Four Novels (26 page)

“They were living the first days of their love.”

Pierre took her hand and held it tightly. But Maria pointed at the town hall.

“His wife is there,” she said. “And Perez with her. Decency demanded that they be separated in death.”

“Maria,” Pierre cried.

“Yes. I said: the border, perhaps. He didn’t answer. What a mess!”

Around her, already, the loneliness brought on by the liquor. She still knew when she would have to stop talking. She would stop.

“It’s a change though,” she said.

The waiter came back. They stopped talking. Pierre paid for the drinks. Were they going to Madrid? the waiter asked. They weren’t sure. They spoke about the storm. Had they been on the road yesterday? They hardly answered and the waiter didn’t insist.

“Would you recognize the spot?” Pierre asked.

“I’ll recognize it. But what about our vacation?”

“There’s no choice,” Pierre said, “if that is a question. You’ve placed us in a situation where we no longer have a choice.”

He had said this without bitterness. He smiled. Claire was silent.

“Our vacation,” Maria said, “when I mentioned our vacation, I was mainly thinking about you. Not about myself.”

“We knew that,” Claire finally said.

Maria got up. She stood in front of Claire, who didn’t move. “It’s not my fault,” she whispered, “it’s nobody’s fault. Nobody’s. Nobody’s. That’s what I meant. I didn’t choose to see this man on the roof last night. You would have done the same thing, Claire.”

“No.”

Maria sat down again.

“Let’s not go,” she stated. “First of all, we won’t be able to hide him, he’s enormous, a giant, and even if we could, he cares so little about it, that we’d be doing something completely useless, even ridiculous I would say. There’s nothing we can save of Rodrigo Paestra except his skin. Claire, you will get to Madrid. I won’t move. Except to go to Madrid.”

Claire was tapping on the table. Pierre had stood up.

“I won’t move,” Maria repeated. “I’ll have a manzanilla.”

“Twenty-five to twelve,” Pierre said.

He left the café by himself and walked over to the car. Judith ran after him. Claire watched him go.

“Come, Maria.”

“Yes.”

She took her by the arm. And Maria got up. No, she hadn’t had much to drink. She had been drinking a bit too soon after the brandy, but she’d be all right.

“I’ll be all right,” she told Claire. “Don’t worry.”

Pierre walked up to her. He pointed at Judith, who was already sitting in the back of the car.

“And Judith?” he asked.

“Oh! She’s still so young,” Maria said. “We’ll just have to be a little careful.”

They slowly drove away from the square. The town was quiet. Some policemen had given in to sleep and were lying flat on the balustrades.

“It’s easy,” Maria said. “You take the road to Madrid. There, straight ahead.”

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

This was still the town. A patrol was coming back, emptyhanded, in single file. They didn’t look at the black Rover. They had seen many others since morning. The foreign registration plates didn’t even make them turn their heads.

Not one of them looked at the Rover.

There was a garage. One garage. Maria had counted two.

“On my way out,” Maria said, “I was worried. When I drove back, I was drunk. But even so I’m going to remember. There was another garage.”

“The road to Madrid,” Pierre said. “You can’t go wrong.”

The other garage. Pierre was driving nearly as slowly as she had during the night.

“Then some kind of a shop, quite large and isolated.”

“There it is. Don’t worry,” Pierre said.

He spoke gently. He felt hot. Probably he was afraid. No one turned to look at Claire who kept silent.

The shop. It was open. An electric saw filled the hot air with its noise.

“Then, I think, some very small houses.”

Low houses, children on the porches looking at the cars. They no longer wondered what time it was. It was any time before noon. Soon, after the houses, there was no other shade on the countryside but the fleeting shade of the birds.

The wheat fields weren’t any help. No landmarks. Nothing but the wheat fields in the blinding light.

“I drove a long time through these fields,” Maria said. “Eight miles as I told you.”

Pierre looked at the mileage. He was figuring out the distance they had covered.

“Two more miles,” he said. “Two more and we’ll be there.”

They stared at the landscape, swelling slightly toward the horizon.
The sky was evenly gray. Telephone lines were running along the road to Madrid as far as you could see. There were few cars because of the heat.

“Didn’t the road turn?” Pierre asked.

She said she remembered a turn, yes, but she hadn’t taken it. Then the road was straight up to the side of the road.

“Everything is going very well,” Pierre said. “We’re getting to the crossing. Look, there, on the left. Look carefully, Maria.”

He must have been speaking so calmly because of Judith. Maybe because of Claire too. Judith was singing, rested and relaxed.

“He died from the heat, it’s all over,” Maria said.

The road was climbing slightly.

“Do you remember? Do you remember this climb?”

She remembered. The road was climbing very slightly, up to a crest that was probably hiding a fork, with one road to the left that they would see upon reaching the top of the hill, and more wheat fields, still more and more wheat fields.

“It’s silly. It’s stupid,” Maria shouted.

“No,” Pierre said, “not at all.”

The other wheat fields. They looked less even than the previous ones. They were studded with enormous, brightly colored flowers. Claire was speaking.

“Around here,” she said, “they’ve started harvesting.”

Seven

“I
T’S LIKE HELL
,” M
ARIA
shouted.

Pierre stopped the Rover completely. Judith listened and tried to understand. But they stopped talking and she began to think of something else.

“Look again,” Pierre said. “Please, Maria.”

The side of the road went downhill on the left, straight to the bottom of the valley. There was no one on it.

“It’s this road,” Maria said. “The people who are harvesting are far away, half a mile on both sides of the road. They won’t reach it before evening. You see, Claire.”

“Of course,” Claire said.

Maria now recognized the road perfectly, its gentle sweep, so gentle, its width, its original way of being buried in the wheat fields, and even its special light. She took the brandy from the car pocket, Pierre stopped her with his arm. She didn’t insist, put the bottle back.

“He lay down in the wheat, waiting for noon,” she said, “over there, probably”—she pointed to an indefinite spot. “It’s so long ago now, where can he be?”

“Who?” Judith asked.

“A man,” Claire said, “who was supposed to go to Madrid with us.”

Pierre started the car. He slowly drove a few yards on the road to Madrid and then, still slowly, he turned into the side road. Two car tracks were noticeable, intertwined with those of carts.

“The Rover’s wheels,” Pierre said.

“You see, you see,” Maria said. “The shade from the wheat must be down to nothing at this time of the day. He must be dead from the heat.”

The heat was suffocating. The road was already dried out. The tracks of the carts and the Rover had been carved into it, until the next storm.

“Oh! How stupid,” Maria said. “It was there. It’s there.”

It was a little after noon, just a little. The time agreed upon.

“Don’t talk, Maria,” Claire said.

“I’m not talking.”

In the fields various spots stuck out, here and there, from the wide rectangles of wheat, staked out by dirt roads, each one gently sloping down to the valley. They watched the car that was coming toward them, they were wondering what the tourists were doing, if they had taken the wrong road. Standing, interrupting their work, all of them were now looking at the Rover.

“They’re looking at us,” Claire said.

“We’re going to rest a little on this road,” Pierre said, “since we didn’t sleep last night because of the storm. There were no rooms in the hotel, remember Claire?”

“I remember.”

Judith also looked at the workers. With her four-year-old experience she was trying to understand. Sitting on Claire’s lap, she could see all the way into the valley.

Maria could now recognize the spot. In the hollow of the road, the heat didn’t move and brought out sweat from every part of their bodies.

“Twenty more yards. Follow the tracks. I’ll let you know.”

Pierre moved ahead. The harvesters, still standing, watched them. This road led nowhere. It belonged to their fields. They were surrounding a large rectanglar area, in the center of which Rodrigo Paestra had lain down seven hours before. They had started harvesting at the bottom of the valley. They were moving up toward the road to Madrid, which they would reach by the end of the day.

The dirt road was getting more hollow, dipping beneath the level of the wheat fields. Only the heads, the still heads of the harvesters could be seen.

“I think you should stop,” Maria said.

He stopped. The workers didn’t move. Some of them would probably come over to the Rover.

Pierre got out of the car and made a friendly gesture with his hand, to the group nearest to them, composed of two men. A few seconds passed. And one of the two men answered Pierre’s gesture. Then Pierre took Judith out of the car, lifted her, and Judith repeated the same greeting after him. When Maria thought of it later, she remembered Pierre’s happy smile.

All the workers answered the little girl’s greeting. The group of two
men and, a little behind them, a group of women. Their faces changed: they were laughing. They were laughing, making faces because of the sun: like ripples on the water, that can be seen from far away. They were laughing.

Claire didn’t leave the car. Maria got out.

“It’s impossible for him to get out of the field now,” she said.

Pierre pointed out to Maria several carts at the bottom of the valley. Half way down, between these carts and the road to Madrid, there were still more carts and horses.

“In half an hour,” Pierre said, “they’re going to eat in the shade of the carts. And, hidden by the wheat, they won’t see us at all.”

A voice from the car.

“In half an hour, we’ll be dead from the heat,” Claire said.

She again had Judith with her. She was telling her a story, while following Maria and Pierre with her eyes.

They had gone back to work. The wind that came from the valley, full of wheat dust, tickled their throats. And this wind was still balmy, it had blown through last night’s storm.

“I’m going there,” Maria said, “so I can at least tell him to wait, to be patient.”

She slowly moved away, as if taking a walk. She sang. Pierre waited for her, in the sun.

She sang the song she had been singing for Rodrigo Paestra two hours before dawn. A worker heard her, raised his head, went back to work, failing to understand why tourists had stopped there.

She walked on mechanically and calmly, just as Rodrigo Paestra had, when he had left her at four in the morning. The road hollowed out so much that no one could possibly see her. Except Pierre and Claire.

What could Maria call the time that opened ahead of her? The certainty of her hope? This rejuvenated air she was breathing. This incandescence, this bursting of love at last without object?

Deep in the valley, there must have been a stream where the storm’s luminous waters were still rolling.

She hadn’t been mistaken. Her hope came true. Suddenly, on her left, the wheat opened up. She could no longer see them. She was alone with him again. She pushed aside the wheat and walked in. He was there. Over him, the wheat, naively, came back together. It would have done the same over a stone.

He was sleeping.

The colorful carts that had passed by him that morning in the rising sun had not waked him. He was where he had settled down, where he had dropped as if struck by lightning, when she had left. He was sleeping on his stomach, his legs folded, just slightly, like a child’s, instinctively looking for comfort away from misfortune. The legs that had carried Rodrigo Paestra through his great misfortune, all the way to this wheat field, had, lonely and courageous, adapted themselves to his sleep.

His arms were around his head, and childishly abandoned like his legs.

Maria called out, “Rodrigo Paestra.”

She bent over him. He was sleeping. She would carry that body to France. She would take him very far, her miracle, the storm murderer. So he had been waiting for her. He had believed what she had told him in the morning. She felt a desire to slip into the wheat next to his body, so that, on waking up, he would recognize an object of this world, the anonymous and grateful face of a woman.

“Rodrigo Paestra.”

Half bent over him, she called very softly, wishing and at the same time fearing to wake him up. Probably Pierre and Claire could neither see nor hear her. Nor even imagine her.

“Rodrigo Paestra,” she said very softly.

So strong was her pleasure at seeing Rodrigo Paestra again that she thought she was still drunk. Then she thought him ungrateful. He was there, waiting for her to come at the appointed time. Just as you wait for spring.

She shouted more loudly.

“Rodrigo Paestra. It’s me. It’s me.”

She bent still farther and called him. This time closer, lower.

And when she got so close to him she could have touched him, she noticed that Rodrigo Paestra was dead.

His open eyes were staring at the ground. The spot around his head and on the blades of wheat, which she had taken for his shadow, was his blood. It had happened a long time ago, probably a little after dawn, six or seven hours ago. Next to Rodrigo Paestra’s face was his gun, like a toy abandoned by a child overcome by sleep.

Maria got up. She left the wheat field. Pierre was standing on the road. He walked toward her. They met.