Picasso: Two Women on the Beach (1956)
I’d met Elena in Seville. I was twenty one – Study Abroad – and had been taken under the wing of my host-mother’s twin nephews, Alvaro and Javier. Identical in good looks and high achievement, the boys would take me to a bar twice a week, ply me with beer, and laugh at my bad Spanish. While I didn’t exactly enjoy their company, I needed them.
At the time, the fact of my virginity hovered over me always. In my mind, sex had taken on an almost physical presence – not an act so much as a fascinating character to whom I had not yet been introduced. Those afternoons in the bar, I’d look between the twins – acrylic black hair, pastel polos – and try to imagine having sex with them. For some reason I couldn’t picture it.
On the surface, this could be an ordinary story about two women who meet in Spain. But there’s a lot going on subliminally that makes it not ordinary. Or I could be overreading again, determined to turn everything into meaning.
Megan, the student, meets Elena, the teacher, one night outside the bathroom in the bar to which the twin nephews – law students, we find out eventually – take her. Neither woman ever brings up anything about their studenting or teaching; we never hear Megan explain why she isn’t hanging out with other students from her university, or what she’s studying (presumably some aspect of Spanish language or culture), or hear any reason she’s rejected the idea of losing her virginity to someone at school. It’s as if, having established the Study Abroad thing, it exists only for symbolic purposes.
A first generation Colombian, Elena grew up in America. I’m not sure where. She mentions palm trees, houses on stilts, the hurricane insurance her mother complains about paying. She misses the jungles around Cali. Once, she had to outrun an alligator.
“Go in a zigzag, “ she says, moving her hands and demonstration. “Flips them like roaches.“
She talks about men a lot. In Elena’s world, flings flare up and die over the course of days. I laugh at all her stories, unwilling to tell her I am a virgin. It isn’t a purposeful lie, only a series of omissions.
Ditto for Elena. Since she isn’t the pov character, we know less about her, putting us in the same boat as Megan, guessing at what’s real and what isn’t. She only says she is a teacher, not mentioning what or who she teaches, and never mentions it again, no anecdotes about a funny incident or a run-in with a student or parent. When the law school twins ask, as students interested in a legal issue, if she’s had any trouble with her visa, if it’s paid for by the school, etc., she skillfully and jokingly changes the subject. “With Elena, most things could be polished into jokes…. Unlike me, I decide, Elena is tough.” So again we’re left with a symbolic rather than expositional occupation, and a character-defining aura of mystery.
Megan and Elena to go Chipiona for a beach vacation, and again, Elena avoids the topic of whose car she’s borrowed or whose house they’re staying in. “[L]ike most things with Elena, it seems to invite more questions than it answers.” The story gives us good reason to assume anything she’s said – where she’s lived, the men she’s screwed – might not be true.
A pivotal scene – I’d call it the pivotal scene except there are several pivotal scenes – involves the exchange of secrets. Megan finally cops to her virginity. Elena talks about her father having a twin brother, who became “an avatar for what my father should have been” after Dad got sick. Later, she adds sexual abuse to the mix, which led to the move to the US. Twins aren’t really rare, but two sets of unrelated twins in one story is kind of odd, and children have been known to think in terms of “the bad twin” when trying to weasel out of punishment for misbehavior; is it such a leap that an abused child might create an evil twin to preserve a good father? This is Elena, after all; we have no idea how deep truth goes for her.
I know Elena is only revealing this secret because I have told her I am a virgin. Rather than reassurance, I feel an abrupt resentment towards the acquisitive nature of all relationships, how even at our most vulnerable we depend, somehow, on a willingness to make trades. It seems pathetic.
At the end of the story, Megan finds a waiter who is willing to relieve her of her virginity. Her secret now moot, she tells Elena, who can’t moot her secrets but recants them: her father, the twin uncle, the alligator, all lies. This further buttresses Megan’s view of secrets as friendship coins to be traded.
Of course, there’s another way to look at reciprocal trading of secrets. “I’m going to tell you a secret” is an act of intimacy; it makes perfect sense that the recipient will show an equal desire for intimacy, and shedding cover stories would be one way to do that. It’s not acquisitive; it’s drawing closer to another person. Or, a bit on the darker side, revealing a secret establishes vulnerability and mutual secrets create equal vulnerability. If one partner later no longer has a secret, it’s logical the other would feel the vulnerability more, and might move to erase it.
Another pivotal scene confuses me. While they’re enjoying the deserted beach, lying on Disney character towels, a boat of migrants washes ashore, “Let them be,” says Elena when Megan asks what they should do. The boat disgorges its passengers who “rush away in all directions, scattering like the seeds of a blown dandelion”, and, empty, is washed out to sea again, and Elena turns her attention to Megan’s incipient sunburn.
Then there’s the matter of the title, which turns out to be pivotal as well. Turns out it’s a fishing technique, dating from ancient times:
“People used to come from miles to fish using this Roman technique,“ he says. “Almadraba, they called it. Catch these huge fish. That was the thing about the Almadraba. Only the strongest fish got caught. The weaker ones were thrown back in, given another chance.“
“Another chance for what ?” Elena asks. “To get caught later?”
The waiter nods and smiles. He isn’t really listening. “Now these foreign companies come in, overfish the sea and sell eighty percent of the tuna to the Japanese.“
This puts the spotlight again on Elena. Was her move to the US outside the bounds of legal immigration? What about her move to Spain, was it of necessity? Is she a strong fish who make it to land, or a weak one who got caught on land? What does she feel, seeing the migrants land on the beach? These two scenes seem related somehow, but I’m not sure exactly how.
The friendship is over after that week on the beach, but we only know Megan’s side. Elena scatters, as we always knew she would. “Has anyone been back to Chipiona?” wonders Megan at the end. Anyone who?
Among other things, the story is an exploration of friendship and secrets, and allows for a lot of room to see one’s own story – or someone else’s. And it maintains a certain aura of mystery, much like Elena.
Addendum: Jake Weber focuses on Meg’s “obsession with the nobility of suffering” and the different levels she sees, as someone who hasn’t suffered much.
A Just Recompense 