Advice on how to beat me in Third Reich!
More concretely, El Quemado was receiving instructions on how to counter what he saw as imminent: the invasion of Russia!
I closed my eyes and tried to pray. I couldn’t. I thought that I’d never get the madness out of my head. I was sweating and the sand stuck to my face. My whole body itched and I was afraid (if I can call it that) that suddenly I’d see Charly’s shining face looming above me. The filthy traitor. The thought jolted my eyes open; there was no one next to the pedal boat shack. They must both be inside, I thought. I was wrong: the shadowy figures were still standing at the water’s edge with the waves licking their ankles. They had their backs to me. In the sky the clouds parted for a moment and the moon shone weakly. El Quemado and his visitor were talking now—as if it were the most pleasant of subjects—about a rape. With some effort I rose to my knees and grew a little calmer. It wasn’t Charly, I told myself a few times. Elementary: El Quemado and his visitor were speaking in Spanish and Charly couldn’t even order a beer in Spanish.
With a feeling of relief, but still numb and trembling, I rose to my feet and left the beach.
At the Del Mar, Frau Else was sitting in a wicker armchair at the end of the hallway that led to the elevator. The lights of the restaurant were all out except for a faint one that illuminated only the shelves of bottles and a section of the bar where a waiter was still laboring away at something I couldn’t make out. When I’d passed the reception desk I’d seen the night watchman with his nose in a sports paper. Not everyone in the hotel was asleep.
I sat down next to Frau Else.
She made some remark about my face. Haggard!
“I’m sure you hardly sleep, and you don’t sleep well. Not a good advertisement for the hotel. I’m worried about your health.”
I nodded. She nodded too. I asked for whom she was waiting. Frau Else shrugged; she smiled; she said: For you. She was lying, of course. I asked her what time it was. Four in the morning.
“You should go back to Germany, Udo,” she said.
I invited her up to my room. She refused. She said: No, I can’t. She gazed into my eyes as she said it. How beautiful she was!
We were quiet for a long time. I would have to liked to say: Don’t worry about me, really, don’t worry. But it was ridiculous, of course. At the end of the hallway, I saw the watchman peer around the corner and then disappear. I concluded that Frau Else’s staff adore her.
I pretended to be tired and stood up. I didn’t want to be there when the person Frau Else was waiting for appeared.
Without rising from the chair, she offered me her hand and we said good night.
I walked to the elevator. Luckily it was stopped at the ground floor and I didn’t have to wait. Once I was inside I went through the farewell ritual again. I said a silent good-bye, only my lips moving. Frau Else held my gaze and my smile until the doors closed with a pneumatic wheeze and I began to rise.
I felt something heavy rolling around in my head.
After taking a hot shower, I got in bed. My hair was wet, and in any case sleep wouldn’t come.
Why, I don’t know, maybe because it was the nearest thing to me, I picked up the Florian Linden book and opened it at random.
“The killer is the owner of the hotel.”
“Are you sure?”
I closed the book.
SEPTEMBER 7
I dreamed that I was woken by a phone call. It was Mr. Pere, who wanted me to come—he offered to take me—to the Guardia Civil headquarters. They had a body there and they were hoping that I could identify it. So I showered and went out without breakfast. The hotel corridors were achingly bleak; it must have been just after dawn. Mr. Pere’s car was waiting at the front entrance. During the ride to the Guardia Civil headquarters, located on the edge of town, at a crossroads plastered with signs that pointed toward various borders, Mr. Pere unburdened himself by talking about the mutations that the natives underwent when the summer—or rather, the summer season—was over. General depression! Deep down we can’t live without tourists! We get used to them! A pale young Guardia Civil officer led us to a garage where there were several tables set up in rows and, hanging on the walls, a collection of car parts. On a white-veined black slab, next to the metal door where the van that would remove the body was already waiting, there lay a lifeless form in what seemed to me to be a state close to putrefaction. Behind me, Mr. Pere raised a hand to his nose. It wasn’t Charly. He was probably about the same age and he might have been German, but it wasn’t Charly. I said I didn’t know him and we left. As we were going, the Guardia Civil stood to attention. We headed back to town laughing and making plans for next season. The Del Mar still looked like a slumbering thing, but this time I spotted Frau Else through the glass, at the reception desk. I asked Mr. Pere how long it had been since he’d seen Frau Else’s husband.
“It’s been a long time since I had the pleasure,” said Mr. Pere.
“It seems he’s sick.”
“So it seems,” said Mr. Pere, his face darkened by an expression that could have meant anything.
After that, the dream advanced (or so I remember it) in leaps. I had a breakfast of fried eggs and tomato juice on the terrace. I went upstairs; some English children were coming downstairs and we almost collided. From the balcony I watched El Quemado, out in front of his pedal boats, musing on his poverty and the end of summer. I wrote letters with intentional and studied slowness. Finally I got in bed and fell asleep. Another phone call, this time real, dragged me from sleep. I checked my watch: it was two in the afternoon. It was Conrad, and his voice repeated my name as if he thought I would never answer.
Despite what I might have expected, maybe because Conrad was shy and I was still half-asleep, the conversation proceeded coldly, in a way that horrifies me now. The questions, the answers, the inflections of voice, the poorly hidden desire to get offthe phone and save a few cents, the familiar expressions of irony all seemed cloaked in a supreme lack of interest. No confidences were shared, except one stupid one at the end; instead, fixed images of the town, the hotel, and my room superimposed themselves tenaciously on the scene sketched by my friend as if they were trying to warn me of the new order in which I was immersed and within which the coordinates transmitted to me over the phone line had little value. What are you doing? Why don’t you come back? What’s keeping you? At your office they don’t know what to think, Mr. X asks about you every day and it’s no use when everyone assures him that you’ll soon be back among us, he’s filled with foreboding and predicts disaster. What kind of disaster? What do I care? All of this followed by information about the club, work, games, magazines, recounted ceaselessly and relentlessly.
“Have you seen Ingeborg?” I asked.
“No, of course not.”
We were silent for a brief instant, after which there came a new avalanche of questions and appeals: at my office they were more than a little upset; the group wondered whether I still planned to go to Paris to meet Rex Douglas in December. Would I be fired? Would I get into trouble with the police? Everyone wanted to know what mysterious and inexplicable thing was keeping me in Spain. A woman? Loyalty to a dead man? To what dead man? And incidentally, how was my article going, the one that was going to lay the foundations for a new strategy? It was as if Conrad were mocking me. For a second I imagined him taping the conversation, his lips curved in a wicked smile. The champion in exile! Out of circulation!