He imagines he’s talking now to a friend from thirty years ago, they’ve kept in touch and maintained the old loyalty, strengthened and improved by time and by the experiences and disappointments of their two lives. He invented friends when he was twelve or thirteen and found himself alone, no longer a child but not yet an adolescent, not a youth, as they used to say — too bad such a beautiful, precise word isn’t used anymore.
Now my son is at the point of entering his youth, beginning to be independent of me, though he isn’t aware of it. He would tell his friend this, if he had one, if he hadn’t lost the ones he had because of distance or negligence or a slightly bitter current of skepticism that the years have accentuated and from which only the core of his life is safe, his wife and son, and maybe also his work in this darkened consulting room. It is calming to tell things to a friend, though words are imprecise, and it is worth the effort to transmit an experience in every detail in order to make it intelligible, free of the melancholy and self-pity that slip into a memory that hasn’t been shared. When I go home and my wife notices I am self-absorbed and asks me if something is the matter, and I say nothing — the strain of work, the oppressive persistence of illness on those new faces that keep showing up every day, faces of the newly exiled — it is a silent betrayal.
We went back that summer, the doctor recounts, or he would if there were a friend to listen. We had only ten days there, and did almost nothing but swim and sunbathe, read on the beach or by the hotel pool, go out occasionally in a rented car to have dinner or drive around the town. I got up early, ran a few effortless kilometers along the hard sand near the shore where the tide had just gone out and the sand stretched smooth and shining in the first light of day. I liked coming back to the hotel and waking my wife and son, having breakfast with them by a window in the restaurant that overlooked the palm trees in the garden. In everything we did there was perfection, a harmony among the three of us that corresponded to the external beauty of the world, to the full moon and the wind at sunset the first night we walked down to the beach and huddled together to protect ourselves against the cold, corresponded to the purity of the form of a shell, and to the taste and aroma of fish roasted over coals that we ate on the terrace of a restaurant beside the sea. My wife and I, my son and I, my wife and my son, my son watching as we hugged or kissed, my wife watching the boy and me as we walked with our heads close together along the beach, looking down, searching for shells and crabs, I watching the boy as he dribbled sand over his mother’s feet.
Two summers later, they return to the same hotel, during the same days of July, with afternoons that stretch with golden laziness toward the dinner hour. Everything is the same, and yet he catches himself spying on himself, looking for some flaw in the repetition of his earlier enjoyment, uneasy, disheartened without reason, irritated by inconveniences that he knows he should attach no importance to, the room that this year doesn’t look out over the sea but onto a patio with palm trees and the windows of other rooms, the east wind that keeps them away from the beach the first few days, provoking a bad mood in his son, who turns surly and locks himself in his room to watch television hour after hour. He’s thirteen now, and the shadow of a mustache darkens his upper lip. He has lost his child’s voice; it changed without our noticing, and we will never hear it again. Two years in our lives as adults are nothing, but in his life they are a leap from larva to butterfly. His big eyes, crinkled in laughter, the expression so like his mother’s, don’t look the way they used to. You look into them, and he isn’t there. His father must convince himself not to feel desolation and resentment. “The boy misses his friends in Madrid,” his wife tells him, smiling with a benevolence he envies. “Don’t you realize that he’s going to be fourteen? I wonder what you were like at that age.” He watches himself as carefully as he examines the face of a patient or palpates his abdomen or listens to his breathing through the stethoscope, looking for symptoms.
One night while he is waiting for his wife to get ready for dinner, as she is talking to him from the bathroom, combing her hair before the mirror, trying a new lipstick, he sees a blond woman lying on a bed in a room on the other side of the patio. It’s too far away to be able to make out her features, to tell whether she’s young or attractive or just a figure his imagination is crystallizing, the blond, barefoot foreigner on the steps of a train one early summer night long ago. She is gesticulating, talking to someone he can’t see. A man’s silhouette appears in the window. The man bends down to the woman, and something slow and hazy takes place. The doctor presses to the window, to see more clearly, excited, because the movements of the two bodies in the room across the patio are rhythmic; his mouth is dry, like that of a teenager choked with desire.
It lasts only an instant. He turns away from the window when his wife comes out of the bathroom; he fears being discovered by her, or blushing and causing her to ask the reason, which would make him blush even more. The two figures in the other window dissolve like fragments of a dream in the clarity of waking up. His wife wears a form-fitting black dress and black high-heeled sandals; she has put on eye shadow and painted her lips a new, softer shade of red that goes with the deep tan of her skin, and she smiles, offering herself to his male scrutiny, seeking his approval. Now the troubled, secret inspector finds no flaw in the quality of his emotion, he hears no false note, senses nothing feigned or forced; his delight in looking at his wife is the same as it was two summers ago, or twelve years ago, it hasn’t waned, hasn’t been contaminated by habit. He looks at her dark, bare legs and is as captive to desire as the first time, in another hotel room, and he drinks her in with all the lust women have always kindled in him. Even when he was twelve he would stand bewitched after school, watching the girls in the first miniskirts, and once one of his young and beautiful aunts bent over him to set down his dinner and before his eyes was the white, trembling flesh of her breasts in her low-cut dress, perfumed, shadowy — the delicate female flesh he now smells and strokes and gazes at as he puts his arms around his wife, trying to pull down the zipper of her dress, to run his hands up her thighs with urgent need.
She bursts out laughing and tries to draw away, flattered and annoyed, always amazed at the suddenness of male desire. “My lipstick is all over your face, we’re late for dinner, and our son’s waiting.” “Let him wait,” he says, breathing through his nose as he kisses her neck, and when, as if invoked by their words, their son knocks at the door and tries to turn the doorknob, he sighs, “It’s a good thing we locked the door.” That will give them time to compose themselves, to calm down, and when they come out, the boy gives them a look that may be slightly censorious, or maybe it’s only questioning, even a little mocking. “What took you two so long to open the door?”
THERE ARE RAPIDLY blinking lights in the darkness beyond the broad white band of waves breaking on the sand; with the new moon, the speeding launches of the tobacco and hashish smugglers breast the foam, along with emigrants coming from the other side, from the darkest line of shadow, the coast of Africa. Aesthetic contemplation is a privilege, but sometimes a lie: the beautiful, dark coast we are seeing this night from the restaurant terrace, the scene onto which we project tales and dreams, adventures from books, is not the coast seen by those men crowded into boats rocked by the sea, on the verge of capsizing and dying in waters murkier than any well, dark-skinned fugitives with glittering eyes, pressed against one another to protect themselves from cold and fear, trying to conquer the feeling of being impossibly distant from those lights on the shore they have no guarantee of reaching.