Albert grabbed her shoulders. She stopped short and merely chuckled a single word: “Rough!” Then kept going, even more eagerly. Dark-blond hair tickled his chest. A basically less-good feeling crept over him. It wasn’t so easy to separate himself from Violet, she took his efforts for play and clung tightly to him, giggling that they were “making serious whoopee,” and pressing him into the mattress, until he finally tossed her away with a bounce and jumped from the bed.
“Did you take it or not?”
She was still grinning. “Albert, calm down.”
“What?!”
“Let’s stop with the little game.”
Albert slipped into his boxers. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Violet rolled her eyes. “Just come back to bed.” Her voice took on a salacious tone. “Want to read the back of my head?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“All right, fine.” She stretched herself. He knew that she knew how much he liked the way she looked. “What do you suggest?”
“Have you taken it, or not?”
“Would it be so terrible if I hadn’t?”
“Are you nuts?!”
Now for the first time her grin flickered. “Okay, look, this is getting ridiculous. Truth is, you’re afraid of losing me, and I’m afraid of losing you. Neither of us can imagine ourselves with anyone else. We need each other. We love each other.”
And suddenly, as she was expressing it so unambiguously, it became clear to Albert: he didn’t love her.
Violet took his silence for agreement. Her grin was bright white again. She leapt from the bed and threw her arms around him. Her cheerful breathing brushed his ear. “Of course I remembered to take it.” He could feel her heartbeat clearly, and her skin was much too warm. “But maybe — in the future, I mean — I shouldn’t take it anymore?”
He could have answered her honestly. He could have confessed that the mere idea of having children struck him as absurd, that he certainly wouldn’t be producing any offspring, not in this life. He could have explained that he felt differently than she did, yes, that he asked himself whether what he felt for her wasn’t simply the blind clinging of a two-thirds orphan to another human being. He could have explained how incomprehensible it was that she still wanted him. He could have ended this love story, which was more substantial in their heads than in reality, once and for all. But what did he do?
He returned her hug.
The problem, thought Albert, when someone loved you the way Violet loved him, was that you were always being pressured to ponder whether it was possible for you to love her, too. And when you arrived at the conclusion that you didn’t love her, you started asking yourself whether you might not be able to, after all. If maybe all it would take was a little effort, a few relaxed days spent together, some heart-to-heart talks, a couple of tender interactions with each other.
By the time the sun came up they were on their way again. Violet had paid for both rooms, she’d rustled up a couple of poppy-seed rolls from a local bakery for breakfast, filled the car with gas, and on top of all that somehow managed to pick Albert a little bouquet of wild-flowers, which now, strapped tight in the Beetle’s passenger seat, he held in one sweaty hand, amazed at how sure you could be that you didn’t love someone, while in the backseat Fred snoozed in an impossible position, and Alfonsa listened to Frank Sinatra on her Walkman, and Violet chirped: “The road is all ours.”
For a hundred miles, Albert pretended to be asleep. It was the only way to evade, somewhat, Violet’s grip. Again and again she’d say his name and ask if he was awake in a tender tone of voice that left no room for any doubt that he would never be able to fulfill her expectations. Or she’d stroke his cheek. Which raised goose bumps on him. He told himself that a woman’s love he couldn’t return was better than no love at all. But he couldn’t find any comfort in that. Not today.
Violet told Fred that before she’d met Albert on the bus, she hadn’t believed in love at first sight, because she’d thought you couldn’t love someone if you didn’t know them. “Now I think otherwise,” she said. “Maybe you can only really love people you don’t know. Once you get to know them, it complicates everything.” For a fraction of a second her voice quavered. “They become … different.”
“I know,” said Fred, decisively: a clear sign that he hadn’t been able to follow her.
Albert’s eyelids stirred. These kinds of conversations were pretty much the opposite of what you wanted to hear when you were about to meet your mother for the first time after nineteen years. His mother. What a word! It sucked all the other thoughts from his head. Albert attempted to calm himself by silently reciting The Hobbit. Till he got to the part with the dragon that lived in Mount Erebor. If only he could have fallen asleep! It was more exhausting than he’d thought to keep his eyes closed for two whole hours. His left leg was all pins and needles, but he thought it was smarter not to change his position, so as not to blow his cover. He was forcing himself not to clutch at the makeup compact. The wild-flowers smelled too wild. The seat belt cut into his throat. And Violet warbled: “Albert, sweetie, are you awake?”
Mother. Mother. Mother.
Crunching gravel. Albert blinked: they’d arrived at the lower terminus of the mountain gondola, at last. They parked by the main entrance, where a few travelers bustled. In spite of the cloudless sky, the day was autumnally gloomy. Albert climbed out of the car and stretched his limbs; he showed Fred where the toilets were, and watched him trudge toward them, his rumpled poncho tossed over his shoulder, hat set crooked on his head.
Alfonsa said, “I’d better leave the two of you alone,” and vanished into the station with a meaningful nod. Her black veil, which he’d never seen her without, prevented him yet again from reading the back of her head.
Violet set down Fred’s backpack and Albert’s bag. Slammed the trunk shut. Pulled out her purse, and passed him a fifty-euro note. “For the cable car.”
“Aren’t you coming?”
“Let’s not make this harder than it already is.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I thought you always catch on to everything.”
She shoved the cash into his pants pocket.
“You …?”
“Exactly.”
“Why did you bring us here, then?”
“Should I have left you all on the side of the road?”
“You were only pretending?”
“Weren’t we both?” She looked at him, sad, intent, and he realized what it was like to look at someone when you were looking at them for the last time. “I tried, I didn’t want to just give up on us. But now I know — I don’t love you, I love what we had, once. And I think that’s how it is for you, too. When you hugged me last night I could feel how hard it was for you.”
Albert wanted to say something, but she wasn’t finished yet.
“I thought that maybe it was just a question of time for us, I thought that if I gave you some space and got rid of the camera, we might have a chance. And for a little while it was going pretty well, wasn’t it? Only, people simply aren’t made to live long and happy lives together. You get either the one or the other.” She smiled wearily. “Anyway, don’t worry. About me. It’s not the end of everything. It’s not.”