The Rocks

by Peter Nichols

Lulu looked sideways at Bernie. Luc sat at his chair between them, impervious to the hysterics and noise of the adults, and Bernie seemed wholly intent on watching his son gather spoonfuls of his lunch of rice and mashed sardines.

  • • •

  After she’d put Luc down for his nap, Lulu found Bernie in a chair beneath the pines behind the house. She sat down nearby.

  “You were positively funereal at lunch. I’m sure you’re repelled by Schooner, but you might make an effort not to be so boorishly disapproving among my friends.”

  “I wasn’t disapproving. I simply wasn’t amused.”

  “No, of course not. Your sense of humor doesn’t extend beyond Laurel and Hardy. What’s going on with you, then?”

  “When were you going to tell me that you’re buying this place with Tom’s money?”

  “Actually, it’s Milly’s money.”

  “Oh, Milly’s money. I was misinformed. I got what little I know from Cassian, who was able to give me the broad details about the financial transfer. Bright kid. So when were you going to tell me?”

  “Not until I bloody well had to,” she said. She pulled from her shorts a pack of cigarettes and the gold Ronson lighter Bernie had given her, and busily lit a cigarette, blowing a spout of smoke upward toward the overarching pine boughs.

  “I might have helped you,” Bernie said, “if you’d asked. But you spend your summers here anyway, so why do you want to buy the place?” In the nearly three years he’d known her, even after they were married, Lulu spent all summer in Cala Marsopa with Tom and Milly, who had rented Villa Los Roques every summer since the war. Lulu had come down with them from England, initially to cook, later as an inseparable part of their summer group, which included rotating rooms of friends. After she’d married Bernie and moved into his apartment in Paris, she and Luc would leave the city early in June and not return until after la rentrée in early September. Bernie made trips down to see them when he could.

  “Because I’m going to make it into a business. I’m going to have people come and stay and eat here for their holidays and pay me money for it. It was Milly’s idea. They want to do other things, they want to travel more, but they still want this place to come to.”

  “Oh,” said Bernie. The ramifications spread outward slowly, the way following a moving object will raise the head to broader, unsuspected views. “That’ll take a lot of work.”

  “Yes, it will. It means a big change. I’m going to stay here. I’m not coming back to Paris.”

  “But you know I can’t live here,” said Bernie. “I have to be based in Paris—that’s my work.”

  “Of course I know it. You love France and the French. Well, I’m sorry, I hate it there.”

  “I thought you were feeling better about it. You’ve seemed happier the last few months.”

  “That’s because I’ve been planning this for months,” said Lulu.

  “Let me have one of your cigarettes,” said Bernie. After he’d lit a cigarette, he said, “And you want Luc to grow up here? To go to school here?”

  “Of course not. I don’t want him growing up to be some Spanish oick any more than you do.”

  “So what are you suggesting?”

  “Well, obviously he has to stay here with me until school becomes important—I mean beyond counting and reading and all that, when he’s eight or nine or ten, whenever it is they start learning things properly—then he should go to school in Paris and stay with you during term time. He’ll come down here in the holidays.”

  Bernie didn’t know what to say. Or, rather, he quelled and swallowed all the thoughtful objections, savage rebuttals, angry recriminations, legal threats, and reasonable entreaties that boiled in his mind and mouth.

  He understood that he didn’t know Lulu at all. The longer he’d known her, the more of a mystery she had become to him. Over the past year, he’d come to realize that he had almost entirely invented the person he’d fallen in love with. He realized too that she had no idea who he was. They were complete strangers to each other, and they’d been growing more mystified and estranged. Since Luc’s birth, the enigma that each was to the other had enlarged into a yawning space between them. Now he was stunned, perhaps, but not surprised.

  He smoked. Beyond the abundant, cosseting, superior health and educational services vouchsafed all mothers and children in France, Paris had always seemed to him the unsurpassable ideal garden in which to plant and grow a child. A few days after his birth, Bernie had taken Luc into the Jardin du Luxembourg. Thereafter they wandered regularly into the Lux—a short walk from Bernie’s apartment—following their ears and eyes, discovering together more than Bernie had known existed there: the model Breton fishing smacks sailing across the octagonal basin before the palace, the théâtre des marionnettes, the gently galloping horses of the carousel. Together, they watched the chess players, and the even more serious boules players, and gazed without shyness at the serene, spectral stone and bronze people frozen mid-pensée while the seasons and the centuries drifted over them.

  There was the wider Paris he had planned to explore with Luc: the bouquinistes, the coal-roasted châtaignes, the bric-a-brac of les puces, the jungle-rich parade of humankind and the wonder of who all these people were and where they came from, these artists and musicians, filmmakers, writers, academics, White Russian émigrés, Roma gypsies, the Walter Benjamins, the Ben Franklins, the serious wanderers of the Earth, all of whom ineluctably pass through Paris at one time or another. No roiling mobs, or stunting urban canyonscapes, but a world passing by on a human, absorbable scale, like a puttering Mobylette; the entire human story, touchable, instructive, charming, reeking agreeably, inexhaustible but not exhausting—all this he had planned to show his son, Luc.

  In his mind now, Bernie saw the life he had fully imagined for Luc in Paris go pfftt.

  “You think he’ll be happy here?”

  “Of course he’ll be happy,” said Lulu. “The weather’s pleasant. It’s quiet and peaceful. He’s already familiar with Preciosa. She’ll look after him. There are other children about, not just Spaniards.”

  “You don’t think he’ll miss me?”

  “I’m sure he’ll miss you, though children need their mothers more than their fathers. You’re off half the time anyway. You’re welcome to come and stay at a hotel and see him on a reasonable basis.”

  “You’d like me to be reasonable?”

  “Yes. Why not? That’s what’s best for Luc, isn’t it? We must put his needs first. Besides, I’m going to be reasonable with you. I won’t take any money from you. You need to support Luc, but I’ve got my own money and I’ll make what I need. You needn’t worry about me.”

  “I can see that. You’ve thought of everything.”

  “Oh, believe me, Bernard”—how brutal it sounded, to hear her use his name, for once—“I have.”

  Five

  Señor Gerald!” exclaimed Lestrado Puig, rising to his feet as Gerald came into his office along the street from the mercado in Cala Marsopa. “This is a pleasure. Sit, please.”

  They sat on either side of the lawyer’s desk. Early in their acquaintance, Puig had abandoned efforts to speak Gerald’s surname, the unpronounceable “Rutledge” with its thicket of confusing consonants, and since they had become friendly, there had been no need—though he could now spell Gerald’s surname to a nicety, for Puig represented the owners of C’an Cabrer, the small farmhouse in the hills above Cala Marsopa where Gerald had lived for the previous three years. Once a month Gerald walked into town and paid his rent to Señor Lestrado Puig, who then sent it on to the owners in Palma.

  “I have had some good fortune,” said Gerald. He explained, as best he could in his now serviceable Spanish, the nature of his earlier voyaging, his published articles, the letter from the publisher in London.

  “This is splendid news,” said Puig. “You should make an in
vestment.”

  “I thought so too,” said Gerald.

  “Do you have an idea?”

  “Yes.”

  Six

  For his first night as master of C’an Cabrer, Gerald slept again on the thin mattress in the small room where he had slept for the last three years. In the middle of the night he woke and walked around the other, still-empty, rooms of the house. He wondered how long he would live here. Perhaps he’d buy another boat someday and sail to Greece. Perhaps the book would sell. But here he would stay and live, for now . . . somehow.

  The night air coming through the open window of the larger room was warm and smelled of citrus and the trees and vegetation around the house. He stood before the window for a moment and then climbed out onto the solid surface of the cistern at the side of the house and looked down the hill, to the sea. The partial moon had risen late and hung over its scattered reflection on the Mediterranean in the southeast—it hung over the Aegean. Suddenly, now that he could, he no longer had the urge to be sailing away. Was it gone, that long-held desire, or would it come back? For three shore-bound years, during which he had felt marooned, he had wanted to be on a boat again, sailing southeast across the Mediterranean. Yet when he’d seriously considered buying another boat and leaving . . .

  He walked to the edge of the cistern top. Put a rail here and he’d have a terrace that overlooked the sea. Knock out the lower part of that window and he’d have a door to his terrace. Sit here and look at the sea and the dirt road between Son Moll and the port, and the villas along the road fronting the rocky shore.

  • • •

  At the bottom of his hill, Gerald found two letters in his dusty mailbox. One was from his sister, Billie, in Sevenoaks. “So you are a Man of Property! Well done! Swallowed the anchor? I must come down for the vendemmia! What larks we’ll have!”

  The other letter was from Pocock at John Murray. A fear gripped Gerald: what if they’d changed their mind and wanted the money back? Well, it was too bloody late!

  Dear Gerald,

  Everything going well with the book here; on course for publication early in the autumn; I’ll be sending you proofs in September.

  The only spot of dissent amongst the savants is with the title. Some feel, and I have to count myself among them, that The Route of Odysseus is rather too prosaic. It’s quite accurate, as far as it goes, but limiting and not exciting. The book is only a little removed from being a gripping travel narrative, and the right title could position it very favorably for reviewers at the Sunday papers, not to mention readers. We’ve been batting this about a bit. I’m sure you’ll appreciate that the word Odysseus doesn’t lend itself easily to the possessive: Odysseus’s Voyage, Odysseus’s Journey, etc., as some have suggested here. Odysseus is, in fact, a bit of a mouthful. Odyssey is preferable to Odysseus and also looks better on the page, although, again, this says scholarly rather than fun. Other suggestions have been: Homer’s Voyage, Homer’s Ill Winds, etc., etc. The best of a poor lot, and really not right.

  Can you put your thinking cap on and suggest something less literal; a little more, dare I say it, poetic, Homeric? We are doing same.

  Otherwise, all bodes well for a good autumn launch and run up to Christmas.

  Sincerely,

  Eric Pocock

  But “route” was the whole point, thought Gerald, a little tetchily. Where Odysseus Sailed—worse. He could think of nothing. Blow the savants; let them come up with it, then.

  • • •

  He was in the lemon grove when he heard the sound of Lupe the donkey: the usual one-note honking for which there was no anthropomorphizing a meaning beyond generalized asinine complaint. Lupe brayed often and Gerald was always pleased when Gonzalo, who lived down the hill and across the road and had worked the farm for the owners, took her away. Gonzalo had used Lupe to carry straw panniers filled with olives, almonds, and lemons down the hill. He was surprised to hear Lupe again, for he had let Gonzalo go, intending from now on to do all the work at C’an Cabrer himself and try to live off the proceeds of the produce he would harvest and take to market—he would somehow have to be the beast of burden. Gonzalo had been told of the sale of the farm by someone, Puig perhaps, or the owners, and he had been visibly upset when Gerald told him he would do all the work himself and no longer required his services.

  Then he heard the girl’s voice. He walked through the trees and found Gonzalo’s daughter, the third member of the Gonzalo labor force that had worked the farm. She was standing beside the house with the donkey, which was now quiescent and staring at the wall.

  She smiled when she saw Gerald. It was hard to tell her age; Gonzalo didn’t look older than thirty-five. His daughter’s looks and womanly figure had initially strongly reminded Gerald of the Italian film star Anna Magnani, whom he had seen in a film screened by a faltering projector in a bar in Argostoli, Greece, shortly after the end of the war. The actress had screamed a great deal during the film, and the Greeks in the bar, all men, had shouted back Anna Magnani! Anna Magnani! after each of her outbursts, which was how Gerald knew and remembered her name. However, Gonzalo’s daughter didn’t have the Italian’s piercing eyes or volcanic behavior or her appearance of innate intelligence—she seemed more a lobotomized version of the actress—but her heavy-lidded eyes and openmouthed smile that habitually found Gerald had persistently made him aware of her interest in him. Gonzalo usually spoke to her in peremptory or rough tones, and Gerald had twice seen him cuffing his daughter on her arms, back, the side of her head. The first time he saw this they were some distance away through the trees and it took Gerald a minute to be sure of what he had seen. The second time they were closer, and he had called out, “Please do not touch the girl like that, it’s not correct,” in his awkward Spanish.

  “¿Qué?” Gonzalo answered, and Gerald repeated what he had said. Gonzalo shrugged and moved away, mumbling. Gerald was pleased to let the man and his daughter go when he returned to C’an Cabrer as owner. So he was surprised and discomfited by her appearance. He looked around but didn’t see Gonzalo.

  “Hola,” the girl said now, swaying slightly in her thin cotton dress beside Lupe’s flicking tail.

  “Hola,” answered Gerald.

  “Good, then, here’s your animal.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Lupe. She is yours.”

  “No, she belongs to your father. She is of Gonzalo.”

  “No, she is of C’an Cabrer. She is of you now.”

  “No, I’m sure not. I don’t want her. Please take her back to your father.”

  “He told me to bring her here to you. She is yours now, truly. And she is hungry. You must feed her.”

  “I don’t know what she eats, I can’t keep her.”

  “She eats anything. It’s not important.”

  “No, please, take her to your father. I will talk to him later.”

  “No,” said the girl.

  “Yes,” insisted Gerald.

  “No.” She laughed and looked suddenly animated.

  “Please take her back to your house.”

  “No. And anyway you need her, for the work. I can work too if you want. I will come every day and help you.”

  “No, thank you. I’m going to do all the work myself.”

  “Ahhh.” She smiled, swaying.

  “Good day,” said Gerald. He turned and climbed up the hill out of sight.

  The donkey’s braying began again. When he came down to the house, the girl was gone. Lupe was nibbling a bush.

  In the afternoon Gerald walked into town and spoke with Lestrado Puig, who confirmed that he owned all the equipment that came with the property, including the donkey. Gerald asked where he could sell the donkey. Puig told him he would find out and let him know.

  • • •

  He woke again in the night and lay beneath the sheet and looked towar
d the open window. Not a breath of wind in the trees—his trees now—not a good night to be at sea.

  Names and lines from The Odyssey floated through his brain. Laistrygonians . . . and Cyclops, angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them . . . Hope the voyage is a long one . . .

  That wasn’t from The Odyssey, but from Cavafy’s “Ithaka.”

  Gerald half rose off his mattress with the urge to look through his books, but remained propped up on an elbow . . . He didn’t have the poem with him. He lay back down. He could write to Pocock and tell him to look it up. He didn’t remember it all:

  As you set out for Ithaka

  hope the voyage is a long one,

  full of adventure, full of discovery.

  Laistrygonians and Cyclops . . .

  Hope the voyage is a long one . . .

  How did it go . . . ?

  . . . Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

  Arriving there is what you are destined for.

  But do not hurry the journey at all.

  Better if it lasts for years,

  so you are old by the time you reach the island,

  wealthy with all you have gained on the way,

  not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

  Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

  Without her you would not have set out. . . .

  Something in there, perhaps? Ithaca in Mind? By Gerald Rutledge. Was that the sort of thing they wanted, Pocock and the savants at John Murray? Poetic and Homeric enough for you?

  He lay on his mattress and looked at the opaque blue-gray trapezoid of night framed by the bare walls. Around it, the walls and ceiling of the dark room seemed to move, closing in, drifting outward, pulsing erratically with tricks of perspective and the dim light.

  Ithaca the Marvelous Journey. By Gerald Rutledge. Except it was hardly that, was it? Mostly a wretched, storm-tossed misery, full of wrong turns and monsters. And some very nasty females.

  Seven