Vernon Mooers writes

THE WHITE MAN'S GRAVEYARD

chapter 9 (2)

A car stopped. Alex ran and jumped in the back seat. It was almost dark. A middle-aged Spanish woman had picked him up. She had a child in the car with her. Alex didn't care where she was going. His Spanish was not very good so he nodded when she said where she was going and tried to make small talk, telling her where he was from, asking her how she was and such.

A couple of hours later they came to a cross-roads at a village and she stopped the car. Signs pointed in every direction. Alex started to get out. It was dark and they were in the middle of nowhere. He stood outside the car and she finally communicated that she was turning, but that he could come to where she was going if he wanted. He got back in and a short while later they arrived at a small house and he helped her carry some things inside.

The lady was hospitable and served him peaches as he sat at the kitchen table. She did not speak a word of English. Alex had taken Spanish for a year in college, failed it and had to repeat the language requirement the next year.

She showed him a picture of her and a man and three children. The youngest child, who was with her on holiday, was put to bed. Her husband was a doctor it seems. Alex gathered that much and that this was their summer home. But he did not know if her husband was dead or not.

She pointed to a bathroom and Alex took a shower, washed his hair and changed his clothes which were saturated with sweat and road dust. When he came out fresh, they sat at the table and drank espresso. Then she went to a room and made up two single beds. She showed him where he was to sleep and she would sleep in the other bed. A light was left on in the kitchen. When they got in the beds, she motioned that they could push the beds together and he did that and then they made love. She seemed to like him. She needed a man and snuggled close and again Alex wondered where her husband was.

In the morning she gave him money and the key to the Mercedes to go to a small store to get her cream. Funny, she trusted him. Little did she know he didn't even have a peso. When Alex came back, they got in the car and drove along the coast past white-washed houses built on cliffs. They walked down onto a small beach. He swam in the clear blue water and she relaxed and he played with her son in the shallow water. Alex noticed she had a long scar on her abdomen. He was conscious she was older than him and also that she liked him. She bought a shrimp-tomato-rice dish in an iron pan and they took it home.

On Monday, Alex told her he had to leave, to go to a Bank. He got her to write the address down and said he would come back. He knew she didn't want him to go, but finally got out his map and she drove him back to the cross road in the late afternoon when it was cool. She dropped him by a field and turned the car and drove off slowly. By dark he had not gotten a ride and slept in the field by the highway in his sleeping bag. Then, Alex wondered what on earth he was doing out there.

He picked up rides in the back of trucks, beside chickens stacked in crates, stole bananas from a market by reaching his hand under a canvas covering when no one was watching during the siesta. Some time after, he'd realized he'd been taken when a family came to the tree he was sitting under and said the figs they beat from the tree with long poles were no good to eat. He stuck to the highway, found a pair of socks in the ditch and kept them. He stole several small red potatoes from a parked truck and slipped them into his pack. At night he warmed them up in his cook kit, with no butter, and boiled some water and put in the harsh grounds remains of a packet of Moroccan coffee he found by the road. He slept in a field again.

Alex was standing by the highway, in the heat, now three days since he'd left the comfort of the Spanish woman's cottage. He picked up a short ride, asked for the hard crust of bread that lay on the floor of the Citroen. Once across the border, in France, he stood on the ramp of the Autobahn all day with a Belgian who'd run out of money and was making his way home. They walked from village to village looking for a Priest. In one, he was away, in another, there was none. Finally they arrived at an annex beside a church, where they were given wine and bread. Luckily, one of the nuns was from Quebec. It had been almost fruitless. They'd walked twenty kilometres to get the food and it just disappeared in him. That night, they slept under a bridge in a small village.

The next day, Alex split up with the Belgian, so they could get rides easier. His stomach was full of pains and cramps. He asked a boy on a bicycle for a loaf of bread, motioning he was hungry and the boy gave him a long stick and he downed it fast trying to fill the void. His stomach pained. That night he stood next to a pier and hitchhiked all night. It was too cold to sleep and some traffic passed. A man stopped in a car and called for him to get in and get warm. Alex got in and was offered a Gitane, then felt a hand on his thigh. After the cigarette, he stepped back out into the cold. He paced the wall by the river all night to keep warm. Finally just before five, a lorry's lights lit him up and screeched to a halt and Alex climbed in. The jovial Frenchman was going to Marseille and just wanted him to talk to keep him awake. 

At daybreak they arrived at the docks in Marseille where the lorry driver was to unload. It was dawn now and the sun was rising. Alex walked toward the commercial part of town where the taller buildings were. Miniature trucks deposited racks of bread and milk outside tiny magasins, but his stomach had passed the point of hunger pangs. They only lasted three days. He had found that out.

It was Friday now, and he knew he could not make Paris before the Banks closed. He was in no hurry any more. He realized it had taken him a week to get from Barcelona, less than eight hundred kilometres. It could take days to get to Paris. Then he saw it, and Alex couldn't believe his good luck. A sign on a stone building said Bank of Montreal. It definitely was a bank and he sat outside on a cement planter for two hours until it opened.

Alex asked them to transfer five hundred dollars from his account in Canada. It only required the cost of the phone call, deducted from the money he collected, and an hour later he returned to the counter, produced his passport and signed the transfer and foreign currency exchange transaction. He walked out of the bank, suddenly rich.

Alex went straight to the nearest cafe and ordered lunch and wolfed it down. Five minutes later his stomach revolted from the shock, went into spasm and he threw up all over the cafe patio. Snobbish waiters looked disgustedly at him and ran around nervously not knowing what to do. "Excuse moi," Alex mumbled and holding his stomach, quickly left and walked around the corner to another cafe.

When he got himself together, Alex tried to figure out what he should do next.  He needed a vacation, a real vacation.

He caught the train along the coast, sat in a second-class compartment all evening, with a teenaged French girl. She bought him wine and, though the compartment was empty, sat next to him by the window and he tried to converse with her, use proper manners. He needed sleep, wanted desperately to sleep and wake up somewhere on a beach by the sea. The train rattled on and when the lights were off, the young girl had fallen next to him, had pulled a blanket over herself. She was no more than fifteen, but she explored and found what she wanted and he let her do what she probably did with boys her age. Then she fell asleep. In the morning she was gone and he was glad he did not have the responsibility for her.

Alex stared out at the endless blue on the horizon, past the breakwater where the waves crashed against the rocks. This was the life. The warm sand formed pillows for the arch of his back and his head. In front of him, a young tanned Italian woman basked in the heat, topless, her bronzed breasts absent of any tinge of white. Next to him, two British girls had bared themselves, one with large healthy meaty droopy boobs, the other's, small and pert, sticking up in the best Margaret Thatcher tradition.

He had been in Nice soaking up the sun for three days now. The beaches of the Riviera, the casinos in Monaco and the palm trees in Cannes were Alex's idea of a vacation. Now he was studying tits -- Italian, French, Scandinavian, German and English. His vantage was a spot by the outdoor shower where the girls would stand close by and wash the salt water off. He'd lay on his stomach, sunglasses on, reading or writing, observing them out of the corner of his eye like an Anthropologist. Older French women in their fifties who still looked like Brigette Bardot, twelve year-olds sprouting buds, American college girls in their prime, making spectacles of themselves jumping for spinning plastic disks onlookers had never seen, making a game of it, inviting advances from Italian men with curly-haired chests and skimpy nylon briefs.

The bare breast novelty wore thin.  The Americans didn't attract him. They were homogenous, a co-ed culture in Europe for the stage-scene change. The Italians and Greeks and Portuguese didn't shave their legs. The French women were middle-aged, rich, their lovers taken for granted, just an appendage to their lives. He was hardened. Alex had just seen too many breasts in Africa, all larger, darker brown, too many sweaty bodies in the heat. For contrast, Alex was attracted to the British girls, white transparent skin and conservatism, their repressive self-controlling hormones, their discipline in sexual matters. He liked the Victorian approach to bodily functions, their proper manners. He was studying the British girls when he remembered the Anthropologist he'd met in the hills in Gwoza. She had organized her life, slotted sex in its proper place, controlled her emotions. Elizabeth. Even the name sounded clean, regal.

He was immune to Nice now, but had no travel plans, no itinerary to follow, no direction in which to point himself. Yes, there it was, England. He would go to the United Kingdom -- search Elizabeth out. She probably didn't expect to see him again. He would find her, uncover those elusive British nipples again. He would be the Anthropologist now, obsessively cross the world to hone in, stalk and hunt down that unsuspecting rare species specimen hiding out on the island of Britain.