Song of Reason

Jennifer McMahon

The sun rises on Cabanas da Tavira, an off-season fishing town in the Algarve. Boats lean on keels while fishermen wait for the low tide to turn. Alone on the boardwalk, a man stands against the rail. 

     He’d left Helen back in the holiday apartment, sprawled across the bed, as is her custom. Her way, to take up all the space that is empty. As she does with him. When they met, Paul was full of emptiness. Life had hollowed him out, then she came and filled him. It is uncomfortable, being so possessed by another. To rely upon them for all support yet awaiting the occasional wash of water for a lift to some temporary liberty. Paul would like to leave but is afraid. He fears the emptying of his existence. How would it feel, to be scooped out like the inside of a boiled egg? He is forty yet depends on his lover for everything. 

     Impatient gulls wheel overhead. They usher in the day’s urgency, but Paul holds still. He won’t be rushed. He and Helen are on holiday. Her idea, this trip. “It will be relaxing.” Her voice, among the gulls. A seabird dives into the water but he can’t see why. 

     Paul cannot understand why Helen works so hard. She needn’t work at all–there’s a handsome allowance on which they could both live comfortably. He resents the days she goes to the office and leaves him at home, alone. Paul fills these days with post-war cinema, the bleak misery and pathos. The films’ grayscale and base immorality, the world still open and experimenting in new forms of expression. Driven, even, by forces outside itself. Paul feels compelled in the same way. The movies reinforce his belief that he’s too old a soul for the current zeitgeist. The gulls shriek louder. With hunger, he supposes.

The café is the only place yet open. The waiter seats Paul at an iron table on the pavement, and he orders breakfast. The café is separated from the boardwalk by a cobbled street alive with sound. Cars hum, bicycles rattle over stones. Sparrows peck around Paul’s sandals while the ever-present gulls cry in circles in the distance. Inside the café a radio plays classical music and opera. The waiter sings along in an impressive voice. He emerges with a cup, milk, and pot of coffee. 

     “You were here yesterday,” he says, pouring the beverage. “With your wife.”

     “Not my wife.” Once there had been a wife. And a child, a home. A business. Things Paul tried over and over yet failed to get right, repeating a cycle until only a void remained where the things used to be. 

     “Girlfriend?” The waiter hovers. Paul is uncertain how to explain Helen, the woman he depends on yet fears leaving. It’s not that she’s someone else’s wife. It’s as if the waiter wants Paul to speak of her taste for desperate cases, how Helen found him in a dive bar one night when she and a friend were slumming it, little rich girls with something to prove. Instead, he sips and pauses. 

     “I think so.” Paul takes his cue from the impatient gulls. “How long will breakfast be?” 

     “Not long.” The waiter retreats.

     Paul swallows bitter dregs. A cyclist wobbles on the cobbles. Yesterday he spotted a place that rents bikes. He hasn’t cycled since he was a boy. Has he had any fun since? He would like to rent one and explore.

     “You’re a lonely soul.” The waiter catches him by surprise. He’s a big man but walks softly.  

     “Sometimes.” The loneliness of being Helen’s dirty secret, whose father he would never meet. Livid, she’d said, he’d be to find out. For his daughter he expected a match of success, an investment banker or better.

     “We’re waiting for a delivery. Do you mind?” Paul doesn’t answer, so the man draws out a chair across from Paul and sits. He smiles. “My name is Ernst. You are Irish, yes?” Paul nods at the waiter. A reasonable assumption. “We get a lot of Irish here. They are okay, mostly families with small children, but they make a lot of noise. I like the quiet, the sounds of the sea. To me, it is beautiful.”

     “You’re German?” 

     “And other things. No one is only one thing.” Ernst is a man who laughs for his own benefit. “We reinvent ourselves every day, I think. Today, I am a philosopher, tomorrow I will be something else. Why are you here?”

     “Vacation. And you?” The waiter’s eyes are a pale gray, deep-set and knowing. He seems wiser if not older than Paul, who admires his self-assurance and believes it rooted in a proximity to the sea.

     “I escaped,” Ernst’s hands spread to encompass the world beyond the boardwalk. “For many years, I represented artists of all types. It was my art to sell theirs. But making art is more important than making money from it.”

     “I don’t know much about art.” Paul doesn’t know much of anything except his own failures and inability to alter them.

     The waiter turns both hands palms-up. “But you have a heart.” 

     “In general terms, yes.” Paul is unmoored by the waiter’s gesture and feels something untether.

     “Then you have everything you need to appreciate art. You think you must understand it, but that is another thing. Appreciating is about falling in love.” At this, a small delivery van pulls up to the kerb.

     “Then I’m screwed.” Paul’s smile is sad.

     “You think you cannot love?”  Ernst rises and waves at the driver who has climbed into the back of the van to sort boxes.

     “Or become lost in it.” He is lost now, but at sea, beyond love. 

     The waiter squeezes Paul’s shoulder, a consolation. “Love can be a disease if it is not well tolerated.” The driver steps down and Ernst gestures at the stack of boxes now beside the van. “This is what we have been waiting for!” He winks at Paul as he carries the boxes into the café. “Soon you will have your breakfast, and all will be well.” 

***

Waking, she tumbles across the bed and to her feet with the eagerness of a child and in this moment he remembers why he fell for her, the infectious energy, but when she takes his hand and lays her palm upon his chest, he feels only a hatred of himself.  The gaping penthouse holds all the space she craves. A bank of windows to the east admits a morning light that flatters with contrast her dark hair and tanned skin. When he does not return her gesture, she puts on a white robe and he moves into the kitchen to make her coffee. 

     “I saw a place that leases bicycles.” He stirs in the correct amount of sugar, adds a splash of milk. “I think we should rent a pair and explore. There’s a church I’d like to see, not that I want to pray or anything.” He hands her the warm mug and takes the seat adjacent. “Isn’t that what people do on holiday?” 

     “Dolphins,” she says decisively.

     “Oh. I think they run boat tours from the boardwalk, whale and dolphin spotting.” He imagines the two of them, their boat at sea, the day long, and feels queasy. “I’m not sure they run this late in the year, but we’ll do whatever you want. It’s your holiday.”

     “Our holiday!” As if this made it so. This is how people like her show compassion for the less well off. Like himself.

     “Well. I mean, you chose it.” As she’d chosen him: divorced, broke, drinking too much. The clink of her drained mug on the glass-top table recalls the litter of shot glasses before him that night; his reflection in the table glass as dead-eyed as it had been in the bar mirror. Both times, his weren’t the only eyes staring back.

     “Hmm,” she says and holds out her cup. He takes and refills it from the now-empty pot. 

     “There’s none left,” he says to himself. Helen takes the mug from him, smiling. It’s only half-full. She really does try, but she’ll get fed up eventually. He’d rather it happened sooner.

     “What do you want?” She’s sincere. If he’s being honest, he wants her to fail. To fail at helping him. He wants a ride on a rented bike to a church where other people’s failures are confessed in whispers.

     “Nothing. I want you to be happy.” It’s all he can say. It is easier this way, easier to surrender. She was something, after all, to his nothing. Deserving of happiness.

     “Why wouldn’t I be happy?” 

     “No reason,” he shrugs, a gull who won’t enter the fray.

     “Cetaceans,” she offers. “I’ve never seen one. How’s the weather for it?”

     “Mild but overcast.”

     “I expected better. Why bicycles?”

     “It was something I did when I was young.”

     She stands, tightens the belt on her robe. “We’ll cycle, then.” 

***

“Not a loser?”

     “I don’t think of you that way.”

     “How do you think of me?” 

     “As a cliché,” she’d said, but he knows she meant something else.

***

Cabanas de Tavira falls graciously to the sea, rises from it with less civility. Paul leads the way up and around an old cottage. The entangled olive grove of twisted limbs and loaded branches is perhaps how olive groves look at their best. He stops and leans against the rough stone wall, turns to watch Helen’s labored approach. Her cheeks are flushed, hair plastered to her forehead. Sunlight arcs through her blouse.  

     “Whose idea was this?” She dismounts and pushes her bicycle the last yard. When she reaches him, she leans it against the wall and heaves in air. 

     “It’ll be easier going back.” 

     “Isn’t everything?” He’d like to agree but doesn’t. “How far to the church?” Impatience in the question, a hurry to accomplish.

     “Another mile or two.”

     “It’d better be a cathedral, a la Notre Dame.” She stands straight, then arches her back the other way. “Do you feel like a kid again, cycling around?”

     “Not at all.” He is weary.

     “Some things, we can’t recapture.” She takes his hand, winds her fingers between his. “I love you.” 

     “I love you too.” He feels the unmooring again, pulling away from the slip.

     “Are you leaving me? I sense something I can’t name.” Was that what he was doing?

     “Like you said, there are things we can’t recapture. I was happy once, and I had a good life.”

     Her head drops and she sniffs. “You mean you’re not happy now?” 

     Paul clears his throat and waits for words to come. “Let’s press on to the church.”

     She shakes herself, takes her bike and turns it around. “You go ahead. I’m going back to the apartment.”

     “Helen?” But he’s pushed back by the current and does not reach for her.

     She pedals, doesn’t look back. The view is excellent, encompasses the harbour, the distant beach, the coastline’s curve. But the church is no longer an attractive destination. What was he even thinking? He hasn’t set foot in years. Helen will be crying, he thinks. It hurts to be disappointed. To not get her way, whatever that is.

     He allows her a few minutes’ lead then mounts his bicycle and coasts back to town, to the cobbled street along the boardwalk. The café is closed, Ernst gone home for the day and there’s nowhere for Paul to go but the apartment. He finds her waiting and weeping in the way of a child who knows she’ll get what she wants. Their lovemaking, entangled, twisted and dirty, leaves them both feeling older than they are.

     “I don’t want you to go,” she breathes in his ear.

     “Then I’ll stay.” The light is fading in the room. The sky beyond the panes an indigo bank of clouds.

     “Promise?”

     He rolls away from her. She’s asleep when he returns from the bathroom, her breathing matched to the waves down in the harbour. Ascending and retreating, life and death. No one lives forever, not even Helen. He imagines she will regret this time wasted on a cliché, while he, as long as he lives, nurses his shame.

***

The fishing boats are out early, dark spots against the brightening horizon where whales and dolphins swim in a sea of dreams. Paul inhales a deep, briny breath and imagines Helen in the apartment, making use of its emptiness. 

     “I came here like you,” Ernst says. “On vacation with a girl. I thought it was love, but it was something else.” He laughs and taps the railing with his ring. The metal clinks. “She loved me, I thought I should love her too. I didn’t want to disappoint her, was it. When she went home, I stayed.”

     “You said you escaped.” 

     “I did. Escaped from love! It was for the best. She’s married with children but still calls to ask how I am. It’s amazing how long a delusion can last.” He taps once more and returns to the café.

     Paul shields his eyes against the rising sun, to better scan the horizon. He imagines what lies beyond, such dreams as only clouds can see. The sun rises but will fall again. Maybe it will find him here tomorrow, bearing witness, or it won’t. 

     The sun ascends higher and one by one the boats return. In the café, Ernst raises his voice: a snatch of O sole mio. 

The sun, my own sun,

It shines before you.

     Over the rumble of diesel engines, over rattling bicycles and shrieking gulls, Paul hears the music. Falls for the lover’s song. He has no good reason to stay but he will, even if it’s only a delusion. Since when did reason have anything to do with love?   

     He crosses to the café and the sun bears witness.

© Variant Literature Inc 2023