Tales of Adventurers (9 page)

The culture of Gino’s island was listless and Levantine. His passport was Syrian; his father was unknown; his mother had been half Kurd and half Maltese. The ancestry of his girls
resembled his own, in so far as they were of mixed blood and obscure nationalities. The island industry was the provision of routine entertainment for summer visitors. Somebody had to undertake the
job. It called neither for shame nor self-congratulation; it merely filled a social need, like unloading coal or selling hashish or cleaning sewers or becoming a policeman, and demanded – at
any rate from Gino – no undignified activity of the body.

Gino was very long and very thin. His interior was full of national and foreign parasites, for he had been poor and a traveler. To him his island was home at long last; and upon it was no more
need for energy or emotion. His only token of feeling was an undulation of the spine, which might have expressed satisfaction, at the same hour every morning when he rose from breakfast, took rod
and line and started to fish from the stage outside the kitchen door. He fished from eleven to six, sometimes sitting, sometimes standing, hunched over the Mediterranean which sparkled and laughed
at the foot of his steps and spread out beneath his island into a still lake of deep greens and browns, sown with traps and nets of his own devising.

He caught fish. He caught fish continuously. They came, it was said in the town, all the way across the Mediterranean for him to catch; and indeed Gino’s island was about as far east as
they could swim. It seemed to be a fish terminus and round point; after a quick nip from Gino’s garbage or the soft ooze beneath his island, there was nothing for it but to turn back to
Greece and Gibraltar and the rich North African banks.

Gino himself looked like an old gray mullet set up by a bad taxidermist who had put back the skin over insufficient stuffing. His head was hairless and his dull eyes were too large. His fishlike
mind knew none of the enthusiasms of humanity except the cooking of his catch. For this he was famous. Whether he fried to biscuit hardness in deep oil, or adventured in the casseroles and herbs
and wine of French cuisine, or served his fish boiled and cold and decorated, they were products of high human art. His other cooking was vile. Indeed all of Gino that was not fish was
distasteful.

He employed six performers. Each year they were sent to him by an agency in Alexandria. One of the batch had to be able to dance efficiently; two must be endurable, however sordid their acts;
the remaining three had just to get on and off the stage without incident, and were usually over forty. He paid wages and commission to the upper three and commission only to the lower three, and
put them all up in rooms like sunlit bathing hutches on the floor above the café. Gentlemen were strictly forbidden both by Gino and the police to visit this second floor; but the holiday
season was short, and the police were very poorly paid. As for Gino, he had signed a Notice to Customers, and thereafter was indifferent to what went on upstairs unless the noise was too great.
Then, in a barely audible voice, he pointed out that the house was very old and might fall down. If anyone were injured, he said, there would be a scandal.

That year there were scandals enough. They were the fault of Tatiana. She was an Egyptian with a Russian mother; and in her character a faint and purely traditional Russianness had remained
proof against the lethargy of Egypt. Tatiana was the star performer, and neither better nor worse than dancers whom the Alexandria agency had sent to Gino in other years. Her morals, which mattered
to nobody, were above the usual standard. Her behavior, for so conventional an island, was indiscreet. She gave parties to her favorites. She considered the whole upper story as her own, and dashed
in and out of bedrooms at awkward moments. Her colleagues, who themselves observed the decent melancholy proper to Gino’s, accepted Tatiana’s instability as a new fashion from worldly
Egypt and a useful topic of conversation.

The other two paid performers were Miriam and Elena the Greek. Miriam, being half Sudanese, was too black for popularity; Gino’s clients preferred to cherish the illusion that they were
being entertained by pure Europeans. Elena the Greek was born at Marseilles of port parentage, into which, somewhere, had entered a strain of Chinese blood; she was called the Greek, because that
was the language she spoke most fluently. The three girls who worked for commission alone had the names and nationalities that the agency had given them. They were old, pink animals who answered to
these names. How or in what memory each addressed herself could not be known. They lived in a dead present, untroubled by remembered suffering. They had no clear thought left to them, and little
revealing speech.

Gino’s season was short, and it was not much of a season. People with money went to Alexandria or the cool heights of Lebanon. From June to September the two hotels of the little town and
the red and white villas, set irregularly among dusty country lanes, were reasonably full of Christian Arab families attracted by the hard and waveless beach. The fathers and the elder sons,
dignified and respectable by day, considered it proper to relax at night. Gino’s represented for them the smart cabarets of French
plages
and Florida beaches familiarized by the
cinema.

Upstairs and downstairs Tatiana disordered the island. She was always surrounded by two or three young admirers, who were fascinated into outrageous behavior, though not into any lavish
spending. She had a dashing habit of throwing her cocktails overboard “to feed the fishes.” This might have been good for trade if she and her parties had not thrown the glasses and
crockery as well. To Gino Tatiana was a liability, a shock, a devastation. She kept the older, slow consuming, steadily paying clients away. The noise and scandal raised the weekly subvention paid
to the police. The glasses were replaceable only at fantastic prices.

Gino increased the bills by erratic and exaggerated items which led to endless arguments with the clients and, after all, had to be reduced. He left his basic charges unaltered. They were
reasonable – little more, indeed, than those of the hotels – although there were a band and three waiters and the performers to be paid, and a cook who attended to Gino’s stove
when Gino himself was, reluctantly, gazing at the dance floor. He felt that he ought to gaze – so far, that is, as
ought
had any meaning for him – but he said no word, he took
no action. He had no interest in women, individually or collectively. They were like the bottles of Egyptian whisky. There was a demand for the stuff, and he supplied it.

His fitful attempts to keep up with rising costs and wages were always a year behind. He had made his calculations when he bought and fitted out the island, and felt that the one effort should
be sufficient for his life; it had to be done, but thereafter there should be no necessity for thought. Beneath the floor the bountiful sea worked for him in darkness. Above was modest catering for
the eternal desires of men. Neither one nor the other could fail.

The season was disastrous. At the beginning of September there was nothing in the bank, and the night’s takings were paid out every morning. The wages of Tatiana, Miriam and Elena fell
into arrears. As yet they did not complain. It was not the first time in their experience that the boss had been in difficulties.

On the next payless Saturday morning there was a row. Wages and commission were now three weeks overdue, and obviously lost forever. Even the three working crones, holding around their shapeless
bodies wraps of pink and pale-blue chiffon, stared at Gino with sad eyes in which was understanding of their fate. Tatiana, trim and terrifying in a beach suit, screamed at him in good Egyptian
Arabic. He was impassive. He bent his shoulders humbly over the till, as if it were the sea, and opened it and showed that there was nothing in it. Tatiana raged around the unswept room, buzzing
like an angry insect of undoubted grace and comparative cleanliness between four greasy, wine-splashed walls, foul ashtrays, spilt food, tables stinking of sweat and debris. She hurled a bottle
into the sea, and was led upstairs, weeping, by Miriam and Elena. The other three returned to bed and their long daydreams of the impossible. Gino went out to fish.

The sun shone. The paintless wooden balconies of the upper story gave back the light of the day and the stored light of a hundred years, sparkling with the fawn and white of timber on the
southern edge of a forest. Tatiana, Miriam and Elena lay in the shade of the eaves, cursing Gino. When they were silent, they could hear the plop of his tackle, re-entering the water, or the
reverberation of a sea-bream smacking its arched body against the planks of the back-door jetty.

Night brought the end. There was no band. There were no waiters. There was no assistant cook. All had gone to the hotels to make what they could in the last week before the season finished. A
few habitual customers drifted in across the creaking bridge of planks. They listened to abuse of Gino, and agreed. They helped themselves and the girls to drinks, and paid what they liked or
nothing at all. Gino did not appear.

In an hour the café had emptied. There was no gaiety, no romance. The island and its inhabitants appeared exactly what they were. The girls, like the clients, had looked to the night and
music, even at Gino’s, to create an endurable illusion. Now there were only themselves and the sea and the slap of moths and beetles, before unnoticed, against the glaring lights. They sat
still, scattered about the room at the tables where they had been left, without energy or desire to move together.

Gino came in from the kitchen, bearing a huge casserole of fish. The scent, rich and appetizing, overwhelmed the staleness of the room. He put the dish on a table, with six flat cakes of bread,
beckoned to the girls and went out.

They moved to the food slowly, and as if ashamed by their failure to retain a single customer. Then Tatiana, with a brisk exclamation, threw away the filthy tablecloth. The others, catching her
mood of self-respect, swiftly washed knives and forks, glasses and plates left untouched since the previous night. They chose clean chairs and sat down at the bare table, three a side, as in some
institution for homeless females deserted by all but themselves. They began to laugh and chatter. Gino’s fish was in no way institutional. It warmed and delighted.

They went to bed early, breathing for an extra four hours, instead of smoke, the cool air currents of the bay, and awakened to a vague feeling of holiday rather than disaster. Miriam made
coffee, and they breakfasted on the balcony. Then, as the heat of sand and dusty tracks consumed the morning, they saw their position in all its hopelessness.

It was Gino’s responsibility to return them to Alexandria, and it was certain that he could not do it. They all spoke loudly of their contracts and of the Law that would, if necessary,
compel him to sell his island to pay their fares. They gesticulated at a just and imaginary judge, but in their hearts they knew that they were terrified by the Law, upon whose edge they lived, and
had no intention of calling to their aid the unknowable, uncontrollable gods of policemen.

They were too far east for chivalry. Tatiana and Miriam ran over the characters and probable bank balances of their devoted followers, in the hope of finding one who might be gallant. Any, they
decided, would provide food and especially bed for the few more days that he would remain at the seaside; not one would commit the generous folly of advancing the fare to Alexandria, or even
– in view of their known economic distress – of allowing it to be earned. There were no capitalists among the fathers and sons who took their holiday by that horned beach. Money
counted, even when Tatiana was feeding the fishes and creating an illusion of imperial excess.

Either Miriam or Tatiana might perhaps make enough for herself to go, but not enough to release a companion as well. Though they had not hitherto been conscious of much liking for each other,
and though the three wage earners despised the three commissionaires, as Tatiana christened them, the solidarity of their profession – they called it the theatrical profession –
prevented them from leaving behind any of their number to end, with certainty, in some horrible village brothel.

Tatiana could raise – probably – from an old friend in Alexandria the money for her fare. Miriam had a contract half promised for the winter, and thought, not very hopefully, that
the agency might lend her what she needed. Elena the Greek, who could dance just enough for a joint such as Gino’s, but looked, without make-up on a blazing morning, like a slender Chinese
grandmother, had no hope at all. The three commissionaires listened with dazed attention to the discussion among their betters. They would not have been surprised if Tatiana had produced thousands
of piasters from a hat or if she had told them to go and prostitute themselves upon the beach. Whatever she decided, they would perform.

Tatiana and Miriam decided nothing. They dived, exasperated, from the balcony into the caressing sea, two worn but serviceable arrows of black and white, startling Gino and wrecking his fishing
for that morning.

The day passed in intolerable nervousness. Tatiana, Miriam and Elena the Greek were not accustomed to be idle, to be without some vague and nearly objectless occupation. They rose usually at
midday, fiddled with their breakfasts and complexions for a couple of hours, practiced a few dance steps, showed themselves in whatever public place was temporarily in fashion, then passed the
evening with some admirer until it was time to go to work. Now, however, with Gino’s island ruined and the season nearly over, there was nothing to be gained by visiting the town, nor had
they the heart for it. They remained in their rooms or on the balcony, quarreling, screaming, in tears, demoralized.

At sunset Gino shut the wooden doors on the gangway to his island, and put up a notice of
CLOSED
in Arabic and French. Then he took his boat and lamp and fish spear, and
disappeared into the darkness of the bay. He said nothing whatever to the girls, accepting their forced occupation of his island without resentment, without pity, without helpfulness.