B0040702LQ EBOK (27 page)

Driving rain was bouncing noisily off the road, creating ripples of shimmering whiteness against the silvery reflection of
the surface. The man appeared out of nowhere and stopped
suddenly in front of him; he instinctively retreated, seeking the
protection of the doorway where he had taken shelter. The
man was carrying a small suitcase in his right hand and in the
other a canvas bag. Water streamed from his hair onto his
collar, his scarf and the lapels of his gabardine raincoat, which
was soaked through.

`Excuse me,' said the man.

He was taken by surprise, and did not answer. The man was
staring at him with wide eyes, above which his forehead
glinted, while water streamed down over his eyebrows.

`Excuse me,' the man said again.

Rain was also pouring from his cuffs over the luggage he
was carrying in his hands.

`What can I do for you?' he responded.

`I'm lost,' said the man.

He was breathing hard as though he had been running.

`I'm lost. I need to get to the railway station. I have a train to
catch at twelve o'clock.'

`It's a long way. You'd better take a taxi.'

`There are none to be had,' the man answered. `I've been
trying for the last hour to get hold of a taxi, but I can't find
one.

`Well, the Metro is just there,' he said.

He pointed to the end of the street, invisible through the
leaden grey of the rain.

`Down there, on this side of the road.'

The man's eyes had not lost their petrified expression.

`I'm a stranger here,' he said.

`The station has a lot of steps,' he added. `You'd better
hurry. It'll take you close on half an hour.'

The man stammered his thanks and walked off through the
rain.

When he got back home with his newspaper and the
shopping, this encounter stuck in his mind: the man's tense
expression, his apprehensive gaze, that slight hesitation when
he spoke. Nor did the memory of the traveller fade from his
mind as he finished his tasks for the morning, adding a few
sentences to the article on fiction in the last decade, and putting onto the computer nearly half of the interview with the
Mexican academic, nor during lunch - he ate at home, since
the rain was still bucketing down - nor during the editorial
meeting at the magazine, which took up the whole of the
afternoon and the early part of the evening.

He got home around half-past eight. Berta was not there,
and she rang shortly afterwards to say she would be home late.
He poured himself a drink and lay down on the sofa, staring at
the blank television screen. The image of that petrified face
above the drenched raincoat persisted, gradually taking on the
vague coherence of a scene from a novel. He got up, fetched
his notebook and a pen and drafted a few notes. A man walks
through a strange city. A man walks in fear through an
unfamiliar city.

At a quarter to ten, Berta rang again.

`I'll be a while yet.'

He poured himself another drink, went to his study,
switched on the computer, put in his short stories disk and
began to write. Finally, after all this time, he had an idea. He
was excited, almost happy, his head clear.

A man walks around a city at twilight. A seasoned traveller,
he is from a faraway country and is a complete stranger to
these streets where the wind catches up discarded lottery
tickets, leaves and cigarette ends. In his eyes there is an expression of such immutable desolation that the people passing
stare in surprise, and even the street-vendors and beggars look
at him suspiciously, though without daring to speak. The man is not strolling, he is drifting, with his hands in his pockets, his
body slightly bent and taking long, slow steps. Sometimes he
pauses in front of shop windows, but he does not look at the
goods on offer; instead he stares at the glass, searching for an
angle that will allow him to see his own reflection, as though
trying to recognise himself.

After working for about an hour he printed out what he
had written and went back to the sitting room with the empty
glass. It felt good to be writing again. He turned on the television set, but he was staring at it distractedly and, through the
moving images, he could still picture the anguish of that
traveller, not now the one he had met in the morning, but
the one in the story he had recently begun.

`He's trapped,' he murmured. `He's terrified. As though
something terrible was about to happen to him.'

It was after half-past eleven when Berta got back, and he was
on his fourth drink. She looked fed up and seemed physically
exhausted.

`Aren't you going to give me a kiss?' he said, hugging her.

`Have you had a lot to drink?'

'I'm writing a story.'

She looked at him as though she hadn't heard and went off
into the bedroom. When she appeared again she had taken off
her coat and was slipping out of her skirt as she went towards
the bathroom. He heard her peeing loudly, heaving a sigh of
relief.

`Didn't you hear what I said? I'm writing a story.'

She came out of the bathroom without her skirt, went to
the bedroom and carried on undressing.

`Have you had dinner?' she asked.

`No.'

`Nor have I. I just couldn't get away. Have we got anything
to eat?'

He shrugged. He felt happy.

`There must be something,' he exclaimed.

He told her about it again the next day, again at the end of the day's work, when they were both home. Berta, who was
leafing through her diary, just stared at him.

`A story?'

`I told you yesterday. You didn't hear me.'

`I was worn out. I don't know if I can take this blasted
reorganisation.'

She lit a cigarette and continued the conversation with
interest.

`So you're writing?'

`Yes, although I've got lots of other work I should be doing.
Yesterday, I came across a guy soaked to the skin and it
sparked off an idea.'

`What's it about?'

He fetched what he had written so far.

`I've just sketched out the idea,' he said. `A man wanders
through a distant city, in which he's lost and scared, as if he's
being followed.'

He read out the brief text. When he had finished, he
looked at her. She still had her eyes fixed on him, engrossed.

`What do you think?'

Berta did not answer.

`Maybe there is no external pursuer and his fear comes
purely from himself, from his own demons,' he added. `The
man has clearly experienced a personal tragedy and maybe
he's forced to travel because of his job. He's constantly changing cities, climates, customs. As the years go by, these perpetual rapid changes and the persistent, troubling memories
gradually begin to induce a strange anxiety in his mind.
Perhaps he's afraid that one day, in one of these strange cities,
he'll forget how to get back to his hotel, and may even forget
who he is. Perhaps he fears he'll be taken over by the places
he goes to, which he always experiences as strange and
unwelcoming, and yet their hostility feels right, somehow,
because it reflects the intense grief living inside him.'

`What happens to him?' she asked.

`I don't know yet,' he answered. `I'm going to think it
over, calmly. I've got him there, wandering round and round
in circles, like in a maze, and it's an image which, far from upsetting me, calms me down. It's as though his anxiety,
whose cause I don't yet know, was swallowing up all my
own worries. I haven't felt this good for months. Anyway, I'll
certainly carry on with it.'

She nodded.

`Yes, you must carry on. You couldn't be that cruel.'

`Cruel?'

`To your character.'

He was disconcerted.

`Who knows, maybe there's worse in store for him yet,' he
said finally, and they both laughed.

At the end of March, he was asked to write a report on a
critical symposium and then several other things came up, so
he put the story to one side. She, however, did not forget it
and she asked him several times how it was shaping up. Her
questions troubled him.

`I haven't had time to go back to it,' he would reply.

She would blink rapidly, as she always did in reaction to
anything strange or unresolved, then the gesture would
change to a smile that implied, not altogether convincingly,
that the reproach was jocular.

`So you're keeping him running round and round in
circles?

One night he woke up, startled by a cry from her. He groped
for the light switch on the bedside table. From the other bed,
Berta was staring at him with a look of such fear on her face
that he too was overcome by a wave of alarm. He threw off
the bedclothes and went over to lie beside her, hugging her
tightly.

`What is it? What on earth is wrong?'

Berta's forehead was bathed in sweat and tears as thick as
mucus welled up in her eyes. She spoke in a halting voice,
with frequent sobs.

`There was somebody looking at me. A man. His face was
right up against mine. A man was looking at me with a
horrible expression on his face.'

From then on, he was woken on several nights by Berta's terrified cries. Berta always said that she had seen right up
close to her the face of a man whose eyes were filled with fear.
A man in a grey street, with ugly low houses, in a dusty city.

On one of those occasions, Berta said accusingly:

`It's the man in your story. It's the same lost traveller,
petrified with fear.'

He couldn't think what to say.

`You have to get him out of there.'

He switched off the light and lay there uneasily. Berta
couldn't sleep.

`You have to get him out of there,' she repeated.

He sat up and spoke in her direction, and though he knew
she was near, he noticed in himself a vague fear of the
darkness.

'OK, IT get him out. Now go back to sleep.'

But she would not be pacified.

`You have to get him out of there.'

`Calm down. I promise I'll do it.'

`How?'

At that point, the idea came to him, suddenly yet with
deliberation, as though it had emerged from deep down and
had always been there inside him.

`A meeting. He'll meet somebody and escape from the
maze.'

He didn't write it. In the mornings, he was too busy with
other things and had no time to go back to the story; also,
spring had come and he usually spent the afternoons chatting
to friends in bars or going for a stroll. However, from the time
he told Berta that the traveller in the story would escape from
his fear because of a meeting with someone, she never again
had that nightmare about the face staring at her.

In the second week of May, Berta had to go on a trip to
negotiate a tender. She was growing more and more fed up
with the company and the jockeying for position in the office.
Also, she believed that she was liable to be the loser in the
constant wars, because the other potential directors were all
men and the one thing they seemed to agree on, concerning the changes in the wake of the reorganisation, was that she was
not in line for any promotion.

The trip was awkward in some ways, because she was going
to North Africa, a journey involving stopovers and waiting for
connections, and Berta was eager to get it over as quickly as
possible; she planned to leave on Thursday morning and be
back by Friday evening.

She went off very early, and that night he missed her sorely.
After one failed marriage and a few unsatisfactory affairs, this
relationship, in spite of the problems that had been making
Berta so edgy in the last few months, had given him a balance
he had never found before, and introduced him to a more
regular lifestyle. He drank a lot less, the only thing he smoked
were cigarettes, he was up to date with his reading, he was
meeting all his deadlines and he had even lost the rage he used
to feel, the bitterness that would rise in him as he saw the days
and months pass without him being able to write a story. The
sight of her undisturbed bed upset him so much that he ended
up sleeping on the sofa in the living room, like a guest invited
to stay the night.

Berta called him the next day, just after lunch, as he was on
his way out. Apparently there were high winds in Melilla and
it was likely that all flights that afternoon would be cancelled.
Her voice sounded tired. She couldn't come home yet.

`What are you going to do?' he asked, disguising the
sudden unease that the news had aroused in him.

`I don't know. There's a boat leaving at eleven o'clock at
night.'

`A boat??

`It goes to Malaga, and I'd have to get a plane from there.
But it's an all-night crossing, and they say the sea is rough as
well.'

Silence separated them as though the line had been cut.

`Berta, Berta,' he said urgently.

'I'm here.'

`What about tomorrow?'

`There are several flights, but the high winds may continue
and the planes will still be unable to take off. Don't worry about me,' she finally added, `I'm fine. I'll read a couple of
detective novels.'