The Muse of the Maze Sample

Larry Buttrose

Contents

About

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Afterword

Memoir: Meeting Robert Graves

About the Author

Copyright

This edition first published in 2016 by

BryshaWilson Press ABN 60 010 047 010

bryshawilsonpress.com

Copyright © 2016 by Larry Buttrose

Photographs © Larry Buttrose

Cover design © BryshaWilson Press

The right of Larry Buttrose to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

All rights reserved. Apart from any use as permitted by the Copyright Act of 1968, no part of this work may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without written permission from the publisher.

- National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

- Creator: Buttrose, Larry, 1952- author

- Title: The Muse of the Maze/ Larry Buttrose

- ISBN: 9781925535037 (ebook: epub)

- Subjects: Graves, Robert, 1895-—Appreciation—Fiction. Poets—Fiction. Australians—Fiction. Barcelona (Spain)—Fiction.

- Dewey Number: A823.3

About

The Muse of the Maze

by Larry Buttrose

Jack Driscoll, a young Australian poet, goes to Spain hoping to obtain a poet’s blessing from Robert Graves, who lives on Mallorca. The story unfolds through Jack’s encounters with three separate women from three different worlds.

Stranded in Barcelona, he embarks on an emotional and artistic odyssey that flings him into an adventure with overtones of classical tragedy and shadowed by the concept of the triple Muse, as espoused by Graves in The White Goddess.

The novel is set in the mid-1970s when the BBC was making the I Claudius series, which popularised Graves’s work as poet, novelist, classicist and critical thinker, with a large, new international readership.

When BryshaWilson Press approached author Larry Buttrose for the publishing rights to re-issue his novel The Maze of the Muse (originally published in 1998 by Flamingo, an imprint of HarperCollins) as an eBook, he revisited the manuscript and revised it extensively. The result is a distinctly new book, which also includes an Afterword telling the true story of the author’s meeting with Robert Graves in 1976. In recognition of all this, the new edition has been renamed The Muse of the Maze.

To my darlings Belle and Ada

Do not remind me of the sea, for the black

sorrow rises in the land of olives, from

under the murmur of leaves.

Lorca

One

The beautiful is nothing but the first apprehension of the terrible

Rilke

It was July, high summer. Franco was still warm in his grave, and punk rock was crying out to be born. We had hitched a great ride in Perpignan, a Mercedes, one of those big old ones, a wintergreen panzer tank with leather seats and fat chrome exhausts. The bloke at the wheel was forty, solidly Spanish, vaguely sleazy, but he was going to Barcelona and we were going to Barcelona, and so there we were. Eva sat up front and did the chat while I half-dozed in the back. Perfect. Well, almost. In this case the nagging imperfection was the truly woeful Eagles tape the driver played while he and Eva smoked cigarettes and shouted over it in Spanish.

‘What’s he saying?’

‘That he’s got five cars, three houses and a yacht,’ Eva called back. ‘And that there’s a position vacant as his secretary.’

‘Sure. Missionary.’

The driver turned round and grinned at me with entirely black teeth, straight out of a Spaghetti Western, and spoke some more Spanish to Eva.

‘Now what’s he saying?’

‘That he thinks we should know he’s carrying drugs across the Spanish border.’ She listened again. ‘Two kilos of hash and a few hundred grams of Colombian coke.’

‘Jesus Christ, where?’

‘In the trunk. He suggests we just play it cool.’

‘Well I suggest we get out. Now.’

‘Sorry. Not such a good idea.’

She pointed behind us, and I turned and saw a French police car, a small black Renault tailing the Mercedes with a mean expression fixed on its grille.

‘Oh shit.’

‘Uh-huh,’ she nodded. ‘Truly fruit.’

Eva was from San Diego. A college student, supple, fine and Latin dark. I’d met her sleeping out in a field near Montpellier. Our bags had crept towards each other during the night, zipped together before dawn. Just forty-eight hours later we faced the prospect of spending the next decade in adjacent medium security prisons.

I saw the lights of the border coming up. In the rear-view mirror, the driver grinned at me again. What was going on? Were we being set up? Planted? But curiously, something else came into my mind—the word Eva had just used, “fruit”. She used it habitually to denote something distasteful, such as, over the oily omelette we had eaten at a roadside shack: ‘Yuk, now this is really fruit.’ Annoyed, I had replied, ‘No it’s not. It’s an omelette.’

The driver braked late and hard, and we joined the queue at the border. Up the line I saw square-jawed toy soldiers posturing. Drivers stepped lively from cars. Boots, or “trunks” as Eva had Americanly put it, were being opened and inspected.

Eva flicked down the vanity mirror behind the sun visor, deliberately unbuttoned her blouse to reveal an enticing shadowland of cleavage, and applied scarlet lipstick. She swivelled round and lisped playfully to me. ‘So how do I look, senor officer?’

Behind us, the French police car pulled up close, locking us in the queue of cars, headlights glaring into the Mercedes. All our driver did was grin. I thought about grabbing Eva’s hand, the two of us making a run for it … No, stupid, they’d chase us, catch us. Arrest us. Shoot us. Besides, in the boot, resting innocently against our driver’s stash, was my backpack, and in it were two books I did not want to lose. One was a definitively slim volume of my own poems, Polaroids. The other was Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, his “historical grammar of poetic myth”. My pagan bible, except it was so complex and hard to read that I’d never actually got right through it. Well, if I was going to get busted and put in gaol, at least I’d have plenty of time to read the whole thing …

Two

Only mysteries make us alive

Lorca

I made my way toward the top of Las Ramblas, and asked directions to the Four Cats Cafe. Olivia had said it was the easiest way of finding her place. ‘You will see many tourists in the Four Cats,’ she had said on the phone. ‘They are shamefully overcharged, but they don’t mind because Picasso designed the menu.’

I was late, and not merely fashionably. I had been in two minds about coming at all—I wasn’t in any proper state yet to socialise. But I was alone in Barcelona now that Eva had gone, and as all I was really doing was awaiting word from Mallorca, my schedule was hardly taxing.

I arrived at a handsome apartment block of finely cut sandstone, with polished brass outside and panes of darkly glittering glass. Her apartment was two flights up a white marble staircase. As I rang the doorbell I could hear quite a gathering inside, people talking and laughing over flamenco guitar from a record player. I wondered whether anyone would hear the bell, but the door was answered promptly enough, by Olivia herself.

‘Ah, Jack.’

‘Sorry I’m late.’

She wore a filmy silver-grey top and a narrow-waisted straight cut skirt of black silk that rustled at her bare feet. My attention lingered on her perhaps a moment too long, and she noticed it. She held onto my arm as I leant forward to kiss her on either cheek.

‘You’re not,’ she replied.

The entry hall was dark, lit only by a fat church candle on a tall brass candlestick. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. Olivia took me easily by the hand and led me down an equally dark corridor, into a generously proportioned dining room, itself candlelit and floored with parquetry. The room was dominated by a massive dining table, with at least twenty people sitting along it. The air rang with shouts, wisecracks, laughter. The stereo was turned up loud. I found it was true that I was not late: the invitation had been for nine, this was ten, yet everyone was just sitting down to their soup.

‘You see, your timing is impeccable,’ Olivia whispered in my ear. ‘Now, here is your seat, next to mine.’

Olivia’s was at the head of the table, with a young, dark-haired woman at her right, and myself at her left. My seat gave a view out a wide window in which I saw the purple dome of the starlit sky, with the moon hanging big and low as if cut out and stuck there by a child’s hand. In its light the spire of the gothic Cathedral shone pale and hazy, blue over the old town. With a tilt of my head I could see the gargoyled stone window casement of the Four Cats in the alley below.

No sooner had Olivia sat down than she got up and walked out of the room. Not knowing anyone else, I was at a loss for a moment. But a discussion nearing argument pitch was brewing at the far end of the table, and I tuned in.

‘It’s not an aggressive animal! They are vegetarians!’ a Nordic blonde woman declared. ‘They do not want to be chased around a sandpit by men in tight suits with sequins sewn on them like girls.’

‘But you must admit,’ the Englishman in the white linen jacket opposite her said, ‘it has a graceful, balletic quality. Essential drama too—you only have to look at the Goyas. And great bravery on the part of the matador.’

‘Balls!’ an American male voice interjected from the far end of the table. ‘The bull’s going for the cape, not the man. It’s melodrama.’

‘Yes!’ the blonde woman nodded eagerly. ‘To me it is the torment of the innocent by the impotent. If only the matadors felt as comfortable with their cocks as the bulls feel with theirs, there would be no fight!’

‘But it’s a side of the national character,’ the linen-suited man persisted. ‘A part of Spain.’

‘A brutal part!’ the woman shot back.

‘Many outsiders have loved the bullfight too,’ the Englishman persisted. ‘Orson Welles … Hemingway …’

‘Q.E.D. the brutal,’ the American quipped, and everyone guffawed, some hooting laughter, other shouting disagreement.

The conversation subsided to its previous buzz, and I was taking in the collection of oil paintings that lined the walls when a deep voice reached me from a couple of seats down of the table.

‘Hey Jack, feeling better?’ It was Jeff.

‘I am, yes. Thanks.’

‘You just needed time.’ He drew a stray blond lock behind his ringed ear. ‘Girl leaves, you need time. It’s a fuck-up, but it happens.’

We talked. Jeff had grown up in New York, ‘out in Queens’. After finishing high school he had just gone on the road. ‘Kerouac’s got a lot to answer for,’ he grinned. ‘So’s Ginsberg. So’s Dostoyevsky for that matter!’

He had lived in Denver, San Francisco, New Orleans, New Mexico. He’d been a cowboy, a janitor, a deckhand on a cruise ship. He’d picked oranges, boned meat, driven taxis, worked a ferris wheel. Just before his thirtieth birthday he went back to New York to study literature, decided it was ‘bullshit’ the second week and bought a ticket to Paris where he had lived in a ‘cupboard’, and started to do what he’d wanted to do all along, which was to write...

…She led me out of the room and back down the dark corridor.

‘How long have you lived here?’

‘In this apartment, seven years. In Barcelona, too many. I used to have a place up near Gracia, in La Pedrera. It was pleasant, but I wanted more space. Besides, the Passeig de Gracia is a big street and noisy with too much traffic. What is your home place?’

‘Sydney.’

‘Ah yes. I have heard of that. A strange name, Sid-knee. What does it mean?’

‘It was named after a British aristocrat.’

‘We French cut the heads off ours. And the next thing they grew new ones.’

We passed three bedrooms running off the hall, the door of one of them shut. ‘These are for the guests. There are always guests. Many guests. My son is staying now. You have met him?’

‘No.’

‘He is so clever, always so amusing. And of course, he is what the Americans call gay.’

‘Homosexual.’

‘Yes, homosexual. And very gay too,’ she laughed.

I saw two cast iron candle-stick holders bolted to the hallway wall, each one like two snakes curled around each other, with a candle burning within a delicate cream lampshade.

‘Copies of Gaudi’s lamps in the Palau Guell,’ she said. ‘But to me the lamps are just about the only good thing about that palace. Oh, and the cellars, that are like a Roman catacomb. They are very peaceful, those cellars. And up on the roof it’s quite pleasant too. He put up there one very amusing thing—a black bat wind-vane. But you know, I think Gaudi did better outdoors than indoors. It is not such a good building inside, that Palau. One moment gothic as a big old cathedral organ, the next fussy and decorative. Even the Guells did not like it much, I think. It is a museum now. You can go and see it if you like, just off the Ramblas down in the Raval.’

‘The Raval? Where is that?’

‘You mean you have not been down there? Oh, but you must explore in there. We call it our Chinatown, even though we have no Chinese. It is marvellous in there. Besides all the smugglers and pimps and putas, it has always been a haunt for artists. Genet loved it, needless to say. The Blue Period of Picasso was painted there—the faces are the faces of El Raval. And if you like you can go into the London Bar and have a drink with the ghost of Gaudi. But be careful down in the Raval in the night, or you might become a ghost yourself.’

We had arrived at a heavy, carved wooden door, studded with brass in the Moroccan style. ‘I hope you will like this place,’ she said. She turned a brass doorknob sculpted in the shape of an eagle’s head and we went in.

Compared with some of the other rooms I had seen, it was modest in size, but the walls gleamed with blue and white diamond patterned tiles.

‘Azulejos from Portugal,’ Olivia said. ‘Now, look up.’

I saw the ceiling was made up of panels of magpies, simply but exquisitely painted. ‘Inspired by Sintra,’ she said.

‘Who is Sintra?’

‘No Jack, Sintra is a place. The old royal city in Portugal, up in the mountains above Lisbon. A beautiful place with tall forests and cool breezes. Byron went there. He wrote about it in Childe Harold. He called it “glorious Eden”. Do you know the poem?’

‘I read it at university, yes.’

‘It is a magnificent poem, is it not?’

‘Well, a lot of Byron isn’t really to my taste.’

‘Not to your taste?? You mean to say you don’t like Byron? She smiled in mock reproval. ‘You cannot say this and mean it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because Byron was a passionate man. A great man. One of the truly great poets. To say you do not like him … it is like saying that you do not like … I don’t know … wine.’ She feigned a quick worried look. ‘You do like wine, don’t you.’

‘Yes, I do like wine,’ I smiled.

‘Now, the magpies. In the old royal palace in Sintra, the Palacio Nacional, there is a very beautiful room, the Sala das Pegas, where the king used to hold his private audiences. On the ceiling there were painted panels of magpies. The kings of Portugal were able to gaze up at one hundred and thirty six magpies - myself, I must be content with only seven. But they are enchanting, are they not?’

‘Very.’

‘Now, there is a charming story about the Magpie Room, and how it got its name. You see, one day the Queen of Portugal caught the King kissing one of the court ladies. He protested that it was just “per bon”, a friendly kiss, an innocent one, like this.’ Her lips brushed mine. ‘You see? That is the kind of kiss the King said it was—innocent. But the incident was enough to get the ladies of the court chattering—like magpies, the King said, and it is after them that the magpies were painted, all of them gossiping “per bon, per bon, per bon” …’

‘Did she believe him, the Queen?’

‘She would have been a fool to. No, I cannot imagine she would have believed him. No sensible woman would.’

I noted that the room was empty, and asked what it was used for.

‘This is my yoga room. Do you do yoga?’

‘I tried it once, but I didn’t have the discipline to continue. But I imagine it’s very good for you.’

‘Do you know what I believe are the best things for the body? Yoga, wine and love. But don’t ask me in what order,’ she smiled.

She led the way out into the corridor, and moved on toward the far end and the final door. I saw that her grey top, which was high at the front and flattered her long and elegant neck, plunged at the back. Hers was lithe and fluid as a dancer’s, the graceful musculature perfectly traced out like an anatomical sketch, beneath milky smooth skin.

‘Such a … beautiful apartment,’ I said. ‘And so big. Big enough to be a hotel. In fact it’s bigger than my entire pension.’ Then I added—and felt instantly gauche—‘it must have cost a fortune.’

‘Oh, I do not own this place. I rent it. Private property—it is theft, as Proudhon said. To me there are only three legitimate uses for money. Good food and wine, books and works of art—and of course, travel.’

‘But what do the owners think of all the things you’ve done and added … the magpies for instance?’

‘The owner is a friend of mine. He is here tonight. He loves what I’ve done with it.’ She opened another brass-studded door. ‘This is my bedroom.’

It was dark and spacious within. The moon and stars shone in the expanse of window glass at the foot of her bed. The only artifical light came from three paper lanterns on a stand in a corner. I realised I had not seen an electric bulb in the entire apartment.

‘I do not enjoy electric light,’ Olivia said. ‘It offends the eyes.’

The room was Japanese-style, spare to the point of monastic austerity, the only items of furniture being a double futon on a low base, and a black-lacquered wardrobe with Oriental picture doors. The floorboards were raw dark timber, unpolished. There wasn’t even a chair.

‘So minimal,’ I said.

She sat down on the bed. ‘Please, come, sit.’

I sat down beside her, and for a few seconds neither of us spoke. I liked the room. It possessed the cool and calm of stone.

‘So, are you enjoying our little gathering?’

‘Yes, I am, thank you. Do you get together often?’

‘Yes. Usually here. Sometimes elsewhere. Sometimes it’s everybody, like tonight. Other nights it is less, just a few people.’

She was looking at me intently, yet retained a feline ease. Her legs were comfortably crossed, her hand travelling languidly up to her face to tidy away a stray strand of hair before dropping back, slack-wristed. In the clean, bare room her eyes had the clarity of rainwater, and her face was youthful, candlelight smoothing away the fine lines of age.

As my eyes accustomed themselves to the light or lack thereof, I saw that unlike the dining room there was no surfeit of art here—only a single painting on the wall by her bed. I got up to look at it more closely. It was cubist, a little girl in a gold dress looking out from a background of rose, green and blue. One eye was red, and there was a red rose on her chest. She wore quite a self-satisfied look. Suddenly I knew, without a doubt, that it was by Picasso—an original. Even more astonishingly, as I gazed at it I saw a female figure in the background who might even resembled Olivia herself. Something about it, even in cubist form, captured her presence.

‘Is … is that … you there, in the painting?’

‘A very much younger me, yes. It’s one of his Las Meninas. After the famous Velazquez. Pablo did his own Maids of Honour series, nearly sixty of them I think.’

‘So you knew him.’

‘Yes.’

I felt her draw up by me in front of the painting. Our hips contacted, and I could feel the warmth of her body beneath her clothing. Turning, I was slightly surprised to find she was smoking a cigarette, and she read it in my face.

‘We all must have a little vice. Besides, it’s just one. Would you like one?’

‘No thank you.’

‘You don’t smoke?’

I shook my head. ‘What was he like, Picasso?’

‘What would you expect?’

‘Arrogant? Difficult? Impossible?’

‘All these,’ she said. ‘And wonderful. A joy.’

‘Where did you meet him?’

‘At the Four Cats.’

‘Were you lovers?’ I asked, quietly.

‘Oh, he was an old man by then,’ Olivia replied. ‘I met so many people back in those days... I was the waif ingenue. I was a dancer and a fashion model … people are so impressed by something as easy as the body. But it is all such a long time ago,’ she said. ‘I am forty-nine in December.’

I took her hand and kissed it. She looked up with an expression of mild surprise...

…Over the next few days I kept checking down at the docks, but the sole remaining ferry had scraped a freighter on its way out of port, and was itself out of action for a couple of nights. The ferry operators were pulling their hair out, as were the port authorities, the tourists, the road transport companies, and the poor marooned island dwellers just trying to get home. The camp beside the terminal had mushroomed into a satellite shanty town patrolled by the trigger-happy youths of the Guardia Civil, it was hot every day and there were no ferries at all now, only daily promises that soon, yes, there would be. And there was not a single airline seat to be got either. All I could do was sit still and attempt to be patient.

On my way back each night to that bed that had been ours, I thought about Eva, wondered if she was already back home in the US. I prayed to the probably godless void that she would write to me at the hotel, our last remaining point of contact. I tried to picture San Diego, but couldn’t. All that came up was some vaguely Mexican imagery, orange sand hemmed with a wavy blue sea. I remembered her teasing touch in the mornings, the tang in her voice. I missed her, badly, as badly as one could, swallowed up as she had been by that vast lost world that lay beyond the mountains that walled Barcelona. All I could do for now was lie on my back and wait and pray for a ship soon, for a telegram from Mallorca, a letter from America.

Meanwhile, I was becoming a regular chez Olivia. There was a gathering every few nights, sometimes the full complement of guests, sometimes only ten or so. There was always a reason for it, a visiting composer, someone’s gallery opening, an old friend passing through town. It was like a club. Everyone knew everyone. We drank, ate, smoked joints, argued, joked, danced.

One night as we sat alone in a corner, Olivia said Jeff had mentioned I was hoping to meet Robert Graves. I told her it appeared the arrangement had gone awry.

‘So what will you do?’

‘If I can’t get out to Mallorca soon, go back to London I suppose.’

‘And what will you do there?’

‘Work in pubs, like I did before.’

‘And your poetry?’

‘I’ll just have to see.’

She took my hand. ‘What a pity it has not worked out for you, with your meeting with him.’

‘Oh, it was a long shot in the first place anyway. That he’d really want to meet some unknown young poet from Australia.’

‘But he is constantly meeting all kinds of people.’

‘How do you know?’

She hesitated. ‘Well … you see … I know Robert. Or should I say, I used to.’

I looked up, startled. ‘Did you know him well?’

‘Quite well.’

‘How long ago?’

‘Oh, I have not seen him for many years.’

‘What … was he like?’

Her eyelids flickered. ‘Actually, I’m sorry, but if you do not mind, I would prefer not to talk about it.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

‘No. It’s all right. Perhaps some other time. But tonight I am already upset anyway.’ She got up and walked to the far side of the room. I thought for a moment she might be crying. ‘I hope you do not mind if I say this to you, but I am worried about Jeff.’

‘Why?’

‘He is drinking too much. Numbing himself, I suppose. Do you know, I give him his own study, a nice room to work in. I love to go and sit in there while he works, watch him at his writing. But now he sleeps so late, it’s afternoon before he gets up out of the bed.’

‘Perhaps it’s something temporary. Some news from America … his family or… ’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Have you seen him like this before?’

‘Yes. But not quite so bad.’

A surprising tear meandered down her cheek. She let it go on, then raised her hand and swished it away. I put my arms around her and held her a moment. When we parted she squeezed my hand and gave me a smile crinkled with anguish.

‘So there, you see the problems the writers cause. Robert with you. Jeff with me.’

I walked back to the Placa Real in a strange state of expectation that night. Here was an irony: I could not get to Graves himself, yet I had met someone who had been an intimate. I was so close to him here in Barcelona, yet I knew now I might only ever know him through Olivia, if she was willing to speak about him. It seemed perhaps the best I could hope for now might be to meet him by proxy.

* * *

With the passing days of late summer, I came to cherish Barcelona. Each morning I would pull back the shutters and venture out into the early sun and look down into the Placa Real. My eye always went first to the fountain in the middle. With the luxury of time here, I had noticed something about it that I had not before: it was supported by the Three Graces, the triple Muse Herself, three goddesses in stone, hand in hand and back to back, smiling blithely out. There they were, right below my window, before my very gaze, a personal shrine.

I was enjoying something else about Barcelona too: the liberation of living in a city where you don’t speak the language, being released from the tedium of life, all the news and chit-chat, the current catch-phrases, the cant of politicians.

Returning to London was an unpleasant prospect. It would already be cold, a mackintosh grey sky, gritty air and streets of slush and sleet. I could smell the rotten old carpet of the pubs, like a wet dog in need of a wash. Could I really take those smoky barns another winter long?

I could always go back to Australia, throw myself upon the mercy of my family. Yet that was another relationship that hadn’t worked out. My childhood had been arid as only life in an outer Canberra suburb can be. I grew up an only child in a bookless house on a treeless street. As an old Aborigine had once informed me at a bus stop: ‘The problem with you white cunts is you got no culture.’

My father had a job I found hard to describe in the schoolyard, "salesman or something". In point of fact he was a department store buyer, a position to which he had been promoted quite late in life from the sales floor. He was an anxious man. He bit his nails, toyed with his hair and drank too much. I remembered the mornings, with him showered and talcum powdered and rushing for work, and how his hands would quiver as he sweated over the knotting of his tie. He hated going to work, not so much because he didn’t like the job, but because he didn’t like having to deal with people face to face. His pet hate was neighbours—strangers, he called them—dropping by at night or on weekends. He shrank to the bedroom and locked the door. He could not abide popular music or kissing on television, would mutter a "tch", and go out to the kitchen for another beer. He played golf at weekends and devoted himself to the upkeep of the house.

On official documents, my mother described her job as "home duties". A nurse during the war who carried that can-do on with her, she was ever being drafted onto school and church committees. She had greyed with an acerbic dignity, although during her latter years she had privately come to lament that she had not left my father while she still could have. She retained a certain look for the man who ran the local plant nursery. I could not help but think the red roses in the front yard bloomed with her unspent passion.

I had done okay at school, not brilliantly but well enough to get accepted into university. I had studied Arts, with an extramural option in psychotropics. When I graduated I took to the road. My challenge to myself was to travel hard and live simply, and at the end of my grand tour make up my mind what to do next. The choice was to return to the Masters Degree on offer, this culminating in probable tenure in the Department of English, or else try to do what I had always wanted to, which was to write.

That is what I did on those warm, still afternoons when the shops pulled down their shutters and the old town drifted into siesta: I tried to write again from scratch, with no preconceptions, no prejudices, no goals or objectives. I was seeking that new voice, the voice of whoever I now was, the person sitting at this broken down table in this broken down hotel room above the broken down Placa Real, pen in hand and paper ready, staring down at the fountain, contemplating the faces of the Muses. And, I thought, if I cannot write here in Barcelona, then I really am not a poet, but rather what one of my uncles always told me I was, a birdbrain...

Three

Four

Five

From the deck I watched the last of the cars roll up through the ferry’s open bow. A few foot passengers filed on too, hippies with rucksacks and guitars, peasant men in old suits with the trouser cuffs fraying and women hefting cardboard cartons with new radios and cassette machines inside. The night was cold, the sky clouded over, the stars in purdah. A queasy pall of diesel emanated from below deck. Down in the harbour chop, black tongues of water licked the floridly rusted hull of the ferry.

I looked at the backpack at my feet. Beyond the boxes of books and stowed sacks of comics, the old scout hat and train set in a corner of my parents’ shed back in Canberra, almost everything I had in the world was in that backpack—my poems, my book, my copy of The White Goddess. This was a truly exultant moment. I was going to try to meet him, at last. I was going like the Tarot Fool, across the breach with everything I had on my back. Certainly in the future I would look back on this as the defining moment of my greatest freedom, when all my life could be hefted.

But for all that, I knew I was something else too now. Today I had allowed myself to be as much a prostitute as the women on the wall. A whore for poetry perhaps, but a whore. A whore now waiting for a whore. I tried to console myself that I was young and things do just happen to the young. But still, virtually to sell myself for a few thousand pasetas … who was the person doing these things? What was going on? Was I being washed down towards some moral falls, over which I would tumble into oblivion? I smiled at the melodrama, yet could not deny it some creeping validity.

The ferry whistle blew. There was no sign of Carla. I strained into the gloom up the wharf, but everyone who was coming seemed already on board, and I heard the announcement in Spanish, the standard one telling friends to get off as we were about to depart. Three people went down the gangplank and stood waving in a little clump on the dock. The whistle blew again and the gangplank rose. Crewmen threw off lines and the engines throbbed, the black water boiling up milky white. The ferry inched away from the dock, and still there was no Carla. Probably she hadn’t been allowed out after Frederico had found her with me. Perhaps she hadn’t wanted to come anyway. Or perhaps too it was a journey I was destined to make alone. Whatever, this rusted tub was nosing its way out of the harbour and on its way. I looked back as long as I could see into the night, but she did not arrive on the dock. She hadn’t come.

As the ferry began to pitch and roll on the open sea

I went up to the bar, and discovered Carla sitting alone with a glass of wine. I spotted her before she saw me, and stopped to look at her. She wore the overcoat over a plain black dress, flat shoes with no stockings. I saw no obvious luggage. It looked like she had left in a hurry. I watched her for a few seconds as she sipped her wine. I had not seen her more beautiful. Her red curls were so profuse, skin so pallid, neck slender, wrists and ankles so finely wrought. The eyes that turned to me were china blue, the lips that spoke the blood red of sangria.

‘It is cold tonight,’ she said. ‘Sit down and have a drink.’

I could only marvel at my good fortune, that such a creature had come to be with me. Her presence instantly eclipsed the tacky backdrop of the ferry, the smoky bar and slot machines, the rock drump from the jukebox, the smell of diesel and fried food. All I saw was her, heard was her voice, smelled was her.

‘Yes please,’ I said. ‘Anything.’

She ordered another glass of wine and I pulled up a stool beside hers.

‘You really came,’ I said.

‘You always say this.’

‘But how did you do it?’

‘Frederico told my mother how he found us together in that place, and to punish me she locked me in my room. But one of my sisters let me out, and to punish my mother I ran away.’

‘She’ll be angry?’

‘Very much angry. But that is for later.’

We drank as the ferry forged out into the Mediterranean, but soon found we were both very tired. It felt like I hadn’t slept in days. We bedded down on the floor in a dark corner of the main deck, using my backpack for a pillow, with Carla’s coat over us.

‘I really thought you hadn’t come,’ I said.

‘I was the same. When I could not find you anywhere,

I thought what am I to do now, go and see an old poet

by myself?’

She smiled, and I put my arm around her and kissed her. Her mouth was warm and soft.

‘Do you know that is the first time I have kissed you,’ I said.

‘Was it good?’

We kissed again, then once more. ‘Very.’

‘And now, please, I must sleep,’ she said. ‘I am so tired.’

‘Of course. Sleep.’

‘Gracias,’ she murmured, already adrift as a drowsy child at bedtime...

Six

Seven

Afterword

While The Muse of the Maze is fiction, its author Larry Buttrose did go to Mallorca as a young poet to meet Robert Graves, in the hope of getting his poet's blessing. This is his account of what happened:

Memoir: Meeting Robert Graves

by Larry Buttrose

Larry Buttrose and Robert Graves, 1976

1976

I stepped out onto the steep cobbled street outside the Villa Verde. I had arrived at the hostal’s door in the wilting afternoon heat of the day before, after having taken the overnight ferry from Barcelona, and the bus up from Palma, along with the locals in breeches and headscarves carrying bound clucking chickens on their laps.

I strolled down towards the centre of the village and the Cafe Del Monde. The hostal keeper had told me everyone in Deya spends at least an hour or so there every day, and thought it would be as good a place as any to begin my quest. After all the hitches and delays of my time back in Barcelona waiting for the letter from Graves’s secretary that hadn’t come, I sensed now the final obstacle might just be overcome.

I had only walked some twenty metres down from the Villa Verde when I saw a pale, pink-faced man staring absent-mindedly out his front window onto the laneway, drying teacups with a white tea-towel. I greeted him and he responded with a smile. He turned out to be English, quite. I explained that I was visiting Deya hoping to meet the poet Robert Graves. He replied that Robert would be calling for tea in less than half an hour, and would I be so kind as to join them...

About the Author

LARRY BUTTROSE

Larry Buttrose is an Australian writer, whose published works include poetry, novels and plays, as well as an extensive range of non-fiction and journalism.

He trained as a journalist with the ABC and holds a BA and PhD from the University of Adelaide.

National Library of Australia listing for Larry Buttrose

Wikipedia entry for Larry Buttrose

The range and quality of his output make Larry Buttrose one of the most versatile, accomplished and interesting authors writing in Australia today.

As a publisher of quality books of cultural worth, BryshaWilson Press is proud to issue The Muse of the Maze in eBook format, giving it the shelf life to take it to a new and wider readership.