Rocks, The (8 page)

T
he steady hornet sound
grew louder, angrier.

“Voilà!”
said François Duhamel. He smiled around the kitchen at C’an Cabrer, sweeping an arm with a grandiloquent air toward the noise coming from the open door to the terrace. “
Je vous présente
Señor Gómez, and his
fearful
Lambretta. Are you ready for our ramble through the campo, gentlemen?”

“Abso
lute
ly,” said Fergus Maitland. He was tall, incipiently flabby, his curly hair wet but drying, still partly plastered down in long waves; small but cheerfully expressive features in a fleshy face. He was dressed not for a walk in the Mediterranean landscape but in his all-purpose summer holiday wear: Lacoste swimming briefs, a short-sleeved rose-colored shirt, black loafers, black socks, Panama hat by Herbert Johnson of Bond Street. “Aegina, my love, Charlie me darling,” he said, “have fun at the beach.” He walked to the kitchen table, where Aegina was giving three-year-old Charlie his breakfast, and kissed his wife and son.

Gerald looked moodily out a kitchen window, opposite the terrace door, at the sloping hillside of lemon trees.

“Be careful at the
playa
,” said François. He was a skinny, floppy-haired man in his early thirties. His wife, Penny, and their daughter, Bianca, were also seated at the kitchen table. “The wind is calm, but the sea is still agitated today. There will be waves out at Cala Espasa,
soyez prudent avec les enfants
, okay?”

“Of course we will,” said Penny.

François walked outside onto the terrace that overlooked the long uphill driveway. Fergus and Gerald—Gerald last, slowly, reluctantly—followed him. They looked down at Señor Gómez coming up the hill ahead of a large plume of greasy blue smoke.

“Christ,” said Fergus, “he really is on a fucking motor scooter. What’s wrong with a car? Wouldn’t a builder want to give some sense of solidity?”

François smiled. “Oh, he does. You’ll see.”

The muffler on the Lambretta was unavailing. The 150 cc engine’s whine reached a nostalgic authenticity as it crested the top of the drive and suddenly subsided to a relatively quiet purr. Señor Gómez killed the engine and looked up at the three men looking down at him.

“Buenos días,”
he said with grave formality. He stepped off his machine and pulled it back on its stand.

“Salud, amigo,”
said François.
“Venimos abajo.”

They descended the steps to the driveway. Señor Gómez was dressed like a peasant: blue cotton shirt faded from many launderings, threadbare darker blue trousers, old tennis shoes. He removed a small, battered, narrow-brimmed coarsely woven straw trilby, revealing a forehead so pale and gray above his sunburned face that the skin looked corpselike. The deep creases on either side of his mouth and around his eyes, and the lattice of lines along the back of his neck, were engrained in black, like the ineradicable soiling of a miner’s skin. Señor Gómez was short, about five-foot-five. He had a Buddha-like composure.

François made the introductions with some flourish.
“Señor Rutledge, el propietario. Señor Maitland, nuestro banquero. Señor Gómez, constructor.”
Gómez shook hands with the three men. Gerald felt the keratinous calluses of the builder’s hand.

“Very old!” said Fergus, smiling jovially, pointing to the ancient Lambretta. It had two separate saddle seats and a crazed, yellowed acrylic windshield.
“Antiquo!”

“Ah, sí,”
said Gómez, impassive yet betraying a scintilla of pride.
“Modelo cincuenta y ocho. Veinticinco años.”

“Bueno,”
said François.
“Pues, vámonos?”

“Sí,”
said Señor Gómez.

François led them around the house to the hillside Gerald had gazed at so glumly through his kitchen window. They climbed a short distance through groves of lemon and almond trees. Tinder-dry leaves, almond shells, twigs crackled underfoot. François lunged ahead with long strides, bobbing over his thighs. Fergus moved awkwardly, picking his way, and was soon out of breath. Gómez walked with short, sure, deliberate steps, like a donkey. Gerald seemed to amble, even uphill, familiar with the ground; but he dawdled in the rear, picking up fallen branches, fruit, dropping them thoughtfully to one side as if grooming a fairway. They reached a path and followed it horizontally around the slope. Soon the house behind them was obscured by the contour of the hill. The land in front of them now fell away and the lemon and almond groves gave way to neat rows of olive trees. Through the trees they could see the town, the lighthouse, the sea.

François stopped. “
Bueno
, here we are,” he said. He turned toward Señor Gómez and Fergus, and spoke to both of them. “
Aquí está la parcela.
Here’s the parcel. From here,
desde aquí
—” He raised his arms, gesturing downhill, then at right angles across the slope, back toward the town. Then, his hands and arms aiding him more figuratively, François spoke in Spanish of hectares, numbers of units, an access road, the running of power, telephone, water, and sewer lines.

“Fantastico!”
Fergus interjected at moments when he thought he caught the gist of a vision of the completed project. In his four years of visiting Mallorca as Aegina’s husband, he’d discovered the convenient fact that with the simple addition of an
o
, many English words became their Spanish counterpart. Others did not, but the continental effect usually carried the day.

Señor Gómez’s face, beneath the straw hat, remained inscrutable. His narrowed eyes flicked across the land as François spoke.

Gerald looked in the same direction, at the peaceful, sloping olive grove. Olive trees could live for two thousand years. They showed their age: the twisted, misshapen boles had erupted—over centuries—with lumps like the warts on a cartoon crone’s nose, limbs were deformed and articulated as if ravaged by rickets—but these were all the healthy survivors, older than most European states, and they were still producing. Gerald had never thought of himself as owning these trees. He had husbanded, pruned, ministered to them for thirty years, mindful always that he was only a caretaker for a brief duration. And they had fed him in return.

He’d never imagined cutting them down.

•   •   •

W
ell, he has to,”
said Aegina, her eyes on Charlie as he shrieked, turned, and ran screaming up the sand toward his mother. A wave rose, curled, and broke with a roar behind him. He wasn’t going to make it, Aegina saw, but that was Charlie’s game. His eyes locked on to hers and she laughed and made a face of mock terror. The sweeping cataract overtook him, reaching as high as his upper thighs, splashing his chest, and Charlie ran on, squealing, eyes popping at the water snatching at his legs like maddened puppies.

It was sunny and almost windless on Mallorca, but somewhere across the Mediterranean, inclement weather, perhaps a mistral in the Golfe du Lion, had produced waves that now swept around the eastern end of the island to provide Charlie and everyone else with a rare day of real surf at Cala Espasa, the normally sheltered cove north of town. He ran ceaselessly in and out of the water, fleeing the waves that unfailingly caught him. The first few times he fell and was completely submerged, and rose gasping for breath, Aegina had rushed for him, her hands playing across his face and head, smoothing the salty water away from his eyes. But Charlie was only thrilled and turned and staggered seaward toward the retreating water. Again and again, untiringly, like a dog after a bone.

Bianca was less enthralled. “Uh-oh,” said Penny, seeing what was going to happen a second before Bianca tripped in the surf and the water buried her. She jumped up and ran, reaching her daughter as she rose spluttering out of the subsiding froth. Bianca was trying to keep up with Charlie but she’d fallen too much and now she started crying. “Oh, sweetheart,” said Penny, scooping her up. She brought her back to their spot on the dry sand beneath the umbrella, wrapped Bianca in a towel, and hugged her. Then she said, “Is he really broke?”

“Practically. He used to have a very small income from an aunt—you know, like people in old novels: three hundred pounds a year, on which they’d live genteelly in Dorset or something. But he spent that capital once he bought C’an Cabrer, and since then he’s lived off what he’s been able to produce and sell. But you can’t make a living now from selling olives and lemons and almonds. Not the way he did. It’s all big supermarkets now, HiperSol and SuperSol, and they buy from large-scale suppliers. The little
comestibles
, like Calix, and restaurants, that wanted thirty liters of olive oil and a few tubs of lemons—well, you know, you’ve seen it—they’re all gone, or going, or buying from the same big suppliers. They’re paying a lot less per kilo, and they only want to buy by the ton. And now the town’s put the property taxes up.”

“It’s so sad,” said Penny. Bianca heard her and looked up at her mother and made a sad face. “It’s all changed now, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It is sad,” said Aegina, her eyes following Charlie in the water. “It’s breaking his heart—it breaks mine too—but he’s got to sell something. He sold two parcels of land down at the bottom of the drive years ago, but they didn’t pay much, not what they’d fetch now. I’ve suggested he sell the whole place and move into a smaller house in town, but he says he’d hate that and I probably would too. He’s lucky he’s got François to do it with.”

“François thinks they’ll do very well. And it should be nice. I mean, they’re really nice houses, and not too many of them. François says you won’t see them from your house.”

“Well, it’s the trees, Penny, that he’s really upset about. He’s been looking after them ever since he’s lived here, they’re like his friends. But there’s nothing else for it. He can either do this, with François, and have some say in it, or sell the whole place to someone else and then it would be a lot worse. I mean, look what’s happened to Mallorca, just since you’ve been here.”

“I know. Though of course, it’s not been bad for François. He’s done awfully well with his developments. It’s great that he and Fergus can make this happen together, for Gerald.”

“Yes, it’s great,” said Aegina.

Charlie ran screaming with laughter up to them, dripping salt water, to get Bianca, but she was alarmed and burrowed into her mother. He ran off into the waves.

“Fergus goes to the Rocks quite a bit, doesn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t mind?”

“No, of course not,” said Aegina. “The guests are all English. He’s comfortable there. Really, I’m glad he’s found a place he likes here, somewhere to go and have a drink. I don’t have to go there, and he doesn’t mind that either. I think he enjoys getting away from us for a few hours. And now he’s got this project, it’ll keep him busy. It works out well.”

“Gerald never goes there?”

“No. He used to walk or drive by when he thought no one would notice. I remember driving past the Rocks in the car when I was a child—when it was the long way home—and he would slow down.”

“What do you think he feels about Lulu?”

Aegina shook her head slowly. “I’m not sure. He was obsessed at one point—my mother had to give him a proper bollocking about it.”

“And you still don’t know what happened between them? Luc never told you?”

“No.”

Charlie came running up again. “I’m hungry!” he said.

“Bueno,”
said Aegina.
“Bocadillos.”

She and Penny opened baskets and laid a lunch out on their towels. The children nibbled on giant sandwiches.

•   •   •

W
hen they returned
to the house from the olive groves, François spread blueprints on the dining room table before Señor Gómez. They showed elevations and construction details for four different designs of two-story villas of approximately the same size and footprint. Each had four bedrooms (or three bedrooms and a study), three bathrooms, an open-plan ground floor with a kitchen and living room flowing toward a terrace. Each house had its own pool. Each design showed slight variations in exterior details and use of interior space. The villas would be oriented toward a view of the sea while not conforming to a uniform relation to each other or the access road. They were similar to but larger than the houses at Los Piños, the small development François had built along the road to Cala Espasa. That project had been a success, all houses sold, but François had found his builder, who lived half an hour away in Artà, merely adequate and was unwilling to expand into a larger project with him. He wanted someone now who could produce a finer finish, with experience of a greater number of units and more difficult terrain, who lived near enough to guarantee a consistent presence. Gómez and another Cala Marsopa builder, Roig, were the only contenders. François wanted Gómez.

“Bueno,”
said Señor Gómez. He declined François’s invitation to lunch. He had to look in at a job, he said, though François believed he was simply uncomfortable at the idea of any kind of convivial social intimacy. The builder rolled up the blueprints and tucked them under an arm. He would be in touch in a few days. They shook his horny hand again and watched him putter away down the drive on his Lambretta.

“It’s a wonder he’s still alive,” said Fergus, as they climbed the steps from the drive. “Trundling around on that thing holding on to a set of blueprints at the same time. He’s a proper crank. Is he interested, do you think? And do we want him?”

“Yes, we want him,” said François. “And at this moment, this is what he wants, I believe. He’s doing a very nice job down at Porto Colom, but this is something different. Quite a big job, but rather nice, you know. A little more cachet. A development of pretty houses in a beautiful setting, on a lovely hill, well made. A showpiece. Yes, he’s interested. Yes, we want Señor Gómez.”

“Should we see that fellow Roig again?”

Gerald went out onto the terrace. He stood in the shade and lit a Ducados. He pictured the village of tourists on the hill above his house, playing music late into the night, their screeching cars, screaming drunken laughter, barking dogs, rubbish thrown down the hill onto his property, the quiet of his olive groves gone forever.