The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(112)

No. I’m fine.

Do you have someone here?

Yes. Is that okay?

Yes. Of course. I dont mean to be a nosey parker.

She put the key in the gate and turned it and swung the gate open.

Call me.

I will.

And take care.

I will. And you.

Good night.

Good night.

Bobby?

Yes.

You know I love you.

I know. Another time. Another world.

I know. Good night.





X


He’d spent the day in town and he crossed back on the ferry in the evening. Standing on the upper deck and watching a boy and girl below passing a joint between them. The ferryboat was named the Joven Dolores. He called it the Young Sorrows. The horn blew a last time and the deckhands threw off the hawsers fore and aft and they began to move off into the quiet waters of the strait. The water slapping off the hull. The clocktower above the old walled town turning slowly and drawing away.

They trudged past the islands in the gathering dusk. Los Ahorcados, El Pou. Espardell. Separdello. The lighthouse at Los Freos. He’d bought a small ruled notebook at the stationer’s in Ibiza. Cheap pulp paper that would soon yellow and crumble. He took it out and wrote in it with his pencil. Vor mir keine Zeit, nach mir wird keine Sein. He put the notebook away in the string bag with his few groceries and stood watching the gulls in the lights of the rigging where they swung out and back over the sternway. Turning their heads, watching the water below and watching each other, then falling away one by one back toward the lights of the town.

He went forward and stood at the iron rail with his face to the wind. Deep throb of the diesel in the decking underfoot. The island of Formentera a low stretch of bight and headland in the distance. The dark little archipelagos. A launch was crossing the shadowline from the sea into the heavens as the ancients in their small stone boats had once aspired to do.

He got his bicycle from the courtyard of the bodega at Cala Sabina and hung the bag over the handlebars and set out up the road toward San Javier and the headlands at La Mola. Fields of new wheat slashing softly in the roadside dark. Up through the pine forest. Pushing the bike. Alone in the world.

There was an iron lock to the heavy wooden door and a black iron handforged key planished with hammer marks and this Guillermo did not want to let him have. Is okay, he said. No one will come.

Bueno. Pero si va a venir nadie, por qué está cerrada?

Ah. No sé. Pero la llave es muy vieja. Es propiedad de la familia. Me entiendes?

Sí. Por supuesto. Está bien.

He pushed the door open and pushed the bike in before him and stood it against the wall and closed the door and took the lamp from the low table and lit it and set back the glass chimney and raised the lamp to see. Stone stairs up the inner wall. Musty smell of grain. The great bedstone lying in the dark and the enormous wooden gears and shafts, the great planetary. All of it hewn from olivewood and joined with iron fittings hammered out on some antique forge and all of it rising up into the dark vault of the mill like a great wooden orrery. He knew every part of it. Windshaft and brakewheel. The miller’s damsel. He climbed the stairs through the shadows lamp in hand to the wooden loft where he slept.

His bed was a sheet of plywood propped up on wooden blocks and laid over with a straw tick sacked up in coarse linen and covered with a pair of black and gray Italian Army blankets. Overhead he’d stretched a plastic tarpaulin against the leaky roof and the bird droppings from the pigeons. He set the lamp on the low table along with the string bag and kicked off his sandals and stretched out on the bed. The pigeons stirred and wisps of straw drifted down in the yellow light. There was a small window set in the heavy stone wall where sometimes at night he’d sit and watch for ships. Their lights in the distance.

He slept and in the night he woke to a low flare of light in the tower. The lamp had burned down and was smoking. He reached and turned down the wick. A ship’s horn. He never slept more than a few hours. Sometimes it was just the wind. Sometimes the rattle of the door below. As if someone were trying the latch. He’d kicked a wedge of wood beneath it with his heel but now he liked the sound of it. He sat with the blanket around him and watched the distant dark of the sea with its shifting cape of stars where they lifted and fell. It came again, the pale ignition of a storm that shaped out the window and cast it brief and shuddering upon the farther wall. A sheet of light flaring silently over the storied sea, the thunderheads along the horizon shaped in the rim lightning and the slow leaden lap like slag in a vat and the slight smell of ozone. Brief season of storms. He slept to the patter of raindrops on the tarp overhead and when he woke it was day.

In the morning he walked on the beach hooded against the rain in his good oiled English anorak. The air was filled with almond blossoms. They lay drifted in the ruts of the road and shelved along the shoreline where they rode the slow black swells. Two dogs came racing down the strand toward him and then saw that they didnt know him and turned away. Great eskers of seaweed had washed up in the storm and the gatherers were on the beach with their wooden pitchforks heaping it onto their carts. They nodded to him as they passed, the little mules leaning into the traces.

He walked out to the headland in the fine rain. Floats of cork, bits of glass. Driftwood. Beyond the point the marbly rocks clattering down the strand, the long seething of the surf drawing away. Ancient. Tireless. Across the sound the rocky keep of Vedrà just visible. The stone spires black in the rain.