Seven Lies South

2

Beecher sat at a table on the terrace of the Bar Central and ordered a brandy and soda. The café was crowded now, and a multilingual blur of conversation rose from the tables. Waiters and shoeshine boys moved swiftly about in response to the snap of fingers and clapping of hands. A burro brayed deafeningly in the streets, and the sound mingled with the despairing cry of a lottery vendor: “Hay venti-dos, Hay venti-dos... un numero suerte... un numero suerte...”

Beecher sat facing the small flower garden in the middle of the plaza. The bougainvillaea and climbing geranium were incredibly vivid against a background of whitewashed shops and pensions and cafés. Off to his right was Mirimar’s administration building, yellow, squat, and ugly. The Guardia Civil had offices there, and also the local police constable, Don Julio Cansana, who was a friend of Beecher.

A stream of burros was coming into the plaza from the hills, pausing to drink from the iron fountain at the foot of the street. Beecher bought a newspaper and sipped his drink.

When he first came to Spain this was the hour of the day he had liked best of all. The siesta was over, the breezes were cool, and the promise of the long evening ahead filled everyone with a sense of significance and excitement. And there had been a lot of good evenings, Beecher thought, putting his paper aside. All sorts of people were available in Mirimar, all national, political, and sexual complexions, and it was an easy matter to find friends. You drifted with the crowd. Everything was informal. You went to parties where everyone drank red wine or Spanish brandy, and someone had a guitar and sang folk songs. In the daytime you soaked up sun on the beach and drank a few bottles of cold beer to minimize the hangovers, which were the most staple topic of conversation in the village. People were always going off on trips. To Gibraltar to change money; to Tangier to eat couscous and hear jazz and watch the slim and epicene boys who danced in the tourist restaurants; to somewhere over the mountains to see the bullfighter everyone was comparing to Manolete and Belmonte.

Beecher had done all these things. Sometimes he felt guilty about squandering time so pointlessly. Or else he felt like a fool. Then something would come along, another party, another trip, another girl, and this would anesthetize his concern for a while. But lately he had been withdrawing from the foreign colony. He avoided parties, and he swam five miles from the village in a graceful cove cut deep into the mountainside. He went alone to bullfights in Málaga, instead of making a carnival out of it with the bearded young Americans who carried goatskins of wine slung over their shoulders and quarreled with everyone around them on the merits of the corrida.

Beecher didn’t understand his withdrawal, except that he was tired of busy people. Of course, few of the expatriates were busy in any normal sense; but they had busy bodies and busy heads. He preferred Spaniards. Don Julio, the policeman, came to his villa occasionally to play dominoes and listen to opera music. And he knew a number of Spanish families from the golf course, and he enjoyed spending a quiet evening with them in their homes in Málaga. These relationships weren’t deep or significant, because he brought nothing to them but his own emptiness and loneliness. He was given friendship because he needed it, not because he had earned it.

Beecher finished his drink and walked through the terrace into the cool depth of the bar. There was a party going on at the corner table, three young Americans with an assortment of Danes, South Africans and Canadians. They were noisy and happy. Beecher knew all of them, and said hello as he walked past their table to the bulletin board at the end of the bar where the postman left his mail. There was nothing but a postcard from a girl who had lived in Mirimar in the spring. She was an Australian who wanted to write, and her family had given her a year of travel to help solve her artistic problems. Beecher tried to puzzle out her microscopic script. She was in London now and had made contacts in television. The English work restrictions were — he couldn’t make out the word, but it looked like “fopelup” which could be “fouled-up” or “filled-up” or even “bollixed-up.” She shared a flat with two British models. They had so many friends it was impossible to get a night’s sleep. She had met someone who knew Peter Ustinov. There was more, but Beecher didn’t bother to read it. He tore up the card and dropped it in the spittoon at his feet.

The girl’s name was Millicent something-or-other, and he had difficulty remembering what she looked like, except for a general notion of blondeness and excitement. There should have been a letter from his sister, Bunny. She was all the family he had; his mother and father had been dead for ten years. Bunny was married to an insurance man and lived happily on Long Island. She was a sweet thing, and was always turning up jobs for Beecher in America. She wrote ritualistically each week, urging him to forsake Spain and come home. It was almost funny; she thought he stayed in Spain because he was having too much fun to leave.

One of the young Americans weaved to the bar and put an arm around his shoulders. “Come on over and have a farewell drink,” he said in a thick, cheerful voice. “Trumbull’s going home. Fed up. Sick of bullfights. Sick of Spain, Europe, everything. Wants to raise a family, collect a pension. Come on, help save the poor bastard.”

The American’s name was Nelson. He was tall and thin, with a great sprout of erratic red hair which seemed to require all the strength of his body to nourish; at least it was the only thing about him that looked strong and luxuriant. His ribs showed sharply against a cotton T shirt, and there were great dark hollows beneath his wild and beautiful gray eyes. He was twenty-four years old, and had a degree in psychology from Ohio State University. “Come on, Mike,” he said, pulling ineffectually at Beecher’s arm. “You’re a wise old bastard. Let’s don’t let him do this awful thing.”

“We’ll give him fight talk number ten,” Beecher said. “Words of comfort for the doubting expatriate.”

“That’s the idea,” Nelson cried shrilly. “We’ll bug him good. Tell him about supermarkets and frozen foods and trick wives rampant on a field of ruptured husbands. On guard, Trumbull! Here comes the artillery.”

Beecher took a drink to the corner table and sat down between Trumbull and a quiet Canadian girl who taught English to a wealthy Spanish family in Málaga. Trumbull was a huge and droll young man with an air of exuberant energy which Beecher found stimulating. He had been a fine college athlete, and had made the Dean’s list, but after graduating he had turned down a half-dozen job offers and had come to Spain to tour the country on motorcycle. He wore a wild black beard, which he contended was essential to the doggerel he wrote, and enjoyed brawling and bullfights and red wine. One of his poems celebrated the rout of Don Willie from the Bar Central by the little Czech. It was called, inevitably, Beecher thought, “The Bouncing Czech.” Because he liked Trumbull and disliked Don Willie, Beecher thought the poem was very funny. It started off: Six leagues and more, this son of Thor, did run and run, this naughty Hun, with rolling eye and roiling bowels, he flew like one of Siegfried’s fowls... Beecher had forgotten the rest of it.

He raised his glass to Trumbull. “It’s true? You’re going home?”

“Yeah, man,” Trumbull said, nodding his big head emphatically. “I want that split-level in the suburbs, and a pine-paneled playroom. When I climb down from the commuter’s special little old sweetie-face will be waiting there with a pitcher of dry Martinis, and her hair in curlers and a baby under each arm.” When he grinned, his firm red lips coiled in the black luxuriance of his beard. “I’ve had Spain. Through being a lousy expatriate wasting time in the company of sexual perverts and Democrats. I’m heading home.”

The Canadian girl said crisply, “What’s all this about sexual perverts and Democrats?”

“My old man’s a Republican. He thinks the words mean the same thing.”

Nelson tugged at his untidy mass of red hair with both hands. “You’re out of your Chinese mind,” he said, in a voice closer to the howl of a dog than to human speech. “They’ll eat you up! They’ll devour you. You’ll have kids and debts up to your navel in two years. Freezers, TV sets, Mixmasters, none of it paid for. The Goddamn home you’re dreaming about will be nothing but a substation for Westinghouse. When are you going to think, man? Dream and grow?” Nelson put his cheek on the table and wrapped his thin arms around his head. “Somebody wave for drinks. I’m too depleted.”

“Nah, you got it all wrong,” Trumbull said, grinning at Nelson’s head, which looked like a huge red cabbage among the clutter of glasses and siphon bottles. “I want to be a proper guy, a solid, taxpaying citizen. I’ll wear tweeds and a yellow vest in my playroom, and I’ll smile with my friends about my life as a bum in Spain. Ah, but there’ll be an ache in it, though,” he said, lowering his voice in a soft, theatrical whisper. “The bullfight posters on the wall, the banderillas Dominguin nailed into that Muira in Pamplona, the empty goatskins on the walls, dry and withered as an old scrotum, all symbols of irreverent youth and feckless gaiety.”

“Stop it, stop it!” Nelson said, his voice thick and hollow beneath his folded arms.

“But my wife will understand,” Trumbull said with a great heavy sigh. “She will be the lovely and rich Walpurgis Trumbull, nee Glockenspiel, and her huge brown eyes will puddle with sympathy as I stare into my drink and dream of these dead golden days.”

Everyone was laughing when he finished, and Nelson went unsteadily to the bar to see about the drink order. Trumbull asked Beecher if he were going to Don Willie’s party, and Beecher said no.

“Silly question, eh?” Trumbull said. “He never crept into your heart, did he?”

“How about you?” Beecher asked him.

“Well, I can’t go to his party after writing that poem about him. He’s probably never seen it, but that doesn’t make any difference. Also, I think I’d be happier buying my own drinks. But I may weasel to the extent of going down to the beach and watching his fireworks.”

Beecher finished his drink in one long swallow. “Is this idea of going home pretty sudden?”

Trumbull shook his head. “I gave myself two years and they’re up. Now I’m going home and go to work. I could have had a dozen pretty good jobs when I got out of school. Engineers are prime targets for Du Pont and GM and so forth. Hell, they offered us our pick of the country, north, south, east, west, you name it. And transportation, and homes, and pension plans. They’d have installed brides in the homes, too, if we’d asked for them.”

“What was wrong with it?”

“I wasn’t dry behind the ears. I’m no expatriate, don’t let the smart-aleck talk fool you. I want to live and work in America. But I wanted these two years to, well, get my breath. Maybe it won’t make me any more valuable in an engineering department, but it’s made me more valuable to myself.” He paused to smile at Nelson who was talking with heated good humor to the waiter. “It’s the same with him. He’s expending a lot of nonsense over here in a fairly innocent way. But he’s going home in a couple of months. He wants to teach, and I’ll bet he’s a better teacher for this mixed-up sabbatical he’s taken.”

“Probably,” Beecher said, and waved for another drink.

They were all so damn young, Beecher thought, and felt an unpleasant stab of self-pity; Nelson and Trumbull, and the dozens like them he’d known in Spain, galloping about like happy colts, taking wild and irresponsible leaps at every fence they came to. But it was okay for them, as Trumbull had pointed out; it was good for them. They wouldn’t forget who they were in this bewildering old complex of Europe and Africa. They had their initials sewn tightly onto Brooks Brothers shirts, and they could always take a peek if things got confusing. At their age nothing changed, least of all themselves; they were fixed and permanent qualities. They could squander time like millionaires. Life waited on them, tolerant of their youth. In the far-off unreal future the realities were waiting; jobs and wives, homes and children, but they had oceans of time to cross before they came to these responsibilities.

“You going to stay here for good?” Trumbull asked him.

“I don’t imagine so,” Beecher said. He had oceans of time, too, he thought bitterly. Oceans of time to do nothing in; at thirty-eight no one was clamoring for his services, and baiting their offers with homes and pension plans. There was no reason for him to go home. Nothing to do, no one to be close to except his kid sister, Bunny, who still thought of him with adolescent pride and respect.

There had been a girl named Alison around for a long time. She had been waiting when Beecher returned from his first war. Not for him particularly, but for any deserving veteran with his feet on the ground and his shoulders braced to support mortgage payments, dental bills, and education insurance. She seemed a wise and happy girl, with round clear eyes, and a snug welcoming body; the answer to prayers that popular magazines had put in the mouths of returning soldiers. This was what the fighting had been all about; not just the chance to boo the umpire and enjoy Mom’s apple pie. His family and Alison’s agreed on this completely. Only Bunny had dissented, he remembered; she had religion and the Air Force combined in a heady adolescent metaphysic, and she had wanted him to become a flying missionary. But he had played tennis and golf with Alison, and put in two unmarked years acquiring “experience” in a brokerage firm. By then their names had become hyphenated in their little crowd. Mike-and-Alison. Mike-and-Alison drank rum Collins. Mike-and-Alison went to ball games. Mike-and-Alison went to parties and got drunk and necked in the driveway of Alison’s home. It took Korea to break it up. Beecher’s training and instincts required him to express resentment over his recall. But he finally got tired of pretending, tired of Alison’s brave face at farewell parties, and tired of her father’s talk of duty and sacrifice and the Hun. The old man didn’t seem to have any clear notion of where the hell the war was, or what it was all about.

But he wasn’t alone in this confusion. At any rate, Beecher had told Alison one night that he was glad to get back to flying. She had reacted with a spunk and spirit which seemed to flow fittingly from her father’s cloudy jingoism.

“I wouldn’t respect you one minute if you didn’t, Mike Beecher. I’ll wait for you, darling, don’t worry.” And they had slept together that night for the first time.

Alison was comfortably married when Beecher returned from Korea three years later. She had him to dinner and fluttered proudly about her thin smiling husband. As Beecher left, he had a moment alone with her in the hall. She wanted to explain about sleeping with him; it had been the times, the frenzy and madness. It was symbolic; a smile and a wave to all gallant soldiers. Nothing personal. There hadn’t been much smiling when they went to bed, he remembered; it had been full of tears and guilt. But he let it go the way she wanted it.

After Korea the Fifties seemed to shoot past him; men he’d been to school with were graying at the temples and griping about taxes and “pressure.” Beecher’s father and mother died, and he salvaged enough from the big house to see Bunny through school without dipping into his savings. His friends advised him about jobs. He sat in their offices and listened to talk about the “team.” They told him his business background was “light.” The wartime flying, eight years of it, was more a liability than an asset. As a friend in a personnel department put it, he was “excitement-prone.” “Any guy with your background, there’s always the risk he enjoys rocking the boat.” And there was little need for boat-rockers in the business world. Beecher had sold space for a sports magazine; worked for nothing on a city-planning commission; tried the brokerage business a second time and lost five thousand dollars playing the market. This defeat scared him; with his track record, how the hell could he advise anyone?

And now time seemed to be racing past him. Each time he looked up from his desk it seemed the leaves were beginning to change color and drift to the ground. There was nothing in his life but chance friends, chance girls, and the routine of work he didn’t seem cut out for. But what was he cut out for?

Finally he made a decision while waiting for a bus on a gray and windy afternoon in New York. The bus had something to do with it, he had decided later; it wasn’t going anywhere he wanted to go. And neither were the ones chugging in the opposite direction. He had decided to come to Spain; he needed time to think, time to find out who in the name of God he was, and what he might fruitfully do with the rest of his life. And Spain was the land that had poured sand in the spinning wheels of time. Everybody knew that.

Beecher had withdrawn his savings, almost ten thousand dollars, and had bought a ticket to Madrid...

And now the money was about gone. And all it had bought him was idleness and irresponsibility and cheap drinks. And the time went racing by just as it had in New York.

Beecher had become weary of searching for a pleasant word to describe himself. He was a bum, that’s all there was to it. But it wasn’t just the lack of money, the lack of prospects. He could go home and get some kind of job. But he had lost his own country, in a curious and bewildering fashion. That was what hurt him. America was strange and frightening to him now — like some big glittering party he hadn’t been invited to. That was the worst of it. The feeling of being left out of things. Of being emotionally severed from his own people.

Trumbull seemed to sense his mood for he squeezed Beecher’s shoulder, and said, “How about a farewell drink?”

“Fine.”

“Do you remember the night I got into the brawl with that big Swede?” Trumbull was watching him closely, his hand still on Beecher’s shoulder. “You took me for a walk and talked some sense into me, remember?”

Beecher shrugged and smiled. “Well, you got it out of your system. You won’t be doing it in Westport, I hope.”

“I’m grateful to you for that night,” Trumbull said. “And for that reason I’m going to be cheeky enough to give you some advice. Okay?”

Beecher raised his glass. “Fire when ready.”

“Get the hell out of Spain, Mike.”