The Rocks

by Peter Nichols

  From the hospital it was half an hour to Artà. He said bon dia to the old abuelo, who smiled at him with an open mouth missing most of its teeth. He filled the back of his Simca with carefully crated bottles, and drove back to Cala Marsopa.

  • • •

  Mateo Pujols had rented a small apartment for Jackson Rale up the hill from the port. The apartment belonged to a friend who had bought it for his mother-in-law. The mother-in-law had died in June and Mateo’s friend was happy to rent it out furnished for the season.

  It suited Jackson because it was in the back streets near a television repair shop, a cobbler, a grocery store, and a plumbing supply yard. The noises that came from these businesses were few and brief and did not go on for hours like the drunken singing of tourists in the streets and bars in the part of town where the hotels and pensions were located.

  Jackson slept late in the mornings. In the small kitchen he kept a supply of staples he’d bought from the nearby grocery store: bread, coffee, milk, sugar for his breakfast; chunks of cheese, ice cream, bottles of water, beer, and J&B Rare. He went to the same café in the plaza every day for lunch. Not too many tourists. He brought his sketchbook and pencils and drew the people and the buildings in the plaza. When he sketched, Jackson’s mind became agreeably blank. He had no thoughts—he didn’t like to think much. It was like a vacation when he sketched. He was always aware of that afterward, when his thoughts started up again: he’d been away on vacation.

  He returned to his room at three. Most days now his new woman would come in the afternoon. He left the door unlocked.

  Soon enough, she came in. The curtains were drawn like she liked, and Jackson was already lying on the bed, naked, belly up like a basking dog.

  “Exactly the way I like you,” she said. She shucked her clothes in seconds and advanced up his legs like a cat.

  This one liked to throw her head around and slap her long white hair across his black legs and groin and torso. And through her white hair she’d stare at his black skin and play her spread-out white hands all over him, like she was making some piece of art. She’d crawl up his legs, slapping her hair over him and then she would squat and lower herself onto his dick. She was older, near his age maybe, but small and hard like a cat, and she would sit on him like that and lose her mind for a while. Then when she was ready she’d roll off him and he’d get on top—she’d tell him what she wanted and that was fine by him—and he’d start pile driving like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, pushing her up the bed till she got her hands flat on the wall above her head and she pushed back at him. He knew when she was getting there because her voice went strangled and then she’d really rip loud with the moans, like someone in serious trouble, and Jackson would have to put his hand over her mouth to keep the noise down while she stared at him wild-eyed, screaming into his cupped palm and breathing through her nose like a racehorse until the snot ran down his hand. He did that for as long as she wanted, pounding away at her while she had her crazy conniptions. She said no letting loose inside and that was fine with him because when she had enough she pushed him off and got on top again and grabbed hold of him with her hands like some native woman pounding corn mush with a log, sitting on top of him pouring sweat until he popped, and she watched that like she was a child watching a chick hatch out of an egg.

  She looked at him all breathless and said, “You have no idea what you do to me, Jackson,” and he said, “I think I got a pretty good idea.” Then she said, “How was that for you?” And he said, “Maybe you could try harder next time,” and she laughed in a beautiful way. She was some beautiful woman. They were like a black-and-white photograph together.

  She didn’t hang around. She was up and dressed and gone as quick as she’d come in.

  • • •

  Because of its location, Comestibles Calix did not get the tourist traffic. It carried items for more discerning palates—for the seasonal foreign residents and the local Spaniards of the professional class—who prepared food at home and wanted something better than the usual Spanish and Portuguese muck in tins. At Comestibles Calix, you could find glass jars of foie gras from the Périgord, biscuits from Lefèvre-Utile of Nantes, cheddar cheese from Somerset, putrid-smelling hapansilakka from Finland, olive oil from Italy and Greece, and bottles of green local oil. Baskets of lemons, bins of olives and almonds. Calix had purchased Gerald’s produce from his earliest days.

  He parked the Simca a few doors down. Into his straw basket, Gerald carefully placed twelve bottles. He entered Calix through the dangling bead curtain of the entrance.

  “Hola,” he said to José and Caterina Calix, who stood behind the counter.

  “Hola, Jerol,” said Caterina, her face shifting into an unstable blend of keenly felt sympathy, sadness, brave cheerfulness, and discomfort. José, a red-haired, now graying Catalan, pushing a haunch of jamón serrano through an electric slicer, nodded at Gerald with the grim camaraderie of soldiers in a trench sharing a last cigarette.

  “¿Cómo está Paloma?” asked Caterina.

  Gerald shrugged and looked away. “Vamos a ver,” was all he could bring himself to say at present. He placed his bottles on the counter. Caterina removed some notes from her till, counted them carefully, adding peseta coins, handed them to Gerald, and looked at him. Her attempt at studied calm now gave way with a betrayal of grief.

  “Dios mío, Jerol.”

  Caterina came around the counter and hugged him. Quickly she recovered herself and returned behind the counter.

  “Sí. Gracias, Caterina. José.”

  Coming out onto the street through the beads, which partially obscured his view of where he was going, Gerald turned in the direction of his Simca and collided with Lulu.

  She tottered and his hand caught her upper arm.

  “Lulu,” he said. And stared at her.

  She was covered in a film of perspiration, strands of her hair flying, the rest of it untidily gathered behind her head. She looked as if she’d run all the way from the Rocks. She stared back at him, as if interrupted, surprised, disoriented by encountering him.

  His eyes flew to the scar on her chin; it was livid, as if pulsing—

  Lulu recovered, twisted, wrenching her arm free. “What are you doing here?” she snapped.

  Gerald motioned with his hand. “Calix. I—”

  Abruptly, she walked quickly past him, down the slight hill toward the port, the center of town. Gerald watched her until she reached a corner and was gone.

  He walked to the Simca in a daze. He got in, and through the windshield looked down the street in the direction she had disappeared.

  He had been inches from her. He’d felt heat coming off her as if from an old electric fire. He’d felt the warmth and sweat on her arm. A synapse in Gerald’s brain sparked a vision, so that he no longer saw the street ahead, but Lulu, writhing naked, hot, wet, on top of him on Nereid’s narrow berth, wild strands of her hair clinging to her streaming face and neck and chest. The cabin stifling hot, their appetite for each other at its peak, still awash in the wonder of what they had found.

  Gradually, Gerald’s vision cleared. He saw the street, people, motor scooters. He started the Simca’s engine.

  Nine

  Billie was in the kitchen making soupe catalane. On one of her earliest visits to her brother at C’an Cabrer, she’d brought down a new copy of Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food. She’d applied many of the recipes from her own well-thumbed and stained copy at home in Sevenoaks to the game and fruit and vegetables she was able to find locally in Kent, but it was always a delight for her to use the book in its proper setting, Mallorca, surrounded by the pale blue Mediterranean. For her soupe catalane, Billie was able to use entirely indigenous ingredients, with the exception of celery, which she had not been able to find in Cala Marsopa. She substituted chopped green peppers instead. Paloma was an efficient, if stolid meal m
aker, always providing plenty of meat (she liked boar) and fish and vegetables, but was chary with lighter fare of salads, soups, squid, and octopus. These, and simple but interesting hors d’oeuvres, Billie enjoyed sharing the fossicking for and preparing with Aegina, but on this visit, Aegina had eaten little and spent no time in the kitchen with her.

  “Is she still not up?” asked Gerald when he came into the kitchen, laden with more bottles of oil.

  “No, she’s not,” said Billie. She chopped onions thoughtfully. Then she stopped and patted her streaming eyes with pieces of bread, and turned to Gerald as he came out of the larder. “Gerald, do sit down. I must talk seriously with you.”

  “Yes, all right,” said Gerald, with relief. She was the older sibling, and generally what she said had the pronouncement of an oracle. He sat and poured himself a glass of red wine from the open bottle on the table, and took a bite from a piece of bread.

  Billie looked at him levelly.

  • • •

  Aegina appeared to have been asleep for many years, as if in a fairy tale, cobwebbed and dusted with sleep pollen, thick and cottony and protective.

  On the table in her room lay piles of the golden yarn she used to make her Roman foot thongs: a woven strip of gold an inch or so wide that fastened around the ankle, ran across the top of the foot to a loop that fit around the second toe, worn without other footwear. They had become the fashion vogue at the Rocks for the last two years for the ladies who liked to slip noiselessly across the patio and dance in otherwise bare feet. They were sold at the bar and had provided Aegina with some decent pocket money. Her thongs, she’d told Gerald, had actually inspired a Roman toga evening at the Rocks. She hadn’t made any since her mother had become ill.

  Gerald sat on the bed beside her. He stretched out a hand to the dark hair across her face and gently moved it aside. My beautiful, beautiful little girl. He missed all the children she had once been—the eighteen-month-old, the three-year-old, the five-year-old, the smallness of her then, the whole weight of her against his shoulder when she was asleep—and he could only bear it because she grew into something more precious and extraordinary, more a necessary part of him, with the passage of time. Her face in repose now, mouth open, still looked like a very young child’s, as if he had sent her off to sleep the night before with The Tale of Pigling Bland. Now he was going to wake her into a harsh world, and wrench her forever out of the happiest part of her childhood.

  She opened her eyes and found Gerald’s. “Is it about Mama? What’s happened?”

  “Nothing,” said Gerald. “Nothing’s happened. But I have to talk to you about Mama.”

  Aegina hadn’t moved, but she was staring at her father, quite awake. “I know what you’re going to say, Papa.”

  He began dissemblingly. “My dear, dear Aegina—”

  “She’s already dead and we’ve got to unplug her. I know that.”

  He looked at her, lying in bed, for some crack in her absolute composure.

  “Well . . . I think that’s what the doctors have been wanting to tell us.”

  “They have told us, Papa. Dr. Jiménez said she had no more función cerebral and that it wasn’t going to come back and that the machine was breathing for her and we had to prepare ourselves to let her go. That’s what he said. We have to prepare ourselves to let her go.”

  “Yes,” said Gerald, astonished. It was he who wasn’t prepared. Aegina, he understood now, had been preparing, every night. “I think I remember something like that.”

  “Well, don’t you think we should, Papa? Stop the machine and let her go? I don’t want to see her like that anymore. She is gone.”

  Aegina reached over and took Gerald’s callused hand in hers.

  “You’ve got a lot of your mother in you,” he said.

  • • •

  They drove to Manacor, the three of them, in the afternoon.

  Gerald saw everything along the way as if for the first time. The olive groves, the old limestone walls. He thought about Aegina. He wanted to tell Paloma how amazing she was, and how beautiful Mallorca looked. He wanted to tell her how grateful he was. He wasn’t sure she knew that. You didn’t go around saying how awfully grateful you were.

  What she had done for him.

  He kept looking at Aegina in the rearview mirror—had to tilt his head a bit to one side and tried not to do it overtly. She was looking out the window, inscrutable behind her sunglasses that were as large as a frogman’s mask. She appeared more composed than he was feeling.

  “All right?” said Billie softly.

  He saw that she was looking at him. “Yes,” he said.

  Dr. Jiménez was not at the hospital. The younger man, Dr. Muñoz, was on duty.

  “Oh, dear,” said Gerald, thinking out loud. “We should have spoken with Dr. Jiménez before coming to a decision.”

  But Dr. Muñoz was able to help them. They could wait in Paloma’s room, he said, until the nurse fetched the priest on duty.

  Aegina sat on the bed beside her mother and picked up Paloma’s right hand. Gerald sat on the other side of the bed. He looked at his daughter but still she seemed calm and determined. He picked up Paloma’s left hand. It was very warm. Billie sat on the bed beside Aegina.

  “Hola, querida,” Gerald said conversationally to Paloma, as he always did, as if she could hear him. “We love you.”

  The priest appeared, with Dr. Muñoz and a nurse behind him.

  “Buenos días,” said the priest. He had very pale skin against which a dense black five-o’clock shadow stood out like charcoal. Small flakes of dandruff dotted the shoulders of his black cassock. Gerald could smell garlic and sobrasada on his breath. He had been summoned from lunch.

  “Would you like to say anything?” said the priest.

  “You mean us?” Gerald looked at Aegina, who shook her head. “No,” he said.

  The priest made the sign of the cross and began to speak softly. “Da, quaesumus, Domine, ut in hora mortis nostrae Sacramentis refecti et culpis omnibus expiati, in sinum misericordiae tuae laeti suscipi mereamur . . .”

  When he was finished, the priest kissed the scarlet stole around his neck, then removed it and stepped forward and placed it for a moment on Paloma’s cheek close to her intubated mouth.

  “Can I do anything else for you?”

  “No, thank you, Father,” said Gerald.

  The priest nodded gently, mumbled a little more Latin, and left the room. Back to his lunch.

  “Ready?” asked Dr. Muñoz.

  “Sí,” said Gerald.

  Dr. Muñoz nodded at the nurse, made a quick sign of the cross over his chest, and turned off the ventilator. The sudden quiet filled the room, like the silence of a refrigerator unremarked until it’s unplugged. Dr. Muñoz neatly removed the ventilator tube and apparatus from Paloma’s face, while the nurse deftly wiped around her mouth with a white cloth. Dr. Muñoz removed the IV drip from Paloma’s hand. He and the nurse left the room.

  They stared at Paloma. Gerald looked to see if her chest would rise. It did not. Aegina leaned forward and kissed her mother on the cheek. They could hear only their own fretful breathing.

  “She looks beautiful,” said Billie. “And peaceful.”

  As she spoke, Paloma’s lips parted as if she were about to say something. Her mouth opened—

  “Mama!” cried Aegina.

  Paloma’s mouth fell open until her jaw resumed the position it had known for more than a week around the ventilator tube. Her lips began to turn blue. The color in her cheeks drained away and her skin became sallow. Then a gray, suety white.

  Aegina stood and screamed. She screamed again. She ran out of the room.

  Billie stood up. “I’ll go after her.” But she couldn’t take her eyes off the swift change overtaking Paloma’s body. “My God, it’s quick.” She touched Gerald’s
shoulder. “Shall I leave you?”

  “Yes, I’ll be along in a bit,” said Gerald, glancing up at Billie with a small effort at a smile.

  But he didn’t stay long. He was looking at a corpse. He’d seen plenty of those.

  Gerald stood and left the room.

  Ten

  I’m not the best father, you know,” said Gerald gloomily.

  “Of course you are, Gerald,” said Billie.

  They were sitting at the kitchen table. It was three in the afternoon. Aegina had not appeared since coming in late the night before, though this time she’d come home on her moped.

  “You are the very best father I have ever seen. Certainly better than our old pater.”

  “He was all right.”

  “He wasn’t interested in us, Gerald. You were too young to see it. He was nice enough, but he really wasn’t interested. I’m sorry, but it was sad, seeing the way he ignored you. You were a boy, you needed a father. He hardly ever read to you or did anything with you. The only thing that he ever got excited about with you was packing you off to school each term.”

  “I thought he was good to me, in his way. He was decent, kind—”

  “A librarian can be kind and decent. I’m sorry.”

  “He wasn’t taught, you know, to show his feelings.”

  “Nor were you. But look how you are with Aegina. And you’re wonderfully affectionate with each other. Look how you both kiss and hug each other. And you laugh together. Who taught you that, then? Not Dorothy!” Dorothy had been their father’s second wife.

  “It’s just the way we are. It’s natural.”

  “Exactly. You’re a natural father. A wonderful father.”

  Billie got up to put on water for tea. When she’d done that she turned toward him. She crossed her arms and stood implacably by the stove. “However,” she said, “have you thought of returning to England?”