“What’s the only thing that matters?” I asked, watching the movement of the sea.
“Life.” El Quemado’s armies began to methodically demolish my lines.
Does the loser lose his life? I must be crazy, I thought, as the tide continued to rise, higher than anything I had seen before in Spain or anywhere else.
“The loser forfeits his life to the winner.” El Quemado broke through my front in four different places and invaded Germany through Budapest.
“I don’t want your life, Quemado, let’s not get carried away,” I said, transferring my only reserves to Vienna. By now the sea was licking at the edge of the wall. I began to feel tremors all over my body. The shadows of the buildings were swallowing up the scarce light that still shone on the Paseo.
“And this game is set up to make Germany lose!”
The water rose up the stairs from the beach and spilled over the sidewalk. Consider your next play very carefully, warned El Quemado, and he began to splash away toward the Del Mar; there was no other sound to be heard. Like a whirlwind in my head, there spun images of Ingeborg alone in the room, of Frau Else
alone in a hallway between the laundry and the kitchen, of poor Clarita leaving work through the service entrance, tired and thin as a broomstick. The water was black and now it came up to my ankles. A kind of paralysis so thoroughly prevented me from moving my arms and legs that I couldn’t rearrange my counters on the map or set offrunning after El Quemado. The die, white as the moon, sat with the 1 faceup. I could move my neck and I could talk (or at least whisper), but that was all. Soon the water swept the board offthe wall, and it began to float away from me, along with the force pool and the counters. Where would they go? Toward the hotel or the old town? Would someone find them someday? And if they did, would they be able to see that it was a map of the battles of
Third Reich
, and that the counters were
Third Reich
armored corps and infantry corps, the air force, the navy? Of course not. The pieces, more than five hundred of them, would float together for the first few minutes, then inevitably they would drift apart, until they were lost in the depths of the sea; the map and force pool, since they were bigger, would last longer and there was even the chance that the waves would wash them onto the rocks where they could rot in peace. With the water up to my neck, I thought that after all they were just pieces of cardboard. I can’t say that I was distressed. Calmly, and with no hope of saving myself, I waited for the instant when the water would cover me. Then, emerging from under the streetlights, came El Quemado’s pedal boats. Falling into a wedgeshaped formation (one pedal boat at the head, six two-by-two behind, and three bringing up the rear), they glided noiselessly along, synchronized and gallant in their way, as if the flood were the per-fect moment for a military parade. They took turn after turn around what had once been the beach, with my dumbstruck gaze fixed on them; if anyone was pedaling and steering, it must have been ghosts, because I couldn’t see a soul. Finally they moved out to sea, though not far, and they changed formation. Now they were lined up in Indian file and somehow, mysteriously, they didn’t advance or retreat, didn’t even move in that madman’s sea illuminated by a lightning storm in the distance. From my position all I could see was the nose of the first one, so perfect was their new
alignment. Suspecting nothing, I watched the blades cleave the water and the boats begin to move again. They were coming straight for me! Not very fast, but as relentlessly and ponderously as the old dreadnoughts of Jutland. Just before the floater of the first one, surely followed by the remaining nine, was about to smash into my head, I woke up.
Conrad was right, not in insisting that I should come back but in painting my situation as the result of some nervous disorder. But that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I’ve always had nightmares; I was the only one to blame—and possibly that idiot Charly for drowning. Conrad, however, saw instability in the fact that for the first time I was losing at
Third Reich
. I’m losing, true, but I haven’t resorted to playing dirty. To illustrate this, I laughed out loud a few times. (Germany, according to Conrad, lost because it played fair; the proof is that it didn’t use poison gas, not even against the Russians, ha-ha-ha.)
Before I left, the rescue worker asked me where Charly was buried. I told him I had no idea. We could go visit his grave some afternoon, he suggested. I can find out at Navy Headquarters. The idea that Charly might be buried in town lodged in my head like a time bomb. Don’t do it, I said. The rescue worker, I realized then, was drunk and overexcited. We
must
—he stressed the word—pay our friend our last respects. He wasn’t your friend, I muttered. It doesn’t matter, he could have been, we artists are brothers no matter where we are, dead or alive, beyond the limits of age or time. The likeliest thing is that they shipped him to Germany, I said. The rescue worker’s face flushed and then he snorted so violently with laughter that he almost fell over backward. That’s a rotten lie! You ship potatoes, not dead bodies, and definitely not during the
summer
. Our friend is here, he said, pointing at the floor in a way that admitted no response. I had to take him by the shoulders and order him to bed. He insisted on walking me out, with the excuse that the main door might be locked. And tomorrow I’ll find out where they’ve buried our brother. He wasn’t our brother, I repeated wearily, though I realized
that at that precise instant, due to who knows what outrageous distortion, his world was made up almost exclusively of us three, the only individuals on a vast and uncharted sea. In this new light the rescue worker took on the guise of a hero or a madman. Standing in the doorway with him, I looked him in the face, and his glassy stare expressed gratitude for my look without entirely understanding it. We were like two trees, until the rescue worker began to take swipes at me. Like Charly. Then I decided to push him, to see what would happen, and as might have been expected, he fell and didn’t get up again, his legs drawn up and his face half covered by an arm, a white arm, untouched by the sun, like mine. Then I went coolly down the stairs and returned to the hotel with time enough to shower and have dinner.
Spring 1943. El Quemado makes his entrance a little later than usual. In fact, as the days go by, his arrival time keeps getting pushed back. If we go on like this, the final turn will start at six in the morning. Is there any significance to this? In the West I lose my last hex in England. El Quemado continues to have luck with the dice. In the East the front runs through Tallin–Vitebsk–Smolensk– Bryansk–Kharkov–Rostov–Maikop. In the Mediterranean I plot an American attack on Oran but I can’t take the offensive; in Egypt no change: the front holds in LL26 and MM26, the hexes along the Qattara Depression.
SEPTEMBER 18
Like a ray of lightning, Frau Else appears at the end of the hallway. I’ve just gotten up and I’m on my way to breakfast, but I’m frozen in place by the surprise.
“I’ve been looking for you,” she says, coming toward me.
“Where the hell have you been?”
“I was in Barcelona, with my family. My husband is sick, as you know, but you aren’t well either and you’re going to listen to what I have to say.”
I let her into my room. It smells bad, like tobacco and stale air. When I open the curtains the sun makes me blink in pain. Frau Else stares at El Quemado’s photocopies pinned to the wall; I imagine she’ll scold me for breaking the hotel rules.
“This is obscene,” she says, and I don’t know whether she’s talking about the content of the pages or my decision to display them.
“They’re El Quemado’s edicts.”
Frau Else turns. She’s even more beautiful than she was a week ago, if possible.
“Was he the one who put them up here?”
“No, it was me. El Quemado gave them to me and . . . I decided it was better not to hide them. For him the copies are like a backdrop to our game.”
“What kind of horrible game are you talking about? The game of atonement? It’s all so tasteless.”
Frau Else’s cheekbones may have gotten slightly sharper during her absence.
“You’re right, it’s tasteless, though the truth is it’s my fault, I was the first to bring out photocopies; of course, mine were articles on the game. Anyway, coming from El Quemado it’s to be expected, we all have to do things our own way.”
“Statement of the Meeting of the Council of Ministers, November 12, 1938,” she read in her sweet and melodious voice. “Doesn’t it make your stomach turn, Udo?”
“Sometimes,” I said equivocally. Frau Else seemed increasingly upset. “History in general is a bloody thing, you have to admit.”
“I wasn’t talking about history but about your comings and goings. I don’t care about history. What I do care about is the hotel, and you are a disruptive element here.” With great care she began to take down the photocopies.
I suspected that it wasn’t just the watchman who had come to her telling tales. Clarita too?
“I’m taking them,” she said with her back to me, gathering up the copies. “I don’t want you to suffer.”
I asked whether that was all she had to say to me. Frau Else was slow to answer. She shook her head, came over to me, and planted a kiss on my forehead.
“You remind me of my mother,” I said.
With her eyes open, Frau Else kissed me hard on the mouth. How about now? Without knowing very well what I was doing I took her in my arms and deposited her on the bed. Frau Else started to laugh. You’ve had nightmares, she said, thinking probably of the terrible mess the room was in. Her laughter, though it may have verged on the hysterical, was like a girl’s. With one hand she stroked my hair, murmuring unintelligible words, and when I lay down beside her I felt on my cheek the contrast between the cold linen of her blouse and her warm skin, soft to the touch. For an instant I thought she was going to surrender at last, but when I slid my hand under her skirt and tried to pull down her underpants, it was all over.
“It’s early,” she said, sitting up on the bed as if propelled by a spring of unpredictable force.
“Yes,” I admitted. “I just got up, but what does it matter?”
Frau Else got all the way up and changed the subject as her perfect—and quick!—hands straightened her clothes, moving like entities completely separate from the rest of her body. Cleverly she managed to turn my words against me. I’d just gotten up? Did I have any idea what time it was? Did I think it was decent get up so late? Didn’t I realize how confusing it was for the cleaning staff? As she delivered this speech, she kicked every so often at the clothes scattered on the floor and put the photocopies in her pocket.
Basically, it became clear that we weren’t about to make love, and my only consolation was the discovery that she had yet to find out about the incident with Clarita.
As we said good-bye, in the elevator, we agreed to meet that evening in the church square.
With Frau Else at Playamar, a restaurant about three miles inland, nine p.m.
“My husband has cancer.”
“Is it serious?” I ask, aware that this is a ridiculous question.
“Terminal.” Frau Else looks at me as if we’re separated by bulletproof glass.
“How much time does he have left?”
“Not much. He might not live through the summer.”
“The summer’s almost over . . . Though it looks as if the good weather will last until October,” I stammer.
Under the table, Frau Else’s hand squeezes my hand. Her gaze, however, is lost in the distance. Only now does the news begin to take shape in my head: her husband is dying; this is the explanation, or the catalyst, for many of the things that have been happening in the hotel and outside of it. Frau Else’s strange mix of seductiveness and rejection. El Quemado’s mysterious adviser. The intrusions into my room and the vigilant presence that I sense in the hotel. Considered from this perspective, was the dream about Florian Linden a warning from my subconscious that I should watch out for Frau Else’s husband? The truth is that it would be disappointing if it all boiled down to a question of jealousy.
“What’s going on between your husband and El Quemado?” I ask after a lapse occupied only by our fingers secretly interlacing. The Playamar is a busy place and in a short time Frau Else has greeted several people.
“Nothing.”
Then I try to tell her that she’s wrong, that between the two of them they’re planning to crush me, that her husband stole the rules from my room so that El Quemado could hone his game, that the strategy the Allies are following can’t be the fruit of a single mind, that her husband has spent hours in my room studying the game. I can’t. Instead I promise her that I won’t leave until her situation (that is, the disappearance of her husband) is cleared up, that I’ll stand by her, that she can count on me for anything she needs, that I understand if she doesn’t want to make love, that I’ll help her to be strong.
Frau Else’s way of thanking me for my words is to squeeze my hand in a crushing grip.
“What’s the matter?” I ask, pulling away as surreptitiously as possible.
“You should go back to Germany. You need to take care of yourself, not me.”
Upon declaring this, her eyes fill with tears.
“You are Germany,” I say.
Frau Else lets out a laugh—strong, ringing, irresistible—that draws the gaze of everyone in the restaurant. I also choose to laugh heartily: I’m a hopeless romantic. A hopeless sentimentalist, she corrects me. Fine, then.
On our way back I stop the car at a kind of inn. Down a gravel path there’s a pine grove with stone tables, benches, and garbage cans scattered about at random. When we roll down the window we hear distant music that Frau Else identifies as coming from a club in town. How can that be when the town is so far away? We get out of the car and Frau Else leads me by the hand to a cement balustrade. The inn is at the top of a hill, and from up here we can see the lights of the hotels and the neon signs in the shopping district. I try to kiss her but Frau Else refuses me her lips. Paradox-ically,
back in the car, it’s she who takes the lead. For an hour we kiss and listen to music on the radio. The cool breeze that comes in through the half-open windows smells like flowers and fragrant herbs, and the spot is ideal for making love, but I thought it best not to steer things in that direction.