‘Why not?’ he pushed; soon he would begin to mock his own desire.
‘I’ve told you,’ she said gently. ‘I’ve had enough. I want to be alone for a time.’
She was alone for the whole of the journey the next evening and night, going early to her sleeper, changing at the frontier the next morning into the wider Spanish train, which got into Barcelona just before noon. A taximan took her to the small Hotel New York in the Gothic quarter and it proved as clean and cheap as he said it would be. She stayed five days in Barcelona and was happy. Like an army in peacetime she was doing what she had to do by being idle and felt neither guilt nor need to make a holiday.
She walked the narrow streets, went to a few museums and churches, bought a newspaper on the Ramblas, vivid with the flower stalls under the leafless trees in the cold dry weather, and ate each evening at the Casa Agut, a Catalan restaurant a few minutes walk from the hotel. She sat where she could watch the kitchen and always had gaspacho, ensalada and a small steak with a half-bottle of red Rioja, enjoying the march of the jefe who watched for the slightest carelessness, the red and white towel on his shoulder like an epaulet. After five such days she took the train to Valencia where she got the express bus to Almería. She would get off at Vera and get a taxi to the empty house on the shore. It was on this bus that she made her first human contact since leaving Paris, a Swedish homosexual who must have identified her as Scandinavian by her clothes and blonde hair and who asked if he could sit beside her. ‘How far are you going?’ she asked when she saw she was stuck with him for the journey. ‘I don’t know. South. I can go as far as I want.’ Though the hair was dyed blond the lines in the brittle feminine face showed he was sixty or more. He spoke only his own language and some English and was impressed by her facility for acquiring languages. She wondered if the homosexual love of foreignness was that having turned away from the mother or been turned away they needed to do likewise with their mother tongue. ‘Aren’t you a lucky girl to find languages so easy?’ She resented the bitchiness that inferred a boast she hadn’t made.
‘It’s no more than being able to run fast or jump. It means you can manage to say more inaccurately in several languages what you can say better in your own. It’s useful sometimes but it doesn’t seem very much to me if that’s all it achieves.’
‘That’s too deep for me.’ He was resentful and impressed and a little scared. ‘Are you on a holiday?’
‘No. I’m going to live here for a time.’
‘Do you have a house?’
‘Yes. I’ve been loaned a house.’
‘Will you be with people or alone?’ His questioning grew more eager and rapid.
‘I’ll be alone.’
‘Do you think I could take a room in the house?’
She was grateful to be able to rest her eyes on the blue sea in the distance. At least it would not grow old. Its tides would ebb and flow, it would still yield up its oyster shells long after all the living had become the dead.
‘I’m sorry. One of the conditions of the loan is that I’m not allowed to have people to stay,’ she lied.
‘I could market for you and cook.’
‘It’s impossible. I’m sorry.’ He would cling to any raft to shut out of mind the grave ahead.
‘You? Are you going far?’
‘The bus goes to Almería.’
‘And then?’
‘I don’t know. I thought to Morocco.’
She escaped from him in Alicante where they had a half-hour break and changed buses. She saw the shirtsleeved porters pat the Swede’s fur coat in amusement, ‘Mucho frío, mucho frío,’ as they transferred it to the boot of the bus returning to Almería. She waited till she saw him take the same seat in the new bus and then took her place beside an old Spanish woman dressed in black who smelled of garlic and who, she learned later, had been seeing her daughter in hospital. She felt guilty at avoiding the Swede so pointedly. She did not look at him when she got off at Vera.
The house was low and flat-roofed and faced the sea. The mountain was behind, a mountain of the moon, sparsely sprinkled with the green of farms that grew lemon trees and often had vine or olive on terraces of stone built on the mountain side. In the dried-up beds of rivers the cacti flourished. The village was a mile away and had a covered market built of stone, roofed with tiles the colour of sand. She was alarmed when the old women hissed at her when she first entered the market but then she saw it was only their way of trying to draw people to their stalls. Though there was a fridge in the house she went every day to the market and it became her daily outing. The house had four rooms but she arranged it so that she could live entirely in the main room.
She reread all of Chekhov, ate and drank carefully, and in the solitude of the days felt her life, for the first time in years, in order. The morning came when she decided to face the solitary white page. She had an end, the coffin of the famous writer coming to Moscow for burial that hot July day; and a beginning, the boy crunching on the oyster shells in the restaurant while the man starved in his summer coat in the rain outside. What she had to do was to imagine the life in between. She wrote in a careful hand The word Oysters was chalked on the wagon that carried Chekhov’s body to Moscow for burial. The coffin was carried in the oyster wagon because of the fierce heat of early July, and then grew agitated. She rose and looked at her face in the small silver-framed mirror. Yes, there were lines, but faint still, and natural. Her nails needed filing. She decided to change into a shirt and jeans and then to rearrange all her clothes and jewellery. A week, two weeks, passed in this way. She got nothing written. The early sense of calm and order left her.
She saw one person fairly regularly during that time, a local guardia whose name was Manolo. He had first come to the house with a telegram from her old theatre, asking her if she would do a translation of a play of Mayakovsky’s. She offered him a drink when he came with the telegram. He asked for water and later he walked with her back to the village where she cabled her acceptance of the theatre’s offer, wheeling his rattling bicycle, the thin glittering barrel of his rifle pointing skyward. The Russian manuscript of the play arrived by express delivery a few days afterwards, and now she spent all her mornings working on the translation; and how easy it was, the good text solidly and reliably under her hand, play compared with the pain of trying to pluck the life of Chekhov out of the unimaginable air.
Manolo began to come almost daily, in the hot, lazy hours of the afternoon. She would hear his boots scrape noisily on the gravel to give her warning. He would leave his bicycle against the wall of the house in the shade, his gun where the drinking water dripped slowly from the porous clay jars into catching pails. They would talk for an hour or more across the bare Scandinavian table and he would smoke and drink wine or water. His talk turned often to the social ills of Spain and the impossibility of the natural division between men and women. She wondered why someone as intelligent as he had become a guardia. There was nothing else to do, he told her. He was one of the lucky ones in the village, he got a salary, it was that or Germany. And then he married, and bang-bang, he said — two babies in less than two years. A third was on its way. All his wife’s time was taken up with the infants now. There was nothing left between them but babies, and that was the way it would go on, without any money, seven or eleven, or more …