The road turned and descended toward the coast. Ahead they could see the sparkle of lanterns hung from trees.
“Here we are,” he said and parked next to a few other small open-topped jeeps. “You might want to leave your sandals.”
“So how about you, do you have a favorite word?”
“Favorite? Maybe not favorite, but one I like. Sprezzatura. Do you know it?”
She shook her head.
“‘Studied nonchalance.’ I don’t think it has a one-word counterpart in any other language either. Could’ve been a word for you. I had an Italian teacher who required all of us to memorize the passage in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier where he says he has found a universal rule—I still remember it—‘to avoid affectation in every way possible as though it were a rough and dangerous reef and to practice in all things a certain sprezzatura so as to make whatever one does look as if it is without effort or thought.’ He thought the idea sublime—it was his goal to teach us all sprezzatura.”
“And did he?”
He shrugged his shoulder and laughed, “I’m counting on you to tell me that.”
They walked out to the beach. A table for forty had been set up with torches around the perimeter. As they approached, a server handed them margaritas with coral hibiscuses floating on top. Paolo Pavesi was in a full-length caftan, and on each arm hung one of the young women Helen had seen sunbathing around his pool earlier in the day. They were wearing matching long white halter dresses with small beads and shells embroidered around a deep V neckline. Paolo embraced Christopher and kissed Helen on both cheeks and brought them over to a group that included his son and daughter-in-law, a stylist and photographer on a fashion shoot for French Vogue, and two men who had come over from Mexico City to play polo. Everyone was polite but indifferent. When Christopher and Helen were included in the circle, the conversation continued in French.
He pulled her back and away from the group. They walked down to the edge of the water.
“So how is your French?”
“Rusty. I’m much better at listening than speaking.”
“Spanish?”
“Nonexistent.”
Paolo’s son, Philippe, approached and asked Helen if she were getting everything she needed. He turned to Christopher and explained that he worked for Credit Suisse in Geneva. He had been in Los Angeles for a business meeting and had come down to Bermeja for a long weekend to see his father. As he and Christopher began to chat about the private equity market in Europe, Paolo clapped his hands and asked them all to find their places and enjoy the ceviche. He insisted that Helen sit next to him. Christopher found a place across from her, and he watched her as the conversation switched, by whim, from Italian to French to Spanish and then back to French. She had taken enough French in school to understand the French portion of the conversation, but she only caught shadows of what was being said in the other two languages. The group from down the coast did not arrive until ten thirty, when the main course of grilled fish was being served. A watermelon granita followed, and then Paolo stood up and raised his glass.
“Bermeja—is infused with the mysteries of life. We come here to discover for ourselves. And for us, like the returning sea turtles, we will all come back because the desire is so strong. With all this vastness”—he gestured to the ocean—“to remember so precisely, to know where they belong, to know where to come. And when we are here, we see with one eye and we feel with the other. It is here that we are our most creative selves. And after this wonderful dinner offered to us from the bounty of Bermeja, you are all invited to come with me to Casa de Mi Corazón. Salut!”
Christopher smiled at Helen and winked. Dinner disbanded, and Christopher joined her to thank Paolo for including them. Philippe caught Christopher before he disappeared. They agreed to meet in London.
As they walked back to the jeep, Christopher asked Helen, “So on a scale of one to ten, how insufferable?”
“It was okay. It would have been helpful if I had spoken two or three more languages.”
“Yeah, well, I think Paolo does it on purpose. The first week I was here, I received an invitation to dinner, and during dinner he stood up and recited the thirty-three rules for ownership in Bermeja. I think he was making them up as he went along, but one of the rules was you had to speak at least three languages. Walking across the hanging bridge was another.”
“He’s just being anti-American or anti-English or both.”
“You’re probably right.”
“I didn’t follow what they were saying about the ceremony of the sun.”
“I only heard a bit, but I think he was referring to the summer solstice. His giant bowl, or ‘inverted temple,’ as he sometimes calls it, is positioned in such a way on the southern promontory that at the end of the longest day of the summer, the sun descends into it.”
“Oh, the shrine to the sun you mentioned.”
He nodded. “I wasn’t sure if you wanted to go to his house. Might have counted for interesting material for your article.”
“My article’s for the travel section. To inform readers about interesting places they might consider traveling to, not describing eccentrics with dark sides. So what do you think happens back at his house?”
“I don’t know, but I can guess. More wine, some hashish, and then a slow free-for-all in his studio.”
“Really?” She didn’t know if he were telling the truth or teasing her.
“Only a guess.”
She understood he was doing both. “I did like what he said about the turtles returning, but his attempt to be a poet-philosopher—”
“Was a little weak. But still, ‘With all this vastness’”—Christopher gestured to the ocean with his chin—“‘to remember so precisely, to know where they belong, to know where to come.’”
She laughed. “Well, I liked what he said about one eye seeing and the other feeling.”
They arrived at the hotel and he turned to park.
“I can get out here.”
“So what are you up to tomorrow?”
“I’m going to spend the morning with Ben—the photographer I was meeting with when you picked me up—we need to go over all the shots, and then I leave for the airport at two.”
He nodded. “If you have time, come by Casa Tortuga. I’ll show you around. It’s worth seeing.” He leaned over and kissed her good night. “Bye, Helen.”
* * *
The next day, Helen kept hoping she would run into Christopher as she and Ben crisscrossed the land to different locations. At twenty past two, she finally closed the door of the taxi to head to the Manzanillo airport, but she told the driver she needed to make one stop. When she arrived at Casa Tortuga, she knocked on the front gate and called hello, but no one answered. She pushed the gate open. A passageway densely bordered with banana trees and periwinkle-blue plumbago led to a palapa overlooking the ocean. The view stunned her. She felt as if she could see the entire world from where she stood. But its vastness disoriented her and made her feel as if she could be swallowed without hesitation or notice.
To her left was the small house Christopher had described. She called again, but again, no one answered. A long narrow pool stretched along the contour of the cliff and formed a spine to the house. She crossed the space under the palapa and knocked on the open door. She called again and walked inside. It was simple—as if a cocoon offering protection. She understood how he could plan to stay for a month. She was reminded of Paolo Pavesi’s words about returns. A pair of faded jeans, the ones Christopher had worn the night before, hung neatly over the back of a chair. On the bed a book on European economic history lay open facedown. Why had he told her to come by if he wasn’t going to be here? She pulled a card from her bag, but she couldn’t think of anything to say, so she just wrote her number and closed the book with her card marking its place.
Chapter Three
Bermeja
The morning air was soft and fresh and there was not even a whi
sper of a cloud in the sky. “Oh, God, not another fucking beautiful day.” Christopher looked out over the ocean and quoted the line from White Mischief that had become the sarcastic mantra at his boarding school during his first year, when the rainy days of December darkness settled down at three thirty every afternoon. Even though it had been almost a quarter of a century ago, he knew that if you said something enough times it became like a tattoo you could never get rid of.
He was spending the entire month of January in Bermeja. He had come with no computer, no cell phone, a few books, but he mainly came back to look at the ocean and to be left alone. He had wanted to test for himself how it felt to return—as if he were daring himself to feel footprints again, to remember the color of the sea. Memories were always rearranging themselves like flocks of birds that shifted formation and changed altitude according to some unknown algorithm. In the New York Times he had read about a study of the diminutive brown creeper that kept flying into buildings in downtown Chicago. One that had been stunned, tagged, and released was found dead a block from where it had been found the year before. He wondered if memory and distance were some long-forgotten form of human migration.
He decided to drive down the coast to check out the waves the Spanish group had described as translucent tunnels running the length of the beach. He did not expect Helen to drop by. Girls like Helen never made an effort. If anything, they had learned never to grant a flirtatious comment, learned never to acknowledge how their bodies served as magnets when they walked across a crowded room, learned never to make the first move. He would not allow himself to think much about her. She would be a hard one to get to know, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to make the effort.
As he drove south, he reminded himself that had he really wanted to see her again, he would either have never left to go surfing or would have told her to come to the beach where he would be—but he hadn’t—so that had to indicate something. He stopped wondering about her when he saw the waves. They were both bigger and more treacherous than the Spaniards had described. The water was cool and rough and tasted slightly sweet. He wondered if the sea captain knew the taste of each ocean. He liked the idea that a conversation that had occurred over two decades ago could still be alive, even if there were only one person left to hear it.
The currents were strong, and he had to use all his skill and energy to duck-dive through the muscular cresting waves. Once he had paddled beyond where they were breaking, he sat on his board for a while to study the patterns of the sets and marvel at the sheer beauty and grace of the lines rolling in—the embodiment of an inevitable perfection. But he couldn’t resist for long. The steady rhythm of the waves stilled his mind—he felt the joy that comes from the synchrony of one’s body with the rhythm of something more powerful. And for three hours he felt the moods of the ocean. As the waves twisted over him, he folded down and held his hand out, tracing their inside curves, using touch first to place and then to slow himself down.
When his arms became so heavy from paddling that he lost his lightness, he rode his last wave to shore. Drenched by the beauty and heat of the day, he stretched out on the beach and fell asleep. Some time later he awakened. Based on the position of the sun, he guessed it to be around four o’clock. He went for a swim to wash off the sand before he headed home. He would have missed her for sure, and he wondered why he kept thinking about her. He had learned, long ago, to be indifferent to things that mattered. He had learned to keep hope separated from any sense of happiness.
Alfonso had been worried when Christopher failed to return for lunch. So when he appeared at Casa Tortuga late in the afternoon, he stopped the unnecessary cleaning and nervous readjusting of the pillows. His humming returned, and he offered Señor Christopher a choice for dinner—grilled fish or lobster. He disappeared to start the preparations for the evening meal. Christopher took a long hot shower. Helen would be at LAX heading back to London. He wondered if she were always so buttoned-up—maybe it was a defense, some strong form of resistance against people like Paolo Pavesi. He understood that, too.
He dressed and picked up his book and walked to the palapa, where some cold beers and a plate of lime wedges had been left for him. He thought about her again, how he would liked to have had an evening alone with her. But if she had felt what he had felt, she would have found a reason to stay an extra day. He took a long drink of beer and closed his eyes. Feeling so worn out had never felt so good. As he sat there, with the peace that comes from feeling an entire day on his skin and through his muscles and in his bones, he decided he had thought enough about her. As he opened his book, her card dropped out.
Chapter Four
London
For the three weeks she had been back in London, Helen, like a pilot doing a safety check before takeoff, had gone through all the reasons Christopher should have called her. She hadn’t expected to hear anything from him for the first week and a half, because he had said he was staying in Bermeja until the end of January. Had she gone to the correct house? She was certain the jeans she had seen were his. And who else would have been reading about European economics in English? None of the people she had met at Paolo Pavesi’s dinner party seemed likely candidates. But Christopher had been content to bring her back to the hotel—he hadn’t pushed for anything more, so perhaps that was all there was to it—a casual flirtation that had lost its signal as time elapsed.
She had been thinking all week about lost signals. Her editor had given her the choice between writing a profile of a young art collector who had placed a twenty-foot Jeff Koons sculpture of his iconic balloon dog on his coastline property in Devon or an article on the discovery of a collection of eighteenth-century binders at the Foundling Hospital museum. The binders were filled with records of abandoned babies along with trinkets or pieces of fabric. She had been moved by the trinkets and the small pieces of silks and chintzes and brocades that mothers had attached to their babies’ clothing as a means of identifying them in case they returned. She chose to write an article on the discovery of the binders, but it had been more difficult to write than she had anticipated—everything she wrote multiplied the questions to be asked.
When a baby was brought to the Foundling Hospital, a registration billet was created, and mothers were not asked their names but were asked to leave a token of remembrance. The babies were given new names, so the tokens were the only connection to their mothers. Some mothers left trinkets, such as a thimble, a key, a few beads on a fragile cord, a heart-shaped locket, a coin cut in half. Others left strips of material or ribbons, presumably cut from their own clothes. Many of the fragments of fabric had images of hope—birds and butterflies, sprigs with blossoms. One woman left a heart cut out of red fabric pinned to her baby’s cap, another the full sleeve of her dress. The ragged pieces of fabric were all that remained of a connection between a mother and a child. One mother left a handwritten poem that ended, “I’d try to have my boy again / And train him up the best of men.” The weakness of her hope turned back on itself. She knew she would never see her son again. The ledgers, bloated with filed billets, were shut and rarely opened. The buried connections had no hope of being anything more than lost signals. In many cases Helen was one of the few, if not the first, to examine the billets since their original creation.
She looked back at the letter from the director of the Foundling Hospital museum. The statistics were grim. Two thirds of all the foundlings had died, and many of them had died within days or weeks of being dropped off. She had read that the mortality rate for infants in eighteenth-century London was 50 percent. She wanted to know why the mortality rate was significantly higher at the Foundling Hospital. She wondered if the mothers ever discovered what had happened to their children. The archivist at the museum had very little information. If the children survived, they were apprenticed starting at age eight—the girls for household work, the boys to tradesmen. Of the 16,282 children who had been admitted between 1741 and 1760, only 152 had been reunited with their moth
ers.
Helen knew she should pull back. Her editor would want the story to be not about the children but about the fragments—what sort of fabric was available in the eighteenth century. These billets provided new information on the type of cloth produced and also gave some indication that it wasn’t only working-class mothers who had abandoned their babies. She would have to find a way to combine the two, but it was the fate of the children that obsessed her—as if somehow knowing more could change anything.
Given her word limit, Helen was trying to figure out how to include an image of one of the tokens that did end up being used to unite child and mother. One mother had left a small ditty bag made up of six different postage stamp–size pieces of fabric sewn together. Nine years later, she reclaimed her son with a scrap of matching fabric. Helen stopped and emailed her editor to ask if there were any way she could have more space. He emailed her back and said he would call in five. When the phone rang, she answered, “David, I’m sorry to bring this up at the last minute, but if you could give me room for five hundred or even a thousand more words—I know it’s a lot to ask, but I’d like to include—”
“Helen, it’s Christopher.”
* * *
He took her to dinner at her favorite restaurant at the end of the Kings Road and they both ordered pollo al mattone and shared a bottle of Gattinara he was pleased to find on the wine list. Instead of catching a taxi home, they walked the three miles back to her flat in Chelsea. It was a typical cold, wet, end-of-January night, with shop windows still advertising sales from the season past. He was surprised when she said she preferred to walk, she wasn’t cold or tired. She was—but she wanted to prolong her time with him.
“I’ll call you tomorrow about dinner,” he said as he kissed her good night. He knew she knew he was teasing her.
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