Oliveira went out into the hall.
“Agatha?”
He got down four steps before noticing that the bathroom door was closed. Then he heard footsteps on the porch, the panel of the mailbox gave a metallic groan, and a plastic envelope slid through the door. On the other side of the frosted glass, Oliveira saw the postman’s yellow raincoat turning away. He thought he’d go down and collect her mail and then say good morning to Agatha, and as he bent down to pick up the envelope he felt a pleasant pain in his waist, a tug that was also a call. The transparent envelope contained a magazine about horses, but the subscription label covered the title. Seeing Agatha’s name in print for the first time caused a simple and clear emotion. He approached the map on the wall and looked for Iceland. It was a violet-colored country. France, where he still was, was saffron red. Portugal was green, an intense green similar to the color of the van. Abandoning a country was child’s play. Swapping colors and not life. Rootlessness had no color, however. It makes no difference to live in one place or another and being born here or there was an accident. One was a chameleon, countries and people mere scenery.
Maybe Agatha would be grateful for an invitation to spend some days with him; maybe she’d even agree to leave with him right now. Oliveira looked for L’Isle-Adam and his index finger traced the route ahead of him, heading for Clermont-Ferrand and arriving in Perpignan and then Barcelona. The skies would be clearer there and it wouldn’t be so cold. Next he found the Arctic Circle and followed it around the world through the Bering Strait, as a silent homage to Agatha. She was a brave woman. Over the course of the night she’d faced her phantoms and overcome them. It was almost fascinating: Oliveira now remembered the house where Alma had died, and it was as if a new fear had joined his own. All his life he’d lived with fear, with the sensation of menace. It was absurd. His egotism had protected him; he couldn’t feel proud of that. Now he wanted to feel simple emotions. It was a new day and he was hungry.
When he went outside, the dome of clouds had taken on a glassy tone, and the sun was a remote and cold aluminum disk. Perhaps it was the first time that the banal event of a day beginning had given him such satisfaction; it was as if he’d had something to do with it and should be commended. Two doors away from the bakery the air was already smelling of freshly baked bread, a thick and almost visible scent that Oliveira could have cut with his hand. The place was small, but the counter left enough space for a square table and two chairs that looked out from behind the window toward the street. The baker was balder and shorter than he looked before when he was sweeping. His mustache completely hid his lips. The electronic theme music of France 3 came from the back room.
Oliveira pointed to a baguette and asked for two croissants and two pains au chocolat.
“And a carton of orange juice,” he added.
“No cartons,” said the man. “It comes in a bottle, fresh squeezed.”
“A bottle, then.” Oliveira counted the coins in the palm of his hand. “When would you say dawn has broken? Officially, I mean. When there starts to be light, or only when you can see the sun?”
The man considered the question with a grave expression.
“I would say there are two moments. One is dawn, and one is day. Dawn comes before day.”
“So, dawn is before you can see the sun?”
“I’d say so,” the man said.
“Dawn comes as soon as the sky is no longer black.”
“I think so. Is the lady feeling all right?”
“Do you know her?”
The baker lowered his eyes, feigning prudence.
“From seeing her arrive at this hour,” he said. “She never spends the night in her house. But something tells me she’s going to be all right from now on. Of course, I’m not minding anybody else’s business.”
“Of course not,” said Oliveira.
He took the package wrapped in thin paper. A croissant flake floated to the floor like a feather.
When he got back to the house, Oliveira went straight into the kitchen. He looked in three cupboards before finding the glasses. They were tall and blue. The window looked out onto a clothesline. A black bra and an apron similar to the one Agatha had used the previous afternoon hung in the breeze. On the paved ground, beside the wall, a box of detergent. A spoonful of white powder had spilled, and seemed to shine on the dirty ground. Oliveira washed down mouthfuls of croissant with big gulps of orange juice. Then, when he decided to take the other croissant up to Agatha, something extraordinary occurred. Maybe it was a quality of the silence, or the image of the lonely, hanging bra and apron. Oliveira began to walk toward the front hallway—without the croissant in his hand—and his footsteps accelerated. He ran up the stairs two at a time. Oliveira tripped on the penultimate step but didn’t feel his knee smash into the hard edge. He opened the bathroom door without knocking, maybe because he already knew. Naked, Agatha was sleeping in the bathtub; Oliveira found the waterline, level with her shoulders and just covering her breast, and saw her relaxed nipples almost at the same time as he saw the first cloud of blood, supple and round like a balloon coming away from the bottom of a swimming pool.
Oliveira called her and heard the echo of his voice. He sprang to her side and his first instinct was to take her by the wrists, pull her hands out of the water to prevent the gentle and efficient and dreadful emptying of her open veins. The tip of his index finger slipped momentarily into her viscous flesh: Agatha had made too deep a cut. He felt a weak pulse, reluctant but existent, a slight palpitation in her thumb. She was alive, it was still possible to save her. The air floating above the mixture of water and blood had a rusty taste. Oliveira knelt down to get his arms under her body. His shirtsleeves absorbed a pastel red. The cuffs were as heavy as sponges. He found that her body was lighter than he’d imagined and the water, instead of making her slippery, increased the friction between Agatha’s skin and his own. His heart was shuddering at the base of his throat. His own blood pounded in his temples. Oliveira felt a second of intense panic and knew he had never known such a sensation and also knew that nightmares are made of the same stuff as this moment. He wanted to stand up and carry Agatha out of the house and take her to a hospital. He wanted to make a phone call and, while waiting for the men who would arrive among strident sirens, apply a tourniquet over those little-girl bones, though he didn’t know how. He wanted to move, do something for the woman who was dying, anything. But his body would not obey.
He closed his eyes as if praying. A single image illuminated his mind: the tiny shadow of the lizard he’d seen before Agatha started telling him about Grímsey Island, where it was always sunny and people had no pasts or guilt, where life was not a burden. Now he knew that the most diligent team of doctors, the most urgent attention could not save this woman, because her pain was not in the yellow skin of her wrists or the scalpel cuts, and she would still be tormented every night even if they replaced all the blood she had lost today. Oliveira looked at her pale face, mouth half open, her soaked forehead as if in the grip of a violent fever. He didn’t feel resentment, although it now seemed like Agatha was abandoning him; he didn’t see a woman who perhaps, with more time, he could have loved, but a body at rest, redeemed and free, so ostentatious in her liberty that only nudity seemed to suit her. At last she sleeps, thought Oliveira. Love, which he’d so often heard about in abstract terms or tacky images, could be this simple: Agatha fleeing and the will to not prevent her flight.
Oliveira took his arms out of the tainted water. The body sank a little, making small waves on the surface, and ended up settling like a bottle. The stream of blood was saffron dust on the bottom of the bathtub, the ink of an escaping octopus. Clumsily Oliveira turned around, leaned his back against the edge of the tub, and stayed there, sitting on the carpet that gave the bathroom a tasteless or outmoded look. His eyes registered the pattern in the wallpaper, the back of the toilet like a beer stein
, and the fiberglass counter, where the tape recorder rested beside the bottle of Xylocaine, and then he felt an emptiness in his stomach, something like the inability to catch your breath after a blow, as he understood that this woman had even wanted to avoid the pain of the blade slicing her skin: Agatha had been afraid, afraid of the pain, perhaps afraid of what she would feel when she started to die. Beneath the blade of the scalpel, the same one she’d used to emasculate a purebred stallion, the black drop, dense and solitary, reminded Oliveira of the English wax his father had used to seal his love letters, whether or not they were addressed to his mother.
—
FROM THE SECOND FLOOR Oliveira could see the street was beginning to show signs of life. A green and blue bus went past, the white interior lights still on, and stopped to drop off a passenger. The door opened and a woman of about fifty stepped down, her hair freshly washed, straightening her dress with her hands. Her day was just starting. Oliveira’s eyes followed her until she turned the corner, thirty meters beyond the door to the bakery.
He didn’t want to think he’d failed her. He wondered if Agatha had thought of him before or after opening her veins, or if she hadn’t considered his presence at all, if after all he’d been nothing more than that evening’s one-night stand. Maybe he had failed her. Maybe he’d had in his hands and in his voice the way to prevent Agatha’s death. But how could he have imagined the effects a word, a subtle lie, might have had on her? Maybe Agatha had made the decision long before that night, and nothing Oliveira might have said would have changed it. Maybe his presence was only required as a witness. He wondered if that was true: if everything had a human cause and another random one, if destiny existed. He also wondered if Agatha had crossed herself, if she’d listened for one last time to her daughter’s voice, if a woman who has decided to die allows herself the luxury of sentimentalism or the nostalgia of faith. A man holding a little boy’s hand walks past on the other side of the street. The boy carries a knapsack wider than his own back. They do not know that here, in this house, so close to them, a woman has suffered. It’s good that they don’t know, especially the boy. “From seeing her arrive at this hour,” the baker had said. Agatha formed part of a street’s waking routine. The baker, the boy, Agatha. Three islands, and Oliveira just another island. Maybe communication between two people was never possible, or it was possible but imperfect, and its imperfections were capable of ending a life. There was no way of knowing. Two big drops burst against the windowpane, almost at once. Then it began to rain. Oliveira felt cold in his eyes and a sort of uncomfortable sting. It was lucky it was raining because people who looked at his eyes would think of raindrops before anything else.
His knee hurt. But, no matter how hard he tried, he could not remember when he’d banged it. He turned around, looked at the bathroom door, and didn’t remember having chosen to close it, either.
V
“Coffee,” said Oliveira. “A strong one.”
He was sitting beside the window. On the table was Agatha’s magazine, open in the middle. Beside the magazine, folded neatly, was the map of the world. Oliveira had taken it down off the wall and as he pulled out one of the thumbtacks he’d torn the flesh under his fingernail. The baker spoke to him from behind the counter.
“Have you made up your mind yet, monsieur?”
“Pardon?”
“Whether dawn breaks before or after. Look, chérie, it’s him. Monsieur wanted to know about the sun, what I told you about.”
“Ah oui,” said the woman. She had freckles on her rosy cheeks and her hair up in an impeccable bun. “My husband told me about that, it’s very interesting. So many things out there and one never stops to think about them. It’s . . . it’s unfair.”
“Monsieur arrived with madame,” said the baker.
His wife knew immediately who he meant.
“That’s very good.” She smiled. “Yes, definitely. This is good news.”
Then the woman went into a room where two columns of baking sheets guarded the door frame like shelves. She took a tray from one and put it on the other. “C’est une bonne nouvelle,” she said. “I knew it. One day someone just had to come.”
The baker placed a cup of coffee on top of the folded map. He lowered his voice and leaned forward, a man peering over a precipice. His tone was more than cordial: it was warm, almost affectionate.
“Monsieur is well? Do you feel ill? My wife can bring you something if your eyes are stinging, monsieur.”
“I’m fine. Thank you.”
“It’s probably the pollution. The clouds bring us all the pollution from Paris. It’s very hard on the eyes.”
“Of course.”
“Drops, monsieur. In any pharmacy. You shouldn’t drive with your eyes so irritated.”
“You’re right. Excuse me. I have to get going.”
“Monsieur is traveling? Will you be away long?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but yes, I do have to make a trip.”
The baker did not insist. Oliveira had been rude to him and on his face appeared a glimmer of disenchantment. Maybe he’d been too abrupt, thought Oliveira, and regretted it, but it was too late now. He was grateful for the coffee, the bitter taste on his tongue. It was still raining. Oliveira couldn’t wait any longer. He put a five-franc coin in the ashtray and collected up his papers in one hand.
“Monsieur doesn’t have to leave,” said the baker. “You can stay without ordering anything.”
“Say good-bye to your wife for me,” said Oliveira.
“Good luck, monsieur.”
“Thank you. Could you do me a favor?”
“Yes, monsieur.”
“Take Agatha . . . take the lady a bag of coffee. A gift from me. She’s sleeping right now, but take it to her later.”
The baker smiled. He looked at Agatha’s house and then looked back at Oliveira.
“Yes, monsieur. With pleasure, monsieur.”
—
THE VAN WAS RESTING beside the curb like an anesthetized horse. To Oliveira it seemed like a useless, obsolete, almost despicable machine. I’ve waited with you, Agatha, I’ve accompanied you to the end of the night. He started the engine and waited for the thin layer of ice on the windshield to melt. His eyes began to water and the interior of the vehicle was a hazy vision. Oliveira squeezed his eyelids and one fat tear fell onto the steering wheel. Then others formed in his eyes, as if they were trying to dissolve his perception of things or at least delay his departure. He was surprised by an idea: if his life ended now—if a drunk driver plowed into him from behind and broke his neck, if a man driven crazy by grief came out shooting randomly—his years of living would have served for nothing. Who would he be, who might he have been? He would be the man who abandoned the only land he could call his own; he would be the man who allowed a woman to die.
He didn’t do any calculations but knew he was running late. He had to get going, continue to make his way south, past the Pyrenees and drive several more hours after that. He had two days ahead of him. After that, his parents’ city, whose name had no meaning whatsoever and in which Oliveira had never lived, would welcome him. He couldn’t imagine his future life, or what his friends would be like or what they’d look like. But he would begin to live a different life and was somehow liberated and ready to respond to the change. There would be a woman. Oliveira would look at her every once in a while and think: You are her. I’ve chosen you. You’ve chosen me. But that woman didn’t have a face, and wasn’t expecting him, and could not know that her life, in that instant, was beginning to be different because Oliveira was traveling toward her. He himself would be until the moment of arrival somewhat uncertain, a malleable substance, vulnerable to words and weather and the portent of love, a body in movement across a map, less alone than before, crossing meridians.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I wrote these stor
ies between 1998 and 2002. Except for “The Return,” which was written near Xhoris, Belgium, they were the first fictions I wrote after arriving in Barcelona in 1999. In choosing them, I thought about something I once heard Tobias Wolff say: that a book of stories should be like a novel in which the characters don’t know each other.
I would like to thank Francis and Suzanne Laurenty, for their hospitality during my year in Belgium; Enrique de Hériz and Yolanda Cespedosa, for their friendship and support during the writing of these stories; and Pilar Reyes, for the dedication with which she read the Spanish version of the manuscript and brought this book into being.
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