B0040702LQ EBOK

by Margaret Jull Costa;Annella McDermott

  He was staring at her so hard that the woman felt it and turned her head. When her eyes fell on the traveller, she gave a start, as if something in his face had surprised or even alarmed her. In her apprehension, she suddenly stood up and the book fell to the ground. The man disguised his own confusion by bending down to pick it up, but she was quicker. There was a suggestion of displeasure in the woman's attitude, as though she felt threatened. The man stood up too, and, making a tremendous effort to remain calm, he spoke to her. Although his words referred to the storm which was delaying all of them, he attempted, by his particularly respectful tone, to apologise for the alarm his presence had caused her, and also to initiate a conversation which, however trivial the pretext, would distract him for a time from his anguished wanderings.

  He carried on writing till very late, waiting for Berta's phone call, which never came. He tried hard not to worry, blaming the lack of news on various trivial causes. Eventually he went to bed - the sofa again - and lay awake for a long time. When he fell asleep, he dreamed he was back again sheltering from the rain in a doorway and that the same passer-by, drenched to the skin and carrying two pieces of luggage, came over to him and repeated the same questions. However, just as he was about to answer - in his dream the scene did not seem like a memory, so vivid was it, and so real the sound and the metallic gleam of the rain and the feeling of dampness - Berta appeared. He tried to speak to her, but Berta did not even look at him: she was speaking solicitously to the traveller, urging him to take shelter under an awning covering the doorway, and she was drying his face, his neck, his hands, with a white cloth she had taken from her handbag, and with evident care and fondness. He could discern in Berta's eyes and in her movements a loving tenderness which he believed she had never shown to himself. He could feel sadness paralysing his body and he was sure that he would be stuck forever, motionless and alone, in that doorway, looking out at the rain.

  He awoke at dawn and immediately sat down to continue the story.

  At the airport, the lost traveller has met a woman, forced, like him, to wait until the wind dies down. Some initial remarks on the problem affecting them have opened the gates to a long conversation. After a while, they are told that the last flight of the day has been cancelled. Together the two travellers leave the airport and walk around the city, absorbed in their conversation.

  That strange distant city and all the circumstances of their peculiar shipwreck conspire to awaken in each of them a frankness that grows as the hours pass. At first, the traveller talks about his job, recalling the early days when all that nonstop travel held a promise of adventure, and he arrived in each city eager to discover some of its secrets. In turn, she told him about her first years in her job when she saw each new project as a story, always with the promise of a happy ending.

  Later, he tells her all the details of his progressive anxiety, how as the years and the journeys have passed, he has begun to fear that one day he will forget his name and will become irredeemably lost in the streets of a city like this one, surrounded by shops selling kimonos, tape recorders and quartz watches. She then tells him about her struggles in the company over the last year, her growing weariness with the infighting.

  They both rejected the crossing in the boat that was to leave at eleven. They hoped that the wind would die down in the night and that flights to Spain would be resumed in the morning. They had dinner together and, later, they sat in one of the cafes near the plaza, where they stayed till closing time. The wind had died down.

  On one side of the huge circular plaza, built as a backdrop for military ceremonies and parades, was the park with its tall palm trees, its ghostly walls, its deserted white paths along which only they now strolled. They walked and chatted for another hour, then went back to the hotel where they were both staying. The sleepy night porter handed them the keys. They had both been drinking and were talkative and wide awake. She remembered that she had in her room a couple of bottles of whisky that she had bought in an Indian shop as potential presents, and invited him in for a drink.

  So they went on till dawn, drinking and talking. The sky was growing light over the port when she told him about her various disappointments in love, and spoke about her present partner, with whom she stayed mainly out of friendship and the fear of loneliness. `Yet I'm still lonely,' she confessed. He moved closer and told her how he had lost his wife in an accident, in the winter rain. `I'm haunted by the memory,' he said. `I can't forget her, I can't forget what happened. I carry it around inside me all the time, like a demon that won't let go.' Like a beast gnawing at his imagination, constantly opening fresh wounds.

  They separated after breakfast, to catch a few hours' sleep before going out to the airport. However, with morning the wind had regained its strength and was gusting over the city, veiling in dust the outline of the distant mountains.

  By midday, Berta had still not called. The story had advanced a lot, but as he re-read it he felt a detachment, even an antipathy, towards what he had written and realised that he could not go on; he did not like the way the story was developing; it was too much of a cliche; the enigma of the lost traveller could not be resolved by an encounter with a woman, however attractive, so he tried to reshape it completely from the point where the man begins to speak with the woman in the airport lounge, attempting to substitute for the relationship between them - after her shock at seeing that face - events with a completely different meaning.

  Instead of engaging in conversation with the traveller, the woman would get to her feet, pick up her luggage and hurry away. Thus the relationship between them could never arise; the growing intimacy would be transformed into distance and only a few brief interchanges would link them intermittently over the course of a night in which she would flee while he tried vainly to pursue her.

  However, the story would not bend in the new direction he had decided to give it. He changed the text numerous times, but successive readings of the new versions forced him to accept that, despite his dislike of the original plot, the meeting between the two travellers and their subsequent intimacy was no more melodramatic and cliched than keeping them apart.

  Moreover, during the long conversation, some elements could be introduced which would give the whole thing a sense of destiny, because it occurred to him that the traveller might begin to suspect, behind the behaviour and appearance of the woman, some mystery relevant to himself.

  It was Saturday afternoon, and he felt resentful. `It's a ridiculous tale,' he thought, knowing that he was enslaved to the story, which was determined to develop in ways that defied his will.

  All he had eaten was some biscuits and fruit and he felt low and sluggish, but he clung to the story as to a vow whose abandonment might bring down on his head all kinds of grief and misfortune. He felt very alone, on an interminable day full of evil omens, and the story, though resistant to some of his intentions, was at least a testimony to reality and coherence.

  The two travellers remained for a further day in the city. Their prolonged conversation had brought them closer and they enjoyed each other's company. The wind continued and flights were still suspended, so that night they bought tickets for the boat, being obliged to share a cabin. With an unease that was simultaneously frightening and pleasurable, the traveller noticed that the woman was beginning to seem eerily familiar to him.

  They sat in the main lounge, where some people were dancing under the fluorescent lights. Only an hour or so had gone by when dancing became very difficult because of the rolling of the ship amid the rough seas. One of the dancers fell against a table, glasses shattered, there were hysterical shrieks that marked the end of the evening and everyone went off to bed.

  The lights were dim and the cabin looked like some ancient crypt recently uncovered thanks to luck and the skill of the archaeologists. She sat on one of the bunks and took off her shoes with a gesture in which the traveller found the definitive key to his unease.

  She had her head bent and her hair concea
led her face, but the traveller was sure now who she was: only some ancient misunderstanding or the persistence of an incomprehensible delusion - unless it was a dream from which he was now emerging, only to realise it was a lie - could have led him to believe she was dead. When the woman looked up at him, his hope turned to joy as he unhesitatingly recognised every single feature of her face.

  That twist in the plot, an unexpected flash of imagination, put a sudden end to his efforts. In amazement he re-read the last passage. For reasons he could not fathom, the lost traveller had irrupted into places never suspected or foreseen by the author.

  It was the middle of the night by now, and only the intermitten frenzy of Saturday-night drivers disturbed the darkness of the streets. He decided not to write any more and went to the living room, where he stood for a long time, immersed in the bafflement induced by the way his story had developed, apparently heading nowhere but into confusion and madness. His growing disappointment led him eventually to an implacable sense of his own solitude.

  It took him a long time to fall asleep and, at nine o'clock the next morning, he was woken abruptly by the ringing of the telephone. It was Berta, back in Spain after taking the boat. Her voice was hoarse with lack of sleep and sounded vaguely uneasy.

  `Are you OK?' he asked anxiously.

  `Fine,' she said, in an evasive tone.

  `When will you get here?,

  She told him that she would be taking the plane at midday.

  'I need to talk to you about something,' she added finally.

  He felt an obscure threat in her tone and could not think what to reply. He simply said that he would be waiting at the airport. He felt very restless, so he went out. It was Sunday and the streets were deserted and quiet. He began to wander around, oblivious to the brightness of the sun, just going where his feet led him. He tried not to think about Berta, prey to a gloomy premonition that echoed the feelings of his dream of the night before last, when he had seen her lavish such tenderness on a stranger. Nor did he want to think about the story that lay in his office awaiting its ending. Yet he could not forget it either, as he strode on, with wide, staring eyes, provoking surprise and even alarm in the few people who crossed his path.

  He had walked a great distance, when he became aware that it was time to set off for the airport. Yet an obscure impulse drove him back home. He turned on the computer, put in his short stories disk, searched in the directory for the story he had been writing for so many months and clicked the command that would make it disappear. When the story had been deleted, he heaved a sigh.

  Once again, he had been unable to finish a story and maybe this time, too, the memory of the unresolved plot would fester in his mind, preventing him for a long time from constructing another one. But the plane would be landing soon and he hurried out of the flat.

  © Jose Maria Merino

  Translated by Annella McDermott

  Jose Maria Merino was born in La Coruna in 1941, but lived for many years in Leon. At present, he is resident in Madrid. Merino's first work of fiction was Novela de Andres Choz (1976). His novel La orilla oscura (1985) won the Spanish Critics' Prize and Las visiones de Lucrecia y la ruina de la Nueva Restauraci6n (1996) was awarded the Miguel Delibes Prize. `The Companion' is from Cuentos del reino secreto (1982) and `The Lost Traveller' is the title story of El viajero perdido (1990).

  She smiled at him from one end of the sofa. She was wearing a very short black skirt and a tight grey sweater. It was dark in the sitting room and out in the street the evening was beginning its leisurely decline.

  `Are you sure your parents aren't going to turn up any minute?' he asked.

  `If you're going to be like that, we'll go out,' she replied.

  `I just feel really uptight,' he said.

  `Why?' she asked.

  He passed her the joint and did not respond at once. Finally, his gaze lost in the geometry of a piece of porcelain, he said:

  `I get like this sometimes, I get a sort of knot in my chest, just here. And it doesn't go away until something happens.'

  `What sort of something?' she asked, stubbing out the joint in a copper ashtray.

  `Something bad,' he said.

  It was a very spacious living room, full of over-large furniture and objects that harked back to a solid but inglorious past. The boy, who was sitting at the other end of the sofa, smiled at the girl and tried in vain to evoke some exciting fantasy. The minutes passed noisily on a pendulum clock. For the second time, she asked him if she should put some music on and he again said no.

  `If they tried to open the door or if they rang the bell, we wouldn't hear them,' he argued.

  `So you spend the whole day just waiting for something to happen,' she said.

  `Yes,' he said shyly.

  At that moment, the phone rang and he almost jumped off the sofa, causing her to collapse in laughter.

  `Aren't you going to pick it up?' he asked.

  `I can't, we're not here,' she said.

  `Where are we??

  `At the cinema or having a few beers somewhere.'

  `What if it's your parents and they've decided to come back?'

  `Don't start that again.'

  The phone continued to ring throughout this conversation and then stopped. Night was falling on the other side of the windows, although the living room had been in darkness for some time. The boy was sweating; he switched on the table lamp to his left, and a few objects recovered their shapes.

  `Imagine it was true what you said before: that we're not here.'

  She crossed her legs and lit a cigarette. Then she screwed up her eyes and pursed her lips; the shadow of a smile flickered across her mouth.

  `It's possible,' she said at last, `we might well be somewhere else, but, for some reason, we might believe that we were here.'

  `That would be great,' he said, as if relieved of an enormous burden. `That way, even if your parents did come back, nothing would happen.'

  `Have you ever seen a film called The Boston Strangler?'

  'No,' he said.

  She changed position, put out her cigarette and proceeded to roll another joint while she summarised the plot for him.

  `It's based on real events, I think. It's about this really normal guy who worked as a plumber or something. The thing is, the guy was a murderer, only he didn't know it. There was a murky area in his life that he knew nothing about, and when he was in that murky area, he used to strangle women.There's a really moving bit when the police discover that he's the murderer, but at the same time realise that he doesn't know it. Like I said, he was a model family man and all that. Anyway, they arrest him, but they don't tell him what he's been accused of, instead they call in some psychiatrists to see if they can make him remember his crimes. The man is completely baffled, of course, because he has no idea what's going on.Then the psychiatrists start working with him and there's one really chilling moment. Just thinking about it makes my hair stand on end. I'm going to put the centre light on.'

  She handed him the joint and got up to turn on the main light. The shadows, far from diminishing, grew thicker in the most densely furnished parts of the room. The boy took a rather anxious drag on the joint. He seemed to have grown thinner in the last few minutes, but that was due to the intensity of his gaze and the effect of the light on his face.

  `And where did he think he was when he was killing these women?' he asked.

  `He wasn't anywhere,' she replied, `the crimes were parentheses, black holes.That's what I think anyway. So, I was telling you about this one moment, when he's with the psychiatrists, when an event surfaces in his memory that he has no knowledge of having been part of. He sees himself climbing furtively down the drainpipe in some inner courtyard somewhere. Then you get a close-up of his face on the screen and it shows the utter horror he feels at remembering something that, as far as he was concerned, never happened. Can you imagine what it must feel like to remember things that haven't happened or that you believe haven't happened?' />
  `How did it end?'

  `I can't remember.'

  `Those things usually end badly.'

  `Have you still got the knot in your chest?'

  `It's got much worse now. That story about the plumber has made me feel really strange.'

  She changed position and sat looking up at the ceiling, watching the smoke from the joint rise up and disperse. The boy could not find a position in which he could sit comfortably for more than half a minute. After a while, he said:

  `Why have you gone all silent?'

  `I'm enjoying myself just imagining things,' she replied.

  `What are you imagining now?'

  `That what you said about the knot is true, that it warns you when something bad is going to happen.'

  `It's true, I told you it was.

  `The same thing happens to my father when he dreams that he's smoking a cigarette. He gave it up fifteen years ago, but sometimes, in dreams, he sees himself smoking again and the following day something always happens.'

  The girl stopped speaking and the tick-tock from the pendulum clock took on vast proportions.

  `Keep talking, please,' he said, `when you stop talking, I feel even more anxious.'

  `Did I tell you what happened to my grandmother when my Uncle Fernando died, my father's twin brother?'

  `Don't tell me any more stories like that.'

  `All right. Do you want to go to my room then?'

  `Not yet. I just need to calm down a bit first.'

  She excused herself and left the living room. When she got to the bathroom, she looked at herself in the mirror and her eyes were shining. She sent herself a knowing smile and unhurriedly retouched her lipstick. Then she brushed her hair, tried out a few horrified expressions and returned to the living room.

  `It was awful,' she said, `it was in the house opposite, I saw it from the bathroom window: a woman just leapt into space.

  `What do you mean?'

  `She killed herself. The people next door have picked up the body and put it in a car.'