Hot Milk

Paradise

I am lying naked on the Beach of the Dead. Playa de los Muertos. There is a tiny sliver of glass embedded above my left eyebrow. I don’t know how it got there. Playa de los Muertos is a nudist beach. There is no shelter for those who wish to be naked. Two slender girls, perhaps seventeen, are swimming naked in the clear, turquoise sea. A ragged, ugly dog swims between them. When they climb out of the water the girls search for sticks that have been washed up on the shore and hammer them like tent pegs into the shiny, white pebbles. When they drape a green sarong over the sticks to make a canopy of shade, the dog crawls under it and they sit with it in the full blaze of the sun. One of the girls takes out a bottle of water and pours it into a bowl for their beast. When she strokes its mangy fur it howls.

The dog is howling.

It is being stroked but it is still howling.

It is howling for nothing.

Life doesn’t get better than this and it is still howling.

It is Pablo’s dog. The Alsatian. The German shepherd. The diving-school dog. I’d recognize his howl anywhere. Pablo’s dog is alive and howling on the Beach of the Dead.

One of the girls takes out a comb and pulls it through her long, wet hair. The rhythmic movement of the comb seems to calm the agitated animal as he laps up water from the bowl. She is combing her hair and he is lapping up water.

The girls turn their attention away from their forlorn beast and lean their backs against his breathing, wet body. They are facing the horizon. A naked man in his late thirties is throwing pebbles into the sea with his young son. When he senses the naked girls are looking at him, he turns away from their beauty and suddenly throws a small rock into the sea. He is displaying his strength to the girls and they are pretending not to notice, but they have noticed him. The man is a father. He is standing with his son and he is forsworn to someone else. Perhaps he has snared a woman as enchanting as these young girls, at ease with their bodies, attending to the tangles in their wet hair. He has already been caught but he wants to be caught again. It is a hunt. The only sort of hunt where the prey wants to be jumped on and mauled by its predators.

The hot rocks. The transparent sea.

The medusas are in abeyance. They have disappeared from the ocean today. Where have they gone? My face is pressed down on the white pebbles. I am naked apart from the glass sliver near my eyebrow. I no longer want to know what anything means.

The heat of the white pebbles warms my belly, the salty sea leaves white streaks on my brown skin. It is paradise, but I am not happy. I am like the dog that used to belong to Pablo. History is the dark magician inside us, tearing at our liver.

There is a whole day to kill on the Beach of the Dead.

Dan from Denver called to say he has given the walls of the storeroom in the Coffee House a new coat of white paint. It is as if his minor refurbishment has now made my room his room. He pointed out that I had left some of my anthropology textbooks under the bed. What did I want him to do with my shoes and winter coat, both of them hanging on a hook behind the door? It was a catastrophe. The storeroom was my place. It might be a modest, temporary place, but it was my home. I had made my mark on the walls when I wrote out the Margaret Mead quote, using the five semicolons (;;;;;) that are also used in a text message to represent a wink.

I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalysed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it.

That evening I met Matthew, who was carrying a box of clothes from the vintage shop. He told me it was work for Ingrid to take home to Berlin and asked me if I had a message I would like him to give to her. It was as if I was forbidden to speak to her and could do so only through him.

I stood there in the fiercest late-August sun, sweating, freaked out.

What kind of message did I want to give Ingrid?

I let him wait.

‘By the way, Sophie, that bottle of wine you and Inge stole from my cellar? It’s a mid-range wine, worth about three hundred pounds. So I reckon you should pay half.’

His hands were full because of the box of clothes, so he waggled one of his white espadrilles in my direction for emphasis.

When I laughed I sounded monstrous to my own ears. ‘Tell her that Pablo’s dog is alive and free. He can swim because he has a sea past.’

‘What do you mean, a sea past?’

‘Someone must have trained him to swim when he was a puppy.’

‘You’re so insane, Sophie.’

Matthew walked towards me, struggling with the box, and kissed me on the cheek. I could tell that his body was cleverer than he was because I liked the feeling of him being close to me. I offered my other insane cheek to his insane lips.

It is 11 p.m. and I am naked again, but this time with Juan.

Our bodies are shaking. We are lying on a Turkish rug on the floor of the room he has rented while he has his summer job at the injury hut.

‘Sofia,’ he says, ‘I know your age and I know your country of origin. But I don’t know anything about your occupation.’

I like how he is not in love with me.

I like how I am not in love with him.

I like the yellow flesh of the two tiny wild pineapples he bought in the market.

He is kissing my shoulder. He knows I am reading an email from Alexandra.

He asks me to read it out loud.

It is written in Greek, so I will have to translate it into English.

Dear Sofia,

Your sister is missing you. A friend said to me that I have two daughters. I corrected her, no I have one, and she said, no you have two. She meant you. I regard you as a sister, but then I remembered it is my daughter who is your sister. Your papa has told me he will leave all our money to the church when he dies. I tell you this as a sister. Although I too have faith, I need to take care of my daughter, who is your sister too. You should know that I lost my job at the bank in Brussels. I am concerned that my two daughters, yes, one of them is you, and his wife, that is me, will be sacrificed to his god and we will lose our investments and our home. This is also to say I hope the health of your real mother is improving and that her legs are getting better.

Kind wishes to you, Sofia

Alexandra

He asks me to read it to him in Greek. ‘It is the right language to read that sort of email.’ He knows he is touching me somewhere that makes me tremble.

We discuss America. The country that gave a home to Claude Lévi-Strauss the anthropologist and to Levi Strauss & Co., the manufacturer of blue jeans, and which might also give me a temporary home to finish my doctorate. If its theme is memory, Juan wonders where will I begin and where I will end. While he takes the tiny sliver of glass out of the skin above my eyebrow, I confess that I am often lost in all the dimensions of time, that the past sometimes feels nearer than the present and I often fear the future has already happened.