The Summer Before the Dark

  But it was like a punishment sitting there, exposed.

  They were surrounded by a poverty so deep that even their clothes, ordinary enough according to the standards of their own countries, were out of reach of anyone here; her handbag—she had taken it for granted until now, when she couldn’t stop looking at the elegant shining thing lying on the scrubbed wood of the table—was probably a month’s wages. She had bought it as a treat for herself, in the hotel shop in Istanbul. But that wasn’t important, it wasn’t the point, for she knew that no one walking past or looking from windows grudged the clothes, the bag, the shoes. It was what they were, she and Jeffrey, that was intolerable, their casual travelling, indolent enjoyment, ease of movement, casual relationships.

  They were only fifty miles from the coast; on the coast they, what they were, was the norm. Everybody there, or at least, the visitors, moved from country to country by car, coach, train, plane, bus, on foot, crossed continents to visit a music festival or even a restaurant, had a freedom of friendship, love, sex that to the people in this village must be truly unimaginable.

  There they sat, Kate Brown, forty-five-year-old mother of four, wife of a respected doctor at that very moment probably lecturing at some conference on a tricky condition of the nervous system, and Jeffrey, who almost certainly by this time next year would be unhappily but dutifully at work in his uncle’s law firm in Washington—“lovers,” and with so little emotional disturbance that when they looked back on this shared experience, the “love” would be the least of its ingredients. There was not a woman or girl in this place who was within a hundred years of such freedom. Madame Bovary would still describe their excesses; and if the men, like Señor Martinez’s brother, did go to Manchester to be waiters, one could be sure that the manners and morals of that wildly sophisticated town would not be brought back here. But the men were mostly peasants, they worked on the land. They grew maize and made flour out of it. They grew olives and sold some. They grew tomatoes. They worked on the estate of the rich nobleman who spent most of the year in Madrid or in his villa on the coast, as his father and his grandfather had done; and the wages of these men kept the village thin and parched.

  By twelve the sun was thinning the leafage of the tree so that it was like lace above them; they retreated into the hotel, and Jeffrey fainted away onto the floor. Again she and Señor Martinez lifted him upstairs and laid him on a bed.

  And again Jeffrey had withdrawn behind blind eyes that had a look of indignation or astonishment: Why are you expecting so much vitality out of me? they asked, whether they looked at ceiling, walls, the square of blinding light that was the window, or Señor Martinez. Again he was soaked with sweat. Now Señor Martinez, with an apology, turned up the young man’s eyelids: inside the flesh was sulphurous. And he pointed silently at the flesh of the arms which lay yellow on the white of the counterpane. Shaking his head, he trod off downstairs to telephone the aunt of the doctor.

  Who said that when the doctor made his regular telephone call to receive her report, she would tell him that there was a young American with fever, much sweating, and yellow eyes and skin. In her opinion, Señor Martinez said, it was a case of yellow fever: she had a relative in South America who had died of it. He shrugged: of course the good woman was not to be taken seriously.

  She went upstairs to find that Jeffrey had as it were collapsed inwardly. He lay on his back, so loose and relaxed that when she lifted his arm it slid onto the bed with a thump. He looked as if the bones in his flesh had collapsed, or had shrunk. His eyes were half open. He looked corpse-like, but she kept saying to herself—silently, of course, as one does for children or the people who choose to put a distance between themselves and the world of imperatives—“Yes, but he’s got to choose either one or the other, he’s got to be a lawyer or a vagabond, for no other reason than that he sees it as a choice. For if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be lying there with a temperature, yellow in the flesh—but not ill, no, not ill as someone is ill with cholera or even with measles.”

  Yet of course Jeffrey was ill, really ill, even if, had he been a Spanish labourer or a small farmer for whom a day’s work was the difference between eating and not eating, he would not have been ill at all. Not, of course, that she grudged it to him! She did not, even if she could not help wishing that he could have gone home to the States to enjoy this spiritual crisis. Which, of course, it was.… As for her, she was muttering to herself, ribald, being out of sight of Señor Martinez, she was here for physical reasons. That was what she had contracted for—the body, the pleasures of the flesh; wishing there was someone with whom she could share the joke, she sponged Jeffrey’s forehead and lifted him to drink.

  In the dining room there was an obese man in uniform with a gun in his belt. It was a military uniform. The gun monitored the meal, while the girl served cold jellied soup and cold meat and salad and bread.

  Kate returned to the room, found Jeffrey exactly where she had left him, made him drink more water, and then collapsed herself and slept. And slept and slept, listening as it were to something just out of hearing; the inner tutor was wanting her to understand something, but she was being too obtuse to understand. She was dreaming of the seal, or had dreamed of it, for she could feel the heaviness of the animal. It was still damp from the water she had put on it. Behind her a low and sullen sun had moved in a low arc sketched across perhaps a quarter of the horizon. It was a small sun, it had no heat at all, everything was getting very dark; she seemed to be walking on and on in a permanent chilly twilight.

  Next morning, when the sunlight withdrew from the room, it was as if it had left a stain of colour on Jeffrey’s flesh. She sought Señor Martinez and asked if he would make another attempt at the doctor. But the aunt was not answering the telephone: it appeared that her mornings were spent at her devotions in the church at the convent. It happened that as Kate and Señor Martinez stood conferring at a window, a lorry stopped in the square. It was a battered old Ford, and the driver was filling the radiator from the fountain. At the same time a horse drew into the square a cart of a kind that must have been seen in Spain for many centuries. The horse was thirsty, for it went straight to the fountain and drank while the lorry driver was dipping his empty oil can right under its nose.

  Señor Martinez’s frown disappeared; he ran out, conferred with the lorry driver, and returned to say that this man—he was a roadworker—would take Jeffrey to the convent to be nursed, if he could be got ready quickly.

  Kate and Señor Martinez attempted to dress the patient, who was unresisting, but so heavy in his limbs that they gave up, and wrapped him in blankets. They carried him downstairs naked but cocooned, and helped him to the high cab of the lorry. Señor Martinez got in with Jeffrey; for the nuns spoke no language but Spanish. Unable to remember the French for “jaundice,” they had agreed on “la maladie jaune,” which layman’s diagnosis would be transmitted to the convent.

  The lorry jerked out of the square, Jeffrey lolling like a shot man between hotelkeeper and roadworker.

  That was at ten in the morning.

  Señor Martinez, who had reported the nuns’ willingness to keep and care for Jeffrey, telephoned on Kate’s behalf at five in the evening, was told he was sleeping, that they believed him to be very ill, but were awaiting the arrival of a doctor from Alicante who came to them for serious cases.

  Though there was nothing she could do there, Kate decided to walk to the convent. The way led along a street she had not before noticed: it was a lane, or alley, rather than a street, very poor, lined on either side with rooms, each room for a family. The room’s front doorstep was in one alley, its back door in another. The doors stood open, and each room contained children of all sizes, and the children’s mother, probably Kate’s age or younger, but looking like an old woman. There were many old people as well sitting on chairs in the lane, among chickens and goats. There were no young or middle-aged men; they were absent at work. Kate walked down this street, smiling: she felt ash
amed, and no amount of reason could dissolve that emotion. She said to herself in every second breath that fifty miles away on the coast she would be absorbed unnoticed into the throng of humanity, an item of morality among hundreds of thousands—indeed, in this month, millions—of her kind. But it was no use. The smiles and greetings of these poor women, in their poor women’s shabby black, the swarms of children, the deadly, desperate rock-bottom poverty, were accusations shouted at her who so amiably walked there with her smart white dress, her fashionable dark-red hair (whose parting, however, was already showing a band of grey) her smart bag, her creamy, white, cared-for limbs.

  She reached the end of the lane a hundred yards after its beginning, on a stony slope of olives through which a horse track ran—the lorry had jolted that way this morning—and looked back to see the lane packed, crammed, solid with black-dressed women and barefooted Murillo children staring after her.

  She walked on, her face burning, through olive trees and then maize plants, until she turned past a eucalyptus that shed its dry scent even more powerfully than the olives. There was the convent. A tall stone wall curved back on either side of ironwork gates, and inside the gates was a clean-swept yard which had some flowering bushes in it, and a whitewashed double-storied building. As she crossed the yard, another great gate—the main gate, obviously, the one she had come in by being a secondary entrance—showed the church dominating everything: the convent building, wall, ornamented gates; olives, fields, stony earth. Its cupola glittered to answer the fire of the sunset. Kate knocked on what she now saw must be a back door, and was smiled at, was made welcome by, first one blackrobed woman, then two, then three, then a small flock of them, all of whom knew about her, and that she must have come to see their patient. She was accompanied into a small room off a courtyard in which Jeffrey lay on an iron bed stead under a shiny picture of the Bleeding Heart. A crucifix stood on a low table; an ivory cross was on the whitewashed wall.

  Since that morning, some drug had taken Jeffrey even further away. He was absolutely still, chill and damp to the touch, his flesh looked as if it had been painted. She might as well not have come, but she sat for a time on a rush-seated chair, while the nuns brought her coffee and cake, and then a glass of wine, always smiling, delighted that she was there giving them opportunities to serve God. At last she thanked them, and left. She went into the church. It was quiet, and smelled of incense, and she would have liked to sit for a while and think, or even perhaps to wonder what prayer might be, but it was no good, there was enough gold and precious stones in this small, unimportant, undistinguished manifestation of the Church to feed and to heal thousands. This thought, here, could have little force behind it: it was an alien thought, had in it the peevish uselessness of the lost cause—but she rebelliously kept it in her mind, and left the church to walk back through a scented, warm, intimate dusk, to the village.

  In the lane of the many families the men had come back from the fields, and she was pleased of the dusk, made heavier by the crude glare of light from each room. It was good evening, good evening, buenas tardes, buenas tardes, all the way, while the children ran with her in crowds through the dust until she stepped into the hotel when they were checked like birds swerving away from an obstacle, and fled away shouting into the dark.

  In the dining room she ate—in the company of an elderly priest who, she learned, was none other than the doctor expected at the convent—hot thick soup, fried eggs, peppers and tomatoes, and stewed quinces. She asked the priest to telephone when he had examined “her husband,” accepted his cold regard, which he believed to be uncondemning, and went up to her room to wait for the call. The priest was to walk to the convent, as she had done, then of course he would talk to the gay friendly women in their stuffy black, then he would examine Jeffrey. It was after midnight when the telephone bell shrilled downstairs, and Señor Martinez came up to report that Father Juan believed the young man to have jaundice, but there were certain features of the case which contradicted this diagnosis. There would probably be something more definite in three days’ time when the local doctor made his regular visit to the convent.

  She went to bed and slept lightly, just below the surface of wakefulness, in a shallow lake of dreams where shadows of ideas moved as cool and light as fishes, a very far place from the dark northern country where she and the seal were making their painful journey. She woke early, when the day was still a fresh greyness flowing across the dark. She sat at her window to watch the waking of the village.

  Soon a man came to the fountain, held his hand to direct the water in a spray across his face, then dipped his head to the flow point, drinking sideways, weak sunlight colouring his brown cheek.

  A black horse wandered in from a side street, and stood with its head down, blinking flies away from its eyes.

  A woman came out of her door, and set a wooden chair in the dust. She went back inside and came out again with a knife, an enamel plate piled with green peppers, a plastic bowl. She wore the shabby black of the poor women of Europe. She sat herself carefully on the chair, as if sitting were an act that could hurt her, and put the bowl between her knees. Holding the enamel plate balanced on the bend of her elbow, she sliced peppers into the bowl. She was old, an old tired woman, with greying hair pulled tightly back. Just as Kate was thinking, No, probably not, probably I’m going to see she’s not old at all, it’s going to be brought home again, the woman looked straight up at Kate, who sat in white frills at her window. The woman smiled, and Kate smiled back, knowing she could not match the smile: and of course the woman was no older than Kate, but she was as worn out as the horse.

  Kate retreated from the window and dressed. A tray arrived with coffee, the sugared buns, jam. The sun now crashed in. She shuttered the room against the dazzle, and, having nothing to read but the magazines of not quite a week ago, which looked every bit as false and silly as she expected they would, from here, this village, she sat idly through the morning until she could eat. Then she slept again, and walked to the convent. Jeffrey lay in his whitewashed cell whose floor was pooled with fragrant water. The nuns threw down scented water several times a day to take the dryness from the air and to settle the dust that lay around the convent like bleached cloth.

  She walked back again, making herself do it, through the poor people, and sat in her room until dinner at ten, and afterwards wished she could go to the café, which at this hour had people in it. But of course she could not, it was full of men. Even with Jeffrey it would have been impossible or awkward, for they would be disturbing people who came here every night, for whom the café was an extension of their family lives.

  She was wishing that she could find some activity to end what she had been telling herself so long she needed: time to think. But she wasn’t thinking, she was feeling. She was wanting her home, her life in it—which was the past, of course. But it was as if she were building a future in her mind, and the continual effort to check herself, to say, That’s over, that’s finished, was bringing on attacks of emotion she could not control.

  She was longing for her husband.

  Her condition up to the time she had left her home in May, the constant swings of emotion from needful love to irritation at her need, from the desire to have more freedom to the coward’s need of being confined, had passed now into a passion of desire which was however being postponed until the future—the autumn. She longed for her husband’s body as once years ago, when she was still a girl, she had longed for a lover; but of course this present longing was a thousand times more intense, since she had accumulated so many memories to feed it. While she was engaged in spending all day, half the night, in holding her marriage up to the light between finger and thumb to analyse it, a small object with neat outlines which she could even now reject altogether, the rhythms of her flesh, her memory, had made an appointment with her husband. Whom her intelligence was regarding bleakly, as someone who had made a conscious choice to enjoy the flesh while it lasted—bleakly but rathe
r wearily, in an effort towards decency, almost in the spirit of: I don’t agree with what he thinks but I’ll fight to the death for his right—etc. Whom her emotions were deriding because they felt him as a small boy who was indulging himself with sweets.

  Her sexuality—in a vacuum, and unsupported by what she thought, what she felt, by what she expected of the future—was a traitor to her conviction that now, at this time, she had only one duty: to think about what her life had become, what it was going to have to be. This, though, was not the hunger of someone who is having to do without food: she was not tormented, or needy; for her sex, apart from the odd twinge, like a contraction of the mouth when smelling food or seeing chocolate on a counter, was as it were postponed. To the autumn. To the future which would not take place, or would not in the shape that her husband, herself, her children, had been visualising until that famous afternoon in May when everything had changed. The future was not going to be a continuation of the immediate past, with this summer seeming in retrospect like an unimportant hiatus. No, the future would continue from where she had left off as a child. For it was seeming to her more and more (because of this sexuality, something displaced, like an organ lifted out of her body and laid by her side to look at, like a deformed child without function or future or purpose) as if she were just coming around from a spell of madness that had lasted all the years since that point in early adolescence when her nature had demanded she must get herself a man (she had put it romantically then of course) until recently, when the drug had begun to wear off. All those years were now seeming like a betrayal of what she really was. While her body, her needs, her emotions—all of herself—had been turning like a sunflower after one man, all that time she had been holding in her hands something else, the something precious, offering it in vain to her husband, to her children, to everyone she knew—but it had never been taken, had not been noticed. But this thing she had offered, without knowing she was doing it, which had been ignored by herself and by everyone else, was what was real in her.