Angelica Lost and Found

Chapter 19. A Little Way on the Tin Globe

I phoned my partner Olivia to tell her that I’d not be at the gallery that day, and I went to the overlook at Fort Point to sit and think about things. The sky was blue, the sunlight danced on the water, ships and boats came and went. Round and round in my mind went this time, that time, all time. In illo tempore. My childhood. Telling the bees. My grandmother told me about that. Her husband had joined the International Brigade in 1936 and went off to the Spanish Civil War. Sometimes when she and I were alone and she’d had too much to drink she’d talk about that time.

‘He said it was something he had to do,’ she said. ‘I told him there were things he had to do right here, like fix the hole in the roof of the barn. He did it and then he went off to fight fascism.’

She was a good-looking old woman in a plough-that-broke-the-plains kind of way but her face became almost girlish as she called up the past.

‘Those days seem a long way back,’ she said. ‘The images were brighter, the smells and flavours stronger than now: the taste of honey in the comb, the smell of it and the feel of the wax on my tongue, the stickiness all around my mouth and on my fingers. Sweet, like the golden time that passes; the pink apple blossoms drifting down on the hives in the summer orchard.

‘Before he left he told me to tell the bees. “Be very careful to say that I’ve just gone away for a while but I’m not dead. If they think I’m dead they’ll leave our hives and swarm somewhere else.”

‘ “You’re very superstitious all of a sudden,” I said to him.

‘ “Traditions matter,” he said, “and bees are very serious people.”

‘We had a tin globe on the desk where we did the accounts,’ said my grandmother. ‘On it Spain was only a little way from North America but on the real globe it was a world away from Bakersfield where we lived then. I tried to imagine that war but I couldn’t, it was a whole different reality.’ Her face looked so young!

‘I told the bees and they stayed with us until the summer of 1938. I saw them swarm away out of the orchard and I cried a lot but we heard nothing until a year later when one of his comrades sent us a letter saying that my man had died at a place called Teruel. I couldn’t find it on the globe but it was in the big atlas.

‘There was a plaster bust of Lenin on top of the grandfather clock in the front room. I was dusting it when we got the letter and I knocked it on to the floor where it smashed into smithereens. “Well,” I said, “I guess it was your time to go.” ’

Why does her story come to me so vividly now? Back when she told it I had never heard of a hippogriff. What’s the connection? Then it rises like a golden carp glimmering. The bees. They existed in their time and space in our orchard but they partook of that other time and space where men with bolt-action rifles were saving the world. Telling the bees was folklore but it worked with real bees.

Two kinds of reality — it happens.