The Third Reich (17 page)

The rest of the afternoon I spent with El Quemado. First I went up to the room, but Ingeborg wasn’t there. I supposed she had gone out shopping. The beach was half deserted and El Quemado didn’t have much work. I found him sitting next to the pedal boats, for once lined up and facing the sea, with his gaze fixed on the only pedal boat that had been rented, which seemed to be very far from shore. I sat down next to him as if he were an old friend and soon I was drawing a map in the sand of the Battle of the Ardennes (one
of my specialties), or the Battle of the Bulge, as the Americans call it, and I gave a detailed explanation of battle plans, the order in which units would appear, highways to use, river crossings, the demolition and construction of bridges, the offensive activation of the Fifteenth Army, real and simulated advances of Battle Group Peiper, etc. Then I erased the map with my foot, smoothed the sand, and drew a map of the area around Smolensk. There, I pointed out, Guderian’s panzer group had fought an important battle in ’41, a crucial battle. I had always won it. For the Germans, of course. I erased the map again, smoothed the sand, drew a face. Only then did El Quemado smile, without diverting his attention for long from the pedal boat still lost in the distance. A slight shiver ran through me. The flesh of his cheek, two or three poorly healed scars, bristled, and for a second I was afraid that with this optical effect—there was nothing else it could be—he could hypnotize me and ruin my life forever. I was rescued by El Quemado’s own voice. As if speaking from an insurmountable distance, he said: do you think we get along well? I nodded several times, happy to be able to escape the spell cast by his deformed cheek. The face that I had drawn was still there, barely a sketch (though I should say that I’m not bad at drawing), until suddenly I realized with horror that it was a portrait of Charly. The realization left me speechless. It was as if someone had guided my hand. I hurried to erase it and immediately I drew a map of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, and with the aid of many arrows and circles I illustrated my decisive strategy to win at
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. I’m afraid El Quemado didn’t understand a thing.

The big news of the night is that Hanna called. She had telephoned twice before, but neither Ingeborg nor I was at the hotel. When I arrived, the receptionist gave me the message and I wasn’t happy to get it. I didn’t want to talk to Hanna and I prayed that Ingeborg would show up before the third call came. My mood thus altered, I went up to wait in the room. When Ingeborg got back we decided to change our plan, which had been to eat at a restaurant near the
port, and to stay and wait at the Del Mar. It was the right choice. Hanna called just as we were about to dig into our frugal dinner: toasted ham and cheese sandwiches and french fries. I remember that a waiter came to find us and as we got up from the table Ingeborg said it wasn’t necessary for both of us to go. I said it didn’t matter, the food wouldn’t get cold anyway. Frau Else was at the reception desk. She was wearing a different dress from the one she’d been wearing that afternoon and she seemed to have just stepped out of the shower. We smiled and tried to carry on a conversation as Ingeborg, with her back to us, as far away as she could get, whispered things like “Why?” “I can’t believe it,” “Disgusting,” “For God’s sake,” “The pigs,” and “Why didn’t you tell me before?” which I couldn’t help hearing and that wore on my nerves. I also noticed that with each exclamation Ingeborg hunched over a little more until she looked like a snail. I felt sorry for her; she was scared. Meanwhile, Frau Else, with her elbows firmly planted on the counter and her face aglow, began to resemble a Greek statue: only her lips moved when she spoke plainly about what had happened hours before in the laundry room. (I think she asked me not to harbor false hopes; I can’t say for sure.) As Frau Else talked, I smiled, but all of my senses were focused on what Ingeborg was saying. The phone cord seemed about to wind itself around her neck.

The conversation with Hanna was interminable. After she hung up, Ingeborg said:

“Good thing we’re leaving tomorrow.”

We went back to the dining room but we didn’t touch our plates. Cruelly, Ingeborg remarked that Frau Else, without makeup, reminded her of a witch. Then she said that Hanna was crazy, that she didn’t understand her at all. She avoided my eyes and tapped the table with her fork. From a distance, I thought, a stranger would have taken her for no more than sixteen. An overwhelming tenderness for her rose from the pit of my stomach. Then her voice rose to a scream: How could this happen, how could this happen? Startled, I feared that she would make a scene in front of the people left in the dining room, but Ingeborg, as if reading my mind, suddenly smiled and said she’d never see Hanna again. I asked her
what Hanna had said. Anticipating her response, I said that it was logical that Hanna should still be a little offbalance. Ingeborg shook her head. I was wrong. Hanna was much smarter than I thought. Her voice was icy. In silence we finished our dessert and went up to the room.

SEPTEMBER 3

I accompanied Ingeborg to the station; for half an hour we sat on a bench waiting for the arrival of the train to Cerbère. We hardly said a thing. Wandering around on the platform were crowds of tourists whose vacations were almost over and who still fought for a place in the sun. Only the elderly sat on benches in the shade. Between those who were leaving and me an abyss yawned. Ingeborg, however, didn’t strike me as out of place on that crowded train. We wasted our last few minutes giving directions: many people didn’t know where to go and the station employees hardly offered much guidance. People are like sheep. After showing one or two the exact spot to catch the train (not difficult to figure out, after all: there are only four tracks), we were accosted by German and English tourists wanting to check their information with us. From the train window Ingeborg asked whether she’d see me soon in Stuttgart. Very soon, I said. The face that Ingeborg made, a slight pursing of the lips and a quiver of the tip of the nose, suggested she didn’t believe me. I don’t care!

Until the last moment I thought she’d stay. No, that’s not true, I always knew that nothing could stop her. Her work and her independence come first, not to mention that after Hanna’s call all she could think about was leaving. So it wasn’t a happy farewell. And it
surprised more than one person, Frau Else first among them, though maybe what surprised Frau Else was my decision to stay. To be perfectly honest, Ingeborg herself was the first to be surprised.

What was the exact moment when I knew she would leave?

Yesterday, as she was talking to Hanna, everything fell into place. Everything became clear and irrevocable. (But we didn’t discuss it at all.)

This morning I paid her bill, hers alone, and carried down her suitcases. I didn’t want to make a scene or have it look as if she were running away. I was an idiot. I suppose the receptionist hurried off to give the news to Frau Else. It was still early when I ate lunch at the chapel. From the lookout point, the beach appeared to be deserted. Deserted compared to previous days, I mean. Again I ate rabbit stew and drank a bottle of Rioja. I think I didn’t want to go back to the hotel. The restaurant was almost empty, except for some businessmen who were celebrating something at two tables pushed together in the middle of the room. They were from Gerona and they were telling jokes in Catalan that their wives hardly bothered to acknowledge. As Conrad says: meetings are no place for girlfriends. The atmosphere was deadly; they all seemed as dazed as me. I took a nap in the car, at a cove near town that I thought I remembered from vacations with my parents. I woke up sweating and not the least bit drunk.

In the afternoon I visited the manager of the Costa Brava, Mr. Pere, and assured him that he could find me at the Del Mar if he needed me for anything. We exchanged pleasantries and I left. Then I was at Navy Headquarters, where no one could give me any information about Charly. The woman I saw first didn’t even know what I was talking about. Luckily there was an official there who was familiar with the case and everything was cleared up. No news. Efforts were continuing. Patience. In the courtyard a small crowd gathered. A boy from the Red Cross of the Sea said they were the relatives of a new drowning victim. For a while I stayed there, sitting on the stairs, until I decided to go back to the hotel. I had a massive headache. At the Del Mar I searched in vain for Frau Else. No one could tell me where she was. The door to the hallway that
leads to the laundry room was locked. I know there’s another way to get there, but I couldn’t find it.

The room was a wreck: the bed was unmade and my clothes were scattered all over the floor. Several
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counters had fallen too. It would’ve made the most sense if I had packed my bags and left. But I called down to the reception desk and asked them to tidy the room. Soon the girl I’d met before appeared, the same one who’d tried to find a table for me. A good omen. I sat down in a corner and told her to clean everything up. In a minute the room was neat and bright (easy enough to achieve the latter: all it required was opening the curtains). When she’d finished she gave me an angelic smile. Satisfied, I found one thousand pesetas for her. She’s a smart girl: the fallen counters were lined up beside the board. Not a single one was missing.

The rest of the afternoon, until it got dark, I spent on the beach with El Quemado, talking about my games.

SEPTEMBER 4

I bought sandwiches at a bar called Lolita and beers at a supermarket. When El Quemado arrived I told him to sit beside the bed and I took a seat to the right of the table, with one hand resting in a relaxed fashion on the edge of the game board. I had a wideangle view: to one side El Quemado, with the bed and the bedside table (the Florian Linden book still on it!) behind him, and to the other side, to the left, the open balcony, the white chairs, the Paseo Marítimo, the beach, the pedal boat fortress. I planned to let him speak first, but words didn’t come easily to El Quemado, so I talked. I began by giving him a brief account of Ingeborg’s departure: the train trip, her job, full stop. I don’t know whether he was convinced. I went on to talk about the nature of the game, saying who knows how many stupid things, among them that the urge to play is simply a kind of song and that the players are singers performing an infinite range of compositions, dream compositions, deep-bore compositions, wish compositions, against the backdrop of a constantly shifting geography; decomposing food, that was what the maps and their constituent parts— the rules, the throws of the dice, the final victory or defeat—were like. Rotting food. I think that was when I brought out the sandwiches and beers, and as El Quemado began to eat I sprang over his legs and grabbed the Florian Linden book as if it were a treasure about to vanish into thin air. Among its pages I found no letter, no note, not the tiniest sign of
hope. Just random words, police interrogations and confessions. Outside, night gradually crept over the beach and created the illusion of movement, of small dunes and fissures in the sand. Without moving from where he was, in a corner that grew darker and darker, El Quemado ate with the slowness of a ruminant, his lowered gaze fixed on the floor or on the tips of his huge fingers, emitting at regular intervals moans that were almost inaudible. I must confess that I experienced something like revulsion, a feeling of suffocation and heat. El Quemado’s moans each time he swallowed a mouthful of bread and cheese, or bread and ham, depending on which of the two sandwiches he was eating, constricted my chest until it felt as if it would burst. Overcome by weakness, I stepped over to the switch and turned on the light. Immediately I felt better, although there was still a hum in my temples, a hum that didn’t prevent me from picking up where I’d left off. Instead of sitting down again, I paced back and forth from the table to the bathroom door (I turned the bathroom light on too) and talked about the distribution of the army corps, about the dilemmas that two or more fronts could pose for the German player possessed of a limited number of forces, about the difficulties involved in transferring vast masses of infantry and armored units from west to east, from the north of Europe to the north of Africa, and about the common fate of average players: a fatal insufficiency of units to cover everything. These reflections caused El Quemado, with his mouth full, to pose a question that I didn’t bother to answer; I didn’t even understand it. I suppose I was carried away by my own momentum and inside I didn’t feel very well. So instead of responding I told him to come over to the map and take a look for himself. Meekly El Quemado approached and agreed that I was right: anyone could see that the black counters wouldn’t win. But wait! With my strategy, the situation changed. As an example, I described a match played in Stuttgart not long ago, although in my heart I gradually realized that this wasn’t what I wanted to say. What did I want to say? I don’t know. But it was important. Then: complete silence. El Quemado sat down next to the bed again, holding a little piece of sandwich between two fingers like an engagement ring, and I went out on
the balcony walking as if in slow motion and I looked up at the stars and down at the tourists passing below. If only I hadn’t. Sitting on the edge of the Paseo Marítimo, the Wolf and the Lamb were watching my room. When they saw me they waved and shouted. Although at first I thought they were shouting insults, their cries were friendly. They wanted us to come down and have a drink with them (how they knew that El Quemado was there is a mystery to me) and beckoned more and more urgently; it wasn’t long before I saw passersby raising their eyes to search for the balcony that was the source of all the commotion. I had two options: either to retreat and close the balcony door without a word or to get rid of them with a promise that I had no intention of keeping. Both possibilities were unpleasant; red faced (a detail that the Wolf and the Lamb couldn’t see, considering the distance), I promised that I’d meet them in a while at the Andalusia Lodge. I stood on the balcony until they were lost from sight. In the room El Quemado was studying the counters deployed on the Eastern front. Engrossed, he seemed to understand how and why the units were deployed along particular lines, though obviously that was impossible. I dropped into a chair and said I was tired. El Quemado scarcely blinked. Then I asked why that pair of morons couldn’t leave me alone. What do they want? To play? asked El Quemado. I noticed an attempt at clumsy irony on his lips. No, I answered, they want to go out drinking, have fun, anything that makes them feel less mummified.