The Lone Woman

Second Dream

AS SOON AS she fell asleep, a feeling of strangeness came over her. She saw herself beneath a completely blue sky and in an unknown place that was nothing like the bus. And it wasn’t only what she saw that was strange, there were strange noises and smells too: the birdsong, the tinkling cowbells, the fragrance of rosemary and thyme.

“What is this place?” she thought, and the effort of trying to find an answer almost woke her up. But what she could see, smell and hear was so pleasant that she decided, right at the last moment, just as she was about to open her eyes, to go on and to immerse herself in that new reality.

She examined what there was beneath that blue sky. She saw sheep, lambs and a hut.

“Of course, that’s why I could hear bells,” she thought. Then she reached out her hand towards one of the lambs nearby and gathered it into her lap. It had a black head and its tail was light brown, but the rest of its body was completely white. It smelled really good.

Suddenly she noticed Margarita. She was sitting at the door of the hut and had a book in her hands. Next to her, lying on the grass, was a huge dog, a greyhound.

“I’m going to read you a poem, Irene. I think it fits your new situation perfectly. You look just like a shepherdess,” Margarita said, opening the book.

How could that be? Had Margarita left prison too? In that case, where were they? In Argentina? On the Pampas? She raised her head and looked around. All about her was a vast meadow. Yes, they could well be in the middle of the Pampas.

She had to interrupt her thoughts. Margarita was beginning to read.

Little Lamb, who made thee?

Dost thou know who made thee?

Gave thee life, and bid thee feed

By the stream and o’er the mead;

Gave thee clothing of delight,

Softest clothing, woolly, bright;

Gave thee such a tender voice,

Making all the vales rejoice?

Little Lamb, who made thee?

Dost thou know who made thee?

She started stroking the lamb. She felt a great feeling of calm, or something beyond calm; quietness, stillness, trust, serenity. Occasionally, a gust of wind brushed her hair, but it did not feel in the least cold. Was that what the Pampas were like? A kind of Arcadia? Perhaps it was. There was the flock, there was the blue sky, there too, although she had not heard it until then, was the sweet sound of the flute. Where was the shepherd flautist? She looked everywhere for him; she scanned the banks of a lake near the hut, she peered into the shadows of the willows bent over the water, but she could see no one.

The sheep had begun to move towards the lake, closely followed by their lambs. The sun was high and the water glittered.

“Do you want to go too?” she asked the lamb in her lap. The animal did not move.

“You were quite right to come here,” said Margarita, standing in the door of the hut. She too seemed calmer than when they had been in prison. “Life is very simple in this part of the world. You can get by on very little here. Do you know why? Because there are no people.”

“No people?”

“Very few. There are no more than two hundred inhabitants in the whole region. It’s a twenty-minute ride to our nearest neighbour. Life is very easy in conditions like this.”

“The green desert,” she remarked, gazing into the distance.

“This is your place, Irene,” said Margarita. She got up from the door of the hut, walked over to where Irene was sitting and lay down on the grass. “The way things were, you couldn’t return to your own country. Why struggle to rebuild your life in the places of the past? It seems fine to me that Antonia should do it, or the prostitutes and gypsies who were with us, because they all had somewhere to go, they had someone waiting for them. But you? What awaited you in Bilbao? I’ll tell you, Irene. First, a cement wall with the words “informer” and “traitor” scrawled on it; second, the baleful looks and the hatred of your former friends; third, the pity of people of good conscience; fourth, insidious persecution by the police, trying in a thousand and one different ways to get information out of you; fifth, the indifference of that family of yours who scarcely ever visited you while you were in prison. In a word, Irene, hell. That is all you would have found in the places of the past.”

“You’re right,” she said. “Besides, my previous world doesn’t interest me at all. I mean, there are some situations, however awful, which can still seem attractive, but not in this case. During my last year in prison, I couldn’t bear to read the newspapers or the bulletins they sent me from the Basque country. They bored me.”

“I’m not surprised, Irene. That was something I could never understand, how a restless person like you could still belong to the stagnant world of your former colleagues.”

The lamb jumped out of her lap and ran over to the lake. The greyhound that had been lying at the door of the hut came over and lay down beside Margarita. It was the same colour as the lamb: white, brown and black.

“It’s called Run Run,” said Margarita. The dog wagged its tail.

“Why Run Run?” she asked. This time the dog looked up.

“Don’t you know the song?”

She shook her head.

“Shall I sing it for you?”

“All right.”

“I used to sing it every day, not just once, but often. But now, I’m not sure, I may not remember it all.”

While Margarita concentrated, she stroked the dog’s head and back. The moment seemed utterly delicious. It was the same as when they used to get together in the sanctum sanctorum in prison, only this time with the dog, the lambs, the blue sky and everything else. She folded her arms and waited for the song. Someone she couldn’t see started playing the guitar to accompany Margarita.

Aboard a train of oblivion,

before the break of day,

at a railway halt in time,

all ready and eager to go,

Run Run headed north,

don’t know when he’ll be back.

I’ll be back for the anniversary

of our solitude, he said.

Three days later a letter

written in bright red ink

told me that his journey

might last longer than he thought,

that this, that and the other,

that he never, and besides,

that life is all a lie

and only death is real,

ay, ay, ay de mí.

Run Run sent the letter

just for the hell of it.

Run Run headed north

while I stayed in the south,

between us lies a gulf,

no music and no light,

ay, ay, ay de mí.

“It goes on, but I can’t remember the rest of it,” said Margarita, patting the greyhound’s head.

“Why do you like that song?” she asked, rather mischievously, remembering what people used to say in prison, that Margarita had been disappointed in love and that in this lay the root of her problems with the law.

“It helps me to get things off my chest. As you know, something similar happened to me. But his name wasn’t Run Run and he didn’t go north. He went to Spain, to direct a play in Barcelona.”

“What was his name?”

“He was the director of the theatre company I was working in. His name doesn’t matter. It’s an old, old story now. Not like yours.”

“Mine?”

“Yours, yes. Your affair with Larrea.”

“Larrea was killed,” she said, looking away. A group of parrots were fluttering around near the lake. They were green, red and yellow. The flock of sheep had disappeared from view.

“Hold out your hand,” said Margarita, almost laughing. “Hold out your hand like God and Adam in the painting by Michelangelo, and see what happens.”

She closed her eyes to concentrate better. What did Margarita mean? That Larrea was there too? That he hadn’t been killed? That he had managed to flee to the Pampas?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The red AIDS ribbon.”

“Yes, I always wear it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I haven’t upset you, have I?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pain brought tears to her eyes. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t open her mouth to shout.

“I don’t want any complications, but if I have to hit you, I will. I’ll beat you up and break a couple of your ribs. Do you understand?” said the policeman, panting. He was very strong, but he was much too fat. “Do you understand or not?” he repeated.

She nodded.

“Fine, that’s how I like it,” he whispered, removing his hand from her mouth. “Don’t go thinking that I’m like that handsome colleague of mine. He’s soft, especially with girls. I’m not like that, believe me.”

He smiled. Beneath the flattened nose was a small moustache beaded with sweat.

“What do you want from me? A magic formula for losing weight?” she said, after taking a deep breath. She saw that her jacket had fallen on the floor again and she bent down to pick it up.

“Be very careful what you do,” said the policeman, watching her every move. “And talk quietly, if you don’t mind.”

“I want to smoke a cigarette. As you know, it helps in tense situations.”

She still couldn’t breathe normally. She was a bit frightened.

“You can’t smoke up here.”

She thought of some cutting remark, but decided to adopt a different tone. In her situation, a cigarette could prove very helpful.

“Just the one,” she said.

The policeman smiled again. He took something out of the inside pocket of his jacket. A square bit of paper.

“What do you want to do? This?” he said, pressing a button on the ceiling that switched on a small light.

The square bit of paper was a Polaroid photograph. It showed a man’s naked trunk, criss-crossed with bloody lines.

“You certainly left your mark on him,” said the policeman.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, lighting a cigarette and inhaling the smoke. She had to be careful. She had very little room for manoeuvre.

“Oh yes you do,” said the policeman with a sigh. He put the photograph away.

“What do you want?” she asked, exhaling the smoke hard.

“We need your collaboration. We want you to collaborate with us.”

“Well, at least you don’t beat about the bush.”

“I don’t like wasting time. I don’t like it at all. I leave that to the handsome policemen.”

He was very fat around the eyes, which were dull, unhealthy-looking. She wondered what his attitude to sex would be? Probably not exactly wholesome. What would he be like with women? Would he beat them?

“Let me make myself even clearer,” the policeman went on. The noise of the bus engine had grown louder and he had to raise his voice. “We have some very concrete proposals to make to you. If you want to collaborate with us, everything will be fine. We’ll give you protection, new papers, a house, a good salary …”

“Until when? For the rest of my life? How much information do you think I have?” she said, almost laughing. She took another drag on her cigarette and managed to blow the smoke far enough to bother the passengers in front of them. One of them fanned the air with a magazine.

“Until when? Well, we’ll have to see. To start with, we have a special task for you. We want to find out about how Larrea died. We think the time has come to find out what really happened.”

“Why don’t you look to your own house first? You killed him, didn’t you?” she said in the most neutral of voices. But the news had startled her.

“That’s one possibility, but we’d like to examine all the possibilities, not just one. We’d like to go over the meeting you had about five years ago in the palace of a certain aristocrat. How’s your memory for faces? If we showed you some photographs, could you recognize the people who were there?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, really I don’t,” she said, blowing more cigarette smoke in the direction of the passengers in front. It was her only way out. She had to get them annoyed, so that they would interrupt that interrogation. It was clear that the large woman was being detained downstairs and was unable to come back up.

The policeman snorted. His flattened nose meant that he couldn’t breathe properly.

“You do, but you don’t want to tell me. That seems perfectly normal. You haven’t heard the rest of my proposal. And that’s exactly what I want to do now, lay the whole proposal out to you.”

The two passengers in front — a couple — were muttering about the smoke, but still didn’t have the courage to protest. If they didn’t react, she would stay there corralled by the policeman for as long as he wanted.

“Get to the point. I don’t like wasting time either,” she said.

“Don’t worry, it won’t take long. I just have to put the downside of the proposal to you — what would happen if you don’t collaborate with us,” replied the policeman. He seemed quite calm. He was smiling. “Can’t you guess? Can’t you guess what would happen to you?”

“I’ve no idea.”

She put her cigarette to her lips. She was annoyed with the couple in front. They seemed prepared to put up with as much smoke as she could blow at them.

“Well, we’ll just circulate the photograph. That should be enough,” said the policeman.

“Enough?” she laughed. “To start with, you’ve no proof. And even if you had, I don’t care. I’ll say it was self-defence, that he was trying to rape me.”

The policeman laughed.

“Besides, if the worst came to the worst, I wouldn’t get a very long sentence. To judge by the photo, he only had a few cuts.”

The policeman looked at her mockingly.

“I wasn’t referring to that photo. I meant this one.”

It was another Polaroid. It showed her and the policeman with the red tie sitting in the smokers’ section downstairs. She was eating a Crunchie bar and he was smiling and talking.

“Take a good look at it,” said the policeman, offering her the photograph. “And if you want to tear it up, do so. That one didn’t come out very well, it’s too dark. The others turned out much better.”

It showed a couple talking animatedly. It was taken from the service area, from the bottom of the stairs. When exactly? In the scrap of sky that appeared in one corner of the photo you could see some orange-coloured clouds and a yellowish circle, the last sun of the day.

“There wasn’t much light,” explained the policeman, guessing her thoughts. “But I have a very special camera, very quiet and very sensitive.”

“And what are you going to do with this?” she said at last. Her cigarette was coming to an end. Not counting the filter, she had little more than half an inch left. And the couple in front were still only muttering and occasionally waving away the smoke with a magazine, but still they did not raise their voices. What more could she do? She had to put an end to that siege. What if she started shouting? Perhaps that was a way out, but she was frightened of the policeman’s strength. Her ribs still hurt.

“As I’ve already said, if you don’t want to collaborate with us, we’ll put those photos into circulation. And then you’ll see. Before the month is out, some journalist will write an article about your life: ‘The price of freedom. The pacts terrorists make in order to get out of prison,’ or something like that.”

The policeman was looking up at the ceiling, as if the headline of the article were written there.

“We’ll issue a statement denying it all,” he went on, “but, of course, my colleague is too handsome to go unnoticed. Many of your former friends know him. They’ve seen him at the police station, I mean. I believe they call him Valentino. Anyway, I don’t want to hold you up any longer. I think I’ve made myself clear. Five or six articles about repentant terrorists who’ve betrayed the sacred cause and then bang, it’s all over.”

“Fine, I’ll consider your proposal. Now, please, leave me alone.”

“No way. I’ve no intention of leaving you alone. I’m going with you as far as Bilbao. I want a reply before we get there. If it’s ‘yes’, you’ll come with us. If it’s ‘no’, …”

The policeman snorted and turned towards her.

“If it’s ‘no’, dear Irene,” he went on, stressing every syllable, “if it’s ‘no’ …”

“I know. The photos will appear in the newspapers, and bang,” she broke in.

“But before that, there’ll be the odd broken bone. You’ve no idea how I long to do it, Irene. I’d almost prefer it if you said ‘no’. I’m only doing this because I have no option but to obey orders, but if it was up to me I’d finish off the lot of you once and for all.”

Again she felt the policeman’s fist in her ribs and couldn’t suppress a cry. For a second, she imagined a passenger coming over to them and asking them what was going on, but she immediately dismissed the possibility. The bus was still speeding along, its engine humming, people had their eyes closed and were dozing. She felt like giving up, like dying. She should have foreseen what was going to happen to her. She knew poems that spoke of it, poems that told the truth.

The Whole of it came not at once –

‘Twas Murder by degrees –

A Thrust — and then for Life a chance –

The Bliss to cauterize –

The Cat reprieves the Mouse

She eases from her teeth

Just long enough for Hope to tease –

Then mashes it to death –

’Tis Life’s award — to die –

Contenteder if once –

Than dying half — then rallying

For consciouser Eclipse –

Suddenly it was as if her head and her hand began to operate independently. While her head was filling with dark thoughts, her hand grasped the cigarette. It was almost finished, but there was still a glowing tip above the filter. She reached her arm over the seat in front and let it drop onto the skirt of the woman sitting there. She heard a shriek.

“Who did that? Who did that?” asked the young man travelling with the woman, stepping out into the aisle and looking at the policeman. He was so upset he could barely speak, he just kept repeating the question over and over, “Who did that? Who did that?” The policeman withdrew his fist from her side.

The aisle began to fill with passengers. No, it wasn’t right. No one respects the no smoking rules. What a cheek, smoking upstairs when there was a special section set aside for smokers downstairs.

The policeman didn’t react.

“What happened?” asked someone from behind. No one answered. They were all looking at the policeman, albeit rather warily. His burly appearance inspired respect. Someone switched on the main light. It seemed as if no one was in their own seat.

“Why did you do that, eh? Why did you do it?” said the young man, addressing the policeman. He felt humiliated.

“It was the girl. It was the girl who was smoking,” said a little boy, pointing at her.

“Really? Is that true?” asked the young man, rather disconcerted. He seemed like a decent chap.

“Yes, it’s true. I saw her,” said the little boy.

“Why did you do that? My wife is pregnant,” said the young man. After that first reaction, he didn’t know what to do.

“And what if I wasn’t pregnant? Would it have been all right if she’d done it then?” said the young man’s wife from her seat. “It doesn’t matter, Eduardo. There’s no point talking to crazy people like her.”

There was a silence. Almost all the passengers had returned to their seats. The incident was about to end as quickly as it had begun. Very soon the hum of the bus would again occupy the foreground and the journey would continue as before.

“Did I burn you?” she asked, standing up and addressing the woman in the seat in front.

“No, but you nearly made a hole in my dress,” said the woman sharply.

“I’d like to compensate you in some way,” she said. She put on her jacket in one movement and reached out her arm towards the young man, who was still in the aisle. “Can you help me? My companion here takes up such a lot of room and he won’t let me out.”

The policeman was moving his chin and mouth as if trying to suck in the ends of his moustache. Would he stop her getting out? After the incident, it wasn’t very likely. The passengers might make even more fuss, and one of them might easily denounce him to the press. In that case, the newspaper article wouldn’t be the one he had predicted — “The price of freedom. The pacts terrorists make to get out of prison” — but something very different, accusing the police of blackmail. Besides, the policeman seemed at a loss to know what to do in a situation like that.

Nothing happened. The young man took her hand and pulled hard, while she rested her other hand on the back of the seat and jumped into the aisle. Once free, she opened the suitcase and took out the picture of Adam and God reaching out to each other.

“It’s lovely!” said the young man. The two passengers occupying the seats on the other side of the aisle nodded approvingly. They liked it too.

“It’s a copy,” she said. “I’d like you to have it.”

“It’s lovely!” said the young man again, taking the picture and holding it so that his wife could see. “Who is it by?”

“It’s on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.”

“We spent our honeymoon in Italy, but we didn’t go to any museums,” said the young man.

“This copy was made by a woman in prison. Her name’s Margarita.”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s still lovely.”

She was about to say that it was lovely precisely because of that, because it had been made in prison, because the maker of the copy had had an awful lot of time to work on it, but she decided not to. At last, she was in the aisle, safe. She picked up her suitcase and went downstairs.

The bus was heading down to the bottom of a valley above which you could see the coppery glow of the lights of Bilbao. The journey would soon be over. Less than half an hour. What could she do until then? How could she keep the two policemen at bay? She only knew three people on the bus, the two nuns and the large woman. Only they could protect her.

The three of them — the large woman and the two nuns — were sitting in the downstairs compartment. Beside the coffee machine, leaning on the small counter, the policeman in the red tie was chatting to the hostess.

“Would you bring me a cup of coffee, please?” she said to the hostess as she passed. As soon as he saw her, the policeman in the red tie gave an alarmed glance up the stairs. He couldn’t understand what had happened. Where was his colleague?

“Ah, there you are, at last,” said the nun with green eyes by way of greeting. She sounded worried. “What did they do to you? That man told us that they had to interrogate you, that they had some grave matter to sort out with you.”

“That’s what they said, and they wouldn’t let me go back upstairs,” added the large lady, casting a glance at the policeman.

“And what grave matter was that?” she asked, taking off her jacket. She felt suddenly hot.

“A bomb,” said the other nun. Close to, she seemed even older. She was angry.

“They don’t have much imagination,” she said, as she took out a cigarette and lit it. “They always use the same old story. What else did they say? That the bomb might explode right here?”

“That’s exactly what they said,” said the old nun. She spoke abruptly, in snatches.

“He took one look at us three old women and obviously thought we’d be gullible enough to believe him,” said the nun with green eyes, laughing. She too was feeling relieved. “Anyway, it wasn’t so much what he said, as the way he said it. It was quite clear that they weren’t going to let us near you. Luckily, you didn’t need us.”

“Saved by cigarettes,” she joked.

“Cigarettes are very bad for you,” said the large woman.

“What have you got in that suitcase?” said the old nun sharply. She was suspicious.

“Sister, please,” chided her companion.

“No, it doesn’t matter. I’d be happy to show you,” she said, opening the suitcase on her knees and taking out the books. Scarlet and Black by Stendhal, Quousque tandem by Oteiza, the poems of Emily Dickinson, the anthology of Chinese poetry and the memoirs of Zavattini appeared on the table.

“You don’t have to take out anything else. Sister Martina is convinced,” said the nun with green eyes, picking up the memoirs of Zavattini.

“I didn’t need convincing,” said the old lady.

“Of course you didn’t, sister.”

The hostess came over with the coffee and had to make room for the tray. At that moment, however, the bus was going down a very bendy bit of the road and didn’t allow for such balancing acts, and so she picked up the cup of coffee and indicated to the hostess that she should take the rest away.

She looked out of the window. Beneath the copper-coloured sky of Bilbao, the mountains were black, but it was a very sweet blackness.

“Just look what I’ve found here,” the nun with green eyes exclaimed suddenly, as if startled. “Amazing!”

They all looked at her, including the hostess and the policeman with the red tie.

“Listen to this!” she said. She began reading a section from Zavattini’s memoirs.

While her daughter was ironing, Leroy’s wife gave us a cup of coffee, all the time talking about Van Gogh as if he were one of the family. The wing of the building where Vincent used to live is almost in ruins; only a few madwomen live there now. The nuns …

The nun with green eyes stopped reading and looked around to make sure that they were all listening. Then, emphasizing each word, she read the sentence that had so startled her:

The nuns referred to Vincent’s paintings as “swallow-shit”.

“Swallow-shit!” the nun exclaimed, opening her eyes very wide. “I can’t believe it! Van Gogh’s paintings swallow-shit!”

Irene took a sip of coffee. She didn’t know what to think. The nun was probably trying to cheer her up, to entertain her by talking about things other than bombs and policemen.

“You modern nuns have so much more heart,” said the large woman, emerging from the thoughts in which she had seemed to be immersed.

“That isn’t why I read it out,” said the nun. “I was just shocked to find those words the moment I opened the book. But of course, the age we live in has a lot to do with it, we are all children of our time. That’s how it was for the nuns who were working in the insane asylum where Van Gogh was staying. And we would react the same about certain things. Many of our mistakes are not properly speaking ours, they are the errors of the age we live in. But, forgive me, there I go sermonizing again.”

“That’s all right,” she said, flicking her ash into the plastic cup. She had finished the coffee.

“What I meant was that we’re not totally responsible for many of the things that we do, that the age we live in also plays its part.”

“Thank you for that.”

“I don’t know why you were in prison, but I’m absolutely sure that it all belongs firmly in the past, and that you have no reason to return there. Those people,” with a lift of her chin she indicated the area near the coffee machine, “have no right to pester you.”

“That’s what I think too. But they clearly don’t agree.”

She turned her head and looked behind her. The policeman who looked like a boxer and the one with the red tie were standing at the bottom of the stairs, talking. The hostess was doing her accounts.

“Look, I don’t want to meddle in your affairs, but I’ll just say one thing,” said the nun, leaning towards her and lowering her voice. “I’m sure you’ve got a family and friends to rely on, but if you want to come to our house, you’d be more than welcome. No one will bother you and you might feel safe there. There’s no shortage of work to do. Nobody gets bored.”

“That’s what I meant,” said the large woman. “Nuns nowadays do a lot of good, they have more heart than they used to. Do you know what they do?”

She gave a knowing smile.

“No, I don’t.”

“I’ll give you a clue. They could easily be wearing something that you yourself have on. And they would have more right than anyone to do so.”

“Do get to the point!” said the old lady, looking bored.

“The red ribbon,” said the large woman, ignoring the comment. “They look after people with AIDS. They share their lives with young AIDS patients. Admirable. Nobody wants to be bothered with sick people, whether it’s AIDS they’ve got or something else. That’s what society’s like nowadays, it’s awful. I myself …”

“You have no reason to complain,” the nun with green eyes said, interrupting her and smiling. “You’ve told us all about your own illness and we know that now you’re as right as rain.”

“Where is the hospice?” she asked.

“About fifteen miles from the city, by the sea. It’s a very beautiful place.”

“But damp, very damp.”

“On the one hand, I’ve no reason to complain, but on the other, I do,” insisted the large woman, and before anyone could interrupt her, she launched into a litany of all the mistakes her doctors had made.

The window was covered with drops of rain. They were like diamonds: diamonds the size of a chickpea or a pea or a grain of rice or as tiny as the diamonds used by watchmakers.

She sat there looking at the drops, and the third dream of the journey began to take shape in her mind. But this time she was daydreaming, with only her imagination to help her.