‘We’re writers,’ Mark turned to the Widow. ‘All we want is a quiet place where we can write for the summer. We can’t afford one hundred and ten pesetas a night.’
‘Ah! You are writers!’ Widow Mangada grew effusive. ‘I, too, am a writer. Stories. Poems. Many poems.’ The Widow subsided then, dropping her blue-shadowed lids. ‘For you,’ she said, stressing her words, ‘I will not charge service. But you understand,’ she glanced up quickly, ‘you must not tell anyone. The Others will pay service. The government demands it. But you and I, we will be friends.’ She gave them a blinding smile, displaying a row of large, protruding yellow teeth. ‘I will treat you like my own son and daughter.’
Mark shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, glancing at Sally’s eager face. He sighed. ‘All right, then,’ he said at last. ‘We’ll take it.’
*
Shortly after three o’clock that afternoon, Mark and Sally were lying on the deserted beach in front of the Widow’s house, drying off after a swim in the mild green surf. They had spent the rest of the morning at the outdoor peasant market shopping for food supplies.
Sally glanced up at the balcony across the street and giggled. ‘The Widow’s mincing around in our room now, putting those embroidered sheets and valuable bedspreads on the beds. “Especially for us.”’
Mark grunted skeptically from where he lay stretched face-down on their beachtowel. ‘I still think there’s something queer about her being a landlady after all the talk of noble birth and university degrees and her brilliant dead doctor husband she gave us over lunch.’
‘I wonder what her poems are like,’ Sally mused, gazing out at the barren island in the middle of the bay. An elaborate white schooner was slowly crossing along the horizon line, like the fabulous relic of an old legend. ‘She told me she’d written an exquisite description of moonlight on the water at Villaviento. “A luster of pearls,” she called it.’
‘Don’t let that fancy tinsel fool you,’ Mark cautioned. ‘She probably writes torrid Spanish love stories for the pulp magazines.’ That evening, Sally struggled to light the smoking petrol stove while Mark lay upstairs, burned raw from the afternoon sun, radiating heat like a Sunday roast. She Was just warming up the frying pan of olive oil when Widow Mangada materialized in the doorway. In a flash, the Widow was at the range, turning down the wick of the petrol stove.
‘Not so high,’ she chided Sally. ‘Or it wastes the wick. What are you making?’ She peered curiously at the heap of sliced potatoes and onions Sally was planning to fry.
‘Ah!’ the Widow exclaimed. ‘I’ll show you how we do things!’
Sally lunged patiently against the big black range while the Widow got the pan of oil steaming and tossed in the potatoes and onions, prattling rapidly all the while about how Sally must order milk to be delivered daily, go early to market for fresh fish, and take care to watch the scales and not get cheated; those tricky peasants weren’t above using rocks instead of proper weights and measures.
When the potatoes and onions were browning, the Widow whipped up two eggs in a cup and poured them into the pan. ‘Somebody came to look at the front room while you and your husband were at the beach this afternoon,’ she said gaily, poking at the pan, as if thinking of nothing but the welfare of the onions and potatoes. ‘They asked about the balcony going off the big front room and I told them, of course: the balcony is for the use of everybody.’
Sally felt a queer catch in her stomach, as if knifed unexpectedly from behind. She thought fast. The only windows to their tiny bedroom, which wasn’t even big enough for a writing table, were in the French doors opening onto the balcony. If other people sat out there, she and Mark would have absolutely no privacy.
‘Why,’ Sally covered her incredulity with a calm, reasonable tone, ‘that would really be impossible.’ The Widow seemed deeply absorbed in sliding the tortilla out onto a plate. As Sally spoke, she flipped the plate expertly upside down, dropping the tortilla back in the pan to brown on the other side.
‘The other tourists can sun on the beach or in the garden,’ Sally went on, ‘but we can’t write in public. We can only write where it’s quiet, on our balcony. Being a writer, as you are,’ Sally picked up the Widow’s words, amazed at her own sudden turn for flattery, ‘I am sure you understand that absolute peace is essential for work.’
The Widow flashed Sally a grin, which sheathed an intent side glance. Then, almost immediately, she broke into a rich, deep chuckle, as if laughing at a joke on both of them. ‘But of course. Of course I understand,’ she said soothingly. ‘To the next person who asks about the balcony, I’ll say: why, I’ve rented that to two American writers. It is just for them.’
In triumph, Sally bore the savory tortilla upstairs together with a bottle of wine. She felt she had somehow outfinessed the Widow at a game yet new to her.
As she shut the bedroom door behind her, Mark groaned: ‘Listen!’
‘What’s the matter?’ Sally asked, concerned. She went out on the balcony to set the tray on the table. It was already twilight, and a bright white moon was rising out of the sea. From below their balcony, along the ocean boulevard, came a loud murmur as of gathering multitudes before some large mob scene.
Sally stared. Crowds of lavishly dressed summer tourists were strolling below, glancing up in curiosity at the balcony. Along the low wall bordering the beach, white-uniformed Spanish maids sat tending squalling children. A donkey was pulling a hand-organ past. Vendors pushed by carts of coconuts and icecream.
‘It’s the town’s evening sport,’ Mark lamented. ‘The idle rich. Gabbing and gawping. They siesta all afternoon. No wonder the beach was so magnificently empty today.’
‘Well, if it’s just in the evening,’ Sally consoled, ‘we’ll get up and start work at dawn.’ But she, too, felt a bit self-conscious pouring wine, trying to avoid the inquisitive eyes below. The Widow had put up a ‘Rooms for Rent’ sign on the balcony that afternoon.
‘I feel like a living illustrated ad of Balcony Dwellers in Villaviento,’ Mark grumbled.
‘Oh, it’s only for an hour or so,’ Sally said, watching Mark take his first bite of the tortilla. He murmured approval. ‘Wait till you hear about the coup d’état I’ve just managed,’ she went on proudly, and told him that the balcony was now exclusively theirs.
‘I was beginning to worry about the balcony,’ Mark said. ‘She’s a subtle lady, that one.’
Sally woke early the next morning to hear the seethe and rush of waves on the beach. Slipping carefully out of bed so as not to wake Mark, still sleeping, shrimp-red, in a tangle of sheets, she crossed the hall to the bathroom to wash up. No water came from the single cold-water tap. Dimly she remembered that yesterday, in a flurry of instructions and useful information, the Widow had switched on the lever of a strange, blue-painted box in the kitchen, claiming that the motor made water.
Sally tiptoed downstairs in the still house. The kitchen was darkly shuttered. Opening the shutters, Sally regarded the blue box mistrustfully, with its odd blue spigots and frayed wires. She had a blind respect for electricity. Bracing herself, she pulled the lever. A flash of blue sparks shot from the box, and a thin column of acrid smoke began twisting out from the heart of the machine.
Guiltily, Sally switched back the lever. The smoke stopped. She knocked on the Widow’s door, next to the kitchen. There was no answer. She called, softly, then louder. Still no answer. This is ridiculous, Sally thought, shifting from one cold bare foot to the other: no water, no Widow. No coffee, either, she added to the list of grievances. For a moment she had the absurd conviction that the Widow had sneaked away overnight, leaving them with an unmanageable elephant of a house. She went upstairs to wake Mark.
‘There’s no water,’ Sally announced in tragic tones. Mark squinted up at her from swollen pink eyelids. ‘And the Widow has disappeared.’
Sleepily, Mark pulled on his bathing trunks and accompanied Sally downstairs to the kitchen. He turned the lever of t
he water-making machine. No response. Mark tried the light switch. No electricity. ‘Something’s fused,’ he said. ‘The whole house is probably a web of defective wiring.’
‘You knock on the Widow’s door and call her,’ Sally said. ‘Your voice is louder. If she’s renting us the house, the least she can do is keep the water running.’
Mark knocked on the door. He called the Widow. The house was deathly still except for the grandfather clock in the hall, ticking like a coffined heart.
‘Maybe she’s dead in there,’ Sally said. ‘I have the strangest feeling there’s nobody breathing behind that door.’
‘Maybe she went out early.’ Mark yawned. ‘I miss my coffee.’
At last they decided to go back to bed and wait for the Widow. Just as Sally was closing her eyes, she heard the screak of the front gate hinges, and brisk staccato footsteps tripping up the walk. Jumping into her bathrobe, she padded downstairs to meet the Widows fresh and lacy as a daisy in her white dress, coming in the door with a bundle of parcels.
‘Ah,’ the Widow crowed merrily on seeing Sally. ‘Have you slept well?’ Sally, looking at the Widow with a more jaundiced eye than on the previous day, wondered if there wasn’t an ironic note veiled in her honey tones.
‘There’s no water,’ Sally stated bleakly. ‘No water for washing. Or coffee.’
The Widow laughed brightly, as if Sally were a charming but rather maladroit child. ‘Why of course there’s water,’ she said, dropping her parcels on a chair and making a little rush into the kitchen. ‘So simple!’
Following her, Sally felt grimly positive that the machine was primed so it would work only for the Widow. With a certain satisfaction, she watched the Widow turn on the lever. There were no results.
‘I tried that, too,’ Sally told her, lounging casually against the door jamb. ‘And nothing happened.’
The Widow tried the light switch. ‘No light!’ she exclaimed triumphantly and gave another one of her deep, confidential laughs with a long shrewd look at Sally hidden in the middle of it.
‘It is so in all the village,’ the Widow said then. ‘No light, no machine.’
‘Then this is usual in the morning?’ Sally queried coolly.
The Widow appeared, for the first time, to realize that Sally was annoyed. ‘Ah, you mustn’t take things so seriously.’ She shook her dark head reprovingly. ‘There is always water here. plenty of water.’
Sally waited, with what she trusted was a skeptical, challenging expression.
With the lofty air of a woman far above mere worldly emergencies, the Widow glided over to the sink, lifted from the counter a wooden lid which Sally had used as a chopping board the night before, and revealed a bottomless black hold. Whisking a pail and long rope from one of her myriad cupboards, the Widow dropped the pail down the hole. There was an echoing splash. The Widow gave the rope a series of short, energetic tugs, and hauled up a sloshing bucketful of sparkling water.
‘You see,’ she moralized to Sally. ‘Plenty of water. All the time.’ She began filling three pitchers of various sizes. ‘Marvelous water. Beneficial for the stomach.’ She motioned at the cold-water tap in the sink, wrinkling her nose up in a grimace of disgust and shaking her head: ‘That water’s bad,’ she told Sally. ‘No es potable.’
Sally gasped. Fortunately she and Mark had drunk wine the previous evening. The tap water was no doubt slow poison. Had the Widow forgotten to mention it before? Or hadn’t she wanted to bring up any disadvantages until they were well settled in her house? Sally wondered, then, with increasing unease, whether the Widow ever would have told them about her secret store of drinkable, health-giving water if the machine hadn’t broken down that morning.
With a new reserve, Sally took a pitcher of water from the cheefully voluble Widow and went upstairs to wash. In a few minutes, the Widow trilled up that the lights were on and water was coming everywhere.
‘She’s probably been prancing around the yard with a divining rod,’ Mark said grumpily. He went down to heat a kettle of water on the petrol stove for shaving.
As they sat on the balcony, shaded by a slatted bamboo awning, sipping their steaming mugs of coffee, Sally rambled on about the quirks of Spanish housekeeping. ‘Imagine,’ she told Mark, ‘the Widow doesn’t have any soap and washes her dishes in cold water with little tangles of straw. She was sermonizing at me just now about how neat I have to be when The Others come. Well, you should see her own cupboard—all higgledy-piggledy with scraps of cold beans and dead fish and a pack of ants carrying away her sugar grain by grain. It’ll be gone by tomorrow.’
Mark broke into a laugh. ‘I’d give anything to know what the townspeople of Villaviento think about her. We’ve probably got in with the village witch.’
Sally typed some letters home on the balcony that morning, while Mark propped himself up on pillows in the bedroom, nursing his burn and writing an animal fable. From the street below came the cry of the bread woman, strolling by with a basket of fried rolls over her arm; the milk boy biked past with a gallon can in his basket. As Sally lazed, her fingers lagging over the keys, the sound of voices drifted up to her.
Widow Mangada was showing a young Spanish couple about the garden, gesturing grandiloquently at the geraniums, the view of the sea. Sally peered down at them through the vine leaves. She half hoped the Widow would have no other customers, it was so quiet and pleasant in the dark house with just Mark and herself.
Preparing lunch that noon, Sally put a pan of string beans on to boil and began cutting up some cold sausage. After ten minutes, she checked the beans. They were as hard as ever, and the water wasn’t even warm. Sally turned the wick higher, hoping to make more heat come out of the stove. An unhealthy flame flared up, thin, smoking green.
At that moment, as if beckoned by some occult signal, Widow Mangada appeared in the doorway, took one look at the smoke funneling out of the stove, and rushed bleating in horror to the range. Whipping off the pan of beans and the chimney of the petrol stove, she revealed, with a flourish, the criminal evidence of over an inch of frayed, charred wick.
‘No petrol!’ she announced with all the drama of a doctor diagnosing cancer. She scuttled over to her cupboard, pulled out a bottle of transparent liquid, and poured it into the tank of the stove. Then she fussed about with the wick, snipping off the charred ends with her fingers, raising the wick higher on the shaft. She lit the wick again and replaced the beans. Not satisfied with this, she tasted a bean and shook her head sadly at Sally.
‘You wait a minute,’ she said and went running out of the room. She returned with a handful of powder which she tossed into the beans, just now beginning to boil. The water fizzed and foamed.
‘What’s that?’ Sally asked, suspicious.
The Widow gave her a coy little look and shook her finger as at a naughty child. ‘It’s just something,’ she smiled evasively. ‘I’ve been cooking a lot longer than you and know a few small tricks.’
Then, as if in chance afterthought, the Widow went on: ‘Oh, by the way, a doctor has rented the room upstairs for a few days.’ She hung poised in the doorway like a white gull ready for flight. ‘He’s coming in about an hour.’
‘Oh, just one man,’ Sally remarked in prosaic tones. She was beginning to enjoy playing dense and making the Widow detail her manoeuvers at a slower rate.
‘No,’ the Widow said, obviously a bit nettled. ‘He has a wife. and two friends.’ She hesitated. ‘And the other couple has a baby.’
‘Oh,’ Sally said eloquently, bending over the steaming beans.
The Widow, about to retreat, thought better of it and advanced again to the stove. ‘You understand,’ her playful tone with Sally changed, barbed now with an odd emotional intensity, ‘I do not care how many people are in the house as long as it is always full. You must learn to share. The cupboards, the stove, they are not just for you. They are also for The Others.’ She put on her glittering yellow-toothed smile then, as if to outshine her bluntness.
‘Why of course!’ Sally said to the Widow in bland astonishment. But something else was evidently bothering the Widow’s conscience, too.
‘The Spaniards, Señora,’ she told Sally gravely, ‘are very different from you Americans.’ Her tone made no secret of which side her sympathies were on. ‘They sing all the time. They turn radios loud. They leave things here and there.’ Carried away by her own speech, the Widow began to sway her plump little body to and fro dramatically, acting it all out in a sort of pantomime. ‘They come in late at night. And their children cry. It is very natural.’
Sally couldn’t restrain a smile as she envisioned a bevy of Spaniards bellowing arias in the cold shower and executing flamenco dances around the petrol stove. ‘I understand perfectly,’ she assured the Widow.
‘Perhaps,’ the Widow brightened, as if struck by a new and marvelously advantageous scheme for Sally, ‘you would like to move your cooking things out of the cupboard, over here. Then the cupboard would not bother you, helter-skelter with Spanish dishes.’ Sally’s look followed the Widow’s cavalier gesture. She was pointing to an open shelf over the garbage can.
So that was it. Sally’s intuitions were quickening; she felt stripped for action. ‘Why, I am perfectly delighted where I am,’ she told the Widow in demure, but firm tones. ‘I wouldn’t dream of being bothered.’
The Widow disappeared from the kitchen with a dazzling, false grin, which Sally felt lingering on as she finished preparing the meal, disquieting as the smile of the Cheshire cat.
While Mark and Sally were eating lunch on the balcony, a car drew up in the front of the house. The Spanish couple Sally had seen that morning got out, with another couple and a little girl, frilled as a peony in her starched petticoats.
The Widow ran out to greet them, swinging the gate wide as if it were crusted with gold and costly gems, almost curtseying as the four Spaniards walked in, carrying the child.
At three, Mark and Sally left their room to go for a swim. Mark disliked the crowds of fat, swarthy women and oiled dandies thronging the beach at midday, and during siesta time, from three to five, they had the beach completely to themselves. In the upstairs hall, all the window shutters were closed and the other rooms were hushed and darkened as in a hospital. Sally shut the door behind them. The sound echoed sepulchrally.