III.
Late one afternoon she rounded the small cove on her way to the Flat Rocks on the end of the point. Catalan matrons in bikinis, their breasts like huge urns, lolled on the stony beach, while wiry, naked children and half-starved dogs scampered among the beached fishing boats.
She climbed a steep staircase built into a bluff that rose from the road and sat on a landing near the top, arms dangling between the railings. The ocean stretched deep blue to a fuzzy zone where it merged with the paler sky. You never see the line between sea and sky in Cadaques, she thought, only that misty band… And she squinted at it for a time, trying to see where the division came.
…
“Jean-Michel’s tiny living room, up four flights of steep steps, is airy and bright,” she wrote, “like a lookout from a masthead over a sea of terra cotta roofs. There are unraveling wicker chairs with stained cushions, a thicket of empty liquor bottles crowding one corner, pipes with their ends chewed littered on the table and mantel, and a standing bookcase of dusty French books, not one of which had ever been opened, I suspect, since the day it was stacked.”
He also had a few amenities rare in Cadaques—a small TV propped on a rickety stool, a cassette player and hodgepodge of jazz tapes on a ledge by the fireplace, and a typewriter with a French arrangement of keys that was proving to be her undoing. At Alana’s suggestion she had approached him in the shop where she bought pear yogurt and ‘galletas’—cookies. He’d said yes, she could use his typewriter, but only in his home, and offered her one of his extra bedrooms gratis. No, in exchange for light housekeeping, she’d insisted, so there wouldn’t be any strings attached.
He’d invited her into his life—took her on jouncing, teeth-rattling motor scooter rides up and down the cobbles of Cadaques and on afternoon sails so languid a gust of wind was an event. For her part, she threw herself lustily into her role as charwoman, scouring away his years of bachelor sloth, considering self-importantly that she was restoring an antique. The layout of his apartment was even more improbable than Alana’s: it had the requisite four stories, but the kitchen was on the ground floor, so meals had to be piled in a basket and carried up three flights of stairs to the living room. The second and third floors contained two diminutive bedrooms each, as bare as monastic cells, whose dimensions were the length of their built-in bunks cubed.
She sat at his typewriter now, the satchel with her manuscript on the floor, kicked aside by her restless, twitching foot. After spending a quarter of an hour mistyping the first few sentences of her paragraph, she got up, huffing with aggravation. The room opened onto a balcony with a low wall, where she came to stand, facing other balconies where drying clothes on lines spread and flapped like bird wings in the wind.
“Jean-Michel,” she’d written. “Mild, indolent bachelor with a comical bird’s face—beak nose and receding chin. He lives off a small inheritance, he tells me…gads his life away, I tease him, among his toys—his pipes, motor scooter, tennis racket, and dilapidated sailboat. He rarely deigns to speak English, which he considers a technical language suited only for discourse among scientists. His attitude toward me is amused and condescending. I’m a typical American, he insists, always busy and bothering about something.”