Chapter 8 Carn-evil
“Barcelona was founded by Hamilcar Barca, and has the more recent architecture of the Barcelonian architect Antoni Gaudi,” said Ida. “Do they do bull-fighting here? I should like to avoid it.”
“Not the right season,” said Alexander. “I checked; it’s March to October.”
“Good,” said Ida.
“We shall, however, be in time for Carnival, which they celebrate here mostly on Thursday, not ‘Fat Tuesday’ or ‘Mardi gras’ as many others do. There are costumes, and parades, and at a safe distance it might be amusing.”
“I prefer the thought of the architecture,” said Ida. “If there are any parts to call Hamilcar Barca to mind, it will be a fine thing to be followed then by our visit to the ruins of Carthage.”
“Who is this Hamilcar Barca?” asked Vera.
“He was the father of Hannibal,” said Ida.
“And who is Hannibal?” asked Vera, confused.
“Hannibal was the Carthaginian general who almost overthrew the Roman Empire, by crossing the Alps using elephants,” said Ida. “This is what the PunicWars is all about, and the Romans were so embarrassed that they felt that Carthage must be destroyed. ‘Delenda est Cartago,’ as Cato said. So the Romans counter-attacked, razed Carthage to the ground, and ploughed it with salt.”
“Well, where then is Carthage?” asked Vera.
“North Africa, near Tunis. We’ll be stopping there,” said Ida. “There’s been an archaeological investigation there for a couple of years, digging up the Tophet.”
“The what?”
“It’s a place either of child sacrifice or infant cremation. Tradition says that children were sacrificed to Baal and Tanit, but, on the other hand, this is what the Romans said, history is written by the winner, and they wanted justification for essentially wiping the Carthaginians out. So they may, or may not, have sacrificed children.”
“Oh! How horrid!” cried Vera. “Ida, I feel so ignorant when I listen to you.”
“But I am sure you know things I do not,” said Ida.
“Don’t worry about it, Vera, dear,” said Alma. “I feel ignorant next to Ida, too, but she’s kind enough to explain without sounding impatient.”
“I am aware that my interests are a little esoteric for most people,” said Ida. “I’m happy to share my knowledge, but I try not to boring about it. I doubt there is much of the Carthaginian architecture left, but we can giggle at Gaudi’s love of dragons. I am looking forward to painting them.”
The women enjoyed sightseeing, and Alexander endured it, enjoying his beloved’s pleasure in the unique architecture of the whimsical Antoni Gaudi. The old man dedicated his days to the cathedral which was his masterwork, but his work could be seen all over the city, even if much of it was out of sight behind the magnificent ironwork dragon gate to the Güell estate. The ship was to be docked two days for sightseeing and for the carnival. Alexander had no intention of dressing up, but indulged his ladies with the purchase of fanciful masks, as a memento.
He was wearing a dragon mask himself for the carnival, aware that in Ida’s sketch book, the Güell dragon gate had uncoiled from the gate to sniff him, and was captioned, ‘Sorprendente! He really is an English police man. I will not eat him.’ Apparently ‘sorprendente’ meant ‘how surprising!’ for Ida had asked. Alexander cherished his lady’s whimsical sense of humour, so much like that of her brother, Basil. He felt a moment’s pity for David, their brother, who found humour difficult to understand.
Ida was busy sketching the elephant in the parade, based on one of the Renault FT tanks given to Spain after the war, the trunk an extension of the 37mm main gun of the Girod turret. There was a ‘mahout’ sitting on top of the turret, pulling strings, which likely went to bells to inform the driver whether to steer left or right, as the driver was entirely blind with the costume over him.
What sixth sense made him turn to look at the crowd between him and the elephant, Alexander could not say; but he was in time to see a woman put down a child, a toddler, and point across the road where a man in a mask was juggling coloured balls.
The child set off at the toddling run on sturdy little legs right into the path of six and a half tons of inexorable metal, which had not got a chance to stop in time, even if the mahout could see the child right under his vehicle’s tracks from his high seat. As a one-time tankie, Alexander knew how poor was the vision of anyone in a tank, and he was setting his wheelchair in motion, flicking off the brake and pushing the wheels with almost hysterical strength. He came up behind the child, seizing her and heaving her up onto his lap seconds before the track came down upon her curly head, the side plates of the track catching the side of the wheel and turning him round, throwing him off to the side.
He was vaguely aware of screams and shouts from those watching, who had become aware of the child just as he caught up with her and jerked her out of danger.
Ida’s scream, ‘Alex!’ was audible to him as the squeaking, growling tank stalled and came to a halt as the mahout became aware of something at the skirts of the machine and called on the driver to halt.
Alexander was looking for the man with the coloured balls, who gazed on him, briefly, with a look of such malevolence through the eyeholes of his mask that Alexander felt quite chilled. And then the man was merging in with the crowds of people in masks and costumes, disappearing.
It had been deliberate then.
The child was prattling about what she had seen and was wriggling. Alexander sat her firmly on his lap.
“Policia! Socorro!” shouted Alexander. It more or less came to the limit of his Spanish; at least ‘socorro’ was easy enough to remember to cry for help, being close to ‘au secours!’ in French.
Police were to hand.
“I need an English speaker,” said Alexander. “This child is in danger.”
“Señor, the tank has stopped, you got her in time, she is safe now,” said the police officer.
“You did not see what I saw,” said Alexander. “I am an English policeman; and I swear someone, or two someones, tried to murder this child by deliberately putting her in harm’s way.”
“That’s a serious accusation,” said the policeman.
“And it’s true because I only really became aware of what I was sketching when I saw Alex was safe,” said Ida, who had run across the road to Alexander, showing her sketchbook. “And my friend, Alma, may have taken a photograph, if you will have it processed, it may show the same thing.”
“I see no murder attempt,” said the policeman, bewildered.
“Don’t you see that woman, pointing across the front of the tank and urging the child to go?” said Ida.
“That, too, was what I saw, and a harlequin juggling coloured balls the other side,” said Alexander. “The child was nearly killed. If my wheels weren’t so well oiled, we’d both have been very well ironed.”
“Catalina! Oh Catalina, querida!” wailed a female voice. She lapsed into a torrent of Spanish and went to snatch the child. Alexander passed the little girl up to Ida.
“No, you don’t, you murderous bint,” he said.
They ended up going to the police station, and the child’s nursemaid, as the woman turned out to be, rather sulkily gave her name and that of the child, who, it appeared, was an heiress.
And who had an uncle who had inherited nothing when the brakes had failed on a mountain road with the child’s parents were in the car, the child having been, fortuitously, left with her mother’s parents for the day.
Alexander was glad to hear that the grandparents were to have custody of small Catalina, and the car which crashed would be gone over by an expert.
The nurse broke down on being arrested, on the clear evidence from Alma’s photograph where it was plain she was urging the child forward, not trying to stop her. She implicated Catalina’s uncle, who had promised to marry her if the little girl was out of the way.
She was subject to derisory laughter from the police, who knew fine well that a man from an old family would never marry a servant.
It rather spoiled the rest of the carnival for Alexander.
“We can go back to the procession if you want,” he said to Ida.
“No, Alma and I want to go back to the boat,” said Ida. “Oh, Alex! I was terrified that you would miscalculate, but I knew I could not get there fast enough to speed you up.”
“And you would have been killed, and, darling, I don’twant to think about that, I’ve seen too much....” Alexander’s teeth chattered, and he leaned sideways to vomit, violently.
Ida saw to water to rinse his mouth, and took him back to the ‘Dido’ as their cruise ship was named, after Dido of Carthage.
She made him take a couple of aspirin, and sat with him until Campbell returned with Gladys, Ida’s maid and Alexander’s man being in the situation of walking out together.
“He’ll have nightmares,” Ida told Campbell, and quickly explained what had happened.
Campbell nodded. He had not been with Alexander though the war, having been Basil Henderson’s bâtman, but he knew ‘the major,’ as he thought of Alexander, very well, and knew that the war had left him dealing with trauma.
Alexander did have nightmares, but was glad of Campbell’s cheery voice, telling him it was all just bad dreams.
“An’ jus’ like you, major, to be a ruddy ’ero, snatchin’ nippers from the jaws of deff!” said Campbell.
“I couldn’t leave her, but I’m seeing what might have happened...” said Alexander.
“Of course you are, Major, but as you’re awake, now, you needs a nice cup of tea, an’ I’ll tell you about some joker in a mask ’oo tried to put ’is arm rahnd my Gladdie.”
“That would not end well,” said Alexander.
“Nah, not nowise,” said Campbell. “Queer sort of costume, black dress and cloak and a bird mask wiv a long beak. So, Gladdie stomps on ’is feet, knees ’im in the wherewithal, and bends ’is ruddy beak. Cuh, he did give us a torrent of foreign. An’ Gladdie says, ‘the same to you wiv bells on,’ and I tol’ ‘im to sling ‘is ruddy ’ook, or take a knuckle sangwidge, which ’e don’t seem to comprenee-vous anywise, so I tells him in French too, an’ Germing, an’ then ‘e gets the message an’ vamooses toot-sweet.”
“I wager,” said Alexander, well aware that Campbell’s French actually sounded fairly educated. “I didn’t know you spoke German.”
“I don’t, well, only barrack-room phrases,” said Campbell. “I said, ‘’Uren see, kamerad, sick verpissen,’ which means ‘listen, you, piss off.’”
Alexander suspected that Campbell would get his meaning across to any German speaker, but smothered his amusement over how this had gone down with a Spaniard trying to use the Plague Doctor disguise to intimidate, and finding it unsuccessful to a pair of English people for whom the traditions of the carnival were somewhat different to those in Catholic countries. In England, carnival was more about summer holiday celebrations with floats got up by children’s organisations for the most part, or local trades. They usually culminated in a regatta on the local water course, the word’s origin, ‘carne vale’ farewell to meat, for the Lenten season, long forgotten in aggressively secular England, for whom religion was kept for Sunday mornings, and morning prayers in school. And where the religious fervour of the Sunday School attendees was in order to have sufficient merits to attend the annual picnic, as well as the rivalry over any Sunday School float got up for a procession. The lustre had gone off such pageantry for him when, dressed as Joseph, taking Mary and the child to flee into Egypt, having been whacked over the head by ‘Mary’s’ doll, and berated in the tones of Essex in some of the worst language he had ever heard for not turning over half his lunch box to her, ‘like wot a man is supposeter.’
The youthful madonna, who was a beauty, had grown up to marry up, and her unfortunate husband was in a sanatorium.
Alexander drank his tea and went back to sleep in a better frame of mind, rocked on the waves with the gentle thud of the engine as they got under way once more. His last thought before he drifted off to sleep was of Kipling’s short story ‘How the ship found herself’ and the rivets chanting, ‘rigidity, rigidity, absolute unvarying rigidity, rigidity.’
