‘It’s up there.’
‘What? Are you sure?’ I tried to control my excitement for fear of giving anything away.
The old man nodded, his interest fading. ‘Yes. At the end of that valley. It’s a long way.’
Within moments I had set off again, restraining myself with difficulty from over-taxing the engine. The few vague words of this old man convinced me that I was on the right track and about to achieve the scoop I had yearned for throughout my professional career. However casually he had spoken he had meant what he said.
I pressed on up the narrow road, forcing the car in and out of the potholes and rain-gullies. At each turn of the road I half-expected to see the tailplane of the aircraft poised on a distant crag, and the hundreds of bodies scattered down the mountain slopes like a fallen army. I started to run over in my mind the opening paragraphs of my dispatch, telephoned to my startled editor while my rivals were fifty miles away staring into the empty sea. It was vital to achieve the right marriage of sensation and compassion, that irresistible combination of ruthless realism and melancholy invocation. I would describe the first ominous discovery of a single aircraft seat on a hillside, a poignant trail of ruptured suitcases, a child’s fluffy toy and then – a valley floor covered with corpses.
For an hour I pressed on up the road, now and then having to stop and kick away the boulders that blocked my path. This remote infertile region was almost deserted. At intervals an isolated hovel clung to a hillside, a section of telegraph wire followed me overhead for half a mile before ending abruptly, as if the telephone company years beforehand had realised that there was no one here to make or receive a call.
Once again, I began to have second thoughts. Had the old villager been playing me along? Surely if he had seen the aircraft come down he would have been more concerned?
The coastal plain and the sea were now miles behind me, visible only for brief moments as I followed the broken road up the valley. Looking back at the sunlit coast through the rear mirror, I carelessly rolled the car over some heavy rubble. After the collision underneath I could tell from the different note of the exhaust that I had damaged the exhaust.
Cursing myself for having embarked on this lunatic chase, I knew that I was about to strand myself up here in the mountains. Already the early afternoon light was beginning to fade. Fortunately I had ample fuel in the car, but on this narrow road it was impossible to turn the vehicle around.
Forced to go on, I approached a second village, a clutch of hovels built a century earlier around a now deconsecrated chapel. The only level place in which to turn a car was temporarily blocked by two peasants loading firewood onto a cart. As I waited for them to move away I realised how much poorer they were even than the people in the village below them. Their clothes were made partly from leather and partly from animal furs, and they carried shot-guns over their shoulders – weapons, I could tell from the way they looked at me, which they might not hesitate to use if I remained here after dark.
They watched me as I carefully reversed the car, their eyes roving across this expensive sports saloon, the camera equipment on the seat beside me, and even my clothes, all of which must have seemed unbelievably exotic.
To explain my presence, and give myself some kind of official status that would deter them from emptying their shot-guns into my back as I drove off, I said:
‘I’ve been ordered to look for the aircraft – it came down somewhere near here.’
I moved the gears, about to move off, when one of the men nodded in reply. He put one hand on my windshield, and with the other pointed to a narrow valley lying between twin mountain peaks a thousand feet above us.
As I drove up the mountain road, all my doubts had gone. This time, once and for all, I would prove my worth to a sceptical editor. Two separate witnesses had confirmed the presence of the crashed aircraft. Careful not to damage the car on this primitive track, I pressed on towards the valley high above me.
For the next two hours I moved steadily upwards, ever higher into these bleak mountains. By now all sight of the coastal plain and the sea had gone. Once I caught a brief glimpse of the first village I had passed, far below me like a small stain on a carpet. With luck, the road continued to carry me towards my goal. No more than an earth and stone track, it was barely wide enough to hold the car’s wheels as I steered around the endless hairpin bends.
Twice more I stopped to question the few mountain people who watched me from the doors of their earth-floored hovels. However guardedly, they confirmed that the crashed aircraft lay above.
At four o’clock that afternoon, I finally reached the remote valley lying between two mountain peaks, and approached the last of the villages on this long trail. Here the road came to an end in a stony square surrounded by a cluster of dwellings. They looked as if they had been built two hundred years earlier and had spent the intervening time trying to sink back into the mountain.
Most of the village was unpopulated, but to my surprise a few people came out of their houses to look at me, gazing with awe at the dusty car. Immediately I was struck by the extremity of their poverty. These people had nothing. They were destitute, not merely of worldly goods, but of religion, hope, and any knowledge of the rest of mankind. As I stepped from my car and lit a cigarette, waiting as they gathered around me at a respectful distance, it struck me as cruelly ironic that the huge airliner, the culmination of almost a century of aviation technology, should have come to its end here among these primitive mountain-dwellers.
Looking at their unintelligent and passive faces, I felt I was surrounded by a rare group of subnormals, a village of mental defectives amiable enough to be left on their own, high in this remote valley. Perhaps there was some mineral in the soil that damaged their nervous systems and kept them at this simple animal level.
‘The aircraft – have you seen the airliner?’ I called out. Some ten of the men and women were standing around me, mesmerised by the car, by my cigarette lighter and gold-rimmed glasses, even by my plump flesh.
‘Aircraft –? Here …’ Simplifying my speech, I pointed to the rocky slopes and ravines above the village, but none of them seemed to understand me. Perhaps they were mute, or deaf. They were guileless enough, but it occurred to me that they might be concealing their knowledge of the crash. What riches they would reap from those thousand corpses, enough treasure to transform their lives for a century. I would have expected this small square to be piled high with aircraft seats, suitcases, bodies stacked like firewood.
‘Aircraft …’ Their leader, a small man with a sallow face no larger than my fist, repeated the word uncertainly. I realised immediately that none of them would know what I was talking about. Their dialect would be some remote sub-tongue, on the borders of intelligent speech.
Searching about for a way of reaching them, I noticed my airline bag packed with camera equipment. The identification tag carried a coloured picture of the huge airliner. Tearing it off the bag, I showed the picture around the group.
Immediately they were nodding away. They muttered to each other, all pointing to a narrow ravine that formed a brief extension of the valley on the other side of the village. A cart track ran towards it, then faded into the stony soil.
‘The airliner? It’s up there? Good!’ Delighted with them, I took out my wallet and showed them the large stack of bank-notes, my generous expenses for the film festival. Waving the notes encouragingly, I turned to the head-man. ‘You lead the way. We’ll go there now. Many bodies, eh? Cadavers, everywhere?’
They were nodding together, eager eyes staring at the fan of bank-notes.
We set off in the car through the village, following the cart track along the hillside. Half a mile from the village we had to stop when the slope became too steep. The head-man pointed to the mouth of the ravine, and we climbed from the car and set off on foot. Still wearing my festival clothes, I found the going difficult. The floor of the gorge was covered with sharp stones that cut at my shoes. I fell be
hind my guide, who was scuttling over the stones like a goat.
It surprised me that there were still no signs of the giant airliner, of any debris or the hundreds of bodies. Looking around me, I expected the mountain to be drenched in corpses.
We had reached the end of the gorge. The final three hundred feet of the mountain rose into the air towards the peak, separated from its twin by the valley and the village below. The head-man had stopped, and was pointing to the rocky wall. On his small face was a look of blunted pride.
‘Where?’ Catching my breath, I took the shroud off my camera lens. ‘There’s nothing here.’
Then I saw where he had guided me, and what the villagers all the way down to the coastal plain had described. Lying against the wall of the ravine were the remains of a three-engined military aircraft, its crushed nose and cockpit buried in the rocks. The fabric had long been stripped away by the wind, and the aircraft was little more than a collection of rusting spars and fuselage members. Obviously it had been here for more than thirty years, presiding like a tattered deity over this barren mountain. Somehow the fact of its presence had passed down the mountain from one village to the next.
The head-man pointed to the aircraft skeleton. He smiled at me, but his eyes were fixed on my chest, on the wallet in my breast pocket. Already his hand was slightly outstretched. For all his small size, he looked as dangerous as a wild dog.
I took out my wallet and handed him a single bank-note, worth more than he could earn in a month. Perhaps because the denomination was meaningless to him, he pointed aggressively at the other notes.
I fended him off. ‘Look – I’m not interested in this aircraft. It’s the wrong one, you fool … !’ When he stared uncomprehendingly at me I took the airline tag from my pocket and showed him the picture of the huge passenger jet. ‘This one! Very large. Hundreds of bodies.’ Losing my temper, and giving way completely to my outrage and disappointment, I screamed at him: ‘It’s the wrong one! Can’t you understand? There should be bodies everywhere, hundreds of cadavers … !’
He left me where I was, ranting away at the stony walls of this deserted ravine high in the mountains, and at the skeleton of this wind-blown reconnaissance plane.
Ten minutes later, when I returned to my car, I discovered that the slow puncture I had suspected earlier that afternoon had flattened one of the front tyres. Exhausted now, my shoes pierced by the rocks, my clothes filthy, I slumped behind the steering wheel, realising the futility of this absurd expedition. I would be lucky to make it back to the coast by night-fall. By then every other journalist would have reported the first sighting of the crashed airliner in the Pacific. My editor would be waiting with growing impatience for me to file my story in time for the evening newscasts. Instead, I was high in these barren mountains with a damaged car, my life possibly threatened by these idiot peasants.
After resting, I pulled myself together. It took me half an hour to change the wheel. As I started the engine and began the long drive back to the coastal plain the light had begun to fade even here at the peak.
The village was three hundred yards below me when I could see the first of the hovels on a bend in the track. One of the villagers was standing beside a low wall, with what seemed to be a weapon in one hand. Immediately I slowed down, knowing that if they decided to attack me I had little hope of escape. I remembered the wallet in my pocket, and took it out, spreading the bank-notes on the seat. Perhaps I could buy my way through them.
As I approached, the man stepped forward into the road. The weapon in his hand was a crude spade. A small man, like all the others, his posture was in no way threatening. Rather, he seemed to be asking me for something, almost begging.
There was a bundle of old clothing on the verge beside the wall. Did he want me to buy it? As I slowed down, about to hand one of the bank-notes to him, I realised that it was an old woman, like a monkey wrapped in a shawl, staring sightlessly at me. Then I saw that her skull-like face was indeed a skull, and that the earth-stained rags were her shroud.
‘Cadaver …’ The man spoke nervously, fingering his spade in the dim light. I handed him the money and drove on, joining the road leading to the village.
Another younger man stood by the verge fifty yards ahead, also with a spade. The body of a small child, freshly disinterred, sat against the lid of its open coffin.
‘Cadaver –’
All the way through the village people stood in the doorways, some alone, those who had no one to disinter for me, others with their spades. Freshly jerked from their graves, the corpses sat in the dim light in front of the hovels, propped against the stone walls like neglected relations, put out to at last earn their keep.
As I drove past, handing out the last of my money, I could hear the villagers murmuring, their voices following me down the mountainside.
1975
LOW-FLYING AIRCRAFT
‘The man’s playing some sort of deranged game with himself.’
From their balcony on the tenth floor of the empty hotel, Forrester and his wife watched the light aircraft taking off from the runway at Ampuriabrava, half a mile down the beach. A converted crop-sprayer with a silver fuselage and open cockpits, the biplane was lining up at the end of the concrete airstrip. Its engine blared across the deserted resort like a demented fan.
‘One of these days he’s not going to make it – I’m certain that’s what he’s waiting for …’ Without thinking, Forrester climbed from his deck-chair and pushed past the drinks trolley to the balcony rail. The aircraft was now moving rapidly along the runway, tail-wheel still touching the tarmac marker line. Little more than two hundred feet of concrete lay in front of it. The runway had been built thirty years earlier for the well-to-do Swiss and Germans bringing their private aircraft to this vacation complex on the Costa Brava. By now, in the absence of any maintenance, the concrete pier jutting into the sea had been cut to a third of its original length by the strong offshore currents.
However, the pilot seemed unconcerned, his bony forehead exposed above his goggles, long hair tied in a brigand’s knot. Forrester waited, hands gripping the rail in a confusion of emotions – he wanted to see this reclusive and stand-offish doctor plunge on to the rocks, but at the same time his complicated rivalry with Gould made him shout out a warning.
At the last moment, with a bare twenty feet of runway left, Gould sat back sharply in his seat, almost pulling the aircraft into the air. It rose steeply over the broken concrete causeway, banked and made a low circuit of the sea before setting off inland.
Forrester looked up as it crossed their heads. Sometimes he thought that Gould was deliberately trying to provoke him – or Judith, more likely. There was some kind of unstated bond that linked them.
‘Did you watch the take-off?’ he asked. ‘There won’t be many more of those.’
Judith lay back in her sun-seat, staring vaguely at the now silent airstrip. At one time Forrester had played up the element of danger in these take-offs, hoping to distract her during the last tedious months of the pregnancy. But the pantomime was no longer necessary, even today, when they were waiting for the practicante to bring the results of the amniotic scan from Figueras. After the next summer storm had done its worst to the crumbling runway, Gould was certain to crash. Curiously, he could have avoided all this by clearing a section of any one of a hundred abandoned roads.
‘It’s almost too quiet now,’ Judith said. ‘Have you seen the practicante? He was supposed to come this morning.’
‘He’ll be here – the clinic is only open one day a week.’ Forrester took his wife’s small foot and held it between his hands, openly admiring her pale legs without any guile or calculation. ‘Don’t worry, this time it’s going to be good news.’
‘I know. It’s strange, but I’m absolutely certain of it too. I’ve never had any doubts, all these months.’
Forrester listened to the drone of the light aircraft as it disappeared above the hills behind the resort. In the street
below him the sand blown up from the beach formed a series of encroaching dunes that had buried many of the cars to their windows. Fittingly, the few tyre-tracks that led to the hotel entrance all belonged to the practicante’s Honda. The clacking engine of this serious-faced male nurse sounded its melancholy tocsin across the town. He had tended Judith since their arrival two months earlier, with elaborate care but a total lack of emotional tone, as if he were certain already of the pregnancy’s ultimate outcome.
None the less, Forrester found himself still clinging to hope. Once he had feared these fruitless pregnancies, the enforced trips from Geneva, and the endless circuit of empty Mediterranean resorts as they waited for yet another seriously deformed foetus to make its appearance. But he had looked forward to this last pregnancy, seeing it almost as a challenge, a game played against enormous odds for the greatest possible prize. When Judith had first told him, six months earlier, that she had conceived again he had immediately made arrangements for their drive to Spain. Judith conceived so easily – the paradox was bitter, this vigorous and unquenched sexuality, this enormous fertility, even if of a questionable kind, at full flood in an almost depopulated world.
‘Richard – come on. You look dead. Let’s drink a toast to me.’ Judith pulled the trolley over to her chair. She sat up, animating herself like a toy. Seeing their reflections in the bedroom mirror, Forrester thought of their resemblance to a pair of latter-day Scott Fitzgeralds, two handsome and glamorous bodies harbouring their guilty secret.
‘Do you realize that we’ll know the results of the scan by this evening? Richard, we’ll have to celebrate! Perhaps we should have gone to Benidorm.’
‘It’s a huge place,’ Forrester pointed out. ‘There might be fifteen or twenty people there for the summer.’
‘That’s what I mean. We ought to meet other people, share the good news with them.’
‘Well …’ They had come to this quiet resort at the northern end of the Costa Brava specifically to get away from everyone – in fact, Forrester had resented finding Gould here, this hippified doctor who lived in one of the abandoned hotels on the playa and unexpectedly turned up in his aircraft after a weekend’s absence.