One image evokes another, as if joined by the slim thread of coincidence: shells on the seashore in Zahara de los Atunes, curved bits of a broken amphora. He must let the thread roll off the spool, or pull lightly lest it break. He is on the verge of a discovery, a sensory memory like a bubble of air from millions of years ago captured inside a blob of amber. The wood floor of the large, dim room where the doctor works is as old as the building, and when someone walks across it, it creaks. He will hear the buzz of the intercom and tell the nurse that the patient can come in now, and footsteps will resonate as they would on the wood deck of a ship.
In the house of one of my grandmother’s sisters there was a room with a wood floor. I liked going there with my grandmother just to enter that room, to feel the floor give a little beneath my feet, and to hear the sound of it. It was like being in another place, another life. I have a similar sensation when I hear a cello. Again time leaps from one thing to another, an almost instantaneous impulse between neurons: Pablo Casals playing Bach’s suites for cello in Barcelona, in the fall of 1938 when the Battle of the Ebro has been lost and Manuel Azaña and Juan Negrín are listening from a box in the Liceo Theater. Behind the table, on a shelf holding a small number of books, most on medicine and history, the doctor has a CD player, which sometimes plays softly as he interviews or examines a patient lying on the cot in a dark corner of the room, in front of a screen. On the cot, the patient becomes more vulnerable, surrenders to the illness, to the doctor’s examination, to what he already sees on the other side of the invisible but definitive line that separates the healthy from the ill, deep in the prison of his fear, pain, and, perhaps worst of all, shame. The healthy flee from the ill, Franz Kafka once wrote Milena Jesenska, but the ill also flee from the healthy.
Before he tells the patient what the tests reveal—there is no way to say it without awakening terror, without feeling a knot in the throat, though it has been said so many times—the doctor will ask him to lie on the cot with his clothes on, all he has to do is lower his trousers a little and pull up his shirt, so the doctor can auscultate the abdomen, palpate the viscera with his long fingers, quickly, smoothly, precisely. The patient suffers the ignominy of lying on his back on a cot, flat and passive, his trousers pulled down to his scrotum, while the intrusive hand seeks what should not be there.
In the background, behind the sounds of breathing, the patient’s and the doctor’s, so close to each other and yet separated by a line, a Bach suite for cello is playing, performed in 1938 by Casals, on a night when the sky over Barcelona may have been pierced by the reports of antiaircraft fire and the flames of exploding bombs may have illuminated the dark city already defeated by hunger and a harsh winter.
Although the sound is low, the patient recognizes both music and the recording. For a few awkward minutes they speak of Bach, of the sound of the cello, of the technical marvel of digital recordings that allow buried musical treasures to be rescued, performances that took place on only one night. They talk, and the sheet with the test results lies on the table in the space bracketed by the doctor’s quiet hands, which in turn rest beside a shell that fingers instinctively reach out to touch. Until Casals exhumed these scores, the Bach suites had never been performed. He found them by chance one day as he was looking through old papers in a stall on a narrow street near Barcelona’s port, just the way Cervantes says he found the Arabic manuscript of Quixote in a secondhand clothes shop in Toledo. Pure coincidence hands you a treasure, triggers a memory hidden for years. That long-ago afternoon on a train: a tall woman in high heels, the beginnings of uncertainty and vertigo, of intoxication, in the green eyes glittering in a dark frame of curls, an unprovoked smile on thin lips set above a firm chin that looked Scandinavian or Anglo-Saxon.
BUT I DON’T WANT HIM to come yet, though he must already be on his way, uneasy but still not terrified, still living a normal life, which he will remember as a land to which he can never return when he leaves here. The doctor knows that the patient won’t want anyone to know what the tests reveal, won’t meet the doctor’s eyes, although a few minutes before, or during his previous visit, they were talking comfortably enough, perhaps about the Bach suites for cello. Now the patient is excluded, expelled, from the community of the normal, like a Jew in a Vienna café reading the newspaper in which the new German race laws have just been published. The café is the same, and the newspaper is the one he’s read every day for years, but suddenly everything has changed, and the waiter who used to speak his name so obsequiously and who knows what to bring without being asked, the same waiter he has every morning, might refuse to bring him a cup of coffee if he learned the truth, though there is nothing in the customer’s face—blondish brown hair, light-colored eyes—that says Jew.
I hold the shell in the palm of my hand. The still-childish hand of my son fits into it so easily, my son who takes my hand so naturally when we go for a walk, even though he’s thirteen. He would say to me when he was young, “Let’s measure hands.” We would hold them up, palms together, and his wouldn’t be even half as long as my bony, angular hand, the back covered with dark hair, not the hand of a doctor but an ogre’s paw making him giggle with happiness and terror. “Swallow up my hand with yours, the way the big bad wolf swallowed the little lambs. Tell me another story, don’t leave yet, don’t turn out the light.” He marveled that when I opened my hand, his was whole, not devoured, not even bitten, like the white lambs rescued by their mother from the belly of the wolf.
We would go outside the hotel and take a sidewalk lined with palm trees and hedges, and soon we would be at the Atlantic, dazed by the light, by the breadth and depth of the horizon, which didn’t end at the sea but farther out, at a line of blue mountains that were North Africa. At night we would watch the flickering lights of Tangiers through the ocean fog. I was in Tangiers once, many years ago, in another lifetime. As the doctor squeezes the curve of the shell, he is squeezing the hand of his son two summers before. His wife is pressed to his other side, to protect herself from the west wind off the sea, blowing from the direction of the dark mass of Africa and the lights of Tangiers, a wind smelling of seaweed. Every night, somewhere along that enormous beach, furtive emigrants disembark, or boxes of contraband tobacco and bricks of hashish are unloaded stealthily. Sometimes the powerful tides of the Atlantic carry cadavers of Moroccans or blacks swollen by the water and nibbled by fish, or bits of old rusted metal or rotted wood from the ships they went down on.
ONLY WHEN THEY REACHED the beach that first afternoon were they aware of the weariness they had brought with them, of how light they felt after shedding it, like leaving their luggage back in the room, along with the sweaty clothing they’d worn that morning as they left Madrid. So many months closed up in that dark room, waiting for visitors, for test results, seeing the faces of men and women marked by illness, chosen by the cruel hand of fate. The boy ran ahead, impatient to get to the shore, kicking across the sand the seemingly weightless blue-and-white ball the wind kept blowing away from him. The sun was still up, but there were few people on the beach, or else it was its length that made it seem bare, almost deserted, offered to them alone. He was a little reluctant to take off his shirt, he was so pale and skinny in that golden light, so resistant to tanning, unlike his wife and son, who had the same cinnamon skin, one of the primary genetic traits the mother transmitted to her son. I wonder what you inherited from me, child of my heart, leaping so intrepidly that afternoon into the first high wave crowned with summer’s foam, tumbled by it, jubilantly rising from the sea with the gleam of water and sun on skin not yet abused by time.
As I dropped facedown onto the sand, I felt, like a tangible plenitude, the curvature and solidity of the world. Jorge Guillén wrote: And walking, my foot knows / the roundness of the planet. I examined the tiny grains, the infinitesimal bits of rock and shell, glass, broken amphorae, worn and pulverized through geological spans by the monotonous force of the sea, which was working this very moment, resonating lik
e a drum in my ear, in my body weak with fatigue, gnawed by months of work, anxiety, insomnia, emergencies, remorse, months of witnessing the pain and infirmity of others, the panic, the progress of their deaths. I took a handful of sand then opened my fingers to let it trickle away in a thin thread. First it was something solid inside my closed fist, closed like the valves of a mollusk to the small fingers of my son, who tried to pry it open but couldn’t; if he managed to pull up one finger, breathing hard, the finger would lock back into place. Then the hand would open, slowly, and the sand that had been so compact would dissolve, leaving nothing but a few tiny grains on my broad, open palm, mineral dots glinting in the sun. Eleven years old but still enjoying that game, still futilely challenging his father, struggling and panting as he tried to pry open a fist where sometimes he found a caramel or a coin. Defeated, he would throw himself on his father and hug him with all his might, with a rough, deep-seated tenderness, and rub his hand against the grain of his beard to feel the prickles. And I had only to touch two fingers to my son’s side, just below his ribs, to make him fall to the sand, laughing and kicking his feet in the air.
“What a pain, you two, as big as you both are now.” Stretched out beside us, her eyes hidden behind her sunglasses, my wife brushed off the sand the boy’s kicking had sprayed over the magazine she was reading. Hours of idleness on the beach and in the hotel pool and siestas in the cool darkness of the room had removed all the fatigue from her face, and she wore the same smile of happiness that had dazzled me the first few times we saw each other. So desirable and young, as if twelve years hadn’t gone by, as if it weren’t her son who had sat down near her and slowly buried her red-toenailed feet, pouring from his half-opened fist a thread of sand that slipped across her arch and between her toes like a caress.
But I didn’t want to deny time, it had been kind as it went by, bringing us so many blessings, which were right there before me in those July days. My wife’s body pleased me more than ever, because for twelve years I had been learning it, with a desire that only familiarity can give, and also because it had sheltered and given birth to my son. I remember the rich threads of milk it spilled in drops from her breasts after the baby finished nursing. The same hand that felt the abdomen of the patient lying on the cot, searching for disease, twelve years earlier caressed that taut, round belly crisscrossed with powerful currents and quivering from the heartbeat of the child about to be born; I felt its planetary curve on the tips of my fingers. Who knows whether a physician can leave his profession behind the way he leaves his white coat in the darkened consulting room and walks toward the exit? My footsteps echo on the polished wood that glows with the luster of things well cared for over time, and I am blinded when I reach the street by the still-summertime brightness of the sun, forced to put on dark glasses and remember that my wife had bought them two years ago, two summers ago, in the same hotel shop where as soon as we arrived we made all the necessary purchases for our days at the beach: bathing suits and sandals, sun cream with maximum protection, a cap for the boy bearing the emblem of Zorro, a large inflatable rubber ball, so light that the breeze from the sea was always carrying it away, frogman goggles and fins, because the boy wanted to spear-fish as he had seen it done on a television documentary.
Now, in the half-light of the consulting room, there is something more. I didn’t see it until this moment, on the shelf with the CD player: the photograph of a child who is still a boy but growing out of boyhood, mussed hair and delicate features, goggles pushed up on his forehead and laughing so hard his eyes squint, with dabs of sand on his nose and in the black hair falling over his forehead.
TO THE WEST, THE BEACH stretched toward the white blur of houses in the town, mist blending the whitewashed walls and the sand into a single sunlit dazzle. Only with the first light of day, or at sunset, did colors show clearly and the forms of things come into focus. To the east, an abrupt hill covered with wild growth stood out sharply above the sea, framing the bay. In the setting sun the windows of expensive homes glittered half hidden in the dark green of hedges and palm trees, enclaves surrounded by high white walls interrupted by the strong purple of bougainvillea. We were told that multimillionaires, primarily German, spent their summers in those houses. At the foot of the cliff, on a large rock that became an island when the tide was in, was a concrete bunker that stood like a mineral cancer on the landscape, as resistant to the assault of the sea as the rock onto which it had been fused. For the boy it was an adventure to hold his father’s strong hand, climb up to the bunker, and through a corridor with a sand floor reach an interior room illuminated by the dusty, slanting ray of sunlight that fell through the narrow embrasure cut into the concrete, where guards could keep watch with their binoculars and rest the muzzles of their machine guns. On a cloudless morning, through the slit, you could see the coastline of Africa in great detail. The father took delight in explaining everything to his son, observing his concentration, pleased by his interest, the courteous and attentive way he listened. In 1943 the Allies defeated the Germans and Italians in North Africa and began preparing for the invasion of southern Europe. Look how close they would have been had they wanted to land on this beach instead of in Sicily; imagine the poor Spanish soldiers cooped up in this bunker, waiting for the American warships to appear.
They started back after the tide began to rise. Small, translucent fish fled between their feet as they splashed through the clean water. They walked along a smooth outcropping of rock that was slippery with seaweed or else covered by a dark, spongy moss that was soft beneath their feet. A wave retreated and left behind a pool in which tiny creatures worked busily, and father and son knelt to watch them more closely. The immediacy of human action shifts to the inconceivable slowness of natural history. Primary organisms dragging themselves from the sea to the land, teeming in pools, in the dense fertile ooze of salt marshes, armoring themselves in order to survive, developing valves and shells over millions of years, feet and pincers that leave a faint trail in the sand, a trail no more fleeting, though, than the marks our footsteps leave, our lives, the father thinks with no drama or melancholy, a fortyish man walking along a beach holding his son’s hand in a state of perfect and tranquil happiness, of gratitude, of mysterious harmony with the world, on one of those long early-July afternoons when the heat is not yet overwhelming and summer is still a perfect gift for a child.
The boy let go of his father’s hand to dive into the waves, and the father veered away from the shore and walked through warmer sand toward his wife, of whom he also has a photograph in the darkened consulting room: wide smile, fine lips always red with lipstick, even that afternoon at the beach, sunglasses like the ones film stars wore in the forties. I liked to think she watched us from a distance, the boy and me, easy to pick out on the beach that was nearly empty at that hour but still warm and bright, a time when there are already puddles of shadow in the footprints and on the sides of the dunes: the two of us kneeling, heads together, observing something in a brilliant sheet of water left by a retreating wave, then walking hand in hand along the shore, the pale, thin man and the plump, dark boy with the embers of a setting sun glistening on his wet skin and rolls of a little boy’s tummy showing above the elastic of his bathing suit. The two so different, separated by more than thirty years, and yet astonishingly alike in some expressions, in the complicity of their gait and their lowered heads, although the boy resembles his mother more, not only in skin tone, but also in the way he laughs, in the strength of his chin, in his hands, in the unruly hair curling in the damp sea air.
There is a salty taste on her lips and a more carnal feel to her kisses when I caress her beneath the slightly damp cloth of her bikini during the siesta, behind the drawn curtains. Her breasts and lower torso are white against her dark tan. I put my hand on the fuzz between her thighs and am reminded of the damp moss along the shore that my toes sank into until they touched the smooth rock. We couple slowly, desire building with the gradual tide, then our two b
odies are used and exhausted by love, mutually fondled, gleaming in the shadow.
As a young man he’d believed like a religious fanatic in the prestige of suffering and failure, in the vision of alcohol, and the romanticism of adultery. Now he could conceive of no deeper passion than what he felt for his wife and son, a love that enfolded the three of them like a magnetic field. Shared fluids, chromosomes mixed in one cell, the recently fertilized egg, the saliva exchanged and digested, saliva and vaginal secretions, saliva and semen sometimes glistening on her lips, dissolved into the nutritive current of her blood, mixed odors and sweat impregnating skin and air and the sheets they lay on, sated, asleep, while from beyond the drawn curtains came the splashing and cries of the children in the hotel swimming pool, and, farther still, if one listened carefully, the powerful roar of the sea, the wind lashing the tops of the palm trees.
WILD PALMS WAS THE TITLE of the novel his wife had been reading on the train and had carried to the beach in her large straw beach bag. He often asked her to tell him about the novels she was reading, and those summaries, along with a few movies, also chosen by her, satisfied his appetite for fiction. To him reality seemed so complex, inexhaustible, labyrinthine, that he didn’t see the need to waste time and intelligence on invention, unless it was filtered through his wife’s narrating or endowed with the ancient simplicity of fairy tales. In art he was moved only by forms in which something of the harmonic unity and functional efficiency of nature shone through. The ruins of Greek temples in the south of Italy or of the spas of Rome awakened in him an emotion identical to what he felt in the huge forests he had visited in New England and Canada. In a classic column, a great fallen capital, he found a correspondence with the sacred majesty of a tree, or with the precise symmetry of a seashell. He showed his son the spiral of a small shell and then, in a book on astronomy, the identical spiral of a galaxy. He led him to the bathroom and showed him the spiral the water made as it flowed down the drain of the sink. He caught a gleam of intelligence in his son’s dark eyes, which had the same color and oblique slant as his mother’s, and identical to hers in expressing, without pretense, wonder or disappointment, happiness or sadness.
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