Alejo’s country house was a couple of hours’ drive from DC, he said. Around it, he explained, were swamps, and flora and fauna that hadn’t altered greatly in ten thousand years. His Aunty, whose house it was, had given up the struggle against the encroaching jungle many years previously. She lived in Equador. And, as she never visited, Alejo did every now and again to check on things, and to party.
Since the strip-bar night I had hardly seen Lucy. We had made up a couple of days after the ‘diary fight’ – our most serious yet – but things weren’t quite back to normal. There was a kind of determined silence about her. I was definitely being phased out, I reckoned. The one time she really did speak to me was when she told me about her job possibilities. It was as if it was understood that we had broken up already. I encouraged her to think about New York. I would win her back, I thought. I wanted to concentrate on expanding my article into a book. I needed libraries. On the down side, though, I didn’t want a normal job so this meant, I told Lucy, I might have a problem making the rent; We should therefore live together there I said. We’d manage somehow, I was sure. Lucy was like: Jamie, even if you weren’t rich, we’d be living apart. She’d be staying at Sylvie’s, she told me.
Lucy was working on a project in the office and wasn’t back till late each day when, she said, she was too tired to talk about our relationship. I was just trying to take Tom’s advice and give her space. But it was hard because it was basically all I thought about all day while she was at work. I couldn’t wait, though, to have her in the countryside. We could go on walks and work out what to do next.
Only when we got onto I-95 did Alejo tell us the last time he’d gone there was with Celice a couple of weeks before the crash. No one spoke for a while after that.
This was exactly the type of adventure I’d hoped to find at Georgetown. One of the stupid angry thoughts that seized me these days was whether meeting Lucy so soon after I had arrived in DC meant that I’d missed out on opportunities to find Secret History type friends. It was ironic that now our time at Georgetown was almost over, I finally was doing the kind of stuff I’d expected to be doing the whole time.
Straight down the highway we sped. Passed signs warning hitch-hikers might be escaped criminals and one which actually said: Antiques Made Daily. After six hours we still weren’t there. I wondered irritably were we lost?
“I seldom know how long trips take. I prefer to fly. An hour we’ll be there,” reckoned Alejo.
“You said…”
“You’re like a child, Jamie,” Lucy interrupted me although I was sure she was as pissed off as I was about being misled.
After another hour we stopped at a strip mall, ate lardo pancakes and bought groceries. Sylvie, Alejo and I also did a little key. I felt better after that.
“We’re almost there,” Alejo reassured us before we set off again. Soon we’d turned off the interstate. I stared bleakly out of the window. We passed vast fields. Sylvie, in the front seat, opened her window. Warm air blew her hair in her face.
“Some of my mother’s family also had a plantation down here,” Alejo said. The landscape of endless pines reminded me of parts of the west of Ireland too, in a way, though there it was on a much smaller scale of course. Just before turning onto an even smaller road we passed a dismal cluster of businesses in a strip mall: a garage and a gravel store. A young white trash looking guy in jeans with a hunting cap was holding what seemed to be an unloaded shot gun slung over his shoulder and a brown paper grocery bag. Some chickens wandered across the road. We had to slow down. On we drove. Shacks gave way to more woods, with occasional flat fields that smelled of chemicals. Then we descended rapidly for about ten miles before reaching a sign declaring our entry into a UNESCO designated biosphere reserve. The countryside had changed. Now on either side of the road the sparse woods gave way to thick tangles of reeds. And despite the air con in the car, you could feel the humidity rising. After about twenty miles began something I hadn’t seen before in the American countryside; the kind of miles long brick wall that sometimes surrounds European country estates. It seemed to go on forever. Every time I thought it was finished there it was again peeping through the hugging vegetation that rose before and above it.
“It has more bricks in it than any other wall on the Eastern sea-board,” Alejo told us. It surrounded, he added, the house we would be staying at. We must have driven a further ten miles along and around the wall until we reached a pair of double gates topped with razor wire. Alejo pressed a bob and nothing happened. He and I got out and pushed the gates open a bit before their electrical mechanism kicked in.
The first thing you noticed on the drive was the thickness of the foliage on either side. It reminded me of my uncle and aunt’s house except that here the flora really was jungle thick and impenetrable. At times the tangle of branches, leaves and vines on one side of the drive joined with those of the other making a canopy which the roof, windscreen and sides of the car scratched along. It was so dark in there even Alejo took off his shades. After a further few miles, we broke out of this forest and now on either side of the grassy road grew long grass about half car height.
“It’s mostly back to marsh now,” Alejo explained. “Last century, slaves fashioned several thousand hectares of marsh into the finest parkland in the Carolinas. Thousands more acres were reclaimed for agriculture. Nothing’s been grown here for eighty years, though. And no one’s lived permanently in this house for about fifty. My aunt inherited it when she was eighteen, but she’s lived most of her life in Ecuador. And apart from when she was younger and would come spend some of the winter here she never came here much. Won’t sell either. I might inherit it when she dies,” he concluded as we approached the house itself.
It was southern style – eleven windows across, three storeys, with an eight columned balconied portico protruding from the front. It was completely falling apart. Probably once it had been brilliant white. Now only tiny speckles were visible here and there on bricks where the kudzu leaves were absent. The long grass stretched practically to the front door but it wasn’t half as tall as the really long grass that covered now what might have once been an elegant and constantly cut front lawn.
Alejo went off to see if the caretaker was in - he wasn’t - and we adjusted ourselves to the weird environment. It was a few degrees hotter than DC and, if you can believe it, a lot more humid. It was like DC after a thunderstorm, except worse. Alejo said it was always like this, but in winter it had always been such a relief to get here from a freezing DC. We stepped in through the creaking, rotting front door.
“There’s only one old guy now to look after the place. He doesn’t do too much.” Where would you start? I thought. “I always thought,” Alejo continued, “I might buy it, if it’s not willed to me. I really would if I decided not to return to Mexico. It reminds me so much of my family’s land in Chiapas. I love coming here: the jungle, the swamp at the back, the damp, the heat, all of it.”
The atrium was the height of the house and empty, except for plaster here and there on the floors in little, anciently swept heaps. A grand cantilevered double-staircase that looked pretty rickety led all the way to the ceiling. I tried the echo - good. It was terrible dark inside there until Alejo opened some of the doors that led off the hall. Lucy said it felt creepy, and she wasn’t wrong. Strangely, though, it was about ten degrees cooler inside the house than outside, and without any air conditioning.
“I had a party here. Freshman year. Fifty of us came. We flew here though in a chartered jet. That was the weekend I first made Celice,” Alejo reminisced. We didn’t say it, but the three of us knew now for sure that for Alejo this was some sort of pilgrimage. We wandered through the ground-floor rooms. There was hardly any furniture. At the back of the house was a room that seemed to run the entire length of the house. Three of its walls were made of damp stained glass fronted bookcases while the fourth consisted of shut shutters which Alejo began opening almost as soon as we had stepped in. The three of us headed straight away for the shelves of books that were filled with hundreds, maybe even thousands of titles.
“You used to be able to buy them by the weight,” Alejo explained after we’d shouted out a couple odd titles to each other – medical, legal stuff in all sorts of languages. “No one thought it worthwhile removing them with the rest of the contents.”
We continued to peruse the spines in the increasing light as Alejo threw open the shutters; nice bindings but the pages were all mildewed and bug eaten. Early evening light streamed into the empty, dusty room from the windows Alejo’s shutter opening revealed. You could see in places the ceiling-plaster was entirely gone and only the floorboards of the upper floors were visible. Through the unshuttered windows you could also see the long grass quite as high as a mid-summer cornfield. In one place though roughly opposite what looked like window-doors there was a mown gap a few feet wide that opened up into several mown paths that wound away from the house. Alejo opened the door-sized windows and we stepped back outside into the humidity and the noise of frogs, cicadas and birds.
“We must pay attention. The swamp moves closer and closer to the house every year. There should be safe paths cut through the grass all the way down to what was once the lake, though.”
“What’s it now?”
“Swamp. The old island’s still there. We can row over to it tomorrow for a picnic, if you like. But there’re crocodiles and the boat’s not very good.” With that he took out one of those little smoked-glass bottles you buy coke in and suggested we do a few keys.
“I’m going to pass Alejo,” said Lucy. “I wouldn’t mind a little sleepee. Is there actually any furniture?”
“Me too,” added Sylvie.
“We’ll sleep together upstairs. I’ll show you.”
Closing the window-door behind us we stepped back into the gallery and through the hall carefully followed Alejo’s exact footsteps as he ascended the grand staircase up to the third floor. He explained, as we passed it, the second floor was completely unsafe, rotten. Papers were strewn all along it. Old letters. Old documents, he said. Torn, damp. Boring, legal stuff, apparently.
The third floor looked relatively well-kept or at least when we reached it Alejo walked without any hesitation on the floorboards. All the doors were wide open. Nothing was inside the rooms. We padded along looking into them or down unto the atrium until we reached the end. Then Alejo stepped through a narrow door and we followed his ascent up the, even narrower, stairs. When we reached what was probably once the servants’ floor, Alejo opened one of the closed doors to reveal a large low ceilinged room with a vast antique bed covered with a transparent heavy plastic dustsheet, other pieces of furniture all covered too - a bed side table, and an ensuite bathroom with old age-specked appliances.
“There’s only cold, I’m sorry,” Alejo said to Lou as she tried one of the taps. “Welcome to the Hotel California,” he added, a little worryingly. He was now fiddling with the manky mosquito shield on the tiny window.
We took the dustsheet off the bed. It was well bouncy. Alejo then uncovered a chest of drawers and told us to help ourselves to the clothes within.
“Celice and I spent a couple of weeks here last year. She left all these clothes. They’re hers,” he added needlessly. “Let’s leave the girls get ready. I can show you further around Jamie.”
“I might sleep, though, in an hour or two.” ‘Only one bed?’ I thought. I was disappointed. I had envisioned a high ceilinged bedroom in which Lucy and I might have privacy. It didn’t look like there was a chance for any of that. I was in no particular rush. So we left them there to get into Celice’s pyjamas.
Once downstairs Alejo and I did two enormous lines. I’d never felt more awake. A spliff speedily put paid to that. We went back down through the windows into the darkened noisy garden. We walked the whole way around the house with a torch crushing the high grass under foot and squelching every now and again into islands of swamp, as we did so. Alejo showed a practical side I’d not suspected him of possessing. He pointed out here and there aspects of the house that needed an urgent seeing to. Gutters mostly.
“The roof’s good. Just. But the lead flashing needs replacing or the house is finished. Will you help me go up there and check it?”
I looked up to the top of the house. It looked very tall. I made a non-committal noise. Alejo didn’t seem to notice.
He described how one of his family estates in Mexico was like it here; how it was located in a similar environment, albeit further away than this from a swamp. He pointed out a strange looking grey-green shrub to me he called a pain tree, because, he said, should you brush against it invisible patches on the leaves and bark would leave a painful scarlet inflammation on your skin. He also indicated another tree whose trunk stank when you approached.
Alejo led me along one of the paths cut through the long grass, every now and again we’d turn off onto smaller branches until I was totally disoriented. I wondered, shouldn’t he show me all of this in the morning when it was light? But he was sure it’d be fine now. The only things we had to worry about, he said, without any irony apparent, were the attacking snakes. Within fifty metres, as the crow flies, of the house, such was the slope of the former back lawn and the height of the grass, you couldn’t see even the outline of the big house’s roof any longer. Every now and again we’d reach an odoriferous little copse composed only of incense trees, or squelch through a marshy bit of grass. Along the way Alejo, aided by my questions, told me the history of his family.
“We’re one of the only truly American families alive. We’ve been intermarrying with conquistadores’ families for four centuries, so I’m a mixture of Castilian, Galician and Andalusian. There’s even some Breton. We’re aboriginal Celto-Iberians. That’s why you and I Jaime we get along so fine. Impervious and hard-headed, that’s what we Iberian-Celts are. I have cousins in almost every country in the Americas. One of my great grandfathers, the Marques de Tolejdes, inherited over four million hectares of land in Chiapas. Well, by the time he was twenty-five he’d given two-thirds of it away - to his tenants. Some say with that action alone commenced the Mexican revolution. We’re now down to one hundred thousand hectares. It’s fine land, but my father won’t allow us to inherit more that ten thousand between us.”
“That’s terrible,” I put in.
“My father’s very old fashioned. He thinks we should make our way in life. Bizarre, don’t you think? Are you rich? What an absurd question. Of course you are. But how? Will you ever need to work I wonder? I shall have to work. My father ordains it. If I have to work I will go to Wharton. I would like to be president one day. Perhaps. But part of me would like just to remain here with you and Lucy and Sylvie of course. We could live here together forever? That is my dream Jaime. My dream.”
We reached what might once have been a little harbour on the lake. Barely any water was visible through the weeds. I couldn’t help but imagine this landscape transposed to Ireland, unto that land which I knew best up in the Dublin mountains; the estate we’d lived on had had a wild lake too. Until it was part filled in to make way for new houses.
“Not really.”
“Does it matter you didn’t get a degree at Georgetown?”
“Don’t suppose so. No, not really.”
“What’s your next move?”
“Not sure. Lucy wants to leave DC now. We could go and live in a cottage I own near Dublin. But she wants to stay in the Americas. She’s going to Mexico soon, you know?”
“I find Lucy’s plan very bizarre. The jungle’s no place for a woman. I wish you would go to New York.”
“Easier said than done.”
“Say the word and me casa sua casa.”
“That’s kind, Alejo. But I don’t think it’d work.”
“Why ever not? No, you must come to New York. It’s settled.”
“Thanks Alejo. But that would be too much.”
“I insist. I’ll be in Mexico most of July. Then we can all live in my apartment together. Yes, my parents are insisting that I don’t live alone. My mother likes you. She saw you in the video of the crash night. This is the solution we were all seeking. Yes. I will work on Wall Street and we will all live together for the summer. Say you will Jaime? You must.”
As we walked back towards the house I conceded I’d think about it.
“I’m worried about Alejo,” said Sylvie to Lucy when they were both snuggled up in bed under one big white silk sheet together. “Since the crash. He’s weirder than ever.”
“I’m just glad Jamie’s here.”
“But you told me you hate him now? I don’t understand?”
“It doesn’t matter. Work is a Godsend.”
“I think Alejo might go off the rails.”
Soon afterwards they fell both asleep.
As Alejo and I re-entered the house through the library he suddenly suggested we wake the girls.
“Let’s sleep with them,” he added, with sudden energy.
“We have to anyway?”
“There’s nowhere else to go,” he agreed.
We went upstairs and when Sylvie went to the loo Alejo took her place beside Lucy and I lay down on Lucy’s other side. At first she and I were facing each other. I was so on for it. The heat. Our few weeks’ abstinence. This might be how I win her back. Her scent. The impress of her body against mine… When she turned over to face away from me, I moved closer in and we gently pressed each other in the darkness as we fell asleep.
An hour or so later Lucy was half awake and with me behind her she felt Alejo’s breath upon her face. Opening her eyes a little bit she saw a pair of brown eyes staring back. She closed them, and what she’d dreamily expected to happen did happen: first, his lips pressed against part of hers. She didn’t move away. She could hear his and our breath. She felt his tongue press in looking for hers. Her mouth opened a little. A little more. And for a moment he explored it before withdrawing and quietly turning over to face Sylvie. She was left staring at the back of his head, at his neat wiry hair, awake as a God.
We woke up the next morning early and after breakfast Lucy and I went for a walk together down to the lake.
“Are you sure this is the way?”
“Sort of,” I replied.
“This walk is a parody of the way our relationship is going.”
“Come on, Lou. Everything’s cool. It’ll be fine.” We were well lost, but I was pretending I remembered the way from Alejo’s walk the night before.
“You say that but how well are we getting on these days?”
I told her about Alejo’s New York offer. “I can go to the New York Public Library every morning and meet you after work. We could explore Manhattan together.” I did recognise that pain tree, but where was it in relation to the lake?
“We’re not going anywhere,” she said abruptly. “I mean, Jamie, I still love you. A break is just what we need.”
“Why did you insist I came here Lou?” I said pained.
“Protection. You’re my protection against Alejo. Or so I thought,” she added, then mysteriously.
We’d just found the lake. I tried to conceal the hurt her words caused me. It was best just to let it lie. I was going to win her back, whatever she said.
“Do you really want to be Alejo’s guest?” she said. She must have been reading my mind. This was why I loved her. We looked across at the island. It was just trees and bushes. “You don’t even like him. You’ve told me. All that ‘Alejo de Fucking Eurorash’ stuff. You have such a bitter tone towards him.”
“We both used to laugh at that? He’s cool. Little weird. But who isn’t?”
“Tom.”
“What?”
“Isn’t weird.” The mid morning sun was beating down on us and the humidity made us sticky.
I agreed. “Okay, he’s straight along the line. Everyone else, though, is.”
“Cept me.”
We crossed some meadows to a wood above a stream.
“This way?”
“Jamie,” Lucy said suddenly. “Let’s fuck right here right now.”
I flinched. I don’t know why, but she noticed. “Sure,” I said. Talk about taking me by surprise!
“You don’t sound very enthusiastic. Jamie? I thought this would be what you would want.”
“I am. I mean I do.” And I knew then that she saw this as the last chance we had to become lovers again and for us to taste what was fast becoming a forbidden delight. Neither the part of undressing in the heat nor awkwardly arranging ourselves on the bed of dry long grass cushioned by Lucy’s top helped to arouse in me the blind urge I needed to carry it through; Lucy was just passive. I couldn’t do it. Fock.
When we finally got to the house the others were sitting by the windows of the library smiling in the sunshine. Sylvie was sunning herself. Alejo too. Having cooperated in finding our way back using the sun, we too were happy again, though there was something ineffable between us which I could not shift and which was growing. The ruse hadn’t worked. Coming away together hadn’t helped.
After lunch that day we drove to the tourist entrance to the Okefenokee reserve about five miles away. The only way to get away from the humidity was the air conditioning of the bus which took us and a group of tourists through the reserve. We saw what Alejo had meant when he’d told us the house was on the edge of a primeval swamp. We went out in a boat the four of us. I quoted from The Waste Land and we chanted:
Elizabeth and Leicester,
beating oars the stern was formed…
That evening we all went to bed drunk and when Sylvie and Alejo started to kiss beside us. Lucy and I did likewise. I was so hungry for her now. And then for Sylv. One thing led to another and indeed finally we all came together.
The next morning I woke as Lucy was getting out of bed. I wanted her again, but she was no, no, no. The others got up then too. It was a little embarrassing, but no one said anything about it. We decided to head back to DC after a short walk. During the walk I ended up with Sylvie and Alejo and Lou got separated from us.
“Alejo why did you kiss me the other night?” asked Lucy. It was really the first time they’d been alone since then.
“I thought they were right behind us,” he replied innocently, but he added when he saw Lucy’s expression, “I thought you were Sylv. We kissed last night as well Lucy. Remember?”
“I saw the way you looked at me. There was no mistake.” Lucy had stopped walking. They could still hear Sylvie’s and my voices.
Alejo had stopped now too and turned around. “Oh, Lucy. I’ve so wanted to kiss you…” He moved towards her.
“No, Alejo,” she said putting her hand up to stop his progress towards her. “I have a boyfriend, you know?” She moved back a little. I shouted out “guys?” just at that moment.
“He wouldn’t mind,” Alejo said looking straight into her eyes. “I know he wouldn’t. You kissed me back.”
“Yes, but I didn’t mean to…”
I called out again.
“Stay where you are. We’ll come find you,” yelled Alejo.
“Besides I didn’t want to make a fuss. I was half-asleep,” she turned away from him.
“We’ll find them this way,” Alejo suggested, seemingly indicating the opposite direction from where we were. “Sylvie’s fed me snapshots of you, Lucy. For so many months and months. Since last September in fact. The whole year, for sure. And she did not know what inflammable celluloid into my insatiable mind since. I’m in love with you Lucy. Lovely Lucy,” Alejo confessed moving forward again. The grass either side of them was taller than they were.
“Stop it. Why are you so weird? Even if I felt the same, Alejo, I would never cheat on Jamie.”
“It’s not cheating just to kiss-n’-go. Jamie understands that.”
“How would you know?”
“Why, he kissed Celice and I didn’t mind.”
“How can you lie about something like that?”
“Don’t you have an o-o-open relationship?”
Just then they found us standing watching a snake cross the path in front.
Of course, I didn’t know what had just passed between Alejo and Lou then, so I was sure she was suddenly being stand-offish again as a result of something I’d just said.
Back in DC the next day Lucy returned from the office and told me that her secondment at the UN had come through. She would be starting the following Monday. In Manhattan.
I was shocked. I knew the end of our time in DC was imminent. But until a date is fixed nothing really seems that immediate.