Fairy Tales 🧚 Alberta

Alicia del Espejo

Rather on Nilus’ Mud

The day on which Baldric first saw the angel named Alicia was like all the other winter days. Except perhaps that the clouds were slightly heavier, slightly darker than usual for mid April. They floated over the scene as if holding their breath, careful not to let down their burden all at once. Baldric had read the biography of the young squire Bartholomew Cubbins, and knew that when a great mass of oobleck hung under the icy trusses of the sky, sooner or later it would all land on your head. It was just a fact of meteorology.

It didn’t help that Mr Foxfield was giving yet another of his endless and pointless lectures on Roman History, a subject on which Baldric couldn’t even speculate, given the absence of motorcycles and Stanley Cup playoffs. Besides, Antonio had already given him a pretty good idea how a centurion behaved on the fringes of civilization, in Gallic lands full of druidic rites and tribal slaughter. Antonio assured his son that his Roman re-enactments were far more important than anything his history teacher had to say.

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Ragor couldn’t stop himself from commenting in a negative fashion on the blindness of the human race. From the perspective of a Blue Dreamer, there was nothing more sacred than knowing what happened in the past. Did humans think that iPhones and Twitterstalk would make them immune to the sumptuous decay of Rome? Or to the brutality of the Third Reich?

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Today’s lesson was on the glories of the Late Republic. Baldric wondered why he was always getting into trouble for being late when they seemed to praise an entire Empire for doing the same thing. Mr Foxfield was saying something about a “triple pillar of the world transformed into a strumpet’s fool” when Baldric locked eyes with the girl just slightly behind him in the next row. Her eyes were dark brown, and her smooth skin still held some of its summer gold. Her chestnut brown hair had traces of gold on the edges as it drifted lazily onto her wooden desk. 

Her arms were thin and tanned, which made Baldric think of Cleopatra and the way she might strategize about military matters while tilting her head from side to side and swaying her hips to the rhythm of a royal cobra rising from a wicker basket.

The artistry of the situation reminded Baldric of the poetry his father used to quote each Christmas around the dinner table: There’s a place in France / Where the naked ladies dance. Sipping his fine Baby Duck champagne, Lorenzo continued his excursion into poetry with the Iberian response, a tradition of llamada y respuesta which occurred in elegant soirées and in the veladas of Southern Europe: All the girls in Spain / do the rhumba in the rain.

Baldric was starting to get interested in what his teacher was saying, especially when he talked about how “Anthony, enthroned in the market-place, did sit alone, whistling to the air, which but for vacancy had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too, and made a gap in Nature.” The jangled abstruseness of these words intrigued Baldric, and made him want to follow his teacher into the library of Alexandria, through the third cataract, and out into the lone and level sands that stretched far away. Here he saw, on a carpet laid on the sand and illuminated by the setting sun, the swaying red scarf of a girl who looked just like Alicia de Mires.

Mr Foxfield then travelled by Land Rover south-west to the peak of Kilimanjaro, from where he spied Richard Leaky and the first scruffy humanoids peering out of the dense foliage. Baldric got a good look at Homo Erectus, who was wondering if it would be worthwhile, banana-wise, to venture out of the jungle and into the world.

But then the lecture got rather technical and Baldric had a hard time following his teacher’s story about tropical fruit and chipping stones into spearheads. He understood the part about the forbidden fruit, however, since the look on Eve’s face seemed very much like that of Alicia as she nudged her pencil from her desk and bent down low to pick it up.

But then the whole story got mixed up in the plans of a serpent and a long list of names that didn’t make any sense: Arphaxad, Mahalalel, Serug, Nahor, Reu, Seth, Enosh, etc. Did Mr. Foxfield really expect them to believe that Methuselah lived 969 years? All of this math made Baldric yearn to be back in the souks of Alexandria, feasting on pomegranates from Sicily, drinking wine from the undulant hills of Andalusia, and watching as Cleopatra sent food-tasters to their death.

By the time Mr Foxfield veered back to Egyptian history and the Third Dynasty of the Snake Charmer, Baldric couldn’t keep his eyes off Alicia, her slim waist, and the dusky tinges that deepened her dimples into exclamation points in Baldric’s brain. She picked up per pencil slowly, and stuck the rubber nib carefully into the corner of her mouth.

Baldric wondered, Where on earth did she come from?

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The Promised Land

Alicia wasn’t of the usual North or East European stock that you find in Alberta. Her parents were in fact Spanish immigrants who came to Canada in the mid 1950s, hoping to plant their native Morilla grapes in the recalcitrant soil of the prairies. Alfonso del Espejo couldn’t read English and had therefore misinterpreted the Canadian government pamphlet entitled “The Valley of Eden,” which he found on an empty café table in his small town south of Córdoba. Alfonso was stupefied to see the statistics on crop yield and land prices in Western Canada. One must remember that his family had been peasants since they were forced to become Christians 500 years ago. The prospect of owning any land at all seemed about as likely as buying a fifty-acre hacienda in the Garden of Eden.

Nevertheless, it was a disappointment to Alfonso when he found out that Eden Valley was inhabited by goats and bears, and not by grape-picking cherubs or angels with a vast greenhouse of horticultural lore. Even worse, he saw that there were Indians living in the Valley, and that the cowboys were no longer encouraged to burn their teepees and take their land. Yet all was not lost: there was plenty of good stolen land slightly to the east, around the towns of Black Diamond and Okotoks, both of which were a flint stone’s throw from the sprawling suburbs of Calgary.

Alfonso’s instinct to move to the New World had been a good one, except that he should have kept going west. Unfortunately, he had never heard of The Doors, and never got their reliable advice, “the West is the best, get here and we’ll do the rest.” If he had heard those words he would have continued three hundred miles further, to the warmer, richer slopes of the Okanagan Valley in the heart of British Columbia. Here, vineyards stretched down from the dry skies to the blue lakes, and towns had names like Peachland and Summerland.

Luckily for the family, Alfonso’s wife Mirales was an expert with bobbins and cork tiles, and thus managed to supply them with food. Her cotton and lace blouses were unparalleled in the rough Alberta landscape, and every farmer’s wife who had been to the swanky saloons of Calgary did everything she could to get her hands on one of them. All they could say when they saw the white cotton patterns making soft loops in their brains was “Look at them! Just look at them!” The witchery of her stitchery wasn’t lost on Baldric, although it would have been difficult for him to appreciate the crown jewels if they were surrounded by the soft lines of her neck, the straightness of her nose, and the honey-gold perfection of her skin.

Mr. Foxfield scowled at him, not realizing that the root of Mark Antony’s dilemma lay in the same type of gaze that yoked Baldric to the beauty of the Mediterranean. “Mr. Letriste! I repeat, why did Mark Antony stay the fleet at Alexandria when he should have…”  But Baldric’s only answer drifted up to him from the streets of fair Padua … she doth teach the torches to burn bright.

“Military strategy, class!” Mr. Foxfield went on, “Military strategy. That is the only reason the Roman Empire kept its hold on the entire Mediterranean Basin.” Baldric had no idea what he was talking about, although the word Mediterranean brought images of a garden and flowers swaying in the hair of Alicia. 

Nor did Alicia have any idea what the teacher was saying. She was tired of times tables and history charts, dates of battles and the early trade routes which had nothing to do with the feelings that were surfacing from the deep romantic chasm within her, with its sparkling currents meandering up into the bright pools of her eyes.

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During recess Baldric approached a group of girls who instead of playing games were huddled around the school entrance. Without thinking, he shouted out, “Hey, Alicia Galicia!” What this meant even he couldn’t say. Alicia couldn’t make head or tail of his remark, except perhaps that her father had made a pilgrimage to the city of Santiago de Compostella in Galicia. But Baldric couldn’t possibly have known this. Was it an insult or some clumsy attempt to get her attention?    

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Ragor remembered his own awkward attempts to get the attention of girls when he was eleven and twelve. Why did Nature make girls grow up so fast and make boys such idiots? He wrote in his green notebook:

Pity the twelve-year-old boy. It’s sad to see how out-gunned he is: a village idiot showing his kung-fu moves to the hidden dragon in the clouds. His thin arms fail to impress, whereas her long bones do. His quivering voice emits distress, amid her sweet meow. And when it comes to strategy, his secret plans get blurted out somehow, while in the upward roll of her eyes she shows she knows what he’s all about.

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Baldric felt stupid for the rest of the afternoon and kicked himself over and over in bed that night. The next day, with bruised tendons reminding him to try some other method, he decided to swap the advice of his father for that of his mother. Arabel told him that his father belonged to the machismo school of dating, in which one attracts a woman’s attention either by pushing her into the bushes or by ignoring her, as if disdain were some sort of aphrodisiac. Beatrice on the other hand counselled a different approach: “If you like a girl, write her an obscure poem with references to roses and rain and little hands.” He had previously rejected all parental advice on this subject, not because the means wouldn’t achieve the ends, but because he had no need for the ends. Now, there was no end to his need.

Baldric tried to write a poem with roses and hands and rain but he thought of Alicia’s eyes and then all he could hear was silence, which shut him up beautifully, suddenly, and made him so speechless that he abandoned poetry altogether. He got out felt pens and a piece of white paper, but the paper was so white it looked like snow carefully everywhere descending, not just on the white page but also on his bed, on Black Diamond, on the wild rose of Alberta, and on the sacred red maple leaf of the country itself. The snow was falling everywhere and then it started melting because it was Spring in his heart and he was overwhelmed by her intense fragility, which made him forget about landscapes and roses and countries and silence everywhere descending. He just looked at her hands, and nobody,not even the rain,had such small hands.

After breakfast he took another look at his poem. What a bunch of nonsense! She would just laugh at him and circle the punctuation errors in red ink.

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The first class of the morning was History, and the curriculum focused at all times on what was considered the root of all knowledge: Greeks and Italians, high tea with scones, and the British Navy. Mr. Foxfield ranted about the ingratitude of India, which in rejecting England had rejected “the very crown in which the jewel was placed. What, did India not want to be a diamond, an emerald? Then why did she go on about the Koh-i-Noor, the blue-tinged diamond that was also the Mountain of Light and the left eye of the goddess Kali?”

Baldric couldn’t help himself from imagining a beautiful fearsome goddess with a perfect spot on her forehead for the Mountain of Light — that she would use to scorch any white-legged Brits who so much as sighed over the glories of the British Raj:

And what was Mr. Foxfield to make of the ingratitude of the Americans, “who traded the gods of Grub Street for their tawdry Greenwich Village and the squalors of Hollywood.” Because Baldric was no longer listening, he would forever pronounce Gloucester “Glue-sester,” Leicester “Lie-sester,” and Thames “Thames.”

The only thing that interested Baldric was the dreamy yet not entirely inaccessible look on the face of Alicia. He feared that his comment the day before would make her want to avoid him, and keep her eyes instead on the teacher. If this happened then she would eventually learn to say “Gloster, “ “Lester” and “Tems,” and thus succumb to the invisible British will that had elevated all souls north of the 49th parallel into a frenzy of Queen worship. 

His friend Brian had a theory: it was due to the hypnotic stare of the Queen that the British maintained their hold over Canada. Because of this, Baldric and Brian poked the eyes out of the Queen’s face on dollar bills. Antonio added to this wisdom, showing him how coins could be melted down and re-forged into miniature statues of Louis Riel on his horse. The only thing that bothered Antonio about this technique was that it would please both the Indians and the Quebecois.

Mr Foxfield was now going on about a guy called Abraham who was on a plane and was being attacked by a wolf. It was at this point, when Baldric wondered if Canadian history wasn’t just another fairy tale, that Alicia’s head gradually turned, quarter inch by quarter inch, away from the teacher and toward him. His eyes, once they met hers, rested in a place beyond worries and bruised tendons. He could see that the past was, like the word suggests, past. 

He scratched some random words onto his wooden desk … the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses.

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Baldric’s poetry made Ragor’s brain flood with memories of the first girls he fell in love with. He remembered staring into the eyes of a blue-eyed girl in grade five, and he remembered the dangling of thirteen-year-old toes on a summer dock.

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During recess Alicia was in a pensive mood, ambling by herself along the row of bushes that flanked the classroom windows. Baldric approached her with trepidation. He got nervous and decided to pass her, pretending to walk toward the empty bicycle rack. But she called out, “Hey, what do you think about Foxfield’s crush on the Queen?” 

Baldric was surprised by the bell-like clarity of her voice, even though he’d heard it a hundred times before. It beckoned him toward some clear, wide world he’d never known. He answered, “Oh, I don’t know, all right I guess. But I guess most things. I don’t really know. Anything.”  

“I suppose you like the Queen.”

“Like the Queen? The Queen of England? No. I don’t care. She needs a different hair-do. She used to look pretty good. I’d rather listen to Freddy Mercury.” He was at a loss what to say, but he didn’t want to sound like an idiot. He imagined Alicia liked people who had opinions about faraway people like the Queen of England. He added, in an attempt to clarify, “Maybe they could put her niece, or someone a bit younger, on the dollar bill. Or maybe they should just put pictures of beavers and hockey players. Maybe they should put Guy LaFleur.” 

“So are you going to Patricia’s party Friday?”

“Party?”

“No one tells you anything! We’ll be playing Spin the Bottle.”  

Baldric had heard about Spin the Bottle from Brian. He said that when girls go to parties everyone gets doped up on root beer and chips and they twirl around so much they get dizzy and then they sit around spinning an empty bottle. And then they play with Ouiji boards and have seances to bring back the dead. 

“I’d love to go. When does it start?”

“Seven o’clock. And wear your jean jacket. It looks good on you.”

Baldric was too nervous to talk to Alicia for the rest of the week, although their classroom gazes got longer and longer until Baldric couldn’t remember what day it was. He started to wonder if maybe it was already next week. He felt like he had gone down the neck of a bottle and was floating around in root beer, sipping air from a straw.

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Next: Spin the Bottle

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