A Necessary Action (16 page)

‘I told you you’d have to experience this year for us both,’ he said. ‘I want you to note down your impressions day by day in this book, as if you were writing letters to me. Then when we meet again, we can go through what you’ve written. Don’t forget you must express yourself, in every way.’

Half an hour later he left the puerto. The first bit he did in Santiago’s fish-van.

He had just introduced Willi Mohr to Dan Pedersen and his wife. All three of them were standing outside Jacinto’s bar, watching the van.

Hugo Spohler did not hear from Willi Mohr during the whole of the following year and neither did he think about him very often. Hugo got himself a better job shortly after Christmas and the following summer he did not have an opportunity to travel south.

When Willi Mohr woke in the morning of the sixteenth of December, he was alone in the house in Barrio Son Jofre. Although he had slept for only four hours, he was wide awake the moment he opened his eyes. The cat had evidently felt cold, as it had crept in under the blanket and lay curled up with its head in his armpit. It was quite quiet in the house, and neither were there any special sounds from outside, only the wind rushing over the mountain ridge far above. The wind had begun to get up after the siesta the day before and no boats had left the puerto, not even the old trawlers.

He pushed the cat away and looked at his watch lying in its usual place on the floor to the left of his mattress, together with his cigarettes and a box of matches. It was half-past seven.

Willi Mohr got up, took off his pyjama jacket and went out into the kitchen. He cleaned his teeth and washed his face and torso with cold water. Then he went back into the room and dressed. He shooed the cat away from the warm bedclothes where it had again curled up, opened the door and shook out the blankets and sheets thoroughly. Meanwhile the cat sat on the stone floor blinking sleepily, waiting for his bed-making to be completed so that it could go back to bed again.

Willi Mohr lit his first cigarette of the day and went upstairs. The sky was covered with an even grey blanket of clouds and although it was not raining the air was heavy and humid. Despite the mist and the low clouds, he could see that the wind was howling through the pines up on the mountain.

He fetched the gas can and the funnel from the kitchen and poured the remains of the gas into the camioneta’s tank. When he put the things back, he took his straw hat down from the nail in the doorpost and was just about to leave when he stopped in the doorway, went back into the room and got the notebook out of his rucksack. Then he sat down on the bottom stair and leafed through it.

The last note was more than three months old and very brief.

4th September, 22.30. Today I fetched wood, bathed and played ping-pong with S. and D. I think I’m beginning to like …

He had never completed the sentence.

On the next pages were three or four small sketches of houses and streets and one of a donkey working a pump. There were also some calculations and some figures, but he had forgotten what they were about.

He leafed on until he came to an empty page, undid the top of his fountain pen, looked at his watch and wrote:

16th December, 8 a.m. Yesterday I waited all afternoon and evening in the puerto but they did not come back. It was past two in the morning when I got home.

He put the notebook in his hip pocket and went out to start up the camioneta. It took a while to get it going. The dog had been locked out again and he had not thought of taking her with him, but when she ran so far after the truck, he took pity on her and stopped. As he lifted the animal up on to the seat he could feel her trembling with the strain, her heart thumping violently.

In the puerto all was silent and calm, as if the inhabitants had not yet woken. The quay shone from the rain and the water was pale and smooth, reflecting the sky in shades of grey. There were a lot of boats lying in harbour, but he at once saw that the calamary boat was still not there.

Willi Mohr parked the camioneta on the quay and lifted down the dog. He listened absently to the sea roaring beyond the mountains and walked slowly across the broad open concrete surface. He had already waited for twelve hours the day before, from two in the afternoon until two in the morning. He had not sat in the camioneta all the time, but had moved from café to café, and no one had spoken to him or even noticed his presence.

He bought a roll and some red jam in the tienda, sat down outside the nearest bar and ordered café con leche. Although the basket chair was under the awning, its arms were sticky and slightly furry with the damp.

He gave the bitch half the roll and forced himself to eat the rest, although he did not feel at all hungry.

An hour went by. Willi Mohr remained sitting in the basket
chair, staring out across the bay. His eyes were blue and expressionless. There was no sign of life in the harbour.

Pedro Alemany came down from one of the steep side-streets and walked out on to the quay. He had a dead yellowish cigarette in the corner of his mouth and was wearing espadrilles, a black shirt, black trousers and a beret. He stood for a long while with his hands in his pockets, looking out towards the approaches, small and fat, his feet apart. Then he looked round, caught sight of Willi Mohr outside the café and slowly walked across the concrete space.

He leisuredly raised a thick, short forefinger to his temple and said something which the other man did not understand. Willi Mohr had no sense of language and knew only a few of the most ordinary words.

When the fisherman saw that he had not succeeded in making himself understood, he first pointed at Willi, then out towards the sea and then made a questioning gesture.

Willi Mohr shook his head and Pedro Alemany stood silent for a moment.

Then he threw out his arms and said with exaggerated diction: ‘Probablemente Villanueva.’

Villanueva was a little fishing settlement several miles farther south, considerably nearer for those coming from the islands. Fishermen who were caught in bad weather often sought shelter there.

‘Telephone,’ said Willi Mohr.

‘Telefono cascado,’ said Pedro Alemany.

He realized that the last word had not sunk in and made a movement with his hands as if he were tearing something apart.

The fisherman pointed out to sea and put up a finger as if he were listening.

Willi thought at first he really was listening to something special, but then realized that the man just wanted to emphasize how bad the weather was out there.

‘Malo, malo,’ said Pedro Alemany, shaking his head.

The word needed no further explanation.

The fisherman thrust his hand into his trouser pocket and pulled out a turnip watch. He opened the front and held out the watch, putting his thumbnail on the large Roman two. With his
other hand he pointed first at the boats by the quay and then towards the sea, while making violent wave movements with his arm.

‘A las dos,’ he said.

Willi Mohr nodded. At two o’clock they were evidently thinking of going out to search, if nothing happened between now and then.

The father of the Alemany brothers turned round and walked away.

Willi Mohr watched him until he disappeared into one of the alleyways. Then he crossed his legs and lit another cigarette.

A dirty little girl was standing a short distance from the table, staring at the roll and jam the dog had not eaten.

A civil guard cycled diagonally across the quay. He was wearing a dark green rubber raincape over his uniform and his carbine was fastened with straps along the frame and carrier. As he cycled past, the barrel of the carbine was for a moment pointing straight at the man at the table.

Willi Mohr went on sitting in the damp basket chair for more than five hours, watching the meagre life in the puerto. He drank two cups of coffee and left the table once, to go into the estanco and buy another packet of cigarettes. The dog lay at his feet and occasionally he bent down and patted her. She then rolled over on her side and begged for more affection, which at once made him withdraw his hand.

He did not feel nervous or anxious, but he was incapable of doing anything else but just this, sitting and waiting. At half-past eleven, the green mail bus rolled down on to the quay towards the small group of black-clad old women waiting there. They gathered up their bundles and baskets, climbed on and remained sitting in the bus until the driver came back and started up again, three-quarters-of-an-hour later. Before the bus left, the driver repeatedly blew the horn, which moaned a shrill lament. A number of ragged small girls sauntered by with great bundles of brushwood on their backs. Then it was silent and empty again on the quay.

About half an hour later the bus returned laden, as far as could be seen, with the same old women and the same bundles.

Shortly before three o’clock, Pedro Alemany came down to
the quay together with three civil guards, all wearing dark green oilskins. The guards went across to the grey police barque, jumped down into it and indolently began to undo the cover over the well of the boat. After a while the cabo came cycling up.

The puerto had acquired another police-chief since Dan Pedersen and Siglinde and Willi Mohr had been expelled four months before. The new one was small and squat and older than his predecessor. He stood with one foot on a bollard, talking to Pedro Alemany. Now and again, he interrupted the conversation and mumbled some instructions to the men in the boat.

Willi Mohr rose and walked over to the group on the quay. He had been sitting still for so long that his back was aching and his joints stiff. At first the others took no notice of him, but then the father of the Alemany brothers looked in his direction and shook his head, saying: ‘Villanueva … no.’

He turned back to the cabo at once, and the conversation continued, while the men in the barque slowly got ready to depart.

When the civil guards tried to start the engine they found that they had run out of gas. One of them hunted out a tin can and jumped up on to the quay. He walked slowly away towards the houses and it was twenty minutes before he came back.

What a sea-rescue operation, thought Willi Mohr scornfully.

The guards filled the tank with gas and manipulated the engine for a while. Then all three climbed out of the boat and walked up to the bar, where they drank a small cup of coffee each. Pedro Alemany was still talking to the cabo. Willi Mohr noticed that the fisherman’s tone of voice had grown more and more irritable and that the cabo was frowning and making lively gestures, sometimes towards the boat, sometimes towards his subordinates and sometimes out to sea.

The three civil guards came back, received yet another stream of instructions from their superior and climbed on board. Then they started the engine and cast off.

The barque was broad and steady and made of riveted metal sheets. It had rope fenders along its side and in the bows there was a machine-gun covered with a tarpaulin. The boat steered in a wide curve across the harbour basin and in the strange light looked as if it were swirling through the mist. The men on the quay watched it until it disappeared behind the breakwater.

Willi Mohr stood a short distance from the others, quite still, his hands in his pockets.

The cabo seemed to notice him for the first time. He stared for a moment and then flung a question at Pedro Alemany.

When the fisherman answered, he spoke so clearly that Willi Mohr understood what he said.

‘A friend of the Scandinavians.’

‘Aha,’ said the cabo. ‘Poor man, his friends …’

‘They’re my sons,’ said Pedro Alemany.

Willi Mohr went back to the bar and sat down in the same basket chair as before.

He drank yet another cup of coffee and looked indifferently at the proprietor’s daughter who was serving him. She was perhaps sixteen years old and quite fresh, with small round breasts, clear skin and lively eyes. She still had a couple of years before child-bearing would begin, and then would come the fat, the dirt and the frustration.

A nun walked by and vanished behind the jalousies. When Willi Mohr went in a few minutes later to fetch some more sugar, she was standing by the bar testing the point of a hypodermic syringe on the tip of her forefinger. A small child, its backside bare, was sitting on the counter, staring at the syringe with large, dark eyes. The nun went and stood under the oil lamp and pushed back her coif to be able to see better, and he saw that she was young and had straight features. Her neck was dirty and she had a large pimple on her forehead, just above the nose. She glanced at him swiftly and timidly.

When Willi Mohr sat down in the chair again outside, he heard the child cry out shrilly from inside the bar.

Half an hour later a boat-engine could be heard chugging in the mist and the barque appeared from behind the lighthouse. Even from a long way away he could see the silhouette of the three civil guards, one sitting bent low over something, and to his surprise, Willi Mohr felt a contraction in his diaphragm as he got up and walked down towards the water. The boat was approaching very fast.

The gendarmes were alone in it. Their oilskins shone from the wet and one of the men had lifted the bilge-boards and was bailing out the boat with a scoop. The sound of the boat’s engine
died away and the bows gently touched the quay. The civil guard flung out his arms in gesture of hopelessness and pointed out to sea. They had taken off their sou’westers and the face of the one sitting in the stern was pale and sweaty. They all talked at once and Pedro Alemany listened. Then he spat out the chewed yellowish cigarette-end, turned round and quickly walked away. The civil guards shrugged their shoulders and climbed up on to the quay. One of them looked at Willi Mohr and shook his head.

‘Terrible,’ he said, making violent wave signs with his arms.

Willi Mohr went back to the bar.

He sat in the basket chair and watched as Pedro Alemany and his men got the trawler ready to leave. They hauled down the nets and took a number of boxes ashore. The engine was warmed up and started. The cabo was there, as was another official in a blue uniform and a white cap, the harbour-master. Two other civil guards went on board.