There are people who believe that all you need to do to elicit the deeper motives of a fellow human being is ask. There are other people who encourage this strange belief, and I am one of them. I had, I told Pedro, several working theories of life. One of them ran as follows: The older you get, the better you become at avoiding discomfort. After about the age of 35, you don't need to be terribly resourceful to avoid hardship, unpleasantness, and indignity, but you pay a price for doing so. Often, what keeps life interesting are the things we do that, at the time, make us miserable. I had spent much of the previous year living in Paris, trying to become fluent in French, only to find that the more I understood what Parisians were saying, the less I wanted to understand. I was now without a single unpleasant new task to perform. I felt compelled to seek another. Surfing…
At this point in my soliloquy, Pedro began to shake his head sadly. "I tell you something?" he said, slurringly. "Frankly?"
"Of course."
"You are a forty-year-old man," he said.
"Yes."
"A forty-year-old man should not be surfing."
"You think forty is too old for surfing?"
"It's too old for everything."
"Canasta," said Pedro's friend, lifting his head from the table. "You can play canasta."
On the last day of surfing lessons, I didn't need much help to look ridiculous, but I got it anyway. The sun had finally won a small victory, and every citizen of Zarautz—all 21,500 of them—dropped whatever they had been doing (which, truthfully, did not seem like all that much) and made for the beach. Lithe, nimble, nearly naked young men grabbed their laughably small surfboards and raced into the sea. Pretty girls huddled together on the sand and pretended not to be impressed. It was a mating scene, the Basque equivalent of a Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello movie. At any moment, I expected the boys dancing on the waves to break out in a chorus and the girls on the beach to leap to their feet and do the twist.
Into this scene I strolled: a thick, 40-year-old man, pale skin pocked by cuts and bruises, stick legs poking out the end of a ratty black wet suit like the bones of a half-eaten chicken. Behind me I dragged a surfboard so long it could have passed for a small pier. Thirty yards down the beach, the two Dutch kids with whom I'd started out surfed beautifully. Out in the water waited Julen, straddling his board, impatient to finish our course. Julen had orchestrated for me perhaps 300 crash landings, no two of them precisely alike, each of them disastrous in its own special way. In a week, I'd spent no more than two and a half consecutive seconds standing on a surfboard.
"Come on, Michael!" he screamed, "One last time only!"
His English, I realized, had improved.
But no one on the beach noticed Julen—or me—because everyone's attention had been diverted by the appearance of a professional photographer. The woman—my wife—and her assistant hauled their equipment across the sand and began to set up.
As they unfurled lights and unsnapped lenses, a murmuring crowd gathered. The same question perched on dozens of Basque lips: Who is to be photographed? Which of the young studs riding the waves is the celebrity? At length, my wife motioned to me. The crowd gasped. Unable to surf, I'd agreed to stage a "surfing scene," in which I'd pretend to ride one of the six-inch wavelets rippling onto the beach. I belly flopped onto the surfboard, the photographer raced after me into the water, and the crowd hissed its astonishment. A mini wave pushed up the back end of the board, and I attempted to stand. My wife screamed: "Get up! Get up!" I struggled to get my feet in front of my belly, but before I could I plunged face first off the board and into the sand. The crowd hooted, but not in derision. They assumed I was a comedy act.
After 20 minutes of paddling, I reached my instructor. "Julen," I said, "how come I can't do this?"
He looked at me. I could see him deciding whether or not to lie.
"When you get old you get…" he said. Then he slapped his hard, flat stomach and pointed to me. "How you say it?"
"Fat?" I said.
"Fat," he said.
"Julen," I said, "how long would it take me to learn how to surf?"
He shrugged sadly, eloquently. He was as much as saying: All I can teach you is that you will never learn.
And then he offered me a picture that was worth a thousand words. He whistled. Out of nowhere, a dog came racing across the beach and plunged into the sea. It paddled through the surf toward us. "My…how you say?" Julen said.
"Dog," I said.
"Dog," he said.
It wasn't even a young dog; it was an old dog. The dog climbed onto Julen's surfboard, then looked behind him, as if waiting for a wave. Sure enough, a big one rose behind him, hungrily, angrily. I dived beneath it for cover and as I did I heard the dog bark, once, and Julen gave the board a tiny shove. Coming up for air, I saw the dog was long gone, riding the wave right onto the beach, where other, lesser dogs sat watching.
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