Matthew Parris
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Hundreds of towns like Cabrils can be found in Spain. Each has its pleasant main square, cafés with outdoor tables in the shade and, close by, its mother church: cool and dark within her sunbaked walls and great doors (always shut), and dominated by a sturdy tower, drawing around itself a tight-knit skirt of narrow streets overhung with wooden verandahs, each town’s old quarter higgledy-piggledy in its own way, yet all, in the end, the same. The church in Cabrils is called Santa Creu (‘Holy Cross’, in Catalan). The plane-tree-shaded main square is a few hundred yards away, but the church has its own little apron of a square, the Plaça de l’Església. Overlooking this is the Hotel de la Plaça; and here we stayed, having read enthusiastic reviews on the internet.
The reviews were right. A stylish former farmhouse near the centre of a country village that has found itself becoming a smart outer suburb of Barcelona, the hotel is a long-established family business, friendly and a little old-fashioned, filled with antiques, family portraits and photographs, and suffused with an atmosphere of eclectic and unpretentious good taste. There are no lifts but a friendly young chap to carry your suitcase up to your small bedroom — ours decorated in a Mediterranean blue and cream, whose shuttered windows with wooden blinds gave directly onto the church’s bell-tower, about 50 yards across the roofs from us.
You can dine on a big upstairs verandah with views out over the coast, and in the cool of an August night, dinner there was a delight. Afterwards we retired to our room and watched the church bells swinging out the chimes of midnight. A happy feeling. I watched the great minute-hand of the church clock edging around with a regular, gentle, intermittent wobble. The clock’s face was a yard or more in diameter and composed of white glass illuminated from behind, from within the bell-tower. The clock’s hands and Roman numerals were iron-black.
It was then I noticed the geckos. At first I thought they were specks or chips in the glass. There were six. Then I saw them moving: darting independently of each other in short sprints across the white clock face in black silhouette. They were hunting the flying insects drawn to the face by the light, snapping up morsels. For them this circle of light was a giant feeding-bowl. Perhaps in their religion they worship it. Sometimes they would pass under the hour hand. Sometimes the minute hand would pass over one of them as it jerked its way on around its circular sweep. The little reptiles clinging effortlessly to a sheet of vertical glass were entirely uninterested in these metal beams.
The clock struck every quarter hour with one, two, or three chimes; so at 00.15 came a single hammer to the bell. It was loud enough from our bedroom: on the clock face it must have been deafening; but the geckos did not seem to react. The sound did not interfere with the insect hunt and they discounted it — as perhaps those used to living under the flight path to Heathrow cease to notice the jets’ thunder. The lizards’ landscape was not, to them, a clock; its hands and their movement had no significance in the gecko mind; and its audible signals to the humans of Cabrils signalled nothing to the reptile imagination.
We humans could see — and, more than see, know — that those lizards were an unwitting part of a massive timepiece: chance witnesses to the march of time. The lizards could only know they were on a brightly lit, vertiginous and insect-rich dinner plate. It is utterly impossible they could know more. We can. We move in parallel worlds.
Upon whose clock face are we crawling, then, my friends? Might we too be observable from another age, another kind of intelligence, another star? To what celestial mind or eye might our peregrinations be conducted, oblivious to where we really are, what is really happening, what it means? Who is chuckling at how little we know?
I closed and sealed the windows, leaving the geckos to their night of feasting, the clock of Santa Creu to its night of timekeeping, and the bell to its night of faithful percussion; and retired to my own world, and to sleep.
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