A Brief Theory of Travel and the Desert Read online

  Several years later, whenever we stayed with our parents, we would sit down with them at the end of the day and spend the end of our summer holidays with them. We would rummage through the drawers and rake over old fears. And we were no longer shy about them seeing us naked.

  When Alien had finished, I went into the bathroom and spread the towel on the toilet lid. I read the contents of some of the medicines placed higgledy-piggledy on a sloping shelf from which hung a small pouch filled with lavender, tied with a bow. Before the water started to flow from the showerhead, I heard the voices of Alien and her father talking in the living room. I stepped into the bath and had an extra-long shower. As I soaped my chest and washed my hair, I thought about what had happened on the plane, and for the first time I felt irritated. Had my passive attitude encouraged the misunderstanding? I’d had an embarrassing erection that wasn’t easy to hide. I decided not to mention the incident when I arrived at the airport. It was late, and anyway, it was unimportant. I suppose most passengers started to talk about what had happened (it had possibly been the biggest dose of relativity and randomness they had experienced in years) even before they reached the taxi stand. One of the flight attendants said that in those few seconds the plane had gone into free fall and probably dropped 20,000 feet or more. It was like switching the light off in the garage, closing the door, and then coming back five minutes later for the pruning shears. That unfathomable darkness, that is nevertheless so palpable when we are clumsily groping for the switch on the wall, is what happened up there in the sky. The moment I tried to hang onto the headrest of the seat in front of me, I felt those sweaty, tapering fingers grappling with my wrist and forcing it back down onto my lap. The girl sitting on my right had gripped my hand and was screaming with panic. Minutes after the plane had climbed back to its normal cruising height, she was still clasping my wrist with both hands, digging her nails into my flesh. When I tried to tell her that it was okay, that the danger had passed, she moved closer and placed her trembling lips on mine. The other passengers were crying or stammering out prayers, laughing hysterically, or slumping back into their seats; meanwhile, the flight attendants began to hand out bottles of mineral water. I had simply not reacted. When I finished my shower, I dried myself and went to the living room, where Alien and her father were waiting to have breakfast with me.

  The alignment of the house meant that the living room felt cool and fresh in the morning, perfect for walking barefoot on the marble tiles. That morning, Alien’s father was quite talkative. I asked him about the new hotel where he was working. He said that most of the guests were English, and he joked about the various wings of the building being distributed according to the total number of tattoos sported by each family. It was obvious that he wasn’t happy, but I kept saying how much I liked his new house. None of the furniture was his, except for a few framed photographs and the armchair in which he liked to take his naps. I noticed a climbing plant trained round the top of a mirror in a rattan frame, a material I had only ever seen before in holiday apartments and cafeterias. When he had finished his coffee he lit up a cigarette; from the garden came a sudden whacking noise, the sound of someone belly flopping into the pool. Somebody shouted, “Hey! Nice one!” and Alien and I laughed. Then somebody else let out a long belch. Her father looked toward the window, tut-tutted, and gave us an incredulous look, his eyes wide open and his pupils dilated. I had seen that expression before. Once, before the divorce, Alien’s father and I had gotten drunk together. It was all very civilized, one night after dinner as we sat in an old-fashioned wicker swing on the porch of his old house, lighting each other’s cigarettes with the ends of the previous cigarettes, like a couple of crooks hot-wiring an abandoned car. As we cleared away the dishes, we asked him if he would like to go to the beach with us, but he preferred to stay at home and read the newspaper. He told us he had bought bread, so why didn’t we make some sandwiches and take them with us for lunch. Wrapping the food in tin foil, I said to him, “Last night, when we were driving back from the airport, I noticed a bar with good-looking waitresses. I bet they serve some mean drinks there.” He laughed. “How about we go check it out some time?” As we were about to leave, he stood at the door with his hands in his pockets, as usual, and explained how to get to the nearest quiet beach.

  “You know what? I think my father has a girlfriend,” said Alien as we set off for the beach. Passing a lush border of banana trees, we went through the gate of the residential complex and out onto the dirt road. “Yes, it’s a lady who lives two blocks away; she has only one leg. She seems very nice. I think she’s the property administrator.”

  I was still thinking about the one-legged neighbor when we arrived at the beach. Alien’s mother was Dutch. She was a difficult, stubborn woman: it was she who had chosen the girls’ names. And another thing—she didn’t come to our wedding, and since then Alien hadn’t spoken to her. You didn’t have to be a genius to realize that Alien’s father felt he had been left out in the cold. I imagined him making love with that one-legged woman. In better times, sitting on that wicker swing, for example, he would have been the first to make a few witty remarks on a scenario like that.

  I had taken along a couple of books from Inneke’s bookshelf: J. D. Salinger and Thomas De Quincy. I stretched out on the sand and thought to myself that at least I. was a real holiday destination. There was hardly anybody else on the beach, except for a girl with her dog and a few heads bobbing like glass marbles in the water, its surface dappled with patches of shadow cast by the clouds.

  “Are you okay?” asked Alien, taking off her clothes and folding them in a pile next to her cheerful poppy-print beach bag. “Great!” I answered, “And you have a great tan. You’re the most beautiful girl on the island.” She rummaged in her bag until she had found her goggles and a snorkel. “I mean it.” I insisted. “You are the most beautiful girl on the island.”

  Her father was right, there were a lot of fish at that beach, especially near the rocks. I lay reading on the sand, but I found it hard to concentrate because my mind kept straying back to the incident on the plane the evening before. After that girl had pressed her lips against mine, I said nothing for a few minutes. Somebody was heaving shallow, nervous sighs. There were babies screaming at the back of the plane. The flight attendants were going up and down the gangway with bottles of water that they handed out to the passengers. A man aged about sixty staggered out of the W.C. He was groaning, and his trousers were round his ankles. He had fallen and hit his head on the metal toilet paper dispenser, which was why he was pressing a makeshift, bloodsoaked bandage to his head in an attempt to stop the bleeding. After a few minutes, I looked at the girl, but she didn’t turn toward me or even seem to notice my movements. She was quite attractive, and younger than me. I was aware of a slight wetness in my mouth in response to the touch of her lips. She must have been about the same age as some of my second- or third-year students. When she stood up, she avoided looking at me, no doubt because she was embarrassed. I had also identified the flavor of her lip balm: vanilla. I hadn’t kissed any lips other than Alien’s for the last seven years. And even though my feelings for her were unchanged, I realized that this sensation had been different.

  I started to read and soon fell asleep to the sound of the sea. When I opened my eyes and as I gradually woke up, I tried to spot Alien in the water, but I couldn’t see her. I stared at the horizon for several minutes. I waited for her to surface with her goggles and snorkel. I got up and approached the water’s edge, hopping to avoid burning my feet on the hot midday sand. I glanced back at my books and the poppy-f lowered beach bag next to her towel. When I turned back, I saw Alien smile and wave to a girl who was sunbathing and playing ball with her dog at the far end of the beach. After talking to Alien, the girl stood up. She turned round, looked at the water for a while, and then fastened her bikini top.

  I smiled at Alien for a few seconds as she walked toward where I was standing. We di
dn’t take our eyes off each other the whole while. When I thought she was near enough to hear my voice, I raised my sunburned shoulders in a questioning shrug. She nodded affirmatively and quickened her pace, finally breaking into a short run, which concluded in a kiss. “Among all the fishes,” she began to say in amusement, “I saw one rather unusual fish.” I didn’t understand. “It was quite an adventure,” she said, breathing out through her nose. Several blue droplets appeared on her chin and trickled down the soft slope of her neck. “Why, what happened?” I asked uneasily. She told me that she had been diving and looking at the fish, a shoal of tiny fish of a strange electric blue color, when a man had also approached to take a look. “I surfaced, removed my snorkel, took a breath of air and said hello to him,” said Alien. “After all, there are just a few of us here, and we’ve all come to look at the same thing…” “And then what happened?” I asked. “I went under again, and when I looked in the direction of the shoal of fish I saw that the guy had pulled down his swim trunks and there it all was in front of me, he was showing off his tackle.” I didn’t know what to say. I tried to laugh but I couldn’t, because she didn’t. Alien looked down at her ankles, traced a few squiggles in the wet sand with her big toe, and went on: “I told the girl over there that there was a man exposing himself in the water.” She stammered for a moment and made a funny face: “His thing had been operated on, it was rolled back. I’m not bothered, but some people might be shocked,” she added. “Anyway, it wasn’t very nice, to say the least.”

  I waded in up to my waist and scanned the surface of the water to see if I could make out the figure or shadow of a man. Then, suddenly, I looked at her, as if the episode had somehow left a mark on her body. “Don’t worry about it,” said Alien, “he swam away, so he’s probably on another beach by now.” “Did he say anything to you? Did he have a beard?” I asked. “No, nothing, he just looked at me. Actually, he seemed slightly jumpy, like a little boy. Then he made a weird, yelping sound.” I really didn’t know how to react to what Alien was telling me. I looked at the girl at the other end of the beach: she was no longer topless, but she was still playing on the sand with her dog, which seemed used to splashing about in the sea and resolutely swimming in pursuit of its ball. “Let’s forget about it,” she said. “I’m ravenous!” She strode back to her towel, looking at the ground the way her younger sister did. She took the sandwiches out of the bag, unwrapped hers and tossed mine to me with a hollow smile. I sat down beside her and kissed her bare shoulder. “Are you okay?” I asked her. There was a sound of excited barking. I turned round and saw the tennis ball flying through the air and a cloud of sand being kicked up by the dog as it ran. “Fine,” she said over her shoulders, “just don’t tell Dad. It would only upset him.” I nodded in agreement. Then she popped the tab on her can of soda and started to drink.

  MIDNIGHT SUN

  As Heikki closes his mouth, his thin lower lip brushes against the short, prickly hairs at the edge of his moustache, stained a copper color by the smoke from his cigarettes. He begins to mouth an answer to the referee, or perhaps to himself; it is the most basic physical response to a random thought that suddenly makes us aware of something. But the right answer never comes. In another kink in the linear, coherent train of thought, the silent gesture gives way to an irrepressible urge to urinate a vivid yellow stream, which dispels the distressing thought of a halffinished building.

  The landscape surrounding the lake at dusk, with its palette of greens ranging from the unnaturally green lawn, as if it had been sprayed that color, and the pale hue of the tops of the polar fir trees, gives way to a view of scaffolding pockmarked with rust, uneven pyramids of rubble and an out-of-tune radio playing somewhere under the ladder.

  This hyperborean scene effectively disproves that the ether is separate from the ground. Now, at the height of summer, it is as if everything is happening inside the iridescent spiral in a glass marble, where it is always day. A glass marble in which the pungent, clean but invisible smell of ozone triggers adjacent areas in Heikki and Tina’s brains.

  On the television set that Heikki has taken out of the cabin—an old black-and-white Grundig with no remote control—the Argentine referee has just blown the whistle for the end of the first half, with his right arm extended and his fingers closed, pointing in the direction of the luxurious locker rooms, the ultimate dream scenario of every advertising agent marketing any brand of men’s underwear. But, from where Heikki is sitting, the referee is pointing to the far edge of the lawn behind him, about sixty feet away, toward the dappled surface of the water and the dark birches on the far side of the lake.

  When he stands up, the nervous twitch in his right knee stops. Like a scene in a Tarkovsky movie, Heikki’s heavy body moves slowly along the wooden table; he turns a rusty chair round, putting it back in its usual position, and turns the volume dial on the television set to the left. He wanders dreamlike around his improvised outdoor living room, a transparent sky above him and a carpet of cool, damp, night-illuminated lawn underfoot. Just like in his early childhood games, Heikki has constructed an ephemeral, precarious house that will only last as long as the football match. Or until Tina decides it is time to take all the furniture back inside. Because the game is over. Because there’s nothing else worth talking about tonight.

  He quickly walks down to the birches and fir trees by the lake, where the gnarled roots break through the grass and surface here and there. Tiny drops of dew tremble as the rubber soles of his boots, about a size twelve, come to a halt beside a bare patch of black earth in the cool grass. Suddenly, he catches a glimpse of a fish jumping out of the water. Thanks to the subtle glow of the Finnish summer solstice, the variety of greens is breathtaking. The green soaked greenery in a greener green (Nabokov). The lingering light gives the cabin and the lake, as well as the silence, which is only broken by the occasional wave rolling over the surface of the water, the translucent quality of a canvas held up against the light.

  Heikki reaches the small jetty raised on concrete pylons that juts out into the lake. Another golden-scaled fish emerges for a few seconds. From there, Tina’s pitch-roofed log cabin, which appeared smaller from a distance, looked more like the hut of a paraplegic forest ranger, which it probably was before she lived there. Tonight, in fact, there are two houses—Tina’s cabin and the other one: Heikki’s short-lived, makeshift, ephemeral house. Without the dining table, the three straw-bottomed chairs, and an old-fashioned sideboard on which he has stood the television set, the cabin is empty. If the TV were turned off and the succession of images stopped flashing on and off the screen, it would seem as if the heart of the forest had suddenly dried up.

  After a few minutes, Heikki feels a hot tingling sensation in his urethra. Meanwhile, he waits with his fly open. He undoes the fasteners that hold up the denim bib and makes an awkward grunting sound, which somehow matches the color of his moustache, and the earth soaks up the slithery stream of his alcohol-bleached urine. Then, Heikki’s robust body quivers slightly from his waist to his forehead, for a moment investing him with a kind of vulnerability, although there is nothing ingenuous about him. Staring at the purplish head of his penis (curved and prominent like the eye of a cartoon character which has popped out of its socket in amazement) and the space between the arms of the V formed by his boots at the water’s edge, Heikki returns to what he had been thinking before he was interrupted by the referee: This is Zidane’s big night, as long as the fates smile on him. I just know it is going to be Zizou’s night, even if he is playing in black and white. At the same time as he catches a glimpse of another fish leaping out of the water, a thought originating in some place in the brain that is impossible to pick up on an X-ray (just as Heikki’s soul could never be captured on photographic film) enters his mind like an underground spring flowing into a lake: Everything is possible. Any situation can become normal. Here I am again, as usual, hardly giving it a second thought, all washed up, without a drop of se
men.

  He goes back to his chair, to his ephemeral house under the sky, inside the glass marble. The chair legs are slightly bowed forward because of the damp. He is waiting for the broadcast to be resumed from the Olympic Stadium in Berlin; the twenty-two players are still off the field. Heikki opens another beer. Then he wipes the cold sweat from the can off the palms of his hands. On the bare table there is a bottle of vodka, five large crushed beer cans, two pieces of peach in syrup floating beside three cigarette butts in a souvenir dish from the Åland Islands, and a white, blue, and green cap emblazoned with the name of his mechanic. There are also two crumpled twenty-euro bills that he is going to leave for Tina.

  In less than two hours from now, the midnight sun will roll out a new July day inside the glass marble. The slightest movement will cause a faint glimmer in the orb. Progressing a little further into the iridescent spiral, it will be the first of the 1,460 days during which Italy or France will reign supreme over world football. From the stool where she sits operating the sander on the porch, Tina watches the stiff, rigid movements of Heikki’s body. He is sitting quietly absorbed in the game. Every so often, he crosses his leg over his knee and fiddles with his bootstrap. He looks right at home in his outsized playpen. Like an innocent child. One who doesn’t yet have wet dreams.