70-30

By Rodney St Clair Ballenden

Arnau, an older man, embedded in the fantasy of the romantic poet, springs the barrier of reality to engage with Estel, a younger woman, struggling to overcome the strictures of her society and culture. 70-30 tells the story of their two dreams; the one of birth and the other of death. Estel, believes the purpose of life is to live for the love of a mother, a child, and to secure their material needs for the benefit of the greater society and environment into which they were born. Romance is for pretenders. Those who deny the reality of their circumstances are the pretenders and that, Arnau, the old man, as she calls him, is just a dreamer without direction. He tricks himself and not her.
And then, one day she defends him.
This triggers a series of meetings between Estel and the old man that spurs her lover, Digger, a municipal worker, to action. Using Arnau as the excuse, Digger embarks on a mission to exclude all foreigners from the village and from their cultural traditions. The nit de Sant Joan, celebrating the gift of fire, becomes a key festival of this struggle. Only the intervention of her mother persuades Estela to acknowledge the danger of her liaison with an older man, and she agrees to obey the rules of society, and distance herself from any further acquaintances with him.
Arnau, disguised as a simpleton, carries his burning log down the mountain, and joins in the festivities of the nit de Sant Joan. When he dances around the falla mayor in the village square, Estel sees an old man dancing with the devil, and joins Digger to throw him out of the village, and out of their lives, forever.
They ransack Arnau’s room, and find his notebook, the final piece of evidence needed to evict him. But, when Estel reads certain passages, she understands what he had tried to share with her, and goes in search of him to walk once more through the pathless woods.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rodney St Clair Ballenden
• Release date: Nov 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463185667

Rodney St Clair Ballenden

Rodney St Clair Ballenden was born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1947. In lieu of an academic career he traveled extensively through Europe, the United Sates of America and Greece. He married Colleen and returned to South Africa to farm, but the call of the wild drew him into a hermit existence placing him in extreme situations exposed to danger and the vagaries of storm and wind. From his observations on man and his relationship with the wilderness he began to write, and his books are available on the SmashWord platform as well as at Amazon. Rodney now lives in Greece.

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70-30

by

Rodney St Clair Ballenden

Copyright © 2019 cover, text and story by Rodney St Clair Ballenden.

All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. 70-30 is licensed for your personal enjoyment. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

Background to the Story:

The advent of love intrigues me.

When walking through the shopping mall or down the street, couples approaching draw their attention to me. What do those two people see in each other? I wonder. How are they possibly compatible? And the most baffling thought of all, do they ever make love? I mean, they are both the size of an ox. I fully understand that all creatures large and small are so made to get it together. In fact, what would be the use of nature if they could not? But still, the mechanics of it intrigues me.

Now, I add another more challenging thought. What if he were older and she much younger? Surely, love still happens no matter the age?

Of course it would. Love knows no boundaries.

And again, what would be the use of nature if the age difference were an impossible equation? Nature knows no such thing as age. Nature advocates the strongest. If you are physically capable and can stand up to an adversary, you can do it. So, the challenge for such a disparate couple would be the social factors forcing them apart. Family strictures and norms, perhaps the most daunting of them all. Friends, of course, would just label them mad. And the church…ooh la-la…let’s not go there. But in the village, ah yes, the collective family, therein lies the story.

Thus, 70-30 was born.

And the secret, even for the so-called normal couples, could be to allow love to happen and surrender to the consequences. Not everyone is struck by the Cupid arrow, a bolt of lightning that incinerates all fear. In the case of a forty year age gap, such as 70-30, love grows step by step through a quagmire of doubt and denial. Lovers must build many bridges across the raging waters before they can cross.

And even then they may not make it.

dedicated to:

those out there, large and small,

terrified and shy,

who did it.

They talked long and they talked hard, and neither initiated the first sentence. It just flowed, like the beer at La Corriente, a deluge of warm comfort. Only the subject matter remained the same; always them as two human beings in a game of tag, not in open view, but hidden in the talk of two nameless people. And how strange it was that those strangers did this or that? And how was it possible that such opposites collide? The beauty of their talk was that there was no answer, and the one supposition fuelled the next. So, the topic remained unfathomable, and the mind sank to insignificance as the feelings emerged.

From 70-30 THE MEETING

Love is an attraction between two dynamic forces, irresistible and forever colliding.

From 70-30 MUSCLE TO MUSCLE

in the air

The river ran cold under the bridge, the earth brittle to the touch. Spring was in the air, still only a promise, and slow to come. The buds on every tree wrapped tight, not daring to burst. Even the birds clung to the lower branches, chilled to the bone, but hanging on for the first real sunny day. High in the mountains the snows melted day by day, trickling into the gullies and streams.

And she walked.

She walked briskly, bent into her anorak, her hands deep in her pockets. Her nose dribbled, but she did not bother to wipe it. No one could see her. She looked around. No one followed. And on either side of her only the emptiness kept pace. She walked alone. Her beanie, a tower of coloured folds, was a gift from her mother way back in the early years when they were still a family. Her boots tight fitting and heavy, crunched the grass with every step.

She had climbed through the wooden fence into the open pasturelands to avoid meeting any of the local farmers and walked steadily away from the village along the lower slopes of the mountain range. There was no path to guide her, so she picked her own way towards a line of trees on the horizon, their branches drooping under a frozen sky.

Even as she walked he watched. She couldn’t see him, because he sat under the overhang of the shed, a dark figure blending into the shadows.

He didn’t plan it that way. It just happened.

He looked up and saw her, a figure of intriguing delight that seemed to hang for a moment in the crisp mountain air, begging him to look again, and look deeper.

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, he muttered, his mind tripling into dangerous places he had wished to leave behind; places of feeling and trust.

He caught a glimpse of her blonde hair, soft and beguiling as it flowed from under her beanie. She turned and her hand reached up to her face. Then, she headed up the slope towards the crest, but shrank away, as if persuaded by the steepness of the slope to hurry back down towards the river.

And the river flowed with the intensity of the insane.

It never wavered in its downward plunge, leaping into the crevices, and boring between the boulders strewn across its way, ever onwards towards the plains of the greater delta and into the sea. A slither of green. The rapids white, gauging out a path. The roar incessant and cawing, teasing anyone to dare ignore its voice.

I am here, the river said. Listen to me for, although I never stand still, the message you seek I leave behind.

He had settled on the outskirts of L’Esta, a small village in the Spanish Pyrenees, driven there by the low cost of living and a past he was sick of remembering. He had never made a success of his work in the cities along the coast, and when his savings ran dry he took the bus to the end of the line. L’Esta was the end of the line, so said the younger generation. A place of no hope. No career. No job. No future. A place of loss. That suited him fine. He had lost the dream of those grand goals many years ago. In fact fifty years ago. Not at birth. He was savvy enough to know that no one loses their life at birth. He believed mankind was born perfect and guiltless, even the mindless and deformed were innocent. That was what he wrote in his notebook:

We are born perfect and without sin.

He was forty one years old when he met his spirit self, and from then on surrendered to loss. Any loss. A trinket. A fortune. Anything material, never moral or a discipline of virtue. And since that day he had walked upright and fearless, his shoulders square to the world. No matter what came his way, be it in fury or in farce, he met the challenge with a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his lips. He loved and he trusted without question anyone who showed him respect or lay by his side and covered him when he was cold. But that was back then, all of thirty years ago.

Some called him simple. Others called him deranged. He himself agreed he was born mindless and deranged, not that he drooled or soiled himself. He just thought along different lines and made different decisions from the normal man or woman born of normal circumstances and living a normal life. They all agreed he was not one of them, and thus left him alone, an aberration, tolerated in their midst because, unlike the snows, he never melted, and so their waters were never troubled. He kept to himself, like the shadows, on the outskirts, deemed an embarrassment even to himself, his embarrassment stemming from his failure to make a success of his material life. He had never earned more than his daily bread and never complained of the delicacies missing from his dinner table. He married once, but she deserted him, disgraced by their circumstances. They rented a basement room beneath the highway interchange, and not only the incessant traffic overhead disgraced her, but his attention to her, his touch, especially at night in their single bed, disgraced her, and she up and fled, leaving nothing of herself behind. He had vowed never to marry again, in fact, never to allow a woman into his life unless he could provide for the comfort and security she deserved. His attention and love, once the cornerstone of his prized value of surrender, now insufficient.

Now, he watched this young woman, knowing he was not at all in the likeness of her, as she hurried back down the slope towards the river, the bushes holding her back, but thrusting through to burst into a clearing. She walked hunched over, her anorak holding her together and her boots guiding her through the grass. She cared not where she went. She aimed for the trees, but if the slope of the ground took her around the hill to the river below, she would go there oblivious of the distance and the surrounding countryside. She cared only that no one followed and no one saw her.

She had come to the village of L’Esta to hide.

Yet, she craved the fresh air and the wildness of the walk, out in the open, free as a bird. She had been a faithful servant of the city for the time it took to strip her of the dignity and belief she had so desperately sought.

She had never walked in the city. She had run. She had run headlong into love and a deep relationship, giving herself body and soul to a man, without counting the cost. Then, her day of reckoning had come. She was not prepared. She was not even aware. She was hopelessly out of her depth, her mind fuzzy in the belief of Shangri-La, her body limp in the beauty of a supposed everlasting love.

And her baby was still born.

It never breathed a breath of life and, it seemed, right then she breathed her last. She gave her milk to the ward and left. She arrived home and cried. And she cried alone. The boyfriend was out with friends, laughing and joking, their voices loud, their mirth mindless as the liquor took hold. From that day forth her life slid into the crevice of emptiness. She blamed everyone around her, especially at work, and became a pariah of sorts, where the boyfriend wanted her body, but not the broken soul. She balanced this equation by adding hostility, her brand of revenge.

She would make love and break away as he was about to climax.

Cramps. Cramps. Help me. I’ve got the cramps, she would scream, and clutch her leg to squeeze him out.

Fuck sake.

Pull it. Pull it, and she would hold her foot in the air.

And that would be the end of that.

Of course, such a ploy could only work for so many hits, and then what? So, she took to walking, and walking at prime time.

For the cramps, she argued. Betsy at the office says it’s good for the hip and those muscles, and she massaged her inner thigh. I’ve lost all feeling there….just numb.

Fuck sake, he said, and packed his bags.

Alone, she started to eat. Not because she was hungry. She had nothing else to do. All her adult life she had lived for others. At work, she lived for the boss. At home, she worked for the boyfriend, and occasionally for her mother.

She loved her mother.

Not sloppy love. She cared. She respected and acknowledged her mother as a fine teacher-supporter-and all smothering woman of worth. Mother was always there, foul mouth and tempestuous, her attitude a shining example of unwavering belief. No matter how she hated what her daughter had decided to do, mother was there. No matter how her daughter spread her legs for a man who did not care, and for no reward either, mother stood tall by her daughter, ready to skewer the dragons of betrayal to the wall of revenge. Mother was not sure which came first, revenge or betrayal. Nevertheless, Mother was always there.

So too the fights.

L’Esta

She walked back to the village of L’Esta along the banks of the river. The path well worn by the sheep and cattle moving between the pasturelands and their overnight enclosures around the sheds on the outskirts of the village. In winter all livestock huddled inside those sheds for weeks, sometimes months, when the snows lay thick on the ground, and the wind cut through their skin to the bone. Now, in the spring, they wandered free, according to the greening grasses and the melting snow. Water was bountiful, trickling everywhere, through puddles and depressions, towards the low lying lands, drawn irresistibly into the swelling belly of the greater water, the sea.

Already, pinprick spots of blue and pink and yellow flowers appeared in small patches between the hoof marks of the cattle, and on the very edge of the river bank. The wonder of nature, despite the freezing cold and dark nights for those flowers to survive and pop their heads out on a warm sunny day, brought joy to the hearts of those that passed by.

She trod carefully not to cause hurt to any one of those pinpricks of colour. Her eyes darting from feet to path and back again. When the fence line reappeared she deliberately stayed inside the pasturelands not to pass too close to the old sheds and houses where secret eyes could watch her. The mud lay in grotesque puddles where the cattle had churned it up and she didn’t want to slog heavy footed up the middle of the road, the trace of her easy to follow.

He slid briefly into view from around the side of the shed, a piece of wood in his one hand and a rasp in the other. He paused in the sunlight and stared at her. She returned his stare, just for a second, then she lifted her hand and wiped her nose as he ducked back into the shadows.

The village appeared in a sudden wall of rock. Between the pasturelands and the village there was a clear divide, neither dribbled into existence. They both happened at once, so that when the one ended the other began. She climbed through the fence and was immediately in the village, her boots leaving footmarks on the cobbles. But only for the first few steps and then they disappeared. A dog barked, its nose under the bottom plank of an old gate. She clicked her tongue and the dog wagged its tail. An old man digging in his garden looked up, and she nodded in greeting. He stared back and then dug again. She stood still, her attention drawn to the roof of a house half hidden behind a stone wall, and approached cautiously, as if in secret, that perhaps someone was watching and would report her for paying attention to something beyond her means.

To whom? She asked. Who’s watching? And she spun around.

There was no reply.

I can look, can’t I?

She climbed a pile of rubble against the wall and peered over. The house was dug into a pit. Three great walls enclosed it from the rest of the village, and a grove of trees from the pasturelands out front. The river ran close by, a gate at the end of the property opened onto a platform leaning over the water. What used to be a vegetable garden lay in a square along the side wall. A circle of paved bricks with a rotten table in the middle nestled up against the other wall to form an entertainment area. Under the shade of the trees, completely private and secure from any prying eyes, was an old fashioned hand pump. She had no way of knowing for sure, but she imagined a pipe ran into the river, and so water could be pumped directly into that fountain. A cow could drink. Birds could wash, and a bucket or two could be tipped over the veggies nearby.

That’s what I’d do, she said. "If I owned this property I would clean it up.’’ She sighed, her voice soft, ‘’I would love that.’’

The house was dilapidated, abandoned, and falling to ruin.

She lingered long, her eyes pouring over every detail, noticing the windows, all the glass broken or removed, the front door, opening out onto the courtyard, missing, and the roof caving in at the back, the moss thick and healthy. She couldn’t see inside, the light from the morning sun too high in the sky to penetrate the dark interior, but she could make out a pile of wood close to the door. She walked around to the back of the house and stopped, confused that there appeared to be no entrance from the street. She peered over the wall again and decided the only way onto the property was down the side wall. But that didn’t make sense. So she walked back to the village side of the property. A double set of doors, held together by a chain and padlock, guarded a shed at street level, and that clued her in.

This must be the entrance, she said.

She forced the doors open, just enough to see inside.

In the dim light she made out a large uncluttered space and the top of a staircase, the balustrade running out of sight as it plunged under the floor boards of the shed.

Perfect, she muttered.

And again, she looked around in case someone had overheard.

She closed the doors as best she could, pulling the chain tight so that no one could suspect her intrusion, and walked across the bridge and into the village square. The church bell rang out, once – twice – and echoed to silence. She took the narrow street leading down the side of the church, and followed it up the slope towards the back of the village. The moss lay thick on the cobbles tight up against the walls of the houses behind the church, the winter sun too feeble to burn it off. Her footfalls echoed behind as she climbed the steps to her mother’s home. The door scraped as she entered and a breeze of cold air greeted her.

Mother, she called out.

There was no reply. She hung her anorak on a peg and walked down the passage into the kitchen-dining room area. Her mother sat at the counter crushing garlic with the back of a spoon in a bowl.

I called, Mother.

I heard.

Hello then.

Here, help me with this, and Mother shoved the bowl across the counter. My hands are too old for such work.

Then don’t do it.

It smells good. Mother licked her finger and leaned on the counter, watching her daughter crush the garlic, adding salt to stop the cloves from slithering around. Estel, Mother began, and when she sounded her daughter’s name in that harsh tone it meant she had something to say, something important, and not trivial to be shrugged away. I don’t want you to go off like that. You hear me?

I only went for a walk, Estel said, defending herself.

Tell me…that’s all.

I didn’t go far.

That’s all, Mother said, her tone warning Estel to hold her tongue.

Estel crushed the garlic to a creamy paste.

Mother poured a glass of wine and stared out the window, the mountains in the background majestic in their supreme attire, their tops perfect in the late snowfalls of March. The lower slopes were barren, but greening here and there as the fresh spring grasses pushed through the old tussles of last summer. It was a cold house, built more for the hot summer months than the cold winter months, but at least it had a view. Not like the other houses in the village that all looked inwards