As he wandered, he came across a real-estate agent’s office and acting on the impulse Flip Rawls had inspired, he went in. Houses? Why, Puerto Veragua was famous for the number and desirability of its houses. Beautiful houses, all practically being given away. The agent spoke in Spanish and scrappy English, helped along by the few words of Spanish Lance was able to contribute. Before he could think of the words to excuse himself, he was being bundled into a car and driven back along the road he had just traveled, past Flip Rawls’s blue door, and half a mile farther to a house not unlike hers on a miniature scale—two rooms and a kitchen built along a partly covered terrace with the same immense view of the sea. Its water supply was a well and there was no electricity. Lance was ready to admit that perhaps Flip Rawls had been right.

  Didn’t he think it was beautiful? At least, that’s what he understood the agent to ask him and he agreed that it was muy bueno. They drove back, the agent wreathed in smiles. When Lance was thanking him and taking his leave, it appeared that there had been a misunderstanding. Much Spanish, obviously angry, while Lance looked on helplessly. At last, he gathered that the agent considered the house rented. He protested. The agent insisted. Lance had apparently said something that closed the deal. Incapable of creating bad feeling where money was concerned, he gave in and asked the price. It was ludicrously low and included a servant. Lance paid the month’s rent demanded of him. He didn’t care how he spent the little money he had left, so long as he kept enough to get home. What the hell. He would stay for a week. Maybe Andy would come down for the weekend and they could go back together.

  He wrote that evening to his friend in the capital:

  Dearest Andy Bear—I made it, whatever “it” is. I’ve just been conned into taking a house for a month, which is about 25 days longer than I wanted. Don’t worry. It doesn’t cost anything. I don’t like beds you haven’t slept in, so please come and get my new one warm for me. It’s about 110 in the shade here so you don’t have to take that literally. If you have to go back to NY suddenly like you said, just leave my bags with the hotel or, if you think it’s safer, send them down here. Try to get down. I won’t go on saying thank you but I’ll never stop saying I love you.

  Sir Lancelot

  (I happen to be writing on a round table.)

  He moved in the following morning. The place was deserted but there were signs of somebody’s having been there since the day before—fresh mosquito netting over the big beds in the two rooms, some cheap garden furniture scattered about the terrace. He dropped his bag in one of the rooms and went out to the edge of the terrace.

  Silence. Silence and heat and the sun turning the sea into a blinding sheet of light. He squinted and lifted his hand and slowly began to twist his long fingers through his thick blond hair. Far off to the left he could see a big clump of foliage and a bit of tiled roof that he supposed must be Flip Rawls’s place. He pulled off his shirt and dropped it on the terrace wall and ran his hands over his muscular arms and torso, wiping away the sweat. He looked down at himself and slowly, with infinite care, plucked one stray hair from his smooth chest. It was so still that he fancied he could hear the hair give way. He lifted it between thumb and forefinger, scrutinized it to see if it had come out whole, and blew it away. He absently rubbed his chest where the hair had been and the corner of his mouth twitched. Loneliness grew in him, threatening to break his controls. This is the way it’s going to be from now on, he told himself. Where in hell was the servant the agent had promised? he wondered impatiently, seizing on any pretext to take his mind off himself.

  He looked down across rocky, precipitous ground to the sea. He couldn’t even get down to take a swim. Down maybe, but it would be hell getting up again. Well, that was something to do to pass the time. He could hack out some steps down to the sea. A private beach. His mother would approve. The Vanderholdens liked to feel they owned things that were generally considered part of the public domain, like the sea or a city park. He turned abruptly and went back to a bedroom to unpack his bag. The effort of hanging up his light summer clothes brought sweat streaming from him and he took off his trousers. Even in jockey shorts, he felt heavily dressed. He had begun to gather up his shirts when he heard a light step behind him. He turned, crouching on the floor over his bag. A girl was standing in the door.

  The sun was bright behind her, so he couldn’t see her face clearly but he saw that she was wearing a white blouse and a long full skirt that fell almost to the ground.

  They remained motionless a moment, staring at each other like two startled young animals. Then Lance sprang up, snatching his dressing gown off the floor and pulling it around him.

  “What is it?” he demanded, surprise making his voice harsh.

  The girl took a timid step back into the light. He saw that she had a flat face, like the faces he had seen in Balinese drawings, round with great, wide-apart, almond eyes and a soft mouth whose lower lip was almost the same size and shape as the upper. Her black hair was drawn straight back and wound in plaits on the back of her head. She was not tall and her body, though not heavy, looked capable of hard work. She stood with her hands at her sides gazing at him steadily with wide eyes.

  “What do you want?” he asked more mildly. “Yo no hablo español.”

  She spoke rapidly in Spanish and, seeing his look of blank incomprehension, beckoned him out onto the terrace and indicated a basket of provisions. She picked it up and led him into the kitchen where she set it down and spoke again. All her movements were slow and without sharp definition, as if she were saving her strength.

  “Usted …” Lance pointed at her and performed a complicated pantomime that included sweeping the floor, bending over the stove, and washing dishes. When he was finished he had created a meal, complete with messy pots.

  She watched him with the simple wonder of a child and finally she laughed with a restraint that matched her movements. Her body didn’t sway or contract. She uttered a series of high fluty sounds and then nodded, smiling at him, and said, “Si.” She looked awfully young to be a servant.

  He wanted to say something friendly in welcome but he could think of no words, so he made a frustrated gesture and smiled.

  “I can see it’s going to be very stimulating, from a conversational point of view,” he said. “I’ll go finish unpacking.” She received this information with unblinking attention and remained standing beside her basket of provisions until he had gone. He returned to his suitcase feeling a little less lost.

  His unpacking completed, he returned to the terrace wrapped in Flip Rawls’s sarong. He sat on the parapet, his knees up, clasped in his arms, his chin resting on them, watching the kitchen door like some odd, passionate, brooding god. Whenever a pot clattered or fat hissed over the fire, a reluctant smile played across his lips at the thought of the child performing her grownup chores. Eventually she emerged bearing a steaming dish. Lance sprang up and stood over her as she set it down on the table where a place had been set for one.

  “Adonde usted comida?” he asked, looking around for the Spanish phrase book he had brought with him. She looked up at him as blankly as if he had spoken an unknown tongue and after a moment’s hesitation started back to the kitchen without speaking. He followed her and found her own place laid on the kitchen table. He gathered up plate, knife, and fork and carried them back to his table. She trailed after him. He drew up another chair opposite his and gestured to it. She sat down obediently.

  “Comida con migo,” he said. He was watching her for signs of embarrassment or uneasiness but she seemed to be taking it placidly as part of her job. Their eyes met and he rewarded her with a dazzling smile. For the second time since he’d been here, his rich laughter burst from him at the way she sat, prim and self-contained and terribly young.

  “Well, this is great,” he said. “What have we got here?” He served them what appeared to be fish buried under a scarlet sauce and she began to eat with her head bowed over her plate. He continued to watch her.

  “You’re very pretty,” he said with his mouth full and laughed again as she looked up with a polite attention that suggested she would be delighted to speak to him if she could: “What’s your name?” He put down his knife and fork and leafed through the phrase book. Growing impatient, he put it aside and branched out on his own. “Usted. Nomme. Nomme usted.”

  She uttered her careful laughter and spoke at some length during which he heard Luisa repeated several times.

  “Usted … Luisa?” he asked.

  “Si.” She nodded.

  “Yo … Lance.” He pronounced the e as a separate syllable to make it easier for her.

  “Señor Lance,” she repeated gravely, turning the c into a soft ch and the e closer to o, as in Sancho.

  “No. No señor. Lance. Es todo. Lance.”

  “Si, señor,” she agreed.

  “Lance,” he insisted.

  “Lance,” she whispered at last with the reluctance of a child who is encouraged to do something she knows is wrong. They ate. She served several more dishes deep in fiery sauces. Every time she leaned across the table, her loose blouse fell away from her shoulders revealing her round childlike breasts. It was a pleasant sight and Lance wasn’t insensible to it, although he felt himself forever beyond the reach of physical sensation, past wanting or caring.

  When the meal was over, he withdrew to a deck chair at the end of the terrace to give Luisa working room, but he found himself watching her as she moved around the table, studying the slow-motion movements of her legs under the long skirt, observing the way her bare feet seemed to grip the ground. When she went to draw water from the well, he jumped up to help but she shook her head vigorously. It was good having somebody moving around the house. It created a homely atmosphere but it was a bit of a nuisance, too. He would have liked to stretch out naked in the sun, but the place was so small that there was no corner where she mightn’t stumble on him. Finally, he went to his room and took a nap.

  When he awoke, the sun was setting with the unleashed splendor he was learning was characteristic of Puerto Veragua. He went to the edge of the terrace and stood between sea and sky, looking down at the waves rippling into the rocky cove below and up at the glory of the passing day. It began at the top of the sky in piled-up castles of pink cloud. Below were the foundations of color on which they rested, like the strata of the earth, orange and bloodred and purple. Slowly they shifted into the deep velvet tones of night. The sky was filled with the announcement of night and the sea grew still at the wonder of it. What could one do with a day to justify the majesty of such an ending? Lance wondered with uneasy awe.

  His contemplation was interrupted by the arrival of Luisa around the corner of the house, carrying a hissing lamp that gave off a bright white light and had the effect of banishing the twilight, so that the day was turned abruptly to night. They ate a light supper together, engaging in fragmentary conversation as at lunch. When she left him, vanishing into the night, he wanted to call her back. As he sat in the bright pool of light shed by the lamp, the night drew in, whispering secretly, until it seemed to tower just outside the circle of light, threatening in its immensity.

  He had the whole long evening ahead of him, alone. He should have asked the girl to stay with him a little longer. What had ever possessed him to move to this desolate house? He stared broodingly into the night and cursed the habit of money that had made him rent it so casually. When he thought of the way he had lived these last few days, letting himself drift, lolling in the sun, he felt the quick stirring of anger with himself. He felt his mind drifting back into the past and he fought against it. It was too painful and it couldn’t tell him anything anyway, except that he had struggled to find his own place in the world—his own place, not that provided by the accident of birth—and that every time he thought he had succeeded, everything had gone terribly wrong.

  Sitting alone, with the night so close that it seemed he might touch it, the future seemed a dark void. He would stay here long enough to get his nerves straightened out and then he would go back—to work, to achieve something, even though there was no longer any hope of reward. His savings were almost gone. There was that to look forward to—the force of necessity, the relief of no longer being able to choose.

  He awoke the next morning to find Luisa already there. She presented him with a breakfast of beans and chili sauce topped by a fried egg, which after a moment’s hesitation he downed without protest. Her presence made the place seem bearable once more and in turn charged him with energy. After breakfast he set off down the road in the blazing morning sun to pay his respects to Flip Rawls and to deliver the bit of native pottery that was all he had been able to find for her in the local market. He also hoped he might borrow some tools to create his private beach.

  He found her on her terrace having breakfast, a very different affair from his, all silver pots and dainty slices of toast. The New York Times was folded beside her. He doubted that there had been anything about him in it for more than a week. In view of her strong stand on the housing situation, he was a little embarrassed about telling her what he’d done but she was unruffled by his news.

  “I’m so pleased,” she purred with the delightful tilt of her head. “I didn’t dare suggest it myself—one never knows with people—but I hoped—I had a feeling you might come to it. Those things are in our destinies.”

  Lance felt as if she had tricked him somehow. She showered him with invitations—for lunch, for dinner, for lunch the next day—all of which he refused in order to hold his own against her. Eventually he made off with a pick and shovel and trudged back along the dusty road, indulging himself by imagining that he was a real workman with a real job for which he would be paid. He had always enjoyed things that were supposed to be disagreeable, like selling his possessions during the brief period when he had had the exhilarating experience of being broke. He had been fascinated by pawnshops; necessity was a tonic.

  He attacked his self-imposed task vigorously. He liked the feel of his muscles straining and he liked the sting of sweat in his eyes and the sun burning into his body. He liked in a perverse way the searing sting in the palms of his hands as the tools raised blisters on them. By noon he had hacked tenable footholds out of the rocky ground all the way down to the cove and when he reached the bottom he let himself fall into the sea with an enormous splash, still wearing shorts and sandals.

  He worked his way out of them in the water and swam around naked for half an hour, diving and splashing and feeling surprisingly pleased with himself. Occasionally he looked up at the little house, where a flitting shadow told him reassuringly that Luisa was in competent charge. When he climbed back up in his dripping clothes, she indicated to him that lunch was ready.

  After lunch, he decided to settle the question of his privacy once and for all. He dragged a deck chair to the farthest corner of the terrace and called Luisa to him. He wanted to explain that while he was in the chair he might be naked and in any case was not to be approached. Luisa stood beside him with the patient attentiveness that was becoming familiar to him.

  “I like to take sunbaths without any clothes on,” he explained in English. He made gestures of removing his sarong and stretched himself out in the deck chair. He rose and pointed at her and made forbidding signs that were supposed to indicate that she was to keep her distance. He went through the motions of removing his sarong once again. Not convinced that he had made his point clear, he stretched out in the chair again and closed his eyes and gestured the sarong away.

  “Si,” she said.

  He heard her moving beside him and then his sarong was unfastened and hands were on his cock. He let out a yelp and shot up into a sitting position as if a gun had gone off behind him. She was kneeling beside him and her blouse was gone. Her firm young breasts pressed against his thigh as she leaned down to him and ran her lips and tongue lightly over him. He was too astonished to do anything but enjoy it. His cock sprang up to welcome her attentions. He guessed that she couldn’t be more than sixteen but she was doing everything with assurance and composure and great skill. Perhaps it was a local custom.

  She hoped that the way her father had taught her to do it would also please a foreigner. Her brothers liked it. She was the only female in the household and it was a great honor for her to be allowed to pay homage to this sacred part of a man. Her father had taught her that it was a sin only if she allowed it to be put into her, as many fathers did with their daughters. He had taught her to remove her blouse because playing with her breasts added to the pleasure. The foreigner had made it clear that he wanted to be naked. She had been sent away from her last work because she hadn’t understood her duties and she didn’t want to risk its happening again.

  The señer’s prong was much bigger than the ones she was accustomed to and she wasn’t able to put much of it into her mouth. She hoped that she could please him with her hands. She loved holding it. At first it had been as soft and tender as some small wild creature. Now it was big and hard and mighty, as if it were about to release its juice. For the first time, she didn’t want a quick ending. She loved having it in her mouth and feeling it and looking at its beautiful color, pink and golden. If all men looked like this, it would be very difficult to resist the great sin of letting them be inside her. She had never before been tempted but she longed to let this one into her.

  Recovering from his astonishment, Lance drew her up and put his mouth on her adorable breast and nibbled a nipple. She felt him get very hard when he did this and she uttered little cries of delight, knowing that she pleased him. He lowered his hands to the waistband of her skirt, trying to find out how to unfasten it. She pushed his hands away and pulled back and shook her head and spoke at some length. Was she telling him that she was a virgin and that their pleasure must be restricted? He couldn’t think of anything else she would have to say under the circumstances.