“So what do you say, does that 5.35 per cent seem a lot to you or a little?”
“Said like that, it doesn’t seem very much at all. But it probably is a lot.”
“It sounds like a rate of commission,” said Antonia, “and since commission is normally about 10 per cent, 5.35 per cent doesn’t seem bad at all.”
Margarita smiled at Antonia’s remark and continued her calculations.
“Of course, it depends how you look at it. For example, if you calculate the time in hours, the commission would come to thirty thousand hours. Imagine the number of films, meals in restaurants, walks in the country or at the beach, all the trips, all the …”
“All the hours of work!” Antonia interrupted her. “Out there, I used to work ten hours a day in a canning factory. Those hours don’t count. They’re no loss. On the contrary.”
Antonia had said all this very seriously, but Margarita burst out laughing. She was happy. That day, the game was going well.
“All right, then, I agree to subtract all the dreary hours spent working. So, at ten hours a day, assuming I’ve got my sums right, your stay in prison will mean a loss of only fifteen thousand hours, good hours, real hours.”
“You can take away the hours spent asleep as well. Sleep is the same anywhere. I’m sure there are people living in palaces who sleep worse than I do here.”
“You’re very inspired today, Antonia. You’re absolutely right. Let’s subtract those hours too,” agreed Margarita. Then she did her calculations. “Eight hours of sleep a day means subtracting twelve thousand hours. Therefore, our beloved colleague here has lost three thousand hours in prison. Only three thousand real hours.”
“There’s something else too, Margarita. There are the good times that we spend in prison. Good times are good times wherever you are.”
“You’re right. We’re having an excellent time right now. And during these years we’ve had many moments like this. I think we could lower the number of wasted hours to fifteen hundred.”
“I think it should be lower still. You have to bear in mind all the bad times you have outside. Bad times are the same everywhere.”
“You’re so logical, Antonia. Well, if we err on the low side, in a period of four years you might have about fifteen hundred bad hours. Therefore, if we take away those fifteen hundred hours, the result is zero.”
Margarita laughed again, then added:
“Congratulations. You’re about to leave prison without ever having been here. It’s a shame that mine and Antonia’s cases are more serious. It’s harder to calculate away our twenty per cent, isn’t that right, Antonia?”
“Yes, we’re paying way too much commission.”
The bus had just reached the top of a long hill from which you could look out on a vast expanse of land. By then, they had left behind them the second city, Barcelona’s other side, and now there were mainly vineyards: young vineyards, bright green, separated by lines of cypress trees, with a house here and another further off, far from the motorway. Nevertheless — as she realized when she took a more careful look at what she could see from her window — the victory of the country over the city was still not complete: from time to time, she would see a grimy building, a warehouse perhaps, or a run-down factory, like a tick clinging to the skin.
There was an empty space of about two feet between the roof of the bus and the plastic screen around the driver’s seat. The bus was now going down the hill and a strip of blue sky and the red and green lights of a toll station suddenly appeared in that space. Almost simultaneously, as if in sympathy, the video screen filled with coloured stripes.
The bus rumbled across the asphalt surface of the toll station. Shortly afterwards, when the bus continued on its way and drove underneath the archway linking the toll booths, she had the feeling that she was crossing a frontier and that she was finally leaving behind her a part of her life that had lasted exactly three years, ten months and twenty-seven days. Or, rather, twenty-eight days, because she had to include in the accounts the time between leaving prison and starting the journey.
She closed her English notebook and put on the headphones that came in the little red box. The first three channels were broadcasting orchestral music, which was supposed to be relaxing; the fourth was also devoted to music, but interspersed with sports reports; the fifth, connected to the video, reproduced in words the title being shown on the screen at that precise moment. The film they were going to show was called Eve and the Serpent and had been passed by the censor.
“The serpent is the most evil of all the creatures in God’s creation,” she heard a voice intoning through the headphones. On the screen, next to the credits, was a real snake.
The sombre soundtrack wrapped around the words that followed:
“The serpent said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.”
She took off the headphones and finished drinking her coffee, staring at the backs of the two nuns, whose seats were slightly ahead of hers. If there was any truth in the ironic remark the driver had made before they left Barcelona — he had said that the two nuns would really love the film — they were in for a few rather shocking scenes.
She looked out of the window. The grey covering the sky was becoming thinner and there were more and more patches of blue, especially along the edges, in the distance. In the centre, where the sun was hiding, the grey was taking on yellowish tones as if the sky over there were made of quartz.
The bus was now speeding along the motorway in the best possible direction, towards the bluest part of the horizon. Besides, the purr of the engine had a calming effect, much more so than the orchestral music provided through the headphones, and she thought — suddenly, as if it were a revelation — that she felt well, very well, in harmony with things, contented with what she was hearing and with what she was seeing, with the taste of coffee in her mouth and the smell of her favourite cigarette in the air, as she sat, almost curled up, in that particular corner of the bus, which, for some reason, perhaps because they didn’t want to breathe in other people’s smoke, no other passenger chose to visit. In fact, as she had noticed already on a couple of occasions, the passengers on the upper deck preferred the hostess to bring them coffee or a drink in their seat. All the better for her; she just hoped it would remain like that for the rest of the trip.
She picked up a book from the pile she had on the table, and looked for a part she had underlined, a quotation from the sculptor Oteiza which she knew almost by heart. It seemed to her that the wellbeing she felt at that moment had a lot to do with what he was describing there, and she wanted to read it again. She needed the books, or rather the people behind the books, to give her a sense of security and to confirm what she was feeling.
When I was a child in Orio, where I was born, my grandfather used to take us for walks along the beach. I felt terribly drawn to the big hollows scooped out in the part farthest from the sea. I used to lie down and hide in one of them and look up at the great expanse of sky above me, whilst everything else around me disappeared. I felt utterly protected. But what did I need protecting from? As children and ever afterwards, we feel our existence to be nothing, that it is defined for us by a negative circle of things, feelings, limitations, in whose centre, in our own heart, we sense our fear — the supreme denial — of death. My experience as a child lying in that hollow in the sand was that of being in flight from my small nothingness to the great nothingness of the sky into which I would penetrate, in order to escape, in the hope of salvation.