Some are returned by the waves, swollen and livid and half eaten by fish. Others you see from the highway, dashing across open land, hiding behind a tree, or flattening themselves against the bare ground, terrified, tenacious, looking for the road north taken by those who preceded them, beleaguered heroes of a journey no one will speak of. When we drive back from the restaurant toward the hotel, we come upon two Guardia Civil jeeps beaming their spotlights on the dunes near the highway; with his face against the back window, the boy, as excited as if he were at a movie, watches as we pass silently whirling blue warning lights and the silhouettes of two armed guardias. What would it be like to hide in this moonless night, wet and panting, lying in a ditch or one of those cane fields, a nobody with no belongings, no papers or money or address or name, not knowing the highways or speaking the language, the doctor thinks later, in bed, lying close to the woman sleeping with her arms around him, both of them exhausted and drained by the greed of love.
He wakes with the first light, clearheaded and rested, but doesn’t get up, he barely moves in order not to leave her arms. He watches the gradual dawn like a silent and patient witness, drowses with eyes half closed, then feels the spirit and energy to get up and put on his running clothes: a favorable sign that their happiness will be repeated, that things will be exactly the same, his wife’s and his son’s love, the fullness of every sensation, as strong as his pleasure in thrusting deep within her. That memory is so vivid that he gets out of bed with an erection.
At that hour of morning, the colors on the seashore have the faded tones of an old postcard, the blues, grays, greens, and roses of a hand-colored photograph. He begins running along the highway curving up the cliff, at a fast pace, with long, energetic strides, pumping his arms rhythmically, noting in his Achilles tendons the effort of the climb, his lungs expanding in the sea air, his whole body weightless, moving with a physical joy he never experienced in his youth. With every curve the precipice is more dizzying and the view more sweeping: Tangiers in the distance to the west, a white line in the fog-free blue, the Rif Mountains, where flat-roofed villages cling to ravines just as they do in Alpujara de Granada.
Large silver German-make cars, dogs barking behind the walls of houses isolated amid rock gardens and palm trees. In the hotel they’d told us that the Germans arrived when there was nothing at all along the coast, except the bunkers erected against a possible invasion that happened much farther away: first in Sicily, in the south of Italy, then in Normandy. The Germans began coming at the end of the war, their war; they chose to build their houses and plant their gardens on those heights battered by the winds, where no one ever climbs and where there is nothing but that cave with the black drawings of animals and archers and buried amphorae in which the skeletons of Phoenician travelers were later discovered.
This time he is determined to reach the peak, to find the grotto. He’s been told that after he passes a certain curve where a large pine twists out above a ravine, he should leave the highway and follow a path that winds upward through thickets of rockrose and a kind of acacia with sharp thorns and clusters of yellow flowers whose seed, he’s heard, has been carried by wind or birds from across the water, because it’s a variety that grows in the desert. If he had a friend, he would tell him that almost as soon as he took what he thought was the path, he realized that he was mistaken, because it quickly became overgrown by brush. He made his way through harsh branches that raked his skin, through the sticky leaves of the rockrose, trying not to become disoriented, although soon he could see only a few steps ahead. He could hear the sea crashing against the cliff but didn’t know the direction it was coming from. He stumbled over fallen branches and feared he might loose his footing, get too near the edge of the cliff. But he kept going and fought the feeling he was lost; soon he would come to a clearing, find one of those rocks that rose above the vegetation, and climb up on it to get a sighting of the road.
He was so absorbed in the task of pushing through the thorny brush that he was slow to hear the ferocious barking of dogs. A few meters in front of him, invisible till that moment, was a high whitewashed wall topped with jagged glass. He followed it, without coming to a door or window, until he turned a corner and immediately froze. In terror and vertigo he pressed his body to the walclass="underline" only one step away was the edge of the cliff and, far below, the splendor and roar of the foam crashing upon the rock that was the base for the bunker.
He stood motionless against the wall struck now by the sun, his eyes closed, not daring to open them and look into emptiness. Then he stepped back, moved away from the precipice, and again heard the dogs. Clinging to the rough wall, he advanced in the narrow space between it and the brush.
He reached an open area in front of the main gate of the house just as a heavyset blond woman came running toward him, sobbing and saying something in a language he didn’t understand. Even before he saw the writing on the ceramic plaque, he remembered that he’d been in this place before. Berghof.
He thought at first that the woman was scolding him for having invaded her property. But she didn’t have the look of the owner of the house, more that of a servant, the hands she was waving so frantically as she shouted to him were the large, reddened hands of a domestic, a scrubbing maid or cook from a different epoch. She screamed and pulled him toward the half-opened iron gate, where the barking was louder. With dreamlike naturalness, he accepted that the woman knew he was a doctor and was asking him to help someone who was ill.
But she can’t have known I was a doctor, she can’t have been waiting for me to come. From the moment he enters the house, dragged in the woman’s tight grip, he imagines he is telling his wife this adventure, telling her later this morning when he is back at the hotel, sitting beside her on the bed, bringing her a story as he would breakfast: I wish you could have seen what happened to me, what I saw.
Led by the woman, he crosses a patio of white walls and marble paving and arches where sheer curtains flutter, offering a view of the sea and the coast of Africa, those same arches we’ve so often seen from the beach, wondering who had the privilege of living there. There is a marble fountain in the middle, but the sound of the water and our footsteps is masked by the barking that becomes even fiercer as I step inside the house. The woman is sobbing and rubbing her hands on her voluminous bosom, looking much older now: the blue eyes, light hair, pug nose, and round, rosy face made her look young, but now I realize she must be over sixty. With tear-filled eyes she gestures for me to hurry. The place is a pastiche of Andalusian and German decor, with huge iron grilles at all the windows and dark, paneled doors. But I see all this very quickly, blurred by confusion. We enter a large room where the woman points to the floor, waving her arms, crying openmouthed, tears streaming down her round, withered cheeks, but my eyes, accustomed to sunlight, are slow to adapt to the shadow, and see nothing.