What is it? A combination of roasted whole wheat and millet mixed with shredded dried apples, apricots, raisins, hazelnuts and almonds, the principal ingredient being un-milled oat flakes. I get hungry thinking about it and thank the Swiss doctor who invented it. In my Spanish penthouse I poured myself a dish, had it for lunch, then lay down for a nap.
Negotiations with the Greeks dragged along as I had predicted. They knew they were in a hopeless position but were reluctant to surrender. In one sense it would have been easy for them to scrape together the missing twenty-seven million; all they had to do was sell off some of the ships on which they had made their money originally, but to do this would have been insane. If they lost their ships, they would be losing their life’s blood, and they were not stupid.
But what they could not yet bring themselves to face was the collapse of their dreamlike city on the shores of the Mediterranean, so I wandered contentedly about the town and gave them time, knowing that when they read the weekly statements of loss, they would be psychologically prepared to accept our terms. They had to have cash to keep their various shipping companies operating, and the only way they could get it was to unload the buildings to World Mutual. We could wait; they couldn’t.
On my self-enforced diet of Bircher muesli I lost weight, restored my energy, and felt ravenously hungry every afternoon at four o’clock. While the Greeks were agonizing over what figure they would accept for their skyscrapers, I agonized over which of the Torremolinos restaurants to patronize that night. Because of its international clientele the town had a plethora of good places: a superb smorgasbord, a fine German restaurant at the Brandenburger, an Indian-curry place that was better than any in New York, six or seven top Chinese restaurants, a French one good enough to rate at least one star in Michelin, and a wonderful old Spanish dive called, naturally, El Caballo Blanco. It was a pleasure to contemplate these restaurants when one was famished, and I ate better in Torremolinos than in most of the other places in which I worked. Often as I left the penthouse on my way to an evening meal, I said a little prayer: ‘Thank God, I’m not in Afghanistan or Marrakech.’
Nevertheless, my enforced idleness began to pall, for my talks with the Greeks occupied me only a few minutes a day: ‘Yes, we’d consider going three million more … with certain considerations even four … definitely not six.’ As the probable length of my stay increased, I began to look around for something to divert me; a man can read Simenon only so many hours a day and the hundred-odd night clubs and bars grow tiring when one is over sixty. It was in such a mood that I wandered down one of the alleys at about ten o’clock one night and saw above me a preposterous sign: a huge wooden revolver, crudely carved, along whose barrel were the words THE ALAMO. Loud noises were coming from it, punctuated by raucous profanity in Brooklynese, and I thought it would be fun to see what the Americans were up to. The door was open and I walked into an extremely small room with three tables and a shabby davenport along one side. The walls were decorated with a variety of nineteenth-century pictures of the old west, now fly-specked and torn loose at the corners. The serving bar was short, crowded at the left-hand end by a record player and a huge stack of disks; at the right, by cases of a bilious-colored orange drink.
And there was something more! Behind the bar stood a Scandinavian girl of seventeen or eighteen with a countenance so beautiful and so unaffected that I had to stop in my survey of the joint to marvel at the perfection of her blond hair and cool complexion. She caught me looking at her and smiled, cocking her head delightfully to one side and disclosing her white teeth. Using only gestures she asked if I wanted a beer, and when I nodded, she poured me one, left the bar and brought it to me. I could then see her miniskirt and shapely legs, and I found myself asking, ‘Swedish?’
‘Norwegian,’ she said simply, and for a reason I could not have explained to myself, except that she was obviously such a delightful human being, I quoted from a famous old barroom ballad:
‘Ten thousand Swedes
Crept through the weeds
Pursued by one Norwegian.’
‘Ssssshhhhh!’ she cried, putting her finger to her lips in mock horror. ‘That’s how fights start. Where’d you learn that?’
‘ “The Siege of Copenhagen.” Everyone knows it:
‘We all took snuff
But not enough
At the Siege of Copenhagen.’
‘You recite that to a patriotic Swede and he’ll knock your head off,’ she warned.
‘I don’t recite it to Swedes.’
She sat down with me for a few minutes, rose to go back to the bar, changed her mind when a tall American with a heavy beard came to take over, and resumed her seat with me. We talked of many things, for she was a girl with a most probing concern about the world. She asked me particularly if I had ever visited Ceylon. I said no, and she began to hum a piece of music that I had known since childhood. As she hummed the music, I sang the English words:
‘I hear as in a dream
Drifting among the flowers
Her soft and gentle voice
Evoking songs of birds.’
‘You know it!’ she cried with pleasure. ‘I’ll bet that when you were a boy you had a Caruso record …’ She stopped abruptly, studied me, and said, ‘You are very much like my father. You poor man. I feel so sorry for you.’ She took my right hand in hers, kissed it and disappeared, but not before I saw that she was close to crying.
Later in the evening she came back and we began the first of our probing conversations. She struck me then, as she does now when I recall her, as one of the most vital persons I had ever met. All her senses seemed to work overtime, hauling into her brain observations which she weighed, judged and filed away. In her evaluation of herself she was harsh: ‘Mr. Fairbanks, if I’d had a first-class brain, do you think I’d have dropped out of education at seventeen? I’d have gone on to become a doctor … or a’—she hesitated, casting about for the precise word and ending her sentence with one I had least expected—‘or a philosopher.’
‘You can go back,’ I said. ‘At eighteen your education’s just beginning.’
‘Yes, but what I also lack is a first-class imagination. I have no originality … I’m not an artist.’
‘Why can’t you just be an educated person?’
‘I’d want to make a contribution … something constructive.’
I should not have said what I did, but I asked, ‘You expect to make one in a Torremolinos bar?’
She did not flinch. ‘I’m like all the other serious ones down here. I am really trying to find myself.’
‘And so far?’
‘I’m satisfied with one conclusion. I was not meant to live away from sunlight. I work in here till about four o’clock in the morning … night after night. The fellows don’t bother me. The American soldiers like to grab at my legs but who cares, it’s a job. But at noon next morning, when the sun is high, I’m on the beach. An hour’s sunshine and I’m rebuilt. That I’ve learned.’
‘And after that?’
‘I’ll keep my looks till I’m thirty.’
‘Long after that,’ I assured her.
‘You don’t know me,’ she corrected. ‘My God, how I like to eat. So if I do last till thirty … well, that means I have twelve good years to look around. That’s a hundred and forty-four months. I’m not stupid. In a hundred and forty-four months I’ll find something.’ She paused, exchanged pleasantries with some of the soldiers, then said, ‘But nothing I shall discover in those months will be bigger than what I’ve already discovered. That I live by the sun. If they sent a commission from Oslo, saying, “Britta Bjørndahl, you have been elected prime ministress of Norway,” I’d tell them, “Move the capital to Málaga and I’ll accept.” Since they would be reluctant to do that, I have given up all hope of becoming prime ministress.’
‘Marriage?’
‘There’s a neat question.’ She pondered it for some time, then said, ‘I like men. I’m not like some
girls who crumple if they don’t have a man around. But I like them. However, if my luck shall be that I’m not to find … I could live without men … that is, without them on a permanent basis.’
‘Have you found anyone here?’
With a nod of her blond head she indicated the tall fellow behind the bar. Her gesture was not deprecatory, but on the other hand, it wasn’t marked with excitement, either. I had asked if she had a man for herself, and she had replied, in effect, ‘Well, yes, you might say. That’s him.’
It was in this way that I first took studied notice of the bartender. He was a tall, lean chap, well built and well mannered. He wore his hair in what the younger generation called ‘the Jesus bit’ or ‘the Kahlil Gibran thing’—that is, his hair came almost to his shoulders and a flowing beard covered his face. He wore tight faded-blue Levis and Texas boots. He was a commanding figure, most gentle in speech and behavior, and he ran a good bar. Britta told me he was an American draft dodger, like so many of the others I would meet in Torremolinos.
Intuitively I liked the young bartender, and was about to say so when she said abruptly, ‘You must forgive my emotionalism when you were singing the song. What do you think of Les Pêcheurs de perles … as an opera, that is?’
‘I’ve seen it only once. It’s about the same as Norma and Lakmé. A native priestess falls in love, with a European in Lakmé, a Roman in Norma, and an Indian of some sort in Pêcheurs. Of course, there’s a high priest who sings bass and in the end the girl dies. It’s no better than the others, no worse.’
‘I mean the music’
‘Well … that’s another matter. Pêcheurs is certainly the poorest of the three. But what you must remember is that Bizet was writing it when he was only twenty-four. It’s a lovely, youthful opera, and at your age you ought to like it.’
‘But I don’t,’ she said. ‘I think it’s a real bore. I just wondered what you thought.’
‘But you were singing it,’ I said, and she told me of the frozen years her father had wasted dreaming of Ceylon and of how his fixation had influenced her. ‘I’d really like to see the place,’ she said. ‘If some young fellow—and he wouldn’t have to be so young either—if he walked in this bar and said he was going to Ceylon, I’d go along with him tomorrow, no questions asked.’
‘You really have cut loose, haven’t you?’
‘I’ll never go back to Norway. I’ve saved seventeen dollars, which is all I have in the world. Yet I’d go to Ceylon without thinking twice … so long as it had sun.’
It was in discussions like this, as I sat in the Alamo nursing my beer, that I came to understand the new breed of young women who drifted about Europe and whose most attractive representatives congregated in Torremolinos. They were intelligent; they were beautiful; they were grimly determined not to be sucked back into routine; and they were a challenge to all who met them. Since they were a new force in history and a new experience for me, I have often pondered how best to describe them; no device could be better than a sample of the notes which were tacked onto the bulletin board at the Alamo, and at a hundred other spots throughout Torremolinos:
Swedish girl nineteen wishes to see southern Italy. Can drive. Will share expenses. Go group or single. Ask the bartender details.
English girl seventeen, good driver, absolutely must get to Amsterdam. Has eleven dollars. Will accept any offer.
California girl eighteen has new Peugeot. Heading Vienna. Will accept partner if he can drive and pay his share expenses. For details see bartender.
I chose these three notices because I happened to meet each of the girls involved, and any young man in his right mind would have journeyed to the moon with any one of them. It was an exciting time in Torremolinos.
In these first days when Britta Bjørndahl talked with me of Tromsø, I had not of course spoken with Joe; I had only seen him behind the bar, nor was I then aware that four other young people whom I had known in the past were in town. I supposed that Gretchen Cole was touring somewhere in southern France, and that Cato Jackson was hiding out in Newark or Detroit. I had no idea that Yigal Zmora had quit his father’s university at Haifa, nor that he had visited his English grandparents in Canterbury. As for Monica Braham, the last I heard of her was her flight from Vwarda in the cockpit of a Lufthansa plane. She could be anywhere; Buenos Aires or Hong Kong were logical possibilities.
During my first two visits to the Alamo, I did not happen to run into any of the four. I discovered later that Cato, Monica and Yigal had borrowed a car and were in the mountains on a tour of those three historic cities Ronda, Antequera and Granada. Gretchen, of course, was still cooped up alone in her pop-top.
But on my third visit I did meet Joe. In fact, I took him and Britta to dinner at a Chinese restaurant and we talked for about two hours. At first I was antagonized by his hairdo, and by the fact that he was a self-proclaimed draft dodger; I had served in the navy in World War II and had never known of a single draft evader among my acquaintances, and I felt ill at ease sitting with one.
‘No comparison of the two cases,’ Joe said when I raised the question. ‘Your war … you had a visible enemy … everyone recognized him …’
I was surprised at how well and how sparingly he used the language, and as the evening wore on I listened with attention as he made one sensible point after another. ‘How did you become a rebel?’ I asked.
With his long fingers he fluffed out his beard and said, ‘This doesn’t make me a rebel. The fact that I can’t cooperate with a ridiculous draft doesn’t make me a revolutionary. What I want most of all … is go back to college … get a degree.’
‘To do what?’
This stumped him. He chewed on his lower lip for some moments, shifted in his chair and said quietly, ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’
‘What’s eating you?’
‘Well, when you haven’t done anything yet—don’t even have a degree—wouldn’t it be pretentious to sound off with big ideas about what you’re going to accomplish?’
‘But you do have ideas … back in your head?’
‘I do.’
‘Like what?’
He saw that I was badgering him into making a statement for which he was not yet emotionally prepared, but this did not irritate him, for he also saw that I was willing to talk with him about important matters, so he looked up at the ceiling and said, ‘On the night of January 4 there was a blizzard in Wyoming. I was caught in the middle of it.’ He paused, looked down at me and asked, ‘You ever in a blizzard?’
‘Not in Wyoming.’
‘I stood out on the road … all the cars were stranded … and the world seemed to have two faces. More drawn in and tiny than you could imagine. The whole world was a tight circle drawn about you by the snowflakes. But it was also much vaster than I had realized, reaching out in all directions so far that it met itself coming back. I experienced the same sensation driving down here from Madrid … over those empty plains. The hugeness of the distance and the closeness of the part where you happened to be standing.’
‘Leading to what?’ I asked.
‘Speculations,’ he said, and it was apparent that he intended to drop the question. Britta said something about having been in lots of blizzards, endless ones, in fact, but Joe was staring into my eyes. ‘Speculations,’ he had said, and I had not a clue as to where those speculations would lead him but I suspected that here was a young man who had conceived an image of the world, and to have attained this was the beginning of constructive thought. Our mutual respect dated from that moment.
In the days that followed, while the nervous Greeks surveyed their crumbling empire and postponed decision, I often sat at the bar while Joe served drinks and kept the phonograph going, and in broken sentences amid the interruptions he related the history of his flight. He doubted that he would return to the United States, for he had no inclination to be a hero nor any taste for jail. He wondered what he ought to do about an education, because he was saving his
money in Torremolinos and knew no foreign languages in which to study at European universities.
The more I talked with him about important matters the more I grew to like him; I had invited him to dinner the first night because he was attached to Britta, but now I was inviting Britta because she was associated with him. In our talks I tried to find out something about his parents, but he forestalled me. Of his mother he said simply, ‘Grotesque,’ of his father, ‘Pathetic,’ and he would say no more.
He was an archetype of the young man of promise who is a natural loner. He was generous with his money and insisted upon taking Britta and me to dinner when he had a little saved; he was helpful with the forlorn drifters who kept pestering him at the bar, asking for handouts or leads to jobs; and he was gentle with girls, especially with Britta; definitely he was not the savage-animal type that young men in long hair and leather jackets are supposed to be. He was an appealing human being, perplexed by his society and his relationship to it, and bewildered as to what he ought to do next. But in his confusion he was developing character, and if he ever found his way out of his present dilemma, he could, I felt sure, become a notable man.
There was a shock in store for me, because one night after we had dined at the smorgasbord, and I had sat mesmerized by the amount of food he and Britta could eat, plates piled high four times, he suggested, ‘I’m providing identification papers for an American girl who’s trying to cash personal checks. I left them at the apartment. Care to see where we live?’ We left the center of Torremolinos and walked slowly down the hill to the old fishing village, where we passed a collection of low cottages, stopping at one which overlooked the Mediterranean. ‘Good location,’ I said as Joe pushed the door open and turned on the light.
He explained that he and Britta were occupying the place while the owner was in Morocco lining up a regular supply of grass, so I was more or less prepared for what I saw: a couple of beds and a little furniture, but when I saw the wall decoration I burst into laughter. Over the bed to the left hung a very large, well-printed poster which showed a benevolent yet monitory Pope Paul, his gentle eyes smiling and his forefinger wagging. Below in bold print stood the words: