Lovers on All Saints' Day

Life on Grímsey Island

I

Oliveira didn’t really care where the hotel was, because he didn’t intend to stay there any longer than necessary. When she was still sober, Agatha had suggested a family-run inn she thought she’d seen near the Auneuil exit, a few months earlier, one day when she’d been called to take care of an old mare with a broken leg. “Putting them down always depresses me,” she’d told Oliveira in her tired voice, “that’s why I don’t take those jobs anymore. The one that day was the last.” After a routine procedure with no complications, Agatha had thought a coffee with brandy might make the memory of the mare dying easier to bear — the fearful neighing, the tension in the spotted legs that gave way as the drug advanced toward the heart — and had gone into a place with a silhouette of a jockey with a riding whip and spurs on the sign. The inn was so pleasant, and it was run by such a nice old man, that Agatha had promised to return and spend a night in one of the four rooms upstairs.

“The old man fought in the war,” she told Oliveira. “But he deserted to be with his family, and no longer found it humiliating to confess. I congratulated him. I would have done the same.”

It soon became obvious they weren’t going to find the old deserter’s inn: Agatha couldn’t remember which route she’d taken that afternoon, and all the streets in the village looked like the same street with recently painted yellow signs and green wooden doors that looked black at night. It was a relief for Oliveira: he’d imagined the old man’s effusive greeting — he’d have a luxuriant mustache that would cover his lips — curious to know who Oliveira was and what his relationship was to the woman, whether they wanted a double bed, if they wanted to be woken early. He couldn’t help finding the prospect of that sort of affability, that forced familiarity, objectionable.

So they kept driving. They decided to track the arrows, obey the inert instructions, and go to an Etap, one of those automatic hotels for a hundred eighty francs a night where nobody mans the desk after ten, and clients register at a screen and use codes as long as telephone numbers to open the doors of the garage, the building, and the room itself.

“You don’t have to talk to anybody,” said Oliveira. “Don’t have to smile or give any explanations.”

“You’re ashamed to be seen with me?”

“Of course not, Agatha.”

“We could go in separately. I can say I’m your aunt, or something.”

“None of that. Don’t be ridiculous.”

Agatha smiled and closed her eyes.

“How romantic,” she teased. “Our first fight.”

Then the red wine made her start to doze off, and Oliveira found that, if he pressed down the clutch and took his foot off the accelerator, he could hear her breathing, the light snoring of a stuffed-up little girl. When they arrived, Oliveira stopped the van outside the main entrance — a banner of white light bathed the hood in its vulgar brightness, and a smeared handprint appeared on the windshield — took his credit card out of his wallet, and before getting out, heard Agatha stir, open her eyes, and say she was delighted they’d chosen such a well-lit place. For him there was something attractive in that giving in to childhood fears on the part of an older woman he’d met a few hours before and with whom he was now looking for a bed where they could make love.

He came back rubbing his hands together. In his lips he held a little piece of paper with serrated edges. Agatha took it from him gently, holding it between her thumb and index finger and waiting for him to open his mouth. The tremor of his door as it banged shut didn’t startle her, but shook the empty bottle under her bare feet. Oliveira wished at that moment that he’d had a drink as well, because the wine would have warmed him up.

“It’s never been so cold,” he said.

“I was dreaming of my daughter,” she said. “I dreamed she was alive, here in the back, and we were talking about horses.”

“She couldn’t have been back there. It’s full of cases and bags.”

“And my instruments.”

“Yes. The heaviest of all.”

“Don’t exaggerate. But a person could easily fit. The proof is that in the dream all that was there and Alma as well. She was asking me what the syringe was for, the scalpel. In the dream she was wearing a Charleston boa.”

“What does the little paper say?”

“Three nine at the beginning,” said Agatha, “nine three at the end. A few more numbers in between. Do you want me to go?”

Before he could reply, she was standing, in bare feet and furrowing her brow, in front of the sliding garage door. With two long strides that didn’t betray the alcohol levels in her bloodstream she was at the keypad. She reproduced the number — Oliveira could hear the beep each time she pressed a button — and smiled when the white light illuminated the entrance and the door slid along its rail set into the pavement.

Oliveira stepped lightly on the accelerator. There was something familiar in that situation, a certain domestic ease that made it unlike a one-night stand. He opened the window as he passed her: a husband coming home, a man expected somewhere.

“Thanks,” he said.

“It’s like Ali Baba’s cave,” said Agatha.

The room was on the second floor. They had to go up a couple of flights of stairs with green carpeting, so worn that their feet barely felt it, and walk down to the end of an ammonia-scented corridor. Only the electric hum of an ice machine broke the silence. When they got to number 17, again she was the one who punched in the code. The tones they found when they entered were violets and fuchsias, the bedspread a lewd purple, the metal bed frame was pink like icing. Beside the bed a half-length mirror reflected a man not as young as Oliveira. He ran his hands over his temples and some loose hairs stuck to them, and he noticed calmly that his forehead had broadened over the last couple of years, like a shoreline during floods.

“Three nine, nine three,” she said.

“What about it?”

“It begins with my age and ends with my age.”

Oliveira kept his face as straight as a gambler’s. He could smell the woman’s breath, sour from wine and lipstick.

“But backward, no?”

“Yes, backward,” said Agatha. “It would be a palindrome of my age if the numbers in between weren’t so disorderly.”

Agatha crossed her arms over her waist and took off her blouse without even unbuttoning it, as carefree as someone trying on old clothes in a theater dressing room. Her breasts had white parallel stretch marks like trails of milk. Between the cups of her cotton bra hung a silver cross that Oliveira hadn’t seen when they pulled out of the gas station. The Christ, as if made of pearl, seemed stained by lotions, perfumes, and sweat.

“Did I tell you what your surname would be in Iceland?”

Oliveira shook his head, his back to her. He was looking for a hanger in the closet to keep his shirt from getting wrinkled. He couldn’t help smiling: a bachelor’s habits.

“Franciscosson,” said Agatha. “That’s what your surname would be. Horrible, don’t you think?”

II

He had found her (it was exactly the right verb) at an exhibition of circus horses six kilometers north of Beauvais, on the property the equestrian Francisco Oliveira’s heirs, one of whom he had no desire to be, had turned into a fairground. The place was no more than five minutes off the A16, but the willows and the whistling of the wind and the horses kicking in their stalls, or perhaps a combination of it all, warded off the din of traffic like erasing the static on a tape recording. At dusk, when the public had left, Oliveira wanted to take one last look at his father’s property, not out of any kind of nostalgia, but in order, later in his life, to be able to describe what he’d given up. There were people in the livery stable. Oliveira circled around the back wall, trying to identify the voices coming from inside without being seen. He peered through the cracks in the wood: there was Antonio, the Portuguese man who’d looked after the stables for the last seven years, accompanied by a woman. Between them, a Lusitanian stallion lowered and raised his head. It could be Elmo, might be Urano. Oliveira never called the horses by their names; he refused to put himself on the same level as them in his father’s regard. Urano, Elmo, Oliveira junior: three different forms of the old rider’s satisfactions. Was that what Oliveira had been, one more lodger at the stables? As a boy, that question had frequently crossed his mind. Now, about to leave it all behind, he was almost ashamed of remembering those regrets.

He walked around the side of the livery stable and undid the wooden bar latch. The bar fell beside him with a crash that startled the woman. The horse didn’t bat an eyelid. Oliveira realized he was sedated.

“Don’t stand there gawking,” she said. “Come and help us.”

“I don’t know anything about horses,” said Oliveira.

The woman wore a cooking apron that said MON ROYAUME POUR UN CHEVAL. Her hair was the color of a crow’s feather, and her angular, sad facial features looked as though they’d been carved with a knife on a bar of soap. She obviously didn’t know she was speaking to the son of Francisco Oliveira.

“You know how to hold a bag up in the air,” she said.

Oliveira approached. Minutes earlier he’d been walking beside the stream that flows out of the Thérain, and now the sawdust stuck to his shoes and the hems of his jeans. The woman handed him a clear plastic bag half full of a transparent liquid. It wasn’t sunny, but the slanted winter light still managed to play with the prism of water in the bag. On Oliveira’s wrist and arm it drew red, yellow, and purple figures. From the bag a tube descended and disappeared into the animal’s side; they had shaved the area where the needle went in. Oliveira felt the absurd sensation of localized cold, as if only in that space where the flesh was visible the skin bristled. He looked through the bag. He saw the oblong sign on which Francisco Oliveira had summarized his idea of horsemanship: CADENCE, LÉGÈRETÉ, GÉOMÉTRIE. He saw two deformed heads — a soapstone bust that had once been beautiful, black, lively hair — and the huge eyes of a horse beginning to nod off.

“Hold the bag up high,” said the woman. “Above your shoulder, at least.”

The horse began to wobble. His front legs trembled for an instant, and then his body fell sideways like the façade of a building, raising a cloud of sawdust with the dull thud of his flesh. But he refused to put his head on the floor, and the woman had to kneel on his neck and all her weight was barely able to overcome the patient’s resistance. The horse blinked; he panted; his lips hung open like resin revealing the pink gums, the white teeth hard as plaster. Antonio tied a strap around the left hoof and fastened it to the railing of the stands. As he pulled the strap, the horse’s legs separated and revealed the genitals, black as oil against the brown of the groin. The woman brushed the dust off the testicles with her bare hands, washed the area with a bile-colored liquid and then with hot water, and an apparition of steam rose in the cold air. She moved her hands in the pail of water — Oliveira noticed the edges dirty with dog food — dried them with a mauve towel that she spread out on top of the sawdust, and on the towel the instruments for the operation. The woman took out of an aluminum case a small scalpel, the size of her little finger, and drew a precise line on the horse’s scrotum. It wasn’t as if she were cutting: the scalpel was a felt-tip pen and the animal’s skin fine paper. But the blade had cut. The scrotum opened like fruit rind, separated as if it had a life of its own, and the smooth white testicles were exposed to the air, luminous against the black skin.

Then the woman made another cut. The first trickle of blood appeared; immediately the white fruit of the testicles was covered in red. The woman squeezed both hands at the base of the scrotum and the testicles popped out. She raised the scalpel and cut something else, but at that moment Oliveira had to kneel down in the sawdust because he felt his head emptying of blood and the world before his eyes turning black.

“What’s the matter?” said the woman.

“He’s going to faint,” said Antonio.

“Stand up, for God’s sake. I need that serum flowing.”

Oliveira heard them, but had no voice.

“Well, you hold the bag, Antonio. I’ve almost finished.”

Oliveira didn’t see her finish. He stayed on his knees, his back to the animal. When he turned around, a sort of masculine shame kept him from looking between the horse’s legs: his gaze came to rest on the horseshoes that reflected the darkened sky. In this cleansing space the woman appeared, and Oliveira thought the fatigue in her expression was not the result of the operation, but had been with her for a long time.

“Are you all right?”

“I’ll get over it,” said Oliveira.

“Do you want to come in? A cup of tea, or something hot, would do you good.”

Oliveira shook his head.

“I have to get going.”

“But you’re not going to drive like that, it’s dangerous,” the woman said.

Oliveira saw she wasn’t smiling: her voice was more pleading than polite.

“Half an hour more, half an hour less,” she added. “Wherever it is you’re going, it’s not going to make any difference.”

—

WHEN OLIVEIRA TOLD HER that all of that, the stables and every mare and every stallion, the livery and the right to use it, the two hectares of arable land surrounding the large house, could have belonged to him and he had renounced it all, Agatha’s hands flew to her head and she called him crazy, foolish, deranged. Then Oliveira heard himself explaining his father’s life with indifference that wasn’t exactly genuine and without too many details — but touching on the subject, even if only in monosyllables and short phrases, was already a rarity — speaking about the man who was the master of equestrian artistry and traveled all over Europe and even as far as Brazil teaching admiring students the art of sitting in a saddle. Agatha had also admired him at some point, and Oliveira couldn’t find a way to make her understand his contempt for the world of Lusitanian horses: she would have found it absurd to abandon a place like Beauvais with the arguments that sounded too much like those of an only son jealous of his father’s profession, the tantrum of a spoiled little boy. Had it been a simple slight, Oliveira thought, his motives would be easily explicable. But the memory of his father was tainted with resentments, pinned not on a lifetime’s assessment but on precise and painful images. Oliveira did not belong anywhere and that was his father’s fault. He had only two or three memories of his mother, as if he’d concentrated all his energy on that paternal anthology of reproaches. They’d arrived in France when he was still a boy. Their route had been the opposite of that of most other immigrants: they began on the outskirts of Paris and, as they became more secure, as the rider’s prestige was recognized in Brussels and Stuttgart, they moved away from the capital and out to the provinces. Oliveira grew up with the notion of living in a foreign country, but knowing that none belonged to him. He earnestly pretended whenever faced with a flag. He envied other children who used French without feeling clumsy. Gradually he noticed, little by little, he was forgetting his own language.

He could have told the woman about these memories and said: “This house is my father, these horses are my father. Now do you understand why I’m leaving?” But he didn’t. He concentrated on practical questions, the total area of the property, the price of the stallions. When his father died, the estate was divided up easily and in less than three weeks, so many people were due a share of the inheritance if the son turned it down. The only condition Oliveira imposed was that Antonio should keep his job, but that didn’t keep the foreman from telling him what was in his head. “One doesn’t throw a life away just like that, kid. One would have to be sick at heart. You act as if you’ve lived alone your whole life, as if no one’s ever loved you.” But Oliveira went ahead, without thinking that selling the property, instead of renouncing it, would have at least gotten him some money, which he was going to need. The compensation he’d received, not for the place but for the purebred his father had given him for his twenty-first birthday, was all the money Oliveira had now.

“I spend my life taking care of horses, and you get rid of them,” said the woman. “Incredible that we’re sitting here together.”

“Don’t you ride?”

“Only very badly,” she said.

They were sitting on one of the long wooden benches in the kitchen, beside the gas stove, trying to warm up a little. The lamp over the sink cast a bright yellowish light around the room, and the stove projected an ostrich-shaped shadow. Oliveira realized that it had been a long time since he’d last exchanged more than a couple of polite phrases with a woman: gratitude for merits not his own but his father’s, promises to keep in touch and organize something with the Beauvais horses at the next festival. Perhaps for this reason he thought it lucky that Agatha had arrived in town by train, that someone else — a gay journalist with a German accent — had given her a lift from the station. Now he, who was heading south, could drive her home to L’Isle-Adam, which was barely out of his way. He suggested it, and the ease with which she accepted allowed Oliveira to consider her vulnerable and fantasize from that moment on about her body and the infinite possibilities that might result from a man and a woman traveling alone between the towns of the Oise, each of them alone but traveling together, with the awareness that a night of sex wouldn’t transform them but might be, as had happened to him with other women for one night, an anesthetic, numbing his solitude.

They left about nine, when the December night had fully settled in. Oliveira’s van was parked under an oak tree; the air vents and the windshield wiper blades were covered with twigs and wet leaves. Agatha saw the logo of the rental company, green and yellow letters slanted as if caught in the wind.

“Oh, but you’re really leaving entirely,” she said. “I didn’t realize things were so serious.”

He spoke to himself.

“Of course I’m leaving entirely,” he said. “I don’t imagine there’s any other way to leave.”

After packing, Oliveira had realized that five cubic meters was quite a bit more than he needed. The blonde at the agency had warned him, of course, but Oliveira couldn’t manage to persuade himself that her face — her upper lip covered in a yellow scab as if she were just getting over a nasty flu — inspired confidence. So, in the cargo compartment, the luggage Oliveira was beginning his journey with took up a little more than half the available space: two garbage bags full of clothes and several cardboard boxes left enough room for a person. Agatha read: HAUT-PLANTADE, THIERRY GROS CAILLOUX, HAUTS-CONSEILLANTS.

“They’re all wine boxes,” said Agatha.

“Yes, but only one has bottles in it. The rest are full of records and cassettes, movie magazines. Things like that.”

“Any photos?”

“Photos of what?”

“I don’t know, the maestro, some horse. Is there no part of this house you might want to remember some day?”

Oliveira thought it over or pretended to.

“No, none,” he said finally. “Do you have photos of your family?”

“Only of Alma. My daughter. But that’s because she died two years ago, and I don’t want to forget what she looked like.”

Oliveira was going to say he was sorry: I’m very sorry to hear that or My deepest condolences, but both phrases seemed awkward, ill-suited to the casualness of the revelation, and he couldn’t think of any others.

“Tell me more,” he said then. “We’ve only talked about me. Tell me what your partner does, for example.”

“He’s long gone. He left when Alma was a zygote.”

Oliveira was shaken by the force of her cynicism. He felt indiscreet: that’s what you get for trying to approach a stranger. Agatha kept talking, seeming at ease. She leaned back toward the load with a cat’s curiosity.

“Which is the box of wine?” she said. “I feel like a drink, maybe that would warm us up.”

Then they took the N1 south, a bottle of Saint-Julien held like a baby’s bottle between Agatha’s feet. By the time the van merged with the heavy traffic of the A16, the surface of the wine was below the top of the label. The rainy season was late in coming; the sky seemed clogged up, invariably gray. Soon the highway was no longer illuminated, and all Oliveira saw was the glare of the lights of northbound cars, that sort of permanent eclipse behind sheets of zinc that separated their lanes from oncoming traffic. Agatha slid down in her seat, took off her shoes with one hand, and put her feet up against the glove compartment. Then she turned on the heating. It blasted Oliveira in the face.

“Sorry. Do you want a sip?”

“Not for me, thanks.”

“Very good,” she congratulated him. “One does not drink at the helm, everyone knows that.”

After passing under a concrete bridge — a fluorescent sign ordered FAITES LA PAUSE TOUTES LES DEUX HEURES — Oliveira slowed down. He changed into the right-hand lane; Agatha asked him if they were going to stop for something as he pulled into a rest area, a concrete bay surrounded by pines. “I just need to use the rest room,” he lied. The noise of a fight came out of a bus parked a few meters away. Two teenagers were rolling around on the ground, and the sound of a fist as it thumped into a skull seemed exotic to Oliveira, something forgotten, a childhood memory. “I won’t be long,” he said as he got out. This, however, was true: he crossed the parking bay toward the services hut, found a tin vending machine built into the wall, put in ten francs, and a little pack of condoms, square and perfect as if no one had ever touched it, dropped into the palm of his hand. The dispenser also offered toothbrushes and razors. Oliveira decided he wasn’t in need of anything else and returned to the van.

Agatha had finished the bottle. Her raincoat was hanging over the hand brake, between the two seats. When she spoke, it was clear her tongue was beginning to get tangled up.

“Do you like me, Oliveira?”

He didn’t answer.

“Are we going to make love? Because I’d rather not go to my house, that’s the only thing.”

“Well, let’s go somewhere else, then,” Oliveira heard himself say.

He waited a moment and added:

“That is unless you’re in any hurry, of course.”

“None at all,” said Agatha, lowering her head. “It’s winter and the fucking night never ends.”

III

The television was a luminous window hanging in the corner attached to the wall, and the slanted view Oliveira had from the bed was that of a man with thick glasses standing beside a map of France, indicating with a pointer the route of some electronic clouds across the western half of the hexagon. He was moving his lips but not saying anything, because underneath France, between Nice and Marseille, the word Mute ordered his silence. Then a series of squares appeared, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Oliveira saw that he’d have nothing but bad weather for the whole trip, but thought he might reach Clermont-Ferrand ahead of the rain they were forecasting. Who was that man? Why was Martine Desailly not there, the woman who’d been in charge of predicting the weather for years? The one-o’clock news was part of Oliveira’s routine, and his day incomplete without the most recent scandal from the Assemblée Nationale or the images of the dead in Algiers, more or less sophisticated forms of violence that vindicated his desire to leave, to hide away from the world. Agatha was sleeping. After sex, she had locked herself in the bathroom for fifteen minutes; Oliveira was going to ask if she was feeling all right, but then saw that she hadn’t redone her makeup, as he’d thought at first, but that the dampness of her eyes was displacing her mascara a little. He thought it would be futile to ask her why she’d been crying, when they were going to say good-bye in an hour and never see each other again in their lives. He felt cynical but also justified in refusing to accumulate other people’s sadness when it wasn’t within his power to alleviate it. “I’m going to sleep for a little while, if you don’t mind,” Agatha had said, “but don’t be embarrassed about waking me up if we have to get going.”

“Don’t worry, have a good sleep,” said Oliveira. “Shall I turn off the light?”

“No. Leave it on.”

“I don’t mind turning it off. So you can sleep better.”

“It’s fine as it is, Franciscosson. Leave it on.”

Oliveira saw her move one hand over her forehead and chest in a quick blessing degenerated from use, like a businessman’s signature. Agatha, with her eyes already closed, kissed the Christ on her necklace and rolled over.

Now, Oliveira watched her sleep. He did not envy her turbulent sleep; the woman’s body frequently shook as if she were falling through the air in her dreams. Her constant little kicks had uncovered her: her hips had the marks of someone who had lost weight quickly — perhaps after pregnancy, Oliveira already knew that her daughter was dead but didn’t want to know more — and on her thighs the dimpling of cellulite gave her skin the look of fine cork. The hair on her body glistened with the changeable halo of the television like synthetic thread, like the nylon line on a fishing rod. Oliveira went around the other side of the bed, knelt down on the carpet, his gaze at the level of her barely visible vulva. This woman had been beautiful, that was obvious; Oliveira had been aroused by her innocence in bed, her apparent docility, her reluctance when he suggested she turn over.

Then she seemed to sense Oliveira’s gaze.

“What’s up? Do we have to get going?”

He hadn’t thought of that, but he looked at his watch. He still had to take Agatha home and find a rest area, perhaps on the other side of Paris, to get a little sleep before dawn, so he wouldn’t be nodding off on the drive south. Ever since he’d decided to leave he’d found himself in moments like this, when it seemed like his arrival was something illusory, something that would never happen.

“Yes, it’s time,” said Oliveira. “Shall I hand you your clothes?”

The woman sat up in bed. Her breasts dropped slightly, not scrawny but full like bags, like the bag of serum Oliveira had held that afternoon.

“Well, then,” Agatha grumbled like a girl getting up for school. “If we have to go, we have to go. Of course, I haven’t got a vote on this.”

Outside, an icy wind bit their ears and dried their lips. As soon as they stepped into the garage, a motion detector switched on a bright light. Her shadow gathered in on itself, a shapeless, inhuman silhouette.

“So,” said Oliveira. “Tell me how to get to your house.”

“My house,” Agatha repeated in irritation. “You know what? If it were up to me, I’d stay here until morning.”

“Well, stay. What’s the problem?”

“The problem is that France is not covered in railway lines, monsieur. Or perhaps you’ve seen a train going by here? And with the price of a taxi I could pay for five nights in a hotel like this.”

“Exactly,” said Oliveira. “That’s why I’m going to drive you, that’s why I need to know how to get there.”

Agatha didn’t say anything.

“How do you get there?” Oliveira insisted impatiently.

“Yeah, yeah, don’t badger me,” said Agatha. “Just follow the signs for Paris, that’s all. You’ll see L’Isle-Adam soon enough, it’s pretty straightforward.”

This time, however, there was no traffic. Every once in a while, a pair of red lights would whistle past in the left-hand lane and disappear as quickly as they’d appeared; occasionally the van would overtake a transport truck, the bodywork jostling and the steering wheel trembling in Oliveira’s hands as he pulled out of the slipstream. Agatha was silent, as if Oliveira had offended her by saying they had to leave the hotel. To make up for the mistake he couldn’t quite identify, out of cordiality to a woman he’d slept with or simple pity, pity for the sadness Agatha seemed to carry with her like a snail’s shell, Oliveira tried to start up a spontaneous conversation. What would his name be in Iceland? What had she said he’d be called?

“Franciscosson. The son of Francisco. Francisco, your father, the great Portuguese rider of this century.”

“And you?”

“Me what?”

“What would your surname be?”

“Ah.” Agatha straightened up in her seat. “Well, my father’s name was Raymond, so I would be called Raymonddóttir. The daughter of Raymond. But the two letters together, the d of Raymond and the d of dóttir, sound ugly and grating.”

“Yes, a little,” Oliveira admitted.

“It would have to be Raymondóttir, with just one d.”

“Doesn’t sound that great, either.”

“No. Good thing I’m not Icelandic.”

Oliveira smiled. Suddenly seeing her like that, lighthearted and carefree, pleased him as if the well-being of this stranger had begun to matter to him.

“Have you been there?”

“No. But I’d like to, God knows I’d really like to. It must be a lovely country, don’t you think? Do you know how to say ‘I’m lost’ in Icelandic? Ég er týnd.”

“Eg er tynd,” Oliveira tried to repeat.

One of Agatha’s hands moved to her chest; through the material of her blouse her fingers closed over the Christ figure.

“God knows I’d like to live there. Maybe one day I’ll be able to. The night hardly lasts at all, Oliveira. In June, dawn breaks at three in the morning, and night doesn’t fall until twelve. And anyway, the sky never darkens completely, it stays as blue as the sea, it never gets this repugnant black we have here.”

“But that’s in June,” said Oliveira. “In winter it must be worse than here.”

Agatha wasn’t listening. She wasn’t looking at him, wasn’t looking ahead. Her gaze was lost in some distant point, far beyond the window at her side, a point lost among the grain silos, the fields of crops combed by the wind in yellow waves that were the color of fool’s gold against the backdrop of the sky.

“There is an island, in the north of Iceland. It’s called Grímsey. The Arctic Circle goes right across the middle of it, cutting it in two. On Grímsey the sun never sets. It’s light at midnight, it’s light at three in the morning. Can you imagine, Oliveira? A never-ending day, that’s there all the time.”

“Yes, but that’s in the summer. In the winter it must be the opposite, night all the time.”

“Light at midnight,” said Agatha. “Light at three in the morning. So no one is afraid, no one feels the horror of having a fear of the dark.”

The first sign announcing L’Isle-Adam appeared an hour later. Oliveira exited the highway onto one of those minor side roads that always fascinated him because anything could happen along them: a cow, a couple in conversation sitting at the edge of the pavement, and maybe, at the right time of year, a deer leaping across the road.

“Now what do I do?” said Oliveira.

“Straight ahead. I’ll tell you, don’t worry.”

Oliveira looked in the mirror: it had happened. The attack, the urgent need to drop her off and turn back into himself, a man who only counted on himself, a solitary man. And what if she asked him to spend the night with her, to sleep over at her house? He would decline, of course, but how? It was incredible that it still took so much effort to make all the arrangements to conserve his independence, speak those words, make those gestures. It was incredible that life had so insistently proved the futility of any opening up, the greater wisdom of closing in on himself, and he still didn’t know how to apply those lessons. He began to think how he’d say good-bye to her, and the evaluation of various displays of affection, a kiss on the lips, cheek, or forehead, an exchange of phone numbers — but he didn’t yet have a house to call his own, much less a phone number — seemed to him too much like a children’s game. A sign, this time white, announced the entrance to the town on the left, a hundred meters ahead.

“Do I turn here?”

“Yes,” said Agatha.

Oliveira looked in the rearview mirror, pushed down the indicator. The van was beginning to turn when Agatha said:

“No, sorry. Keep going straight, it’s further on.”

A swerve of the steering wheel straightened out the van.

“You sure?”

“I’m a bit sleepy, or still drunk, I don’t know. It’s straight on, Oliveira.”

He obeyed. Agatha refocused her attention, her eyes wide open, scanning the view. You don’t know where you live, thought Oliveira, you’re lost or don’t want to arrive, and suddenly felt a new link to her: You hate your house, too. He went over in his head the times the odometer had clicked around, one, two, three, four, this was a considerable detour, this woman was considerably lost. They crossed Pontoise along a narrow sleeping street plagued with speed bumps that shook the aluminum instrument case like a maraca. Oliveira expected a comment from Agatha, but, although she didn’t take her eyes off the road, and although her fingers were crickets that leaped as they recognized the way, nothing came out. They had to get close to Meulan before Oliveira started to understand.

“We’re not going to your house, are we?”

Jokingly, she reproached him for being so masculine that he couldn’t tolerate losing total and absolute control of the vehicle.

“Agatha.”

“What?”

“Where are you taking me?”

“Relax. We’re here anyway, we can’t turn back now.”

She pointed to an embankment leading to an oak-lined drive.

“Turn in,” she said.

The gravel shifted under the tires. The house Oliveira arrived at was a façade with no sign of depth, black and flat like a canvas painted to conceal the construction behind it. There were no lights on. From outside, the attic could be seen standing out against the sky.

“Park here,” said Agatha, and her thin fingers moved in the air. “Don’t turn off the engine, so the lights will shine into the room.”

“Aren’t there any lights?” Suddenly Oliveira was furious. “But where the fuck are we?”

“My daughter died here,” said Agatha. “You’ll think I’m crazy, but I wanted you to see the place. I don’t know why you, Oliveira, maybe just because you’re the one who’s with me tonight. Sometimes things are that simple.”

—

TANGLED IN THE BUSHES along the drive were pieces of the police tape they’d used to cordon off the house. Agatha walked ahead and he followed her, breathing the swampy air the autumn rains had produced, the smell of the stagnant water and rotting wood. Oliveira imagined the place next summer, mosquitoes spiraling above the long grass. They walked around the redbrick walls to the glass door into the kitchen. The windows were intact, but the interior was invisible. Agatha turned the knob and the door opened soundlessly. Inside the colors were no different, the world was blue and black.

“They lived here,” said Agatha. “Alma spent her last year here, Oliveira.”

On the large table with a synthetic cover rested three coffee cups, each on top of a different coaster. One of them had the label of a Belgian brand of beer, Judas. The letters of the word were red, but in the darkness, broken only by the van lights shining through the big front window, the red turned purple as if they were at the bottom of the sea or like the lips of someone who’d frozen to death. Oliveira went into the front room looking all around — not a stick of furniture, no rug, just a parquet floor dulled by dust — scrutinizing the bare, white walls, lacking even a nail hole, that basic trace of humanity, evidence that someone had wanted to take possession of a place with the simple gesture of hanging up an image. He wondered in which of the corners of the house Alma had lain down to die, which room and which bed had been chosen by the person who’d injected her with the morphine Agatha was now mentioning, talking about the autopsy, the communiqué the police had sent out to the close family members of the dead people with the description of the bodies neatly organized, laid out methodically with the rigidity of a military barracks, and covered with a freshly washed white sheet, a terrible quotidian detail as if an affectionate grandmother had just embroidered it for that purpose.

“There were twenty-one bodies,” said Agatha. “Most of them were lying on the floor, there, not on the parquet but on mats.”

Oliveira tried to conjure up the image.

“As if they were asleep. Each one on their mat, each mat parallel to the next and all of them equidistant from each other.”

“How old was your daughter?”

“Seventeen, Oliveira. Seventeen fucking years old. People should have to be old enough to buy booze before they’re allowed to join a cult.”

It was too sad an irony to be convincing. Oliveira looked outside, the van’s lights dazzled him and he felt a sharp pain in his retina. The running engine’s murmur reached them, dimmed and distant: the ventilation switched on, the fan belt squealed like an injured animal. Beside the stairs, before going up, Agatha pointed to a niche, the only interruption of the smooth surface of the wall, where the group had kept a nickel silver chalice that was later melted down and a hardcover Bible with rice-paper pages and a velvet bookmark.

“I was able to see it once,” said Agatha. “The Battle of Armageddon had been underlined with a light pencil. ‘And the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean.’ That part was underlined, I remember because Alma recited it on a recording she made for me.”

“Light pencil?”

“Yes, you know. Soft lead, or whatever they’re called. The ones architects use.”

Oliveira was struck by the way she was talking about it as if it were a modern relic or a juvenile cult object, Lennon’s glasses or Bogart’s hat. When he wanted to tell her, he felt arrogant. Who was he to describe the shape of her grief? The stairwell smelled of damp and dust, and Oliveira’s nose felt relief when they got to the upper floor, where the air was no less heavy but had a bit more freedom of movement. The light, upstairs, was indirect: again blue, again black.

“Do you want me to go down and move the car? If I back it up a little, maybe we’ll get a bit more light.”

“No, stay here. The tour’s almost finished.”

“You don’t have to be sarcastic, Agatha.”

“Believe me, I do, my dear. It’s absolutely necessary.”

In the first room on the left, the door was half closed. Agatha pushed it as if afraid she might wake someone. On each side of the window was a bunk bed without any ladders.

“They look like the ones in the hotel,” said Oliveira. “Except for the color.”

“Except they’re for sleeping and nothing else,” said Agatha. “Nobody kissed anybody here. They all loved each other but didn’t sleep together. They were committed to God the father, married to their new Church.”

She pointed to the bed on the right.

“Alma slept in that one. The four people in this room were women.”

Agatha brushed off the dust and sat down on the bare mattress. Oliveira asked:

“Did she sleep on the top bunk or the bottom?”

“Top. She was taller than me, since she was twelve or thirteen she was a head taller than me.”

“So why are you sitting down there, then? Come on, I’ll help you up.”

Agatha stepped into Oliveira’s interlaced hands: he lifted her easily, and then steadied her with a hand on her bum. She smiled.

“Cheeky,” she said. “You’re not coming up?”

Oliveira stretched out on the lower bunk.

“I’m fine here, thanks.”

He could feel every knot and every seam of the mattress in his back. He crossed his arms behind his head and closed his eyes. He played at opening them and closing them, acknowledged there wasn’t much difference and, nevertheless, that his eyes were adjusting to the dark, and gradually details of the room were coming into focus: the geometric designs carved on the white door, the bare wire hanging from the ceiling where once a lightbulb would have hung. Above his body, the bedsprings creaked with Agatha’s every movement. Lying there he realized he couldn’t imagine a day of devotion; everything religious was so abstract to him that it was impossible to relate it to waking up, coffee brewing in the kitchen, or taking turns to use the shower. He’d had faith when he was little, of course, because a child is capable of seeing the fulfillment of a prayer, the answer to a plea in anything. And later, what had happened? He got used to the idea of himself, learned that every man is an island, and then the notion disappeared: the notion of that Christian god he’d been told about, that god Oliveira had never seen or heard.

“Oliveira.”

“What’s up?”

“Nothing. Just wondering if you’d fallen asleep.”

“I’m wide awake,” he said. He heard the sound of friction. He guessed that Agatha was scratching the wall with her fingernail.

“You wouldn’t leave without telling me, would you?” she said.

“I’m quite comfortable here, why would I leave?” said Oliveira. “And you? Do you want to get going?”

There was no answer. Oliveira watched the silvery springs working, the delicate contractions each time the woman above him moved. The nail scraped the wall.

“Sometimes babies suddenly forget to breathe. I don’t know why that happens,” said Agatha.

And she kept talking. In the days after giving birth, Agatha woke up often in the middle of the night wondering if the little girl was still alive, if she hadn’t died. “As happens to babies, Oliveira, you know.” Then she’d tiptoe over to the crib and put her face up close to the little girl’s: a baby’s breathing was one of the quietest things in the world. At that moment, she’d give thanks, thanks to God, sure that no one else was responsible that something as frail as a baby could survive overnight.

“In films there’s always someone who wakes up because they feel that someone else is watching them. But it’s not a lie, you know.”

One night — Alma would have been about twelve, she’d just started her first period — Agatha woke up to find her daughter standing in front of her. She asked her if something was wrong; she imagined first of all what seemed obvious, and told her it didn’t matter if she’d stained the sheets. Alma kissed her on the forehead, replied that it wasn’t that, and went back to bed.

“It took me almost a year to understand those visits,” said Agatha.

Oliveira waited for her to follow up with an explanation, but Agatha fell silent.

“What was it?” he said then. “What did you understand?”

“Alma hadn’t stained the sheets,” said Agatha. “She never had nightmares, or any of that nonsense. She simply wanted to make sure I was still breathing.”

Then she fell silent.

“And what does that mean, according to you?” Oliveira asked.

But Agatha kept quiet again.

“Don’t get all mystical, okay?” said Oliveira in irritation. “There’s nothing that annoys me more. We’d better talk about something else. The van, which is still running. If the battery doesn’t die, we’re going to run out of gas.”

“How long till daybreak?”

“Not long, I think. Try to see your watch in this gloom, if you can.”

He, however, consulted the sky. He strained to see, tried to concentrate as if his willpower were capable of projecting the violet glints of dawn onto the clouds. A solitary lizard clung to the wall above the window frame, and Oliveira thought that winter would soon kill it.

“I can’t see anything. Not a single light anywhere.”

“Shit,” said Agatha. “Don’t leave me alone, okay?”

“I’m not going to leave you alone.”

“How can it be dark for so long? Doesn’t it seem horrible to you, Oliveira? A person alone, at night. It’s like a conspiracy, as if someone did it on purpose, and I swear I’m getting tired of it. It’s no life for normal people, is it?”

Oliveira didn’t say anything.

“In Iceland it wouldn’t be like this. Sometimes I wonder what life would be like on Grímsey Island. It must be different. The sun shining all the time, and you could be outside, doing things. Not thinking. Talking to people, and in daylight, what more could you ask for? Thinking is horrible, all those ghosts, what you’ve done, what you haven’t done. Góda nótt, Oliveira, that’s good night in Icelandic. But on Grímsey Island they must not even have the chance to say it. Isn’t that a perfect life?”

IV

Oliveira drove thinking about the strange way the town had been gradually surrounding them, arranging well-chosen elements on both sides of the road. First a vineyard, then a couple of brick houses, then traffic lights — one green and bright for Paris, Amiens, or Rouen, then another, white and smaller, which didn’t direct them toward L’Isle-Adam but confirmed they were in it — and finally, constructed block by block around the van as it advanced along a decidedly urban street. Only one window had a light in it: it was the shop window of a bakery that spilled a yellow light across the sidewalk and part of the road. A man was sweeping the sidewalk with a straw broom; several dry leaves and an Orangina can ended up in the gutter. The letters were projected onto the pavement backward. “Eiregnaluob,” said Oliveira. “Boulangerie.” He was starting to get sleepy; he felt pins and needles in his hands, found it hard to focus. He looked in the rearview mirror, and saw tiny paths of blood in his eyes like a route map.

“Eiregnaluob,” he said.

“What did you say?” she reacted.

“Here we are,” Oliveira said.

He parked right in front of the house. At this hour nobody was going to complain: not a single bicycle was visible. As he got out of the van, he felt in his nostrils and tear ducts the cutting cold of the early morning. She seemed more awake; it was as if she’d gotten a second wind. But, in spite of her alert step and clear diction, she was worn-out, no longer the woman whose skillful hands had operated on a horse on the sawdust floor of the Beauvais livery.

While Oliveira was looking for the key to the back doors of the van, she said:

“If you want, you can come in.”

Oliveira waited for her to say something more: a romantic proposal, a declared project. Something to flee from.

“It’s not something I usually do,” she went on. “Well, I never do. If you’re not able to take it the right way, forget it and be on your way.”

“Take it the right way? What do you mean?”

“As a way of saying thank you.”

“But there’s nothing… but I haven’t done anything any other person wouldn’t have done.”

“That any other person hasn’t done. But it doesn’t matter to you. How I spend my nights is something that doesn’t matter to you. What I decide to do—”

“It would give me great pleasure,” said Oliveira.

“What would?”

“To see inside your life.”

“It’s not my life, it’s my house,” said Agatha. “And it’s a mess.”

She took her instrument case, and Oliveira followed her inside the house. As soon as he closed the door, he found a living room on the right and a dark wooden handrail going up and a narrow hallway that went all the way to the back, where he could see a wall of sky-blue tiles and the black iron burners of a gas stove. On the widest wall of the front room, above the main radiator, hung a faded map of the world.

“There’s no coffee,” said Agatha.

“I didn’t feel like any,” Oliveira lied.

Oliveira was going to say: Actually, I’m not going to stay very long. But the heating was so pleasant, the possibility of lying down and closing his eyes for a few minutes so tempting, that the words didn’t take shape in his mouth. He could just as easily sleep in a rest area, somewhere along the highway; but here he wouldn’t have to worry about thieves or noisy drunks, much less overly sociable creatures trying to look for company, something he, in particular, would be unable to provide. He discovered Agatha’s house smelled like her; or, vice versa, that all of her, her underarms, the nape of her neck, her belly button, had been impregnated with this smell, a blend of mothballs and pressed flowers. That, perhaps, gave him the sensation of already knowing or finding himself back in a place he was used to. They went up to Agatha’s bedroom, Oliveira’s eyes fixed on her hips. He noticed he was desiring her again. Or maybe he was confusing desire with the sudden instinct of belonging.

“I would, however, like to take a shower,” said Oliveira. “I’m falling asleep.”

“Well, we’re in luck, then. That’s the only thing I can offer you, hot water.”

“You’re not so bad,” he said, a yawn hindering his words. “You’ve had a couple of naps.”

She didn’t hear him.

“Look, this wardrobe is a hundred and eighty years old. It belonged to my great-grandfather’s uncle, or something like that. A deacon, in any case.”

Agatha’s room was not that of a woman who spends much time at home: apart from the wardrobe, a reporter’s tape recorder, sitting on top of the television set, was the only proof of human presence. There was nothing to suggest the inhabitant’s tastes or opinions. The television was unplugged. Two black cables hung down like lianas and one of them touched the floor. The screen still had the factory adhesive on it, in spite of being an old model. The adhesive was covered in dust. Solitary people like him put the television in their bedroom; lonely, sad people like Agatha soon forgot about the television, left it to rot like fruit.

“This wardrobe is the first Christian of the house,” said Agatha.

When Oliveira didn’t make any comment, she turned her back on him, as if she were going to inform on someone and ashamed of her duplicity.

“It’s all I’ve got, Oliveira. This shitty religion is all I’ve got, this God is all that keeps me company, and not you or anyone else can understand that.”

“Maybe so. But tonight I’ve been here. And He hasn’t.”

“You’re leaving.”

“And He’s staying, is He? Where is He, then? Show Him to me. I’ve always wanted to meet Him.”

“It’s all I’ve got,” Agatha repeated. “And you’re leaving, Oliveira. Really, it’s as if you’d already gone.”

“Well, it would be best not to get any hopes up. I was never planning to stay.”

“Without pity, please. Have some respect.”

“I didn’t come here to save you, Agatha.”

She closed her eyes. It seemed as though she would rather not have heard the last sentence, but, at the same time, she seemed accustomed to grappling with it.

“It hurts me to think of you leaving. Is that bad? I prefer to convince myself you’ll stay until daybreak. I don’t suppose that’s a sin, carrying on believing things even when you know they’re lies.”

He didn’t dare try to comfort her, much less contradict her. He was afraid Agatha would start to cry, although it was obvious her declaration wasn’t intended to provoke sympathy or pity. Maybe, he thought, it wasn’t even directed at him, and just a part of this woman’s eternal struggle against herself. Nevertheless, he felt cruel. Then he understood he was content, because now he would have liked to erase those words that had threatened the fragile delicacy of the moment.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I’m not used to talking about things like this. I don’t know how to say what I think without trying to win an argument. It’s terrible, my father always scolded me for it.”

Agatha took a pair of unpadded headphones out of the wardrobe. “I wanted to show you something,” she said. She plugged the headphones into the tape recorder and put them on Oliveira like a princess’s tiara.

“Is that a good volume?”

—

Okay, now a few little things I want you to do for me.

Give my clothes to Father Michel. He knows a Red Cross center nearby that’ll take them for sure, and I imagine they’ll be useful to some immigrants. I don’t know why I didn’t ask you this before. Tell him that I looked for the place once to give them the clothes personally, but couldn’t find it and ended up lost in Marines. I know you argued with him recently, he told me because I sometimes ask him for advice, and our conversations are long and focused. But don’t turn him away, Mama, for your own good. He’s not hounding you, like you said, it’s not that he wants to force you into anything, he’s worried about your soul. He didn’t even tell me you don’t go to church anymore. I figured it out myself from the things you’ve told me on the phone.

Everything to do with school you can give to Madame Mabilat, I don’t know if some of it might be useful to younger students. Ask her if she remembers the time, when I was in troisième, that she punished me for spraying yogurt around her desk and crumbling a slice of orange cake on it. Tell her that I dreamed of her furious face recently, but in the dream there was a chicken coop behind the school and I was going to break freshly laid eggs as revenge for the punishment. Ask her if she knows what that means.

We eat well here, Mama, so don’t worry about that. You ask me to tell you how things are, but what you want are material details and I find it very hard to talk about that. I’ve tried to explain and it’s as if you don’t hear me, here one distances oneself from all of that, other things matter more. I’m very glad to hear your work with horses is going so well, don’t get me wrong. The last time we spoke you told me about the things you’d done, you said the previous Sunday you’d been to a Lusitanian horse fair in Brussels and had a lovely time and forgot for at least a day that I was not at home anymore. And that’s when I realized you didn’t go to church. I don’t have any proof or anything, because I wasn’t with you, but I’m still sure you didn’t go to church that Sunday. Now do you understand why I chose to be here, with my brothers? Not that I think your influence was negative, of course. I know you’re still a good Christian, but I was afraid of straying from our Lord and from the truth in which you educated me. The Lord knows I love you and I admire you, and He has put this congregation in my path so my faith won’t be weakened. Always remember it’s you who I owe for the discovery of faith.

Last of all: don’t keep asking me where we are, understand that our life is now far from our families. Master Albert wants us to gradually detach ourselves from our mortal and earthly pasts, and in a little while I won’t be able to send you any more recordings, because we are going on a journey. It has to be enough for you to know there is a light guiding us, and that Christ has died so that light won’t go out, so we all have the chance to be born again.

If you see Tempo, give him something to eat from me. He likes raisins and to have his back legs stroked. But don’t let him come in ’cause the baker has spoiled him. He gets scared when he’s in other people’s houses and he might pee, it happened to me once, on the stairs, almost at the top. But I cleaned it up before you got back, and I bet you never even noticed.

—

OLIVEIRA LOOKED UP and found Agatha sitting on the edge of the bed, naked. She’d opened the heavy curtains, and the vague hint of dawn bathed her flesh in blue, turned her into a specter. Oliveira knew: something was expected of him. But he was as afraid of his reaction fulfilling the woman’s expectations as of getting it completely wrong. The world seemed like an impenetrable space at that moment, a room without doors where the luckiest ones walked around wearing blindfolds. He didn’t know what to do. He had one certainty: his presence was enough to tow Agatha and bring her to safety, to get her as far as the edge of the night, and that thought touched him with strange pride. Suddenly, nothing was more important. He lay down on his side, his face a few inches away from the buttocks of the seated woman, and he saw how in that position the shadows of cellulite were accentuated. He took her by the shoulder and pulled her toward the pillow, and saw her disappear into the hollow of his underarm like a bird. He felt his fatigue closing his eyelids; he thought if he closed his eyes he’d sleep for three days and not even the outbreak of war would wake him.

“All the parents are wondering the same thing,” he heard himself say. “What did they do and what could they have done differently. And this would have happened anyway.”

Agatha didn’t move. From some point lost in Oliveira’s side came a tiny voice in which there was no complaint or grievance, just a terrible emptiness, the exhaustion of a defeated person and the notion that this defeat would be repeated until infinity.

“Before, I needed that, Oliveira. I wanted people to tell me it wasn’t my fault. Now all I want is not to be alone at night. And in this house I am always alone and now there’s no way to change that.”

“That’s not true. Everything changes, you just have to know how to look at it.”

“I hate that wardrobe. I hate the deacon, whoever he was, I hate this house. I hate God, Oliveira.”

Oliveira looked up. The ceiling was white plaster; in the center, an eighteenth-century design had been sculpted without too much talent in bas-relief, unevenly and asymmetrically. “If only I could at least have chosen so many things,” said Agatha. The hanging lamp seemed to have sickened with pallor; just as happened at dusk, this moment when the electric light got confused with the gray of the sky was, absurdly, the darkest of all.

“Dawn is breaking,” said Oliveira. “Now you can forget about Iceland.”

“Now I can forget,” Agatha echoed.

“At least for tonight,” said Oliveira.

He smiled, but she didn’t look at him. Without even looking at him once, she found his flaccid organ in the folds of his trousers and made it grow, and Oliveira closed his eyes, felt the head moving and the woman’s lips confining it. The important thing was Agatha, to keep her company, be with her. This trip south, disguised in the cheap magic of a return to the land of his parents, was not actually anything more than a small private desertion, the act — some would say the cowardice — of a man incapable of living in the place life had assigned him. But now, suddenly, it was taking on a new transcendence. Oliveira had a role in the world and an important position, although momentary, in the life of Agatha, the woman whose tongue he could feel. Here he was safe and the night was safe, too. Here, Oliveira was no longer a threat to himself. He let himself go then and enjoyed doing so, and when he felt himself coming it was as if the night behind him was releasing all its weight, as if the road from Beauvais was repeating over his shoulders in a single instant. Before falling into a deep sleep, he thought of the van and the things inside, and imagined himself emptying his boxes of records on this very bed and organizing them alphabetically in the wardrobe of a long-dead deacon.

—

HE WOKE UP DISORIENTED. He was surrounded by unfamiliar details, and took a while to remember where he was; he was covered by a virgin-wool blanket that made him itch and that he didn’t think he’d ever seen before. How long had he been asleep? Long enough, at least, for crusts of sleep to have accumulated in the corners of his eyes, for the weight of his body on top of his arm to have cut off the circulation and a seemingly permanent cramp to appear in his muscles. He held his breath: nothing broke the silence. A warm fresh smell came in from the hallway, a mixture of soap and steam. Only when he stood up did he realize he was barefoot, and in the soles of his feet he felt the creaking of the wooden floors, each uneven board. He found his shoes. His tired feet were swollen, and his shoes were hard to get on. The tape recorder wasn’t there.

Oliveira went out into the hall.

“Agatha?”

He got down four steps before noticing that the bathroom door was closed. Then he heard footsteps on the porch, the panel of the mailbox gave a metallic groan, and a plastic envelope slid through the door. On the other side of the frosted glass, Oliveira saw the postman’s yellow raincoat turning away. He thought he’d go down and collect her mail and then say good morning to Agatha, and as he bent down to pick up the envelope he felt a pleasant pain in his waist, a tug that was also a call. The transparent envelope contained a magazine about horses, but the subscription label covered the title. Seeing Agatha’s name in print for the first time caused a simple and clear emotion. He approached the map on the wall and looked for Iceland. It was a violet-colored country. France, where he still was, was saffron red. Portugal was green, an intense green similar to the color of the van. Abandoning a country was child’s play. Swapping colors and not life. Rootlessness had no color, however. It makes no difference to live in one place or another and being born here or there was an accident. One was a chameleon, countries and people mere scenery.

Maybe Agatha would be grateful for an invitation to spend some days with him; maybe she’d even agree to leave with him right now. Oliveira looked for L’Isle-Adam and his index finger traced the route ahead of him, heading for Clermont-Ferrand and arriving in Perpignan and then Barcelona. The skies would be clearer there and it wouldn’t be so cold. Next he found the Arctic Circle and followed it around the world through the Bering Strait, as a silent homage to Agatha. She was a brave woman. Over the course of the night she’d faced her phantoms and overcome them. It was almost fascinating: Oliveira now remembered the house where Alma had died, and it was as if a new fear had joined his own. All his life he’d lived with fear, with the sensation of menace. It was absurd. His egotism had protected him; he couldn’t feel proud of that. Now he wanted to feel simple emotions. It was a new day and he was hungry.

When he went outside, the dome of clouds had taken on a glassy tone, and the sun was a remote and cold aluminum disk. Perhaps it was the first time that the banal event of a day beginning had given him such satisfaction; it was as if he’d had something to do with it and should be commended. Two doors away from the bakery the air was already smelling of freshly baked bread, a thick and almost visible scent that Oliveira could have cut with his hand. The place was small, but the counter left enough space for a square table and two chairs that looked out from behind the window toward the street. The baker was balder and shorter than he looked before when he was sweeping. His mustache completely hid his lips. The electronic theme music of France 3 came from the back room.

Oliveira pointed to a baguette and asked for two croissants and two pains au chocolat.

“And a carton of orange juice,” he added.

“No cartons,” said the man. “It comes in a bottle, fresh squeezed.”

“A bottle, then.” Oliveira counted the coins in the palm of his hand. “When would you say dawn has broken? Officially, I mean. When there starts to be light, or only when you can see the sun?”

The man considered the question with a grave expression.

“I would say there are two moments. One is dawn, and one is day. Dawn comes before day.”

“So, dawn is before you can see the sun?”

“I’d say so,” the man said.

“Dawn comes as soon as the sky is no longer black.”

“I think so. Is the lady feeling all right?”

“Do you know her?”

The baker lowered his eyes, feigning prudence.

“From seeing her arrive at this hour,” he said. “She never spends the night in her house. But something tells me she’s going to be all right from now on. Of course, I’m not minding anybody else’s business.”

“Of course not,” said Oliveira.

He took the package wrapped in thin paper. A croissant flake floated to the floor like a feather.

When he got back to the house, Oliveira went straight into the kitchen. He looked in three cupboards before finding the glasses. They were tall and blue. The window looked out onto a clothesline. A black bra and an apron similar to the one Agatha had used the previous afternoon hung in the breeze. On the paved ground, beside the wall, a box of detergent. A spoonful of white powder had spilled, and seemed to shine on the dirty ground. Oliveira washed down mouthfuls of croissant with big gulps of orange juice. Then, when he decided to take the other croissant up to Agatha, something extraordinary occurred. Maybe it was a quality of the silence, or the image of the lonely, hanging bra and apron. Oliveira began to walk toward the front hallway — without the croissant in his hand — and his footsteps accelerated. He ran up the stairs two at a time. Oliveira tripped on the penultimate step but didn’t feel his knee smash into the hard edge. He opened the bathroom door without knocking, maybe because he already knew. Naked, Agatha was sleeping in the bathtub; Oliveira found the waterline, level with her shoulders and just covering her breast, and saw her relaxed nipples almost at the same time as he saw the first cloud of blood, supple and round like a balloon coming away from the bottom of a swimming pool.

Oliveira called her and heard the echo of his voice. He sprang to her side and his first instinct was to take her by the wrists, pull her hands out of the water to prevent the gentle and efficient and dreadful emptying of her open veins. The tip of his index finger slipped momentarily into her viscous flesh: Agatha had made too deep a cut. He felt a weak pulse, reluctant but existent, a slight palpitation in her thumb. She was alive, it was still possible to save her. The air floating above the mixture of water and blood had a rusty taste. Oliveira knelt down to get his arms under her body. His shirtsleeves absorbed a pastel red. The cuffs were as heavy as sponges. He found that her body was lighter than he’d imagined and the water, instead of making her slippery, increased the friction between Agatha’s skin and his own. His heart was shuddering at the base of his throat. His own blood pounded in his temples. Oliveira felt a second of intense panic and knew he had never known such a sensation and also knew that nightmares are made of the same stuff as this moment. He wanted to stand up and carry Agatha out of the house and take her to a hospital. He wanted to make a phone call and, while waiting for the men who would arrive among strident sirens, apply a tourniquet over those little-girl bones, though he didn’t know how. He wanted to move, do something for the woman who was dying, anything. But his body would not obey.

He closed his eyes as if praying. A single image illuminated his mind: the tiny shadow of the lizard he’d seen before Agatha started telling him about Grímsey Island, where it was always sunny and people had no pasts or guilt, where life was not a burden. Now he knew that the most diligent team of doctors, the most urgent attention could not save this woman, because her pain was not in the yellow skin of her wrists or the scalpel cuts, and she would still be tormented every night even if they replaced all the blood she had lost today. Oliveira looked at her pale face, mouth half open, her soaked forehead as if in the grip of a violent fever. He didn’t feel resentment, although it now seemed like Agatha was abandoning him; he didn’t see a woman who perhaps, with more time, he could have loved, but a body at rest, redeemed and free, so ostentatious in her liberty that only nudity seemed to suit her. At last she sleeps, thought Oliveira. Love, which he’d so often heard about in abstract terms or tacky images, could be this simple: Agatha fleeing and the will to not prevent her flight.

Oliveira took his arms out of the tainted water. The body sank a little, making small waves on the surface, and ended up settling like a bottle. The stream of blood was saffron dust on the bottom of the bathtub, the ink of an escaping octopus. Clumsily Oliveira turned around, leaned his back against the edge of the tub, and stayed there, sitting on the carpet that gave the bathroom a tasteless or outmoded look. His eyes registered the pattern in the wallpaper, the back of the toilet like a beer stein, and the fiberglass counter, where the tape recorder rested beside the bottle of Xylocaine, and then he felt an emptiness in his stomach, something like the inability to catch your breath after a blow, as he understood that this woman had even wanted to avoid the pain of the blade slicing her skin: Agatha had been afraid, afraid of the pain, perhaps afraid of what she would feel when she started to die. Beneath the blade of the scalpel, the same one she’d used to emasculate a purebred stallion, the black drop, dense and solitary, reminded Oliveira of the English wax his father had used to seal his love letters, whether or not they were addressed to his mother.

—

FROM THE SECOND FLOOR Oliveira could see the street was beginning to show signs of life. A green and blue bus went past, the white interior lights still on, and stopped to drop off a passenger. The door opened and a woman of about fifty stepped down, her hair freshly washed, straightening her dress with her hands. Her day was just starting. Oliveira’s eyes followed her until she turned the corner, thirty meters beyond the door to the bakery.

He didn’t want to think he’d failed her. He wondered if Agatha had thought of him before or after opening her veins, or if she hadn’t considered his presence at all, if after all he’d been nothing more than that evening’s one-night stand. Maybe he had failed her. Maybe he’d had in his hands and in his voice the way to prevent Agatha’s death. But how could he have imagined the effects a word, a subtle lie, might have had on her? Maybe Agatha had made the decision long before that night, and nothing Oliveira might have said would have changed it. Maybe his presence was only required as a witness. He wondered if that was true: if everything had a human cause and another random one, if destiny existed. He also wondered if Agatha had crossed herself, if she’d listened for one last time to her daughter’s voice, if a woman who has decided to die allows herself the luxury of sentimentalism or the nostalgia of faith. A man holding a little boy’s hand walks past on the other side of the street. The boy carries a knapsack wider than his own back. They do not know that here, in this house, so close to them, a woman has suffered. It’s good that they don’t know, especially the boy. “From seeing her arrive at this hour,” the baker had said. Agatha formed part of a street’s waking routine. The baker, the boy, Agatha. Three islands, and Oliveira just another island. Maybe communication between two people was never possible, or it was possible but imperfect, and its imperfections were capable of ending a life. There was no way of knowing. Two big drops burst against the windowpane, almost at once. Then it began to rain. Oliveira felt cold in his eyes and a sort of uncomfortable sting. It was lucky it was raining because people who looked at his eyes would think of raindrops before anything else.

His knee hurt. But, no matter how hard he tried, he could not remember when he’d banged it. He turned around, looked at the bathroom door, and didn’t remember having chosen to close it, either.

V

“Coffee,” said Oliveira. “A strong one.”

He was sitting beside the window. On the table was Agatha’s magazine, open in the middle. Beside the magazine, folded neatly, was the map of the world. Oliveira had taken it down off the wall and as he pulled out one of the thumbtacks he’d torn the flesh under his fingernail. The baker spoke to him from behind the counter.

“Have you made up your mind yet, monsieur?”

“Pardon?”

“Whether dawn breaks before or after. Look, chérie, it’s him. Monsieur wanted to know about the sun, what I told you about.”

“Ah oui,” said the woman. She had freckles on her rosy cheeks and her hair up in an impeccable bun. “My husband told me about that, it’s very interesting. So many things out there and one never stops to think about them. It’s… it’s unfair.”

“Monsieur arrived with madame,” said the baker.

His wife knew immediately who he meant.

“That’s very good.” She smiled. “Yes, definitely. This is good news.”

Then the woman went into a room where two columns of baking sheets guarded the door frame like shelves. She took a tray from one and put it on the other. “C’est une bonne nouvelle,” she said. “I knew it. One day someone just had to come.”

The baker placed a cup of coffee on top of the folded map. He lowered his voice and leaned forward, a man peering over a precipice. His tone was more than cordial: it was warm, almost affectionate.

“Monsieur is well? Do you feel ill? My wife can bring you something if your eyes are stinging, monsieur.”

“I’m fine. Thank you.”

“It’s probably the pollution. The clouds bring us all the pollution from Paris. It’s very hard on the eyes.”

“Of course.”

“Drops, monsieur. In any pharmacy. You shouldn’t drive with your eyes so irritated.”

“You’re right. Excuse me. I have to get going.”

“Monsieur is traveling? Will you be away long?”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but yes, I do have to make a trip.”

The baker did not insist. Oliveira had been rude to him and on his face appeared a glimmer of disenchantment. Maybe he’d been too abrupt, thought Oliveira, and regretted it, but it was too late now. He was grateful for the coffee, the bitter taste on his tongue. It was still raining. Oliveira couldn’t wait any longer. He put a five-franc coin in the ashtray and collected up his papers in one hand.

“Monsieur doesn’t have to leave,” said the baker. “You can stay without ordering anything.”

“Say good-bye to your wife for me,” said Oliveira.

“Good luck, monsieur.”

“Thank you. Could you do me a favor?”

“Yes, monsieur.”

“Take Agatha… take the lady a bag of coffee. A gift from me. She’s sleeping right now, but take it to her later.”

The baker smiled. He looked at Agatha’s house and then looked back at Oliveira.

“Yes, monsieur. With pleasure, monsieur.”

—

THE VAN WAS RESTING beside the curb like an anesthetized horse. To Oliveira it seemed like a useless, obsolete, almost despicable machine. I’ve waited with you, Agatha, I’ve accompanied you to the end of the night. He started the engine and waited for the thin layer of ice on the windshield to melt. His eyes began to water and the interior of the vehicle was a hazy vision. Oliveira squeezed his eyelids and one fat tear fell onto the steering wheel. Then others formed in his eyes, as if they were trying to dissolve his perception of things or at least delay his departure. He was surprised by an idea: if his life ended now — if a drunk driver plowed into him from behind and broke his neck, if a man driven crazy by grief came out shooting randomly — his years of living would have served for nothing. Who would he be, who might he have been? He would be the man who abandoned the only land he could call his own; he would be the man who allowed a woman to die.

He didn’t do any calculations but knew he was running late. He had to get going, continue to make his way south, past the Pyrenees and drive several more hours after that. He had two days ahead of him. After that, his parents’ city, whose name had no meaning whatsoever and in which Oliveira had never lived, would welcome him. He couldn’t imagine his future life, or what his friends would be like or what they’d look like. But he would begin to live a different life and was somehow liberated and ready to respond to the change. There would be a woman. Oliveira would look at her every once in a while and think: You are her. I’ve chosen you. You’ve chosen me. But that woman didn’t have a face, and wasn’t expecting him, and could not know that her life, in that instant, was beginning to be different because Oliveira was traveling toward her. He himself would be until the moment of arrival somewhat uncertain, a malleable substance, vulnerable to words and weather and the portent of love, a body in movement across a map, less alone than before, crossing meridians.