While the Women are Sleeping Read Free Page A

slightly nonplussed, but only slightly, and without a hint of suspicion, as if he wasn’t in the least surprised to see me—or, indeed, anyone—there. I think that was the first time I had seen him face on—without a camera to his eye and without a hat to mine—or simply from close up, and my sight was already accustomed to the dim light after the brief time I’d spent gazing out from the balcony. He had an affable face, alert eyes, and his features weren’t ugly, simply fat, and he struck me as one of those handsome bald men, like the actor Michel Piccoli or the pianist Richter. He looked younger without his moustache, or perhaps it was the red moccasins, one of which lay upturned on the grass. Yet he must have been at least fifty.
    ‘Oh, it’s you. I didn’t recognise you at first with your clothes on, we usually only see each other in our beach-wear.’ He had said exactly what I had thought earlier, when I was upstairs. We had spent nearly three weeks seeing each other every day, and it was impossible that his busy eyes would not at some point have lingered, despite everything, on me or on Luisa. ‘Can’t you sleep?’
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘The air-conditioning in the room doesn’t always help. You’re better off out here, I think. Do you mind if I join you for a while?’
    ‘No, of course not. My name’s Alberto Viana,’ and he shook my hand. ‘I’m from Barcelona.’
    ‘I’m from Madrid,’ I said and told him my name. Then there was a silence, and I wondered whether I should make some trivial remark about the island or about vacations or some other almost equally trivial remark about the activities we had observed on the beach. It was my curiosity about those activities that had led me to his side by the pool, well, that and my insomnia, although I could have continued to struggle with that upstairs or even woken Luisa, but I hadn’t. I was speaking almost in a whisper. It was unlikely anyone could hear us, but the sight of Luisa, and of the night porter, sound asleep, had given me the feeling that if I raised my voice I would disturb their slumbers, and my hushed tones had immediately infected or influenced the way Viana spoke.
    ‘I’ve noticed that you’re very keen on video cameras,’ I said after that pause, that hesitation.
    ‘Video cameras?’ he said, slightly surprised or as if to gain time. ‘Ah, I see. No, not really, I’m not a collector. It isn’t the camera itself that interests me, although I do use it a lot, it’s my girlfriend, whom you’ve seen, I’m sure. I only film her, nothing else, I don’t experiment with it at all. That’s fairly obvious, I suppose. You’ve probably noticed.’ And he gave a short laugh, half-amused, half-embarrassed.
    ‘Yes, of course, my wife and I have both noticed. I think she feels slightly envious of the attention you lavish on your girlfriend. It’s very unusual. I don’t even have a regular camera. But then we’ve been married for some time.’
    ‘You don’t own a camera? Don’t you like being able to remember things?’ Viana asked me this with genuine bemusement. As I had imagined, his shirt did have a pattern, a multicoloured blend of palm trees and anchors and dolphins and ships’ prows, but nevertheless the predominant colour was the black I had seen from above; his trousers and socks still appeared to be pale blue, bluer than my white trousers, which, like his, were exposed now not just to the moonlight, but to the moon’s faint reflection in the water.
    ‘Yes, of course I do, but you can remember things in other ways, don’t you think? We all have our own camera in our memory, except that we don’t always remember what we want to remember or forget what we would prefer to forget.’
    ‘What nonsense,’ said Viana. He was a frank fellow, not at all the cautious type, and he could say things without offending the person he was talking to. He gave another short laugh. ‘How can you compare what you can remember with