We were silent for a while again. The sun was scorching my shoulders but I didn’t move or do anything to protect myself. In profile, El Quemado looked like a different person. I don’t mean that he was less disfigured (actually, the side facing me was the more disfigured) but simply that he looked like someone else. More remote. Like a bust of pumice stone fringed with coarse, dark hairs.
I can’t remember what made me confess that I wanted to be a writer. El Quemado turned around and, after hesitating, said that it was an interesting profession. I made him repeat what he’d said because at first I thought I’d misheard him.
“But not of novels or plays,” I explained.
El Quemado’s lips parted and he said something I couldn’t hear.
“What?”
“Poet?”
Under his scars I seemed to glimpse a kind of monstrous smile. I thought the sun must be addling me.
“No, no, definitely not a poet.”
I explained, now that I had paved the way for it, that I in no way scorned poetry; I could have recited from memory lines by Klopstock or Schiller. But to write poetry in this day and age, unless it was for the love object, was a bit pointless, didn’t he agree?
“Or grotesque,” said the poor wretch, nodding.
How can someone so deformed say that something is grotesque without taking it personally? Strange. In any case, my sense that El Quemado was secretly smiling grew stronger. Maybe it was his eyes that conveyed the hint of a smile. He hardly ever looked at me, but when he did I caught in his gaze a spark of jubilation and strength.
“Specialized writer,” I said. “Creative essayist.”
On the spot, I sketched in broad strokes a picture of the world of war games, with all its magazines, competitions, local clubs, etc. In Barcelona, I explained, there were a few associations in operation, for example, and although as far as I knew no federation existed, Spanish players were beginning to be quite active in the field of European competitions. In Paris I had met a few.
“It’s a sport on the rise,” I said.
El Quemado mulled over my words, then he got up to retrieve a pedal boat that was coming in to shore; with no sign of effort he pulled it back into the roped-offarea.
“I did read something about people who play with little lead soldiers,” he said. “It wasn’t too long ago, I think, at the beginning of the summer…”
“Yes, it’s essentially the same thing. Like rugby and American football. But I’m not very interested in lead soldiers, although they’re all right… they look a little bit fussy.” I laughed. “I prefer board games.”
“What do you write about?”
“Anything. Give me any war or campaign and I’ll tell you how it can be won or lost, the flaws of the game, where the designer got it right or wrong, the correct scale, the original order of battle…”
El Quemado watches the horizon. With his big toe he digs a little hole in the sand. Behind us Hanna has fallen asleep and Ingeborg is reading the last few pages of the Florian Linden novel; when our eyes meet she smiles and blows me a kiss.
For a moment I wonder whether El Quemado has a girlfriend. Or whether he’s ever had one.
What girl could kiss that terrible mask? But there’s someone for everyone, I know.
After a while:
“You must have lots of fun,” he said.
I heard his voice as if it were coming from far away. The light bounced offthe surface of the sea, making a kind of wall that grew until it touched the clouds, which—fat, heavy, the color of dirty milk—were drifting almost imperceptibly toward the cliffs to the north. Under the clouds a parachute came in toward the beach, pulled by a speedboat. I said I felt a little sick. It must be the work waiting for me, I said, I’m a wreck until I finish what I’ve started. I did my best to explain that being a specialized writer required a complicated and cumbersome setup. (This was the main argument that the players of computerized war games could make in their favor: the savings of space and time.) I confessed that for days a huge game had been spread out in my hotel room and that I should really be working on it.
“I promised to turn in an essay at the beginning of September, and here I am, lazing around.”
El Quemado didn’t say anything. I added that the essay was for an American magazine.
“It’s an unheard-of variant. No one’s ever come up with anything like it.”
Maybe it was the sun that was making me ramble on. In my defense I should say that since I’d left Stuttgart I hadn’t had the chance to talk to anyone about war games. My fellow gamers will know what I mean. For us it’s fun to talk about games. But clearly I’d chosen the strangest conversation partner I could possibly have found.
El Quemado seemed to understand that I had to play in order to write.
“But that way you must always win,” he said, showing his ruined teeth.
“Not at all. If you play yourself there’s no way to cheat with strategies or maneuvers. All the cards are on the table. If my variant works, it’s because it’s mathematically guaranteed to work. As it happens, I’ve already tested it a few times, and both times I won, but it needs to be polished and that’s why I play alone.”
“You must write very slowly,” he said.
“No,” I said, laughing, “I write like lightning. I play slowly but I write fast. People say I’m high-strung but it isn’t true; they say it because of the way I write. Without stopping!”
“I write fast too,” murmured El Quemado.
“I guessed as much,” I said.
My own words surprised me. Actually, I hadn’t even imagined that El Quemado could write. But when he spoke, or maybe sooner, when I said that I wrote fast, I guessed that he must be a scribbler too. We stared at each other without saying anything for a few seconds. It was hard to look him in the face for too long, although little by little I was getting used to it. El Quemado’s secret smile still lurked there, maybe mocking me and our newly discovered shared trait. I kept feeling sicker. I was sweating. I didn’t understand how El Quemado could take so much sun. His craggy face, full of charred folds, sometimes glinted blue like cooking gas or took on a yellowish-black hue like something about to explode. And yet he could just sit there on the sand, with his hands on his knees and his eyes fixed on the sea, showing no signs of discomfort. In a departure from his usual behavior, which was so reserved, he asked whether I would help him bring in a pedal boat that had just arrived. Groggily, I nodded. The Italian couple on the boat couldn’t steer to shore. We got in the water and pushed gently. From their seats, the Italians kidded around and pretended to fall in. They jumped out before we got to shore. I was happy to see them head away, skirting bodies and holding hands, toward the Paseo Marítimo. After we pulled the pedal boat in, El Quemado said that I should swim for a while.
“Why?”
“You’ll fry your circuits in the sun,” he said.
I laughed and asked whether he wanted to come in with me.
We swam for a while, intent only on getting past the first line of bathers. Then we turned around to face the beach: from that vantage point, next to El Quemado, the beach and the people crowded on it seemed different.
When we returned he advised me, in a strange voice, to rub myself down with coconut oil.
“Coconut oil and a dark room,” he murmured.
With deliberate abruptness I woke Ingeborg and we left.
This afternoon I had a fever. I told Ingeborg. She didn’t believe me. When I showed her my shoulders, she told me to put a wet towel over them or to take a cold shower. Hanna was waiting and she seemed to be in a hurry to be rid of me.