Sunburn (22 page)
Was he not, though, being unfair? He’d never even accused Lea of being unfaithful, and had no proof that she had been. And after all, he thought, would that be so bad? Many women her age had affairs. It didn’t necessarily mean that they wanted to leave their husbands. Perhaps he should have had a few dalliances himself. But it really didn’t suit him. He wasn’t attracted to other women. Occasionally he’d get a crush on someone, but it was more a schoolboy thing or a fatherly feeling, as with Marianne.
Then he thought of the things about Lea that he didn’t like, little things that over the years he’d come to accept as those flaws in a person that one must learn to live with. In their first year or two together, he’d thought her calm exterior would drive him crazy, but he’d adjusted.
Suddenly, all the idiosyncrasies that he’d come to regard almost as his own fell into their perspective. He remembered that long ago he used to sing in the shower, and Lea had asked him to stop, and it had been a small thing, so he had. And he used to dog-ear pages until Lea had scolded him jokingly about it. He also used to wipe his mouth with a dish towel, and drink milk directly from the bottle, and use too much mayonnaise on ham sandwiches, and stack more than one record at a time on the record player. But all that had stopped, and now he realized that it had been Lea and her influence that had changed him. Had it been for the good? He doubted it. It really didn’t make much difference, other than that the accumulated weight of all those trivialities sometimes made him feel trapped.
Wouldn’t it serve her right if he left her? He was already starting to think of himself as free of her, as though she had been a burden to him all these years, which was not true. He was simply faced with the phenomenon of himself as his own man, responsible to no one else, and the thought didn’t frighten him. After all, he was well into middle age. It was a purifying thought.
Now, lying back, he thought of the other changes he’d made. He’d had to keep working all the time bringing in a paycheck, even though Lea’s job had provided plenty of money. Still, he admitted, he had enjoyed his work. It had given him enough, but not too much, free time. But what about that novel that he’d talked himself out of being interested in? Hadn’t that gone by the boards because of Lea’s insinuations that he could spend his time more profitably? In other words, getting paid.
Then, in the dead, still quiet of the room, he became conscious of some noises. They had that same muted quality he’d come to recognize as coming from Sean’s room. He got up and walked to the window. Yes, it was clearer now. There were voices—Lea’s and Mike’s, unmistakably. The light was on. A shadow passed in front of the shutter, and then the room went dark. The wind outside freshened for a minute, then calmed again. He heard more voices—whispered voices. Then it was quiet. He stood at the window, looking down on the courtyard, not really thinking. He thought of yelling out, announcing his presence. But he couldn’t make a sound. Where was Sean? Had he gone out?
The clouds above were lead black, like wet slate, and they wouldn’t break. He leaned one hand against the sill and with the other rubbed his eyes. He was sweating. His scalp itched. He heard Lea cry out, a cry he knew well, followed almost instantly by a similar cry from Mike. Leaning heavily against the sill, he closed his eyes, wondering how he could leave the house without being seen.
Sean looked up through bleary eyes at the door to his office. He’d heard something outside, something like a car driving up. He tried to get his head clear, then reached for the bottle beside him on the desk. That would be Kyra getting home, he thought. What time was it? It was getting dark out, but he didn’t feel as though he’d been asleep that long. He took a sip and cleared his throat, still sitting. He thought he might get up and greet her, but realized he was too groggy to pull it off with any élan whatever, and so decided to stay until she came in to see him. He looked down at the page in front of him, and swore to himself. Some day’s work.
He didn’t hear the front door open, but he heard, or rather felt, the soft impact of it closing. Kyra would be in in a second, and would laugh at his besotted state. He knew what she would say, that she couldn’t leave him alone even for a day with a bottle nearby without him getting drunk. And he would say, truthfully, that he found it impossible to concentrate when she wasn’t around, and missing her made him drink. Then she would muss his hair and kiss him, and he would pat her gently on the rear with his good hand. Then maybe he would take her over to the couch.
But she didn’t come in, and he thought he heard a male voice coming down the hall. Would that be Tony? Did she think no one was home? She’d said there was a chance she would see him and bring him back up to the house. Well, that would be good, he thought. He hadn’t seen Tony since that day in Blanes, and he always enjoyed his company.
He quietly pushed his chair back, stumbling slightly as he did so, but he was barefoot, and didn’t intrude on the stillness of the house. What the hell was Kyra doing? Why didn’t she come and see him? He stood at the doorway out to the courtyard, and saw the light in his room go on. Ah. She thought he was in there sleeping.
But then he heard Tony’s voice also coming from the room. There was whispering, and then the light went off. Still, the voices continued. He strained to hear, but could make out no words.
Kyra and Tony. He wanted to call out, to scream out her name and ask her why, but he couldn’t.
Already he’d drunk so much that he couldn’t focus his eyes, but he crossed back to his desk and took a long drink from the bottle. Then he went again and stood in the doorway. His legs didn’t want to work, so he locked his knees to keep himself standing. By now he could hear them again, though the sounds were muffled through the shutters. It was clear what they were doing.
He had no idea how long he stood there, but he didn’t move. Breathing heavily, he leaned against the doorpost with the bottle in his hand, and bit down on his tongue. It was numb. Finally, he heard Kyra whimper with pleasure, and then they both cried out, and he sank to the ground.
In his blurred state, he felt lost. He’d always said that he’d kill himself if Kyra betrayed him. And now here it was. He almost smiled. So this is how death comes, he thought. Unexpected and uninvited.
Tears came and overflowed his eyes. There was no doubt what he would have to do. He just hadn’t even considered that it would be today. It had always been in the future.
He pulled himself up and walked, staggering, out into the courtyard. Standing in the center of it, he looked up at the sky with its burden of rain. He didn’t sob, but tears ran down his cheeks, covering his face, and he didn’t wipe them away.
Behind him, the room was now silent.
Out in the back by the fence was the old shed where he stored his tools. He walked back to it, his index finger jammed into the neck of the bottle to keep it with him. After falling up against the door, he got inside and felt around in the dark until he found the large coil of rope that the painters had used with the scaffolding. His bare foot landed on a cockroach and it squashed underneath, but he barely noticed. It didn’t matter now, anyway.
Looping the coil of rope up around his shoulder, he picked up the bottle again and walked to the stairs leading to the roof. He wiped the back of his hand over his eyes so that he could see the steps, and walked up to where the beam protruded. Sitting on the ledge, he put the bottle down and took the coil from his shoulder. He sat on one end of the rope, and holding it against him with his stump, he managed to tie a loop knot in the end. Then he made a lasso and threw it out over the end of the beam, catching it on the second try. He took the end he held in his hand and made another knot, pulling the rope back through it so that it made a noose, which he put over his head and made tight.
The rope was ten feet long. Just about right. Inching his way out onto the beam, he grabbed the bottle and kept it beside him. He could see Tossa down in the distance, above the bare trees and under the blanket of cloud. He took a long drink. It was beautiful, he thought.
What was he doing up here?
Suddenly he realized how drunk he was, and how bad his hearing had gotten. Was he willing to die for the evidence his ears had given him? He laughed at himself, at his ludicrous position. Surely, this was the silliest he’d been. There must be other explanations. It might not be Kyra, even. There were two other women in the house. He would have to confront it. If he believed in Kyra, here was his first test.
And then there was the nonsense of having told everybody that he would kill himself if Kyra was unfaithful. Even he’d come to believe it. Yes, he’d said it enough times, but that was the kind of statement that people shouldn’t hold you to. There were too many questions yet, and he didn’t feel like dying just now as he looked down at Tossa. He regretted that he’d made such a big deal out of the suicide thing. His friends would take him less seriously in the future, perhaps. But at least there’d be a future.
The more he thought, the more he became convinced that it hadn’t even been Kyra and Tony. His ears really were bad. He had just been drunk and groggy, and now he was beginning to feel tremendously relieved. Not only had it not been Kyra, but he could live, and suddenly he wanted to do that very much.
So he began to inch his way back to the ledge, but his dizziness began to control him. He looked with longing at the house, only a couple of feet away, and almost lost his balance. Righting himself, he took a couple of deep breaths, and then made the mistake of looking straight down. Again, the dizziness came in a wave. Suddenly he remembered the noose around his neck. He had to get that off—at least then if he fell, maybe he’d only break a leg. He reached up with his hand and started to loosen it, but he couldn’t open it enough to clear his chin, and he got impatient and gave it a little jerk. That made him lose his balance and he reached out to grab for something, but his stump only smacked painfully against the beam. He knew he was falling, and tried again to wrench the rope from around his neck, but it was still in place as he fell out into the air.
The Basques drank a lot of champagne on that and the following day. Franco finally died in Madrid, and there was freedom in the air.
PART III
Two minutes and a quarter from now
Nikolaus will wake out of his sleep and
find the rain blowing in. It was appointed
that he should turn over and go to
sleep again. But I have appointed that
he shall get up and close the window first.
That trifle will change his career entirely.
He will rise in the morning two minutes
later than the chain of his life had
appointed him to rise. By consequence,
thenceforth nothing will ever happen to
him in accordance with the details of the
old chain.
—MARK TWAIN “The Mysterious Stranger”
Eighteen
The French liner
Antoinette
sat at its berth in the port of Barcelona, decked out in flags and streamers, having stopped overnight on the first leg of its trip from Marseilles to Dakar, via Casablanca and Tenerife. I stood blinking in the cold morning sun with a headache and a mouth that tasted like cheese.
Antoinette
sat at its berth in the port of Barcelona, decked out in flags and streamers, having stopped overnight on the first leg of its trip from Marseilles to Dakar, via Casablanca and Tenerife. I stood blinking in the cold morning sun with a headache and a mouth that tasted like cheese.
I’d spent the night before in semisleep, cradled around my third and fourth liters of
tinto.
How much time had elapsed since I’d found Sean? I knew that somewhere the big holiday season was getting into full swing. Or had it passed? The night before, I’d gone to the market and bought some snails in tomato sauce, a wedge of Camembert, or so it was called, and a loaf of bread, along with the aforementioned
tinto,
and had come back to the tiny, airless room I’d rented just back from the
ramblas.
On one of my several trips to the bathroom, I was stopped by a skinny, dark youth wearing a pair of bright orange bikini shorts. He asked me if he could have some of my wine, or maybe come to my room and share it. I declined. Later I heard some scuffling outside my door, but didn’t get up to examine it.
tinto.
How much time had elapsed since I’d found Sean? I knew that somewhere the big holiday season was getting into full swing. Or had it passed? The night before, I’d gone to the market and bought some snails in tomato sauce, a wedge of Camembert, or so it was called, and a loaf of bread, along with the aforementioned
tinto,
and had come back to the tiny, airless room I’d rented just back from the
ramblas.
On one of my several trips to the bathroom, I was stopped by a skinny, dark youth wearing a pair of bright orange bikini shorts. He asked me if he could have some of my wine, or maybe come to my room and share it. I declined. Later I heard some scuffling outside my door, but didn’t get up to examine it.
There was one window in the hall leading to the john, and through it, I noticed that somehow it had gotten light. I put on a clean shirt, made an attempt at shaving with cold water, and finally got out to the street.
I’d bought my ticket in Barcelona on the day before the funeral, but that seemed so long ago that I could scarcely believe I was finally going on board, getting out of this place at last. The girl who sold me the ticket spoke a bit of English and explained to me that in the French system, there were ten classes on a liner: three in deluxe, three in first class, two in economy, and two others, standard and
dortoir,
or dormitory. Since I was by now getting used to counting my pesetas, I’d elected to go lowest class. I’d lived in dormitories before. There was a remarkable difference in price. The girl assured me that there would be three meals served daily, lunch and dinner with wine. So I booked into
dortoir
as far as the Canaries. I wasn’t quite ready for Africa yet.
dortoir,
or dormitory. Since I was by now getting used to counting my pesetas, I’d elected to go lowest class. I’d lived in dormitories before. There was a remarkable difference in price. The girl assured me that there would be three meals served daily, lunch and dinner with wine. So I booked into
dortoir
as far as the Canaries. I wasn’t quite ready for Africa yet.
At the pier, I waited in line silently while the travelers in front of me checked their baggage, but when I showed my ticket I was ushered around and brought, still carrying my suitcase, past the others and onto the ship.
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