The Drifters (56 page)

‘My God!’ Cato shouted ‘Look!’ And down the unpaved
slope leading to the ferry came a huge truck loaded with pipe.

‘You going to bring that on board?’ Britta asked the ferryman in Spanish.

‘Why not?’ He signaled the driver to come forward cautiously, and when the front wheels reached the ferry, the boat sank about two feet and water sloshed aboard, but the truck kept coming until the rear wheels hit the ferry, at which point the gunwales were only a few inches above water.

‘Just fine!’ the ferryman called cheerily.

‘What’d he say?’ Yigal asked, and when Britta translated the optimistic news, Monica said, ‘Wow,’ and crossed herself.

It was an exciting introduction to Portugal, this perilous transit of a muddy river on a ramshackle ferryboat. On the Portuguese side there was amiable confusion, with all work stopping while the customs crew gathered to inspect the pop-top. The chief climbed in and asked Gretchen to show him where they all slept.

One of the young Portuguese pointed first at Joe and Gretchen, then at the bed, asking without words if they shared it, but before anyone could answer, the chief rebuked the young man. In Spanish, Britta started to converse with the chief, who looked at her sternly, answering in French: ‘We never speak Spanish here. We can, but we don’t.’ He found a map, which he handed to Gretchen with peasant gallantry. His stubby forefinger traced the roads of Portugal for her, coming to stop at an inconspicuous village on a road well back from the ocean. ‘Alte of the four mountains. Alte of the rushing river. You are fine young people and I hope you will do me a favor. Drive up to see Alte. Because I want you to know Portugal at its best.’

He shook hands with each of the six and wished them a pleasant sojourn in his country. An assistant handed Joe the car papers, properly stamped, and as the pop-top started to leave the customs shed the chief turned his attention to the Spanish driver of the truck, and Britta heard him growl in Spanish, ‘And what the hell are you going to do with those pipes?’

The introduction to the new country was a revelation. Because Portugal stood so far behind Spain on any social or economic index—it was really an eighteenth-century
land—the modern excesses that had ruined the coast of Spain had not yet penetrated here, and one saw how beautiful mountain land could be when it fell gently to meet clean, uncluttered beaches. The towns of Portugal were neat and ancient and feudalistic. Along the edges of the Atlantic there were no skyscrapers, and such foreign millionaires as had slipped into the area to build had been forced to do so unostentatiously, so that from the winding highway the traveler could not even see the new buildings.

But it was the land itself that captivated Joe. The hills were covered with low trees so beautiful in formation that he stopped the car and persuaded Britta to ask what they were. She tried Spanish, but the man she was speaking to refused to use that language, even though she suspected he understood. ‘Almonds,’ he said in French. ‘You should have been here in January when they bloomed. You could smell them for miles.’

There were oranges, too, and old oaks and evergreens, but most of all there was a wealth of small farms, their fields marked off by walls of rock, their homes built low against the ground and looking as if they had grown from the soil and not been built upon it. ‘This is pretty special,’ Joe said, and the more he saw of the land, and its visible signs of having been tended and loved throughout the centuries, the more he enjoyed Portugal. ‘I feel as if I’d been here before,’ he said ‘It’s like coming home.’

Slowly he drove through that magic area of forest and hill and ocean called Algarve. He suspected that this was one of the choice spots in the world, a locale fortunate of itself, but also fortunately ignored by history and development. Here there was no Málaga airport bringing thousands of money-spending tourists every day. If you wanted to visit Algarve, you had to spend time and ingenuity, not merely money.

‘Let’s have lunch at Albufeira,’ he said, looking at the map. ‘It’s on the ocean. Afterward we can go back into the hills to see what Alte has to show.’ The others agreed with this, so they proceeded—with many stops to view the long, empty beaches—to that curious town on the waterfront where the streets wind in and out of tunnels which carry them through low hills. At one minute they were on a crest … two turns to the left and they were directly under where they had been a moment before. Monica was delighted with the fairy-tale quality of the town and cried,
‘It’s so marvelously different from Torremolinos.’ But Joe noticed, as he told me later, that when the time came to eat, she intuitively smelled out the one bar grubby enough to have fitted into the Torremolinos scene.

Inside, an angular, pasty-faced English expatriate known as Churchill lounged in a corner, and with a telepathy that was uncanny, he and Monica recognized each other, not by name but by condition.

‘Hullo,’ he mumbled as if not fully awake. ‘You’re English, I see.’

‘Name’s Monica. How’s the food here?’

‘Bloody dreadful.’

‘And the beer?’

‘Acceptable, if you’re buying.’

‘I am, if you tell us something about the place.’ She directed Cato to move some tables together, and said to Churchill, ‘Join us.’

He said he wasn’t hungry, but he sat with them as he nursed a beer and gave them his evaluation of Algarve: ‘Consider it a British colony. We’re smart. We know where the bargains are.’ With a bony finger he pointed at tourists crossing the square. ‘Those two are English. So are the other three. Hell, they’re all English. It’s bloody dreadful.’

When the waiter brought two greasy menus, Churchill pitched them onto the floor and told the man, in lively Portuguese, ‘Go across the street and fetch us six portions of
caldeirada de peixe.
’

‘What did you order?’ Britta asked.

‘You get it, you eat it,’ he said rudely. He was about forty, extremely thin, un-barbered, aquiline-faced, sloppily dressed, with dirty tennis shoes, and seemed too bored with his exile to be either witty or truly sardonic. But he was informed, and when Joe said, ‘We thought we’d take a look at Alte,’ he clasped his hairy hands about his stubbled chin and said, ‘God must have lent you His compass. I congratulate you on choosing the best spot in Algarve.’

While he was expatiating on the region, and sipping the dark beer of Portugal, the waiter returned with a tray containing three huge tureens, placing one before each of the girls. ‘What is it?’ Britta asked. Taking her spoon, Churchill dredged the bottom of the tureen and brought up some shellfish and a baby octopus. Lifting them high in
the air, he splashed them back into the tureen. ‘Seafood,’ he growled, ‘of majestic quality.’

Britta, unruffled by his behavior, smiled gently and asked, ‘Aren’t you having any?’ and he replied, ‘A bite or two from yours,’ whereupon he dipped in, catching a small octopus, which he lifted into the air, allowing it to dribble into his mouth, one tentacle sliding down over his chin. With a loud sucking noise he drew the errant tentacle into his mouth, chewed it sloppily, swallowed it, and said, ‘Best dish in Portugal.’ He thrust his spoon into Monica’s tureen, then Gretchen’s, stealing an octopus from each.

The meal was a good introduction to Portugal: hot garlic bread, green wine, and an abundance of potatoes and onions in the
caldeirada.
Britta kept score on the kinds of fish in her helping: eel, shellfish, perch, sardines, squid, and best of all, the baby octopus, sweet and chewy and very marine-like in taste. ‘This is good,’ she told Churchill and again he growled, ‘Majestic quality. I told you it would be.’

It was late afternoon before they left Albufeira. They drove some distance into the hills before finding a road which led to Alte. After several miles of moderately steep climbing, they reached a turn from which they could look down upon a village so compact that it could be encompassed in a single glance. Perched on the side of a cascade which tumbled down a narrow canyon, Alte was surrounded by four hills; it was a doll’s village, and as attractive as any they had ever seen.

It was dusk and drovers were returning from the hills, leading their horses. ‘I’m going to like this place,’ Joe said.

The second person whose life was affected by the trip to Portugal was Britta, for when the time came on that first night out of Torremolinos to arrange the pop-top for sleeping, she faced up to something that had been troubling her for the past few weeks. The pop-top, as modified, offered six sleeping spaces, and how they were distributed became important. The factory had built in four sleeping spaces: a double bed along the length of the car, spacious and comfortable; one jammed in along the front seats, soft but small; and a hammock suspended from the roof, neither comfortable nor large. The additional pair that
Yigal and Cato had contrived were separate bunks cantilevered from the sides; they were large but not very soft.

Going to bed thus became a tactical problem similar to the one faced by the man who first canned herring: who would lie next to whom? Arrangements had to begin with the double bed, for what happened there would determine the rest, and Gretchen, as owner of the car, solved this firmly and in a manner which invited no discussion.

‘Joe has to drive and he needs a good night’s rest. He gets the big bed. Cato is tall, so he sleeps with Joe. Monica is the shortest, so she takes the catty-corner bed up front, and Yigal is short enough to use the hammock. That leaves the new beds for Britt and me.’ Monica started to speak, but Gretchen cut her short: ‘And if anyone just has to have sex, you can borrow the big bed during the afternoon.’ She nodded slightly toward Monica and Britta.

It was this that forced Britta to make a decision. She had now been away from home four months, and as she climbed awkwardly into the bed assigned her, stepping over Joe as she did, it occurred to her that the restrictions of the pop-top were providential. She had known for some time that her affair with Joe had about run its course.

What is there in it for either of us? she thought as she lay in the unfamiliar bed. He’s a good guy … but where will it lead?

She was not thinking of the fact that Joe had no money to support her, nor any immediate likelihood of earning any. Nor was she worried about the improbability of his ever marrying her; she enjoyed sex on her own terms and liked men enough to live with them on her own responsibility. She intended one day to marry, if, in the term used so often by girls her age, ‘things worked out.’ By this she meant that she would have to meet the right man, under the right circumstances and with the right promise for a productive future. If, as the young people also said, ‘things didn’t work out,’ she would not be averse to living according to the pattern of the past four months.

She had found Joe to be the considerate, just man she expected when she first climbed into his bed. They had had a good time together, and if her future affairs proved half as rewarding, she would have no complaints. ‘In strict honesty,’ she whispered to herself as she lay, sleepless, directly above the man she was preparing to read out of her life, ‘I suppose there won’t be marriage. Just a succession
of Joes. I’m lucky in small things but not big ones. Well, it won’t be unbearable.’

Why had she reached these gloomy conclusions? I am able to summarize her reasoning that night because when we next met she reviewed her situation with me and said, ‘I decided then that no substantial good would ever develop for Joe and me. It was fun in bed, but what concern did we really have for each other? We weren’t going to make a home, or have children, or work for the same goals—so what was the purpose?’

‘Are home and children your goals?’ I asked in some surprise.

‘Not necessarily. But meaning is. I want my life …’ She hesitated, then started laughing at her pomposity. ‘The real reason, Mr. Fairbanks, is that with Joe, there would be no possibility of our going to Ceylon. Joe is not a man of the sun. He’s like my father. He’ll find a dark corner somewhere and fight his battles with a kind of dull stubbornness.’

She told me much more, of course, and from it I derived the portrait of a self-directed young woman, an Ibsen heroine from the north country, sure of herself inwardly but confused in her outward relationships. Had a young man of even minimum accomplishments come on the scene at that time, inviting her to Ceylon or Hong Kong, she would have left us in six minutes, the time it would take to pack her bag. Sex and emotional involvement played no profound role in her life, but she did insist that both be meaningful over the long haul, and if, when the man got her to Ceylon, she found either it or him to be of little value, she would drop him in the instant and be off for Lima or Wellington, if either city promised a more fulfilling life.

I never ascertained what, in her mind, comprised the fulfilling life. It wasn’t sex, or marriage, or an established home, or an assured income, or any of the things girls were perturbed about when I was a young man. When I asked her for definitions one afternoon, she said simply, ‘The word is
decency.
I want all parts of my life to add up to something decent.’

So in her hammock that first night, in an olive field beside the Guadalquivir, she decided that the sleeping arrangement which Gretchen had laid out would be permanent. The affair with Joe was ended.

After their visit to Sevilla, when they were preparing the pop-top for the ferry that would carry them into Portugal next morning, Britta said, as they sat about the campfire, ‘I liked La Rábida. I think it means more for a Norwegian to stand at the spot where Columbus started than it does for you others.’

‘Why?’ Gretchen asked.

‘It proves so much about Viking history. We discovered America hundreds of years before Columbus, everybody knows that. But we did nothing with it. We were brave but we lacked ideas. I often wonder what the Vikings told their people when they returned home. I suppose they said, “There’s land out there,” and the kings said, “So what?” and that was that. We even forgot we’d been to America. But Columbus came home filled with ideas … his journey amounted to something … not because of his bravery, because of his ideas.’