The Third Reich

AUGUST 26

I’m following Ingeborg’s instructions. Today I spent more time than usual at the beach. The result is that my shoulders are red from the sun and this afternoon I had to go buy a cream to take away the sting. Of course we were next to the pedal boats and since there was nothing else to do I spent the time talking to El Quemado. The day brought a few bits of news. The first is that yesterday Charly got outrageously drunk with the Wolf and the Lamb. Hanna, weepy, told Ingeborg that she didn’t know what to do: leave him or not? She can’t stop thinking about going back to Germany alone. She misses her son; she’s fed up and tired. Her only consolation is her perfect tan. Ingeborg says that it all depends on whether she really loves Charly or not. Hanna doesn’t know what to answer. The other news is that the manager of the Costa Brava has asked them to leave the hotel. It seems that last night Charly and the Spaniards tried to beat up the night watchman. Ingeborg, despite the signs I was making to her, suggested that they move to the Del Mar. Luckily Hanna is determined that the manager change his mind or at least return their deposit. I expect that everything will be resolved with a few explanations and apologies. In response to Ingeborg’s question about where she was when all this took place, Hanna answers that she was in their room, sleeping. Charly didn’t show up on the beach until noon, looking the worse for wear and dragging his board. Hanna, when she saw him, whispered in Ingeborg’s ear:

“He’s killing himself.”

Charly’s version is completely different. He couldn’t care less about the manager and his threats. He says, with his eyes half closed and looking as sleepy as if he’d just stepped out of bed:

“We can move to the Wolf’s house. Cheaper and more authentic. That way you’ll get to know the real Spain.” And he winks at me.

He’s only half joking. The Wolf’s mother rents rooms in the summer, with board or without, at modest prices. For a moment it seems that Hanna is about to cry. Ingeborg steps in and calms her down. In the same joking tone she asks Charly whether the Wolf and the Lamb aren’t falling in love with him. But the question is serious. Charly laughs and says no. Then, recovered, Hanna says that she’s the one the Wolf and the Lamb want to get into bed.

“The other night they kept touching me,” she says, at once mortified and coquettish.

“Because you’re pretty,” explains Charly, unperturbed. “I’d try it too if I didn’t already know you, wouldn’t I?”

The conversation swings all of a sudden to places as far-flung as Oberhausen’s Discotheque 33 and the Telephone Company. Hanna and Charly begin to wax sentimental and remember all of the places with romantic significance for them. But after a while, Hanna insists:

“You’re killing yourself.”

Charly puts an end to the reproaches by grabbing his board and heading into the water.

At first my conversation with El Quemado centered on topics like whether anyone had ever stolen a pedal boat from him, whether the work was hard, whether he didn’t get bored spending so many hours on the beach under that merciless sun, whether he had time to eat, whether he could say who among the foreigners were his best customers, etc. His answers, invariably succinct, were as follows: twice someone had stolen a pedal boat, or rather, left it abandoned at the other end of the beach; the work wasn’t hard; sometimes he got bored but not often; he ate sandwiches, as I suspected; he had no idea which country’s natives rented the most pedal boats. I contented myself with his answers, and I endured the intervals of silence that followed. Clearly he wasn’t used to conversation, and, as I noted by his evasive gaze, he was rather mistrustful. A few steps away, the bodies of Ingeborg and Hanna shone, soaking in the sun’s rays. Then, suddenly, I said that I’d rather be back at the hotel. He glanced at me without curiosity and continued to watch the horizon, where his pedal boats were nearly indistinguishable from the pedal boats belonging to other stands. Far away I spotted a windsurfer who kept falling again and again. From the color of the sail I realized it wasn’t Charly. I said that mountains were my thing, not the sea. I liked the sea, but I liked mountains better. El Quemado made no comment.

We were silent for a while again. The sun was scorching my shoulders but I didn’t move or do anything to protect myself. In profile, El Quemado looked like a different person. I don’t mean that he was less disfigured (actually, the side facing me was the more disfigured) but simply that he looked like someone else. More remote. Like a bust of pumice stone fringed with coarse, dark hairs.

I can’t remember what made me confess that I wanted to be a writer. El Quemado turned around and, after hesitating, said that it was an interesting profession. I made him repeat what he’d said because at first I thought I’d misheard him.

“But not of novels or plays,” I explained.

El Quemado’s lips parted and he said something I couldn’t hear.

“What?”

“Poet?”

Under his scars I seemed to glimpse a kind of monstrous smile. I thought the sun must be addling me.

“No, no, definitely not a poet.”

I explained, now that I had paved the way for it, that I in no way scorned poetry; I could have recited from memory lines by Klopstock or Schiller. But to write poetry in this day and age, unless it was for the love object, was a bit pointless, didn’t he agree?

“Or grotesque,” said the poor wretch, nodding.

How can someone so deformed say that something is grotesque without taking it personally? Strange. In any case, my sense that El Quemado was secretly smiling grew stronger. Maybe it was his eyes that conveyed the hint of a smile. He hardly ever looked at me, but when he did I caught in his gaze a spark of jubilation and strength.

“Specialized writer,” I said. “Creative essayist.”

On the spot, I sketched in broad strokes a picture of the world of war games, with all its magazines, competitions, local clubs, etc. In Barcelona, I explained, there were a few associations in operation, for example, and although as far as I knew no federation existed, Spanish players were beginning to be quite active in the field of European competitions. In Paris I had met a few.

“It’s a sport on the rise,” I said.

El Quemado mulled over my words, then he got up to retrieve a pedal boat that was coming in to shore; with no sign of effort he pulled it back into the roped-offarea.

“I did read something about people who play with little lead soldiers,” he said. “It wasn’t too long ago, I think, at the beginning of the summer…”

“Yes, it’s essentially the same thing. Like rugby and American football. But I’m not very interested in lead soldiers, although they’re all right… they look a little bit fussy.” I laughed. “I prefer board games.”

“What do you write about?”

“Anything. Give me any war or campaign and I’ll tell you how it can be won or lost, the flaws of the game, where the designer got it right or wrong, the correct scale, the original order of battle…”

El Quemado watches the horizon. With his big toe he digs a little hole in the sand. Behind us Hanna has fallen asleep and Ingeborg is reading the last few pages of the Florian Linden novel; when our eyes meet she smiles and blows me a kiss.

For a moment I wonder whether El Quemado has a girlfriend. Or whether he’s ever had one.

What girl could kiss that terrible mask? But there’s someone for everyone, I know.

After a while:

“You must have lots of fun,” he said.

I heard his voice as if it were coming from far away. The light bounced offthe surface of the sea, making a kind of wall that grew until it touched the clouds, which—fat, heavy, the color of dirty milk—were drifting almost imperceptibly toward the cliffs to the north. Under the clouds a parachute came in toward the beach, pulled by a speedboat. I said I felt a little sick. It must be the work waiting for me, I said, I’m a wreck until I finish what I’ve started. I did my best to explain that being a specialized writer required a complicated and cumbersome setup. (This was the main argument that the players of computerized war games could make in their favor: the savings of space and time.) I confessed that for days a huge game had been spread out in my hotel room and that I should really be working on it.

“I promised to turn in an essay at the beginning of September, and here I am, lazing around.”

El Quemado didn’t say anything. I added that the essay was for an American magazine.

“It’s an unheard-of variant. No one’s ever come up with anything like it.”

Maybe it was the sun that was making me ramble on. In my defense I should say that since I’d left Stuttgart I hadn’t had the chance to talk to anyone about war games. My fellow gamers will know what I mean. For us it’s fun to talk about games. But clearly I’d chosen the strangest conversation partner I could possibly have found.

El Quemado seemed to understand that I had to play in order to write.

“But that way you must always win,” he said, showing his ruined teeth.

“Not at all. If you play yourself there’s no way to cheat with strategies or maneuvers. All the cards are on the table. If my variant works, it’s because it’s mathematically guaranteed to work. As it happens, I’ve already tested it a few times, and both times I won, but it needs to be polished and that’s why I play alone.”

“You must write very slowly,” he said.

“No,” I said, laughing, “I write like lightning. I play slowly but I write fast. People say I’m high-strung but it isn’t true; they say it because of the way I write. Without stopping!”

“I write fast too,” murmured El Quemado.

“I guessed as much,” I said.

My own words surprised me. Actually, I hadn’t even imagined that El Quemado could write. But when he spoke, or maybe sooner, when I said that I wrote fast, I guessed that he must be a scribbler too. We stared at each other without saying anything for a few seconds. It was hard to look him in the face for too long, although little by little I was getting used to it. El Quemado’s secret smile still lurked there, maybe mocking me and our newly discovered shared trait. I kept feeling sicker. I was sweating. I didn’t understand how El Quemado could take so much sun. His craggy face, full of charred folds, sometimes glinted blue like cooking gas or took on a yellowish-black hue like something about to explode. And yet he could just sit there on the sand, with his hands on his knees and his eyes fixed on the sea, showing no signs of discomfort. In a departure from his usual behavior, which was so reserved, he asked whether I would help him bring in a pedal boat that had just arrived. Groggily, I nodded. The Italian couple on the boat couldn’t steer to shore. We got in the water and pushed gently. From their seats, the Italians kidded around and pretended to fall in. They jumped out before we got to shore. I was happy to see them head away, skirting bodies and holding hands, toward the Paseo Marítimo. After we pulled the pedal boat in, El Quemado said that I should swim for a while.

“Why?”

“You’ll fry your circuits in the sun,” he said.

I laughed and asked whether he wanted to come in with me.

We swam for a while, intent only on getting past the first line of bathers. Then we turned around to face the beach: from that vantage point, next to El Quemado, the beach and the people crowded on it seemed different.

When we returned he advised me, in a strange voice, to rub myself down with coconut oil.

“Coconut oil and a dark room,” he murmured.

With deliberate abruptness I woke Ingeborg and we left.

This afternoon I had a fever. I told Ingeborg. She didn’t believe me. When I showed her my shoulders, she told me to put a wet towel over them or to take a cold shower. Hanna was waiting and she seemed to be in a hurry to be rid of me.

For a while I stared at the game with no energy for anything; the light hurt my eyes and the hum of the hotel was lulling me to sleep. With no little effort I managed to go out in search of a pharmacy. Under the terrible sun I wandered the old streets in the center of town. I don’t remember seeing tourists. Actually, I don’t remember seeing anyone. A couple of sleeping dogs; the girl who waited on me at the pharmacy; an old man sitting in the shadow of a doorway. Meanwhile, the Paseo Marítimo was so crowded that it was impossible to walk without elbowing and pushing. Near the port a little amusement park had been built and that’s where everyone was, hypnotized. It was insanity. There were all kinds of tiny stalls that the human torrent threatened to crush at any moment. As best I could, I lost myself again in the streets of the old town and returned to the hotel the long way around.

I got undressed, closed the shutters, and smeared my body with salve. I was burning up.

Lying in bed, in the dark but with my eyes open, I tried to think about the events of the last few days before I fell asleep. Then I dreamed that I didn’t have a fever anymore and I was with Ingeborg in this same room, in bed, each of us reading a book, but at the same time there was something very intimate about it. I mean, each of us felt close to the other even though we were absorbed in our respective books; each of us felt love for the other. Then someone scratched at the door and after a while we heard a voice on the other side saying: “It’s Florian Linden, get out now, your life is in great danger.” Immediately, Ingeborg let go of her book (the book dropped splayed on the rug) and fixed her eyes on the door. I hardly moved. Frankly, I was so comfortable there, my skin so cool, that I thought it wasn’t worth being frightened. “Your life is in danger,” repeated Florian Linden’s voice, farther and farther away, as if from the end of the hallway. And in fact, just then we heard the sound of the elevator, the doors opening with a metallic click and then closing, carrying Florian Linden down to the ground floor. “He’s gone to the beach or the amusement park,” said Ingeborg, dressing quickly. “I have to find him. Wait here, I have to talk to him.” I didn’t object, of course. But left alone, I couldn’t keep reading. “How can anyone be in danger in this room?” I asked aloud. “What’s he scheming, that third-rate detective?” Getting more and more worked up, I went over to the window and looked out at the beach, expecting to see Ingeborg and Florian Linden. The sun was setting and only El Quemado was there, arranging his pedal boats under red clouds and a moon the color of a plate of boiling lentils, dressed only in shorts and remote from everything around him, that is, from the sea and the beach, the sea wall of the Paseo, and the shadows of the hotels. For a moment I was overcome by fear; I knew that danger and death lay out there. I woke up sweating. The fever was gone.