After a while she moved on to the snack bar for coffee, and then the gate number was posted and she walked downstairs to select her seat on the plane. She felt a woman of the world knowing about such matters now but still she acknowledged some nervousness over her second flight and could sense a rising anxiety.
“But after all,” she thought contentedly, “in five more days I’ll be back here at Orly again, with Majorca safely behind me—I’ll be waiting for the jet that will take me home.” Home! The word dazzled her. This awareness of the nearing completion of her journey was one of the reasons for her lightness of heart today; that, and the knowledge that the fears behind her far outweighed any terrors that could lie ahead. She was delighted to be done with Paris. She had left Copenhagen—but she was not to think of Copenhagen, she remembered—and presently she would be done with Majorca as well.
“And ‘done with’ is a horrid way to think of it,” she admitted, “but this is because of Stearns.” If Stearns had not intruded in her life—and it had really been the worst intrusion possible, coloring the remainder of her trip—it would all have been very different. She remembered that he had warned her—very casually it seemed to her in retrospect—and of course she should have said, “No, thank you.” Adam had been quite right about this. But how on earth could she have known what lay ahead? Stearns had startled and then astonished her, and then, abruptly, he was gone. She questioned his moral right—no, really he had none—to involve an innocent woman traveling alone. She could give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he’d not known the extent of the danger but still it had been extremely reckless and thoughtless of him to approach her. He had been desperate, of course. He had taken a chance on her, knowing very well the odds against his book’s ever being delivered. For if he had been murdered then it was because of this book that he’d given to her, and of course he couldn’t expect a complete stranger to risk her life, too. In a sense it was his death that absolved her of all responsibility in the matter. World politics did not concern her, the conference in Majorca held no meaning for her, and of course it was her life that was endangered.
Stearns had asked far too much. It had been the rankest imposition on his part to inflict this upon her, but fortunately no one knew that she had the book. If Stearns was dead and she visited Majorca without going anywhere near the export company then no one in the whole world would ever guess that she had carried it off the boat with her. This was important to remember: that no one would ever know. It meant there was no one for whom she had to perform, no invisible audience waiting to applaud her bravery. At the Anglo-Majorcan Export Company they did not even know of her existence, and there was no one capable of proving that at table 43 Stearns had been anything more than a dining companion.
Marvelous…and in five days she would be flying home. It was a beautiful thing to have the dreads flee, fears dissolve, and to look ahead to home and to an end of this unending solitary travel.
“Tickets please,” said the smiling young woman.
Melissa climbed on the plane and took her seat, again over the wing. From here she could see the observation deck and with surprise she saw The Pale One standing behind the rail, the wind ruffling his hair, his spectacles glinting in the sun. Yes, it was definitely he, and she realized that he was not accompanying her to Majorca. “We part company at last,” she thought. “How wonderful, what a relief!” Yet even as the gaiety flared she was aware that this flight would carry her toward the source of her tension, closer to the spider’s web which she must avoid by a masquerading innocence.
“Good-by, Pale One,” she thought as the plane taxied down the runway—and suddenly with a pang she remembered that it was Adam who had christened him The Pale One, a beautiful Adam whom she had known long ago in a fairy tale until he had broken her heart in some way she could no longer remember.
She leaned forward and fluttered her hand at the faces lining the observation deck, and as she sank back into her seat it was to observe with irony that she had been seen off in at least one air terminal of the world.
11
From the moment that Melissa saw the island from the air, a green jewel rising out of an infinitely blue Mediterranean, she knew that Majorca was going to be different. Copenhagen and Paris had been gray cities, but this was a country washed by sunlight, wind, and sea. Nor did nearness change this first impression, for as the plane swept down the runway of the airport her glance encountered no towering obstacles of steel but literally rested upon tawny, dust-colored earth, clumps of green and the long shedlike building with corrugated roofs that was Palma’s air terminal.
From the taxi that carried her toward Palma she counted seven windmills and was astonished. This was Spain?
“More—many more,” said the driver. “All around Palma.”
“I didn’t know,” she confessed.
As they entered the town she thought that this was a place few tourists had discovered, for along the quays fishermen mended their nets, shops were opening after siesta, and the faces in the street were dark, with candlelit eyes. But as they continued along the harbor, leaving the town behind, she saw great tourist hotels edging the Paseo Sagrera and overlooking the harbor, block after block of high white cubes striped with balconies and tiers of awnings.
The taxi drew up to her hotel, swung into its crescent-shaped approach and deposited her at the entrance. She was ushered through glass doors into a huge lobby where every sound was muted and bellhops and desk clerks spoke in quiet, reverent voices. To her left lay a maze of boutiques; to her right, down carpeted steps and through glass doors, she glimpsed a glass-walled dining room with crystal chandeliers and tables piled high with fruit and flowers. Ahead of her, elevators soundlessly deposited tourists dressed for the pool, the tennis court, the cocktail lounge. Only the tourists made noise.
Her room was beautiful, with tiled floor and a balcony overlooking the pool. In the bathroom the water glasses were wrapped in sterile cellophane and the toilet was gift-wrapped in transparent plastic but, ironically, there were smudged footprints on the floor, and Melissa imagined a manager confiding to his maids that sterilizing sufficiently blinded tourists so that dirt per se was of little consequence.
Having explored her room Melissa’s next act was to open her suitcase and rip a page of blank paper from her sketchbook. On this she drew four large squares, labeling them Thursday—which was tomorrow—Friday, Saturday, and then Sunday. For on Monday she would return to Paris, and then fly home, so that between now and that date stood only four whole graspable days, twenty-four hours in duration, and infinitely manageable at this point with the help of tours, long sunbaths, the selection of souvenirs, visits to Palma, and on Monday the reward of home.
Once the squares were drawn Melissa sat back and looked at them with relief and a deep satisfaction. The mind was a peculiar instrument, she thought as she regarded this handmade calendar, for only a week ago—another Wednesday—she had been in Copenhagen, and a week before that she had been aboard ship, yet if she went back in time to each of those Wednesdays she remembered that Palma had felt to her an insurmountable number of years away. Yet she was here. Time had borne her gently, firmly, and inescapably toward this completion of her trip, and if it had deprived her of Adam, it was also carrying her now toward the possibility of home. It was she who had erected walls of dread around each new country; it was she who had clung to each city, holding back; but Time had only smiled as it swept her relentlessly along.
But still it astonished her to realize that only a week ago she had been in Copenhagen with Adam. It seemed inconceivable to her…a man, a woman meeting. She could almost see them laughing and holding hands in a sunlit corner of her mind but where had they gone? They were no longer together and no longer in Copenhagen; between them already lay Time, and for her the dark days of Paris, yet only seven days ago they had been together and real. She shivered—change again!—and without unpacking her suit
case she extracted from it a sweater and high-heeled pumps, returned her calendar to the sketchbook, zipped and locked her case, and prepared to invade the dining room for dinner.
* * *
—
She dined at eight-fifteen, sweeping grandly into the hall to be seated at a small table beside an enormous window. The maitre d’ hovered over her, a boy arrived to fill her water glass, and the wine steward immediately followed. She had the feeling of being extremely mysterious to them, for there were no other women dining alone and this evening she could experience again the sense of freedom that she had begun to feel on her first morning in Copenhagen before she met Adam. Certainly she must be the only other woman traveling alone in Majorca; no one else, she suspected, would be idiotic enough to come by ship and plane to the Balearic Islands when they had all of Europe from which to choose. Tonight she felt distinguished and set apart by this fact, and because she moved with grandness—Majorca was, after all, going to be different—she was aware of people staring at her, and she did not in the least mind because they were looking not at her but at grandeur. Life did have its small moments.
She ordered sangria from the wine steward and shish kebab from the waiter, and as she waited, a woman of the world and with something of Adam resurrected in her, she became aware of one man whose glance did not detach itself from her after the first moment, but who sat and watched her with interest. How perfect, she thought—a man was all that her small triumph had lacked, and when he averted his gaze she frankly glanced at him. He sat with three other people—a man, a woman and a teenaged boy—and it was not difficult to deduce that he was the unattached male of the party. He was deeply tanned, his crew-cut blond hair bleached almost white by the sun, his eyes a blue that contrasted strikingly with the brown of his face and the near-white of his head. She thought he looked like one of those mythical young-old airplane pilots who lived with the elements and whose gaze was accustomed to wind, sea, and great spaces.
He turned again to look at her—it was extremely flattering—and with a faint smile Melissa glanced away. The group arose and made their way slowly out of the dining room, but not before the man had given Melissa a last curious glance. Watching him leave she thought, “Another Adam?”
* * *
—
When she returned to her room an hour later she was humming softly. Flicking on the light she unlocked her suitcase to begin unpacking and at once her humming stopped and she frowned. She had retained a very clear picture of the top layer of her suitcase when she left the room: she had placed the homemade calendar on top of the sketchbook that traveled in the left-hand corner, Emerson’s Essays had rested beside it, then Henri’s Art Spirit, two pairs of shoes had lain next to the books, and her plastic traveling case had been wedged into the right-hand corner. Now the flowered traveling case lay in the center with the books on either side of it and upside down, her sketchbook was on the right, and the calendar had been neatly placed on the left, under a pair of shoes.
Her suitcase had been searched.
It jolted her, distracting her at once from happy fantasies of romance. She walked to the door and listened beside it for a moment, and then she went to the window and drew the curtains on the flood-lit pool and the slender moon sailing over the Mediterranean beyond. So they were no longer content to follow at a distance. Had she been wrong—could she have been wrong?—to believe herself safe so long as she went nowhere near the Anglo-Majorcan Export Company?
She sat down on the bed, a little frightened and wary, not quite understanding why they were growing impatient and moving in now. She could not believe that she had deepened their suspicions by coming to Majorca, for if they possessed her itinerary, as obviously they must, they would know that her visit had been planned months ago in America. It had to be that here in Majorca, so near to the point of conclusion, their curiosity and their suspense were growing insupportable. This thought appealed to her, for it made them seem almost human, subject to the same longings for reassurance that she herself experienced. She began to picture someone in Majorca angrily pacing a floor, saying in a harassed voice, “But my God, this is costing us money—two weeks in Copenhagen and Paris and we still aren’t sure that she’s the right person!” It was soothing to suppose that she might worry them a little. Walking over to the suitcase she checked it through again.
But nothing was missing, not even Stearns’ book, which at this moment seemed unfortunate to her. “I wish they’d taken you,” she told the book bitterly, but not even the most malevolent of glances could exorcise it from sight. Changing into her pajamas she turned off the light and climbed into bed.
* * *
—
Following a ten o’clock breakfast the next morning—she had awaited it impatiently, not yet accustomed to Majorca’s languid pace—Melissa set out to look at the town of Palma, which she guessed would have little kinship to the world of tourist hotels. She was quite right. After a long stroll down the sunny boulevard she turned into the Plaza Gralmo Franco to meet an older, kinder century. Here there was deep shade—for only tourists sought the sun—and a cobbled strip where old men sat and dreamed and barefooted children played intricate, secret games. Shops walled in this plaza, but there was not a boutique among them; they were crammed instead with the staples of life, and if here and there souvenir merchants had inserted themselves, their shops too had a good-humored gypsy hawkers’ quality. The plaza seemed to Melissa a picture frame in which an ancient courteous past and an earthy, practical present mingled, so that it held two dimensions, the one imposed upon the other.
She had carried her sketchbook with her, and she sat down for a little while on a bench and made quick sketches of the children and of the iron balconies lining the plaza. No one objected, and the only attention she drew came from the warm-eyed young men who distributed their attention equally among all the females. Presently she got up and left, and passing the post office, telephone company, and police station headed for the cobbled thoroughfare that rose steeply toward curving, narrow streets filled with shops. Here a new century had made inroads, here stood the shops of leather, glass, fabric, woodcarvings, the windows artfully arranged to catch the eye of the tourist. She walked from one to another in delight, stopping to examine delicate carvings of Don Quixote, richly tooled leather purses, fur rugs, old maps, and jewelry of Spanish gold.
It was some time before she realized that she was being followed, and then it was due only to a sixth sense that had begun to appraise coincidences of sound and movement behind her and to acquire an awareness of footsteps that halted when she halted, of eyes watching through glass when she stepped inside a store. It surprised her that her mind, even as she admired tapestries and old books, could process the scene around her, assessing and timing and drawing significant conclusions like a computer. Two pairs of footsteps, two pairs of eyes, whispered this sixth sense, warning her, but both feet and eyes remained elusive, always just around a corner although once, turning very quickly, she saw two men disappear much too hastily into a shop. They wore black suits and cocoa straw hats, and she thought they appeared to be young men. Their presence made her aware of the fact that she had wandered quite far from the Gralmo Franco, and that each shop she entered carried her deeper into this maze of slanting, cobbled alleys and squares. Her map gave no names but it did assure her that this network of streets was only several blocks deep and wide and this tempered her uneasiness so that before retracing her steps she calmly stopped to buy a few woodcarvings.
On the way back her shadows remained unseen, but when she passed a man in a black suit fanning his face with a cocoa straw hat she thought he might be one of them. She came upon him suddenly and he at once glanced away, which set him apart from every native male she had encountered in Palma. He was not young, though, and his face was thin and ferretlike.
Presently as she continued to follow the twists and turns downhill she came out upon a street she had not
seen before. This one was broad enough for cars and its shops had a settled, businesslike appearance foreign to the tourist trade. At this end of the street a stone well was set into the pavement, with steps surrounding it. It looked such a pleasant neighborhood that Melissa decided to follow the street to the end. She took a step forward and then stopped as a harsh, urgent shout from down the street broke the quiet, and behind her she heard footsteps break into a run on the cobbles. Her glance swerved to the man who had shouted. She saw him standing at the next corner staring in her direction with his mouth open. She turned to look at whom he shouted and saw a man running toward her down the alley she had just left. When he saw her he stopped running and slowed to a self-conscious walk, and suddenly, jarringly, Melissa realized that both of these men wore black suits and cocoa straw hats and that the shout and the running steps concerned her, that for some unknown reason she had upset the two men so that she was the object of this sudden tension that ripped apart the tranquility of this street. Across the road a man and woman had felt it, too. They stopped laughing, their mouths still open in surprise at the strident shout, and an old woman seated on the steps of the well gaped at Melissa. The entire block had become abruptly, ominously still, as if life was held momentarily in suspension. An indefinable menace hung in the air, completely puzzling to Melissa until she looked again to the man who had shouted and her glance fell by accident upon the sign posted on the nearest building. This was the Veri Rosario.
Uncertain Voyage Page 12