He let his words tremble into laughter. ‘Sorry,’ he said, and he started to reach out towards her, but settled for putting his right hand palm down on the hard red leather seat of the stool that stood empty between them. ‘It’s this heat. Time feels as if it’s stopped. And I get maudlin on beer. Just ignore me. Please. I am alive today, and that makes me one of the lucky ones. I get to walk in the sun, I get to sit in a bar and think my thoughts. And today, at least, I get to chat with a beautiful young woman and maybe, if she will let me, to buy her another drink.’
‘I’ve barely touched this one,’ she said. ‘And two is already over my limit. I’m not really supposed to drink at all.’
‘Well, what does it matter? One more won’t make a difference now.’
‘I still need to find a hotel or a guest house. If I’m going to stay, I mean.’ She closed her eyes, and exhaustion was right there. ‘All right. Just one more. For the road.’
‘Juan,’ the man called, not raising his voice but speaking with a different kind of assurance.
When the young bartender reappeared he didn’t wait for instructions but set about pouring two more beers. She watched him work, his slow, measured movements announcing a tensile hardness, the lines of his strong young body inside the shirt, the narrow back and waist. Again she thought of a matador, how she imagined one might be based on some of the pictures she must have seen in books. He was handsome, especially in profile. Chiselled for an audience or a movie screen. She wondered if there was an age when a person stopped being their mother’s child and became entirely themselves, if the growing apart was not only natural but inevitable, even essential.
‘Are you in pain?’
She hadn’t even realised that she was holding her stomach with both hands, or that her face had drawn itself into a wince. The old man had got up from his seat and was standing at her side, one hand easy across her shoulders in a kind of protective half-embrace. For a second she yearned for that, for the feeling of having somebody close. She tried to smile. ‘It’s nothing. Cramps, that’s all. The coldness of the beer on an empty stomach. Really, I’m fine. But perhaps I’ll leave this beer, if you don’t mind. And I’d better be going.’
Juan stood behind the counter, watching. If he was concerned, or cared at all, then it didn’t show. But the old man’s expression was full of worry. He stepped back in order to let her up from her seat, but the arm that had been on her shoulders remained outstretched, hanging in the air and ready to catch her if she stumbled. She felt conscious of her movements now, but the sensation in her stomach – not cramps at all, but a memory of something worse – remained with her, causing her to react slowly and in an exaggerated fashion. She straightened the skirt of her dress, cotton flower-patterned pleats, down over her thighs, then stooped for the rucksack that she’d dropped at the foot of her bar stool.
‘Let me take that for you,’ the old man said, reaching for the backpack, but she drew it against her chest.
‘No, it’s fine. It’s nothing. I can manage on my own.’
He hesitated. ‘Then let me at least walk with you and help you choose a place. We’ll find somewhere to fit whatever budget you have. If they see that you are with me you’ll be sure to get a better price.’
‘I thought you said you were a stranger in these parts.’
‘I am. Unless you belong ten generations to Segovia, you’re a stranger. It’s the same here as in any small town. But forty years still counts for something. I have a business here. People know me. That helps.’
‘What sort of business?’ She considered him again, still with the rucksack cradled tightly in her bare arms. She saw him staring at her forearms and wrists, the skin smooth and tanned to old gold over bones that gave an impression of fragility – not, she knew, in an altogether unattractive way – and for those few seconds his vigour seemed to belie his age. Nothing else about him had changed, except that a lightness had come into his eyes, and she understood that there was more to him as a man than she’d already seen.
‘This place,’ he said, and opened one arm, palm splayed. ‘This bar. I’ve been running it for more than half my life. Sometimes I have no idea at all where the years went. Juan runs it now, but I still like to be around. It is important to feel as if we matter, even when we no longer do.’
She looked at him, then lowered her backpack to her side and moved towards the door. He read her slow pace as an invitation to follow. Outside, away from the doorway, the brightness of the day was blinding. She hadn’t realised how cool the bar had been or how good and refreshing the beer had tasted. Within seconds of having moved between the two atmospheres, perspiration began to blister her temples. Buildings converged, the streets narrowing and heightening to a claustrophobic sepia, and the ground, lined in ancient, broken cobble, put up a severe challenge even to her low-heeled sandals. She saw him watching where she walked, the flesh around his eyes etched in dread that the least misstep would cause a twisted or even broken ankle, and her gratitude for his concern was genuinely felt even as it ebbed back into sadness. She had a pair of good shoes in her rucksack, bought on a whim back in Madrid with the vague idea of perhaps dressing up some night for dinner in one of the city’s nice restaurants, but indolence and the awareness of her isolation had kept that from happening.
‘I know a nice hotel near here,’ he said, after they’d been walking for a couple of minutes. ‘With rooms starting at about forty euros. Is that too expensive? If it is, I can find you somewhere else, but this one is attached to a cafe that serves very good tapas, and they know me there because it’s a place I often come to eat. I’ll speak to the manager on your behalf and try to strike the best deal. I think you will find nothing better for the price unless you can sacrifice your central location.’
‘No, that sounds fine,’ she said, though it was more than she’d expected to have to pay. She’d been on the road three weeks, trawling in slow fashion for the sake of her savings, from Malaga and Granada in the south, up through Seville, Cordoba and Toledo. In Madrid she had managed to find a half-decent room for thirty a night and was expecting Segovia to cost her even less than that. A hostel would have sufficed. She glanced at him and wondered if he noticed how brittle her voice had become. Again, she felt the ache to cry, but resisted giving in, having already cried too much for all the things she could not change.
A bend in the street smothered the sunlight, leaving them in shade as dense as windowless rooms. Then the buildings separated again and the light returned in a searing way, obliterating detail. She stopped and raised a hand to shield her eyes, instantly if momentarily blind.
‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ He reached for her rucksack and this time she let him take it. She nodded that she was, that it had already been a long day for her and she was just tired now but would be fine once she could lie down.
By six, she had spread a large bath towel across the seat of the room’s single armchair, a low wing-back, upholstered in faded paisley, and settled herself just inside the open, curtained window. Stillness filled the afternoons with disquiet, their suffocating blaze lengthening interminably the sense of solitude. But once the light began to wane and in its cooling shifted towards something resembling a breeze, being alone felt bearable. And wasn’t that the same, surely, as giving up, surrendering to your lot? Refreshed and still naked from the shower, she leaned back in the towel-covered chair and her hand went to her stomach again and turned a slow backwards circle, then rose up and loosely cradled her right breast. Having lost what little substance she’d had, she felt hollowed out. At forty-two, even her fantasies had slipped away.
He’d been kind. They talked about meeting later, for dinner, and when she seemed reluctant he said that he’d come anyway, because he had to eat, and that if she felt like it, if she’d slept or rested enough, she could still choose to join him. He hoped to see her, he said, just before opening the door; he would be very glad of her company. And the food here was worth trying because it would give her a true
flavour of the place. She had sat on her side of the bed, not looking at him, looking at the floor, the bare varnished boards made of old wood knitted together, and said that she might be down if, as he said, she could get some sleep, but that he should not expect her, and that he shouldn’t wait, or read anything into it if she didn’t appear. He wouldn’t, he said, holding on to a dignity that no longer much mattered, but he’d be there from about nine o’clock onwards, either in the cafe or in the hotel’s bar, and he’d continue to hope.
Beyond the white web of the curtains, lazy rush-hour cars hummed and rumbled past, and the first twinge of dusk had bruised the latening hour.
Some of his questions, she’d answered, but in halves. There was a right time to ask them, after the walls had come down, as long as he was careful about cutting too deep. He’d opened the window but had left the curtain drawn, the light gauze, which helped diffuse the light, so that being awake no longer felt quite so painful.
‘Did you ever marry?’ he asked, from somewhere very close, and she opened her eyes without realising that she’d shut them, looked at him for a second or two, then shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, and fought an urge to bite her lip, an old habit that she’d never fully given up. ‘That is to say, not officially. Not in the eyes of church, or any god. But sort of, I suppose, once, for a while. For almost five years, if you could be less than literal about the facts of it.’ What her mother and those of that generation and before would have called living in sin. Because David – his name was David – had already been down the aisle, marriage wasn’t on the cards. He referred to her as his partner, and introduced her as such whenever the situation required it of him, so it had become the accepted term for what they had going. But that word also implied equality, evenly split shares in everything and backs to the wall together, and the reality was that she’d never been cut out for living in such a way. Her flesh was one thing, but the essential parts of herself, those that made her who she truly was, could only ever belong to her alone.
‘Children?’
‘Why?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Nothing.’ She hesitated. ‘Don’t ask everything of me. I’m not a book for you. I’m not a story. Don’t ask for everything.’
‘If I was doing that, I apologise. I don’t want to upset you. That’s the last thing I’d want.’
‘You haven’t. I’m not. No. No children. To answer your question. I’m alone.’
At first he said nothing. Then he cleared his throat. ‘It was just something to say when you hope to get to know someone better, that’s all. A way of trying to understand who they are.’
‘That’s asking an awful lot.’
‘I didn’t mean for it to be.’
‘I know, but the next question would have been about what I do, how I make a living. Then about where I was born and grew up, where I went to school. Or my parents, and brothers and sisters. People are more than these definitions. You’re looking in the wrong place, if you are hoping to see who someone really is.’
The light in fading felt as thick and slow as honey coming off a spoon and, haunted by the sensibilities of sleep, made for burdened movements. She let the air come into her and through her, and watched the waxy yellow-greyness turn dirty where it seemed to bunch against the horizon line. Wings of shadow spilt from the buildings all the way down the left side of the street, and as pleasing as the view happened to be she found herself wishing for a sight of the aqueduct, for the way it would surely shape and hold its shade at this hour and for how even the dying light would flare in gluts through its archways. In terms of the things they built, the Romans were forever. These great constructions were their veins and muscles, these aqueducts, roads, statues and amphitheatres, their flesh and blood and bones. And maybe, too, their idea of a heaven worth achieving. Yet it was also all just stone. Grand, beautiful, ingenious and built to last, but still, ultimately, nothing more than the boast above the grave, markers commemorating those otherwise forgotten. Eventually, all rivers run dry.
She liked being naked in this chair, and to have the opened window ahead of her, as if she were offering herself up to the city’s embrace. But the reality wasn’t that at all, because the curtain, and the two floors of elevation, and behind her, the empty room with its locked door, helped keep her hidden. The bed was tossed, the top blankets pulled or kicked away, the sheet damp from sweat. She sat a moment longer, then went and lay down, and when the sight of the ceiling became too much, she threw a forearm across her eyes and stretched out until her hips lifted and her legs thrashed apart. And at last, after enough time had gone by, she got up again and began to dress.
At the bottom of her rucksack, in a clear plastic bag, was her last clean dress, the crimson flash. She slipped on her underwear, changed her mind and decided to forgo the bra, just for tonight, and stepped into the dress, stretching it into place around her waist, rump and breasts. Then she straightened the string-tied shoulder straps, let her fingertips trace the neckline’s plunge all the way to the dead centre of her chest, and stooping a little to make the best use of the room’s mirror, began, almost without thought, to tidy the mess of her hair.
He’d been nice to her. He had kind eyes, big gentle hands, shoulders that could put a wall between her and everything else, if that was what she needed. She’d leave it until nine or half past before going down, and she’d eat and let herself be fed. That gave her a couple of hours. Feeling both lost and at home, she returned to the bedside and stood rummaging through the rucksack until she found her good shoes, the ones she’d not yet worn.
The Aftermath
The woman enters first, through the double-bolted door into a third-floor room bare except for a standing lamp in one corner and, against the far wall, a wooden pallet serving as a bed and on top, heaped as they had been abandoned, a sleeping bag, a large pink quilted blanket and a soiled pillow. Beside the lamp, on the floor, is an olive-green plastic electric kettle plugged into a nearby socket, and two dirty white mugs.
Seconds behind her, the man appears in the doorway. He is wearing a fawn trench coat, worn open, over an unremarkable grey suit, and his tie hangs like the tongue of something monstrous from his coat pocket.
‘Well? Are you coming in, or not?’
‘What? Oh, yeah.’
He steps into the room, closes the door, and leans back against it.
‘There’s coffee, as long as you don’t need milk or sugar.’
‘Fine. Thanks.’
She moves past him, coming intentionally close. Her clothes have the tiredness of stage costumes: high heels, tan leather jacket that looks a size too small and which she wears with the sleeves pushed up her long forearms and, underneath, a yellow T-shirt that only reaches to the waistband of her short denim skirt. She glances around as if looking for something, then slips the strap of her handbag from her shoulder and sets it down on the floor.
‘Come in,’ she says again. He nods his head but doesn’t yet move.
In front of him, bending from the waist in a way that with her legs straight and slightly apart is surely meant to tease, she picks up the mugs, throws the slops and dregs out carelessly onto the floor, pours a little water from the kettle into each, repeats the process, and switches on the kettle to boil.
When she turns back to face him again, she catches him staring. He lowers his eyes, not necessarily out of embarrassment. There is a look of memory on his face. She hands him the mugs, and he holds them while she fumbles in her jacket pocket for a couple of sachets of instant coffee, tears them open and shakes one into each. Then she takes the mugs back from him and sets them again beside the kettle.
‘Should we take off our coats?’
In answer, the man slips off his trench coat, folds it carefully lengthwise, and brushes away some real or imagined dirt. The woman peels off her own jacket, then accepts his coat, balls them up together and throws them down onto the floor at the foot of the sleeping bag. The man watches, but doesn’t speak.
>
‘That’s better. Don’t you think that’s much better? Now we can get comfortable.’
Her T-shirt is sleeveless, with armholes large enough to reveal clear glimpses of a white lace bra. She glances at him in a covert way, then stretches, raising her arms high above her head, exposing two or three inches of her stomach.
‘I like these hours. The day catches up on you. Don’t you find that? But it’s good to be able to kick back and relax. These couple of hours before sleep have a kind of calm that I like.’
He is listening and nods, yet seems distracted.
‘I can’t stretch like that any more,’ he says. ‘Not since I put my back out that time. They’ve all looked, doctors, chiropractors, even acupuncturists. But no one knows anything about backs. I mean, not really. I’ve read that swimming is good for it, for an injury like that. But I can’t swim. Never learned.’
‘Well, don’t worry. I won’t make you stretch. Or swim either. Not if you don’t want to. I can stretch enough for both of us.’
The room is squalid, with torn, shabby orange-and-brown wallpaper on the walls, a window partly concealed by a bath towel being used as a makeshift curtain. The air in here has a gritty staleness that he can feel between his teeth.
‘I know,’ she says, reading him. ‘The place could definitely do with a lick of paint.’
‘A lick?’
‘Well. Money’s hard to come by. You should know that as well as anyone. We’re not all lucky, you know. And you get what you pay for.’
The Boatman and Other Stories Page 12