Sunburn (10 page)
“You know Pedro we just met? His wife came into his place in August and threw their baby through the big picture window, I swear to Almighty God. Why it wasn’t killed I’ll never know. And the next day they walked hand in hand along the
ramblas.
ramblas.
“And there was an English singer here during the summer, working at the Hof van Holland, across town. He was to be paid at the end of the summer, and the owners decided not to pay him. No reason. He nearly killed them both with a wine bottle. He’s in jail now, and will be for a long time.”
“But why didn’t they pay him?”
“As I said, no reason. Happens all the time. He didn’t have a legitimate work permit, and he had no rights anyway.”
“Even to his pay?”
He smiled. “He’s lucky he wasn’t working for Spaniards. If he’d beat up two Spaniards the way he did, he wouldn’t be in jail now. He’d be dead.”
Marianne spoke up. “Then why would anybody want to come here in the summers?”
“It’s free, fast, and cheap. Lots of girls. And the English and Germans and Dutch get their vacations and want to party all the time. I suppose it would even be nice for a few days. It’s mostly the people who live here, the summer people, who have the stories. They come for the money, and do their year’s work in five months. And so it’s all they think about.”
“And so the normal rules don’t apply?”
“What’s normal? Everyone here knows the rules, and the main rule is that there are no rules, except don’t cross the
guardia.
”
guardia.
”
At the bar inside, the wine was sold from casks, by the bottle. Tony went back to refill our bottle and stopped to watch the television. When he came back out with the wine and a chess set, he looked at us and smiled. “Franco worsens,” he said.
He and Marianne began to play, and all the while he kept up a patter with the passersby. After a short while, I decided to get up and take a walk. I’d had a lot of wine, and I thought a walk might freshen me up. I asked Tony if he’d be driving back to Tossa and, if so, if he’d drop me off at Sean’s. That settled, I told them I’d be back in an hour, and started off.
The heat was still oppressive, especially in the narrow streets between the white buildings, shut off from access to the sea. I stopped in at a bar and had a beer, then another.
I wandered out again. In a public square there was a fountain and I dipped my hands in to splash water in my face.
“Ai.”
I looked up to see a member of the
guardia
coming toward me shaking his head no. Saluting, I turned and left, finally coming out by the beach. I walked down the white wooden steps and lay down on the sand.
guardia
coming toward me shaking his head no. Saluting, I turned and left, finally coming out by the beach. I walked down the white wooden steps and lay down on the sand.
When I woke up, it was much later. The sun was still up, but it just cleared the tops of the buildings along the
ramblas.
I sat up with a start, shook my aching head several times to clear it, then stood and walked back to the Calamic.
ramblas.
I sat up with a start, shook my aching head several times to clear it, then stood and walked back to the Calamic.
They were still there, talking over the chess board.
“Have a nice walk?” asked Marianne.
“I fell asleep on the beach.”
They laughed and stood up. “Better get you home.”
Half an hour later they had dropped me off at the end of the rutted road that led to Sean’s house. The sun had just about set. When I got to the house, Lea met me at the door.
“Where have you been? You look beat.”
“My dear, I am beat. I think I’ll skip dinner. Where were you today?”
“Just in town.”
“I wish you’d have told me.”
“I got up so early. You were asleep. You’re not mad, are you?”
“No.”
I crossed the room. “Tell Sean I’m sorry I’m missing dinner, but I need a nap.”
“Do you want me to come up with you?”
“No. I’m sorry. I drank too much.”
As it turned out, Lea and Kyra ate alone. Sean was in bed in his room, nursing an earache.
The next day, Lea and I went out for a walk. Sean stayed in bed throughout the morning, and Kyra sat knitting in the living room. Her presence annoyed me. She said that Sean’s ear was very bad, and she’d poured oil into it and let him try to sleep. He hadn’t slept at all the last night.
Outside, we held hands and picked our way through the trees, up toward the vineyards that bordered the road. The heat had let up. We got to a low rock wall and Lea sat on it. She kicked at the red dirt.
“Are you upset with me?” she said.
“Why would I be?”
“Yesterday.”
“Did I act so much like it?”
She nodded.
“Well, I drink too much. It seems that all there is to do here sometimes is drink. Get up, drink, walk someplace, drink again, and think about the passing of time.”
“Are you so bored, really?”
I shrugged. “I love you, you know.”
She was relaxed, leaning back enjoying the sun. Her nipples stood out against her white shirt. I reached out and rubbed her belly, and kissed her. She moved forward on the wall and I raised her skirt up above her waist. We kissed again for a long time. She reached for me, unbuckled my pants, and wrapped her arms around my neck. I entered her standing, picked her up and held her while her legs and hips enveloped me. When we finished, I fell back to the warm ground. She cleaned us off with her shirttail, tucked me back in, and lay down next to me.
“Drinking and thinking isn’t all you do here,” she said.
Fifteen or twenty minutes passed. The sun beat down on us.
“I ran into Mike in town yesterday,” she said. “That boy fascinates me.”
“Um.”
“He had a coffee with Kyra and me, and again I felt that same something. I don’t know what it is—a sadness, I suppose. Kyra and I talked about him on the way home. She said he’d been like that since he’d arrived here, evidently. A real loner. Scares people off, and doesn’t much care.”
“He seemed nice enough to me.”
“Oh, superficially he’s fine. But there’s something, after you get to know him . . .”
“How long did you talk to him?”
“Just a short while. This is all according to Kyra. And you know what else she said?”
“You want me to guess?”
She laughed. “No. I’m sorry. But evidently Mike smuggles guns for the Basques, or used to, which isn’t so amazing in itself, except that even to the Basques, he said he didn’t care about the movement. Just liked the danger, he said.”
“Did you ask him about it?”
“No. It’s all what Kyra says.”
“You realize that probably she’s full of shit.”
“Maybe. I don’t think so, though.”
“Why not?”
“Well, she says she found out from Tony, and he does have connections with the underground.”
“Well, anything’s possible, but I’d have reservations about anything I heard from Kyra.”
“I don’t know. I’m changing how I feel about her. After talking more with her, I’m starting to see that she’s not so shallow. She’s certainly not the tramp you make her out to be. You two just have bad chemistry, is all. I think, for example, that she really loves Sean.”
“Ha.”
“No. I mean it. She as much as told me that she uses his jealousy to keep him loving her at fever pitch.”
“Then she’s sick,” I said. “The jealousy itself is bad enough, but using it for that is the worst.”
There was a light breeze and Lea sat up. She reached for a cluster of dried grapes that had been left on one of the vines, and began eating them. She motioned toward the horizon. “Clouds.”
I looked. It would be a while before it rained.
Lea chewed on a few more grape-raisins that, to me, tasted bitter and dirty. She spit the seeds into her hand. The smell of our lovemaking rose off her, sitting as she was. I closed my eyes.
“I don’t think, Douglas, that you really understand her at all.”
I nodded. “Probably not, but I don’t like her enough to try to.”
“Why not?” she asked sharply. “Does she frighten you?”
“What nonsense is that?”
“It’s not. So what if she uses jealousy to keep her and Sean’s love immediate? She wants to feel things. Not so much have a status quo she can always control, but live right out on the edge of things.”
“She’s breaking Sean’s heart,” I said.
“She doesn’t see it that way. She says that it keeps him going, keeps him excited and stops both of them from stagnating. And little things seem to sustain them, you’ve got to admit. They don’t seem bored, or as weighed down by time as you and I do.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Bring it back to that. It always seems, lately, to come back to that theme, that I’m bored and—”
“You just said it yourself.”
“That was before making love just now.”
“Well, I hate to think that we do it out of boredom.”
And that one hit so close we lapsed into silence.
She leaned down again and put her head on my chest. The cloud came nearer and covered up the sun.
Finally, I spoke quietly. “I just don’t believe in all this frantic passion anymore, hon. We both know it’s not the small events that wind up making any difference, but the way you live, the things you really care about every day.”
“But don’t you think,” she said softly, “that all your drinking and complaining about time to reflect are your own way of telling yourself that those things like your writing, or our house back home, or any of what you call the little things, the day-to-day things, really don’t mean so much? That we’re both of us out of touch with ourselves and don’t much believe in anything anymore? You say our love, but even that sometimes is like an old shoe.” She smiled then, and ran her hand over my brow. “Just sometimes, but you know what I mean. Serviceable and comfortable, but that’s all. You know? Not completely alive.”
“Do you really feel that?”
“Sometimes I do, Douglas. I really do.”
I put my arms around her and hugged her to me. She was right, though I couldn’t admit it then. Nothing much did mean anything to me, and all the trappings of discourse and intercourse really were only that. In truth, nothing had touched me in years, and while I’d been busy working, I’d pretended so hard not to notice that I hadn’t noticed. It became my style to be cool and aloof, and I was.
I thought back to Sean and Kyra and the episode of him killing the chicken. Why had it incensed me so? It was cruel and bloody, no doubt, but also vital in a way I hadn’t been since—since I can’t remember, maybe ever. It could be that Kyra’s taunting was her way of keeping Sean alive, and maybe that newfound vitality was the key to the connection between Kyra and his novel writing. Things had meaning to him now, and details were important. Maybe her teasing was a tonic to his closed-up, tight-assed, earlier self saying, “There, you bastard. Deal with this, and this, and if I piss you off, good. Explode, get mad, grow.”
Bullshit, I said to myself. She’s driving him crazy.
It started to rain, then hail. We got up and ran for the cover of the trees. Crouching between two oaks, Lea told me she’d made a date to see Mike that afternoon, and did I mind? I said I didn’t, but that was a lie.
Eight
Berta, as she did most Saturday mornings, got up early and caught the bus into the Blanes station. As always, it was crowded, mostly with tourists in bright-colored shirts and light pants, lining up for their tickets. Everyone was so wonderfuly carefree, she thought. It must be wonderful to take a vacation. It certainly was nice of Señor Sean to give her Saturdays off most of the time.
The station lay in a pocket of sulphur fumes just outside the city. It was a small, brown, squat building with a baggage section on the right. Inside, usually the locals sat around near the walls, while the tourists, even this late in the season, controlled the center of the room, mingling with one another, making friendships to last for fifteen minutes. Outside, the huge buses waited to take the disembarking passengers to one or another of the tourist towns—Lloret, Tossa, Figueroa.
This morning a little Spanish girl with a pretty white dress sat crying by herself in the corner. She had a bloody nose, which she hadn’t been able to stop from running onto the dress. Berta was about to walk up to her when a man of uncertain age bustled past with a piece of cloth that he’d dunked in the water fountain outside, a fountain that had seen cleaner days. The girl’s cries seemed to double in volume as her father tried to clean her up, yelling at her the whole time to watch out for her dress. Berta bought her ticket and went outside to avoid the noise. She was only going to Caldetas, about twenty-five kilometers down the line.
When the train arrived, she took a place near the front of the car, happy to have a seat. She took out a full-length comic book and read quietly until the train reached Caldetas, a station rather de pressingly like the one in Blanes. Her brother was waiting for her.
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