Emile saw the Azores glumly across a plate of cheese and cold cuts. Gibraltar was meat loaf. He ate bloated spaghetti sailing down the coast of Spain and when they docked early one morning in Naples he felt, in spite of his indifference to Simon’s ambitions, that he had no choice. They left the Runckle in the middle of the morning and went to an American restaurant where Emile put away two plates of ham and eggs and a club sandwich and felt like himself for the first time since leaving Toledo. They took an afternoon boat in a choppy sea to Ladros. Simon got seasick. The contest headquarters was in a café in the main piazza and although Simon’s face was green the first thing he did was to enroll and pay his entry fee. They got cots in a dormitory near the port where twenty-five or thirty other contestants were boarding. Simon worked conscientiously on his muscle-building. He oiled and sunned himself and wore, like the others, something called a slip, a sort of codpiece. He rented a boat and exercised in this during the mornings. After his siesta he worked out with the bar bells. Emile, wearing voluminous American trunks, rowed with him in the morning and spent a pleasant time swimming off the rocks.
It was very hot and Ladros was crowded but the sea had a color he had never seen before and there was something in the air, a suspension of conscience, that made the white beaches and the dark seas of his own country seem censorious and remote. He seemed, in crossing the bay of Naples, to have lost his scruples. The contest was on Saturday and on Friday Simon came down with a bad attack of food poisoning. Emile bought him some medicine in a pharmacy but he was up most of the night and was too weak to get out of bed in the morning. Emile felt for him deeply and wished it were in his power to help. He had wasted his savings and if his sole ambition was ridiculous could he be blamed? Simon asked Emile to take his place and in the end he agreed. It was the brute power of boredom that forced his decision. He had nothing else to do. He got into his bathing trunks, put on Simon’s numeral and went up to the piazza at a little after four. The hot, bright sunlight could still be seen at the foot of the street but the square was in shade. There was a long wait. Presently a boatload of English tourists came in and filled up the tables at the edge of the square and then, in numerical order, the procession started.
He didn’t want to seem sullen, that after all would have been unfair to Simon, but he did want to seem disengaged, to make clear that this was not his idea, not what he wanted. He didn’t look at the faces below him but stared at an advertisement for San Pellegrini mineral water on a wall beyond the café. What would his mother have thought, his uncle, the ghost of his father? Where was the dark house in Parthenia where he had lived? When he had crossed the piazza he waited around with the others and then was led into the café by the proprietor and didn’t realize until then that there were only ten and that he was one of the winners.
It was getting dark by then, deepening into the grape-colored sky that more than anything else made him feel not unpleasantly far from home. Now the piazza was crowded. The ten men stood at the bar drinking coffee and wine, held together by the bond of a common experience and a questionable victory and alienated by the barriers of language. Emile stood between a Frenchman and an Egyptian and the best he could do was to speak a little crude Italian and smile hopefully but fatuously to prove that he was friendly and self-possessed. As it grew darker and darker in the piazza, as the light of day faded and as they stood under the bare lights of the café that had been arranged sensibly and economically to light the work of the bartenders and to flatter no one, they might, but for their lack of clothing, have been a group of workmen, clerks or jurors, stopping for a drink on their way back to wherever their lives were centered, to whereever they were awaited and wanted. Emile did not understand what would happen next and he asked the proprietor in dumb show to explain. The explanation was long and it was a long time before Emile understood that they, the ten winners, would now be auctioned off to the crowd in the piazza. “But I’m an American,” Emile said. “We don’t believe in that!”
