by Eduardo Lalo
“That doesn’t exist anymore, man. This place is full of Germans.”
He suggested we ask at a bar. In our ignorance, we had arrived at a development composed almost exclusively of apartments for rent, designed to satisfy the needs and expectations of Nordic masses thirsty for sun and fun.
Simone left me with our rucksacks in the outdoor café sipping an herbal tea and went to find out where we could spend the night. She knew neither Spanish nor Catalan, and her English was extremely rudimentary (rather than English it was really only a few dozen words uttered with French syntax and pronunciation). An hour later I saw her returning, furious. She had been in several hotels, which were very expensive and, besides, there were no vacancies. We had been total idiots. This was high tourist season and everything, up to the very last bed, was taken. We would have to return to the town and take the train someplace else or spend the night there as best we could.
Though it might seem surprising, the hope of finding, a few hours later, a comfortable room to spend the night, was erased by the prospect of returning to the torture of the train, and by the uncertainty of where we’d get off and the effort of my having to move again. I suggested that we find a place that wasn’t too dangerous and spend the night with one eye opened. Tomorrow was another day. Simone didn’t like the idea, as she already hated that cluster of towers and Nazi tourists, but finally she realized that I wasn’t willing to take another step.
The pills had staunched the flow of diarrhea, but I was still weak and sick. We went to the promenade along the sea and later, when night finally fell, with sandwiches and a bottle of water, to one end of the cove. Other couples and some groups of friends were chatting, drinking, and smoking. We decided their company would protect us, and that we could spend the night on the beach there. We calmed ourselves, thinking that this kind of thing happens to everybody sometime.
Soon I fell asleep on the sand. Simone ate and smoked her half-packet ration for the night, putting out the butts, next to one another, on a little mound of sand. The cold woke me a little past two. In the distance, you could see shadows around a bonfire. Near us there was nobody. Simone was resting, sitting up with her sweater on, her hands hidden in her armpits and her legs inside the wool shawl pulled down over her knees. The wind had risen; it was impossible to stay where we were. We moved our things to a wall of rocks at the very end of the half moon. It was damp, but we were more protected. There we waited for dawn, holding each other tightly and rubbing each other’s backs, talking and smoking. Sometimes we could hear the laughter of people coming out of the discos and stumbling back to their apartments. At some point we realized that we were happy.
We cursed the Spanish custom of opening late. We had to wait in front of one joint to be able to have coffee, eat, and use the bathroom to shake off the sand we had even in our ears.
On the beach, as the sun was coming up, we had decided to go straight to Alicante. Our adventure had been poorly planned, and we were in no mood to leave anything else to chance. Alicante, a real city, would provide us with a better place to stay for a few days. Besides, it had a beach. There we could find out if some place nearby offered everything we were hoping for.
We arrived by train after midday. We left our rucksacks on the floor of our room in a pensión and fell like a ton of bricks onto a bed similar to the one in Barcelona. We woke up at dawn dying of hunger and ate the last package of crackers. As it was too early to do anything else, we must have awakened half the boarding house with our mechanical movements.
In the morning we left with our beach bag to check out the center of town. The city spread out from a hill. It was small and welcoming, with a beautiful seaside promenade. We found out where to take the bus to go to Playa de San Juan. This was a wide stretch of coastline, bordered by outdoor restaurants where you could eat all manner of seafood and paellas. There was practically no vegetation except for palm trees here and there. Beautiful bare mountains rose near the coast. It felt like we were in North Africa more than in Europe. The water wasn’t too cold, and the churning sea reminded me of the many afternoons I had spent in my adolescence riding the waves on the beaches of another San Juan.
Simone didn’t know how to swim and entered the water, topless, with more determination than bravery. I watched her raise her arms and jump when the waves broke over her. I took her by the hand to where the water covered us and played with her body that gave into me with fear as well as desire. After our swims we’d eat lunch with a big appetite, almost always paella and wine in a little seaside eatery, and take a bus back to the pensión, where we’d have a siesta. Later we’d go out for a walk around the city. Night after night we discovered the variety of its bars, the benches in the squares where you could feel the best sea breezes or where at dawn you could drink horchata that had the double advantage of quenching one’s thirst and tasting delicious. We’d return to the pensíon on deserted streets, holding each other by the waist, stopping to kiss and run our hands over each other, a prelude to the rite of our bodies tanned by the sun, the rite we’d perform all over the hotel room, after which we would sleep. Perhaps there is no other moment of my life in which I remember tastes so clearly. The rice, the wine, the sip of cool water drunk directly from the bottle, the salty taste of Simone’s breasts or thighs, these natural delights which gave the impression of being unending, which I felt when she’d whistle a complete and spectacular version of “Le Temps des Cérises” over her glass of beer.
On a side street no more than two meters wide, I discovered a rather well-stocked bookstore. It was the best of the few there were in the city, and it was where readers in Alicante went. Late one afternoon, poking around next to me in the literature section, I met a writer from Valencia. He was a few years older than me and lived a few steps from there, near his administrative job at the Ministry of Education. Instead of living in his city or in Madrid, where he would have liked to work to be in the hub of literary life, he was forced to spend years in provincial institutions before having the seniority necessary to solicit a transfer to the capital. He was teaching in Villajoyosa, which from what he told me had a lot of villa and very little joy. That evening I was alone, as Simone had decided to stay in the pensión combining siesta and reading, and having begun a conversation about books and authors with the Valencian, with the usual excess of literary addicts, we ended up moving our exchange to an outdoor café. From there, two hours later, we went to notify our companions, who were impatiently awaiting us, to suggest that we continue the conversation, now with four voices, that very same night at one of the cafeterias along the coastal promenade. Simone and I, drinking a beer while we waited, saw him zigzagging between the tables on the immense terrace, bringing his wife, who also wrote and taught at an institute, and a signed copy of his first book. They spoke very little French, but this fact had not kept them from devouring in the original all of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
Thus began my friendship with Santiago Vergés and Isabel Martínez, and one of the penalties of time and distance has been to lose sight of them. Then, on those long days and nights in Alicante we shared literature, beach, and paella and returned to our dwellings in the wee hours of the morning holding one another in line, kicking our legs like cancan dancers every time we’d hear, coming out of any place, the pounding pasodoble tune of “Paquito el chocolatero.”
We were doing so well in Alicante that we had almost forgotten our plan to go off on an adventure. Nevertheless, one Sunday morning, we took an uncomfortable bus to a distant beach to the south of the city, on the way to Murcia. Santiago and Isabel had told us about it. It was sufficiently distant from the tourist centers that the European masses didn’t go there and far enough off the beaten track without bars and restaurants that the Spaniards didn’t bother to go either in large numbers. Fortified with food and water, we arrived after midday at an arid desertlike coast of stony ledges covered with harsh dry weeds and plants. After walking a while along a path, we reached the top of the dunes. Belo
w stretched an exquisite sea, and a wide expanse of sand dotted with the belongings of a handful of beachcombers. It was hot, and there was no shade anywhere, but there was a cool ocean breeze that felt invigorating.
We decided to take a shortcut, sliding down the slope of the high dune. I was the first to coast on a wave of sand that picked up speed. The mild fear of falling felt like one of life’s pleasures, especially for someone like myself, who had spent a whole year without seeing the ocean or feeling its elements. Below, happy and laughing my head off, I recovered the bag of food and shouted to Simone, urging her to come down. But fear made her body stiffen and her fall became a sequence of bumps and somersaults. On the final stretch, her legs flew up in the air and her bikini top rose to her neck. She stopped, all discombobulated, on the verge of crying, her mouth and ears filled with sand. When she heard me laughing, she stood up to chase me.
I let her catch up with me, assuming this would turn into play, but discovered she really wanted to hurt me. Her fists were weak and easy to fend off. In situations like this, it felt like I was dealing with an incomprehensible woman. Finally, more exhausted than anything else, she backed off, took her things, and walked away toward the beach. A few minutes later I caught up with her sitting, smoking, and without the slightest inclination to speak to me. I left her alone and went into the water. If any part of my body came out of the water, it bristled in the wind. I swam further out for the pleasure of the exercise and to warm up. From afar I saw that Simone was lying face up and that one arm covered her eyes. A little later I saw her now on her side, eating what I presumed was an apple. It was impossible to know what was in her head.
During the afternoon the coast became less solitary. Couples, some families, and especially groups of boys populated the wide space of sand with their bags, towels, and beach umbrellas. On a walk by herself, Simone had stopped in front of a man who was using palm leaves to weave hats and birds that looked nothing like the fauna of the Mediterranean. While I had lunch, I watched her stooping in front of him, apparently at ease, speaking very little and listening attentively. The duration of her anger and of this conversation managed to irritate me. The day that was to be a dream had turned into a fiasco from the moment we arrived. I resented the fact that Simone didn’t realize this or that she was intentionally prolonging her fury.
I went to where she was talking with the man. I saw her look at me with resignation, as if I were some pesky intruder. She didn’t even bother to introduce me. I stood there a while, listening to the conversation filled with banalities. The man spoke French with a Belgian accent.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“Where?”
“Where our things are.”
“Hey, don’t you see that I’m busy?”
“Come over for a minute. I have something to tell you.”
She stood up with an exaggerated reluctance that awakened my fury. I grabbed her hand and we walked in the direction of our things.
“I’d like to know what you’re doing?” she asked, pulling away.
“I want to be with you. We didn’t come this far to quarrel.”
We got to where we had left our clothes. I came close to her but she didn’t respond.
“What’s the matter?”
“I am annoyed.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re a salaud.”
“You’re not being fair. I’ve done nothing.”
“Oh, no? Monsieur never does anything. He never laughs or makes fun of anyone. Monsieur is innocent.”
“Come on, Si,” I said, naming her by the first syllable, “let it go already.”
“I don’t feel like it.”
“We still have a few hours. Let’s have a nice time. Look around you. This is what we wanted to find.”
She looked among her things. After several attempts to light it, she bent the tip of a cigarette. I made a cup with my hands and Simone managed to make the cigarette flare up with rapid and deep breaths.
“Thanks,” I said ironically.
“Salaud.” This time the insult had another tone.
Soon we were in the water. Her breasts glistened in the sun and her nipples were enormous and erect. Simone grabbed onto me when the waves came and I took advantage of her clinging to act out a whole farce of revenge and retributions, which we improvised together, inspired by the joy of our truce. The sun was beginning to cast long shadows, highlighting the rich colors of the sky, sea and earth as its strength gradually faded. The blissful hours had passed too quickly. After a snack, we lay in the sand in each other’s arms and gradually our peacefulness turned into sleep.
The wind at sunset roused me suddenly. I sat up and felt surrounded by the almost deserted beach. Alerted by an anxious feeling, I looked for my watch and realized that we were about to miss—if we hadn’t already—the bus that would take us back to Alicante. I immediately woke Simone, and we grabbed our things and ran in the direction of the dunes. We climbed up the path as fast as we could. Simone, who smoked like a chimney and never exercised, was flushed and breathless. I ended up thrusting our bag in her hands and running toward the road. Nobody was at the wood shelter that served as a bus stop. Nearby, six people were getting into a Renault 5 and obviously couldn’t take us. There was no other car, only a couple of motorcycles and the carcass of a bicycle without wheels, left by someone who knows when. I saw Simone hurrying along the slope where the path in the dunes ended.
“We’re fucked,” I said.
“What?” she said struggling to catch her breath.
“We got here too late. There’s nothing to be done; we missed the bus. Look: there’s nobody here.”
“What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hitchhike.”
“I guess so, but where? There’s no traffic here. We’d have to get to the highway. That’s several kilometers away. I hope by the time we get there we still can be seen.”
“And these?” She said pointing at the motorcycles. “Maybe they can take us.”
“Yes, but where are they, and in any case we can’t count on their riders going to Alicante.”
“Shit! What a day.”
We decided to walk it. The sooner we got to the highway, the more chances we’d have that a driver would stop. I went in front, Simone, two steps behind me. Along the roughly paved road, the dunes gave onto a breakwater piled with boulders. Sometimes we’d feel the fine spray of the salt water that the waves dashed over the rocks.
“How much longer?” I heard her speak after a long silence.
“I don’t know. A half hour, an hour; I didn’t notice this morning when we came in the bus.”
“Nom de Dieu!”
On a curve we saw that someone was walking down the very middle of the road about three hundred meters ahead. It was the Belgian. Simone shouted his name. Some seconds later, the man stopped and looked back. I heard a voice too distant to understand what he was saying, and we saw him put his bag down on the ground and move his arms like a windmill.
This time, when we reached him, I was introduced. Dominique had a hole in his smile. He was missing some teeth.
“We missed the bus,” Simone informed him.
He grimaced; I couldn’t tell what that meant. A crest of palm leaves stuck out of his bag, above his head. He was carrying, one on top of the other, three hats he had woven and which had not found buyers. Simone, who seemed happy to meet up with someone out in this deserted area, spoke to him in a familiar way that seemed excessive. I participated very little in the conversation, and the thought occurred to me that I might be jealous, but I realized that I really didn’t trust the guy.
Dominique said that when we reached the highway, we would most probably find someone to take us to Alicante or, at least, some nearby town where, if we had money, we could hire a taxi. As we had to be seen on the highway, he suggested we cut across the field to get there sooner. We left the road and entered a barely discernible rocky and winding pa
th. Then Dominique asked us to wait, as he had to pee. He took an unusual amount of time and, when I heard him returning from a different direction, I turned around anxiously. I hazily noticed something, and, a second later when he was beside us, I saw the knife. Instinctively, I pushed Simone away, who screamed when she realized we were being attacked. I sidestepped the body that lunged toward me, and moving awkwardly, I managed to hit him in the head with the bag I’d been carrying on my shoulder and which I was now holding onto tightly. Simone, beside herself, was screaming and pleading next to me, moving around the circle we now formed with the Belgian.
“Throw me the bag!”
In it was, aside from our clothes and some leftovers of food, all our money. Giving in meant putting ourselves completely in his hands.
“Come on, give me the bag.”
Simone had taken refuge behind me and was trying to reason with him.
“Give me the bag and you can go.”
“No, I can’t give it to you. Do what you want.”
The Belgian was so fast that I realized his attack more by Simone’s cry than having seen it. I took one or two steps back and raised my arm to defend myself. I must have slipped, or tripped over a stone, because one of my legs gave way and I fell to the ground. The position of being under him proved my best weapon, because upon trying desperately to stand up, my right leg became entangled with the Belgian’s and made him stumble. Then, with the hand that softened my fall, I picked up some dirt and threw it in his face. I grabbed Simone and off we ran. I heard her pleading with words I had never heard her use and I dragged her away shouting, “Run, run!” We stopped, our hearts pounding, behind a grassy hillock. The wind playing with the dry bushes intensified our fear. Behind us one could see the last light of day, a strip of sea and the sliver of a waning moon.
