The Lone Woman

The Lone Woman

SHE WAS A woman of thirty-seven who had spent the last few years in prison. Slight and serious-looking, she was dressed neatly in clothes of a somewhat masculine cut; when she walked, she did so slowly, calmly; when she spoke, her voice was surprisingly husky; when she looked, her eyes seemed hard — two brown spheres that time had polished to a sombre gleam. After her release from prison, she had spent a terrible night, wandering the bars of Barcelona, and ending up sleeping with a man she had only just met. Then, the following morning, after more bars and more walking, she had decided to return to the city where she was born, Bilbao. Forty minutes later, she was standing outside one of the sets of automatic doors at the railway station.

The door sensed her presence and trembled slightly, as if the two glass leaves were about to part at any moment, and then, acting instead as a mirror — for she had stopped and was looking at herself — it reflected her own figure back at her in precise detail: the leather suitcase she was holding with both hands, her black tights and black moccasins, her suede jacket with the red AIDS ribbon pinned to the lapel, her white shirt, her cropped hair. She kept looking herself up and down, like a woman who has just got dressed and is uncertain about her appearance.

“Not bad,” she said quietly, staring at her legs. After all those years inside, it was odd to see herself full-length. The mirrors in prison were rarely more than two feet high.

The door trembled again and two hefty young foreign women, carrying rucksacks taller than themselves, emerged from the station and occupied the space where her image had been. They took a couple more steps and stood before her.

“Could you help me, please?” asked one of them, unfurling what appeared to be a plan of the city as abruptly as if she were opening an umbrella. There was something vaguely insolent about her tone of voice, reminiscent of fifteen-year-old school-kids in TV sitcoms.

“No, I can’t,” said the woman, without even looking at her. She was in no mood to start poring over the map of a city in which almost the only thing she knew was the prison. Besides, she despised tourists, especially tourists carrying rucksacks.

The abruptness of her reply startled the two young women, although, after the initial shock, their look of surprise became an exaggerated grimace. How could she treat them like that? Had she no manners? Why was she so aggressive?

“You stink of sweat. Why don’t you go and have a shower?” thought the woman, shifting her suitcase to one hand and going in through the door. She didn’t understand what the two foreign women shouted after her. The English she had learned in prison was good enough for her to be able to read and, to some extent, speak, but not enough to understand the insults of British or American tourists.

Once inside the building, she felt as if she were about to faint, as if her legs would give way beneath her if she continued walking towards the people milling about in the waiting rooms or by the ticket office. She hurriedly sought refuge in the area behind one of the shops, less crowded, emptier than the rest. Things were happening all around her, everywhere: a red light began to blink, a child bumped into the luggage cart and fell flat on its face on the floor, someone rushed past, their head turned to look back at the electronic departures board. And in moments of calm, when the general bustle died down, her eyes collided — like the child who had fallen flat on his face — with the glittering glass columns or the loud yellow or red plastic surfaces.

“So, you’re leaving us. Well, congratulations. I mean it. From now on, you’ll have all the electric light you want.”

The inside of the station more than bore out the truth of those words addressed to her, just as she was about to leave prison, by Margarita, one of her cellmates. There were lights everywhere: in serried ranks across the ceiling and reflected on the paved floor, creating a brilliant atmosphere that affected everything in the building, from the magazines and books to the sweets in the sweetshop. It was in stark contrast to prison, of course, because there, in the cells and along the corridors, darkness predominated — a kind of grey dust that filtered through the air and drowned the feeble glow from light bulbs and fluorescent tubes.

She looked restlessly about her, at the pizzeria to her left towards the rear, then over at the area full of coffee shops, but she couldn’t see the information office. It wasn’t where she remembered it, opposite the ticket office. As for the departures board — which again was new to her — Bilbao was not amongst the destinations of those trains about to leave.

She compressed her lips and gave an irritated sigh. The station clock — a very sober, black and white Certina — said it was twenty past two in the afternoon. According to her wrist-watch — which was also a Certina, a man’s watch — it was two twenty-three. She regretted not having phoned the station that morning. She was used to the rigid prison timetable, to a life that passed, not like a river or a current in the sea, but like the little wheels in a clock, always turning on the same axis, never changing speed, so anything unusual, any uncertainty, made her feel uneasy. She must find out what her travel options were as soon as possible.

She picked up her suitcase again, this time in her left hand, and joined the group of passengers who were waiting in an area furnished with green plastic chairs. She spotted a young man in soldier’s uniform, reading a sports paper. She went over to him and asked for his help. Could he tell her where she might find the timetables?

“Why don’t you ask the computer?” the soldier said to her, pointing to a rectangular column. Halfway up the column was a window filled by a bright blue screen.

She put her suitcase down on the ground and struggled to follow the instructions. She could only get the machine to tell her about trains travelling to places near Barcelona or to cities like Paris, Zurich or Milan. She sighed again. This was beginning to get on her nerves.

“Do you need any help?”

The soldier had joined her at the computer. She told him that she couldn’t find the timetable for trains to Bilbao.

“There isn’t a train until eleven o’clock tonight,” said the soldier, with a slightly flirtatious smile. When he saw the look of amazement on her face, his smile broadened and he spoke to her rather differently. “Is that too late for you?” he said. “You could spend the rest of the day in Barcelona.”

She wasn’t in a hurry to get anywhere, not even to Bilbao, and she was on the point of accepting the invitation that lay behind the soldier’s words. After all, it was the first invitation, albeit only half-spoken, tentative, that she had had in a long time, at least from anyone of the opposite sex, and she needed all the help she could to bolster her self-confidence; she needed to be looked at, spoken to, desired, as if she were a normal woman, not a whore — the role she had passively undertaken on her first night out of prison. However, barely twenty-four hours had passed since she left prison, and still less, only about ten hours, since her encounter with the stranger with whom she had gone to bed in a cheap hotel, and she felt like being alone. She looked at the soldier and declined his offer. She couldn’t stay in Barcelona, she had to get to Bilbao as soon as possible.

“I’ll tell you what then,” said the soldier with a sigh. He was rather disappointed. “The best thing would be to go by bus. It leaves at about half past three and goes straight there on the motorway. You’ll be home by ten o’clock tonight.”

“You seem to know a lot about timetables,” she said, forcing a smile.

“I’ve got a friend back in the barracks. He always gets that bus. He usually buys his ticket over there, behind the station. The company’s called Babitrans.”

The soldier said goodbye to her, joking about lost opportunities and sketching a military salute. For a moment, she thought of continuing the joke and adding a further thread to the relationship that had grown up between them, but, instead, she simply watched him walk away.

The soldier disappeared amongst the crowd, down the escalator that connected the station with the metro. Yes, it was a bit of bad luck not to have met him ten or twelve hours earlier. Or perhaps the real bad luck lay in having met the other man, the awful guy who had picked her up in a bar, the fourth or fifth that she had visited that night.

She noticed the cigarette machine next to the entrance to the pizzeria, and the thoughts going round in her head immediately changed direction and flew off to the period in her life when she could choose any brand of cigarette she liked or, rather, choose the brand with which she identified and which she would carry with her, at least on certain occasions, like an amulet. She felt suddenly happier and thought that her recovery could begin right there, with that trifling realization, her recovery of herself through the objects that had surrounded her in her previous life.

“Try to find your own things,” Margarita had advised her when she said goodbye. “They wait for us and they are the only things that can help us when we get out of prison. When you leave here, try to remember what they were and set about finding them. They’ll help you a lot. I’ll do the same some day. I’ll go back to Argentina and I won’t stop until I find my knee-high leather boots.”

The laughter with which her cellmate had closed that brief conversation floated in her head as she went over to the cigarette machine. Margarita was over sixty and still had a long prison sentence to complete. It was highly unlikely that she would ever return to her native Argentina.

Her favourite brand, Lark, was in the last column in the machine. She put three coins in the slot and pressed the button.

“At last!” she exclaimed to herself.

She hadn’t been able to smoke that brand, her usual one, for several years; it was a brand she had chosen as an adolescent, as an emblem almost of her own personality. She had been “the girl who smoked Lark” and now, after spending four years in a prison cell in Barcelona, there was a chance of being that girl again. On the other hand, the maroon packet — an extremely rare sight inside the prison walls — proved to her that she really was out, that before too long she would have a new handbag, and in that handbag a key, the key to her own house, the object that best characterized those who were free.

She placed the packet on her open palm.

“Lark has an inner chamber of charcoal granules to smooth the taste,” she read. Above the letters, there was a cross-section of the filter showing the granules.

She put the pack in her jacket pocket and crossed over to the other part of the station via a side passage. Even before she reached the exit, she spotted two buses parked on the station forecourt; the first was white, the second yellow and white, and she had the impression that both had their engines running and were about to leave. She quickened her step and almost ran through the automatic doors at the end of the passage.

Startled by her sudden appearance, about a dozen sparrows took flight — up until that moment they had been pecking at the breadcrumbs scattered for them by an old woman.

“Where are you off to in such a hurry?” the old woman shouted in a disagreeable voice, before cursing the gusty wind snatching at her coat. She seemed slightly crazy.

The sparrows circled, flying into the wind, over the station in the direction of the prison, which was less than five hundred yards away from there. An idea flitted through her mind and made her smile. Those birds probably had their nests in holes in the prison walls. Indeed, that particular flock of sparrows were probably the ones she used to see from the tiny kitchen window or from the courtyard.

Two drivers were standing chatting by the yellow and white bus.

“Yes, this is the bus. It leaves at three forty and flies straight to Bilbao,” said one of them. Both he and his colleague seemed in a good mood.

“Well, it flies when I’m driving. When you’re driving, it crawls,” added the second driver, and the two men burst out laughing and punched each other on the arm.

She looked at the clock. There was less than an hour before it left.

“Where do I buy a ticket?” she asked.

“In the station. Right over there,” replied the driver who had made the joke, pointing to door number seven. “But you don’t have to do that. My colleague here will be delighted to do it for you, won’t you? He’s very well brought up and a bit of a ladies’ man too.”

“Thanks, that won’t be necessary,” she said, forestalling the other driver’s response. Then, simply in order to escape from them, she went and sat on a stone bench.

She put her suitcase down on the ground and took out the packet of cigarettes. The gold band from the cellophane wrapping and the silver paper covering the cigarettes flew off in the same direction as the sparrows, towards the prison.

And the smoke? Would that fly in the same direction too? She lit the cigarette with a plastic lighter, inhaled the smoke and then, suppressing all the memories that the taste of the tobacco evoked — memories of a school dance, memories of a day at the beach — she slowly exhaled. Just like the birds and the wrapping, the smoke headed off towards the prison.

She closed her eyes and shook her head. She must stop playing these games, she must keep calm and try to control the thoughts buzzing around in her head like a swarm of bees, only to end up always in the same place: prison.

“I have to move on. I’m out now,” she murmured to herself. Nevertheless, she knew perfectly well that it was going to be very difficult to forget about prison. As difficult as it would be to give up the habits she had acquired there: talking to herself, for example.

She leaned back on the bench, and for the first time that day, she looked up at the sky. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant sight. The sky was nothing like the “slow blue river” mentioned in a poem dedicated to Barcelona. On the contrary, it seemed to be made out of grey marble, like the top of a tomb. No, looking at the sky didn’t help her much either. It was almost better to go on thinking about things that had happened in prison. Things which, in fact, were not things but people like Margarita or Antonia, her cellmates, her friends. She would have to keep her promise to write to them every fortnight or every month, and to send them books, and the odd picture to put up in their cell.

She finished her cigarette and, picking up her suitcase again, she went into the station. At first, as she walked towards the automatic doors, the faces of her two friends, Margarita and Antonia, remained in her mind, motionless, like two picture postcards; then, when she reached the bus-company office and stood in the queue, the image of Margarita came alive and the memory of her last day in prison reasserted itself.

“This is my present, for you to put in your house, in your bedroom,” Margarita was saying to her as she moved about the cell, the scene of that particular memory. She was handing her a small picture, a detail from the fresco painted by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel: God and Adam reaching out to each other.

“I can’t possibly accept it, I can’t,” she said, pushing it away. She knew how important that picture was to Margarita. On the nights when they would sit philosophizing, for example, when they had managed to get hold of a couple of beers and could allow themselves the luxury of staying up until the small hours talking and drinking, Margarita always ended up discussing that picture. There was one particular detail that had great significance for her — the gap between the two fingers. Despite all the efforts of both God and Adam, their fingers never touched. There was only a tiny space between them, but they didn’t touch. What did that mean? The impossibility of man ever making contact with God? The impossibility of being good? Adam’s independence from God his creator?

“You have to accept it, you must.”

Margarita closed her eyes, adopting one of her favourite poses, that of a medium who has just gone into a trance, a pose that had given her quite a reputation amongst the women in prison; many thought she was mad, but, amongst those who were impressed by the way she spoke and by her evident culture, she had a reputation as a kind of priestess, a seer.

“Well, I’m not going to,” she replied, rearranging the things she had already packed in her suitcase.

“I know how much you like the picture, almost as much as I do. I don’t know why you like it, but you do. And the oddest thing of all is that you’ve never said so, you’ve kept the attraction it holds for you a secret. And that, as an Argentinian psychoanalyst would say, suggests the presence of something very important. Don’t laugh, please. I’m convinced that the picture reminds you of something in your past life, something so important that you’ve never been able to tell anyone about it, not even after a few beers.”

“What’s even odder is that you’ve never found out,” she said, no longer laughing.

“What does that scene remind you of?” Margarita insisted, taking the picture back and examining it closely. “You ought to tell me. You can’t leave without at least giving me that satisfaction.”

“It’s nothing very special. It just reminds me of a boy I grew up with. He was a draughtsman and he was always talking to me about Michelangelo. That’s all I can tell you, there’s nothing more to it.”

“I don’t think you’re telling the truth,” said Margarita, looking her in the eye.

“You’re quite right, but you were so insistent that you forced me to invent something,” she confessed, holding her gaze. She was getting a bit impatient. She wanted to finish packing.

“So I was right; it is something important!” exclaimed Margarita. “I knew it all along. People always hide the really important things.”

Although the rumours circulating in prison spoke of the kidnapping of a child, no one knew exactly why Margarita had been given such a long sentence. That was her secret, the thing that she would never talk about, not even on those rare nights when they all got slightly drunk.

“Anyway, the picture is yours. You’re to pack it in your suitcase.”

“All right, if you insist.”

Margarita placed the picture amongst the clothes and the books.

“What books are you taking with you?”

Before she had time to reply, Antonia, their other cellmate, appeared. She was a young woman of about thirty, though she looked older, the consequence of the life she had led before she was sent to prison.

“You are a mean sod, leaving us just when we were having a good time. You’re heartless, you are,” she said as soon as she came in, underlining her reproach with a little shove.

“And that’s not the worst of it, she’s taking with her the entire contents of number eleven,” Margarita added, rummaging around in the suitcase and taking out one of the books that had just been packed. “Number eleven” was a cell fitted out as a library, a victory for the inmates on their corridor.

“I’ve only taken my favourite books, about ten of them. And they’re nearly all duplicates.”

“So Stendhal is amongst the chosen few,” said Margarita, opening the copy of Scarlet and Black that she had in her hands. “I don’t know if I would choose that. No, I don’t think I would.”

She put the book down and peeked again in the suitcase.

“And what about your English books? Have you got those too?”

“Yes, teacher, I’ve got them too.”

Antonia followed Margarita’s lead and took another of the books out of the suitcase. It was an anthology of poetry.

“Here’s our poem,” said Antonia, turning to a particular page. And she started reading out loud.

Beat at the bars.

Cry out your cry of want.

Let yourself out if you can.

Find the sea, find the moon,

if you can.

“I hate that poem. Stop it,” Margarita said, interrupting her. She snatched the book from her hands and returned it to the suitcase.

There were certain things, like cigarettes, alcohol or barbiturates, that helped to make imprisonment bearable. However, it was reading that had helped her most, or, to be more precise, the little literary group that Margarita, Antonia and she had formed around cell number eleven, an island inside the prison, a place which, as well as functioning as a library, occasionally served as a lecture hall. According to Margarita’s calculations, about ninety per cent of the prisoners had been in that cell at some time, but only about fifteen could be said to be regulars.

“Have you gone to sleep?” she heard someone say. The man at the ticket office was staring at her from the other side of the counter. He was a very spruce young man, with his hair slicked back. He seemed impatient.

She apologized and asked for a ticket to Bilbao. In the smoking section.

“I don’t want to poke my nose in, but, if I was you, I wouldn’t travel in the smoking section,” said the young man, talking very fast.

“Look, just give me the ticket,” she insisted. She had a deep dislike of hysterical people.

“Now calm down, don’t get angry. Let me explain,” the young man said, still gabbling. “The thing is, our buses are double-deckers, and the lower deck, which is reserved for smokers, isn’t even half as big as the top deck. And if there are a lot of passengers,” the young man went on, talking quickly so that she wouldn’t interrupt him, “all the smokers travelling on the top deck come downstairs whenever they feel like a smoke and a real fug builds up. Do you see what I mean?”

“You’ve convinced me,” she said. She didn’t want to prolong the conversation.

“Seat number thirty-two,” said the young man, holding the ticket out to her. “And I’m sorry if I poked my nose in where it wasn’t wanted.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Do you know why I gave you that advice? Because I’ve often travelled downstairs myself. We employees have to. They make us sit downstairs even if there are free seats on the top deck. I get sick every time I have to make a trip.”

“Why don’t you protest?” she said, addressing him now as “tú” and raising her voice a little. “Call a strike. And if the company won’t give in, steal a bus and burn it.”

“Right,” said the young man, with a nervous smile.

“I’ve got forty-five minutes before the bus goes. Where can I eat around here?”

“There’s a self-service restaurant next to the left luggage. It’s called the Baviera. That’s the best place. As for what I was saying about the bus, it’s no big deal. We’re all quite happy with the company really.”

The young man looked away. He regretted ever having started that conversation.

The Baviera was an impersonal place, all plastic and steel, protected from the noise of the station by great glass screens. She liked it, mainly because it was quiet, thanks to the screens and the absence of any piped music. She was starting to get a headache and the silence made the air grow fresher again, or so it seemed.

Leaving her case in the corner farthest from the entrance, she went up to the counter and chose two dishes: a salad of mussels and green peppers, and pasta in tomato sauce.

“Have you got any small bottles of vermouth?” she asked the waitress at the hot-meals counter.

“Only what you can see,” the waitress replied, pointing to a tray packed with bottles and cans of drink.

She placed two cans of beer between the two plates of food and went over to the checkout. Then, returning to her table, she sat down in a chair from which she could see the whole place and took a good look at all the customers: diagonally opposite, at the other end of the restaurant, there was a man, apparently a foreigner, eating alone; nearer to her, taking up three tables, there were about ten young men with very short hair — soldiers out of uniform probably — eating sandwiches and telling jokes; then there was a table occupied by a boy and a blind man wearing dark glasses; then there was her, in perfect symmetry with the foreigner at the other end — with no friends to talk to, no travelling companions.

She felt tired. Her headache was becoming more intense above one eye.

“I’m really spaced out,” she thought, staring at the foreigner at the opposite end. She had no one to talk to. No one had been waiting for her outside the prison. No one was waiting for her in Bilbao. As Antonia or Margarita would have said, she didn’t have much going for her, only about as much as some wretched tourist in a strange country.

She shook her head — which made it hurt a little more — and tried to banish the ideas surfacing in her mind. Pity was a vile emotion, and self-pity was even worse, the vilest emotion of all. She must keep an eye on herself, be severe with herself. In her situation, normal behaviour — the behaviour of someone who has never been in prison — wasn’t enough. One of the poems she had read in the library in cell number eleven said: “I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.” It was true, and she could be no less than the sparrows she had frightened away near the buses on the forecourt.

The mussels that came with the salad reminded her of the tins that Antonia, Margarita and she used to eat in the pantry at the far end of the kitchen, a place which they called the sanctum sanctorum, because it was the focus of those private celebrations. Generally, it would just be the three of them. According to Margarita, it was the ideal number of guests.

“Three people can eat together really well; they can eat and keep up a flow of conversation at the same time. Four, on the other hand, is disastrous. The conversations keep cutting across each other.”

“What about two? How does that work?”

“Sometimes it can work really well with two, Antonia. But, in my experience, it’s better to eat alone than in company.”

But in order to feel comfortable alone at her table — her thoughts were following the thread of her memory — it would be best to have something to read, and she didn’t even have a newspaper. During that morning, it had occurred to her to buy a newspaper from the Basque country, but in the end she hadn’t felt like it and so hadn’t done so. As for the books she had in her suitcase, she didn’t want to risk getting food on them. Besides, they weren’t the sort of book you could read during a meal.

Then she remembered the letter. She had written it after breakfast in a café in Las Ramblas, and it was still in her inside jacket pocket. Why not? She could read it again and decide once and for all whether or not she should send it. And if she got food on it? In that case, she would interpret the stain as a bad omen and she would tear the letter up.

She pushed away the now empty plate of mussels and wiped the edge of the table with a paper serviette. Then she opened the second can of beer, took the letter out of the envelope and started to read what she had written. What did she really want? Did she want some of the pasta to slip off her fork and on to the paper? Did she want to withdraw what she had said? She didn’t know, she couldn’t know until she had read the letter through from start to finish.

Andoni,

At last I’m out of that hole of a prison and I think the moment has come to clarify a few things. I don’t love you and you don’t love me, so, as my cellmate, Antonia, used to say: fuck off. I don’t want to see you ever again, and the only thing I regret is that it’s taken me so long to get round to saying it. I should have told you to fuck off ages ago, not now. Because you’ve been a lousy friend, a bad friend who abandoned me whenever I had a problem and only ever gave me bad advice. When I started sorting out my paperwork in prison, for example, what did you say? You told me to wait, to be careful, to consult the organization hierarchy. Hearing you talk, anyone would think you were a serious militant counselling a less serious one and yet — oh, fuck off, Andoni, fuck off — you’ve never been a politically active member of anything, not even a club for foodies. If you had been a true friend, you would never have talked to me like that, because, at least in my experience, being fond of someone usually makes you selfish, selfish enough to think only of yourself and your loved ones, not about what would suit the organization or what those who are above good and evil might advise. You should have said to me, yes, leave prison, it doesn’t matter if the others accuse you of being a traitor, I’ll support you, we’ll go on a trip, I’m longing to be with you. But that isn’t what you did. You did exactly the opposite.

Obviously, you won’t agree. You’ll say what you used to say when you came to see me, that you need me, and I agree, what you need is a big sack that you can empty all your sorrows and your bad news into, but I’m not going to be that sack any longer, you can find another one. Come to think of it, you’d be an awful friend to have for everyday use. You’re so mean, so petty!

By now, Andoni, you’ll be wondering why I’m writing you this letter, since I seem to feel such hatred for you all of a sudden, because I think that’s precisely what it is, hatred; the more I write, the more clearly I see that. I mean, it’s not just what I said at the start, about me not loving you and all the rest, it’s worse than that, it’s quite simply that I hate you. Especially after what happened tonight. Do you know what I did? I went to bed with a man I didn’t even know. It was utterly humiliating. He treated me like a whore, though I was much cheaper than any whore, because I paid for almost all the beers. And the hotel he took me to must have been the cheapest in Barcelona, even the sheets were dirty. Do you know what I think? I think it’s all your fault. If you had been a better friend, if I had found you waiting for me outside prison, none of that would have happened.

Anyway, like I said, Andoni: fuck off. And don’t even attempt to contact me in Bilbao. If you do, you’ll be sorry.

Should she send the letter, or tear it up? She lit a cigarette and started analysing her feelings with the subtlety of someone trying to understand the inner meaning of each and every ripple on the surface of a river. She still couldn’t find a precise answer, though. On the one hand, it was clear that the letter was born of a particular state of mind, her state of mind that morning following her ghastly sexual encounter with the man who had picked her up in a bar; besides, it was unfair, even unnecessarily cruel, the letter omitted anything that might give a more balanced view of events, for example, the financial help that Andoni had given her during those years; on the other hand, the reproach that lay at the heart of what she had written — the lack of joy in their relationship — exactly reflected a feeling that had been growing day by day long before she fell into the hands of the police.

She inhaled the smoke from her cigarette and looked around her. The foreigner at the table opposite was no longer alone, now he was accompanied by a woman and by a girl of about ten. And the group of soldiers out of uniform had grown too and now spilled over onto two more tables. At the table near her, the boy sitting next to the blind man was eagerly examining the tickets, as if doing so gave him pleasure.

“Great,” he said to the blind man, putting the tickets away, “we’ll be home before eight.”

“What are you going to make me for supper? I’m fed up with this Barcelona rubbish,” said the blind man with a broad smile. He too seemed content.

“I’ll make you a huge potato omelette. How would that suit you?”

“Fantastic,” said the blind man emphatically.

The person whom she had taken for a boy was, in fact, a very short woman. However — as the message being given out by her surroundings made crystal clear — she was the only person on her own in the restaurant. Years ago, whenever she came back from a school trip or from a holiday, she would find her parents and her brothers at the station, and if her family couldn’t be there, then her friends would meet her. Now, after four years in prison, she had no one.

She stubbed the cigarette out on the floor and put the letter back in its envelope. Her thoughts had changed in tone and had become aggressive. Why had no one come to meet her? Where were her brothers? And what about her friends? She knew that many of them despised her for leaving the organization and taking on the role of reformed terrorist, but she found it hard to believe that everyone felt like that, that all her friends from before felt like that, without exception. And Andoni? But she could expect nothing from him. He had turned out to be a weak man, a puppet incapable of rejecting the prevailing ethos of the places he frequented. “You’ve been a lousy friend, a bad friend who abandoned me whenever I had a problem,” said her letter, and it was true.

With her suitcase in one hand and the letter in the other, she left the self-service restaurant and hurried over to where she remembered seeing a postbox. The thoughts that had just gone through her head had made her furious: her family, her friends, society itself — which was no more than an extension of the family — had been a refuge during her childhood, a kind of carpet she could safely cross, without touching the icy floor, without hurting herself, as the poem said, on the sharp stones of the labyrinth; but then, as a person grew and matured, that carpet began to wear thin, to unravel, or worse still, to become viscous, a sticky coating that stuck to your feet and stopped you moving. And woe to anyone who rebelled against that viscous substance! Woe to anyone who renounced the law of the family!

No, people never like

those who keep their own faith.

No, people didn’t like you having your own opinions, they would set themselves up as judges, judges who judged and always condemned. Because that was one of the characteristics of puppets, their judgments always, inevitably, turned into condemnations. That is how they had behaved towards her. And still did. They had made her life impossible, first, because she had gone to live with her boyfriend, then, because, despite having married him, she had decided not to have children, and later, because she had got divorced; later still, it had been her involvement in politics and, lastly, her decision to leave the organization and get out of prison. Again and again, with every major decision she took, she found herself surrounded by that sticky substance secreted by those around her, decent, altruistic people all of them, all wanting to set her on the right path.

“Fuck off, Andoni,” she murmured as she posted the letter. At that moment, her friend’s name denoted a much wider territory.

The clock on the main wall of the station said three twenty. She rejected the idea of buying a Basque newspaper and, feeling calmer, relieved to have got rid of that letter, she went to the toilets next to the entrance to the metro. She would go to the toilet and then out to where the buses were. Although the atmosphere in the station was beginning to seem attractive to her — an intermediate landscape between prison and the outside world — her headache was getting worse and she needed some fresh air.

“I’m eighteen,” she read on the toilet door, while she was peeing, “and I’d like to get in touch with girls my own age. If you’re interested, just hang around here any Saturday at 7 p.m. Wear a white hat, just to make sure.”

It wasn’t the only message. The door was more like a small ads page. And there was no shortage of obscenities either, some even in verse:

I like my women

on their backs in their beds

with no knickers on

and their skirts over their heads.

When she came out of the toilet she saw a line of light-green telephones. She stopped in front of one, put her suitcase down on the ground and felt around in her jacket pockets. She put two hundred-peseta coins in the machine and dialled a number.

“Hello, Dad,” she said when she got through.

There was a silence at the other end.

“You’re out then,” said a voice grown feeble with the years.

“I’ll be home tonight. How are you?”

“Fine,” said the voice. Then there was a sob. Trying to get a grip on himself, he asked: “How are you getting here?”

“On the bus.”

She had to bite her bottom lip. Despite herself, she too felt like crying.

“I’ll call your brothers. I’ll tell them to pick you up at the bus station.”

“No, don’t tell them anything, Dad. I’ll either get a taxi or I’ll walk. Really, Dad, I’d prefer it like that.”

“I see. What you mean is that those people will be there to meet you with their flags and their noise,” said the voice.

“No, it’s not that.”

“You shouldn’t mix with people like that. I’ve told you before …”

“Dad, please,” she said firmly, though without raising her voice. The numbers on the little screen on the telephone were beginning to blink. Her money was running out. “Honestly, no one’s going to be there to meet me. Haven’t they told you? I’m a traitor now.”

“Your brothers hardly ever come here any more. And when they do, they don’t say anything. That’s what happens when you get old. No one …”

They were cut off. She swore and slammed down the receiver. It was always the same, always. Her good intentions never got her anywhere.

Annoyed by the failure of her phone conversation, she hurriedly left the station and went over to the buses. Before leaving the pavement and crossing the street, however, she stopped and decided to remain by the automatic doors until all the people crowding round the yellow and white bus had found their seats. She didn’t feel like talking to anyone. She didn’t want to run the risk of getting stuck with a talkative fellow passenger.

She took out a cigarette and looked up: the sky was still grey, but it had lost that hard look. It was no longer like a slab of marble, it was more like a dirty sheet, as dirty as the sheets on the bed she had slept in the night before.

She put her cigarette to her lips and started looking for her lighter.

“Allow me,” she heard a voice say behind her. Startled, she stepped aside and spun round with her fists raised.

“Leave me alone!” she yelled at the man who had spoken to her, knocking the match out of his hand. The match fell to the ground, but it didn’t go out.

“There’s no need to be like that,” said the man with a smile that seemed to well up from the very centre of his eyes. He was about her age and was wearing a well-cut brown suit with a red tie. He looked like a singer of romantic ballads.

“I said ‘Leave me alone’,” she said again, removing the cigarette from her lips.

“Can’t we talk?” said the man, still smiling. He sounded very self-assured.

Panic suddenly gripped her. It was as if something — like a ball of cotton wool soaked in alcohol — had started to burn inside her, as if the stranger’s match had set fire to all the fear that had accumulated there over those past few years; it was a cold fire, though, paralysing. While she was running for the bus, her heart began beating faster, and her memory repeated to her, again and again, thudding in her head, the lines that a colleague in the same organization had written after he had escaped from prison:

The mind of an ex-prisoner

Always returns to prison.

In the street, he passes judges, prosecutors and lawyers,

and the police, though they don’t know him,

look at him more than at anyone else,

because his step is not calm or assured,

because his step is far too assured.

Inside him lives

a man condemned for life.

Like the man in the poem, she too felt observed, scrutinized, persecuted, and she had the feeling that the eyes watching her were wrapping her in a sticky web that stifled her and trammelled her every movement. But as soon as she joined the queue of people getting on the bus, she faced up to her feelings of panic and — after retrieving the cigarette from her pocket and lighting it — managed to get her mind free from the weight of fear, to begin to analyse what was going on around her. What was really going on? Was she being observed? Was anyone actually looking at her? No, she had no reason to think that. There was no sign that she was being watched. The passengers nearest her were chatting in groups or pairs, and the taxi drivers parked nearby were listening to the radio or reading the newspaper. And what about the constant flow of people coming out of the station? And those who were sitting on the benches outside? No, they were all looking somewhere else, no one was paying her the slightest attention. And the man in the red tie? She didn’t have to worry about that either. He hadn’t followed her. He was nowhere to be seen.

At the door of the bus, a hostess was checking the passengers’ tickets. The two drivers, who were still in the same mood they had been in an hour before, were trying to joke with her.

“You should get your hair cut short like this young lady,” said one of them, winking at her.

“You’re in seat thirty-two. Upstairs, almost directly above this door,” said the hostess, frowning. She seemed fed up with the drivers’ rudeness.

“Could I stay downstairs? I’m smoking,” she said, showing her the cigarette. And she craned her neck and looked inside, where she saw a tiny counter with a coffee machine, and a sort of lounge area.

“Smoking’s bad for you,” said one of the drivers, the most talkative one.

“You can’t come downstairs until the bus has set off. Just go to your seat, please.”

The hostess’ voice was as jarring to her as the attitude of the two drivers. The hostess had spoken to her in the severe tones of a prison warder.

“We’ll put your suitcase away for you,” said the talkative driver, holding out his hand.

“Can’t I keep it with me? I want to look at some of the books I’ve got in there during the journey. Besides, it’s not very big,” she said, trying to be nice.

“If that’s what you want. I never argue with a woman. Well, only with my wife,” replied the driver, and he and his colleague burst out laughing.

A nun came running up from the far side of the bus depot; she was out of breath. She was about sixty and had come on ahead of her much older companion, who was walking towards them, taking short steps.

“Is this the bus to Bilbao?” the first nun asked the drivers.

“Have you got tickets?” asked one of the drivers, glancing over at the other nun who had not yet arrived.

“No,” said the nun. She was a tall woman, with a rather Nordic air about her. She had green eyes.

“Well, you’d better buy them as soon as possible. You’d better run over to the ticket office. We’re just about to leave.”

“Running’s very good for the health,” added his colleague.

The nun’s green eyes fixed on those of the second driver. At first, the man held her gaze, then lowered his eyes and mumbled an apology.

“Where is the ticket office?” asked the nun coldly, at the same time gesturing to her companion to stop where she was and wait.

“Go into the station through gate number seven and the office is right there,” she told the nun, before the drivers or the hostess could say anything. Then she stubbed out her cigarette on the ground with her foot and got on the bus.

“I’ve got a great film for the video. Those two little nuns will just love it,” said the driver as she was going up the steps. He sounded vengeful. He was feeling uncomfortable because, moments before, he had allowed himself to be intimidated by the nun.

Through the bus window, above the roofs crammed with aerials, the sky — the dirty sheet — had begun its transformation. Across one section of it there were five or six blue parallel lines, as if it really were a sheet and someone had been slashing at it with a knife. Weren’t mattresses usually blue? Because what was up there was also blue. What’s more — she closed her eyes when she noticed this — the clouds near those blue lines were tinged with red, the colour of a bloodstain that someone had tried and failed to wash out.

“You’re not thinking of leaving, are you?”

In her memory she could only see certain parts of the body of the man asking her that question, his white hands, his hairy belly, his thick neck. They were in the cheap hotel room where they had spent the night; the man was on the bed and she was standing beside the wardrobe, getting dressed.

Yes, she said, she was.

“Well, you can forget that. I had too much to drink last night and I wasn’t on form. I’m fine now though. Come back to bed. Now.”

The man was scrutinizing her. His voice had a metallic edge to it.

“Now, do you hear! I don’t like having to argue with whores!”

“There’s no need to shout. Just give me time to light a cigarette.”

She didn’t know what the filter of a cigarette was made of, but, thanks to a self-defence course she had taken when she was a student, she did know that if you lit it and worked it into a point with your fingers it became a sharp weapon, like a bradawl made of black glass.

She retrieved her packet of cigarettes and took one out. They were Havanos, the only kind she could find in the dive where they had drunk their last beer the night before.

“You’ve lit the wrong end! I can smell it from here!” said the man, lying down on the bed.

“You’re right,” she replied while she sharpened the point. She burned her fingers slightly, but she felt no pain.

After a few seconds, she felt the base of the filter. The material had become completely crystallized. It now formed a sharp point. Holding the weapon between her index finger and her thumb, she hurled herself on the bed.

The man let out a howl when she lunged at him with the filter and drew a line across his belly; he tried to beat her off with his fists. But the two cuts that followed the first — in parallel, from his penis to his throat and from his throat back down to his penis — stopped him in his tracks. Maddened by pain, terrified by the blood pouring from his wounds and beginning to stain the sheets, he fled from the room, not out into the street, since he was naked, but to some other part of the hotel.

The nun with green eyes came out of the station and joined her companion before going up to the door of the bus. When she saw them, she stopped thinking about what had happened in the hotel and started thinking about those two women instead: where did they live? Sheltered from the misfortunes of the world, in some enclosed order? Or did they work in a hospice, with people suffering from terminal illnesses? In a way, she felt a certain kinship. All three had taken the difficult option. She had entered a radical political organization; the nuns, even if they were not from an enclosed order, had opted for the most testing section in their church.

Before she realized it, the bus had moved off. It made its way very slowly round the station, past a hotel and up a rather narrow street.

The woman read the street sign: “Carrer Nicaragua” and every nerve in her body tensed. The prison she had left the previous evening faced on to four streets, and that was one of them.

The bus reached a crossroads and turned towards the main prison gate, as if the driver wanted to show her the outside of a building which, despite the four years she had spent there, she knew only from inside. First, she looked up at the watchtower, at the guard with his blue and red beret, and then, shifting her gaze slightly to the left, she let her eyes linger on the grey roof of an annex to the main building. The women’s section was housed under that grey roof, and the fourth window from the end belonged to the cell that Margarita, Antonia and she had shared or, rather, the cell that Margarita and Antonia continued to occupy. It was number seven. She remembered the song:

If you want to write to me

you know where I am,

in cell number seven

just waiting for a line.

A van parked opposite the main gate forced the bus to stop. Outside the prison, walking up and down the pavement or sitting on the kerb, the people who had gone to visit their relatives were growing bored with waiting and trying somehow or other to pass the time. They chatted, smoked, knitted, studied the wheels of the bus. They all looked rather ill. They were badly dressed, in cheap, ugly clothes. Most were women. Yes, the law was like a line drawn along the bottom of a mountain, and the people who were most exploited and had the fewest economic resources crossed that line as easily as a rubber ball bouncing down the mountainside.

The van drove inside the prison and the bus set off. She looked again at her cell window.

“Bye,” she whispered, with the image of Margarita and Antonia in her mind. Although it was only a short word, it splintered in her throat, or, rather, deeper down than that, and she started to cry. She was crying silently, her eyes closed.

“Everything has a solution. Not even death is as terrible as it seems,” said her neighbour in a friendly voice. She was a woman in her mid-fifties, and very heavily built. She must have weighed more than fifteen stone.

“How do you know?” she asked.

The bus was continuing up the street, following the blue signs to the motorway. It slipped along like a fish.

“I know because I’ve been very close to death myself. I’ve touched it with my fingertips you might say,” replied the fat woman. She was speaking in a faint voice, as if she were half-asleep. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you the story of my life. It wouldn’t be right. We all prefer to travel in silence, to have time to think about our own things, I mean.”

“I don’t object to people telling me their life story, but not right now. I’m going downstairs to have a cup of coffee.”

“Yes, sometimes that can help too.”

When she got up from the seat, she felt a sharp pain in her forehead; at least, her encounter with the man with the red tie had made her forget her headache. Nevertheless, that thought reawoke her fear and made her examine the people who were travelling on the upper deck, first those ahead of her, then — as she turned round to go down the stairs — those behind. She calmed down a bit when she saw that the man with the red tie wasn’t there, but her fear kept asking questions. Did the police intend to follow her? She thought not, but given the appearance of two or three of the other passengers, and the rumours that had been going around prison — about the Anti-terrorist Brigade’s interest in those who had been amnestied — she could not be sure.

“If you want to leave your case here, I’ll look after it for you,” said the fat woman.

“Thanks, but there are a few books inside that I want to look at.”

“Yes, books can be very helpful too.”

The bus driver accelerated as soon as he reached an avenue that led to the motorway. While she was going down the stairs, she noticed a blue line, right in the far distance, beyond the churches, the streets and the houses. It wasn’t the sky, it was the sea.

Just as the young man at the bus company had warned her, the lower deck was much smaller than the upper deck. There was a dark plastic curtain separating off the area reserved for the driver, while the rear section, from the stairs to the back of the bus, seemed to be the luggage compartment. As for the remaining space, it was divided between a galley kitchen with a counter, a toilet, the small area reserved for smokers — which had a table with six seats around it — and the few seats reserved for actual passengers. The objects attached to the ceiling and the walls — the stainless steel sink or the coffee machine and, further along, the video screen — made the space seem even smaller.

That cramped area was occupied by only three people: the hostess and the two nuns.

“They haven’t had much luck,” she thought, looking over at the nuns and nodding to them. They had to travel in the smokers’ section with a video screen immediately above them.

“Do you want anything?” asked the hostess adopting the same expression, irritable yet fawning, that she had worn when talking to the drivers. Was she really a hostess? She seemed more like a policewoman.

“A coffee, please, and a Bacardi with ice,” she said. She put her case on the table in the smokers’ section and sat down next to the window.

“We don’t serve alcohol. The company …”

“Fine, bring me a coffee then.” Again she felt that stab of pain in her head, this time on the left side.

She breathed deeply so as not to give in to her irritation with the hostess. She didn’t want to spoil the journey, her first after four years of being locked up.

She took out a small key from her inside jacket pocket and opened the suitcase, thinking about the books she had packed. She wanted to have them near, to touch them, to open them at random and leaf through them. Now that she was out, they might not perhaps give her as much consolation as in prison, but she was sure that they would help her in what, to quote Margarita, was her “re-entry into the world”, because, like Lazarus, she had been buried and, like him, she had been restored to life.

The picture that Margarita had given her — the image of God and Adam reaching out to each other — was on top of everything else in the suitcase and was the first thing she saw when she opened it. She placed it on the seat next to her and piled up six books on the table. There was a novel by Stendhal — Scarlet and Black — an essay by Jorge Oteiza — Quousque tandem — the memoirs of Zavattini, an anthology of Chinese poems, a collection of Emily Dickinson’s poems and Van Gogh’s letters to his brother. When she had finished piling up the books, she made another pile with her notebooks.

She was just about to put the picture away again, when she realized that there was something written on the back. She read it slowly, trying to decipher what it said. It was a poem. A poem written in Italian.

Dalle più alte stelle

discende uno splendore

che’l desir tira a quelle

e che si chiama amore.

She looked up from the last word in the poem and glanced out of the window. As they left Barcelona behind them, a second city was emerging, its other half, its sinister underbelly. There, the ground on which the new, freshly painted buildings stood seemed scorched; the grey factories seemed exhausted, oppressed by the weight of the world. The hills, though, were green and pretty, crowded with houses, doubtless the refuge of the people in charge of the running of that second city.

The bus drove over the bridge linking two of those hills and she fixed her gaze on the muddy river flowing down below. The banks were full of seagulls which, oblivious to the roar of traffic, appeared to be scavenging for rubbish; there must have been about a hundred of them, possibly two hundred. One of them took flight and rose rapidly until it was lost against the sky. Over there, the sky was the same colour as the seagull, half grey and half white.

“You should leave your suitcase by your seat. Other passengers have a right to sit here too, you know,” said the hostess, placing before her a tray with coffee, a spoon, a paper serviette and a sachet of sugar.

“I’m perfectly well aware of that. I know you’re not supposed to leave suitcases on the table,” she replied, picking up the plastic cup and placing it in one of the round holes in the table.

She put the picture back in the suitcase, closed the case and placed it on the floor.

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” said the hostess without a glimmer of emotion. “Do you want any headphones?” she asked, showing her a little red box.

“What are they for? For the film?”

“One of the channels is for the video. The others are for listening to music. Do you want them?”

She nodded and held out her hand for the red box.

“That’s two hundred pesetas,” said the hostess, seeing that she made no move to reach for her purse.

“I’m sorry. I thought they were included in the price of the ticket.”

She took her purse out of her jacket pocket and held it very close to her chest as she opened it. She didn’t want the hostess to know how little money she had. She only had one note and a few coins. And that was the worst thing — the idea came to her suddenly, like a revelation, the revelation of something that she already knew, but which she had relegated to a far corner of her mind — that this money was nearly all she had. Yes, money was going to be a problem. Because the real problem, the number one problem, the problem that encompassed all other problems, was always money. What ailed a madman was not his madness, but the fact that his madness stopped him earning any money. And the same could be said of someone who was ill or of someone like her, who had just got out of prison.

“Sorry, with the coffee that’s three hundred,” said the hostess, taking the coins she gave her, but keeping her hand open. She seemed tense.

She hurriedly gave her the extra money and the hostess smiled mechanically and disappeared behind the plastic curtain that separated the driver’s area from the rest of the lower deck. Was she really an employee of the bus company? That suspicion — that fear — again opened up a path inside her, crept in through the interstices, like a current of air, and she felt suddenly afraid of finding herself in the middle of one of those stories people were always telling in prison, about the inmate who is released, but followed by the police and eventually picked up again, only to end up even worse off than before.

She relaxed her shoulders and lit a cigarette. She shouldn’t be afraid. Regardless of whether the police were following her, regardless of whether her suspicions were correct, she had no reason to worry. She wasn’t going to commit a crime. Nor was she going to become paranoid. The books would help her, her notebooks would help her. Just as they had in prison.

She picked up one of the notebooks that she had left on the table; it was the one containing her English exercises. She opened it at random and read a little poem that Margarita had used at the start of her classes to help her students — two prostitutes, as well as Antonia and herself — to memorize the names of the days of the week in English:

Solomon Grundy

born on Monday,

christened on Tuesday,

married on Wednesday,

took ill on Thursday,

worse on Friday,

died on Saturday,

buried on Sunday,

and that was the end of Solomon Grundy.

Outside, the landscape was gradually shrugging off the weight of the city and taking on its usual appearance: farm buildings, trees, birds. Three crows, sitting on a cable running parallel to the motorway, had turned their backs on the traffic and seemed absorbed in their thoughts. When she looked at them, the birds flew off.

“The life of Solomon Grundy was very short. Time flies like a bird. Time flies as the arrow does,” she read, returning to the notebook.

Nothing existed in a pure state. That English notebook was not just an English notebook. It was also her diary and it perfectly reflected her different states of mind.

“Time is a wonderful thing. We must not use it up staying in prison.”

She took a sip of coffee and then, with the pen that she kept in her jacket pocket, she crossed out a word and amended the phrase she had just read.

“Time is a wonderful thing. We must not waste it staying in prison,” she read. That change seemed to her to improve the sentence.

She inhaled the smoke from her cigarette and read through some of the other things written in the notebook. She paused at a page full of numbers. It wasn’t her writing, but Margarita’s.

More memories surfaced in her mind.

“You’ve been here three years, ten months and twenty days. If you leave here next Tuesday, that will be a total of three years, ten months and twenty-seven days,” Margarita had said to her, writing down the numbers in the notebook. Her memory took her back to her prison cell, after the bell for silence, the time when the prisoners, who were always very tired by then — tired of being cooped up within four walls, tired of thinking, tired of shouting — would simply sit smoking and watching the smoke from their cigarettes unravel, or watching as it was carried off by some draught, some current of air or, perhaps, why not, by a breeze from the sea. Because the sea — the prisoners in the end completely forgot this — was very close to the prison.

“So,” Margarita went on, “you’ve spent forty-seven months in here. If you bear in mind that the average life expectancy of the female population is now seventy-four, that is, eight hundred and eighty-eight months, you have spent 5.35 per cent of your life in prison. Does that seem a lot or a little?”

Margarita liked to play these cruel games, especially during those night-time conversations.

“Which would you prefer? For the lover you had before you came here to go off with another woman, or for him to die in an accident? And another thing, if the devil or your fairy godmother, or both of them together, gave you one wish, just one, what would you ask for? To leave prison or to have a friend of yours who has died come back to life again?”

At first, she had distrusted Margarita and had even thought of asking to change cells because they seemed so ill-matched. What sort of person was she, that woman who talked all the time and revelled in the most morbid thoughts? At the time, the rumour going around the prison — that Margarita had kidnapped a child in order to revenge herself on a man — didn’t seem that hard to believe. But after a while, like someone who crosses a frontier and gradually grows used to the climate and the customs of a new country, she began to feel happy in her company. As a cellmate, Margarita was priceless. She was an intelligent, slightly eccentric woman who talked a lot, but who almost always — perhaps because she had worked in the theatre — spoke in different voices, like someone constantly changing roles or like someone who, because of their manic nature, cannot control the ups and downs of their moods.

“So what do you say, does that 5.35 per cent seem a lot to you or a little?”

“Said like that, it doesn’t seem very much at all. But it probably is a lot.”

“It sounds like a rate of commission,” said Antonia, “and since commission is normally about 10 per cent, 5.35 per cent doesn’t seem bad at all.”

Margarita smiled at Antonia’s remark and continued her calculations.

“Of course, it depends how you look at it. For example, if you calculate the time in hours, the commission would come to thirty thousand hours. Imagine the number of films, meals in restaurants, walks in the country or at the beach, all the trips, all the …”

“All the hours of work!” Antonia interrupted her. “Out there, I used to work ten hours a day in a canning factory. Those hours don’t count. They’re no loss. On the contrary.”

Antonia had said all this very seriously, but Margarita burst out laughing. She was happy. That day, the game was going well.

“All right, then, I agree to subtract all the dreary hours spent working. So, at ten hours a day, assuming I’ve got my sums right, your stay in prison will mean a loss of only fifteen thousand hours, good hours, real hours.”

“You can take away the hours spent asleep as well. Sleep is the same anywhere. I’m sure there are people living in palaces who sleep worse than I do here.”

“You’re very inspired today, Antonia. You’re absolutely right. Let’s subtract those hours too,” agreed Margarita. Then she did her calculations. “Eight hours of sleep a day means subtracting twelve thousand hours. Therefore, our beloved colleague here has lost three thousand hours in prison. Only three thousand real hours.”

“There’s something else too, Margarita. There are the good times that we spend in prison. Good times are good times wherever you are.”

“You’re right. We’re having an excellent time right now. And during these years we’ve had many moments like this. I think we could lower the number of wasted hours to fifteen hundred.”

“I think it should be lower still. You have to bear in mind all the bad times you have outside. Bad times are the same everywhere.”

“You’re so logical, Antonia. Well, if we err on the low side, in a period of four years you might have about fifteen hundred bad hours. Therefore, if we take away those fifteen hundred hours, the result is zero.”

Margarita laughed again, then added:

“Congratulations. You’re about to leave prison without ever having been here. It’s a shame that mine and Antonia’s cases are more serious. It’s harder to calculate away our twenty per cent, isn’t that right, Antonia?”

“Yes, we’re paying way too much commission.”

The bus had just reached the top of a long hill from which you could look out on a vast expanse of land. By then, they had left behind them the second city, Barcelona’s other side, and now there were mainly vineyards: young vineyards, bright green, separated by lines of cypress trees, with a house here and another further off, far from the motorway. Nevertheless — as she realized when she took a more careful look at what she could see from her window — the victory of the country over the city was still not complete: from time to time, she would see a grimy building, a warehouse perhaps, or a run-down factory, like a tick clinging to the skin.

There was an empty space of about two feet between the roof of the bus and the plastic screen around the driver’s seat. The bus was now going down the hill and a strip of blue sky and the red and green lights of a toll station suddenly appeared in that space. Almost simultaneously, as if in sympathy, the video screen filled with coloured stripes.

The bus rumbled across the asphalt surface of the toll station. Shortly afterwards, when the bus continued on its way and drove underneath the archway linking the toll booths, she had the feeling that she was crossing a frontier and that she was finally leaving behind her a part of her life that had lasted exactly three years, ten months and twenty-seven days. Or, rather, twenty-eight days, because she had to include in the accounts the time between leaving prison and starting the journey.

She closed her English notebook and put on the headphones that came in the little red box. The first three channels were broadcasting orchestral music, which was supposed to be relaxing; the fourth was also devoted to music, but interspersed with sports reports; the fifth, connected to the video, reproduced in words the title being shown on the screen at that precise moment. The film they were going to show was called Eve and the Serpent and had been passed by the censor.

“The serpent is the most evil of all the creatures in God’s creation,” she heard a voice intoning through the headphones. On the screen, next to the credits, was a real snake.

The sombre soundtrack wrapped around the words that followed:

“The serpent said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.”

She took off the headphones and finished drinking her coffee, staring at the backs of the two nuns, whose seats were slightly ahead of hers. If there was any truth in the ironic remark the driver had made before they left Barcelona — he had said that the two nuns would really love the film — they were in for a few rather shocking scenes.

She looked out of the window. The grey covering the sky was becoming thinner and there were more and more patches of blue, especially along the edges, in the distance. In the centre, where the sun was hiding, the grey was taking on yellowish tones as if the sky over there were made of quartz.

The bus was now speeding along the motorway in the best possible direction, towards the bluest part of the horizon. Besides, the purr of the engine had a calming effect, much more so than the orchestral music provided through the headphones, and she thought — suddenly, as if it were a revelation — that she felt well, very well, in harmony with things, contented with what she was hearing and with what she was seeing, with the taste of coffee in her mouth and the smell of her favourite cigarette in the air, as she sat, almost curled up, in that particular corner of the bus, which, for some reason, perhaps because they didn’t want to breathe in other people’s smoke, no other passenger chose to visit. In fact, as she had noticed already on a couple of occasions, the passengers on the upper deck preferred the hostess to bring them coffee or a drink in their seat. All the better for her; she just hoped it would remain like that for the rest of the trip.

She picked up a book from the pile she had on the table, and looked for a part she had underlined, a quotation from the sculptor Oteiza which she knew almost by heart. It seemed to her that the wellbeing she felt at that moment had a lot to do with what he was describing there, and she wanted to read it again. She needed the books, or rather the people behind the books, to give her a sense of security and to confirm what she was feeling.

When I was a child in Orio, where I was born, my grandfather used to take us for walks along the beach. I felt terribly drawn to the big hollows scooped out in the part farthest from the sea. I used to lie down and hide in one of them and look up at the great expanse of sky above me, whilst everything else around me disappeared. I felt utterly protected. But what did I need protecting from? As children and ever afterwards, we feel our existence to be nothing, that it is defined for us by a negative circle of things, feelings, limitations, in whose centre, in our own heart, we sense our fear — the supreme denial — of death. My experience as a child lying in that hollow in the sand was that of being in flight from my small nothingness to the great nothingness of the sky into which I would penetrate, in order to escape, in the hope of salvation.

She looked out of the window again. Despite the patches of blue, like holes, like points of entry, her spirit — her nervous spirit, surrounded by negative things — could not penetrate that sky and then stay there floating around like one more cloud. Nevertheless, that vision comforted her, like the monotonous drone of the engine. What speed would the bus be going at? Ninety? As they sped past, she barely had time to study the farms built on the edges of the vineyards.

She put down the book by Oteiza and picked up Stendhal’s Scarlet and Black. It was a book to which she felt profoundly grateful. The story of Julien Sorel and Madame de Rênal had given her many hours of pleasure at a difficult time, when she had been in prison for about a year, a dull period which began with the death of hope — the sad flower that every prisoner wore pinned in her buttonhole the very day she arrived — and ended in acceptance. Thanks to that book, part of that time, that leaden time, had been rendered weightless.

She opened the book at random and started reading.

As the sun set, thus hastening the decisive moment, Julien’s heart beat unusually fast. Night had fallen. With a joy that removed a great weight from his chest, he realized that it would be a very dark night.

She wanted to continue reading that fragment — another of the bits she had underlined — but she couldn’t. The purring of the engine was sweetly lulling her to sleep. Before leaving the book and closing her eyes, she thought that her head no longer ached, that she was feeling better and better, that she was coping really well with the new situation, with the world. That was her last thought. Then she fell asleep and began to dream.