A Necessary Action

by Per Wahlöö

  ‘I’ve got some money,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ said Siglinde, ‘then we can live off you until things straighten out.’

  They dropped Santiago off at the nets, halfway round the bay.

  ‘We’ll move tonight, when it’s a bit cooler,’ said Dan Pedersen. ‘Will you come with the fish-van?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Santiago Alemany, raising his hand in farewell.

  When the truck had driven away, he sat down on the ground, threaded the net over his big toe and went on where he had left off.

  He said nothing to those sitting nearest him and neither did anyone say anything to him.

  5

  It was three in the afternoon when a civil guard by the name of Pablo Canaves knocked Ramon Alemany unconscious with his carbine in Jacinto’s bar.

  Ramon Alemany came round fifteen minutes later. He laughed and talked but walked very unsteadily, and he seemed almost incapable of recognizing people round him. His brother helped him home and put him to bed. Then he washed the blood from his injuries and bathed the bump on the back of his head with cold water. By then Ramon had already fallen asleep.

  He slept heavily for four hours. When his father came and woke him up, Ramon Alemany got up with a headache. He also found it difficult to see, and over and over again had to shake his head to get the lines to meet and fall into the usual everyday pattern. It hurt very much when he shook his head. He tried eating a piece of bread dipped in olive oil, but at once felt very sick and vomited.

  Immediately afterwards he carried two containers of paraffin down to the fishing-boat. They were full and together weighed more than a hundred-and-sixty pounds. He did not once put them down on the way, and when he climbed over the railing, red and black spots danced before his eyes. He could see only very indistinctly and spoke slurringly and disconnectedly. His father thought he had been drinking and hit him several times across the back of his neck with a piece of rope, but not especially hard.

  At the same time, Pablo Canaves had gone off duty. He was married, lived in the puerto and was sitting at home in his bare kitchen in his stockinged feet, his uniform jacket unbuttoned. He talked to his wife as he ate a plateful of boiled rice and two salted sardines.

  ‘I knocked a man unconscious today,’ he said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Ramon Alemany.’

  ‘Oh—him!’

  6

  The town was quite small and yet was the largest and the most important in the district. It lay high up and was wholly surrounded by mountains, except in the east, where a narrow crooked valley opened out to the sea. The mountains were quite steep but very eroded, and the yellow-grey stony slopes were thinly covered with pines and low, thorny bushes. To the east, towards the sea, there were terraced fields of olive and almond trees and there was quite a number of farms there too, most of them derelict and abandoned. From the town ran two roads, one down to the puerto, the other southwards, parallel with the coast and in the direction of the provincial capital seventy kilometres away. The main road was asphalted and climbed in long bends up towards a pass in the mountain range. For ten years, work had been in progress to continue it northwards to open up negotiable communications with several isolated villages. But the work was carried out in such difficult circumstances that it was making no noticeable progress.

  It was not necessary for anyone travelling directly from the provincial capital to the puerto to take the road round through the town in the mountains, for there was also a through road which ran into the main road twelve kilometres south of the town. This road was old and very bad, but it saved time and had a view over the sea. A lot of people made use of it. Three thousand people lived in the town up in the mountains, of which about five hundred were fully employable men. Most were peasants or farmworkers, but as the land could not support them, many worked on road construction projects, assisted employment. This work was on a quota and could only just employ those who applied for assistance. The daily pay had a ceiling of very low sums.

  A little way out of the town, on the western slope, there was a military camp for two hundred men of the marine infantry. The soldiers were peasant boys who handled their carbines clumsily and awkwardly. They could often be heard exercising and shooting up in the mountains, but they were only to be seen in the town on Saturday and Sunday evenings.

  There were also ten bars, a civil guard-post of thirty-five men, twelve priests and a doctor. Most cases of sickness were nursed by a few nuns who wandered in and out of the houses like angels of death, with hypodermic syringes hidden under evil-smelling robes.

  This was the town up in the mountains. It was a quiet place and to the outsider it gave an impression of quiet contemplation and sublime calm.

  7

  Dan Pedersen had rented a house in Barrio Son Jofre, just by the southern entrance to the town, and he moved there with Siglinde and Willi Mohr. Their possessions were somewhat varied, souvenirs, a dog, a cat, household articles, typewriters, clothes, books, raffia baskets, sketching blocks and even the odd piece of furniture, for Dan and his wife had lived in the country for nearly two years and had managed to accumulate quite a few oddments. Willi Mohr on the whole owned no more than he could carry, his rucksack, his box of oils and a roll of canvases.

  The whole lot was loaded on to the camioneta and Santiago Alemany’s fish-van and then they set off on the thirteen-kilometre climb up to the town. Dan Pedersen drove and Siglinde and Willi Mohr sat in the back trying to keep some sort of order in the carelessly stowed load. Santiago Alemany followed behind them in his fish-van, which was a Ford of the smallest kind and very old. Everyone was on good form and they sang, loudly and vociferously, to drown the sound of the engines.

  Halfway up, they had to stop and fill up with water before the radiator boiled dry on the Ford, and a moment later they passed two civil guards who, seeing they were foreigners, at once waved them on. Just this side of the entrance to the town they passed yet another road patrol, two men in green uniforms, who were standing leaning on their bicycles by the ditch.

  A fortified poor-house, thought Dan Pedersen, and at once forgot what he had thought.

  The house in Barrio Son Jofre had stood empty for a long time, but the owner had had it swept out, water brought in, and in the dark it did not look at all bad.

  ‘There’s one habitable room up there and one down here,’ said Dan Pedersen to his wife. ‘Which one do you want?’

  ‘The one up there, with the window,’ said Siglinde.

  Dan asked: ‘What do you think of it, the whole place, I mean?’

  Despite everything, he was still feeling a little uncertain.

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ said Siglinde.

  As long as it doesn’t go on too long, she thought.

  Outside, Santiago had lit a paraffin lamp and was unloading together with Willi Mohr.

  ‘Unload the camioneta first,’ said Dan Pedersen, ‘and let the things stay out there, and we’ll go up and fetch the other things at once.’

  The owner of the house, who ran the Café Central up in the square, was an old friend of Dan’s. He had promised to lend him a bed and a mattress for the time being. The bed was too big for the fish-van.

  Ten minutes later their luggage lay in a heap in front of the door.

  ‘The strongest can come and help,’ said Dan Pedersen. ‘The bed’s as large as a cathedral.’

  Willi Mohr climbed up on to the truck. He was used to heavy manual work.

  ‘Fine,’ said Dan. ‘You two can carry the things in in the meantime.’

  He was satisfied with the division of labour, as he had known Santiago for a long time and trusted him.

  Dan Pedersen at once wound the starting-handle of the truck and drove off. Siglinde was standing outside the house. It was dark and silent and they could hear the sound of the engine until the truck stopped right up in the square.

  Santiago began carrying things into the house. In the room on the ground floor, the paraffin lamp spre
ad a weak flickering light, and the ginger cat sniffed suspiciously round the walls.

  It took almost half an hour for Santiago to move everything into the house. He did it leisuredly and carefully, placing each thing where Siglinde thought it ought to go.

  The last thing he carried in was Dan’s typewriter. He took it up to the room above and put it carefully down on to the floor.

  Then he straightened up and lit a cigarette. Siglinde had opened the shutters and was standing looking out. The paraffin lamp below threw stray reflections of light up the stairs, and through the open window came a warm breeze from the sun-warmed mountains.

  When Santiago had finished his cigarette, he was just about to drop the butt on to the floor, when he changed his mind and took two steps forward and flicked it out of the window. It fell on to the cobblestones in a shower of sparks.

  He was now standing just behind Siglinde. She was bare-footed and was still wearing the blue dress with shoulder-straps. She was standing quite still.

  They said nothing. Santiago opened his mouth and moistened his lips with his tongue.

  It was quiet outside.

  He took a step nearer and put his hands on her bare, downy shoulders.

  Siglinde did not move. He was standing close up to her. All he had on was a clean shirt and pair of cotton trousers and she felt him very close, sensed his breath and perhaps the swift beats of his heart. And yet she let his hands remain, just for a moment, just to feel what it felt like.

  With a swift consistent movement, he pulled her dress and bra straps down from her shoulders, pressed his lips to her neck, below her ear, and put both hands round her naked breasts.

  Not at all brutally, but uncertainly and groping, almost as if he were afraid of touching her.

  Her breasts were soft, firm and round, and he held them in his hands, the nipples stiff and rough against the sensitive skin of his palms.

  He changed his grip and weighed her breasts in his hands, the tips of his forefingers resting gently on her nipples. He bit carefully in the soft angle between neck and shoulder.

  Through the thin material of her dress she felt his sex, hard and upright, against a point just below the small of her back.

  Siglinde had felt what it was like.

  She freed herself, turned round and hit him across the face, quite hard, with the back of her hand.

  He took a step back into the darkness.

  She quickly pulled up her dress and bra straps, but he had time to see her naked breasts with their large dark nipples, which seemed black against her sunburnt skin.

  ‘Don’t ever try to do that again,’ she said scornfully.

  She was not really indignant. But she had found herself in similar situations so many times in her life that she knew exactly which tone of voice was the most effective.

  She walked past Santiago Alemany, over towards the stairs. She didn’t look at him and anyhow would not have been able to distinguish his features in the poor light.

  Siglinde was pottering about down below and quite a long time went by before Santiago came down. His face was controlled and closed and he constantly seemed to fix his eye on a spot behind her somewhere.

  She looked at him and almost imperceptibly shrugged her shoulders.

  She had tested herself a little just before, a little too much, too. Not for her own sake, true, for in spite of the actual physical contact, she had not really felt a thing. She liked sleeping with men, but only one at a time and preferably the same one for as long a consecutive period of time as possible. In addition she was thoroughly satisfied and generally considered herself to be happy.

  She would really like to have said ‘Don’t sulk, now,’ but she was too wise for that and said instead: ‘Give me a cigarette, there’s a good boy.’

  A flicker of surprise shone in Santiago’s eyes and the mask cracked for one brief moment.

  Siglinde thought: You poor wretch you. It’s hell that you can’t find anyone who wants to. Good God, there should be a rescue corps of sensible women set up, women who could be sent here as instructors and sweep out all this hypocrisy and stupidity and complexes, before those fat masturbating priests and nuns have time to destroy this generation too.

  When she looked at Santiago his face had changed yet again. His look was calm and reflective, and he moistened his lips with his tongue as he systematically sorted out the things on the floor.

  A moment later they heard the truck start up and come nearer.

  Dan Pedersen and Willi Mohr had been forced to take the bed to pieces to get it on the vehicle. Now they had to carry the sections upstairs and put it together again. When they had done it, Siglinde went up to look and burst out laughing. It was a huge wooden bedstead of stained oak with carved ornamentation along the sides. It would have held four people with comfort and it was a miracle that in a country so short of wood it had not been broken up years ago. Presumably no one had had the energy to set about the task. Siglinde tried it out and pronounced it creaking, dignified and pretentious.

  Then they all went up to the Café Central and drank a bottle of white wine. The place was large and poor and almost empty. Near the door sat a few civil guards playing cards and at the far end was a rickety ping-pong table.

  Dan Pedersen and Santiago played for a while. Dan was the better player and won in three straight sets, each time with a secure margin. When they changed ends for the last game, he said: ‘How’s things with Ramon?’

  ‘Not too good. Concussion, I think. But he got up and went out with the boat.’

  ‘With concussion? He shouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘He’s very strong.’

  ‘Yes, but there are limits.’

  Half an hour later, they parted at the cross-roads, Santiago shaking hands with them, one after another.

  ‘You’ll be stopped by the patrols,’ said Dan.

  ‘They’ve stopped me so many times I think they’re sick of it now,’ said Santiago.

  He drove all the way without once being stopped.

  The others stood outside the house in Barrio Son Jofre. The cobblestones felt warm and friendly under their feet, and the star-studded sky arched over them between the mountains.

  ‘Apropos that corporal,’ said Siglinde. ‘Why doesn’t Santiago work like the others?’

  ‘It’s not just a matter of hauling up a whole lot of fish,’ said Dan Pedersen. ‘The problem is to sell it and get a decent price. If there were enough people like Santiago, then this country wouldn’t look as it does.’

  ‘You two are good friends, aren’t you?’ said Willi Mohr.

  ‘We’ve known each other a long time. Yes, we’re friends. Friendship is something special here, something to do with sacred principles, something important and meaningful. You’ll understand after a while.’

  ‘Genuine friendship isn’t something you pick up in the street,’ he added. ‘It’s as rare as love.’

  He pushed open the creaking door and they stepped into their new home.

  While Willi Mohr was undressing, he heard Dan and Siglinde moving about and talking upstairs. After a while the bed creaked and the wavering light on the stairs went out.

  Willi Mohr thought about Barbara Heinemann.

  ‘Good-night, Willy, sleep well,’ called Dan and Siglinde from above.

  ‘Good-night, sleep well,’ said Willi Mohr.

  He smiled in the darkness and tried to think: Perhaps after all …

  Tomorrow he would paint.

  8

  Dan Pedersen was outwardly a man without inhibitions, whether physical or spiritual. He found it easy to make friends, easy to work, easy to love. He was outward-looking and open to impulses and impressions, had a mobile intellect and a quick temper, often falling victim to occasional weaknesses and depressions. Like his wife, he was the product of a comfortable life and a tolerant upbringing. He had gone to Spain because it was cheap there and he would be able to finish a very bad serial he was writing under an assumed name and for whic
h he had already been paid an advance. Later he took another advance and was now waiting until it was absolutely necessary for him to do some writing. As a professional writer he was what is usually called nimble-fingered. He could write so that what he wrote seemed good without it any way being so. In general he knew how things should be done but was seldom able to do them himself. He liked Spain very much, but he had liked Norway very much too, even during the war. He liked drinking too, but drank to excess only rarely. He often felt uncertain, but that was not often noticeable.

  Siglinde was like him in many ways, and in some ways she was his superior. She was more farsighted and practical, but she was also more conscious of the threats in life. All her life she had borne a latent fear for a variety of things, fears which often varied in reason and character and which she tried to suppress because she thought them foolish. She possessed an immediate attractiveness, which appeared shallow and which made people think of sexuality. She was really a wholly normal girl with a normal physique, though here, in this phantom world of suppressed emotions, she played a peculiar rôle, and she herself noticed it, but did not bother about it because it seemed absurd to her. In the puerto they had often had trouble with peeping toms. In fact she was a shy person and could not, for instance, say certain things without sweating all over.

  Willi Mohr was a bad painter, although he was technically skilful. He lacked spark and an artistic sense of purpose, and he energetically tried to replace what he lacked with industry and obstinacy, without for one moment believing or even wishing that this would be successful. Generally speaking, he was incapable of involving himself in anything, he believed, not even in his own problems, which he found quite meaningless. He was caught in a closed circuit and he himself considered that he could not with certainty remember any occasion on which he had been really happy or really miserable. He was locked in an attitude of physical and intellectual perfection, and if he had really been in a position to hope, he would have hoped for a miracle.