Should she send the letter, or tear it up? She lit a cigarette and started analysing her feelings with the subtlety of someone trying to understand the inner meaning of each and every ripple on the surface of a river. She still couldn’t find a precise answer, though. On the one hand, it was clear that the letter was born of a particular state of mind, her state of mind that morning following her ghastly sexual encounter with the man who had picked her up in a bar; besides, it was unfair, even unnecessarily cruel, the letter omitted anything that might give a more balanced view of events, for example, the financial help that Andoni had given her during those years; on the other hand, the reproach that lay at the heart of what she had written — the lack of joy in their relationship — exactly reflected a feeling that had been growing day by day long before she fell into the hands of the police.
She inhaled the smoke from her cigarette and looked around her. The foreigner at the table opposite was no longer alone, now he was accompanied by a woman and by a girl of about ten. And the group of soldiers out of uniform had grown too and now spilled over onto two more tables. At the table near her, the boy sitting next to the blind man was eagerly examining the tickets, as if doing so gave him pleasure.
“Great,” he said to the blind man, putting the tickets away, “we’ll be home before eight.”
“What are you going to make me for supper? I’m fed up with this Barcelona rubbish,” said the blind man with a broad smile. He too seemed content.
“I’ll make you a huge potato omelette. How would that suit you?”
“Fantastic,” said the blind man emphatically.
The person whom she had taken for a boy was, in fact, a very short woman. However — as the message being given out by her surroundings made crystal clear — she was the only person on her own in the restaurant. Years ago, whenever she came back from a school trip or from a holiday, she would find her parents and her brothers at the station, and if her family couldn’t be there, then her friends would meet her. Now, after four years in prison, she had no one.
She stubbed the cigarette out on the floor and put the letter back in its envelope. Her thoughts had changed in tone and had become aggressive. Why had no one come to meet her? Where were her brothers? And what about her friends? She knew that many of them despised her for leaving the organization and taking on the role of reformed terrorist, but she found it hard to believe that everyone felt like that, that all her friends from before felt like that, without exception. And Andoni? But she could expect nothing from him. He had turned out to be a weak man, a puppet incapable of rejecting the prevailing ethos of the places he frequented. “You’ve been a lousy friend, a bad friend who abandoned me whenever I had a problem,” said her letter, and it was true.
With her suitcase in one hand and the letter in the other, she left the self-service restaurant and hurried over to where she remembered seeing a postbox. The thoughts that had just gone through her head had made her furious: her family, her friends, society itself — which was no more than an extension of the family — had been a refuge during her childhood, a kind of carpet she could safely cross, without touching the icy floor, without hurting herself, as the poem said, on the sharp stones of the labyrinth; but then, as a person grew and matured, that carpet began to wear thin, to unravel, or worse still, to become viscous, a sticky coating that stuck to your feet and stopped you moving. And woe to anyone who rebelled against that viscous substance! Woe to anyone who renounced the law of the family!
No, people never like
those who keep their own faith.
No, people didn’t like you having your own opinions, they would set themselves up as judges, judges who judged and always condemned. Because that was one of the characteristics of puppets, their judgments always, inevitably, turned into condemnations. That is how they had behaved towards her. And still did. They had made her life impossible, first, because she had gone to live with her boyfriend, then, because, despite having married him, she had decided not to have children, and later, because she had got divorced; later still, it had been her involvement in politics and, lastly, her decision to leave the organization and get out of prison. Again and again, with every major decision she took, she found herself surrounded by that sticky substance secreted by those around her, decent, altruistic people all of them, all wanting to set her on the right path.
“Fuck off, Andoni,” she murmured as she posted the letter. At that moment, her friend’s name denoted a much wider territory.
The clock on the main wall of the station said three twenty. She rejected the idea of buying a Basque newspaper and, feeling calmer, relieved to have got rid of that letter, she went to the toilets next to the entrance to the metro. She would go to the toilet and then out to where the buses were. Although the atmosphere in the station was beginning to seem attractive to her — an intermediate landscape between prison and the outside world — her headache was getting worse and she needed some fresh air.
“I’m eighteen,” she read on the toilet door, while she was peeing, “and I’d like to get in touch with girls my own age. If you’re interested, just hang around here any Saturday at 7 p.m. Wear a white hat, just to make sure.”
It wasn’t the only message. The door was more like a small ads page. And there was no shortage of obscenities either, some even in verse:
I like my women
on their backs in their beds
with no knickers on
and their skirts over their heads.
When she came out of the toilet she saw a line of light-green telephones. She stopped in front of one, put her suitcase down on the ground and felt around in her jacket pockets. She put two hundred-peseta coins in the machine and dialled a number.
“Hello, Dad,” she said when she got through.
There was a silence at the other end.
“You’re out then,” said a voice grown feeble with the years.
“I’ll be home tonight. How are you?”
“Fine,” said the voice. Then there was a sob. Trying to get a grip on himself, he asked: “How are you getting here?”
“On the bus.”
She had to bite her bottom lip. Despite herself, she too felt like crying.
“I’ll call your brothers. I’ll tell them to pick you up at the bus station.”
“No, don’t tell them anything, Dad. I’ll either get a taxi or I’ll walk. Really, Dad, I’d prefer it like that.”
“I see. What you mean is that those people will be there to meet you with their flags and their noise,” said the voice.
“No, it’s not that.”
“You shouldn’t mix with people like that. I’ve told you before …”
“Dad, please,” she said firmly, though without raising her voice. The numbers on the little screen on the telephone were beginning to blink. Her money was running out. “Honestly, no one’s going to be there to meet me. Haven’t they told you? I’m a traitor now.”
“Your brothers hardly ever come here any more. And when they do, they don’t say anything. That’s what happens when you get old. No one …”
They were cut off. She swore and slammed down the receiver. It was always the same, always. Her good intentions never got her anywhere.
Annoyed by the failure of her phone conversation, she hurriedly left the station and went over to the buses. Before leaving the pavement and crossing the street, however, she stopped and decided to remain by the automatic doors until all the people crowding round the yellow and white bus had found their seats. She didn’t feel like talking to anyone. She didn’t want to run the risk of getting stuck with a talkative fellow passenger.
She took out a cigarette and looked up: the sky was still grey, but it had lost that hard look. It was no longer like a slab of marble, it was more like a dirty sheet, as dirty as the sheets on the bed she had slept in the night before.