Frau Else laughed, this time openly, as if she’d just been told a joke.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not laughing at you.”
“Just at what I’m saying,” I said, laughing too, as if I weren’t offended at all. (Although the truth is I was offended.)
This response seemed to please Frau Else. I thought that without intending to I had grazed a hidden wound. I imagined Frau Else courted by a Spaniard, perhaps involved in a secret love affair. Her husband, of course, suspects and suffers agonies; she can neither give up her lover nor find the strength to leave her husband. She is trapped by her conflicting loyalities; her own beauty is the source of her tribulations. I envisioned Frau Else as a flame, the flame that sheds light but in the process consumes itself and dies, etc.; or like a wine that, upon mixing with the blood, ceases to exist as what it once was. Beautiful and distant. And exiled… This was her most mysterious quality.
Her voice woke me from my reflections:
“You seem very far away from here.”
“I was thinking about you.”
“For God’s sake, Udo, you’ll make me blush.”
“I was thinking about the person you were ten years ago. You haven’t changed at all.”
“What was I like ten years ago?”
“The same as you are now. Magnetic. Active.”
“Active, of course, what choice do I have? But magnetic?” Her hearty laugh echoed through the restaurant once more.
“Yes, magnetic. Do you remember that party on the terrace, when you went offto the beach?… It was pitch-black there, though the terrace was brightly lit. I was the only one who saw you leave and I waited until you came back. There, on those steps. After a while you returned, but now you were with your husband. When you passed me, you smiled. You were very beautiful. I don’t remember having seen your husband go after you, so he must have been on the beach already. That’s the kind of magnetism I’m talking about. You attract people.”
“My dear Udo, I haven’t the slightest memory of that party; there’ve been so many, and it was such a long time ago. Anyway, based on your story it seems that I’m the one attracted by others. Attracted by my own husband, no less. If you say that you didn’t see him leave, then clearly he was already on the beach, but if the beach was dark, as you so rightly claim, I couldn’t have known that he was there, so when I left it must have been been because I was drawn by his magnetism, wouldn’t you say?”
I chose not to answer. Much as Frau Else tried to destroy it, a current of understanding had been established between the two of us that released us from the need for explanations.
“How old were you then? It’s only natural that a fifteen-yearold should be attracted to a slightly older woman. The truth is that I hardly remember you, Udo. My… interests lay elsewhere. I was a wild thing, I think, wild like all girls, and insecure. I didn’t like it at the hotel. As you can imagine, I suffered a lot. Well, all foreigners suffer a lot at first.”
“For me it was something… lovely.”
“Don’t look like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like a clubbed seal, Udo.”
“That’s what Ingeborg always says.”
“Really? I don’t believe it.”
“She puts it differently. But it amounts to the same thing.”
“She’s a very pretty girl.”
“Yes, she is.”
All of a sudden we were silent again. The fingers of her left hand began to drum on the plastic tabletop. I would have liked to ask about her husband, whom I still hadn’t seen even from afar and who I sensed had something important to do with the nameless essence that radiated from Frau Else, but I didn’t have the chance.
“Why don’t we change the subject? Let’s talk about literature. Or rather, you talk about literature and I’ll listen. When it comes to books, I know nothing, but believe me, I do like to read.”
I had the feeling that she was making fun of me. I shook my head in rejection. Frau Else’s eyes seemed to rake my skin. I’d even say that her eyes sought mine as if by scrutinizing them she could read my innermost thoughts. And yet her intentions were kind.
“Then let’s talk about the movies. Do you like the movies?” I shrugged. “Tonight there’s a Judy Garland film on TV. I love Judy Garland. Do you like her?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen her in anything.”
“You haven’t seen The Wizard of Oz?”
“Yes, but it was a cartoon, the way I remember it.”
She gave me a disappointed look. From some corner of the restaurant came very soft music. We were both perspiring.
“No, that’s something else entirely,” said Frau Else. “Although I suppose that at night you and your girlfriend must have better things to do than come down to the hotel lobby to watch TV.”
“Not much better. We go out to clubs. It’s mostly boring.”
“Are you a good dancer? Yes, I think you must be. One of those serious dancers, the kind who never gets tired.”
“No, that’s not me.”
“What’s your style, then?”
“I have two left feet.”
Frau Else nodded in an enigmatic way that indicated she understood. The restaurant was filling up with people coming back from the beach; we hadn’t noticed. In the next room guests were already seated, ready to eat. I thought Ingeborg would be in soon.
“These days I don’t do it as often; when I first came to Spain I went out dancing with my husband almost every night. Always at the same place, because back then there weren’t as many clubs and also because this one was the best, the newest. No, it wasn’t here, it was in X… It was the only club my husband liked. Maybe precisely because it was out of town. It doesn’t exist anymore. It closed years ago.”
I seized the opportunity to tell her what had happened on our last visit to a club. Frau Else listened unperturbed as I gave a detailed account of the dispute between the waiter and the man with the stick that had ended in a general brawl. She seemed more interested in the part of the story involving our Spanish companions, the Wolf and the Lamb. I thought she must know them, or know who they were, and I said so. No, she didn’t know them, but they couldn’t be the most appropriate company for a young couple on their first trip together, practically a honeymoon. But what harm could they do? A worried look crossed Frau Else’s face. Did she perhaps know something that I didn’t? I told her that the Wolf and the Lamb were more friends of Charly and Hanna’s than mine, and that in Stuttgart I was acquainted with much shadier characters. I was lying, of course. Finally I promised that the Spaniards interested me only as conversation partners with whom I could practice my Spanish.
“You should think about your girlfriend,” she said. “You should be considerate of her.”
On her face was an expression akin to disgust.
“Don’t worry, we’ll be fine. I’m cautious by nature and I know how to keep my distance, depending on the person. Anyway, Ingeborg likes spending time with them. I guess she’s not used to that kind of people. Of course, neither of us takes them seriously.”
“But they are real.”
I was about to tell her that everything seemed unreal to me just then: the Wolf and the Lamb, the hotel and the summer, El Quemado (whom I hadn’t mentioned) and the tourists, everyone except for Frau Else herself, lonely and alluring; but luckily I kept my mouth shut.
We sat there for a while longer without speaking, although in the midst of our silence I felt closer to her than ever. Then, with a visible effort, she got up, shook my hand, and left.
As I was on my way up to the room, in the elevator, a stranger remarked in English that the boss was sick. “Too bad the boss is sick, Lucy,” were his words. I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he was referring to Frau Else’s husband.