Rocks, The

by Peter Nichols

  “How are you doing, Lulu?” asked Cassian. He put a hand on Lulu’s arm.

  “I’m very angry at those people, that Hungarian and his stupid crew, for not being more careful. For leaving him here. What if they’d been halfway to Italy or somewhere? Who would have come out to look then? Of course, there’s not a sign of the Salvamentos. No helicopters or airplanes. It’s entirely up to us.”

  Cassian said gently, “Well, we’ll do our best, Lulu. That’s all we can do.”

  Dominick said: “It’s been quite a while since he went into the water—”

  “I know that!” Lulu said. “Don’t you think I know that? Don’t tell me what’s obvious.”

  She looked over the wide, blue, relentlessly dull sea. No corners, no dips or holes or hills or different colors or identifying marks of any kind. Nowhere to stop and rest. Only a limitless blue opportunity to sink and die an unnatural, struggling death. She could hear the gentle, realistic entreaties in the tones of their voices, behind their words, to give up hope. She would not. Nobody else would find him. Nobody else would care. It was up to her. It was all up to her. It was the only way anything ever worked. You couldn’t depend on anybody else. But she knew herself, so she knew what to do. Most people had no clue. They waited to see what would happen to them, and then they complained when it did.

  “Luc will know that I’ll come and look for him. So he’ll hang on. So we’re going to keep looking.”

  Dominick stopped himself from saying, Lulu, why would Luc think for a moment that you—you, mind you, darling, after diving off that fucking ship—would get into another boat and come out and look for him yourself?

  She said, “Of course he’ll know it!” so sharply that Dominick thought he must have spoken out loud.

  Jorge and Dominick swapped looks. Jorge’s said, Pues, how much longer? I hate to say it, hombre, but it’s . . . and Dominick’s said, Never mind, just keep doing what she says.

  Sometime later, Lulu said, “Look, there he is.” She pointed.

  Two hundred yards away, they could all see a hand waving at them. They could even see right away that it was Luc.

  “Dios mío,” said Jorge. He spun the wheel, and the boat grumbled toward Luc like a suddenly energized mastiff. When it was close, Jorge turned it around and backed toward Luc as if into a parking space. Then he pushed the throttles ahead for a moment to all but stop the boat’s drift, and pulled them back into neutral. He leapt onto the stern and lowered the hinged chromium ladder from the narrow diving platform close to the waterline. The stern drifted slowly to Luc. They all gathered on the platform. Jorge climbed down the ladder into the water. He reached out and took Luc’s hand. He pulled him to the ladder.

  “Hallo, Mum,” said Luc. It came out as a croak. “Fancy seeing you here.”

  “Tire, tire!” Jorge said to those on the boat.

  Cassian and Dominick took Luc’s arms. Jorge put an arm around his waist. Luc’s arms and legs still worked a bit. They pulled him up the ladder.

  Lulu embraced him. Then she let him go. “You’re all right now,” she said.

  They got him up across the rear deck into the cockpit, where he sat down on a molded, cushioned seat. His lips were cracked, his eyes were red.

  “Got any water?” he croaked.

  “Sí, sí, sí,” hissed Jorge. He hurried below into the boat’s cabin.

  “I don’t believe it,” said Dominick. He looked at all of them in amazement.

  “How long have you been in the water?” Cassian asked him.

  “I went in about midnight. What time is it?”

  “Almost two. Fourteen hours.”

  Jorge reappeared with small bottles of Evian water. He pulled the top off one and handed it to Luc. Luc took it and drank slowly. He dribbled it onto his lips and licked them off. He poured it over his face.

  “Fantastic,” he said.

  “It’s just incredible. Luc, how did you stay afloat?” asked Dominick.

  “Dunno,” between dribbles of water. “Just hung about. I was on my back for a bit.” More water, hardly seeming to swallow it, but letting it flow in and out of his mouth. “At first I was sure that was it. I knew they weren’t coming back because they didn’t see me go. But after a while, I knew you’d come out and look for me, Mum.”

  “Of course I did,” said Lulu, almost indignantly. “What else would you expect?”

  “Nothing.” He smiled, then registered pain and put a hand to his cracked lips. “I realized that. So then, I just kind of hung around.”

  They took him below and wrapped him in towels.

  At the wheel, Jorge turned the boat in a wide, slow sweep, pushed the throttles forward, and sped back toward the land at a gentle cruising speed. Now and then, he shook his head and looked around at the empty sea and mumbled: “Increíble. Increíble.”

  Fourteen

  At the end of August, Aegina and Charlie and Fergus drove away in the Range Rover, back to London. Tourists and summer residents left the island. Villas were shuttered. Boats sailed away. Streets were quiet. Only the momentary insect whine of a moped interrupted the wind moving through the canopies of the pines that grew around houses all over Cala Marsopa.

  There followed days in September that were just as hot and sunny as any day in August, the sea as blue and seductive as midsummer, the air as full of the electric tinnitus of cicadas in the noonday heat, but they were interspersed with brand-new days when cool winds blowing across the island from the Serra de Tramuntana along the north coast carried the trace of woodsmoke and the cool humidity of mountain clouds. The perceptible creep of autumn, the different air, and the aspect of the sea from C’an Cabrer, one day royal blue and faceted with sun, the next battleship gray and rolling like molten pewter, all these signs excited Gerald. Toward the end of September came cold, heavy drops of real rain, augurs of the equinoctial gales that would soon complete the change of season.

  This was when Gerald most loved the island, when it resembled again the lush and peaceful backwater he had first come to know. He had lived in this same spot for thirty-five years, but much had altered around him; Aegina had grown up and gone away and brought Charlie back to the island. C’an Cabrer had metamorphosed (most noticeably in recent years with Aegina’s money and ideas) from bare buildings that had housed goats and sheep into a rather nice Mediterranean home. And the seasons, as now, reliably made everything new again. He liked to remember Goethe’s line: “A man can stand anything but a succession of ordinary days.”

  Once Aegina & co. had left and the house was quiet, Gerald attended to his tools. He laid his knives and scythes and saws and pruning gear out on the bench in his toolshed and set about sharpening and cleaning everything. He brought the Grundig shortwave radio from the house and listened to the BBC World Service as he worked. The eternally comforting rendition of “Lillibullero”—the recording by the Royal Marines band that he’d heard all through the war and almost daily through the years since—signaling the top of the hour followed by the GMT time tick, and the chimes of Big Ben. On Sunday mornings he listened to Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America. On the third Sunday in September, Cooke spoke of the oak and maple leaves changing into their characteristic fall colors along the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut and how the parkway had been pushed into creation by the formidable Robert Moses, a city planner who had altered and stamped New York City as indelibly as Hausmann had made his mark on Paris. Then Cooke spoke of the current difficulty between the Reagan administration and the houses of Congress to instigate new public works on a scale vastly less ambitious than anything Moses had accomplished, and how such discussions were already contaminated by the Democrats’ early jockeying to field an opponent to Ronald Reagan in the presidential election at the next turn of the leaves, just one year away. Gerald always enjoyed Letter from America; it might as well have been Letter from Mars, conjured up and dispatched by the u
rbanest of Englishmen, in the space of fifteen minutes. Then “Lillibullero” and Big Ben again.

  On some days, Gerald could still be surprised to find himself living out the greater part of his life here. Not a location of classical antiquity—he’d never heard of Mallorca before finding it on his chart—though it did contain the same plants Homer put in the garden of Alcinous: the olive, the grapevine, pear, pomegranate, apple, and fig. Yet everything, including two wives and his daughter, had followed the chance putting into a convenient port—an accident of the wind—just as so much had been determined by capricious winds, or gods, in The Odyssey. But now he’d lived here for decades, most of that time alone, a kilometer from the woman who had kept him here, and hardly seen her in all that time. Twice, perhaps, in thirty-five years. Once on the street, sudden and electric; and again, a freak episode (though wasn’t everything?) for a morning in a distant part of Spain. Gerald had been hollowed out by what had happened between them, but tissue had grown around the hollow and life had evolved out of that crook of accident. Not the one he’d imagined when he had first come here. But now . . . C’an Cabrer had become home, the genesis of his child. What he had made of his life.

  On the last Monday in September, before Big Ben had chimed eight in the morning, Gerald heard heavy equipment through the lemon trees—not Gómez again, surely? The work had ceased after that first day, and Gómez had never reappeared. Fergus’s visionary development had come a cropper, just as Gerald had hoped it might, notwithstanding his pecuniary need for its success. “Don’t worry, no question of you returning the six grand,” Fergus had assured him, “the deal’s done, the money’s absolutely yours to keep, old boy.” “Who owns the land, then?” Gerald had asked him. “Well, my group right now. They’ll probably offer it back to you for half price, then you can sell it again.” Gerald knew he would never sell it again, he’d simply get by, with, for now, his windfall six thousand.

  He didn’t stop to turn off the radio. He loped downhill through the trees. He could hear more than one heavy-duty diesel revving in tandem with the dry snapping of tree limbs and the deeper muffled groaning of earth-moving efforts. Behind that, as Gerald got closer, rose the unsynchronous whine of many chain saws.

  Gómez’s work—fifty yards of bushwhacked trail cleared by the bulldozer and his man with a chain saw—had already been obliterated by the orange Komatsu backhoe and the Caterpillar wheel loader, each twice the size of Gómez’s machine. Scattered across the hill above them were more men than Gerald could quickly count, clearing a highway-wide swath with chain saws, shovels, pickaxes. Gómez was not driving either machine.

  “Oiga!” Gerald called up to the operator in the enclosed cab of the backhoe. The man couldn’t hear him. He only noticed him when Gerald ran forward into his line of vision beside the plunging bucket. Then he burst out of the cab, yelled angrily at Gerald, waving him away. Gerald approached him.

  “What are you doing?” he asked the operator.

  “I’m doing my work! What are you doing? You crazy?”

  “Do you work for Gómez?”

  “Who? No. Jaime Serra. Now, keep away!” The backhoe operator climbed into his cab. Before he shut the door, Gerald yelled:

  “Who is he? This Serra?”

  The operator shouted, “Is a builder.” Then he shut the door. He grabbed at the levers arrayed before his seat. The backhoe’s bucket reared into the air and then plunged downward, its teeth burying in the earth beside the raw stump of a cedar. The bucket dug down, worrying at the root structure as if maddened. As Gerald watched, the stump trembled, then rose, torn out of the ground by the bucket. In quick, jerky movements, the bucket uprooted the stump and pushed it aside. Two men set upon it with chain saws, swiftly amputating the root tendrils. The backhoe’s track jerked and the whole machine lunged forward.

  Gerald watched the activity for a moment, the two great machines tearing at the earth, the men like ants carrying pieces away. They moved efficiently on up the hill.

  He turned and hurried toward the house, already framing the irate letter to Fergus. It was clear they had sold the land. They were supposed to offer it back to him first.

  Sold it to whom? And would they, whoever they were, build the same houses?

  For once, Gerald wished he owned a telephone.

  One

  It was cold on the moonscape plain south of Mohammedia where they left the Atlantic coast and the hills of the Rif and headed inland on the two-lane N9. The Renault Quatrelle’s heater wasn’t working. Luc thought it was probably leaves in the air intake. He’d thought this for more than a year, but only in cold weather when he was in the car driving and unwilling to stop. He wished he’d thought of it before they left Paris, but then it didn’t occur to him that it would be cold enough in Morocco in July to need a heater—the three previous nights in France and Spain had been warmer—and he didn’t want to stop now either, in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. With its loose sliding windows and other misaligned openings, the Renault was as airtight as a tent. Luc was freezing, but Aegina, asleep in a blanket on the backseat, didn’t seem to mind. She slept easily and deeply.

  A sign hove into the dim yellow radius of the Renault’s headlights: Arabic hieroglyphs, below them the words Tensift–El Haouz. Luc hoped it was a town. They’d eaten dinner west of Rabat, a good tagine royale with a bottle of Rif mountain rosé, though that was many hours ago and he was hungry again. And sleepy, but food would wake him up. Half an hour went by. No town. The landscape—what he could see of it beyond the headlights, loose in their housing, flickering like tallow candles in the cold filament pulse of starlight—stretched out as a barren sea floor littered with nubs of pale corals disappearing into the dark. The road was flat and straight, or nearly so, though the slight rises, dips, and contours gave Luc the sensation of driving through endless dark rooms that had no walls but constantly changed in size and shape.

  “Aegina.”

  He’d said it several times, she realized. She came slowly up to the surface and opened her eyes. The car was slowing down. It was, she felt, far into the night. She lay still and watched the light on the inside of the car’s roof and on Luc’s face growing lighter as he peered ahead.

  “Aegina—” He glanced back, his eyes met hers briefly, then he looked forward as the car came to a stop. He turned in his seat again and looked at her. “Hungry?”

  She sat up. Ahead, a bus—one of those ancient smoking Moroccan buses that carried whole families and chickens on the roof—was stopped, engine running, headlights boring a tunnel through the smoky dark ahead.

  Beside the bus, two men and a boy squatted at the edge of the road around a brazier filled with glowing coals over which they held sticks like short fishing rods. No dwelling or shed, no truck or animal. Just a gas lamp, the brazier, the men, and the boy beside the road in the middle of nowhere, and several of the bus’s passengers taking the sticks rising from the coals. Aegina smelled burning meat.

  “I’m famished,” she said. “Is that food?”

  “Smells like it.”

  “Where are we?”

  “No idea,” said Luc. “About halfway, I think, between the coast and Marrakech. Probably get there at midday. I might need to sleep for a couple of hours at some point.”

  “I’ll drive after we eat.”

  They got out and walked toward the small oasis of food and light. The sticks were skewers of lamb. Aegina smelled rosemary and coriander. As they reached the brazier, one of the squatting men produced out of the dark a small, round, flat loaf of bread, sliced and open. He held up fingers: Un? Deux? Trois?

  “Deux, s’il vous plaît,” said Aegina.

  He picked two skewers off the brazier and laid them on the open bread. He threw salt and spices over the sizzling meat, closed the bread around it, and pulled out the bare skewers. Luc got three skewers in his bread.

  “Vingt-cinq dirham,�
�� came the guttural French.

  Luc paid with crushed dirty notes from his pocket.

  The bus pulled away leaving the faces of the three Moroccans hovering above the brazier coals. A single red ember on the dark plain beneath the neon pinprick of stars.

  Luc and Aegina walked back to the Renault and ate their Moroccan sandwiches, leaning against an engine-warmed front panel. Aegina tasted everything as it uncorked in her mouth and spritzed beneath her tongue: the hot meat, the salt, the spices, the warm fat and grease soaking into the bread.

  “I’ve never tasted anything more delicious in my life,” she said. She looked at the three figures huddled beside the brazier, and into the impenetrable circle of dark surrounding them, and back at Luc. “Luc—can you believe we’re here?”

  “More amazing,” he said, chewing, looking at her, “is being here with you.”

  “Yes. It’s fun.” She smiled—her mouth full, cheeks distended, lips unable to close over teeth and sandwich—she smiled at him with more than fun. “I’ll drive now. I’d like to.”

  He wanted to kiss her greasy lips, but while he was thinking if he should, Aegina got into the driver’s seat. Luc got into the back. He lay down and pulled the blanket over his legs. Soon the car was swinging and lurching down the road.

  “You’re good?” Luc asked.

  “Fantastic,” said Aegina.

  He looked up at the mass of her dark head, tilted slightly forward, alert, arms stretched forward to the wheel, the side of her face, jaw still working on the meal, in the glow of the faint headlights.

  He felt happy.

  Two

  Since her mother’s death in 1966, when Aegina was fourteen, she’d gone to boarding school in England. On long weekends and at the beginning and end of term, she stayed with her aunt Billie, Gerald’s unmarried elder sister, who lived in a converted chicken coop, called the Chicken Coop, near the edge of Knole Park, in Sevenoaks, an hour by train south of London. It had been a lifesaving arrangement for all three of them, though Aegina and her father had missed each other badly during the first year while she was in England. But the arrangement had forced upon Billie—a woman of distinct tastes and habits with no wish to adapt them to the constraints of a relationship with a partner—a charge and imperative that stitched together her scattered life. Billie lived on a tiny income from translating French academic articles, supplemented with the infrequent sale of her Middle-earth–looking ceramic ware, grew fruit and vegetables in her garden, and foraged for what she didn’t grow. She eschewed owning a motor car in favor of a retired Automobile Association BSA motorcycle and sidecar. After Aegina’s arrival, the bike presented a problem only at the beginning and end of each school term when Aegina went to and from St. Hilary’s School for Girls, eleven miles away, with her regulation trunk and tuck box. However, they managed the whole three-wheeled ferrying challenge with rope and careful cornering.