Essential Stories by V.S. Pritchett Page A

in his shirt sleeves and braces, said it was for us to decide. We could have anything we wanted. This started another argument. He stepped back a pace and put himself in an attitude of self-defence.
    “Soup! Soup? Make up your minds about soup! Who wants soup?” bawled Juan.
    “Red wine,” some of us answered. And others, “Not red, white.”
    “Soup I said,” shouted Juan. “Yes,” we all shouted. “Soup.”
    “Ah,” said Juan, shaking his head, in his slow miserable disappointed voice. “Nobody have any soup. I want some soup. Nobody soup,” he said sadly to the proprietor.
    Juliano was bouncing in his chair and saying, God he would never forget that summer when Angel was nearly drowned! When we had all been together. But Juan said Felix had not been there and we had to straighten that matter out. Juliano said:
    “They carried him on to the beach, our little Angel on to the beach. And the beach superintendent came through the crowd and said, ‘What’s happening?’ ‘Nothing,’ we said. ‘A man knocked out.’ ‘Knocked out?’ said the beach superintendent. ‘Nothing,’ we said. ‘Drowned!’ A lot of people left the crowd and ran about over the beach saying, ‘A man has been drowned.’ ‘Drowned,’ said the beach superintendent. Angel was lying in the middle of them all, unconscious, with water pouring out of his mouth.”
    “No! No!” shouted Fernando. “No. It wasn’t like that.”
    “How do you mean, it wasn’t like that?” cried Juliano. “I was there.” He appealed to us, “I was there.”
    “Yes, you were there,” we said.
    “I
was
there. I was there bringing him in. You say it wasn’t like that, but it was like that. We were all there.” Juliano jumped protesting to his feet, flung back his coat from his defying chest. His waistcoat was very loose over his stomach, draughty.
    “What happened was better than that,” Fernando said.
    “Ah,” said Juliano, suddenly sitting down and grinning with his eyes at everyone, very pleased at his show.
    “It was better,” he said. “How better?”
    Fernando was a man who waited for silence and his hour. Once getting possession of the conversation he never let it go, but held it in the long, soothing ecstasy of a pliable embrace. All day long he lay in bed in his room in Fuencarral with the shutters closed, recovering from the bout of the day before. He was preparing himself to appear in the evening, spruce, grey-haired and meaty under the deep black crescents of his eyebrows, his cheeks ripening like plums as the evening advanced, his blue eyes, which got bloodshot early, becoming mistier. He was a man who ripened and moistened. He talked his way through dinner into the night, his voice loosening, his eyes misting, his walk becoming slower and stealthier, acting every sentence, as if he were swaying through the exalted phase of inebriation. But it was an inebriation purely verbal; an exaltation of dramatic moments, refinements upon situations; and hour after hour passed until the dawn found him sodden in his own anecdotes, like a fruit in rum.
    “What happened was,” Fernando said, “that I was in the sea. And after a while I discovered Angel was in the sea. As you know there is nothing more perilous than the sea, but with Angel in it the peril is tripled; and when I saw him I was preparing to get as far away as possible. But he was making faces in the water and soon he made such a face, so inhuman, so unnatural, I saw he was drowning. This did not surprise me for Angel is one of those men who, when he is in the sea, he drowns. There is some psychological antipathy. Now when I see a man drowning my instinct is to get away quickly. A man drowning is not a man. He is a lunatic. But a lunatic like Angel! But unfortunately he got me before I could get away. There he was,” Fernando stood up and raised his arm, confronting the proprietor of the restaurant, but staring right through that defensive man, “beating the water, diving,