The Frontiers of the Sea

THE ATLANTIC

BY PETEK USTINOV

OLD men sit on walls and watch the sea; young men do it too, but dutifully. Among the nets and green glass baubles they do it, and seem to read the sky like a newspaper. At all points of the compass they sit on walls, as though the sea were a vast arena full of spectacle and pageantry and meaning, which, for them, it is. The smell of tar and rancid water, thick as blood to the nostril, hovers round the edges of the arena, and the old men no longer notice it. They have traveled beyond the trifling bits of observation a landlubber may pick proudly up on holiday; they have traveled beyond prose and poetry into that ultimate simplicity which separates them from life as surely as luck and seamanship have always separated them from death. They spend their days in a wordless limbo of comprehension. They think of nothing and understand.

Planted like trees, or rather like masts, on the best seats, they stare with the lustrous patience of old dogs at the vast hunting ground. They are part of the seascape, and it often appears that, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, they are slowly returning into nature without surprise or fear of death. The shells on the beach look like the abandoned toenails of these old men, and they are more beautiful there than on the foot, among all the other vestiges of decay, the broken wings, the sandlogged crabs, the silver fish with the surprised eyes, the woman’s lonely shoe, the rusty toy. Cleansed and sterilized by salt and iodine in the great hospital of the sea, decay and corruption are as evocative on the shore as broken columns and noseless gods are inland, and they are older still. There are no compromises. No need is there to subtract the television aerials which are silhouetted against the peachy sky behind the Colosseum; no need to half close the eyes in order to eliminate the Autostrada which sweeps by the crumbling temples and frozen palisades. The sea is as it was, and if an airliner whistles and sobs above it for a while, it brushes it away as a horse wearily dispenses with a fly. Landed man has not yet found a way to take possession of the sea, to tame it and bend it to the glacial mechanical will, while the seaman knows better than to try.

With great indulgence, without comment, the old men watch the holidaymakers: the varicose columns of white flesh which stand in the shallows like chunks of veined marble under their canopies of gathered skirts; the opulent stomachs rising softly to the crater of the navel; the tiny children (the only sensible ones in the old men’s unexpressed opinions) yelling their heads off with rage and fright as their laughing parents (the idiots) try to force them to learn to swim; the brown ladies, aglisten with pungent unguents, praying to the sun with that intense application which their forebears used to reserve for God, and with only an exorbitantly expensive handkerchief between them and scandal.

There go the cabin cruisers, the owners wearing rakish caps with anchors on them and braid on the peaks, and not a knot or a hazy knowledge of celestial navigation among the lot of them. And there the playboys and playgirls screech by on parallel planks of wood, standing first on one leg, then on the other, then sinking between the ridges of high water.

This was all midsummer madness, a malady of heal. The people from beyond the hills have skulls like eggshells, and the first ray of sun and the first whiff of sea air send them off in this lunatic flirtation with shallow water. The old men look through all this with die air of great lovers who have suffered a lifelong passion for a demanding mistress. They have delved to the depths of sorrow and vaulted to the pinnacles of delight, in silence and in solitude and for life. They vaguely notice these flatulent little outbursts, this unworthy bottompinching seduction of their element. They hardly hear the saxophones and hissing percussion as the tiny tumult barks away from the bars all night. They wait patiently for the autumn.

IN THE village of San Jorge de Bayona, one such old man was Vicente Mendendez Balestreros, and for a man with such a sonorous name, it was perhaps surprising that he could neither read nor write. In truth, he didn’t have to, since he had only received letters from the government, and such letters were not worthy of an answer. He didn’t talk very much, but his thoughts, while rare, were mysterious and abstract. He had no wife, since he had little enough without having to share it. Money never worried him, but he was jealous of the silent cathedral of his mind.

The summer was over, thanks be to God, creator of all seasons. The bars were either locked or else humbled by presence of the locals. The little boutiques, with names like Conchita and Eros, were shut, their minute windows empty. The two modern residential hotels, El Fandango and the Hacienda Goya, had their slatted blinds down, and there were no bikinis to hang on the balconies. The nights were noiseless once again, apart from the deep breathing of the sea.

Vicente, with no wife to scold him, and no great appetite, sat on the wall longer than the other old men. Whenever they left him, they never said good-night, so envious were they of his liberty. Somehow in old age he had preserved his youth, while they had voluminous ladies waiting for them in their two-room cottages, venerable hags with hair on their chins like the hairs that leak out of overripe sofas, and with breasts that hang like a donkey’s burden. They also had holy lithographs all over the place. Religion comes into the house with the women. The priest even dresses like a woman to propagate it.

Vicente was Catholic, but he didn’t believe in God, unless belief in the sea can be conceived as a form of belief in God. He would mutter and make signs and kneel and kiss like all the others because he had been brought up that way, but when it came to belief, he could only subject himself to the guidance of reason, tempered always by the bitter paradoxes of experience. Priests he regarded not as men with a divine vocation, but rather as men skillfully avoiding work. The organ gave him earache, and the better it was played, the more intense was his pain. At the same time, he had no patience with members of other religions, unless they happened to be sailors, in which case they had better things to do than to bother with dogma.

One evening—it was well after ten, the moon was full, with black clouds scudding in ordered masses across the sky — Vicente was still on his wall, and all alone. Suddenly he shivered, and the toes of his bare feet curled up as though at bay. A cool wind sighed from an unexpected quarter, and a noise like a distant cavalry charge began to grow fitfully from the horizon. A sheet on a clothesline flapped like a sail when a ship changes direction. He rose. His face creased up as his hazel eyes looked into the distance, where the last colors of the day were by now only suggested by a trace of green, a touch of mauve, a tortoiseshell patch of black and orange.

He hobbled to the nearest cottage and banged on the door. One of the monumental women opened up and asked what he wanted. At this hour of the night, at almost any hour, there was a barrier between each man and the outer world. Vicente didn’t say what he wanted. He merely pointed at the horizon with his chin. Eventually the man appeared. It was Paco Miranda Ramirez.

“What can you see there?” he asked.

Since Vicente couldn’t be bothered to say, Paco walked out in his underwear, brushing away the stridencies of his wife, and had a good look at the horizon himself.

“It’s too dark to see,” Paco said.

Vicente shook his head briefly in disagreement.

“What do you see?”

“Come indoors,” cried the wife.

“Silence, woman,” countercried the husband, who was always courageous in front of another man.

“A boat?” he asked Vicente.

Vicente nodded.

“In trouble?”

Vicente made a gesture, a languorous sweeping movement of his arm and a bridling of his head to suggest the enormity of the trouble.

Paco paddled off barefoot and woke some of the other men with talk of shipwreck. The reason the men responded with such alacrity to the call was that almost twenty years back they had towed a Belgian yacht to safety and been compensated by half its purchase price, which is a rule of the sea. This prize money had brought great happiness to the village, and one man, a certain Diego Linares Montoya, had even been able to fulfill his life’s ambition and die of cirrhosis of the liver as a consequence of this heaven-sent bounty. At that time too it had been Vicente, then a newcomer to the wall, who had peered into the inky night and sensed distress. His senses were respected throughout the local countryside, as the others knew, not without bitterness, that he had had the courage to remain a bachelor, and that in reward his eye and ear and especially his telepathy had remained unimpaired and pure.

“I bet he’s made a mistake this time,” grumbled José Machado Jaen, as he helped push the heavy rowing boat into the water.

“And when you get your ten thousand pesetas, I’ll be there to watch you eat your words,” said Paco.

The women stood in a wailing phalanx at the edge of the beach, their handkerchiefs to their mouths, avid for tragedy, praying. Vicente was like Ulysses at the stern, tiller in hand, guiding the boat as it entered the zone of the sudden wind. The women saw their men disappear, reappear, disappear, reappear, and finally disappear into the darkness. Only the rhythm of the oars could be vaguely heard for a moment, and then it was swallowed by the gathering storm.

The seas became mountainous, but the men hardly noticed. It was only when Vicente held up his hand and they stopped rowing that they became conscious of the folly of it all. It was raining now, and the waves broke over them, covering their feet and even their calves with galloping streams of hysterical water. There was nothing in sight.

“We’ll all drown, and it’ll be a magnificent funeral,” shouted José Machado Jaen.

“The old man knows what he’s doing,” cried Paco.

Vicente’s expression never changed as he looked around him, his gnarled face wet with spray. He pointed, and they turned the boat briefly sideways to the waves, almost capsizing. There was no sign of mast or hull, no sound but the joyful anger of the sea. The men looked anxiously at Vicente, and he suddenly grew tense. They followed his gaze, and a dark object appeared momentarily, only to sink again in a deep trench of water. Try as they might, they seemed unable to approach it. High seas destroy all sense of distance. The dark object drifted away at one moment, the next it was upon them, sucked up against the side of the boat. It was a man.

These Spanish fishermen had cultivated feet as adroit as those of monkeys, and now they suspended themselves at dangerous angles over the side of their craft, and although they were often submerged by the elemental panic, they held on to the poor fellow, and eventually succeeded in dragging him aboard. Nobody could blame Vicente for the fact that there was no prize this time. His senses were as keen as ever, and he appeared to be doing the work of God, which, even if less lucrative than the best works of man, salved the conscience in advance against the next mortal sin. The crew felt humble and virtuous as they rowed strongly back to their village. They could be sure that they had taken part in a miracle.

THE rescued man was half-dead when they carried him ashore. He had a pair of rough white canvas trousers on, but his torso was bare, and dramatically thin. He was dark, but one could tell he was a stranger. His gray eyebrows met over the bridge of his aquiline nose, and his full lips expressed that sensuous disgust which people from the Eastern Mediterranean often share with their camels.

A feeling of biblical wonder had now so gripped them that it spread to the women, and couples vied with each other to offer hospitality to this half-dead man, and they almost came to blows in their struggle for visas to heaven. Eventually it was decided that the honor of giving up his sofa to this dripping shred of humanity should fall to one Antonio Martinez Mariscal, who was the oldest of the rescuers, and who would therefore presumably have need of this good mark in the profit column of the soul’s account earlier than the others. The nearest doctor was in the small town of Maera de las Victorias some eighteen kilometers inland. Paco Miranda Ramirez set off on a rusty bicycle without lights to fetch him. Deprived of one good deed, he eagerly volunteered for another, more difficult and more exhausting. Eusebio Sanchez Marin decided to go on foot to the neighboring village of Santa Maria de la Inmaculada Concepcion to fetch the priest, so that all this virtue could be registered with the proper Authority. The others saw the volunteers off with the jealousy of Holy Week flagellants who find there aren’t enough scourges to go round.

It was almost four in the morning and a feather of light lay gently on the horizon by the time Dr. Valdes arrived in his rickety car, Paco Miranda Ramirez standing on the running board and holding his bicycle on the roof. One feeble headlight of the doctor’s car kept winking suggestively like an aged roue at a stage door. As dogs and masters grow to resemble each other, so had the doctor and his car.

“Let’s have a look at this miracle,” he wheezed as he entered Antonio’s house. Vicente pointed at the stranger with his chin. The women made way, and the doctor saw a frightened little man in a shirt several sizes too large for him lying on Antonio’s bed, as though he had been the subject of some Reinbrandtian lesson in anatomy. Certainly his expression of fear was in large measure due to the circle of impressive women who had sat round him all night, muttering, telling their beads, and searching his face for a sign. All in all, it had been more nerve-wracking than any shipwreck.

“He’s not Spanish,” suggested Paco’s wife darkly, meaning that access to the Cross might be denied him. The other wives were not willing to go so far, and thought that perhaps he was a Basque, or a Portuguese from some remote province, or perhaps a South American. The doctor asked him how he felt. He grinned in a meaningless way, since he realized from the tone of voice that he was being addressed, but didn’t seem interested or capable of answering.

“If you ask me,” said the doctor, “he’s as Spanish as everyone else here, but of a backward mentality — or else he has been the victim of a traumatic shock which has affected his powers of speech.”

“Is he Spanish, Vicente?” asked Paco.

Vicente shook his head negatively.

“What the devil does he know about it?” cried the doctor angrily. “Can’t even read or write, and suddenly he’s an authority on whether a man is Spanish or not!”

Vicente shrugged his shoulders like a child who pretends he doesn’t mind being punished.

By the time Father Ignacio arrived, Paco’s wife was able to tell him that the miracle involved one of God’s idiots, who had been saved from a roaring sea by those of solid mind. This, she suggested, had a comfortable ring of Christian charity to it, with a soupçon of celestial embellishment for good measure.

FATHER IGNACIO, a man narrow both in body and in mind, knew intimately that no-man’s-land of skeptical expectation in which many country priests put out their thoughts to pasture. He lived in the knowledge that miracles had occurred in other places and at other times, and yet he had the saddening but certain conviction that nothing extraordinary would ever happen to him. If it did, he certainly wouldn’t know how to react.

The little man spoke suddenly, saying something like “Shkipra.”

“Shkipra, Shkipra,” he repeated insistently when they asked him to elucidate.

The ladies made quite a few wild guesses at the meaning of this elusive word, eventually settling for madness as its most probable source. Dr. Valdes racked his brain for any malady of that name, but he had taken his exams very long ago, and he required of his patients that they fall ill with a few well-defined complaints. Shkipra was not one of them.

Father Ignacio sharpened abruptly, and said, quite out of the blue, “Senatus Populusque Romanes. ”

The ladies looked at him inquiringly.

“What did the Reverend Father say?” asked Paco’s wife.

“S.P.Q.R.”

“Shkipra,” agreed the little man excitedly, pointing to his own chest.

“The man is, no doubt, a Roman,” declared Father Ignacio, glaring through his metal-rimmed glasses. “That is what he has been trying to tell us.”

“A Roman,” spluttered Dr. Valdes, “how d’you make that out?”

“Senatus Populusque Romanus,” replied Father Ignacio, “the Senate and tiie People of Rome . . . I remember seeing it on every dustbin in the eternal city.”

“And Rome is the seat of Mother Church,” reminded Paco’s wife with a sallow look of sanctity, “the home of all miracles.”

“What the devil d’you mean!” Dr. Valdes protested, who had served in the Legion of Death and survived. “Spain produces more miracles than any other country in the world, and without foreign assistance. The weeping Virgin of Fuenteleal, the Fountain of San Leandro, which spouts blood, the nodding Christ of the Thorns.”

Father Ignacio held up an indulgent yet peremptory hand.

“It is unseemly to enter into worldly arguments about the extent of our and other people’s miracles, especially since our richness in these divine phenomena should make us tolerant toward those less endowed. It remains that this simple Roman peasant owes his life to the fact that some celestial force visited our good friend Vicente and directed his eye to a specific point in the heaving waters. It is enough that we and this poor peasant share the true faith. The story is a perfect one; its moral is as symmetrical and as lovely as a flower. Deo gratias ”

“Amen,” murmured the ladies.

The door burst open, and Sergeant Cuenca Loyola of the Guardia Civil stood there, his sinister patent-leather hat reflecting the unsteady light of the candles. Behind him stood Baez, his assistant.

“What’s going on here?” growled Sergeant Cuenca Loyola.

“A miracle,” crowed the ladies.

“A miracle? I’m surprised. Surprised with the lot of you, and disgusted. Father Ignacio, Dr. Valdes, Paco, Vicente. Don’t you people know that I should have been the first to have been informed of a new arrival? I could arrest you all for attempting to smuggle a person into Spain.”

“If I hadn’t been summoned, he’d have been a corpse by now,” snarled Dr. Valdes.

“I should have been called at the same time!” Sergeant Cuenca Loyola was willing to make that concession. “Now, to work.” Baez took out a notebook and pencil.

“I’d like to know what the devil you think you’re going to write down on that pad,” Dr. Valdes cackled.

“What we put down on our pad is official business, and I want no reflection or comment on it whatsoever,” declared the sergeant.

“I served with the Legion of Death,” protested Dr. Valdes, “and I know and respect the regulations, but even General Millan-Astray himself, genius that he was, may his soul repose in peace, couldn’t have made sense of the silence of this fellow.”

“We’ll make him talk,” said the sergeant, who believed that even the ignorant were in the habit of deliberately attempting to conceal their ignorance. “Now, your name!”

The stranger smiled, and nodded.

Doctor Valdes began spluttering with asthmatic laughter.

“He agrees with you, Sergeant!”

“Silence. I asked you for your name!”

“Shkipra.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” remarked the sergeant with satisfaction.

“How do you spell it?” asked Baez.

“Shkipra.”

“He’s illiterate,” declared the sergeant. “Baez, write it phonetically. Now, in which province were you born?”

“Shkipra.”

“Date?”

“Shkipra.”

The sergeant exploded. “And I suppose your father’s name, your profession, the unit in which you performed your military service, they’re all Shkipra!”

“Shkipra.”

LATER in the morning, a handsome car pulled up outside the police station of San Jorge de Bayona, and three officers stepped out. They had been summoned urgently by Sergeant Cuenca Loyola. As they entered the chalk-white room, silent but for the baleful buzzing of imprisoned flies, the sergeant sprang to his feet, and indicated to Shkipra to do likewise. Poor Shkipra had begun to find the inability to communicate oppressive, and he just sat in pained silence, staring at the floor as though fascinated by something going on there.

“Never mind, never mind,” said Major Gallego y Gallego good-naturedly, sitting on a wooden form and beckoning to his colleagues to do likewise.

“Now, Sergeant, what is the trouble?”

The sergeant glanced up. His style was going to be inhibited by the sudden appearance of the entire village at the tiny barred window, to say nothing of Vicente, who stood leaning on the frame of the open door, sullenly minding his own business in a place he had no business to mind.

“Clear away there, clear away from the window! Out! Out!” cried the sergeant.

“Easy,” said the major. “Let us retain our composure, please. Now, Sergeant, let’s have your report.”

Acutely aware of his loss of face, and cursing those administrative necessities which at times forced a man to have recourse to higher authorities, the sergeant cleared his throat.

“Well, sir, as I understand it, this person landed on Spanish soil in an unauthorized manner between twenty-three hours and twenty-four hours last night.”

The major smiled.

“Did he report to the police?” asked Captain Zuniga.

“Did he have anything to declare?” asked Lieutenant Quiroga, local chief of customs.

The major asked for quiet with a gesture of his hand.

“What do you mean by an unauthorized manner?” he inquired.

The sergeant hesitated.

“A manner not in accordance with the usual manner of entering the country,” he said.

“If an angel from heaven suddenly landed on your roof, would you describe that as an unauthorized manner of entering the country?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

The sergeant looked nervously at the priest, who, being outside the closed window with the rest of the village, could hear none of this.

“Well, yes, sir, I would regard it as unauthorized, unless I had had previous instructions to that effect.”

“From whom?”

“From you, sir.”

The sergeant wiped his brow with a rag.

“Why from me?”

“From you or from Father Ignacio.”

“Very good.” The major chuckled.

“Now, suppose you tell me exactly how this invading army crossed the Spanish frontier.”

“This invading army— ?”

“This man.”

“He was brought in by the men of the village — on a boat.”

“On a boat? In other words, he was drowning in Spanish territorial waters?”

The sergeant heartily detested the major’s tone without being able to understand it.

“He was drowning, yes — or at least swimming, sir.”

“It’s one way of avoiding the expense of the more conventional means of transportation, although it can be wearying if you have a lot of baggage.”

The major turned to Quiroga of the customs. “I think we can be fairly sure, Quiroga, that he had very little to declare — how was he dressed on arrival, Sergeant?”

“In trousers, sir.”

“Trousers, that’s all?”

“Just trousers, sir.”

“If he had anything to declare, Quiroga, it’s probably what any member of the male sex might decently be concealing.” He laughed at his own levity, and then, with a touch of mock concern, he asked, “The priest can’t hear through that window, I hope?”

“No, sir.”

“Good, good. Now, Sergeant, what did this man have to say for himself when he had sufficiently recovered to talk?”

“Nothing, sir. He has consistently refused to say anything.”

“Refused? Has it occurred to you that he might be incapable of saying anything?”

“Fie has said one word, sir.”

“One word, Sergeant? Then he has not said nothing, as you have stated.”

The sergeant wiped his brow again.

“What is that word, Sergeant?”

“Shkipra.”

“And what docs that signify?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

The major sighed.

“To what question did he reply — what is the word again?”

“Shkipra, sir. To all questions, sir.” The sergeant held up his two-page questionnaire. “I have no idea in which column to place the reply, sir.”

The major turned to the stranger.

“What is your name?” he asked.

“Shkipra.”

“And how do you enjoy Spain?”

“Shkipra.”

“I see what you mean.”

The major drew a packet of Bisonte from his pocket and offered the man one.

“Cigarette!” said the man delightedly, accepting it.

“He says at least two words, Sergeant,” the major said menacingly, “ ‘Shkipra’ and ‘cigarette.’ ”

“Cigarette,” agreed the man.

“Now I tell you what we’ll do. Olá, you!” called the major to Vicente, in the doorway. “Run over to the schoolhouse, and bring an atlas of the world.”

“He’s no use,” growled the sergeant; “he can’t read or write.”

“Did you understand me?”

Vicente didn’t deign to reply, but left slowly.

THE awe of the villagers was considerable when they saw Vicente return a few minutes later holding a globe high over his head like a beacon.

“That’s not exactly what I meant,” said the major, “but it’ll do,” and he turned to the stranger. “Shkipra?” he said.

The stranger knitted his brow with effort, and had difficulty with the curious shape of the map, but he worked his way around it. Suddenly he stopped gyrating the atlas and pointed at a small area with his finger, shouting excitedly, “Shkipra, Shkipra!”

The major put his glasses on and examined the indicated area.

“Albania,” he announced.

“Albania,” echoed round the room.

“Impossible,” said Zuniga.

“Tirana?” asked the major.

“Tirane,” replied the stranger, “Durres, Elbasan, Shkoder.”

“It is Albania,” declared the major, folding his glasses.

“But that’s a Communist country,” said Quiroga.

“It’s also very far away for a lonely swimmer,” reflected the major.

“What do we do now?”

After a pause, the major said, “This is a matter for Madrid.”

“Meanwhile, I’d best lock him up,” the sergeant volunteered.

The major studied his man.

“Oh, I hardly think that’s necessary, Sergeant; find him a few little things to do. I don’t think he’s much of a threat to our security.”

Before the sergeant could remonstrate, Vicente had made a clicking noise which attracted their attention. Looking at the stranger, Vicente invited him to come along with him. Without consulting anyone, or asking permission, the stranger rose and left with Vicente.

“Who is that?” asked the major in admiration. He had rareiy seen such a display of authority as that exercised by Vicente.

“A poor ignoramus,” replied the sergeant, with ill-disguised hatred; “it was he who rescued El Albanes.”

“Then it is only just that they should become friends,” said the major. “Come, we must make out our report to Madrid.”

And with a parting piece of charity, which proved he wasn’t such a terrible man after all, he told the sergeant that there would be no need to fill up his questionnaire. The sergeant, however, was in no mood to see this gesture as anything but an insult, since in his opinion a sergeant with an unfilled questionnaire is only half a sergeant.

EVERY day, and sometimes far into the night, there were two figures on the seawall. They never spoke, since there was nothing to say and no common language to say anything in. Their eyes were unblinkingly fixed on the huge winter canvas, with its shrieking gulls and its vast uncertainties. Sometimes they would roll a cigarette or two; at other times they would tie and untie knots idly in stray bits of discarded fishing net. Occasionally some abstraction would make them both sit up and take notice or even smile. The nearest they ever came to any conventional communication was when one of them would stare quizzically at a cloud, and the other would nod slowly or shrug half a shoulder. The villagers were loath to intrude into the great silence, which became like a fount of peace, an influence on all who were open to it and who knew its history. Every now and then Paco’s wife or one of the other ample señoras would arrive with some goody which had been left over or else specifically cooked for the two old men. And every morning, the fishermen would ask Vicente’s advice on the weather conditions, and he would reply with an affirmative or negative gesture. The Albanian, who understood the nature of the questions without any difficulty, would always reply silently in exactly the same way as Vicente, but with movements more suave and less austere than those of his friend, movements which had their roots in a more mellifluous choreography.

Noisy children would become quiet for a while when they passed the seawall on their way to and from school, and scrofulous dogs with degrading habits, who encircled people in vast untrustworthy patterns, shot with yellow looks and dishonest trepidation, would go straight up to the two old men, their sparse tails wagging and their eyes alert. The Albanian liked to pretend to throw stones. The dogs would turn in a single leap, waiting for the sound of the falling stone, and when it failed to register, they turned again slowly, with the patient look of one who is being teased. Every now and then a stone would whistle through the air, and smash itself giddily on other stones while the dogs flew howling after it, stopping perplexed in an ocean of pebbles, unable to identify the one that had been thrown, now as motionless as all the rest. Then some innocent villager would pass that way, and once again the dogs would hang their heads, bare their unhealthy fangs, and seem to tiptoe in apparently aimless but hate-filled circles round the intruder.

One day, Major Gallego y Gallego turned up again in his blue car, and they took El Albanes away. Vicente leaned against the car, and the major had to ask him to leave. He refused. They accelerated away, and Vicente stumbled into the road behind them. He walked a kilometer in the direction the car had taken, and then stopped in the naked Spanish landscape. Far from the sea, he was lost. Roads led nowhere. Here all was dust and dryness. Trees seemed to be dying, the bushes were gray with lack of moisture. Even the hot cackle of the cicadas sounded to Vicente like the noise of fleshless beings, the grinding of bones, the semaphore of death. Defeated, he turned back toward the sea and the confines of his understanding. His face was suffused with sorrow, an emotion more terrible than pain because of its longevity.

When he returned, he lay down on the beach and slept. At dawn, he woke, but did not rise. The villagers were upset to find him there; even more upset not to see him on the wall. Paco’s wife cooked him some food, which he refused to eat. Their concern turned to anger on his behalf.

“Why couldn’t they leave El Albanes here?” cried the wife of José Machado Jaen; “what harm had he done?”

The men were less emotional, since they were tolerant about questionnaires and forms and applications and military service and war, and even if they didn’t fully understand them, they recognized them as the barriers beyond which a woman’s influence cannot penetrate. The zones of masculine folly are well guarded.

It was only when it became clear that Vicente had decided to die that the men joined in the chorus of complaint.

Father Ignacio came down to the beach, tripping on his cassock, to try and convince Vicente that suicide was a sin, but all his suggestions of hellfire and brimstone seemed like a relief from the useless wounds of this world.

Dr. Valdes paid the beach a visit, at the behest of Paco Miranda Ramirez, who bicycled all the way to Maera de las Victorias again.

“If you don’t eat,” Dr. Valdes wheezed, “I’ll take you away, and in the hospital at Maera, a wizened and terrifying nun will practice what’s known as intravenous feeding on you. D’you know what that is, Don Vicente? They make a hole in your arm the size of a finger, and pump beef tea in there until it begins to come out of your eyes. I knew a woman who, every time she cried, had beef tea rolling down her cheeks, so that everyone knew her shame, and instead of sympathizing with her tragedies, people used to say, ‘Aha, she has been to the good sisters in the hospital in Maera and had intravenous feeding, the wicked soul’!”

It was of no avail. Every time Dr. Valdes wanted to feel Vicente’s pulse, or look at his face, he rolled over on his stomach. Eventually the doctor left, discouraged, asking who was going to pay his fee.

As a last resort, the villagers urged Sergeant Cuenca Loyola to come down to the beach. It was hardly to be expected that he would succeed where the others had failed, but he made a brave attempt at gentleness all the same.

“Look here, hombre,” he said, trying to kneel in such a way that his uniform would not be soiled, “there’s nothing to get so upset about. El Albanes wants to go home to Albanera, or wherever it is those people live — Shkipra — how would you like to be in a country in which you don’t know the language?”

Vicente looked at him feebly, nevertheless suggesting by his expression that it would be marvelous.

“Get some food inside you. Don’t be a fool. I can’t order you to eat, I can only ask you, which I do, you see. You’ve done a fine job with El Albanes, don’t ruin it all. I’ve written a report, and you’re in it. It’s gone to Madrid. Your name is at this very moment on a desk in Madrid.”

The business of saving Vicente had become so perplexing that there was never a moment during the day when there wasn’t someone hovering about, even local journalists, and the first person up in the morning would report to all the others that he was still alive.

“What can we do?” asked Major Gallego y Gallego, who had been consulted, and who was attracted, as ever, by the quirks of human nature and the inexhaustible stupidity of men. “It has never been possible to prevent a man from dying when he wants to die. I’m not even sure that such an attempt isn’t an invasion of personal liberty, Whatever Mother Church may say. But what a reason for dying! It seems ridiculous to any lucid and educated man — and yet, if we think for a moment, isn’t there something enobling in the purity and simplicity of such a desire in this case? It is like the adolescent love of two schoolchildren, or even more, like the unquestioning and silent devotion of a dog. A dog? It sounds like a pejorative comparison, and yet, much as I love my wife and children, the only being in the world I can always trust is my dog, precisely because he is silent. Words complicate and betray. I wouldn’t know how to live without them, but blessed are those that can.”

“Yes, but isn’t there something we can tell him?” asked Father Ignacio, who blushed at any vaguely Voltairian sentiment, and who was eager not to be involved in an argument with the major, more from a fear of contamination than anything else.

“I feel sure that if we could say that El Albanes has safely reached his homeland, or something of the sort, that he has been happily reunited with his family, it would influence our poor friend.”

“We can say that, but it would be a lie,” said the major.

“We mustn’t lie, of course we mustn’t,” retorted Father Ignacio. “But isn’t there any happy aspect of the truth we can render even happier?”

“Not yet. He was taken to Madrid. There are only two Albanian refugees in Spain, and they are both classified as unreliable by the police, so we still are totally in the dark as to how he swam into our territorial waters. There is, of course, no diplomatic representation, and we have had to rely upon the Swiss, as usual, to find a way of returning him to where he came from. Unfortunately, there was a delay, since the Americans got to hear of this, and wished to interview him, believing that Albanian or even Chinese submarines might be operating in waters frequented by an American fleet. An admiral, a vice admiral, and three rear admirals grilled him for three hours.”

“What did he reveal?” asked Zuñiga.

The Major smiled.

“Shkipra,” he said.

ONE morning, when all hope had been given up, and the case of the man on the beach was beginning to excite the entire Spanish press, and even the international news agencies, and when the police had taken the decision to drag Vicente forcibly to hospital, the old man asked Paco’s wife for bread in a feeble voice. He ate a little and drank a little consommé, and after a while struggled step by step to the wall, where he sat down, took a deep breath, and looked at the sea with contentment.

People like Dr. Valdes believed it was a pity he hadn’t died, just to teach him a lesson. Father Ignacio felt the proximity of new miracles, and caused the bells of the church to be rung as a sign of thanksgiving. The sergeant regretted that Vicente hadn’t been dragged to hospital, “where lunatics belong.” Only Paco and the fishermen felt there was more reason than desperation in Vicente’s sudden return to the wall.

“He wouldn’t have gone there just because he was afraid to die,” Paco insisted, looking at the enigmatic little figure now once again where he belonged.

And, in fact, the truth was that to Vicente there was no mystery in an Albanian floating near the coast of Spain. It wouldn’t have surprised him if the man had turned out to be a pygmy, or a headhunter from Borneo. The sea is the sea, a place without frontiers and without surprises. Its rules are older and more binding than the law. A man overboard is saved whatever his race or creed, or at least his rescue is attempted, and if necessary, nothing short of heroism will satisfy tradition. A battleship may pay a friendly visit to an open city, but whoever heard of a division effecting a friendly occupation of a town?

The land is where the trouble starts. The roads that lead nowhere, the dust and the sand and the starving trees, and the people, all crushed together in a heaving marmalade, and the churches and the barracks and the rippling tides of gossip, rumor, information.

Vicente did not think all these thoughts. He didn’t have to in order to know how to behave according to his lights, which were bright and clear. His intuition was infallible, and his reflections so profound they would have defied expression even by a poet.

If he now decided to return to the wall, it was because a part of him — was it the toes, or the eyes, or the inner ear, or just a mood of the heart? — told him that somewhere across the huge arena, an acquaintance had returned to his seat at the ringside, and was now perched once again on some other wall before some other disarray of pebbles, casting his senses toward some other horizon, which, while not identical, was yet very much the same.