“Not just that. Your ear has been bad for a while now, and you should have come to see me the day after the beating.”
“You wouldn’t have been here,” said Sean, smiling. “You know you need a few days’ notice.”
“No, seriously, you should take better care of yourself. You’re not so young, you know.”
“No older than you.”
“But I,” whispered the doctor, “I take care of myself. I don’t think I am so young.”
“Well, I guess I do.” He took out another cigar and bit off the end, spitting it into an ashtray. “I don’t remember when I’ve ever felt younger or better or stronger, though I admit my head has felt better.”
“You could’ve had a concussion.”
“I guess I would’ve noticed something that bad.”
“Well, take my advice. Start noticing your body a bit more. It starts to make a difference at our age. Some little thing, that wouldn’t have mattered twenty years ago, can go untreated and become a big problem. How would you like to be deaf, from just getting used to an earache?”
“Okay,” Sean said, patting the doctor’s knee and puffing his cigar, “you win. You’ve got a point there. I’ll watch things a bit.”
“Good. You’re not as flexible now, you know. Things break down more easily, and get harder to fix up.”
“OK.
Basta.
I’ll be a good boy.”
“All right. Now sit here while I write you the prescription. And open the window, will you? That cigar stinks.”
Tony was waiting at an outside table when Sean walked up, but they decided to move inside. The place was serviceable and pleasant. A jukebox played Spanish songs, and the bar along the right wall was loaded with calamari, mushrooms, anchovies, snails, chicken—all the standard
tapas.
They walked through to the back room, where tables had been set for lunch. The room had a large window high on the back wall that provided the only light. The lights were turned off until evening. They sat at a table covered with a starched, plain white tablecloth and a spray of flowers in the center. The waiter came and took their orders, removing the extra utensils as he left, and they had a beer while waiting for the food.
“So where’s Marianne?”
“Left, shipped out, gone home.”
“How come?”
“Homesick, she says. I don’t know. I think she was just scared, myself. People don’t get homesick that badly anymore, do they?”
“I don’t know. What was she scared of ?”
Tony laughed, showing his white teeth. He drank some beer. “You kill me,” he said. “You ask me why she’s scared after you almost got yourself killed last week.”
“You mean the political thing?”
He nodded. “She really tried to be aware politically, I think, but she just never got to feeling at home here. She didn’t know what to think, except that when Franco dies, if he ever does, it will be a dangerous time. So she wanted to get away before that.”
“Is that what she told you?”
“No. She told me she was homesick.”
They finished their beers and ordered two more.
“Do you miss her?” Sean asked.
“That’s a funny question, coming from you.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t know,” he said, smiling. “It betrays a certain softening.”
“Well, let’s pass that. Do you?”
“What?”
“Miss her?”
“Yeah. I think I do, though it’s funny. I didn’t have much going with her. But you know sometimes when you get a feeling that things are going to be much better, if you just give them some time? Well, that’s the feeling I had. Not that things had been bad. I just felt hopeful. I felt as though we could talk to each other.” He brushed his hand against the tablecloth, as though wiping something away. “I guess it was just me, though. Evidently she didn’t think much about it.”
“That’s too bad.”
He shrugged. “Well, better to find out sooner.”
The lunch arrived, along with a bottle of
tinto.
They were both having
entrecôte.
Sean looked down at the skinny piece of meat, and doubted very much whether it was
entrecôte,
but it tasted delicious, though it was tough. Everything tasted good to him lately. These Spanish cooks knew what they were doing.
Tony, as he so often did, brought the conversation around to politics, asking what had happened at the riot.
“You weren’t there?”
“Other side of town,” he said. “No trouble there. I miss all the fun.”
“Yeah, it was a good time.” Sean rubbed his head for effect, and smiled. “I don’t really know what happened. Of course, I read in the papers the next day, but they didn’t say anything, as usual. I don’t really know what brought it about.”
“Going into the old city brought it about.”
“What do you mean?”
“Narrow streets. Bad lighting. If you wanted to beat up some radicals and hush it up, where would you do it?”
“But why hush it up? You’d think they’d want it publicized as an example or whatever.”
“Yeah, but these are funny times, as we’ve said again and again. No one knows for sure what will happen when Franco dies. There are even people who believe there will be no violent change, though I think they delude themselves.”
“So you think . . .”
“I think, to use an Americanism of yours, that all hell will break loose.” Tony finished his wine and signaled for another bottle. “Looks like we might drink too much again. You’re bad for me.”
“¡Salud!”
Sean drained his glass.
“But see,” Tony went on, “the officials are in a bad position. They know the wind is blowing, but not in which direction. Many of the police are Basques first—no, it’s true; I know it—and if there is revolution, they will fight with us. They will remember, then, who stood strong with Franco, who ordered that he wanted to see radical blood. And the officials, at least many of them, are reluctant to do anything. They must stop the rallies, or Franco’s government will be on them, but if they are too forceful, or visible—well, you see. It’s a terrorist’s time.”
The wine was having its effect. Sean gave up trying to cut the beef and, picking up the steak, discreetly brought it to his mouth for a bite.
“Excuse me,” he said to Tony, “for my abominable manners, but I’m getting impatient to eat this stuff.” He took another bite.
Tony, amused, was also impressed. His elder friend here was undoubtedly the only man he knew who could pull off such behavior with élan. He poured them both more wine. “You don’t seem,” he said, “any the worse for having been there.”
“No. But talk to my doctor. Actually, I think, all in all, it was a good thing for me, not that I’d relish doing it again.”
“What was good about it?”
“Kyra,” he said. “It turned things around somehow. Since then, all the bullshit has—well, that’s not quite true—but most of the craziness between us has let up. I think the main difference now is that we believe each other. No, even more than that, we believe in each other. And really it was that night, when we both thought we might be dead or in jail or beaten to a pulp. All of a sudden I realized that I’d been approaching it all wrong, that maybe the secret was to just say ‘Damn the consequences. It’s about time you let things out.’ It was that feeling of loss, but more than that, the feeling that if she’d been killed, or would be gone for a long time, she’d never have known how I felt about her. How could she have? And as soon as I recognized that, I changed. I can’t explain it better than that. The defenses dropped, and I felt young again. I don’t know. Maybe she picked up on that, or maybe she felt the same things, but since then things have been as close to perfect as I’ve ever had.”
“You’re not jealous?”
Sean’s face clouded and then cleared. “I don’t much think it applies anymore.”
But Tony didn’t miss the brief change of expression, and he didn’t pursue the subject.
Over orange flan and coffee for dessert, Sean asked Tony if he’d meet him in two hours and drive him home. He didn’t expect his lawyer to detain him for long, and besides, he was high enough on the wine that he couldn’t envision concentrating more than two hours on anything.
Sean decided to walk from the restaurant. He wasn’t yet drunk, but he felt good. His mind was at ease. Things were going well. It was midafternoon, and the streets and sidewalks were comfortably free of masses of people. Siesta time, a glorious tradition: It was at this time that Sean felt most acutely the difference between Blanes and the resort towns.
He walked along, buoyed by drink, and took pleasure in the closed-up businesses and shops. Not that places didn’t close in Tossa, for instance, but there never seemed to be the accompanying slowdown. He thought that the midafternoon slump was the most natural thing in the world, and that it had been genius to institutionalize it. He felt here that the very streets reflected that full-bellied, wine-soaked lethargy.
And yet today he wasn’t tired. He whistled tunelessly as he walked, and he walked steadily, though slowly. He stopped and asked directions from a toothless old man who was sweeping the gutters with a broom made from a bundle of tied sticks. Then he tipped him a hundred pesetas. He already had a good idea of where he was. He’d just liked the looks of the man, and wanted to speak with him.
Carlos Bertran was the first man Sean had met in Spain. He was about five feet, two inches tall, and weighed at least two hundred pounds. He had known of Sean’s arrival from a mutual friend, a lawyer in New York, and had been at the plane to meet him. Sean had stayed at his house while he’d toured the coast, but they had never become friends. Sean, instinctively, had never liked obese people, nor had he particularly enjoyed the company of nondrinkers. Bertran, for his part, had not pursued him as a friend, but as a client, and in this he’d been successful. It couldn’t hurt, he’d explained, to have a representative in a foreign country, and for someone with money who was planning to settle, it was imperative, lest the various licenses, visa problems, and graft take more than was absolutely necessary.
Bertran didn’t take a siesta. He didn’t drink at lunch, and so rarely returned from it heavy-lidded. Sean wondered how he’d gotten so fat when he didn’t drink. Maybe he had when he was younger.
His office was nearly a mile from downtown, set back from a quiet, shaded road. He worked in the back half of a square, white, one-story house. In the heat of summer, he would often take clients outside to the patio behind his office, which was covered with a bamboo-slatted awning. Now, though, he sat behind his large desk, offered one of the comfortable red leather chairs to Sean, and proffered a Havana cigar.
“Gracias.”
Bertran lit it for him.
Sean blew out the thick, blue smoke, and settled back in the chair, starting to feel drowsy. “I almost forgot our appointment today.”
The lawyer turned his palms up and smiled. “Tomorrow would have done as well.”
“Ah, but the timing, the timing. So much is the timing.”
They didn’t feel comfortable with each other, and so often spent half of their meetings in an effort to ease things a bit.
Bertran laughed politely, bobbing his head up and down. His face, surprisingly, was good-looking. It had none of the fleshiness of the rest of him. His eyes were maybe a little too dark, a little too piercing, but they didn’t squint. His cheeks were full but not flabby. Always clean-shaven, he looked nearly aristocratic above the neck. Again he chuckled.
“I have a story that will amuse you,” he said. “I have a client, a woman, who owns a house near Barcelona, just outside the city, inland, where the forest begins. I should say she used to own a house there. It has since burned down, and she is suing the department of roads. That is strange, you say. Why the department of roads? You know the toll booths they have erected on the autoroute? Yes? Well, there was a fire in the hills near this woman’s house, and she called the Barcelona fire department, which immediately set out. I see by your smile you can guess, and it is true. The men on the fire trucks, in their uniforms, carried no money, and the toll taker wouldn’t let them through. They had to beg from the people in cars backed up behind them. In the meantime, the woman’s house burned down.”
Sean stared at the ceiling, shaking his head. “That’s a good story. God bless the bureaucrats.”
“I remember reading about the fire and this incident in the papers, little thinking I’d become involved in it. What must go through the mind of that toll taker?”
“I suppose that’s what happens when you’re trained your whole life not to question orders. Someone had ordered him to let no one through without paying. I’ll bet he still thinks he did the right thing.”
“God help us.”
They were relaxing now, and gradually got down to business. A window in the room was open, and occasionally Sean would stare at it to wake himself up. Still, business matters bored him, and it soon became all he could do to keep from dozing.