Read Rocks, The for Free Online

Every year since, the first San Miguel became his madeleine. As he drank it, scenes from all those summers spent at the Rocks and around Cala Marsopa rose up whole and three-dimensional before him with all their hopes, intrigues, and desires that had somehow never been slaked.
    He drank half the bottle immediately while it was as cold as possible. Of course, if he did make
Lawrence of Arabia
, it wouldn’t be good enough for his mother (she had only seen the film once and found “all that desert excruciatingly boring”). Her job as a mother, which she took seriously, had always been to goad him with his complacent wallowing in mediocrity. His persistent nonarrival. The little triumphs—a César nomination for one of his screenplays—were heard, when he mentioned them, pronounced “how nice for you, darling,” and never mentioned again. The success and good fortune of managing to get jobs, make money, were ignored. The two years he’d spent in Los Angeles developing a screenplay that went nowhere, but for which he’d made good money, was an opportunity to offer sympathy over yet more failure. “I know you wanted it, darling, but I do think it’s as well nothing came of it. It was such absolute rubbish.” Trouble was, he agreed with her: when was he going to make it—
really
make it? When was he going to be more than an also-ran? At forty-five, could there still be something big ahead, or was this it? Small movies, made for not a franc more than the anticipated box office of German, French, and middle-European territories, ennobled by the appellation
noirish
, destined for certain oblivion; enough money to live less than another year on; and the perks of per diems, good hotel rooms, and someone like April Gressens?
    The old, cold horror gripped him: was he fated to hack his way through mediocrity?
    “Perdó.”
    He looked up. It was the catering girl with the hooked nose.
    She’d spoken reflexively in
mallorquí
, but now she said in Spanish,
“Perdóneme”
—her hands were full of plates, cutlery—
“tengo que—”
    “Yes, of course,” Luc answered in fluent Spanish. “I’m in your way.” He started to rise.
    “No, you can sit,” she said, “if I won’t disturb you. I have to lay the table.”
    She worked efficiently around him. Now he saw that she was impressively ugly. A gargoyle on the wall of an Egyptian crypt. Large black eyes, a low brow, a wide full mouth, everything asymmetrical, and that nose, like a Tintin villain. Everything else, though, was pretty good: the thick dark Spanish hair, a dancer’s body.
    “You’re
mallorquina
?” he asked.
    “My ancestors are from here. I live in Barcelona but I’ve come here to Mallorca every summer of my life.”
    “Ah, like me, except for the ancestors,” said Luc. “What are you called?”
    “Montserrat,” she said.
    “I’m called Luc—Lluc in Catalan.”
    “Yes, I know,” she said. She smiled at him suddenly, as if she knew something he didn’t that amused her intensely. “Pleased to meet you.”
    “And you,” he said. “This what you do?”
    “No. This is work for the summer. I’m studying art history, religious iconography, at the University of Barcelona.”
    The best university in Spain. Not just an asymmetrical face, then. “Are you religious?”
    “When I need to be.” She grinned. Sharp white teeth in wine red gums. “Nice to meet you—at last.” She went off to set another table.
    At last? What’s that all about?
    Now he couldn’t take his eyes off her.
Montserrat.
Her ancestors, easily discerned, were Roman, Moorish, Catalan. She was the highly evolved product of all of Mediterranean history and cultures. Luc understood her immediately as he would never fathom the opaque shallows of the homogenized April from California. Intelligence poured off her. She was quick, knowing (she knew more than he did about something, apparently), and funny. She would understand him too, he knew it absolutely. He sipped his beer,