It’s true, the ladder-man’s becoming insubstantial. He’s losing his corporeality; transforming into air motes, edgeless and wan. Hair-raising is what I’ve started calling him. ‘Are we going on another
hair-raising
adventure?’ I lick him all over to bring him back to life. I conduct fellatio so many times I get swollen lips. He certainly picks up when I do this. But it doesn’t last long. Soon I can stab him with my knife and it doesn’t hurt. Soon he can’t balance on the ladder any more. He can sit weightlessly at the top though, like an angel reclining on a cloud. I have to tie him down before we go to sleep or else he rises to the tin roof and sticks there like a moth.
Other ladder-men seem to be moving into our barrio, taking over his chores. There’s an infestation of ladder-men in Triana these days. People can’t make a living on the streets any more, so they seek higher pastures. The banging on the roofs at night can be quite alarming. Territorial disputes erupt, and ladder-men give chase to each other like lynxes come down from the forests.
Ladder-men are falling from the roofs in their battles. Joining the bumps of pumpkins in kitchen gardens. The residents of Seville want the men off their properties, purged from the skyline, rid from their flowerbeds. The ladder-man excess means they’ve become less popular. Fading are the days when the gentle twilight shepherds were held in high esteem. Then, before we know it, fading into oblivion are the ladder-men themselves. All of them, walking south in a long procession, like the Moriscos leaving Seville after hundreds of years in our midst.
‘If you’re going, can I come too?’
‘You’re not a ladder-man, and ladder-women don’t count,’ he writes on his slate. Constantly reading Aurelio’s notes has taught me letters.
‘But Hortense. She had a ladder necklace.’
‘She probably made it herself,’ he writes on the palm of my hand with a reed pen.
‘You’ll have to touch earth to go down there,’ I say, hoping to change his mind.
‘A gang from the guild will lend me a hand,’ he explains in mime.
‘I want to come too.’
Aurelio puts his arms around me. He’s all jutting hips and bony pelvis.
I stick my hand inside his ribcage and hold onto his heart. It feels like a poached quince. His heart pulses in my hand like his penis used to do when he was aroused.
‘You can come along for the ride,’ he allows.
Which means, I suppose, that I miss out on the fun at the end of the journey.
But I join the caravan posthaste, travelling light with a few belongings and a tent. No mules or horses allowed. Our penance will be to walk like pilgrims. Just some ladder-girl strays like me and a fair few wives and children in attendance. A ladder-man whose name I don’t know carries a cat on his shoulders, birdlike. In Santa María this fellow was the rooftop king of cats. He fed and pampered hundreds, or so I’m told.
Four ladder-men pick up Aurelio’s ladder keeping it flat and horizontal. Aurelio climbs directly from a friend’s pony onto the ladder. He’s a sultan lounging on a litter. I hold a sunshade over his head to protect him from inclement
weather. The journey begins and we follow the bends of the river south.
The caravan travels for three days, along the fertile Guadalquivir valley. We pass almond groves and olive farms. Peasants planting and pruning greet us in concern. Perhaps they think we are mourners returning from a funeral in Seville. What do they know that we don’t?
At end of day we lay down in the fields alongside sheep and goats. Aurelio and the ladder-men prefer to sleep up high, on hayricks or in the lofts of stables. In the morning we join Bartolomé, a former parish priest, for prayers then step fully clothed into the river to wash. Even Aurelio. As long as he doesn’t touch the sandy bottom he says he feels okay. He avoids his ‘terror’. If I knew what everyone calls his ‘terror’ was, I would try to cure him.
When the river is flowing quickly we get on our ladders and float downstream instead of walking. Ladders make good rafts and you can stick your hand down and pull out a fish if you’re fast enough. Aurelio stands on his ladder while we’re drifting along the water. He’s no fool; he has attained the art of perfect balance. Others copy him, which makes the rest of us ‘clingers on’ feel very incompetent.
We go back to walking when the river veers the wrong way. Aurelio dries his clothes standing on his ladder in the stream of a windmill. The fan of the windmill ruffles his
shepherd’s shift. He can catch the wind like it’s falling rain or strands of whipped sugar. He catches a stream of wind in his hands and cupping it tightly, gives it to me. I smile and take it from him. I feel the wind spinning inside the bowl of my hands, the wind using up its energy. It makes a sigh when it’s spent.
We stand on a stile beneath the windmill and I copy him. My skirt rises up and flaps in my face. Then I jump off the stile and pretend to fly like we used to do as children. I collect sticks and vines and Aurelio crafts for me a little windmill. He skewers leaves with the sticks. I hold my windmill up to the air as I’m walking along, combing the air with the twirling leaves. The toy mill whistles and whirrs. I blow on it with my mouth and it rasps like corn husks.
Closer to our destination Aurelio doesn’t bother with the ruse of the litter any more. He lets it be known he can levitate himself off the ground. I continue to carry his ladder and sack for him, walking with a ladder over each shoulder (his and mine) while Aurelio drifts along beside me. Sometimes he floats horizontal like an eel. In daylight it’s hard to see him, but at night he shines luminously, giving off a warm copper glow. Up in a loft we join hands and my body becomes burning rock, straight out of a volcano. I turn to liquid as we make love, then harden back into myself, copper running through my veins.
We’ve been walking along the riverine valley for some days, me kicking autumn leaves out of the way, Aurelio looping trees, pulling late season fruit from the top branches, when our procession of exiles takes a detour uphill. Our caravan passes one whitewashed village after another. The road is busy with travellers. Lots and lots of ladder-men. We pass some returning from our destination. Ladder-men wrapped in blankets with singing children hanging onto them. And weeping wives in black. Silent stragglers.
‘There’s the possibility for renewal,’ Aurelio writes on his slate after I’ve tied him down for the night. There is the possibility, he repeats, and then there isn’t. You go all the way up and you mightn’t come back. I’m going to have to take the chance. (He’s writing to himself rather than to me for a change and that’s a worry.)
We come to an open plain with birds flying straight upwards. A shiver runs down my spine. Before long we meet a sign that reads, ‘Climb at your own cost’, and then further on down the track, another: ‘Let dead souls go’.
I see where everyone’s heading. Far away in the distance a thin pillar or pole rises up to the clouds. As we get closer I can see it’s not a pillar, but a giant palm tree, made of very strong wood, so tall it couldn’t be one tree, it would have to be hundreds joined together. And there are creatures moving up the long tree in columns, like ants.
We march closer. It’s not a tree but a ladder with rungs and there are angelic forms climbing up to Heaven. Hundreds of them, disappearing through the roof of the sky. And a few, I notice, are coming back down the other side of the stairway, very slowly, stopping to bump noses with those going up. How very peculiar.
This is the stem of the Earth, I think. This is the place where we are joined to the sun and the moon, like an apple is joined to the rest of the tree.
Aurelio and I pass by a field of tents. Families prodding fires, cooking soup. Children running about with straggly hair. Some are sitting and playing a game in the soil. Knucklebones we called it in my village.
‘Waiting for their ladder-men to return,’ explains Aurelio, in a sign language I’ve become familiar with. He’s looking grim and I’m feeling grim in expectation. Files of anxious women line the path like pine trees. When a frostbitten man with white whiskers lumbers past, two women run forward and embrace him, shrieking in delight.
Getting closer to the giant ladder I can see that the climbers are not really angels as they don’t have wings. I know who they must be. They are ladder-men on their final mission.
We cross a ring of water a couple of metres wide, but shallow. I only get my feet wet. Then we clamber over a
barrier of giant egg-shaped stones. Purple and mauve like the inside of mussel shells.
We have to walk through what in hindsight I think must have been an optical illusion. It’s a ring of fire, six feet high. There’s a magician of sorts who stands on the other side of the fire. He uses a scythe to sweep the flames back and let us pass. He has no fear and neither do we, walking through the gap in the flames. (Not a hair on my body is singed.)
And now comes a rope that is intended to keep wellwishers back. It is here we must part. I can go no further, but I may linger for a short while. A man has come to weigh Aurelio. He has to be light to make his ascent. ‘So the ladder doesn’t lean.’
‘Someone is going to fall,’ I say in agitation, looking up, expecting to see a man tumbling down at this very moment.
The measurer shakes his head. ‘It rarely happens.’
‘What is your weight these days?’ I ask, and Aurelio shakes his head. He’ll be too light to measure.
‘No gravity, no weight,’ the measurer tells Aurelio with approval. ‘So you’re going up directly. You won’t need to fast.’
‘Better to follow the chain of men,’ a voice behind us says. The papal edict: mount the ladder with Jacob or else.
Somewhere else there must be a sign, I’m sure, that says, ‘Don’t miss your chance of returning’.
My ladder-man is embracing me goodbye, but his body is so wasted he has already half-departed. There’s to be a victory of sorts, and suddenly I know what it is: it is the strength of my love returning from childhood. It’s as if it has been held in some carved tree-trunk all this time and it’s suddenly been released; the raw lovely feeling of being seven and eight comes rushing back to me. I emerge long-limbed from a white crib, clutching the three stones that (used to) make Aurelio and me the same weight, even though I’m twenty times heavier than the wafer he has become. We are the same weight in feeling, and that is rare.
And Aurelio departs into the void that is also the restingplace of my mother, somewhere up above, beyond.
The rope is open and Aurelio is approaching the forbidding ladder that rises up to the sky. There’s a queue of people behind me, so I can’t stand here any longer. I make my way back across the circles of fire and stone and water and it is here, on the dusty path, that I pause and watch my ladder-man begin his ascent. I feel quite composed, almost proud. But there are so many climbing today and I soon lose sight of Aurelio.
I’m surprised that I don’t feel weepy. What wondrous man is this who’s healed a wound, not furrowed one
open? Even in parting he’s withdrawn himself, yet not his affection. I return to the holding fields and find an empty spot to camp. In three days, there will be a chance for his renewal. And after that you can wait and wait, so they tell me. After a week the ladder-men never return. Or if they do it’s a miracle. Whatever happens up in the clouds they will either return to flesh or decompose in air. It’s a question of mental resistance, so say those returning with rounded flesh. It’s an exquisite feeling to turn into air. Your body becomes a lyre and you feel music running through the threads of your being. It’s better than the best lovemaking, they say. Who would return to us after knowing such ecstasy? Only those who can bind flesh to their bodies. Attach themselves to sheets of ice until their bodies harden and thicken again. It is very painful apparently, to bind oneself to ice, and most escape the torture for the freedom of the lyre, so say those who have endured and returned to us whole.
So I sit on our two ladders with my chin in my hands and wait. Some of the women I know from our caravan are waiting too. We look to the ladder in the sky, even when it’s too dark to see. On the second evening, when I know the time is ripe for either his return or his mourning, I light a candle and keep a vigil by the path with the other women. There is sporadic shrieking. Rapturous reunions
follow. One of the men from our caravan has returned. We womenfolk run to embrace him. He’s frozen solid and walking very stiffly. We warm him by a fire, hold him till he cries and thaws. He can’t tell us anything yet. His teeth are chattering. His body shaking. His hair and skin are drained of colour.
Eventually he tells us that there were pale-blue angels up there who ran swords through the ladder-men’s bodies. The men leaked orange blood but they didn’t die. The angels lured the men to their glittering landscapes to sleep with them. He said he’d never met such licentious women. ‘They do it with anyone. No matter how cold you are; they want you.’ It was a huge place, the returning man said, with snow cathedrals and a high-pitched ringing glare that hurt both your ears and eyes. The colours were so sharp that after a while he lost sight of everyone he knew. (He was sorry, but he couldn’t tell us what happened to the other ladder-men in our caravan.) There were some nice angels, he admitted, who handed out sugar crystals.
When the returning ladder-man has regained his normal complexion, he has to go through the ritual burning of his ladder. Or so the authorities decree. Back in Seville he will never again be seduced by the lure of rooftop balconies. The man says he feels cured already. But the ladder-burning ritual must go ahead.
Later that night I hear the returned ladder-man’s wife sobbing in the tent beside mine. ‘You’re not the man you used to be.’ I am quietly perturbed. But the next day I wake in anticipation. This is the day my Aurelio has to return, or he will never do so. I stand alert on the track and keep a look out for his rake-like physique. As day dies I know any chance of seeing him again is unlikely, but I force myself to be happy for him. He will become a lyre of the air and hear the music running through his veins. Forever.