by Gail Godwin
Walls of terra-cotta & cream & ochre. Green-tiled roofs topped with a thousand different minarets, vanes and decorations, terraces & balconies, broken-off top stories, wash hanging along Alhambra-like porticos— the ruins of the Moorish palace almost in touching distance. And the great purple hills to the north, orange trees in patios, a hundred families’ lives observed at dusk from one fourth-floor vantage point. The plash of the fountain, the chimes of the cathedral, a clang of a mop bucket set wearily on a tile floor.
The hotel room in Málaga—blue walls, terrazzo floors of Indian red & white squares, one chair, one table, one stained sink, both taps reading “Frio.” A huge brown wardrobe & an iron bed with a blue & white cotton bedspread like the hospitals. One window under which all the sounds of humanity blended together. “Compro botellas!” A child crying, a motorcycle resounding in the narrow alley.
Set the mood for isolation. No language, no heat, no way to get out of the town.
A brief insight into the futility of plans & ambition.
No way to contact anyone. In a private chamber of retrospection.
the little cloth salesman from Barcelona
the huge ventana with the faded tapestry curtain in ochres & greens & reds of forest paths & clumps of fern & red flowers
the bells (three of them, the last one always strikes three too many)
This is yours. Don’t try to spoil it by adding elaborations.
Don’t forget the chamber pot [which she used furtively rather than go out into the dark hall into an unlighted WC].
JANUARY 31
ENERO 31—LAS PALMAS, CANARY ISLANDS128
Hostal Concha
Dr. Grau Bassas, 7
Las Palmas
Gran Canarias
I have a prescience that this is going to be a happy month of tropical warmth & golden beaches & memories of strange freedom. A taxi driver drove me all over the place, running in & out, making phone calls, & found me an ideal spot—if only I can stay. At the moment I am in a room on the third floor more outdoors than in. I can hear the ocean (my old friend) & feel the salt breezes. I am in the middle of an island in the South Atlantic and I am free & warm & happy. Que seré seré. La Giralda y Palacio del reyes in Seville today.129 Afterwards, a lunch in a glassed-in upstairs restaurant with a view of the city.
The little manager here is already enamored, so I shall have a native to show me the ropes. Ah . . . I am a born roamer. The sun, the sun, for twenty-eight days. Maybe more. I hope Miller takes his time.
FEBRUARY 1
I think I will be forced to draw some pictures of this island. The colorful houses, the schoolchildren (all dressed in brown), the houses nestled around the volcanoes (one of which let loose with a gentlemanly belch in 1949). The canaries are singing away and the sun is hot. Buy: bathing suit. Writing paper. Drawing tablet. Some sort of food. Sunday the l. m. is taking me to the island of golden sands.130
This morning while walking on the beach I thought: I have been so many places, had so many experiences, when, when will I begin to write it all down? This climate is too marvelous to be believed. Naturally have been thinking about Florida this a.m.
Conquest. He is most obliging & bought me a bottle of perfume. (“Well, you were mad at me because I smelled so good, so what could I do?”) And tonight we are going to see a Spanish film called La Llegado un Ángel131 & starring a fourteen-year-old girl. I guess it’s too much to hope for English titles. Afterwards we will have dinner (I keep forgetting these Spanish eat so late) & then come back here. During this month—get brown, get hair fixed like that girl I saw today, have my suit shortened, have everything cleaned. (This perfume is like everything else about this magic island, fruity, spicy, heady, exotic.) Why haven’t the Americans discovered Canaria? Well, I’m glad they haven’t ruined it here. Antonio & I went uptown to look for a bathing suit (the styles are about ten years behind)—the smell of fish, the trucks of bananas rattling by, the dirt everywhere. But this hotel is immaculate & smells of Lysol—the tiled steps, the mosaic walls, everything is scrubbed down to perfection. Of all my European travels, this was the end. A.’s suits are made by a loving tailor, he changes his shoes & socks fifty times a day. He has a satyr’s face.
FEBRUARY 3
SATURDAY
Last night we went into Las Palmas & bought a bathing suit & walked up & down the promenade & went in a little sweet shop & drank Cuba libres (even if Cuba is no longer free) and ate sweets. Sweets, sweets. It’s a wonder that boy has any teeth. I am getting a little disgusted with myself. London ought to be a change. I shall try to be a lady. Last night I dreamed about my first day at work—catastrophic. Everybody was always taking collections for coffee & going out to lunch & I couldn’t get my work done. Then I threw a cognac at a fellow worker and called her nosey. Ah, it was a true “Godwin Nightmare.”
From eight to twelve, the bellman in Hotel Gran Canarias wears a uniform and serves the idle tourists. But from twelve to three, he is entitled, as are all Spaniards, to a princely three-hour lunch. Commerce literally stops for three hours, and if the visitor has to buy a bottle of perfume or a roll of toilet paper between twelve and three, it is just too damn bad. All in all, I think it is a lovely custom.
FEBRUARY 4
Overcast—dammit. Watch me lose the little tan I have. Last night we took a bumpy bus ride (the bus just starts when it decides it has enough people and leaves them hanging out the doors) to the new city on the hill where we ate squid & sea salmon and drank Cuba libres in a small glass-enclosed restaurant. There was a sweet clean little mongrel which we fed and he followed us the whole night. We visited the new church and A. made the sign of the cross on my forehead with holy water. I wish he hadn’t done that. It made me feel odd. After all, I’m not impervious to religious symbolism.
What a beautiful day we had yesterday. Took a car to the mountain village of Teror (stair-step plowed fields, geraniums growing wild, white & ochre houses growing between mountains). The village itself sports balconies of canary-pine wood and a big church of which they are fanatically proud.132 We had three or four kinds of meat—all fresh—with our various alcohols. Then we walked to the very top of the hill to the city of Arucas, the site of banana plantations, 133 stopping along the way to get rum & Coke from roadside bars where the countrymen gathered to play cards. We got progressively drunker along the way. Dear Tony outlined for me all the ways he would be a good husband and said he needed a wife to help him run his three businesses. I haven’t the slightest doubt that he will be a huge success. I like him, he is attractive & knows how to treat a woman, but talking in terms of a lifetime—that is a different thing. He has no desire to live anywhere except the Canaries (I must say I can’t blame him). But it is nice to speculate on all my might-have-been lives.134 If I don’t quit being so selective I may wind up with nothing.
Old Mr. Wilmot, a long-term British guest at Las Conchas: 135
“I was looking at my list of relations to see who was going to die next and by damn I found I was the next on the list.”
“I give him ten of those peseta sort of things.”
“I get tired of living alone. In London, whenever I heard a funny story I wanted to share with someone I’d hop a train and go to my bookseller. It’d make his day.”
“I have a son sixteen, haven’t seen him in almost seventeen years.”
“She does right well at it . . .”
“Y’know, these kids don’t mind letting you join in their games at all.”
“I got a job setting out the red lanterns for a construction crew— it was bloody good fun until I set my tent on fire & almost burned down the Piccadilly Hotel.”
FEBRUARY 9
Must take a gamble in less than twenty days. Once taken, once decided, I must never, never look back or second-guess myself. This island has a great & prosperous future. Tony has asked me to stay here & help him start his business and share his life. This is hard to put into words, but my choice will represent the selection of
one way of life & the complete rejection of the other. I have thought of nothing lately but what certain other people think: B., Uncle Bill, Aunt Sophie, Dean Luxon, all those. But what do I really want? It is indeed a comforting feeling to have a man like this who so completely and warmly respects & loves women. If only that damn job in London would fall through . . . I’ll never forget how mad Tony got when I spent 120 pestas on a Vogue & Esquire. “Write to your mother and ask her to send your old magazines & you can read them over.”
But could I give up my books? My writing? Etc., etc. All I am speaking of is the very layer I have only recently acquired. Perhaps the very fact that I have read too much, studied myself too much, grown away from God is what is causing all this trouble.
What do I want out of this world? It is so wearying to be always thinking of oneself. What if one lived for another person, too? I’ve never tried it. It might be interesting.
FEBRUARY 11
The thing that is both frightening and rather wonderful about this island is that the people are still living with the basic Catholic precepts of the fifteenth century. They eat, sleep, marry, have as many children as God sends them, & die.
Well. 9: 00 p.m. Antonio just returned & I won’t see him anymore tonight. Some German people reported 2, 000 pesetas plus shaving equipment gone. So Tony has to go to the police. Damned irresponsible people leaving money in their rooms. Actually, I’m relieved that I’ll have a little time to myself. The man hasn’t given me time to think. This room is not so bad. At least it’s private & warm. Portrait of Tony to remember later on cold nights in London.
A very Spanish face, dark complexion, jagged bones in his forehead— which gives him a “rumpled” look. Fine small Roman nose & compact ears. His smile always starts with his nose. It wrinkles. His mouth, when closed, is pink & childish. When opened, rather like a rogue (bandito). His teeth are hard & big; one top front one was chipped when a friend tripped him in the cinema when he was eleven. He is very clean & has nice hands & feet (small also). One finger (his left index) was shattered by a firecracker at the top joint. So he looks like a scarred soldier when he motions a waiter or rests that hand on the table. His suits fit him like loving caresses. His legs are magnificent—the legs of a cyclist & swimmer. His hair is not quite black, and dry & curly. He uses no glop or goo. Only Colgate, Varon Dandy, 136 & Camay soap. His English is touching & original. He is going through the stage preceding the perfect mastery of a second language, and says “proyect” instead of “project,” “fithful” instead of “faithful,” “make a walk” instead of “take a walk,” “for whole life,” “recept” for “receipt” . . . and consistently refers to himself in the third person. “Tony will change you . . . You think you can be a block of ice with your Tony? Not for one minute.” And “Ahff coorse!” (Of course) He will be a good businessman if I will get the hell out and let him concentrate.
FEBRUARY 14
El día de los queridos137
Heard from Lorraine yesterday. I am brown & have lost the dissipated look around my eyes which worries me so much. Am eager to rewrite the beginning of “Roxanne” from a better, less emotional perspective. Finished a book of Moravia’s short stories.138 Totally depressing. His women are all viragoes, his men lacking in resolution & character. Each story is only a segment of an affair. I could do as well, I am sure.
FEBRUARY 15
Hoy llove. “Rain is like god here. Be happy,” said Antonio. Perhaps in five to ten years we can purify water from the sea, but it will cost twenty-five million pesetas. Life goes on. When the faucet has no water, someone must carry buckets upstairs & empty them into tanks. Such is day-to-day existence in L.P. Tony received word from Martinez in Madrid that his travel agency has been granted. He will be a huge success. He has such a “straight line” way with people. Joking, honest & stern. At night, the women & babies lean over windowsills & watch the people pass by. When women are not having babies or feeding families, they are hanging out clothes. One thing about a hotel—it completely isolates you from the local ways. You can be in New York, Las Palmas, Miami Beach, or the Côte d’Azur & it will be just the same: good plumbing, thick towels, soft beds & a bar.
“Tony, I think I should leave you for a while to make sure we love each other . . .”
“Okay. You go to Tenerife for two days. I will buy the ticket.”
It is fatal to wear slacks around here at night. The men go “hssst!” and stab lighted cigarettes toward your face.
FEBRUARY 20
8: 45 P.M.
In my room overlooking the roofs of Grau Bassas. The moon comes up full and quickly, almost sinister. Child’s voice. Sound of a muffled radio. Some old song. Church bells. Motor scooter. Dog’s bark; goat’s maaa. Feel strange & dreamlike. Haunted by memories & fragments of I-don’t-know-what.
All day I have felt drowsy & as if I am about to be launched—like a spaceship.
Eat, sleep . . . eat, sleep . . .
Finished Point Counter Point, 139 by Huxley. Wrote it when he was thirty-four.
Tony is becoming reconciled to the fact that I must go. But can I be strong and not wishy-washy? Can I keep from wavering, making new promises in a weak moment?
Standing on a curb, legs apart, briefcase in hand, bargaining for his first office building. Warm, dry hands, fragrant hair, the ever-burning puro between his teeth, even when he talks. The sure, confident, self-assured yet self-forgetful way he holds his head. A man at twenty-four. A little giant.
MARCH 6
A surfeit of sun, idleness, the taste of sweets on my tongue, the smell of suntan oil turned to vinegar.
I am so completely disgusted with my idleness, with the same clothes I’ve worn since October. I long for all the civilized niceties that aren’t supposed to matter: a manicure, a fresh coiffure, clean new underclothes, polished shoes, a very unemotional, cold evening at a play or a good concert.
Mr. Wilmot gave me the first three chapters of his autobiography to read: “Selected Stills in Black and White from the Highly Colored.”
Chapter 1 begins: “It has always seemed to me singularly unfortunate that ante-natal instruction is not made available to the forthcoming immigrant, as well as to the hostess.”140
Antonio is in a rage because I shook hands with Rosenbaum.141
“De acuerdo . . . hasta luego . . .” Tony is jabbering on the phone.
I’m sure his cigar is between his teeth.
MARCH 7
Tomorrow I was supposed to leave. Each day my endurance stretches to endure still another postmanless day. Everything has changed. The tides, the sun angle, the visitors. There are new flocks of lily-white tourists on the beach. The Mullingers & the white-haired lady & the sick man leave tomorrow. Tony is engrossed in his business. I think he secretly knows it is all over. Oscar Wilde said: Only the faithless can understand the real sorrows of love.142 I’m bored with my tan. Am as brown as I want to be. Thinking of Anderson this morning143 —exactly ten years ago this June. Where is the old gang now? Married & at home. Do I envy or flout them? The thing here is, there is absolutely nothing to do. I am sick of reading & eating & escape-sleeping. Only 11: 30—one more hour & then I’ll either pack or go into a depression. Manuelo finishes the suit today. It will probably be all wrong but I must smile & say how much I like it.
MARCH 11
Things are silver & gray-green cool today with a breath of moisture over everything. Although it is cool & almost sunset, the water has never been more tempting. Not to fight it, as I did the other day when I was crying for a good fight & no human was available.
But to go in slowly & definitely & let it slosh over my thighs, stomach, chest, neck—soothing, healing. I know it would be warm.
Two seventy-five-year-old queers in no. 3. An American & an Englishman. The American went out for a walk & the Englishman almost died of jealousy. “Have you seen McNabb?” he screamed. “You see he hasn’t been well. He was supposed to meet me for lunch & he didn’t and I’m worried. He hasn’t
been well, you know.”
He clawed a flaccid face, his milky blue eyes looking over my right shoulder, lisping a little. “‘I pay for water & I want water.’ That’s what Mr. McNabb said to me only this morning. He wanted his bath, you know. He has a frightful amount of money, and then, of course, he’s American, and you know he’s sick. These Americans are different, you know.”
A pleading look at me for agreement, thinking I was Spanish.
“Yes,” I said.
There goes a couple who gives me the courage to get old. A man & his wife walking along the Canteras.144 About fifty-five or sixty, each of them. No freakish beauty preserved through endless ritual & no frantic evidence of trying to look younger. She was wearing a full-length brown coat—the kind that could have been advertised in this month’s Vogue for Mrs. Exeter145 or could equally be fifteen years old. He had on a tailored suit—I think. Their faces I couldn’t see because they were directly below me & walking in the northerly direction. Both had good posture, without being stiff. They walked in step (unconsciously). I am somehow sure they are happy and are not afraid of getting to be seventy-five.
MARCH 14
—Four more days.
Tony took me to Pueblo Canario & we drank tea & ate biscuits and I got my family some presents. Wine flasks for Tommy & Rebel, castanets for Franchelle, a Toledo brooch & inlaid case for Kathleen. Also: a pair of Toledo cufflinks for B., & Tony bought me a pin just like my mother’s.
I am excited about my story. Decided now to just do December to April & see what happens.
Note: Philip Roth’s treatment of Libby in “Very Happy Poems”146 as contrasted to the what-she-ate what-she-wore slickness of a Marcia Davenport heroine.147
The difference is hard to describe, but oh, can you feel it when you’re reading. Roth’s Libby is human & has human frailties: (1) her conversation is not a series of thought masterpieces; (2) she is not always right—always adhering to the moral code of Good Housekeeping & Ladies’ Home Journal; (3) she thinks in disjointed spurts, not montages; (4) everything doesn’t fit together so damn neatly like a five-and-ten jigsaw puzzle.