Abdel rose from his chair and walked over to where I was standing. One hand on my back, he guided me into the light and addressed the people gathered there.
“This is Amy,” he said. “She’s a good friend.” His French was simple, as if it was me he was talking to. As if he wanted to make sure I understood. “She helped me when I needed help. She was kind to me.”
There were murmurs of welcome, and people made room for me. A plate of dates and nuts was placed in front of me. Fruit juice was poured into a paper cup.
After fifteen minutes, Abdel spoke into my ear. “We can leave now.”
He led me away from the table and off along the street.
“Is that your family?” I asked.
He nodded. “An uncle and some cousins.”
The moment we turned the corner, he reached for me and pulled me close. His mouth tasted of the pear juice he had been drinking.
“In here,” he said.
I followed him through a gap in the wall, over a pile of rubble, and on into a building that was still under construction. We climbed bare concrete stairs. The air felt cooler. On the top floor we came out into a spacious room. There was no glass in the windows, and I leaned on the sill, looking out over the low rooftops to the east. A strip of black sea showed. There were pinpricks of light where a ship lay anchored.
He was standing behind me, close to me, his breath against my neck. I turned to face him. After kissing me, he knelt on the floor, undid my jeans, and slowly pulled them down. I pushed both my hands into his hair. He kissed the inside of my thighs. My breathing thickened, and I was trembling. The muscles in my legs lost all their strength. I don’t think I could have walked. When he stood up, I unzipped his trousers and slid one hand inside. He maneuvered me away from him. Folded me over the sill. I felt the part of me that might have questioned what I was doing fly off into the night, fast as a flung stone. That part of me would know nothing. Forget it was ever there. The rest of me shook as if with cold.
I glanced over my shoulder. “Do you have something?”
His hand opened. The glint of silver foil.
“Let me do it,” I said.
I tore the packet open, then dropped to my knees in front of him, taking him in my mouth before unrolling the condom. He drew the air in past his teeth, his stomach hollowing. I stood up again and bent over the sill. A mound of gravel three floors down, dim light on a puddle. He leaned past my shoulder. Found my mouth with his. My head twisted to the right, I felt him enter me. Still behind me, he reached for my breasts. I closed my eyes, then gasped as he pushed deeper. His breathing speeded up. I had to bite my forearm to keep from crying out.
Later, when he had finished, I opened my eyes and saw that I was high above the ground. TV aerials on rooftops, the dark ribbon of the sea. A cargo boat at anchor. I had forgotten where I was, and even though my eyes were open the view still seemed unreal. What was I doing in this place?
We stood at an angle to each other, straightening our clothes. His eyes were lowered, his expression serious.
“One day, this will be a bedroom,” I said. “People will make love here.” I looked around, trying to imagine it. A carpet, curtains. Wallpaper. “We were the first, though.”
I smiled at him, and he smiled back, but I had the feeling he wasn’t sure what I was saying. I glanced at my watch. Half past eleven. If I left now, I could catch the metro.
“I have to go,” I said.
He led me back down the stairs. My legs still felt unsteady. I wondered who would buy the place. Would they ever guess what had happened in their home while it was being built?
Out on the street we kissed again. It was hard to stop.
At last, I broke away and looked back up the road. He seemed to understand that I might find it embarrassing to walk past his family. He told me of another route to the station. It was quicker, he said. “Shall I walk with you?”
I shook my head. “There’s no need. Really.”
We said goodbye.
There was a shift in the air, and I thought I could smell the seashore. Fish heads, engine oil. Rust. I was tired suddenly, and longed to be back in my apartment.
I had been aware of traffic in the distance—the Ronda Litoral wasn’t far away—but now there was another noise, closer and more urgent. The vicious insect buzzing of a two-stroke motorbike. When I looked round, I saw nothing except a blinding headlight, the figure of a rider behind it, shadowy and indistinct. My shoulder jerked, as if I had been hit by a solid, padded weight. The force of it knocked me off my feet. Only when I sat up in the gutter did I realize my bag was gone.
“Fuck,” I muttered.
The bike’s engine had died away, and I was alone. The night was warm and brackish, as before. Apartment buildings showed fewer lights. My shoulder stung and throbbed, but I didn’t think anything was broken.
I climbed shakily to my feet, then pulled my T-shirt away from my body and looked inside. A graze curved past my right breast and under my armpit where the strap had resisted for a second before it snapped. The whole thing had happened so fast. All I could remember was the rapidly expanding glare of the headlight and the snarl of the engine, and then the blow to my shoulder. I couldn’t have described the make of the motorbike. I couldn’t even have described the color. I had no memory of a license plate. How many assailants had there been? One—or two? I couldn’t have said. And now that I glanced round I saw that I was only a couple of steps from safety—for there, lit with a faint white glow, was the escalator that led down into Fondo metro station.
I checked the pockets of my jeans. Luckily, I still had my phone. But I had nothing else. No credit cards, no keys. Still, the phone was something.
I called Mar and told her I’d been mugged.
Alarm rushed into her voice. “Are you all right?”
I said I was. I had no money, though, and no way of getting home. I asked if she could come and pick me up. There was a silence on the other end.
“I’m sorry to ruin your evening.”
“No, no, it’s fine,” she said. “I was thinking of leaving anyway.”
“Are you all right to drive?”
“I only had one beer. Where are you?”
“Fondo.”
“Where?”
“I’m outside the Fondo metro station. It’s in the northeast of the city. Sant Andreu.”
Another silence.
“That’s going to take me a while,” she said.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll wait.”
I sat on a bench near the main entrance. I could always have walked back to where Abdel lived—I was sure he would have helped—but it was too late for that now. I had asked Mar to come. The Rambla del Fondo stretched away into the distance, its central reservation planted with trees. There was also a red M on a pole, signaling a second entrance. The sky above me was smothered with clouds. It looked marbled, like the endpaper from some nineteenth-century book.
I had been waiting for about an hour when a car pulled up nearby. Behind the wheel was a man in his forties, his tie loosened, his shirtsleeves rolled. The window on the driver’s side slid down. He asked me if I needed a lift somewhere.
“My daughter’s picking me up,” I said. “She should be here any minute. But thank you.”
“Well, all right. If you’re sure…” He continued to look at me, concern in his eyes, then he shifted into gear and drove away.
Not long afterwards, I saw my own car approaching, Mar’s face in the windscreen.
Once inside, I put my arms round her. “Thanks so much for coming.” She had the air-conditioning on, and her skin and hair felt cool.
Sitting back, I saw she had a strange, stubborn look I recognized from when she was younger. It would appear when I did something she didn’t associate with me. When I seemed to be acting out of character. It was a
s if she was determined to hold on to some idea she had of me and ignore all evidence to the contrary, even if it was happening right in front of her eyes. Her gaze shifted from my face to what lay beyond me—the utilitarian apartment blocks, the graffiti, the streetlamps’ brownish-yellow light.
“You really have a friend out here?” She sounded, in that moment, exactly like her father.
“I have all kinds of friends,” I said. “Some aren’t as well-off as others.”
She appeared to think about this. Politically, of course, she couldn’t disapprove. Still, it had come as a surprise to her. It’s only natural, perhaps, for children to believe their parents lead narrow lives. It originates in the idea they have of you, that you’re someone who can be predicted, counted on—someone safe. Perhaps it’s even a necessary belief, since it allows them to rebel against you. Be dangerous themselves.
“So they took your bag?” she said.
“Yes.”
“You’re not hurt, though.”
“No. I was lucky, wasn’t I?” I put my hand on her shoulder, then stroked her hair. “I’m sorry if you were worried. I didn’t mean to worry you.”
“You should be more careful.”
She glanced in her rearview mirror, then pulled away from the curb. She didn’t seem to mind that her evening had been interrupted. If she was upset or angry, it was because I’d got into trouble. Your mother wasn’t supposed to be somebody who needed help. Your mother was the one who came to the rescue. Everything was the wrong way round.
It was only later, as we passed through the tunnel beneath Plaça d’Alfonso Comín, that I wondered if she had smelled Abdel on me when I got into the car and gave her a hug. Though I hadn’t lied exactly, maybe she had seen through my talk of “a friend.” Was that the real reason why her face had taken on that stubborn look?
* * *
—
I WOKE AT SEVEN-THIRTY, after only three or four hours’ sleep, and went into the kitchen. Not wanting to disturb Mar, I left the radio off and moved quietly, on bare feet. I drank my coffee on the terrace, then watered the geraniums. The sun was already coloring the tops of nearby buildings. The yellow awning on a penthouse terrace glowed. To the south and high up there was a long, thin cloud that was semitransparent. It looked as if a huge hand had idly dragged a piece of white chalk across the blue.
Later, as I pulled on some clothes, I noticed that the self-inflicted bite mark on my arm had almost faded. I remembered the view from that unfinished house—the jumbled rooftops and aerials, the anchored boat—and an echo of that snatched pleasure went through me like a shudder. I took Mar’s keys, leaving her a note, then let myself out of the apartment.
The far end of my street was an inch deep in pale gray dust, like the surface of the moon. Some bags of cement must have fallen off the back of a truck during the night. I crossed Avinguda Foix and climbed a slope that led past the dog park. Hector was standing on the beige dirt in a red T-shirt, with his arms folded, while Rocky cocked his leg against a tree. I waved at him, and he waved back, his glasses flashing in the morning light.
The local police station stood among palm trees and shrubbery on the top of a small hill. With its fawn-colored stucco facade and its ornamental battlements, the building looked like a castle in a fairy tale, and when Mar was young the two of us would make up stories about it. The chief of the Guardia Urbana was a man called Grau. He had gaps between his teeth and a foul temper—he was always shouting and slamming doors—so we cast him in the role of ogre. Mar shocked me by suggesting that he ate the people he arrested. The undergrowth that surrounded the police station was home to a number of stray cats. The old woman who came twice a day to feed them was almost as feral as they were. We would often see her, hunched over, muttering. She was obviously a witch, Mar told me. If so, I said, perhaps she had cast a spell over the chief of police. He might appear to be an ogre, but it would only take one kiss to turn him back into a handsome prince. Well, I’m not kissing him, was Mar’s response.
That morning, I was interviewed by a broad-shouldered officer with a shaved head. I knew I had no chance of seeing my bag again, I told him, but I thought I should report the incident all the same. He listened without interrupting, making occasional notes on the pad that lay in front of him. When I mentioned Sant Andreu, his head lifted. I continued with my account—how late it was, the empty road, a motorbike that came from nowhere…
“Lucky the strap broke,” he said, “otherwise you might have been dragged.” He looked at me steadily. “Were you hurt?”
“Not really. Just a graze.”
I began to list the contents of my bag, then I stopped. I had just realized that I had lost the thin gold ring Pol had bought for me while we were traveling in Crete. This was in the mid-eighties, when we were still in love, my daughter not yet gathering inside me. I remembered the gleam of the gold, so soft and yellow. Almost buttery. Its coolness as it slid onto my finger. I remembered the gray marble floor in the jewelry shop, and how I held my hand out in the air, my fingers spread, and I thought of all the years that had slipped through them, more than twenty. So much was over and done with, and soon to be forgotten altogether. I felt there was less of me than there had been before, as if time itself had diminished me. I was crying.
The policeman passed me a couple of tissues. I thanked him, then told him about the ring.
“We’re not together any more,” I said. “We haven’t been together for a long time. Somehow that makes it worse—the loss of something that’s already gone…” I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be bothering you with all this.”
His eyes circled the room. “It’s not exactly busy round here.”
I wasn’t sure this was true, but it was his way of saying that he wouldn’t hurry me, and I was grateful for his tact, his grace.
“You don’t have to answer this,” he said, “but I feel I have to ask. What took you to Sant Andreu?”
“I was visiting a friend.”
“That surprises me.”
“Really? Why?”
He shrugged. “A woman like you…”
I watched him, but didn’t speak.
“Put it this way,” he said. “It’s a long way from Sarrià.”
I thought of Abdel, and wanted him inside me again.
I cleared my throat. “I should have been more careful,” I said. “I was feeling happy. I wasn’t paying attention.”
The policeman seemed to realize I was hiding something, but he chose not to pursue it.
“What do you do for a living?” he asked.
“I have a shop.” I described it for him.
“I know the place.” He put down his pen and leaned back in his chair. His face relaxed. “It’s my mother’s birthday next month. Maybe I’ll drop in and buy something for her.”
“Please do.” Smiling, I stood up. “And thank you for being so understanding.”
* * *
—
A BUILDING SITE?” Montse lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out of one side of her mouth, as if it was interfering with her thought process. “Are you out of your mind?”
“Not so loud,” I said. “It’s a secret, remember?”
“What’s a secret?”
Montse’s husband, Jaume, had appeared in the kitchen doorway.
I was at their house for dinner. As sometimes happened, they had tried to set me up with somebody they knew. Josep—or Pep, as he was known—was the finance director of a prestigious perfume company. He had lost his Japanese wife in a car accident five years before, Montse had told me on the phone, but he was “over it,” apparently. Also, she had added wickedly, he was loaded. We hadn’t hit it off, though, and he’d left early.
“You wouldn’t be interested,” Montse told Jaume.
“Is it Amy’s secret?” he asked.
We looked at him, but said
nothing.
Jaume smiled. “How could I possibly not be interested?” But he didn’t linger. Fetching a bottle of cognac, he moved back onto the terrace, where the other guests sat talking in the candlelight.
Once he had gone, I turned to Montse again.
“It’s crazy, I know,” I said. “There are times when life just seems completely unbelievable.”
“I can’t remember the last time I felt like that.”
“That’s the point. It’s part of being young, I think, that unbelievability. It’s not that you expect it. It’s just that it keeps happening. It’s because you don’t know any different, and because there are no limits. Later on, things start taking on a shape. The possibilities seem—I don’t know—fewer somehow, or even nonexistent—” I stopped myself. “I’m rambling. I must be drunk.”
Montse shrugged, then lit another cigarette.
There was a brief silence.
“Poor Pep,” she said. “He didn’t stand a chance.”
Suddenly, we were in hysterics. That was how it was with Montse—everything tipping, sooner or later, into hilarity, as if the whole of life was on a slide, with laughter at the bottom.
We went to join the others on the terrace, where Jaume was talking with great urgency about the wave that was coming. Wave? Montse said. What wave? A financial crash, Jaume said. It was already happening in the United States. Europe would be next. All our lives were going to change. People thought he was exaggerating, or being pessimistic, and the conversation turned to the subject of the drought. It hadn’t rained for months, and the levels in reservoirs in Catalunya had dropped by 75 percent. There were rumors that water would be brought in by tanker from places like Tarragona and Marseille. As I sat down, Jaume glanced my way and raised both eyebrows, as if I had done something to impress him, and I wondered if he’d been in the kitchen doorway for longer than we realized and heard more than he was supposed to.
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