The Stories of William Sansom

by William Sansom

  Lips uncurled to show big humorous teeth: eyes dropped modestly to enormous plimsolls. But still no word—which said so much.

  ‘Coñac, Pete?’

  ‘He’s given it up!’

  ‘All for the sake of a lady! Lady of Spain, I ad-o-ore you.’

  A big sigh from Peter. And then just three words sighed with exhaustion:

  ‘Gon and sif.’

  At which everyone threw back their blond heads and roared.

  *

  Peter took care not to let on: they could think what they liked, and he liked what they thought.

  In point of fact, it had been a long hot ride through a bewildering country of olives and corn and squat white farms. He had seen little of this since his eyes were on the ruts and sharp stones of a very rough road: he had taken more trouble to avoid falling off than to make this girl fall for him. Once or twice he had suggested stopping: but her strong black head shook its negation, her lips smiled but stayed firm. She had no intention of leaving the saddle: she even rode up whatever hills there were, and he was compelled by his male dignity to plod up, under the burning afternoon sun, after her. It was long, dusty, hot and tiring.

  Conchita’s upbringing was such that the idea of permitting any irregularity could never occur. But in spite of this, and of her determination to keep those bicycles on the road, she had encouraged him with her eyes. For her heart had indeed softened towards this romantic rich northerner: and the brain had conceived in some vast vague way something, something … something like a cadillac in the snow: and an altar. Such glances, together with a general lack of anything else ‘to do’ in such a slow place, tempted Peter down the dusty path once more the next day. And then again once more. On three successive days he disappeared along the scorched agave-lined roads. ‘Into the blue’ as he described it later—a waggish allusion to the colour of the agave and the questionable ‘blue’ itself.

  Miguel threw himself on Conchita’s mercy—and was rejected. One moment he entreated, the next grew angry. But she simply maintained that she was showing a kindness to the foreigner by showing him the neighbourhood. While she said this a light perversity, a small petulance allowed her eyes a dozen other meanings. It was difficult for Miguel to protest against this argument of hospitality—but he pleaded: ‘What would everybody think?’

  ‘They can think what they like!’ a suddenly modern and progressive Conchita pouted.

  ‘And what about me?’ Miguel shouted angrily. ‘What am I to think?’

  She only shrugged her shoulders.

  The matter came to a head on the Sunday. In the evening a dance was to be held. Miguel, telling himself to forget and forgive, asked her in a polite and friendly way at what time he should call for her? She answered that she was sorry, she had made other arrangements. Adding casually, ‘with Señor Peter.’

  Miguel stood for a moment shocked. He stood there in his pale skin and dark oiled overalls against the street of sun and oleanders and looked at her long and hard. At last he seemed to take a deep breath, about to say something: but then, as if it were of no use, he lowered his eyes and turned and entered the shop. He shut and locked the doors. He went upstairs to his room and lay down on the bed. For an hour he lay and smoked. He drew in the smoke hard, hitting at his lungs. His anger fired up and the little cigarette fired with it. An inch of sunlight, refracted into many colours like a medal ribbon, travelled slowly across the ceiling: it was exactly like the rainbow ribbon that the man Peter had carried once on his breast. But Miguel did not know that, he only cursed the small light for being there at all. Now everyone in the village would see and know. He lay there gritted with anger, then dull with a terrible loneliness, then hot again with pride: all feelings ran together, no one could separate them or say which rose the higher.

  At first he had wanted simply to stride out and confront this pestering northerner. But there was little he could say. The man was a foreigner, presumably rich, and Miguel knew his police. Besides, another impulse moved him—he was too proud. Years before, the men of that island had fired their muskets on the ground behind the lady who rejected them, a sign of scorn. Scorn at being scorned: but nevertheless a publication of humiliation. And this need, something like the need of the cuckold to exhibit himself, moved Miguel too. He wanted to go out to the dance and sit there alone, an object of pride and pity.

  He lay on his bed, and thought, and commiserated. Isolated in that small room, with the slow minutes for company, his small body grew its huge thought.

  He tormented himself. He exaggerated every picture of her—of her sudden shape on the bicycle, of her face arguing at him, of her eyebrows raised in nonchalance as she said she was going to the dance with this Pee-ter: each such glimpse he made steady as a photograph, and played with it in his mind. He screwed his eyes shut and stared hard at these pictures. They took possession—the good days receded against these new, frightening, insolent impressions. The cruelty took his breath away.

  A small matter, he tried to tell himself, Bicycling. A dance. But he remembered her face, a face wanting something now—and all the power of the present invalidated the past. He had to act. His cigarette began to gasp as the misery bit harder and faster, as the walls grew blanker round him, as this small prison he had made for himself contracted and within it an unreal fever swelled to get out. From a little seed, drenched with hot thought, the vicious plant spread its grotesque, gigantic leaves of thick grey shadow shutting out all light.

  Then he remembered: A few years before a young man, unbalanced for pitiful reasons of his own, had left just such a dance, strolled into the night, and hanged himself from a tree. The tragedy had shocked the village: now it thrust its picture on to Miguel’s anguished mind, it kept recurring through the long later afternoon, it moved him and it filled him with fear: but also with fascination, it was an image of hopelessness and it called him with a vertiginous drag; it held out to him the dear poison, revenge.

  At nine o’clock, as the first sounds of the orchestra struck across the hot night air, summer’s music carrying far, Miguel rose and began to shave. He watched his face carefully in the little mirror, wiped it slowly and thoughtfully, then turned to his suit hanging ready on a peg. His hand reached out, then fell back. He shrugged the whole idea away, and slowly went downstairs still in his working overalls: it had seemed right to dress himself for what he had in mind, then it seemed simply not worth the trouble. Anyway—he spat on the floor and laughed once, and enjoyed the feeling of the laugh—they would have to dress him later.

  He stood in the room where he had worked for so long. From hooks on the white-washed walls there hung the dead parts of bicycles. In the gloom handlebars stuck out like antlers: tyres made a hoopla: spoked wheels and chains hung like the instruments of old torture. The bicycles themselves stood ranged on trestles, old and dusty and thin machines with wooden handlebar-holds and patched saddles. He stood looking at them for some time, head bowed, a small sad man in his greased overalls. Then he took up a knife. He went over to two of the bicycles and began to hack at the tyres. He cut with long savage thrusts, like a barber sharpening his razor, this way, that way, until the tyres hung in shreds and the bone of metal wheel shone clean. He was breathing hard now. He lurched over to the tool-bench, took up a length of rope and threw it out into the middle of the floor. Then he went at the bicycles again, and with quick, exact movements, as if he was working against time, his teeth gripped and the sweat coming, he dismantled piece by piece these two bicycles until they lay in their scattered parts by the rope on the floor. He took up the knife again and began hacking more slowly, almost with love, and now sobbing so hard his shoulders shook, at the two leathern saddles.

  *

  That was at nine o’clock—when the music began, and when Conchita, out of her red day-skirt, and now in evening white, waited brown-skinned and expectant by the door of the dance patio.

  At eight o’clock those five holiday-makers had been well into their coñac at the oleander c
afé when a large American car had drawn up.

  ‘Yank!’

  ‘You said it, P.’

  Out stepped a middle-aged American, octagonal glasses and a Florida straw. For a few minutes the English stopped speaking. Then, since they had been there a few days, and felt thus indigenous and superior to any stranger, they began again, casually, largely, to talk. The American heard English and quickly invented a question to ask them. ‘What the hell,’ he said, pointing to that ghost-ship turkey-bird, which was at that moment standing on one pink leg and watching them blackly sideways, ‘kind of bird is that?’

  The ice formally broken, they became friendly. They exchanged drinks, and finally they thought what fun it would be to drive in the big car to the port-capital and make a night of it.

  ‘Bit of a rest from the rustic idyll, eh Peter?’

  ‘Bit of a rest.’

  ‘But you had an engagement, didn’t you, old boy?’

  ‘Engagements made to be broken.’

  ‘Better fish?’

  ‘Better fish.’

  ‘Then what are we waiting for? Waiter, the bill!’

  ‘Gracias, señor.’

  ‘And grassy arse to you. Come on, let’s go.’

  And off they all drove.

  *

  Conchita waited half an hour, an hour. Time is supposed not to matter in Spain: to a woman, even to a village-girl waiting for a foreign prince in large white plimsolls, it does. She walked to and fro in front of the entrance to the dance, greeting her friends, watching one after another go in, feeling more and more unhappy, foolish and angry. A friend of hers, entering the dance happily on the arm of her man, mentioned by chance that the English had all gone off to the port.

  Her heart fell. But somehow it was not unexpected; the big man in the peaked sports-cap had been a kind of dream, and as such could too easily disappear.

  She was cruelly disappointed. But finally, more than disappointed she was angered: not only at this personal slight towards her but by such bad manners, which were in themselves to be scorned. Her immediate wish was for sympathy: and for this her thoughts turned instinctively to Miguel. It occurred that he might be difficult: but not seriously, not for long. In any case, to go to him was instinct in her: she trusted him, and a long engagement makes a man more than a man, makes a kind of brother of him.

  So at nearly half-past nine she walked away from the dance patio and back along the long street, past every house she knew, past all the shops and all the lives, until she could see Miguel’s closed door and the scrawled letters of his sign.

  She stopped: and stood there suddenly arguing against her instinct. A reflection of resentment against Miguel rose, even then, when she remembered how he had tried to stop her meeting the foreigner. But, of course, she stood there really resenting her own guilt. Minutes passed. She felt as if the door should not be shut and that somehow he should be there to welcome her. It made her the more sorry for herself. But it was this shut door, its very barrier, that determined her to go on, not knowing then how she would behave, whether to remain cold or laugh him into forgiveness.

  She knocked. There was no answer. She went round by the side, and found the patio and the inner room empty. Then she glanced through into the bicycle room and saw him standing there still as a statue.

  He seemed to be looking at the dark doorway from where her knock had come: he looked taller, as if he was standing on something.

  A chair? Was he up changing a light bulb? It was too dark instantly to see.

  She was glad at having surprised him. A kind of mischief, mixed with sudden joy to see him again, swept away all other thoughts and she called, very suddenly, at the top of her voice, to frighten him: ‘Hola!’

  He seemed to stumble.

  His foot seemed to miss its hold on what she saw now was a chair indeed, and then as she ran forward the foot just caught the chair again. As she steadied him, his hands were up again at the electric wire he had been mending.

  Then it seemed that the electric wire was thicker than usual, it was rope slung from a beam above, and his hands were struggling with some of it that seemed to be caught round his neck—and she only remembered seeing him shake that noose free, and recognizing it as a noose, before she fell in a dead faint dragging him to the ground with her, her hands round his knees, exactly as a hangman might apply his weight to the legs of his charge.

  Later, when he had got water and rinsed her face and temples, when she had cried in his arms for a long time and he had stopped her speaking of any of it—for it was all over—later they spent the long last hours of that evening and into the night sitting together on the floor, like two children over their toys, mending the two broken bicycles, stitching together the saddles, reassembling the brakes and the chain and all else that had been undone. The tyres, though, were spoiled for ever.

  Question and Answer

  TO Bompard, to Endoume….

  That was enough of a mystery, without this other.

  What had happened? It seemed, nothing. Yet here was this feeling, fat as a whale, of nothing at all being right.

  Even the man with the hammer had failed, his moment of laughter had petered away altogether.

  He looked across the table at Miss Ponzone, at Grace Ponzone, at her his bride-to-be sitting up fresh in her evening flesh, edible, and thought how much he loved her. But it did not seem to help.

  Grace pulled deeply and surely at her cigarette, all the smoke disappeared inside her, she stared for a long time at the neon moon of the church clock hanging in the blackness across the port—and then slowly let the smoke blow out thin from where in her secret lungs it had lain. He liked that. He still liked it tonight. For anyone as young and tender to take to her lips the dirty brown weed and draw upon it hungrily, kicking the lungs inside, soothing nerves that surely could not need it—this was always a shock but always most exciting, it had a look of vice. He enjoyed her show of sophistication. Somehow she still carried with her the air of one of those twelve-year-old prodigies from the poorer streets—girls who wear the cast-off dresses of their elder dancing-sisters, dresses too long and too gaudy for such stick-legged youth, so that they look like angels turned up in a brothel. Grace looked so, she was beautiful but a mouse, she had small bones and brown hair and a wan face far too young for her, and he liked her for it.

  They were full of aïoli, and they had bathed in the hot sun all day. So huge a helping of thick golden garlic mayonnaise battling with the daylong sun-flush—that might be enough to tire anyone, any two people. But it had to be admitted that tonight perhaps there was more than this to make everything so flat and ominous. What had to be admitted was what few men, except to themselves, are ever heard to admit. Much in love, about to be married, he was wondering whether finally it was worth it. He was doubting the wisdom of binding himself. He sat and wondered and despised himself for so wondering. How, really, when he is without doubt in love, can a man dare to think such things? But then how, on the diving-board, longing for the swift air and the cool blue plunge beneath, can a man dare to hesitate before doing what he has plainly chosen to dare?

  They sat without talking, dullness between them. Occasionally their eyes met, they smiled, and once she stretched out and pressed his hand: took hers back, though, This was no nervous dullness, nor prison-yelling for escape; nor ennui, nor apathy—and certainly not peace; it was something intolerably placid, it was flat nothingness, and quite affectionate.

  All right, he thought, so we’re just tired. People can’t go on and on and on, this is just the pause. Cats one moment chase each other playing wild tigers, then sit down to wash. But there was something ominous about the hammer-man.

  A man had come along the quay—they were sitting on the southern side of the old port in Marseilles, the Rive Neuve—selling small celluloid fairies on cards on a tray. He had stopped by a table nearest the pavement where a grey-haired man and a grey-blonde woman were dining quietly, and then stomached his pink fairies to and fro
just over the edge of the tablecloth. They watched the grey-haired man raise a hand, without looking up from his plate, to wave the intrusion away. It was normal: Algerians with carpets, a couple of boy acrobats, a pregnant lottery-seller and a boatman adrift in a singing sea of red wine had already tried to entertain the table. It was normal, but it was not a table to have. Yet—thought that young man sitting with his Grace—perhaps it would have been better to have such a table on an evening such as this?

  He watched as the grey-haired diner brushed away the fairies with his hand. And then suddenly the fairy-vendor snatched from his coat pocket an enormous plastic yellow pistol and fired from this a long, soundless, red carnival tongue. The fat tongue stayed stretched out quivering like a terrier’s leg between the diner’s mouth and his raised fork, the diner bit his own tongue, dropped his fork and grasped up at his breast.

  ‘Dieu—my heart!’ he gasped; but managed to fleet a joke into this at the last moment.

  The fairy-man drew himself up furiously. ‘So you have a heart?’ he yelled—and snatched out an iron-headed hammer, swung it high and crashed it down at the diner’s head.

  His woman shrieked. The smile fled from under the man’s grey hairs as he ducked away from the hammer, and then that hammer of rusted iron and grey-grained wood bounced playfully up again, being made of soft rubber, and everyone broke down laughing, man, woman and vendor most of all.

  As she laughed, the woman stretched out a hand and took a fairy. Her man bought it, and thereafter the pair of them laughed and joked and filled their glasses with more wine, the little episode had so enlivened them.

  Infectious. Grace and he warmed to the absurdity—they had laughed with the other laughter. But then the warm night, the rattling traffic, the rock-founded rich seediness of the port slipped back into place and they too sat back again waiting, with nothing to do or say. Could two in love thus relapse against such warmth of laughter and clowning, against the warm southern evening among the crowded tables?