Evening. No darkness. Lights everywhere. Sleet.
Merano.
The little girl and her mother had got off a few stops earlier. They had said goodbye and thanked him profusely. The bus had set off again. A thousand stops on a journey that never seemed to end. Keller had dozed off.
He had been woken by the driver’s voice announcing the end of the journey.
Trying not to put too much weight on his injured leg, Keller got off the bus and looked around. There were far too many lights.
He was used to just one colour at this time of day: black. Black seemed to have been banished from Merano. He told himself he was in a town now. Towns had different rules.
In the mountains, black meant safety. Black attracted the rays of the sun and, with them, heat. Black in the midst of a snowdrift could save your life.
White was the colour of mourning. When a local Bau’r was to be buried, people went down the mountain in a long procession to the small village church. Everybody came, it was a sign of respect. At funerals, women did not wear black headscarves, they wore white ones. Death was the colour of innocence.
He walked, doing his best not to collide with the passers-by, who all seemed to be in a rush, their heads down. There were cars (not many, admittedly, but far more than he was used to seeing) whizzing past, splashing the pavements with slush-blackened snow, as well as the odd motorcycle, traffic lights, brightly lit shop windows displaying merchandise that bewildered him.
He could not fathom men’s fashions. Why did they wear jackets like that in the winter? Didn’t they freeze to death? And those moccasins. They would not even withstand an April shower. And how could people afford these prices?
As for the women’s clothes shops, they made him avert his eyes. He remembered the glances Voter Luis gave Mutti, glances charged with desire. He also remembered how she would blush with embarrassment and, above all, with pleasure.
Mutti was beautiful, and Elisabeth would have been beautiful, too, with that raven hair of hers and those long legs that made you think of a spider. He would sometimes call her his little spider. But why show off so casually what was meant to stay hidden?
A man does not desire what he can see, only what he imagines.
Maybe, he thought, what his eyes were seeing was not about seduction. Maybe there was something else hidden behind these lights, these shop windows, these strong, pungent smells.
In his final years, Voter Luis kept saying that Death loved the mountains. It loved them the way you love a game that is fixed from the start. An exhausting fight for survival from which no one emerged the winner. No one except Death.
“Death loves mirrors. The world is its mirror. That’s why it’s written in Ecclesiastes that all is vanity. Vanity is the same as death.”
Maybe that was what the blinding lights and garish clothes were trying to do. Not to seduce, like the furs and feathers of animals in the mating season. On the contrary, they were trying to push life away, scare it off. And escape death.
Because death sought life. If you wanted to escape the former, then you had to frighten away the latter.
He carried on walking, deep in thought.
Merano.
“Town,” as Voter Luis called it.
The pain in his leg was just a minor nuisance. The heating in the bus, the poppy, maybe little Anna’s kiss, had all had their effect.
Not far from the bus station, on a square where some children were having a snowball fight, making a happy racket, there was a café. Inside, it was crowded. Women drinking steaming cups of coffee and eating slices of strudel with cream. Men underlining their words with emphatic gestures over glasses of spirits. The café also had a couple of small metal tables outside, along with some uncomfortable chairs. Keller sat down at one of the tables.
Whenever Voter Luis went into town (you could count these occasions on the fingers of one hand), he would always bring back two slices of Sachertorte, one for his wife, one for his son. Keller had not had any for years. He thought of Lissy, who had never got her slice of Sachertorte, and that made him a little sad.
He took a small package and a tin container out of his holdall and put them down on the table. Inside the package was the meal Marlene had prepared for him. Simon folded the napkin and was about to bite into the hard bread and speck when, to the words of a song (“Where is my happy ending?” a mawkish voice whined), a waiter came out of the café and approached him in an irritable, aggressive manner.
“You can’t eat here, old man. Go away.”
“I’d like a slice of Sachertorte.”
“Are you deaf? You have to leave.”
Keller put a couple of banknotes on the table. “I can pay. I’d like a slice of Sachertorte. No cream.”
“You’re scaring away the customers, you’d better leave. I don’t want your wretched money.”
Keller gave him a long stare, then put his hunting knife on the table next to the banknotes. “And I don’t need any cutlery.”
The waiter looked at him, then at the knife and withdrew. When he flung open the door, the background music had changed: a deep, gravelly voice was singing words that made Keller smile. “Um Elf’e kommen die Wölfe, um Elf’e kommen die Wölfe, um Elfe kommen die Wölfe, um Zwölf’e bricht das Gewölbe.”
The door closed. Keller took a couple of bites of the bread. All the customers in the café were now staring at him. A strange old man, tall and sturdy, with a hat on his head and a greatcoat as black as a raven’s wings, nibbling at the bread with precise, methodical bites, heedless of the waiter’s chiding. Heedless, too, of the café’s fat owner, who was nodding and turning red as the waiter explained the situation to him with broad gestures.
“You have to leave.”
Without waiting for a reply, the owner slapped Keller. The sandwich fell onto the dirty snow. Keller picked it up, then got to his feet. He smiled.
“I can pay. I just want a slice of Sachertorte. To see if it’s as good as I remember it.”
The owner put a hand on his shoulder. It was heavy. He squeezed, hard. “Just take your shit and go. I have a rifle behind the counter, and it’s loaded.”
Keller moved his face close to the owner’s and let out a squeal, just like a pig who knows he’s about to be slaughtered, although without losing his smile. That was what terrified the owner: the smile. His knees gave way, and Keller held him up.
“A slice of Sachertorte. Thank you.”
He got it. Two slices, in fact. He ate one of them. It wasn’t as good as he remembered. Too sweet. He wrapped the other slice in the cotton cloth.
After a final sip from his thermos, he stood up. Marlene had given him very specific directions to Herr Wegener’s villa. Outside the town, by the river. An hour from the centre. He had time to look in a few shop windows.
With that strange Charlie Chaplin gait of his, he resumed his walk.