Foreigners

by Stephen Finucan

  “Ciao,” she replied with her sweet smile.

  He would have liked to have taken things more slowly, but Antonio now seemed to be in a hurry. Driving back along the cliff road Stanley was struck by the remarkable view it afforded. Capri lay before them like one of the pastels in the Mercato’s dining room, crude in its composition but stunning in its effect. And when they reached the other side of the island and stopped the taxi on a bend in the road so they could take a picture of the Faraglioni, Stanley was taken aback by the strength of his emotions at seeing the strange rock formations; the three chalky pinnacles rising out of the turquoise sea filled him with such a sense of desolation.

  “God,” Shirley said, standing by his side, “I wonder who owns all those yachts.” She turned back toward the taxi. “Do any movie stars own any of those yachts, Antonio?”

  Antonio, who’d been leaning against the hood of the car, came over next to them. He looked down at the harbour and squinted, as if he could make out one boat from another. “Yes,” he said, nodding. “Yes, some of them. And over there,” he pointed toward a large, white villa on the opposite cliff. “That is where they go. Very expensive hotel.”

  Shirley handed him the camera. “Take our picture, will you, Antonio. Make sure you get some of those yachts in it.”

  At the hotel that morning, Stanley had been up with the sun. He slipped into shorts and a golf shirt and made his way downstairs. No other guests seemed to be awake yet and he found Giuseppe sitting in the dining room with his wife, drinking coffee and eating hard buns and blueberry jam. The landlord jumped to his feet when he saw Stanley and began to set a table for him.

  “No,” Stanley said, putting up a hand. “I just want some coffee, if that’s okay.”

  “Si. Yes, yes. Uno caffè americano, si.”

  Stanley stood there, not really knowing what to do, while Giuseppe went about preparing his coffee. He smiled at the landlord’s wife and said what a lovely morning it was, but she just nodded, not seeming to understand. When Giuseppe brought him the coffee, he nodded a thank you.

  “Is it all right if I take it back to my room?” asked Stanley, feeling rather sheepish about his request.

  “Yes, of course,” said Giuseppe.

  In his room again, Stanley was careful not to wake Shirley. He opened the shutter doors and took his coffee out onto the balcony.

  Their room overlooked the courtyard. The scent of the lemon trees below mixed with the aroma of his strong coffee and gave Stanley a pleasing sense of calm. There was nothing impressive about the view. It would do little to sell the Mercato to a prospective guest. Directly opposite were the peeling pink stucco walls of terraced apartments, their patios cluttered with hanging laundry and tangled kitchen gardens. To the left, the raised rail lines of the Circumvesuviana, and in the distance beyond, past the stretch of residential sprawl, the faint blue of the Bay of Naples. To the right, the drab modern grey brick of the neighbouring apartment block that fronted onto the Corso Italia. And still, in the quiet of morning, it was a delight. The warmth of the sun, the town just coming to life. It was worth it just for this, Stanley thought: Sant’Agnello at dawn. Gloria would have liked it very much.

  Capri Town was horrible, the Piazzetta so overrun that they had to shoulder their way through. When Stanley stopped to get a photograph of the dome of Chiasa Santo Stefano, he was pushed so hard from behind that he nearly dropped the camera, but when he turned and looked into the crowd, no one met his eyes. He wondered how it could be that this town and Anacapri shared the same island. And how too that it was this place that garnered all the attention. It was so dirty, so confused, so unfriendly—no different than Marina Grande below. And from the café terraces that choked the square he felt the stares of patrons as they sat with their espressos, like arbiters in judgment.

  Ahead of him, Shirley seemed to lose her way. She was in a hurry to get to the fancy shops on Via Camerelle—Gucci, Ferragamo, the lot, Antonio told them, and cheaper than if they went into Naples. But now she was searching for him, trying to find his face among the throng. Stanley waited and watched her. There was a trace of panic around her eyes. People jostled her as they made their way past. She called his name and a few passersby gave her odd looks. Stanley was less than fifteen feet away, but he might as well have been fifteen miles, for even when he fell into her direct line of sight she could not see him. He remained standing a moment longer, being jostled himself, until her panic began to progress into fear; then he stepped forward and took her by the hand, and when she first looked into his face it was as if she were looking into the face of a stranger.

  “Stanley?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, Stanley. I thought I lost you.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m right here.”

  “I think we should go now, Stanley.”

  “Yes, dear,” he said and began to lead her from the square.

  They found Antonio back at the taxi rank leaning against the car, smoking a cigarette. He was talking to two other men, who were laughing at something he had just told them. He hadn’t seen them approach, and waved a hand at them when Stanley said, “We’d like to go back to Marina Grande now, please.”

  Then, realizing it was who it was, he put a smile on his face and looked at his watch.

  “So soon?” he said.

  “Yes,” Stanley replied.

  “Maybe you like to see Villa Jovis? It is very beautiful.”

  “No,” Stanley said, opening the taxi door for Shirley. “Marina Grande, please.”

  Antonio shrugged his shoulders and threw his cigarette onto the pavement. He passed a surreptitious comment to the two men as he climbed behind the wheel; again they laughed.

  The road to Marina Grande did not bother Stanley as it had before. He knew he could do nothing about the hidden dangers, but now he felt better prepared for them. Shirley put her head on his shoulder. He ran his fingers through her hair and saw that her roots were starting to show their grey again. His kissed her softly on her crown.

  “Let’s eat at the hotel tonight,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Shirley. “Yes, that sounds nice.”

  The scooter shop appeared to be closed when they passed it by. The marina itself was quieter, less crowded. Stanley still could not understand its charm.

  TO HAVE NOT

  FRANKLIN FOWLER CURLED HIS TOES in the sand and smiled, then he called to the cabaña boy.

  “Hernán, orto maragrita, por favor.”

  “Si, el Señor Folwer. Immediatamente, señor.”

  Franklin watched as Hernán made his way to the thatch-roofed bar on the thin strip of grass that separated the Hotel Vivo’s pool from the swath of white-sand beachfront that was restricted to paying guests. The beach was protected on each side by thick spans of yellow rope stretched between iron stanchions. Hotel guards in dark brown trousers and beige blouses with flashes on the shoulders patrolled these lengths. Around their waists they had low-slung white belts with dangling batons. The guards were not entirely necessary, but they gave the guests a sense of security, and helped furnish the illusion that their hotel was of the same class as the bigger resorts across the bay in Nuevo Vallarta. At those bigger resorts, better-dressed guards than these policed the beaches for the beggars and trinket hawkers who descended upon the guests like mosquitos at dusk in the hope of earning a few pesos, or if they were lucky, actual American dollars. Such pedlars and panhandlers did not bother with the Hotel Vivo.

  “Su bebida, el Señor Fowler.”

  “Gracias tanto, Hernán,” Franklin said, taking the drink. He licked some salt from the rim, then held the cold glass to his forehead a moment, before setting it into the little hole he had burrowed in the sand beside his beach chair. Then Franklin reached into the canvas bag he had taken to carrying around with him and retrieved two ten-peso notes.

  “Muchos gracias, el Señor Fowler,” said Hernán and bowed graciously.

  Franklin waved his hand: “It’s nothi
ng, Hernán. No es nada.”

  He watched as Hernán made his way once again across the cloying sand toward the bar. When Franklin had first begun spending his afternoons on the beach he’d always gone to the bar himself. He didn’t like the thought of Hernán—who, though he was a cabaña boy, was several years Franklin’s senior—having to struggle across the sand in his heavy-soled shoes to bring him his drink. He thought he was doing the older man a favour. That is until the hotel manager, an ex-pat Brit with a swollen belly and varicose nose, took him aside and explained that the cabaña boys depended on tips from the guests to subsidize their otherwise meagre wages.

  “I’d no idea,” Franklin had said, embarrassed by his miscue. “Have there been complaints?”

  “Not complaints exactly,” the manager replied. His name was Willy Booth, and Franklin found him rather intimidating. He leaned in close when he spoke, resting a thick-fingered hand on Franklin’s shoulder. It was not so much a posture of confidence as one of implied threat, as if he was offering a warning rather than kindly advice, though never once did the smile pass from his lips, which made it all the worse. “Let’s just call it concerns, shall we,” Willy said. “These buggers know better than to complain.”

  From that point on Franklin had allowed himself to be served, or rather paid for the privilege of service. Willy had told him just to throw the boys a few pesos, but Franklin decided on twenty. It was his only real expense apart from his bar tab and club membership, which was what Willy called the nominal fee Franklin had to pay for using the Hotel Vivo’s beach, seeing as he was not actually a paying guest of the hotel. Franklin owned a private house on a lagoon farther along the road.

  Franklin took a sip of his drink. What a glorious taste, he thought, as the salt mixed with the tart lime and the pungent tequila. He tipped his head back and let the ice slide along his tongue and down his throat before it had a chance to melt. It gave him a quick rush of pain behind his eyes, like when he used to bite into an ice cream as a child. He put his thumb behind his front teeth and pushed hard to relieve the pressure of the cold. It was a trick his mother had taught him. As the ache subsided, he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes to the sun. This is the life, he told himself, and rubbed a hand across his belly. It was growing fat with leisure; soon it would be big like Willy Booth’s.

  Willy Booth. Franklin would never have thought it after that first meeting, but without Willy he would be lost. And he half suspected that Willy might be the same without him. Well, if not exactly lost, then at least somewhat more solitary.

  It was Willy who forced the issue, inviting Franklin into the bar for a drink that turned into many more and soon became a routine that both looked forward to, though neither would come out and say as much. To see them together, they were an odd couple indeed. There was Willy, his body engorged like a weightlifter gone to pot, his appetite for pleasure nearly as swollen, and always wearing a smile that only just masked the belligerence residing beneath. Next to him Franklin’s weediness was thrown into stark relief: he was spindly arms and spindly legs with only the hint of a paunch pushing out the front of his shirt. And whereas Willy’s skin seemed stretched thin over his bulk and barely able to contain him, Franklin looked to have more than he needed—this was most noticeable beneath his chin, where the flesh hung loose like a turkey’s wattle, making it appear as if he had once been a much larger man, which wasn’t the case.

  For his part, Franklin recognized their incongruities, and he was aware that their differences went far deeper than merely the physical. In Willy, Franklin saw a vigour that he craved, and he secretly hoped that some of the big man’s excessiveness might rub off on him.

  In truth, Franklin began to think of Willy Booth as a godsend, as the conveyance that would deliver him from the deepening rut of his life. He even said as much to him. “Willy,” Franklin said one night in the bar, his chair tilted precariously on two legs, his vision blurred by drink, “you are a godsend.” Willy looked at him with a pinched expression that forced the blood into the end of his bulbous nose, then refilled their glasses with the Johnny Walker Black he’d commandeered from behind the bar, and said, “Your problem, Fowler, is that you’ve no romance in your life. Ningún romance. Ninguna vitalidad. Ninguna aventura. Know what I mean?”

  Franklin knew exactly what Willy meant.

  When his mother died, Franklin found himself an orphan. He was forty-one years old and, for the first time in his life, alone in the world.

  After the funeral, Franklin stood in the kitchen of the house on Montrose Avenue and made himself a cup of coffee. He liked it sweet: three sugars. He took his coffee, and a handful of biscuits from the tray he had brought home from the reception in the basement of St Bart’s, and went out into the backyard. He stood by the fence and munched a Chinese rice cracker that to him tasted of nothing, though an elderly friend of his mother told him the crackers were meant to taste like prawns. Franklin had never eaten prawns before.

  Below him lay Bickford Park. On the hillside opposite, a number of people had set out towels on the grass and were bathing in the late-May sunshine. A group of older men played bocce at one end of the park, the soft clicking of the balls floating upward on the currents of warm air and mingling with the shouts coming from the baseball diamond below Harbord Street. Franklin watched it all, drinking his coffee and chewing his flavourless biscuits. And while he did, he thought, I have never played baseball, I have never bowled bocce, I have never lain out in the sun.

  El Rio Pequeño de Magdalena was not a river at all. Nor was it the enchanting lagoon that the agent in Puerto Vallarta had described. Rather it fell somewhere between a modest inlet and a vast salt marsh.

  There were two other properties on the lagoon, both vacant. Each had rather humble plantation-style houses, like Franklin’s. But whereas the other two had peeling facades, their columns looking like grey snakes shedding their skin in the sun, the weatherboard walls of La Casa de Mavis— Franklin had named the house after his mother—were painted bright canary yellow. The realtor, an American who ran the Coldwell Banker office in Puerto Vallarta that specialized in holiday homes, had arranged, in a moment of generosity or pity, Franklin wasn’t sure, to have the house painted. He also arranged the hiring of a part-time cleaning woman and a part-time gardener, who saw to the upkeep of La Casa de Mavis for the cost of twenty American dollars a week each. Franklin wondered if he might not be able to find even cheaper help, but decided it would be impolite to refuse the man’s assistance.

  Seen from the far shore of the lagoon, the estate, which was how Franklin liked to refer to it, looked a lovely sight: the bright yellow house standing out like a tropical bloom against the green forest behind, the closely cropped lawn, with newly tilled beds awaiting the planting of multicoloured local flowers, sloping gently toward the water’s edge. Close up, though, the lurid paint and shorn grass weren’t nearly as convincing; it all looked inconsistent and slapdash. But Franklin didn’t mind; it was cheap, it was his, and it didn’t overlook Bickford Park.

  His mother had managed to pay off the mortgage to the house on Montrose Avenue when Franklin was still in elementary school. She saved the documents that the bank gave her until Victoria Day, then she took her young son out into the backyard where they filled a steel bucket with dirt. She rolled the documents into a tight tube and planted them in the bucket, so that to Franklin they looked like the beginnings of a little paper tree. Then she took him by the hand and led him to the picnic table, which she decided would be a safe distance. After she sat him down, she smiled sweetly and said, “This will be our own private fireworks.”

  She went back to the bucket, where she removed a pack of wooden matches from the pocket of her housedress and having lit one, touched its flame to the mortgage papers. Then she stood back and watched them burn.

  There was smoke, but very little flame. It was, to say the least, anticlimactic. And Franklin hoped that because of this his mother would relent and take him above Bloor
Street to Christie Pits where, after the sun went down, there would be real fireworks. But after the bank papers had smouldered away into a fine grey ash, she took him by the hand again and brought him back into the house. They sat together in the living room and watched Mannix with the volume raised to drown out the sound of the Catherine wheels and Roman candles and aerial repeaters that drifted through the night air.

  His mother loved Mannix. Every week they watched the show, and she’d often told him how Mike Connors was the spitting image of his father. But Franklin had found photographs in his mother’s room of her and his father from before he was born, and some from after, of the three of them in hospital when Franklin looked like nothing more than a bundle of blankets. There was no resemblance. Mike Connors had a big chest and thick dark hair and a jaw that was square and strong; his father’s hair was patchy and his face mean and pinched. And he ran away before Franklin came home from the hospital.

  Franklin could not find the photographs after she died, though in truth he didn’t search very carefully for them. He didn’t pay much attention to anything when he boxed up her belongings for the Goodwill. He dumped the contents of drawers into cardboard packing crates, then he folded her dresses and laid them on top—so things didn’t shift around— before he taped the lids shut. She had only a few books and very little jewellery, so he put those into packing crates, too. It took a day to erase her existence from the house on Montrose Avenue, though it took two months after her death for him to bring himself to do it.

  It took far less time to actually sell the place. Franklin accepted the first offer, even though the real estate agent advised him against it. The house on Montrose Avenue had appreciated more than tenfold, and with that money, along with the small stipend from his mother’s insurance policy, Franklin had little need to worry, and even less need to work. Which is what he told the principal at St Jude’s when he informed him that he would not be returning for the autumn semester. And when the principal asked him what he planned to do, Franklin had replied, “Nothing. Maybe write a book.” The thought had never occurred to him before that moment, but he liked it. The only thing he took from the classroom where he had spent every working day for the past eighteen years was a plaster bust of William Shakespeare. When he picked it up, he found that someone had forced chewed wads of paper into the shallow cavities of the Bard’s nostrils.