“You talk very interestingly and awfully well for a hot day like this. Does the wine make you talkative?”
“It’s a different sort of talkative than absinthe,” Catherine said. “It doesn’t feel dangerous. I’ve started on my good new life and I’m reading now and looking outward and trying not to think about myself so much and I’m going to keep it up but we ought not to be in any town this time of year. Maybe we’ll go. The whole way here I saw wonderful things to paint and I can’t paint at all and never could. But I know wonderful things to write and I can’t even write a letter that isn’t stupid. I never wanted to be a painter nor a writer until I came to this country. Now it’s just like being hungry all the time and there’s nothing you can ever do about it.”
“The country is here. You don’t have to do anything about it. It’s always here. The Prado’s here,” David said.
“There’s nothing except through yourself,” she said. “And I don’t want to die and it be gone.
“You have every mile we drove. All the yellow country and the white hills and the chaff blowing and the long lines of poplars by the road. You know what you saw and what you felt and it’s yours. Don’t you have le Grau du Roi and Aigues Mortes and all the Camargue that we rode through on our bikes? This will be the same.”
“But what about when I’m dead?”
“Then you’re dead.”
“But I can’t stand to be dead.”
“Then don’t let it happen till it happens. Look at things and listen and feel.”
“What if I can’t remember?”
He had spoken about death as though it did not matter. She drank the wine and looked at the thick stone walls in which there were only small windows with bars high up that gave onto a narrow street where the sun did not shine. The doorway, though, gave onto an arcade and the bright sunlight on the worn stones of the square.
“When you start to live outside yourself,” Catherine said, “it’s all dangerous. Maybe I’d better go back into our world, your and my world that I made up; we made up I mean. I was a great success in that world. It was only four weeks ago. I think maybe I will be again.”
The salad came and then there was its greenness on the dark table and the sun on the plaza beyond the arcade.
“Do you feel better?” David asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I was thinking so much about myself that I was getting impossible again, like a painter and I was my own picture. It was awful. Now that I’m all right again I hope it still lasts.”
It had rained hard and now the heat was broken. They were in the cool shutter-slatted dimness of the big room in The Palace and had bathed together in the deep water in the long deep tub and then had turned the plug and let the full force of the water splash and flow over them, swirling as it drained away. They had blotted each other with the huge towels and then come to the bed. As they lay on the bed there was a cool breeze that came through the slats of the blinds and moved over them. Catherine
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lay propped on her elbows with her chin on her hands. “Do you think it would be fun if I went back to being a boy again? It wouldn’t be any trouble.”
“I like you the way you are now.
“It’s sort of tempting. But I shouldn’t do it in Spain I suppose. It’s such a formal country.”
“Stay the way you are.
‘What makes your voice be different when you say it? I think I’ll do it.”
“No. Not now.”
“Thank you for the not now. Should I make love this time as a girl and then do it?”
“You’re a girl. You are a girl. You’re my lovely girl Catherine.”
“Yes I am your girl and I love you and I love you and I love you.