Джон Макдональд - The End of the Night

Rosalinda assured me that the electricidad and the agua and the teléfono were all working and in readiness for Señor and Señora Pinelli. It was evident to me that they had been lonely and bored in the house, and welcomed the chance to be busy. She said that there was a girl in readiness, who would begin work as a maid as soon as the Pinellis arrived. The girl’s name was Nadina, and she was related to them in some way. I did not have the words to explain to her my relationship to the Pinellis. I said that I was a friend, but that I also worked for them. She smiled and nodded with total lack of comprehension.

The servant quarters were adjacent to the house, on the east side where the crest began to slope down, so that it was about six steps up from their doorway to the kitchen door. I selected the smallest bedroom for myself in the main house, on the northeast corner, with no view of the sea. The Pinelli luggage was placed in the master bedroom, a room about twenty by forty with huge glass doors that opened onto a private terrace overlooking the sea. There were two great double beds there, with massive posts carved of black wood.

After I had unpacked my own things, I went to the master bedroom. Rosalinda was unpacking Kathy’s things, hanging her clothing in a vast closet big enough to serve as a dressing room. She gave little cries of pleasure as she examined the dresses and suits, skirts and blouses. “¡Qué lindo! ¡Qué bonito!”

By then it was dark, and so I did not see the beach until the next day. It was the most private beach imaginable. Two hard ridges of rock reached from the height down to the level of the sea. They were about eighty feet apart. Only at the lowest tide was it possible to walk around them. They enclosed a crescent of coarse, clean, brown sand. Stone steps reached from the front terrace down to the beach. They were of reinforced concrete and projected out from the concave wall of the cliff, with a hemp railing on the sea side. They made one long sweep, descending, from east to west, to a balcony halfway down, then reversed and slanted down from west to east to a truly massive freeform sun platform six feet above the sand. The platform was about eight by ten, and of reinforced concrete at least ten inches thick. It was anchored in place by steel rods as big around as my wrist. At high tide the sea came up under it, covering all the sand, so that each time the tide ebbed, the beach was new again. When I wondered at the massiveness of the platform, Rosalinda told me, with elaborate use of pantomime that it was the third such platform. Storms had smashed the other two. She made a spinning motion of her hands to show that they had been hurled high in the air. She said this one would be taken by the sea one day. She seemed to think it incomprehensible to try to outwit the sea’s fury.

I cannot forget what it was like to awaken there that first morning and hear the sound of the sea, and see the sun against the mint-green wall of my room. I had that feeling of inexplicable and joyous anticipation which had been gone for a long, long time. I felt renewed. All things were possible.

I was served on the terrace, elegantly, with papaya, toasted muffins, strong, black coffee. I went down to the sea and swam out until the blue house was a sandbox toy. The sea sighed and heaved and glittered. I floated there, and yelled for no reason, and went all the way in, using a long racing crawl, spending myself. I baked in the sun. I showered. Rosalinda served lunch. I napped until three, then drove into Acapulco and bought myself an ornate silver lighter and a snake-skin billfold, sat and drank black beer at a sidewalk café and smiled at pretty girls who walked slowly, arm in arm, in the dusk, while the birds made a great clatter over settling down for the night in the big green trees.

Those four days before John and Kathy arrived were good days. They were the last good days of my life. Had I known they were, I could not have enjoyed them more. I did not think of the future in terms of purpose or direction. I just had the unreasonable confidence that everything was going to be fine and golden. It was euphoria. And it could not, of course, last. I sent a card to my folks. I bought a lottery ticket and won two hundred pesos. I worked diligently on my tan, and my Spanish. I waited for the phone call from my employers.

I picked John and Kathy up at the airport at noon on Friday. There were two men with them. August Sonninger and Frank Race. August was a squat, bald, imperious little weasel in a soiled scurfy beret, Bermudas, Indian sandals and a sports shirt emblazoned with pastel fish. He was obviously the dominant, completely in charge, full of power plays and rude contradictions, snapping his fingers for service. The others treated him as if he were king. Frank Race was a towering, languid, storklike man in a cotton cord suit and a tasteful tie. He drawled in an inconsistent Limey accent, and seemed to be trying to give the impression that all this was a sort of grotesque game, and he was playing along for kicks. He was almost amusing, in a withdrawn, ironic way. Kathy was being very windblown and girlish with them. It didn’t seem to suit her. The big surprise to me was John Pinelli. The great soft pink-and-white thing had come alive. He was full of snap, glitter and enthusiasm. For the first time I was aware of the quality of his mind — quick, perceptive, agile, imaginative.

They were hopped up, so busy with plans and schemes that they seemed only vaguely aware of being in Acapulco.

August Sonninger and Frank Race stayed through until the following Tuesday afternoon when I drove them and John Pinelli back to the airport. I guess it was not what Rosalinda had expected. She had a sense of order. They would not conform to any schedule. They seemed to take no pleasure in the house. They talked business endlessly. They fought over details. To the four of them I was a part of the background, like the house and the sea and the servants.

I learned that Kathy and John were still being remote and formal and polite with each other. From their arguments I gathered that John Pinelli had bought into the enterprise by signing over, in exchange for a stock interest, his piece of the successful television property.

They had brought a pile of scripts with them. They called on me for some special service on Saturday night, at about eleven o’clock. They were all in the big living room. Frank Race came and got me off the terrace. He had me sit down with a script in my hand. He and Kathy both had copies. Sonninger sat scowling at us.

“Read the Wilson lines, old boy, if you will,” he told me, pointing to a speech that started a scene.

“I don’t know anything about...”

“Just read the lines, old boy.”

I started to read the first speech, feeling like a damn fool, trying to sound the way I thought Wilson should sound from what little clue I had.

Sonninger broke in. “You!” he said.

“Yes?”

“This is not talent scouts,” he said in his slight Mittel European accent. “It is not Actors’ Studio. Just read, please. Nothing more.”

I shrugged and read my lines as if I were reading a market report. That’s what they wanted. That’s what they got. Kathy had the corner on emotion. Frank Race and I read our lines woodenly. She emoted. I thought she did fine. But I thought the script was horrible stuff, full of pretentiously poetic expression. It went on until three in the morning. They would quarrel viciously, yell at each other, and then mark up the copies of the script. Sonninger was boss. I couldn’t see how they were improving it in any way. If this was going to be the first release by Sierra Productions, it looked like a poor place to stick your money.

The only other time I wasn’t totally ignored was on Monday morning at about eleven. I had swum and I was baking on the platform above the beach. Frank Race came gingerly down the steps, his pallid, narrow body gleaming with oil. He carried a beach towel and a script.