Four Novels (23 page)

“You should go back to sleep,” Maria said. “I’ll close the gate.”

He lay down on his bed, went on looking at her. And as she moved away, all of a sudden he became bolder.

“You’re going for a ride, like that, alone? I could come along if you want. If you don’t take too long.” He laughed.

Maria also laughed. She could hear her laughter in the empty courtyard. The man didn’t insist.

Maria took her time. She lowered the top, fastened it. The man heard her. He cried out softly, already half asleep.

“The storm is over,” he said. ‘Tomorrow will be beautiful.”

“Thanks,” Maria said.

She got into the Rover, backed up, and drove to the gate without headlights. She idled. She had to wait for the next patrol which was due in two minutes. She could see the time.

There it came. The patrol stopped in front of the gate, was silent, and moved on. Tourists, they must have thought, leaving for Madrid at night to take advantage of the cool temperature.

When Maria opened the gate, the patrol had vanished. She had to get out of the Rover again, but this time, very fast. Maria got out, then closed the gate. Still this heat in her hair. Why be so scared? Why?

Once, the surface of a lake had been as calm as this night. The weather was sunny. Maria remembered the reflection of the sun on the lake and, suddenly, from the boat, through the calm water, you could see the depth of the lake shining also. The water was clear. Shapes appeared. Normal shapes, but raped by the sun.

Pierre was in the boat with Maria.

Maria got back into the Rover. The watchman hadn’t followed her. She looked at her watch. Dawn would be there in less than an hour and a half. Maria took the brandy bottle and drank. A long, enormous gulp. It burned so much that she had to close her eyes with pleasure.

Five

S
HE HAD TO ENTER
the street the patrol had just left. Their paths went in different directions at the end of that street. They had gone to the right, taking the last street in the town, the one along the wheat fields. She would move toward the main square, driving parallel to the front of the hotel. From the balcony she had been able to see clearly the layout of the town. It was possible. Two perpendicular streets bound Rodrigo Paestra’s roof.

She started very slowly, up to the turn, a few yards from the gate. Then she had to speed up. Only ten minutes left before the next patrol. Unless her calculations were wrong. If they were, it was probable that Maria would give Rodrigo Paestra to the town police two hours before dawn.

The Rover was making a dull noise, but it drowned out the sound of the patrol’s footsteps, dimmed by the mud. Still, she had to move forward. She reached the corner of the two streets from which you could see their whole length. They were still deserted. In just an hour people would be getting up to go to the fields. But these people were still asleep.

The noise of the engine didn’t wake anyone at that time of night.

Maria didn’t get out of the Rover. Could he hear her? She sang softly.

From where she was, she couldn’t see him. She could only see the sky and, in the sky, the clearly outlined mass of the chimney. The section of the roof on Maria’s side was plunged in the darkness of night.

She went on singing the song she had been singing earlier, when she was losing hope that he was there. And she went on singing as she got out of the Rover. She opened the back door, put away the numerous objects Judith always picked up wherever they stopped and then left
behind on the back seat. There were also newspapers. One of Pierre’s jackets. Claire’s scarf, even her own scarf, there. Newspapers, more newspapers.

There were about eight minutes left before the next patrol.

A shadow broke up the neat angle of the roofs against the clear sky. It was he. He had gone around the chimney. Maria kept singing. Her voice clutched at her throat. You can always sing. She couldn’t stop singing once she had started. He was there.

The warm wind was again blowing all over. It made the palm trees on the square cry out. It alone was moving through the deserted streets.

He had gone around the chimney, still wrapped in the black shroud in which she had seen him earlier. He was down on all fours. He had become a mass more shapeless than before, monstrously inapt. Ugly. He crawled over the tiles while Maria sang.

Probably six more minutes before the police would come by.

He must have been barefoot. He made no noise except a sound like the wind when, in its course, it blows against trees, houses, street corners.

He was slow. Did he know there was so little time left? Did he know? His legs, stiff after such a long wait, were clumsy. His face was exposed and his whole body, enormous, on the ridge of the roof, was spread out like an animal in a butcher’s stall. With both hands, while singing, Maria signaled him to roll over, down the slope of the roof. And then she pointed to the Rover. Showing him that he would, at the end of his fall, land in the Rover. She sang faster, still faster, more and more softly. The wall was blind for twenty yards on this side of the town. Nobody could hear Maria.

He was doing it. He got ready to do it, his legs raised at first and then falling down, and he was doing it. Again his face had disappeared in the black shroud and a bundle of rags worn by time, its color nondescript like soot, moved toward Maria.

Still no one in the streets. He now rolled cleverly, trying not to make the tiles of the roof squeak under him. Maria made more noise with the engine. She was still singing, not realizing that she was singing for nothing. He was there, he was coming, he was getting there. She sang.

He had covered a yard. She was still singing, still the same song. Very softly. Another yard covered. He had covered three yards. In the street, there still was no one, not even the watchman who must have gone back to sleep.

A patrol should have left the square and gone northward, in the direction of the Hotel Principal. That was their route. Voices were coming from there, loud at first, then becoming dimmer. There were probably four minutes left before these voices would burst out at the end of the street alongside the hotel. Rodrigo Paestra had to cover one more yard to reach Maria.

Just as she thought her calculations were wrong because, before the four minutes were up, steps were already echoing that would turn up in the street alongside the hotel balconies, just as she thought that she wasn’t hearing right, that it was impossible, Rodrigo Paestra must have thought so too because he covered the one yard that was left and fell into the Rover, rolling more quickly, flexible, his body like a spring. He had hurled himself forward. He had fallen into the Rover. A bundle of soft, black laundry had fallen into the Rover.

That was it. Just as Maria started, the patrol must have turned into the street. He had fallen on the seat. And he must have rolled onto the floor. Nothing moved. And yet he was there, close to her, on the floor, wrapped in his blanket.

A window lit up. Someone shouted.

Whistles rang out through the town, taking turns endlessly. Maria was approaching the main square. When he had fallen from the roof, the gutter had broken under his weight and had made a catastrophic noise, an obscene racket. One window lit up? Yes. Two, three windows lit up. Things crying out. Doors of the night.

Was it the warm wind that had just risen? Was it Rodrigo Paestra? The whistling went on. The patrol on the hotel street had sounded the alarm. But it hadn’t seen the Rover taking off fifty yards away, in another street. The wind had carried its noise toward the fields. Those squares of light over the countryside were windows. The electricity still wasn’t working and the windows were slow to light up. After making a turn, Maria was about a hundred yards from where the police must have been searching the roofs.

A patrol was coming toward her on the double. She stopped. The patrol slowed down in front of her, looked at the empty car and went on. It stopped further on, under a window, and called out. No one answered. It went on to the end of the street.

She had to go more slowly. Why would the Rover have been where the gutter was still vibrating, broken, in the wind? The black Rover
belonged to a guest at the hotel, a guest who was free, alone, disturbed by this difficult night. What should Maria be afraid of?

Was she no longer afraid? Her fear had practically disappeared. It had left only a fresh, just matured, flowering memory of what it had been. Less than a minute had gone by. Fear became as inconceivable as the heart’s jumbled adolescence.

Maria had to make up her mind to cross the square. She did it. She knew now that behind her nothing could be seen of Rodrigo Paestra. The seat was empty. It was impossible to leave the town without crossing the square, where the two roads leading out of the town started, one going to Madrid, the other to Barcelona and France.

At that time of night, only one car, it had to start at some point, was driving toward Madrid. The first tourist, people would say.

About twenty policemen were standing opposite the café where Maria had had her manzanillas the day before. They were listening to the whistles, were answering, waiting for orders to move on. One of them stopped Maria.

“Where are you going?”

He looked at the empty car, was reassured, smiled at her.

“I’m staying at the hotel. We didn’t get a room and I can’t sleep,” she added, “with all the noise you’re making. I’m going for a ride. What’s going on?”

Did he believe her? Yes, he looked at her carefully, then glanced away from her and pointed toward the hotel, in the distance. He explained: “They must have found Rodrigo Paestra on a roof, but I am not sure.”

Maria turned around. Spotlights swept the rooftops just before the hotel. The policeman said nothing else.

She started off slowly. The road to Madrid was right opposite her. You had to turn around a clump of palmettos. She remembered very clearly that it was there, the road to Madrid. There couldn’t be any doubt.

The engine of the car worked smoothly. Claire’s black Rover took off, then moved in the direction Maria wanted, toward Madrid. Maria was at the wheel and, carefully and methodically, she drove around the square. The whistling went on in the part of town where the gutter was still yelping. A jackal. The young policeman, puzzled and smiling, watched Maria drive away. She was driving around him, around the square. Was she smiling at him? She would never know. She drove into
the main street, the westward extension of the hotel street. She didn’t look whether any balconies, adjacent to corridors she knew, were lit up.

It was the road to Madrid. The biggest road in Spain. Straight ahead, monumental.

True, this was still the town. One patrol, two patrols, empty-handed, saw and looked at the black Rover with foreign license plates which was moving toward Madrid so early in the day. But the recent storm, and this sudden youthfulness of the night, made several of them smile.

One called out to the woman who was driving alone.

There were two garages. And then some kind of a shop, quite large, and isolated. And then very small houses. Maria no longer knew what time it was. It was just any time before dawn. But dawn wasn’t there yet. It needed its usual amount of time to get there. It wasn’t there yet.

After the houses, the shacks, there were the wheat fields. And nothing but wheat under the blue light. Blue was the wheat. It went on and on. Maria was driving slowly, but moving ahead. At some point in the night, at a turn, she saw a sign, clearly lit up by her headlights, and noticed that she was eight miles out of the town she had just left, Rodrigo Paestra’s town.

She went on, up to a dirt road that looked dark next to the light wheat field. She turned into it, went on for about a third of a mile, and stopped. On both sides of this road there was the same wheat as before, and the night was just as full. There was no village in sight. And there was total silence as soon as Maria turned off the engine.

When Maria turned around, Rodrigo Paestra was getting out of his shroud.

He sat down on the back seat and looked around him. His face looked blurred in the blue light of the night.

If there were birds in this plain, they were probably still sleeping in the sodden clay, between the blades of wheat.

Maria took some cigarettes out of her pocket. She pulled one out and handed it to him. He pounced on it and when she lit it for him she noticed that Rodrigo Paestra was shivering with cold. He smoked the cigarette with both hands so as not to let it fall. It is cold in Spain, on stormy nights, an hour before dawn.

He was smoking.

He hadn’t looked at this woman.

But she was looking at him. His name is Rodrigo Paestra. While looking at the wheat, she could see him.

His hair was glued to his scalp. His clothes were stuck to his body as if he had drowned. He probably was tall and robust. Was he about thirty? He was still smoking. What was he looking at? The cigarette. Most likely, as he looked at it, his eyes were black.

Maria unfolded the blanket next to her and held it out to him. He took it and put it on the back seat. He hadn’t understood. He was smoking again. Then he looked at both sides of the car. He was the first to speak.

“Where are we?”

“The road to Madrid.”

He didn’t say anything else. Maria didn’t either. She turned again, facing the windshield. They were both smoking. He finished first. She gave him another one. He was still shaking. In the light of the match, his expression was vacant, reduced to his concentrating on not shaking.

“Where do you want to go?” Maria asked.

He didn’t answer immediately. He was probably looking at her for the first time, from very far away, without caring. Anyway, this was a glance from him. Maria didn’t see his eyes, but she saw his glance as clearly as in broad daylight.

“I don’t know,” Rodrigo Paestra said.

Again Maria turned to the front. Then, not being able to bear it, she turned back to face him. She intensely wanted to look at him. The haggard expression he had had when he had looked at her had vanished. There were only his eyes now. And, over his eyes, the eyelids opening automatically whenever he raised his cigarette to his mouth. Nothing. Rodrigo Paestra had no strength left except to smoke. Why had he followed Maria this far? Probably just to be nice, a last polite gesture. Someone calls you and you answer. What was Rodrigo Paestra now? Maria devoured him with her eyes, devoured with her eyes this living prodigy, this black flower which had bloomed that night in the licentiousness of love.