Dusk and Other Stories (2 page)

He is happy here. He likes the wide, tree-cool avenues, the restaurants, the long evenings. He is deep in the currents of a slow, connubial life.

Nico comes onto the terrace wearing a wheat-colored sweater.

“Would you like a coffee?” she says. “Do you want me to go down for one?”

He thinks for a moment.

“Yes,” he says.

“How do you like it?”

“Solo,”
he says.

“Black.”

She likes to do this. The building has a small elevator which rises slowly. When it arrives she steps in and closes the doors carefully behind her. Then, just as slowly, she descends, floor after floor, as if they were decades. She thinks about Malcolm. She thinks about her father and his second wife. She is probably more intelligent than Malcolm, she decides. She is certainly stronger-willed. He, however, is better-looking in a strange way. She has a wide, senseless mouth. He is generous. She knows she is a little dry. She passes the second floor. She looks at herself in the mirror. Of course, one doesn’t discover these things right away. It’s like a play, it unfolds slowly, scene by scene, the reality of another person changes. Anyway, pure intelligence is not that important. It’s an abstract quality.
It does not include that cruel, intuitive knowledge of how the new life, a life her father would never understand, should be lived. Malcolm has that.

At ten-thirty, the phone rings. She answers and talks in German, lying on the couch. After it is finished Malcolm calls to her, “Who was that?”

“Do you want to go to the beach?”

“Yes.”

“Inge is coming in about an hour,” Nico says.

He has heard about her and is curious. Besides, she has a car. The morning, obedient to his desires, has begun to change. There is some early traffic on the avenue beneath. The sun breaks through for a moment, disappears, breaks through again. Far off, beyond his thoughts, the four spires are passing between shadow and glory. In intervals of sunlight the letters on high reveal themselves:
Hosanna
.

Smiling, at noon, Inge arrives. She is in a camel skirt and a blouse with the top buttons undone. She’s a bit heavy for the skirt which is very short. Nico introduces them.

“Why didn’t you call last night?” Inge asks.

“We were going to call but it got so late. We didn’t have dinner till eleven,” Nico explains. “I was sure you’d be out.”

No. She was waiting at home all night for her boyfriend to call, Inge says. She is fanning herself with a postcard from Madrid. Nico has gone into the bedroom.

“They’re such bastards,” Inge says. Her voice is raised to carry. “He was supposed to call at eight. He didn’t call me until ten. He didn’t have time to talk. He was going to call back in a little while. Well, he never called. I finally fell asleep.”

Nico puts on a pale gray skirt with many small pleats and a lemon pullover. She looks at the back of herself in the mirror. Her arms are bare. Inge is talking from the front room.

“They don’t know how to behave, that’s the trouble. They don’t have any idea. They go to the Polo Club, that’s the only thing they know.”

She begins to talk to Malcolm.

“When you go to bed with someone it should be nice afterwards, you should treat each other decently. Not here. They have no respect for a woman.”

She has green eyes and white, even teeth. He is thinking of what it would be like to have such a mouth. Her father is supposed to be a surgeon. In Hamburg. Nico says it isn’t true.

“They are children here,” Inge says. “In Germany, now, you have a little respect. A man doesn’t treat you like that, he knows what to do.”

“Nico,” he calls.

She comes in brushing her hair.

“I am frightening him,” Inge explains. “Do you know what I finally did? I called at five in the morning. I said, why didn’t you call? I don’t know, he said—I could tell he was asleep—what time is it? Five o’clock, I said. Are you angry with me? A little, he said. Good, because I am angry with you. Bang, I hung up.”

Nico is closing the doors to the terrace and bringing the cage inside.

“It’s warm,” Malcolm says, “leave him there. He needs the sunlight.”

She looks in at the bird.

“I don’t think he’s well,” she says.

“He’s all right.”

“The other one died last week,” she explains to Inge. “Suddenly. He wasn’t even sick.”

She closes one door and leaves the other open. The bird sits in the now brilliant sunshine, feathered, serene.

“I don’t think they can live alone,” she says.

“He’s fine,” Malcolm assures her. “Look at him.”

The sun makes his colors very bright. He sits on the uppermost perch. His eyes have perfect, round lids. He blinks.

The elevator is still at their floor. Inge enters first. Malcolm pulls the narrow doors to. It’s like shutting a small cabinet. Faces close together
they start down. Malcolm is looking at Inge. She has her own thoughts.

They stop for another coffee at the little bar downstairs. He holds the door open for them to go in. No one is there—a single man reading the newspaper.

“I think I’m going to call him again,” Inge says.

“Ask him why he woke you up at five in the morning,” Malcolm says.

She laughs.

“Yes,” she says. “That’s marvelous. That’s what I’m going to do.”

The telephone is at the far end of the marble counter, but Nico is talking to him and he cannot hear.

“Aren’t you interested?” he asks.

“No,” she says.

Inge’s car is a blue Volkswagen, the blue of certain airmail envelopes. One fender is dented in.

“You haven’t seen my car,” she says. “What do you think? Did I get a good bargain? I don’t know anything about cars. This is my first. I bought it from someone I know, a painter, but it was in an accident. The motor is scorched.

“I know how to drive,” she says. “It’s better if someone sits next to me, though. Can you drive?”

“Of course,” he says.

He gets behind the wheel and starts the engine. Nico is sitting in the back.

“How does it feel to you?” Inge says.

“I’ll tell you in a minute.”

Although it’s only a year old, the car has a certain shabbiness. The material on the ceiling is faded. Even the steering wheel seems abused. After they have driven a few blocks, Malcolm says, “It seems all right.”

“Yes?”

“The brakes are a little weak.”

“They are?”

“I think they need new linings.”

“I just had it greased,” she says.

Malcolm looks at her. She is quite serious.

“Turn left here,” she says.

She directs him through the city. There is a little traffic now but he seldom stops. Many intersections in Barcelona are widened out in the shape of an octagon. There are only a few red lights. They drive through vast neighborhoods of old apartments, past factories, the first vacant fields at the edge of town. Inge turns in her seat to look back to Nico.

“I’m sick of this place,” she says. “I want to go to Rome.”

They are passing the airport. The road to the sea is crowded. All the scattered traffic of the city has funneled onto it, buses, trucks, innumerable small cars.

“They don’t even know how to drive,” Inge says. “What are they doing? Can’t you pass?

“Oh, come on,” she says. She reaches across him to blow the horn.

“No use doing that,” Malcolm says.

Inge blows it again.

“They can’t move.”

“Oh, they make me furious,” she cries.

Two children in the car ahead have turned around. Their faces are pale and reflective in the small rear window.

“Have you been to Sitges?” Inge says.

“Cadaques.”

“Ah,” she says. “Yes. Beautiful. There you have to know someone with a villa.”

The sun is white. The land lies beneath it the color of straw. The road runs parallel to the coast past cheap bathing beaches, campgrounds, houses, hotels. Between the road and the sea is the railroad with small tunnels built beneath it for bathers to reach the water.
After a while this begins to disappear. They drive along almost deserted stretches.

“In Sitges,” Inge says, “are all the blond girls of Europe. Sweden, Germany, Holland. You’ll see.”

Malcolm watches the road.

“The brown eyes of the Spaniards are irresistible to them,” she says.

She reaches across him to blow the horn.

“Look at them! Look at them crawling along!

“They come here full of hopes,” Inge says. “They save their money, they buy little bathing suits you could put in a spoon, and what happens? They get loved for one night, perhaps, that’s all. The Spanish don’t know how to treat women.”

Nico is silent in the back. On her face is the calm expression which means she is bored.

“They know nothing,” Inge says.

Sitges is a little town with damp hotels, the green shutters, the dying grass of a beach resort. There are cars parked everywhere. The streets are lined with them. Finally they find a place two blocks from the sea.

“Be sure it’s locked,” Inge says.

“Nobody’s going to steal it,” Malcolm tells her.

“Now you don’t think it’s so nice,” she says.

They walk along the pavement, the surface of which seems to have buckled in the heat. All around are the flat, undecorated facades of houses built too close together. Despite the cars, the town is strangely vacant. It’s two o’clock. Everyone is at lunch.

Malcolm has a pair of shorts made from rough cotton, the blue glazed cotton of the Tauregs. They have a little belt, slim as a finger, which goes only halfway around. He feels powerful as he puts them on. He has a runner’s body, a body without flaws, the body of a martyr in a Flemish painting. One can see vessels laid like cord beneath the surface of his limbs. The cabins have a concrete back
wall and hemp underfoot. His clothes hang shapeless from a peg. He steps into the corridor. The women are still undressing, he does not know behind which door. There is a small mirror hung from a nail. He smooths his hair and waits. Outside is the sun.

The sea begins with a sloping course of pebbles sharp as nails. Malcolm goes in first. Nico follows without a word. The water is cool. He feels it climb his legs, touch the edge of his suit and then with a swell—he tries to leap high enough—embrace him. He dives. He comes up smiling. The taste of salt is on his lips. Nico has dived, too. She emerges close by, softly, and draws her wetted hair behind her with one hand. She stands with her eyes half-closed, not knowing exactly where she is. He slips an arm around her waist. She smiles. She possesses a certain, sure instinct of when she is most beautiful. For a moment they are in serene dependence. He lifts her in his arms and carries her, helped by the sea, toward the deep. Her head rests on his shoulder. Inge lies on the beach in her bikini reading
Stern
.

“What’s wrong with Inge?” he says.

“Everything.”

“No, doesn’t she want to come in?”

“She’s having her period,” Nico says.

They lie down beside her on separate towels. She is, Malcolm notices, very brown. Nico can never get that way no matter how long she stays outside. It is almost a kind of stubbornness as if he, himself, were offering her the sun and she would not accept.

She got this tan in a single day, Inge tells them. A single day! It seems unbelievable. She looks at her arms and legs as if confirming it. Yes, it’s true. Naked on the rocks at Cadaques. She looks down at her stomach and in doing so induces it to reveal several plump, girlish rolls.

“You’re getting fat,” Nico says.

Inge laughs. “They are my savings,” she says.

They seem like that, like belts, like part of some costume she is
wearing. When she lies back, they are gone. Her limbs are clean. Her stomach, like the rest of her, is covered with a faint, golden down. Two Spanish youths are strolling past along the sea.

She is talking to the sky. If she goes to America, she recites, is it worthwhile to bring her car? After all, she got it at a very good price, she could probably sell it if she didn’t want to keep it and make some money.

“America is full of Volkswagens,” Malcolm says.

“Yes?”

“It’s filled with German cars, everyone has one.”

“They must like them,” she decides. “The Mercedes is a good car.”

“Greatly admired,” Malcolm says.

“That’s the car I would like. I would like a couple of them. When I have money, that will be my hobby,” she says. “I’d like to live in Tangier.”

“Quite a beach there.”

“Yes? I will be black as an Arab.”

“Better wear your suit,” Malcolm says.

Inge smiles.

Nico seems asleep. They lie there silent, their feet pointed to the sun. The strength of it has gone. There are only passing moments of warmth when the wind dies all the way and the sun is flat upon them, weak but flooding. An hour of melancholy is approaching, the hour when everything is ended.

At six o’clock Nico sits up. She is cold.

“Come,” Inge says, “we’ll go for a walk up the beach.”

She insists on it. The sun has not set. She becomes very playful.

“Come,” she says, “it’s the good section, all the big villas are there. We’ll walk along and make the old men happy.”

“I don’t want to make anyone happy,” Nico says, hugging her arms.

“It isn’t so easy,” Inge assures her.

Nico goes along sullenly. She is holding her elbows. The wind is
from the shore. There are little waves now which seem to break in silence. The sound they make is soft, as if forgotten. Nico is wearing a gray tank suit with an open back, and while Inge plays before the houses of the rich, she looks at the sand.

Inge goes into the sea. Come, she says, it’s warm. She is laughing and happy, her gaiety is stronger than the hour, stronger than the cold. Malcolm walks slowly in behind her. The water
is
warm. It seems purer as well. And it is empty, as far in each direction as one can see. They are bathing in it alone. The waves swell and lift them gently. The water runs over them, laving the soul.

At the entrance to the cabins the young Spanish boys stand around waiting for a glimpse if the shower door is opened too soon. They wear blue woolen trunks. Also black. Their feet appear to have very long toes. There is only one shower and in it a single, whitened tap. The water is cold. Inge goes first. Her suit appears, one small piece and then the other, draped over the top of the door. Malcolm waits. He can hear the soft slap and passage of her hands, the sudden shattering of the water on concrete when she moves aside. The boys at the door exalt him. He glances out. They are talking in low voices. They reach out to tease each other, to make an appearance of play.