Bernardo Atxaga - The Lone Woman

“If only it were true,” she sighed. It seemed to her a marvellous place to be, far from her former world, with Margarita, with Larrea. A poem she had read somewhere declared that collecting milk in wooden bowls, tending cows, mending old shoes, making bread and wine, sowing garlic and collecting warm eggs were the only truly important tasks. If there was any truth in that, and if she could count on a little love and friendship from a few people, a new life was still possible.

“Hold out your hand! Hold it out!” Margarita insisted.

She did as her friend asked and she groped for Larrea’s hand, just as she had on that first night, just as they had every time they had said goodbye on the outskirts of Biarritz.

She didn’t find the hand. Someone grabbed her wrist and forced her awake. The dream had ended.

“YOU NEARLY PUT my eye out with your finger,” said the large woman, adjusting her wig. “But that wasn’t why I woke you up. I need to go to the toilet.”

The red numbers on the digital clock showed ten past nine, and the blackness of night covered all the windows in the bus. Inside, now that the video was over, only the bluish lights in the ceiling were still lit, on guard. The engine sang a single note and produced a kind of buzzing curtain of sound isolating that metallic enclosure from the rest of the world. They were still speeding towards Bilbao.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t think it was so late,” she said to the large woman. She hadn’t quite woken up.

“We’ll be in Bilbao in less than an hour,” said the woman, without moving from her seat.

Irene realized that the headphones were on the floor. She found it hard to keep her eyes open. “I seem to drop everything,” she said, bending down. Her jacket was on the floor too.

“The same thing happens to me,” said the woman. “Before, though, I never used to drop anything.”

Irene recalled a fragment from her dream and smiled faintly. Just before Margarita started singing, the lamb on her lap had run over towards the lake. That fragment obviously corresponded to the moment when her jacket had fallen off her lap. It was amazing how dreams could transform things.

After retrieving her jacket, she picked up the headphones and held them to one ear. They were playing Latin American songs similar to “Run Run”.

“I noticed that on you before,” said the large woman, pointing to her jacket.

“What did you notice before?” she asked, placing the headphones on the arm of her seat. She was more awake now.

“The red AIDS ribbon.”

“Yes, I always wear it.”

That wasn’t quite true. In prison, they weren’t allowed to wear the ribbon because of the safety pin. Nevertheless, her answer expressed what she would have wished to do. In the four years that she had been in prison, she had seen sixteen young girls die, and she had decided to wear that symbol until the day someone found a cure for the illness. Would modern equivalents of Fleming, Chain and Florey emerge? She had read a book about the discovery of penicillin and greatly admired these three biologists. She had felt very insignificant in comparison.

“You don’t know how happy that makes me,” said the large woman, placing a hand on her arm. “I didn’t say anything before, but I’ve been gravely ill myself. Really.”

“I believe you. You mentioned something about it earlier.”

She didn’t much feel like talking, but she owed that woman a conversation, she had a bond with her. After all, did not those marked by sickness and by prison belong to the same province? Both carried a mark that set them apart from the other people on the bus.

“Yes, I’ve been close to death a couple of times and do you know something? There’s no reason to fear death. Death is sweet. If you die and the doctors bring you back to life, you feel really angry. You don’t want to come back.”

“I don’t know if I can agree with you there,” she said, taking out her packet of cigarettes. She felt like smoking. “That happens with certain dreams, where you’d like to stay inside them for ever, but with death, I’m not sure.”

“It’s just the same, really it is!” exclaimed the woman, somewhat agitated. “What’s wrong? Do you want to smoke?” she asked, pointing to the cigarettes. “Why don’t we both go downstairs? As I said, I need to go to the toilet.”

“I’d rather stay here right now, actually. The engine’s so noisy downstairs.”

The large woman made a face, as if she couldn’t believe what she had just heard. But she said nothing.

“Go to the toilet. We’ll talk afterwards,” she said, to calm the woman. Then she got out of her seat and stood in the aisle to help the woman up.

“I haven’t upset you, have I?”

“Not at all. When you come back, we’ll carry on talking.”

The bus started to brake and, shortly afterwards, at the end of a long bend, the green and red lights of the toll booths came into view. Where were they exactly? She looked to either side of the bus and saw three fairly large towns, with populations of maybe twenty thousand each. Could one of them be Tarazona? When her mother had been alive, they had gone there together, to Tarazona — to the Hotel Uriz, the first hotel she had ever stayed in — and to the monastery of Veruela, where the poet Bécquer had spent a long period of time. Like all the teachers of her age, her mother had been mad about Bécquer’s poems, poems that she would recite to her at the drop of a hat. What were those poems like? “The dark swallows will return to their nests beneath your balcony, but those who were witness to our love, they will never return,” one of them said, more or less. Yes, she had had a happy childhood, but memories were not much use to her. Like dreams, they only managed to salvage the occasional isolated moment. The rest of the time, in everyday life, the present dominated.

The area around the toll booths was very brightly lit, and many of the sleeping passengers stirred in their seats. A blue panel indicated that it was only another forty miles to Bilbao. So that large town near the motorway couldn’t possibly be Tarazona. So …

She interrupted the thread of her thoughts and, for the first time since she began the journey, she thought about Bilbao, searching out the images hidden behind that name. And from amongst them all, she chose that of the rooftops in the old part of the city, the roofs that she had always seen from her house; hundreds of rooftops, matt red in colour, with the rain falling on them. She felt nostalgic for that rain. How long had it been since she felt the soft rain of Bilbao on her face? It wasn’t just four years. She had had to leave the city a long time before she went to prison.

When they left the toll booths for the darkness of the motorway, the glass in the windows became polished surfaces, mirrors. However hard she tried, she couldn’t see what was happening in the sky — if there was a moon, if there were stars. In the window she could see only her own reflection, her short hair, small ears, puffy eyes. “So here we are, Irene,” she thought, addressing her own image.

The policeman who looked like a boxer attacked her precisely at that moment. She noticed a strange movement behind her, as if two arms were trying to embrace her, and immediately, before she had time to realize what was happening, she was impelled into the other seat and hurled against the window. She felt a sharp pain in her side, she couldn’t breathe. She, nonetheless, tried to cry out.

“Shut up, you whore!” said the policeman, putting his hand over her mouth. He was speaking to her in a whisper, so that not even the passengers closest to them could hear him. All she could see was his flattened nose and his puffy eyes, puffier even than her own. “If you scream, I swear I’ll break something,” he added, again thrusting his fist into her side.