The Six O’Clock Ferry

In Calablanca, August was measured in lemon ice creams. Alba Ribas kept count in an oilcloth-covered notebook behind the counter of the kiosk that had been her grandmother’s: one hundred and twelve on Monday, one hundred and forty on Tuesday and, on Wednesday, one of those days hot enough to glue flip-flops to the asphalt, one hundred and ninety-three. It was the only statistic in town she cared about. The others —how many young people left in September, how many came back— she preferred not to know.

At five she shut the freezer, hung up the sign that said «Back in a bit (or tomorrow)» and carried her paint bucket up the path to the cape. The Calablanca lighthouse was white only on postcards. Up close it was a stone cylinder with peeling whitewash, a green door that didn’t quite close and, for nine summers now, a blue whale painted around its base, circling the whole tower, chasing its own tail.

The whale was hers. Every August she added something: a shoal of sardines, a rowing boat, the initials of two people who had married on the pier. This year it needed repainting from end to end, because Saturday was the Night of the Lanterns and the whole town would come down to the lighthouse jetty to set paper lanterns on the water. It was the one night of the year when Calablanca made itself beautiful without anyone asking.

Tomás, the last lighthouse keeper, was already in his rush-seat chair by the door, transistor radio in his lap, cap pulled down to his eyebrows. He was eighty-one, had a small pension and the habit of commenting on the shipping forecast as if it were the football scores.

"Northwesterly swell," he announced. "One-nil to the northwest."

"Good afternoon to you too, Tomás."

"You look like you’re in a hurry."

"I’ve got four days and half a whale."

Tomás scratched his white beard with the radio aerial. It was his way of announcing that he knew something and had no intention of giving it away for free.

Alba climbed the scaffolding, which was really two painter’s ladders and a plank that had once been a door, and started on the tail fluke. At that hour the light fell sideways across the bay and turned everything the color of a peach. Down below, the harbor was getting ready for the festival: the Town Hall people were stringing garlands of bulbs between the lampposts, the baker had set up his trestles to sell coca, and two children were fighting over a fishing rod with no hook, with the gravity of a court case.

Tomás’s radio crackled. It wasn’t the forecast: it was the ferry channel.

"Calablanca, this is the Gaviota," said the voice of Nuria, who had skippered the ferry since she was twenty-two and spoke over the radio as if she were in her own kitchen. "Coming in in ten minutes. Somebody tell Alba I’ve got a package for her."

Alba set her brush down in the pot. Tomás turned up the volume with suspicious slowness.

"What package?" he asked into the microphone, because no one in town had ever understood that the channel was not a telephone.

"A tall one," Nuria answered. "With a hard hat. And some plans under his arm that say 'Provincial Council' in very large letters. Over."

There was a silence in which you could clearly hear Tomás saying nothing.

She had been hearing the rumor for a month, like everyone else. The lighthouse had a crack. A real one, the kind you can see from the beach at low tide: it rose from the base, crossed the second-floor window and disappeared under the gallery. The Provincial Council was sending an architect to sign a report, and the report had two possible answers. One was «repairable». The other was a bulldozer.

"They say the report has to be in before Saturday," the woman at the tobacco shop had said. "That if they knock it down, they’ll do it before winter."

"They say there’s some man from Barcelona who wants to put a glass hotel up there," the baker had said.

"They say the architect is from here," Nuria had said the week before, looking at her over a glass of horchata with an intent Alba had decided not to understand.

Now she understood it.

She climbed down with her hands stained blue. Tomás was already on his feet, leaning against the frame of the green door, and for the first time all summer he had nothing to say.

"It’s none of my business," said Alba.

"Of course not," said Tomás.

"I’m going down to the pier because I need turpentine."

"They don’t sell turpentine on the pier."

"Then I’ll see if they do."

The Gaviota docked with its usual thump against the tires on the jetty. Off came a family with a beach cooler, two cyclists, a dog that didn’t seem to belong to anyone and, last of all, a tall man in a linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a tube of plans over his shoulder and a white hard hat hanging from his belt, as if he were about to pick a fight with a building.

Ten years is a long time for a face. Leo Ferrán’s shoulders had broadened and a vertical line had appeared between his eyebrows, the kind you earn by looking closely at small things. But he still walked the same way: leaning slightly forward, as if he were late for something that hadn’t started yet. And he still had the habit of looking at the lighthouse first and at people second.

He looked at the lighthouse. He looked at the half-painted whale. And then, between the baker’s trestles and the children with the fishing rod, he looked at her.

Alba had rehearsed this. Not out loud, because she wasn’t a fool, but on plenty of nights, with the window open and the fan on. In the rehearsal she always said something witty and he was left speechless. In the rehearsal she didn’t have blue paint up to her elbows.

Leo stopped three steps away. He took off his sunglasses, which was the worst part, because behind them were the same eyes he’d had at nineteen: brown, attentive, with that habit of apologizing ahead of time.

"Hi, Alba," he said.

From the Gaviota’s wheelhouse, Nuria sounded the horn exactly once, in case anyone in town hadn’t heard yet.