2:00 AM – 13 July 72 - Wed
Sunburn! Finished deCamp’s Citadels of Mystery which I found very interesting. Have done a lot of reading on this honeymoon but no writing. We are scheduled to go home July 21 – good thing since we are absolutely broke (especially after buying leather outfits.) Will buy a watch in Geneva if I have any dough left. Read Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey and Crotchet Castle – the first was the funniest. Rev Dr Larynx no match for Folliott. Now I have to plunge back into Shelley Circle books – first thing I’ll do when I get home. Seven Masterpieces of Horror very entertaining – especially Castle of Otranto. I hunger to complete my gothic – must put a ghost in – de rigueur. Had the good idea that everyone sees a different ghost – the ghost that’s haunting them. Monk Lewis’ Mistrust much better than The Monk – though equally littered with mangled, heaving bosoms. Ah, hotel life. This really does feel like a honeymoon. We wake around 10 – Bruce calls for breakfast – I bring in table & chairs from balcony. Then we go to the pool or down to the beach. Playing In the surf is definitely the most fun thing to do. Lunch is four small courses – always starts with soup. Bruce always has consommé and I always have gazpacho – I could wallow in the stuff. Then an egg or a rice course – pretty bland – followed by a meat course, which fills us up. Bruce always has pastry for dessert and I always have cherries – though sometimes we order glace or flan. They put three carafes of wine – white, red, pink – on the table for lunch and dinner. Afternoon is for siesta, making love, assuaging sunburn and reading. Tea or drinks down by the pool. Dinner is at 9 or 9:30 and I wear my long Chinese dress. Soup de jour – always very good – fish and “boiled vegetables” (usually potatoes and green beans) then ham or chicken, which they claim, is “veal”. Fish usually a mass of bones. Our waiter is Manolo “Jefe” because he has charge of a group of little boy waiters. We get him because we always want to sit outdoors on the terrace – his special province. He has scars on his eyebrows – weird jagged ones – and all over his cheeks and the suspicion of a cataract in his left eye. He asked if we were Mexican (because of Bruce’s Spanish accent.) We have to ask him for water every time – he always forgets. (Bottled water here.) I send Avril a suede bag for her birthday. Fri. 14 July 72 -1:00 PM Sitting on terrace awaiting lunch (train leaves at 2:30.) I read CP Snow’s Death Under Sail for the same reason scientists study one-celled organisms – you can clearly see how they do everything. (And I thought I would like his mysteries better than the Lewis Eliot novels.) Very “Sixth Form”; not even marginally believable. For example, most people say they can keep a secret but actually can’t. You wouldn’t trust your life to a thing like that. At least he is not going through the motions like Ngaio Marsh (Tied Up In Tinsel) the hotel has a huge supply of paperback Brit mysteries. Who was that guy who said books are games? Well reading Snow is playing a board game with a three year old – it’s never my turn and I can’t possibly win. Women characters are creatures from another planet – not people at all. (Agatha Christie knows WAY better than that.)Bruce asks me about y reading – I say I am educating my taste. He says I ought to worry about other people’s taste. But why? The whole point of being me is to find out what that is. Bruce reads to me from his book – Arthur C Clarke says men and women have an “unstable” relationship until the arrival of the first child “stabilizes” it! You could just as easily say the reverse! I tell Bruce BF Skinner said in Walden 2 that age 15 is the perfect age for motherhood! Because then you can play with your kids! Let’s hope he’s revised his views since then. I discovered last night that Manolo is 27! Having 5 kids aged him a good 20 years. Train to Madrid – 6 pm Really enjoying Agatha Christie’s Halloween Party, even though I spotted Rowena Drake as the murderer from the very beginning (never thought of Michael Garfield, though.) Bruce and I amuse ourselves by constructing a mystery with a detective named Tench, assistant named Buffin. 7:20 PM Geneva station – Mon 17 July 72 All night sitting up Madrid to Paris – but from Paris to Geneva slept a lot. The watch store kept showing me monstrously ugly watches, insisting nothing elegant is self-winding. Bruce took their side saying now I am old enough to wind them up! Finally got a bracelet watch (bigger than I would have liked) of pretty squares. Self winding. $90. The Asturias Hotel, Madrid, had the most magnificent elevator – glass and wooden cage, very creaky, and a bellboy named Beezer. Gives me Buffin’s first name – Beezer Buffin.
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Alysse Aallyn
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