By the Seat of My Pants

by Lonely Planet

  Every morning, Baumy would serve as quartermaster of the family motor pool, assigning cars to the various family members. In addition to the buggy, there were three jeeps – two of which were antique Willys that were as hard to drive as tractors – there was a Citroën 2CV, a BMW Isetta with one door that opened, a Land Rover and a small, practical Ford Fiesta that I quickly identified as the one vehicle I could actually operate. Baumy chose a pair of jeeps as our transportation for the day.

  The men were scheduled to participate in a match-play tournament, which left the women and myself free for a day of yachting.

  I clambered over the side of a white Willys to a bench seat in the back. Anya took the driver’s seat, alongside Emi. In the other vehicle were Baumy and the two girlfriends.

  The interior of Ibiza resembled the Pacific Palisades coastline where I had grown up, with similar olive and grey shrubs and rocky bluffs. The hills were scarred black from a recent brushfire, just as the Santa Monica Mountains above my house had often been when I was a child. We wound through a series of small parishes until we came to the marina.

  I had expected some sort of monstrosity of a yacht, the nautical equivalent of the cars they drove, but instead was surprised by the 7.5-metre powerboat Anya and her sister were now untying. In fact, this boat, the Ente, or duckling, seemed far too small for so many large German women.

  I quickly discovered that if you weren’t doing anything on this boat, there was nowhere to hide the fact that you were idle. Baumy assumed the role of captain, taking the helm and directing Anya and Emi as they pushed off with a pole and made sure the boat didn’t scrape its neighbours as we powered out. The girlfriends had arranged themselves on the forward deck of the boat, the spot where they were least likely to be disturbed. I had no choice but to take a seat behind Baumy, who, despite her bikini and Gucci sunglasses, conveyed a sort of U-boat commanderlike solemnity on the whole voyage.

  When we were out of the harbour, she turned to me. ‘Do you have a privet?’

  ‘A what?’ I asked.

  She frowned. ‘For a boat. A licence. Can you drive a boat?’

  ‘No’, I informed her.

  ‘Ach’, she said, and turned back to the controls.

  I felt useless.

  Our destination was a sandy island a few kilometres from the marina, across a sea no rougher than a wooden floor and under a late-morning sun whose heat was heavy and oppressive.

  As soon as we were out of the marina, all the women took off their bikini tops, and the small yacht was overwhelmed by breasts. Everywhere I looked, there were mammaries being jiggled by the application of sunscreen. On the prow, the girlfriends were like a pair of Aryan figureheads, warning other craft of this boat’s female cargo. Emi and Anya sat beside me, their breasts bobbing with the boat’s progress, and at the helm, Baumy stood defiantly, her chest sagging and heavier with age but still on proud display. For me, a mongrel mix of races and religions, to be loose amid this much pedigreed flesh was bewildering. I stayed seated and gazed port, the only direction in which there was no skin.

  The only purpose to our voyage that I could divine was more consumption. We threw an anchor and waded ashore at a beach restaurant where an appropriately large amount of calamaris and steaks were ordered. There we were, five blonde women and me – I felt as incongruous as a trapezoid stranded among perfect circles.

  Still, I should have been able to enjoy the company of five attractive women, and even found some vindication in my ending up here, on this Spanish isle, with all this pulchritude. If my various Tokyo and New York friends could have seen me then, I would have appeared as some sort of ridiculous winner in life’s lottery of breast allocation.

  But this was weird. In all my previous meetings with girlfriends’ families, there had been questions: What did I do? Where was I from? What were my interests? Even if nobody cared about the answers to these questions, there was at least the pretence of getting to know each other. But ever since I had arrived at the Beckers’ summer house, they had not evidenced any curiosity about me at all. These folks didn’t know if I had a job, where I lived, if I had gone to college, had siblings, parents, infectious diseases. At first I thought perhaps Anya had informed them, but one night she explained to me that she hadn’t really discussed me at all since arriving.

  ‘They just don’t worry about things like that’, Anya would tell me later.

  ‘What? You mean they don’t worry about other people’s lives?’ I asked.

  ‘Or their own’, she shrugged.

  Now, as I looked around the table and at Baumy laying down a platinum credit card to pay for the lunch, I was struck by a combination of admiration and resentment. How could they not care? I wondered. But then, as I watched these formidable women with their stern good looks and cruel confidence, I had to admit that this indifference must be what allowed them to cut an unfeeling swath through life. They weren’t bogged down with the self-doubt that comes from introspection. And if they weren’t busy scrutinising their own emotional interiors, then why should they waste their time trying to figure out mine?

  They never slowed down, the Beckers; they lived like an army on the offensive. You woke up, you ate as much as you could, and you advanced. There was no time for reading, for wondering about the state of the world, for questioning why we were here. In the presence of the Beckers’ sheer physical perfection and splendid material possessions, such matters suddenly seemed the peculiar concerns of hobbyists. I began to envy their thoughtless charge. It seemed a much more pleasant way to go through life than my path of pointless contemplation and ultimately self-defeating introspection. Beyond her appearance, hadn’t that confidence been the trait that had drawn me to Anya?

  After lunch, Baumy piloted the vessel through a narrow channel to a beach where we played a few rounds of paddleball. When we climbed back on board, Baumy fired up the motor and slid the throttle forward. We bounced over the waves for a few metres and then there was a thump and silence. She pulled back the throttle, jiggled the starter. Nothing. We were adrift.

  Everyone turned and looked at me.

  What was I supposed to do?

  Then I realised, as the only person on board with a penis, it was my job to somehow address any mechanical problems.

  ‘Karl,’ Anya said, ‘can you do something?’

  This seemed a strange request. Anya knew me. I didn’t even know how to operate a video camera. And here I was supposed to repair a boat?

  ‘What? I’m no –’

  Anya turned away. Emi, who was sitting facing me, covered her breasts.

  ‘Shouldn’t we call for help?’ I said. There were numerous boats around us, bobbing just fifty or so metres away in the piss-warm Mediterranean. Wouldn’t it be better to see if some salty sea dog could lend a hand?

  No one paid any attention to my suggestion.

  I stood up. Fine, I could pretend to know what I was doing for a few minutes until we called for help. I took up a position beside Baumy, who held up her hands and stared at the wheel as if it had betrayed her. Of course, in her view, it had. Cars, boats, planes – she also had a pilot’s licence – these all served her, and their various shortcomings were matters to be addressed by men. (Later, while flipping through a family scrapbook, I would find a German newspaper clipping in which Baumy stood smiling in a potato field next to a wrecked Piper Cub. She had walked away unscathed from her own plane crash.)

  ‘Did you hit something?’ I asked as she flicked the starter toggle up and down.

  ‘Of course not’, she said.

  A conversation ensued in German between the women, at the end of which Baumy dropped anchor. I was handed a diving mask.

  I was to submerge myself under the boat to see what might be amiss. I didn’t bother pointing out that I didn’t know what to look for. The important thing, it seemed to me, was that someone went in the water. Now.

  I splashed off from the rear platform, took a breath and dove under the boat. We weren’t very deep
, that fact I noticed immediately. I became a little claustrophobic in the 1.5 metres between the sandy bottom and the white-painted hull. I surfaced, took a breath, and then went back down again, exhaling a little as I did so. This time I rotated so that I put my hands on the hull. It was cold and slimy. There were streaks of brownish-green moss and algae growing on the fibreglass.

  I twisted and kicked for the surface.

  Back under again, I noticed a few silver-reddish fish and a submerged bottle. But I could find nothing wrong with the boat until I swam towards the stern and saw what looked like the top of an oversized coffeepot nestled in the sand. I quickly dove and retrieved it, surprised by its weight. I could barely lift it to the surface. As soon as I swung it onto the platform, I recognised it as a propeller. It was only as I looked down at the stripped shaft where our screw should have been that I realised it was our propeller.

  Baumy leaned over, saw the propeller, and shouted, ‘You broke the boat!’

  ‘Me?’ I shook my head, gasping from the exertion of diving. ‘It was on the bottom. We must have gone over some rocks.’

  Baumy had gone back to the bridge.

  I climbed back on board. It was a little cooler now; the sun was lower on the horizon. And most of those boats that had been happily bobbing in the late-afternoon current seemed to have headed back to port.

  ‘Can’t you fix it?’ Emi asked me.

  ‘How?’

  She shrugged. The Becker men, apparently, were called upon to repair things whenever necessary. I had no idea how to reattach a propeller.

  ‘Wouldn’t this take welding or soldering or something like that?’ I asked.

  I received no answer.

  ‘Mama,’ Anya said, ‘we’re sinking.’

  She was right. We were noticeably lower in the water.

  Now I felt like I was vindicated. We were going to sink. We would have to swim for the deserted beach and then spend the night huddling amid sand fleas and mosquitoes all because Baumy and the girls had been too stubborn to get help when it was there for the asking. Unless I could somehow patch the leak. I adjusted the mask and dove back into the water. The screw had been yanked back, cracking the mounting that held the propeller and leaving two large gaps where the cowling had been connected to the hull. It could be fixed, I thought; maybe even stuffed with shirts and towels so that the boat would stay afloat. All we’d have to do then was get a tow.

  When I surfaced, I heard laughter.

  ‘Ciao, bella! Ah, bellissimo!’ a man was shouting. ‘Why don’t you come aboard?’

  A nine-metre powerboat had pulled starboard. On board were a half-dozen vacationing Italian men who were now crowded so closely against the rail of their rear deck that their boat was listing to port. One of the Italians was manoeuvring their vessel closer while another was waiting to swing a pole onto the side of our boat. It was only at the last minute that the various Becker women reattached their bikini tops and gathered their possessions, preparing to abandon ship.

  ‘What about the boat?’ I asked.

  No one was listening. A champagne cork popped. The girls giggled.

  I grabbed my shirt and sandals and swung aboard the La Vita é Tropa – Life’s Too Short.

  The next day, I declined to go out with Anya or her mother, insisting that I wanted to stay around the house. This struck everyone in the family as curious behaviour. Why would anyone stay home when they could be out spending money, playing golf or risking their life at sea, in the air or on the road?

  I took a seat on a stone bench on the patio and flipped through old issues of Ola! and Bunte. Before me was the dappled Mediterranean, the blue far more lovely when viewed from here than from the bottom of a sinking boat. Then, from behind me, I heard the same scratching and shuffling I had heard on our first night as I tried to get to sleep. I peered into the bougainvillea behind my bench, and froze. There, standing on its hind legs, was a huge black rat. It was a male, with surprisingly large testicles. And it clearly wasn’t frightened; in fact, it seemed to be begging. We stood for at least ten seconds, the rat looking from my face to my hands. He almost seemed to shrug as he realised I had nothing to offer him.

  Finally, he climbed over the bench, jumped down to the patio and then made his way onto a marble coffee table where he sniffed at an ashtray and empty water glass. He was fat and walked with an awkward waddle that made me think he wasn’t used to carrying so much weight. I had never seen a wild rat so comfortable around human beings. I tried to shoo him away by waving my arms at him, but he merely paused and calmly observed my antics before sliding off the coffee table and waddling away, past the swimming pool.

  I didn’t feel like staying outside on the bench. I went inside and tried to explain to the housekeeper what I had seen, but I couldn’t think of the Spanish word for rat.

  When the Beckers returned home that afternoon, I mentioned the incident.

  ‘He’s called Hugo’, Baumy smiled. ‘He stays in the garden. He never comes in the house.’

  ‘But he was in the house, I saw him’, I said.

  ‘No’, Baumy said. ‘He never comes in the house.’

  The girlfriends nodded. They had been feeding Hugo fresh melon and cerrado ham.

  ‘If you feed a rat, he will never go away.’ As soon as I said this, I already knew that I had completely missed the point.

  The boat had sunk. This was mentioned in passing during another breakfast. No one attached any great importance to the matter, nor was there any mention of the fact that it had been abandoned. The Ente had been raised and towed back to the marina and was now dry-docked at a repair yard.

  As the rest of the family had planned to go out on the yacht of another industrialist family, Lothar asked me if I would check on the Ente and approve the ‘reparations’.

  For a moment, I considered objecting based on my ignorance of nautical matters. But who would listen?

  ‘Fine’, I assured Lothar.

  ‘Make him do a good reparation’, Lothar ordered with a smile.

  Sure. Whatever. I drove the Ford Fiesta down the hill to the Maritimas Pepe, where I parked and entered a warehouse in which dozens of boats were mounted on trailers or suspended on padded yokes like giant slingshots. As I walked up and down the row of boats, looking for the Ente, a man in a polo shirt and jeans approached me and asked if I wanted to buy a yacht. His belt buckle was an eagle clutching what I assumed to be a fake diamond in its beak.

  I explained that I was here about the Ente.

  ‘Ah, yes’, he nodded and retreated to his office. I found the Becker’s boat next to a much larger, more impressive vessel which had a chunk taken out of the hull like it had been bitten by a giant shark. The man returned with a clipboard on which was written a long inventory with even longer numbers of pesetas listed next to each item.

  He translated for me:

  Bilge

  Motor

  Screw

  Pump

  Starter

  Electrical system

  Battery

  The whole boat had been swamped, and everything needed to be replaced. The amount in pesetas ran into several millions. I tried to convert the figure to dollars, and wasn’t sure how to assess whether or not this was a good deal. I had already assumed that the family overpaid for virtually everything. I didn’t want Lothar to think I was an inept negotiator, however, so I told the gentleman to lower the fee by 100,000 pesetas.

  ‘Done’, he said.

  None of the Beckers ever asked about the cost of the repairs.

  That night, Anya and I went out for dinner and then to Pacha, a local nightclub. We didn’t return until 4am and when we opened the front door and walked into the entry hall and dining area, where the lights had, of course, been left on, we saw Hugo, the rat, or at least his ass, hanging out of a fruit bowl on the dining-room table, his black fur shockingly vivid amid the red, yellow and pink of the fresh peaches.

  Anya screamed.

  Hugo, startled, leaped from
the bowl and skittered down the table leg. Panicked, he began running around the room, unsure of how to exit. Anya climbed on top of the nearest chair, shouting at me to do something.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Kill it.’ Anya ordered.

  ‘But they feed it –’

  Anya pointed at the vermin now catching its breath in a corner, beneath a sideboard. ‘Kill it.’

  I looked around for a weapon. There were Hummel duck sculptures and a tray with a duck pattern.

  Baumy had been woken by the commotion and now strode into the dining room, wearing a T-shirt which reached to the middle of her thighs. She and Anya exchanged words and Baumy retreated down the hall, re-emerging a few minutes later with a wooden racquet, which she handed to me.

  ‘Kill it.’

  I took the racquet, unsure of how to wield it, and advanced towards the rat, who was still cowering beneath the furniture. The poor fellow had overestimated his welcome and would now pay the price. The Beckers had no patience for mammals that didn’t respect boundaries, even though the Beckers themselves had sent confusing signals. At my approach, the animal began to run back and forth, from one wall to another, desperate to escape.

  I backed him into a corner, away from the shelter of the sideboard, and we both froze. Then he made a break for it, attempting to run past me towards Baumy, who stood with her arms folded over her chest, and Anya, who was still perched on top of a chair. I swung the racquet down and caught Hugo between it and the floor and pressed hard. I couldn’t finish the job. I let up for a moment and the rat darted out and charged up my leg, over my stomach and down my other leg. Shaken, I swung the racquet at the floor, missing the rat as it scurried back to the shelter of the sideboard.