Lovers on All Saints' Day (20 page)

“Monsieur doesn’t have to leave,” said the baker. “You can stay without ordering anything.”

“Say good-bye to your wife for me,” said Oliveira.

“Good luck, monsieur.”

“Thank you. Could you do me a favor?”

“Yes, monsieur.”

“Take Agatha . . . take the lady a bag of coffee. A gift from me. She’s sleeping right now, but take it to her later.”

The baker smiled. He looked at Agatha’s house and then looked back at Oliveira.

“Yes, monsieur. With pleasure, monsieur.”

—

T
HE VAN WAS RESTING
beside the curb like an anesthetized horse. To Oliveira it seemed like a useless, obsolete, almost despicable machine. I’ve waited with you, Agatha, I’ve accompanied you to the end of the night. He started the engine and waited for the thin layer of ice on the windshield to melt. His eyes began to water and the interior of the vehicle was a hazy vision. Oliveira squeezed his eyelids and one fat tear fell onto the steering wheel. Then others formed in his eyes, as if they were trying to dissolve his perception of things or at least delay his departure. He was surprised by an idea: if his life ended now—if a drunk driver plowed into him from behind and broke his neck, if a man driven crazy by grief came out shooting randomly—his years of living would have served for nothing. Who would he be, who might he have been? He would be the man who abandoned the only land he could call his own; he would be the man who allowed a woman to die.

He didn’t do any calculations but knew he was running late. He had to get going, continue to make his way south, past the Pyrenees and drive several more hours after that. He had two days ahead of him. After that, his parents’ city, whose name had no meaning whatsoever and in which Oliveira had never lived, would welcome him. He couldn’t imagine his future life, or what his friends would be like or what they’d look like. But he would begin to live a different life and was somehow liberated and ready to respond to the change. There would be a woman. Oliveira would look at her every once in a while and think: You are her. I’ve chosen you. You’ve chosen me. But that woman didn’t have a face, and wasn’t expecting him, and could not know that her life, in that instant, was beginning to be different because Oliveira was traveling toward her. He himself would be until the moment of arrival somewhat uncertain, a malleable substance, vulnerable to words and weather and the portent of love, a body in movement across a map, less alone than before, crossing meridians.

I wrote these stories between 1998 and 2002. Except for “The Return,” which was written near Xhoris, Belgium, they were the first fictions I wrote after arriving in Barcelona in 1999. In choosing them, I thought about something I once heard Tobias Wolff say: that a book of stories should be like a novel in which the characters don’t know each other.

I would like to thank Francis and Suzanne Laurenty, for their hospitality during my year in Belgium; Enrique de Hériz and Yolanda Cespedosa, for their friendship and support during the writing of these stories; and Pilar Reyes, for the dedication with which she read the Spanish version of the manuscript and brought this book into being.

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