End of story, It’s all a game

We are minor in everything but our passions.

Elizabeth Bowen, 1938

Back in the Twentieth Century, near the village of Campello, in the province of Alicante, Spain, there existed a big old white-walled, tile-roofed hacienda on a sandy knoll above a beach.  The Casa Campello was a kind of unconventional youth hostel that featured a communal kitchen, dorm-style bedrooms, a patio shaded by an immense date palm, and a clientele composed of young backpackers from all over Northern Europe.  The lingua franca was English, the sexes were evenly divided, and the girls were tanned and healthy.  There was a dense pine wood (convenient for liaisons, though fouled in places by toilet-less villagers) on the hill behind the house, the water at the beach was warm and clear, and all the guests were free and easy and “down here for a good time.”

“What’s not to like?” I asked myself when I arrived, without a peseta, after a rough crossing from Ceuta, North Africa, and a night on the beach.

Approaching Javi, the pot-bellied, avuncular Spaniard with a perpetual five o’clock shadow who ran the place, I explained my plight.  He heard me out, expressed admiration for my adventurous spirit, and made the following proposal:  I would work for him eight hours a day, at any task he might choose, for my room and board.  There would be no cash exchange at all.

With my stomach rumbling, I quickly agreed, and went to work cleaning toilets right after lunch.  For a week or two, he doled out only the worst jobs to me, but I labored without protest, and always did my best.  He appreciated my effort, and when his Dutch bartender suddenly quit, a week or so later, he offered me the job.

The first of many good things about the job was that the barmaid and I could keep all our tips, after sharing them out with each other, so now I had some spending money.  Second was that I worked nights, and now I could spend my days at the beach, swimming, working on my tan, and chatting up the girls.  Third was that the barmaid was Carol Willcocks, a very pretty and shapely young English girl from Bexleyheath, Kent, whom I had been eyeing since my arrival.  It was she in fact who had awakened me on the beach and pointed me up the hill toward the Casa Campello on my first morning in town.  Unfortunately, she had a male companion named Bean who had been her friend since grammar school, and they appeared to be inseparable.

A week after I started at the cantina, Bean had to go back to work on the London Underground, and he and Carol had a tearful parting in the patio, after breakfast, with the whole Casa watching.  Everyone seemed moved by their emotion, but I could not wait to see the last of the bastard.

Later, I found out from Carol that the feeling was mutual, and that he had told her, shortly before he left, “I don’t expect you to be a saint whilst you’re down here, love.  Only one thing I ask.  Don’t have nothing to do with that bleeding Edward, or Eduardo, or whatever he calls himself.  I shouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.”

“Silly boy, old Bean, isn’t he?” she laughed when she told me later.  “Of course, you were the first thing I thought of, Eduardo, the minute he left.”

I liked Carol very much indeed.  I liked her at first simply for the way she operated in the bar, effortlessly calm, graceful, and soft-spoken, no matter how rude or rowdy the customers got.  In the beginning, I thought she was just cool and collected, but later I found that she – like most of us at the Casa – was stoned on a combination of hashish and barbiturates ninety percent of the time.

There was a bit of South London in her voice, a tendency to drop her double T’s, but not – thank God – her aitches, for she had worked hard on her accent.  What came across was something very hip, classless, and big city: sophistication without any particular “breeding.”

Working behind the bar at night, and hanging out at the beach all day, I get plenty of opportunity to observe you, Carol, and observe you I do, from head to toe. You wear your hair long, and it is chestnut in color, streaked lighter in places from the sun.  When you’re working, you have the delightful and seductive habit of flicking your head to the right, to get the hair out of your eye.  At the beach you wear it pinned up like a Victorian lady, showing off your long, elegant neck.  Your forehead is high, Anglo-Saxon, and your brows are set high as well, plucked in a thin, up-slanting line.  Your eyes are large and heavy-lidded, with long sun-faded lashes; and their color is a deep blue-grey, like the North Atlantic in summer.  Your nose is high-bridged and straight, with a little downward curve at the tip.  Your lips are full, and so red that you tone them down with a light pinkish lipstick.

For someone with such natural grace and self-confidence, you smile rarely and a bit shyly, which only adds to your allure.  When you do crack a grin, the contrast of your small, even white teeth against the deep golden tan of your face is spectacular.  Your laugh is even rarer, but it is worth waiting for.  Low and rather delicate, it lights your beautiful countenance with an infinitely seductive light . . . at least from my biased point of view. And your body in a bikini?  Only the master James Joyce can do it justice: Dimberwapping dell-pretty wench. . .

I approach you slowly after your boyfriend leaves, feeling my way along.  Cleaning up the bar with you after closing time, I have plenty of opportunity to get to know you.  And what I learn, I like even more.

Your father works for the Post Office.  Your mother is a housewife.  You were a war baby, the child of an unmarried English girl and a Canadian flyer adopted by the childless Willcocks couple after the war. Your parents are relentlessly working class.  When you were a child, they restricted your reading because you might “damage” your eyes.  Later, when you bought some pretty bauble, they would say, “Why’d you waste your money on that, then?  It ain’t for our class, is it?”

Although they made you quit school at sixteen and go to work as a shop girl in Bexleyheath High Street, you refused to let them browbeat you, and made it a point of honor to visit the public library four nights a week.  There, you went about systematically educating yourself, creating yourself, discovering literature, history, painting, and even music, all on your own.

I love the way you tell your story, very slowly and calmly, over a late-night cigarette and a cognac after the bar is closed down, and I find myself falling for you – disquietingly, feverishly so.  In a way, I am almost glad that Bean is so recently gone, for out of discretion I must resist declaring my intentions.

Instead, I tell you my life story, and the tale of my infamous clan, leaving nothing out. Taking my cue from Albert Camus — “A man defines himself by his make-believe as well as by his sincere impulses” — I even exaggerate my family’s sexual shenanigans.  I am encouraged that you display no shock or dismay, that on the contrary you find it all, as you say, “Rather titillating, Eduardo.”

I love the way you pronounce my name, in the English manner, with the silent “R.” And I equally adore the slightly mocking tone you take with me, a tone that women sometimes employ on men to whom they are attracted.

Then one night after work, a few days after Bean left town, you take my hand without a word and walk me down to the beach.  We sit in the sand, hand in hand, for the longest time, gazing up at the stars, saying nothing, until I feel your head fall onto my shoulder.  I put my arms around your slender waist and squeeze you to me, marveling at how soft you are, how your body gives against mine.  We fall backward onto the sand, and instantly we are sucking the life out of each other.

We fall asleep in the sand and awaken only when the sun comes up out of the Mediterranean.  We walk back to the Casa, arm in arm, just in time for breakfast.  Although everyone immediately remarks our new relationship, and I see a few eyebrows raise, no one says a word about it.  A very permissive atmosphere rules at the Casa; ménages à trois, switchers, and sexual dramas of every kind are commonplace.

We pack a lunch, and later that morning we hike to a secret cove we know, on the way to San Luis.  There we just lie in the sand all day, under a little acacia tree, falling asleep now and then, saying little of importance, except what we can see written in the other’s eyes.  Your skin smells of salt and sea air.  Your body is warm to the touch.

In the late afternoon, after a long swim out to sea, I get you to read to me from a little volume of Jacques Prévert’s poetry that you have carried with you; and you choose a poem entitled “Alicante.”

Une orange sur la table

Ta robe sur le tapis

Et toi dans mon lit

Doux présent du présent

Fraîcheur de la nuit

Chaleur de ma vie.

Your voice is clear and cool when you read, your French perfect.

“That is so beautiful,” I say.  “But where’d you learn such good French?”

“In France, of course, you silly git.  I was an au pair in Paris for a year and a half, wasn’t I?”

“What else is there that I don’t know about you?”

“More than you could ever imagine,” you say, laughing, nudging me in the ribs.

We are nearly naked, hip to hip in our swimsuits, and the sun is very hot on our bodies.  And your skin so brown, your belly so round, your breasts so. . .

“I love you,” I say.

I cannot help myself; but you just smile and look at me with your afternoon eyes and keep on reading.

On our way back to the Casa that evening, with the sun going down behind the Sierra de Abanilla, we speak of colors.

“You are red.  That’s clear, isn’t it?” you say.  “And I’m blue, yah?”

“Exactly,” I reply.   “We’re like fire and water.  And what I’d like to do right now is just . . . drown in you.”

“Don’t speak so quickly, Eduardo, you might just get your wish.”

Next day at the beach, I make a little house of sand.

“If it falls down,” I say, “that means we’re not going to make it, but if it stays up, even against the tide, that means we’ll be together always.”

When the tide starts coming in, and it looks like the house might fall, you set to work helping me and it stands up against everything the sea throws at it.  You make a wall, a garden, a path, a terrace for the sun.  Then you break off two little sticks and say, very softly, “This is you, and this is me.”

I look at you in a certain way, and you say, “Oh, right!”  And you break off another smaller stick and say, “This is a half-grown one.”

Then you get a tiny, tiny stick, and put it next to the other three.

“This is the baby,” you say.

And I think I will die of joy.

“Yes,” you go on, rapturously, “there shall be a whole great brood of them running wild and naked under the redwood trees in California.  I can just see them now!”

On the way home to the Casa that afternoon you stop abruptly, with your hands full of beach things, look me in the eye and say, “The thing is, Eduardo, it’s all a bit of a lark, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“I don’t think I’m the kind of girl you imagine at all.  I’m not really the sticking sort, you see.  More fun with just a random pick-upthan with a steady bloke, actually.  After all, I’m only twenty-one years old.  You are so bloody sincere, Eduardo, when what I really crave sometimes is just a good shag.  You know what I mean?”

“You trying to warn me, or what?”

“Yes, I should think I am,” you say, putting on a posh accent.  And then you light up with a smile.  “But don’t let that put you off, old egg.”

Monday is our night off, so we hitch into Alicante to find a room, some place to be alone.  We look everywhere, but they don’t want you if you aren’t married.  This is the time of Franco; Opus Dei and the Spanish Catholic Church are ascendant, and rules against “immorality” are strictly enforced.  On the verge of giving up, we try one last pensión, and they let us in.  Our room is on the roof, with potted plants and trees all around it, and a view of the harbor.  It is plain but clean, with a squeaky double bed, and we’re delighted to get it.  We go out to dinner at a little workingman’s restaurant around the corner and load up on pescado, patatas fritas and dry white wine.  On the way home, we pop some of your Benzedrine pills.

You look so pretty in your pink sleeveless mini-frock that I almost hate to remove it, but I unzip it down the back as soon as we get in the door, and you help.  Off with your bra and bikini panties in a flash.  This is the first time I’ve had a chance to look at all of you, in full light, and what I see pleases me infinitely. We fall to the bed and you whisper the words I want to hear.  “I love you,” you say, as you open your legs to me.  “I really love you, don’t I?” you say again, as if astonished by the notion, when I come inside.

And what is it like?

Honeysauces, says the master, James Joyce sugar of roses, marchpane, gooseberried pigeons, ringocandies…

Yet for the next week we have little peace, and we bicker on the job like an old married couple.  The intensity of our feelings for each other has frightened us, perhaps, because it signifies the end of youth, and freedom, and the beginning of responsibility.

Then one night a tall, handsome Jamaican with a head full of natty dreads comes strutting into the bar.  A drug dealer named Rupert, he once knew you and Bean casually in London, and he asks you to a late-night party at his beach house.  You accept gladly, though I am pointedly excluded.

You do not get in the next morning until 9 AM.  I know because I’m sitting under the date palm sipping my coffee when you arrive, looking a bit used up.

“Have fun?”

“Yes,” you say, “but I couldn’t bear to see him today.  It’s just too intense.  Will you come with me to the beach?”

“For protection?”

“If you like,” you say, and we have a wonderful time all day long, laughing and playing in the waves and avoiding all unpleasant topics.

Days occur like this, sometimes, illogically, gifts of brief rainfall in a dry land.  We decide to go back to our pensión in Alicante after work.  We make love all night again, with the aid of Benzedrine, and it’s even better than the first time.

In the morning, though, you say, “I shall be off now, love.  He’s leaving for Paris in a day or two, and I should like to spend some time with him before he goes.  But don’t get all soggy on me, yah?  My feeling for you has got nothing to do with him.  You see, I can fancy you and fancy him at the same time.”

“How do you feel about him, exactly?”

“Oh, he’s nil.  Nothing to him, really.  Just a bit of chocolate lolly.  Won’t last a moment. And you’re this great lovely organic peach, aren’t you?  But that’s not going to stop me.  It’s me nature, i’n’it?”

“Oh, yes,” I say bitterly.   “It is, Carol, and I’m quite familiar with it.  It’s what I’ve been trying to avoid all my life.”

You are gone the next day, without giving notice.  People at the Casa say you left with Rupert in his Jaguar.

I have come halfway ‘round the world to be paid in my own coin.  Or as Malraux put it: “A certain depth of misery is like the thought of death: it puts human beings in their proper places.”

Some years later, when I’m in graduate school at San Francisco State, I’m surprised to receive a note from you, Carol, forwarded by my father in Southern California: “I’m in New York, love, heading out to California by bus, and I should be frightfully grateful if I might kip at your flat for a fortnight’s time.  What do you say?”

Having just more or less amicably ended a relationship with a young fashion model, I find myself free for the moment, and I must admit that the old excitement comes over me when I read your letter. Yet which of us does not fear disappointment in the rekindling of old flames?

When I go to pick you up at the Greyhound bus station, I almost walk right past you.  You’ve put on weight.  Not that you’re fat.  You’re still just as beautiful as ever, but no longer my little Spanish waif.  You are a woman of twenty-seven years old, and you look every minute of it.

In the car, on the way to my apartment, you chirp away a bit nervously, awkwardly, unsure of yourself, trying to please.  Your South London accent, which I’d once adored, grates a bit upon my ears, which are now attuned to the hipper, cooler tones of the Haight-Ashbury District where I live.

A few years ago, you had the power of life and death over me: “You turned me into your pet piggy, rooting around in the refuse at the peripheries of your consciousness,” I wrote in my journal of the time. Now here you are, this chatty, dolly little London bird, bending my ear.

We make love as soon as we get home, as if to put that part behind us.  And though it’s still very good, it is not Spain — not Spain by a long shot.

That night at dinner you seem brighter, more self-confident.  Some of the old fire comes back, and you start spinning me tales the way you used to, making me laugh over your trials and turmoils of the past few years.

You have been everywhere, it seems, done everything, had every man you wanted, and more.

Rupert did not last a month.

“Well, you still look great,” I say, “whatever you’ve been through.”

“Yes,” you say, acknowledging the compliment with a small self-deprecating grin.  “But inside I’m a bit done in, you see.  A bit tired of all the craziness and drugs.”

“What are you looking for now?”

“I’m looking,” you reply, with something of the old rakish smile, “for a little house under the redwood trees, and a brood of kids running wild and naked in the woods.”

“Sorry, Carol,” I say, “but I’m afraid it’s too late for that now.”

Yet for the next few days we have a wonderful time together, reminiscing about our mad youth in Spain; and the old flame flickers up for a time, before finally dying out.

That’s not the end of it (we linger together through August, September, and October of that year), but it might as well be.

When Pilar, an old girlfriend of mine from the United Farmworkers Union, shows up with her biker husband, looking for a place to stay, she sleeps with us in my double bed while Chato kips on the narrow couch in my front room.

In the middle of the night, I hear Pilar whispering in my ear, “Oye, Eduardo, tu novia es razonable, liberal?Your girlfriend is she open-minded?”

“Completamente,” I whisper back. “What about your husband?”

“Are you serious?  He’s a Mexican!  But, thank God, he sleeps like the dead.”

She pulls up her CHICANO POWER t-shirt, exposing her spectacular bronze breasts, and mounts me like an Aztec goddess, huffing and puffing and making little inadvertent squeaking noises.  At one point, it gets so wild that we roll out of bed, hitting the floor with a bang, and I fear that the bandido in the next room will come running in to cut out my heart, but he sleeps through it all, blissfully unaware.

You, Carol, on the other hand, merely pretend to slumber.  When Pilar and I have reached and surpassed the pinnacle of our exertions and are lying side by side, panting with exhaustion, I reach over to pat you on the thigh and find that you are wet with desire.

Inspired, I grab Pilar’s right hand with my left and guide it over my lower body to your hot prickly cauldron, where my right hand has been busy stirring up a bubbling froth.  Instantly, you both catch your breath.  For a moment, I’m afraid that you will balk, but you settle into the slower, lighter, more knowledgeable female rhythm of Pilar’s circling fingers very quickly, leaving me free to explore other options.

Ten minutes later the three of us are at it again, in a new and different way.

Yet when we awaken in the morning, we avoid one another’s eyes, as if the light of dawn has filled us with some residual sense of indignity.

Feeling a need to diffuse the tension, I try a joke: “I tell you, ladies, there’s only one thing I regret about last night.”

“What’s that?” Pilar wants to know.

“That I don’t have two pricks,” I say, but neither of you laughs.

With the dirty stuff, you and I have given up on love, Carol.  And we never mention the word again.

I have no idea that any of this has affected you until one night I come home from school to find you sitting naked on my bed, plucking out your pubic hairs one by one.  There is a little pile of them on the sheet beside you, and the left side of your pubis is nearly bald.

It is some kind of message, I suppose, but I pretend not to notice, and leave the room.

In November, when you’re offered a job as nanny to a rock impresario’s kids in Aspen, Colorado, with free skiing thrown in, you accept.

I write you a letter, just to say hello.  You write me back, just to let me know that you’re getting on fine. And that’s the last I know of you until many years later.

It’s Christmas time.  I’m a full-time novelist now and have sold a couple of films as well. I live in London with my wife and child.  I walk into the Knightsbridge tube station with my arms full of gifts for my family and friends.  And by some incredible twist of fate, I witness an altercation that I was never, ever, meant to see.

You, Carol, have just been apprehended by a pair of London bobbies.  At first, I think they’ve caught you trying to sneak into the tube without paying, a common enough offense, one of which I myself have been guilty.  It quickly becomes apparent, however, that they suspect you of having shoplifted some expensive merchandise from Harrods’ department store.  They’re trying to lead you off peaceably for interrogation, without clapping the cuffs on you, but you are resisting, protesting indignantly:

“‘Ow dare you?   Take yerbleedin’ ‘ands off me this instant!”

You’re dressed presentably enough in a shop lady’s long, open woolen coat, with a clean but frayed white blouse, a well-worn tweed skirt and run-down high heels.  And despite the visible lines about your mouth and eyes, you are at thirty-eight years old still slender and attractive.  Yet in your agitation and distress, you have let your accent drop to a closer approximation of your antecedents than you probably would have liked.  Whatever the case, it’s evident to even the most casual observer that you are guilty as hell.  It shows all over your face.

My heart flies out to you, but I stand rooted in my tracks for one of the longest moments of my life, attempting to assimilate what my boggled eyes tell me to be true, while busy commuters, arms full of bags and boxes, bump and weave around me, uttering little harrumphs of irritation.  I desperately try to formulate some course of action, but the fact is that I’m torn between two warring impulses.  One is to simply march up to the police and vouch for you, attest to your character as an old friend, perhaps alluding to a mental trial that you are going through.  The other is to get the fuck out of there before you catch sight of me in this moment of your most profound humiliation.

I hesitate too long though, Carol, and what I most dread comes to pass.

You see me.

Your eyes that I remember so well – so deep, so Atlantic blue – go wide, and then a kind of veil comes over them. Your head drops.  Your rigid body goes slack, and you deliver yourself into the hands of the coppers without a whimper.

End of story.

It’s all a game.