She didn’t have to wait long for the signal; the aristocrat picked up the cocktail stick and, after various attempts — his eyesight obviously wasn’t very good — he managed to place the olive in his mouth. Then he snapped the cocktail stick in two and placed it in one of the ashtrays on the table.
She leaned back and reached her left arm out behind the Yeti’s back.
“When are we going to eat? I’m hungry,” said someone. Her arm froze.
“Let’s finish our drinks first,” said the aristocrat.
Between Larrea and the Yeti there was a wider gulf than she had supposed, almost another arm’s length. It became even more difficult when the Yeti, misinterpreting her posture — she had leaned her body towards him — drew her to him and started to embrace her, putting an arm around her shoulders.
“It’s cold, isn’t it?” said one of the other women who was sitting next to the aristocrat, and two or three people agreed. At any moment, people would start to get up from the table.
She freed herself from her colleague’s embrace and made a last attempt to reach Larrea, stretching her arm, her hand, her index finger as far as she could.
Then something ineffable happened. Contrary to all probabilities, the tip of her index finger touched the tip of another index finger. Startled by that unexpected contact, she rapidly withdrew her hand and resumed her normal posture at the table. She looked over at Larrea. He had his arm outstretched too and was holding out his hand to her behind the Yeti’s back.
The dream images provoked in her the same shudder she had felt ten years ago in the garden in Biarritz, and she snuggled down in her seat so as to savour that feeling. But she couldn’t. The bus, which was still flying along at nearly ninety miles an hour, hit a dip and she nodded a little, enough to interrupt her dream and to force her to open her eyes. For a moment, on the other side of the window, she saw a village surrounded by pine trees and a great strip of blue sky. Nice, she thought, it was nice that blue sky. Then she closed her eyes and tried to go back to the scene in the garden.
It was useless. The dream had taken another direction and a new scene replaced the previous one. She and her colleague in the organization, the one they called the Yeti, were standing in a maritime museum arguing; they were in the room containing the gigantic skeleton of a whale.
“Just what are you up to?” asked the Yeti.
“What do you mean?” she said, walking away towards the whale’s tailbone. She felt a stab of pain in her head.
“Do keep still, will you? What I have to tell you is very serious,” said the Yeti. He had a clumsy gait and disliked having to move.
Most of the schoolchildren who were visiting the museum at that moment were either looking at the tropical fish aquarium or at the one containing octopuses. Only one little girl had remained apart from the others. She was looking at the black lampreys, at their white teeth. Perhaps she was an image of her? Perhaps she had been like that, a solitary child?
The question provoked by the image in the dream vanished at once. Again she saw the Yeti’s face.
“You know perfectly well what I mean. You’re going out with that guy Larrea. I know you’re seeing each other. I’m certain of it, absolutely certain.”
Despite his appearance, he wasn’t rough-mannered. He spoke gently, as if it pained him to have to say those words. She sighed and stroked one of the whale’s ribs.
“Who told you? The security people?”
“It’s very dangerous for the organization, very dangerous indeed.”
The Yeti always repeated everything, so that the idea would go in, like a nail into wood.
“Why is it dangerous?”
The words left her mouth without creating any echo inside her at all. Absurd thoughts occurred to her. For example, how big would the whale have been whose skeleton she was looking at?
“The police know about him and all the members of his little group. They tell them what to do.”
“That’s not true.”
What speed could that whale have reached when it lived in the sea? How deep could it dive? Could it go down to where the lampreys lived? The questions came into her mind unbidden.
“I tell you it’s true. The police pull the strings and they move. They probably know about you too.”
“Look, I know they take a different line on things, but to say that they’re under police control is insulting. That’s pure sectarianism.”
“You can’t continue with your relationship. You’ll have to separate immediately. These are not just empty words. It’s an order from the organization.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“There’s nothing to think about, it’s an order, don’t you understand, an order!”
The Yeti stopped shouting and gave a long sigh.
“It’s an order, an order. You must understand,” he said, resuming his sorrowful tone and putting an arm around her shoulder. She burst into tears. The message had at last reached the deepest layer of her consciousness. Yes, now she understood. She would not see Larrea again or, rather, she would see him one more time, just to say goodbye.
She opened her eyes and the light dazzled her. The sun occupied a large part of the sky, the part she could see through the window, and as far as she could make out, it was beating down on a grey desert. How many serpents lived there? What had become of paradise after Eve listened to the serpent? Had it become a grey desert like the one they were crossing? She looked again at what lay outside and she saw a straight line formed by pylons and a flock of crows circling one of them. How many crows lived in that desert?
“I’m asleep,” she said to herself in an attempt to exorcize those senseless questions. She snuggled down in her seat again and looked for other images. She wanted the dream to go on.
She spent some moments with her eyes closed, trying to follow the conversations that she could hear in that part of the bus. Then — the voices seemed to grow ever farther off — she saw a flower, a violet-coloured geranium. She knew that she was back inside the dream again. She had seen that flower on her last meeting with Larrea, through the frosted glass of a bathroom window.
“What do you want to do, then, just leave it?” said Larrea. He was having a shower and the hot water was reddening the skin on his arms and shoulders.
“You know I don’t,” she said from the stool in the bathroom. She was wrapped in a large towel, and was smoking a cigarette.
“I don’t think we’ve got much option,” said Larrea, turning off the shower. “I can’t ask you to join my organization, and it’s the same with you, you can’t ask me to join yours. No one would take it seriously. Besides, I really don’t think they’d let me in.”
The geranium on the other side of the window appeared and disappeared depending on Larrea’s movements in the bath.
“The way you put it, we only have two alternatives,” she said. “We can either disobey the order and stay together, or we can say goodbye right now.”
For the first time since that meeting in the aristocrat’s house, there was tension between them.
“We mustn’t go thinking we’re Romeo and Juliet. We’re not a couple of adolescents,” said Larrea, picking up a towel and drying himself. He was smiling, but it was as if he were smiling to himself.
“How old were Romeo and Juliet?” she asked him. The decision they were about to take made her voice sound hoarse, huskier than usual.