John McGahern - The Collected Stories

He went back over the stripped rock and clay to the café and waited until the beer came before opening his letter, a letter from his publisher enclosing reviews of his last book. It was never easy to read reviews, and he read through them quickly when the beer came. It was much like listening to talk about yourself from another room, and the listener cares little about the quality of the talk as long as it is praise. Always the poor reviews rankled and remained, they were probably nearer the truth in the long run. To publish was to expose oneself, naked, in an open market, and if the praise was acceptable he could hardly complain of the ridicule, since one always had the choice to stay in original obscurity.

The editor’s letter was an inquiry about how the new book was coming along; in the sun of Spain it should ripen into something exciting. In the sun of Spain not a line had been written or was likely to be.

‘I have known writers who failed. Who stopped writing. And they stank to themselves and to everybody else,’ had once been said to him when he hadn’t written for a long time.

‘Why don’t you stink, then?’ he’d asked.

‘I have no talent. I never began.’

‘Couldn’t I become a doctor and do a great deal more good in the world?’

‘Yes, but you’d rot.’ He remembered the argument had grown rancorous.

‘I’ll rot anyhow.’

‘I know writers who failed. It’s a failure worse than any other. But if it happened our friendship wouldn’t change. That is separate.’

‘Why should it be worse than any other?’

‘I don’t know. It’s more personal than any other. Perhaps the egotism is so fierce to begin with.’

‘It’s a load of balls in my opinion.’

‘Besides, you’re too old to change.’

That was true. He was too old. He paid at the counter. He would fill the red plastic container at the fontana and go down to Garrucha and drink cognac until the fishing boats came in.

X

The man had two friends: Tomás who owned the café on the harbour, and José, an old sailor with whom he drank, buying almost all the drinks; and in return José insisted on helping him buy fish when the boats came in. The day José’s small pension came each month was the one day he bought the drinks.

The café was open but deserted, not even Tomás’s son was behind the bar, so he sat outside at the red iron table and stared out on the sea that showed no sign of the returning fishing boats. He was glad to have to delay drinking; he had too great a want of cognac to sink this day out of sight.

No one passed in the white dust of the harbour, the starved greyhounds panted with lolling tongues in the shade, and he sat for half an hour until the slow flop-flop-flop of Tomás’s slippers, the heels trodden down, came from the room behind the bar.

After shaking hands Tomás yawned out towards the empty sea, and then laid his head on his palm in a gesture that he’d been sleeping.

‘Mucho calor.’ The man nodded.

‘Mucho, mucho calor.’

Tomás clapped his hands and his son came from the back of the café. He shouted an order and lowered his short stout body, the eyes puffed from sleep, into a chair at the table. The boy brought two cognacs, a beer and coffee on a tray.

They were on the second drink when José came. He wore a black beret and white shoes and a threadbare but neat blue suit. Cognac and coffee were brought for him by the boy and he started to talk to the man in English.

‘Is the señora not well?’ he asked.

‘She’s well but she doesn’t like to go out so much since the accident.’

‘ Malo , that accident, malo .’ Both of them nodded. Then Tomás started to speak very rapidly to José. The man could not follow all the words. One fishing boat, a black speck, had appeared far out.

‘Tomás wants to know if that President Kennedy who was shot in America was a rich man?’ José turned to translate after rapid speech in Spanish.

‘Very rich.’

‘Richer than El Cordobés?’

‘Much, much richer than El Cordobés.’

‘He had someone to leave his money to?’

‘He had a large family.’ José translated the answers for Tomás.

There were now three boats coming home and pale flashes of gulls were visible behind the first boat. Both men nodded with satisfaction at the information that President Kennedy had a large family to leave his money to.

‘Tomás says it is a very good thing that a rich man has a large family to leave his money to when he dies,’ José said.

The gulls flashed in the late sun as they dived for the guts behind the boats as they came in, and when the fish boxes were landed José bought a kilo of gambas. They’d a last drink at the bar before the man left. Once he came to the dirt-track he drove very slowly, his reactions slow and stiff from the alcohol.

XI

A candle burned between the two wine glasses, and onion and parsley were already sprinkled on the sliced tomatoes in the long yellow dish on the table. She was humming at the stove, making notes on papers scattered between the cooking utensils. She moved towards him when he came in with the white string bag of gambas and the plastic container of water.

‘I’m so happy,’ she said. ‘If one is energetic and works one doesn’t want to stay in bed and cry.’

He poured the water equally into the clay jars, jars carried on women’s heads in pictures of Egypt, that stood in a wooden stand beneath the stairs.

‘The table and house look very beautiful,’ he said.

‘One can work at the same time as cook so that one isn’t just a domestic animal.’

‘You are doing the translations, then?’

‘I was afraid of it but now I feel well and started it after you left.’

‘I saw Tomás and José and got this letter for you.’ He was at a loss how to respond to her happiness. He would not show her his letter or the reviews. The chances were they would disturb her too much. He knew she had a dread that her life would be lost in his, and it would break this peace.

‘They want as much translation as I can do for them. They say I am the best translator they have.’ She burst out of the intensity of her reading, once or twice gloating like a child.

They ate with the door closed because of the sharksmell, but they could hear the sea, and they drank white local wine with the shellfish and tomatoes and bread. She was full of plans and happy all through the meal, but after they’d eaten footsteps sounded on the path to the door, and a bicycle scraped against the wall. When he opened the door it was one of the local guardia. He asked for water. The man invited him in and offered him a chair. He laid his rifle against the stairs and sat at the table. They spoke in stumbling Spanish, the sea filling each silence, the drops of water sweating through the porous clay of the jars into the dish beneath the stand. As the guardia finished each cigarette, he ground it under his boot, twisting the heel until he’d ground it into the tiles in some misguided idea of courtesy. The last time he’d come they’d to scrape the tobacco from the tiles.

His boots were large and broken, the tops rising well above the ankles.

‘Are the boots not too heavy for the heat?’ the man asked after following the crushing of another cigarette butt.

‘Much, much too heavy.’

‘Why do you wear them, then?’

‘It’s regulations.’

‘Do they cost much?’

‘They cost very much.’ He named an exorbitant price.

‘Why don’t you buy a cheaper, lighter pair in the shop?’

‘It’s not allowed. The government has given the monopoly to this man. All the guardia have to buy off the monopoly. They can charge what they like.’