A Necessary Action (7 page)

She would really like to have said ‘Don’t sulk, now,’ but she was too wise for that and said instead: ‘Give me a cigarette, there’s a good boy.’

A flicker of surprise shone in Santiago’s eyes and the mask cracked for one brief moment.

Siglinde thought: You poor wretch you. It’s hell that you can’t find anyone who wants to. Good God, there should be a rescue corps of sensible women set up, women who could be sent here as instructors and sweep out all this hypocrisy and stupidity and complexes, before those fat masturbating priests and nuns have time to destroy this generation too.

When she looked at Santiago his face had changed yet again. His look was calm and reflective, and he moistened his lips with his tongue as he systematically sorted out the things on the floor.

A moment later they heard the truck start up and come nearer.

Dan Pedersen and Willi Mohr had been forced to take the bed to pieces to get it on the vehicle. Now they had to carry the sections upstairs and put it together again. When they had done it, Siglinde went up to look and burst out laughing. It was a huge wooden bedstead of stained oak with carved ornamentation along the sides. It would have held four people with comfort and it was a miracle that in a country so short of wood it had not been broken up years ago. Presumably no one had had the energy to
set about the task. Siglinde tried it out and pronounced it creaking, dignified and pretentious.

Then they all went up to the Café Central and drank a bottle of white wine. The place was large and poor and almost empty. Near the door sat a few civil guards playing cards and at the far end was a rickety ping-pong table.

Dan Pedersen and Santiago played for a while. Dan was the better player and won in three straight sets, each time with a secure margin. When they changed ends for the last game, he said: ‘How’s things with Ramon?’

‘Not too good. Concussion, I think. But he got up and went out with the boat.’

‘With concussion? He shouldn’t have done that.’

‘He’s very strong.’

‘Yes, but there are limits.’

Half an hour later, they parted at the cross-roads, Santiago shaking hands with them, one after another.

‘You’ll be stopped by the patrols,’ said Dan.

‘They’ve stopped me so many times I think they’re sick of it now,’ said Santiago.

He drove all the way without once being stopped.

The others stood outside the house in Barrio Son Jofre. The cobblestones felt warm and friendly under their feet, and the star-studded sky arched over them between the mountains.

‘Apropos that corporal,’ said Siglinde. ‘Why doesn’t Santiago work like the others?’

‘It’s not just a matter of hauling up a whole lot of fish,’ said Dan Pedersen. ‘The problem is to sell it and get a decent price. If there were enough people like Santiago, then this country wouldn’t look as it does.’

‘You two are good friends, aren’t you?’ said Willi Mohr.

‘We’ve known each other a long time. Yes, we’re friends. Friendship is something special here, something to do with sacred principles, something important and meaningful. You’ll understand after a while.’

‘Genuine friendship isn’t something you pick up in the street,’ he added. ‘It’s as rare as love.’

He pushed open the creaking door and they stepped into their new home.

While Willi Mohr was undressing, he heard Dan and Siglinde moving about and talking upstairs. After a while the bed creaked and the wavering light on the stairs went out.

Willi Mohr thought about Barbara Heinemann.

‘Good-night, Willy, sleep well,’ called Dan and Siglinde from above.

‘Good-night, sleep well,’ said Willi Mohr.

He smiled in the darkness and tried to think: Perhaps after all …

Tomorrow he would paint.

Dan Pedersen was outwardly a man without inhibitions, whether physical or spiritual. He found it easy to make friends, easy to work, easy to love. He was outward-looking and open to impulses and impressions, had a mobile intellect and a quick temper, often falling victim to occasional weaknesses and depressions. Like his wife, he was the product of a comfortable life and a tolerant upbringing. He had gone to Spain because it was cheap there and he would be able to finish a very bad serial he was writing under an assumed name and for which he had already been paid an advance. Later he took another advance and was now waiting until it was absolutely necessary for him to do some writing. As a professional writer he was what is usually called nimble-fingered. He could write so that what he wrote seemed good without it any way being so. In general he knew how things should be done but was seldom able to do them himself. He liked Spain very much, but he had liked Norway very much too, even during the war. He liked drinking too, but drank to excess only rarely. He often felt uncertain, but that was not often noticeable.

Siglinde was like him in many ways, and in some ways she was his superior. She was more farsighted and practical, but she was also more conscious of the threats in life. All her life she had borne a latent fear for a variety of things, fears which often varied in reason and character and which she tried to suppress
because she thought them foolish. She possessed an immediate attractiveness, which appeared shallow and which made people think of sexuality. She was really a wholly normal girl with a normal physique, though here, in this phantom world of suppressed emotions, she played a peculiar rôle, and she herself noticed it, but did not bother about it because it seemed absurd to her. In the puerto they had often had trouble with peeping toms. In fact she was a shy person and could not, for instance, say certain things without sweating all over.

Willi Mohr was a bad painter, although he was technically skilful. He lacked spark and an artistic sense of purpose, and he energetically tried to replace what he lacked with industry and obstinacy, without for one moment believing or even wishing that this would be successful. Generally speaking, he was incapable of involving himself in anything, he believed, not even in his own problems, which he found quite meaningless. He was caught in a closed circuit and he himself considered that he could not with certainty remember any occasion on which he had been really happy or really miserable. He was locked in an attitude of physical and intellectual perfection, and if he had really been in a position to hope, he would have hoped for a miracle.

These three people lived together in the house in Barrio Son Jofre for four months and six days, from the ninth of August to the fifteenth of December.

While they were living there, a number of things happened. The summer ebbed away into a last spell of explosive heat, with burning hot days and steaming, sweaty nights. Then came a brief autumn with continuous warm rain, when the underground streams from the mountains roared along under the surface of the ground. Dried-up wells were filled and plant life, which never resigns itself, came to life again and waited for the sun, which would soon come back and burn it all up again. After the rain came the winter, the most exciting time of the year, and also the most pleasant. The winter could be said to begin in November. Beautiful, glass-clear sunny days were followed by astonishing storms and apocalyptical thunderstorms. One never knew what it would be like from one day to the next.

The people in the house in Barrio Son Jofre came to learn each other’s patterns of behaviour and adapted themselves
accordingly. They soon acquired a tenable daily routine which was self-evident and required no discussion. Dan Pedersen finally set to work to earn his advance. He sat on the second step of the staircase and wrote. The typewriter was on a chair in front of him and the light from the open door fell on to his paper. He liked it there, despite the fact that the cat insisted on lying on his heap of typescript and despite the fact that he had to move every time Siglinde wanted to go upstairs. As she walked past, he used to run his hand down her naked leg.

Willi Mohr had borrowed some tools and had knocked up an easel. Then he sat by the door, six feet from the staircase, and painted. It took him about a week to paint a picture and then he took the drawing-pins out of the piece of hardboard, pinned the canvas on to the wall and never looked at it again.

Sometimes Dan looked at his pictures and said critically: ‘You must try and get free, Willi. That’s technically skilful but there’s nothing in it. No feeling either, but most of all no content.’

He tapped the heap of typescript with his pipe.

‘This is at least utterly false and repulsive,’ he said, ‘and I also know why I’m doing it.’

He sighed and wrote another sentence.

Willi Mohr smiled sardonically and went on dabbing with his brush.

Now and again Siglinde took out her sketching-block and sat down on the outside steps to draw the cat. She did it quickly and elegantly, with bold simplifications. When Dan told her it was good, she refused to believe him, although he was right. She was talented, but could never see any point in drawing a cat.

‘Things that are quite meaningless can’t possibly be any good,’ she said.

Otherwise she did the housekeeping and that involved the burden of the daily chores. She had to cook all the food on an open fire, and this she did very well. Presumably it was due to her that the house in Barrio Son Jofre bloomed in the middle of its grotesque decay.

The previous tenants, a group of Asturian labourers, who had been taken from their homes and put to assisted work on the roads, had not been so well placed. Inscriptions on the walls bore witness to their despair and hatred.

Siglinde did all the shopping.

Willi Mohr fetched the water.

Dan Pedersen collected the wood.

No one had consciously created this organization. It had just come about.

Dan Pedersen’s royalties did not come and would be some time coming too. Willi Mohr paid. He was relatively well off and kept his money in his wallet at the bottom of his rucksack. Above the wallet lay a 9 mm Walther pistol, an army model, carefully wrapped in a cloth.

As they had no form of lighting except candles and the old paraffin lamp, their working day coincided with the daylight. At dusk they went up to the bar in the square and drank something. Sometimes they played ping-pong, but Dan always won. Willi Mohr usually got beaten by Siglinde too, and this annoyed him a little.

Once, just before falling asleep, he realized that this was a healthy sign.

The people in the house in Barrio Son Jofre had a daily routine, but they did not allow themselves to be enslaved by it. Once or twice a week they started up the old truck and went down to the puerto. When it was warm they bathed from the cliffs or from the breakwater by the pier and they swam in the green salty water. Occasionally they stayed long into the night and knocked about Jacinto’s bar or some other place. On these occasions they were always together with Santiago or Ramon, usually both.

One of the Alemany brothers often used to come up to the town. Then they brought fish with them, which Siglinde cooked on the open fire and which they ate together.

Willi Mohr went out fishing three times with the others. Santiago and Ramon had a motor-boat which was used at night for calamary fishing. It was large and well-made and eminently suitable for pleasure trips.

On these three occasions they went quite far out, to a small archipelago of rocky islands, and they fished with hooks close under the cliff walls. The archipelago was bare and uninhabited, but full of hidden bays.

They bathed there too and once Ramon Alemany looked at
Dan Pedersen and laughed and said: ‘You’ve a very beautiful wife.’

Siglinde was standing two steps away, dripping wet in her blue bathing-costume. She looked healthy and strong and happy.

Dan Pedersen slapped her jokingly on the backside and said: ‘Siglinde? Oh, her bottom’s far too big.’

Santiago was sitting in the boat watching them. He did not laugh.

Willi Mohr noticed the little scene and tucked it away in his mind.

He caught several small fish that day and one that was large and flat and blue, but it did not amuse him much.

He thought: I won’t go with them next time.

At the end of October, a prominent fascist official came to the puerto. He was a member of parliament and a military man and had been persuaded there by his wife, who liked visiting idyllic and untouched parts of the country. They stayed for three days with a very rich director of a bank in the provincial capital, who had long ago built himself a large summer residence and equipped it with a staff of servants, near the lighthouse, but had practically never stayed there. With them the couple had their twenty-year-old daughter and her fiancé, a senior official in the Portuguese Embassy. They drove from the provincial capital in a large cream-coloured American car, towing a trailer on which was a little mahogany racing-boat equipped with a brand new outboard motor of a kind that cannot be bought on the open market.

The daughter was studying economics at Madrid University and belonged to the small group of emancipated Spanish women. She went about in white slacks, a red jumper, and French cork-soled shoes, which made her look a trifle long-legged.

She and her Portuguese fiancé had the servants put the racing-boat into the sea, start the motor and then they set off round the pier. It was windy beyond the mountains, but in the bay the water was green and calm. When they had got about two
hundred yards behond the lighthouse, they slowed down and moved closer to each other on the seat. She unbuttoned her bra and pulled down the zip of her slacks, and then they busied themselves with an occupation which would have filled the member of parliament with wonder and doubts, had he been equipped with a pair of binoculars.

Three minutes later they lost the engine, which had been badly fixed on and had shaken loose with the vibration. It hissed as it fell into the water and immediately sank to the bottom and stayed there, forty feet below, jammed between two large stones. A couple of small squids fled in terror, each in a different direction.

The girl at once lost interest, took away the young man’s hand and pulled up her zip. Although it was less than half an hour before the civil guard’s barque towed the racing boat into the pier, the engine appeared to be a wholly indispensable toy. The barque went out again.