With summer, Paris came to life again, but all the bustling felt alien, part of the lives of others. I remained, in my head, on this side of the Atlantic, with a sensation of anxiety and depression that never left me, not knowing how to fill my days. I thought both of returning and not returning to Puerto Rico. The idea of another year in this state crushed my energy, which was already diminished by Marie’s disappearance. I couldn’t get her suffering out of my mind, or the foundation of the bridge that she had begun to build toward me the day of our last encounter.
I ended up telling the whole story to Simone. One Sunday we went for a walk along the islands on the Seine and stopped to sit on a bench facing Notre Dame. My tale took up over an hour, and even though our relationship hadn’t felt intimate until that moment, I didn’t find in her the indifference of ready-made answers. Finally she said that I seemed so fragile that she was afraid to touch me.
We started seeing each other more often. We’d go to the movies, chasing down in distant quartiers reruns of old movies, which a certain sector of the public had not forgotten. We’d go to Sylvie and Hamed’s apartment in the Tenth to have dinner; we’d sit down to chat beside the ponds and along the promenades in the Jardin du Luxembourg. She was right: I could have collapsed at any moment. I felt I was living in a void, and what I perhaps didn’t want to admit to myself was that I dreaded what could happen between us. I’d watch her reclining on a chair with her eyes closed and her skirt raised to get some sun on her legs after winter, and I endlessly went back over my doubts. In spite of a certain grace, Simone wasn’t a beautiful woman, but I was fascinated by her inexhaustible energy and deep roots in the city, her universe of tastes and tendencies, so different from my own, and yet I held back, which, I hoped, wouldn’t offend her.
Absurdly it was hard to watch her trying to pull me out of my doldrums with her playful and irreverent talk, with the persistent display of her naked body beneath sheer cotton fabrics, with her way of not taking me seriously and reproaching me for being gloomy. One day, compelled by desire and loneliness, I put my hand between her thighs. They were slender and welcoming. She changed her position, barely shifting, before pressing her hands on mine and squeezing her legs. We stood up and walked with our arms around each other’s waist. We kissed under a tree on the promenade and I felt her buoyant breasts quiver against my chest.
Of all the love affairs I’ve had, the one that brought Simone and me together was both the most fleeting and the only one I recall without bitterness. That evening, in my studio, we made love with an intensity I could not recall ever feeling before. Simone was all about skin, whether rubbing against a body or against furniture; clothes were like a wrapping in which her body would swim. Her flesh and muscles palpitated, moving in constant defiance and enrichment of the laws of gravity. She didn’t know shame. She could sit down to eat, carry on the most incredible conversations, read or write for hours, without covering herself, without showing any modesty or embarrassment. Her body made any place its home.
That was the summer of the parks. I’d pick her up at the cheap hotel where she worked cleaning rooms and making beds and we’d wander around the open spaces of the city. We agreed to save up for a vacation and would economize by buying strawberries, cherries, bread, cheese, and salads, which we’d consume in parks, on terraced steps and in squares. We’d stop and stand in the chalk circles drawn by street artists, we’d listen to the old Revolutionary songs played on a hand organ on one of the bridges of the Île Saint-Louis. Simone knew them all and sang and danced to them, tilting her body, barely moving, receiving the knowing look of the two men singing who knew her since childhood. In the vast Beaubourg plaza I’d insist that we listen to the Andean ensembles or the bands of drums from Senegal and the Congo. We’d sit on the dirty ground littered with cigarette butts, wrappings, and empty bottles to watch the spectacle of the man with the deep hoarse voice who earned a living by putting out live coals with his tongue and spitting out huge flames, or we’d admire the skill of the jugglers, comics, or the youngsters, always different ones, who had come to Paris with a guitar.
Sundays we’d go to an apartment near the Gare de Lyon to have lunch with her father. The place was small and gloomy. Georges would drag one leg and move by straining on aluminum crutches whose bottoms were stained by dirt from the street. With our help he’d prepare traditional stews, bouillabaisses, blood sausage puddings from Auvergne. Her father would always serve a red table wine, which he’d pour for everyone, generously, until the last drop. The dining room was filled with a big cloud of smoke, which couldn’t escape through the tiny windows. After dessert, Georges would painstakingly go over to the sideboard, a lit Gitanes dangling between his lips, and bring over a bottle of eau-de-vie. The harsh liqueur hit the stomach, leaving a trail of heat starting from the tongue. Simone and I would end up lying on the couch, gulping down a last glass, smoking one more cigarette, listening to her father starting to snore in his easy chair. Starry eyed, Simone would then leap upon me, in a farce or comedy that was repeated every time and that came close to exhibitionism, ending by shocking me and producing a string of insults that would wrap up the game.
We’d go back to my apartment when the endless twilight would seem to solidify over the still air of the city, when the people around us would be bent on heading home.
One morning I went to visit Sandrine. Since being involved with Simone I had been avoiding her. Marie’s senseless accusation had made our attempts to communicate ambiguous and awkward. I knew well the capricious and universal susceptibilities of relationships, especially the ones that could be in the process of becoming exclusive. If I caught her on a bad day, Sandrine could see my new relationship as a betrayal of Marie or even of herself. In these matters, logic and fairness were always precarious. All the same, I valued our friendship and didn’t want to lose it. Besides—and perhaps this was what moved me also to visit her—I wanted to know if she had news of Marie.
She had received a letter. She gave it to me to read and I looked for the return address. Marie had written it from the family beach house. She recounted the odyssey of the first days there, the fury that had turned into resignation, exposing the contradictions of her relationship with the mother. She had been admitted to the psychiatric hospital for two weeks and for over a month had been living in her house on the Upper East Side. She liked her psychiatrist, and the medications had helped her, but she still didn’t feel well. She would stay home for the summer and then return. Finally, she asked Sandrine to tell me that she would write soon. The letter was filled with news but said nothing important. It felt like she was practicing being sane. Sandrine did not agree. She was happy for her friend and told me it wasn’t good (implying that it was very bad) for me to be so suspicious, to see shadows around every corner. Our conversation didn’t go much further. I must have caught her on a bad day.
Simone and I were planning our vacation. We were vaguely considering places we’d heard about that appealed to us when one day Simone brought from her father’s house an antiquated map of Europe. We spread it out on the bed, spending hours pronouncing the names of all the different places and fabricating impossible itineraries that were more like marathons.
Our modest savings brought us back down to reality. I longed for the sea and for my native tongue; Spain was fairly close, and, in that era before its entry into the Common Market, it was still a cheap country. We decided to trace straight lines and measure them with a ruler. The lines that went to the east coast of Spain were the shortest. Thus we chose our destination. We would try to stretch our money as far as possible so as to be out of Paris for three weeks, in what we hoped would be a cottage by the sea. Every few days we would venture out to the nearest village or city for a change of pace and atmosphere.
Hamed and Sylvie lent us a couple of army rucksacks they had used traveling around North Africa; we filled them with our clothes and a few books, bought our tickets, and finally, sitting face-to-face with our legs entwined, looking out the window of the train, we found ourselves leaving the city. Early the next morning we reached Barcelona, where we planned to stop for a couple of days.
In the Gothic Quarter we chose the hostel whose sign seemed the most weather-beaten, presuming it would cost the least. Once in our own room, we closed the curtains and began to undress standing up. I could feel the amazing heat in Simone’s thighs, the soft swell of her belly against my cock. We fell upon the bed causing a creak that made us pause and look at each other in wonder. The furniture was very old, the mattress thin and rutted. Any movement started a symphony of squeaking that must have been audible over the whole floor. Hugging and holding each other close, we fell to the floor. The dirt stuck to the sweat on our bodies. Afterwards, as the morning seeped in like liquid beneath the curtains, we fell into an idyllic sleep.
Later that day we discovered the Ramblas, the Plaça de Catalunya, the towers of the Sagrada Familia, the Sant Jordi church. We walked along the streets near the hostel, taking in the activity of pimps and whores, of dealers in hashish and hard drugs, the Arab and Gypsy enclaves. As the sun set, we made love in the showers of the hostel, wary of any footsteps that drew near, stifling our nervous laughter, moans, and declarations of love.
Later, dining on gambas al ajillo, leaning on the bar of a café, among Germans and Scandinavians, barely twenty-four hours after our departure, I felt that Paris was far away. In Barcelona we could breathe new, fresher air. No one knew us; nothing had happened to us on these streets, no history weighed us down.
Everything we needed or wanted was cheap. Espadrilles, packets of unfiltered cigarettes for me, filtered for Simone, a bottle of wine, to which, when the sales clerk told us the price, we quickly added a second. We returned to the hostel late, drunk, and happy to have spent the night discovering the city step by step. All along the dark corridor of the boardinghouse, our hands explored inside each other’s clothes, our fingers anticipating, knowing everything.
Once Simone was in bed, dead tired and sleepy, I went to drink from the faucet. The wine, the food, the lovemaking had produced an intense, insatiable thirst. Cupping my hands, I drank at length. The water tasted bad, of salt, of metal. Finally, I fell into the bed that creaked and swayed me like a pendulum.
After two intense and marvelous days, we got up very late. We walked out into a blinding sun. The heat, which in Paris had never had this intensity, was overwhelming. Wandering around the streets, with our clothes soaked, it was so hard to breathe that we were gasping. Nothing tasted right that day, neither the coffee nor the cigarettes nor each other’s lips. Simone bared the claws of her bad mood. Realizing we were lost (we didn’t have a map and it wasn’t easy to find one’s way), she directed her fury at me in florid slang. Soon we were fighting, slinging insults that flew out of our mouths like surprises, driving our bodies apart.
We sat back to back under a tree (in a park we never did identify), a big space between us. I turned to watch her smoke, concentrating with a face that made me imagine her childhood tantrums. After the third cigarette smoothed her brow, her eyes met mine and she finally laughed. We made up then and there as we would do many times, in the delicious way lovers do.
We decided to extend our stay in Barcelona for one more day. The city’s relaxed contrast with the formality of Paris made us feel like we were on vacation. I insisted upon spending a little time in a museum, though Simone didn’t share my enthusiasm. She wandered through the rooms of medieval Catalan art and didn’t stay with me when I’d stop in front of paintings, sculptures, and altarpieces. When I’d turn to comment on something, hoping to interest her in the art and ease my worry over her boredom, I wouldn’t find her in the gallery. She was two centuries of painting ahead, unmoved by the wonders that surrounded her, sitting barefoot and with her legs crossed on a circular sofa, ready to ask me if we could leave. I was struck by her indifference. She took culture for granted without wanting it or paying it much attention. She was a graduate student in literature, but already I knew her well enough to presume she would not make it to the final dissertation stage. In the future I could see her working in a nursery school or an administrative position or managing a bouquiniste stall or a gift shop. What work she did really didn’t matter to her. The life she wanted was right in front of her. Unresponsive to the opinions of others on what mattered, she had no ambition. She was satisfied to be the girl who had grown up on the streets of Paris and would always remain on those streets. My artistic aspirations meant nothing to her; Paris had for me a literary aura that said nothing to Simone. She would have preferred me to be simpler, satisfied with a few basic everyday desires, without prospects, spontaneous to the point of oblivion.
That night, the third in Barcelona, I was slow and tired, wanting to return to the hostel to take a bath and read. However, it was hard to curb Simone’s energy. We’d stop in front of all the outdoor stands on the Ramblas, we’d watch the street players and wander with the river of people flowing through the streets. The queasiness that would erupt in me the next day was being forged.
We returned to the hostel and I fell asleep almost immediately. There would be no lovemaking gymnastics that night. I had a dream in which Marie appeared. She was sitting on the mattress in my apartment in Paris reading a book with very big pages, and then lifted her eyes and said to me, irritated: “I’m not leaving here.”
I awoke at dawn’s early light. Simone slept curled up beside me. You could begin to sense the early risers on the street and hear the foghorns in the port. I went to the window and peeked through the curtains. It was a cloudy day, but probably by mid-morning the sun would come out. At eleven thirty we would take the train heading down the coast. We’d buy a ticket as far as Alicante, depending on the landscape we saw out the window: if we saw a place that appealed to us we would get off there and look for a place to stay. It was a risky plan, but we were willing to be adventurous. On the map we had opened in Paris, we saw places with marvelous names: Tabernes de Valldigna, Cabo de la Nao, San Vincente de Paspeig. We imagined an uninhabited peninsula, with a fishing village nearby where we could stock up every few days.
This prospect filled me with enthusiasm. Sun, sea, a primitive lifestyle, giving full reign to our sexuality: all this gave me hope for a personal rebirth and the awakening of a creative period. I saw myself sitting at a rustic table, barefoot, listening to the waves, writing. We wouldn’t want for anything more; we were filled with illusions, thinking that we were made for this life and that we now had it within reach.
I felt a vague pain in my abdomen. I dressed and went into the bathroom. I defecated a very liquid diarrhea. I attributed it to the wine, the seafood, and cold cuts. I returned to the room and sat down to read, letting Simone sleep. But before I could even start, I had to return to the toilet several times. I had a headache and felt increasingly unwell.
I had to pull Simone out of her sleep, insisting on the time and rushing her through the process of packing, getting breakfast, and making it to the station. The café au lait and bread and butter, the free breakfast at the guesthouse, didn’t agree with me at all. Just a few minutes left before our train was leaving, I had to run to look for the restrooms. I already knew the Turkish toilets, having run into them in Paris, but I was not prepared for the spectacle of that train station toilet. The stink, the collective and overflowing excrement, the polluted puddles that covered the floor and got as far as the door, were overwhelming. My condition did not allow for alternatives and I had to squat, struggling to maintain a perilous balance; falling into that muck would be catastrophic. I sacrificed my handkerchief and dragged my shoes to try to wipe off the dirt.
When I returned to the platform, Simone was shouting from a door. At that moment, the train began to pull away. With my illness and the state of the bathrooms, I had lost track of time. I climbed the steps of the train thinking it would have been better to spend another day in the city.
It was summer and the trains were crowded. My belly produced sounds and I felt waves of pain that didn’t allow me to keep still. We ended up finding a place at the end of the car, near the bathroom. There I spent hours sitting on the floor or running in every few seconds, amid bundles and suitcases. I became weaker and sicker and the trip turned into an endless torture. Simone managed to get a cup of hot tea, slices of dry bread, and a couple of antidiarrheal pills, thanks to her enterprising attitude and the solidarity of a couple of Swedes. I hoped to feel better and make it to our incomparable beach.
I was determined and managed to get off at a station whose name I’ve forgotten. Before arriving, we had seen a rocky coast, with sunny little coves and a deep blue sea that seemed unreal to a Caribbean like myself. It was an effort to carry the rucksack. I had a steady pain in the region of my kidneys.
We walked out of the station and came upon a ghost town. We quickly realized that the area had fallen into the hands of developers who built condominiums that brought little benefit to the town itself, which lay a few kilometers from the coast. The locals remained in the town. The vacationers did not stroll along its streets and basically, upon leaving the station, took taxis to the coast.
On the highway to the beach, leaving town, we decided to hitchhike. I had taken the rucksack off my back and was practically dragging it as we walked along waiting for a ride. The sun was high and there was no shade anywhere.
A pickup truck stopped in front of us. Some bricklayers were going in the direction we wanted. We sat in the back amid tools and bags of cement. The half hour trip did me good. We saw, as we got closer, the blue line of the horizon and the apartment towers that were finished or half-built. We got off in front of a modern-style café and I asked the driver if he knew of some cheap place we could stay, some room or cabaña.
“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. Below 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?”
“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 path. 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.
We looked all around us, stuck as if time had frozen. Finally we started running again, trying to get away without really knowing if we were. Our direction kept changing without any order, presuming that this way we were confusing the Belgian, going more or less toward the northeast back to the coast.
We became slightly calmer when we reached the dunes. Further, below, was the beach where we had spent the day. Not a soul could be seen.
The night was long and hard. We were whipped by the wind and the slightest sound put us on the lookout. Our feet, clad only in espadrilles, were hurting, having tripped while running against stones and the roots of plants. For a long time we changed position every fifteen minutes, not because this tactic would prevent in some way a reencounter with the Belgian, but because the wind and the fear prevented us from staying calm. We hid several times and were indecisive about what we should do. We opted, finally, to let the hours pass.
At dawn we were sufficiently calm and rested to continue walking in the direction of the main highway. We were hoping that the Belgian had gone away a while back or that he was sleeping. After a good long walk, Simone glimpsed in the distance the lights of the cars traveling on the highway. Eager to be finished with this nightmare, we walked in single file in that direction.
A couple of hours later we reached the highway to Alicante. Nobody stopped when we tried to hitchhike, probably because they couldn’t see us in the dark. With the first light, our hopes increased. Simone could barely remain standing when, in the distance, I caught sight of a taxi. I signaled vigorously and felt like leaping for joy when I saw him stop. The driver lived in a town nearby and was going to Alicante to begin his day’s work. During the trip I told him our adventure, and when he left us near the hostel, he refused to charge us. Simone, madly grateful, stuck her head in the window and gave him two noisy kisses.
We entered a café dying of hunger and thirst. We ate and drank in silence, exchanging few words, totally enervated. A little while later, dragging our feet, we made it to our room.
When we got into bed, Simone began to cry. She was crying from a place that only she could know, far beyond us, that room, or Alicante. I consoled her as well as I could, until we both fell asleep.
This experience soured our joy. We did not venture outside of the city again, and even San Juan Beach didn’t feel safe. We spent some days as if we were convalescing, afraid to run into the Belgian around any corner. Simone could not be alone, not even in the pensión. We walked along the streets as if afraid that something awful might befall us again.
Santiago and Isabel helped us shake off the gloom. We’d meet up with them almost every night and go out to eat tapas in the little restaurants along the coast. Thanks to Santiago, some months later, I would see my first stories published in a Madrid magazine and, afterwards, I would become its stringer in Paris, sending movie reviews and critiques of the latest literary works.
The incident on the beach changed the way I felt about Simone. I now allowed myself to identify traits and attitudes in her that I had never liked but had ignored, perhaps motivated by my hopes for novelty or a fresh start. Her frequent and perplexing mood changes, the extremes of certain emotions unleashed by seemingly minor incidents, her lack of prudence disguised presumably as spontaneity, just like her disappointing and sometimes embarrassing indifference to culture: all these were aspects which, I realized, had always affected me whether or not I’d wanted to admit it. On the other hand, however, there was her joyful manner and our rich sexuality. One fact, whether or not it was fair, was crucial to my malaise: I blamed her for the incident with the Belgian. We hadn’t talked about it, but at certain moments in that endless night and in the days that followed, I caught her brooding over her foolishness. The look in my eyes must have betrayed me, because more than once she asked what I was thinking. I always hesitated to answer and would look away, pretending that I was distracted. “Nothing,” I’d say, and ask her about anything that would change the subject.
We’d been together barely three or four months, but the intensity of what we had lived, our almost exclusive concentration on each other, the trip to Spain, and the way in which I had forgotten Marie over that period, allowed us to feel as if we had been together much longer. We didn’t realize that the relationship was already in decline.
We wanted to stay in Alicante one more week but were very low on money. Too many unforeseen expenses, books and cassettes, too many tapas and bottles of wine, were boring a hole in our pockets. We could only extend our stay for four more days. Enough to take our last walks and swims at San Juan Beach, and for the final dinners with Santiago and Isabel, who, conscious of our lack of funds, treated us on several occasions.
Around nine o’clock on a late-summer evening we boarded the express train that would follow the coast, passing Valencia and Barcelona before reaching the border at Irun. We passively watched the scenery go by with the low spirits of a trip’s end, without any desire to talk much. In Paris the exams I hadn’t taken in June awaited me. Their subject matter seemed lost in time and merely thinking about them was enough to depress me.
After a night of interrupted sleep, we got off at Austerlitz station and parted on the metro platforms. Simone was going to visit her father, to get clean clothes, to ask if she could find work again at the hotel, and the next day, she would go back to my place. I went to my studio on the Impasse de l’Astrolabe. Paris looked like an old postcard: a familiar panorama that I observed with strange indifference. As I entered my building, I opened the mailbox. It was filled with junk mail, but there was also a fistful of letters. I examined the envelopes stamped in San Juan or New York, the one from my parents containing a much-needed check, and I counted three letters of different thickness with my address in Marie’s tiny handwriting.
I organized them to read them in the order they had been sent. The first went on for five pages in lines that scrawled downward. Knowing her, I knew they had been written in bed. She recounted, grosso modo, the heartbreaking tale of her disappearance. Her mother had hired a lawyer to have her declared incapacitated and thus to place her under the guardianship of the family. An ambulance had taken her to the airport and on that same day—it was nighttime in New York—she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. There she discovered the consequences of her act. Her ward companions terrified her. She was in a world of madmen and she realized she had crossed a line. This more than anything else forced her to react. She didn’t want to be one of those incurable crazies who have conversations with themselves and repeat absurd gestures. That first night, she became determined to get out of there as soon as possible. She managed to get Dr. Simmons to discharge her and to administer the rest of her treatment at her parents’ home.
The last two pages were about us. They included a complicated reflection on what Marie called “our time” without clarifying whether she meant past, present, or future. She asked me to write to her, to forgive her, not to forget her. I folded the pages and put them back in the envelope thinking of them as a message in a bottle that had drifted to shore from a shipwreck in a distant ocean. I realized how much Simone and Spain had made me forget. I didn’t want to brood over the sordid aspects of the letter and preferred to ignore what it implied about me.
The second letter had been written twenty days later. It was very short, and barely covered one side of a small sheet. It began by reminding me that she had written to me and had not received an answer. She presumed cynically that the absence of news implied that I was having a blast. She couldn’t believe that our entire past deserved nothing more than this disregard. The letter stopped at the end of this paragraph, without any farewell salutation. Below, without anything further, was her signature.
A familiar unhappiness took hold of me. Once again I witnessed the zigzag of her emotions, without being able to interrupt—or to respond. The city, which so recently had been stripped of its old associations, once again rolled over me with the patina of all that I had endured. Her depressive complaints, more than the pain of loss and nostalgia, brought Marie back into my life.
The third envelope contained something thick. I felt it, putting off opening it for a moment. In it there was only a cassette. I went over to the radio and put it in the player, but before pressing the “play” button, I paused: the idea that I was going to hear Marie’s voice again made me stop dead. I resisted for just a minute, knowing that I would give in.
I realized I was, in some way, betraying Simone, but I sat down at the desk with a cigarette and coffee. Marie spoke as she had so many times before, from the hallowed place that had room for only the two of us. In her monologue I heard pauses and transitions that seemed to contain my responses, the phantom of our dialogue. Now nothing remained of the edginess of her second letter or the clinical case history of the first. As I listened I became aware of the powerful bond between us, which despite everything endured.
Marie signed off, but I stayed at the desk until the tape stopped automatically. I felt a joy words could not describe, a joy unlike the passion inspired by Simone. My feelings for Marie touched other places in my past and my being, like a palimpsest of our life, something I couldn’t destroy without destroying myself.
Even while knowing it would upset me, I wrote to Marie that very evening. I spoke of what her voice had awakened in me. To explain my silence, I told her I had just spent a few weeks in Spain. I didn’t mention Simone or go into any details. Thus I committed a vile act toward both of them, but at that moment I could do nothing else.