“You shouldn’t go meddling in other people’s lives without their permission,” she said with a scornful gesture. “Only a pig would spend his life doing that.”
“You’re right, we are obliged to do some terrible things in our job,” he replied, adopting a melancholy tone. “That’s the old argument, isn’t it? Does a good end justify the means? I don’t honestly know. On the one hand …”
“Look, your philosophy of life doesn’t interest me in the least,” she broke in, putting on her headphones.
On screen, an exhausted-looking man wearing a loose white shirt was saying: “My son wasn’t a terrorist. He was a good student. They laid a trap for him, I’m sure of it.” He was talking to a very beautiful woman, and on the cane table between them lay a newspaper with a photo of two corpses lying in the gutter. “Two terrorists dead, one seriously injured,” said the headline.
She looked away from the screen and looked instead at the fields near the motorway. Here and there, as if born by some miracle out of the parched earth, there were flowering trees in groups of twenty or in lines of five, or two by two, or all alone, in the most unexpected places. Taking the scene as a whole — this was an idea she had after the bus had travelled on for a few miles — what you saw out of the window was like an emigration of trees, an exodus, the long march of trees towards their destiny. They seemed to be travelling west, towards the part of the sky that was still blue. Were they guided by a star? Was Venus guiding them? No, there was no guide. No possibility of flight. The trees could not move.
“I promise you, I’ll do everything I can to find out what happened to your son,” the woman journalist on the screen was saying to the man in the white shirt. “But, first, I’d like you to take a look at these photos that I found in the newspaper archives. Do you know these men?”
The man looked closely at them.
“I know him very well,” he said, pointing at one of the photos. “He’s one of my son’s friends at university. But I don’t know this other man. I’ve never seen him before. Who is he?”
“Well, he’s the only one who survived that so-called shootout with the police.”
“Your newspaper says that he’s seriously injured.”
“But I don’t believe it myself. The editor is a bit nervous about it all, and he’s simply accepted the official version. If he’d analysed …”
The journalist’s words on the screen were cut off. The man in the red tie had just removed her headphones and was holding them in one hand, whilst with the other — the open palm towards her as if to say “Stop” — he was signalling to her not to get angry.
“I’m sorry, Irene, but you must listen to me. I mean it. We could be friends.”
“I don’t think so,” she said, snatching the headphones from him. The violence of that gesture attracted the attention of the hostess and the passenger who looked like a boxer.
“I can understand your being angry with me, Irene. In other circumstances, I would have behaved more politely and tried not to alarm you. But, please, just give me a few moments, the time it takes to smoke another cigarette. I can’t go back to my seat without having told you what I came to tell you. Will you allow me that time? Just until you’ve smoked one more cigarette.”
The man’s grey eyes were looking at her hard. She picked up the packet and took out a cigarette.
“All right. That sounds like a reasonable deal — assuming you keep your word,” she said, lighting the cigarette.
She felt tired, tired and anxious about something that she could feel like a wound inside her. She wasn’t doing very well; the policeman was gaining the upper hand.
“May I take one?” said the man, pointing to the cigarettes. “I’ve never tried that brand.”
No, the policeman didn’t need any grand theory about the soul, nor any in-depth analysis of why people act in a certain way. He just needed to know three or four things, obvious things like the fact that a person who has spent four years within the four walls of a prison emerges into the world debilitated and with a great hunger for affection, ready to accept the smallest sign of love, however wretched or obscure. That was exactly what was happening to her: contrary to what her mind was telling her, she was still sitting there listening to the policeman in the red tie or, rather, the policeman with the grey eyes, a man who, she had to admit, did strike her as extremely handsome. In that sense, she was reacting to the signal, and the message — like poison in her guts — was gradually leaching into her soul.
“Look, Irene, I’m going to put things quite bluntly, as a friend, but bluntly,” said the man, putting his cigarette down in the ashtray on the table and leaning towards her. His tone of voice was one that called for greater privacy, for more intimate lighting than there was at that moment on the bus. “Your situation looks very bad, Irene. On the one hand, you have no work. On the other, you’ve become marginalized from the organization by rejecting the party line and asking to leave prison. Lastly, Irene, how can I put it … you’re still a pretty woman and you still look quite young, but you’re getting on a bit. A while ago, you told me you were thirty-seven, and nowadays, well, you know how it is, men prefer young girls, adolescents, and unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, they get them too; it’s really not that hard these days to get an adolescent girl into bed you know.”
“Really?” she said, raising her cigarette to her lips.
“No, Irene, it isn’t, and that’s the fact of the matter. However regrettable it may be, you have to accept it.”
She smiled broadly. The man in the red tie’s clumsy efforts to convince her had just become painfully obvious. He wasn’t the worldly-wise man he seemed. Like a lot of policemen born in remote villages and with an education that almost always began in a seminary, his Catholic upbringing had made a profound impression on his personality. They all had a Virgin Mary in some corner of their heart.
“I have no problem with the facts. It’s up to the individual who they have relationships with. That’s what your mother did, after all.”
For the first time since the conversation had begun, she had found a weak point. The man in the red tie hesitated. He didn’t know how to go on.
“It’s true,” he admitted at last, picking up the cigarette that was burning out on the ashtray on the table. “There is a great deal of sexual freedom nowadays, but …”
He left the phrase hanging and moved his face towards hers, at the same time mischievously opening his smile. Did he know about her sexual encounter of the night before? If they had been following her since she left prison, they would.
“… but that freedom,” the man went on, lowering his voice almost to a whisper, “is only one-way, Irene. You see a lot of older men with young girls of eighteen, but you don’t see any women of a certain age with eighteen-year-old boys. That’s how things are, Irene.”
“That’s how you choose to see it.”
“Your situation, Irene, does not look good,” said the man, taking no notice of her comment. He didn’t want to go down that particular road. “One danger you may well have to face is loneliness. You’re not going to tell me that, what with problems finding work, problems with relationships, you’re not going to end up back in your old haunts, in your old political world … You’ll find out for yourself, of course, but it doesn’t seem like much of a life to me, at least, not what you could call a life. And that’s something which, and again, forgive me being so frank, will be of the utmost importance to you after the years you’ve lost. I think you need new friends and I could be one of them, why not? I can’t guarantee I can solve all your problems, but …”