“Why don’t you protest?” she said, addressing him now as “tú” and raising her voice a little. “Call a strike. And if the company won’t give in, steal a bus and burn it.”
“Right,” said the young man, with a nervous smile.
“I’ve got forty-five minutes before the bus goes. Where can I eat around here?”
“There’s a self-service restaurant next to the left luggage. It’s called the Baviera. That’s the best place. As for what I was saying about the bus, it’s no big deal. We’re all quite happy with the company really.”
The young man looked away. He regretted ever having started that conversation.
The Baviera was an impersonal place, all plastic and steel, protected from the noise of the station by great glass screens. She liked it, mainly because it was quiet, thanks to the screens and the absence of any piped music. She was starting to get a headache and the silence made the air grow fresher again, or so it seemed.
Leaving her case in the corner farthest from the entrance, she went up to the counter and chose two dishes: a salad of mussels and green peppers, and pasta in tomato sauce.
“Have you got any small bottles of vermouth?” she asked the waitress at the hot-meals counter.
“Only what you can see,” the waitress replied, pointing to a tray packed with bottles and cans of drink.
She placed two cans of beer between the two plates of food and went over to the checkout. Then, returning to her table, she sat down in a chair from which she could see the whole place and took a good look at all the customers: diagonally opposite, at the other end of the restaurant, there was a man, apparently a foreigner, eating alone; nearer to her, taking up three tables, there were about ten young men with very short hair — soldiers out of uniform probably — eating sandwiches and telling jokes; then there was a table occupied by a boy and a blind man wearing dark glasses; then there was her, in perfect symmetry with the foreigner at the other end — with no friends to talk to, no travelling companions.
She felt tired. Her headache was becoming more intense above one eye.
“I’m really spaced out,” she thought, staring at the foreigner at the opposite end. She had no one to talk to. No one had been waiting for her outside the prison. No one was waiting for her in Bilbao. As Antonia or Margarita would have said, she didn’t have much going for her, only about as much as some wretched tourist in a strange country.
She shook her head — which made it hurt a little more — and tried to banish the ideas surfacing in her mind. Pity was a vile emotion, and self-pity was even worse, the vilest emotion of all. She must keep an eye on herself, be severe with herself. In her situation, normal behaviour — the behaviour of someone who has never been in prison — wasn’t enough. One of the poems she had read in the library in cell number eleven said: “I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.” It was true, and she could be no less than the sparrows she had frightened away near the buses on the forecourt.
The mussels that came with the salad reminded her of the tins that Antonia, Margarita and she used to eat in the pantry at the far end of the kitchen, a place which they called the sanctum sanctorum, because it was the focus of those private celebrations. Generally, it would just be the three of them. According to Margarita, it was the ideal number of guests.
“Three people can eat together really well; they can eat and keep up a flow of conversation at the same time. Four, on the other hand, is disastrous. The conversations keep cutting across each other.”
“What about two? How does that work?”
“Sometimes it can work really well with two, Antonia. But, in my experience, it’s better to eat alone than in company.”
But in order to feel comfortable alone at her table — her thoughts were following the thread of her memory — it would be best to have something to read, and she didn’t even have a newspaper. During that morning, it had occurred to her to buy a newspaper from the Basque country, but in the end she hadn’t felt like it and so hadn’t done so. As for the books she had in her suitcase, she didn’t want to risk getting food on them. Besides, they weren’t the sort of book you could read during a meal.
Then she remembered the letter. She had written it after breakfast in a café in Las Ramblas, and it was still in her inside jacket pocket. Why not? She could read it again and decide once and for all whether or not she should send it. And if she got food on it? In that case, she would interpret the stain as a bad omen and she would tear the letter up.
She pushed away the now empty plate of mussels and wiped the edge of the table with a paper serviette. Then she opened the second can of beer, took the letter out of the envelope and started to read what she had written. What did she really want? Did she want some of the pasta to slip off her fork and on to the paper? Did she want to withdraw what she had said? She didn’t know, she couldn’t know until she had read the letter through from start to finish.
Andoni,
At last I’m out of that hole of a prison and I think the moment has come to clarify a few things. I don’t love you and you don’t love me, so, as my cellmate, Antonia, used to say: fuck off. I don’t want to see you ever again, and the only thing I regret is that it’s taken me so long to get round to saying it. I should have told you to fuck off ages ago, not now. Because you’ve been a lousy friend, a bad friend who abandoned me whenever I had a problem and only ever gave me bad advice. When I started sorting out my paperwork in prison, for example, what did you say? You told me to wait, to be careful, to consult the organization hierarchy. Hearing you talk, anyone would think you were a serious militant counselling a less serious one and yet — oh, fuck off, Andoni, fuck off — you’ve never been a politically active member of anything, not even a club for foodies. If you had been a true friend, you would never have talked to me like that, because, at least in my experience, being fond of someone usually makes you selfish, selfish enough to think only of yourself and your loved ones, not about what would suit the organization or what those who are above good and evil might advise. You should have said to me, yes, leave prison, it doesn’t matter if the others accuse you of being a traitor, I’ll support you, we’ll go on a trip, I’m longing to be with you. But that isn’t what you did. You did exactly the opposite.
Obviously, you won’t agree. You’ll say what you used to say when you came to see me, that you need me, and I agree, what you need is a big sack that you can empty all your sorrows and your bad news into, but I’m not going to be that sack any longer, you can find another one. Come to think of it, you’d be an awful friend to have for everyday use. You’re so mean, so petty!
By now, Andoni, you’ll be wondering why I’m writing you this letter, since I seem to feel such hatred for you all of a sudden, because I think that’s precisely what it is, hatred; the more I write, the more clearly I see that. I mean, it’s not just what I said at the start, about me not loving you and all the rest, it’s worse than that, it’s quite simply that I hate you. Especially after what happened tonight. Do you know what I did? I went to bed with a man I didn’t even know. It was utterly humiliating. He treated me like a whore, though I was much cheaper than any whore, because I paid for almost all the beers. And the hotel he took me to must have been the cheapest in Barcelona, even the sheets were dirty. Do you know what I think? I think it’s all your fault. If you had been a better friend, if I had found you waiting for me outside prison, none of that would have happened.
Anyway, like I said, Andoni: fuck off. And don’t even attempt to contact me in Bilbao. If you do, you’ll be sorry.