Bernardo Atxaga - The Lone Woman

Larrea drove out of the car park and, keeping to their ritual, he opened his window and put out his arm. For her part, she stepped out on to the road and prepared herself for that gesture of farewell. But for some reason, it didn’t work that day. Their two hands didn’t touch.

Larrea braked, as if he were going to stop in order to repeat their goodbyes, but in the end he drove on. She didn’t know how to react either and simply watched him drive off.

She would never again see her lover. He would die about a fortnight later trying to disembark on a beach in Vizcaya. According to the rumours, the police had set a trap.

Suddenly the Yeti’s face appeared on the scene.

“You women just muddle everything up, everything,” he shouted. “How can you say that we betrayed him? If we wanted to eliminate him, we could have shot him ourselves! We could have shot him, do you understand? We don’t go around giving tip-offs to the police, you know that as well as I do. Look, I’ll tell you what, you’re obviously very upset. Why don’t you go to Paris for a few days until you calm down.”

“I don’t want to go to Paris. I’d rather be involved in a raid or something.”

“You see what you women are like?” The Yeti was tugging at his beard and gesticulating. “No, you’re not taking part in any raid. You’ll go to Paris. More than that, you’ll keep well away from the organization for at least three months.”

A new voice entered the scene.

“They’re dangerous people all right,” it was saying. It was a man’s voice. “They spend all those years submitting themselves to a harsh regime of discipline, committing all kinds of atrocities, and then they can’t adapt to everyday life. It’s just like the soldiers in the Vietnam war.”

“The other day, we showed a video about that, about a Vietnam veteran who took some customers in a supermarket hostage for some really stupid reason, because he couldn’t find a jar of jam, I think it was.”

It was the voice of the hostess on the bus, she was sure of it. Were they talking about her? Her heart began to pound. A few seconds later, the man who was talking to the hostess confirmed her fears.

“Look at her, she’s asleep now and she looks like a perfectly normal woman, but she’s only been out of prison for a day and already she’s been up to mischief. Last night she marked a man for life. She cut him really badly with some sharp object. I don’t know quite what the object was, because they’re very odd cuts. They’re not clean cuts. Anyway, that’s why I’m here, to take her back to prison. She’s capable of anything, she is.”

She seemed to recognize that voice. Wasn’t it the man at the station in Barcelona who had offered her a light? That guy with the red tie, was he there? No sooner had she asked herself that question than someone hit her on the knee and she cried out.

SHE SAT UP in her seat and opened her eyes. Everything around her was quiet. The hostess was talking to a very big man with a face like a boxer, while, behind her, the two nuns were reading with their faces turned away from the images on the video screen. No, she hadn’t really cried out. The cry had remained inside her dream, on the other side, inside that reality which, just then, seemed to her more solid, more intense.

She looked around the bus again, at the tiny space which, despite its apparent immateriality, was now the real stage on which her life was being played out. The nuns continued reading and the hostess was listening to what the passenger who looked like a boxer was saying about the film. The noise of the engine was still there too, gently enfolding everything. In fact, the only things that weren’t in their place were her books and her coffee. The books were on the floor and the plastic coffee cup had rolled around the table spilling the dregs.

She gathered the books together, mopped up the coffee with a paper serviette and got to her feet in order to throw it in the bin fixed on the metallic wall of the toilet. For some reason, her movement attracted the attention of the nun with green eyes, who stopped reading and turned towards her. It was only a brief look, but enough to reveal the tension on her face. She was frowning and her face seemed deeply lined.

“Why should you have to watch the film if you don’t want to? You should ask them to turn it off,” she said, guessing the reason behind that tension.

On the video screen, a maid was running along a gallery in a palace, pursued by the master of the house, a foppish chap with slicked-down hair. She was wearing a dressing gown with apparently nothing underneath. She would occasionally change direction abruptly, affording the viewer a glimpse of her bottom.

“The hostess says she can’t turn it off,” replied the nun with green eyes, turning back to her. She was talking loudly, in an energetic voice.

“Why can’t she?”

The hostess was aware of the conversation, but didn’t want to intervene.

“Apparently that would be depriving the passengers who come downstairs to smoke of seeing the film. Thanks for your concern though. There aren’t many people these days who would care about two old nuns like us.”

“That’s all right,” she said, feeling slightly embarrassed. That exchange just confirmed to her the oddness of the situation. That was the first time since she was at school that she had spoken to a nun.

She sat down at the table again and put on the headphones.

“Don’t run away, Marie. I bet you’d make a wonderful lover,” she heard the man say. On the video screen, the half-naked maid and the fop were face to face in a barn next to the palace.

“What’s got into you?” said the maid, taking a step back.

“Come here! I’m master of this house and everything in it,” bawled the fop grabbing the maid and tugging at her dressing gown.

“Have you gone mad? You’ve no right!” protested the maid. She was a very bad actress and pronounced the words flatly.

The film jumped a few frames. The fop appeared in close-up on the screen.

“Forgive me, please!” he whimpered. “I didn’t mean to offend you! I love you! Why don’t you love me? Please, I beg you, love me in return!”

She put the earphones down on the table and rubbed her eyes with her two hands, as if she wanted to wash them clean. Then she lit a cigarette and sat looking out of the window at the grey desert they were crossing, at the mountains in the distance, at the sky. But she couldn’t see anything very clearly, because the sunlight — almost as strong as a summer sun — was piercing the layer of clouds and cloaking everything in a resplendent whiteness.

The bright light inside the bus gave definition to the column of smoke from her cigarette and she amused herself watching its evolutions, following its curls and spirals up to the ceiling where they dissolved into nothing. For a moment, she thought about her life and about the things that she wanted to forget; she thought that she should try to transform part of her life into smoke which, later, like her cigarette smoke, would form spirals and curls that finally vanished into air. Was such alchemy possible? Could life become smoke? Even the worst aspects of life?

Holding her cigarette between her lips, she put two of the books from the table back in her suitcase, the novel by Stendhal and the essay by Oteiza. Then she looked at those remaining in the pile and chose another two books: the anthology of Chinese poetry and the collection of poems by Emily Dickinson.

Though far apart, the two hearts

love each other in silence, without speaking.

The woman sews by the light of the candle,

the man walks beneath the moon.

As soon as he reaches the stairs, the man knows

that his wife is still awake.