They saw him every day — punching the pintables that lined the cafe terraces, shooting pool with the soldiers in the main square casino, lurching out of side roads by the bus station on his bike, bellowing past the hotel to El Hondon swimming pool with some bikini-ed Swede or American clutching his waist. Diana and Eleanor would mention Andy from time to time. "Saw that hooligan with the motorbike this morning in Bar Oliva drinking Anises. the yob on the motorbike was in the Telefonica with some dagos today.
: the bike oik almost ran someone down in the market square… I wish the bike oik wouldn't go around half naked all the time. "
Parry fille and Parry mere were alike convalescing after a long run of abbreviated affairs. In particular, Diana had recently tired of a set of spendthrift stockbrokers which she had found herself going to bed with; Eleanor had recently been spurned by the young director of a new radio company, who had waived her frank entreaties at a crowded after-dinner party. For Mrs. P. the cure was relatively straightforward— she needed a rest. The younger Diana, on the other hand, was suffering from the inevitable attack of night fatigue; night fatigue, with its languor and apathy, an indefinite series of one-directional days over which the dusk hung like the promise of extinction. So they gave themselves up to silence, dark glasses, and sun, to a period during which they would re-invigorate their bodies and conserve their sexual energies, going to bed early, sober and alone.
With two weeks of the holiday still to run Mrs. Parry decided that she didn't much like Ronda and got on an airplane to London. The evening before, over dinner in the starched chill of the Reina dining room, Eleanor complained of a slight restlessness, and when Diana went to her mother's room the next morning she found her gone.
Diana had, she supposed, intended to stay out the month, but as she ate lunch that day and reread her mother's note a familiar tremor came over her. The night fatigue was passing; she felt active, envious, neglected again. At two she walked down to the Iberia office and booked a flight for the next day. She spent the rest of the afternoon drinking up the remaining sun, every now and then anxiously examining her bikini marks. She returned to her room, did her exercises until her thighs were as stiff as steel rods and her breasts felt like little fists of muscle, and then, as a sort of token, put on her short white Pucci dress, checking in the mirror that her black pubic triangle was just discernible beneath it as she left for the hotel bar. She was there bought champagne until 8:30 by a perspiring American called Dexter, with whom she dined. "Let's look in at Coca's afterwards," Dexter then said.
They drank more champagne in a discotheque alcove. Dexter was putting his hand up Diana's dress a good deal; Diana retaliated by not uncrossing her legs. At eleven, when Diana JO
was wondering whether she could be bothered not to sleep with Dexter — it was, after all, the simplest way of terminating the evening — Andy came in.
Andy came in, stripped to the waist as usual, a bottle of twenty-peseta wine swinging from one hand, a length of bread in the other. He waved and shouted hellos at the bartenders and turntable operators, kissed two waitresses, and took the floor, dancing alone under the throbbing strobes with elaborate martial-arts movements. Ten minutes later he started to saunter round the club, nodding to his friends, peering closely but offhand at the prettier girls, until he came to Dexter and Diana, at which point he paused. Three feet from their table Andy came to an emphatic halt and began to stare at them both, declining to reply when Dexter uneasily asked what he could do for them. Andy inserted the last wedge of bread into his mouth and chewed on it for what must have been half a minute, meanwhile dusting his palms. Diana soon forgot her embarrassment as she concentrated with rapt distaste on the loose movement of his jaw, the swilling and munching of his large square teeth, the moist swipes of his thick tongue. "Hey there!" said Dexter with simulated amusement when Andy reached out for the half-full champagne bottle, held it up to the light, and swallowed its contents in one long pull, his adam's apple pulsing like a geyser bubble in the intermittent light. Andy dragged his bare forearm across his mouth and burped immensely. "Most refreshing," he said, replacing the bottle and moving round the table toward Dexter, at whose side he knelt and into whose large red ear he started intently to whisper. Andy and Dexter stood up. "Guess I'll be getting along," said Dexter wonderingly. Andy watched him leave and then, with a complacent air, turned to Diana. He held out a hand toward her.
Ninety seconds later Diana was being driven at speed by Andy Adorno down Ronda's main street. Her mind had been full of good things to say to Andy—"Wow, if big boy want, big boy take," "Look, hippie, I don't go for mysterious strangers," "OOoo, aren't you oddly compelling" — but there was something about his manner, something at once single-minded and negligent, which suggested to her that he was on some crappy drug and was liable to get ugly. Now she could think only of her immediate physical discomfort. Using one hand to keep the hem of her dress somewhere in the vicinity: of her navel, she put the other arm around his waist. He smelled of dew and sleeping bags. As her sleeve brushed his armpit she wondered vaguely if she would have time to wash the dress before she packed.
Andy abruptly beached the motorbike at the far end of the bridge over Ronda Gorge, the vast fault in the plateau on which the town was spread like assorted crockery on a great white tabletop. He led her back across the bridge to one of its semicircular, railinged indentations. "Have you ever looked over?" "Once. It stinks." "Not at night." He suffered her to kneel on the paved seat and to look out through the bars into the deep stone valley. He stood behind her, very close. "It's eight hundred feet down. Lots of guys a year come here especially to kill themselves. I spoke to the old wreck whose job it is to hose them off the rocks. They always do it here, from the middle, climb over the railings, look around. Think of it." While Andy spoke Diana sensed a thickening presence at the top of her exposed thighs. At first she thought it was his hand and paid no attention. Then her knuckles whitened on the railings as she heard the discreet trickle of his fly zipper. "Then they look around," Andy continued huskily, "and they must wonder how they could hate anywhere so casual. So they look down. Look down." Diana leaned over further, listened to the sound of a stream, telephone crickets, saw water shine, fireflies winking at each other. "Then they just let go, and the earth soars up and — AW, MY RIG!" Andy backed off, half doubling over. "The zip… got it… aw, my fuckin' snake!" After Andy had disengaged himself and they had stopped laughing, Diana waited a few seconds and said, "I'm going back tomorrow" — but he made her take the ticket from her bag and he swung it out over the bridge wall. Diana watched the slip of red paper wing its way down through the dark air.
Whenever Diana thinks about those seconds now she re-experiences them simultaneously — discreet trickle, crickets telephoning, shine of water, winking fireflies — but it is with enduring consternation that she reviews the following month. "Come on," he said, checking her out of the hotel, "I'm going