But suddenly they had halted in the middle of the barren plateau in front of a castle-like structure, no, really and truly a castle; for wasn’t that the escutcheon of the former dynasty above the entrance portal? And the building and grounds were so vast that it could only be a royal castle, not merely an imitation or a dream of one.
No indication of a “hotel”: neither neon lights nor a sign; also no cars in the courtyard, not even one or two modest ones with local license plates that would show that although there were no guests, at least a few employees were there waiting for them. To be sure, although all the windows were dark, at the main gate a light was shining, in fact a pair of torches, one on either side, and as if they had been there a long time.
They got out of the car. A night breeze was blowing; “from the south-east, from the Sierra,” she said. A buzzing and rattling from the acacias that formed an avenue leading up to the entrance: the sound of the black, sickle-shaped seedpods, with which the bare trees were bursting (the rattling came from the dry seeds in the pods). On the ground of the avenue each of their footsteps caused a crackling in the fallen sickles. The chauffeuse stuck her index and middle finger in her mouth and blew; her whistle circled the entire castle. (In her Sorbian village such a whistle had been called for in the middle of the gentlest village song.) All the acacia branches, from the fork to the tip, had dagger-like, razor-sharp thorns, each thorn outlined against the star-bright Iberian winter sky, once the car’s headlights were turned off. Did that mighty rushing come from below, from the río Duero, here not so far from where it flowed into the Atlantic, and was the castle located on a bluff high above a broad valley? “No,” she said, as if he had asked: “No river, just a little brook down in a ravine.”
An answer like this was consistent with her viewing the imposing structure as a roadside hostel placed there to accommodate them. When her whistle drew no response, she clapped her hands as she stood there on the graveled circular drive, bordered by box shrubs, in front of the entrance. And to do so, she put down the suitcase. Which suitcase? Which would it be but the one belonging to her passenger, which she had lifted out of the car herself and carried this far.
Still no answer, so she bent down to pick up a pebble, just one, and aimed it at a certain window among the twenty-four on the second floor, dark like all the others. She hit it squarely in the middle: a sound not of glass, or at least not of modern glass, but of very old glass; less of glass than of soft stone or very hard wood.
As our newly minted enthusiast told it, the lord of the manor now opened the window. Lord of the manor? The epitome of one. And he was alone, as a lord of the manor must be nowadays. But she is said to have shouted up to him as if he were the bellhop and supposed to hop to it: “Two rooms!” And in no time: the lord of the manor was coming downstairs from his second floor to meet them, who by now were standing in the flickering light of the hall, having scrambled over the threshold, almost knee high. Before he was even close to them, he held out two keys, keys with bows as shiny as if they were made of crystal. And he smiled briefly, as if in greeting, as if he had been expecting the two, or at least her, the woman; but he spoke not a word, either then or in the hours that followed, as the traveling entrepreneur likewise kept silent from this moment on, as if he had nothing more to add to the long speech he had made during the nocturnal drive.
The lord wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a black tie, as if he were simultaneously the hotel manager and the maître d’hôtel, in charge of the restaurant. The curved staircase looked as if it were of marble, and had steps so shallow and broad that one floated up it as if being carried. Their rooms, located in opposite directions, were as spacious as ballrooms, the bed in each case tucked into a corner, and they had floors of something like red brick, with uneven spots, dips and miniature valleys and chains of hills, which made her feel, as she told the author, as if she were walking back home in her garden; “the only thing missing was the swampy patches.”
And when she opened the casement windows and leaned out, gazing toward the south and the Sierra, it looked as if down below in the manor grounds, now brightly lit by the moon, “in my eyes a farmer’s pasture,” a hedgehog hobbled by, the same one as at home; with teeny glittering eyes, as if to say, “I am here already.” And in the castle pond, “in the village puddle,” the glaring reflection of the moon, now transected by the reflection of the familiar matitudinal bat. When, not until their last morning? And the bat mirrored in the still water with a clarity of contour never seen in reality.
8
The two travelers supping on the ground floor, not in one of the reception rooms but in one of the corner rooms, to be reached by way of a labyrinth of corridors, some of which ended at blank walls or trompe l’oeil doors. The corner room no larger than a niche, yet with a domed ceiling set with thousands of tiny enameled tiles whose colors and shapes formed a repeating pattern, so that at first it looked as though the dome were growing larger and larger, and then as though there were no dome at all but a low, flat ceiling, almost low enough to touch with one’s fingertips from a seated position.
The small chamber was reminiscent of certain almost inaccessible places into which people used to withdraw in earlier times, not for any clandestine activities but because they wanted to be alone with their own kind — close friends, members of their own social class or sex. And in fact this had once been a smoking room, a place reserved for men. Only now it was the woman who led the man there, unhesitatingly taking this turn and that, and, playing hostess, pointing out his place at the table, barely large enough for two, making as if to run her finger over the likewise enamel-tiled wall, to wipe away centuries-old soot. And in fact her hands were now sooty, from the fire in the fireplace, whose dimensions matched those of the niche, the opening no bigger than the stovepipe aperture low in the enameled wall. A mere hand’s breadth from the “firehole” (her term for “fireplace”), the enamel was already cold.
A cold winter night, cold as only winter nights on the plateau can be. Distant thunder. Explosions. In the still damp piles of firewood? The once and perhaps future client had changed for supper; was dressed like the lord of the manor or whomever (who in the meantime was standing in the invisible, inaudible, unsmellable kitchen or wherever). The lady banker or whoever was still in the outfit she had been wearing earlier. At most she picked up from time to time, as if playfully, one of the fans lying next to her plate and ran her finger over one of its five, or six? classic segments, always the same one, painted with landscape images, in this case depicting the Sierra, the Sierra de Gredos? — in this country everything was a “sierra,” from the Bay of Biscay to the Straits of Gibraltar, and this sierra or whatever on the fan could just as easily be the Sierra Cantabria, or the Sierra Guadarrama, the Sierra de Copaonica, the Sierra Morena, or the Sierra Nevada. And appropriately, the traditional term for the obligatory landscape images on all fans: simply país, countryside.
And as if the entrepreneur had tacitly asked the lady banker what she was doing in the Sierra de Gredos, of all places, and in winter, of all times, and with the current world situation, of all things, she then, speaking on her feet (or sitting), delivered one of those pronouncements for which she was famous all over the continent and beyond. (The designations “lady banker” and “entrepreneur” no longer fit the two of them, and not only since their arrival at the castle or hostel; from the moment of their landing at the remote little airport of Valladolid, they had become something else besides; and then, during the evening drive along the road, almost exclusively that something else; a different reality; the second wind of being no one in particular.)