Via Dolorosa (2 page)

Cover art by Joshua Hansen.

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Malfi
at www.ronmalfi.com

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Malfi

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Snow

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The Narrows

Novellas

The Stranger

The Separation

Skullbelly

Borealis

—Chapter I—

They stayed at the
Paradis
d’Hôtel
, and it was a magnificent hotel. Pushed back and hidden in the shade of the black and wet trees and resting along the white, banded cusp of sand, it sat and looked out upon the dark and silent sea. It was a large hotel, but still somewhat quaint, with a roof of red shale and a naturally stained
Roystonea
fence surrounding the circular gravel drive. Out back, extending the length of the hotel and facing a vast, rolling slope of lawn, was a stone veranda, pressed cool and firm to the ground beneath a sprawling, slate-shingled arcade. The lawns themselves were brightly green and handsomely manicured, the grass as soft and as fine as down. In preparation for the cicadas, saplings were draped in cheesecloth and sprayed with repellant. Agaves, long and green and thinly-stalked, swayed out by the pools. The air was mostly still but when the breeze came, it came smelling of the sea, and it came with an assuredness that could only come from a place that was uncorrupted by man, far out in the wide and open sea.

For the first two weeks, they breakfasted in the hotel gardens under the shade of the cool, sweeping palms. The breeze was a reminder of their isolation, smelling of the ocean and nothing else. Lunchtime, they would dine either at the hotel, which provided a vast selection of eateries, each of discriminating and individual refinement, or they would venture out about the island and eat at one of the small, indigenous bistros or cafés tucked along the brilliant stretch of white beach at the salted foot of the sea. They drank cold, tropical drinks beaded with sweat and, when in the proper mood, the man would order a plate of flat fillets of anchovies, heavily salted, and eat them without crackers and just a small cocktail fork. The girl would smile and read her poetry books and watch the man as he ate and drank. If they were seated at a table on the beach, she would dig her toes into the sand while she read.

At the pools, she would swim laps while he watched and worked over his sketches, and she would sometimes pause and prop herself up on the paved concrete ledge of the pool and smile at him. Looking at her, flexing and popping the tendons in his sketching hand, he would smile back. It was one of those rare and perfect moments when you are so incredibly content that you are too afraid to move or breathe and risk ruining any of it.

“You look tired and hot,” she would say. “You should come in the water.”

“I’m fine here.”

“You should come in.”

“I like watching you swim. You’re beautiful,” he told her, “and it’s better for me to look up and watch you swim, sweet.”

“The water is like magic here,” she said. “I feel I could swim all day until it’s dark and I would never get tired. It’s like magic that way.”

“Don’t get too tired.”

“No,” she said, smiling beautifully at him, “there’s no getting tired.” She told him, “It’s like magic.” She said, “We’re in a dream.”

“Yes,” he said back. “Oh, yes.”

“I think I’d like to go lay out all sexy on the beach,” she told him.

“You should put on some
sunblock
so you don’t burn.”

“I want to tan. I want to look pretty for you, and tan.”

“You don’t tan,” he said. “You get pink. Like shrimp.”

And she laughed. “Like shrimp,” she repeated, still laughing. She had the perfect mouth for laughing—a small, discrete mouth, where the outskirts of her lips hardly exceeded beyond the boundaries of her small, narrow nose. “Like peeled and pink shrimp.”

They swam together in the cool sea during the day. The girl swam out far, but the man stayed in close to the shore. The water was not clear enough for one to see his feet on the bottom the deeper he waded out. Cold patches were in abundance, and it was very easy to be comfortable one moment and to have your muscles freeze in the sudden chill the next. At night, the tide came in close to shore and pulled at the sand, making it smooth and dark and fine. Their footprints from the daytime were washed clean away. (It was good, they discovered, to hike the dunes surrounding the hotel, and to recreate, on a constant basis, their footprints. It was their stake on the land.) One afternoon, some of the brown-faced Moroccan staff deposited several planks of whitewashed boards out behind the hotel. During a walk, searching with casual interest through the sea-grass, the couple uncovered the planks. The man retrieved his paints and made faces on them while the young woman laughed. They were faces, caricatures, of people they knew from back home. They were good faces.

There was a triad of marble fountains on the east side of the hotel and in the dip of a valley courtyard, large and wholly clean. When the weather was nice, great white swans could be seen drifting across the surface of the water, and on the clearest days, the sky and the great sweeping clouds were reflected. And for quite some time, the weather was nice.

But when the rains came, the winds tore at the great palms and stripped the magnolia trees bare. The storm shook the hotel and rattled the windows. It was a strong, dedicated rain, and it came to the island as if by custom, pounding the sand and roiling the sea and beating hard and strong against the framework of the quaint but magnificent hotel. The rain came only once and lasted a full two days, and the skies never cleared on those days, and everything remained dark and wet and muddy and as if caught in a dream.