Foreigners (28 page)

Their room overlooked the courtyard. The scent of the lemon trees below mixed with the aroma of his strong coffee and gave Stanley a pleasing sense of calm. There was nothing impressive about the view. It would do little to sell the Mercato to a prospective guest. Directly opposite were the peeling pink stucco walls of terraced apartments, their patios cluttered with hanging laundry and tangled kitchen gardens. To the left, the raised rail lines of the Circumvesuviana, and in the distance beyond, past the stretch of residential sprawl, the faint blue of the Bay of Naples. To the right, the drab modern grey brick of the neighbouring apartment block that fronted onto the Corso Italia. And still, in the quiet of morning, it was a delight. The warmth of the sun, the town just coming to life. It was worth it just for this, Stanley thought: Sant'Agnello at dawn. Gloria would have liked it very much.

Capri Town was horrible, the Piazzetta so overrun that they had to shoulder their way through. When Stanley stopped to get a photograph of the dome of Chiasa Santo Stefano, he was pushed so hard from behind that he nearly dropped the camera, but when he turned and looked into the crowd, no one met his eyes. He wondered how it could be that this town
and Anacapri shared the same island. And how too that it was this place that garnered all the attention. It was so dirty, so confused, so unfriendly—no different than Marina Grande below. And from the café terraces that choked the square he felt the stares of patrons as they sat with their espressos, like arbiters in judgment.

Ahead of him, Shirley seemed to lose her way. She was in a hurry to get to the fancy shops on Via Camerelle—Gucci, Ferragamo, the lot, Antonio told them, and cheaper than if they went into Naples. But now she was searching for him, trying to find his face among the throng. Stanley waited and watched her. There was a trace of panic around her eyes. People jostled her as they made their way past. She called his name and a few passersby gave her odd looks. Stanley was less than fifteen feet away, but he might as well have been fifteen miles, for even when he fell into her direct line of sight she could not see him. He remained standing a moment longer, being jostled himself, until her panic began to progress into fear; then he stepped forward and took her by the hand, and when she first looked into his face it was as if she were looking into the face of a stranger.

“Stanley?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Oh, Stanley. I thought I lost you.”

“No,” he said. “I'm right here.”

“I think we should go now, Stanley.”

“Yes, dear,” he said and began to lead her from the square.

They found Antonio back at the taxi rank leaning against the car, smoking a cigarette. He was talking to two other men, who were laughing at something he had just told them. He
hadn't seen them approach, and waved a hand at them when Stanley said, “We'd like to go back to Marina Grande now, please.”

Then, realizing it was who it was, he put a smile on his face and looked at his watch.

“So soon?” he said.

“Yes,” Stanley replied.

“Maybe you like to see Villa Jovis? It is very beautiful.”

“No,” Stanley said, opening the taxi door for Shirley. “Marina Grande, please.”

Antonio shrugged his shoulders and threw his cigarette onto the pavement. He passed a surreptitious comment to the two men as he climbed behind the wheel; again they laughed.

The road to Marina Grande did not bother Stanley as it had before. He knew he could do nothing about the hidden dangers, but now he felt better prepared for them. Shirley put her head on his shoulder. He ran his fingers through her hair and saw that her roots were starting to show their grey again. His kissed her softly on her crown.

“Let's eat at the hotel tonight,” he said.

“Yes,” said Shirley. “Yes, that sounds nice.”

The scooter shop appeared to be closed when they passed it by. The marina itself was quieter, less crowded. Stanley still could not understand its charm.

TO HAVE NOT

F
RANKLIN
F
OWLER CURLED HIS TOES
in the sand and smiled, then he called to the
cabaña
boy.

“Hernán, orto maragrita, por favor.”

“Si, el Señor Folwer. Immediatamente, señor.”

Franklin watched as Hernán made his way to the thatch-roofed bar on the thin strip of grass that separated the Hotel Vivo's pool from the swath of white-sand beachfront that was restricted to paying guests. The beach was protected on each side by thick spans of yellow rope stretched between iron stanchions. Hotel guards in dark brown trousers and beige blouses with flashes on the shoulders patrolled these lengths. Around their waists they had low-slung white belts with dangling batons. The guards were not entirely necessary, but they gave the guests a sense of security, and helped furnish the illusion that their hotel was of the same class as the bigger resorts across the bay in Nuevo Vallarta. At those bigger resorts, better-dressed guards than these policed the beaches for the
beggars and trinket hawkers who descended upon the guests like mosquitos at dusk in the hope of earning a few pesos, or if they were lucky, actual American dollars. Such pedlars and panhandlers did not bother with the Hotel Vivo.

“Su bebida, el Señor Fowler.”

“Gracias tanto, Hernán,”
Franklin said, taking the drink. He licked some salt from the rim, then held the cold glass to his forehead a moment, before setting it into the little hole he had burrowed in the sand beside his beach chair. Then Franklin reached into the canvas bag he had taken to carrying around with him and retrieved two ten-peso notes.

“Muchos gracias, el Señor Fowler,”
said Hernán and bowed graciously.

Franklin waved his hand: “It's nothing, Hernán.
No es nada.”

He watched as Hernán made his way once again across the cloying sand toward the bar. When Franklin had first begun spending his afternoons on the beach he'd always gone to the bar himself. He didn't like the thought of Hernán—who, though he was a
cabaña
boy, was several years Franklin's senior—having to struggle across the sand in his heavy-soled shoes to bring him his drink. He thought he was doing the older man a favour. That is until the hotel manager, an ex-pat Brit with a swollen belly and varicose nose, took him aside and explained that the
cabaña
boys depended on tips from the guests to subsidize their otherwise meagre wages.

“I'd no idea,” Franklin had said, embarrassed by his miscue. “Have there been complaints?”

“Not complaints exactly,” the manager replied. His name was Willy Booth, and Franklin found him rather intimidating.
He leaned in close when he spoke, resting a thick-fingered hand on Franklin's shoulder. It was not so much a posture of confidence as one of implied threat, as if he was offering a warning rather than kindly advice, though never once did the smile pass from his lips, which made it all the worse. “Let's just call it concerns, shall we,” Willy said. “These buggers know better than to complain.”

From that point on Franklin had allowed himself to be served, or rather paid for the privilege of service. Willy had told him just to throw the boys a few pesos, but Franklin decided on twenty. It was his only real expense apart from his bar tab and club membership, which was what Willy called the nominal fee Franklin had to pay for using the Hotel Vivo's beach, seeing as he was not actually a paying guest of the hotel. Franklin owned a private house on a lagoon farther along the road.

Franklin took a sip of his drink. What a glorious taste, he thought, as the salt mixed with the tart lime and the pungent tequila. He tipped his head back and let the ice slide along his tongue and down his throat before it had a chance to melt. It gave him a quick rush of pain behind his eyes, like when he used to bite into an ice cream as a child. He put his thumb behind his front teeth and pushed hard to relieve the pressure of the cold. It was a trick his mother had taught him. As the ache subsided, he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes to the sun. This is the life, he told himself, and rubbed a hand across his belly. It was growing fat with leisure; soon it would be big like Willy Booth's.

Willy Booth. Franklin would never have thought it after that first meeting, but without Willy he would be lost. And he half suspected that Willy might be the same without him. Well, if not exactly lost, then at least somewhat more solitary.

It was Willy who forced the issue, inviting Franklin into the bar for a drink that turned into many more and soon became a routine that both looked forward to, though neither would come out and say as much. To see them together, they were an odd couple indeed. There was Willy, his body engorged like a weightlifter gone to pot, his appetite for pleasure nearly as swollen, and always wearing a smile that only just masked the belligerence residing beneath. Next to him Franklin's weediness was thrown into stark relief: he was spindly arms and spindly legs with only the hint of a paunch pushing out the front of his shirt. And whereas Willy's skin seemed stretched thin over his bulk and barely able to contain him, Franklin looked to have more than he needed—this was most noticeable beneath his chin, where the flesh hung loose like a turkey's wattle, making it appear as if he had once been a much larger man, which wasn't the case.

For his part, Franklin recognized their incongruities, and he was aware that their differences went far deeper than merely the physical. In Willy, Franklin saw a vigour that he craved, and he secretly hoped that some of the big man's excessiveness might rub off on him.

In truth, Franklin began to think of Willy Booth as a godsend, as the conveyance that would deliver him from the deepening rut of his life. He even said as much to him. “Willy,” Franklin said one night in the bar, his chair tilted precariously on two legs, his vision blurred by drink, “you are
a godsend.” Willy looked at him with a pinched expression that forced the blood into the end of his bulbous nose, then refilled their glasses with the Johnny Walker Black he'd commandeered from behind the bar, and said, “Your problem, Fowler, is that you've no romance in your life.
Ningún romance. Ninguna vitalidad. Ninguna aventura.
Know what I mean?”

Franklin knew exactly what Willy meant.

When his mother died, Franklin found himself an orphan. He was forty-one years old and, for the first time in his life, alone in the world.

After the funeral, Franklin stood in the kitchen of the house on Montrose Avenue and made himself a cup of coffee. He liked it sweet: three sugars. He took his coffee, and a handful of biscuits from the tray he had brought home from the reception in the basement of St Bart's, and went out into the backyard. He stood by the fence and munched a Chinese rice cracker that to him tasted of nothing, though an elderly friend of his mother told him the crackers were meant to taste like prawns. Franklin had never eaten prawns before.

Below him lay Bickford Park. On the hillside opposite, a number of people had set out towels on the grass and were bathing in the late-May sunshine. A group of older men played bocce at one end of the park, the soft clicking of the balls floating upward on the currents of warm air and mingling with the shouts coming from the baseball diamond below Harbord Street. Franklin watched it all, drinking his coffee and chewing his flavourless biscuits. And while he did, he
thought, I have never played baseball, I have never bowled bocce, I have never lain out in the sun.