John McGahern - The Collected Stories

‘No. I’m going to live here for a time.’

‘Do you have a house?’

‘Yes. I’ve been loaned a house.’

‘Will you be with people or alone?’ His questioning grew more eager and rapid.

‘I’ll be alone.’

‘Do you think I could take a room in the house?’

She was grateful to be able to rest her eyes on the blue sea in the distance. At least it would not grow old. Its tides would ebb and flow, it would still yield up its oyster shells long after all the living had become the dead.

‘I’m sorry. One of the conditions of the loan is that I’m not allowed to have people to stay,’ she lied.

‘I could market for you and cook.’

‘It’s impossible. I’m sorry.’ He would cling to any raft to shut out of mind the grave ahead.

‘You? Are you going far?’

‘The bus goes to Almería.’

‘And then?’

‘I don’t know. I thought to Morocco.’

She escaped from him in Alicante where they had a half-hour break and changed buses. She saw the shirtsleeved porters pat the Swede’s fur coat in amusement, ‘Mucho frío, mucho frío,’ as they transferred it to the boot of the bus returning to Almería. She waited till she saw him take the same seat in the new bus and then took her place beside an old Spanish woman dressed in black who smelled of garlic and who, she learned later, had been seeing her daughter in hospital. She felt guilty at avoiding the Swede so pointedly. She did not look at him when she got off at Vera.

The house was low and flat-roofed and faced the sea. The mountain was behind, a mountain of the moon, sparsely sprinkled with the green of farms that grew lemon trees and often had vine or olive on terraces of stone built on the mountain side. In the dried-up beds of rivers the cacti flourished. The village was a mile away and had a covered market built of stone, roofed with tiles the colour of sand. She was alarmed when the old women hissed at her when she first entered the market but then she saw it was only their way of trying to draw people to their stalls. Though there was a fridge in the house she went every day to the market and it became her daily outing. The house had four rooms but she arranged it so that she could live entirely in the main room.

She reread all of Chekhov, ate and drank carefully, and in the solitude of the days felt her life, for the first time in years, in order. The morning came when she decided to face the solitary white page. She had an end, the coffin of the famous writer coming to Moscow for burial that hot July day; and a beginning, the boy crunching on the oyster shells in the restaurant while the man starved in his summer coat in the rain outside. What she had to do was to imagine the life in between. She wrote in a careful hand The word Oysters was chalked on the wagon that carried Chekhov’s body to Moscow for burial. The coffin was carried in the oyster wagon because of the fierce heat of early July , and then grew agitated. She rose and looked at her face in the small silver-framed mirror. Yes, there were lines, but faint still, and natural. Her nails needed filing. She decided to change into a shirt and jeans and then to rearrange all her clothes and jewellery. A week, two weeks, passed in this way. She got nothing written. The early sense of calm and order left her.

She saw one person fairly regularly during that time, a local guardia whose name was Manolo. He had first come to the house with a telegram from her old theatre, asking her if she would do a translation of a play of Mayakovsky’s. She offered him a drink when he came with the telegram. He asked for water and later he walked with her back to the village where she cabled her acceptance of the theatre’s offer, wheeling his rattling bicycle, the thin glittering barrel of his rifle pointing skyward. The Russian manuscript of the play arrived by express delivery a few days afterwards, and now she spent all her mornings working on the translation; and how easy it was, the good text solidly and reliably under her hand, play compared with the pain of trying to pluck the life of Chekhov out of the unimaginable air.

Manolo began to come almost daily, in the hot, lazy hours of the afternoon. She would hear his boots scrape noisily on the gravel to give her warning. He would leave his bicycle against the wall of the house in the shade, his gun where the drinking water dripped slowly from the porous clay jars into catching pails. They would talk for an hour or more across the bare Scandinavian table and he would smoke and drink wine or water. His talk turned often to the social ills of Spain and the impossibility of the natural division between men and women. She wondered why someone as intelligent as he had become a guardia. There was nothing else to do, he told her. He was one of the lucky ones in the village, he got a salary, it was that or Germany. And then he married, and bang-bang, he said — two babies in less than two years. A third was on its way. All his wife’s time was taken up with the infants now. There was nothing left between them but babies, and that was the way it would go on, without any money, seven or eleven, or more …

‘But that’s criminal in this age,’ she said.

‘What is there to do?’

‘There’s contraception.’

‘In Spain there’s not.’

‘They could be brought in.’

‘If you can I’ll pay you,’ he said eagerly.

When she sent back the completed translation she asked the theatre’s editor if he could send the contraceptives with the next commission. She explained why she wanted them, though she reflected that he would think what he wanted anyhow. The contraceptives did get through with the next commissioned play. They wanted a new translation of The Seagull , which delighted her. She felt it would bring her closer to Chekhov and that when she had finished it she would be able to begin what she had come here to try to do in the first place. The only objection the editor had to sending the contraceptives was that he was uneasy for her safety: it was against the law, and it was Spain, and policemen were as notorious as other people for wanting promotion.

She thought Manolo was nervous and he left her quickly after she handed him the package that afternoon, but she put it out of mind as natural embarrassment in taking contraceptives from a woman, and went back to reading The Seagull. She was still reading it and making notes on the margins when she heard boots and voices coming up the gravel and a loud knock with what sounded like a gun butt on the door. She was frightened as she called out, ‘Who’s there?’ and a voice she didn’t know called back, ‘Open. It’s the police.’ When she opened the door she saw Manolo and the jefe of the local guardia , a fat oily man she had often seen lolling about the market, and he barged into the house. Manolo closed the door behind them as she instinctively got behind the table.

The jefe threw the package she had given Manolo earlier in the day on to the table. ‘You know this?’ As she nodded she noticed in growing fear that both of them were very drunk. ‘You know it’s against the law? You can go to prison for this,’ he said, the small oily eyes glittering across the table. She decided there was no use answering any more.

‘Still, Manolo and myself have agreed to forget it if we can try them out here.’ His oily eyes fell pointedly on the package on the table but the voice was hesitant. ‘That’s if you don’t prefer it Spanish style.’ He laughed back to Manolo for support, and started to edge round the table.

They were drunk and excited. They would probably take her anyhow. How often had she heard this problem argued. Usually it was agreed it was better to yield than to get hurt. After all, sex wasn’t all it was cracked up to be: in Paris the butcher and the baker shook hands with the local whores when they met, as people plying different trades.