He felt sick for playing with that girl. What had been the point of that? But he wouldn’t let himself dwell on it. So he’d made a mistake, and perhaps the girl would be upset for a day or so. Big deal.
He thought about Lea. He didn’t really miss her, since she’d never been constantly around anyway. It was just that she’d come to be what Sharon had been—some ideal he could use to hide out behind. Maybe it was time he laid to rest a ghost or two.
He knew where he was. The streets were the ones he had walked in his mind thousands of times trying to figure where Sharon had gone. So now he walked with his head up, knowing where he wanted to go, letting the wind cut through his jacket. It didn’t chill him so much now.
He came to the corner, and sat on the stoop across from the door. At least here it wouldn’t be a matter of lying, and it would come to an end once and for all. He waited about a quarter of an hour and smoked two cigarettes. Then the door opened and the girl who looked like Sharon came out again.
His heart beat violently, but with a clean fear-beat that he knew how to live with. After this, after tonight, it would be different. OK, he’d learned. No more trying to plug how he’d felt at eighteen into how he was now. He had better things to do than that.
The door opened again and the other john came out. He pecked the girl on the cheek and squeezed her breast. When he had gone, Mike stood and crossed over to her. Her eyes were stone cold, but she smiled at him.
“Combien?”
he asked.
Twenty-two
Tenerife is the largest of the Canary Islands, spared the overwhelming bustle of tourism because its largest city, Santa Cruz, does not pretend that it is solely a resort town. It leaves its tourists to Las Palmas, which is happy to have them. Tenerife produces a fine, Madeira-like wine called Teneriffe, and bananas, but it is not by any means a commercial center. Santa Cruz is a beautiful and very small city, lush and well scrubbed, set at the base of a small mountain that extends nearly to the sea. From a mile out, it was breathtaking, and seemed to get better as we approached.
I’d retired so early the night before that I was up well before dawn, and I reached under my bunk after showering, made sure that I was packed, and walked up to enjoy the sunrise on the deck. Even our deck didn’t bother me anymore, and standing there alone in the early morning I thought that I had never felt so free. As soon as there was enough light I saw the island, though we were still quite a ways off. Irrationally, I felt I couldn’t be arriving at a better spot.
When we docked, I went below and found that Jay would be coming ashore until the ship disembarked again at two thirty. He knew a place at San Andrés, at the other end of the island, he said, where they made the best paella in the world, so I decided I’d spend those few last hours in his company, and then set about finding a place to stay.
We went ashore to find most of the town still closed up, so we decided to walk around before having breakfast, while the streets were quiet. The sun was shining brightly in the deep-blue sky, and the day was still except for an occasional wisp of warm breeze. Santa Cruz itself was only about ten blocks deep and twenty-five wide, so we had explored it pretty thoroughly within an hour. Then we stopped and had some coffee and milk in one of the cafés, and bought a box of good Las Palmas cigars.
All of the Canaries are part of Spain, and I felt immediately at home with the money and the language. Still, it was not really a Spanish setting. The African influence was strong. There were more blacks around than I’d ever seen in Spain, dressed in anything from the bright-colored
boubous
of the men on the
Antoinette
to more continental styles. It was a good blend. I didn’t sense, even from the first, that mood of intolerance that had seemed to pervade mainland Spain. It was odd, I thought. The Canaries were a Franco stronghold. He’d come from here. Yet the whole feel of the town was freer, more open than Barcelona had been. Maybe it was only a matter of size, though.
We read newspapers in the park for a while, and then Jay flagged a taxi to the curb and we rode five miles down the island to San Andrés de Tenerife. The ride, along the water, was interesting mostly because after we left the town, the island seemed extraordinarily barren. In Santa Cruz, everything had been well watered, almost tropical, and here, less than two miles away, once again we were bounded by a stony, Spanish whiteness on our left, and the sea on our right. The road out to San Andrés was nearly deserted. We passed only one car coming the other way.
San Andrés itself was a sleepy, typical Spanish village. There were no roads to speak of. The driver left us down by the beach, and I was surprised to see, after all my months of white-sanded resorts, that it was covered by pebbles and debris. That didn’t seem to bother the several children who were out in the water, but it didn’t look very inviting. A few boats were tied up at the breakwater, which extended perhaps two hundred yards out. Here and there on the breakwater a fisherman would tug at his pole, but in spite of that and the children in the water the whole place had a deserted, abandoned feeling.
Jay led me back into the town, which consisted of no more than a hundred white stucco buildings clustered together, and turned into what looked like the door to a house. Inside, a small room contained a bar and some men sitting around drinking. Jay ordered us a couple of beers and talked to the bartender for a few minutes, while I lit up one of the cigars and sat back to relax. He came back from the bar with a plate containing a bunch of deep-fried squid and the biggest lobster claw I’d ever seen.
“He says it’ll be two hours, which is just right.”
“Why so long?”
“He’s got to go down to the pier and get all the fish before he puts it on. Meanwhile, this stuff ought to tide us over. Go ahead, you can have the claw. I’ve had lots.”
“How do you know about this place?”
“Oh, I came here my first-year vacation. Flew to Las Palmas, but the crowds got to me, so I took a ferry over here and loved it. Some German sailor I met turned me on to this place, and it really is the best.”
I had no complaints with the lobster. The claw must have been seven inches long by two wide.
“By the way,” Jay asked, “do you have any money?”
“Sure.”
“Well, he’s in the back now, and wants to get paid before he goes out, and I just realized I’ve got no pesetas.” He grinned, and did a kind of shuffle in his chair. “Yes, I’ve got no pesetas,” he sang. “I have no pesetas today.”
Laughing, I got out my wallet. “How much is it?”
He was still humming the tune. “Pretty expensive.”
I looked in the wallet. What with the cab and last night’s dinner, I was getting down pretty far. “How much?”
“Two hundred.”
“You’re kidding?” Two hundred pesetas was about three dollars.
“No, but that includes all the wine we want, and salad, and coffee, and these first
tapas
were on the house.”
“Jesus. How can he afford that?”
“I don’t know. Just be glad. I’ll give you my half in traveler’s checks.”
“That’s OK. It’s on me.”
We finished our beer, paid the man, and decided to see a little more of the town while we waited for the paella. Our tour lasted only about twenty minutes, however, so Jay decided to show me another bar.
“I’m pretty much out of money,” I said, “if we want to cab it back.”
“No sweat. Let’s see if we can work something out.”
The other bar was similar to the first. It was smaller, and there were more bottles on the counters behind the bar, but again it was just a room with a few tables, a dirt floor, and some faded pinups on the walls.
“Pretty risqué for Spain,” I said.
Jay looked around for a minute. “There’s a lot of little differences here.”
We went up to the bar, and Jay asked the man if he would take traveler’s checks. He said he didn’t know what they were. I thought he was kidding, but Jay explained it to him carefully, and the man then said he’d be happy to accept them if we knew the exchange rate. I thought we were getting the old runaround, but Jay patiently pulled out the paper he’d been reading that morning and turned to the foreign exchange listings. When he’d shown the man the dollar and peseta values, the man smiled and said he’d give him ten dollars’ worth of pesetas at the morning’s price. I couldn’t believe it, since I’d heard stories of people having trouble cashing traveler’s checks in major hotels. I was really starting to like this place.
We both had gin and tonics and talked with the bartender about Franco’s death and what it had meant to him. He didn’t seem to think it would make much difference.
“So you don’t think there’ll be a revolution?”
He laughed.
“¿Dónde?”
“In the north,” I said. “Barcelona.”
He looked puzzled. “Why should there be?”
He bought us both another drink, and we talked for another hour about sports and other things. When I asked him why he had the pinups on his wall, he answered that he liked to look at pretty women.
“Pretty good reason,” Jay said when we left.
Back in the first bar, we were escorted behind the counter to a hall leading to an outdoor dining room. There was a striped red and white awning stretched over a trellis, serving as the roof. The floor was lovely, bloodred tiles. The trellis was hung with grapevines, and the foliage let just enough breeze through to leave us aware that we were on a patio, and not in a room.
In the center of the table was a large carafe of rosé, beaded with condensation, and a plate heaped with artichoke hearts, olives, green and white onions, and radishes. We had barely begun when the bartender-chef brought in the paella, covered, and a loaf of bread. From the size of the pan, we could see it would easily feed six people. We moved our salad plates aside while he spooned out monstrous platefuls of lobster, squid, chicken,
mer luza,
and sausage, not to mention the rice and pimento and peas. We looked across the table at each other and laughed at the size of the servings. The amount left in the pan didn’t seem to have been diminished.
“I bet everybody in there eats on what we leave.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me if it lasted a week.”
We asked the bartender if he’d join us, but he said no; he had his customers inside to watch.
An hour later, stuffed and happy, we walked down to the beach and caught a cab back to Santa Cruz. I told Jay I’d be here at General Delivery if he felt like writing. Then I wished him good luck. He embraced me, and was gone.
I easily got a room at full-pension in an old but very clean and charming hotel. My room had a hard bed and a sink and dresser. Right across the hall was a bathroom with a hot shower. Downstairs, the dining room was well lit and had a full bar. I still didn’t know what I would do, or how long I would stay here but, above all, I felt hopeful.
It was still only early afternoon, so I decided to walk to the top of the mountain behind the city. There was a paved road that wound up it, and it was really no more than one thousand feet high. I’d barely left the buildings of the town behind me, though, when the landscape again changed dramatically. I passed a grove of broad-leafed banana trees, looking cool and inviting in the afternoon sun. Then, before I knew it, suddenly I could have been back in California or even Tossa. Low brush dotted the hill on either side of me. This was rough land. As I got higher, I noticed more and more dwellings I hadn’t seen from the town—shacks of plywood and corrugated iron with a goat or two tethered in front. An old man crossed the road, driving a few sheep before him with a switch.
I began to sweat. This was quite a steep climb. Where the shacks were nearer to the road, dogs ran snarling toward me until their leashes choked them off.
Finally, I reached the summit, breathless but invigorated. The road ended in a paved vista point, around which a low white wall had been built. I sat on it and looked below.
To my left, behind the first ridge of the hill, was a group of houses I hadn’t been able to see from below. They looked as if they’d been moved out from Malibu Canyon, with their sculptured lawns and swimming pools. The afternoon shade was beginning to move over them now, and they were like a bit of fairyland—emerald green, refreshing, carefree. I wondered if the peasants in the shacks I’d passed ever came up here just to look.
Maybe once.
In front of me, the hill sloped down to Santa Cruz, and out to the ocean beyond. From up here, I could see the next island on the horizon, but I didn’t know which one it was. It wasn’t visible from the beach.
The wind picked up slightly. I thought back to what Jay had said the other day about details, and how it had sounded so right. I closed my eyes and could almost bring back the melody of that song Mike had played that had started all this. And it had been that song. Just a detail. Might easily have been left out. But if it had, where would we all be now? I didn’t feel any anger toward him. He was young and he’d learn. And I was now willing to see that it hadn’t been all bad for me. I felt alive again. Maybe hurt in places, but better than before. I believed again that little things could make a difference, and maybe I’d been looking at it wrong, and things did fit together. I decided, at least, to believe that in the future. Believing nothing had gotten me nowhere. Start small, work up.