It was crowded on the beach, but most people were unconscious. Sheila was asleep on one of the beds, and Irwin, the writer, was writing on his laptop under an umbrella. He had written a bestseller in the 1970s, and an American who writes a bestseller sells millions of books. He lived frugally, Irwin, and would be able to last the rest of his life with the proceeds of that book. He had given me the book the third year I came to Las Urraccas. With his animated handwriting that he must have practiced for a long time, he had put a tedious assignment in it, 'For Teddy, yours sincerely Irwin Clark the Third.’
It took me the whole holiday to read the book. Every day, he asked me where I was and would stroke his chin when I said they had just met in the Boston University Library or had gone hiking together in the Adirondacks. Every scene in the book was interspersed with a graphically described sex scene, so when I told Irwin that they were taking a boat ride to Nantucket, Irwin knew that the next scene was Bernard and Sylvia's threesome with Deirdre or when I mentioned that they had visited New York by car, he knew that there was a hot lesbian scene where Bernard watched Sylvia and Deirdre do what they wanted.
The sex scenes were the only reason the book sold so well; Irwin couldn't write well. His dialogues faltered, his plot rattled on all sides and led nowhere, but his sex scenes were juicy.
After I finally finished it, I told Irwin that his sex scenes were arousing. I had nothing positive to say about the book and wanted to say something friendly. That night, Irwin tried to woo me at the Coconut, a downtown restaurant in a tropical garden full of trees and flowering plants. I had drunk my pina colada at the bar there, made with rum, fresh coconut, and fresh pineapple juice, a drink that I don't drink anymore, but that was my favorite drink in Zihuat for the first few years. I had reserved a table at half past nine and was pimping on my own. Irwin was drinking beer that he couldn't take very well, and he came up to me and asked me about his book and if I could tell him what I liked about the book.
The memory of that night bored and annoyed me.
It annoyed me that I needed to think about something different every time to avoid facing what had happened.
I recognized this. This was usually my reaction. In previous disasters, too, I would have preferred to delve into something else rather than face what happened or had happened.
I had to go back to the Internet café to find out the best way to travel from here to Chile.
I got back to the bungalow to get dressed. I walked through the beautiful, well-kept garden where the bungalows of Las Urracas were located.
The garden was large and luxuriant, full of green plants with colorful flowers, tall palm trees with light green trunks, winding paths of white stones trimmed with long walls of two bricks on each other, riding red stones with white mortar. Behind the garden was a high white wall: the large white house where the manager of the bungalow park lived with his family. They had two children, an intelligent girl and a little leptosome boy. As regular Las Urracas goers, we had set up a fund where we deposited a small amount every month to pay for the education of those children. The girl sat on the porch doing her homework and waved at me. I waved back, jumped on my scooter, and drove back to Zihuat.