The Hermit (31 page)

Erhard walks through the workshop, down the corridor, and up the stairs. On this floor are three small rooms clustered around a small terrace, where the sun blazes down on a cactus surrounded by rocks. He heads directly into the office. Pauli Barouki is washing his face in the sink he had installed. He’s lanky and grey-skinned.

– Hermit, he says, without glancing up.

– I just want you to know that I never realized until now that Emanuel Palabras owns Taxinaria.

Barouki laughs. This surprises Erhard. – Well, well.

– Is that why you gave me that tiny locker? I asked you to reconsider. It wasn’t fair.

Barouki’s smile vanishes. – Save your idealism. You got that locker because you got the bookshelf. It’s that embarrassingly simple. You can’t get everything you wish for.

– You still don’t get the idea behind that shelf.

– Seems no one does. Barouki washes his faces again, then removes a towel from a small basket underneath the sink. He sits down and pats his face dry, his hands, his arms. – I haven’t treated you differently because you’re friends with Raúl or old man Palabras. I am many things, but I’m not unfair.

– Then why don’t we have the new whiteboard for duty rosters? We’ve discussed it for years.

– Will you pay for it? No. If everyone chips in ten euros, we can talk about it. Or forego your salary for two weeks and we can buy one.

– Maybe I should move on. Maybe Taxinaria’s not as stingy with its money. In the thirteen years that I’ve worked here, this company hasn’t spent so much as a hundred euros on its employees. We painted the break-room ourselves, and the chairs are Gonzo’s, for Christ’s sake.

– You got the lockers when you asked for them.

– That was more than ten years ago.

– C’mon. I wasn’t even here ten years ago. I’ve helped change a lot of things in my time. I helped you get that new dispatch console. You know that.

– That was years ago, and anyway it was just an investment in your equipment. Besides, the drivers weren’t exactly clamouring for that new console.

– Look around you, Hermit, you’re not in wonderful
Danimarca
any more. Every one of us, this entire country, is deep in debt. Mainlanders don’t come here if they owe the banks money. The entire island lacks tourists and we don’t have the funds to pamper drivers, even if we wished to.

– Enough with all that financial-crisis rubbish. You could have done something long ago. You seem to be doing all right lounging around on your manicured lawn up on the hill.

– Careful what you say, Hermit. You’re no
majorero
. Don’t you forget that.

– I’m just telling you to do something. If you don’t care to listen to me, then listen to Anphil. He’s a
majorero
, and he lives and breathes for this place. And what have you done for him? Nothing. I’ve gotten a job offer from Taxinaria, and I’m going to accept it.

Barouki is washing himself again, his back to Erhard. – We do all we can, Hermit. Don’t overplay your hand. I’ve been hearing that young Palabras is now counting pennies on the bottom of the ocean. Those aren’t the kind of people you want to fool around with any more than you need. He turns to Erhard now. – Did you forget how we help you each month with your little money-transfer to your ex-wife? It’s actually quite difficult to transfer money. Our accountant tells me all the time how much of a mess it is, but we do it anyway. Why? Because I promised to help you. It’s called loyalty.

– You think I can’t get others to help with that?

Erhard glances down at the empty table. There’s not a single paper, newspaper, computer, or telephone. It appears as though the table has just been moved into the room He spins on his heels and leaves before Barouki says anything more. Everything happened so fast, but maybe it’s for the best.

On the way out he says hello to Anphil, who’s lying underneath Ponduel’s Lexus. Ponduel’s sitting out front with one of Taxinaria’s drivers, who has stopped in for coffee. The difference between the two companies is negligible, yet they behave like two rival football clubs.

Ponduel’s normally not very chatty, but when Erhard asks him how he’s doing, he complains about the auto workshop. He doesn’t think the Greek – that’s what he calls Anphil – should be the sole mechanic responsible for thirty drivers while freelancing for Taxinaria at the same time he does rush jobs on Marcelis’s wife’s Mazda. Erhard listens for a moment, but knows that Ponduel can keep on like this for a long time. So he heads back to his cab, accompanied by the driver from Taxinaria. He’s in his mid thirties, or maybe he’s forty, with coarse skin. The son of a driver who was killed in a horrible accident the year before during the Maria Festival.

Erhard taps his arm before the Taxinaria driver climbs into his car.

– How do you like it over there? Working there.

The man gives Erhard a friendly look. He’s of the new generation which doesn’t want to get mixed up in all the competition, gossip, and idiocy of years past.

– Just like here, I’d imagine.

– Have you ever met Raúl Palabras?

– I’ve only seen him twice.

– Hmm. Did you know that Emanuel Palabras owns Taxinaria?

–
Quién sabe
. Marcelis is the one who calls all the shots.

– What’s he like? Is he as strict as they say?

The man smiles. – More or less. He yelled at me once. You don’t want to experience that twice.

– What happened?

– I complained about some moving boxes that have been in the break-room since last summer. Only five people can sit in that itty-bitty space. The secretary was thrown out of her boyfriend’s house or something, and she hasn’t found a place to live. So she sleeps on the sofa at the temp’s place, Loulou’s, and she keeps the rest of her things in eleven boxes stacked against the walls.

Erhard laughs. – Why hasn’t Marcelis asked her to remove them?

– You know. She’s a secretary. He makes a suggestive gesture.

– Isn’t Marcelis married?

The man stares at Erhard as if he’s stupid. – Between you and me, I’m saving up to start my own company. After three more years of driving I can go independent. I’m not going to sit in some taxi for the rest of my life like my father.

– Good for you, Erhard says. Though, in truth, he doesn’t believe there’s room enough for three taxi companies on the island. It’s hard enough with two. – Good chatting with you. Maybe I’ll see you around.

Erhard drives down Calle Nuestra Señora del Carmen and parks at the back of the queue to get a few customers, when dispatch rings and tells him that he’s got a phone call. He walks into Café Bolaño and waits by the telephone. Maybe it’s Barouki. He picks it up on the first ring. He hears the line click over.

– We don’t want you here, Hermit.

– Who is this?

– Marcelis Osasuna, motherfucker. Marcelis practically screams into the receiver. Erhard has only met the man a few times, but everyone knows him. And he’s known for his use of English obscenities.

– What makes you think I want to work for you?

– Why do you think,
Extranjero
? Palabras might own me, but he doesn’t decide everything.

Sebastiano must’ve told him. – All I did was ask the boy what it was like to work at your place.

– What fucking boy?

– Forget it. But I haven’t given Emanuel Palabras my answer yet.

– Rumour has it you’re lashing the whip over at Ventura. Don’t come over here and whip me. I’ll give it right back to you.

– Does Palabras know you’re calling me?

Silence. – Of course not. And if you tell him you’re finished.

– So many threats, Erhard says, even though he didn’t mean to say it out loud.

– I can keep ’em coming. I’ve fought tooth and nail for this company. You’re on your way into the lion’s den,
Extranjero
.

Erhard hears Marcelis ruffle through some papers.

– You might be tight with the Palabrases, but you’re not coming over here and taking over.

– Who says I want to?

– What do you want then?

– I want to consider it for a few days, and then I’ll let Emanuel Palabras know.

– You think very carefully, Hermit.

Marcelis hangs up.

For a moment Erhard stands with the black plastic receiver in his hand, then he finally hangs it up, staring at the wall. One of the posters taped next to the payphone is an ad for one of the many private boats that sail to Lanzarote, Tenerife, Gran Canaria – even a little ferry that sails to Hierro of all godforsaken places. He studies the photograph of the captain, or anyway someone wearing a captain’s hat, who’s toasting with some passengers in the ship’s bar. Erhard makes a decision. During the next few hours he won’t think about his future, as a driver or anything else. He will go to Morro Jable and sail to Santa Cruz. Then he remembers Beatriz and the bloody generator. There’s only one person who can take care of her while he’s gone.

He retrieves his notebook from the car. He inserts a quarter in the telephone and punches the doctor’s number.

43

The trip makes him restless.

There’s something strange about leaving the island, the sandy ground under his feet. Apart from short forays to the pile of rocks that is Isla de Lobos with Raúl and Beatriz once in 2008, this is only the third time he has left Fuerteventura. He’s been to Lanzarote twice, once to pick up his Mercedes. That was in 1999.

He sits on the sundeck under the blinding sun for a long time. Ten hours with nothing to do. Afraid to fall asleep, he doesn’t drink any alcohol. He makes a game of shaking small peanuts from a sticky bag and tossing them into his mouth.

The captain isn’t nearly as friendly as he looks in the photograph. He’s grumpy and incoherent. Chain-smokes at the railing and stares down in the water as if he wishes to throw himself into the ship’s wake. Erhard converses with him several times, but is interrupted when tourists want to snap photographs with him. The captain salutes and poses for these photos; he has nothing to do with the ship’s navigation, of course, but is a kind of steward whose job is to radiate a captain’s authority – though he doesn’t quite succeed. It is the kind of thing that always amused Raúl. Big shots in decline. Beaten down. Raúl loved getting politicians, policemen and civil servants pissed, then humiliating them with idiotic tomfoolery, watching them blush when a female bartender offered them tequila in a glass squeezed between her breasts. He loved to steal their hats and pick at their ties like a coquettish stripper, stick bills down their snug-fitting trousers, or send them double vodkas with umbrellas. One time he grabbed a man by his collar simply because he’d dressed his son in a sailor suit. Just because of that.

How could Raúl have turned his fist against Beatriz? It’s logical enough to believe that’s what happened, and yet he can’t believe it. He doesn’t want to believe his friend is capable. He doesn’t want to believe he could misjudge someone’s character. What is he to make of the words Beatriz had somehow said?
Help me. Let me go
.

It frustrates him that his thoughts about Raúl are mixed. Not pure, not simply loving or angry. Maybe what he feels is what a father feels for his prodigal son: reproachful, damned, grief-filled. He enters the little bar on the sundeck where the captain stood in the photograph on the poster. Buys the last bag of peanuts. Afternoon arrives, then evening; sea birds – some long black creatures with square beaks – squawk in the wind that whistles above the boat. The ship approaches land.

He stands at the stern.

Tenerife across the water.

Many years have passed since the last time he was here. When he arrived on the islands and was searching for a place to stay, he’d spent some days at a cheap hotel near a beach. As the boat skips on the waves towards the white harbour, he sees the island with new eyes. The island appears taller and redder than Fuerteventura, and it’s impressive. Far more attractive than the island he’s chosen to live on. He thinks of his mother, who always loved Copenhagen whenever they drove around Tivoli Amusement Park, but feared and hated the city if one of her children were out of her sight for just two minutes, or when they waited at the Central Station for Erhard’s father to arrive on a train, and a homeless man would ask Erhard’s brother Thorkild if he had a light. Living your life in a state between destructive hatred and deep-seated love is exhausting.

He gazes across the water at the island. Every time the boat sinks into the valley of a wave, the island appears larger and more solid.

Calle Centauro is a sad-looking place. A beige road in a business district. But the cafe is white and large, actually more of a discotheque than a cafe. There’s a massive room, constructed around a small atrium with palm trees that jut through a hole in the roof. Erhard sits at a table underneath one of the palms and scans the handwritten menu. Not something he sees very often. Even the dinkiest and shabbiest wine and cocktail bars in Corralejo have lively menus with flamingos and headlines in alternating font colours. This menu is grey and brown, scrawled in cursive with fat circles above the ‘i’s.

The owner must be a woman. There are flowers in small vases, something he can’t recall seeing anywhere in Fuerteventura. Everything is nice and clean and newly painted; all the waitresses seem busy and happy. One of them, a heavy-set girl wearing a tight white peasant blouse, reaches up to light a candle in a candlestick set in an old-fashioned wagon wheel. Then she approaches Erhard. She’s almost too nice, asking him whether he’s on holiday. He nods and she stands ready with her little notepad.

She tells him about nearby sites that he should visit, though not on Saturdays, because there are too many people on Saturdays, and not after nightfall, because the Tunisians are there, and not around noon when the sun is strongest. He asks whether she’s from California, and she is. She laughs, tells him she’s impressed, then asks him where he’s from. He tells her. She says that several of the girls are from Fuerteventura, too, then goes on to say that she lives just above the restaurant, in a flat where the girls can stay if they have just moved here, as long as they work off the rent. She’d like to be a manager some day, she says, if she can learn how. He orders a Mai Tai. He can see the girl’s cleavage over the rim of his menu. Before she walks off, he asks if she knows Søren Hollisen. She hesitates. She has heard the name, she thinks, but she doesn’t know him. Then she heads back behind the bar, where she talks to another waitress, a fierce-looking girl with her combed-back hair in a ponytail. As if Erhard’s some rich grandfather who might dole out some pocket money, the California girl eyes Erhard while she speaks. The ponytail girl drinks from a bottle, unimpressed.