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.
The Dream
THE DREAM HAD several acts, like a play, each with its own characters and its own scenery. Whenever the bus jolted or there was a sudden noise, she would half-open her eyes and almost wake up, and then the scenes would lose some of their purity and re-form with remnants of memory and ideas clinging to the dream the way mud and blades of grass cling to the shoes of someone walking through the forest. Nevertheless, despite these interruptions, the dream, which was fairly long, remained coherent from start to finish.
The scenes in the first part of the dream took place in a large garden, about ten years before, when she was only twenty-seven.
“You see? They’ll soon be out,” said a rather aristocratic-looking old man, walking on to the stage. With the silver handle of his walking stick he was pointing to a row of cherry trees whose branches were thick with buds.
“It’s too early, isn’t it? It could still snow,” she said. She was standing on a wrought-iron balcony that formed part of the loggia of a beautiful stone house.
“According to something I read the other day, it hasn’t snowed in Biarritz in March since 1921,” said a third person, taking the stage. He was a young man of delicate appearance, about twenty-three years old, who expressed himself shyly. He was called Larrea, and people said he was there because he was the main representative of the most radical of the political organizations gathered together in the aristocrat’s house.
“The main representative of the most radical political organization,” she repeated, approaching the frontier between dream and waking, and she suddenly remembered everything surrounding that scene. She and another fifteen militants — all of them members of four different organizations involved in the armed struggle — were meeting in the palace of an aristocrat on the outskirts of Biarritz with the aim of analysing the possibilities of a joint strategy. Three days after the meeting began, they had reached complete agreement except on one point: should they attack all banks, or should they respect those founded originally in the Basque country and with Basque money? On that point, the rather delicate young man and his group had taken one position and everyone else the opposite. The trivial conversation begun by the old aristocrat about the cherry trees had been merely an attempt to relieve the tension arising from that confrontation.
“Shall we go out into the garden?” the aristocrat asked the group gathered in the loggia. “We can sit at the oval table beneath the magnolia tree and have an aperitif. It’s more than an hour before supper.”
The group gave a murmur of approval.
“You should bring a sweater or a jacket. You’ll get cold,” Larrea said to her.
The sound of a horn almost woke her from her dream, but a few seconds later, the images of that meeting in Biarritz continued to parade through her mind clearly and precisely, as real as the plastic coffee cup or the books that she had held in her hand. First, she saw the garden belonging to the aristocrat, and in the garden, beneath a magnolia tree, an oval table carved out of stone. Most of the militants who had taken part in the debates were sitting round that table; it was almost dark, because the shade from the tree obscured the little remaining daylight.
Sitting at the table, she had the impression that her mind was thinking of its own accord, and that the ideas it was forming were phenomena as remote from her own will as the chemical reactions taking place in her intestines, as the beating of her heart. Surprisingly — until that moment she had been unaware of what was happening to her — all that involuntary activity revolved around that young man, Larrea. There was only one more day left of the meeting, after which, since both of them belonged to different, almost rival organizations, they would not see each other again.
Knowing this troubled her. Little by little, ignoring the conversation taking place at the table between the aristocrat and her colleagues at the meeting, that initial idea engendered a twin: she could not accept that separation, she had to make contact with Larrea. At once, her mind provided her with a new and strangely attractive possibility: yes, she should make contact with him, but in the literal sense; she must reach out and grasp his hand, right there, before the whole group went upstairs to supper. Luckily, Larrea had sat down near her. They were separated only by the large bulk of a militant known as the Yeti.
The aristocrat had just finished telling an anecdote, and everyone around the table burst out laughing. She did not. She felt more and more troubled. She was beginning to understand; she was beginning to understand what lay behind some of her own attitudes during the debates. She had never once tried to refute the young man’s arguments. On the contrary, she had felt uncomfortable when some member of her own group, the Yeti for example, had spoken to him brusquely or disrespectfully. And during the breaks, during the lunches and suppers too, she had always tried to sit near him.
She sipped at her aperitif and ate the olive that came with the drink. Should she admit it? Should she say that word? It was more than a year since her divorce. Was she in love?
The aristocrat went on talking, trying to take the tension out of the situation. He had a glass in one hand and she could just see the end of the cocktail stick holding the olive above the edge of the glass.
“When he puts the olive in his mouth, I’ll take Larrea’s hand,” she thought. It was not going to be an easy operation, since she had to reach behind the Yeti’s back, very carefully, so that no one would notice. What would happen if someone at the table realized? And what if Larrea rejected her hand? Those thoughts made her heart beat faster. It was true that beneath the magnolia tree it was growing ever darker, but the risk — the risk of appearing ridiculous — also seemed to her to be growing ever greater.