I followed them on other occasions, as they walked towards the old haunts of my first love affair. I would lurk amidst the shade of the giant chestnut trees, and spy on them. They would sit still and quiet, never speaking a word, as though listening to some sound inaudible to my ear. Later, he would walk her home.
Once, in a rage, I followed him. We walked for ages, leaving behind us Pinilla, where Marisa lived, and crossing the district of Crucero, Calle Astorga, the station, the bridge, Calle Guzman, the Papalaguinda district and the bullring. We had gone past Avenida Hispanica and were approaching Avenida Venatoria. It was very dark. I was weary of the long walk, where he had set the pace, marching along like a robot.
I loathed his height, his thin angularity, his elderly air, but, above all, I hated that head flanked by the two great white ears.
We were alone in that long darkness which the feeble bulbs of infrequent streetlights did little to attenuate. I picked up a stone from the ground and began to run towards him. I stopped a few paces away and threw it at him with all my might. However, my aggression was diluted by the sheer futility of my gesture; the stone appeared to miss him, and I heard it fall further on, raising slight echoes along the road.
Yet there was something in the event that filled me with confusion: I was certain I had hit him with the stone, right between the shoulderblades; yet that certainty was complemented by another; the stone had continued on its way as though it had met no obstacle. My confusion turned to fear, for I was convinced I had seen the stone pass through that dark figure without causing him to falter. So I stood still, watching him disappear into the darkness that thickened in the distance, at the place where the two rivers meet.
One day, I was told that Marisa had a dreadful illness. At my lodgings they seemed to have forgotten their previous dislike of her and Dona Valeriana would make the sign of the cross whenever she spoke of the disease, lamenting the fact that it should strike such a young girl. As soon as I heard about it, I went to the shop on Calle Ordono, but Marisa wasn't there.
I never saw her again. She died a few months later. A lot of people from the town went to the funeral. The service was in the church of San Francisco. It was a Saturday in spring, and there was a thick mist. I walked as far as Puente Castro and carried on to the cemetery. The physical exercise brought me some relief from my pain. When I got to the cemetery, everyone else had left, but I knew immediately where they had placed Marisa's body, for he was there, standing by the recently dug grave with its fresh bunches of flowers.
The afternoon had turned grey. I watched him in silence. He was motionless, paler than usual. I approached until I was within six steps of him. I gazed avidly at his ashen face, full of angularities and his hair like the bristles of an animal. I don't know how long I stared, but slowly I began to realise that my hatred during all those months made no sense.
Marisa's companion, my rival, stood there like the rusting equipment used for lowering the coffins, the worn headstones, the remnants of wreaths, the empty candle-holders. In that absolute silence, with neither birdsong nor voices, I understood that Marisa belonged to him much more than she would ever have belonged to me. Then, very gradually, I saw his dark, thin figure begin to dissolve, fading into the mist in long grey wisps, until he had disappeared completely.
We had gone into Benito's bar and Juanjo was staring at his glass like someone examining a particularly strange object.
`Let's hope things work out for her,' he said.
I looked at him, puzzled.
`Paquita,' he said. `She's a good sort.'
`Sure,' I said, picking up my own glass from the counter.
`By the way,' he added. `You'll have to go to the meeting on Monday instead of her, because she's got a doctor's appointment. She tells me she's been getting some bad headaches recently.'
© Jose Maria Merino
Translated by Annella McDermott
Driving rain was bouncing noisily off the road, creating ripples of shimmering whiteness against the silvery reflection of the surface. The man appeared out of nowhere and stopped suddenly in front of him; he instinctively retreated, seeking the protection of the doorway where he had taken shelter. The man was carrying a small suitcase in his right hand and in the other a canvas bag. Water streamed from his hair onto his collar, his scarf and the lapels of his gabardine raincoat, which was soaked through.
`Excuse me,' said the man.
He was taken by surprise, and did not answer. The man was staring at him with wide eyes, above which his forehead glinted, while water streamed down over his eyebrows.
`Excuse me,' the man said again.
Rain was also pouring from his cuffs over the luggage he was carrying in his hands.
`What can I do for you?' he responded.
`I'm lost,' said the man.
He was breathing hard as though he had been running.
`I'm lost. I need to get to the railway station. I have a train to catch at twelve o'clock.'
`It's a long way. You'd better take a taxi.'
`There are none to be had,' the man answered. `I've been trying for the last hour to get hold of a taxi, but I can't find one.
`Well, the Metro is just there,' he said.
He pointed to the end of the street, invisible through the leaden grey of the rain.
`Down there, on this side of the road.'
The man's eyes had not lost their petrified expression.
`I'm a stranger here,' he said.
`The station has a lot of steps,' he added. `You'd better hurry. It'll take you close on half an hour.'
The man stammered his thanks and walked off through the rain.
When he got back home with his newspaper and the shopping, this encounter stuck in his mind: the man's tense expression, his apprehensive gaze, that slight hesitation when he spoke. Nor did the memory of the traveller fade from his mind as he finished his tasks for the morning, adding a few sentences to the article on fiction in the last decade, and putting onto the computer nearly half of the interview with the Mexican academic, nor during lunch - he ate at home, since the rain was still bucketing down - nor during the editorial meeting at the magazine, which took up the whole of the afternoon and the early part of the evening.
He got home around half-past eight. Berta was not there, and she rang shortly afterwards to say she would be home late. He poured himself a drink and lay down on the sofa, staring at the blank television screen. The image of that petrified face above the drenched raincoat persisted, gradually taking on the vague coherence of a scene from a novel. He got up, fetched his notebook and a pen and drafted a few notes. A man walks through a strange city. A man walks in fear through an unfamiliar city.
At a quarter to ten, Berta rang again.
`I'll be a while yet.'
He poured himself another drink, went to his study, switched on the computer, put in his short stories disk and began to write. Finally, after all this time, he had an idea. He was excited, almost happy, his head clear.
A man walks around a city at twilight. A seasoned traveller, he is from a faraway country and is a complete stranger to these streets where the wind catches up discarded lottery tickets, leaves and cigarette ends. In his eyes there is an expression of such immutable desolation that the people passing stare in surprise, and even the street-vendors and beggars look at him suspiciously, though without daring to speak. The man is not strolling, he is drifting, with his hands in his pockets, his body slightly bent and taking long, slow steps. Sometimes he pauses in front of shop windows, but he does not look at the goods on offer; instead he stares at the glass, searching for an angle that will allow him to see his own reflection, as though trying to recognise himself.
After working for about an hour he printed out what he had written and went back to the sitting room with the empty glass. It felt good to be writing again. He turned on the television set, but he was staring at it distractedly and, through the moving images, he could still picture the anguish of that traveller,
not now the one he had met in the morning, but the one in the story he had recently begun.
`He's trapped,' he murmured. `He's terrified. As though something terrible was about to happen to him.'
It was after half-past eleven when Berta got back, and he was on his fourth drink. She looked fed up and seemed physically exhausted.
`Aren't you going to give me a kiss?' he said, hugging her.
`Have you had a lot to drink?'
'I'm writing a story.'
She looked at him as though she hadn't heard and went off into the bedroom. When she appeared again she had taken off her coat and was slipping out of her skirt as she went towards the bathroom. He heard her peeing loudly, heaving a sigh of relief.
`Didn't you hear what I said? I'm writing a story.'
She came out of the bathroom without her skirt, went to the bedroom and carried on undressing.
`Have you had dinner?' she asked.
`No.'
`Nor have I. I just couldn't get away. Have we got anything to eat?'
He shrugged. He felt happy.
`There must be something,' he exclaimed.
He told her about it again the next day, again at the end of the day's work, when they were both home. Berta, who was leafing through her diary, just stared at him.
`A story?'
`I told you yesterday. You didn't hear me.'
`I was worn out. I don't know if I can take this blasted reorganisation.'
She lit a cigarette and continued the conversation with interest.
`So you're writing?'
`Yes, although I've got lots of other work I should be doing. Yesterday, I came across a guy soaked to the skin and it sparked off an idea.'
`What's it about?'
He fetched what he had written so far.
`I've just sketched out the idea,' he said. `A man wanders through a distant city, in which he's lost and scared, as if he's being followed.'
He read out the brief text. When he had finished, he looked at her. She still had her eyes fixed on him, engrossed.
`What do you think?'
Berta did not answer.
`Maybe there is no external pursuer and his fear comes purely from himself, from his own demons,' he added. `The man has clearly experienced a personal tragedy and maybe he's forced to travel because of his job. He's constantly changing cities, climates, customs. As the years go by, these perpetual rapid changes and the persistent, troubling memories gradually begin to induce a strange anxiety in his mind. Perhaps he's afraid that one day, in one of these strange cities, he'll forget how to get back to his hotel, and may even forget who he is. Perhaps he fears he'll be taken over by the places he goes to, which he always experiences as strange and unwelcoming, and yet their hostility feels right, somehow, because it reflects the intense grief living inside him.'
`What happens to him?' she asked.
`I don't know yet,' he answered. `I'm going to think it over, calmly. I've got him there, wandering round and round in circles, like in a maze, and it's an image which, far from upsetting me, calms me down. It's as though his anxiety, whose cause I don't yet know, was swallowing up all my own worries. I haven't felt this good for months. Anyway, I'll certainly carry on with it.'
She nodded.
`Yes, you must carry on. You couldn't be that cruel.'
`Cruel?'
`To your character.'
He was disconcerted.
`Who knows, maybe there's worse in store for him yet,' he said finally, and they both laughed.
At the end of March, he was asked to write a report on a critical symposium and then several other things came up, so he put the story to one side. She, however, did not forget it and she asked him several times how it was shaping up. Her questions troubled him.
`I haven't had time to go back to it,' he would reply.
She would blink rapidly, as she always did in reaction to anything strange or unresolved, then the gesture would change to a smile that implied, not altogether convincingly, that the reproach was jocular.
`So you're keeping him running round and round in circles?
One night he woke up, startled by a cry from her. He groped for the light switch on the bedside table. From the other bed, Berta was staring at him with a look of such fear on her face that he too was overcome by a wave of alarm. He threw off the bedclothes and went over to lie beside her, hugging her tightly.
`What is it? What on earth is wrong?'
Berta's forehead was bathed in sweat and tears as thick as mucus welled up in her eyes. She spoke in a halting voice, with frequent sobs.
`There was somebody looking at me. A man. His face was right up against mine. A man was looking at me with a horrible expression on his face.'
From then on, he was woken on several nights by Berta's terrified cries. Berta always said that she had seen right up close to her the face of a man whose eyes were filled with fear. A man in a grey street, with ugly low houses, in a dusty city.
On one of those occasions, Berta said accusingly:
`It's the man in your story. It's the same lost traveller, petrified with fear.'
He couldn't think what to say.
`You have to get him out of there.'
He switched off the light and lay there uneasily. Berta couldn't sleep.
`You have to get him out of there,' she repeated.
He sat up and spoke in her direction, and though he knew she was near, he noticed in himself a vague fear of the darkness.
'OK, IT get him out. Now go back to sleep.'
But she would not be pacified.
`You have to get him out of there.'
`Calm down. I promise I'll do it.'
`How?'
At that point, the idea came to him, suddenly yet with deliberation, as though it had emerged from deep down and had always been there inside him.
`A meeting. He'll meet somebody and escape from the maze.'
He didn't write it. In the mornings, he was too busy with other things and had no time to go back to the story; also, spring had come and he usually spent the afternoons chatting to friends in bars or going for a stroll. However, from the time he told Berta that the traveller in the story would escape from his fear because of a meeting with someone, she never again had that nightmare about the face staring at her.
In the second week of May, Berta had to go on a trip to negotiate a tender. She was growing more and more fed up with the company and the jockeying for position in the office. Also, she believed that she was liable to be the loser in the constant wars, because the other potential directors were all men and the one thing they seemed to agree on, concerning the changes in the wake of the reorganisation, was that she was not in line for any promotion.
The trip was awkward in some ways, because she was going to North Africa, a journey involving stopovers and waiting for connections, and Berta was eager to get it over as quickly as possible; she planned to leave on Thursday morning and be back by Friday evening.
She went off very early, and that night he missed her sorely. After one failed marriage and a few unsatisfactory affairs, this relationship, in spite of the problems that had been making Berta so edgy in the last few months, had given him a balance he had never found before, and introduced him to a more regular lifestyle. He drank a lot less, the only thing he smoked were cigarettes, he was up to date with his reading, he was meeting all his deadlines and he had even lost the rage he used to feel, the bitterness that would rise in him as he saw the days and months pass without him being able to write a story. The sight of her undisturbed bed upset him so much that he ended up sleeping on the sofa in the living room, like a guest invited to stay the night.
Berta called him the next day, just after lunch, as he was on his way out. Apparently there were high winds in Melilla and it was likely that all flights that afternoon would be cancelled. Her voice sounded tired. She couldn't come home yet.
`What are you going to do?' he asked, disguising the sudden unease that the news
had aroused in him.
`I don't know. There's a boat leaving at eleven o'clock at night.'
`A boat??
`It goes to Malaga, and I'd have to get a plane from there. But it's an all-night crossing, and they say the sea is rough as well.'
Silence separated them as though the line had been cut.
`Berta, Berta,' he said urgently.
'I'm here.'
`What about tomorrow?'
`There are several flights, but the high winds may continue and the planes will still be unable to take off. Don't worry about me,' she finally added, `I'm fine. I'll read a couple of detective novels.'
`Call me the minute you have some news,' he replied, and she rang off with a promise that she would.
He did not go out after lunch. He was seized by a pressing need to continue the story he had begun so many months before. He discovered that his character was trapped in a remote city on the other side of the ocean. The winds were rising, his plane could not take off, and flight after flight was cancelled. Amidst that wind with its burden of dust and sand, snatching up pieces of newspaper and plastic, the traveller was filled with a sense of deep confusion and had to make an effort not to lose consciousness. He had gone up to the old quarter, but the houses, uninhabited or ruined, only increased his unease, so he made his way back to the airport.
Sitting on one of the seats, with a small, dark suitcase placed carefully at her feet, and her handbag on the seat next to her, was the woman he had noticed earlier in the queue of passengers. The traveller joined the group of people standing by the check-in desk listening to the explanations of the airline representative. He was talking about a phone call that would come shortly from Spain, to say whether the last flight of the day could take off, but it was clear that the verdict was unlikely to be favourable.
He hesitated for an instant, though his first impulse had been to go back outside, where the bushes around the glass building were bending in the wind. Finally, he went over to the seats, took the empty chair nearest to the woman, and stayed there gazing at her profile as she sat motionless with her hands around a closed book. Her legs were pressed together, and her posture was slightly forced, possibly a sign of her impatience.
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