Of course, neither Charly nor Hanna nor even Ingeborg noticed anything out of the ordinary about the pedal boats.
When we got back to the hotel, I asked Ingeborg what she thought of Charly and Hanna.
Good people, she said. I agreed, with reservations.
AUGUST 22
The next morning we ate at the café, La Sirena. Ingeborg had an English breakfast of milky tea, a fried egg, two strips of bacon, baked beans, and a grilled tomato, all for 350 pesetas, much cheaper than at the hotel. On the wall behind the bar there’s a wooden mermaid with red hair and bronzed skin. Old fishing nets still hang from the ceiling. Otherwise, everything is different. The waiter and the woman behind the bar are young. Ten years ago an old man and an old woman, dark skinned and very wrinkled, worked here; they used to talk to my parents. I couldn’t bring myself to ask after them. What good would it do? The new people speak Catalan.
We met Charly and Hanna at the agreed-upon place, near the pedal boats. They were asleep. After we spread our towels out next to them, we woke them up. Hanna opened her eyes right away but Charly grunted something unintelligible and kept sleeping. Hanna explained that he’d had a rough night. When Charly drank, according to Hanna, he didn’t know when to stop, which wasn’t good for him or his health. She said that at eight, after hardly sleeping, he had gone out windsurfing. And there was the board, lying next to Charly. Then Hanna compared suntan lotions with Ingeborg, and after a while, with the sun toasting their backs, their conversation turned to some guy from Oberhausen, a manager who it seemed had taken a serious interest in Hanna although she liked him only “as a friend.” I stopped listening and spent the next few minutes examining the pedal boats that had so disturbed me the night before.
There weren’t many of them on the beach; most, already rented, were moving about slowly and erratically on the water, which was calm and deep blue. Certainly there was nothing disturbing about the pedal boats still waiting to be rented. They were old, outdated even in comparison to the boats at neighboring rental spots, and the sun seemed to glint offtheir pitted and peeling surfaces. A rope, strung from a few sticks driven into the sand, separated bathers from the area set aside for the boats. The rope hung scarcely a foot from the ground and in some places the sticks were listing and about to fall over completely. On the shore I could make out the rental guy helping a group of vacationers launch their boat, at the same time making sure it didn’t hit one of the countless children splashing around. The renters, about six of them, all perched on the pedal boat and carrying plastic bags that might hold sandwiches and cans of beer, waved toward the beach or slapped each other on the back in jubilation. When the pedal boat had made its way through the fringe of children, the rental guy came out of the water and headed our way.
“Poor man,” I heard Hanna say.
I asked to whom she was referring; I was told to take a closer look without being obvious about it. The rental guy was dark, with long hair and a muscular build, but the most noticeable thing about him by far were the burns—I mean burns from a fire, not the sun— that covered most of his face, neck, and chest, and that he displayed openly, dark and corrugated, like grilled meat or the crumpled metal of a downed plane.
For an instant, I must admit, I was hypnotized, until I realized that he was looking at us too and that there was an indifference in his gaze, a kind of coldness that suddenly struck me as repulsive.
After that I avoided looking at him.
Hanna said that she would kill herself if she ended up like that, scarred by fire. Hanna is a pretty girl, with blue eyes and brown hair, and her breasts—neither Hanna nor Ingeborg was wearing her bikini top—are large and shapely, but it didn’t take much effort for me to imagine her covered in burns, screaming and wandering blindly around her hotel room. (Why, precisely, around her hotel room?)
“Maybe it’s a birthmark,” said Ingeborg.
“Maybe. You see the strangest things,” said Hanna. “Charly met a woman in Italy who was born without hands.”
“Really?”
“I swear. Ask him. He slept with her.”
Hanna and Ingeborg laughed. Sometimes I don’t understand how Ingeborg can find this kind of talk funny.
“Maybe it was a birth defect.”
I don’t know whether Ingeborg was talking about the woman without hands or the rental guy. Either way I tried to convince her that she was wrong. No one is born like that, with such ravaged skin. At the same time, it was clear that the burns weren’t recent. They probably dated back five years, or even more to judge by the attitude of the poor guy (I wasn’t looking at him), who had clearly grown used to attracting the same interest and stares as monsters and the mutilated, glances of involuntary revulsion, of pity at a great misfortune. To lose an arm or a leg is to lose a part of oneself, but to be burned like that is to be transformed, to become someone else.
When Charly woke up at last, Hanna told him she thought the rental guy was good-looking. Great biceps! Charly laughed and we all went swimming.
After lunch that afternoon I set up the game. Ingeborg, Hanna, and Charly headed to the old part of town to go shopping. During lunch, Frau Else came over to our table to ask whether we were enjoying ourselves. She gave Ingeborg a frank and open smile, although when she spoke to me I thought I detected a certain irony, as if she were saying: you see, I care about your well-being, I haven’t forgotten you. Ingeborg thought she was a pretty woman and wondered how old she was. I said I didn’t know.
How old must Frau Else be? I remember my parents said that she had married the Spaniard—whom incidentally I still haven’t seen—when she was very young. The last summer that we were here she must have been about twenty-five, around the same age as Hanna, Charly, and me. Now she’s probably thirty-five.
After lunch the hotel lapses into a strange lethargy. Those who aren’t going to the beach or on an outing fall asleep, overcome by the heat. The staff, except for those stoically tending bar, vanish and aren’t seen on the hotel grounds until past six. A sticky silence reigns on every floor, interrupted from time to time by the low voices of children and the hum of the elevator. At times one has the impression that a group of children has gotten lost, but that’s not the case; it’s just that their parents can’t bring themselves to speak.
If it weren’t for the heat, barely mitigated by the air-conditioning, this would be the best time of day to work. There is natural light, the restlessness of morning has worn off, and there are still many hours ahead. Conrad—my dear Conrad—prefers to work at night, which explains the frequent circles under his eyes and his sometimes alarming pallor, which makes us wonder whether he’s sick when he’s simply sleep deprived. He claims to be unable to work, unable to think, unable to sleep, and yet it’s he who has bestowed upon us many of the best variants for any number of campaigns, as well as countless analytical, historical, and methodological studies, and even simple introductions and reviews of new games. Without him, Stuttgart’s gaming scene would be different—smaller and with a lower level of play. In some sense he has been our protector (mine, Alfred’s, Franz’s), recommending books that we never would have read otherwise and passionately addressing us on the most disparate subjects. What holds him back is his lack of ambition. Ever since I’ve known him—and for a long time before that, as far as I can tell—Conrad has worked at a small-time construction company, in one of the lowest-ranking jobs, beneath nearly all the office staffand construction workers, performing tasks that used to be handled by office boys and messengers-withoutmotorbikes, the latter the title he likes to claim for himself. He makes enough to pay for his room, he eats at a cheap restaurant where he’s practically one of the family, and every once in a while he buys some clothes. The rest of his money goes to pay for games, subscriptions to European and American magazines, club dues, some books (only a few, because he usually borrows from the library, saving up his money for more games), and donations to the city’s fanzines, for virtually all of which he writes. It goes without saying that many of these fanzines would collapse without Conrad’s generosity, and in this too one can see his lack of ambition: the best that some of them deserve is to vanish without a trace, putrid little ditto sheets spawned by adolescents more interested in role-playing games or even computer games than the rigors of the hexagonal board. But that doesn’t matter to Conrad and he supports them. Many of his best articles, including his piece on the Ukrainian Gambit—which Conrad calls General Marcks’s Dream—were not only published by such a magazine but in fact written expressly for it.