The Summer Before the Dark (16 page)

Señor Martinez, the Spaniard, at fifty or so was what Jeffrey would look like. He was all sloping prominences: sloping bald skull, small sloping shoulders, an unexercised sloping stomach. Jeffrey, the American of German immigrant parents, must have in him a gene or two from these shores, for Señor Martinez could easily be his father.

But how ill was he?

Kate was thinking that if this were her son, she would not be worried at all, she would diagnose that condition of
opting out:
there is a temperature or a cold or a lowering
of vitality that merits a doctor’s visit and some days in bed, but the point is the days in bed. Why, she used the evasion herself, quite consciously, when life got too much of a good thing. It is a state of affairs like winter for the earth: it feels as if all heat has retreated inwards, the fire is deeply hidden under rock, the sun is too far away. One lies huddled or sprawled, according to one’s temperament, far away, behind surfaces of flesh, hair, eyes that do not seem to have much to do with one, like a dog lying in the sun to get winter warmth.

Señor Martinez, father of children, did not seem more perturbed than she was. Yet on the face of it Jeffrey was ill enough not to see them; he stared past or through them, and he shivered convulsively in great spasms that seemed self-consciously dramatic. Señor Martinez, his lively dark eyes full of support and warmth, said, “Alors, ça va mieux demain, oui oui, madame, j’en suis certain,” as if he were a doctor and she a worried mother. He went off saying that she would find a meal in the dining room but of course this was not a fashionable hotel like the ones they were used to; she must take what she found.

The dining room was no larger than one for a bourgeois family, which was probably what it had once been. There was heavy dark furniture, heavy white tablecloths. The meal was bread soup, a piece of fried meat, fruit. She was served by a girl who cleaned rooms as well as waited at table and helped in the kitchen. This hotel was used by visiting government officials, by the police, whose local headquarters was some miles away, and by the priests who came to confess the nuns and serve them sacraments.

She went to bed quietly. This was the first silent place since she had left her large garden in Blackheath. The Spanish coasts, Istanbul, Global Food in London—
all had rung, hammered, shouted, or chattered with noise. Here, towards midnight, she woke to hear a horse or a mule clop past under the windows. But Jeffrey was wakened too, and just as if he had not for so many hours been not there, been absent from ordinary life, he sat up and demanded in a normal voice what he could have to eat—and where were they?

She explained. They enjoyed a normal moment of reunion in the silent hotel in the village where now nothing was moving. He said, “I must have been sick, then?” She confirmed it, and went downstairs in her robe, as if in her own house, to see if she could find something to eat in the dining room, for she knew that the maid and Señor Martinez—whose wife and children were away visiting relatives in Barcelona—were in bed and asleep. She found a loaf of bread and some butter, covered against flies, on the great sideboard, and brought slices of bread and butter and some fruit up to the room. And there was Jeffrey, who had in the interval plunged in and out of a bath, had combed and dressed, demanding that they should go out and find a café or a restaurant. He seemed full of energy—suspiciously so. His extreme irritation, his restlessness, were a warning. She explained again that in this village everyone must now be asleep; that they were far from tourist country; that in the morning they could leave. He devoured the food as if he hated it, and was sick again, just as he was demanding to go out for a walk and enjoy the moonlight.

He held on to the bottom of the bed, swaying, yellow, saying that he was quite recovered. He crawled back onto the bed, lay down, slept.

He would probably be better in the morning.

And indeed he woke early, and they descended together
to the hotel dining room, where Señor Martinez was drinking coffee. She confessed her theft of the night; but of course he had already noticed it and understood it. He was charming, but she noted the change in his manner. She had left the passports on the hotel desk the night before: the fuss over Jeffrey’s sickness had prevented Señor Martinez taking down the details for his records. This morning he had done this. Last night she and Señor Martinez had been like parents conferring over a sick child’s bed; now he had to think that his guests were in some sort of scandalous relation. He was exuding reproach, sadness. As it were a philosophical reproach. While his kind, fine eyes rested on the lovers, it was as if he said, We are poor people here. We cannot afford such things.

But he made the girl bring them good fresh coffee, and heavy bread, toasted in the English manner—he knew all about this custom, oh yes, for his younger brother had been a waiter in a restaurant in Manchester; and he said over and over again, as a nervous person repeats himself, that he was sorry there would be no bus until tomorrow: his nervousness, if it was that, said what he was too polite to say, that he wished their sinfulness and irregularity could be removed from his hotel earlier.

What his courtesy said was that he regretted the limited resources of this place: for of course these two were on holiday, and it was unfortunate that such experienced and travelled people were confined to a village that had so little to offer of what they were used to.

And so he went on; while Kate sat silent, knowing she was putting this nice man in a false position, but hoping that the shadiness of the room was hiding her embarrassment. Señor Martinez continued to speak French, and to her; by now he knew that Jeffrey understood a few words
of Spanish, but he was ignoring him. His disapproval was directed at the man, then? He felt none for the woman? He did not like Jeffrey, but did like Kate in spite of her immorality?

When the meal was over, they went out into the little square. It was empty. A dog lay in some shade. Already as hot as it would be at midday, the August sun whitened the sky. The fountain trickled silently. The large rectangle of screened glass opposite drew them towards it; the door stood open to admit air. It was a café, but it was for the people in the evenings: no one here had time to sit about in the day. There was no one in the café, not even a waiter. They walked into a street off the square, passing a blacksmith’s and a shop. This was the village shop. It sold onions, coarse sausage, olive oil from barrels, sardines that had lost all individuality, being crushed together with salt crusted on them, large greenish-red tomatoes that smelled strongly of the vine and the fields, enormous loaves of pale bread, green peppers. There were, perhaps, a hundred families in the place; and after a few yards the fields began, where maize stood turning yellow among olive trees and stones.

They returned in silence to the square. Señor Martinez had observed their attempts to reach the amenities of the café, and had set a wooden table under a tree outside the hotel’s main door. He waved them towards it, and brought them glasses of mineral water with slices of lemon. There they sat, and knew they were being watched. The few houses of this village had shuttered windows, and the shutters had eyes behind them. Once or twice a farmer, or a labourer, walked through the square, wishing them Good Day. These men were full of dignity and reserve. Just as Jeffrey remembered. Here it was, what he had
been looking for, in the withdrawn reproachfulness of Señor Martinez—who nonetheless was at this moment in the kitchen conferring with the cook to produce a meal more the style of the visitors than that of the village—and in the women who sat or stood behind windows, not showing themselves, in the men, who as the morning passed, came to cup water from the fountain.

But it was like a punishment sitting there, exposed.

They were surrounded by a poverty so deep that even their clothes, ordinary enough according to the standards of their own countries, were out of reach of anyone here; her handbag—she had taken it for granted until now, when she couldn’t stop looking at the elegant shining thing lying on the scrubbed wood of the table—was probably a month’s wages. She had bought it as a treat for herself, in the hotel shop in Istanbul. But that wasn’t important, it wasn’t the point, for she knew that no one walking past or looking from windows grudged the clothes, the bag, the shoes. It was what they were, she and Jeffrey, that was intolerable, their casual travelling, indolent enjoyment, ease of movement, casual relationships.

They were only fifty miles from the coast; on the coast they, what they were, was the norm. Everybody there, or at least, the visitors, moved from country to country by car, coach, train, plane, bus, on foot, crossed continents to visit a music festival or even a restaurant, had a freedom of friendship, love, sex that to the people in this village must be truly unimaginable.

There they sat, Kate Brown, forty-five-year-old mother of four, wife of a respected doctor at that very moment probably lecturing at some conference on a tricky condition of the nervous system, and Jeffrey, who almost certainly by this time next year would be unhappily but dutifully at work in his uncle’s law firm in Washington—
“lovers,” and with so little emotional disturbance that when they looked back on this shared experience, the “love” would be the least of its ingredients. There was not a woman or girl in this place who was within a hundred years of such freedom. Madame Bovary would still describe their excesses; and if the men, like Señor Martinez’s brother, did go to Manchester to be waiters, one could be sure that the manners and morals of that wildly sophisticated town would not be brought back here. But the men were mostly peasants, they worked on the land. They grew maize and made flour out of it. They grew olives and sold some. They grew tomatoes. They worked on the estate of the rich nobleman who spent most of the year in Madrid or in his villa on the coast, as his father and his grandfather had done; and the wages of these men kept the village thin and parched.

By twelve the sun was thinning the leafage of the tree so that it was like lace above them; they retreated into the hotel, and Jeffrey fainted away onto the floor. Again she and Señor Martinez lifted him upstairs and laid him on a bed.

And again Jeffrey had withdrawn behind blind eyes that had a look of indignation or astonishment: Why are you expecting so much vitality out of me? they asked, whether they looked at ceiling, walls, the square of blinding light that was the window, or Señor Martinez. Again he was soaked with sweat. Now Señor Martinez, with an apology, turned up the young man’s eyelids: inside the flesh was sulphurous. And he pointed silently at the flesh of the arms which lay yellow on the white of the counterpane. Shaking his head, he trod off downstairs to telephone the aunt of the doctor.

Who said that when the doctor made his regular telephone call to receive her report, she would tell him that
there was a young American with fever, much sweating, and yellow eyes and skin. In her opinion, Señor Martinez said, it was a case of yellow fever: she had a relative in South America who had died of it. He shrugged: of course the good woman was not to be taken seriously.

She went upstairs to find that Jeffrey had as it were collapsed inwardly. He lay on his back, so loose and relaxed that when she lifted his arm it slid onto the bed with a thump. He looked as if the bones in his flesh had collapsed, or had shrunk. His eyes were half open. He looked corpse-like, but she kept saying to herself—silently, of course, as one does for children or the people who
choose
to put a distance between themselves and the world of imperatives—“Yes, but he’s got to choose either one or the other, he’s got to be a lawyer or a vagabond, for no other reason than that he sees it as a choice. For if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be lying there with a temperature, yellow in the flesh—but not ill, no, not ill as someone is ill with cholera or even with measles.”

Yet of course Jeffrey was ill, really ill, even if, had he been a Spanish labourer or a small farmer for whom a day’s work was the difference between eating and not eating, he would not have been ill at all. Not, of course, that she grudged it to him! She did not, even if she could not help wishing that he could have gone home to the States to enjoy this spiritual crisis. Which, of course, it was.… As for her, she was muttering to herself, ribald, being out of sight of Señor Martinez, she was here for physical reasons. That was what she had contracted for—the body, the pleasures of the flesh; wishing there was someone with whom she could share the joke, she sponged Jeffrey’s forehead and lifted him to drink.

In the dining room there was an obese man in uniform with a gun in his belt. It was a military uniform.
The gun monitored the meal, while the girl served cold jellied soup and cold meat and salad and bread.

Kate returned to the room, found Jeffrey exactly where she had left him, made him drink more water, and then collapsed herself and slept. And slept and slept, listening as it were to something just out of hearing; the inner tutor was wanting her to understand something, but she was being too obtuse to understand. She was dreaming of the seal, or had dreamed of it, for she could feel the heaviness of the animal. It was still damp from the water she had put on it. Behind her a low and sullen sun had moved in a low arc sketched across perhaps a quarter of the horizon. It was a small sun, it had no heat at all, everything was getting very dark; she seemed to be walking on and on in a permanent chilly twilight.

Next morning, when the sunlight withdrew from the room, it was as if it had left a stain of colour on Jeffrey’s flesh. She sought Señor Martinez and asked if he would make another attempt at the doctor. But the aunt was not answering the telephone: it appeared that her mornings were spent at her devotions in the church at the convent. It happened that as Kate and Señor Martinez stood conferring at a window, a lorry stopped in the square. It was a battered old Ford, and the driver was filling the radiator from the fountain. At the same time a horse drew into the square a cart of a kind that must have been seen in Spain for many centuries. The horse was thirsty, for it went straight to the fountain and drank while the lorry driver was dipping his empty oil can right under its nose.