She took another puff from the joint. Felt blissfully light-headed.
“This stuff is strong,” Giulia remarked, “so what about you?”
“Just a boring story,” Marta replied. “I wanted to see the world, I suppose. Wanderlust. Did a few bad things to get the cash.”
“What sort of things?”
“A couple of films for a Dutch company. Porn. Amateur stuff. Pretend casting videos done in a hotel room. Just a means to an end.”
“What was it like?” Giulia enquired.
“Felt very dirty afterwards but, like you, it’s something I don’t want to talk about much. I’ve drawn a line. The moment I had the money, I left Budapest. They were hoping I would do more, but it was never my intention. I met Stieg on the road. He’s okay. I like the way he smells. Different somehow from the guys back in Hungary. Strange, no?”
“Yes, life sure is strange,” Giulia remarked. “Even if I still haven’t a clue what it’s all about, family, men, sex, adventures, sometimes it makes no sense.” Her mind was sinking in a haze of dope. It was relaxing. It was good.
“Stieg knows this place two hours down the coast to the east,” Marta said. “Some sort of artist’s colony. Very remote. Almost private. Apparently the grass you can get hold of there is not only terribly pure but also quite cheap. We’re talking of heading there in a few days. Maybe you should come with us?” she suggested.
The initial group Giulia had been travelling with since Paris had now fragmented to all corners of the south and she had no longer had any loyalty to it. She hazily recalled Marta’s earlier words, “a means to an end”.
“Sure,” she nodded. The African sun above was sensually wrapping her into a warm cocoon of laziness. She knew she should get up and move out of it, or her pale skin would burn badly, but it felt difficult to summon the necessary energy.
Marta’s voice punctured Giulia's reverie.
“Our room’s shower is not working properly. Do you think we could use yours, Giulia? I do love this weather, but it makes me sweat like a pig.” There was a thin sheen of perspiration on her forehead and cheeks.
“Of course,” Giulia said.
They both rose unsteadily to their feet and walked into the shade. Stieg was at the bar downstairs nursing an absinthe and daydreaming. Flies buzzed. The three of them slowly walked past the tiled central patio of the building and down the corridor to Giulia’s room.
Once in her room, Giulia collapsed onto her bed and watched Marta and Stieg undress. They looked beautiful. Shiny. An innocent form of nudity. Stieg winked at her as he slapped Marta playfully on her rump and then took her by the hand and led her to the narrow shower stall.
Giulia took a final puff from the dregs of the joint now beginning to burn her fingers and listened to the sounds of water, laughter, splashing and then lovemaking.
She lowered her right hand and slipped it under her white linen skirt and inside her panties and touched herself. The hair that had been shaved away in Paris was growing again.
The next morning they all packed their few belongings into a rucksack each and ventured down the coast towards the colony. The bed and breakfast owner agreed to store Giulia’s laptop and her winter clothes while she was away. In her own mind, she knew there was little certainty she would even return.
Eleonora had moved into Jack’s hotel. She had her own room but for a week they would spend most of their days together. Speculating. Comparing notes. Evoking memories. Growing ever more familiar with each other. They visited Flora again but failed to extract any further information that might prove useful.
Unlike Giulia, she was allowed to eat spicy food so Jack introduced her to some of his favourite eating places in the Latin Quarter. The Japanese kebab place a few doors away from the hotel, Chez Bebert the couscous restaurant on the Boulevard St Germain, the Korean BBQ near the Bastille, the Crêpes stand near the Luxembourg. All places he had once wanted to take Giulia to, naturally.
Sitting together at a large wooden table in the hotel’s reception area, laptops facing each other, they had systematically explored their respective inboxes for Giulia’s old e-mails, a process Jack found painful as it evoked too many memories and reminded him of the so many words of tenderness and affection she had once bestowed upon him. Searching for forgotten words, throwaway remarks that might give them a clue to her present whereabouts or intentions.
“I’m no longer even sure whether she even loved me once,” Jack remarked.
“She did,” Eleonora answered.
“Really?”
“Yes, she spoke to me so much about you. And she wrote to me about it too. Here, in some of her mails. Do you want to see?” she asked, ready to move her computer across the table.
“I’d rather not,” he said. They had agreed at the outset that they would refrain from looking back at the past under a microscope darkly. Some things were better left private.
Eleonora fell into a deep silence. Jack’s mouse danced a distracted fox trot on the rubber pad as he moved on-screen between past messages.
She looked up and gazed deeply into his eyes. “What did you see in Giulia?” she asked him.
Jack pondered at length. He didn’t want his answer to be flippant.
“Life,” he finally said.
Eleonora squinted.
“She was so lively, almost childish at times,” he added. “Selfish, but in a healthy way. She made me look at things in a new way, in a positive way. Just one look at her and the whole day felt better, something I wouldn’t have to struggle through. Essentially, she made me a better man. Not someone who had seen it all and become a cynic. She became life itself for me.”
“That’s true. She is a force of nature. Always so cheerful. And determined. Nothing could ever make her change her mind once she had decided on something. Like the time, she borrowed her father’s camper and drove us to Venice for the film festival…”
“Could she be there?” he suggested. ‘Venice?” he wondered briefly.
“Something inside tells me it can’t be Italy. She’d feel a sense of defeat having to return to her own country, I believe.”
“You’re probably right. But then the Giulia you knew is not the one I did…”
“I know. After she met you, it’s strange. On one hand, she was so happy but also, on the other hand, there was a sadness about her.”
“My melancholy can be contagious,” Jack stated. But he knew this was not the sole reason. He had not been fully available then, and this had been like a worm eating away at her mind and her insides. He had proven incapable of giving all of himself. And Giulia was young and when she wanted the world, she wanted it now.
“It’s not just you,” Eleonora pointed out. “When I was with Henry,” she said, “I was both happy and sad. That’s what love is, isn’t it? One goes automatically with the other.”
“But does it always have to be this way?’
Eleonora didn’t answer. She scrolled down her screen. Looked up at Jack.
“I think it was in Barcelona she was happiest,” she remarked.
“That’s true,” Jack said. “It was her first time away from home on her own, before San Francisco.” Giulia had been arguing with her father for months to allow her to go on the student exchange programme. Her first genuine taste of liberty, of independence.
“I visited her there,” Eleonora said.
“Me too,” Jack said. Which they both knew.
Eleonora snapped her laptop screen down.
“She’s left Paris. We both agree on that. People often return to places they have been happy in, don’t they?”
“So they say,” Jack confirmed.
In books, yes. In real life?
“We should go to Barcelona,” Eleonora decided. “I know the names of some of the friends she met there. Boys. Girls too. The bars she enjoyed drinking in.”
“Maybe.”
“We have to do something,” she said. “Have you any better ideas?”
It
might work. It might also make things worse, Jack reflected, returning to the steps of Parc Güell or that café on Plaza Catalunya where they’d had their first serious row.
How would he feel setting foot in Barcelona again? At least, they could stay in a different hotel, not the Condal where the uniformed men manning the reception desk always gave him strong disapproving looks or smirked when he picked up his room key, hand in hand with a young woman visibly half his age. As Giulia had been. And Eleonora was too.
“Barcelona it is,” he said. He would confront the ghosts of the past. He had little choice.
The beach went on for miles. Sand of gold and the sea a shimmering blue against a cloudless horizon. They had travelled across a set of undulating dunes for half an hour after abandoning the main coast road as it bent inwards. It was as if a desert extended straight into the warm waters of the Atlantic, melting into the rhythm of the lapping waves as they caressed the shore with white endless tongues.
Giulia caught her breath. It was like a vision of paradise.
In Italy, most beaches were heavily regimented, with deck chairs and parasols organised into geometric configurations, straight lines and right angles that allowed no fantasy or freedom. She had been told there were some unspoilt, wild beaches in Sicily and Sardinia, but she had never had the opportunity to go there.
As far as her eyes could see the sea merged with the sky.
“Worth the journey, no?” Stieg remarked.
The two young women agreed.
“There is a small village a further three kilometres down the coastline, I gather. With a few shops where one can get food and drink, and a handful of buildings and a scattering of huts, it’s pretty basic but I’m told most people stay in tents on the beach at this time of the year.”
“Feels like the end of the world,” Marta remarked, gazing at the sun-scorched vista unfolding before them until the distant point where land and sea melted into each other.
Giulia followed the couple as they marched briskly down the sand. By the time they reached the colony the sweat was pouring down her back and her whole body felt as if she was wading through an open-air sauna. She should not have worn jeans.
It was just a hodge podge of fragile beach shacks and dozens of tents of all colours dotted in a zigzagging pattern across the sand beyond the reach of the tide line.
“We’re here,” Stieg shouted out.
“Is this it?” Marta queried, visibly disappointed by the Spartan aspect of the place. They could hear voices further down in the water where the stick insect silhouettes of a dozen or so people were playing around in the sea. A red and green flag floated above the nearest tent.
“Isn’t it great?” Stieg remarked, throwing down his heavy rucksack to the sand, taking the weight off his shoulders. Giulia did likewise. All she could feel was the discomfort of the heat holding her body in a vice.
“I take it all back,” Marta said. “It’s not the end of the world, more like the beginnings. Before civilisation established itself.”
Giulia could understand it. It was bare, sparse, primitive.
Next to her, Stieg was pulling his soiled T-shirt off above his head.
“Let’s swim,” he shouted out. “Wash all the grime of the journey away …”
Marta enthusiastically followed his example. Giulia copied her and slowly unbuckled the belt of her jeans. By now, Stieg in his haste had already stripped totally, and stood there naked, the sun already deepening the deep tan of skin. Giulia looked away. Turned to Martha as she unbuttoned her wet shirt. The Hungarian girl was down to her smalls. With no hesitation, Marta unclasped her black bra and swiftly pushed down her matching panties. Giulia hesitated. She had on occasion gone topless on beaches, but had never stripped down in public totally. She peered ahead. The others in the sea all appeared to be nude too.
“Come on,” Stieg said. Marta giggled. “It’s the way we were all created. Naked. You’d stand out, if you were the only one here to keep your bikini bottom on. Don’t be such a prude, Giulia.”
Her two friends began running towards the soft lapping waves, leaving her behind. Sounds of laughter breezed across the beach, or was it the shriek of distant birds? Giulia braced herself and stripped. She felt self-conscious about it. Her small breasts, the whiteness of her skin, the increasing bushiness of her pubes, the size of her bum. Only five men and members of her family had ever witnessed her naked.
She took a deep breath and trooped down to the edge of the water, dipped her toes in. It was surprisingly warm. Stieg and Marta were already well beyond the crest of the waves, up to their waist in the sea, splashing water at each other and shrieking with delight. Giulia raised her arms and waded in.
Barcelona had proven a dead end. No one there had seen or heard of Giulia since she had completed her Erasmus exchange programme and duly returned to Rome, although many had fond memories of her and expressed dismay at the news she had disappeared. Eleonora had tracked down a girl who had been in the same Catalan Literature class at the University and had visited Giulia in Italy six months later, on which occasion the three young women had all met up for a late night drink in a joint off Via Veneto which had always been one of their teenage haunts. The Spanish girl, Mariana, had remembered how Giulia had once mentioned she had spent a wonderful time in Sitges, a beach resort thirty minutes south of the city.
Jack and Eleonora had conveyed this sparse piece of news to Giulia’s father who had flown in to Barcelona for the day to enquire about the progress, or lack of, of their investigation. Giulia’s uncle, his brother, was a pilot for Alitalia, so members of the family had easy access to cheap flights.
They met up in the café of a bookshop that Giulia had been known to frequent, a few blocks off the Ramblas.
“I still don’t understand why she has left,” the surgeon said. “She never missed for anything at home, you know. She was spoilt even.”
“She just wants to live her life, Dottore,” Eleonora pointed out. “I’m sure it’s nothing personal against you or your family.”
“But why run away?” he sighed.
Jack stayed silent.
“I’m sure she’s all right,” Eleonora said. “Once she has satisfied her curiosity, she will come back, I am sure.”
“I hope so,” her father said. “Her mother and I worry so much.”
“None of us believe any harm has come to her,” Jack intervened, not that he had any evidence of the fact. They all looked at each other with concern. The possibility of suicide was like an elephant in the room.
“She wouldn’t,” her father firmly said. “I just know. Not my daughter.”
He had to make his way back to the airport. They walked him to the coach stop on Plaza Espaňa.
“Any news, we will be in touch. Absolutely,” Jack assured him. Eleonora nodded approvingly and kissed the doctor on both cheeks. Jack and he shook hands.
It was the last week of the tourist season, fiesta time, much fireworks the following weekend theyhad been informed at reception, and they had been unable to get two separate rooms in the same hotel. He had offered to place a cushion between them in the large king-size bed they would have to share on this night, but Eleonora had just shrugged her shoulders in response. They both felt emotionally drained, sensing that their hapless quest was reaching yet another dead end.
Jack woke up several times during the night, as he usually did. A thin sliver of moonlight peered through the open window which looked over a panorama of flat roofs and terraces where a variety of neighbouring houses hung their washing out to dry overnight. Eleonora slept soundly, the warmth of her body reaching him in peaceful waves, the muted sound of her breathing like an even serenade. Her partly naked back faced him. She was wearing a long purple silk night-gown. He, just his underpants. He had turned his back to her when she had changed before bedtime. Once, he realised she was also awake and looking at him in the darkness, the cadence of her breath now different. Were they both thinking the same thing? Or of the
same person? He kept his eyes closed, willing sleep to return.
At five in the morning, he woke again, noted the time on the LCD of the radio alarm on the bedside table. In her sleep, Eleonora had moved nearer, and was now barely an inch away from him. Somehow, the thin blanket had been pulled away to her side and Jack was now only half-covered. Not that it was cold by any means. Jack turned over. The movement was more instinctive than deliberate as he navigated in a blur between sleep and consciousness. He just wanted to smell her, decipher that distinctive sweetness in her fragrance. As if she was sensing this, it was Eleonora who shifted imperceptibly and slid over the sheet until their bodies met.
Spooned.
Through her skin, he could feel her heartbeat, its strong vibration swimming across her skin like electricity. Jack’s arm was in an awkward position, unready as he had been for Eleonora to bridge the gap between their bodies and he knew that if it remained where it now was under his flank, he would soon cramp badly. He pulled his arm out and his hand grazed her rump. Her night-gown had hitched up during her sleep. Her softness overwhelmed him. He knew she was now awake. Neither said anything.
His hand slowly journeyed across the skin of her arse. It felt as if she was on fire. Silk and flames.
He felt himself hardening. His cock growing against the back of her thighs. There was no way she could not feel his arousal. Eleonora could have moved away to her side of the bed, but she didn’t.
Now fully awake and encouraged, his heart beating the light fantastic, Jack moved his wandering hand away from her rear and moved it upwards under the thin material of her slip until he reached her right breast, cupping its firmness, almost weighing it. He extended his finger until it grazed her nipple, landing on its sharp promontory, rubbing against its uneven texture then circling it slowly but steadily. Now it was her time to harden.
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