“So delightful,” says the Agent.
“We call that one Bouncing Bet,” says Hamilton.
“Charming.”
Hamilton points with a finger. “Brown-Eyed Susan.”
“So attractive.”
“John-Go-To-Bed- At-Noon.”
Below, from the lawn, a muscular blackbird crashes into the air.
Around us in the middle distance, which is as near or far as anywhere else seems to get, lie other havens of plaster and flora. I like it here. The villas loom pink and yellow on the arid land, like sweetshops on the planet Mars. The light has the color of fake gold.
We have three servants, Ana and Lourdes, and Rosa, the gypsy girl, to whom I will be obliged to return. I’m familiar with the servant thing, because I had one before: Irene. Oh, Irene! . . . The thing with servants is, you’re always cleaning up after them, but not very intensively, it’s true, and they’re terribly polite. Servants are poor, and I’m talking broke—I mean busted. They give what money they have to the Agent; yet they’re always finding that little bit extra, to give to me. Rosa, the girl, is especially insistent. We accept these dues with a seigneurial twinkle. Nobody said it was fair, but at least it’s intelligible. What’s the trick with money? Money, which might as well grow on trees? It all comes down to the quality of your trash. In New York government did it. Here we do our own. Tolo the gardener, with Bustos the dog tensely balanced beside him, on the cart pushed by the mule: they go to the village dump. Or we rely on fire. Quality not quantity. Our trash is class trash. Rosa, who is poorest of all, lives in the gypsy camp over the slope at the far end of the valley. We sometimes stroll out that way, in the evenings, and wait, and then discreetly precede her when she walks to the villa; she never turns, but she knows we’re there. The camp is made of trash but none of it is any good. Trash. I am its lord. She its bondmaid or prisoner.
Our hobbies?
Well, strolling. Impeccably turned out in twills and tweed, with hunting cap, with Bustos bouncing at our feet. It’s an appealing notion, that animals should contain the souls of gods. You can believe it of a cat. Even a mule. You can’t believe it of Bustos, loose-skinned and entirely frivolous, with his entreating eyes. The hide-faced peasants, the burdened women clad in black, they croak a furtive greeting, which Hamilton de Souza spiritedly returns. He picked up the lingo right away, but I can’t get any kind of fix on it. The only word I feel at home with is somos. There’s a game we play, Bustos and I, with that saliva-steeped tennis ball of his; and he likes to twirl those sticks. Across the valley, to the slope. The camp really is very dirty.
Oh, and gardening, too. No hands-on stuff, like at Well-port. We stand over Tolo’s bent form, and point with our cane. The flowers are amusing, but dreadfully vulgar. All those bursts of pink and crimson.
Our other hobby is gold. We collect it. We amass it. About once a month, with the Agent, we motor to Lisbon and pay a call on an elderly Spaniard in his office at the Hotel de Luxe. We have money ready, supplied by the Agent. We count the florid bank notes and hand them over across the desk. Then, after the old guy has examined, weighed, and wrapped it in a turquoise napkin, we get our gold, in little ingots the size of collar studs. Lassitude and shame and a dreamy disgust provide the medium for these transactions. We sit there, leaden. The heavy brown furniture, and Señor Menini: his eyepiece, the solder in his teeth, his dusty scales. Hamilton and I grow rich in gold.
Can you call Rosa a hobby? Does she qualify? A glimpse of Rosa, as she walks to the well in her pink tatters, and Hamilton’s blood slows and clogs, and his hair hums. He just seemed to walk right into that one: love at first sight.
The very day we got here he cornered her in the scullery and embraced her with tears in his eyes, saying adorada, adorada. Rosa is pink and dirty; she is dusky, she is rosy. One of her duties is to replenish Hamilton’s chamber pot each morning. He is usually to be found in his pajama bottoms, shaving, when she comes through the door. In slow declaration he turns toward her. She crouches to place the embarrassingly heavy bowl beneath the bed. She leaves with her eyes on the floor, saying bom dia. Frankly, he’s missed the boat with Rosa. She’s much too young for Hamilton— or for anybody else, probably, except her brothers and her dad and her uncles and so on, or so Hamilton speculates (I can tell), when he skirts the camp at dusk. Last week she celebrated her thirteenth birthday, so now she’s only twelve. He watches her in the yard with her cloth and bucket, as she kneels to tackle the clean plates. The slope of her back, the way she wipes her brow. In her luminous scraps of clothes she is pink and bruised, like the inside of her mouth, the teeth still both big and little. Soon, to fill those gaps, she will get some milk teeth, purchased from the tooth fairy. … In women, what is he looking for, mother, daughter, sister, wife? Where is his wife? She’d better turn up soon, while there’s still time. Rosa gives him presents, which, on his trips to Lisbon, Hamilton fondly redeems.