She wasn’t in a hurry to get anywhere, not even to Bilbao, and she was on the point of accepting the invitation that lay behind the soldier’s words. After all, it was the first invitation, albeit only half-spoken, tentative, that she had had in a long time, at least from anyone of the opposite sex, and she needed all the help she could to bolster her self-confidence; she needed to be looked at, spoken to, desired, as if she were a normal woman, not a whore — the role she had passively undertaken on her first night out of prison. However, barely twenty-four hours had passed since she left prison, and still less, only about ten hours, since her encounter with the stranger with whom she had gone to bed in a cheap hotel, and she felt like being alone. She looked at the soldier and declined his offer. She couldn’t stay in Barcelona, she had to get to Bilbao as soon as possible.
“I’ll tell you what then,” said the soldier with a sigh. He was rather disappointed. “The best thing would be to go by bus. It leaves at about half past three and goes straight there on the motorway. You’ll be home by ten o’clock tonight.”
“You seem to know a lot about timetables,” she said, forcing a smile.
“I’ve got a friend back in the barracks. He always gets that bus. He usually buys his ticket over there, behind the station. The company’s called Babitrans.”
The soldier said goodbye to her, joking about lost opportunities and sketching a military salute. For a moment, she thought of continuing the joke and adding a further thread to the relationship that had grown up between them, but, instead, she simply watched him walk away.
The soldier disappeared amongst the crowd, down the escalator that connected the station with the metro. Yes, it was a bit of bad luck not to have met him ten or twelve hours earlier. Or perhaps the real bad luck lay in having met the other man, the awful guy who had picked her up in a bar, the fourth or fifth that she had visited that night.
She noticed the cigarette machine next to the entrance to the pizzeria, and the thoughts going round in her head immediately changed direction and flew off to the period in her life when she could choose any brand of cigarette she liked or, rather, choose the brand with which she identified and which she would carry with her, at least on certain occasions, like an amulet. She felt suddenly happier and thought that her recovery could begin right there, with that trifling realization, her recovery of herself through the objects that had surrounded her in her previous life.
“Try to find your own things,” Margarita had advised her when she said goodbye. “They wait for us and they are the only things that can help us when we get out of prison. When you leave here, try to remember what they were and set about finding them. They’ll help you a lot. I’ll do the same some day. I’ll go back to Argentina and I won’t stop until I find my knee-high leather boots.”
The laughter with which her cellmate had closed that brief conversation floated in her head as she went over to the cigarette machine. Margarita was over sixty and still had a long prison sentence to complete. It was highly unlikely that she would ever return to her native Argentina.
Her favourite brand, Lark, was in the last column in the machine. She put three coins in the slot and pressed the button.
“At last!” she exclaimed to herself.
She hadn’t been able to smoke that brand, her usual one, for several years; it was a brand she had chosen as an adolescent, as an emblem almost of her own personality. She had been “the girl who smoked Lark” and now, after spending four years in a prison cell in Barcelona, there was a chance of being that girl again. On the other hand, the maroon packet — an extremely rare sight inside the prison walls — proved to her that she really was out, that before too long she would have a new handbag, and in that handbag a key, the key to her own house, the object that best characterized those who were free.
She placed the packet on her open palm.
“Lark has an inner chamber of charcoal granules to smooth the taste,” she read. Above the letters, there was a cross-section of the filter showing the granules.
She put the pack in her jacket pocket and crossed over to the other part of the station via a side passage. Even before she reached the exit, she spotted two buses parked on the station forecourt; the first was white, the second yellow and white, and she had the impression that both had their engines running and were about to leave. She quickened her step and almost ran through the automatic doors at the end of the passage.
Startled by her sudden appearance, about a dozen sparrows took flight — up until that moment they had been pecking at the breadcrumbs scattered for them by an old woman.
“Where are you off to in such a hurry?” the old woman shouted in a disagreeable voice, before cursing the gusty wind snatching at her coat. She seemed slightly crazy.
The sparrows circled, flying into the wind, over the station in the direction of the prison, which was less than five hundred yards away from there. An idea flitted through her mind and made her smile. Those birds probably had their nests in holes in the prison walls. Indeed, that particular flock of sparrows were probably the ones she used to see from the tiny kitchen window or from the courtyard.
Two drivers were standing chatting by the yellow and white bus.
“Yes, this is the bus. It leaves at three forty and flies straight to Bilbao,” said one of them. Both he and his colleague seemed in a good mood.
“Well, it flies when I’m driving. When you’re driving, it crawls,” added the second driver, and the two men burst out laughing and punched each other on the arm.
She looked at the clock. There was less than an hour before it left.
“Where do I buy a ticket?” she asked.
“In the station. Right over there,” replied the driver who had made the joke, pointing to door number seven. “But you don’t have to do that. My colleague here will be delighted to do it for you, won’t you? He’s very well brought up and a bit of a ladies’ man too.”
“Thanks, that won’t be necessary,” she said, forestalling the other driver’s response. Then, simply in order to escape from them, she went and sat on a stone bench.
She put her suitcase down on the ground and took out the packet of cigarettes. The gold band from the cellophane wrapping and the silver paper covering the cigarettes flew off in the same direction as the sparrows, towards the prison.
And the smoke? Would that fly in the same direction too? She lit the cigarette with a plastic lighter, inhaled the smoke and then, suppressing all the memories that the taste of the tobacco evoked — memories of a school dance, memories of a day at the beach — she slowly exhaled. Just like the birds and the wrapping, the smoke headed off towards the prison.
She closed her eyes and shook her head. She must stop playing these games, she must keep calm and try to control the thoughts buzzing around in her head like a swarm of bees, only to end up always in the same place: prison.
“I have to move on. I’m out now,” she murmured to herself. Nevertheless, she knew perfectly well that it was going to be very difficult to forget about prison. As difficult as it would be to give up the habits she had acquired there: talking to herself, for example.
She leaned back on the bench, and for the first time that day, she looked up at the sky. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant sight. The sky was nothing like the “slow blue river” mentioned in a poem dedicated to Barcelona. On the contrary, it seemed to be made out of grey marble, like the top of a tomb. No, looking at the sky didn’t help her much either. It was almost better to go on thinking about things that had happened in prison. Things which, in fact, were not things but people like Margarita or Antonia, her cellmates, her friends. She would have to keep her promise to write to them every fortnight or every month, and to send them books, and the odd picture to put up in their cell.