Salt Picnic by Patrick Evans

Author:Patrick Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Victoria University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

9

Then, the day she slipped into the Spanish language and never got quite out again. Not exactly the Castellano of the Linguaphone records—sometimes not at all like: but an extraordinary moment for her all the same. She was listening to the women as they sat in vigil over something big that was happening on the stove. A pot, simmering for half the day—barely simmering but enough to fill the kitchen, the downstairs rooms, even parts of the alleyway, with that insistent odour she’d realised by now was the default smell of la casa. It was what she’d become aware of as soon as she first stepped into the house: sweet and not sweet, somewhere on a subtle border between the two. Vegetal, always vegetal, and above all dark, almost Gothic: the word that’d been most in her mind whenever she tried to pin down the feel of this place, its dominant mood. That something that needed a name.

Then: ‘Don’t touch it,’ Magdalena told her sister, who was pushing her chair back to get up. ‘Nose, not head.’

Don’t think about it, smell it—

Concepción began to fire back with something Iola couldn’t understand—she could recognise the language by now but she could get nowhere with it just yet. She’d understood the Spanish, though, that was the amazing thing that just happened: she’d understood all of what Magdalena had just said, all of it!

And now the woman was at it again, and Iola could understand that too, nearly all of it, a lot of it, a lot of what she was saying was starting to make sense. ‘How many times have we done this before! And now you want to stick your head in the pot? You’re going to stir it with your big nose, is that what you want?’ And then she said something about Antonio as well, and once it was about him Iola couldn’t keep up with it at all except for a couple of words, excavación and arena, and there was something else she was less sure about. It was as if talk of the night man had taken the language with it to somewhere strange—but now it was back again, now Magdalena was talking about something else, about tomorrow’s trip to the pines: ‘We won’t need the shovel this time, then,’ and Concepción said something back at her that brought a shriek of laughter out of both, and then Magdalena said, ‘Yes, but there’s still work for us to do, both of us, you know that—’

Carefully but (she was sure) perfectly, Iola asked, ‘Is there work for me, too?’

The sisters turned to her and stared, without expression. Concepción said something to Magdalena that Iola couldn’t understand. The other language, of course. It didn’t even sound like Ibicenco anymore: but then, of course, she knew not a word of it to know that. They’d taken a step back from her. Two steps. And there were always the further versions Daniel had told her about all those months ago now. Always moving away from her, moving away and away.

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