The ocean. Now that I was facing it I became conscious again of the motorway roar and crash of tide. Big thoughts were in order. The waves were huge: blue-white walls rearing up and pounding the beach. A couple of perfect Germans walked along the damp sand at the water’s edge, a man and woman, naked, both with the same broad-shoulder-length hair, holding hands, taking it in turns to pull on a joint. It was paradise in a way, Zipolite: Anarcho-Eden-on-sea. You could probably fuck here, on the beach, in blazing daylight, and no one would bat an eyelid. The only thing you couldn’t do, if you came across people doing that, was what you most wanted to do: watch.
There were pelicans flying over the sea, a few people swimming. I stood up and walked towards the sea. The sand burned my feet and I ran towards the damp sand at the water’s edge where the footprints of the perfect Germans were already disappearing. The sea was spiteful as fat in a pan: I went in up to my knees and was almost bowled over by the waves. The undertow wrenched the sand from beneath my feet like someone tugging a rug. The sea was trying to tear everything back into itself, making a bid for Zipolite itself, trying to haul it back into the sea grain by grain.
Out where the Berlin Wall waves were crashing in, two people were swimming. However you chose to look at it they were having a huge dose of ocean. They were emphatically not paddling. Toppling over the crest of one of those waves was like falling off a cliff — and then having the cliff come crashing over on top of you.
They started coming back in, swimming together. I could see them more clearly now: a man and a woman. A wave crashed over them and he held her up above the waves. I was the only other person around, in the water up to my thighs, surrounded by the hiss and foam, the roar. They had their arms around each other but as they came nearer I saw that she was out on her feet, head lolling. Not only that but she was pale green. As I watched, her knees buckled and she collapsed. The guy picked her up in his arms: a classic example of broad-shouldered behaviour. Someone else came splashing out beside me, the waves thumping into us. It was a French guy Laura and I had spoken to the day before — and the woman, I realised now, was his girlfriend.
We waded out a little further. Then the guy who’d saved her — evidently — and the French boyfriend walked back into the shallows with the woman sagging between them. There was nothing for me to do except watch as the French boyfriend and some other Europeans led the woman back up the beach. After that, I walked with the guy who’d saved her back along the beach, puppy waves snapping at our ankles.
‘I saw you out there. I thought you were messing around,’ I said, wanting to hear all about it, wanting the full story.
He’d been standing some way off — he was Australian — trying to figure out the rips. Ocean people do this, they figure out the rips. He’d seen her get hit by a wave, seen her go under. As soon as she came up she got hit by another. She didn’t know where she was. Waves kept smacking into her and she was getting pulled out to sea. He swam out to her but it looked like he’d got there too late. He thought she was dead but as soon as he touched her she pulled him under. He wrestled himself free, kept hold of her, rode the waves in. Saved her.
‘You must be a good swimmer,’ I said.
In the circumstances it was a stupid remark but he nodded and said, ‘I grew up by the ocean.’ The fact that we were walking, naked, by the edge of the ocean helped imbue this reply with an elemental appropriateness, yes, but wherever we were I would have liked the suggestion of dues paid, of a long apprenticeship of the waves. I would also have liked the way that he didn’t specify which ocean, as if there was only one ocean. Also, the romanticism of growing up by something: the railroad tracks, the gasworks, the North Circular even.
The Australian walked back to the bar. ‘I need a drink after that,’ he said.
‘You deserve one,’ I said and hurried back to wake Laura, to tell her I’d seen someone plucked from death’s watery embrace. She was still sleepy, disoriented. Some way over to our right a group was forming round the French couple. I put on my chafing trunks. The French couple’s friends were trying to administer some kind of first aid but they didn’t really know what they were doing. The boyfriend tried the kiss of life, a muscular German manipulated her arms as if she were a rowing machine. A bald guy said she should sit up; an Italian tried to manoeuvre her into the coma position. From where I was standing it looked more like a gang-rape than an attempt to save her life. No one knew what to do.
No one except the Australian, who touched me on the elbow and walked over. He too had put on some swimming trunks. He walked slowly over the hot sand and took control of the situation. That’s exactly what a situation is, I thought to myself, something someone will take control of. Implicit in the idea of a situation is someone taking control of it. Quickly he made her puke up a lot of water, reassured her, told someone to get a doctor.
I went back to where Laura was lying, sitting up now. She put on her bikini bottom and we walked over to the bar. After a while the Australian came over with his group of friends. They ordered beers and he told the story again. I chipped in from time to time.
‘She OD’d on the ocean, man,’ said a guy from California who had seen everything many times before.
‘The waves were too much for her,’ said the Australian, shaking his head. I realised we both had towels round our necks. I was only a witness but the gravity of the situation had invested me with a certain authority in everyone’s eyes.
I put down my beer like a judge pounding his gavel, clutched the ends of my towel with both hands and said, ‘You’ve got to respect the ocean.’
‘You said it man. What’s your name anyway?’ said the Californian, reaching out his hand.
‘Call him Ishmael,’ said Laura. ‘Ishmael or Hombre.’
We hung out with our new friends for the rest of the day and then, in the evening, back in Puerto Angel, we had the quarrel about our tuna steaks. Laura fell ill the next day. She had a fever and terrible diarrhoea and spent the whole day lying on her bed in the hotel where major renovations were taking place. We were woken at six by the incredible sound of birds; once that had died down the drilling started. I went to the beach with my mask and snorkel but the water was too murky to see anything. The sun was too hot. I could feel it piercing my skin, doing damage. It has changed since Lawrence’s time, the sun. Then it healed, now it harms. I looked down sometimes and was surprised that I cast a shadow: the sun was hot enough to go straight through me and dissolve shadows. I had been in hot places before, I like hot places, but I had never been anywhere as hot as this. Even though, technically, I had been in places that were maybe a few degrees hotter, I had never been anywhere that felt as hot as here — except Rome perhaps. Who knows? There’s something about the heat, in places that are seriously hot, that compels you to think not in relative but in absolute terms. One lives in a perpetual, boiling present. Even people who have lived in hot places all their lives, whose families have lived there for generations, feel compelled to comment on how hot it is, as though they have never felt anything like it. In a seriously hot place, somewhere where temperatures coagulate for six months a year in the nineties, people are commenting in astonished, resigned tones about the heat every ten minutes. Eventually that is all you do: you wipe your forehead and say how hot it is. Entire summers can pass like this. Apart from the heat, nothing else happens. The heat is the only news. For some peoples the sum total of their destiny is to mop their foreheads and remark on the heat. A good life, I think, one unclouded by culture. The sun beats down. Only the angles change. One moment you are young — a boy in shorts and T-shirt, or a girl barefoot, in sandals — the next you are ancient, worn out and widowed, but that moment lasts at least one lifetime, usually several.