Farewell My French Love Read online

  ‘It’s such a fun building. Gaudí must have been a fascinating character,’ says Jane, as she glances at her watch. ‘Oh Nadine, can you believe it’s four o’clock? We should have a rest and sleep off some of this jetlag.’

  We walk back to the hotel and take to our beds.

  ‘Do you know, we only walked about a kilometre from the hotel to find all that wonderful architecture? I simply adore Barcelona,’ says Jane.

  As I lay my weary body down, I recognise something of the old Nadine, the independent woman, who achieved much, but who had left much of our domestic life and certainly all our travel arrangements to Olivier. Now I have taken up that mantle, and it’s a new day—the first day of travel with a woman friend, and not Olivier. And I am not afraid.

  Mandy had sent me a collection of wedding photographs, so I know that her partner Natalia has the bearing of a dancer and the beauty of a model. Yet, three hours later, I’m stunned at how beautiful Natalia is when we find our friends at the rear of Bardot’s Tapas Bar, a long, narrow space with walls lined with wines and spirits. Mandy introduces us to her partner and their three friends gathered around a low table. Tall slim Natalia is a silver blonde young woman, whose chic hairstyle is shaved to a number one on one side and a mop of longer hair flowing to her ears on the other side, held back by a bobby pin. Mandy’s hair is just as striking—black as crow’s feathers and cropped short in pudding basin style. It suits her sharper features.

  Natalia’s long body is accentuated by her crisp, white shirt, tucked into expensive tattered jeans. Jane and I perch ourselves at one end of a coffee table. On the first evening of our holiday I wear black evening pants and a paisley blouse. No tuck-ins for me. Tapas dishes sit in the middle of the table and I figure this will be dinner as we slept for two hours until the alarm went off.

  Gin and tonics arrive. ‘It gets everyone in a happy mood in no time,’ explains Mandy, winking at me.

  The tapas are mouth-watering morsels. Anchovies in Spanish olive oil, spicy patatas bravas—potatoes with a dash of paprika sauce on top, manchego cheese and slices of fleshy Cristal bread.

  We discuss wellness and nutrition before broadening to men. Despite Paul, the token British bloke in our midst, we laugh at a host of stories of stepfathers, and lovers and ex-husbands before conversation alters course into quicksand topics—Australian politics, cancer cures and dying.

  They believe strongly that diet can restore health from any serious disease. I know this is not true, but this is the first day of my holiday and I’m not going to get upset about arguing that Oli had tried many whacky so-called holistic cures and odd fad diets. I watched once when he bought 1500 dollars’ worth of quackery and then six weeks later prayed by his hospital bed when he almost died from pneumonia. He had religiously followed this regimen swallowing countless pills, vitamin supplements and drops. He never took another of those pills, taking only the palliative care doctor’s regime. So I sit and nibble while the other six talk on about saving lives.

  They talk about everything, but the one issue which has me intrigued: Mandy’s sexuality. Because I knew her to be as straight as her black bob hairdo.

  I struggle with the concept of how anyone on the cusp of turning 40 can change their sexual orientation.

  Later, Mandy must have sensed my curiosity because at a moment when Jane is talking avidly with Natalia across the table, engaging their three friends, she says ‘I suppose you wander what triggered my coming out? Nat invited me for coffee and told me she had fallen in love with me, and had felt like that for eighteen months before she got enough courage to tell me.

  ‘She tried not to feel that way because she loved her partner at the time,’ says Mandy. ‘But she eventually decided, “Well, I’m going to tell Mandy how I feel.” I told her she was crazy.’

  Soon they will celebrate ten years together, longer than I was with Olivier.

  For me it was a very short three years of marital contentment until diagnosis a week after our third wedding anniversary. It was a diabolical switch of marital mood. Poor Olivier. Even today my heart aches for what he must have gone through. Much of that first year I operated in a kind of shock. But I’m here now, and I smile at Mandy and say ‘I’m so happy for you, Mandy, because ten years is such a milestone in marriage.’

  No sooner have we left our hotel room this morning than Jane and I exchange words. Oli and I always enjoyed the big smorgasbord breakfasts when we stayed in grand four-star hotels. And Olivia Balmes has set out to impress with an extensive smorgasbord in a long, enticing display. I’m salivating as I eye off the wicker basket of glossy pastries, the platters of fruits, the pots of berry jams, the carafes of juices and the line-up of creams, custards, cereals and yoghurts. Nothing hot or cold has been overlooked.

  Then I notice Jane has not followed me into the dining area. She’s lingering at the entrance swing doors and when our eyes meet, she gestures for me to return.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m not eating there,’ she says, her determined tone stripping away my gleeful anticipation.

  ‘But why not?’ Surprise wells up into dismay. ‘It’s as good a spread as Oli and I once had in a fabulous new hotel in Kraków in Poland. There’s no one there. We’ll have the whole breakfast area to ourselves.’

  ‘I checked up. Breakfast here is fifteen euros. Across the road it’s five euros.’

  ‘That will be nothing more than coffee and toast!’ I’m dismayed at the prospect of missing my gourmet breakfast.

  ‘That’s exactly what I want.’

  ‘It’s our first morning in this new hotel and look there—two waitresses and a chef twiddling their thumbs! If we had breakfast here every day, we wouldn’t spend as much as it cost us to be met at the airport,’ I state in defiance.

  But Jane is adamant and will not even survey the spread. I must either eat alone on my first morning or submit. So, I follow her across the road to a small café and sit at a pavement table to pick at mushrooms on toast. I console myself by thinking how much Oli would approve. He loved mushrooms.

  We find ourselves in Barcelona at a pivotal moment in its history as the capital of Catalonia is in the midst of a people’s push for separate nationhood. Barcelona seems to be divided into two camps—those who want to split from Spain to become the latest new country of the European Union and those like a taxi driver we hailed to take us to Picasso’s museum.

  ‘We are one family of seven brothers,’ he says emphatically, using Spain’s seven regions, of which Barcelona is one, as a metaphor for unity.

  When we board the bus for the city tour this morning, the signs of a peaceful political struggle are everywhere as it rumbles around Barcelona. It is impossible to count the many city buildings draped with huge yellow and red-striped Catalan flags, flapping from filigree iron balconies and plaster-embroidered facades. The iconic La Pedrera also displays its Catalan colours.

  We stop at Ciutat Vella, Catalan for ‘old city’, which is defined by a forbidding ancient Roman wall. We walk down a maze of narrow alleyways into the Gothic Quarter, and Plaça del Rei, or King’s Square, the core of old Barcelona, where centuries of history took place. Columbus would have passed the rectangular Renaissance tower, Torre del Rei Martí, and climbed those wide stone steps of the medieval royal palace to be received by the Spanish king and queen, Ferdinand and Isabella, after his 1492 voyage. The notorious Spanish Inquisition was held behind those huge doors, where many cruel decrees were issued.

  Our crocodile line of tourists trudge down the centuries-old Carrer del Bisbe, to Plaça Sant Jaume, where Barcelona’s city hall is on one side of the square and the Autonomous Government of Catalonia Palace is opposite. The city hall flies both the Spanish national flag and the striped regional flag of Catalonia to reflect what clearly has become an uneasy coexistence. The Catalan state proclamation was made here in 1931, but by 1938, the dictator General Franco suppressed Catalan culture and language for more than forty years until his dea
th in 1975. Yet they haven’t forgotten their uniqueness and I remember Claire, a French friend of Oli’s who lived in Perpignan, who told me, ‘Well, I’m not actually French, I’m Catalonian.’

  I straggle behind the group limping badly from a strained ankle that I sustained in my new hills garden three weeks ago. I try to spot Jane, but she is at the head of the group and it isn’t until we all gather in the Plaça Sant Felip Neri that I catch up.

  ‘My ankle is killing me,’ I tell her. ‘I think the cobbled walkways have aggravated it.’

  I hadn’t complained of my ankle before now because it didn’t ache yesterday during the flight, but now it is throbbing. My physiotherapist strapped it on Friday before leaving Australia, but I realise I forgot to take the painkiller this morning.

  ‘I don’t know what to suggest,’ Jane replies. ‘This is the first stop and we have a few more hours to go; there is bound to be more walking. I will stay close and you lean on me if the pain gets too bad.’

  Our tour guide, an enthusiastic young fellow, tells us that the temple in the square is named after the Italian Jesuit Sant Felip Neri.

  ‘This is a famous little baroque-style church which was built in 1752,’ he says. ‘Look at all the pockmarks on the front of the church,’ he adds with a serious intonation. ‘It was caused by shrapnel from a bombing raid and more than twenty little children who were huddled inside were killed here on the thirtieth of January 1938.’ He adds that Gaudí was on his way to worship in this church when he was run over by a tram in the Gran Via and died soon afterwards.

  Back on the bus tour, we ride on to Park Güell. The whimsical 37-acre fun park surrounded by a rubble-work wall is a wonderland of Antoni Gaudí’s playful mind.

  The pair of colourful gingerbread house lookalikes at the entrance are as enticing to children today as the Hansel and Gretel fairytale on which they are surely based.

  Named after fabulously rich turn-of-the-century Catalan industrialist entrepreneur Eusebi Güell, who commissioned Gaudí to create his vision of a ‘gated garden city’, Güell’s 1900 vision failed miserably. Only three of the planned sixty allotments eventually sold. Gaudí bought the display house and lived here from 1906 for twenty years. La Torre Rosa, his strange pink house, is a museum on his life and artworks.

  We walk up tiled steps straddled by a huge multi-coloured mosaic salamander, which lead us to an astonishing large open-space plaza where the curved ‘spine’ of a massive ceramic-encrusted serpent forms seating alcoves. Here we sit to soak up the joyous din of playful children and observe the many elements of this wondrous place with its gardens, decorated terrace walls, and strange artworks creating a sense of childlike wonder. This is such a happy place filled with people of all ages and I’m swept up into the merry mood.

  On the lower level, we wander around the Sala Hipóstila, multiple fluted columns which dwarf us as they reach up to form a spectacular ceiling line encrusted with exotic mosaic Catalan symbols.

  ‘This looks very much like the architecture of La Pedrero,’ says Jane.

  ‘Well, it’s the same mind,’ I respond.

  At the outer rim of the columns, nudging the lush garden, Spanish musicians are strumming guitars and string instruments, their melodic tunes wafting around us. It is so idyllic and yet, I cannot hold onto the joyful moment. One minute Jane and I are congratulating UNESCO for declaring Park Güell a World Heritage Site and the next minute, as I hear the music, wave upon wave of sobs well up and I begin to cry uncontrollably. Suppressed longing has become an overwhelming sense of loss.

  Through the music filling my ears, I hear Jane cry out in alarm. ‘Nadine, whatever has happened?’

  She has her arms around me and guides my sobbing head into her shoulder. Yet, I remain inconsolable.

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ she cries.

  But this wellspring of despair won’t be stilled. Tears cascade down my face. Her tenderness and soothing words begin to calm me, and my sobs subside, but the tears continue to fall. There is nowhere to sit and I feel on the point of collapse. I have failed to contain my despair; I cannot pretend life will ever be lovely again.

  ‘Darling, we must go back to the bus, so you can pull yourself together,’ she says, worry lines etched on her forehead. ‘I think it’s the music. Let’s move away.’

  ‘I know it’s the music,’ I blubber. ‘But I want to buy their CD.’

  She doesn’t reply.

  ‘Please! I must have it!’

  Because those musicians remind me of a moment on our honeymoon in a little triangular square near Nostradamus’s fountain in St Remy de Provence. A jazz band was playing with a big black American trumpeter, who was a crowdpleaser. Oli was transfixed and when, at the end of his performance, he urged us, in a broad, mellow voice, to buy their records, Oli said. ‘Let’s buy one, chérie.’ He loved jazz. He had lightly patted my bottom, and with a quirky lift of one eyebrow, he slipped the money into my hand.

  Music and memories—a potent emotional cocktail for a new widow still searching for a way out of this valley of sorrow. So why now, after all the tears shed over that pitiless first twelve months?

  The grief counsellor had warned our group that music would likely trigger grief well into the future. And this is where I am now in this amusing space, the most unlikely place to be so overcome.

  Poor Jane. She is the loveliest of friends, but she is not Olivier and I will never holiday again with him.

  It isn’t until our bus reaches the Montjuïc funicular that I regain my composure. The skywards trip is so exhilarating as we soar above the whole city that my spirits lift too. Jane disappears immediately into the castle at the mountain top, but I stop and survey the stunning views of Barcelona. How like Adelaide it is, spread out on the plain, neatly tucked between the mountains and the sea.

  The view is so breathtaking with the Cathedral clearly visible and La Rambla, that exotic boulevard running like a throbbing main artery through the heart of Barcelona. And there, at its head, right by the sea, is the tall Columbus Statue.

  Bus trips are important to get a sense of the city. However, it isn’t until the next day when we take a taxi to Palau Nacional, the Museum of National Art of Catalonia, high up on the Montjuïc hillside, that we really experience this divine city—in an unexpected manner. After the taxi drops us off, we discover the museum is closed. Far below, and at the very end of the wide central Avinguda de la Reina Maria Cristina, we can see the Plaça Monumental Bullring. It’s quite distinct with its egg-shaped cupolas crowning the top of the building’s towers, but it’s a long way away. We give each other a crestfallen look, which says the obvious: ‘I guess we have to walk down the mountainside.’

  There is no question we take the road—the taxi ride was at least five kilometres. But ahead of us is a fearsome steep drop. If it was covered in snow, it would make an ideal Olympic ski run.

  l am gripped with fear. My history of falling down stairs flashes before me. Before us are tiers of dangerous stairs … Hundreds of cement steps. Straight down the hillside.

  Without a word to Jane, who is fearless, I grab hold of the rail. Jane stays by my side and I’m sure she smells my fear. One step at a time. How often have I heard that phrase from well-meaning people advising how to cope with grief? Except this is a physical challenge. Down countless steps running from Plaça de les Cascades, which heralds a cascading waterfall, a glorious sheet of water falling in three tiers down the mountain with about thirty jets of water spraying high into the air. Not surprisingly, the magnificent spectacle with stairs running along each side is called the Magical Fountain. Adding to this unique visual experience, there is the sound of music, which engages our senses on our long walk. Many more stairs, steeper now, take us between high green clipped hedges down to street level.

  ‘That was amazing!’ I exclaim to Jane. ‘How many steps do you reckon?’

  ‘It seemed a thousand, but was probably four or five hundred. We should have counted that first lot.’

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bsp; ‘I can’t remember when I have walked so far,’ I add, breathless but exhilarated. I have never tested myself to such an extent, always heeding a specialist’s warning after an operation on my middle ear to restore my balance. ‘You will need to lead a sedentary life,’ he’d said.

  Jane looks at her watch. ‘That took forty-five minutes and we just had to keep going. It was such an adventure? I’m not even breathless.’

  ‘It makes a mockery of the gentle little twenty-minute stroll around Belair.’ (Although my ankle has begun to throb again.)

  What excites me is that I have exceeded my own limitations. I’ve broken out of my comfort zone to a new understanding that I can cope with exertion. What new possibilities this realisation presents! I can walk long distances! Such a step away from the lethargy of my grieving self, those feelings of inadequacy, still lurking in memory ready to grab me again. Yet, today, my heart is lighter than it has been for a long time: travel experience continues to channel me in the present and, dare I utter it? I can see a glimmer of a better future.

  Jane and I had our first dose of holiday ‘hiccups’ last night. This was how I describe it when Olivier and I had words or an altercation or downright serious disagreement about something. He would sometimes have trouble throwing off his overnight lingering mood, so in the morning, I would say ‘Oh that was only a holiday hiccup, darling,’ and it always worked a treat.

  And this morning, too, it works for Jane and me on our last day in Barcelona. There are so many stories of friendships breaking up over holiday disasters and women, who were friends beforehand, never uttering a word to each other again. Jane would know these tales too. Because at our usual pavement table, we display bonhomie (good-heartedness) to each other and as we stroll down the delightful La Rambla thoroughfare it’s as if there had never been a disgruntled word between us.