"Are you really?" said Richard, squinting and blowing a dense blue stream of Cuban smoke upward toward the leafy overhead trellis.

"Really and truly. Thank you so much, Lukey darling, for such a lovely water-ski." She extended a hand toward him and moved her fingers as if caressing his cheek, though he was seven feet away.

"Anytime," said Luc.

And off she went.

This was it! A ruse-it had to be. Going to bed so early when Richard would stay up for hours more playing backgammon with either Cassian or Dominick now that he was here. Luc excused himself too, awkwardly, walking stiffly to his little toolshed along the wall.

He lit a candle and tidied his bed and then sat on it. He listened for noise without, and heard the chat of the diners still at the table, but no steps or rustlings along the path between his shed and the pool. After a few minutes he turned on the small, low-wattage electric lamp beside the bed and tried reading-he was on a Franoise Sagan jag, going through her little livres de poche in French, currently in the middle of Les Merveilleux Nuages, but he couldn't get through a sentence. After twenty minutes he turned out his light, blew out the candle, and wandered down to the bar. Richard and Dominick were playing backgammon at a table. Other guests were drinking at the bar. His mother was sitting at a table with Cassian and Tom and Milly.

Arabella had gone to bed.

Luc rode his Rieju motorcycle into town, parked it on the street outside the Miravista, where the soft tones of Jackson Rale's electric guitar were floating over the walls like a vapor. He walked through the archway entrance, along the short path, and stopped at the top step overlooking the open dance floor beneath the tall pines. He scanned the dancers and the people at the tables. He knew half of them. Aegina wasn't there, unless she was in the loo.

Jackson Rale, a black American guitarist of indeterminate middle age, was playing "Besame Mucho." When he stopped and took a sip of his drink, Luc approached him.

"Hey, Jackson." It was the way the American always greeted him, and Luc had started to say the same to Jackson.

"Hey, man," said Jackson. "What's cookin'?"

"Oh, nothing much," said Luc. He understood that Jackson wasn't really inquiring about anything, nor, probably, did he care what, if anything, was cooking, nor if there were a petroleum tanker fire blazing out on the street. Jackson exuded an immense if polite indifference to everything around him except his guitar and his Cuba libre. Mateo Pujols, the Miravista's owner, had obtained his services for the months of July and August through a booking agent in Palma. Jackson was a large man, not fat, but like one of those padded American football players gone to seed. He sat in the Miravista's patio under the pines beside the open-air dance floor and played short sets with his electric guitar. His technique didn't call attention to itself. He didn't play rock and roll or jazzy riffs, but steadily picked out an ancient repertoire of nightclub standards as soft filler between the longer and much louder sets of new and recent pop records that people came to the Miravista to dance to. Jackson's fingers were the size of pork sausages and looked far too large for the guitar's narrow fret board, yet he played smoothly and dependably, as if in his sleep. Luc particularly liked one song he played, a tune he'd heard before, maybe in a movie, but didn't know the name of, and he'd asked Jackson, a couple of weeks ago, what it was called.

"'Perfidia,'" said Jackson.

"I like it," said Luc.

"Yeah, it works," drawled Jackson. "Every time."

"Per . . ."

"'Perfidia,'" Jackson repeated. "An old Mexican song."

"Is it a woman's name?" asked Luc.

"Perfidia?" Jackson started to laugh, softly, rhythmically, a deep note of satisfaction, as he sat on a barstool beside his small amplifier under the trees, tuning his guitar, a dark-red-tinted Gretsch Chet Atkins Country Gentleman with considerable wear in the varnish below the strings. "It should be," he said, "heh, heh." He looked at Luc, his black face inscrutable and at the same time all-knowing. "It's a word for what some woman do to a man." Jackson looked away and raised his Cuba libre to his mouth.

In a second, Luc understood. "Oh. Yeah." Then he was incredibly grateful to Jackson for his man-to-man confidence. Perfidia: Mexican for blow job? And a song named for that? Putain, those Mexicans.

That's what he wanted from Arabella and had imagined until it ached: a perfidia out on his boat.

"Jackson, have you seen my friend Aegina? She's a little younger-"

"I know who you mean. Your little Spanish-looking girlfriend-"

"Well, she's not really my girlfriend, we're just friends."

"You better think that one through again," said Jackson. "But I ain't seen her, man. She ain't been in. Not tonight, so far."

"Okay, thanks." Luc scanned the crowd again, irresolute. Then he turned to leave. "See you, then, Jackson."

"Yep," said Jackson, with the enthusiasm of a mailman confirming the inevitability of the next day's visit. He put his drink down, returned his hand to his guitar. His thick fingers trembled lightly over the strings of the Gretsch and "Embraceable You" burbled out of his amplifier.

Luc walked back out to the street and started his motorcycle.

Four.

Every evening at seven, a nun, Sor Victoria, came to Paloma's room. She smiled at Gerald but said nothing to him, except on the first occasion, when she came in and asked, "Permiso?" And Gerald, momentarily alarmed to see a sister of God, but quickly grateful, had nodded and said yes. Sor Victoria always sat on the edge of the bed and took Paloma's hand in her own and prayed quietly, raptly: "Dios, le ruego en el nombre de su hijo, Jesus Cristo . . ." When she was finished, she placed the limp hand over Paloma's heart and, with only a nod toward Gerald, withdrew.

After she was gone, Gerald usually turned off the noisy fan and opened the windows opposite Paloma's bed. Then the katabatic winds dropping from the pine-forested Serra de Tramuntana after sunset blew across the fertile midplain of the island, carrying spores of citrus and smoke and manure off the small farms of Mallorca, and the cool earthy breeze filled the room and diluted the pervasive hospital smell. The organic sounds outside the hospital-cars straining through streets sized for donkeys, glasses being set down and cleared off tables in cafes, women calling to children at great distances above the rising buzz and fade of mopeds and scooters-entered the room to dampen the insistent metronomic whoosh of the ventilator that sometimes, when the window was closed, seemed to grow so loud in the room that Gerald thought it must have engaged another gear or be forcing air into Paloma with greater effort, until he realized he was playing tricks on himself and he got up and went outside for a cigarette.

At eight, as Paloma's intravenous monomeal continued to drip from bags into her arm, Gerald put aside the book he'd been trying to read and broke out his oval slab of floury bread, hard cheese, olives, figs, uncorked his wine, and ate his dinner. Sitting beside her for two days, he had tried to read but found it difficult to concentrate. At moments, he'd talked to Paloma, on the chance that she could hear him, but he wasn't good at chatting inventively or cheerfully to her supine, vacant, huffing and puffing body. He was too aware of the magnitude of her absence, and he lapsed into grim, fidgety silences. He gave himself over completely to eating the food he'd brought with him. Like smoking, it gave him something distracting, physical, and ordinary to do. The small normal preparations and movements, even chewing and swallowing, comforted him. He'd heard on a BBC program that ants, suddenly exposed when a sheltering rock or rotting fallen tree limb is removed from above them, immediately stop to wash their faces, a familiar routine that reassures them against the stress and fear of sudden change. Gerald didn't know if this was true, but he understood it. Smoking and eating and other mechanical daily tasks made him feel better.

Billie appeared at nine. She was flustered.

"She's gone off and she didn't come back. Gerald, do you really think it's a good idea that she has a moped?"

Gerald looked toward Paloma. "Paloma did. She bought it for her. She thought it would be good for Aegina to be more independent. Able to go off and see her friends."

"But she's only fourteen. I mean, is it even legal? And she doesn't wear a helmet. Aren't you worried about her?"

"Yes, of course I'm worried about her. I worry about her when she's asleep in bed in the other room. I still get up in the middle of the night to see if she's breathing-"

"I mean about the moped."

"I know you do. It is legal, and nobody here wears a helmet. She wouldn't if I insisted. But that's the Spanish, they're much more rough-and-tumble than we are. Paloma would let Aegina wander off all over town when she was quite young, seven and eight. She thought it was good for her. I always see the specter of disaster, I imagine the worst vividly, terrible things. But her mother"-he looked down at the figure in the bed-"always thinks everything will be all right."

Billie sat down and stared at Paloma. "Can she hear us, do you think?"

"They say not. But"-Gerald swung his head and gazed at Paloma-"I don't know."

Billie looked at her brother. "Tell me again what happened."

When he'd gone to the post office two days ago to call his sister, Gerald had been brief. "Paloma's in the hospital, brain hemorrhage, she might not wake up," he'd told her. Now he said, "She was in the kitchen, ironing. I was making a pot of tea. She suddenly got a very bad headache. She said she had to sit down for a moment. She stood beside the ironing board and sort of tottered. I took her into the bedroom and made her lie down. She closed her eyes. I went back into the kitchen and made the tea. I brought it into the bedroom on a tray and she was asleep. I thought that was good. Then I saw she wasn't breathing properly. I tried to wake her and couldn't. I carried her down to the car and brought her here. Aegina was off somewhere, good thing too."

"And what did they do to her, Gerald?" Billie looked fearfully at the bandages wrapped around Paloma's head.

Gerald looked at the bandages now too. "They opened her up and looked inside her brain for a hemorrhage. They found it and did whatever they do. It was big, they said. Then they said we must wait and see, but a doctor told me he thought it was unlikely she'd wake up." He looked at Billie. "He thought she was more or less gone."

"Gerald . . . Gerald, I'm so . . . Oh, it sounds so absurd to say I'm sorry. Does Aegina know all this?"

"Well, I've told her, more or less, but she doesn't really want to hear it."

"No, of course not," said Billie. She looked at Gerald as he glanced up at her. "So what happens now?"

"I think they're waiting for me to tell them when to turn off the machines."

Billie stood and went to the window and looked out at the street, the buildings, the lights, the dark. Thoughts came to her like Russian dolls, each opening and revealing another inside, only the dolls kept getting bigger.

"God, Gerald."

Five.

On his whiny Rieju, Luc sped up the hill away from the sea, past small villas, slopes of pine, and terraced olive groves. Through the narrow streets of the poligono, the bike's echo running the gauntlet between tall stone buildings sounding louder than the engine itself. Beyond town, the road skirted the foot of the dark scrub oak, pine, and prickly pear slope of Monte Turo, before bending southeast toward the coast again.

The entrance to the Duhamel house was an unmarked gap in the pines and led uphill on a rutted dirt track. In the dark, Luc remembered the location and contour of most of the holes and rocks not quite illuminated or altered out of shape in the jarring swing of his weak headlamp. The house had no electricity. Luc had rarely been there during the day, so it always seemed a flickering, glowing place, first appearing from the outside as faint embers in the trees.

emile Duhamel, Franois's father, had designed and built the place of unchinked limestone himself, with a few laborers, in 1959. It was his response, he said, to the Villa Arpel of Jacques Tati's film Mon Oncle. Inside it was an intended maze of odd-shaped rooms and curving passages lit by paraffin lamps and candles. Its windows were irregular trapezoidal or oval openings without glass, with exterior shutters for light, ventilation, or protection from weather. Gas stove, paraffine refrigerator in the kitchen. The bathrooms contained open-plan showers and sinks fed by gravity tanks into which water was pumped from the cistern by hand with a large-volume marine bilge pump. Hot water flowed from the tank painted black on the roof. The toilets were outside in a stone shelter over a lime pit, a small row of fenestrated planks set in reposeful cubicles of stone discreetly walled from view of the house and each other but wide-open to the outdoors and equipped with moldering paperbacks.

emile was of course an architect. He had lived with Franois's mother, Sza Sza, a painter, for many years, though he was still married to his wife, Beatrice. His two older children with Beatrice often came down to Mallorca for a week or two in the summer. Most nights the house hosted an ongoing salon, guests free to drop in and eat, talk, read, play guitars, flutes, bouzoukis, or records on battery-operated record players, sleep if they wished in any of several ascetic rooms containing simple pallets, coarse sheets, candles and matches, and books: the essais of Montaigne, Saint Augustine, the odd volume of the Alexandria Quartet, or Harold Robbins.

The people who came to the Duhamels' were like the Duhamels themselves: a community of non-Spanish Europeans living interesting, at times distressing personal lives, who owned modestly renovated small fincas and either lived on the island year-round, or spent their summers there year after year, often coming down in the spring during the time of the almond blossoms, and their children, and the friends the children might bring down to spend a few weeks with them. They were self-employed professionals, artists, writers, nonviolent sweet-natured criminals, mysteriously self-supporting or genteelly impoverished, living on small annuities or the eked-out proceeds from the sale of ancestral paintings and furniture or a flat or a house, occasionally sleeping with one another in a manner that disturbed no one. In unspoken ways, they recognized one another, and everything they did made perfect sense to them, though they often arrived on the island as pariahs of the outside world, but were soothed and taken in by their steady, tolerant, and nonjudgmental friends and lovers on Mallorca.

It was past eleven but not too late for Luc to turn up chez Duhamel. Lounging on the pillows in the main room, he found the Duhamels, pere et femme, puffing at a chillum, with Schooner Trelawny, who was in his sixties and always wore guayaberas to house his Old Holborn tins and matches, and Natalie Veilleux, who at seventeen slipped conveniently between generations and lay on her stomach on a dhurrie on the floor, chin on her hands, feet waving in the air, bare thighs rolling beneath them, gazing inscrutably (stoned) at Luc as he came in.

"Lucas!" said Schooner, who knew this was not Luc's name. "Teddy's just now gone off in the motor to look for none other than you. You must have missed each other at the one-way in the poligono." Teddy was Schooner's sixteen-year-old son, who spent his summer holidays with his father in Mallorca.

"Oh," said Luc. "Has Aegina been here?"

"She and Franois are in his room," said emile.

"Thanks."

Luc wound through a labyrinthine passageway to Francois's room. Though Franois lived in Paris most of the year too, they hardly ever saw each other there. In Mallorca, Franois was probably his best friend.

They were lying on the floor, side by side, their heads propped against Franois's bed, a mattress on the floor. Aegina's eyes were closed. Nina Simone was singing "Mississippi Goddam" on the little blue and white battery-powered record player. Despite the open window, the air was filled with sweet, blue hashish smoke. Luc wondered if they'd been fucking, but they were dressed and the sheets were still neatly drawn up to the pillows, although they could have been rolling around on the floor together. He didn't really know what Aegina and Franois got up to on their own. The three of them were still natural and giggly together, the way they had been as children, but this summer, when Luc was alone with Aegina-not often, but at the Miravista when everyone else was dancing or off in the loo, or at the beach or in his boat-he had become either speechless or prone to idiot wisecrackery, and twitchingly self-conscious about his occasional spots. Aegina was still only fourteen, though in her bikini she looked older. And there was something very different about her this summer. A wildness and impenetrability he hadn't known behind what he knew so well, like a jungle he'd only just become aware of at the back of a beach he'd known forever. He hadn't kissed Aegina, apart from normal cheek-bussing, but he thought about it all the time now. He didn't want to ask Franois if he had.

"Salut, mec," said Franois.

"Salut," said Luc. He sat down on the floor between the window and the bed.

Franois proffered a thick joint. "T'en veux?"

Luc took it, put its soggy end between his lips and inhaled, and nodded toward Aegina. "She been here long?"

"Hours, man. She's completely wrecked."

Aegina's head was pushed forward by the edge of the bed, her neck at an awkward angle. He took a toke and handed the joint back, but Franois waved it away. He was rolling another.

"I'm thinking of having my ear pierced," said Franois. "Just one. And then I'll put a gold ring in it. Like a pirate."

"You'll look like a pede."

"No, straight guys are doing it. It'll look cool."

"Putain," said Luc. "Not me. It'll fucking hurt."

He took another deep hit. He would get wrecked too, then.

Six.

Sunday it rained, on and off, unusual for summer. In the late afternoon, the sun came out and dried the darkened patio tiles and the flower beds and bougainvillea of the Rocks, and brought out the guests who had been weather-bound in their rooms, tired of their books, scouring old newspapers for anything left unread, staving off or finally succumbing to obligatory sex with their spouses or the people they were putatively fucking.

Cassian and Dominick had spent the afternoon playing backgammon to the accompaniment of desultory drips from the overhanging tiled roof at the corner table beside the bar. They played on into the twilight as guests, still in the beachwear they'd worn all day despite the weather, drifted out to the bar.

A chubby blond woman, Susie Breedham, heaved herself onto a barstool beside them. "Christ, have you two been at it all day?"

"We have, yes," said Cassian.

"Darling Susie," said Dominick, "what have you been up to, sweetheart?"

"Wanking when I got bored out of my fucking mind and couldn't stand it any longer. Otherwise sleeping and reading and drinking. Not in that order."

"I'd have been happy to give you a hand if you'd only asked."

"Sweet of you, Dominick. I didn't want to bother you."

"No bother at all."

"I'll let you know if I can't manage by myself."

"Do."