She was just about to put the picture away again, when she realized that there was something written on the back. She read it slowly, trying to decipher what it said. It was a poem. A poem written in Italian.
Dalle più alte stelle
discende uno splendore
che’l desir tira a quelle
e che si chiama amore.
She looked up from the last word in the poem and glanced out of the window. As they left Barcelona behind them, a second city was emerging, its other half, its sinister underbelly. There, the ground on which the new, freshly painted buildings stood seemed scorched; the grey factories seemed exhausted, oppressed by the weight of the world. The hills, though, were green and pretty, crowded with houses, doubtless the refuge of the people in charge of the running of that second city.
The bus drove over the bridge linking two of those hills and she fixed her gaze on the muddy river flowing down below. The banks were full of seagulls which, oblivious to the roar of traffic, appeared to be scavenging for rubbish; there must have been about a hundred of them, possibly two hundred. One of them took flight and rose rapidly until it was lost against the sky. Over there, the sky was the same colour as the seagull, half grey and half white.
“You should leave your suitcase by your seat. Other passengers have a right to sit here too, you know,” said the hostess, placing before her a tray with coffee, a spoon, a paper serviette and a sachet of sugar.
“I’m perfectly well aware of that. I know you’re not supposed to leave suitcases on the table,” she replied, picking up the plastic cup and placing it in one of the round holes in the table.
She put the picture back in the suitcase, closed the case and placed it on the floor.
“I didn’t mean to offend you,” said the hostess without a glimmer of emotion. “Do you want any headphones?” she asked, showing her a little red box.
“What are they for? For the film?”
“One of the channels is for the video. The others are for listening to music. Do you want them?”
She nodded and held out her hand for the red box.
“That’s two hundred pesetas,” said the hostess, seeing that she made no move to reach for her purse.
“I’m sorry. I thought they were included in the price of the ticket.”
She took her purse out of her jacket pocket and held it very close to her chest as she opened it. She didn’t want the hostess to know how little money she had. She only had one note and a few coins. And that was the worst thing — the idea came to her suddenly, like a revelation, the revelation of something that she already knew, but which she had relegated to a far corner of her mind — that this money was nearly all she had. Yes, money was going to be a problem. Because the real problem, the number one problem, the problem that encompassed all other problems, was always money. What ailed a madman was not his madness, but the fact that his madness stopped him earning any money. And the same could be said of someone who was ill or of someone like her, who had just got out of prison.
“Sorry, with the coffee that’s three hundred,” said the hostess, taking the coins she gave her, but keeping her hand open. She seemed tense.
She hurriedly gave her the extra money and the hostess smiled mechanically and disappeared behind the plastic curtain that separated the driver’s area from the rest of the lower deck. Was she really an employee of the bus company? That suspicion — that fear — again opened up a path inside her, crept in through the interstices, like a current of air, and she felt suddenly afraid of finding herself in the middle of one of those stories people were always telling in prison, about the inmate who is released, but followed by the police and eventually picked up again, only to end up even worse off than before.
She relaxed her shoulders and lit a cigarette. She shouldn’t be afraid. Regardless of whether the police were following her, regardless of whether her suspicions were correct, she had no reason to worry. She wasn’t going to commit a crime. Nor was she going to become paranoid. The books would help her, her notebooks would help her. Just as they had in prison.
She picked up one of the notebooks that she had left on the table; it was the one containing her English exercises. She opened it at random and read a little poem that Margarita had used at the start of her classes to help her students — two prostitutes, as well as Antonia and herself — to memorize the names of the days of the week in English:
Solomon Grundy
born on Monday,
christened on Tuesday,
married on Wednesday,
took ill on Thursday,
worse on Friday,
died on Saturday,
buried on Sunday,
and that was the end of Solomon Grundy.
Outside, the landscape was gradually shrugging off the weight of the city and taking on its usual appearance: farm buildings, trees, birds. Three crows, sitting on a cable running parallel to the motorway, had turned their backs on the traffic and seemed absorbed in their thoughts. When she looked at them, the birds flew off.
“The life of Solomon Grundy was very short. Time flies like a bird. Time flies as the arrow does,” she read, returning to the notebook.
Nothing existed in a pure state. That English notebook was not just an English notebook. It was also her diary and it perfectly reflected her different states of mind.
“Time is a wonderful thing. We must not use it up staying in prison.”
She took a sip of coffee and then, with the pen that she kept in her jacket pocket, she crossed out a word and amended the phrase she had just read.
“Time is a wonderful thing. We must not waste it staying in prison,” she read. That change seemed to her to improve the sentence.
She inhaled the smoke from her cigarette and read through some of the other things written in the notebook. She paused at a page full of numbers. It wasn’t her writing, but Margarita’s.
More memories surfaced in her mind.
“You’ve been here three years, ten months and twenty days. If you leave here next Tuesday, that will be a total of three years, ten months and twenty-seven days,” Margarita had said to her, writing down the numbers in the notebook. Her memory took her back to her prison cell, after the bell for silence, the time when the prisoners, who were always very tired by then — tired of being cooped up within four walls, tired of thinking, tired of shouting — would simply sit smoking and watching the smoke from their cigarettes unravel, or watching as it was carried off by some draught, some current of air or, perhaps, why not, by a breeze from the sea. Because the sea — the prisoners in the end completely forgot this — was very close to the prison.
“So,” Margarita went on, “you’ve spent forty-seven months in here. If you bear in mind that the average life expectancy of the female population is now seventy-four, that is, eight hundred and eighty-eight months, you have spent 5.35 per cent of your life in prison. Does that seem a lot or a little?”
Margarita liked to play these cruel games, especially during those night-time conversations.
“Which would you prefer? For the lover you had before you came here to go off with another woman, or for him to die in an accident? And another thing, if the devil or your fairy godmother, or both of them together, gave you one wish, just one, what would you ask for? To leave prison or to have a friend of yours who has died come back to life again?”
At first, she had distrusted Margarita and had even thought of asking to change cells because they seemed so ill-matched. What sort of person was she, that woman who talked all the time and revelled in the most morbid thoughts? At the time, the rumour going around the prison — that Margarita had kidnapped a child in order to revenge herself on a man — didn’t seem that hard to believe. But after a while, like someone who crosses a frontier and gradually grows used to the climate and the customs of a new country, she began to feel happy in her company. As a cellmate, Margarita was priceless. She was an intelligent, slightly eccentric woman who talked a lot, but who almost always — perhaps because she had worked in the theatre — spoke in different voices, like someone constantly changing roles or like someone who, because of their manic nature, cannot control the ups and downs of their moods.