A swallow in winter, p.1
A Swallow in Winter, page 1
In memory of Emma Langley, 1983–2020.
Friend, editor, game changer.
“What say?”
S.A.
Swallows don’t celebrate Christmas.
When winter comes, you can find them basking in the humid air above the forests of Africa. Tracing loops in the sky. Soaring upwards and darting down again, momentarily suspended on their backs as they skim the treetops, before splitting the haze of foliage and flowers that mark the beginning of the forest.
Swallows don’t understand why they return to spend the winter here, above the hills, on the scorching rooftops of this village built from baked earth and corrugated iron.
But they hold memories of this place. Memories buried deep within their tiny twenty-gram bodies, or those of their ancestors.
What makes them suddenly head south? They have no idea. They’re hardly fleeing the snow – of which they’ve only heard tell – or even the cold. And yet there’s something that makes it impossible for them not to be here, scattering the midges, scribbling in the azure sky.
Swallows don’t concern themselves with the tiny beings scurrying beneath them. Humans. They see them walking from continent to continent, trapped by gravity. They watch them crossing the desert, in single file, sometimes sinking into the sand and disappearing. Gliding above the waves, swallows can count humans in their hundreds, navigating the white sea on a bobbing cork.
All that most swallows know of humanity – its tragedies, its beauty – are these miniature figures far below, who think they stand tall on the Earth, when they fail to outstrip even the most stunted of trees.
Then again, we shouldn’t idealize swallows. Aside from their passion for flying, which gives them poetry and soul, they are concerned only with themselves. Their tiny triangular heads contain just three compass points: nest, chicks, survival.
Gloria was different.
She had never built a nest, never hatched chicks. She didn’t care so much about surviving as living.
So why, on this December morning, was she flying in the opposite direction to the other birds?
And why, several days earlier, had this swallow defied the pull of the equator, which should have detained her throughout the winter?
Gloria was alone. She had been flying for a long time now, witnessing the desert cast itself into the sea, then the earth born anew from the mist. She was heading northwards in the depths of winter.
At the same time, slightly further north, Freddy d’Angelo was travelling in the same direction. He was driving a yellow freezer van, on the sides of which was swirled, in beautiful red letters:
Gelato Pepino & Schultz
In the dead of night, he had set off from the city of Genoa, passing through every coastal tunnel between Italy and France. He kept leaning over the steering wheel to scour the sky for the first signs of a snowstorm that had been forecast for the past three days. He was listening to an old cassette of Frank Sinatra crooning about Christmas, but Freddy played it all year round, even in the middle of summer.
Freddy d’Angelo had been working for the ice-cream company Pepino & Schultz for thirty-seven years. Despite his surname, he couldn’t speak a word of Italian. He lived alone in a small village in the northeast of France, by the A26 motorway, also known as the Autoroute des Anglais.
Professional to a fault, Freddy had never tasted the ice cream he transported. A few years earlier, when the gelato brand was hugely popular across Europe, Freddy would encounter a small fleet of Pepino & Schultz vans on the roads. But the glory days hadn’t lasted. Business was bad. There were only two drivers left. One delivered across Italy, while Freddy took care of France and England.
On this particular Christmas Eve, the yellow van was hurtling through the frosty morning with a triple-locked cargo of ice cream: six hundred tubs in two flavours – almond milk or chestnut – loaded in Italy for delivery to the centre of London that night. Freddy d’Angelo was cursing the last-minute order: hadn’t he delivered half a vanload to the same customer only a week ago? He was muttering to himself about how irresponsible people were, about the snow that was forecast, about the journey through Calais after he had driven across France and most of all about the unrest close to the Channel Tunnel. For months now, he had barricaded himself in every time he approached the port. He didn’t slow down but would watch in alarm as shadows scurried around him. Freddy felt a growing sense of unease. Sitting in his van for hours, he would brood over the great unrest of our times, how everything had gone to rack and ruin, invaded, unrecognizable. Deep down, though, in his heart, despite the world around him being torn apart, he wasn’t unhappy to be on the roads – rather than alone in his modest home, under the flickering strip light of his kitchen.
Freddy had been counting. It would soon be a hundred days since anybody had spoken to him properly. He wasn’t including exchanges of less than three words, such as Evening or Budge up!
One hundred days.
He had experienced periods of loneliness like this before, for thirty-five or even forty days, but a chat about his yellow van – with a vintage car enthusiast, across two tables in the ferry cafeteria – would always bring an end to the silence.
Going further back, a very long time ago, he could recall real conversations. Freddy had been secretly in love with the woman who worked at the Pepino & Schultz ice-cream warehouse, in Genoa.
Emilia. The only employee who spoke a little French. Freddy and Emilia would linger for twenty minutes or so, chatting beside the van. When there was a chill in the air, she would warm herself by standing on her tiptoes, clutching her big folder tightly to her chest, shrugging her shoulders all the way to her ears.
“Do you take in the scenery when you’re driving?”
“What scenery?”
“I don’t know. The sea … the wheat fields…”
Freddy smiled. A rare event.
“No.”
It had never occurred to him to look at the view of the sea or the fields of wheat. Emilia chided him endlessly. She couldn’t believe it.
Freddy d’Angelo gazed at her and smiled. Again. Those moments by her side seemed to last all night long – the smell of coffee in the small hours, the hum of the engine idling.
Then, one day, Emilia had been dismissed. She left in such a hurry he never had a chance to express his feelings for her. Or to say goodbye.
Freddy was deep in thought as he pulled away from the motorway toll booth. After dropping off his ice-cream cargo in London that night, he planned to visit a French café, where, on another snowy morning, a waiter had saved him from his solitude by enquiring whether he wanted his fish battered or breaded. They had chatted a while: fishing rods, size-twelve fish hooks, fried fish, childhood memories. Freddy didn’t ask for more from a conversation. At the wheel, he was used to talking to himself for miles on end, introducing himself to the imaginary passenger next to him in the driver’s cab. He was a decent sort, Freddy would explain, a man of few words, perhaps a little unsociable, for the most part a loner.
“What about you?” he would venture. “Here’s me, chatting away, and you haven’t told me the first thing about yourself.”
He would glance in the direction of his phantom passenger and nod, to indicate he was listening attentively, chipping in a word here and a word there, as if the toolbox next to him had begun to tell him its life story.
Gloria was flying at fifty miles per hour, over the pine trees. The wind was making the arc of her wings quiver. She still couldn’t fathom what it was that propelled her in this direction. While Gloria knew she was different – on the margins of her species – there was no escaping the mysterious calls from within, which control the lives of all birds. If such instincts soothed most swallows, to her they felt like a form of bondage. Still, this summons north on a December morning was different somehow. It was about more than the migratory instinct. This call, Gloria sensed, was intended for her alone and for her freedom. Somebody was waiting for her, up north. That was the only way she could explain it.
Gloria had been born sixteen years earlier, between the beams of a barn, close to a small cliff. She spent her first spring there, following her sisters southwards before the summer’s end. She loved the exhausting back-and-forth over the sands, across the water and forests. She could have carried on that way, like all the other swallows. But during her third winter, in Africa, there had been an accident. She crashed into the window of a remote village church. A blue pane, reflecting the sky, had invited her to dive into it. Gloria came to, bleeding, on the earthen floor. A boy gathered her up on Christmas morning and cradled her in his right hand, clasping her to his neck.
“Don’t be frightened,” he whispered.
She recovered for several weeks inside an old condensed-milk tin, repurposed as a hospital bed. The little boy took care of her, fed her and comforted her. He called her Gloria after the brand of tinned milk.
Thanks to him, she had a name, which is rare for birds and most importantly, she was still alive.
That winter everything changed in her swallow’s life. Her eyes were opened to the existence of human beings. And when she left the tin of condensed milk behind, shortly before spring, Gloria did so in the knowledge that there was no end to her fascination with this horizontal life that she had discovered upon falling to Earth. In the years that followed, she spent her time observing, listening and hiding in the ceilings of houses whenever she could. She accompanied wanderers for days at a time.
Most swallows never ask qu
She owed her transformation to the small boy who had saved her life. The following year, she failed to find him in the abandoned village on the banks of the River Congo. Where had he gone? She spent several weeks combing various routes, in search of the ten-year-old boy with the same black eyes as her. Would she recognize his features now if she encountered him again? All she knew was that he only had one hand, the right one. The other arm stopped at the elbow, inside the sewn-up sleeve of his shirt.
She never found him, but she promised not to forget that she owed him everything. She sensed that she and the boy were alike in some way. On the day they parted, he had watched her flying off into the distance until she disappeared out of sight. Had he still two hands to beat the air, two arms to flap like wings, he surely would have taken off with her.
The snow began to fall at six o’clock in the evening. After bypassing Paris, Freddy d’Angelo had slept for an hour in a car park. The refrigeration unit hummed behind him. He loved this van, which was his true home. Even though the engine had already been replaced twice, the bodywork had held firm for nearly forty years. Freddy had fitted out the interior of the driver’s cab in velvety moquette, and he touched up the red letters when they faded.
He turned on the windscreen wipers to chase away the first flakes and started up the engine. His hopes of arriving in Calais before nightfall were fast receding.
One hour later, Freddy heard three beeps ring out from inside the door. He moved his hand across the seat and grabbed his mobile phone, which never rang. The screen announced a message from Pepino & Schultz. He didn’t open it straight away, but put the telephone down beside him and continued to drive while wondering what his employer might want from him. Further along, he stopped at a deserted car park where the snow was turning a few trees and a shelter white.
The text message contained two words: Delivery cancelled. He was very still for a few minutes, hoping more information might materialize. Finally, he pressed down three times on the question mark and sat there patiently as the windscreen wipers laboured against the snow.
Three beeps again. Three new words: Instructions after Christmas.
Freddy had been expecting something like this for some time now. He was aware that the customer in London had not paid for the latest deliveries, that there were very few other contracts in sight and that Pepino & Schultz was going through a rough patch.
He waited a while longer in his van, feeling lost, when a third – definitive – text appeared: Go home.
This was what he had been dreading since the first message. Having to return home, several hours from here, to await new instructions. Parking his van in the garage below his house. Turning on the lights in his kitchen. Staring at the two chairs tucked under the table while the coffee heated up.
All this seemed more than he could cope with.
What he couldn’t see was the small, black, white-bellied crossbow, flying above the van at the same moment. A stray swallow in winter.
Despite the splendour of the snow, which she was discovering for the first time, and the soft glide of flake over feathers, Gloria knew that she wouldn’t be able to hold out much longer. For swallows, the only border that exists is an invisible, moving one. It is the border that delimits the regions of the world where the temperature is warmer than ten degrees – separating them from the rest of the planet. In the course of the seasons, this border keeps shifting, advancing or receding, like a dangerous floating net. Demarcating the no-go zone.
Gloria had dived into this forbidden world, but a small persistent voice inside her kept on saying: “Someone is waiting for me, through the snow.”
Night had fallen by the time Gloria entered the village. She needed to find shelter. Her strength was faltering.
It was a deep, low sound that guided Gloria: an organ led her to the lights of a church. She circled the clock tower two or three times, blinded by the snow. She hadn’t forgotten how treacherous stained glass could prove for the wings of birds, even on Christmas nights.
For the first time, Gloria was having doubts as to why she was here. As the sound of singing reached her over the whistling of the wind, she continued in her search for an opening. She thought she had found refuge in a hole in the slate roof, but the stone was so cold and her body temperature kept plummeting, so she threw herself into the storm once more.
On completing a final aerial loop, she noticed a rectangle of shrinking white light in a neighbouring street.
A garage door about to close.
Freddy d’Angelo was sitting at home in his kitchen. He was listening to the rattling of two ravioli tins in a saucepan of boiling water. The neon strip light kept blinking behind his chair. He had retrieved the Sinatra cassette from the van and inserted it into the portable cassette player on the kitchen radiator. He would switch it on after he had caught the bursts of carols wafting over from the neighbouring church.
What was he going to do with the rest of his life?
This world was no longer intended for someone like him. And if the ice creams of Pepino & Schultz were about to disappear, what would be left of life as Freddy had known it? He thought about the one hundred days he had just spent without talking to anyone.
He was waiting for something to happen.
Just then the light blinked off. The kitchen was plunged into darkness and a deafening noise made the tiled floor beneath his feet vibrate.
Freddy immediately recognized this sound: a foghorn, the siren signal of a departing ship.
It was the horn he had picked up at a general store in Marseilles, thirty years earlier. Its blast had saved his life several times over, when heavy goods vehicles were blindly overtaking him on the motorway. But Freddy’s stroke of genius had been to connect the horn to the van’s refrigeration unit, as an early warning system in case of electricity cuts. He had devised this scheme the day after delivering a load of melted ice cream to a brasserie on the Champs-Élysées. A wave of purple cream had spilled onto the pavement, to the cheers of bystanders. Freddy still woke up in the middle of the night thinking about it, and he had sworn that he would never again endure such humiliation.
Freddy d’Angelo picked up a torch, lit a candle to leave on the table and headed downstairs. The electrics for the entire house had cut out at the same time as the van and the horn wouldn’t stop blaring. Freddy swept the garage with the beam of his torch. Next, he opened the van door on the driver’s side and lowered a control lever under the steering wheel.
Absolute silence was restored.
Freddy pulled down a ladder and climbed onto the roof of the driver’s cab. The air-conditioning unit was up there – as was, most likely, the cause of the power cut. The unit sometimes swallowed stray scraps or dead leaves from the road, causing the electrics to short-circuit. But, at a glance, nothing in this spick-and-span garage could have been sucked in by the ventilation system.
He rolled up his sleeves, gently pushing his fist inside the body of the air-conditioning unit.
He paused, closed his eyes and hesitated before withdrawing his hand just as carefully.
Between his fingers, illuminated by the torch, he held a ball of feathers that was still warm. A bird with a white belly. In the middle of this freezing night, it must have sought refuge in the warm air tunnel – triggering the blackout.
Right there, in the hollow of his hand, Freddy could sense the energy that comes with great struggles and journeys, as well as the relaxation that follows a supreme effort. He suddenly felt tears welling up in his eyes… The certainty that what he had been waiting for was finally happening: paths crossing, lives colliding with his own. An event. Something.
