The Rocks

by Peter Nichols

  “However we do it, I think we should get out of here as soon as possible. Somebody might get upset about the cow.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “We should stop the first bus going in either direction. If it’s going north it’ll go to Tangier, or to Rabat or Casablanca or somewhere where we can get a bus to Tangier. If it’s going south, we’ll take it back to Marrakech and get the next Tangier bus or train. Okay?”

  “That will be expensive.”

  “I’ve got money.”

  They’d come straight from Essaouira, collected the shirts, packed, and left Marrakech all in one day. They’d slept, tired, chastely, in the car while parked at a petrol station.

  Aegina looked out across the dusty plain where the cows and their herder were already some distance away. “Poor cow.”

  “Hey, fuck the cow. And that fucking Moroccan cowboy who let it wander into the road. It’s not even hurt, it’ll probably grow another horn. We’re the ones stuck in the middle of nowhere with a hundred shirts, and very possibly a tribe of angry Bedouins about to appear out of the desert wanting payback.”

  “Luc, I’m sorry about your car, but at least we’re not hurt, and it really isn’t your fault. I know it’s all really unfortunate. But you’ve been in a bad mood ever since we left Essaouira, and this isn’t helping you, I know.”

  “Can we stop talking about them, please?”

  “We’re not talking about them,” she said. “I’m not anyway.”

  They had parted from Rolf and Minka in Marrakech on strained terms. Aegina had decided they weren’t really a couple but were partnered in some more mysterious alliance.

  She sat down on the large suitcase and took off her sunglasses, cleaned them on her cotton shirt, and put them back on. She looked studiously up and down the road.

  North and south, the ends of the road dissolved into liquid distance. Cars materialized as indistinct nuggets of boiling atoms that soon resolved into dark approximate shapes and grew bigger—Luc thought of Omar Sharif’s indelible first appearance in Lawrence of Arabia. But they came on like low-flying aircraft, the Moroccans sealed inside staring bug-eyed at the couple with the big suitcase beside the road as if they were Martians, before streaking past in a Doppler wavefront, leaving Luc and Aegina in a wake of wind and dust and filling quiet.

  Yes, he was in a bad mood. He wanted to get out of Morocco, back to Spain, where he would feel steadier, where maybe they would be like they had been before Essaouira. He’d been speeding toward Spain and feeling better with every kilometer put behind them until they’d hit the cow.

  Another molten speck emerged from the mirage across the road to the south. It grew clearer, larger, then low and sleek, and shiny black.

  “Fuck,” said Luc almost inaudibly. “I don’t believe it.”

  Aegina stood up. She looked from the approaching car to Luc. “I don’t want to go with them.”

  “Believe me, I don’t want to either, but they are going in the right direction. And I really think we should get out of here.”

  The car approached, slowed, pulled off the road and stopped.

  “Fuck, man. What happen to the little Renault?” said Rolf through Minka’s open window. He and Minka got out, looking from the car to Luc and Aegina. “Are you all right?” Minka asked them.

  “We hit a cow,” said Aegina. She pointed at the small shambling herd now some distance away. “One of those.”

  Rolf and Minka looked from the cows to the crumpled car. “Ja, man, you are fucked. It is the end of the road for the little Renault.”

  He turned to them. “Well, we give you a ride, then. You’re going still to Algeciras, ja?”

  “Thanks, but you don’t have room,” said Aegina.

  They had returned the Peugeot. The newly tuned and cleaned Jaguar Mark X carried two suitcases on its roof rack, and the interior looked filled with bundles. It rode low to the ground.

  “No, man. We put your big case on the roof with ours. We get you in, with all your shirts.”

  • • •

  Rolf drove more slowly than he had in the Peugeot on the way to and from Essaouira, picking his way carefully and defensively through small towns. The Jaguar seemed to feel the weight of its new passengers.

  Luc pretended to fall asleep in the backseat, while, beside him, Aegina chattered with Minka. Then he really fell asleep.

  • • •

  At Tangier, Rolf drove the Jag onto the ferry, directed by the car deck crew. They got out and climbed the stairs up to the passenger decks.

  “We see you in the bar, yes?” said Minka.

  Aegina didn’t answer. She pushed through the door leading onto the deck.

  Luc followed her. She walked quickly ahead, focused on where she was going, as if she couldn’t wait to get outside, as if unaware that he was behind her. At the edge of the deck, she stopped, placed her hands before her on the rail as if bracing for a wave, and looked out at the city beyond the port.

  “Are you okay?” said Luc, leaning on the rail beside her.

  She was breathing deeply. She didn’t answer.

  After a moment, he said, “What’s the matter?”

  She turned and aimed her suddenly inscrutable sunglasses at Luc. “So when did you fuck her? While I was passed out in our room?”

  “What?”

  “When did you fuck her?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I can tell.”

  “You can tell what?” Now even he could tell.

  “She didn’t look at you the entire time we were in the car. You both ignored each other—I can just tell! I know!”

  He opened his mouth several times like a fish in the air. Aegina turned and walked away down the deck.

  Luc walked after her. “Aegina—”

  She turned and shrieked at him, “Stay away from me!”

  People along the deck turned to look at them. Aegina spun and ran down the deck. Luc paused, then walked slowly after her. But he couldn’t find her.

  • • •

  Rolf and Minka reached the car first. Luc, who had been looking all over the ship without finding Aegina, came down the stairway with other passengers returning to their vehicles and saw the odd group beside the Jaguar. Aegina, sullen, stood away from the car, three car-deck crewmen standing around her, effectively trapping her, one of them straddling the large suitcase full of shirts, which had been removed from the car’s roof rack. Luc heard the crewmen as he approached: “Is this your suitcase?”

  “It’s okay,” said Rolf. He appeared uncharacteristically alert, focusing his attention on the three crewmen. “She is with us. It’s my car.”

  In fluent Spanish, Luc said to the three crewmen, “What’s the problem?”

  “El problema es que los pasajeros—”

  Aegina interrupted, in English to Luc: “I came down to get my suitcase. I’m getting off by myself.” She repeated this in fast, angry Spanish to the crewmen.

  One of the crewmen, looking implacably at Luc, said, “Passengers who boarded the ferry in cars must disembark in the cars, with all their luggage in the cars. She cannot walk off the ferry.”

  “Bueno,” said Rolf to the crewmen. He turned to Luc and Aegina. “We all get back in the fucking car now. We don’t fuck around with these guys anymore.” He unlocked the car, then grabbed the suitcase and threw it up onto the roof rack. “Get in the fucking car now,” he said quietly. He pulled the rubber spider lashing over the suitcase, anchoring it atop the other cases.

  “Aegina—” said Luc.

  Silently she pulled open a rear door and got into the car.

  “Todo bien?” said the crewman who had been their spokesman.

  “Todo completely bien, man, okay, okay,” said Rolf.

  The crewmen walked away.

 
When they were all in the car, and Rolf had started the engine, Aegina said: “I’m getting out as soon as we’re ashore.”

  Rolf—a brand-new, electrified Rolf—turned around and looked at her. “You don’t get out of the car until we are through the port and into Algeciras. Then, don’t worry, I throw you and your fucking bag, all of you, out of my car—”

  “Hey—” began Luc.

  “Fuck you, man.” Rolf thrust an index finger into Luc’s face. Then at Aegina. “You be still. You sit and you be quiet.”

  For the first time in hours, Luc glanced at Minka. She was looking ahead; her face was gray.

  Rolf turned and looked forward and pulled the gear into drive. The Jaguar followed other cars off the boat into the line that moved fitfully toward passport control and customs.

  • • •

  Twenty minutes later, they stood mutely around the Jaguar as the aduana agents removed the door panels and pulled out the first plastic-wrapped bundles of kif.

  “Oh, Scheisse, man,” Rolf said to a customs agent. “I had the car serviced in Marrakech. Fuck, I don’t believe it. Look what my mecánico has done to me. I don’t know anything about this.”

  Abruptly, Minka bent over and began to vomit onto the dusty tarmac. She collapsed onto her hands and knees. Spasms wracked her. Long viscous threads hung from her mouth; she tried to wipe them away and smeared vomit across her face. She began to weep.

  Luc glanced at Aegina but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. He looked at Rolf, who was regarding Minka with disgust and anger.

  The agents stood back, as if in fear of being spattered, and watched her.

  Luc walked to Minka and kneeled beside her. He tore the tail off his blue-and-white-check cheesecloth shirt and began to wipe her mouth. He couldn’t help it: he put his hand on her shoulder.

  Eleven

  Gerald didn’t spend a moment thinking about going. He put down the telegram and thought only of what he might need to bring.

  He got out an ancient blue sail bag. He rolled up and placed at the bottom of the bag a change of clothes, underwear. Then his blazer, a good shirt, and tie.

  What else? In his old canvas rucksack he placed the deed and description of the property known as C’an Cabrer. His passport with Spanish residency stamp. Aegina’s birth certificate. Some photographs.

  Some impulse made him grab two bottles of his olive oil from the larder.

  Gerald took the sail bag and rucksack down to his car, a tinny 1955 Simca Aronde Commerciale station wagon.

  He drove into town and stopped in front of the Banco Santander. Inside, to the astonishment of Barbara, the teller, he withdrew twenty thousand pesetas in cash, almost all he had in his account. Barbara looked at him in alarm. Gray-blond hair windblown about his head, blue eyes dancing anxiously in his tanned face, glancing at his watch. He appeared to be in flight.

  “¿Qué pasa, Señor Rutledge?”

  “Todo está bien,” said Gerald, smiling tightly, his callused hands stuffing the bundles of notes into his rucksack. “Bien, bien.”

  “¿Seguro?”

  “Seguro. Gracias, Barbara.”

  He drove across the island to Palma. At 6:45 p.m. a marinero waved the Simca aboard the Alicante ferry. The ferry pulled away from the dock at eight p.m. It would reach Alicante at six the next morning. He would get to Algeciras sometime tomorrow.

  Gerald watched as the huge stained-glass ensaïmada of a window in La Seu Cathedral, lit from within, bulking over the city in the old town, grew smaller and yellower and older as the ship rounded the breakwater and steamed, rolling and shuddering in periodic rhythm, out into the dusk over the purpling sea.

  He was at sea again. Not often in the last twenty-two years. But here he was and he let himself look down at the water frothing past the steel hull of the ferry. He went with it, just for a moment, where he would once have gone: east and south around the boot, across the Ionian Sea, doubling Cythera and Malea’s stormy cape, into the Aegean—

  With a jolt, Gerald looked up from the water and around the deck at the other people standing by rail. Lulu would no doubt have been informed. She might even be on this ferry.

  • • •

  He slept restlessly, aware all night that he was at sea, dreaming a cascade of disturbing dreams that tumbled away like a ship’s wake. Once he left his cabin to go on deck and watch and hear the sea rushing alongside the hull. He saw the lights of fishing boats in many directions.

  He came on deck again as shades of azure and deeper blues dimmed the stars above the ship’s port quarter, and the mainland of Spain was a spotty line of radium against a black horizon ahead. He was curious to see this coast from the sea once more. He had sailed past here twice: bound for Malta on HMS Furious in the spring of 1942, rolling atrociously in a leveche gale, after a fueling stop at Gibraltar, and after the war, in 1947, considerably more slowly in the tiny engineless Nereid. In those days, the best landmarks, identified and ticked off on the chart one by one as the navigator passed them, were the round stone coastal torres vigía, small lookout towers often no higher than twenty feet, many erected by the Moors during their occupation of Spain, others built after the Reconquista, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to repel the Moors. As the sky lightened, Gerald recognized the dark silhouette of Monte Benacantil hulking above Alicante, and, closer, the Castillo Santa Bárbara turning pink across the mountain. But beneath it, Alicante was now a city. Serried rows of apartment blocks covered the narrow coastal plain below the mountain like a reforestation plan. The torre on the shore near the port, when he at last found it, was lost against a backdrop of shipping containers.

  It took him eleven hours to cover the 670 kilometers to Algeciras, all of it on the A-7 Nacional within sight of the sea. He stopped in Motril and bought bread and cheese and water for his lunch and ate and drank while driving. The sea was flat, the wind just as he remembered along this coast in summer—too light, frustrating under sail—but ashore all was changed. The coast west of Málaga to beyond Marbella, which Gerald remembered as a dusty stretch of coastal hills as tawny as a lion’s flank, was now an uninterrupted stretch of contiguous, densely clustered villa-and-golf developments.

  Mostly he saw Aegina, always beyond the fly-spattered windscreen, incarcerated in a Guardia Civil jail.

  The whole notion of going to Morocco to buy shirts had sounded very unlikely, dodgy even—he’d imagined camel-borne brigands and rapists—but he could see the appeal, the lure of the Moorish fountainhead, and his fears for Aegina had been marginally allayed by the fact that Luc would be with her. The money she said she hoped to make was very little, not enough to make much of a dent in what she’d need over the next few years in art school, and he’d been working on his own plan for that—he’d just sold another small parcel of his land near the bottom of the drive to a Spanish couple from the mainland—but it was admirable and enterprising of her to try to make some money on her own and that had persuaded him.

  He reached Algeciras after dark. It felt as big as Palma, but not pretty, heavily industrial. He had no idea where she was being held. He drove on, immediately lost in the town and not seeing anywhere to stop. Looming over the end of many streets floated the familiar anomalous marvel of the Rock of Gibraltar, which Gerald knew lay immediately south of the town across Algeciras Bay. He steered for that until, like a cygnet finding its way to water, he found himself in the commercial fishing port, on a street of decrepit pensions which conformed with his notion of the right sort of place to stay. The rates would be reasonable, and no one of sound mind would trouble with his Simca on the street.

  Tired after the previous night and the long day, he slept better to begin with, but again he was awake early, now intent on finding Aegina and, however he could, helping her.

  Twelve

  Aegina sat on her bunk with her back pressed into the corner of her cell, reading. The position offered no
privacy from the grid wire in the door, but she liked feeling the two walls at her back. She was on her second James Bond book, From Russia with Love.

  Nobody would tell her anything. She’d tried asking the guards what they thought she had done, what was going to happen to her—and when—but they would only shrug.

  Twice a day she was taken outside to a concrete-walled space for half an hour. She met the other women there, older, haggard-looking, chain-smoking. “What are you here for?” they asked her. She told them she didn’t know. She’d been in a car coming off the ferry—

  “Aie,” they said, shaking their heads, “las drogas.”

  “No,” Aegina said, “I had only shirts.”

  “Shirts!” cackled one of the women, and they all laughed.

  She’d seen the way Rolf and Minka looked as the customs agents began going through the car. Then the guardias took them all into an office and immediately separated them.

  One of the women offered her a cigarette. Aegina thanked her but she didn’t smoke, she said. She asked the women why they were there. “Aie, this one!” they said, and laughed some more.

  She was alone in her cell, although it had two beds, and a toilet without a seat behind a partition that shielded it from view through the wire in the door. She heard the other women in cells down the hall, talking and laughing; sometimes they talked long and quietly and she couldn’t make out the words.

  On the second morning, she asked the gangling young guardia who mopped the floors if there was anything to read, in either Spanish or English. He went away and come back with two Spanish novelas whose covers showed women with torn shirts running from, on one cover, a man on horseback, on another, a steam engine, and three books in English: You Are All Sanpaku, a book extolling the virtues of a macrobiotic brown rice diet, and two James Bond paperbacks. Aegina had heard girls talking about James Bond books in school. They weren’t at all as she’d imagined. There was hardly any sex. Mostly it was traveling and killing and descriptions of watches, cars, train rides, the Bahamas, Istanbul. It took her out of the cell.