The man let out a howl when she lunged at him with the filter and drew a line across his belly; he tried to beat her off with his fists. But the two cuts that followed the first — in parallel, from his penis to his throat and from his throat back down to his penis — stopped him in his tracks. Maddened by pain, terrified by the blood pouring from his wounds and beginning to stain the sheets, he fled from the room, not out into the street, since he was naked, but to some other part of the hotel.
The nun with green eyes came out of the station and joined her companion before going up to the door of the bus. When she saw them, she stopped thinking about what had happened in the hotel and started thinking about those two women instead: where did they live? Sheltered from the misfortunes of the world, in some enclosed order? Or did they work in a hospice, with people suffering from terminal illnesses? In a way, she felt a certain kinship. All three had taken the difficult option. She had entered a radical political organization; the nuns, even if they were not from an enclosed order, had opted for the most testing section in their church.
Before she realized it, the bus had moved off. It made its way very slowly round the station, past a hotel and up a rather narrow street.
The woman read the street sign: “Carrer Nicaragua” and every nerve in her body tensed. The prison she had left the previous evening faced on to four streets, and that was one of them.
The bus reached a crossroads and turned towards the main prison gate, as if the driver wanted to show her the outside of a building which, despite the four years she had spent there, she knew only from inside. First, she looked up at the watchtower, at the guard with his blue and red beret, and then, shifting her gaze slightly to the left, she let her eyes linger on the grey roof of an annex to the main building. The women’s section was housed under that grey roof, and the fourth window from the end belonged to the cell that Margarita, Antonia and she had shared or, rather, the cell that Margarita and Antonia continued to occupy. It was number seven. She remembered the song:
If you want to write to me
you know where I am,
in cell number seven
just waiting for a line.
A van parked opposite the main gate forced the bus to stop. Outside the prison, walking up and down the pavement or sitting on the kerb, the people who had gone to visit their relatives were growing bored with waiting and trying somehow or other to pass the time. They chatted, smoked, knitted, studied the wheels of the bus. They all looked rather ill. They were badly dressed, in cheap, ugly clothes. Most were women. Yes, the law was like a line drawn along the bottom of a mountain, and the people who were most exploited and had the fewest economic resources crossed that line as easily as a rubber ball bouncing down the mountainside.
The van drove inside the prison and the bus set off. She looked again at her cell window.
“Bye,” she whispered, with the image of Margarita and Antonia in her mind. Although it was only a short word, it splintered in her throat, or, rather, deeper down than that, and she started to cry. She was crying silently, her eyes closed.
“Everything has a solution. Not even death is as terrible as it seems,” said her neighbour in a friendly voice. She was a woman in her mid-fifties, and very heavily built. She must have weighed more than fifteen stone.
“How do you know?” she asked.
The bus was continuing up the street, following the blue signs to the motorway. It slipped along like a fish.
“I know because I’ve been very close to death myself. I’ve touched it with my fingertips you might say,” replied the fat woman. She was speaking in a faint voice, as if she were half-asleep. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you the story of my life. It wouldn’t be right. We all prefer to travel in silence, to have time to think about our own things, I mean.”
“I don’t object to people telling me their life story, but not right now. I’m going downstairs to have a cup of coffee.”
“Yes, sometimes that can help too.”
When she got up from the seat, she felt a sharp pain in her forehead; at least, her encounter with the man with the red tie had made her forget her headache. Nevertheless, that thought reawoke her fear and made her examine the people who were travelling on the upper deck, first those ahead of her, then — as she turned round to go down the stairs — those behind. She calmed down a bit when she saw that the man with the red tie wasn’t there, but her fear kept asking questions. Did the police intend to follow her? She thought not, but given the appearance of two or three of the other passengers, and the rumours that had been going around prison — about the Anti-terrorist Brigade’s interest in those who had been amnestied — she could not be sure.
“If you want to leave your case here, I’ll look after it for you,” said the fat woman.
“Thanks, but there are a few books inside that I want to look at.”
“Yes, books can be very helpful too.”
The bus driver accelerated as soon as he reached an avenue that led to the motorway. While she was going down the stairs, she noticed a blue line, right in the far distance, beyond the churches, the streets and the houses. It wasn’t the sky, it was the sea.
Just as the young man at the bus company had warned her, the lower deck was much smaller than the upper deck. There was a dark plastic curtain separating off the area reserved for the driver, while the rear section, from the stairs to the back of the bus, seemed to be the luggage compartment. As for the remaining space, it was divided between a galley kitchen with a counter, a toilet, the small area reserved for smokers — which had a table with six seats around it — and the few seats reserved for actual passengers. The objects attached to the ceiling and the walls — the stainless steel sink or the coffee machine and, further along, the video screen — made the space seem even smaller.
That cramped area was occupied by only three people: the hostess and the two nuns.
“They haven’t had much luck,” she thought, looking over at the nuns and nodding to them. They had to travel in the smokers’ section with a video screen immediately above them.
“Do you want anything?” asked the hostess adopting the same expression, irritable yet fawning, that she had worn when talking to the drivers. Was she really a hostess? She seemed more like a policewoman.
“A coffee, please, and a Bacardi with ice,” she said. She put her case on the table in the smokers’ section and sat down next to the window.
“We don’t serve alcohol. The company …”
“Fine, bring me a coffee then.” Again she felt that stab of pain in her head, this time on the left side.
She breathed deeply so as not to give in to her irritation with the hostess. She didn’t want to spoil the journey, her first after four years of being locked up.
She took out a small key from her inside jacket pocket and opened the suitcase, thinking about the books she had packed. She wanted to have them near, to touch them, to open them at random and leaf through them. Now that she was out, they might not perhaps give her as much consolation as in prison, but she was sure that they would help her in what, to quote Margarita, was her “re-entry into the world”, because, like Lazarus, she had been buried and, like him, she had been restored to life.
The picture that Margarita had given her — the image of God and Adam reaching out to each other — was on top of everything else in the suitcase and was the first thing she saw when she opened it. She placed it on the seat next to her and piled up six books on the table. There was a novel by Stendhal — Scarlet and Black — an essay by Jorge Oteiza — Quousque tandem — the memoirs of Zavattini, an anthology of Chinese poems, a collection of Emily Dickinson’s poems and Van Gogh’s letters to his brother. When she had finished piling up the books, she made another pile with her notebooks.