‘The conference was being held in a suburb by the sea…’

The conference was being held in a suburb by the sea, whose dockyards were so extensive that the brightblue water remained hidden behind mile after mile of warehouses and silos and giant stacks of shipping containers. Enormous cranes loaded or unloaded the colourful rectangles one by one from the deserted decks of vast tankers that waited amid the concrete expanses of the dockside.

The hotel was a grey block surrounded by other, taller blocks of apartments, all of whose windows remained covered day and night by metal shutters. Directly in front of the hotel was a car park. Several flagpoles stood erect in a line in the tarmac and their wires made a singing sound in the wind like that of a ship’s rigging. On the right-hand side a bank of dry grass rose up to meet a wall with some overgrown trees – cedars and eucalyptus – behind it. They formed a neglected avenue along what appeared to be an old driveway made of dusty white earth that curved around to meet a pair of rusty gates ornately fashioned out of iron, and then continued beyond them, disappearing into the trees around the hillside where a wedge of glittering sea could just be seen below. The gates were locked and the earth around them was so undisturbed it suggested they had not been opened in a long time.

The conference was held at this hotel year after year, one of the delegates told me, despite the fact that it was ugly and also inconvenient, being a long way from the centre and with little in the way of transport links. He supposed the organisers had a deal with the manager. At mealtimes all the delegates had to be loaded into a bus and driven for twenty minutes through the featureless, broken-down suburbs to a restaurant, where he supposed they had another deal. The restaurant, he added, was actually very good, since eating in this country was a national sport, but the problem was that the deal – whatever it was – involved a set menu, so you were surrounded by people feasting on a whole variety of delicacies while being given no choice in what to eat yourself. More than once he had seen the organisers proudly lead a group of delegates outside – where chefs were cooking fresh fish and great skewers of squid and prawns on enormous braziers – in order to take photographs of the scene, before being returned inside to face the same meagre panoply of soup and cold cuts they’d been offered the day before. The hotel itself provided only tea and coffee, but somewhere hidden in that concrete shoebox or its environs, he said, was a pastry chef of rare talent, and he urged me to try one of the small tarts that were usually circulated with the hot drinks in the breaks between sessions. These tarts were a common element of the national fare, he said, and could be bought in mass-produced form from supermarkets, but not since childhood had he tasted an example to match those on offer here. He had almost forgotten, so ubiquitous were the copies, that the original had ever existed, and it almost gave him pain to re-enter the colour and texture and savour of that lost authenticity, which was not, he felt almost certain, the work of a professional team but of someone working, as it were, alone. He had never, however, in his years of coming here, glimpsed that person, nor even made an effort to enquire about him or her; he merely knew, when he bit into one of the fresh, delicious tarts, that they were unmistakably the work of the same individual. There had been an English delegate here once who had claimed to have had the same epiphany with a national sweet – it was called, he believed, the Eccles cake – and this man’s remarks had caused him to wonder whether something of the lost mother wasn’t being sought in that case, because for himself it was merely a question of art. The original recipe for the tart, it was said, had been devised by nuns who used such quantities of egg whites to starch their habits that they had to think of something to do with all the yolks. A convent would not be one’s first port of call in search of the maternal, that much was true; and he had even wondered whether this tart of the nuns, to which the citizens of their nation – especially the men – were virtually addicted, symbolised something about the country’s attitude to women. When he thought of those habits, so stiff and white and pure, it occurred to him that they were the vestments of sexlessness and of a life without men. The sweet little tart, by which the man’s hungry mouth was fobbed off and occupied, was perhaps nothing less than these women’s divested femininity, separated and handed over, as it were, on a plate; a method of keeping the world at bay as well as a sign, he liked to think, of the happiness of that state, for he didn’t believe that anything created in suffering and self-abnegation could taste quite so delicious.

The hotel had a long central corridor on each floor with a row of rooms to either side. The floors were all identical, with brown carpets and beige walls and rooms standing in a row along the corridors in exactly the same sequence. There were two big stainless steel lifts that rose and fell slowly, the doors continuously opening and closing in the reception lobby, where people sat on plain red sofas apparently mesmerised by the endlessly repeating spectacle of one set of doors closing on a human group while the other set of doors released a new group. Sometimes, in the corridors on the upper floors, the doors to the rooms stood open while they were being cleaned and it could be seen that they were all the same, with the same brown carpet and shiny laminated-wood furniture and the same view of the surrounding apartment blocks with their shuttered windows. Yet on those occasions when a guest was to be seen letting themselves into their room with the hotel’s plastic key card, something in their demeanour suggested they unconsciously believed their own room to be recognisable and distinct. The cleaners wore white aprons and worked all hours of the day, moving steadily along the corridors and up and down the floors and back again. They had big plastic-wrapped bundles of starched white bed linen that they left piled outside in the corridors while they worked inside the rooms, so that the corridor sometimes looked like a deserted landscape where snow has just fallen.

Downstairs in the reception area there was a large television screen surrounded by sofas where groups of men often sat or stood to watch a few minutes of football or Formula One racing. When the news came on the men usually wandered away, so that the newsreader would be left earnestly addressing an empty space. Directly on the other side of the big plate-glass windows was the smoking area, where more groups of men and the occasional woman stood, mirroring the group around the television inside. These two spaces were also where the delegates tended to gather before an event or to take the bus to the restaurant, and on those occasions the presence of the large panes of glass between one group of delegates and another – each able to see but not hear the other – seemed to signify something about the artificiality of our situation. A little further along there was a bench which faced away from the hotel, looking out over the parked cars, and which seemed to have been elected as a place for solitude, despite the fact that it stood just on the other side of the windows and could be clearly seen from inside. The people on the sofas were no more than a foot or two away from the person on the bench, the back of whose head they could see in great detail. Nevertheless, when someone sat on that bench it was understood they wished to be alone or to be approached singly and with caution, whereupon a much quieter and lengthier conversation than those in which the group was generally engaged could ensue. It was here also that people often made telephone calls, speaking in other languages than the English that was generally the currency of conversation.

The organisers of the conference wore t-shirts printed with the conference logo and were mostly very young. They gave an appearance of constant watchfulness and anxiety, since it was their responsibility to make sure that everyone attended their events or caught the bus, and were often to be seen locked in sombre consultation, their eyes glancing frequently around the hotel lobby as they talked. If a delegate was absent there were frantic searches and lengthy narratives concerning when he or she had last been seen. Often one of the organisers would go up in the lift to search upstairs, whereupon the doors of the other lift would not infrequently open to reveal the missing delegate. One of the other writers present, a Welsh novelist, was the cause of constant anxiety for his habit of setting off on foot into the undistinguished labyrinth of the surrounding suburbs and returning with stories of churches or other distant landmarks he had visited. He wore walking boots and always carried a small knapsack, as though to remind the organisers of the tenuousness of their hold on him, and indeed he had several times failed to present himself at mealtimes for the bus, only to appear at the restaurant slightly flushed and breathless but nonetheless punctual, having walked there from somewhere else. This same man went to great lengths to befriend other participants – organisers and delegates alike – writing down the particulars of things they said or places they talked about in a small creased leather notebook and frequently returning to them to check that he’d noted the name of a town or book or restaurant correctly. He told me that he always made such notes on his travels, typing them up and filing them according to name and date when he got home, so that he only had to open the file on, say, his visit to the Frankfurt book fair three years earlier for every one of its details to be available to him. He had got into this habit, which more or less dispensed with the necessity for remembering anything, not because he tended to be forgetful but because his capacity for holding on to information, however useless or trivial, would otherwise have kept him in a state of constant distraction. It was apparent that his conversational tactic of asking people questions – which he appeared to adopt, though he didn’t say so, out of shyness – made him the recipient of an unusual amount of such information, and yet when asked a question about himself he would become evasive and vague and unwilling to go into more than the sketchiest detail about his circumstances. He had, he said, attended every single event at the conference, even those conducted in languages he didn’t understand: he felt the organisers would have been disappointed in him otherwise.

I noticed that while the Welsh novelist talked lengthily to everyone with a minor or tangential connection to himself – including the driver of the bus and the hotel staff – he tended to avoid those he might have considered his equals, well-known writers from his own and other countries. There were several of these in attendance, some of whom I had met before, including one who approached me on the second day and reminded me that we had once participated in an all-female panel discussion together in Amsterdam, in which the panellists – distinguished female thinkers and intellectuals – had been asked to talk about their dreams. I remembered her on that occasion as timid and strained-looking with a somewhat indignant air, but standing in the hotel lobby she emanated poise and vigour, as though in the years since we’d last met she’d been acquiring energy rather than expending it, and she reminded me of her name – which was Sophia – with the pragmatic directness of someone who accepts rather than fears the likelihood of such things being forgotten. I can’t imagine, she said now with a gracious smile, a panel of male intellectuals being asked to discuss their dreams, and I suppose the moderator was hoping to elicit our so-called honesty; as though, she said, a woman’s relationship to truth were at best unconscious, when in fact it might simply be the case that female truth – if such a thing can even be said to exist – is so interior and involuted that a common version of it can never be agreed on. It’s a saddening thought, she said, that when a group of women get together, far from advancing the cause of femininity, they end up pathologising it.

Since our evening in Amsterdam she had published several novels, she told me, as well as a book about the Western literary canon, from which she had argued numerous men should be removed and numerous women added. That book had been well received elsewhere, she said, but here in her native country it had virtually been ignored. She was attending this conference not on account of her credentials as a feminist writer but for her work as a translator, by which she had enabled several of this country’s writers – nearly all of them men – to become more internationally recognised than she was herself. Or maybe, she said, with a high bell-like laugh, I’m only here because this is my hometown. They have to fly everyone else in from all over the place, she said, but it’s cheap to invite me because I only have to walk up the road.

I wondered whether the fact that she was at home was the explanation for her altered appearance, as though she shone more brightly in her natural setting. She wore a tight, low-cut dress in a vivid turquoise colour, with a broad belt cinched to emphasise the slenderness of her waist, and a matching pair of high-heeled boots. She was very small and slight, with sallow skin and thin, soft, light-brown hair and a large expressive mouth, and she held her head up very high, like a child standing on tiptoe and straining to see over the adults. Around her throat and wrist she wore several pieces of jewellery and her face was carefully made up, especially around the eyes, which she had outlined dramatically so that they appeared continually startled, as though they were observing things whose intensity and extremity only she could see. After a while I could recognise behind this disguise the timid woman I remembered, and I understood her outfit to be something designed to prevent her from being forgotten or ignored, yet it also had the effect of making her femininity seem a kind of question other people were required to answer or a problem they were expected to solve.

This was not, she said, gesturing through the plate-glass doors, in all honesty the most exciting place to live, but after her divorce she had recognised that it would be better for her and her son to be near her parents, and so they had left the capital, though she hoped to return there one day, she said, once the dust had settled.

‘My mother is very kind to us,’ she said, ‘despite the fact that I am the first member of my family to get divorced and that this is a stigma on her, which she can’t quite bring herself to let me forget. She looks at my son when she knows I am watching her and she puts her hand over her mouth as if some priceless object had just fallen to the floor and smashed to pieces in front of her eyes. She treats him like he has a terrible illness,’ she said, ‘and perhaps he has, but if so it’s up to him to survive it, even if other people are sympathetic to him.’

The child had in fact recently broken his leg playing football, she went on, and the injury had mysteriously developed into a viral infection whose cause or cure the doctors couldn’t seem to find. He was in hospital for a month and bedridden for two months after that, and this experience had brought about a profound change in his character, she said, because he had always been very physically active and obsessed with sport, from whose rules and rewards he had seemed to take his ethos for living. As the witness of his parents’ divorce, for instance, he was forever trying to figure out which side he should be on, and who had won and who lost in each of the many battles being played out before his eyes. It was natural, obviously, for him to side with his father, with whose male values he identified and with whom moreover he did many of the activities he enjoyed; and his father had shown little restraint in exploiting that loyalty at every opportunity, inculcating in him as he did so the beginnings of a much greater tribal identity by which, she could see, the child’s entire life and character would be shaped. That tribe was one to which nearly all the men in this country belonged, and it defined itself through a fear of women combined with an utter dependence on them; and so despite her best efforts it was only a matter of time, she realised, before her son’s questions about right and wrong found their answer in the low-level bigotry with which he was surrounded and to which everything was encouraging him to submit. Nevertheless, whenever he complained that his father had said one thing and she another, she refused to offer an opinion on which of them was right, as he was imploring her to. Make up your own mind, she would say; use your brain. He would often become upset by her response, and this was the proof that her ex-husband was giving him the most partisan accounts of their situation, because the child simply couldn’t cope when there was no side for him to be on; in other words, when there was no point of view. Yet the effort of using his brain was far less appealing than the easy prospect of believing his father’s stories; that is, until he was physically immobilised for a three-month period.

In bed he had entered what at first seemed to be depression, becoming silent and listless and struggling to show an interest in anything, and this was followed by a period of anger and frustration which, though different, was just as bad. Incapacitated as he was, and removed from the field of action, the facts of his life became much clearer to him. One of those facts was that his father rarely called or came to see him; another was that his mother was never far from his bedside. One morning, she said, I came into his room with some breakfast for him on a tray. I had been up working since six o’clock because I had a piece to deliver later that day, and I hadn’t yet showered or brushed my hair. I was wearing my glasses and my oldest clothes and I didn’t have any make-up on, and he looked up at me from the bed and he said to me, Mama, you look so ugly. And I said yes, this is what I look like sometimes. At other times I wear make-up and nice clothes and I look pretty, but this is also what I am like. I don’t always please you, I said, but I am just as real this way as the other way.

She paused and turned her eyes through the windows towards the car park, where the other delegates could be seen gathering for the bus. The wind blew their hair sideways and flattened their clothes against their bodies.

When he got out of bed, she continued presently, he was a quieter and more thoughtful person, and he even accepted the news that he would not be able to play any sport for at least another year with good grace. In a way I am grateful, she said, for his illness, even though at the time it felt like the last straw and as if there was no end to my bad luck. It seemed so unfair, she said, that while his father was driving around in his sportscar and visiting his girlfriend at her villa on the coast, I was stuck in a tiny flat in my hometown with a sick child and my mother calling five times a day to tell me it was all my fault for being too outspoken and continuing to work after I got married. In this country, she said, the only power women recognise is the power of the slave, and the only justice they understand is the slave’s fatalistic justice. At least she loves my son, she said, although I’ve noticed that the people who love children the most often respect them the least.

A tall, bulky, sombre-looking man had entered the lobby and was standing not far from us looking absorbedly at his phone. With his thick black curly hair and black beard and large pouchy immobile face, he looked like one of the giant, pitted statues of Roman antiquity. When she noticed him Sophia’s face lit up and she darted forward to touch his arm, whereupon he looked slowly up from the screen with a marked unwillingness, while his large, faintly sorrowful eyes registered the nature of the interruption. Sophia spoke to him trillingly and rapidly in her native language and he replied slowly and sonorously, standing quite still while she became very animated, her posture constantly changing and her hands gesturing and fluttering while she talked. He was much taller than her and held his head very erect so that when he looked down at her his eyes appeared to be half-closed, which gave the impression that he was either bored or mesmerised by their conversation. After a while she turned to me, and laying her hand once more on his arm, introduced the man as Luís. He is our most important novelist at this moment, she added, while his head lifted even further and his eyes threatened to close entirely. This year he has won all five of our major literary prizes for his latest book. It has been a sensation, she said, because the subjects Luís writes about are subjects our other male writers would not deign to touch.

I was surprised to hear this assessment of Luís, after Sophia’s earlier remarks about male writers and their tendency to eclipse her, and I asked what subjects those were.

Domesticity, Sophia said very earnestly, and the ordinary life of the suburbs, the ordinary men and women and children who live there. These were things, she reiterated, that most writers would consider to be beneath them, pursuing instead the fantastical or the noteworthy, gathering around themes of public importance in the hope, she didn’t doubt, of increasing their own importance by doing so. Yet Luís had trounced them all with his simplicity, his honesty, his reverence for reality.

I write about what I know, Luís said, shrugging and looking over our heads at something in the distance.

He is being modest, Sophia said with her bell-like laugh, because he worries he would betray the world he writes about by becoming arrogant. Yet in fact he has given it a new dignity, one that is unique in our culture, where the divisions between rich and poor, between young and old, and most of all between men and women have seemed insurmountable. We live with an almost superstitious belief in our own differences, she said, and Luís has shown that those differences are not the result of some divine mystery but are merely the consequence of our lack of empathy, which if we had it would enable us to see that in fact we are all the same. It is for his empathy, she said, that Luís has received such acclaim, and so I believe he should congratulate himself, rather than feeling ashamed for being praised.

Luís looked most unhappy while all this was being said, and his response was a profound silence that lasted until the organisers called us to the bus that had drawn up outside. We drove along wide, empty roads whose pale concrete surfaces were fissured and cracked and thronged with weeds, circumnavigating the strange, unpeopled landscape of the vast dock, whose block-like impenetrable shapes extended as far as the eye could see, and then re-entering the shabby, discursive network of suburban streets on the other side. The day was grey and windy beneath a low sky, so that where the human dimension appeared it looked fretted and oppressed: the awnings of restaurants and shops were flapping, litter was bowling along the pavements, the breeze was tugging hanks of smoke from outdoor braziers into the air, scattered groups of pedestrians were clutching their bags and coats and pressing forward with bowed heads. When we arrived at the street where the restaurant was, it was blocked: the road had been entirely dug up since the day before, and was now a trench marked off by incident tape that snapped and fluttered in the wind. The bus manoeuvred its way into a side street and then made a lengthy series of slow turns, while its occupants discussed this new development, eventually dismissing it with head-shaking and resigned shrugs. Finally the bus found a place some distance from the restaurant to let us off, and people began to walk alone or in groups back to where we had been. We passed through a concrete lot surrounded by decrepit graffitied buildings, where laurel trees were putting out their red spiky flowers. A strange music came in eddies on the wind from somewhere nearby: it was the sound of someone playing a pipe or flute, and presently a boy could be seen standing half-concealed in the shrubbery in the ruins of a graffitied wall, the instrument lifted to his lips.

It was typical, the man beside me said as we clambered over the makeshift walkway that had been put up over the former street, that these roadworks should have appeared without warning and apparently by magic, when the organisers could have chosen one of any number of restaurants in the area for us to visit three times each day, and one should be slow, he said, to attribute this inconvenience to a lack of information, because it was quite possible the organisers knew about it all along but were unwilling to change their arrangements. It would be easy to believe, he said, that the people of this country were beset by feelings of powerlessness, but it could just as well be called stubbornness, because they refused to change even when change was a possibility. He himself worked for their most important national newspaper and had had frequent opportunities to see this phenomenon at first hand: one day he would be sent to cover a major political crisis or human disaster and the next to report on the supposed appearance of the Virgin Mary on a rock somewhere in the countryside, and would be expected to treat these two events with equal seriousness. Just as there might be an explanation for the appearance of the roadworks, he said, so there ought to be for the lady in blue: you can’t have one without the other, he said, and so people accept the mystery of the roadworks as a way of avoiding asking themselves the bigger questions.

We had entered the restaurant by now and had sat down at the long table reserved for the delegates that stretched all along one side of the room. The other side was always crowded, and the noise and laughter that emanated from there contrasted with the awkwardness of the long table and the fixity of its set places, to which the delegates were increasingly reluctant to consign themselves, knowing their fate would thus be settled for the duration of the meal, and against which they had started to make pacts before crossing the threshold as to who would sit where. Only a few feet away on the other side of the room people were gathered in noisy, ebullient groups, embroiled in meals that appeared to have no beginning and no end and to which the waiters, threading through the crowds with dishes borne on silver trays above their heads, kept adding more and more developments.

The man beside me unfurled his thick white napkin with a flourish and tucked it into the collar of his shirt. He was somewhere in his sixties, with a bald nut-brown head and an expression of cynical humour in his small round eyes. He had read my book, he said, and would be interviewing me for his newspaper, but in considering what to say to me a novel idea had occurred to him, which was to treat me as one of my own characters, with himself granted the power of narrator. This was not the kind of approach he generally adopted in literary interviews, of which he had done a perhaps excessive number, considering all the other matters he was expected to cover for the paper: tomorrow, for instance, he had to attend the cup final, an irksome assignment since he found the crowds and their mad excitement over something that after all happened without fail every year particularly tiresome, and as he had said he had often found himself writing about religious miracles one day and state corruption the next. Interviews with literary authors he usually enjoyed, but all the same he saw it as his task to bring himself to their world, researching their lives and reading their previous work and generally boning up on the issues they concerned themselves with. But this time, perhaps because he had been so busy and because there were so many authors at the conference requiring his attention, he had approached my book without much in the way of context. In fact he had only finished it late last night, returning to his room after dinner, and it was as he was going to sleep that the idea of acting as its author had come to him. It interested him that he had been led to believe he could assume that power: usually novels had the opposite effect on him, in that he couldn’t ever imagine writing as the author had written, or indeed, in some cases, wanting to; even thinking about it exhausted him, and he sometimes found himself wishing these prodigies had a little less energy, because every time they wrote something new they also created his obligation to respond to it. The tremendous effort to conjure something out of nothing, to create this great structure of language where before there had been only blankness, was something of which he personally felt himself incapable: it usually rendered him, in fact, quite passive and left him feeling relieved to return to the trivial details of his own life. He had noticed, for instance, that my characters were often provoked into feats of self-revelation by means of a simple question, and that had obviously led him to consider his own occupation, of which the asking of questions was a central feature. Yet his questions rarely elicited such mellifluous replies: in fact, he usually found himself praying that his interviewee would say something interesting, because otherwise it would be left to him to make a newsworthy piece out of it. Going to sleep, as he had said, he had suddenly felt inexplicably empowered in that regard, as though he had realised a far simpler question than those he usually asked – and perhaps, indeed, only one – would unlock the whole mystery for him. The question he liked the most – and this was the one he intended to ask me, in his new role as narrator – concerned what I had noticed on my way here, and if his – or rather my – theory was correct, by asking me that question, the question of what I had noticed on my way here, he would enable me to write the whole interview for him, so to speak.

Two men had sat down opposite us at the table, and one of them now interrupted to ask whether he had heard correctly that my neighbour was going to cover the cup final tomorrow; and if so, what his opinions were on the likely outcome. My neighbour slowly and painstakingly readjusted the napkin in the collar of his shirt, and with an expression of sombre patience began to give a long and apparently regretful reply, whose import seemed to be that it would not be the outcome they wished for. A heated discussion ensued, during which Sophia entered the restaurant and, seeing an empty place beside mine, came and sat down in it. In that same moment Luís – who had followed her in – could be seen striding towards the other end of the table and then bypassing it entirely, taking a seat alone at a small table in the very furthest corner of the restaurant. Sophia gave a little gasp of frustration and, standing up again, said that she was just going to find out why Luís was insisting on sitting alone. She returned a few minutes later and regretfully picked up her bag, saying that since he wouldn’t move she would have to go and keep him company, as she felt it was wrong to let him go off like that. My neighbour broke off from his conversation to tell her that this was a ridiculous proposition: what are you doing, he said, adjusting again the white napkin in the collar of his shirt and looking at her with his small, round, inquisitive eyes, pursuing him around the restaurant? If Luís wanted to be alone, he should be left that way; otherwise he should come and join the rest of us. Sophia considered this with a delicately knitted brow and then trod lightly off in her high-heeled boots, this time returning after some minutes with a truculent-looking Luís in tow.

‘We won’t allow this depressive behaviour,’ she said to him with her trilling laugh. ‘We’re going to keep you in the land of the living.’

Luís sat down with an expression of undisguised irritation on his face and promptly joined the other men in discussing football, whereupon Sophia turned to me and meekly said into my ear that while she realised Luís could give the impression of being arrogant, in fact his success was painful for him and caused him to suffer from intense guilt, as well as from feelings of overexposure.

‘Unusually for a man of this nation,’ she said, ‘and perhaps for any man, he has been honest about his own life. He has written about his family and his parents and his childhood home in a way that makes them completely recognisable, and because this is a small country he worries he has used them or compromised them, though of course for readers in other parts of the world it is just the honesty itself that comes through. Though of course if he were a woman,’ she said, leaning more confidentially towards my ear, ‘he would be scorned for his honesty, or at the very least no one would care.’

She sat back so that the waiters could put the dishes on the table. They contained a brown, strong-smelling puree, and Sophia wrinkled her nose and said that this dish had a name that could more or less be translated as ‘the parts no one would eat otherwise’. She took a tiny spoonful and dabbed it on the edge of her plate. The Welsh novelist had by now appeared, his hair stiffened by the wind and his shirt unbuttoned to show his flushed neck. After some hesitation he sat down in the only remaining seat, beside Sophia, smiling warily to show his narrow yellow teeth. When he asked her what was in the dishes, she did not repeat her translation but merely smiled graciously and said that it was a local delicacy made of ground meat. He reached forward and piled some on to his plate, as well as several pieces of bread. We would have to excuse him, he said: he was extremely hungry, having attempted to walk out along the coast and instead become increasingly entangled in a series of industrial complexes and housing developments and shopping precincts, all of which appeared to be in a state of semi-ruin and were more or less deserted, yet to which all roads unerringly led, so that finally he was forced to clamber over walls and verges in the attempt to get to the water, finding himself at last in a cordoned-off concrete expanse surrounded by barbed wire and what looked like numerous watchtowers, being held at gunpoint by three men in uniform. He had wandered, apparently, into a military zone, and it took all his scant linguistic resources to explain to these men that he was not a terrorist but a writer attending the literary conference, of which – perhaps surprisingly – they had heard. They turned out to be quite genial, and offered him coffee and tarts before sending him on his way, which he regretted not having accepted once he’d realised how far he was from the restaurant. He’d had to run most of the way back, he said, which in his walking boots was no easy feat.

Luís’s attention had been caught by this narrative and he launched into an account of the country’s socio-economic decline, which had been precipitated, he said, by the financial crisis nearly a decade earlier whose reverberations, in places like this one, were still being felt. The Welsh novelist used this diversion as the opportunity to eat, nodding his head frequently while he despatched his first course and then, satisfied, sitting back in his chair. His own region of Wales, he said when Luís had finished speaking, was similarly on a more or less unrelievedly downward trajectory, though it had barely completed its evolution into the modern era in the first place. There were still families, he said, where only a generation earlier the elders had spoken no English, and in his conversations with local people he heard of a world in which humans had once lived deeply and richly in their own habitat, on familiar terms not just with one another but also with animals, birds, mountains and trees, as well as with traditions of song and storytelling and worship, and of emotional histories too, of deep grudges and unbreachable rifts, of clans that married and intermarried, dwelling on the land in a reality all their own. Not forty years ago, he said, whole communities would climb the mountain together on Sundays, old ladies and babes in arms, strapping farmers and village girls and chattering gangs of children, along with their dogs and ponies and baskets of food, of ham sandwiches and great thermoses of tea, and the men would sing as they climbed the hill. The novel he was currently writing was an attempt to revive that vanished world, and he had done considerable research into its manners and mores, as well as its agricultural practices, its culinary and domestic traditions, its patterns of churchgoing and socialising, its folklore, its vernacular poetry and song. He had interviewed countless people, most of them – for obvious reasons – elderly, and had built up a quite extraordinary picture in terms of his preparatory notes, yet what was surprising was how often these people claimed to be relieved not to live in that way any longer, even as they expressed their nostalgia for it. Sometimes he almost thought he felt the loss of the old world more keenly than they did themselves, because he actually didn’t see how they could bear the drabness of their old people’s homes with their gutless conveniences of television and central heating, when what they remembered was so beautiful. Nothing remained, one old lady had said to him, of the world she knew: not one blade of grass was the same. He had asked her to explain what she meant, because surely grass was at least still grass, but she had merely repeated that over the course of her lifetime every single thing had changed and become unrecognisable to her. This lady had died peacefully not long after his conversation with her, and he felt lucky, he said, to have had the chance to speak to her and record her memories, which otherwise would have died with her. Yet even as he reconstructed those memories, so painstakingly that they shone like new in the pages of his novel, the meaning of her remarks about change continued to elude him. He could not, in the end, accept that the very essence of things had been lost, and at times he had almost become angry with her while writing, as though it was she herself who had stolen that essence and taken it away with her for good. Where he lived, for instance – in a farmhouse in the Snowdonia national park – the landscape was more or less unaltered and the local community were very active in combatting the small changes – excessive road signage, new car parks – that by increments would damage its character and beauty, as well as in reviving some of the old cottage industries and traditions of land management. When he walked out into those hills, their reality, he believed, was just as it had always been, though of course, he added, glancing warily around at the others, he realised he was fortunate to live somewhere of which that could be said.

Luís had been listening with an impassive expression on his great moody face, his fingers occupied with tearing small sections from a piece of bread and rolling them into hard little balls which he then dropped on the table around his plate.

‘My mother once told me,’ he said, ‘that at harvest time when she was a child the village held a day of festival, and the farmers would always leave one last field to mow on that day. Everyone would stand to watch the men mowing with their scythes, because this was a tradition, and it was also a tradition that they left a circular patch in the middle of the field unmown, working in from the edges of the field rather than up and down in straight lines as they usually did. All of the frightened wildlife that normally had the opportunity to run away was therefore trapped in this circle,’ he said, ‘which got smaller and smaller as the men mowed around it, so that in the end there were a great number of creatures cowering there. The village children had already been armed with shovels and picks and even knives from the kitchen, and at a certain moment they were permitted to come forward and descend on the unmown circle in a cheering mob to kill the animals, which they did with great pleasure and gusto, spattering themselves and each other with blood. My mother cannot think about these episodes,’ he said, ‘without becoming upset, even though at the time she participated in them quite happily, and indeed many of our relations now deny that such barbaric practices ever occurred. But my mother says that they did, and she continues to suffer on account of them, because unlike the others she has remained honest, and she refuses to remember the past without also remembering its cruelty. I sometimes wonder,’ he said, ‘whether she believes she sealed her own fate with that unthinking conduct, because life has treated her cruelly in return, yet it is only her sensitivity that creates that impression and her relatives, as I have said, don’t see things that way at all. When I started to write,’ he said, ‘it was because I felt the pressure of her sensitivity, as though it was an affliction or unfinished task I had to take from her, or something she had bequeathed to me that I had to fulfil. Yet in my own life I have been as doomed to repetition as anyone else, even when I didn’t know what it was I was repeating.’

‘But that is completely untrue,’ Sophia exclaimed. ‘Your life has been completely transformed by your talents and what you have made of them – you can go anywhere and meet anyone, your praises are sung all over the world, you have your nice apartment in the city, you even have a wife,’ she said with a pleasant smile, ‘that you don’t have to live with and who is devoted to bringing up your child. If you were a woman you would certainly find your mother’s life hanging over your head like a sword and you would be asking yourself what progress you had made, other than to double for yourself the work she had been expected to do and receive three times the blame for it.’

The waiters had by now removed the dishes of puree and were bringing the next course, a small moulded shape which Sophia portentously described as being made of fish, and of which she again took only the tiniest amount. When the dish was passed to Luís he waved it away and sat hunched and unoccupied in his chair, staring at the wall above our heads, where various nautical items – fishing nets, giant brass hooks, the wooden steering wheel of a boat – had been hung as decorations. It was interesting, Sophia said now to the Welsh novelist, that he had repeated those words of the old lady, because she had recently heard almost exactly the same words herself, although in a very different context. Her son had not long ago gone to stay for a few days with his father, and had come upon a cache of photograph albums he had never seen before. Her ex-husband had taken all the photograph albums when they separated, she explained, perhaps because he believed he owned their history or perhaps because there was something in those albums he feared would contradict his version of what happened, because otherwise, she said, why would he hide them away?

‘Whatever the reason,’ she said, ‘he left me with not one single photograph of our life together, and so when my son found the albums in a cupboard he was in a way seeing that life for the first time, since much of it he was too young to remember. When he came home after the visit,’ she said, ‘I could see straight away that something had happened, and he was very quiet for several hours. He kept looking at me when he thought I wouldn’t notice, and in the end I said to him, have I got something on my face? Is that why you keep looking at me in that strange way? So then he told me about finding the albums, which he spent the whole morning going through, because his father had gone out to play tennis with some friends and had left him alone. You are in the pictures, Mama, he said to me, except it isn’t actually you. I mean, he said, I know the person in the pictures was you, but I couldn’t recognise you. I told him I hadn’t seen those photographs for years,’ Sophia said, ‘but that I must have aged more than I thought I had. No, he said to me, it isn’t that you look older. It’s that everything about you has changed. Nothing is the same as in the photographs, he said, not your hair or your clothes or your expression, not even your eyes.’

While she spoke her eyes grew larger and more brilliant and it seemed possible they were filling with tears, yet she continued to smile in a way that made it clear she was practised in keeping her composure. The Welsh novelist looked at her with polite concern, an expression of faint alarm on his face.

‘Poor kid,’ Luís said gloomily. ‘Why does this bastard arrange a tennis match in the first place?’

‘Because that way,’ Sophia said, smiling more graciously than ever, ‘he knows he deprives me of my freedom and peace of mind even when I have some time to myself. If he took care of our son during their weekends together,’ she said, ‘he would in a sense be giving something to me, and he has devoted his life to making sure that is something he will never do, even through the medium of our child. I have no doubt,’ she said, ‘that if our son was wholly in his care he would do a first-rate job of bringing him up, making sure he beat all the other boys at sport and won at every competition and punished his mother regularly with his lack of concern for her. In court,’ she said, ‘he fought me for custody, and I know that many of my friends were shocked that I opposed it, because they thought that as a feminist I ought to promote equality for both sides, and also because there is the belief that a son needs his father in some special way, to learn how to be a man. But I don’t want my son to learn to be a man,’ she said. ‘I want him to become one through experience. I want him to find out how to act, how to treat a woman, how to think for himself. I don’t want him learning to drop his underwear on the floor,’ she said, ‘or using his male nature as an excuse.’

The Welsh novelist raised a finger hesitantly and said that he hated to disagree, but that he felt it was important to point out that not all men would behave as her ex-husband had done, and that male values were not merely the product of enshrined selfishness but could include such things as honour, duty and chivalry. He himself had two sons, as well as a daughter, and he liked to think they were well-balanced individuals. He couldn’t deny, he said, that there were differences between the girl and the boys, and that likewise to deny the differences between men and women was perhaps to obviate the best qualities of both. He recognised he was very lucky in that he and his wife had a good marriage, and he found that their differences were generally complementary, rather than the source of conflict.

‘Is your wife also a writer?’ Luís said, toying indifferently with his napkin.

His wife was a full-time mother, the Welsh novelist said, and both of them were satisfied with that arrangement, since his literary revenue very fortunately meant that she didn’t have to earn money and could instead help him find the time he needed to work. In fact, he said, she did do a bit of writing in her spare time and had recently written a book for children that had been quite a surprise hit. When their children were smaller she used to tell them stories involving a Welsh pony called Gwendolyn, and in the end there were so many of these stories, all following one from the other so as to keep the children’s attention night after night, that the book, she had said, literally wrote itself. Obviously he himself was too subjective to be able to offer an opinion on the adventures of Gwendolyn, but he had shown it to his agent, who had luckily been able to find his wife a pretty impressive three-book deal.

‘My ex-wife and I used to tell my son stories,’ Luís said gloomily, ‘and of course we read to him in bed every night, but it hasn’t made the slightest difference. He doesn’t pick up a book from one day to the next. Sometimes he has to read something for school and it is as if he is being tortured, yet when I was his age I read everything I could get my hands on, including the instructions for the washing machine and my mother’s gossip magazines, because there were no books in the house. But my son is repelled, to the extent that he is always losing the book he’s meant to be reading. I’ll find it lying outside in the rain, or forgotten in the pocket of his coat or beside the bath, and each time I’ll retrieve it and clean it up and replace it where he can find it, because I see in the rejection of these books a rejection of myself and of my authority as a father. My son loves me,’ he said, ‘and he doesn’t consciously blame me for the things that have happened to him, but I suspect he feels that if he gave his attention to a book and lost himself in it, he might never be found again, and the world he is trying to hold on to might spin out of his control. My ex-wife and I treat him with the utmost kindness,’ he said, ‘and we have done everything in our power to get along with one another since our separation and to reassure him that he was not the cause of it, but his response has been to show absolutely no curiosity about life and to anchor himself by means of his own reliable comforts and pleasures. He sits in his room day after day, motivated to do nothing but watch television and eat pastries and other sweets, and it is impossible not to feel,’ he said, ‘that we have broken him, not out of malice but out of our own carelessness and selfishness.’

Sophia, who had been becoming increasingly agitated while Luís spoke, now interrupted him.

‘But you aren’t helping him,’ she said, ‘by treating him as a fragile thing and shielding him and covering up your conflict, when the consequences of that conflict are right in front of him every day. I couldn’t protect my son,’ she said, ‘and so instead he has had to make up his own mind and to realise that his destiny is in his own hands. When he doesn’t want to read a book I say to him, fine, if your choice is to work in the gas station out on the highway when you grow up, then don’t read it. Children have to survive hardship,’ she said, while Luís sombrely shook his head, ‘and you have to let them, because otherwise they will never be strong.’

By now the waiters had brought the final course, an oily fish stew of which no one except the Welsh novelist had eaten very much. Luís looked with a harrowed expression at Sophia, and sadly pushed his plate away from him as if it were the offer of her optimism and determination.

‘They are wounded,’ he said slowly. ‘Wounded, and I don’t know why this particular wound has been so deadly in the case of my son, but since I gave him the wound it is my job to tend him. All I know,’ he said, ‘is that I’m not telling the story any more, either to him or to myself.’

There was a silence while the waiters cleared the dishes, and even the men opposite, who had sustained a conversation about the leadership qualities of José Mourinho for all this time, stopped talking and gazed ahead of them with blank, satiated expressions.

‘I have known many men,’ Sophia said, resting her slender arms on the table, whose white cloth was littered with crumpled napkins and wine stains and half-eaten pieces of bread, ‘from many different parts of the world, and the men of this nation,’ she said, blinking her painted eyes and smiling, ‘are the sweetest but also the most childlike. Behind every man is his mother,’ she said, ‘who made so much fuss of him he will never recover from it, and will never understand why the rest of the world doesn’t make the same fuss of him, particularly the woman who has replaced his mother and who he can neither trust nor forgive for replacing her. These men like nothing better than to have a child,’ she said, ‘because then the whole cycle is repeated and they feel comfortable. Men from other places are different,’ she said, ‘but in the end neither better nor worse: they are better lovers but less courteous, or they are more confident but less considerate. The English man,’ she said, looking at me, ‘is in my experience the worst, because he is neither a skilled lover nor a sweet child, and because his idea of a woman is something made of plastic not flesh. The English man is sent away from his mother, and so he wants to marry his mother and perhaps even to be his mother, and while he is usually polite and reasonable to women, as a stranger would be, he doesn’t understand what they are.

‘After my son found the photographs in his father’s house,’ she went on, ‘and made the observation that I was not the same person I had been, not even in the molecules of my skin, I became for a while very confused and depressed. It suddenly felt as if all my efforts since the divorce to keep things the same, to keep my own life recognisable to me and to my son, were in fact false, because underneath the surface not one thing remained as it was. Yet his words also made me feel that for the first time someone had understood what had happened, because while I had always told the story to myself and others as a story of war, in fact it was simply a story of change. And it was this change that had been left unexamined and unremarked on, until my son saw it in the photographs and noticed it. While he was away for those few days visiting his father,’ she said, ‘I had arranged to spend time with a man and had invited him for the weekend to our apartment. I have had to be careful about allowing my son to see me with other men, for the reason that he might innocently mention something to his father, who would undoubtedly respond with the most vitriolic aggression. This necessity for caution and secrecy,’ she said, ‘has also made these interludes of passion more exciting: they are a kind of reward I offer myself, and I often spend time thinking about them and planning them, even sometimes when I am with my son and for whatever reason am feeling bored. But on this occasion,’ she said, ‘once my son had gone to his father’s and I was waiting in my apartment, I heard the footsteps on the stairs and the key turning in the lock and I suddenly became confused as to which of the men I’ve known in my life was about to walk through the door. It seemed to me in that moment,’ she said, ‘that I had made too much of the distinctions between these men, when at the time the whole world had appeared to depend on whether I was with one rather than another. I realised that I had believed in them,’ she said, ‘and in the ecstasy or agony they caused me, but now I could barely recall why and could barely separate them from one another in my mind.’

Sophia’s audience at the table were becoming visibly uncomfortable, twitching in their chairs and allowing their eyes to rove, embarrassed, around the room, except for Luís, who sat very still and watched her steadily with an impassive expression.

‘Deep down,’ she said, ‘I felt that these relationships lacked the authenticity of my relationship with my ex-husband, and I was always finding fault with the men themselves as a way of explaining this feeling: one man didn’t speak languages as well as my husband did; another couldn’t cook; another wasn’t as good at sport. It almost felt,’ she said, ‘as if it were a contest, and that if these men were inferior to my husband in any way he would win that contest, and I would explain this uncharitable attitude to myself as merely the product of my own fear of him. My husband came very close to killing me,’ she said, ‘without ever laying a finger on me, and I saw now that it was my willingness to be killed that allowed him to get that far, just as it was my belief in one man or another that allowed him to cause me pleasure or pain. But in my apartment, listening to the key turning in the door, it suddenly seemed to me that my husband himself could be the man about to enter and that finally it would make no difference, because the woman he knew – the woman who had believed in his persona – was no longer there.

‘You say,’ she said to Luís, ‘that you are refusing to tell the story any more, perhaps for some of the same reasons, because you don’t believe in the characters or in yourself as a character, or perhaps because stories need cruelty in order for them to work and you have washed your hands of that drama too. But when my son made those comments to me about the photographs, I realised that he had somehow, without my quite noticing, taken the burden of perception from me, which to my mind was inseparable from the burden of living and of telling the story. He showed me in that moment that it was, in fact, separate, and the effect on me was to make me feel an incredible sense of freedom, at the same time as suspecting that by shedding that burden I would have nothing else to live for. You have to live,’ she said to Luís, reaching her hand imploringly to him across the table, and he reluctantly reached out his own hand and gave hers a squeeze before withdrawing it. ‘No one can take that obligation from you.’

One of the organisers came to the table and said that the bus was now ready to take us back to the hotel. Outside the restaurant, passing through the graffitied concrete lot where the boy was no longer to be seen playing his flute, the Welsh novelist remarked that things had got pretty intense back there.

‘I wondered whether Sophia was making a bit of a play for Luís,’ he said in a low voice, glancing to either side of him, where the ruined walls of the buildings showed dark voids behind their crumbling edges and the wind sent the weeds growing along the roadside rocking back and forth. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I think they’d make quite a good couple.’

I asked him whether he would be attending Sophia’s reading, which was scheduled for the afternoon, and he said that unfortunately he wouldn’t be able to make it. He was writing a piece about attitudes to the Brexit vote in Wales that had to be delivered by the end of the day. It had been widely observed that the people who lived in the most hopeless poverty and ugliness were those who had voted most overwhelmingly to leave, and nowhere was that truer than his own small country.

‘It was a bit of a case of turkeys voting for Christmas,’ he said. ‘Though obviously I can’t say that in print.’

There were housing estates down south, he said, in the post-industrial wastelands, where the men still rode ponies and shot at one another with guns and the women brewed up cauldrons of magic mushrooms in their kitchens: he didn’t imagine they spent a lot of time discussing their membership of the EU, if they even knew what it was. In all seriousness it was sad, he added, that the country had come together in what was essentially an act of self-harm, though he himself would luckily be unaffected, since most of his sales revenue came from abroad: ironically, in fact, the more the pound fell against the euro, the better off he was. But it had spoiled the atmosphere even in his own community, where friendly neighbourliness had been replaced by mutual suspicion. He was all for people speaking their minds, but it did make him miss the time when what was beneath the surface had been permitted to stay there. The day after the referendum, he said, he had been visiting his parents in Leicestershire and had stopped for petrol and a cup of coffee in a service station. It was a dismal place, and the man sitting next to him – a great pockmarked tattooed creature – was tucking into a huge plate of fried food and announcing to the whole room that at long last he could be an Englishman eating a full English breakfast in his own country.

‘It makes you think democracy wasn’t such a good idea after all,’ he said.

I said I had assumed his family came from Wales, and he glanced at me with his strange wary smile, showing his narrow yellow teeth.

‘I grew up just outside Corby,’ he said. ‘To be honest it was pretty dull. I keep thinking I’ll write about it one day, but there just isn’t a lot to say.’

*

‘The next morning the wind had dropped and the…’

The next morning the wind had dropped and the sagging grey clouds had begun to thin and lift, and by the time the delegates had started to gather in the lobby an intense heat had arrived that seemed to wait behind the veil of cloud, half-threat and half-promise. Some of them wanted to go to the beach and the organisers were sombrely conferring and looking at their watches. The beach was at least half an hour’s walk away, they said: unfortunately it would be impossible to get there and back in time for the next event. Someone asked whether there would be simultaneous translation provided for that event, whose subject was contemporary interpretations of the Bible, and the organisers said that unfortunately in this case they were unable to provide simultaneous translation: this weekend was a big religious festival here, and a lot of their staff had gone home to their families. Also there was the cup final, which they were worried would further deplete audience numbers. They act, a man called Eduardo said to me, as though they are the victims of fate, but in fact these are events that could have been seen from a long way off and avoided. Yet perhaps, he said, it is the very intentness of our own will that causes us to be blind to other realities. A few years ago, he said, some friends of his rented a house in Italy and chose to travel there by car, simply keying the address into their satnav and following its directions, which miraculously took them all the way from Holland – where they lived – down through Europe to this farmhouse in the remotest regions of the hot south. They spent two weeks there, marvelling at their own freedom and autonomy and the ease with which they had made this transition. When the time came to go home and they had packed up the car again, they found that the satnav was for some reason not working. They realised, he said, that they had absolutely no idea where they were – they didn’t even know the name of the nearest town – and since they spoke not one word of the language and were in any case in the middle of an unpopulated wilderness, they were forced to drive around and around this savage landscape on dirt roads, trying in increasing panic to find an escape route before they ran out of petrol and food. All that time, he said smiling, when they thought they were free, they were in fact lost without knowing it.

He asked whether I would be attending the Bible talk, which since I wouldn’t be able to understand it I would have to treat as a mystical experience in itself, and I said that in fact I was going into the city for the day, as my editor had arranged a few interviews for me to do while I was here. He nodded his head slightly sadly, as though this information represented a disappointment, though to whom it wasn’t clear. I had chosen a propitious time for my visit, he said, since it happened to be the brief season when the city’s jacaranda trees were in bloom. They were a feature of the landscape there, running in great tall columns along the boulevards and avenues and decorating the many famous squares. Yet it was only for the merest couple of weeks that they burst into flower, producing great ethereal clouds of luminous violet clusters, which moved in the breezes almost in the manner of water or indeed of music, as though the pretty purple flowers were the individual notes that in chorus formed a rippling body of sound. These trees took an extraordinarily long time to grow, he said, and the towering specimens in the city were decades – indeed centuries – old. People sometimes tried to grow them in their own gardens, but unless you were fortunate enough to have inherited one, it was almost impossible to reproduce this spectacle on your own private property. He had many friends – smart, aspirational people of good taste – who had planted a jacaranda tree in their new garden as though this law of nature somehow didn’t apply to them and they could make it grow by the force of their will. After a year or two they would become frustrated and complain that it had barely increased even an inch. But it would take twenty, thirty, forty years for one of these trees to grow and yield its beautiful display, he said smiling: when you tell them this fact they are horrified, perhaps because they can’t imagine remaining in the same house or indeed the same marriage for so long, and they almost come to hate their jacaranda tree, he said, sometimes even digging it up and replacing it with something else, because it reminds them of the possibility that it is patience and endurance and loyalty – rather than ambition and desire – that bring the ultimate rewards. It is almost a tragedy, he said, that the same people who are capable of wanting the jacaranda tree and understanding its beauty are incapable of nurturing one themselves.

He was acquainted with my editor, he added, since the city was in the end a small world and everyone more or less knew everyone else. In a community as static as theirs, other people’s lives were an ongoing drama that kept evolving through different phases of existence, like a long-running soap opera; occasionally a new character would come in, but the core cast remained the same. Paola was a good woman, he said, though one of those to whom something is always happening and who always somehow manages to come out of it stronger. In this country, for a woman to survive the numerous attempts to crush her, he said, she has to live like a hero, always getting up again and always, ultimately, alone.

On the television in front of the deserted sofas, a huge crowd was gathered around a church, holding aloft wreaths of flowers and candles while a man in ecclesiastical costume addressed them through a microphone. A little girl with an enormous blue satin bow in her hair and a matching elaborately frilled dress stood staring at the screen while her parents called to her from inside the open lifts.

‘Our embarrassing secret,’ Eduardo said, rolling his eyes at the religious spectacle on the television. ‘You can possibly cope with thinking half the country is mad, but then tomorrow, with the football, it becomes clear the other half is mad too.’

The other delegates were gathering on the tarmac beyond the plate-glass windows, waiting to be taken to the next event. We passed out through the doors and into the car park, where he looked doubtfully at the sky.

‘You have seen us in strange weather,’ he said. ‘But I think it’s about to improve.’

Hammering sun, he added, was the norm at this time of year: these melancholy interludes of grey confusion were rare and yet nonetheless had the most dispiriting effect, as though they represented the temporary absence of authority. Dictatorial as it was, the sun was at least consistent: in England you are used to the sky weeping on you, he said, but here we take these things personally, like children take their parents’ moods personally and assume they are to blame. Perhaps it follows, he said, that people who live in the sun don’t take responsibility for their own happiness. According to his son, the unseasonal weather had at least yielded some excellent surf conditions, which undoubtedly meant that he and his friends would pack up and move to the beach for a few days, with no more ambition than a colony of seals, he said, who go where the forces of nature direct them. My children live in only two dimensions, he said, like the character Tintin, whose adventures are made possible by occurring in a world that is fixed and that can be represented by a cartoonist’s pen, where for me it is people and their thoughts that have been the true reality. I treated my children with only kindness, he said, and the result is that they have none of the anxieties I had at their age and also none of the ideas and visions by which I believed the world could be transformed and which turned even the smallest things into elements of a great drama, so that everything always seemed to be in a state of flux. For them the world is fixed, as I say, and they are willing to take their piece of it, but in the end it will be a much smaller piece, he said, than that which I have taken myself, despite the fact that I have apparently devoted myself to the life of the mind. I have more than they will probably ever have, he said smiling, yet I appear to them as a tortured soul: they are always giving me advice designed to make me happier and more relaxed, and it is good advice, he said, but they don’t seem to realise that if I took it the drama would be over and the world would have less interest for me. The other day, he said, my son and I were talking about politics, and he observed that in the current situation the possibility of destruction seemed genuinely to be upon us, to the extent that he couldn’t see what move on the chess board would get us out of this corner. I replied that this was something all of us had felt in our turn, as we passed into adulthood and recognised the role of outside events in shaping history and their capacity to interfere in and change our lives, which until now had remained in the hermetic state of childhood. He said something which very much surprised me, which was that in any case he felt the destruction had by now been earned in full by humanity, and that even if it meant the lives of his generation weren’t allowed to run their full course, he believed it would be for the best. Every time he thought of the future, his son said, he had to remind himself that this sense of his own story was just an illusion, because not enough was left any more for another story: enough time, enough material, enough authenticity. Everything has been used up, he said, except I suppose, Eduardo added, the waves, which continue to pound on the shore and will still be pounding when we’re gone.

The bus had arrived and the queue of delegates was shuffling forwards through the open doors. Eduardo held out his hand. The sun suddenly broke through the cloud and surged hot and fierce across our faces and the tarmac of the car park and the glinting metal of the bus.

‘I suspect that you are running away,’ he said, his eyes screwed up either with puzzlement or because of the heavy glare. ‘I hope you make good use of your freedom.’

*

‘The hotel where Paola had asked me to meet her…’

The hotel where Paola had asked me to meet her was as plush as the one from which I’d come had been bleak. The walls of the vast lobby were panelled with dark wood and leather, and an air of mystery had been created by the use of columns and dim lighting and lowered sections of ceiling, so although the people inside remained visible, it encouraged them to feel concealed. The reception desk, an enormous dark plinth in a sunken hall staffed by a row of uniformed attendants, gave such an impression of grandiose finality that it was as if, Paola said, this was where the wheat was being separated from the chaff. She sat perched on a leather footstool in a silvery tunic and thin gold sandals, tapping speedily at the screen of her phone and shooting enquiring looks around the lobby while her assistant, a large soft girl with a sweetly placid expression, sat on a sofa nearby. The hotel, Paola said, laid claim to literary associations that were more or less spurious, since they consisted entirely of the fact that a bookshop had once stood on this site which was demolished to make way for the new building. Nonetheless the theme had been conserved in the hotel’s insignia – a motif of famous signatures written in faded ink – and in the severe splendour of its decor, though in their haste to recreate the ambiance of a library they had somehow, she said, forgotten to supply any books, except for the wallpaper made from a photograph of worn leather spines that had been used for the inside of the lifts. But we should be grateful, she said, that they took such a serious attitude to literature, because even if this place was entirely unrepresentative of writers and their lives, it was ideal for conducting interviews and in summer was one of the coolest and quietest spots in the city.

The first journalist would be arriving at any moment, she added, and there would be a filmed interview later, on behalf of the last remaining arts programme on national television. Only a handful of writers were invited to participate in this programme, she went on, so she was happy I was one of them, because opportunities to promote books were harder and harder to come by. The format was very straightforward and the whole thing would probably only take fifteen minutes, since the programme had had its running time cut in half last year. It was unclear precisely why this had happened, she added, except that everything to do with literature always seemed to be shrinking, as though the world of books was governed by a principle of entropy while everything else proliferated and expanded. The newspapers now gave half the space to reviews that they had ten years ago and bookshops were forever closing down, and with the arrival of the e-reader there had even been doomsayers predicting the book as a physical entity might cease to exist entirely. Like the Siberian tiger, she said, we are always being threatened with extinction, as though novels likewise had once been fierce and were now fragile and defenceless. Somewhere along the line, she said, we have failed to promote our product, perhaps because the people who work in the literary world are those who secretly believe their interest in literature is a weakness, a kind of debility that marks them out from everyone else. We publishers, she said, proceed on the assumption that no one cares about books, whereas the makers of cornflakes convince everyone that the world needs cornflakes like it needs the sun to rise in the morning.

Her eyes had been busily scanning the lobby and they suddenly lit up at the sight of a man coming through the big smoked-glass doors. She leapt off her stool and went to meet him, while her assistant asked me if I wanted any coffee before things got started. There would probably be some free time between the interviews, she said, but you could never be sure: sometimes they went on for much longer than they were supposed to. Some writers perhaps had more to say than others did, she said doubtfully, or perhaps they just enjoyed talking more. I asked her how long she had worked in publishing and she said she had only had this job for a couple of months. Before that she had worked for one of the national airlines. This was a better job, she said, because the hours were more sociable and it meant she could spend more time with her children. Her children were very small, she said, but she had got into the habit of asking each of the writers she met to sign a copy of their book with a dedication for them. She put the books on a special shelf at home, because although the children were too young to read them now, she liked the idea of them finding a shelf with all these books dedicated to them in the future. Perhaps, she said, if there was time, she could trouble me to sign one of mine for them later.

The journalist had sat down on a nearby sofa and was leafing through his notes. He stood up to shake my hand, wearing an expression of great seriousness: he was very tall and entirely bald and his thick-framed glasses were so large they seemed designed to magnify his role as interrogator at the same time as offering the hope that he might not be seen. His skin was extremely pale and his large hairless head had a somewhat glimmering, preternatural appearance in the dim room. The assistant offered him water, which he accepted with raised eyebrows, as though the offer had surprised him. Beside him on the table was a pile of books, the pages bristling with Post-it notes. He hoped I wasn’t finding it too hot in the city, he said: he himself couldn’t bear this time of year, since unlike most of his countrymen he had a very fair skin that suffered badly in the sun. He preferred the English climate, where even a summer’s day had a caressing silkiness to it and the trees, to quote from Tennyson, laid their dark arms across the lawn, though of course the English themselves came here in their hordes – he grimaced with his rather plump pale mouth – to lie roasting on the beaches. He had wondered, he added, whether out of tact or courtesy or just plain shame they might desist from this habit in the light of their recent rejection of European membership, but there was no sign that this was the case.

‘There they sit,’ he said, folding his arms and looking theatrically around himself with defiant bullishness, in imitation of these interlopers, ‘entrenched in the resorts and watering holes, unable to converse in any but their native tongue nor even to comprehend the implications of their own boorish stupidity. Like great big babies,’ he said, somewhat resembling an oversized baby himself, ‘who have managed to derail the whole family because no one made the effort to bring them up properly. At one time I had a love affair with England,’ he added, resuming his normal demeanour. ‘I loved its poetry and its irony – I loved it so much I cursed the fact I hadn’t been born an Englishman. But now,’ he said, ‘I feel lucky not to be one.’

The changing perspectives of identity, he went on, was a subject he sensed I had given some consideration to: was it not the case that one could believe oneself to be disadvantaged by things that later were proved to be assets, and conversely – and perhaps more commonly – that there were people who remained convinced they were the favourites of the gods until life taught them otherwise? As a scholarly boy with no sporting ability, for instance, he had regarded himself as seriously disabled until it was revealed that a good brain was worth far more than the knack of catching a ball. A friend of his had a phrase that always amused him: life, this friend said, was the revenge of the nerds, and this charming notion – that it was the bookish laughing stocks who ended up with the power – acquired certain nuances when one applied it to writers, for whom the question of power generally remained unresolved. A writer was only given power by the act of someone reading their book: this was perhaps why so many writers became obsessed with having their books made into films, since it dispensed with the arduous part of that transaction. In the case of the English, their power was a memory, and the spectacle of them attempting to exercise it was as ridiculous as that of a dog dreaming it is chasing a rabbit.

It was his practice to read the entirety of an author’s oeuvre, he added, seeing me glance at the pile of books, and not just the latest one, as so many of his colleagues did. He had often been surprised by how many authors seemed to feel that this constituted an investigation into their past life, as though the books had no existence in the public realm and he had somehow caught them out. On one occasion, an author was unable to remember anything at all about a book he had written a few years earlier; on another, a female novelist had admitted that she liked only one of the many books she’d written – books that her readers still bought and presumably read – and felt the others to be pretty much worthless. Still others – and this was admittedly far more common – seemed to value their work on the basis of the rewards and recognition it had received, and to have adopted the world’s assessment of their own importance; but only, he added, adjusting his glasses, if that assessment was positive. What surprised him was that these writers seemed, when they embarked on their career, to have had no particular plan, and to have written books much as other people got up and went to work in the morning. It was, in other words, simply their job, and was as provisional and exposed to the possibility of boredom and mundanity as any other job: they didn’t know what the future would bring, though they subscribed to the same vague belief in progress as everyone else, and they were likewise liable to make much of their successes while blaming their failures on other people’s ignorance, as well as on luck, which was the chief means by which they believed that certain others among their contemporaries had got ahead.

‘I admit it has been something of a disappointment to me to make these discoveries,’ he said, ‘because I revere literary art, and though I accept that an early novel even by a great master might lack the depth and complexity of a later work, I don’t especially want to feel that by reading an author’s oeuvre I am merely watching them stumbling through life, only marginally less blindfolded than everyone else.’

He had always been compelled by provocative and difficult writing, he went on, because this at least proved the author had had the wit to unshackle himself from convention, but he had found that in works of extreme negativity – the writings of Thomas Bernhard were an example he had been considering lately – one nonetheless eventually hit an impasse. A work of art could not, ultimately, be negative: its material existence, its status as an object, could not help but be positive, a gain, an addition to the sum of what was. The self-destructive novel, like the self-destructive person, was something from which in the end you remained helplessly separated, forced to watch a spectacle – the soul turning on itself – in which you were powerless to intervene. Great art was very often brought to the service of this self-immolation, as great intelligence and sensitivity often characterised those who found the world an impossible place to live in; yet the spectre of madness was so discomfiting that it made surrender to the writing unfeasible; one stayed on one’s guard, as a child might stay on its guard against a mad parent, knowing itself ultimately alone. Negative literature, he had noticed, got much of its power through the fearless use of honesty: a person with no interest in living and hence no investment in the future can afford to be honest, he said, and the same dubious privilege was extended to the negative writer. Yet their honesty, as he had said, was of an unpalatable kind: in a sense it went to waste, perhaps because no one cared for the honesty of someone who was jumping the ship the rest of us were stuck on. The real honesty, of course, was that of the person who remained on board and endeavoured to tell the truth about it, or so we were led to believe. If I agreed that literature was a form that took its life-blood from social and material constructs, the writer could do no more than stay within those constructs, buried in bourgeois life – as he had recently read it described somewhere – like a tick in an animal’s fur.

He paused, searching for something in his notes, while I observed the extraordinary pallor and tenderness of his hairless head bent over the pages. Presently he looked up again, fixing me in the giant orbs of his glasses. The question he wished to discuss with me, he said, was the question of whether I believed there was a third kind of honesty, beyond that of the person who leaves and that of the person who stays; an honesty to which no moral bias could be ascribed, that is interested neither in debunking nor in reforming, that has no compass of its own and can describe evil as dispassionately as virtue without erring on the side of one or the other, that is as pure and reflective as water or glass. He believed certain French writers had become interested in this question, he said – Georges Bataille came to mind as an example – but to him they went no further than positing honesty as amoral, in other words as refusing to differentiate between good and bad and offering no judgement on one or the other. His question was more, in a sense, old-fashioned: could a spiritual value be attached to the mirror itself, so that by passing dispassionately through evil it proved its own virtue, its own incorruptibility? Did I not, in the end, thirst for that proof, to the extent that I might consider evil as a subject?

For the sake of fairness he ought perhaps to tell me, he added, that he was known in this city as a maker and breaker of reputations: a bad review from him could kill a book, and so one consequence of his own honesty was that he had many enemies, which meant that when he brought out a book of his own – he had so far produced three volumes of poetry – the knives, as they say, were out. These attacks had resulted in his work not gaining the recognition it might otherwise have received: he had applied for numerous academic fellowships in the States, as well as for literary posts in this country, and had been unsuccessful, yet his power as a critic remained undiminished; indeed, if anything it was constantly increasing, to the extent that he was acquiring an international reputation. Friends of his had advised him that if he wanted to make it as a creative writer, he should stop savaging other people’s work, but you might as well ask a bird not to fly or a cat not to hunt; and besides, what would his poetry be worth if he wrote it while living in the same zoo as all the other denatured animals, safe but not free? And that was without even mentioning the moral duty of the critic to correct the tendency of culture likewise to err towards safety and mediocrity, a responsibility you couldn’t measure in dinner invitations.

What he couldn’t tolerate above all else, he went on, was the triumph of the second-rate, the dishonest, the ignorant: the fact that this triumph occurred with monotonous regularity was one of life’s mysteries, and he was well aware that in pitting himself against it he ran the risk of succumbing to the same despair that made the literature of negativity so impotent. Too much time among the Pharisees and not enough with the devil himself: this was how, he said, the question of evil had come to interest him. He was only twenty-six – he was aware, he said, that he looked much older – and when he had alluded to those writers who seemed to have no overarching plan and who claimed not even to know what was going to happen in the book they were currently writing, as though their work were the result not of careful thought or artistic competence or merely hard work, but of divine inspiration or worse, imagination, he was not describing himself. He wouldn’t start a piece of writing without knowing precisely where it was going to lead any more than he would leave his house without knowing what his destination was or without his keys and wallet. Such claims were the bane of our culture, he said, because they imputed a kind of feeble-mindedness to the arts, where men and women in other fields were proud of their self-discipline and competence. He expected, he said, that I would agree with this assessment, since he had deduced from my work that if I had an imagination I had the sense to keep it well concealed.

‘And there is no better hiding place,’ he said, ‘than somewhere as close as possible to the truth, something all good liars know.’

He was looking up at something over my shoulder and I turned to see the assistant standing there. She was very sorry, she said, but the interview had now run its allotted course, and since the next interview was for television and involved precise timings, we would have to bring things to a conclusion. The journalist immediately began to remonstrate with her and a lengthy exchange ensued, in which he spoke very quickly and forcefully and she replied very slowly, repeating certain phrases and nodding her head with sympathetic regret, until finally he began irritably to pack his books and notes back into his briefcase. Her training with the airline, she said, as she led me away towards the lifts, had come in handy more times than she might have expected in this job. She had to admit this journalist was one of her trickier customers, and his interviews nearly always ended with the same argument, since he seemed to take such a long time to get round to asking a question and when he did, discovered that he himself had the best answer for it. She mildly rolled her eyes and pressed the button to call the lift. In fact she had gone to the same school as him, she added, and often saw him at family occasions, but whenever they met through work he pretended not to know her. At home he is very polite and nice, she said wistfully, as well as being the only one prepared to talk to the grandmothers, who will listen to him for hours on end.

The hotel had given permission for a temporary studio to be set up in the basement, she said as the lift went down, and though it didn’t look quite as professional as their usual set, the illusion was actually quite convincing. We emerged into a large, low-ceilinged space where several people were absorbed in adjusting wires and lights amid piles of camera equipment. In the far corner, surrounded by bare concrete walls and packing cases, a small segment of a room had been recreated, with tall bookshelves and pictures and a threadbare Persian rug on which two antique chairs had been placed at a conversational angle. A number of very bright lights were trained on it, giving it the appearance of a golden book-lined island, with the men working in a kind of purgatorial gloom just beyond its shores. A slender woman with a wide pale face elaborately made up for the camera approached us and held out her hand. She wore a high-necked blouse with long buttoned sleeves and her long thick pale-gold hair was drawn smoothly back in a ponytail, like a studious princess with the book-lined island as her home. She would be conducting the interview, she said in English, and once the men had sorted out a small problem with the sound equipment we could probably get started straight away. She turned and said something to the assistant and the two of them talked back and forth for a while, sometimes laughing and laying a hand on one another’s arm, while the men silently and absorbedly worked at the equipment, plugging and unplugging long trailing wires and rummaging in the big black camera cases that lay open around them on the floor. Presently the interviewer indicated that they wanted us to take our places, and we went and sat on the antique chairs among the bookshelves, where the bright light caused everything around it to fall into half-darkness, so that the cameramen became obscure figures moving through the murky shadow. A man who was evidently the director stood just at the edge of the light, issuing instructions to the interviewer while she slowly nodded her head, occasionally looking at me out of the corner of her painted eye and giving me a complicit smile.

The technicians were asking us to talk, she said to me, so that they could adjust the sound levels and work out what the problem was. They had told us to just talk about what we had for breakfast today, she said, though there were probably more interesting things we could discuss. She was hoping our conversation would focus on the problem of recognition for female writers and artists: perhaps I had some thoughts on that subject I could share with her, so that she could make sure to ask the right questions in the interview. The topic probably wasn’t new to me, but it might well never have occurred to their viewers that the same inequalities that beset the home and the workplace could dictate what was presented to them as art, so she saw no reason not to give the nail another bang on the head. And it was of course true, she added, that few notable women were ever really recognised, or at least not until they had been judged to be no longer a public danger by having become old or ugly or dead. The artist Louise Bourgeois, for example, was suddenly all the rage in her last years and finally allowed to come out of the closet and be seen, when her male counterparts had been on the public stage all along, entertaining people with their grandiose and self-destructive behaviour. Yet if one looked at the work of Louise Bourgeois, one saw that it concerned the private history of the female body, its suppression and exploitation and transmogrifications, its terrible malleability as a form and its capacity to create other forms. It was tempting to consider, she said, that Bourgeois’s talent relied on the anonymity of her experiences; in other words, that had she been recognised as a younger artist, she might not have had cause to dwell on the ignominious mysteries of her life as a woman, and instead would have been partying and posing for the front covers of magazines along with the rest of them. There are a number of works, she said, executed when Bourgeois was the mother of small children, in which she portrays herself as a spider, and what is interesting about these works is not just what they convey about the condition of motherhood – in distinct contrast, she said, to the perennial male vision of the ecstatically fulfilled madonna – but also the fact that they appear to be children’s drawings drawn in a child’s hand. It is hard to think, she said, of a better example of female invisibility than these drawings, in which the artist herself has disappeared and exists only as the benign monster of her child’s perception. Plenty of female practitioners of the arts, she said, have more or less ignored their femininity, and it might be argued that these women have found recognition easier to come by, perhaps because they draw a veil over subjects that male intellectuals find distasteful, or perhaps simply because they have chosen not to fulfil their own biological destiny and therefore have had more time to concentrate on their work. It is understandable, she said, that a woman of talent might resent being fated to the feminine subject and might seek freedom by engaging with the world on other terms; yet the image of Bourgeois’s spider, she said, seems almost to reproach the woman who has run away from these themes and left the rest of us stuck, as it were, in our webs.

She paused for a moment to look enquiringly towards the camera lights, beyond which the men were gathered in shadowy consultation, their arms full of cables. The director shook his head and she raised a perfectly drawn eyebrow and then slowly returned her gaze to me.

I remember, she continued, as a young girl, the realisation dawning on me that certain things had been decided for me before I had even begun to live, and that I had already been dealt the losing hand while my brother had been given the winning cards. It would be a mistake, I saw, to treat this injustice as though it were normal, as all my friends seemed prepared to do; and it was not so very hard to get the better of that situation, she said, because the boy that is handed all the cards is perhaps also very slightly complacent, as well as having a big question mark in the form of the thing between his legs, which he must work out what to do with. These boys, she said, had the most ridiculous attitudes towards women, which they were busy learning from the examples their parents had given them, and I saw the way that my female friends defended themselves against those attitudes, by making themselves as perfect and as inoffensive as they could. Yet the ones who didn’t defend themselves were just as bad, because by refusing to conform to these standards of perfection they were in a sense disqualifying themselves and distancing themselves from the whole subject. But I quickly came to see, she said, that in fact there was nothing worse than to be an average white male of average talents and intelligence: even the most oppressed housewife, she said, is closer to the drama and poetry of life than he is, because as Louise Bourgeois shows us she is capable at least of holding more than one perspective. And it was true, she said, that a number of girls were achieving academic success and cultivating professional ambitions, to the extent that people had begun to feel sorry for these average boys and to worry that their feelings were being hurt. Yet if you looked only a little way ahead, she said, you could see that the girls’ ambitions led nowhere, like the roads you often find yourself on in this country, that start off new and wide and smooth and then simply stop in the middle of nowhere, because the government ran out of money to finish building them.

She paused again and glanced over at the director, who gave her a thumbs-down, and gestured for her to continue talking. She carefully tucked a lock of her straight, pale-yellow hair behind her ear and then folded her hands in her lap.

At around this time, she said, I began to discover the worlds of literature and art and I found there much of the information I needed, information my mother had neglected to pass on to me, perhaps in the hope that I would somehow make my way through this minefield in ignorance unscathed and that if she alerted me to the dangers I might take fright and make a misstep. I made sure to work hard, she said, and to achieve the highest results, but no matter how hard I worked there was always a boy there, level with me, who appeared to be less out of breath and to be taking things in his stride; and so I cultivated the art, she said, of nonchalance, and gave every impression of being less well-prepared than I was, until one day I found that this impression had become a reality, and that I achieved even more by leaving a few things to chance and by taking a leap of faith, such as the child takes when the training wheels come off the bicycle and it finds itself cycling unsupported for the first time. I also enjoyed the attentions of men, she said, while making sure never to commit myself to any one man or to ask for commitment in return, because I understood that this was a trap and that I could still enjoy all the benefits of a relationship without falling into it. At a certain point it struck me that I could even have a child, she said, without necessarily compromising myself in the usual ways. But I didn’t really want a child, she said, despite the fact that my friends were having them and could talk of little else, because it seemed to me that there were so many children, she said, and that if I could manage without one then I ought at least to try. It did not seem like enough, she said, simply to pass the baton to the next runner, in the hope that she would win the race for me.

The job that I do, she said, gazing at me steadily with her clear, almond-shaped pale-blue eyes, is in many respects a superficial one, since it involves being looked at, and part of the reason I was given it was because of my ability to manipulate my appearance. I have a male counterpart on the show, she said, and he is not required to look attractive, but I am not in the slightest bit interested in that example of inequality. What I am interested in is power, she said, and the power of beauty is a useful weapon that too often women disparage or misuse. My background is principally in the visual rather than the literary arts, she said, because that is where these politics are decided and where the battles of life are mainly fought and it is also, she said, where the nature of male superiority is at its most exposed. For a while, at university, I sat as a life model for the art students, she said, partly to make money and partly to get this subject of the female body out into the open, because it almost seemed to me that even by clothing myself I was inviting the mystery to take root there under my clothes, and to weave the web of subjection in which later I might become trapped. I myself was taking art history, she said, and for my thesis I studied the work of the British artist Joan Eardley, whose position struck me as an example of the tragedy of female authority, though in a very different way from that of Louise Bourgeois or indeed of the poet Sylvia Plath, who remains as a warning to us all of the price to be paid for the fulfilment of one’s biological destiny. Joan Eardley hid herself away on a tiny island off the coast of Scotland, she said, where she documented the savageries of nature, of the cliffs and the tempestuous sea and the sky, always seeming to be standing on the edge of some unspeakable violence or turbulence, she said, as though she were trying to locate the edge of the world itself. She spent a certain amount of time also in the city of Glasgow, where she drew and painted the street children, whose poverty and depressing cheerfulness she was unable to observe entirely without sentiment: she drew them obsessively and also it seems involved herself in their lives, rather as Degas haunted the world of his ballet dancers, she said, with the difference that Joan Eardley was not a man and so her vision appears disturbing and strange rather than familiar and legitimate. Also on her visits to the Glasgow slums she painted certain men, people she encountered on the streets or in the boarding houses, and again treated these subjects as some of the famous male artists have. There is a painting by Eardley, she said, of a male nude asleep on a bed: he is lying on his side, his grey, bony, undernourished body entirely revealed, in a room that is also unrelievedly grey, and the bed is as narrow and comfortless as a coffin. This painting, she said, is unlike anything else I have seen painted by a woman, and partly because of its large size it seems to take the bleakest possible view of life, so that it almost succeeds in refuting the whole history of men painting women in such poses. The pathos of that sleeping body, she said, its lack of any promise or possibility, is entirely shocking, and indeed the painting caused a scandal at the time, for the resemblance between this man and the victims of the concentration camps with whose images the world had become familiar a few years earlier. Yet despite that scandal – which resulted, bizarrely, she said, in a number of men turning up at Eardley’s door and offering themselves as her next nude model – Eardley’s oeuvre remains unrecognised and her life, which as far as I can ascertain was without sex and was certainly childless and solitary, ended in agonising illness at the age of forty-two. It was a life without illusion, she said, and it seems to me that it remains impossible for a woman to live without illusion, because the world will simply snuff her out.

In my own case, she said, I have fought to occupy a position where I can perhaps right some of these wrongs and can adjust the terms of the debate to an extent by promoting the work of women I find interesting. But increasingly, she said, this position feels like I am standing on a small rock in the ocean that is getting even smaller by the minute as the water rises. There has been no territory marked out, she said, and so there is no place where I can take a step and find myself still on dry land. It perhaps remains the case, she said, that for a woman to have a territory she must live as Bourgeois’s spider, unless she is prepared to camp on male territory and abide by its terms. There are as yet only two roles, she said, that of model and that of artist and the alternative, she said, as the men moving through the gloom began shaking their heads at one another and the director threw up his hands in a gesture of despair, is to disappear into some belief or philosophy and find a shelter that way. She cocked her head, listening while the director spoke to her, and then turned to me with her slender, elegant eyebrows disparagingly raised.

‘It seems extraordinary,’ she said, ‘that all these men together can’t fix the problem, but they say they will have to take the equipment back to the studio to repair it. It is very disappointing,’ she said, rising from her chair and beginning to disentangle the microphone cord from her clothing, ‘and considering the subject of our conversation, more than a little ironic.’

The third interview, the assistant said on our way back upstairs, would be the last one, and she hoped it was more successful than the other two had been. She believed Paola had booked a restaurant afterwards for lunch, so hopefully I would have the opportunity to relax before returning to the conference. We emerged into the lobby, where Paola was sitting on her stool talking on the phone. She waved and rolled her eyes and the assistant led me back to the sofa where the first interview had occurred and where a man was waiting, though in fact when we got closer I saw that he was hardly more than a boy. He sat lightly on the edge of his seat, dressed in a white t-shirt and a faded pair of jeans and dangling a baseball cap loosely from his fingers, a mildly anxious expression of innocence on his face, like that of a young saint in a religious painting. He sprang up to shake my hand and then waited politely for me to sit down before returning to his place. His brown hair fell in ringlets around his guileless, almost feminine features, and his darker brown eyes were fixed on mine with childlike earnestness.

‘I wonder,’ he said eventually, ‘if you have ever thought of what it would be like to live in the sun. I got the idea from your book,’ he added. ‘One of the characters talks about how he has lived his whole life in the rain and the cold, and how being in the sun has changed his character. I wondered if it might be the same for you.’

I said it probably wasn’t worth thinking about, since living in the sun wasn’t something I planned to do.

‘But why not?’ he said.

We sat and looked at one another.

‘I’ve thought about it,’ he said, ‘and I believe it would be the right thing for you to do.’

I asked him where he suggested I should live.

‘Here,’ he said simply. ‘You would be very happy. No one would trouble you. People would be very kind to you. You wouldn’t even have to learn the language,’ he said, ‘because everyone can speak English and they accept that that is the way things are. We would look after you,’ he said, ‘and everything would be easier. You wouldn’t need to suffer any more. You could find a cottage on the coast, by the sea. You would be warm and your skin would turn brown. I’ve thought about it,’ he repeated, ‘and I don’t see any disadvantages.’

In the dim distances of the lobby people stood or sat or moved around, visible but at an unbreachable distance, as though they were under water. There was a constant low murmur of voices from which no individual word could be distinguished. Sometimes a group moved away and was replaced by another group, and when people came and went with their suitcases through the smoked-glass doors the extraordinary reality of the hot, bright, motionless street outside could momentarily be seen.

I said I wasn’t sure it mattered where people lived or how, since their individual nature would create its own circumstances: it was a risky kind of presumption, I said, to rewrite your own fate by changing its setting; when it happened to people against their will, the loss of the known world – whatever its features – was catastrophic. My son once admitted to me, I said, that when he was younger he desperately wished he could belong to a different family, such as the family of a friend of his with whom at a certain period he spent a lot of his time. This family was big and noisy and easy-going, and there was always room for him at the table, where huge comforting meals were served and where everything was discussed but nothing examined, so that there was no danger of passing through the mirror, as he had put it, into the state of painful self-awareness where human fictions lose their credibility.

This was the state into which he felt our own family life had been forced, I said, and for a while he had done everything he could to hold on to those fictions, insisting on the old routines and the old traditions, even though what they represented was no longer there. In the end, I said, he gave up and began to absent himself more and more, spending all his time with this other family, as I had said, and refusing to take any of his meals at home, because even sitting around the table, he later admitted, made him feel overwhelmed by sadness and anger at what had been lost. But later, I said, a time came when he was no longer always at the house of this other family, to the extent that the parents began to ask after him and to invite him to family occasions, so that he worried that he had upset or offended them by coming less often. The truth was that he no longer wanted to go there, because the same things that a year or two earlier he had found warm and consoling he now found oppressive and annoying: those mealtimes were a yoke, he now saw, by which the parents sought to bind their children to them and to perpetuate, as he saw it, the family myth; his friend’s every movement was subjected to parental scrutiny and his choices and attitudes to parental judgement, and it was this last element – judgement – that my son found most repellent and that drove him away from their door, lest he be subjected to it too. In their invitations for him to return he began to see that the history of his presence there had not been as one-sided as he had thought: in his need for the consolation they offered he had failed to see that they needed him too, as the witness to – and perhaps even the proof of – their family happiness. He even wondered, bitterly, whether they had enjoyed the spectacle of his misery, because it affirmed the superiority of their own way of life; but in the end, I said, he drew back from that harsh assessment and began to accept their invitations again, not always but often enough for the sake of courtesy. He recognised that in taking their comfort he had created a responsibility towards them; and this realisation, I said, had caused him to consider the true nature of freedom. He understood that he had given some of his freedom away, through a desire to avoid or alleviate his own suffering, and while it didn’t seem exactly an unfair exchange, I believed he wouldn’t do it again quite so easily.

The journalist had listened to all of this with the same expression of patient innocence on his face.

‘But why is it so bad to depend on people?’ he said. ‘Not everyone is cruel. Perhaps,’ he said, ‘you have just been unlucky.’

There was a word in his language, I said, that was hard to translate but that could be summed up as a feeling of homesickness even when you are at home, in other words as a sorrow that has no cause. This feeling was perhaps what had once driven his people to roam the world, seeking the home that would cure them of it. It may be the case that to find that home is to end one’s quest, I said, but it is with the feeling of displacement itself that the true intimacy develops and that constitutes, as it were, the story. Whatever kind of affliction it is, I said, its nature is that of the compass, and the owner of such a compass puts all his faith in it and goes where it tells him to go, despite appearances telling him the opposite. It is impossible for such a person to attain serenity, I said, and he might spend his whole life marvelling at that quality in others or failing to understand it, and perhaps the best he can hope for is to give a good imitation of it, as certain addicts accept that while they will never be free of their impulses they can live alongside them without acting on them. What such a person cannot tolerate, I said, is the suggestion that his experiences have not arisen out of universal conditions but instead can be blamed on particular or exceptional circumstances, and that what he was treating as truth was in fact no more than personal fortune; any more than the addict, I said, ought to believe that he can regain his innocence of things of which he already has a fatal knowledge.

‘Where is he now,’ the journalist said, ‘the son you talked about?’

I said that he had chosen to go and live with his father for a while, and although I couldn’t be said to be happy without him, I hoped he would find what he was looking for.

‘But why did you let him go?’ he said.

If I had given my children freedom, I said, I couldn’t start dictating its terms.

He nodded his head in mournful acquiescence.

‘All the same,’ he said, ‘at a certain point you also are free to choose whether to live in the rain or to live in the sun. We would take good care of you,’ he repeated. ‘If you didn’t want to see anybody, you wouldn’t have to. But the people here would appreciate you. I still believe that you have been unlucky,’ he said, ‘and that if you had lived in this country your experiences would have been different. The character in your book,’ he said, ‘notices that the dampness that has been inside him his whole life is beginning to dry out and that this might be an opportunity to live for a second time. But he can’t, because he has a family back at home and his children are still young. And besides, his national identity is the part of his character from which he believes his success has come. If he didn’t have it, he would be the same as everyone else and would have to compete with them on the same terms, and in his heart he knows he doesn’t have the talent to win. But you,’ he said to me, ‘don’t belong anywhere, and so you are free to go wherever you choose.’

The assistant approached shyly and said that it was time for the interview to end and for Paola and me to leave for the restaurant. Also, she wondered whether it would bother me too much to sign two of my books for her children, as she had mentioned earlier. She took the books out of a supermarket carrier bag and placed a pen carefully on top of them and held them out to me. I signed the books, the assistant spelling out each of the children’s names for me. The third interviewer rose to leave while Paola, who was still sitting on her stool and talking on her phone, pointed at the phone and then held her finger in the air. Shortly afterwards she flung it in her bag and leapt off the stool and came to join us. The assistant told her about the morning’s events and she listened while retrieving her phone from her bag again and tapping something rapidly on the screen. Then she looked at her watch and turned to me. She had booked a restaurant in the old part of town, she said: my translator, a woman called Felícia, would be meeting us there. If I preferred, she said, we could take a taxi, or if I didn’t mind the heat we could walk, since there was just about enough time.

‘It would be good to walk, no?’ she said, her small button-like eyes bright with expectation.

After the sepulchral cool and dimness of the lobby, the heat outside on the pavement was momentarily shocking. A pallor of dust hung in the dry throbbing air beneath the fierce blue of the sky. The street was deserted, apart from a group of office workers who stood across the road in the rectangle of the building’s shade, smoking and talking. One or two cats lay stretched out on their sides in the dark spaces beneath parked cars. The noise of distant traffic and of machinery from a building site somewhere nearby droned steadily in the background. We set off along the pavement, Paola moving with surprising rapidity despite her diminutive stature and the thin gold sandals she wore on her feet. She was somewhere in her fifties, but her neat mischievous face with its shining eyes was almost childlike. Her clothes were made of a light, flowing material in which her small, solid, vigorous body strode out freely and she swung her arms, her fine brown hair flying behind her.

‘I am a great walker,’ she said. ‘Here I walk everywhere. It gives me such pleasure,’ she said, ‘to see people trapped in their cars while I am free.’ The capital, as I must know, was famous for the steepness of its terrain. ‘Either I am going up or I am going down,’ she said. ‘Never in the middle.’

She used to have a car, but she drove it so rarely that she was always forgetting where she’d last parked it. Then, one day when she needed it, she found that someone had crashed into it.

‘I am perhaps the only person,’ she said, ‘who could write off their car without even sitting in it. It was completely destroyed,’ she said, ‘so I just left it there and walked away.’

The suburb where I was staying seemed a long way from here, she said, but actually was no more than half an hour on foot, if you knew which way to go: it was only because of the peculiarities of the road system and the lack of public transport that it seemed much further. Yet it felt so cut off out there that she had heard numerous stories over the years – some of them quite entertaining – of authors absconding or attempting to escape.

‘But in fact,’ she said, ‘you have been quite close to civilisation all along.’

A lot of people were incapacitated by the city’s heat, she added, even those who had lived here all their lives, but she herself had learned the art of conserving her energy and not wasting it battling against forces over which she had no control. When her son was small, for example, she would rise early so that he would always find her fully dressed in the kitchen, making breakfast and ready for the day: she would take him to nursery, talking cheerfully all the way, and when she had dropped him off would promptly return home, remove all her clothes again and get straight back into bed to sleep. Her prodigious walking was offset by periods in which she would often remain entirely stationary for literally hours at a time, like a reptile, she said, who doesn’t even use the energy it takes to blink. She had lived here for thirty-five years, she said, in answer to my question, having spent her childhood in the remote north of the country.

‘There,’ she said, ‘everything is water. The sky is always heavy and the rivers are full and everywhere there is the sound of dripping and trickling and pouring, so that when you are there you almost become mesmerised.’

Recently, she had gone back and spent a few weeks at home because her mother had been ill.

‘It was so strange to find myself in that watery environment again,’ she said, ‘with the sound of the rain falling and the rivers rushing downhill towards the sea, and the damp grass everywhere and the heavy, dripping trees. After a while I began to remember things I had completely forgotten,’ she said, ‘to the point where it started to feel like my whole life as an adult had been a dream. I almost felt myself disappearing,’ she said, ‘as though that place could simply take me back into itself. I was sitting by the river one day reading,’ she said, ‘exactly as I used to do when I was a girl of twelve or thirteen, and everything I had done since then suddenly seemed completely questionable, since it had only brought me back here again to exactly the same spot.’

Returning to the city afterwards she had spent several weeks in a state approaching ecstasy, and had walked over every inch of it, unable to get enough of the familiar feeling of the warm stones beneath her feet.

‘Like a married couple on their second honeymoon,’ she said. ‘Except that unlike my actual marriage, this one has lasted. Also, it’s been better for my health.’

Fortunately her ex-husband spent little time in the city, she said, since he raced yachts and was frequently at sea.

‘I call him the Buccaneer,’ she said. ‘When he comes riding into town looking for me, I make sure I am difficult to find.’

She had one child by her husband, a boy of fourteen. They had already separated before the child was born.

‘In fact he didn’t even know I was pregnant,’ she said, ‘since I concealed it from him for as long as I could, because I knew I would never have got away from him otherwise. And when he did find out I effectively had to go into hiding, because I am certain he would have tried to kill me. I admit it was selfish of me,’ she said, ‘to get pregnant in the deliberate way that I did. But I was forty years old and it was really my last chance.’

It had been difficult for her son to gain a perspective on his father, whose long absences and dramatic presences were so unsettling, and whose lifestyle was both brutal and glamorous, while Paola’s existence by necessity encompassed all the mundanities of domestic routine. His father had numerous girlfriends, all of them very young and very beautiful, while I, Paola said, am getting old and barely seem like a woman at all any more.

‘I am no longer interested in having a man,’ she said. ‘My body is asking for privacy. It likes hiding under these loose clothes, just as if it was covered with the most disfiguring scars. It has finally cast out my lifelong belief in romantic love,’ she said, ‘because even at fifty I had somehow kept the idea of finding my true mate, as though he were the hero of a novel who had failed to turn up and had to be tracked down before the novel ended. But my body knows better,’ she said, ‘and it demands to be left alone.’

We had been walking downhill along a succession of narrow alleys and were now passing through broader, tree-lined streets that occasionally showed glimpses of pleasant squares with fountains and churches along their intersections. This was a very old part of the city, Paola said, which only ten years ago had languished in squalor and neglect, but now money had been spent and it was becoming a popular neighbourhood, with new shops and restaurants opening up and even businesses starting to move here. The shops were the same shops you saw in town centres around the world and the bars and cafés were touristic versions of themselves in the same inevitable way as everywhere else, and so this regeneration, she said, begins to look a little like a mask of death. Europe is dying, she said, and because every separate part is being replaced as it dies it becomes harder and harder to tell what is fake and what is real, so that we might not realise until the whole thing has gone.

She looked at her watch and said that we still had some time before we needed to be at the restaurant; if I didn’t mind, there was a place not far away that she thought might interest me. We set off again at an even brisker pace than before, Paola’s long fine hair flying out behind her and her silvery tunic flapping and swirling.

‘It is a little strange, what we are about to see,’ she said as we walked. ‘I found it by chance a few years ago. I was passing nearby and the strap of my sandal broke and so I needed somewhere to sit and fix it. I saw that this church was open and I went inside, not thinking anything about it, and I got quite a shock.’

Some fifty years before, she said, the church had been ravaged one night by a terrible fire, whose intensity was such that the very stones had lifted and the leading of the windows melted away, and two of the firefighters had lost their lives putting it out. But instead of restoring the church, the decision was made simply to repair the structural aspects of the building, which continued to be used as a regular place of worship, despite the disturbing extremity of its appearance and the violent events to which that appearance testified.

‘Inside it is completely black,’ she said, ‘and the walls and ceiling are warped like the inside of a cave where the layers of stone have expanded, and the fire, even while it devoured whatever paintings and statues had been there, left everywhere a patina of its own in which one believes one can glimpse ghostly images. Everywhere there are these strange half-shapes like melted wax and then in other places sheared areas where the stonework was split into two by the heat, and empty plinths and alcoves where things are missing, and the texture of the whole thing is so densely affected that it is almost no longer manmade, as if the trauma of the fire had turned it into a natural form. I don’t know why,’ she said, ‘but I find the sight of it extremely moving. The fact that it has been allowed to continue in its true state,’ she said, ‘when everything else around it has been replaced and cleaned up, has a meaning that I am not quite able to understand or articulate, and yet people continue to go there and act as if everything is normal. At first I thought that someone had made a terrible mistake,’ she said, ‘in letting it stay like that, as if they thought no one would notice what had happened, and when I saw people inside praying or hearing mass I thought it was indeed possible that somehow they hadn’t realised. And this seemed so awful that I wanted to scream at everyone there and force them to look at the black walls and the emptiness. But then I noticed,’ she said, ‘that in certain places where statues had obviously been, new lights had been installed which illuminated the empty spaces. These lights,’ she said, ‘had the strange effect of making you see more in the empty space than you would have seen had it been filled with a statue. And so I knew,’ she said, ‘that this spectacle was not the result of some monstrous neglect or misunderstanding but was the work of an artist.’

We had paused at a traffic light on a busy intersection and were waiting to cross the road. There was no shade, and the air shimmered over the throbbing traffic while the sun pounded unrelentingly on our heads amid the noise. On the other side of the road stood an avenue of great trees like purple clouds in whose grove-like dimness human figures were discernible. People strolled or sat on benches amid the dark trunks and beneath the densely patterned foliage, whose depths of light and shade grew more intricate the more I looked. I saw a woman standing staring absently ahead of her while a small child crouched to examine something at its feet. I saw a man sitting cross-legged on a bench turn the page of his newspaper. A waitress brought a glass to someone sitting at a table and a boy kicked a ball that sped away into the shadows. Birds were pecking imperviously at the ground. The separation between that silent glade-like place and the thundering pavement where we stood seemed for a moment so absolute that it was almost unbearable, as though it represented a disorder so fundamental and insurmountable that any attempt to right it would be ultimately shown to be futile. The lights changed and we began to cross. Sweat was coursing down my back and a pounding had begun in my chest that felt like the extension of the pounding of the sun, as if it had incorporated me into itself.

When we got to the church Paola had described, it was shut. She paced back and forth in front of the locked door as though expecting another way in to present itself.

‘It is a shame,’ she said. ‘I wanted you to see it. I had pictured it,’ she said, crestfallen.

The square where we stood was small and well-like and the sun was falling directly into it so that only a rim of shade remained around the edges of the pale shuttered buildings. I leaned against a wall and closed my eyes.

‘Are you all right?’ I heard Paola say.

*

‘After the heat and light of outside,’

After the heat and light of outside, the restaurant was so dark it felt like the middle of the night. A woman was sitting at a table in the furthest corner, beneath a reproduction of Artemisia Gentileschi’s Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist. A bicycle helmet lay on the table in front of her.

‘We are very late,’ Paola said, and Felícia shrugged, making a grimace with her large mouth that was half-smile and half-frown.

‘It’s not important,’ she said.

We sat down and Paola launched into an explanation of our detour and its failed purpose, while Felícia followed the story patiently with a furrowed brow.

‘I don’t think I know that place,’ she said.

It was just at the bottom of the hill, Paola said, only a few hundred metres away.

‘But you arrived by taxi,’ Felícia said doubtfully.

That, Paola said, was because of the heat.

‘You are hot?’ Felícia said to me, apparently surprised. ‘It isn’t so hot at the moment,’ she said. ‘At this time of year it can be much worse.’

‘But if you aren’t used to it,’ Paola said, ‘it might affect you differently.’

‘I suppose it’s possible,’ Felícia said.

‘A little bit goes to the head,’ Paola said. ‘Like wine. I feel like drinking wine,’ she added, reaching for the menu. ‘I feel like losing my bearings.’

Felícia nodded slowly.

‘It’s a good idea,’ she said.

She was a tall, spare woman with a long pale face which in the dim light of the restaurant seemed carved out of deep shadows.

‘Let’s – what is the expression in English?’ Paola said. ‘Let’s undo our collars.’

‘Loosen,’ Felícia said. ‘Let’s loosen our collars.’

‘Felícia has a very tight collar,’ Paola said, and Felícia gave her strange half-smile half-frown.

‘It’s not so bad,’ she said.

‘Very tight,’ Paola said, ‘but not so much that she chokes. They need to keep you alive, no? You are more useful that way.’

‘It’s true,’ Felícia said, moving her bicycle helmet from the table so that the waiter could put down the wine.

‘What’s this?’ Paola exclaimed. ‘Now you are bicycling?’

‘I am bicycling,’ Felícia said.

‘But what happened to your car?’ Paola said.

‘Stefano took the car away,’ Felícia said. She shrugged. ‘It belongs to him, after all.’

‘But how can you manage without the car?’ Paola said. ‘You live so far away it’s impossible.’

Felícia appeared to think about it.

‘It’s not impossible,’ she said. ‘I just have to get up one hour earlier.’

Paola shook her head and swore under her breath.

‘What offended me,’ Felícia said, ‘was his reason for taking it. He said that he could no longer trust me with the car.’

‘Trust you?’ Paola said.

‘The arrangement has been,’ Felícia said slowly, ‘that whoever is looking after Alessandra has the car. So if Stefano has her for the weekend, the car goes with her. But most of the time she is with me, so the car stays parked outside my apartment. When something goes wrong with it, Stefano expects me to take care of it. Two weeks ago,’ she said, ‘it needed entirely new tyres, and it cost almost half my salary for the month to replace them.’

‘So it has been to his advantage,’ Paola said.

‘It was after I replaced the tyres that I received a letter from Stefano’s lawyer,’ Felícia said. ‘The letter said that my salary was not sufficient to justify having a car and to cover the costs of maintaining it. I had not noticed,’ she said, ‘that the car was gone. I was getting Alessandra ready for school and we were late, but when I read the letter I looked out of the window and saw that the car was not there. Stefano has his own key,’ she said, ‘so I realised that he must have come during the night and taken it while we were sleeping. I had a very full schedule for that day and it completely depended on having the car, so I was shocked by the fact that he hadn’t warned me. But also,’ she said, ‘I realised that unconsciously I had taken a feeling of security and legitimacy from the car, because even though it was expensive to maintain, the fact that I shared it with Stefano seemed to offer me some kind of protection. Until that moment when I looked out of the window and saw an empty space where the car had been, I had been holding on to a delusion, when even an hour earlier I would have sworn I had no delusions left. And even then,’ she said, ‘I remained deluded, because I picked up the phone and called Stefano, thinking there must have been some mistake. He was very calm,’ she said, ‘and he spoke to me as if I was a naughty child that has to have their punishment explained to them, and when I began to cry he became even calmer, and he agreed it was very sad that I brought these misfortunes on myself with my lack of self-control.’

‘But that is completely wrong,’ Paola exclaimed. ‘Your own lawyer can argue that you need the car because you are taking care of the child.’

Felícia nodded slowly.

‘I thought so too,’ she said. ‘And so I called her, even though that kind of conversation is very expensive, and she said there was only one question, which was the question of whose name is on the documents for the car. According to her there was absolutely no moral argument I could make, which I found so impossible to believe that we ended up talking for much too long and so running up an enormous bill on top of everything else. I should have known by now,’ she said, ‘that Stefano does nothing on the basis of what is right or wrong, but instead acts only according to what the law will allow him to do. He understands that the law can be used as his weapon, where I only think of it in connection with justice, by which time it is far too late.’

‘It’s unfortunate for you that Stefano is so intelligent,’ Paola said, and Felícia smiled.

‘It’s true that I made sure to choose someone intelligent,’ she said.

‘The Buccaneer used the law like they use the big ball on the chain to demolish a building,’ Paola said. ‘It was clumsy and it made a lot of mess, and in the end there was nothing left. Though if it ever becomes legal to kill another person,’ she said, ‘I will hear a knock on my door before even a minute has passed and it will be him, because although he has been happy to break the law in small ways that won’t expose him, he has never liked the idea of serving a prison sentence on my behalf, even for the pleasure of murdering me.’

Felícia sat back in her chair, her wine glass nursed in her lap and her melancholy smile just visible in the shadows.

‘The wine is so nice,’ she said. ‘It makes me feel I could just sleep.’

‘You are tired,’ Paola said, and Felícia nodded and half-closed her eyes, still smiling.

‘This morning,’ she said slowly, ‘I got up at six, I dropped Alessandra at school at seven and I cycled to the college where I teach translation to give a class at eight. Then I cycled back and caught the train out to the suburbs where I had two English and French classes to teach at the school there. The only problem,’ she said, ‘was that one of the other teachers was absent today and so there were twice the usual number of students and, since a test had been scheduled, twice the number of papers to take home to mark. I couldn’t see how I would be able to carry them on the bicycle. I was quite proud of the solution I came up with,’ she said, ‘which was to tie the bundle of papers to the seat and cycle home standing up. Then,’ she said, ‘I took the train into the city and went to the library where I had been asked to give a talk on cataloguing translated texts, before coming here. Alessandra was unwell this morning,’ she added, ‘and so I had half-expected to get a call from the school saying that I needed to come and collect her, in which case I didn’t know what I would have done since my schedule was completely full, but fortunately the call didn’t come.

‘I did, however, receive another call,’ Felícia said, tilting her chair back and resting her head against the wall, ‘which was from my mother, saying that she was tired of storing certain boxes and small pieces of furniture that she had agreed to keep for me, and that if I didn’t come and get them by the end of the day she would be putting them out on the street. I reminded her,’ she said with her strange half-smile half-frown, ‘that since I am staying in the apartment of a friend I have nowhere to put these items, and neither do I now have a car in which I could come to collect them, while in her house there is a big attic where they can sit disturbing nobody. She said she was tired of having my things in her attic, and repeated that she would be putting them out on the street if I didn’t come and collect them by the end of the day. It was not her fault, she said, that I had made such a mess of my life and that I didn’t even have a proper home to live in. You came from a nice home, she said, and yet you expect your child to live like a tramp. I said to her, Mama, it was different for you, because Papa took care of everything and you didn’t have to work. And she said yes, and look at what all your equality has done for you – the men no longer respect you and can treat you like the dirt on their shoe. Your cousin Angela has never worked, she said, and she has been divorced two times and is richer than the queen of England, because she stayed at home and took care of her children and treated them as her asset. But you don’t have a house or any money or even a car, she said, and your child goes around looking like an orphan on the street. You don’t even get her fringe cut, she said, so it covers her eyes and she can’t see where she is going. And I said, Mama, Stefano likes her hair that way and he insists that I don’t cut it, so there is nothing I can do. And she said, I can’t believe I brought such a woman into the world, who allows a man to tell her what to do with her own child’s hair. And she repeated that she no longer wanted my possessions in her house and she put down the phone.

‘Last night,’ Felícia said, ‘a friend came to visit us at the apartment, a woman friend Alessandra hadn’t met before. We were talking about my work, and Alessandra suddenly interrupted. Mama’s always talking about her work, she said to this friend of mine, but in fact it isn’t work – what she calls work is what other people would call a hobby. Don’t you agree it’s a bit of a joke, Alessandra says to this friend, to call it work when all she is doing is sitting reading a book? And the friend says, no, she doesn’t agree, and that translation is not only work but also an art. Alessandra looks at her and then she says to me, Mama, who is this person in our apartment? She isn’t very well dressed, Alessandra says; in fact she looks like a witch. My friend tried to laugh but I could see she was very upset at being spoken to in this way, especially by a five-year-old child, and I couldn’t explain to her in front of Alessandra that this is how Stefano is finally getting his revenge, by poisoning my own child against me and filling her with his own arrogant nature. I remember,’ Felícia said, ‘when Stefano and I first separated, Stefano took her away with him one day and didn’t bring her back. He was meant to have her for only a few hours, and he kept her for ten days and refused to answer my phone calls and messages. During those ten days I nearly went mad with grief: I don’t think I slept for more than a few minutes at a time, and I paced around and around our apartment like a trapped animal, waiting for the situation to end. It was only later,’ she said, ‘that I understood that the pain I endured during those days was not the pain of responsibility. It was not a consequence of my fight with Stefano but rather was the result of calculated cruelty, to the child as well as to myself: his theft of Alessandra was a show of strength and a way of proving his power to me, that he could take her away and bring her back when he chose to. If we had fought physically,’ she said, ‘he would likewise have won, and this was what he was making clear to me by removing the child at will, that if I thought I had power – even if only the old power of the mother – I was completely mistaken. I had not, moreover, found freedom by leaving him: in fact what I had done was forfeit all my rights, which he had only extended to me in the first place, and made myself his slave. There is a passage in one of your books,’ she said to me, ‘where you describe enduring something similar, and I translated it very carefully and with great caution, as if it were something fragile that I might mistakenly break or kill, because these experiences do not fully belong to reality and the evidence for them is a matter of one person’s word against another’s. It was important I didn’t get any of the words wrong,’ she said, ‘and afterwards I felt that while you had legitimised this half-reality by writing about it, I had legitimised it again by managing to transpose it into another language and ensuring its survival.’

‘We survive,’ Paola said, tilting her empty wine glass to look inside. ‘Our bodies outlive their use of them, and that is what annoys them most of all. These bodies continue to exist, getting older and uglier and telling them the truth they don’t want to hear. The Buccaneer is still pursuing me even after all these years,’ she said, ‘making sure that whenever I show a sign of life he is there to crush it. My head is whirling with wine,’ she added, with a crooked, mischievous smile, ‘just like he used to whirl me around by my hair, except that now it doesn’t hurt. That is revenge, no? It used to hurt so much when he pulled my hair,’ she said, ‘so it is good to talk about these things when your head is whirling with wine instead, and with the picture of the man’s severed head on a plate before my eyes. What I don’t understand,’ she said to me, ‘is why you have married again, when you know what you know. You have put it in writing,’ she said, ‘and that brings with it all the laws.’

I hoped to get the better of those laws, I said, by living within them. My older son had once made a copy of that painting on the wall, I said, except that he had left out all the detail and merely blocked in the forms and the spatial relationships between them. What was interesting, I said, was that without those details and the story to which they were associated, the painting became a study not of murderousness but of the complexity of love.

Paola slowly shook her head.

‘It isn’t possible,’ she said. ‘Those laws are for men and maybe for children. But for women it’s just an illusion, like the sandcastle on the beach, which after all is only how the child proves his nature, by building the temporary edifice until he too can become a man. In law the woman is temporary, between the permanence of the land and the violence of the sea. It is better to be invisible,’ she said. ‘It is better to live outside the law. To be a – what is the word in English?’

‘An outlaw,’ Felícia said, grinning in the shadows.

‘An outlaw,’ Paola said, satisfied. She raised her empty glass and clinked it against Felícia’s. ‘I choose to live as an outlaw.

*

‘The taxi driver had pointed the way to the beach…’

The taxi driver had pointed the way to the beach from the place on the road where he dropped me, making sweeping gestures with his arms to convey the necessity for continuing to walk out beyond the boardwalk, which curved away among the dunes out of sight. The blank, heavy heat of the afternoon had begun to break down and a soft bruised colour had come into the sky. The white cement of the low wall bordering the sand held the residue of the day’s glare against a sharp line of encroaching shadow. The muffled sound of the water rose from beyond the dunes, and there was suddenly the sea’s feeling of weight and extension, despite the fact that it was out of sight.

My phone rang and the screen showed my younger son’s name.

‘There’s been a bit of a disaster,’ he said.

Tell me, I said.

It happened late last night, he said. He and some friends had accidentally started a fire, he said. There had been some damage and he was worried about what the consequences would be.

There was no point phoning you because you were away, he said. But then I couldn’t get hold of Dad either.

I asked him whether he was all right. I asked him how on earth it had happened, and what he had been thinking of.

‘Faye,’ he said fractiously, ‘will you just listen?’

He and another boy and a girl were at a friend’s flat for the evening. The flat was in a block that had a gym and a swimming pool in the basement. At around midnight the three of them had decided to go swimming, and had gone with their towels and their swimming costumes downstairs. They had used the changing rooms, but when the boys had left the men’s changing room the door had swung shut and locked behind them. The other boy had left his towel in there, draped over a heater. Within a few minutes, they saw through the changing room window that the towel had caught fire. There was a pool cleaner with a long handle leaning against a wall, my son said, and so I grabbed it and I broke the window and I managed to hook up the towel and pull it back through the window and we put it out. There was broken glass everywhere, he said, and the whole pool house was full of smoke and then an alarm went off and all these people started to come running in. They were shouting at us and accusing us of vandalising the building and we kept trying to explain what had happened but they wouldn’t listen to us. The other two had stepped in the glass, he said, and their feet were bleeding and they were crying because they were so frightened, but these people just kept shouting in our faces. One of them was talking about his children, he said, who were asleep in the flat on the floor above, and he kept saying how traumatised they would have been to wake up and find there was smoke in their bedroom, even though they hadn’t actually woken up. They took our names and addresses and said they were going to call the police, he said, and then they went away. We stayed there and I cleared up all the glass and I spent hours picking the pieces out of the other two’s feet. They were both really upset, he said, and after a while I told them to just go home, and that I would wait there for the police to come. And I waited and waited, he said, but the police didn’t come. I waited all night, he said, and in the end I just left and went to school.

He began to cry.

All day I’ve been expecting someone to come and call me out of class, he said. I don’t know what to do.

I asked him whether it was permitted to swim in the pool at night.

Yes, he wailed. People do it all the time. And it wasn’t our fault about the door, because my friend told me it was broken and that they were meant to be fixing it. I know we were stupid to put the towel on the heater but there wasn’t a sign telling you not to and we didn’t realise it could catch fire. I don’t know why the police didn’t come, he said. I almost wish they had, because I don’t know what to do now.

They didn’t come, I said, because you didn’t do anything wrong.

He was silent.

In fact, I said, you ought to be congratulated, because it was a good idea to use the pool cleaner and the building might have caught fire otherwise.

I’ve written a letter, he said presently. I did it during break. It explains everything that happened. I thought I would take it there and leave it for people to read.

There was a silence.

When are you coming home? he said.

Tomorrow, I said.

Can I come over? he said, and then he said: Sometimes I feel as if I’m about to fall over the edge of something, and that there’ll be nothing and no one to catch me.

You’re tired, I said. You’ve been awake all night.

I feel so lonely, he said, and yet I have no privacy. People just act as if I’m not there. I could be doing anything, he said. I could be slitting my wrists and they would neither know nor care.

It isn’t your fault, I said.

They ask me things, he said, but they don’t connect the things up. They don’t relate them to things I’ve already told them. There are just all these meaningless facts.

You can’t tell your story to everybody, I said. Maybe you can only tell it to one person.

Maybe, he said.

Come when you feel like it, I said. I can’t wait to see you.

The sky had turned a dull red and a breeze had picked up that made the dry grasses amid the dunes sway back and forth. The boardwalk was deserted and I followed it until I came out on to a stretch of beach. It was wild and strewn with litter and the sea was roiling and crashing where the beach shelved downwards to the water. The wind was stronger here and the dunes were sending their lengthening, mountainous shadows across the rough greyish sand. Amid the shadows I saw human figures, crouching or standing or sitting. They were arranged mostly in pairs and they were either still or moved around intimately and absorbedly as if bent on some primitive task. A short distance away there was a fire made of driftwood and the wind sent the smoke whirling upwards. There were more figures gathered around the fire and the lit ends of their cigarettes made piercing orange points in the dusky light. I could sometimes hear the low sounds of conversation, which the wind and the sea’s crashing then blotted out.

I began to walk amid the figures up the beach. They were men, either naked or sometimes wearing a simple loincloth. Some of them were hardly more than boys. They were mostly silent as I passed, and either looked away or seemed not to see me, though one or two stared at me frankly and expressionlessly. A boy of startling beauty glanced into my eyes and glanced away again, burying his face shyly into the thick muscled shoulder of his companion. He was kneeling and I saw the rounded shapes of his buttocks beneath the other man’s large hand. I walked on, past the group who were gathered round the fire and who turned to look at me like animals surprised in a grove. The strange red light had spread across the sky in a great stain tinged with yellow and black. Far in the distance the buildings of the dock and the suburbs stood dimly in a smudgy haze of surf. I found an empty stretch of sand and I began to take off my clothes. A few feet away the sea heaved and churned, brimful and restless, streaked with red and grey. The wind was stronger beyond the dunes and a fine rain of sand blew against my skin. I went down to the water, pressing quickly forward through the barging waves. The beach shelved so steeply that I was quickly sucked out into the moving mass, whose density and power seemed to keep me effortlessly on the surface so that I rose and fell along with its undulations. The men had turned to watch me. One of them got to his feet, a huge burly man with a great curling black beard and a rounded stomach and thighs like hams. Slowly he walked down towards the water’s edge, his white teeth faintly glimmering through his beard in a smile, his eyes fixed on mine. I looked back at him from my suspended distance, rising and falling. He came to a halt just where the waves broke and he stood there in his nakedness like a deity, resplendent and grinning. Then he grasped his thick penis and began to urinate into the water. The flow came out so abundantly that it made a fat, glittering jet, like a rope of gold he was casting into the sea. He looked at me with black eyes full of malevolent delight while the golden jet poured unceasingly forth from him until it seemed impossible that he could contain any more. The water bore me up, heaving, as if I lay on the breast of some sighing creature while the man emptied himself into its depths. I looked into his cruel, merry eyes, and I waited for him to stop.