Jaume Cabré - Winter Journey

"Take me into your bed, Goddess."

1 helped her out a little, because she'd gone quiet, with her mouth open, virginal, reticent and shy.

"Fine, Eloisa. You know where we can go on vacation?"

"The taxis are through that door."

"Dor. It's a quiet Israeli village, next to Salou, 50o kilometers north of Tel Aviv and twenty kilometers south of Haifa. Beautiful scenery, beaches, a port where the environment and its traditional fisheries and gastronomy strill thrive. Discover the friendly face of Israel. You'll love it. Shall l reserve two seats on El Al? We can spend the next millennium there."

She was listening intently and 1 tried to be sincere.

"Okay," 1 said. "We can go to Dor after they finally make me a Norwegian."

Then 1 had a brief vision of Dr. Werenskiold signing the papers and granting me a passport, and years of life in Norway in peace and harmony by the side of my valkyrie. All of a sudden, my blood ran cold: that bastard Werenskiold! He hadn't signed anything yet! And 1 started to sweat.

"You're going to have to wait a minute, Eloisa. 1 forgot 1 have to be somewhere."

"Didn't you say…"

"It'll just take a minute," 1 interrupted her. "Will you wait for me?"

And 1 was rude enough to look at my watch. She nodded as if to say, What choice do 1 have? and watched me walk away. 1 didn't realize until much later that the color of the water in the glade had gone cloudy. Fervent as a medieval knight, 1 ran up the stairs, pushing aside the poor devils who didn't know Eloisa and rushing to make it to the doctor, to meekly accept the conditions for changing my nationality and sign on the dotted line, get the thing over with and go back to happiness.

Things never turn out the way you want. Not even in Norway. Dr. Werenskiold didn't know the valkyrie Eloisa was waiting for me at the foot of the ministry-mountain with her glade-like eyes, did you, Dr. Werenskiold? So he made me wait seven confusing and humiliating minutes. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven indecent minutes that could separate me from my eternal love. And afterwards, when 1 was sitting in front of him with my flattering Latin smile, the doctor spent two hours cleaning his glasses and looking at me in silence, making the same face that my father makes to mean, What are we going to do with this boy, Mother, what are we going to do? I'm not going to give you a car or a horse or a shotgun; you don't deserve them. My father has always treated me as if 1 weren't a human being… Enough of that, it makes me sick and 1 don't want to throw up.

"We still can't say that you have a regular job, Mr. Masdexaxart."

Fine. Tatoo the serial number on my arm. Long live Norway. I'm in a hurry. I have to go.

"But I have a steady income."

"I'm talking about work, Mr. Masdexaxart."

If there weren't so many people around, 1'd take this letter opener and stick it in your fat priest's neck. I want to be Norwegian because 1 love Eloisa, period.

"1 have an interview tomorrow: home appliance repair."

"Well…" Half an hour's thought. "That might be right for you."

I like to tell lies, doctor. Especially if people are going to believe them.

"Ubi bene, ibi patria."

"What?" The priest was suspicious, in case it was a secret message.

"1 mean 1 love Norway with all my heart, Dr. Werenskiold."

"I'm not saying you don't, but there seem to be a lot of citizens who aren't very fond of you. You owe three months' rent and there are now sixteen official complaints about your behavior."

Assholes, unemployed Norwegians who want to give me a hard time because I'm not blond or tall and my thing is little.

"I'm sure it's a misunderstanding, Dr. Werenskiold."

"Sixteen misunderstandings."

The doctor's irony was insulting. But he was playing at home, and I couldn't give in to the taunts of the crowd. 1 smiled, in other words, and because 1 was like a love token in the hands of fate, friends, that wanted only to return to my glade, I gave up on the interview.

When 1 headed for the lobby, 1 was about to shout that 1 was the happiest man in the world. There was a crowd of people and nobody could get to the escalator. So 1 stuck my head up in the direction of the blessed wall where she was waiting for me and put on a smile a perfect happiness. But after a few seconds my smile melted. Eloisa wasn't there. Okay, she had to be… Maybe over there… Maybe she was looking for somewhere to throw… Or she'd gone out to see if… By the time I got to the lobby I'd invented two thousand plausible explanations for Eloisa's disappearance. I looked around: lots of indifferent faces, but the countenance of my valkyrie was not among them. Then 1 felt afraid and my soul said, Eloisa, my glade, ubi es?

I don't know if it took two or three hours, but I looked everywhere. Everywhere. I asked hundreds of people, I went out on the street fifty times thinking, Shit, shit, shit, what if somebody's run over her, or kidnapped her, or simply killed her. 1 checked the neighborhood, 1 went through everything, even the trashcans, looking for any sign of the girl with the river-glade eyes. But the world had ended and the evidence pointed to my never seeing Eloisa again. In the middle of the afternoon, tired, famished, sweaty and parched, 1 left the Ministry wanting only to get inside the deafening world of King Crimson so they could blow you all away. Not you, friends: them. And 1 wanted some Crim so bad that 1 thought the best thing would be to go to the little record store on Osterhausgate and act like 1 wanted to buy In the Wake of Poseidon, for example. And after an hour, smile my Mediterranean smile and tell the Sigrid on duty, No, I guess not. I went down into the metro wondering if the store on Osterhausgate was the best place to listen to Crim and forget about my problems. In spite of everything, the white tiles in the tunnel reminded me of the hidden melody from a few hours before, and all of a sudden I was done with Crimson and wanted a quick dose of Sibelius. I was sad, friends. Very sad. Quae solitudo esset in Metropolitano, quae vastitas! As Saint Stephen, the first martyr, exclaimed in a situation similar to mine. 1 let three trains go by hoping to be able to hear the whistled music in that impossible place, but, no luck. Worse, an imposing-looking woman with black hair and blue eyes set up a speaker and a diabolical machine right next to me, threatened me with a smile and started singing, to a taped accompaniment, an ignominous selection of the best known and most strenuous arias from the operatic repertory. While the fake soprano filled the air with arias, 1 was trying to decide whether to crack open her skull or cut her vocal cords. But I remembered that 1 was playing away from home, and chose to abstain. When I'd had enough, 1 decided to get away on the first train that came by. As soon as the train arrived, the woman fell silent in honor of my departure. The car was almost empty. Just as the doors were closing behind me with a sigh, I heard the same melody from Finlandia, clear, precise and almost mocking. It came from the platform. 1 tried desperately to keep the doors from closing by trying to stick my hand between them, but, indifferent, they guillotined my plea as the train started up, and against my will l left all my hopes and dreams behind.

When 1 got to my hostel, 1, Quiquin of Barcelona, had fallen from my horse in Osterhausgate. The Sigrid on duty was going to give me Poseidon, but there on the counter was a pile of The Last Recital of Pere Bros and that made me wonder because if it really was his last recital then he must've checked out, and it wasn't very long ago that he and Kremer had made me rich in Oslo. 1 was curious and asked to listen to the disc. Schubert, as usual, crying in B-flat major. But that damn what's his name, Fischer. That's one weird, Fripp thing. So 1 put it on five times and 1 decided to steal one of the CDs because it was only right that I should have that fantastic music. Coming back from my Damascus with the CD in the pocket of my jacket, 1 found a smiling Dr. Werenskiold outside of my hostel flanked by two hefty uniformed civil servants. He asked me where on earth 1'd been all that time and informed me that he was then turning me over to one of the gorillas, who was in fact a fairly well-known police commissioner whose name 1 couldn't remember. It seems that my lawyer had filed a complaint against me for attempted valkyrie abuse and my hardass Bosnian friend had given evidence that 1 was the head of an illegal web of distribution of contraband tobacco. Both of these outrageous lies made me angry, but the friendly civil servants made a gesture that meant, Don't even try.