Coming out of the Sierras at Motril, he joined the main road to Malaga, and for the second time in his life followed the route of the retreating republican army. The road to Almeria, as Joshua now traversed it some forty years after the republicans’ retreat, had been subject to violence of a different order, this time out the land rather than the people being brutalized. The road was crammed with new hotels and condominiums, hammered into every available clifftop and cove. Haphazardly built, without a thought for tomorrow. SPRECHEN DEUTSCH HIER. WE SERVE FISH AND CHIPS.
He turned in his rented car in Almeria and spent the night there, bound for Ibiza in the morning. Such, however, were the vicissitudes of Spanish air schedules that he could not fly directly to Valencia, continuing from there to Ibiza, but was obliged to fly all the way back to Madrid, and from there to Valencia, catching yet another flight for the twenty-minute hop to the island.
If his mood had been one of gathering apprehension before, now it was downright filthy. There was no such nicety as women or children first or even seat selection on an internal Air Iberia flight. Instead, you hovered near the gate, prepared to scrimmage, elbows at a ready angle, flight bags a weapon, once your flight was called. Then you were shoveled into a bus, rammed in tight, until it was all but impossible to shut the doors. Next the driver lighted a cigarette and the bus waited on the apron while, your face pressed against the window, you watched the inevitable second bus pull up, only to take on the remaining two or three passengers and the flight crew. Then the buses toured the tarmac, giving the driver an opportunity to pick up speed before he finally braked to an abrupt stop before your plane, sending the passengers flying against each other and the windows. The doors opened, achingly slow, and the passengers scrambled, trotting toward the rear entry door of the airplane, elbowing, shoving, never giving an inch. When Joshua finally clambered on board himself, bruised and cursing, it was to discover that the quick and the brave had already claimed most of the vacant seats, laying out coats and satchels, a measure of ownership, and standing guard, glowering.
Finally he made it as far as Valencia, only to find out that something was amiss there. Too many belligerent Guardia Civil were milling about, rifles slung from their shoulders. Men and women passengers for Ibiza were brusquely separated. Passports or identity cards were demanded. Bags were searched. Then they entered separate waiting rooms to be frisked in the presence of plainclothesmen. Joshua’s tight-lipped request for an explanation was countered with shrugs. Then, suddenly, the crisis had seemingly passed and passengers were hurried off through the blustery night and onto their airplane. For the first time in years, Joshua was wretchedly ill in flight, heaving up the contents of his churning stomach again and again. After more than twenty-five years he was returning to Ibiza, his cherished Ibiza, ashen-faced and drenched in sweat.
Ashen-faced and drenched in sweat, come to think of it, was just how he had left the island in 1952.
5
SEYMOUR’S CORONARY STRUCK HIM, NOT AS HE HAD always feared, in an out-of-town motel, making love to a stranger, but in the security of his own home. He had been unwinding in his living room, after a grueling day, munching chopped liver and crackers, sipping a restorative Scotch, watching Walter Cronkite, when he felt something like a barrel stave tighten round his chest. Sweat broke from his every pore. And the stave, impossibly, tightened further. “Molly,” he managed to call out, “take me to the hospital. I’m having a heart attack.”
“Oh, come on. None of your jokes now. The table’s set and everything.”
“Call Morty Zipper.”
“I’m waiting for an important phone call,” Larry warned, irritated.
“Help. I’m dying.”
“Everything happens to me,” Molly said.
“Molly,” he groaned.
“All right. I’m coming, I’m coming.”
“Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.”
One glance at him in his chair and Molly’s heart began to palpitate. “Oh, my,” she said.
“I love you and the children. I always have,” he said. “Now please call Morty Zipper. Or an ambulance. Both.”
Molly hurried to the phone. Quaking, tears running down her cheeks, she held his hand while they waited for the ambulance.
“Remember, I have twelve shirts at Troy. The muffler has to be changed on the Buick. Izzy Singer is not to come to my funeral. No rabbis. I want Josh to speak over me.”
“Don’t talk like that. Stop. You’re going to be all right.”
“I’m dying.”
“Death isn’t the end. The body goes, inevitably, but the spirit lives on. Our children will tell loving tales about you at the Passover table.”
“Larry?”
“So will your children’s children.”
“How did I ever marry such a cunt?”
“Don’t you dare talk to her like that,” Larry said, shifting in and out of focus.
“Sh, darling.”
“Josh left a black bag in my bedroom cupboard just before he took off for Spain. It’s very personal stuff. His. You’re not to open it. Just return it to him.”
“You’re not supposed to talk.”
“Don’t say in the Star obit ‘the beloved husband of,’ ‘the beloved father of.’ I hate all that Hallmark cards shit. Just the facts.”
“It could be only heartburn. Or indigestion.”
But the men had already come with the stretcher and the oxygen tanks. One of the paramedics immediately recognized Molly. “Hey, how’d you get here so quickly, love?” he asked, grinning, pausing to rub her bottom in passing.
Molly leaped free of him. “You don’t understand,” she said stiffly, her cheeks crimson. “He’s my husband.”
“Oh, geez. Sorry.”
“Don’t you dare touch me,” Seymour moaned, horrified.
“Easy, old fellow. Easy now.”
6
THERE HAD BEEN NO AIRPORT ON IBIZA IN 1952, NO paved roads winding out of town, and only a few cars and a handful of small hotels. In those days, even the bus ride to San Antonio, some twelve kilometers distant, was an adventure. The bus was a hybrid. The chassis was of World War I vintage, a former U.S. Army vehicle, and the body, reconstituted many times, was made of wood, slapped together with a hammer and nails. Now, returning, Joshua discovered that all the roads had been paved. Private cars were abundant, there were modern taxis everywhere, and a fleet of spanking new buses of the Côte d’Azur type ran between Ibiza and San Antonio on the half hour, punctually.
Joshua arrived at midnight and took a taxi directly to one of the smart new hotels. Standing on the balcony, looking out to sea, he could not get his bearings. The old town, the watchtower, the familiar harbor were all obscured from view. All he could see were hotels – hotels everywhere – and new condominiums, their balconies confronting the sea like enormous bureaus with all the drawers left open; and then, his eyes moist, he recalled Peabody, charged with concern, Peabody, his smile tender, saying, “Try Ibiza.”
“Ibiza?”
“Ibiza.”
Peabody, who had used to stride down the Boulevard St. Germain, the world itself his inheritance, was on the Ganges now, searching for his firstborn son, Jeremy. Janet’s sweet fruit. Jeremy had last been heard from in Goa, eight months earlier, headed for Varanasi. Peabody was advertising in English-language newspapers all through Asia, sticking Jeremy’s photograph up on café walls and leaving copies with the police and the most likely hotels.
The last time they had talked on the phone, Peabody had said, “Damn it, Joshua, but weren’t we a grand bunch once?”
“Damn right we were.”
“Except for Bill Markham.”
“Yes.”
The harbor was obscured from Joshua’s view, but in his mind’s eye he was twenty-one again, seated at the dockside café with Juanito, watching a tall sorrowful man leaning against the deck railing, biting into an ivory cigarette holder. Mueller, sauntering into the bowels of the
ship, emerging with his handsome brown stallion.
Are you a man or a mouse?
One a.m., on Ibiza, eight o’clock in Montreal. Eight p.m. home time. Family time. Susy would be chattering away at Pauline, Pauline attentive, as they did the dishes together in the kitchen. Alex would be out, of course, but Teddy would be chewing on a pencil at the dining room table, pretending to concentrate on his homework. Joshua tried to put through a phone call, but was told there would be a two-hour delay.
Hell.
“I don’t want to be left alone,” she had said. “I hear every creak in the house. I dream I’m in my coffin.”
After breakfast the following morning, Joshua rented a car and drove to the old town through streets that had simply not existed in his time, streets of boutiques, pizzerias, pubs, and restaurants. Even the harbor, vastly extended, was not as he had remembered it. There was no longer a barraca at the edge of Sa Penya. Affronted, Joshua stopped a policeman and asked him if he knew where he could find Juanito Pus.
The policeman scratched his head, baffled. “What does he do?”
“Why, he’s a fisherman, of course. He was always on the waterfront. Everybody knows him.”
“You’ve been here before, then?”
“I used to live here, maybe twenty-five years ago.”
“Twenty-five years?” He whistled. “Well, the fishermen use another harbor now.” And he pointed out a cove, beyond the new yacht basin, where impressively expensive-looking boats rocked at anchor. Joshua drove there at once and was relieved to find fishermen mending their nets on the quay. “I’m looking for Juanito Pus,” he said.
“The old one?”
“Yes,” Joshua allowed, “the old one.”
Juanito hadn’t fished for years, they told him, but the family ran a stall in the fish market and Joshua should be able to find him there. So he started back to the old town, parked, and wandered among the stalls of the fish market, searching for a familiar face. Somebody found him first. A man who looked exactly like the Juanito he remembered, with the same endearing smile. The man grabbed Joshua by the shoulders and exclaimed, “The Canadian!”
Grinning back, his heart hammering, all Joshua could manage was a nod.
It was Juanito’s son, somebody he had known as a twelve-year-old puppy, a waterfront urchin, now a grown man of thirty-seven. Young Juanito explained that his son had been in an accident and his father was at the hospital sitting with the boy right now. They gossiped for a bit – Joshua’s Spanish rusty, infuriatingly inadequate – and then Juanito gave him directions. But at the clinic, the receptionist told him that Juanito had left and the boy was asleep. Disappointed, Joshua returned to his hotel and again tried to put through a call to Pauline. This time he was told there would be a four-hour delay. Joshua poured himself a stiff Scotch and sat out on his balcony, looking out to sea.
“I wish you were coming with me,” he had said.
“And I wish you weren’t going.”
“I have to.”
“You’re already in Spain.”
Damn it.
In Montreal, he was here; in Ibiza, he brooded on home. Inadequate in both places. What a prick you are, Joshua.
After dinner, he drove out to the Mar y Sol, parked his rented car, and set out on foot for Sa Penya. Its main street, actually an alley, where only fishermen and whores and donkeys had trod before, had been turned into a mall, and there was not a donkey hutch anywhere that hadn’t been converted into a restaurant or bar or boutique selling leather or jewelry. Tall, black-haired Argentinian boys sprawled on the pavement, joints being passed from hand to hand, their wares laid out on carpets before them. Rings, bracelets, pendants. A plump, curly-haired girl, wearing a T-shirt embossed with the slogan so THAT WHALES CAN LIVE, GROW JOJOBA, sat with them, plucking away at a guitar. Middle-aged homosexual couples fluttered past. Joshua avoided the posh basement bars, throbbing with acid rock rather than flamenco, and inquired after Juanito in the sleazy ones, where the locals obviously found refuge. Finally, he came up with his address and found the narrow house, only four doors beyond the winding passageway that had once led to Casa Rosita. But then his nerve failed him. Oddly enough, he had never been to Juanito’s place. He did not even know his wife. And it was eleven o’clock – maybe they had already gone to bed. He decided not to intrude. Instead, he drifted down to one of the new cafés on the main street and sat down to have a drink on the terrace.
The days are long, Seymour’s grandmother had said, but the years fly past.
The Mackenzie King Memorial Society seldom convened for their Annual Day any more, their last reunion a disaster.
Plump, good-natured Mickey Stein, recuperating from a heart bypass operation in Houston, had been unable to attend. Jack Katz and AI Roth were suing each other over a real estate deal in Toronto. Max Birenbaum had come, but stomped out in a huff, unable to endure the ribbing he was getting about his hair transplant. Larry Cohen, with the Department of Revenue now, had spent the evening avoiding a fulminating Bobby Gross, who was being taken to court on a tax-evasion charge.
“You know what your hero, E. M. Forster, once said?” Bobby charged, finally cornering Larry. “If I had to choose between betraying my friend or my government, I wish I’d have the courage to choose my friend.”
“That’s a loose paraphrase and he wasn’t talking about chiseling. Besides, I have nothing to do with the case. I can’t help.”
Lennie Fisher, who had been accepted as a member by the Royal Yacht Club of Ontario, invited everybody to join him for drinks on his sloop if and when they were in Toronto. “And I want you to know,” he said again and again, “if I’m moored in the outer basin, it’s only because everybody has to wait their turn for a berth in the inner basin. It has absolutely nothing to do with my being Jewish.”
“Even in the old days,” Seymour Kaplan said, “you were always the class tuchus-lecker.”
“What you mean to say is, I don’t look back on FFHS as the good old days, the glory days, because my life hasn’t been a downhill slope.”
The reunion was haunted by sweet Benny Zucker, gaunt now, his skull protruding through flesh drawn taut, telling everybody, “Boy, was I ever lucky. It was really a close shave. It weighed five pounds and six ounces, but it turned out to be nonmalignant.”
“You’re looking great,” Joshua said.
“If it was terminal, they’d have me on chemotherapy now, wouldn’t they, Morty?”
“Damn right,” Morty Zipper said, slipping out into the hall to bite back his tears.
“How long has he got?” Joshua asked, bringing him a cognac.
“I wish it were Eli. Is that a terrible thing to say?”
In the morning, Joshua drove right to the clinic. It was sweltering in there. The boy, who had been struck by a taxi, lay in bed with both his broken legs suspended by pulleys from the ceiling. He was thin, pale, his eyes dull. Joshua guessed that he was eight years old, but small for his age. He was twelve. “My father was going to drop by your hotel last night,” young Juanito said, “but he did not wish to disturb you.” Juanito, he added, had just left and could be found at home.
So Joshua returned to Sa Penya once more and started out for Juanito’s house. Suddenly, he was hailed from behind and turning, he saw a shrunken old man with a seamed face, wet eyes, and a sunken mouth. To his intense embarrassment, he did not immediately grasp that this was Juanito. Yesterday’s furnace. Well, he was no longer a skinny, callow punk in jeans, encouraging a beard. He touched Juanito’s cheek and the old man grinned, revealing long yellowing teeth with many a gap between. They strolled arm-in-arm, not speaking, but exchanging wry glances, to the waterfront café where they had taken their first drink together. “Juanito, my friend,” Joshua said, coughing to clear his throat, “this certainly calls for a cognac.”
“But I don’t drink any more,” he protested. “Not for the last eight years. The doctors, you know.” With a trembling hand he put on his glasses for Joshua, smiling
shyly, explaining that his failing eyesight had improved with abstinence.
“What happened to the barraca?”
Gone, gone, just like his fishing tubs, which had been lost in bad times. Ibiza’s fabled fishing grounds were no more, he explained, and smiling ruefully he added, “There are very many foreigners here today.”
Once fish had been so abundant as to be all but worthless on the island, the bulk of the overnight catch being sent to market in Valencia, the rest sold for pennies outside the barraca as a courtesy to the local women. Now, although some of the old men still stubbornly fished the once-fertile bank, there was hardly enough to feed the locals. The new hotels, the condominiums, in Ibiza and San Antonio, the entirely new seaside villages squeezed into every available cove by German developers, everybody dumping raw sewage into the sea, had driven the fish away. Juanito shrugged. He bit off the tip of a cigar and spat on the pavement. “Ibiza is prosperous now.” He told Joshua of shrewd old cronies who had sold their worthless fincas to crazed foreigners for fortunes. “You should have bought when you were here.” Then he burst out laughing. “We had to sell your clothes and your typewriter, remember?”
When the fishing had failed, Juanito, like his father and his grandfather before him, had gone to sea, sailing to the French ports, North Africa, and the Canaries. Fourteen years at sea, he said, signing on as a cook, but now he managed on his small pension and the help he got from his son.
“He has grown into a fine fellow,” Joshua said, “and he looks just like you.”
“He is a good man, but he is too wild. He drinks too much.”
“Hey, Juanito. Come on, man.”
Something of the old fire flared in his rheumy eyes. He grinned broadly. “Remember, we were going to fish together with the Eskimos one day. Through the ice.”
They passed the next morning together, reminiscing and driving about the island, Juanito shaking his head in wonder, amused that Joshua could actually afford a rented car.
Joshua Then and Now Page 41
