This Is Not for You (4 page)

“We still can. We haven’t decided anything.”

“But you want to go with them, don’t you?”

“It sounded like a good place, that’s all.”

“I don’t think that one guy was so keen on having us along. And he’s the one who seemed nice.”

“What is it about you that makes good looks and decent manners so repellent to you?”

“They scare me,” you said bleakly.

But arriving in Barcelona and walking down to the square where Columbus looks so intently out over the wrong sea revived you. We sat with the boys at a sidewalk cafe, drinking brandy and eating popcorn, unable to talk sensibly against the songs, threats, dances and fights of two dozen beggar children for whom we were the most likely carrion in the neighborhood. You had not seen beggars before and in your distress encouraged them with small change against Andrew’s advice. Their number doubled; their anger increased. Two waiters beat them off a dozen yards. Cowed but still insolent, they jeered at us across the forbidden space.

“I can’t stand this any longer,” Peter said suddenly. “Let’s get aboard ship.”

“Before dinner?” Andrew asked.

“We can eat on board.”

Without ever actually having decided to go with them, we went. Standing on deck, looking back at the square and the children, I heard Peter say to you, “Why do they have to be ugly with our greed? Why can’t we suffer for our own sins?”

“I don’t know,” you said. “I’ve never even thought about it.”

“Don’t then,” Peter said, stepping away from the railing. “Let’s look at the sea, instead.”

As you crossed to the other side of the deck, I felt Andrew beside me relax.

“I’m glad you decided to come along,” he said.

He was still watching the children when I turned to answer him. There was hardness in his face, but it seemed to me in conflict with a stronger, less certain gentleness. Aware that I was looking at him, he smiled.

“It’s hard to have no decent answer,” I said.

“It certainly is, and that could be the slogan of my life.”

A rough sea and the smell of rancid oil discouraged our appetites. Rain made the deck uncomfortable. We were very tired from sitting up all the night before and so decided to go to bed. I wonder now why we all so unquestioningly always traveled third class. You and I had plenty of money to travel comfortably. Andrew, as it turned out, was the son of an oil-rich Albertan who provided all his children with handsome allowances. Only Peter, living on the G. I. Bill in Paris and scrounging for painting materials, had any reason for such economy. Andrew would have explained it in one of his terrible lapses into sociological jargon as “dedication to peer group values,” I suppose. We were students and therefore traveled like students. That night you and I found ourselves in adjacent upper berths in a cabin for a dozen women. I was too tired to object to the sour smelling straw mattress, the heat or the noise. I lay down in my clothes and was asleep at once, but several times in the night I woke to the retching of an unhappy traveler. And once I saw that several men had invaded the cabin and were dressing themselves in the underwear of women who had bothered to get undressed. I slept again without reaction. I had even forgotten that you slept just across the gulf of aisle. It was not until morning that I realized you had been sick in the night.

We found our way up into the air and stood gray-faced in the gray morning, staring out at the line of shore which was Mallorca.

“Doesn’t look very promising,” Andrew said, appearing beside us. “I’ve just heard that we’ve been through the worst storm in ten years. It’s supposed to start clearing at noon.”

Peter had obviously had no better a night than you. The pallor he always had was luminous that morning, and he shook a little under his thin jacket though it was not really cold. But he seemed easier with Andrew as well as with us. He was the only one who had been to Mallorca before, and his confident anticipation reassured us.

The streets of Palma were shallow streams of mud, and Peter’s friend who was to get him black-market money and cigarettes had left the island, and the bus we got on to take us to the north coast of the island bogged down twice in water holes. We all had to get out, help unload the heavier luggage, trunks, crates of live chickens, a bass fiddle, wade out of the mud to higher ground, back again to push, reload, and climb back to sit, wet and filthy on hard benches. It took over five hours to cover the few miles up over the mountain and north to the inland town of San Telmo which was as far as we could go by public transportation. We had been told we could get a taxi to take us from there back over the coastal hills to the village which was our destination. But there was no taxi. We walked the last four miles, grateful to have nothing but our bicycle packs to carry. The sky had cleared, and already, under the intense sun, the road surface had dried to dust. We passed tiny, slow-moving burros loaded with wood, then rested on large rocks and watched them pass us. Peter found a harmonica in his pocket, which he was soon teaching you to play.

We arrived at the hotel about seven o’clock in the evening to find that it was, truly, on the sea. Waves broke against its rock foundations, and the terrace hung out over the sea like a deck. We were greeted with enthusiasm by the owner and his wife. We were the only guests in the hotel and therefore chose our rooms among the twelve available. Somehow our simple luggage was scrambled, mine with Andrew’s, yours with Peter’s. No one joked about it. Peter returned mine and claimed his own.

When we discovered that there was no water for bathing, we changed into our suits immediately and went to the beach. It was a clear, warm evening, but the sea was still rough with the storm we had traveled through. We played hard in the surf, returned to the beach more scratched and bruised than we intended. You or Peter began to build a sand castle which we were to rebuild almost every day with greater elaborateness. At last you could be a child. We were all as intent and as isolated from each other as children. And we did not return to the hotel until we were called from play like children. It was eleven o’clock at night when we sat down to an eight-course dinner, the first real meal we’d had in two days. Immediately afterwards we went to our rooms.

You and I tried to write letters, but our lamp sputtered against a sea wind that blew even through closed shutters; so we turned it out, opened the window to the sound of the sea and lay down. Almost at once I also heard the sound of someone crying.

“E.?” I said quietly.

“I think it’s Peter,” you answered.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” you said.

We listened again, but the crying had stopped or had been taken in to the sound of the sea.

“I feel guilty to feel so happy,” you said. “Are you glad we came?”

“I think so,” I said. “Yes.”

“Thank you for being patient with me…”

“E.,” I said, “don’t…”

“I know I just mean… thanks.”

By the time we arrived on the terrace the next morning, Andrew and Peter had finished a breakfast of tea and dry toast.

“Kate, what is ‘flush’ in Spanish?” Andrew asked.

I shook my head.

“Or in French?”

“ ‘
La toilette ne march pas
’ will do,” Peter said. “The point is that they just don’t want to understand. I’ve already given an imitation of a toilet flushing that would have gotten me into RADA. They don’t want us to use the water.”

“Why?” you asked.

“Because it’s the dry season. They have to have it hauled over the mountain.”

“All right,” Andrew said. “We’ll pay to have it hauled over the mountain,” and he went back into the kitchen to see if he could make the necessary arrangements.

“The tycoon,” Peter said, but not unkindly. “All I want is a boat, and I think I’ve got one. Look.”

We followed him to the edge of the terrace and looked down at a small row boat, moored in a rock pool just beyond the steps.

“I’ve got one spear gun, one mask, one pair of flippers, but we can take turns if you’re interested.”

We were interested, you because there was no new skill you did not want to acquire, having taken your progressive school education seriously, I because I knew I would be good at it.

“Good news,” Andrew said, coming back with a breakfast tray for us. “For the enormous sum of twenty cents a day, we can have working toilets and baths. I’ve told them to put it on my bill.”

“No,” you said. “Five cents apiece.”

“Oh Esther, please—” he said.

“Five cents apiece,” you insisted.

“Don’t argue with her, Andy,” Peter said. “It’s a good point. Now get on with your breakfast and let’s try the boat.”

Andrew did not like being crossed, but he shrugged off his irritation. I was sorry. It seemed to me stupid to make an issue of so simple a generosity. But the simple was always what mattered to you.

“Dailiness, the Eternal Now Moment,” you would argue to defend yourself against my exasperation.

No vocabulary obscured the fact that your primitive sense of fairness came directly from nursery school.

“Oh grow up, E.,” was my standard retort, but you never did.

Peter, who unlike Andrew had his hands full protecting himself, found your odd little assertions of independence reassuring. He never really encouraged the attention you increasingly gave him, but he accepted your company as he never accepted mine. He gave you a sketching pad and took you with him several mornings when he rowed out to a small island in the bay. Andrew and I encouraged these expeditions not because we wanted to be together but because we wanted to be away from each of you. Often we exchanged no more than a few words after you left, then sat in companionable silence reading, writing letters, or simply watching the sea. Occasionally Andrew suggested a walk, but more often we waited for you both to come back before we did anything. For as much as we liked the relief of those mornings, we missed the enthusiasm you and Peter brought to any project. Peter was physically frail, obviously often not feeling well, though he never spoke of it, but often he had enormous energy, too. Climbing a steep hill, the rest of us fell silent, but Peter almost always sang or played his harmonica or recited patriotic speeches or made up poems of encouragement for us. At the top, he’d hurl himself to the ground in comic exaggeration of his breathlessness, but, while we rested, he could never sit still. He was finding rocks and flowers, exclaiming over the shapes of clouds. Occasionally he would begin to dance, awkward and serious, stop suddenly squint at us, and then begin to laugh.

“Don’t play the fool,” Andrew would say, a little uneasily.

“Esther, let’s make ourselves caps with bells on so that people won’t mistake us for our serious friends.”

And you would join him in inventions, sometimes no more than pure mime, sometimes elaborate with props, branches from the stunted bushes that grew out of rock, grass, flowers, the paper which you always carried. Once, in one of the strange, raised-stone graveyards, you played leapfrog tag together. Andrew and I were always audience to your demented innocence. But we were not very good at entertaining ourselves without you.

Andrew looked up from his book to watch you coming in from the island. Peter had handed you the oars, then wrapped himself in a blanket. He stood in the bow of the boat, playing “For Those in Peril on the Sea” on his harmonica. Then he gave the sign of the blessing and shouted, “Peace be with this hotel.”

“They make me feel old,” Andrew said, but like me he did not altogether dislike the feeling.

Peter’s enthusiasms could be suddenly cut off by a complicated reticence which you accepted without question, but which obviously troubled Andrew, perhaps even angered him.

“Why is Andy so impatient with Pete?” you asked one night. “Pete admires him so much, and it hurts his feelings.”

“It’s when Pete goes quiet,” I said.

“Well, he can’t be sociable all the time.”

“But sometimes he does it to get at Andy, don’t you think?”

“Maybe,” you said. “It’s not a good sort of friendship. People shouldn’t have to get at each other or explain anything. They should accept each other.”

The next morning Peter suggested that we all go out to the island together to spearfish. Andrew was reluctant, but, when he saw that I wanted to go, he agreed. We anchored just south of the island in about thirty feet of water. Peter began to put on the fins and mask.

“Why don’t you let one of the girls have the first go?” Andrew suggested quietly.

“You be the man of the family, darling,” Peter said. “Just let me be myself.”

In the moment afterwards, when no one spoke, Peter stood up and dove into the water, almost capsizing the boat. I was not honestly surprised, and for you nothing had really been revealed.

“Let’s swim.”

More carefully each one of us went over the side, and then we swam rather self-consciously together to the island. Peter stayed out beyond the boat for a while, but then he came over to us and very deliberately offered the equipment to me. I felt unreasonably angry with him, as critical as I might have been, perhaps was, of myself. I accepted the gun, the mask, the fins, each with careful politeness. I suppose I was responsible for the competitive mood that developed. I was the strongest swimmer of the four, but I knew nothing about spearfishing. It is so easy to misjudge distance and size in the reflecting clarity of that water. More or less by accident I caught the first fish. You did not want to be bested, were always willing to test yourself against whatever I had achieved, but you expected to lose, and losing always increased your admiration of your opponent rather than your uncertainty about yourself. Peter, on the other hand, needed to put me in my place, and he could not. When Andrew snagged a small octopus by mistake and brought it to me with mock ceremony, he was content, but Peter went down again and again until his lips were gray. It was time for lunch, but he would not stop.

“Pete, come on,” Andrew shouted.

“I’m not hungry,” he answered. “Go on in if you want to.”

It did not seem sensible to leave him, but after a few minutes we swam back to the boat to wait. Finally Andrew decided we must go into lunch. We had not eaten in five hours, and breakfast had been the usual tea and toast. Andrew shouted again and got no answer; so he pulled on the anchor. It was snagged in coral, thirty feet below. Each of us had a turn, but it would not budge.