The innkeeper told me about a compatriot of mine, an inglés of some sort; they believed him to be a Canadian who had been in the town for some time with a broken down motorcycle and no money. He undoubtedly would eventually receive money and he had sent for the part that he needed for his motorcycle to Madrid but it had not come. Everyone liked him in the town and they wished that he were there so I might meet a compatriot who might even be a fellow townsman. He had gone off somewhere painting but they said someone could go off and find him and bring him in. The interesting thing the innkeeper said was that this compatriot of mine spoke absolutely no Spanish at all except one word, joder. He was known as Mr. Joder and if I wished to leave any message for him I could leave it with the innkeeper. I wondered what message I should leave for this compatriot with such a decisive name and finally decided to leave a fifty peseta folded in a certain way that old travelers in Spain may be familiar with. Everyone was delighted at that and they all promised that Mr. Joder would surely spend the ten duros that night without leaving the bar but that he and his wife would be sure to get him to eat something.
I asked them how Mr. Joder painted and the transport man said, “Hombre he is neither Velázquez nor Goya nor Martínez de León. That I promise you. But times are changing and who are we to criticize?” Miss Mary came down from the high room where she had been photographing and said that she had taken good and clear pictures of the storks but that they would be worthless because she had no telescopic lens. We paid up and drank cold beer on the house and all said good-bye and drove out of the square and the blinding light on the steep climb above the town to the high country toward Segovia. I stopped above the town and looked back and saw the male stork come in with his lovely flight to the nest on the top of the church tower. He had been down by the river where the women beat the clothes and later on we had seen a covey of partridges cross the road and later in the same lonely high bracken country we had seen a wolf.
That was this same year when we had been in Spain on the way to Africa and now we were in a yellow green forest that had been destroyed by elephants about the same time that we were riding across the high country to Segovia. In a world where this could happen I had small time for sorrow. I had been sure that I would never see Spain again and I had returned only to show Mary the Prado. Since I remembered all the pictures that I loved truly and so owned them as though I possessed them there was no need for me to see them again before I died. But it was very important that I should see them with Mary if that were possible and could be done without compromise or indignity. Also I wanted her to see Navarre and the two Castiles and I wanted her to see a wolf in high country and storks nesting in a village. I had wanted to show her the paw of a bear nailed onto the door of the church in Barco de Avila but it was too much to expect that would still be there. But we had found the storks quite easily and would find more and we had seen the wolf and had looked down on Segovia from a near and pleasant height, coming onto it naturally on a road that tourists did not take but that travelers would come by naturally. There are no such roads anymore around Toledo but you can still see Segovia as you would see it if you walked over the high country and we studied the city as though it were being seen for the first time by people who had never known it was there but had always lived to see it.
There is a virginity that you, in theory only, bring once to a beautiful city or a great painting. This is only a theory and I think it is untrue. All the things that I have loved I bring this to each time but it is lovely to bring someone else to it and it helps the loneliness. Mary had loved Spain and Africa and had learned the secret things naturally and hardly without knowing she had learned them. I never explained the secret things to her; only the technical things or the comic things and my own greatest pleasure came from her own discovering. It is stupid to expect or hope that a woman that you love should love all the things that you do. But Mary had loved the sea and living on a small boat and she loved fishing. She loved pictures and she had loved the West of the United States when we had first gone there together. She never simulated anything and this was a great gift to be given as I had been associated with a great simulator of everything and life with a true simulator gives a man a very unattractive view of many things and he can begin to cherish loneliness rather than to wish to share anything.
Now this morning with the day becoming hot and the cool wind from the Mountain not having risen we were working out a new trail out of the forest that the elephants had destroyed. After we came out into the open prairie land after having to cut our way through a couple of bad places we saw the first great flock of storks feeding. They were true European storks black and white and red-legged and they were working on the caterpillars as though they were German storks and under orders. Miss Mary liked them and they meant much to her since we had both been worried about the article that said that storks were becoming extinct and now we found that they had merely had good sense enough to come to Africa as we had done ourselves; but they did not take away her sorrow and we went on toward camp. I did not know what to do about Miss Mary’s sorrow. It was proofed against eagles and proofed against storks, against neither of which I had any defense at all, and I began to know how great a sorrow it really was.
“What have you been thinking of all morning when you’ve been so uncommonly silent?”
“About birds and places and how nice you are.”
“That was nice of you.”
“I didn’t do it as a spiritual exercise.”
“I’ll be all right. People don’t just jump in and out of bottomless pits.”
“They’re going to make it an event in the next Olympic Games.”
“You’ll probably win it.”
“I have my backers.”
“Your backers are all dead like my lion. You probably shot all your backers one day when you were feeling especially wonderful.”
“Look there’s another field of storks.”
Africa is a dangerous place for a great sorrow to live very long when there are only two people in a camp and when it gets dark shortly after six o’clock in the evening. We did not talk about lions nor think about them anymore and the emptiness where Mary’s sorrow had lived was filling again with the routine and the strange fine life and the coming of the night. When the fire burned down I pulled a long heavy dead tree from the pile of deadwood the lorry had brought in the afternoon onto the coals and we sat in our chairs and watched the night breeze blow the coals up and watched the wood catch fire. This night breeze was a small wind that came off the snows of the Mountain. It was so light that you only felt its coolness but you could see it in the fire. You can see the wind in many ways but the loveliest is at night in the brightening and the lowering and raising of the flame in your fire.
“We’re never alone with our fire,” Mary said. “I’m glad now there is only us and our fire. Will that log burn until morning?”
“I think so,” I said. “If the wind doesn’t rise.”
“It’s strange now without the lion to look forward to in the morning and you haven’t any problems or worries now, have you?”
“No. Everything is quiet now,” I lied.
“Do you miss all the problems you and G.C. had?”