Fly-Fishing the 41st Read online

  “Yes,” I said, “claro.”

  The official stamped my license caja rural de Granada, and handed it to me. I paid him the necessary pesetas.

  Two hours later I was in the small town of Rio Frio through which the Rio Frio flowed. I touched the water. It was indeed a cold river.

  Old men and women, bent over a railing by a bridge, threw balls of bread to the trout. I talked with some fly fishermen who were having a bite to eat on a bench, their rods leaning up against a nearby tree. A young boy displayed his father’s catch to me, carried in a reed basket.

  “Truchas arco-iris,” the boy declared proudly, pointing to the fish. They were beautiful trout, but not what I was expecting. The rainbow trout was introduced from America.

  “I hope to catch the native trout,” I said.

  “Oh, trucha común,” said the father. “I don’t know if there are any left.”

  “What do I need to do to get a permit to fish here?” I asked the fisherman.

  “Talk to the warden,” he said. “He’s the man in the green uniform. His name is Pépé.”

  Pépé was in the warden’s shack, his belly spilling over his belt. He wiped the underside of his big round nose with his hand, disturbing a neatly combed Dalí-style mustache.

  “What can I do for you?” he said.

  “I’d like to fish Rio Frio.”

  The little wooden shack had corkboards full of photos of fishermen holding big rainbow trout. “You need to make a reservation,” he said, licking his finger with his tongue and flipping some papers. “Only fifteen people can fish the stream per day. As you can see, Friday is a popular day,” he added, looking at me as if I didn’t understand. “Everyone is fishing for Friday dinner.”

  He looked into a little book of appointments. “Tomorrow we have only six anglers. Would you like to fish tomorrow?”

  “I want to fish Sunday.”

  “Sunday is just four days from Christmas, everyone is shopping, no one else is scheduled for that day.”

  “I’d like to fish Sunday,” I repeated.

  “Very well,” Pépé said. “I’ll meet you here in the guardhouse Sunday morning at nine. You won’t want to fish much earlier than that; it’s too cold before the sun comes up and the trout won’t be biting.”

  ALHAMBRA

  I had come in part to Granada to see the Moorish palace of the Alhambra. Its many fountains, bubbling springs, and reflection pools amid the orange trees and myrtle hedges harnessed and expressed without words the beauty and language of water.

  Toward the middle of the thirteenth century, and just after his return from the siege of Seville, the Moorish sultan of Granada, known as Alhamar, commenced building the splendid palace of the Alhambra. By the early nineteenth century it was in ruins, until Washington Irving arrived in Granada and unveiled its secrets and histories with his prose. I read Irving’s tales of love between princes and princesses and anecdotes of daily life in the palace while I was sitting in the palace itself.

  “I had repeatedly observed,” Irving wrote, “a long lean fellow perched on the top of one of the towers, maneuvering two or three fishing-rods…. It seems that the pure and airy situation of this fortress has rendered it…a prolific breeding-place for swallows and martels, who sport about its towers in myriads…. To entrap these birds with hooks baited with flies is one of the favorite amusements of the ragged ‘sons of the Alhambra,’ who…have thus invented the art of angling in the sky.”

  I had walked there from my hotel and entered the palace through airy arches and between tall slender cypress. It was a labyrinth of passageways and courtyards that confused its visitor into a fiction. All about, too, was the sound of water as it flowed through chutes between trimmed hedges and fragrant orange groves. I understood that as a people of arid climates the Moors coveted water as others did jewels, and that, as Muslims, water was the synthesis of all things pure. The Koran reserved the parable of water for describing paradise—a place with gardens of flowers and fruits where it flowed without end. Throughout the palace, water was enshrined by the architecture, which forced it to make all manner of bubbling and gurgling music as it slid through long pools and small channels cut in stone.

  I stopped to rest on a bench and watched the goldfish in the pools. They gathered and glinted near the surface in the low rays of sun. I walked deeper into the maze of fruits, flowers, fragrances of citrus, green arbors, myrtle hedges, delicate air, and rushing waters. I explored the half-lit tunnels and passageways, the courts and terraces, and towers high over Granada. Water ran in cascades down the steps of a stairway and funneled through the handrails. Everywhere water was spurting and gushing, pleading from dark cavernous corners; sun-bedecked, algae-strewn, reflecting the blue sky, the orange trees, and the white palace walls. The cry of water was heard throughout, and all of Andalusia. It was heard beneath the wheat, between orange and olive trees, in the lachrymose song of the Gypsy, the strings of their guitars, and the words of their native poet Federico García Lorca in his poem “La Guitarra”:

  Llora monotona

  como llora el agua,

  como llora el viento

  sobre la nevada.

  Sunday morning, I was on the bank of Rio Frio again, blowing on my hands to warm them so I could string the line through the guides of my fly rod. Above the river were orchard hills covered with olives and small stone houses with red-tile roofs. The olive foliage was a soft muted green as if the leaves had been lightly dusted with flour and the rows of them appeared soft like strings of clouds.

  “It’s too cold,” Pépé said, “for me, anyway.” He started to walk away. “I’ll leave you to your fishing, buena suerte.”

  The sun had just risen a finger’s width above the orchard hill and was not yet strong. As it rose higher it would warm the air and the water; insects would hatch from the stream and trout and swallows would eat them. I headed upstream on foot to wait for that synthesis of events.

  The river split into two smaller streams. I chose to take the right fork because it looked neglected. Bushes had grown over it and grasses grew wild on the banks. I pushed through the forest of dense scrub until it cleared, as the stream meandered through an olive grove. I stopped there and stared into a large dark pool for some time until I saw another man’s reflection in it.

  It was an old man on the opposite bank walking his goats to the river. After they had drunk their fill, he led them up a hill through the olives.

  I walked upstream, beyond the goatherd, under an oak forest, my feet crunching dried leaves as I went. The pools in the stream became even deeper and darker and the trees grew thicker and closer to the bank. In one pool I saw several trout making neat swirls as they rose to take emerging mayflies.

  I rigged up my fly rod, tying a small dry fly to the line. Then, taking care not to hook the branch of one of the scrubby oaks, I cast my fly into the pool. It landed softly and floated over where the trout were feeding. One took it, gently and swiftly. When it had tired, I steered it to my hand, and held it. It was not the native trout, but a rainbow. I knocked it on the head with a stone and put it in a pocket of my vest. Then I walked farther upstream, through fields of overturned sandy soil.

  The pools became clearer and shallower upstream and the olive trees on the banks grew in girth, twisted and pitted with ghoulish craters. The message in Spanish that fishing was prohibited was printed on signs nailed to several trees. Perhaps up here, I thought, far above the village, there were native trout. But as I continued upstream, the signs became more numerous and there was a small house up ahead. I began to feel uncomfortable and after walking several more yards decided to return to the guardhouse.

  “How did you fare?” Pépé said when I returned.

  “I got one.”

  “Oh, a good rainbow trout,” he said, peering in my vest pocket. “Your first trout in Spain?”

  “Yes,” I affirmed, though I was thinking that I wished I’d caught a native.

  I brought my American tr
out to the restaurant where I had gone two nights before and they agreed to cook it for me. I asked for the waiter-fisherman but he was not there. The trout was prepared con vino y romero, with wine and rosemary, and I devoured it. Then I returned to my room to read.

  Don’t sound desperate when you call the French girl, my inner voice said, though you are in need of some company.

  I got out of bed, walked to the telephone, and dialed her number.

  “Allo,” darted a crackly voice at the other end of the line. “Allo,” she said again, but she sounded cool and foreign like the drafty hallway. I feared she had returned to her life as a medical student and forgotten the young man on the airport bus.

  “This is James,” I finally replied. “I met you a couple of weeks ago on the bus. We sat together.”

  “Of course,” she said. It was Yannid again, the blue overcoat, the persimmon-colored cheeks. “I assume you arrived in Spain?”

  “Yes, I’m calling you from Granada.”

  “I wish I were in Spain. It’s cold here. I have long shifts in the hospital and exams coming up, but that’s more than you want to know. How are you? Honestly?”

  “I was thinking about you while fishing today,” I told her. “That I’d like to come visit you after Christmas. I’d like to see you when I come to Paris.”

  “I’m not sure if I’ll be here when you arrive. Mom likes to spend the holidays in Belgium with my sister and me. I don’t like to go but I probably will. We return shortly after the New Year. And you, where are you spending Christmas?”

  “I’m going to Italy; my friend has a house in Tuscany.”

  “Oh, yes, you told me.” Yannid paused for some moments. I sensed that she was thinking. “I told you, you know”—she paused again—“you don’t have to stay in a dingy hotel when you come to Paris. I have room in my apartment in Rouen, you just have to wait until I get back.” She paused again, this time for longer. “And I hope you don’t expect anything.”

  “Expect anything.” I gulped, my heart racing. “No.”

  “Because it’s kind of radical to come all the way from Italy and not expect anything.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” I said, and laughed. “But if I do, then I can say that I don’t expect anything, but that I do like you. I should tell you that.”

  “Good,” she said with a more official voice. “Even if I go to Belgium with Mom, I will be back in Rouen by the third of January. Call me when you get to Paris and we’ll arrange to meet up on the first weekend. I’ll take you for a drive in Normandy and then you can settle in. Okay? Good-bye for now. Oh, and merry Christmas.”

  TUSCANY

  Before I’d left on my trip, my friend Larry Ashmead asked if I’d like to spend Christmas with him and his friend Walter at their home in Tuscany. He could take me eel fishing. I flew to Rome on Christmas Eve and drove north in a rental car, along seemingly endless hedges of oleander, to a wide-open rural countryside.

  Larry’s home was an old farmhouse in the village of Cosona. It was like others on the nearby Tuscan hills, a stone building on a terraced hill ringed by cypress and olive trees.

  Larry greeted me at the door. It was the first time I had seen his warm, inviting look outside of New York. He walked me through his fifteenth-century farmhouse over wide rugs in somber earth tones. He introduced me to his friend Walter, a retired artist and entrepreneur. They had arrived from America the night before.

  We sat in couches by the fireplace to rest, eating hunks of parmesan cheese and drinking a local red wine. Olive wood burned a blue flame and warmed the hearth.

  “You should know,” Walter told me, “that when Larry and I bought the house five years ago, we shined a light down into the cistern and saw goldfish swimming down there. That’s the only fish I’ve seen in Tuscany since we started coming here, but I’m no authority.”

  “Well, if you can’t catch the goldfish,” Larry suggested, “we can go visit the eel pots down at Lake Trasimeno; the Italians are crazy about eels.”

  I took a walk in the early evening down the side of the hill below the house. The tall cypress were almost black against a platinum sky, like sleek dark fishes pursuing the stars. The distant hills were dry, and still bathed in a hint of roseate light from the setting sun.

  The next morning, Christmas morning, was bright and clear and the distant hills were a soft violet color. Larry, Walter, and I piled into a Fiat and drove to Lake Trasimeno to go fishing. There was a pier on the lake from which we could see where the fishermen had set their eel pots. The traps were marked by tall sticks that protruded from the milky blue water.

  “The eel is a traveler,” Larry proclaimed. “You know they spawn in the Sargasso Sea and the young come up the freshwater rivers, even to this little lake in Tuscany, just like they do up the Hudson in New York.”

  I was casting a small minnowlike lure into the lake when a man driving by on the road stopped his old Land Rover and joined us by slow steps at the lake’s edge. He was wearing a jacket and tie.

  “You’re casting in a good spot,” he said, “most of the lake is shallow but here it is multo profundo. Let the lure sink and bring it in slowly and maybe you will catch a pike. Piano, piano,” he repeated softly. I reeled in my line and watched the lure flash and flutter in the water. Then I cast out again, cranking the reel handle more slowly.

  “Piano.” He pushed his hands down in the air as if he were testing the softness of a pillow.

  On the morning of St. Stephen’s Day, the day following Christmas, I took an early walk to the village of Santa Anna and a small church there locally famous for its frescoes. The rolling hills were quiet and blanketed by a light frost. Were it not for the sounds of distant gunshots, I would have thought Tuscany was still asleep. The reports were so distinct it seemed as though you could follow them with your eyes across the smooth hills.

  Then I saw a hunter crawling out of an old Land Rover, slipping with his dog into a pocket of brush in the open countryside. He wore a green waxed jacket, wool pants, and leather boots. Others plodded across the hillside shouldering their guns, making straight tracks through the soft, newly tilled clayish soil, while their spaniels, limber and amber eyed, crisscrossed the countryside intent on the smells of game in the still air.

  Toward midmorning the frost was all but gone, lingering only in the shadows of houses and barns. Finding that the church with the frescoes was closed, I returned to the house for lunch.

  Larry and Walter had prepared a big ham, which they had carried from New York. The smell of the baking pig filled the brick-arched interior of the old house. We ate more pici with melted pecorino cheese and swilled more Tuscan wine with an arugula salad sprinkled with black truffle oil.

  Larry said, knowing I was leaving the next morning for Paris, “Your last chance for a fish in Tuscany is the goldfish in the cistern. Shall we try for him?”

  I explained to Larry that it wasn’t the kind of fishing I normally did, but it was a worthy exercise and I might as well try. He had found the key to the cistern top and, before I had my rod rigged with a hook and a small bit of ham, he had unlocked it and was staring into the dark black hole.

  “Try a bigger piece,” Larry suggested, watching me bait my hook. “I remember it being a pretty big goldfish.” I lowered the line into the water and left the rod while we went inside to warm up by the fire.

  We sat by the fire for a while and I talked about where I planned to go when the weather improved the next summer. Larry offered no opinions or suggestions; he just listened.

  “Let’s go see how the line is,” he began, after a while, so we went out to the cistern. I picked up my rod to reel in the line and, to my surprise, something was pulling at the other end. I lifted the tip of the rod and watched it tick as the fish swam in tight circles. I put the rod down and took the line in my hand, pulling a sleek black fish from the water. It was an eel.

  As I looked down into the cistern, there was enough light from a lamp on the house for me t
o see my reflection in the bottom. It was like looking into the round hole of the Pantheon’s ceiling and seeing your reflection in the sky. I asked Larry how he thought an eel had ever got in there. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m just your editor.”

  The next day when I left, he gave me a book of poems by Eugenio Montale.

  “There’s a famous one about eels,” he said.

  WHAT ISA FISH?

  My father’s heroes were seduced into learning by a curiosity about the natural world, and he described the ongoing process of that seduction as a person’s loucura (Portuguese for craziness). Darwin’s was beetles, Nabokov’s butterflies, Audubon’s birds. As a child in Brazil my father fell in love with birds, and birding continued to be his raison d’être in New York, where he grew up, married, and had children, and in Connecticut, where he divorced.

  You are lucky to have one too, my father said. Yours is fish.

  When in its element, the fish is seen by us in glimpses—an impression of fins and scales gliding over coral, a flash of silver and blue emerging from the depths of the ocean, materializing from the gravel at the bottom of a mountain brook.

  Fish are also the creatures, some say, from which we have evolved. The limbed lungfish has been left along the evolutionary line as some clue of our connection to life in a primordial soup. We ourselves are nurtured, fishlike, in fluid before we breathe air, and are constructed largely of the medium within which fish play.

  Fish are both the object of human fantasy—the mermaid, half golden locks and breasts, half scales and tail—and the representation of the sublime and horrifying, the white leviathan of Ahab’s monomania. For Far Eastern peoples, the fish is the symbol of peace and order, strength and perseverance. It inhabits Japanese Zen garden pools. It is the meal of good fortune on the Chinese New Year, the auspicious symbol of boys’ day in Japan, the representation of the eye for Tibetan Buddhists. The fish is holy for Jews on Passover, the early symbol of Christianity, the miracle of Jesus, the food that bestows immortal life, the Friday dinner. It is Pisces, the twelfth sign of the zodiac, which denotes the end of the astrological year and also the beginning.