‘This
afternoon has gone mad with figs and heated sounds,’ the poet Lorca wrote and
so it has. This blast of Irish heat over the last few days reminds me of my first international
residency, Fundación Valparaiso, in Mojacar in the southeast of Andalucia that I had the great fortune to experience some eighteen months ago. It
provides food and board and a working space to artists every month for ten
months of the year.
I
was given the room named after Lorca, with sleeping area, workspace and balcony
that looked up towards the pueblo with its white, cubed houses stacked high on
the side of the mountain. Sebastian was in the garden, cutting down the almond
trees. Their blackened trunks, destroyed in the previous year’s fire were being reduced to
logs of almond fuel. His chainsaw whined in the hot, Spanish air. Blue fell through
my open window.
There were eight of us, six visual artists, one
composer and me, the only writer. People
travelled from as far apart as the Ural Mountains in Russia to Vancouver Island in Canada and many
countries in between. We met up for pre-dinner tapas and took the first
tentative steps towards fellowship. We were served cockles and mussels and
squid, its ink dark enough to write with. We broke bread together, pan, brot, chleb. A gecko took the last rays of heat from the wall.
I could hear the crickets singing each to each.
Morning came, gilding the tiles of my floor, and from
across the balcony, Iris the Slovak composer had already started the first
notes of her new composition. I headed
out into the world of figs ripening, red peppers drying on the path. On the dusty
walkways around the residency I saw the devastation of the fire of the summer
before that swept down from Holy Mountain and consumed the valley. The pomegranate tree held up charred arms still
bearing its exploded wine apples, their claret jewels turned to ash. The branches
of an almond tree clutched onto their last, sooty harvest. I cracked one
impermeable shell; the nut still firm though held an aftertaste of
conflagration. At a neighbouring house,
a scorched, skeleton cactus tried to make good its escape, by pushing its only green
prickly shoot through the iron bars of the gate. I walked back to my room and wrote.
In studios opening onto the arid landscape I got a
glimpse of how this terrain informed my companions’ paintings that they pinned
to the walls of their studios, dogs,
stones, scorpions. Searching for a
common language, we worked with whatever words we had in common as our minds
became alive to the possibilities, the difficulties of communication. How did I get across what I wanted to say: please, bitte, por favor. Thank
you, danke schön, spasiba. The wind came up at midday, shutters slammed
shut. Ideas blew away; I ran after them
and tried to tie them down in my room that looked out on the mountain with its
rich Moorish past. Hungry for stories, for images, the words came,
eating up the blank screen. They crept out of shadows or flew in on the wing of
an egret to drop temptation at my hands. With the urgency of fire I wrote as I
had never written before. I set alight an idea across that arid landscape of
page, and watched the white swallow it up. ‘This is no small gift,’ I said to
myself, ‘this space that I have been given.’
