He caught fish. He caught fish continuously. They came, it was said in the town, all the way across the Mediterranean for him to catch; and indeed Gino’s island was about as far east as they could swim. It seemed to be a fish terminus and round point; after a quick nip from Gino’s garbage or the soft ooze beneath his island, there was nothing for it but to turn back to Greece and Gibraltar and the rich North African banks.
Gino himself looked like an old gray mullet set up by a bad taxidermist who had put back the skin over insufficient stuffing. His head was hairless and his dull eyes were too large. His fishlike mind knew none of the enthusiasms of humanity except the cooking of his catch. For this he was famous. Whether he fried to biscuit hardness in deep oil, or adventured in the casseroles and herbs and wine of French cuisine, or served his fish boiled and cold and decorated, they were products of high human art. His other cooking was vile. Indeed all of Gino that was not fish was distasteful.
He employed six performers. Each year they were sent to him by an agency in Alexandria. One of the batch had to be able to dance efficiently; two must be endurable, however sordid their acts; the remaining three had just to get on and off the stage without incident, and were usually over forty. He paid wages and commission to the upper three and commission only to the lower three, and put them all up in rooms like sunlit bathing hutches on the floor above the café. Gentlemen were strictly forbidden both by Gino and the police to visit this second floor; but the holiday season was short, and the police were very poorly paid. As for Gino, he had signed a Notice to Customers, and thereafter was indifferent to what went on upstairs unless the noise was too great. Then, in a barely audible voice, he pointed out that the house was very old and might fall down. If anyone were injured, he said, there would be a scandal.
That year there were scandals enough. They were the fault of Tatiana. She was an Egyptian with a Russian mother; and in her character a faint and purely traditional Russianness had remained proof against the lethargy of Egypt. Tatiana was the star performer, and neither better nor worse than dancers whom the Alexandria agency had sent to Gino in other years. Her morals, which mattered to nobody, were above the usual standard. Her behavior, for so conventional an island, was indiscreet. She gave parties to her favorites. She considered the whole upper story as her own, and dashed in and out of bedrooms at awkward moments. Her colleagues, who themselves observed the decent melancholy proper to Gino’s, accepted Tatiana’s instability as a new fashion from worldly Egypt and a useful topic of conversation.
The other two paid performers were Miriam and Elena the Greek. Miriam, being half Sudanese, was too black for popularity; Gino’s clients preferred to cherish the illusion that they were being entertained by pure Europeans. Elena the Greek was born at Marseilles of port parentage, into which, somewhere, had entered a strain of Chinese blood; she was called the Greek, because that was the language she spoke most fluently. The three girls who worked for commission alone had the names and nationalities that the agency had given them. They were old, pink animals who answered to these names. How or in what memory each addressed herself could not be known. They lived in a dead present, untroubled by remembered suffering. They had no clear thought left to them, and little revealing speech.
Gino’s season was short, and it was not much of a season. People with money went to Alexandria or the cool heights of Lebanon. From June to September the two hotels of the little town and the red and white villas, set irregularly among dusty country lanes, were reasonably full of Christian Arab families attracted by the hard and waveless beach. The fathers and the elder sons, dignified and respectable by day, considered it proper to relax at night. Gino’s represented for them the smart cabarets of French plages and Florida beaches familiarized by the cinema.
Upstairs and downstairs Tatiana disordered the island. She was always surrounded by two or three young admirers, who were fascinated into outrageous behavior, though not into any lavish spending. She had a dashing habit of throwing her cocktails overboard “to feed the fishes.” This might have been good for trade if she and her parties had not thrown the glasses and crockery as well. To Gino Tatiana was a liability, a shock, a devastation. She kept the older, slow consuming, steadily paying clients away. The noise and scandal raised the weekly subvention paid to the police. The glasses were replaceable only at fantastic prices.
Gino increased the bills by erratic and exaggerated items which led to endless arguments with the clients and, after all, had to be reduced. He left his basic charges unaltered. They were reasonable – little more, indeed, than those of the hotels – although there were a band and three waiters and the performers to be paid, and a cook who attended to Gino’s stove when Gino himself was, reluctantly, gazing at the dance floor. He felt that he ought to gaze – so far, that is, as ought had any meaning for him – but he said no word, he took no action. He had no interest in women, individually or collectively. They were like the bottles of Egyptian whisky. There was a demand for the stuff, and he supplied it.
His fitful attempts to keep up with rising costs and wages were always a year behind. He had made his calculations when he bought and fitted out the island, and felt that the one effort should be sufficient for his life; it had to be done, but thereafter there should be no necessity for thought. Beneath the floor the bountiful sea worked for him in darkness. Above was modest catering for the eternal desires of men. Neither one nor the other could fail.
The season was disastrous. At the beginning of September there was nothing in the bank, and the night’s takings were paid out every morning. The wages of Tatiana, Miriam and Elena fell into arrears. As yet they did not complain. It was not the first time in their experience that the boss had been in difficulties.
On the next payless Saturday morning there was a row. Wages and commission were now three weeks overdue, and obviously lost forever. Even the three working crones, holding around their shapeless bodies wraps of pink and pale-blue chiffon, stared at Gino with sad eyes in which was understanding of their fate. Tatiana, trim and terrifying in a beach suit, screamed at him in good Egyptian Arabic. He was impassive. He bent his shoulders humbly over the till, as if it were the sea, and opened it and showed that there was nothing in it. Tatiana raged around the unswept room, buzzing like an angry insect of undoubted grace and comparative cleanliness between four greasy, wine-splashed walls, foul ashtrays, spilt food, tables stinking of sweat and debris. She hurled a bottle into the sea, and was led upstairs, weeping, by Miriam and Elena. The other three returned to bed and their long daydreams of the impossible. Gino went out to fish.
The sun shone. The paintless wooden balconies of the upper story gave back the light of the day and the stored light of a hundred years, sparkling with the fawn and white of timber on the southern edge of a forest. Tatiana, Miriam and Elena lay in the shade of the eaves, cursing Gino. When they were silent, they could hear the plop of his tackle, re-entering the water, or the reverberation of a sea-bream smacking its arched body against the planks of the back-door jetty.
Night brought the end. There was no band. There were no waiters. There was no assistant cook. All had gone to the hotels to make what they could in the last week before the season finished. A few habitual customers drifted in across the creaking bridge of planks. They listened to abuse of Gino, and agreed. They helped themselves and the girls to drinks, and paid what they liked or nothing at all. Gino did not appear.
In an hour the café had emptied. There was no gaiety, no romance. The island and its inhabitants appeared exactly what they were. The girls, like the clients, had looked to the night and music, even at Gino’s, to create an endurable illusion. Now there were only themselves and the sea and the slap of moths and beetles, before unnoticed, against the glaring lights. They sat still, scattered about the room at the tables where they had been left, without energy or desire to move together.
Gino came in from the kitchen, bearing a huge casserole of fish. The scent, rich and appetizing, overwhelmed the stalen
ess of the room. He put the dish on a table, with six flat cakes of bread, beckoned to the girls and went out.
They moved to the food slowly, and as if ashamed by their failure to retain a single customer. Then Tatiana, with a brisk exclamation, threw away the filthy tablecloth. The others, catching her mood of self-respect, swiftly washed knives and forks, glasses and plates left untouched since the previous night. They chose clean chairs and sat down at the bare table, three a side, as in some institution for homeless females deserted by all but themselves. They began to laugh and chatter. Gino’s fish was in no way institutional. It warmed and delighted.
They went to bed early, breathing for an extra four hours, instead of smoke, the cool air currents of the bay, and awakened to a vague feeling of holiday rather than disaster. Miriam made coffee, and they breakfasted on the balcony. Then, as the heat of sand and dusty tracks consumed the morning, they saw their position in all its hopelessness.
It was Gino’s responsibility to return them to Alexandria, and it was certain that he could not do it. They all spoke loudly of their contracts and of the Law that would, if necessary, compel him to sell his island to pay their fares. They gesticulated at a just and imaginary judge, but in their hearts they knew that they were terrified by the Law, upon whose edge they lived, and had no intention of calling to their aid the unknowable, uncontrollable gods of policemen.
They were too far east for chivalry. Tatiana and Miriam ran over the characters and probable bank balances of their devoted followers, in the hope of finding one who might be gallant. Any, they decided, would provide food and especially bed for the few more days that he would remain at the seaside; not one would commit the generous folly of advancing the fare to Alexandria, or even – in view of their known economic distress – of allowing it to be earned. There were no capitalists among the fathers and sons who took their holiday by that horned beach. Money counted, even when Tatiana was feeding the fishes and creating an illusion of imperial excess.
Either Miriam or Tatiana might perhaps make enough for herself to go, but not enough to release a companion as well. Though they had not hitherto been conscious of much liking for each other, and though the three wage earners despised the three commissionaires, as Tatiana christened them, the solidarity of their profession – they called it the theatrical profession – prevented them from leaving behind any of their number to end, with certainty, in some horrible village brothel.
Tatiana could raise – probably – from an old friend in Alexandria the money for her fare. Miriam had a contract half promised for the winter, and thought, not very hopefully, that the agency might lend her what she needed. Elena the Greek, who could dance just enough for a joint such as Gino’s, but looked, without make-up on a blazing morning, like a slender Chinese grandmother, had no hope at all. The three commissionaires listened with dazed attention to the discussion among their betters. They would not have been surprised if Tatiana had produced thousands of piasters from a hat or if she had told them to go and prostitute themselves upon the beach. Whatever she decided, they would perform.
Tatiana and Miriam decided nothing. They dived, exasperated, from the balcony into the caressing sea, two worn but serviceable arrows of black and white, startling Gino and wrecking his fishing for that morning.
The day passed in intolerable nervousness. Tatiana, Miriam and Elena the Greek were not accustomed to be idle, to be without some vague and nearly objectless occupation. They rose usually at midday, fiddled with their breakfasts and complexions for a couple of hours, practiced a few dance steps, showed themselves in whatever public place was temporarily in fashion, then passed the evening with some admirer until it was time to go to work. Now, however, with Gino’s island ruined and the season nearly over, there was nothing to be gained by visiting the town, nor had they the heart for it. They remained in their rooms or on the balcony, quarreling, screaming, in tears, demoralized.
At sunset Gino shut the wooden doors on the gangway to his island, and put up a notice of CLOSED in Arabic and French. Then he took his boat and lamp and fish spear, and disappeared into the darkness of the bay. He said nothing whatever to the girls, accepting their forced occupation of his island without resentment, without pity, without helpfulness.
The soft splash of Gino’s oars recalled them to sanity. They stared after him into the calm blackness of the sea. They could hear him; they could see the twin phosphorescent puddles of the oars receding into the distance, but the boat itself was invisible. Their fear of this isolation was extreme. All quarrels forgotten, they drew together on the balcony. The lights of the little town glittered half a mile away. The villas were nearer, but their lit windows were so scattered over the coastal plain that they only increased the sense of loneliness. In the girls’ minds, and indeed in fact, they were castaways; it mattered nothing that their island was joined to all Asia by only a dozen planks.
They crept downstairs and turned up the lights in the kitchen. All day they had not had the energy to eat. There were bread and vegetables and a few eggs. Fish there was none, for Gino never kept it overnight. Miriam again turned cook. They ate in silence, exhausted and hopeless.
The effort of cooking and feeding did them good. Their washing-up extended itself spontaneously from the plates to Gino’s revolting kitchen. They were six women who had seldom had goods of their own to scrub and polish. Not one of them would have done a stroke of work for Gino, but this was for themselves. The silence, the closed door, the sea around and under impressed on them that it was for themselves.
By morning the unconscious communal spirit of discipline was dead. No one made breakfast. They drifted down to the café and drifted back into the bedrooms to continue the interminable discussions. At least they were all calmer. One of the commissionaires had a touch of sunburn; it made her pudgy face look firm and elastic.
At ten Tatiana took command and persuaded Miriam to the kitchen. It was clean as they had left it. On the table were two flat baskets, a yard in diameter, piled with fish, among them a dozen fat, expensive soles. Tatiana, pacified by this industry, observed that Gino had eaten nothing. Outside on the jetty his indifferent back was towards them, hunched over the rod. Patronizingly she offered him a cup of coffee and the last of the bread. He accepted without pleasure or surprise, and thanked her. His words were formal Arabic courtesies, meaning nothing: phrases by which two human beings could converse for minutes without the need of any thought at all. She asked him what to do with the fish. Gino shrugged his shoulders. If people came to eat, they ate it; if they didn’t, nobody ate it. He landed a red mullet and paid no further attention to Tatiana.
For all their working lives Tatiana and Miriam had depended on manager or proprietor. His was the responsibility, theirs the obedience. Even Tatiana’s Russian liveliness was purely professional. Her plan for living was to make the clients spend in return for her wages and commission. Her future was a succession of engagements at third-class cabarets. Her firm faith, founded on nothing, was that they would become first-class cabarets before she was too old.
The boss of the moment might be inefficient or exacting, lecherous or contemptuous, broke or miserly or generous; but the boss he was. He did not merely live, as they, between four walls from nine in the evening to three in the morning. He was in the mysterious outer world of contracts, arrangements, recommendations. Looking at Gino’s back, it was evident to Tatiana and Miriam that they were, for the first time, without a boss, and that Gino was in their own world of helpless resignation. He might as well have been the ghost of a fisherman sitting outside his own back door.
Even this understanding of Gino did not move them to any constructive plan. Indeed their angry chatter reached new depths of futility. All former schemes, however wild, had depended on Gino being forced to do something. They had at last realized that nothing would force him to do anything.
It was the fish that made the plan. There it lay, in quantity, luxurious. Alongside the baskets was the empty bread bin. Without ne
ed of imagination, the economic problem solved itself. Two of the commissionaires put on aprons of sacking and Gino’s shoes – for their own had the high heels of their vocation – and shuffled off to the town with the fish baskets upon their heads. They returned at midday, weary, humiliated, miserable, but with bread and groceries and money over. Fresh sole was fifty piasters a kilo on the market. The girls were all ignorant of common commerce, and amazed.
Day after day passed while they ate and slept well, and fussed frantically to get themselves away. Gino wandered through and among them on his own plane, occasionally cooking, always unseeing, and, after a while, unnoticed. Those who could write with ease wrote letters to the Alexandria agency, to cabaret proprietors in Beirut and Cairo, to old admirers, to anyone they had ever known with money to lend or employment to offer. The only result of all that fevered, impractical planning, that seesaw of hope, those hysterical visits to the post office to insist that letters had been lost, was that Elena the Greek was lent a pound by her sister. They tried to plan how it should be spent, but the island imposed its own solution. The pound immediately went on soap and a washtub.
The town returned to its winter peace, Gino and his girls had provided a week of scandal, conjecture and conversation, and a week was all they were worth. Nobody bothered them. They bothered nobody. On the island they were brown, healthy and rested, but neither knew nor felt the improvement. They were dull with fear of poverty, illness and starvation, and, when they thought, they had no hope; but they had little time to think. The island was their taskmaster.
Organization grew, though they intended none. Tatiana, by reason of her education, was general manager. Miriam was assistant cook. Elena the Greek, who had a passion for neatness perhaps inherited from that unknown Chinese ancestor, expended it upon the crusted dirt of Gino’s hidden corners. Two of the commissionaires were becoming known in a more friendly fish market. The third was washerwoman. To all the girls their life seemed inactive and frustrated, for they were unaware of their achievement. Their only comfort was the superb fish supper that Gino often made for them. He seemed to enjoy their appreciation. He said nothing, but his body undulated graciously as he set the dish upon the table.
Tales of Adventurers Page 7