The Drifters (43 page)

‘Pssst,’ one of the young soldiers whispered, ‘that’s the spade who shot up that church in Philadelphia … murdered all those Episcopalians … you read about it?’

Indeed she had. The Paris
Herald Tribune
had been full of the story last March and she had discussed it with black students at the institute. They had justified both the incident and the philosophy that lay behind it, but she had not been
able to agree with them, for she believed that if Negroes insisted upon armed confrontation, they would get it … to everyone’s loss. She looked at the newcomer with interest and asked one of the soldiers, ‘Could I meet him?’ and the boy replied, ‘Why not? He comes here every day.’ He called the Negro to the table and said, ‘Cato, want you to meet my good friend from America—what’s your name?’

‘Gretchen Cole.’

‘Cato Jackson.’ He looked around for his girl friend, but she was behind the bar helping the Scandinavian girl.

‘These young men tell me you were involved in the Philadelphia incident.’

‘I was,’ he replied evenly, never certain what attitude a white interrogator might display.

The discussion was protracted, with several of the soldiers surprising Gretchen by making sharp and telling points, and with Cato demonstrating a mature intelligence. She gained the impression that he was putting her on with some of his comments. But she liked him and hoped she might have an opportunity to see him again soon. But when she drove back to her camping spot she found a German businessman, a Herr Kleinschmidt from Berlin, waiting for her with good news: ‘You spoke the other night about guitars … said you might like to buy a Spanish one. Well, I found out where they make them and tomorrow I’ll take you.’

It was a mountain village in the high sierra north of Málaga. The road leading into it was treacherous, but by driving slowly Gretchen negotiated the pop-top into a town square that might have been used as a hideout by El Cid. She was captivated by the antique quality of the place and wondered what she would find in the craftsman’s shop to which the German led her. The owner was an old Spaniard with four teeth and a sheepskin jacket. On racks above his head he kept a store of old wood from which, when the humidity was right, he fashioned country guitars, big strong instruments with heavy bridges and stout heads into which the old-style wooden keys were well fitted. For his strings he used natural gut, and when Gretchen took one of his instruments and struck a chord, it reverberated with gratifying overtones.

‘A good guitar,’ the workman said in Spanish.

They discussed the price, the German businessman acting as interpreter, and at first Gretchen felt that it was too high. ‘But this is a good guitar,’ the man insisted, and
Gretchen, playing a series of rapid chords in which each stood clear of itself with a hard, true sound, had to grant, I’ve rarely heard better. I’ll take it.’

‘But first I must polish it,’ the man said, and Gretchen told him she’d wait. But he explained that the polishing would take two days, so she asked her German guide, ‘Is there any way you could get back to Torremolinos?’ and he found that a bus left at four, so she said, ‘I can get along without Spanish. You know, this guitar is worth waiting for.’ So the German went down the mountain.

When the bus disappeared toward Málaga, she was alone, totally as she had ever been, and she walked about the impoverished village looking for a good place to park the pop-top, and after a while she found a spot past which a mountain stream ran, and she drove the car there and parked it so that her head was almost directly above the running water, but when she had been in the pop-top for a while and dusk had not yet come, she felt an uncontrollable urge to sing, so she returned to the craftsman’s shop and asked if she could borrow one of his other guitars, and he gave her one and she walked through the streets with it and children followed her and older men, too, for they had nothing better to do, and when she reached the pop-top she sat on a rock beside the stream and began playing the old ballads.

In time an old man from the village asked for the guitar, and with it he sang mournful flamenco, and a woman took it to sing flamenco of a wilder type. Then they returned the guitar and asked her to sing again, and the inconsolable loneliness of youth fell upon her and she sang the lament for the long-dead Earl of Murray, and although the peasants could understand not a word she was saying, they knew that in her song some good thing had perished, and they sorrowed with her:

For two days she stayed in the village, watching as the craftsman finished polishing her guitar, and with each new application of oil he would rub it for an hour or more, handing it to her from time to time so that she could test
its growing voice. ‘It’s getting sweeter,’ he told her. ‘By this time next year it will sing like a dove.’ She understood.

But at night, when her singing with the borrowed guitar was ended and the peasants were gone home to their beds, she would lie in the pop-top and listen to the whispering of the mountain stream and confess how lonely she was. There seemed to be not a person in the world with whom she could communicate, and she wondered if this was to be the course of her life. She had known many fine young men, some more concerned about the American society than she, but she had met none in whom she could express a continuing interest. She wondered if there was some latent deficiency in her character which the ugly experience in Patrick Henry had merely brought to the surface. Like any sensible person she preferred not to believe that frightening thesis. There’s nothing wrong with me, she insisted to herself.

But toward morning on the second night, when roosters were preparing to rise, she could no longer fool herself that she was going to fall asleep, so she rose and in the quietness of the pop-top took down the borrowed guitar and played meaningless chords to herself, and after a long while she began singing:

 And as she sang she wondered if that was not really the essence of life, to serve at the source of power, to do what had to be done, and if the gallows became the logical end of your behavior, to accept it … but above all else, to participate, to be at the center of life as a participant.

Slowly she became aware that villagers had gathered about her car; they had been watching her through the night, and now, seeing that she was awake, they had moved closer Jo discover what kind of girl this strange, lonely American was.

Times were good in Torremolinos—but when weren’t they?

Debauched? Yes. Degenerate? No. I don’t think you can call a man degenerate if he likes beys
and
girls.

After a lifetime of travel he settled here on the Costa del Sol and told us there were five rules for successful travel. Never eat in any restaurant called Mom’s. Never play poker with anyone called Doc. Get your laundry done at every opportunity. Never refuse sex. And order any dish containing wild rice.

God is great but grass is gentler.

He set up this marvelous bar right near the beach, but he made one unfortunate mistake. He sold sixty per cent of the bar to each of seven different people and skedaddled to Tangier with the money. His mistake lay in coming back.

He lived for five years over a bar in Torremolinos, writing his great novel on Spain. He gave me two chapters to read, and I realized he was a little mixed up when I discovered that he was calling his Andalusian matador Leopold Kuferberg.

‘You visit sixteen countries in seventeen days but you fly real low over eight others.’

Margaret kept such a close watch on Justin, doing her damnedest to keep him off the bottle, that the only time he had a real chance to get loaded was on the nights she let him out of the house to attend the Torremolinos chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous.

If within the old man there is not a young man, then he is but one of the devil’s angels.—Thoreau

Wandering through Torremolinos by night is like touring a sewer in a glass-bottom boat.

I heard her myself. She told the Swedes, ‘I don’t give a damn what you do so long as you don’t frighten the horses.’

To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes

He that has a beautiful wife or a castle on the frontier must be prepared for war.

The guide told my mother that it took at least one hour to see the Prado, but she said they also had to see the Escorial and she would give him two dollars extra if he could cover the Prado in half an hour.

Torremolinos … where the only people not on a trip are the tourists.

Each year, just before Easter, the Spanish police make a sweep of all the bars and joints and clean out every hippie who looks like Jesus Christ. You’d be astonished at how many they find who look like him.

Switzerland is very nice, but I’m homesick for California. I like to see the air I breathe.

Sometimes even Greek shipping tycoons run out of money.

Several times I have mentioned that nest of skyscrapers which clustered at the eastern end of Torremolinos like some gigantic Indian pueblo transported to the Mediterranean. The complex had been conceived by a consortium of Greek shipowners and had been launched in their grandiloquent style. When completed, it would consist of thirty-one individual buildings, each seventeen stories high, for a total of 527 stories, or 3,162 apartments. And since each apartment would contain four single beds, the Greeks were building from scratch, as it were, a city for a population of 12,648.

Unfortunately, in the summer of 1968, after they had completed eighteen of the buildings, with thirteen others in various stages of construction from mere holes in the ground to buildings without roofs, they ran out of money and had either to abandon the project or to look around Europe for additional capital. Their search threw them into the orbit of World Mutual, so that I spent May, June and July of 1968 in Torremolinos, looking over the possibilities of our bailing them out, but they were a difficult lot to do business with, and no matter how carefully I reviewed their perilous position and explained the degree of control World Mutual would insist upon if we were to provide the missing money—about twenty-six million dollars, I calculated, if furnishings and landscaping were counted in—they gagged at the prospect of surrendering any rights. All they wanted was the money, at the cheap rate of interest, and on this rock our negotiations foundered.

They had struggled along through the latter part of 1968 underfinanced and handicapped at every turn, but early in 1969 it became obvious that they must either get additional money immediately or lose the project. Now they came to Geneva, begging us to succor them on any
terms we could offer. Unluckily, they came at a time when we were so deeply involved in Australia, Philadelphia and Vwarda, and facing such unexpected demands for our long-range projects in Portugal, that we could not answer them quickly. Of course, this worked to our advantage, for the Torremolinos situation was degenerating swiftly, and the Greeks suspected we were delaying only to embarrass them.

At any rate, in 1968 we had offered them the cash on favorable terms; now we stalled, but in mid-April, when our position had strengthened, our directors told me, ‘Go down to Torremolinos and buy out the Greeks. Get rid of them. Write your own terms.’

So on May 5 I flew to Málaga and jumped into a Rolls-Royce in which the unsuspecting Greeks waited for me, and as we approached Torremolinos we could see the eighteen completed towers plus the jagged beginnings of other buildings on which work had been halted for nearly two years.

‘A magnificent project,’ one of the Greeks told me with nervous enthusiasm. I said nothing, and they led me to a luxurious penthouse which they had reserved for me on one of the seventeenth floors, and when I saw that splendid panorama, looking far past Málaga to the east and almost to Gibraltar in the west, with beaches of shimmering beauty, I could not suppress a gasp, for this was surely one of the most compelling sights in Europe, a vision of the new tourism when cities of more than twelve thousand could be constructed from scratch for the pampering of travelers from South America, Africa and the Antipodes.

Seven nervous Greeks waited apprehensively for me to say something, so I smiled and reviewed in my mind the study which I carried in by briefcase; it had been prepared for my guidance by the experts in Geneva:

‘You’ve built a masterpiece,’ I conceded, adding quickly, ‘And World Mutual proposes to take the project off your hands in its entirety—land, buildings, furnishings—for seventeen million dollars.’ There was a gasp, and one of the men started to speak, but I said quickly, ‘As to a loan, no possibility … none at all.’

‘We’ll go to Gianni Agnelli,’ one of the men blustered.

‘No possibility in Italy, either.’

We had a knock-down confrontation, after which the Greeks had to accept the reality that the possibility of a loan no longer existed. They could either sell to us or throw the project into bankruptcy and recover only a fraction of what we offered. Having surrendered on the loan, they whispered among themselves, after which their spokesman said, hesitantly, ‘Your offer of seventeen million dollars …’