The Last Resort (26 page)

“Allah akbar, Allah akbar . . .”

Bea is now on her third Gitanes. Suddenly it occurs to her that maybe Bonilla is playing a joke on her or that he hasn’t told her the full story on Harpic. Because, let’s see, what exactly does this job entail? She will have to provide lodging for the authoress from Borrioboola-Gha, escort her to a number of parties, and act as her interpreter during her afternoon of glory at the Hotel Villa Magna, where she will address the women of Spain and dedicate
The Blue Midriff
to them? And what about the evenings? And the rest of the time she has to spend with this Harpic? “Guardian angel” is how Bonilla put it. “Go wherever she goes” was mentioned as well. Suddenly the Harpic assignment has completely lost its appeal.

“Allah akbar . . .”

Ring, ring, ring . . .

Bea has no intention of answering the phone. This is the time of day she usually goes down to the solarium to take her mud bath, but today she just doesn’t feel like it. She just doesn’t feel like going into that hermetically sealed chamber where nobody talks, where the mud is like a warm, soft muzzle on all conversation—a very pleasant muzzle, no doubt, but a muzzle all the same. If she is to go to the mud baths, total silence and introspection are what the next few hours will hold for her.

The telephone rings again. Bonilla can go to hell for all she cares—she’s not picking up that phone. She gets up and smooths out the flowered bedspread, telling herself that she has most definitely decided. This afternoon she will skip out on the mud baths and see where the afternoon takes her. Perhaps she will go for a walk, sit on the terrace, get drunk, talk to the stucco columns on the balcony—damnit, anything but lie around with the other guests, as silent and somber as Egyptian mummies, covered in mud or bandages like a bunch of escapees in the Tintin adventure
The Cigars of the Pharaoh.

Just as she opens the door to the Muguet, before she steps out into the hall, the phone rings once again and Bea allows herself one last moment to reflect, not very favorably, upon her friend in Madrid.

“Goddamn con artist,” she whispers, and for some reason this makes her think of Antonio Sánchez and his article about love and infidelity, and then the infidelity part suddenly makes her think of Bernardo. Her hand continues to rest on the doorknob, but she is not sure anymore if she wants to leave the room. And then Bea thinks of Santiago Arce, who is so attractive, so off-limits, so immune to her charms.

Men,
she thinks.
It’s always the same old story.

Given her current mood, what she needs right now is some nice person she can chat with, but who? Where? And, most importantly and most specifically, about what?

Bea turns the doorknob. As she closes the door behind her, it slams with unnecessary force, a movement that sounds like a complaint, as if to say, “Shit. Of all things . . .”

Golf

Golf . . . golf. The great mystery, in which the lowest scorer wins; which, like haggis, comes from Scotland; like cancer, eats into the soul; like death, levels.

—P. G. Wodehouse,
The Heart of a Goof

A Conversation While Watching Golf. Or, the Story According to Rafael Molinet: how he learned of all the events that transpired in the previous chapters and how he plans to put such information to use

“So, what do you think? I mean, can you just picture Antonio Sánchez locked up in his room, writing and rewriting some shocking exposé about the vices of modern society? Balls, it takes balls. When my friend Ana told me what he was up to, I practically died laughing: the son of a bitch! And everything else, what do you make of it? J. P. Bonilla and his paddle-tennis game. Hilarious, huh? But wait, wait . . . don’t go away. I’m out of cigarettes. Let me run up to my room. I’ll be right back down—there’s plenty more to tell, Mr. Moulinex.”

I despise it when people call me Mr. Molinete, Mr. Molina, or, as on this particular occasion, Mr. Moulinex. But this was not the moment to waste time complaining about people’s manners, for we had been talking for a good two hours, and I was fascinated by all the stories the blond Bea regaled me with. First she told me all about her friends and what they were doing at the hotel, and then she launched into a detailed explanation of what Ana Fernández de Bugambilla had told her, something about the journalistic endeavors of this Mr. Sánchez.

“Sánchez,” she said to me, “is one of those people who always knows everyone’s secrets. And if he doesn’t know them, he just makes them up.” I wish I could have added something—anything—to our little chat to make it seem more of a dialogue, but the blonde was on a roll and did not seem interested in banter. After that, she went on to tell me about another, much more recent telephone conversation with someone by the name of Bonilla, just a few minutes before we met, and everything—I mean everything—she told me before running upstairs for more cigarettes was absolutely captivating, not to mention informative and useful. With a bit of patience and an ear for confessions, a person can really get quite a comprehensive picture of the things that go on behind closed doors.

Bea and I ran into each other on the north balcony facing the golf course. I must say, it is the very best spot in the hotel for exchanging confidences. Nobody ever goes up there, because of the strong winds on that side of the building. And of course we all know how these things happen: When you find yourself in the presence of someone who wants to talk, you should never pass up the opportunity to listen. I would have held out against anything from a strong breeze to a desert
simoom
just to listen to all the information I have so joyously described to you over the past few chapters. Have you ever noticed how simple it is to get people to divulge their deepest, darkest secrets when you are an innocent bystander? Oh yes, perhaps I did do my part to encourage the confessions on this occasion, but Bea probably would have spilled the beans on her own. And, anyway, I happen to be a bit of a magnet for this type of situation. After all, I am a loner, a detached listener, so absolutely foreign to many people, and those are just the qualities that make me the ideal candidate for listening to people’s life stories. But no other confession has ever been quite as interesting as this one. Or as useful.

There I was one October afternoon on the north balcony at L’Hirondelle d’Or at the exact same moment as Bea. All I had to do was prick up my ears. I learned so many things from Bea that day—things that would change the outcome of this story, in fact.

I took advantage of Bea’s brief cigarette run to gaze out at the golf course, but she didn’t take long. In less than five minutes she reappeared, pack of cigarettes in hand—barely enough time for me to spot Sánchez and his friend Bernardo down below, very doggedly chasing a little white ball around the green. Before sitting down at my side, Bea squinted out at them and waved—how many times had we all done that in the course of a day? And then, as if our conversation hadn’t been interrupted at all, she plunged right back into her tale. Now, the one problem with these spontaneous confidences is that they do tend to get terribly off-track. They start out swell, terrific, full of all sorts of interesting details, but after a while the storyteller starts to sound like a mechanical toy, yapping away, and all that brio and intrigue become monotonous. And so, after divulging copious amounts of information about her friends, Bea lit a cigarette (number seven, I think,
bon Dieu
) and began to digress, meandering to other topics—personal travails, details about her life that didn’t interest me in the least. At that point I closed up shop, so to speak—I stopped paying such close attention to her and let my mind wander. Every so often, naturally, I would lift my eyes off the green hills of the golf course and look at her, nodding as if I were fascinated by all that she had to say, but to tell the truth, I haven’t the faintest recollection of all that she told me about her life in Madrid, because minutes later something happened—something important, which would dramatically change my train of thought.

The golf course at L’Hirondelle d’Or is very small. As they play, the golfers move closer to and farther away from the main building depending on the whims of the greens. Stage one of my conversation with Bea had gone on so long, what with everything she had to say about Sánchez alone in his room with his computer and so on, that Bernardo and Antonio S. must have walked past us at least three times, like horses running around and around a racetrack. First they headed away from the hotel to tee off. Then they came back toward us, en route to hole five and then, a bit later on, they passed in front of us again on their way to hole seven. As such my eyes began to follow them, and I waited anxiously for the right moment to bid farewell to the blond Bea and to get the hell out of there in the most amiable manner possible. In the meantime, however, I had no choice but to sit there like a fool watching the golfers flit about.

Each time they approached the balcony, the four of us would all call out a greeting, like a bunch of wind-up toys: “Hello,” “Hell-oo again,” we said, over and over again. It was all rather ridiculous, but those mechanical, repetitive social rituals were what allowed us all to go on doing what we were doing: Bea talked and talked; I pretended to listen to her; and the two men tallied up their points out on the green, I suppose.

“Are you listening to me, Mr. Moulinex?”

“Yes, dear. I’m following you, absolutely. Go on, please.”

Bea went on and on, all right—something about her eldest son, I believe, but I just couldn’t bring myself to pay attention. None of what she said mattered to me, because an idea was now floating around in my head—although it wasn’t quite a full-fledged idea, not yet. More than anything it was a feeling that
something,
some nugget of information, had begun to take shape in my mind. But since I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, the uncertainty fluttered about in my stomach like a bad case of indigestion.

As Bea went on about her family or whoever, I whiled away the time observing the golfers as they approached us now for greeting number four. On this occasion, however, they came to a halt at a shady corner just beneath our balcony, where a water fountain bubbled away—such a refreshing, pleasant sound at that particular hour of the afternoon. It was all so
Thousand and One Nights,
if you can imagine it.

Boredom can be such a strange state of mind—and often I think it is the state of mind that has the virtue of unlocking our most unexpected feelings. Yes, I truly believe there is a great deal of truth to the things one discovers when one is bored to distraction.

Sánchez was now directly beneath our balcony, just a few yards away from where Bea and I were sitting, standing with his back to us. All of a sudden I found myself staring at his bald spot in that intense, distracted manner of someone feigning interest in a dull conversation. Intense, distracted, and meticulous, too—not unlike the way we would stare at the person sitting in front of us at church when we were children.

His was a pink, precise little crown: Sánchez’s bald spot, I mean. It was a scant few yards beneath my foot, but, no, I didn’t feel like stepping on it—not for the moment, at least. I was so close and yet so very far away. I was upstairs, he was downstairs, and the hair that cradled his bald spot shone more than it should have and the bubbling fountain was like music and the afternoon was clear and perfect. Everything was perfect . . . everything except for that bald spot, which loomed even larger when its master bent down to take a sip of water.

Is it possible that Sánchez anoints his crown with some or other oil-based product?
I wondered.
Vaseline, perhaps? Some type of ointment to prevent sunburn?
Fortunately, I have managed to hold on to my hair, but even if I were bald as a billiard ball, I would never stoop to smearing my skin with such a disgustingly greasy substance—
que c’est dégueulasse!

“. . . And ever since that fateful day, my older son has failed all his university entrance exams. But I can’t blame myself for that as well, can I, Mr. Moulinex?”

Molinet, my dear. Mo-li-net!
That is what I wanted to shout at that woman; she was so very dense when it came to names. But I refrained yet again. Thanks to her, I now knew so many of the deep, dark secrets and undercurrents that united her friends in the most mysterious ways. But then, inevitably, I had to ask myself: Why the hell had I been spying on them for the past six or seven days? Of what use was it to me?

“You are absolutely right, my dear. One cannot blame oneself for what other people think.”

“
Think,
Mr. Moulinex? What do you mean, what other people
think
? Have you been listening to me at all?”

“Absolutely. Every last word, dear.”

“Well, let me continue,” she said. And, in effect, she continued.

At that moment, not more than two or three yards beneath my foot, I saw how Sánchez’s bald head began to wrinkle into a series of pink folds, just like that first night in the dining room. Beads of perspiration, thousands of them, quivered atop that brilliant surface. I almost took off my eyeglasses—I am rather blind without them, and removing them would have alleviated my horror somewhat, but the grotesque can often be every bit as compelling as the beautiful, so I kept staring. To make matters worse, Sánchez then ran his hand over his head in an attempt to reposition a damp lock of hair that had been displaced as he bent down for a drink of water. His buttocks faced the sky as he bent over the fountain, hunched his back, and pursed his lips as if to plant a kiss on the cascading water. There was something in that
glub, glub, glub
. . . a kind of screech that escaped his lips as he slurped the water. I don’t know quite how to describe the sound. It was like the noise made by a sink drain but infinitely sharper—more like the sound of chalk on a blackboard, a kind of
eeewwweeeewwwyyy,
the kind of screech that runs through the spine and threatens to explode from under one’s fingernails. Yes, that is what it was: first, the
glub glub
and then, oh Lord:
eeewwweeeewwwyyy . . . glub.
Followed by a shudder. And then once again that feeling came over me again, the feeling that something dreadful was gnawing at me, though I couldn’t quite place it:
eeewwweeeewwwyyy . . . glubglubglub.