So I change gears and accelerate.
I crossed paths with oncoming cars that blinded me; I passed a truck in an unnecessarily risky way, perhaps; I went through a subdivision of Mexican-Mission-style houses at sixty miles per hour; and finally, far ahead, I saw the red taillights I was after. I caught up to make sure it was she: she never went over thirty-five miles per hour, she was in no hurry, she wasn’t escaping, and she went so slowly I had trouble not letting her feel I was breathing down her neck and keeping an eye on her from a distance, following her. She could have taken me to the ends of the earth; suddenly I wasn’t tired anymore, I wasn’t hungry; all I needed was the old protected feeling of the trees wrapped and half hidden by the spiderweb fog, while I was forced to drive with my left wheel on the center strip, but I was generally calm, curious without impatience, maybe resigned — waiting for the spider.
We go on like this for half an hour. I’m not surprised when I lose sight of her around two or three curves, but then on a downslope — where she should appear again — she’s not there, not even if I push on the accelerator, and yet she should have been no more than three hundred yards ahead of me. I stop short, turn around, and with my heart in my throat start driving again in the opposite direction, and find her immediately: she has ended up in a field — she went off the road at thirty-five miles per hour, if such a thing is possible — her front wheels sunk in an irrigation ditch, the nose of the car pointed down like that of an animal drinking.
I pull over, get out, sink into the wet grass as I reach the Ka, walk around it, and glimpse the body inside lying on its side across the passenger seat, and in the windshield I find a blossom of shattered crystals. When I open the door she startles, as if I’ve woken her, but she doesn’t get up, she groans weakly; the interior light is still working, and it illuminates her bloody face, the dirty seats, the sticky black blood everywhere. “You must always wear a seat belt,” I tell her, paternally, absurdly. I drag her out unceremoniously, disregarding her protests, and when I have her in my arms, perhaps overwhelmed by the feeling of a woman against me, I lose my strength, and I let her slide through my hands and fall into the mud. Seen from above, so fragile and defenseless, she looks to me as if she couldn’t hurt a fly.
I searched for a jacket or a coat in her car, but there was nothing, not even a purse; she wore only a fitted blue zip-up sweater, and it was unseasonably cold. I helped her to my car, I made her sit in it, I brushed against her breast once as I fastened her belt, and before I could think twice I pretended to make an adjustment and brushed against it again. As I drove I looked at her legs: her stockings were torn at the knees, and the unraveling runs glowed in the half-light and pointed straight up like arrows aiming under her skirt of lightweight wool. I couldn’t shake an image of my head sunk between her thighs.
I took her to the emergency room, where they put her on a gurney, and in the icy fluorescent light she suddenly became a patient, the victim of an accident, with bloody scratches visible through her tattered stockings. The nurse asked me to stay, saying he would be right back to talk to me, and I nodded; I squeezed the hand of the woman, who had been whimpering and moaning all the way there, incoherent rambling that offered no clue to her identity. I told her, “You’ll see — everything will be all right.” The nurse agreed. As soon as they disappeared into the warren of the clinic, I walked to the exit, looking neither right nor left, and took a few indecisive steps outside. No one came running after to stop me, so I got into the E270 and took off.
Another empty parking lot. Without the cars, all that remains are the white lines on the pavement: what purpose do they serve? Where has everyone gone tonight — why don’t they stay put, in the places destiny has reserved for them? When you’ve found a niche, dug a hideout, why go elsewhere?
Later, in a half-waking nightmare, I saw the white grid printed on my retina; the unused, useless parking lot made me dizzy, as if it were a net hanging in space; standing in the middle of the lot, I nearly got caught in it, condemned, dead, hooked like a fish, the abandoned herringbone, the deboned fish already digested and passed along from the stomach of the parking lot to the twisted intestine of the roadways, and then out the exit: the garage.
I didn’t see her again.
The house jumped out at you suddenly after you drove up an avenue of plane trees that had been pruned back by a sadist but were still thick with large, soft leaves that created an oppressive tunnel. You burst out into the light at the foot of a knoll, and up there you saw yellow walls and green shutters, and for a moment your eye wanted to replace the straight lines and square frames and 1930s architecture with something older — volutes and flourishes, or columns and tympanums; you expected to find something from the 1800s when you drove across the crackling gravel and raised your eyes to gaze into the midst of all that boxwood and ivy and roses.
Every homeowner is free to treat his gravel as he pleases; I’ve seen people who will walk on it only in slippers, I’ve seen red gravel shipped in from Australian quarries, carefully polished blond gravel from Monument Valley, black pebbles from the Indian Ocean: I’ve seen and I respect gravel that belongs to people who are respectable and even likable. So I immediately stopped the car in front of the garage (or maybe it was a greenhouse) and told Witold that it would be better for us to walk the last few yards on foot, and even though it was a short distance and the hill wasn’t steep, I was breathless when I got to the entry and I had to sit on the lip of an enormous terra-cotta planter, which held a ton of inert soil and a faded little lemon tree.
Witold frowned at my round belly and the two dark eyes of sweat that had appeared on my gray T-shirt. He said that, in his opinion, there was no one home. The shutters were closed, but it was exceptionally warm for 11:30 on a morning in late March, so maybe the owners had pulled them shut in order to protect some antique upholstery. “Maybe they’re pulled shut so the fabric on the sofas won’t fade,” I said, and I went to the dark green door. There was no bell or buzzer, and no knocker or lion’s-mouth ring to grab. For a moment I was tempted to shout for someone, but actually I wasn’t unhappy to have a chance to look around the place by myself, and maybe leave without ever getting in touch. Witold had ventured around the corner to take a peek, and I gestured to him to continue on around the house; on the other side, I expected, we would find the place for the new garden that had been described to me on the phone.
From the full sun of the façade we pass into the shadow behind, walking across a rectangular terrace that extends about twenty yards out from the house, where two great umbrellas of white sunshade fabric, tightly shut, sorrowfully announce that we’re here in the wrong season. We stand at the balustrade of concrete columns and study the terrain that stretches across an acre or so. The first fifty yards slope down slightly, then it’s flat for thirty or forty yards, and it’s closed off at the far end by another hill that rears up steeply. All around are woods of chestnut and hornbeam trees. It looks like the owners changed their minds twenty times without ever clearing away the rubble of their earlier mistakes. There are traces of an unpretentious old garden, two high walls of boxwood, a few cotoneaster and holly hedges (at such a distance, I might be guessing wrong: I’d have to go down and check what they are). Witold says, “My soul rejoices before such beauty.” It’s a riddle, but I don’t feel like trying to solve it. I make no comment. He adds that a tractor will be needed to flatten the site. I nod.