Empty hours, empty days passed. I didn’t know what to do with all those minutes, those seconds. I walked around, watching other people living their lives, as if mine had ceased.
Until one day I suddenly realized that I didn’t belong there.
After a personal tragedy we make critical decisions on the spur of the moment but they’re often temporary because they’re driven by emotions that are still raw. The certainty I had felt when I decided to start a new life in my hometown disappeared without a trace.
One bright, silent morning I decided that there was nothing wrong with changing my mind. I had been at Antonia’s house for two weeks, I had felt loved and cared for, but I needed to find my own path. Unsure of what I would do next, I decided to leave the path I had chosen and go to Barcelona to visit Simon. But I didn’t call him beforehand; I thought I’d call from the station in Barcelona. I wanted to travel in peace, without knowing that someone would be waiting for me at the other end of my journey. I’d sleep in a narrow bunk, listening to the rhythm of the wheels turning around and around on their axes without hearing them. My body would feel the ground covering distance beneath me, leaving my past further and further behind.
Things never turn out quite the way we expect them to. What’s important is to know what your goal is. I wanted to begin a new life somewhere pleasant, leaving my recent past in another pleasant place behind, to be able to enjoy my memories of Willemien without the grief of losing her too soon. In the end I achieved my goal, it took me months of traveling paths I never would have imagined traveling, but I did manage to find peace again.
Antonia accompanied me to Cáceres; I took the train to Madrid, where I waited for the Talgo. I had reserved a private sleeper compartment, just as I had on my outward journey, because I had no desire whatsoever to sleep next to a stranger. When I boarded the train I was greeted by a steward in a blue uniform who looked like he had just gotten out of bed. The young man had just arisen because he had to work all night, and his fresh face was welcoming despite its contrast to the dark night enveloping us. The steward had a name tag pinned to his chest: Roberto. Although they had the same name, he bore no resemblance at all to our Robert, no doubt because his mother wasn’t Dutch. This thought promptly made me wonder whether his mother and father were still alive, or if he’d already had to bid one of them good-bye.
“Good evening,” Roberto said, sounding a little rehearsed.“May I see your ticket please?”
I searched my jacket pockets for the ticket and, as is always the case, I found it in the last one I checked. I handed it to him and he smiled when he read it.
“Thank you very much. Come with me, please. Your companion just arrived a few minutes ago,” he said guilelessly, and he turned into the carriage corridor. My feet were frozen to the floor.
“Companion? What companion? You must be mistaken, young man,” I said, taken aback.“I’m travelling alone.”
He looked me up and down a few times and smiled in a remarkably familiar way without saying a word. I immediately recognized that smile. It triggered an avalanche of memories from Holland. Searching through images, faces, and names, I came to the conclusion that the smile I had just seen was the very same one I had seen day after day on the face of one of my roommates in Someren, long ago. It turned out that the steward for my carriage was the son of Paco, the liveliest of our group of eight, the one who never stopped talking once he got started, who suffered from insomnia and could make the nights unbearable by keeping you awake if he couldn’t sleep. The last I had heard of him was that after eight years in Holland he had returned to Extremadura to continue his life with his wife and children who had waited for him all that time. It had been more than twenty-five years since I had seen Paco.
Roberto accompanied me to my compartment, knocked on the door and an old man opened, exclaiming, “Long time no see!”
“Paco! You haven’t changed!” I lied, I couldn’t help it.
“You have! You look more Dutch than ever!” he said, lying too.
“What are you doing here? Are you going to Barcelona?”
“Not really. I called Antonia yesterday ’cause I heard you were back in town, and she told me that you were leaving today. We live in Madrid now and I have connections on the Talgo, so I decided to come by before you left. Oh, and I’m really sorry to hear about your wife.”
“Thanks. It was hard, but I’m getting used to it,” I continued to lie; I needed time to get used to the fact I was talking to a friend. Was he really a friend? We had lived under the same roof and worked in the same factory for years, but did we have anything else in common? He had shown up on the train as if we were bosom buddies. I would never have done that. Perhaps I had made more of an impression on him back then than he had made on me. Perhaps he had idealized his years in the camp and the factory after his early return to Spain. Or perhaps we had been good friends and I had simply forgotten.
Roberto departed, saying that the train would be leaving in a quarter of an hour. Fifteen minutes with an old acquaintance, I thought. But Paco had other plans. He spent the fifteen minutes telling me what had happened in his life over the past twenty-five years and, since he didn’t make any sign of leaving, I asked him if he ought to be getting on.
“Don’t worry,” he said enthusiastically, “I can always go to Barcelona and return tomorrow on another Talgo.” I shuddered at the thought of spending the night with this man who I still had not fully reconciled with the young man from Extremadura I had known in Holland. “It’ll be like old times, in our bunk beds in Someren. Remember?”
I looked at the bunks in the compartment—my compartment—, which were folded up to make four seats; I couldn’t see any resemblance with the beds in our Dutch camp. I didn’t want to think of those bunks in Someren, I didn’t want to remember the bed where I had dreamed of a beautiful life with Willemien night after night. Thirty years had passed, that dream had become a reality, and then the dream had died.
How do you remember a dream that, once you’ve accomplished it, dies too soon? Willemien would have known how to answer that question. But now that it had occurred to me to ask her, Willemien was dead, and I was aboard a train with a young man grown old.
Paco didn’t leave when the whistle sounded, or when the train doors shut, or when the train lurched forward. The man kept talking and talking, until he asked, “So, tell me! How did Holland treat you?”
Luckily I didn’t have to answer because Roberto came in and asked us if we’d like to join him in the bar car. His father didn’t hesitate, he got up and insisted I join them.
In the restaurant car there was a bottle of wine waiting for us, which Paco poured. Then he raised his glass in a toast: “To returning to our roots, to Extremadura,” he said, his eyes shining.
“To roots,” I said through my teeth. What roots, I thought. The ones I put down in the village, the ones I put down in Holland, or the ones I put down these last few years in Figueres—the ones I’ve decided to leave behind so as not to run into Willemien every time I turn the corner?
Roberto waved to a stewardess who had just entered the restaurant car. She came over and said hello to Paco, too. While Paco made small talk with the young woman, Roberto explained to me that his father often joined him on the shifts he was working. He had retired early due to back problems and he got bored staying at home. So Roberto invited him along whenever he knew the train wasn’t too full.
We spent hours in the restaurant car. After a while we stopped talking, though I hadn’t been so talkative myself, and began playing with some dominos Paco had brought along. Roberto disappeared temporarily at every station to see if anyone was boarding or disembarking, then he’d return to join us.
At three in the morning Paco went to bed and I decided to stay up a half hour longer. Not that I wasn’t tired, I was completely exhausted, but I thought I’d sleep better if I waited a little, to be certain tha
t when I went to bed there wasn’t an ex-emigrant from Extremadura under my bunk, asking me what I had been up to lately.
That half hour in the restaurant car without Paco became hours, and it changed my destination. I don’t know how it happened, but I found myself talking to Roberto about his experiences on the train, of his life as a train steward and his way of understanding where people came from.
“I’m Extremaduran, my family is Extremaduran, and I’ve never lived abroad, but I’m the son of an emigrant,” Roberto said. “I can’t escape that fact. My father went to live at the opposite end of the earth for years, leaving my mother alone and pregnant. You know that back in the sixties anything beyond Spain’s borders was the other end of the earth. Sometimes he showed up at the holidays and then he went away again. I was conceived during one of those holidays. I think that’s why I had to look so long to find out where I belonged, and I finally found it when I boarded the Talgo.
A few thoughts had occurred to me, but Roberto didn’t seem interested in my opinion. He really was his father’s son.
“I think some people are rooted in themselves,” he continued. Once in a while he looked at me to make sure I was still awake. “When you’re rooted in yourself, you feel settled wherever you go. I guess to feel good we need to find places to adapt to. Except once we’ve adapted we need to move on, to find a new place to adapt to. But once you’ve adapted to several different places, you no longer have one place where you belong. That’s when the place where you belong becomes the space between those two different places. Moving around and seeing new places—that’s my natural habitat. The truth is I’m a nomad.”
He fell silent. It seemed like this was the first time in his life he had voiced these thoughts. These words had been dancing in his head for years, but he had never said them aloud. In the chaos of his monologue, there was something that had caught my attention, a familiar conclusion. Perhaps I was a nomad, too, perhaps my third life—the years in Figueres—had made me become rootless, too.
Maybe it was because it was four in the morning, but the fact of the matter is that I finally began to talk.
“I’m a nomad, too,” I said, choosing my words much more carefully than he had. “I don’t have roots anywhere in the world, but at the same time I have roots everywhere. Part of me is in Extremadura, part of me is in Holland, and part of me is in Cataluña.” I drew three spaces on the table with my hands. The three spaces were separate, forming a triangle. Extremadura was on the left, twenty centimeters in front of me, Holland was in the middle, about fifty centimeters away, and Cataluña was nearer, on the right. They formed an equilateral triangle. I fell silent, wondering where to spend the rest of my life. Eventually I said, “And then there’s a huge void.”
Roberto drew an arc on the table, through the triangle. Then he said,“The void fills with movement, the void can only be filled by doing things, moving around. Searching.”
“For what?”
“Anything. People who are searching have a goal. They have a reason to get up in the morning, they know that eventually they’ll find what they’re looking for, and they have a reason to live.”
“What are you searching for?”
My question caught him off guard.
“I’m not searching for anything.”
“You’ve found everything you were looking for already?”
“No, I mean I’m not looking for anything in particular, I take what comes, I let life surprise me, knowing that whatever happens it will always be good, or at least there will be something good about it. Working on the Talgo, I meet different people and see different things every day, there’s always something new to see. For example, when I got up this morning, I never imagined I’d spend the night talking to one of my father’s old friends. If I had known, I would have had preconceived notions about what would happen, perhaps I would have decided to leave you alone to let you talk about the past. But since I didn’t know, I didn’t ‘plan’ anything, I let whatever’s going to happen happen, and that’s how you and I have ended up talking here.”
I thought about what I would have done if I had known ten minutes before I boarded the train that Paco was waiting for me in my compartment. Maybe I would have stayed in a hotel in Madrid. I would have slept, sad and alone, in my hotel room, and, the next evening I would have slept on the train, sad and alone once more.
“In other words, if I understand what you’re saying, we have two options in life: to go searching or to let yourself be surprised,” I said, genuinely interested in his opinion.
“They’re two different ways of dealing with the present. We generally combine the two, except when we lose heart, then we have to search. In order not to be reminded of what has made us lose heart.”
“And you think it’s time for me to search now?”
“Only you can answer that question.”
Before retiring to my compartment to sleep for the last few hours of the journey, Roberto invited me to join him on the Talgo whenever I wanted. He’d put me in an empty compartment, and after the trip he’d let me sleep in the spare bed in the hotel room where they put him up.
I told him I’d think it over.
Her
It was Saturday morning. I had stayed up talking to Karen Abrams in the bar until all hours and eventually I agreed to stay over and sleep on the sofa in her living room. While she was making coffee, I looked around me, disoriented; her house was beginning to grow on me.
We had breakfast together and then I sat down at her computer to read my emails. Lianne Pérez-Horst had already sent a message with the draft of her article.
It was difficult for me to recognize the woman Lianne Pérez-Horst described. She talked about perseverance and patience. I even read that, according to her, I was “both happy and damaged, at the same time.”
She described an endless, romanticized search. It struck me as a movie, not my own life.
“It’s your life as she sees it,” Karen Abrams said.
“She only met you for three hours, you’ve known yourself for thirty years.”
A staggering thought, one that had never occurred to me.
I sent a reply, giving her my approval. Karen Abrams asked me if I’d like to go into town with her. I said I had things to do. I didn’t want to spend too much time in her company.
On the way home Anneke called me. She was in Amsterdam to take care of a few things, she said, and she asked if I had time to go shopping with her. There was no doubt in my mind that, since it was Saturday,Anneke didn’t have business to attend to in Amsterdam. She had come just to see me. It seemed like a fine idea to go shopping with her.
At the end of the afternoon we went for a bite to eat. I knew what the dinner would be like. Anneke always looked around in restaurants and bars. She watched people and listened to them. Sometimes eating in a restaurant with her was no different from eating alone, because other people’s conversations seemed to interest her more than talking to me. Sometimes it was the same on the bus or the train, but in those cases it seemed like people were more aware of the fact she was eavesdropping, and those conversations seemed to interest her less.
When I was younger I didn’t go out to dinner with her as often, so the fact had escaped me. It was only since I’d begun my studies at university, since I’d moved out, that I’d realized it. We were eating in a restaurant and I was telling her something when I noticed her turn her head a little so she could better hear the conversation at the next table. It was so obvious, and it struck me as so embarrassing. I couldn’t understand why she found it so interesting.
“It’s just a question of coincidence,” she said quietly.“It’s so interesting to see what we can learn just by listening to the conversations around us. I’m also interested in what you’re saying, of course, sweetie, but we’ve got all night to talk. You can learn so much from the people around you sometimes . . .”
From that point on I realized that seeing Anneke in public was quite different from seeing her at home. In time I got used to it, I didn’t find it embarrassing anymore and I even saw it in a positive light. If she was listening to other people, it meant I didn’t have her undivided attention, and that made me feel like I had room to breathe.
But that Saturday, after shopping, we sat down to eat at five thirty in an empty restaurant. And she chose a table that was set apart, near the window. The other tables were a few meters away, hidden behind some columns.
At first I thought perhaps Anneke wanted to talk to me about something important, but that wasn’t the case. For once she had chosen the window—and my company— over the conversations of strangers. I talked about Jenny and her mood boards again. I knew I had told her before, but I couldn’t think of anything else to pass the time. I didn’t really have anything else I could tell her about. It was all work-related, or about my search. My job was boring, and my search was a secret.
After the waiter took our order, I noticed Anneke was watching another table. For a moment I thought she was eavesdropping on another conversation. But I was wrong.
“People who eat alone make me sad,” she said when she looked at me again. I turned and saw a man eating a large plate of pasta by himself.
“I always eat alone,Anneke,” I said.
“Of course, you eat alone at home, but not in a bar or a restaurant, that’s what I mean.” I eat alone there, too, I thought, but I didn’t say so. I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable.
Sometimes I wondered if my mother would have become like Anneke if she hadn’t died. I grew up with the conviction that she wouldn’t have, that my mother was different from Anneke, radically so. But the older I got, the more I realized that the image I had of my mother was based on the perspective of an eight-year-old girl. In my head she was a thirty-two-year-old woman in love with her husband and with her daughter, with me. A woman who lived only for me and who could do no wrong.
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