Landing

by Laia Fàbregas

I walked into the bar, like always, and sat on my stool. I waited for Karen Abrams to finish her conversation with a customer and come over.

  “How’s it going, cutie?” she asked, as always.

  “Great.”

  “Any news? I didn’t see you yesterday. I thought maybe you’d gone off to search for someone.”

  She seemed not to have heard the news.

  “I worked late yesterday, went to the supermarket, and by that time it was too late.”

  “Have you learned anything about the word in the box?”

  “No. I don’t think it means anything. When I Google it there are no results.”

  “Really! I don’t think I’ve ever gotten no results in Google.” She looked thoughtful. “In other words, we have a box with a word inside that doesn’t mean anything in any language in the world. Where do we go from here?”

  “I don’t know. I have to figure that out.”

  “Why don’t you bring the box in some evening and we can have another look?”

  “No. Sorry. I don’t want to bring it out of the house. I’ll think of some other way to continue our investigation.” She looked at me mistrustfully and glanced away. After taking a deep breath she got a Coca-Cola from the fridge and filled her glass slowly.

  “Want one?”

  “Yes, please” I said as sweetly as I could.

  “Who’s next on your list?” she asked sincerely as she poured my Coca-Cola.

  “Lianne Pérez-Horst.”

  “Aha, a Dutch woman who married a Portuguese guy.” Her tone of voice was enthusiastic, as if she wasn’t angry anymore.

  “Isn’t Pérez a Spanish name?”

  “Could be.” She glanced around the bar. “You want to stay for dinner? I made a special dessert just for you.”

  “Just for me? Why just for me?”

  “I thought you probably had a terrible day at work.”

  She knew.

  “It’s not the end of the world. But it kept me from researching Lianne Pérez-Horst.”

  “Bummer. You want to go upstairs and use my computer?”

  I was surprised to hear myself say yes. I had my own computer at home, but she was trying so hard to be helpful that I didn’t want to turn her down.

  “If you keep an eye on the place for a second I’ll go upstairs and turn it on. I’ll be right back . . .”

  I stayed on my stool and looked around. What did she mean ‘keep an eye on the place’? I hoped none of her customers would ask me for something, because I wouldn’t be able to help them. The only thing I knew how to do was draw a beer. Karen Abrams returned in five minutes.

  “Go on upstairs and do your thing.”

  “Thanks.” I climbed the stairs to her flat, surprised by her generosity. I sat down on an old office chair and typed name number seventy-two from my list.

  It turned out Lianne Pérez-Horst was a freelance journalist with her own blog. She lived in Eindhoven and was married to the son of a Spanish immigrant. I thought of the dead, nameless man. He was also a Spanish immigrant. Maybe Lianne Pérez-Horst’s father-in-law knew the man who had died on the plane.

  I took a look at her blog; there was a lot to read. That night, while Karen Abrams was serving her customers, I spent three hours in front of the computer reading all of Lianne Pérez-Horst’s blog entries. Her words and the comments by her readers gave a clear description of her life, making it easy for me to view it from afar. I wondered whether someone who revealed so much about herself might also write about someone else. I wondered whether I might find myself described in her words, if she had written about that day in 1987 in Someren. But her story didn’t date back that far. She had only been blogging about her life for the past four years.

  I could approach Lianne Pérez-Horst in several different ways. I could send her a message with a few simple questions, I could call her, or I could just show up at her house, because all her contact information was online. It had been a long time since I’d been to Eindhoven, and it struck me as a good place to visit the following weekend. I nearly asked Karen Abrams if she’d join me, but as soon as I had the thought I realized it was crazy. Karen Abrams owned a bar, and our conversations were best held in a bar. I wouldn’t know what to say to her on the train.

  Lianne Pérez-Horst had two children. Saturday morning the family would get up early to go see her older son’s soccer game. The bicycle race they had wanted to do afterwards had been cancelled by the sponsor on account of bad weather. Despite that, they had considered going on a bike ride, just the four of them. They liked adventure and weren’t afraid of a downpour or the high winds that were forecast. But in the end they had decided to stay home and make an apple pie, leaving the bikes for another day.

  The eldest son had asked for “a mud day” and his parents had promised that the next time they went out on their bikes it would be a mud bath.

  It was all there, for anyone to read. Lianne Pérez-Horst’s family life was open to the public. Looking at her life from the outside, it seemed utterly idyllic, unattainable, suffocating.

  That Saturday afternoon when she was making apple pie seemed to me like the perfect time to ring her doorbell.

  On the way home I decided to call Anneke, I was in a good enough mood to talk to her.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, it’s me.” I was always “me” when I called Anneke and Jan. They didn’t have another “me” to confuse me with.

  “How are you, sweetie?”

  “Good. Last week I was in Berlin, there and back in the same day, visiting my friend Jenny. She makes mood boards.”

  “Mood boards? What are they?”

  I told her all about Jenny’s life as if she were a real friend. While I was talking I thought about a study I had recently read, that said people tell sixty lies a day. I wondered how many lies I was telling as I talked at length about someone as if she really were my friend, though she wasn’t.

  “It sounds like a lovely job,” Anneke said eventually. “When will Jenny come and visit you? Would you like to invite her over for dinner with us?”

  “I don’t know, Anneke, she’s working pretty hard right now, but if she comes to visit I promise we’ll come and see you,” and that wasn’t a lie. I liked to visit Anneke and Jan with someone else, to divert their attention.

  “And when are you coming to visit?”

  “I don’t know, Anneke, there’s some trouble at work, I guess you’ve heard about the missing tax returns, right? How about I come over next week?”

  “Perfect, Jan will be happy to hear it.”

  “Good night.”

  “Good night, sweetie.”

  Him

  The first painting Willemien sold at her parents’ friends’ new gallery was an Extremaduran landscape called Airplanes in the S ky. But in the broad, blue sky she had painted there wasn’t a single plane, not even a cloud. Nevertheless, the swath of blue was hypnotizing, and people would stand in front of it for minutes on end, looking for a plane that wasn’t there.

  More than a year had passed since our first meeting with the gallerists, and since then Willemien had spent many hours on her paintings, and she had also given birth to our second son, Simon. We could have done things differently, the show could have been rescheduled, but back then we thought we could do anything. We knew that life could get even more difficult, and Willemien didn’t want to lose the opportunity. Having a child at the same time as preparing for the show seemed to her to be a unique opportunity for creativity: creating both inside and outside herself.

  At times I’ve thought that later she had to pay the price for all the energy she expended back then. But Willemien wouldn’t be Willemien if she had done things differently.

  Simon was born quickly, as if he knew his mother didn’t have any time to waste. He was an easy baby, who soon learned to sleep like a c
hamp. Many times Willemien said she wasn’t surprised by his silent collaboration, because she had spent the pregnancy explaining to Simon that shortly after he was born she would have a show of her work.

  They were intense, exhausting, happy months. We channeled all our energy into preparing for the opening, knowing that the day afterwards would be a vacuum we’d fill with rest and peace.

  The day before the opening, Willemien spent all morning with the gallerists, hanging her paintings in the gallery. I stopped by after work to see how it looked and to help out if they needed it. When I arrived they were hanging the placards with the names of the paintings, while Willemien was nursing Simon in one of the back rooms. I spoke with the owners for a little while and they left to run an errand. We waited for Simon to fall asleep and then Willemien gave me a tour of the gallery’s three rooms. She showed me each painting, one by one. Some I had seen before, others I had never laid eyes on.

  The first room was filled with Extremaduran landscapes, the second featured the paintings of the stone houses, but when we came to the third room I was speechless. In ten paintings,Willemien had painted my dreams: the enormous, shining light bulb, the factory’s blinding skylights, the house with the books that stood out from the shelves, begging to be read, the chimney of one house going over to talk to another.

  “This is your room,” she said with pride.

  I was lost for words, looking at my dreams. I wondered how she had captured so well what had existed only in my head.

  “How do you know the exact colors of my dreams?” I eventually asked.

  “Because you told me about them so many times, I can see them, and this is what they look like in my imagination.”

  I took another look around the room. I imagined Willemien spending an entire day on one of these paintings, thinking about things I had made up, and meeting me afterwards with her painter’s smile when I returned home from work.

  “Why didn’t you show me them before?”

  “They look better here, hanging against the white walls, in good light. Do you like them?”

  “Of course I do.”

  She stroked my cheek and left me alone with the paintings. I was struck by the similarities in the images. It was like Willemien had had the same dreams as me, like we had both made the journey to the light bulb factory together. I realized that in her inner world, there was plenty of room for me. I felt fortunate to share my life with a woman who came from a world so different from mine in so many ways.

  A few minutes later, she was back at my side. She took my hand and led me back through the room with the stone houses. I stopped to look at one of the paintings more closely. In the window of one of the houses Willemien had painted there were two faces looking out at the street. I looked carefully and recognized Francisco and Francisco, the boys from Cuacos de Yuste.

  “So in the end they built a house together?” I said joking.

  “Yes. I like it better that way. If I had put them in two separate houses, they would seem lonely.”

  Willemien asked me what I thought of the show. I remembered I had already told her when we started our tour, and I realized she was nervous.

  “It’s going to be great,” I said, with all the conviction I could muster, not being completely confident myself.

  The next day, at the opening, I spent most of my time looking after Arjen, who had already turned three, and Simon, who was just seven months old.

  In the years that followed, Willemien had four shows in different galleries and sold some paintings. But in 1971, when Robert was born, she put her brushes aside for a few months. Three children took up too much of her time. And then, there was no more room on our walls for more paintings, and Willemien didn’t have a show coming up, so she decided to stop painting until she had time to prepare for a new show. The paintbrushes laid there for weeks, waiting for Willemien, and weeks turned into months without us noticing. When Robert turned one,Willemien told me she didn’t think she’d ever paint again.

  “Never again is a long time,” I said, surprised.“Just wait, after a few years, when Robert is in school, you’ll go up to the attic one day and before you know it you’ll be painting again.”

  “You don’t understand. It has nothing to do with the children. It’s just that I’ve painted everything I wanted to paint. I think I should start doing something else. These past few years blank canvases always inspired me to fill them with color, but that doesn’t happen anymore. The blankness stymies me, the empty canvases don’t speak to me. I don’t know why.” She looked at me, hoping I’d understand, perhaps even hoping that I’d be able to help her understand her creative block. But I couldn’t hide that I was out of my depth.“You’ll find another way,” I said,“I don’t know what it is yet, but one day I will.”

  In the years that followed Willemien bought art books and went to shows with the children, but she didn’t make any of her own work again until life dealt her its first blow.

  When Willemien fell ill we had been married for ten years. Her fatigue began after we returned from a holiday in Extremadura. After making the trip by train for several summers, we made our first trip by car in 1974. In the green Opel Kadett we had bought. At first we chalked it up to the long car trip and the change in climate, but a few weeks after our return she was still just as tired and her joints started to ache.

  The doctors spent several fruitless months trying to discover the reason for her aches and pains. Eventually, the doctor who had called us in to give us the results of the latest tests told us that it would be best if we moved to a gentler climate.

  “Give it a try for a few months, and in time you’ll see how much better you’ll feel in the Mediterranean weather. Even if you don’t get better, you’ll be able to carry on a normal life.”

  While images of the Andalucian coast, which we had visited that past summer, flitted through my mind, I looked at Willemien and realized she had fixated on his last few words:“Even if you don’t get better, you’ll be able to carry on a normal life.”

  Normal was a word Willemien hated. Normal is what her parents had spent their whole lives wanting her to be, what she had never been. When we got home after a silent car ride,Willemien was furious.

  “He said I could live a normal life. What is a normal life? How can my life be normal if I’m sick, and whatever I have doesn’t even have a name and can’t be cured?”

  “But lieverd, we’ve talked about moving to Spain many times. You’ll see, you’ll feel much better once we’re there.”

  She looked at me, and I was surprised to see something new in those eyes I knew so well. I realized there was another Willemien inside her, a weak, helpless Willemien, who didn’t have the strength to reply. It was the first time I really understood what was happening to her.

  The worst thing about an undiagnosed illness is the uncertainty. Not knowing what to expect, not knowing whether the beginning of the end has arrived, or if it’s just a rough patch. Faced with uncertainty, I was used to choosing a position—to considering the options and opting for the most appealing vision of the future. When I accepted that my wife was sick, I saw two options for surviving.

  I could choose a version of our future in which Willemien faded away; I could begin to live life with the knowledge that she wouldn’t be with me much longer. So that if she really was going to die in the next few months I would be ready to say goodbye. That way, if she eventually got better, it would be like an unexpected gift.

  But I could also choose a version in which Willemien was too young to leave us, in which it was impossible to say goodbye because she wasn’t going anywhere, to live from day to day knowing we were going through a rough patch, that everything would get better and return to normal. In that case, if fate dealt us a blow and took Willemien from us, it would be a brutal farewell, the loss would kill me, but I would have lived my last days with Willemien to the fullest, not w
ith a Willemien I had already written off.

  I had chosen this second version of our future when Willemien made me see there was a third way to cope with the uncertainty. She wanted to live each day as if it were her last, yet knowing that she wasn’t going to die. Because knowing that she wasn’t going to die gave her the strength she needed to conquer her illness.

  This was our future. And we got to work building our new life by finding the pitch where we would play this final, decisive game.

  The next day I called Pedro and asked him to find out where it would be easiest to get a job along the Mediterranean coast. I knew many people from Extremadura had left for Cataluña in recent years, so I wasn’t worried about finding work. I was slowly getting used to the idea that, after twelve years, I would be returning to the warmth of southern Europe, if not exactly to my home.

  Pedro called me a few days later and read me a list of ten or twelve factories near Barcelona where Extremadurans were working. I remember feeling depressed because none of the options Pedro gave me were very interesting.

  That night, after putting the children to bed,Willemien and I had dinner and I told her what Pedro had said. But instead of asking me which factories they were, she acted like she hadn’t heard what I’d said and asked me, “Do you know who Salvador Dalí is?”

  “No,” I said, thinking she was talking about some guy who could help me find a job.

  “He’s an amazing painter.”

  I was taken aback, trying to understand what this amazing painter had to do with anything, till she explained, “I heard that they just opened a wonderful museum. Do you know where Figueres is?”

  “No.”

  “A few kilometers from the Mediterranean coast. North of Barcelona. It’s a small town. I imagine it’s similar to Someren. Let’s move there.”

  She sounded as sure of herself as she had ten years earlier, when she said we should move to Eindhoven. But this time, instead of feeling worried, I felt relieved. It meant we wouldn’t have to move somewhere larger than Eindhoven. It meant I wouldn’t have to work in one of the factories Pedro told me about.