The Rocks

by Peter Nichols

  “Of course you are,” he said.

  “You’re the film producer!”

  “Just a screenwriter.”

  “Oh, brilliant!”

  Another cretin.

  “No, no, Luc, her name really is Sally!” said an elderly man sitting on a nearby barstool. He appeared to be naked, except for the salami-sized cigar in one hand, and all but the rear strip of his tiny Speedo concealed by a large belly. “This Sally’s a Sally!”

  For most of the 1960s, the Rocks’ universally beloved bartender had been a plump, pretty, effusive English blonde named Sally. The regular annual guests had thereafter called all successive bartenders Sally.

  Sally pulled a San Miguel from the thick-doored icebox-style fridge with the handle that clicked shut, and placed the bottle, immediately frosting with condensation, on top of the bar.

  “I’ll try to remember,” said Luc. “How are you, Richard?”

  “I’m well, old bean,” said the man with the cigar. “And how are you? Arabella’s jolly excited to see you. And to meet your friend.”

  “I’m looking forward to seeing her,” said Luc. “You can put it on my tab,” he told Sally.

  “Brilliant!” she said.

  Peripherally, Luc noticed the younger couple at the bar smiling broadly at him. He could tell, a prickling in his skin, that they were just about to say to him, with a rapid and thrilled rise in inflection, “Oh, do you work in films, then?” He turned quickly away.

  Luc took the beer and walked across the courtyard and sat at a table that had not yet been laid for dinner. He raised the icy bottle to his lips. His first San Miguel this year. It had been Luc’s first alcoholic drink, 1965, the summer he turned fifteen. The first one had been too bitter, but a few days later he’d had another and soon they began to taste just right. Those bubbles on the roof of his mouth and the clean, hoppy flavor. Every year since, the first San Miguel became his madeleine. As he drank it, scenes from all those summers spent at the Rocks and around Cala Marsopa rose up whole and three-dimensional before him with all their hopes, intrigues, and desires that had somehow never been slaked.

  He drank half the bottle immediately while it was as cold as possible. Of course, if he did make Lawrence of Arabia, it wouldn’t be good enough for his mother (she had only seen the film once and found “all that desert excruciatingly boring”). Her job as a mother, which she took seriously, had always been to goad him with his complacent wallowing in mediocrity. His persistent nonarrival. The little triumphs—a César nomination for one of his screenplays—were heard, when he mentioned them, pronounced “how nice for you, darling,” and never mentioned again. The success and good fortune of managing to get jobs, make money, were ignored. The two years he’d spent in Los Angeles developing a screenplay that went nowhere, but for which he’d made good money, was an opportunity to offer sympathy over yet more failure. “I know you wanted it, darling, but I do think it’s as well nothing came of it. It was such absolute rubbish.” Trouble was, he agreed with her: when was he going to make it—really make it? When was he going to be more than an also-ran? At forty-five, could there still be something big ahead, or was this it? Small movies, made for not a franc more than the anticipated box office of German, French, and middle-European territories, ennobled by the appellation noirish, destined for certain oblivion; enough money to live less than another year on; and the perks of per diems, good hotel rooms, and someone like April Gressens?

  The old, cold horror gripped him: was he fated to hack his way through mediocrity?

  “Perdó.”

  He looked up. It was the catering girl with the hooked nose.

  She’d spoken reflexively in mallorquí, but now she said in Spanish, “Perdóneme”—her hands were full of plates, cutlery—“tengo que—”

  “Yes, of course,” Luc answered in fluent Spanish. “I’m in your way.” He started to rise.

  “No, you can sit,” she said, “if I won’t disturb you. I have to lay the table.”

  She worked efficiently around him. Now he saw that she was impressively ugly. A gargoyle on the wall of an Egyptian crypt. Large black eyes, a low brow, a wide full mouth, everything asymmetrical, and that nose, like a Tintin villain. Everything else, though, was pretty good: the thick dark Spanish hair, a dancer’s body.

  “You’re mallorquina?” he asked.

  “My ancestors are from here. I live in Barcelona but I’ve come here to Mallorca every summer of my life.”

  “Ah, like me, except for the ancestors,” said Luc. “What are you called?”

  “Montserrat,” she said.

  “I’m called Luc—Lluc in Catalan.”

  “Yes, I know,” she said. She smiled at him suddenly, as if she knew something he didn’t that amused her intensely. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “And you,” he said. “This what you do?”

  “No. This is work for the summer. I’m studying art history, religious iconography, at the University of Barcelona.”

  The best university in Spain. Not just an asymmetrical face, then. “Are you religious?”

  “When I need to be.” She grinned. Sharp white teeth in wine red gums. “Nice to meet you—at last.” She went off to set another table.

  At last? What’s that all about?

  Now he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Montserrat. Her ancestors, easily discerned, were Roman, Moorish, Catalan. She was the highly evolved product of all of Mediterranean history and cultures. Luc understood her immediately as he would never fathom the opaque shallows of the homogenized April from California. Intelligence poured off her. She was quick, knowing (she knew more than he did about something, apparently), and funny. She would understand him too, he knew it absolutely. He sipped his beer, watching Montserrat swing her lean thighs and narrow hips around a table. Her quick eyes and hands adroitly covering a table. She had strong hands. Her genetic makeup contained eons of domestic skills. She could probably herd goats just as well, with children on her hip. He imagined her in Paris. Reading a book on religious iconography in the Luxembourg Garden. In his apartment. He imagined the view from just above the knees upward between Montserrat’s thighs. Maybe she could transfer to the Sorbonne.

  He’d got her all wrong, he realized. She wasn’t ugly at all. Her face was a Picasso.

  His mother was, of course, right again: What was he doing with April? Like a good Californian, she was skilled in bed, but with a rote avidity that smacked more of conscious performance than lust, and was, not astonishingly, beginning to bore him. He would undoubtedly bore her too before long, with his frame of reference that might as well be allusions to the Upanishads for all that April understood at any given moment what he might be on about. He ought to find someone like Montserrat, warm, real, unconcerned about his mother’s sexual protection. Like old Gerald had done: married a local woman who’d given him a child and stuck to him, and devoted herself to him until she’d dropped. He imagined the children he and Montserrat would make together: dark-haired, beautiful, artistic, extraordinary, asymmetrical. They would all be Picassos—

  “Hey!” said April.

  Luc tensed reflexively as she dropped into his lap with a proprietorial heedlessness.

  “Look. What. Your. Mother. Gave me,” she said, her voice full of amazed reverence. “Aren’t they just, like, incredibly beautiful?”

  “They are,” he agreed.

  They were straps of braided gold yarn containing glinting metallic filaments. They looked exotic, fabled, Levantine. They had the burnished golden hue of ancient coins.

  “You wear them on the top of your feet,” she said, raising her bare foot.

  “I know. I’ve seen them before.”

  April didn’t seem to hear him. “You put this loop around the second toe, like this, and then they go over the top of the foot and then around the ankle and fasten like this.” She put the pair
on her feet, which were like a child’s feet: pale, unveined, undistorted by ill-fitting footwear, now dressed as if for a toga party.

  “Your mother just, like, floated over to me when I came in and gave them to me. To keep!”

  “She’s taken a shine to you.”

  “Really? Aw. She is totally beautiful. Look, what do you think?” She lifted her legs, pivoting them for angled views of her adorned feet, unaware (or perhaps not) of the way her buttocks ground into Luc’s lap.

  He looked over her scissoring legs at Montserrat, who had moved off to a more distant table.

  “Aren’t they amazing?” said April. “You wear them on bare feet, without shoes.”

  “Yes, they’re amazing. They were made in the sixties by someone who lived here. A friend of mine.”

  “I’m going to wear them tonight.”

  April rubbed her gilded foot along Luc’s leg. She moved her buttocks again, consciously now. “Mmm. What’s this?”

  Only his body’s brainless response; Luc wasn’t interested in pursuing it. “Nothing much.”

  April got up and stood beside Luc. She raised her leg, stretching her foot aloft balletically, and then brought it down onto Luc’s lap, pushing into him.

  “Hey,” he said.

  April gazed at her feet. “These things are making me feel, like . . . I don’t know . . .” She raised her arms and began to sway. She’d shown him her belly-dance technique several times. That’s what’s coming, he realized. He stood up as the towel around April’s hips began to twitch and her gold-topped feet darted toward him. Again, he looked at Montserrat, across the patio.

  “Okay,” he said. He took her hand and tried to lead her toward the barracks, but April, gyrating slowly, pulled her arm away. He turned and walked on quickly toward the barracks. He leapt up the stairs toward his room.

  Three

  Late in the afternoon, Charlie rode his bike down the rutted dirt driveway from C’an Cabrer, his grandfather’s farm. It was another kilometer along the paved road into Cala Marsopa. He met Bianca at the English and German bookshop and café off the plaza. They bussed each other on both cheeks and walked, Charlie pushing his bike, through town to the port.

  “Ho-laaa,” Rafaela, the pale, lightly mustached, dark-haired woman who owned the Bar-Restaurante Marítimo, greeted them both with affection.

  “Hola,” Charlie replied, with a smile, “cómo estás?” He’d been brought to this restaurant overlooking the port as an infant in a basket, and he’d come back every summer of his life. Rafaela always knew him. It wasn’t so everywhere in Cala Marsopa. A week ago, buying a bag of hot churros from the gnarled vendor whom Charlie had known since toddlerhood and remembered like an uncle who always had a treat for him, the old man had looked at him—now a six-foot youth—without recognition, and asked him for “fünfundzwanzig pesetas,” and Charlie had been cut to the quick.

  Rafaela led them to a table on the terrace overlooking the yachts and the fishing boats in the harbor. They ordered hamburguesas, papas fritas, and Cokes. Before the food arrived, Sylvestre, Natalie, and Marie joined them. Rafaela had known them for years too: the children of children of foreign residents who had lived on or come back to the island since Rafaela had been a child herself. They ordered calamari.

  “On va tout le monde à l’anniversaire de Lulu au Rocks?” asked Sylvestre.

  “Yeah. I’m going to be the DJ,” said Charlie.

  “Ahhh, non!” said Marie, expectorating the first word with exasperation. “Putain, j’en ai marre de cette musi-i-i-que.”

  “No, it’s cool,” said Charlie agreeably. “Anyway, it’s what Lulu wants.”

  After they’d eaten, Sylvestre and the two French girls walked back through town.

  The sea breeze had died. It was hot near the stucco apartment buildings and concrete walls that had replaced the shade of bent pines and crumbles of limestone that defined the edges of the old fishing harbor that still appeared in postcards of Cala Marsopa. Charlie and Bianca climbed the steps to the top of the breakwater and walked out to the blinking light at the far end where they sat in the shadow of its structure, out of the flash. It was cooler above the water.

  They kissed wetly, hungrily, like people eating steadily under a time constraint. Charlie put his hand inside Bianca’s shirt and slipped her precocious breasts free of her bra. She threw her legs over his lap and let her hand rest on Charlie’s thigh. Charlie’s own crossed legs prevented, he hoped, Bianca feeling his erection pulsing spasmodically beneath her. As a child, Bianca had been skinny. When Charlie saw her the summer they were both twelve, she’d become softer. At thirteen, she was heavier. This year, at fifteen, Charlie’s age, that heaviness had concentrated in her sizable breasts, and her hips. Now he thought of Bianca ceaselessly when he masturbated, but they’d been playmates since they were children and he didn’t want to spoil their friendship. Sex had come over them, and they played with it nicely like friends playing dolls. They went no further. By unspoken agreement, they’d settled on this decent plateau of intimacy. Charlie liked Bianca too much to make her uncomfortable.

  After a bit, he looked at his watch and said, “I better get going.”

  At the bottom of the steps, Charlie got on his bike. Bianca sat on the crossbar and he pedaled them down the quay. He dropped her close to the plaza and she said, “À toute à l’heure,” as he pedaled away.

  Five minutes later, he swung into the small driveway off the alley and laid his bike against the wall outside the kitchen.

  At seven, with the tables set, dinner being prepared, most of the Rocks’ guests were in their rooms, bathing, dressing, or still taking a siesta. A few were sitting at the bar in bathing suits. Charlie walked across the patio toward the bar, past two middle-aged men hunched over a backgammon board. Dominick Cleland, even hunched, was tall and thin, with a thatch of straight gray-blond hair that made him look like a dissolute version of a well-known British cabinet minister. He was wearing a royal blue Turnbull & Asser shirt over Speedo briefs. His long, hairless legs, shapeless and knobbed as a giraffe’s, entwined around themselves, ended in long sockless feet and white Gucci loafers. He had written pulp novels about the misbehavior of the British upper classes, but his subject no longer held the public’s interest and he hadn’t published a book in twenty years. With a small annuity left to him by an uncle, he lived most of the year in a tiny flat in South Kensington, and spent his summers at the Rocks. He felt at home there. If he was near the phone in the bar when it rang, Dominick liked to answer it by shouting into the receiver, “Los Roques! Dígame?” regardless of the fact that no one but Anglophones ever telephoned the Rocks.

  His opponent, and physiological opposite, Cassian Ollorenshaw, resembled, even in his youth, the actor Edward G. Robinson at his most toadlike and implacable. Now, his face blotchy red from inflamed rosacea, he peered at the board through small, round, yellow-lensed glasses. His body below his large head was inconsequential, swallowed in a voluminous white T-shirt and skirt-sized swimming trunks. They played fast and silently. They’d been there, playing backgammon at a table on the patio, every summer—except a couple of years when Cassian had been in prison—since Charlie’s father had first brought him to the Rocks as an infant. They’d been there when he played in the pool as a child with the children of guests, and with those same children when they returned as teenagers. They were more familiar to him than most of his relatives. Cassian looked up now and said, with a small smile, “Hallo, Charlie.”

  “Hi, Cassian.”

  “Hallo, Charlie,” said Sally, as he approached the bar. “I’m supposed to give you whatever you want to drink tonight.”

  “A Coke, please. Just the bottle’ll be great, thanks.”

  He took his Coke into the small room off the bar that once housed the gas bottles. It was no wider than its two glass doors. Inside stood a chair and a table that supported a turntable. Char
lie set his Coke down on the table and began going through the vinyl albums that filled a wall of shelves.

  Lulu came out of the house, gliding across the patio in a gauzy linen djellaba that billowed behind her. She smiled serenely.

  “Lulu, darling,” Dominick Cleland greeted her loudly, while shaking a cup of dice. “Are you having the most wonderful birthday ever, my love?”

  “I am, thank you, Dominick. So happy you’re here to share it with me.”

  Lulu didn’t break her pace. Dominick threw the dice.

  The guests at the bar wished Lulu a happy birthday. “Thank you,” she said, her smile raking them as she swept by. She went into the small music room.

  “Charlie,” she said.

  “Oh, hi, Lulu. Happy birthday.”

  She hugged him. “I have a present for you.”

  “For me?”

  “Yes, darling.”

  She handed him a small black bundle of cloth. It fell open in his hands. He held it up. It was a long black shirt without a collar, opening halfway down the chest with lots of small buttons close together.

  “It’s from Morocco. It’s old but it’s never been worn. I want you to have it. I think it will look very good on you.”

  “Thanks, Lulu.”

  “Put it on.”

  “What, now?”

  “Yes, sweetheart. It’s your uniform for this evening. I want to see how it looks on you. Take off your shirt and put it on.”

  She sounded like a mother, affectionately, matter-of-factly in charge. Charlie unhesitatingly pulled off his white T-shirt. He pulled the black Moroccan shirt over his head.

  “Marvelous,” she said. She ran a hand over the shirt, smoothing it down his chest. “Do you like it?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Charlie. “It’s really—”

  “It is a man’s shirt. Don’t worry.”

  “No, I like it, it’s great.”

  “You look very good in it, Charlie. Now you remember what we discussed about the music?”