Loves of Yulian (5 page)

While on one side of our car was the ocean, the beach, and a sidewalk inlaid with S-shaped black-and-white stripes, on the other side was a city, which I knew to be the capital of Brazil, with tall buildings, offices, stores, and traffic. And the idea of such a city being equipped with its own beach was another concept that had to work itself into my mind slowly. Back in our own capital, Warsaw, if one wanted to go to the beach, he would have to pack a suitcase, go to the train station, buy a ticket, wait for a train, ride that train for a long time, and finally get off at a resort on the Baltic sea and rent a hotel room. Here, all one had to do was cross the street. And on top of all that, as Mother had told me, here it got hotter during the winter and colder in the summer. When I had asked why that was, Mother had said that it was because the earth was round so that it rotated around the sun.

Our
pension
was a ways away from the downtown part of the city, and was surrounded by a big, fenced-in yard with grass and trees, and M. Gordet came inside with us and introduced us to the woman who owned it. She was a small and thin woman, like Mother, only older. She had black hair with a considerable amount of gray and very dark skin that looked almost like leather. She had a thin face, a bit of a mustache above her lip, and a gold tooth right at the front of her mouth. Her name was Sra. De la Vega, and M. Gordet said she would take good care of us. This made the senhora smile, lighting up her face with two rows of perfectly even white teeth, except for that one gold one. She spoke French to Mother and M. Gordet, though I could tell that she had difficulty with it.

I had not been paying much attention to their talk until I heard her mention the word
beach.
“I go to the beach every afternoon,” she was saying, “and your son can come with me. It’s just short walking, you know.” And it was arranged right then that directly after lunch today, I would accompany her to the beach.

Our room was a corner room, with windows on two sides, which Mother opened immediately, letting a fresh breeze into the warm room. The furniture was wicker, something I had never seen indoors before, and there was only one bed. This meant that I would have to sleep with Mother, something I had done before in some of the hotels and
pensions
across Europe, but preferred not to. Whenever I rolled over or even scratched my leg, Mother would complain. “Don’t do that, Yulian,” she would say, even though I thought she was sound asleep. If I got out of bed, however slowly and carefully, Mother would wake up. And since Mother went to bed considerably later than I did, and since my bladder tended to get very full during the night, mornings were particularly difficult for me, when I didn’t have my own bed.

But I noticed that the bed had sheets with green vines and blue flowers printed on them. I had never seen sheets with anything printed on them before, but these might give me something to look at as I lay in bed with nothing to do, while waiting for Mother to wake up. And these vines and flowers certainly went well with the wicker furniture.

When we went downstairs for lunch in the
pension’s
dining room, Mother and I were both surprised to see M. Gordet waiting for us. Whether he had been waiting all that time or gone out and come back, I had no idea, but Mother kissed his cheek as though she had not seen him for a week. He would have lunch with us, he said, and Mother told him how pleased that made her.

M. Gordet translated the lunch menu into French for us, after which Mother asked, “What do you want to order, Julien?”

I looked at Mother in surprise. Nobody had ever asked me what I wanted to eat before. If I had heard Mother correctly, her question marked for me a transition into a higher state of being. . . which, on reflection, made perfect sense since this was our first meal on a new continent. Mother gave no indication of there being any sort of significance attached to her question. In fact, there was a definite possibility that she had asked the question quite absently, since M. Gordet had just lit her cigarette, from a pack with a label I had never seen before, and Mother seemed to be in the act of savoring its essence.

“They’re American,” M. Gordet said about the cigarettes.

Whatever meaning lay behind Mother’s question to me, I decided that I should assume my original impression to be correct and respond in kind. One of the items that M. Gordet had read off was an omelet with ham and some other ingredients, whose French names I did not recognize. I loved eggs in any form—scrambled with chopped spinach, they even made that dismal vegetable palatable—and I was sure that this is what Mother expected me to order. But, as I now knew from experience, an omelet of some sort was likely to be on the
pension’s
lunch menu on most days, and I would get a chance at it tomorrow. On the other hand, the acknowledgement of my maturity that I assumed to have just been handed to me, deserved an equally mature selection. There was a fish item on the menu. On numerous occasions Mother had tried to make me eat fish, and it had never been a pleasant experience for either of us. When I had scarlet fever in Barcelona and had had to eat that boiled, unsalted fish, that had been really awful. But the fish on the menu here was described as fried in butter, which even made cauliflower taste good, and also some kind of almond things.

“I. . . I. . . I would like the f. . . f. . . fish,” I said. I seemed to have more trouble getting the words out than I usually did, which tended to happen when I was excited about something.

“Don’t do that,” Mother said in Polish, and I knew it was the stuttering she was referring to, and not the fish. Then she turned to M. Gordet. “When he gets excited about something, he does that,” she explained. “The doctor said it’s just temporary. It’s from the stress of what we’ve been through and having to move all the time. It’ll stop once he’s settled and in school.” This wasn’t the first time that she had tried to explain my stuttering to M. Gordet.

I certainly had not heard the doctor say anything about school, but I knew how much my stuttering embarrassed Mother.

“The fish,” M. Gordet repeated. He had a little piece of paper on which he was supposed to write our order for the waitress.

“Y. . . yes M. . . monsieur,” I said.

Then the waitress, who seemed to know M. Gordet, brought two Martinis on a little tray and took the order slips from him.

“George, how nice,” Mother said, but I could tell that she wasn’t really at all pleased. Anything stronger than one glass of wine tended to make Mother sick. But they clinked glasses and M. Gordet leaned his head toward Mother’s, as he had not done in the ship’s dining room, and talked in a low voice.

Unlike some of the men that Mother had met during our travels, he did not seem like a bad sort. I had definitely not liked the photographer in Lisbon, who had shot photographs of her in his studio, which she wouldn’t let me see afterwards, or the fat man in Rome who had taken us to his old mother’s house for dinner, tried to make me eat octopus, and then laughed at my revulsion. I didn’t even hold it against M. Gordet that he had marched me to our cabin that way when the two Dutch brothers had tried to push me off the ship. They must have told him some story regarding that kick in the eye, and he had no reason not to believe them. No, while M. Gordet rarely spoke to me and did have a habit of running his comb through his hair quite frequently, I did not have any negative feelings toward him.

I counted eight other tables in the dining room. The furniture here was wicker, just like in our room, but painted a light green, and the tablecloths had floral designs on them, just like our bed sheets, though not the same design. I saw no other children in the room, which was a relief to me, though some of the tables were empty. When our food arrived, I was further relieved to discover that, as I had hoped, the fish was quite good. This was particularly welcome since, so far, Mother had taken no notice of what I had, voluntarily, ordered.

I had finished my canned pears and was staring out of the dining room window when I sensed somebody standing behind me. Turning, I saw that it was Sra. De la Vega in a beach jacket and a scarf tied around her hair. A pair of very large sunglasses covered her eyes and made her small face look even smaller. “Time to go to the beach, my little one,” she said.

“Ah, Sra. De la Vega,” Mother exclaimed, noticing her for the first time.

“Gabriella,” the senhora corrected.

“Gabriella, you’re on your way to the beach,” Mother said. “I’m so grateful to you for taking my son.”

“He can help carry my things,” she said. Then, to me, “Go upstairs and put on your bathing suit. Do you like lemonade?”

I said that I did.

“Go upstairs, shoo! I will wait for you on the front porch.”

I went upstairs and exchanged my pants for my bathing suit. In Poland everyone had always brought a second bathing suit to the beach, so you could change into a dry one when you came out of the water, but I only had the one.

Sra. De la Vega had a folded beach chair, a beach blanket and two thermoses, besides her large, flowered cloth purse. I had expected to be handed the two thermoses and/or, possibly, the folded beach blanket, but the senhora surprised me by handing me the folded, wood-frame-and-canvass beach chair, plus the blanket. The beach chair wasn’t heavy, but, because of its size, awkward for me to carry. The senhora had held it with ease, because she was taller than I was, but I had a great deal of difficulty keeping it off the ground. I tried to manage it with as little struggle as possible, so that she would not take it away from me, but, much to my delight, I saw that the senhora took little interest in my problem and set right out down the street. Several times I had to stop and shift the load to my other hand, but my companion didn’t embarrass me by stopping to wait for me. A few running steps brought me even with her each time, before having to set it down and switch it to the other hand.

The beach was only one block away, and the senhora set a brisk pace. And she didn’t make me hold her hand to cross the wide avenue or even tell me to look both ways. She crossed the street by herself, and I, some paces behind, decided to wait for some cars to pass before plunging ahead. Making this decision was also a first for me, and I couldn’t help a little pride.

Sra. De la Vega was a considerable distance ahead of me by the time I reached the sidewalk with the S-shaped mosaic lines that I had seen from the car. As I crossed this sidewalk, I tried to determine whether it was white with black S’s or the other way around. There were a lot of people on the beach already, some in the water, some on blankets, and two men and a lady smacking what looked like a beanbag with feathers, back and forth with their hands. The bathing suit that this lady was wearing was not the one-piece kind that I had always seen on women before, but what looked like the panties and brassier that my mother wore under her dress.

Sra. De la Vega did not seem to stop and look for a good spot, as Kiki and I always did when arriving at the beach, but walked directly to a spot as though it had been reserved for her. As she passed other people, they seemed to know her and exchange greetings with her.

Once she had reached her spot, the senhora stopped and waited for me to catch up. With both my arms sore now from the load, I had had to stop for a short rest, and was embarrassed now to keep her waiting. I hurried as fast as I could, my feet sinking into the soft sand at each step.

When she had taken the blanket from me and spread it out, and then set up her chair, the senhora removed her beach jacket, revealing a bathing suit similar to the one worn by the lady playing with the feathered beanbag, though a different color. Except that while the top half of the other lady’s suit had covered the lower half of her breasts, the senhora’s top was so much smaller and her breasts so much longer, that a good three quarters or more of each leathery breast was open to the air.

I looked away quickly. Back in Poland, people coming out of the water would frequently change from a wet bathing suit to a dry one right in plain sight, and you were supposed to, automatically, turn your head away and not look. That had been fine with me, and when, on occasion, someone did catch me inadvertently looking at them, I would be very embarrassed. But now, the smooth swellings above the suit top of the lady playing the beanbag game had a fascination I had not experienced before. Suddenly I found myself watching in the hope that in stretching for the feathery projectile she would, somehow, stress the mechanism holding up that top to the point where it could no longer perform its function and I would be treated to a glimpse of one or both of the hemispherical treasures.

There were some things to this whole business that I didn’t understand. I knew that men had, what Kiki called,
birdies
, and women didn’t. I had one, but Mother did not. In place of a
birdie
, Mother had hair, and she would, sometimes, come out of the bathroom with nothing on, but holding one hand over her hair, while covering her breasts with the other forearm. It always embarrassed me for her to see me looking at her. Had she not been able to see me, I would have looked more closely to find out exactly what was there.

But Kiki had also told me that if I touched my
birdie
when I didn’t need to, such as when I had to negotiate it out through the leg opening of my shorts to go to the bathroom, I would go crazy. I could not understand how simply touching a part of your own body could make you go crazy, but, as with God and Jesus, I had taken it on faith. On the other hand, since I understood it to require a certain accumulation of touches to achieve that dreaded result, I had developed an inexplicable craving to tempt fate by sneaking my hand under my nightshirt, at night, and make split-second contact between the tip of my finger and the purple tip of the hazardous organ. But, once I knew Kiki to be wrong on the subject of Jews and Heaven, and particularly since I believed myself considerably more grownup than my peers, rather than going crazy, I had accepted her as being wrong on the subject of
birdies
as well and the entire adventure lost its appeal.