Sapphire Moonlight

Chapter 48

Chapter 48

Joaquim and Thais were at the Tarrafeiro's, sitting at a table in the porch. It was half past two in the afternoon.  

The restaurant had an enclosed part, a big room with large rectangular windows, but they had chosen to stay outside. A short wall some fifty centimetres high surrounded the outdoors curved, in the shape of the internal side of the sole of a shoe plus a part of the frontal and external one, porch-like roofed area of the restaurant.  

While eating their icecreams they gazed at the beach, beyond the floodwall. The beach could be seen comfortably from the place where they were. As the sun was too strong there was nobody there, either on the sand or in the water. People would start to come in about one hour's time. Thais kept watching the waves breaking in succession, first a liquid sugar-cane-juice green, semitransparent, half-opaque, and then the breaking and the ever ongoing turbulent white foam at the crest, that rushed downwards to finally slow down and then drift to the shoreline at ground level.  

Joaquim called Thais's attention to a ship that could be seen in the horizon. Another ship showed up in the distance smaller than the first and even a third one much smaller and dimmer than the others could be detected. It seemed unclear what they might be doing there, whether going away on a trip to Europe or to Africa or whether they were incoming ships, or else simply stopped there, maybe fishing. They had an indefinite status.  

A few sporadic cars passed now and then lazily in the avenue.  

Joaquim and Thais were the only customers in the bar.  

Thais turned her eyes from the waves and the sand and the ships in the distance to look at the long arc of the beach that started where they were and swept down towards the cluster of buildings in the distance. 

'I wish it lasted forever,' she said. 

'The beach?' 

'The beach as it is now.' 

'It will,' said Joaquim. 

'In a way.'  

'In your memory. As if it were yesterday, or this morning. Don't you remember the things you did in the past?' 

'I do. But I meant all this in reality.' 

'It will last at least a few years, maybe a long time. I don't believe any significant changes are likely here in the near future. But it depends on what the trend will be as far as the building market is concerned.' 

'Take a look at the waves,' she said dreamly.

Marcelo and Elaine were some blocks away, near the main avenue in a bar near the corner, called Bordorello's. They were sitting at a table and were also looking at the beach.  

'What kind of a ship might that one be, I wonder,' Marcelo said.  

'A liner?' 

'It might be a tanker,' he went on, guessing, 'or a cargo ship. Or perhaps, yes, a liner.' He saw he had said something obvious, very obvious. He thought Elaine might laugh at him or be ironical. She didn't, nor was she ironical.  

'It doesn't seem to be moving,' she said. 'Why should it be stopped there?' 

'Perhaps waiting for its time to go to the dock and moor.' 

'Have you ever been on a ship?' Elaine asked Marcelo. 

'When I went to Argentina. We took an Argentinian ship from the town of Rio Grande, in Brazil, to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Have you?' 

'No, I haven't. The school trip when you graduated from secondary school? I remember. I heard about it at the time.' She was two years his junior.