Her mind suddenly lit up. The large woman who had said hello to her in the cafeteria didn’t belong to her previous life. She was one of the passengers on the bus, the woman in the next seat in fact, the woman with whom she had exchanged a few words before going down to the smokers’ section.
“I’m just going over there. I feel in need of some fresh air,” she said to the nuns, pointing to the hillock near the petrol station. The petrol station was red and yellow, and the hillock was covered in bright green grass.
“Enjoy your meal,” said the two nuns when they saw the plastic bag she was carrying in her hand.
She had to make a special effort to walk like any ordinary person. She felt an impulse to walk very slowly, or better still, to take sixty-five steps as fast as she could in order simply to turn around and start all over again. That was what she used to do in the women’s exercise yard in prison, and after four years of going back and forth thousands of times, that habit had become superimposed on her natural liking for leisurely walks and aimless wanderings. The sixty-five steps had ended up becoming a distance set in stone, a rule.
“Two exercise yards and a half,” her feet told her, or so she imagined. She was already at the petrol station. Another exercise yard to go and she would reach the top of the little hill, the observation point she had chosen for the first half hour that she was to spend out in the countryside after four whole years.
A gust of wind whisked a plastic bag from the pile on which it was placed and dragged it across the cement floor. That was the only thing moving. There was no one at the petrol station, at least there didn’t seem to be. The gleaming red pumps appeared to have just been placed there, waiting for the first car to arrive. The office door was closed.
The wind carried off two more plastic bags, in the same direction as the first. A moment later, when the noise of the bags brushing against the ground became imperceptible, and silence fell again, the loudspeakers in the roof of the petrol station — she hadn’t noticed them until then — began broadcasting the sounds of a choir that mingled human voices with the howls of a dog.
She stopped short. She knew that opening. It belonged to a song that Antonia often used to play on the cassette-player they had in their cell. Yes, the chorus of voices and howling would be followed by an acoustic guitar, and the guitar by the words of a singer talking about a dream he’d had, a lovely dream that turned out to be nothing but a false alarm.
At last, the words she was waiting for emerged from the loudspeaker:
Last night I dreamt
that somebody loved me;
no hope, but no harm,
just another false alarm.
Was it possible to live without love? Was it bearable to live night after night with no one to put your arms around? What did you do when there were no friends to be found anywhere? The questions arose in her mind one after the other and she clung to them, feeling slightly embarrassed, because that world, the world of songs and sentimental lyrics, was not her world, or at least it hadn’t been until she went into prison.
A man in blue overalls came out from behind one of the pumps and forced her to interrupt her thoughts.
“What are you doing standing there?” he shouted. He was carrying an iron bar in one hand.
“Don’t get jumpy, I’m not planning a hold-up,” she replied, in a firm voice. Then she walked past him and over to the grassy mound.
“Where do you think you’re going? That area is the property of the petrol station. We have orders to keep it clean,” said the man.
“Oh, fuck off,” she replied without turning round.
She put everything she was carrying down on the grass, the book by Emily Dickinson and the bag containing the sandwiches and the beers; then she bent her knees and sat down as she used to during the breaks in the yoga classes that she had attended in prison. Before her, at the far edge of a yellowish plain, there were two trees that must have been extremely tall and strong, but seen from there, seemed as slender as spiders’ legs. To the right of those trees, near the horizon, the sky was pale blue; to the left, it was dark blue. The sun was just above the trees, but quite high above the horizon, just where the two blues of the sky joined.
She felt a cool breeze on her face. “Last night I dreamt that somebody loved me,” the wind was saying at that moment. “No hope, but no harm, just another false alarm,” she added mentally when the wind dropped and fell silent.
She thought about the song again and about the questions that it had suggested to her a moment before. No, you couldn’t live without love, just as spiders — the little reddish spiders in prison, for example — could not move through the air without first spinning a thread. Sometimes, because the thread was invisible, it seemed that they could, but that was just an illusion. The thread was necessary, love was necessary. The problem was its fragility. The thread could be broken as easily as, one way or another, could love. If they hadn’t killed Larrea …
“Don’t think about it!” she suddenly exclaimed, thumping her own head. She had to drive out such ideas. She had to get a grip on herself. After all that time, thinking about Larrea was pointless.
She closed her eyes and began to breathe deeply. The sun touched her right cheek, and at first she tried to concentrate on that feeling of warmth. However, as if her mind couldn’t settle there, her thoughts drifted off to the cat that had come to meet her as she got off the bus. What colour was its head? Black? Yes, black. And its back? Did it have a black back too? Yes, it did, she was sure it did. And what about its front? No, its front wasn’t black, it was white. And its tail? She couldn’t remember anything about its tail, or rather, she remembered that there was a scar right at the base.
She heard a noise, like someone fumbling with a plastic bag, and she opened her eyes. The cat that she had been thinking about was only a yard away from her and was trying to take the sandwiches out of the bag.
“What are you doing here!” she shouted, startled by its sudden appearance. The cat took fright and left the bag alone. “It’s like magic!” she said. That unexpected coincidence amused her.
The cat sat down about two yards away, its eyes fixed on the bag.
“Which do you prefer, cheese or salad?” she asked, in a softer tone of voice. She broke off a piece of cheese and put it down on the grass. The cat snapped it up.
“Do you like beer?” she asked it a little later, when the sandwiches were eaten. Ignoring the can of Heineken she offered it, the cat walked over to the other side of the hill and sat gazing at the horizon. The sky was still divided into two different blues, but on the frontier between them, above the tall trees, you could see a line of flat clouds. With a little imagination, you could think of them as flying saucers taking off towards the sun.
She put down the can of beer and opened the book of poems by Emily Dickinson. She wanted to find a favourite of hers, a poem about grass. She had promised herself that the very first opportunity she had to sit down on some grass after leaving prison, she would read the poem out loud.
She found it at once, and started reading it slowly, pronouncing each word like a little girl, or like a sleepwalker. The alcohol in the beer that she had drunk helped her shrug off the embarrassment she still felt whenever she read anything out aloud, even when she was alone.
The Grass so little has to do –
A Sphere of simple Green –
With only Butterflies to brood
And Bees to entertain –
And stir all day to pretty Tunes
The Breezes fetch along –
And hold the Sunshine in its lap
And bow to everything –
And thread the Dews, all night, like Pearls –
And make itself so fine
A Duchess were too common