Lost Luggage (23 page)

The girl took his advice and sat down by a thick-paned window, staring out, fascinated by the battle between clouds and sea. From time to time, with rhythmic surges, a large wave loomed, a shimmering enamel-gray slick like a whale's belly glinting in the sun, engulfing the view and then collapsing back into the water. Then the whole boat shuddered with an undulating thrust, and Anna felt the spasms of seasickness again. The coffee and teacake remained untouched on the table. She lit another cigarette.

In the distance she could see the four men concentrating hard on their game. They dealt, placed their bets, and the cards slid across the white Formica tabletop. In 1966, a franc was a lot of
money for a Spanish truck driver. Gabriel and Bundó had begun by checking out the lay of the land and betting low. Monsieur Champion had immediately adopted the distant, overstuffed look of an aristocrat in Monte Carlo, holding his head high and looking down his nose as he placed his bets. He was smoking a cigar but didn't seem to be enjoying it, as if his real aim was to foul the air. Ibrahim limited himself to following his master's instructions. He was only winning back his bets, but whenever they lost the hand Monsieur Champion went for him.

“
Nom de Dieu
!
Que tu es simple, mon Ibrahim
!
Quel gaspillage
!”

A spray of water hit the window, and Anna's view went cobwebby as if the glass had cracked on impact. A few seconds later, a screech on the public address system shattered the players' concentration. First in English and then in French, the Captain announced that the ferry had been caught in an unforeseen storm and they'd have to make a detour south. There'd be an hour's delay in the crossing, perhaps even more. He apologized for any inconvenience this adverse weather might cause—totally contrary to the wishes of the company—and suggested that passengers entertain themselves with the facilities offered on board the
Viking III.
In response to the formal, droning voice, a fast-whirling eddy sucked in the ferry then spat it out. The jolting was terrifying. The lights flickered and there was a collective shriek from the passengers. A din of smashing crockery. Anna's coffee spilt over the table and she stanched the tide with paper napkins. The four players simultaneously performed the same reflex action of holding their cards in one hand and pinning down the coins with the other. Even so, three or four of Bundó's went rolling across the floor. An Englishman, the same one who'd been talking to himself on deck, somehow climbed up on the handrail of the stairs and started reciting Shakespeare.

“Down with the topmast! Yare! Lower, lower!” he shouted, gesturing as if commanding the multitude with the words of the boatswain at the start of
The Tempest.

“Will we be arriving very late?” Bundó asked, gripping the coins in his hand. “What time are they expecting our young lady?”

“She won't be admitted till tonight. They're doing the job tomorrow morning. There's plenty of time.”

The ferry made another giddy movement, not as violent as the last one but more startling as if it were skidding across the water. The actor responded by raising his voice.

“A plague upon this howling!”

Monsieur Champion dealt out the cards, still looking smug. He'd just won a hand, a small fortune, with a bit of bluffing that the truck drivers hadn't spotted. Ibrahim, in contrast, had been twitchy and squirming in his chair for some time. Finally, he dared to stand up.

“I'm just going down for a moment to check on Sans Merci. I'm worried that . . .”

“You're not moving from here, Ibrahim,” the Frenchman ordered. “Sit down. Sans Merci's used to this kind of turbulence—more than you and I are. It's in his blood. One of his ancestors pulled the royal coaches in the revolution. And anyway, we're on a lucky streak and we've got to make the most it. These Spaniards owe us.”

Bundó opened the betting with a timid peseta. A humiliated Ibrahim mechanically picked up his cards. His mind, however, was down in the hold, picturing the horse, frantic, trying to stay upright in his narrow box, sweating like he did on the racecourse, waiting for the signal in the starting box. Except, this time, there was no course ahead where he could let off steam.

“Lay her a-hold, a-hold! Set her two courses; off to sea again; lay her off.”

The English actor was quieter now, though he persisted with his recital. The cafeteria had gradually filled with an unrelenting but oddly harmonious din, like a village social club. The roaring of the sea outside might have been background jazz. If it weren't for all the movement, no one would have known they were in the middle of a storm. In one corner, thick cigar smoke gave the table of the four card players an aquarium-like glow. A new sound rose to join
the hubbub: On the far side, two boys were sitting on the floor, one playing the guitar and the other singing unfamiliar songs, by Bob Dylan, Donovan, and Eric Burdon. Anna had never heard them before. She could tell that the boys were French from their accents. After a while she went over to them, greeted them with a nod, and sat on the floor with them. They looked at her without interrupting their music. She offered them a cigarette and both accepted.

“Anna,” she introduced herself.

“Ludovic.”

“Raymond.” He accompanied this with a guitar riff.

Ludovic gave him a shove for showing off. Both had long tousled hair. Unshaven. They'd applied black eyeliner and were wearing a sort of uniform of shabby corduroy trousers, woolen pullovers, silver-threaded scarves, and military jackets. They must have been about twenty, no more, and they were brothers. From Paris. Their grandmother had knitted the pullovers. With a good distance between her and the truck drivers, left to her own devices and speaking French, Anna now felt more secure. She asked where they were going (London). They wanted to know if she was traveling alone (yes), and then they invited her to travel with them (we'll see). They'd been given an address in Brixton where they could stay for a few days. They'd be visiting music shops, putting up ads saying they were looking for a drummer and bassist. They were going to form a band. Didn't have a name yet. They were going to hit the big time.

“Do you know anything by Brassens?” Anna asked when she finished her cigarette. She felt like singing with them.

“Shit no!” Raymond rejoined. “We don't play French stuff. We're fed up with all that poetry. We don't want to save anyone. Each to his own, okay? Life's got a lot of colors. It's not just black-and-white. And we don't like cats.”

“Brassens, Brel, Ferré! They're a pain in the arse!”

“Gainsbourg! Serge Gainsbourg! All right, he's okay. And Boris Vian. But we want to make our name in English. So we sing in English.”

Raymond couldn't resist strumming the first few bars of Donovan's
“Sunshine Superman,” and Ludovic shut his eyes. Psychedelia was so powerful, even when reduced to a simple acoustic guitar. Anna felt wounded, as if these two long-haired boys were attacking her summers of singing “La mauvaise réputation” on the beach.

“Oh yeah? And how do you think you're going to make your name?” she challenged them.

The two brothers looked at each other again, smiling as one. They apparently shared some secret.

“I feel free, I feel free, I feel free . . . Dance floor is like the sea; Ceiling is the sky . . .” Ludovic sang.

“What cares these roarers for the name of king? To cabin: silence! Trouble us not.” From the other side of the cafeteria, Shakespeare's words answered Cream's.

“We've got a few songs,” the more practical Raymond added. “And if they don't work for us because they're too predictable or too strange, we know how to write new ones.”

“How?” Anna asked.

The boys exchanged another glance. They were expecting the question. Ludovic put his hand in a pocket of his backpack and pulled out a matchbox. He opened it to reveal a few scraps of blotting paper.

“Tripping. We're the dukes of the stratosphere, we're the liquid flame that nourishes the sun . . .”

“The skin of the chameleon between two shades, black diamond held between a Javanese girl's thighs . . .”

Anna was amazed. She didn't know if they were making fun of her or not.

“They're the words of our songs,” Raymond informed her.

That summer, Anna had smoked her first joint. A Belgian painter and his girlfriend had joined her group on the beach one night and passed around a few spliffs. She'd tried them. At first she felt giddy—it was scary—but by the third toke all the muscles of her body were tingling so agreeably that, like everyone else, she started giggling nonstop. Later the same night she heard talk of psychedelic drugs. Someone said there were some English guys in Platja d'Aro, who were at Tiffany's disco every night putting
on the Byrds and the Animals and, around daybreak, they would invite their friends to try some amazing new stuff. The lucky ones went down to the beach near Ramis Point and were blown away by an indescribable mystical experience. The word was that, for a few hours, they inhabited parallel dimensions. The initiated said a fount bubbled up in their brains, a wellspring of sensations that transformed the world, turning it into a richer place, a sort of comic strip but with more love in it. Coming down from the trip, everyone described it differently, but everyone wanted to have another go the next day.

“What are those bits of paper? LSD?” Anna asked. The three letters felt thrilling on her tongue. Chance had dropped her right at the heart of this world of privilege. The two boys nodded. A spark of intimacy bonded the three of them. “I want to try it.”

“Now? Here?” Though they were playing at being the experts, the brothers had only dropped acid three times, very much behind closed doors, in the place where they rehearsed. “It's too dangerous.”

With a new onslaught from the sea, the ferry juddered from bow to stern, a shiver running up Neptune's spine.

“More dangerous than this? This trip's getting to be too much.” Anna pronounced the words looking at once desperate and angelic. The brothers couldn't say no. Raymond opened the matchbox again.

“Let's share a small hit, okay? To last a couple of hours. We need to have our wits about us when we get to the English coast.”

Raymond took out one of the brownish bits of paper, broke it into three equal shares and handed them out.

“Put it under your tongue and it'll dissolve,” Ludovic instructed, showing her what to do. Anna imitated him with trembling fingers.

The next day, or months later, when she tried to remember those first moments, Anna would be incapable of providing any logical sequence to what happened next. The version she offered her friends, like a dream narrated to a shrink, wove between snippets of the two brothers, her own experience, and the astounded looks on the faces of their fellow passengers, Bundó and Gabriel included. She could clearly recall, for example, that it took ages for
the acid to take effect, half an hour that seemed to stretch forever in which she and the brothers gazed into each other's eyes, creating a kind of visual circle that contained the three of them, and only the three of them. Shakespeare's lines reached them from the background, very far away—the English actor was indefatigable—coupled with the voice of the Captain, addressing the passengers once again because the storm was getting worse, with thunder and lightning, Saint Mark, Saint Matthew, Saint Barbara don't leave me now, it'd be much better if the
splasssshfff
of the pounding waves wasn't too close, otherwise the booming
barrrrummm
from the bottom of the sea—
sluuurp!
—will show no mercy and will suck everyone down, amen.

“Are we too good-looking, do you think?” the brothers asked. We want to be uglier. Ugly, horrible. Ugly. Horrible. Like Serge Gainsbouuuurg, with great big eeeeears, and great big hooooked Jeeeewish nose. Beauty lies wiiiiithin, or it iiiiiisn't beauuuuuty, Anna Aneeeette.”

Her only response was to kiss their mouths, which had the iodized taste of an oyster and a pearl (not that she really knew what a pearl tasted like).

Her first experience of the LSD appeared in the simple, perfect form of a drop of water. She was the center of that drop. It had fallen from the sky without a sound, and, all around it, concentric circles were expanding and painting the world. Outside, the rain splashing the glass was a bubbly orange, Fanta orange. Anna opened her eyes wider (now that they were enjoying a life without oppressive eyelids), mentally embracing everything the circles contained. First of all, it was the two brothers. Like a Hindu deity, Raymond had sprouted four more arms and an elephant's trunk and was playing the guitar, but instead of music, it radiated golden light, the color of happiness, which he was sniffing at with his trunk. At his side, an ecstatic Ludovic had gone so pale that he was white and two-dimensional. Every part of his body, every piece of clothing had a number written on it. Anna only had to read it to know what color she had to apply with a paintbrush made of eyes. While she was filling in the colors of the jigsaw, Ludovic was
weeping with joy, and his tears were watering his trousers. A floral penis was growing in his groin, as succulent and threatening as a carnivorous flower. Anna spotted the English actor in the distance (a fluorescent skeleton trying to hold its skull in place and reciting Hamlet's monologue) and saw that the four card players, who were now five (as a purple-skinned, cigar-smoking baby had joined them), were dressed up in medieval gear and holding hands as they played.