Remarkable how many men spoke to her, without a moment’s hesitation, and not merely in this particular hour, simply addressed her, in a casual way, as good neighbors, or, to use a local word, “compadres.” Might that have to do with the fact that this aventurera was not like many other women, who with strangers put on an absent or even forbidding expression, lighting up only when they caught sight of the one man who was theirs? That this vagabond looked at any stranger with open, laughing eyes that promptly instilled trust — precisely their deep-black color had that effect — almost like an idiot, if it were not for her sovereign, yes, sovereign, and at the same time cheerful and, yes, compassionate beauty?
Yet remarkable, on the other hand, that this woman, once she catches sight of the one man who is hers, will have assumed a veritable scowl, the kind of look that, given the dark black of her eyes, almost, and not merely “almost,” inspires fear?
40
When, precisely, she traveled from Candeleda to the village in La Mancha, she told the author there, was of no significance for their tale. It was enough that it was long after Candlemas (= Candelaria) and the month of Ramadan and the festival of unleavened bread, and sometime between Sukkoth, the Buddhist Dugout Festival, and All Souls’ Day. “The angels of the night and the day follow upon one another and watch over you,” she read during the train trip in the Arabic book belonging to her vanished child.
The Sierra de Gredos had still been visible from Liubovia, then still from Navamoral (= Mulberry Hollow) de la Mata, and, finally, on the bus trip from Talavera de la Reina in the direction of Toledo and Ciudad Reaclass="underline" until long after Talavera and after the crossing of the río Tajo, whenever she turned around in her seat in the back of the bus, the blooming of the blue mountain to the north, far, far off, with white crags at the top: so, up on the summit plain the first snow had fallen again.
She had taken her time once more: spent the night in Talavera (= Cutting Edge)-of-the-Queen in the hotel by the bus station; in Toledo she had herself poled across the río Tajo in the one-man ferry, from the city to the rocky steppe, and, far out in the meadow on the other side of the river, tracked down the remote church dedicated to the patron saint of Toledo, who was unfamiliar to most residents, and from whom she had taken one of her daughter’s several names, along with Lubna, Salma, Ibna, etc.
The following night she spent in Orgaz, already deep in La Mancha, quite barren and also well above the altitude of the Tajo valley. And the next day she strolled through the capital of La Mancha, Ciudad Real, spent hours gazing at the prehistoric archeological finds there, and toward evening took the only bus to the spot where she was scheduled to meet the author.
The return to conventional time was not as distasteful to her as one might have assumed. She could still feel inside her the alternate time dispensation of her crossing of the Sierra, providing an additional impetus that would not leave her that soon. Also no brooding as to what the future held.
Since the loss of images, there was, to be sure, no more “and,” that sweet, duration-forging link between her steps. Yet on the other hand she had her story inside her, there to pass on to others. She took in current events as current events, and these brushed against her story without disrupting it — indeed, some news, world happenings, or historic events that had occurred in the meantime actually reinforced what she had experienced, precisely by way of contrast, lent her experiences colorful outlines and backgrounds.
While she had been crossing the Sierra de Gredos, the first manned spacecraft had landed on Mars. The highway signs throughout Europe and the rest of the world now indicated the hours, minutes, and seconds in neon lights. The final communiqué from a global presidents’ summit conference announced: “At last we all speak a single language.” The president of a poor country asked the Universal Bank for money, pledging that his country would “show itself worthy of the community of deal-makers.” A new pope again asked in the name of his Church for forgiveness for something for which there could be no forgiveness, at most dissolution of the Church. Africa was declared the “continent of peace” for the coming decade (and the black faces pictured in that connection made that seem almost credible, and, above all, possible). Belgrade, the other riverport city and sister city of hers in the northwest, had been recently, for the second or third time in its history, conquered by the Turks, and the victorious second-in-command, the author of a book called Jogging Through Turkey, stood in his jogging suit at the spot where the Save flows into the Danube, waving a bundle of money, and at the same time pissing into the confluence of the rivers. Aquileia had become the capital of Italy. Ancient Greek had again become a required subject in schools from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Dog owners proclaimed that anyone who was not a friend of animals was an enemy of mankind. And — no “and”—her favorite team — no, not the one from Valladolid — Football Club Numancia, had in the meantime beaten FC Barcelona and Real Madrid and become the Iberian champions: the Europe Cup game against Manchester United was about to take place. (To judge by that, wasn’t everything about which she cared passionately threatened with extinction after all?) And: Spain had abolished the upside-down question mark at the beginning of questions. ¿True?
Upon the bus’s arrival in the La Mancha village it was already night. The bus station was almost as big as a city terminal. The village itself, though only a hamlet, spread far out into the meseta. Centuries earlier it, not Ciudad Real, had been the capital of La Mancha. Nonetheless it had had in those days, as it did today, the air (yes, air) of a village, a pueblo. The author took her home with him for the night and the telling of her story; his house, as he told her at once, should help her feel at home, for it had been in the village’s days as the capital a sort of storehouse for goods and money, owned by her colleague and predecessor Jakob Fugger, a branch of his business in the middle of sixteenth-century Spain, turned over to the banking emperor by Emperor Charles as compensation for the imperial debt to the House of Fugger.
The bus station was a barracks in the middle of the otherwise empty square (“not to be confused with the Plaza Mayor, the main square”), housing both the ticket counter and a bar. At first she did not recognize the author; took him for a labrador, a land or field worker, a rather haggard and ragged one.
Yet he, too, looked right past her as she got off the bus with the last passengers. Had she changed that much? It was true: it had not been possible to cover the scrapes and scabs with makeup. Yet her face always remained the same!: so it was probably the fault of the author, who was often uncertain about precisely those people of whom he had a clear mental image when they, whom he was expecting, suddenly stood before him.
So for the moment she let him go on hunting for her and behind his back ordered something to drink at the bar (her thirst from the Sierra was still with her). Only then did she come up behind the man and grab him under the arms, and at last he recognized her. And he seemed familiar to her now, as if not from their first encounter but from somewhere else entirely.