The Hermit

by Thomas Rydahl

The man gives Erhard a friendly look. He’s of the new generation which doesn’t want to get mixed up in all the competition, gossip, and idiocy of years past.

  – Just like here, I’d imagine.

  – Have you ever met Raúl Palabras?

  – I’ve only seen him twice.

  – Hmm. Did you know that Emanuel Palabras owns Taxinaria?

  – Quién sabe. Marcelis is the one who calls all the shots.

  – What’s he like? Is he as strict as they say?

  The man smiles. – More or less. He yelled at me once. You don’t want to experience that twice.

  – What happened?

  – I complained about some moving boxes that have been in the break-room since last summer. Only five people can sit in that itty-bitty space. The secretary was thrown out of her boyfriend’s house or something, and she hasn’t found a place to live. So she sleeps on the sofa at the temp’s place, Loulou’s, and she keeps the rest of her things in eleven boxes stacked against the walls.

  Erhard laughs. – Why hasn’t Marcelis asked her to remove them?

  – You know. She’s a secretary. He makes a suggestive gesture.

  – Isn’t Marcelis married?

  The man stares at Erhard as if he’s stupid. – Between you and me, I’m saving up to start my own company. After three more years of driving I can go independent. I’m not going to sit in some taxi for the rest of my life like my father.

  – Good for you, Erhard says. Though, in truth, he doesn’t believe there’s room enough for three taxi companies on the island. It’s hard enough with two. – Good chatting with you. Maybe I’ll see you around.

  Erhard drives down Calle Nuestra Señora del Carmen and parks at the back of the queue to get a few customers, when dispatch rings and tells him that he’s got a phone call. He walks into Café Bolaño and waits by the telephone. Maybe it’s Barouki. He picks it up on the first ring. He hears the line click over.

  – We don’t want you here, Hermit.

  – Who is this?

  – Marcelis Osasuna, motherfucker. Marcelis practically screams into the receiver. Erhard has only met the man a few times, but everyone knows him. And he’s known for his use of English obscenities.

  – What makes you think I want to work for you?

  – Why do you think, Extranjero? Palabras might own me, but he doesn’t decide everything.

  Sebastiano must’ve told him. – All I did was ask the boy what it was like to work at your place.

  – What fucking boy?

  – Forget it. But I haven’t given Emanuel Palabras my answer yet.

  – Rumour has it you’re lashing the whip over at Ventura. Don’t come over here and whip me. I’ll give it right back to you.

  – Does Palabras know you’re calling me?

  Silence. – Of course not. And if you tell him you’re finished.

  – So many threats, Erhard says, even though he didn’t mean to say it out loud.

  – I can keep ’em coming. I’ve fought tooth and nail for this company. You’re on your way into the lion’s den, Extranjero.

  Erhard hears Marcelis ruffle through some papers.

  – You might be tight with the Palabrases, but you’re not coming over here and taking over.

  – Who says I want to?

  – What do you want then?

  – I want to consider it for a few days, and then I’ll let Emanuel Palabras know.

  – You think very carefully, Hermit.

  Marcelis hangs up.

  For a moment Erhard stands with the black plastic receiver in his hand, then he finally hangs it up, staring at the wall. One of the posters taped next to the payphone is an ad for one of the many private boats that sail to Lanzarote, Tenerife, Gran Canaria – even a little ferry that sails to Hierro of all godforsaken places. He studies the photograph of the captain, or anyway someone wearing a captain’s hat, who’s toasting with some passengers in the ship’s bar. Erhard makes a decision. During the next few hours he won’t think about his future, as a driver or anything else. He will go to Morro Jable and sail to Santa Cruz. Then he remembers Beatriz and the bloody generator. There’s only one person who can take care of her while he’s gone.

  He retrieves his notebook from the car. He inserts a quarter in the telephone and punches the doctor’s number.

  ‌

  43

  The trip makes him restless.

  There’s something strange about leaving the island, the sandy ground under his feet. Apart from short forays to the pile of rocks that is Isla de Lobos with Raúl and Beatriz once in 2008, this is only the third time he has left Fuerteventura. He’s been to Lanzarote twice, once to pick up his Mercedes. That was in 1999.

  He sits on the sundeck under the blinding sun for a long time. Ten hours with nothing to do. Afraid to fall asleep, he doesn’t drink any alcohol. He makes a game of shaking small peanuts from a sticky bag and tossing them into his mouth.

  The captain isn’t nearly as friendly as he looks in the photograph. He’s grumpy and incoherent. Chain-smokes at the railing and stares down in the water as if he wishes to throw himself into the ship’s wake. Erhard converses with him several times, but is interrupted when tourists want to snap photographs with him. The captain salutes and poses for these photos; he has nothing to do with the ship’s navigation, of course, but is a kind of steward whose job is to radiate a captain’s authority – though he doesn’t quite succeed. It is the kind of thing that always amused Raúl. Big shots in decline. Beaten down. Raúl loved getting politicians, policemen and civil servants pissed, then humiliating them with idiotic tomfoolery, watching them blush when a female bartender offered them tequila in a glass squeezed between her breasts. He loved to steal their hats and pick at their ties like a coquettish stripper, stick bills down their snug-fitting trousers, or send them double vodkas with umbrellas. One time he grabbed a man by his collar simply because he’d dressed his son in a sailor suit. Just because of that.

  How could Raúl have turned his fist against Beatriz? It’s logical enough to believe that’s what happened, and yet he can’t believe it. He doesn’t want to believe his friend is capable. He doesn’t want to believe he could misjudge someone’s character. What is he to make of the words Beatriz had somehow said? Help me. Let me go.

  It frustrates him that his thoughts about Raúl are mixed. Not pure, not simply loving or angry. Maybe what he feels is what a father feels for his prodigal son: reproachful, damned, grief-filled. He enters the little bar on the sundeck where the captain stood in the photograph on the poster. Buys the last bag of peanuts. Afternoon arrives, then evening; sea birds – some long black creatures with square beaks – squawk in the wind that whistles above the boat. The ship approaches land.

  He stands at the stern.

  Tenerife across the water.

  Many years have passed since the last time he was here. When he arrived on the islands and was searching for a place to stay, he’d spent some days at a cheap hotel near a beach. As the boat skips on the waves towards the white harbour, he sees the island with new eyes. The island appears taller and redder than Fuerteventura, and it’s impressive. Far more attractive than the island he’s chosen to live on. He thinks of his mother, who always loved Copenhagen whenever they drove around Tivoli Amusement Park, but feared and hated the city if one of her children were out of her sight for just two minutes, or when they waited at the Central Station for Erhard’s father to arrive on a train, and a homeless man would ask Erhard’s brother Thorkild if he had a light. Living your life in a state between destructive hatred and deep-seated love is exhausting.

  He gazes across the water at the island. Every time the boat sinks into the valley of a wave, the island appears larger and more solid.

  Calle Centauro is a sad-looking place. A beige road in a business district. But the cafe is white and large, actually more of a discotheque than a cafe. There’s a massive room, constructed around a small atrium with palm trees that jut through a hole in the
roof. Erhard sits at a table underneath one of the palms and scans the handwritten menu. Not something he sees very often. Even the dinkiest and shabbiest wine and cocktail bars in Corralejo have lively menus with flamingos and headlines in alternating font colours. This menu is grey and brown, scrawled in cursive with fat circles above the ‘i’s.

  The owner must be a woman. There are flowers in small vases, something he can’t recall seeing anywhere in Fuerteventura. Everything is nice and clean and newly painted; all the waitresses seem busy and happy. One of them, a heavy-set girl wearing a tight white peasant blouse, reaches up to light a candle in a candlestick set in an old-fashioned wagon wheel. Then she approaches Erhard. She’s almost too nice, asking him whether he’s on holiday. He nods and she stands ready with her little notepad.

  She tells him about nearby sites that he should visit, though not on Saturdays, because there are too many people on Saturdays, and not after nightfall, because the Tunisians are there, and not around noon when the sun is strongest. He asks whether she’s from California, and she is. She laughs, tells him she’s impressed, then asks him where he’s from. He tells her. She says that several of the girls are from Fuerteventura, too, then goes on to say that she lives just above the restaurant, in a flat where the girls can stay if they have just moved here, as long as they work off the rent. She’d like to be a manager some day, she says, if she can learn how. He orders a Mai Tai. He can see the girl’s cleavage over the rim of his menu. Before she walks off, he asks if she knows Søren Hollisen. She hesitates. She has heard the name, she thinks, but she doesn’t know him. Then she heads back behind the bar, where she talks to another waitress, a fierce-looking girl with her combed-back hair in a ponytail. As if Erhard’s some rich grandfather who might dole out some pocket money, the California girl eyes Erhard while she speaks. The ponytail girl drinks from a bottle, unimpressed.

  He counts his money and finds he has just enough for a couple of drinks and a meal, but not to spend the night. He’ll have to sleep on the beach, which he’s done before. It’s easy enough if he’s pissed. Maybe it’ll be the last time he’ll ever need to.

  The notion that his luck is about to change doesn’t stick; it slips through his fingers like sand. He doesn’t dare believe it. For nearly twenty years, misfortune has followed him; he has made poor decisions and lived the wrong kind of life and met the wrong people at the wrong times. Usually he feels, and even says, that his timing has been ten years off. First ten years too early. Married while still a teenager – that says it all. While the last twenty years have been ten years too late. Too late to do anything about his music, to meet a nice woman, to lean back and enjoy life as one does at his age in Denmark and as so many of his Danish contemporaries here on holiday do. And suddenly, emerging out of his wretchedness, in the middle of all that’s going on with Raúl and Beatriz and the dead boy, he sees an opportunity that he needs to grasp. No matter how difficult or foolish it might turn out to be. The opportunity to become something else, to be someone. Maybe he’ll be able to purchase one of the houses above the city. With a garden. He can sit reading in an air-conditioned office or take a walk down to the workshop to speak with Anphil, or he can host meetings and offer his guests a dram of whisky.

  He hasn’t told Emanuel Palabras anything about this.

  In the morning, before he left his house, he called Palabras and mentioned the episode with Barouki, and Marcelis’s phone call. He didn’t repeat everything that Marcelis had said, but he did say that Marcelis seemed unhappy with Erhard’s potential role.

  All bark and no bite, Emanuel had said. Raúl had his share of confrontations with Marcelis too. Welcome to the company, he added.

  The last thing he said: Say yes and I’ll give you a salary worthy of a director. Which sounded good at that point, but Erhard considers his title now. What did Raúl actually do for the company? If Erhard assumes Raúl’s job, does that also mean that Erhard should keep a low profile and stay out of daily operations? He wants to make a difference; if he can’t, he can always quit. Nobody owns him.

  But he’s tempted by thoughts of skipping his generator idea and getting Beatriz to a private hospital in Puerto, maybe inviting Aaz and his mother to his place for coffee.

  Ponytail girl is the one who brings his Mai Tai, setting it on a saucer. He pays sixteen euros and lays four in her hand. It’s a decent tip, and yet she stares at the coins with no change of expression. He asks her if she knows Søren. Her gaze is sharp. Maybe she’s mostly into girls, he thinks. She glares at him as if she thinks men are pretty much a waste of time.

  – What do you want to know?

  – Søren Hollisen, do you know him? Perhaps he’s a customer?

  – I know who he is. Everyone here knows.

  – How do you know him?

  – I don’t know him. It’s impossible to know him.

  – But you’ve met him.

  – Met, she says, making air quotes with her fingers.

  – Are you from this island?

  – Fuerteventura.

  – Oh, Erhard says. But he isn’t interested in small talk with this girl. – Does anyone here know him better than you?

  – Ellen.

  – Who is Ellen?

  – The owner, a Brit. She’s out in the back. But she’s leaving soon.

  Erhard thanks her, then sips his Mai Tai. It’s too sweet. Too much syrup, not enough lime. But it’s got plenty of rich, dark rum. He eats the embellishment, a pineapple and orange. While he chews the pineapple, a woman in a light-blue shirt and black trouser-suit sits down at his table. She looks like a man, but one with long hair gathered up in a bun and a mouth so tight and narrow that it resembles a line drawn with a Sharpie.

  – Friend or foe? she asks with a distinct Irish accent.

  Erhard says nothing, just looks at her.

  – You’re looking for Søren Hollyson. She pronounces it Soren – Are you a friend or foe?

  – Neither.

  – What has he done this time?

  – As far as I know, he hasn’t done anything.

  – Why are you looking for him then? I’m guessing it’s not because you’re attracted to him?

  There’s something sly about the way she questions him. It feels like more of an interrogation than when Hassib asked him questions.

  – Maybe I’ll tell him myself.

  – Go ahead, but you’ll have to travel to Dakar. Has it got anything to do with money?

  – Maybe, Erhard says, to confuse her a bit.

  – He has nothing to do with this place any more. We’ve done everything we can to get back on our feet again after the mess he left behind. We don’t want to get mixed up in anything.

  – Easy now, easy, Miss…

  – Blythe-Patrick. Ellen.

  – OK, Ellen. I don’t know Søren at all.

  – Are you with the Danish police?

  – No. I’m from Denmark, it’s true, but I haven’t been back in many years. I live in Fuerteventura.

  – Well, I haven’t seen him in months, perhaps a year. But I’ve heard he’s in Dakar.

  – I may not even need to talk to him. Maybe you can help me?

  She straightens in the chair and glances around the cafe, as if she’s nervous someone will hear them. But there’s no one around. On a sofa in the back of the room sits a couple, so clearly pissed that they’re practically asleep. – I don’t want to get mixed up in Søren’s shit.

  – I’m not mixing you up in anything, Erhard says. He draws the small baggie from his pocket with the slip of paper inside. – Do you recall if the cafe ever had a subscription to a Danish newspaper? Sometime last year?

  The woman glances down at the paper and grins. – Yes. I do. I do, because no one ever read it. Politiken, it was. She butchers the pronunciation as pollyticken. – It just sat there. Turned out that we never got Danish visitors. And the Norwegians and Swedes apparently don’t give a toss about Danish newspapers.

  – When did you subscrib
e?

  – I don’t know. A year ago? One day it just stopped coming. Søren started the subscription, but no one knew how to cancel it, so we just chucked all the newspapers into the rubbish bin.

  – Have any of your colleagues suddenly vanished in the last three months?

  – Vanished, no. But a few have them have gone home. To England, Spain, Holland, or wherever it is they’re from.

  – Do you know any young girls who’ve gotten pregnant and had an abortion?

  – You Danes aren’t afraid of stepping on people’s toes, are you? She laughs. – But I like that, as long as you don’t scare my girls.

  – I’m trying to help someone I know find his girlfriend. She was last seen here with this newspaper.

  She leans across the table and lowers her voice. – If you’re looking for girls in the 18- to 30-year-old range who forget to insist on condoms, then you’ve come to the right place. There are all sorts of girls like that here, in every stage of pregnancy, even the skinny ones that you don’t notice are pregnant until they retch on the floor of the bar. Islanders may be Catholics, but their daughters aren’t exactly nuns. The clinic down in Santa Cruz makes a pretty penny. This is a party island. The men don’t care, and the girls are too stupid. It’s as simple as that. Is she Danish?

  Erhard had always imagined the mother was Danish, because the child had been swaddled inside a Danish newspaper, but now he’s not sure. He recalls the images he’s seen of the boy. – Possibly. She’s light-skinned.

  – A friend’s girlfriend, you say? You don’t know much, do you?

  – Did someone take the newspapers home? Maybe a Danish girl, a customer here?

  – Well, on any given day except Sundays, more than 1,500 people party here until the sun rises. Could one of them have taken the newspaper home? It’s hard to say. I know that we mostly just threw them out. We got tired of them.

  – So when did you stop receiving the newspapers?

  – In October. Maybe November.

  – What did you do with them? Where did you throw them out?

  The woman scrutinizes Erhard as if he doesn’t understand something. – In the rubbish bin, of course.