A Distant Beach Read online

  A Distant Beach

  Pedro Menchén

  Translated from Spanish by

  David Allen White

  Originally published under title: Una Playa muy Lejana.

  Barcelona, Spain: Los Libros de la Frontera, 1999.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This novel, originally published in 1999, is the first installment of the Trilogy of Dark Love, which was followed by See you in Casablanca (2001) and concluded in 2005 with Don’t Come Back Here Any More. Independent as to plot (they can be read in any order you prefer), I have tried in each one of them to study a different aspect of the nature of love.

  P.M.

  To Julio Alberto Hillers, who took his

  own life for love in the spring of 1983.

  One must be clear about this, once for all, that to be in love is a personal matter which does not concern the object loved, not even if love is returned.

  Cesare Pavese

  Part One

  Chapter One

  I

  I’m not going to try to tell Fernando’s story here. His life and his person are interesting only to me. All the same, how can I deny that his death and perhaps his memory were the cause, however tangential, of the events that have brought me to write this book? I will pick up by saying that the death of my friend left me devastated and that life in Madrid soon became unbearable. I only wanted to get away from the city, even for a few days, but I was incapable of doing things such as packing a bag or reserving a ticket. Finally I decided to ask for a few days of vacation from the accounting firm where I worked. We were in the middle of third-quarter value added tax declarations and had just recovered from Christmas, so when Mr. Tavira heard my request, he looked at me with incredulity.

  “Are you kidding, or what?” he said to me. He was almost always friendly with me, but lately a stomach ulcer had soured his personality.

  “If you don’t give me those days,” I said without hesitating, “I’ll go to the doctor and get a medical excuse. I’m not well, Mr. Tavira. I need some time off.”

  “What do you mean, you’re not well? So what’s wrong with you?” He scrutinized me as he was accustomed to do, somewhat sideways. “Yes, now that you mention it, I see that you don’t look well in the face. But I’m not well either,” he thundered, “ and I hang on!”

  I stood speechless, without looking at him. I couldn’t forget that I was useless, that I was there only through the influence of my uncle (a lawyer friend of his), that I had no right to be petulant.

  “What am I going to do? Who can I put in your place?” he complained.

  “I’m only asking you for a few days. You already owe me several vacation days. Besides, the estimates for Finance aren’t due to be turned in until the 20th of next month. When I come back ...”

  “All right! Take a week! When you come back, you’ll have to put in some overtime.”

  Poor Mr. Tavira! He was so sick (I had heard rumors from more than one person that he had cancer) and he seemed so ineffectual against my insistence, that I soon pitied for him and almost wanted to stay. How much better it would have been if I had! But what happened is that I took my vacation. The hard part was picking the place. I thought about some city in the North (Oviedo, perhaps, or Santander), but the cold in Madrid was so dreadful, and I supposed that there it would be even worse, so I decided (after reading the weather report) on Benidorm.

  The best way to go to Benidorm, for someone who has no car, consisted in taking a bus in a straight line along the Mediterranean Freeway. But I didn’t want to take a bus. When you ride a bus, you don’t believe you’re traveling; you just get moved from one place to another. More than the destination, I was interested in the trip for its own sake. I looked at the railway map and traced some alternate itineraries that would eventually get me to Benidorm or somewhere nearby. The one that appealed to me the most and had the greatest possibilities was the route Madrid-Cuenca-Valencia-Benidorm. I had already been to Valencia once, but not Cuenca, and I thought I could spend one or two nights in that city. Fernando and I had always wanted to go to Cuenca, where it seemed one of his ancestors came from, and we never had the opportunity to make that trip. Now I would make it by myself. I would go to Valencia by train and then take a bus that would get me from there to Benidorm. Nobody was waiting for me in any of those towns and I knew that I would have enough time to get bored, so I was in no hurry to arrive.

  Cuenca was a city completely unknown to me, although I had heard of the hanging houses, the enchanted city, and all those sites on the post cards. I supposed that it would have to be a small village, with a provincial atmosphere and somewhat rustic. I phoned Atocha Station and they gave me the train times. There were several leaving throughout the day for Cuenca, one every two or three hours, so I calmed down. I would go to the station after breakfast and catch at random the first available train.

  It was Saturday, January 30 (how well I remember!), and it looked like it was about to snow. There were hardly any people out and about in the streets and Atocha Station presented a pathetic and desolate aspect. The 9:45 train had already gone, so I entertained myself in the coffee shop reading a newspaper and took the 12:15. I found a seat in a coach that was practically empty. There was only a young couple on the other side of the aisle (whom I supposed to be engaged or recently married), a woman my age, and in a corner, an older man.

  “Every time I end up with less personal freedom. This is the reason I’ve had serious arguments with my parents. They control me economically. They have threatened to throw me out of the house if I keep seeing her. But without a home and without money I’m nobody, and they use this to their advantage....”

  I stopped reading the letter and looked out the window. It was time to analyze Fernando’s life, to delve into his deepest meaning. It was also time to put my own life back together, to analyze who I was or who I had been. I was thirty-one years old, I had known Fernando for the preceding eight years, and I had the sensation of having dangerously withdrawn from reality during all that time.

  “You two are the two poles of my life,” said Fernando in another letter. I had stuffed some in my pocket. “I see clearly now. You are all I have. The rest of the world is vile and treacherous. Life is as hard as before, but I have someone at my side who helps me like no one else in your absence. I have had a lot of trouble, and I spend my few free times with my love. Although you don’t believe it, she substitutes for you, but she does not displace you; she is only an honorable substitute. I have turned back to the path. I have found inner peace. I hold you more present than ever, because you are the one I love most, together with her. I hope you don’t think I write you as a compromise. I miss our conversations. In a certain way, I console myself by talking with my girlfriend, but it’s not the same. Her beauty and her charm distract me constantly and I can’t speak. I like to feel myself lost in my feelings. The chaos of sensations is something fascinating and the quantity of things and images that she suggest to me, immense. Because of this, I miss our conversations, so analytical and so interesting. This doesn’t mean that I don’t talk that way with her, but it’s less frequent for the reasons stated before.”

  After so long a time, these letters seemed to me now even more passionate, more torn, more innocent, but also sadder. In them there were more ideas and feelings than news. “I embrace you as strongly as you can imagine” he said at the end of one letter. And in another: “You are here, although I don’t see you. Your presence goes with me....” And in another: “Come, for you and I have shared sadness, despair, and for once we will share love.”

  The last letter that I took out of my pocket was written by his mother. I returned to reread it, although I knew very well what it said. She said that Fernando had taken his
father’s gun, a gun which he had hidden in a supposedly secret place, a place that only she and her husband knew, and that he had shot himself in front of Sandra, in the door of her house.

  The letter didn’t go into any more details. It said simply that they had taken him to the hospital, still conscious, and that he had died within a few hours. She hadn’t notified me before (she apologized for that) nor even remembered me. During some days she had not been capable of reacting and even now was in bed under medication and making an effort to inform me of what had happened, given the affection that had united us, her son and me. “I know everything that there was between Fernando and you. I have always known it,” she assured me – Oh, I wailed, and Fernando said he always concealed my letters well! – although she did not blame me for it, in fact, on the contrary, “Who knows if that” she underlined the word “wouldn’t have been better for him. The relationship with this girl in some way ended by destroying him.”

  She wanted to see me, but she asked me not to phone her, because they weren’t picking up. Both she and her husband were staying in the Guadarrama subdivision, where the events had occurred. They would both be grateful if I were to visit them. Seeing me would almost be like seeing him. On the other hand, they wanted to give me some things that “in a certain way” belonged to me. After donating his organs, they had him cremated. All the same, she was not sure that the fact that some parts of him were still alive out there was any comfort. Their only son was dead and nothing and nobody could replace him.

  She said some other things, but I didn’t read any more. I went back to read from the beginning of the letter. Fernando dead! Fernando dead! I repeated to myself over and over, unable to believe it. If I had seen him two weeks earlier! If I had only spoken to him by phone ten days earlier! It couldn’t be!

  Before leaving I intended to write a reply to his mother. But I couldn’t get from “Dearest friend Teresa” or “My dear friend Teresa.” Somehow I blamed her for his suicide. She had always been a possessive mother, one of those mothers with an unhealthy fixation on her son. I couldn’t forget all the harm she had done Fernando, I couldn’t forget the emotional, economic, and moral blackmail she had made him submit to, nor the times she had induced him to break off relations with girls he would eventually meet. I wanted to say all this to Teresa, I wanted to blame her for the things that had hurt her son so much, but, when all was said and done, this would serve no purpose and it seemed to me too cruel. So in the end I wrote her a conventional letter in which I said all the things she expected to hear from me. I promised to go to see her, but I didn’t have the slightest intention of doing so. I had no excessive curiosity about the details (if he had shot himself in the heart or in the head, etc.). And besides, all the things that she wanted to give me, what could they be but photos, letters, records, books, and such? I could do without that. I had enough pictures of Fernando, also his letters which he had sent me over Christmas or summer vacations, and my letters didn’t interest me. I’m not into fetishes or anything like that and the death of my friend, unexpected and absurd, disappointed me. Why hadn’t it happened to me, I wondered. Perhaps I could have prevented it.

  II

  It was three in the afternoon when I got off the train in Cuenca. With nothing else to do I left the station and wandered through gray and lonely streets in search of a boarding house or a restaurant, and found none. It was colder there than in Madrid and a desperate wind howled at the corners. Practically all the establishments I saw were closed, and faced with the fear of not finding anything to eat, I said to myself, “First the restaurant and then the room.” Suddenly at an intersection I saw a square sign with the colors red, green, and yellow. It was a Chinese restaurant, not Manchego or Castilian, as I wanted. Nevertheless, I turned toward it.

  There were only two or three occupied tables and I thought they were closing up, late as it was, but a waiter told me that I had enough time to eat.

  I left my travel case under the table, took off my muffler, unbuttoned my jacket, and sat down. The table was too big for just me. I found myself in the middle of the room and I felt uncomfortable. But it was too late to change.

  I soon observed that, at a nearby table, was the engaged or newlywed couple who had come from Madrid in the same coach as I: a boy and a girl so conventional, who were looking at a map and leafing through a travel folder of the city. I noticed that they had also recognized me and instantly averted their glance. It annoyed me that they knew I was alone and that I was a tourist. I heard them speak in whispers, laughing at times, and although I knew that they had better things to do than think about me, I felt observed and uncomfortable, not only by them, but by the waiter, who was showing too much solicitude for my taste, almost servile. So it was that when he brought me the chop suey, I began to swallow quickly and, barely enjoying the food, without taking the dessert, tea, or coffee, I paid and exited to the street.

  Very close by I found a hostel called La Macarena. The owner, a tall, thin woman dressed in black, had her own quarters on the second floor while the guests occupied rooms on the third. I paid for two nights in advance, and after I signed a slip and received a duplicate key for the street door, she led me to my room. This was very small and in it there was barely enough room for the bed, a wardrobe, a chair, a wash-basin, and a night table. But I preferred it this way, because to me it seemed more hospitable than a large one.

  I looked in the wardrobe (there was nothing), in the drawer of the night table (also nothing). I turned on the faucet of the wash-basin, I let the water run for a moment and then I turned it off... Finally I peered through the drapes of the glass door which opened onto the balcony. At that moment three boys were passing along the sidewalk in front. They walked quickly, joking and laughing. I observed them till they disappeared from my sight and then I let the drapes fall with a stab of pain.

  The heater didn’t work, naturally, so I threw myself on the bed with my jacket on and tried to read a book by Somerset Maugham that I had bought on purpose for the trip. But I couldn’t read. I went back and attempted it again. With the greatest effort I managed to advance a few pages.

  We all at some point have a bad day, one of those terrible days in which you soon discover that your life is a mistake from beginning to end, one of those days in which you even regret having been born, although you do not for this reason consider suicide (among other things, because not even that would make sense). And that was for me one of those bad days. I was in a hotel room in an unknown city, a hotel room in which, by chance, I had just arrived, and I knew that nobody would go looking for me, nobody would phone me, nobody would knock on my door. Notwithstanding, I listened to the noises that came from the adjoining rooms, in which there were people who were accompanied: their laughter, their voices, their panting while making love, or saw furtively from the window the people who passed in the street, people who didn’t know I existed. What would I do there, I wondered. What was the point of this trip? What was the point of my life? Fernando was dead. There was no remedy for that. My parents were also dead. I had only a sister and a brother, older than I, already married, whom I seldom saw. Nobody missed me anywhere, I told myself, and for the first time this fact had sunk in. I couldn’t flee from loneliness because loneliness was inside me. What difference did one place or another make to me? What do Cuenca, Benidorm, or Madrid matter? And why go to a city like Benidorm, where, as far as I could tell, people had no purpose other than getting drunk and having a good time?

  I put the book to one side and looked in my jacket pocket, by chance, for a letter from Fernando.

  “I have scarcely seen Silvia because our vacations didn’t coincide and my parents didn’t want to change – what was I doing then? It was summer, August. The Madrid address. I hadn’t left Madrid that summer. – Also I have quarreled a lot with them over her. They still refuse to accept her because they say she is not in my class. The two of us have gone through a hard test. They have taken away my freedom and my confidence. I’m
worse every day. You are free – yes, I was free, but I didn’t know what to do with my freedom – but we are bound by some very strong chains. My parents have gone back to threatening to throw me out of the house. I only hope to finish my studies soon and to be free to marry her. You can’t imagine how much strength and confidence she gives me. She has given me confidence in myself. She has given me the strength to free myself from (according to her, the malign) influence of my mother and to be myself always and everywhere.”

  Yes, I remembered that letter. I remembered the somewhat sarcastic comments that I had made at the proposal of a new version of Romeo and Juliet. Could something like this happen nowadays? I rather doubted it. Love, in every case, was strong enough to triumph in the end. I remember the day that Fernando introduced Silvia and me on a downtown street, after several unsuccessful attempts over the course of a year, and his decision, sudden and unexpected, to take us both by the hand and lead us, he in the middle, down the sidewalk of a long avenue, before the curious stares of the people. I remember very well the pressure of his hand and his smile of satisfaction, while I looked timidly and with a gesture of apology at Silvia. That was the Fernando that I wanted to remember!

  Silvia was one of those girls (very rare nowadays) who hardly worried about her hair or her clothes. Although she always seemed inattentive, in reality she was very caught up in what was happening around her and, when she spoke, she knew very well what she was talking about, even though she might not have been informed about the subject. She was one of those people who have a certain kind of natural wisdom. I can still see her even now, as on that afternoon, sitting on the ground in a park, I can see her eating things with her fingers and licking them with absolute enjoyment. Would she continue to play with unknown dogs and do that sort of thing? Silvia was instinct and nature. Fernando, however, was sense and intelligence. But there was a strange harmony between the two, and it really gave pleasure to see them together, for they made a magnificent couple.