1:35:03
I'd go to a faraway end
of the beach and write post cards...
1:35:06
...and letters and keep up
my third person journal...
1:35:10
...until it was time to meet him
outside the bathhouses on the street.
1:35:14
He would come out... followed.
1:35:18
Who'd follow him?
1:35:20
The hungry young people that climbed
over the fence from the free beach.
1:35:25
He'd pass out tips among them,
as if they'd all...
1:35:28
...shined his shoes
or called taxis for him.
1:35:32
Each day the crowd got bigger...
1:35:35
...noisier, greedier.
1:35:38
At last, we stopped going out there.
1:35:41
And after that? After you stopped
going to the public beach?
1:35:45
Then one day...
1:35:46
...a few days after we'd stopped
going out to the beach...
1:35:51
...it was a blazing white day.
1:35:54
Not a blazing hot blue day,
but a blazing hot white one.
1:35:59
We had a late lunch at a shabby,
lonely restaurant by the sea there.
1:36:03
Sebastian was white as the weather.
1:36:06
He had on a white silk suit,
a white tie, a white Panama.
1:36:11
And he kept touching his face
and his throat here and there...
1:36:15
...with a white silk handkerchief...
1:36:17
...popping little white pills
into his mouth all the time.
1:36:20
I knew he was having a bad time with
his heart and that it frightened him.
1:36:24
"Let's go north," he kept saying.
1:36:26
"I think we've done Cabeza de Lobo.
I think we've done it, don't you?"
1:36:31
I thought we'd done it.
1:36:32
Then there were those children
along the beach...
1:36:35
...which was fenced off with wire
from the restaurant.
1:36:39
Our table was less than a yard away
from the wire fence.
1:36:43
And those children...
1:36:46
There was a band of them.
1:36:48
They looked like a flock
of plucked birds...
1:36:51
...and they came darting up
to the wire fence...
1:36:53
...as if they'd been blown
there by the wind...
1:36:56
...by the hot, white wind
from the sea.
1:36:58
They were all calling out,
"Pan! Pan! Pan!"