The sweat rose from Forrester’s skin, a hot pelt across his forehead. Standing beside the fuel hydrant, he wiped away the sweat with his hands. The young woman seemed to respond to these gestures. Her own hands emerged from the shawl, moving about in a complex code, a semaphore signalling Forrester to her. Responding in turn, he touched his face again, ignoring the silver paint on his hands. As if to ingratiate himself, he smeared the last of the paint over his cheeks and nose, wiping the tacky metal stains across his mouth.
When he reached the young woman and touched her shoulder she looked with sudden alarm at these luminous contours, as if aware that she had been forming the elements of the wrong man from these painted fragments — his hands, chest and features.
Too late, she let herself be bundled backwards into the darkness of the hangar. The sunglasses fell from her hands to the floor. Forrester’s luminous face shone back at him like a chromiumed mask from the flight-office windows. He looked down at the sightless young woman scrabbling at his feet for her sunglasses, one hand trying to hide her eyes from him. Then he heard the drone of a light aircraft flying over the town.
Gould’s aircraft circled the Club Náutico, the panels of its silver fuselage reflecting the sun like a faceted mirror. Forrester turned from the young woman lying against the rear wall of the hangar, the glasses with their fractured lenses once more over her face. He stepped into the afternoon light and ran across the runway as the aircraft came in to land.
Two hours later, when he had crossed the deserted streets to his hotel, he found Señor Cervera standing on the dune below the steps, hands cupped to his eyes. He waved Forrester towards him, greeting him with relief. Forrester had spent the interval in one of the hotels in the centre of Rosas, moving restlessly from one bathroom to the next as he tried to clean the paint off his face and hands. He had slept for half an hour in a bedroom.
‘Mrs Forrester—’ The old man gestured helplessly.
‘Where is she?’ Forrester followed Cervera to the hotel steps. His wife was hovering in an embarrassed way behind her mahogany desk. ‘What’s happened?’
‘The practicante arrived — just after you left.’ The old man paused to examine the traces of silver paint that still covered Forrester’s face. With a wave of the hand, as if dismissing them as another minor detail of this aberrant day, he said, ‘He brought the result to Mrs Forrester…’
‘Is she all right? What’s going on?’
Forrester started towards the elevator but the old woman waved him back. ‘She went out — I tried to stop her. She was all dressed up.’
‘Dressed? How?’
‘In… in a very extravagant way. She was upset.’
‘Oh, my God…’ Forrester caught his breath. ‘Poor Judith — where did she go?’
‘To the hotels.’ Cervera raised a hand and pointed reluctantly towards the Venus hotels.
Forrester found her within half an hour, in the bridal suite on the third floor of one of the hotels. As he ran along the canal road, shouting out Judith’s name, Gould was walking slowly across the footbridge, flying helmet in hand. The dark figure of the young woman, the lenses of her fractured sunglasses like black suns, followed him sightlessly from the door of the hangar as Gould moved along the painted corridor.
When at last he heard Judith’s cry Forrester entered the hotel. In the principal suite on the third floor he discovered her stretched out on the bridal bed, surrounded by the obscene murals and bas-reliefs. She lay back on the dusty lam bedspread, dressed in a whore’s finery she had put together from her own wardrobe. Like a drunken courtesan in the last hours of pregnancy, she stared glassily at Forrester as if not wanting to recognize him. As he approached she picked up the harness beside her on the bed and tried to strike him with it. Forrester pulled it from her hands. He held her shoulders, hoping to calm her, but his feet slipped in the vibrators and film cassettes strewn about the bed. When he regained his balance Judith was at the door. He ran after her down the corridor, kicking aside the display stands of pornographic magazines outside each bedroom. Judith was fleeing down the staircase, stripping off pieces of her costume. Then, thankfully, he saw Gould waiting for her on the landing below, arms raised to catch her.
At dusk, when Gould and Forrester had taken the distraught woman back to the hotel, the two men stood by the entrance in the dusk.
¥ In an unexpected gesture of concern, Gould touched Forrester’s shoulder. Apart from this, his face remained without expression. ‘She’ll sleep till morning. Ask the practicante to give you some thalidomide for her. You’ll need to sedate her through the next three weeks.’
He pointed to the silver stains on Forrester’s face. ‘These days we’re all wearing our war-paint. You were over at the hangar, just before I landed. Carmen told me that you’d accidentally stepped on her glasses.’
Relieved that the young woman, for whatever reasons, had not betrayed him, Forrester said, ‘I was trying to reassure her — she seemed to be worried that you were overdue.’
‘I’m having to fly further inland now. She’s nervous when I’m not around.’
‘I hadn’t realized that she was… blind,’ Forrester said as they walked down the street towards the canal. ‘It’s good of you to look after her. The Spaniards would kill her out of hand if they found her here. What happens when you leave?’
‘She’ll be all right, by then.’ Gould stopped and gazed through the fading light at the causeway of the airstrip. A section of the porous concrete seemed to have collapsed into the sea. Gould nodded to himself, as if working out the time left to him by this fragmenting pier. ‘Now, what about this baby?’
‘It’s another one — the same defects. I’ll get the practicante to deal with it.’
‘Why?’ Before Forrester could reply, Gould took his arm. ‘Forrester, it’s a fair question. Which of us can really decide who has the defects?’
‘The mothers seem to know.’
‘But are they right? I’m beginning to think that a massacre of the innocents has taken place that literally out-Herods Herod. Look, come up with me tomorrow — the Cerveras can look after your wife, she’ll sleep all day. You’ll find it an interesting flight.’
They took off at ten o’clock the following morning. Sitting in the front cockpit, with the draught from the propeller full in his face, Forrester was convinced that they would crash. At full throttle they moved swiftly along the runway, the freshly broken concrete slabs already visible. Forrester looked over his shoulder, hoping that Gould would somehow manage to stop the aircraft before they were killed, but the doctor’s face was hidden behind his goggles, as if he was unaware of the danger. At the last moment, when the cataract of concrete blocks was almost below the wheels, Gould pulled back on the stick. The small aircraft rose steeply, as if jerked into the air by a huge hand. Thirty seconds later Forrester began to breathe.
They levelled out and made a left-hand circuit of the empty resort. Already Gould was pointing with a gloved hand at the patches of phosphorescent paint in the hills above Rosas. Before the take-off, while Forrester sat uncomfortably in the cockpit, wondering why he had accepted this challenge, the young woman had wheeled a drum of liquid over to the aircraft. Gould pumped the contents into the tank which Forrester could see below his feet. As he waited, the young woman walked round to the cockpit and stared up at Forrester, clearly hoping to see something in his face. There was something grotesque, almost comic, about this mongoloid girl surveying the world with her defunct vision through these cracked sunglasses. Perhaps she was disappointed that he was no longer interested in her. Forrester turned away from her sightless stare, thinking of Judith asleep in the darkened hotel room, and the small and unwelcome tenant of her body.