of the last thirty-five Christmas Eves of her life. "Demos, trasgos e diaños, espíritos das neboadas veigas."

Owls, she was saying. Toads and witches. Demons, goblins and devils. Spirits of the misted meadows. Jon knew the words in a version of Galician that was no one's. He had first heard them as a boy, from Pecas's mother, in a different kitchen with a different pot. He had heard them every year since. Pecas's mother was now where the spirits of the misted meadows went. Pecas was doing the work now.

Maribel, Jon saw, was leaning forward. She was watching Pecas's hand. She was watching the blue flame. She had never seen anything like this and she was not pretending otherwise.

"Corvos, píntigas e meigas," Pecas said, "feitizos das menciñeiras."

Crows, the word went. Salamanders and sorceresses. Spells of the healer women.

Pecas's voice had in it now the particular low cadence of a woman who was, for the length of the spell, not a person Jon knew and not a person Abraham was married to. She was a voice the courtyard had been waiting for. Jesus, on the far side of the courtyard, was not looking at the pot. Jesus, Jon saw, was looking at Maribel.

The spell went on. Pecas's voice was the only voice for a long count of minutes. The aguardiente burned blue. The pot gave off the smell of the sugar and the coffee beans and the peel and the alcohol all at once, which was the smell of the first cold October evening in the mountains, and of a childhood courtyard, and of Pecas's dead mother, and nothing in Jon's pocket of languages was equal to it.

Pecas finished.

"Con este fol levantarei as chamas deste lume que asemella ao do inferno," she said, "e fuxirán as bruxas a cabalo das súas escobas, indo bañarse na praia das areas gordas."

The flame climbed, one last time, and died.

There was a silence. There was always a silence. Jon had been waiting for it since he was six.

Pecas filled the cups.

#

They drank in small cups. The queimada was, at that temperature, the hottest thing Jon had drunk in a decade. It burned the roof of his mouth in the way it had burned the roof of his mouth every year for thirty years, and he did not mind. He drank slowly. Maribel drank slowly beside Pecas. She looked at Pecas over the rim of her cup. Pecas looked back.

Jesus raised his cup at Jon across the courtyard. Jon raised his back.

One of Jon's childhood friends began, in the loose way of a man who has drunk enough, a story about a Christmas at this house when Jon had been fourteen. Abraham joined in. The doctor, sitting beside Nando, laughed a short laugh that reminded Jon, for half a second, of a corridor outside a café nine years before, and, hearing it, Jon thought — in a way he had not thought he would — that it was all right.

He turned his head.

Maribel was beside him.

He had not heard her move. She had moved the way Maribel moved, which was the way a careful guest moves who has decided she is no longer a guest.

She put her mouth near his ear.

She said, quietly, Let's go somewhere more interesting.

Jon set his cup down.