Free The Hermit by Thomas Rydahl Page B

the way up to his elbows before drying them with napkins. He does that five or six times during the course of a single meeting. He’s a friendly man who loves air conditioning. He’d only driven a taxi for a few months before he became a haulier, a fleet operator, and ran his own business for almost ten years before becoming the director of TaxiVentura in 2004. He’s good with schedules. Erhard snaps on the radio and waits for the twelve o’clock news to come on, but there’s nothing of interest.
    He stops at a petrol station and washes his car. Afterward he rinses off the yellow foam, then dries the car with an old rag, polishing it with wax he’s gotten from one of the other drivers. He rarely does this. On an island where it’s always windy and dusty, it almost seems idiotic to wash and polish your car.
    While the wax settles, he reads the last chapter in the new book by Almuz Ameida, the great hope among Spanish crime novelists. He sits in the shade on a bench next to the station. From there he can see the rocks and cliffs on the beach. He can see the sand as it swirls up each time the wind sweeps eastward, like a broom, towards the island. There is always a bunch of cars parked on the flat section of the rocks. Surfers and nudists. Tourists who don’t get out of their cars, because of the drifting sand. At this moment he sees a family sitting in a most-likely-rented Seat and staring across the beach. There are no kitesurfers. They are all down at Playa Cualpa. But if one looks hard enough between the rocks one sees several brown, mosslike lumps reclining in inflatable chairs. Usually with a beer close by or small bottles of white wine. It’s the island of intoxication. Not like Ibiza or Mallorca or Crete – youthful boozing that’s mostly an excuse to have sex. The drinking here is discreet. Outside the few noisy discotheques and roaring cocktail bars with their improvised menus, hundreds of people are quietly crawling from one buzz to the next. Alcohol is cheap, the weather is good, and the calendar empty.
    Why not?
    He’d sat between those rocks himself once, horny as a bull, during his first seven months on the island. His skin becoming brown and hard. From morning to night he lay with an erection behind a rock, his rest interrupted only by short hikes down to the water. At night he slept under a ledge farther north up the coast. He’d light a fire and eat jellyfish or fish he caught himself. Mostly, he ate the leftovers from family picnics, heels of bread or hunks of sausage. If it got really bad, he walked to the supermarket and bought tins of food. He had money from home. Not much. A backgammon case stuffed with a few thousand euros. But he didn’t want to spend the money. For a long time he didn’t feel he deserved to spend the money. For a long time he just wanted to be left alone. Without smiling. Without any kind of pleasure. Not even the sunshine or the starlight. He lay quietly, dispassionately observing the sky. But in the end this proved difficult. In the end the small pleasures found him.
    The sound of the water trickling through the rocks when the sea was at low tide. Warm bread from the fire. One morning, a large bird sat with a fish in its beak a metre away, dripping water and blinking its huge buttonlike eyes. Sometimes he had company. But only later, after a few months. People who wanted to see him for themselves el ermitaño , the man who lived among the rocks. Most of them just gawked at him, standing as far away as possible to watch him clamber about. Others came all the way up to his campfire and offered him food or asked him questions. But he never responded. In those seven months he said nothing. Not even when the two men attacked him with bats and beat him senseless, leaving him lying in the sun like a shelled turtle.
    What doesn’t kill you makes you angrier, as the saying goes.
    He parks his car and crosses the road to the flat section down the slope, steep and covered with