1

Astrid stands at the rail with her back to the town. The breeze lifts her hair in a chestnut-brown, ragged flag. She’s wearing sunglasses, she’s smiling. There is perfect harmony between her white teeth and the white city. The photo is seven years old, I took it in late afternoon on one of the small ferries that cross the Tagus to Cacilhas. Only from a distance do you understand why Lisbon is called ‘the white city’, when the colours lose their lustre and the glazed tiles of the façades melt together in the sun’s afterglow. The low light falls horizontally on the distant houses rising behind each other over the Praça do Comércio up to the ridges of Bairro Alto and Alfama on the other side of the river. It is a month since she left. I haven’t heard from her. The only trace of her is the bank statement showing the activity of our joint account. She hired a car in Paris and used her Mastercard on the route via Bordeaux, San Sebastian, Santiago de Compostela, Porto and Coimbra to Lisbon. The same route we took that autumn. She cashed a large sum in Lisbon on the 17th October. She has not used the card since then. I don’t know where she is. I cannot know. I am forty-four and I know less than ever. The older I get the less I know. When I was younger I thought my knowledge would increase with the years, that it was steadily enlarging like the universe. A constantly widening area of certainty that correspondingly displaced and diminished the extent of uncertainty. I was really very optimistic. With the passage of time I must admit that I know roughly the same amount, perhaps even slightly less, and not at all with the same certainty as then. My so-called experiences are not at all the same as knowledge. It is more like, what shall I call it, a kind of echo chamber in which the little I know resounds hollow and inadequate. A growing void around my scant knowledge that rattles foolishly like the dried-up kernel in a walnut. My experiences are experiences of ignorance, its boundlessness, and I will never discover how much I still do not know, and how much is just something I believed in.

One morning at the beginning of October Astrid said she wanted to go away. She was standing in the bathroom at the basin with her face leaning towards her reflection, painting her lips. Already dressed, she was elegant as ever, in dark blue as usual. There is something reticent, discreet in her elegance, dark blue, black and white are her preferred colours, and she never wears high heels. That is not necessary. When she had said it she met my eyes in the mirror as if to see what would happen. She is still beautiful, and she is most beautiful when I realise yet again that I am unable to guess her thoughts. I have always been fascinated by the symmetry in her face. Symmetry in a face is not something one can take for granted. Most faces are slightly irregular, either the nose is, or there is a birthmark, a scar or the divergent curve of a line which makes one side different from the other. In Astrid’s face the sides reflect each other alongside her straight nose, which in profile forms a faint, perfectly rounded bow. There is something luxurious, arrogant about her nose. Her eyes are green and narrow, and there is more space between them than in most people. She has broad cheekbones and her jaw is angular and slightly prominent. Her lips are full and almost the same colour as her skin, and when she smiles they curl a bit in a subtle, conspiratorial way, and the incipient wrinkles gather in small fan-shaped rays around the corners of her mouth and eyes. She smiles a lot, even when there is apparently nothing to smile at. When Astrid smiles it is impossible to distinguish between her intelligence and the spontaneity whereby she registers the environment on her skin, the temperature of the air, the warmth of light and coolness of shadows, as if she has never wanted to be anywhere else than precisely where she is. The years have discreetly begun to mark her body, but she is still slim and erect even though it is eighteen years since she had her second child, and she still moves with the same effortless, lithe ease as when we met each other.

I would have put out a search for her long ago if I had not had the statement listing her banking activities, but she didn’t want to be found, I understood that much. I am not to look for her. I asked her where she was planning to go. She didn’t know yet. She stayed there in front of the mirror for a while, as if waiting for a reaction. When I said nothing, she went. I could hear her voice in the living room as she was phoning, but couldn’t hear what she said. There is something lazy, laid-back, about her voice, and now and then it cracks, as if she is always slightly hoarse. Shortly afterwards I heard the door slam. While I was taking my shower I saw a plane catch the early sun in a shining sign, passing overhead between the opposite wall and the roof of the back premises. I had to keep wiping the mirror each time it misted up so as not to disappear in the steam as I covered my face with shaving foam. It is always the same distrustful gaze that meets me in the mirror, as if he wants to tell me he is not the one I think he is, the man in there with white foam all over his face. He looked like a melancholy, weary Santa Claus, framed by the Portuguese tiles that made a frieze of glazed blue plant stems around the mirror. She found them in a foggy village near Sintra, we had driven through the mountain roads’ winding tunnels of green, I swore because I got mud on my shoes, while fastidiously and capriciously she inspected the ornamentation on the blue tiles as if they differed radically, and the corners of my mouth trembled when I had a drink of the rough wine that a peasant with his jacket full of straw offered me from a barrel on the back of a donkey cart. At night we made love in a blue hotel, and the shining blue petals and sailing ships and birds on the walls gave her restrained moans an enigmatic tone which made her remote and close at the same time. When I went out of the bathroom she had gone. It was quiet in the flat. Rosa had more or less moved in with her new sweetheart, and Simon was riding around on his motorbike somewhere in Sardinia. It wouldn’t be long before we were really on our own, Astrid and I. We hadn’t talked so much about it, maybe because neither of us could quite imagine what it would be like. It was a new silence and we moved about in it with a new carefulness. Earlier we had enjoyed the freedom when for some reason the children were not at home. Now the rooms opened out like a distance we either put behind or allowed to grow between us.

A whole world of sounds fell silent. The sounds that the others produced and those I contributed myself and which had surrounded me for years with their continuous themes, subsidiary themes and variations of footsteps and voices, laughter, weeping and shouting. A kind of unending music, that was never wholly unvaried and yet remained the same through the years because it was the music I heard and remembered, not the instruments, the sound of our life together and not the individual words and movements of which it consisted. Our life, which repeated itself, day after day, while it changed, year by year. A life of broken nights and noisome nappies, tricycles, bedtime stories and visits to Casualty, children’s birthdays and charter trips, Christmas trees and wet swimsuits, love letters, football matches, rejoicing and boredom, squabbles and reconciliation. During the early years it had gone on growing, this busy, chaotic and polyphonic world, until it filled everything. It spread out among us with all its arrangements and all its planning and all its routines. We stood each on our own side of our new world, and for long periods we could only wave and make signs to each other through the noise and the bustle. In the evening, when all the duties were fulfilled, we sank down together shattered in front of the television news and guessing games and old films, and although neither of us ever dared say it aloud, I was sure that she too sometimes asked herself whether all the details and precautions, all the wearying commonplace everyday business, had not cast a shadow over what was supposed to be the meaning of it all. Only long afterwards did it cross my mind that the meaning was perhaps not to be found in the selected moments I had photographed and pasted into the fat family history book; the meaning of it all was rather linked to the sum of repeated trivialities, the repetition itself, the patterns of repetition. While it was all going on I had only noticed it, the meaning, as a sudden and passing ease that could spread within me when, stumbling with exhaustion, I stopped midway between the kitchen table and the dishwasher with yet another dirty plate in my hand, hearing the children’s laughter somewhere in the flat. Chance and isolated seconds, when it crossed my mind that precisely there, in transit through the repeated words and movements of the days and the evenings, did I find myself in the midst of what had become my life, and that I should never get any closer to this centre.

It was in the silence that I realised it, in the void in which Simon and Rosa were by degrees to leave us. The sounds in the flat were no longer a music whose instruments flowed together in a shifting resonance. They made their appearances alone at the edge of the silence like hesitant signals; when I was in the bathroom with the hot water gurgling down the drain, while I shaved and heard her answer me from the kitchen with the barking of the juicer, the whistle of the kettle or the long sighs of the coffee machine. Now that we could at last make ourselves heard, we sometimes didn’t really know what to say. I woke up beside her and gazed at her face, turned towards me in sleep, towards the first light of day. When I looked at her as she slept, expressionless, at rest, her features withdrew from the semblance by which I was accustomed to recognise her, the facial expressions of her moods that I knew so well, and it might almost be another face, this face that I have had before me for so many years. I knew her as I had seen her en route through the thousands of days and nights we had spent together, but what of herself as she was, to herself? Earlier we could quarrel over trifles, who should do what, who should have done this and that. Now we had suddenly become considerate, almost discreet. Even in bed we approached each other with a cautiously testing tenderness. It was not quite the same tired or lazy intimate, sleepwalking exchange, no longer the same interchange between spontaneous revival or all too determined passion, when the children had fallen asleep, with half-suppressed groans and exclamations so they should not hear us. It was a little like meeting afresh, as if we were slightly surprised that it was really us, that we were still here. We have been together for over eighteen years, Simon was six when we met. We have never been alone for more than a day or two, at most a week at a time, except for that October seven years ago when we drove through Les Landes, Asturias, Galicia and Trás-os-Montes.

Astrid left the next day. If she had not already gone by the time I had eventually finished in the bathroom, I might have asked her why. But when she finally came home well into the evening and we sat having supper in the kitchen because the children were not at home, it was somehow too late. There are questions that can only be asked at certain moments, and sometimes you get only one chance. If you don’t ask in time the chance has been missed. When I served the meal and poured her a glass of wine, her journey was already an accomplished fact, although she had not even packed her suitcase and maybe didn’t really know yet where she was going. During the day, the thought that she wanted to go away had made me ask so many new questions that the one querying why she was leaving had grown far too big, far too drastic. I would not be able to ask it without all the other questions thrusting their confused and blushing heads into the silence that followed. For some reason I was sure there would be complete stillness in the kitchen if I put the question. I did not want her to notice that her remark that morning, while she screwed the cap on her lipstick and quickly inspected her face in the mirror, that her casual utterance had prevented me from getting more than half a page written of the article on Cézanne I should have started on a week earlier and which I believed had been planned out in every single sentence. I didn’t want to sit there like some heavy-hearted youth fearfully airing his jealous paranoia. After all, we were grown-up people, as they say. And maybe I had exaggerated my unease during the day, sitting in my study trying to concentrate. In any case, surely there was nothing unusual about her wanting to be alone for a while to see something new, now our duties had not only loosened their grip but had actually let go of us and left us to ourselves and each other.

She had phoned from the editing room late in the afternoon to say she would be delayed. I could hear the chittering, cartoon film-like gabble from the loudspeaker as she quickly scrolled through a scene on the editing table. After I had put down the receiver I went over the brief conversation line by line, trying to find a hint of change in her tone, but every single word sounded normal and reassuring, and she had been neither more detached nor more affectionate on the telephone than she normally was. Nor when we were in the kitchen was there anything between us to isolate this evening from all the others. I expected her to talk about her travel plans herself, but it seemed she had forgotten all about them. If she was not merely waiting for me to interrupt her. She chatted about the film they had finished editing that day and, with her usual crinkled smile, described the young director, a very serious, quivering type who had despaired as his favourite shots vanished with the cuts. In a way her work was invisible. It consisted of extracting a story from the unconnected shots the directors brought her, and she made them coherent by excising the greater part. That’s how it is with stories, mine as well. I cannot include everything, I have to select from among the pictures I have left, I have to decide on a sequence, and thus my story will be quite different from the one she could tell, even though they are supposed to be about the same subject. While she was speaking I registered each movement in her face. It was the same face as it had always been. At long intervals, through the years I had noticed a grey hair I had not seen before, a line that had grown sharper, but otherwise they were the same eyes that met my gaze through all that had passed between us, the same mouth that spoke to me through everything we had said to one another and later remembered or forgotten.

Later I lay awake and tried to remember the past weeks and months. I tried to find an expression, a gesture, a remark that could explain what was perhaps not a mystery at all. But either no change had taken place, or I had not noticed it. Have I really become so distrait? Apparently. My memory is bad, the days refuse to be separated from each other, they blur so there is only the same well of time in which each day the sky reflects itself anew. Every day was much the same. She went off in the morning and I sat at my table looking out at the row of trees alongside the Lakes which, day by day, was imperceptibly transformed from a wall of rustling green to a gnarled latticework of bare branches in the remains of withered foliage in front of the silent, shining water. She came home and lay down on the sofa while I cooked, we ate, watched television or read, went to bed. The only change was the silence after Simon went away, and later in the steadily longer intervals between Rosa’s visits; the consciousness that we broke a silence when we said something to each other, that we did not as earlier contribute to the same continuing story. More than once I stopped on my way from one room to another and looked at her through an open door as she sat on the sofa reading the paper with her legs pulled up underneath her, absent-mindedly scratching the loose cover with a nail, or as she stood by the window looking over at the row of façades on the other side of the lake as if she had caught sight of something or was expecting something to come in sight over there. When I observed her like this, without her being aware of it, apparently forgetful, immersed in a vision or a thought, she could suddenly look up from the paper or turn away from the view to meet my eye, as if she had felt it on her face, almost like a light touch, and I hastened to make some casual and practical remark to drown out the unspoken question of the moment.

I lay listening to her calm breathing and the distant cars. I thought she had fallen asleep but then heard her voice in the darkness. Perhaps she was surprised that I had not questioned her while we were in the kitchen. Perhaps she had expected me to try to stop her leaving. She lay with her back to me, her voice was calm and matter-of-fact. It might be for quite a while. How long? She didn’t know. I put a hand on her hip under the duvet, she did not move. While stroking her hip I thought my question had sounded as if I knew what she was talking about. I asked her if she was going alone, but she didn’t reply. Perhaps she was already asleep. When I woke up she was standing in the doorway of the bedroom looking at me. She already had her coat on. I got up and walked over to her. She continued to gaze at me as if reading a message in my face which I myself did not know about. Then she picked up the suitcase beside her on the floor. I accompanied her to the front door and watched her walking down the stairs, but she did not turn round. I could not understand myself. I did not understand I had let her go away without giving the least explanation. Of course I had no claim on her to answer all my timorous questions. The claims we had had on each other had gradually fallen away concurrently with the children no longer needing us. But I could at least have asked, and left it to her to decide how much she would reply. She had announced her decision in such a run-of-the-mill and offhand way in front of the mirror, as if it had been a matter of going to the cinema or visiting a woman friend, and I had allowed myself to be seduced by the naturalness of her tone. And later, in bed, when I thought she was asleep, there had been a distance in her voice as if she had already gone and was calling from a town on the other side of the world. As if by her cool statement she wanted to tell me I must leave her in peace. On the other hand her reply in the darkness might have been an offer which, only now, too late, I realised I had failed to accept. I had often had to drag the words out of her, one by one, with long pauses, when her silence and aloof expression told me something was wrong, that she was feeling hurt or offended. It was an established ritual, a reticence I had accustomed her to allow herself, and I knew my own role in the game, the gentle patience of the humble questioner, I knew its tone and gestures by heart, on the very edge of my chair or bent over her turned-away back, while I mumbled my petition for her mercy. When she stood in the doorway of the bedroom waiting for me to wake up, in the long moment when we stood facing each other, she in her overcoat, I in pyjamas, she had perhaps given me a final opportunity to protest, hold her back, confront her with my unease and incipient jealousy. But I had been unnerved by her unmoving eyes resting on my face. I did not know why, but I knew it would be in vain, as I met her thoughtful gaze, that seemed to look at me from a distant, unknown and inaccessible place.

As I sat by the kitchen window with my coffee, contemplating the pattern of bricks in the opposite wall, as I so often do, I cautiously touched on the thought I had carefully shied away from the previous day. While she was presumably sitting in a plane or a train, and I was yet again scanning the displaced patterns of the joints and the red-brown variations of the bricks, I had to ask myself whether she was travelling by herself in that aircraft cabin, that train compartment. If in reality she was in a strange car beside an unknown driver somewhere on the motorway south of the town. I reassured myself that she would have told me if she had a lover (both of us would have smiled at that word). And that if not, she would have taken pains to hit on a convincing reason for leaving. As far as I knew, she had never been unfaithful to me. As far as I knew. Anyway, I had never been jealous, which of course was no guarantee of anything but my own complacency, but if she really had had affairs during the eighteen years we had spent together, she was a more sophisticated and cold-blooded deceiver than I could imagine. No matter how inscrutably silent she could be when I tried to get her to tell me what the matter was, she was equally bad at hiding her moods. But the thought that she had a secret life in addition to our life with each other did not only seem a threat, it also fascinated me because it threw shadows where I had believed for years that everything was open and unconcealed.

As a rule I was absent several times a year in connection with my work; in reality she had had ample opportunity to launch into an escapade or two. Perhaps her impetuous joy in reunion had more than once been a kind of compensation when I came home and we made love as passionately as in the first years, perhaps her renewed desire had been equally made up of smokescreen and bad conscience. I tried to imagine her in bed with another man. I saw her flushed, inflamed face, turning from side to side, and a strange body crouching over her, locked between her knees, I could even see the strange room. Many years ago, shortly after we had moved in together, she said that if I was ever unfaithful to her she would ask me to see that it was not in our bed, and I was sure that she herself would keep this rule, but as I said, I have never suspected the occasion had arisen. I pictured her before me lying in an unknown room, I invented the furniture, the pictures on the wall and the view through the closed blinds onto a street in another part of town, but I could not imagine the strange man’s features, and suddenly I realised that this exercise in jealousy was a blind alley, a trap. In any case our life together had surely lasted too long for a chance affair to be able to shake it, nor had she probably ever imagined in earnest that she would never sleep with anyone but me. The idea seemed absurd, and if she really had an affair it was actually none of my business, as long as it did not change anything between us. But it was precisely that which had disturbed me in the bathroom the previous day, it was that unease which had grown in the dark bedroom and in the doorway only a few hours earlier when she silently regarded me before picking up her suitcase. The increasing feeling that her sudden inexplicable journey, secret lover or not, affected the whole of our life.

I put my dirty cup into the dishwasher and went into my study, telling myself that I must try to live with my unanswered questions, teach myself to live in uncertainty, at least for the time being, without filling the holes in my knowledge with lurid fantasies. It was bound to be quite a while. That was all I knew, all she had said. With the passage of the weeks and no word from her, I do not take her words any longer as a warning, rather an attempt to reassure me. She must have known what she was about to do when she said it, and perhaps she only said it so that I should not lose my head and report her missing to the police. What is she doing? How shall I be able to comprehend the extent of my uncertainty? I leafed desultorily through my notes and watched the ducks’ wedge-shaped tracks on the shining surface of the water or the running figures disappearing and reappearing between the dark tree trunks along the shore. I suddenly felt I had nothing to add on Cézanne. After all, others had probably said what there was to say about him without my assistance. I had planned to finish writing the article and deliver it before going to New York, but I was supposed to leave in less than a week, and I had not even got halfway. The trip had been planned for several weeks. During recent years I have written a number of essays on American painters, and among other things there was a retrospective exhibition of Edward Hopper at the Whitney Museum, which I absolutely had to see. Now I was not at all sure whether I should go. Astrid’s sudden departure had paralysed me. I could not think of anything but her mysterious decision and the equally mysterious resolve on her face as she stood looking at me in the doorway of the bedroom before leaving. I felt seen through as I stood there, sleepy and speechless in my creased pyjamas, but I had no idea what she had seen with that gaze that penetrated right through me, itself impenetrable and impossible to interpret. I felt her eyes strike a core far inside, how in a few seconds they lit up a place I myself did not know, whether it was because it had been lying in darkness and oblivion far too long, or because at that moment she knew me better than I have ever known myself. I have still not found the words to open that glance for me, it was a look from the other side of the words, and already when she was on her way down the stairs, already while I stood listening to her footsteps, I realised I would keep returning to those moments when we faced each other silently on the threshold of the room where we have slept beside each other for so many years. But I also knew she would not come hurrying back just because I stayed at home and kept watch over her absence. Whether I walked round in circles in the flat or in Manhattan would amount to the same thing, her gaze in the doorway would follow me everywhere.

I tried to pull myself together, and to concentrate on Cézanne. My rough improvised notes suddenly seemed vain and futile. One of them was a reflection I had made several years earlier. I had never really known what to do about it because it introduced a distracting element of psychology into the purely aesthetic meditation on Cézanne’s method. The note referred to one of his pictures of bathing women, who in fact are not bathing at all, but have come out of the river and stand or lie on the grass, naked, voluptuous and completely at ease, resting with their sensual weight, as they yield to the movements of the observer’s gaze among their bodies and the branches and foliage of the surrounding trees, so that skin, bark, leaves, water and reflections form part of the same circulation of colour, the same round of contrasts and graduations around the clearing among the trees in which there is a clear view, behind the women in the foreground, of the river and the distant opposite bank. And right at the centre of the picture, on the other side of the river, Cézanne has placed two small indistinct figures, almost invisible in the misty remoteness of colour, a man standing on the river bank with his dog beside him. He is too far away to have a face, but it is impossible to miss him there, looking over at the opposite side, face to face with the spectator across the span of the river, and naturally it is the women he has caught sight of, it is their undisturbed nakedness he is spying on in company with his dog. The indistinct little male person reflects the observer’s gaze in the perspective plane, so someone standing in the silence of the museum for a moment feels a vague, inexplicable shame, as if his gaze, which without distinguishing between flesh and plants, travels around in the abstract separation of the colours, as if this passive and dispassionate gaze was also a hand furtively brushing the breasts and thighs of the unsuspecting women.

When I heard the telephone I was sure it was Astrid, but it was Rosa calling to ask what time they should come. I had completely forgotten that the previous week we had invited her and her boyfriend to dinner. She sounded so well brought up, just like a real dinner guest and not the demanding, impatient child I had fed with yogurt, then Frankfurters and inventive Indonesian dishes. I tried to write a page or two about Cézanne’s discreet voyeur while thinking, between each sentence, of how I was going to explain Astrid’s absence. But she had seen to that, I could hear, when during the entrée Rosa narrowed her eyes teasingly and said that now she was probably up in the Swedish Skerries with Gunilla, pulling me to pieces as deftly as the ten kilo of crayfish they were sure to be having for dinner. Rosa’s eyes have always been narrow and teasing like her mother’s, and the corners of her mouth curl just like Astrid’s in a very sensual and sometimes almost spiteful way when she smiles, which she did when she saw my sheepish expression. I apologised for not serving crayfish as starter, which merely made her laugh and stroke my cheek with a tolerant, comforting gesture. Gunilla is a lesbian child psychiatrist from Stockholm with dyed hair, almost copper coloured, and I have never really taken to her and her voluminous screen-printed dresses and her holistic skerries island with outside loo and oil lamps and lumps of amber as big as cobblestones, even though she has known Astrid since she was married to Simon’s father, or perhaps just because of that. When Rosa and her boyfriend had left I looked up Gunilla’s number in Stockholm, maybe Astrid really had gone up there to stay with her old friend, whom she knew I couldn’t stand, maybe that was why she hadn’t told me where she was going. I could not really decide whether the thought was a reassuring one, and I was actually relieved when I heard how surprised Gunilla sounded on the phone. I even felt a touch of malicious pleasure. It was obvious she didn’t know Astrid had gone away although they rang each other at least twice a week and never talked for less than an hour at a time.

Rosa’s new boyfriend must be at least five years older than she is. He was fairly silent during dinner. We had only met once before, but I was still not sure that his silence and the abrupt minimal sentences he framed it with was due to shyness and not to an abysmal contempt. He was one of those shaven-headed young men in black who, like some gang of renovation workers, has undertaken to speed up the Fall of the West so we can get rid of all the outdated civilised shit. In him the dislike of culture had obviously developed into a dislike of everything, maybe with the sole exception of Rosa; now and then he caressed her neck with what most resembled a stranglehold, while fixing me with his small gimlet eyes. But as well as my daughter my gazpacho seemed to meet with approval, as far as I could judge. Before we ate Rosa had shown him round the apartment, she had even dragged him into my study with the breezy nonchalance of a lovingly nurtured daughter who ignores territorial limits, but he chuckled contemptuously at my series of Giacometti etchings and the open monographs on Cézanne on my table. Rosa had told me he was an artist, and I hadn’t known whether I should be happy or worried over the enthusiastic glow in her eyes. As far as I could gather he mostly worked on installations and was the man behind an exhibition which had aroused some interest on account of its preserved human embryos embedded in magenta plastic and flanked by a wall of video monitors on which a German porno film with juvenile Thai girls played in slow motion. While Rosa helped me fill the dishwasher she reproached me for not giving him more of a welcome, and she told me in wounded tones that he had read my essay on Jackson Pollock and had been looking forward to discussing it with me. Before I had managed to defend myself the phone rang, and she went in to the installation artist, who in the meantime had installed himself in the living room. I could hear them tongue-kissing in there, and the corridor to the kitchen is not exactly short. Then they were drowned out by my mother’s hectic stream of words.

My mother is what is known as an exuberant woman. Everything about her is luxuriant, almost tropical. She asked if she could speak to my charming wife. She says that every time, she doesn’t get tired of saying it, she has said it for eighteen years. I said Astrid had gone up to see her friend in Stockholm. She asked if all was not quiet on the Western Front. She uses that kind of expression all the time, and I’ve often asked myself whether she sounded quite as affected and false when she was young. She can still surprise me, after so many years’ acquaintance, not only with her unusually well developed sense of smell where ’smoke in the kitchen’ is concerned, as she calls it, but also with her intimidating lack of decency when she oversteps all my boundaries and with an ingratiating ‘Cooee’ thrusts her head round the door of my innermost sanctum. I’m sure I would have given her inquisitiveness a hard test if I had invited her to camp out at the foot of our bed. Contrary to what might be thought, Astrid thinks she is sweet, and she can still laugh at the swarm of postcards and letters her tireless mother-in-law sends us when she is on tour in the provinces. Her need for communication is insatiable, and she doesn’t stop before she has used up the entire stock of note-paper in her hotel room. Naturally, her letters are always about herself and about the present condition of her personality in the midst of a violent avalanche of development which makes her see everything in an entirely new light. This happens at least every other month. She is an actor and although it is a generation since she became too old to play Ophelia or Miss Julie, she has never stopped acting the part of the skittish kitten she must once have been. She called to remind us of the premiere she had already invited us to seven times, of a play a young dramatist had written specially for her. She was hoping to see us both. Her tone was unmistakeable, she had seen through the situation, and I caught myself wishing she would tell me what she saw, but she had already thrown herself into a long-drawn-out account of the ‘friend of her heart’ as she called him, a somewhat decrepit opera director with prostate trouble and a silk scarf round his neck. It has always amazed me that Astrid can stand her, that she will put up with being my ‘charming wife’, but she just smiles tolerantly as if it was not her at all who was described in that way. As a whole Astrid is very forbearing, fatuous remarks glance off her friendly smile while she thinks her own thoughts.

As usual my ear was quite hot and swollen when I finally put down the receiver. Rosa and her installation artist left soon after. I would have liked to go on talking to her, it had been too long since we had been together. As a gracious young woman had gradually emerged, wrenching herself free of the gawkiness of an eager child, she too had drawn back from our old intimacy. She used to question me about everything, and I had replied to everything she had asked. I had talked and talked, long before she herself could talk clearly or understand what I said, but as soon as she was ten, she had been the one who talked, she who stubbornly and, permitting no interruption, told me about the world she saw and appropriated, as if the whole time she had to repeat her growing knowledge of it so as not to forget anything. We could still sit in a corner and whisper together, but I noticed more and more often how my questions were left to themselves on the threshold of a new unknown room to which I had no access, and I came to think of my mother, of her heavy-handed lack of restraint, and kept quiet. If I tried to teach Rosa about the pitfalls of adult life, she merely smiled patiently until I had finished. I had to content myself with observing her from a distance, secretly moved, both happy and sad at the sight of her arrogant but vulnerable beauty, which no one had yet had the opportunity to mar. Sometimes I could hardly recognise her, when I saw her chatting and laughing in a circle of contemporaries, unaware that I was watching her, and if she suddenly looked up and smiled at me with those eyes and that mouth, which were both Astrid’s and her own, I had to admit I knew less and less about what went on behind her green gaze. It reminded me of what one of my older friends had said when his children left home. That children know their parents better than parents know their children.

I walked aimlessly around the flat when I was alone again. I couldn’t make out if it seemed larger or smaller to me than usual. I cleared the table and tidied up, but that was soon done. It was quiet again, but it was not our mutual silence, Astrid’s and mine, which one of us could break at any moment. It was a tight-fitting silence which closed around me after each of my sounds, after each car that passed along beside the Lakes. I thought of reading but didn’t get beyond the thought. Instead I put on a record, one of my old John Coltrane records that Astrid can’t bear, but neither Coltrane’s waterfall of notes nor McCoy Tyner’s thundering chords would turn into anything except the crackling, slightly hollow, mechanical echo of an afternoon in a sound studio in Manhattan far too many years earlier. I did not know what to do with myself that first evening of Astrid’s absence. I walked to and fro in the flat, listening to my own steps and the creak of the floorboards beneath me. At one point I stood in the hall with my coat on, I’d go for a walk, maybe have a glass or two somewhere, escape the silence in the flat and the feeling of being cooped up in myself. Then I discovered I had forgotten my cigarettes, and on the way along the corridor to the kitchen it occurred to me that Astrid might think of calling. I wasn’t going anywhere. I sat on the sofa and edited my own meaningless film, channel-hopping between the television offerings of panel discussions, golf tournaments, motor racing and tropical animals. While I walked up and down, I left the television on in order not to be the only person moving and producing sounds among the immovable stillness of objects and furniture. It was the first time in eighteen years that I did not know more or less when she would come home, or if she would come back at all. Naturally we had quarrelled like everyone else, but usually over trivialities and never for long. We had never gone to bed without making peace and smiling at ourselves and each other. The apartment had never, for more than an hour at a time, been allowed to be the scene of those theatrical marital tableaux in which one person stands with her back to the window while the other sits in the foreground pretending to read a newspaper. In all the years that we had been a family and now, when the children had begun to draw back from the ménage, we had moved in a sometimes harassed, sometimes peaceful, but always flexible choreography, in which we met and parted and met again on our way through the days. All the hectic mornings when we sent the children to school, and all the busy evenings when we cooked, had been more or less elegant repeats with imperceptible variations of the same ballet, in which we moved around each other with an intuitive knowledge of the other’s movement patterns. Even when we grew more and more alone together we went on anticipating the other’s movements and compensating for the other’s omissions or fits of inattention, whether it was an electric light bulb to be changed, or a cup grasped in the air before it fell to the floor. Our bodies knew each other in and out and understood how to fall into the same rhythm as we walked along the street or went to bed with each other, even when we turned round in sleep we accommodated ourselves to each other’s bent knees and elbows.

I let my gaze roam around the immovable furniture and belongings. She had found most of them. It was she who decided on the décor, with her unpredictable but sure taste. I have often been surprised when she came home with an unexpected lamp, a tea pot or a vase, but even her most eccentric discoveries soon acquired their natural place as logical additions to our universe of intimate objects. The furnishings of the flat did not merely decorate the frame of our life together, they are also traces of her whims and caprices, just as characteristic of her personality as her drawling, crisp voice or her eager, still slightly girlish way of walking on her long legs. Everything in the room was in its accustomed place, but when I looked at the things now it was as if they rejected my intimate gaze. The dark-red carpet we had once bought in Istanbul was suddenly any old carpet, the Japanese woodcut views of Mount Fuji at the end of an ice-blue sea were no longer the well-known landscape of my daydreams but insignificant glimpses of a hostile foreign world, and the honey-coloured mahogany bureau Astrid had inherited from her aunt seemed to me hideous, although its contours and the polished wood’s year marks were just as unchangeably engraved in my memory as Astrid’s mouth and eyes. Nothing in the room indicated that in a moment she would not come through the door and sit down on the sofa with a newspaper, and I knew precisely how she would sit, in which corner, with her legs pulled up under her, erect and with her head slightly tilted while she read and thoughtfully stroked her neck with the palm of her hand. I remained in the doorway of the bedroom in the same place where she had stood that morning. My duvet lay in a twisted bundle beside hers, smooth and long and airy. My pillow was crushed up against the wall, hers was plumped, full and without a fold, without the hollow her head used to leave. She had taken the time to make her half of the bed, as if she wanted to obliterate her traces before she dressed and positioned herself in the doorway to observe my unsuspecting sleeping face. But she had forgotten to close the door of the wardrobe. She could not have taken very much with her, almost all her clothes hung on their hangers there, and the sight of her lifeless dresses and blouses struck me with a sudden jab, as if she were dead and all that was left of her was her clothes and the other objects that were hers. The brushes on the small table under the mirror, with a few long, tangled chestnut-brown hairs. The Chinese box with its black lacquer lid decorated with gilded herons over gilded rushes, where she kept her jewellery. The rows of shoes, the oldest with dark imprints from her heels. Although her clothes and her belongings bore witness to her personal taste with all its whims, they seemed strangely anonymous now she had left them to themselves in the quiet bedroom. They had so little to say in her absence. The more I had come to know about her, the better, I thought, I knew her, although the opposite might just as well be the case. For all I knew, there might well be still more to know. A bottomless thought. I couldn’t remember when I had stopped imagining her secret, hidden sides, when I had grown used to her as she was with the children and me. I could not know whether she kept any secrets at all from me or had ever done so, or whether her hidden sides had been hidden from herself as well. Perhaps she too had become what I thought she was.

For the first time in ages I took out the fat album in which through the years I had stuck the pictures, the pictures of our life. The oldest of them have faded and the colours have become blurred. Astrid breast-feeding Rosa, with young, plump cheeks. Rosa’s chubby waddling body on the seashore one summer. Simon as an angler with a cod in his arms almost as big as himself. Astrid in a fur cap, posing with the children beside a lopsided and melancholy snowman. Astrid in front of a golden, tree-covered valley in Trás-os-Montes that autumn seven years ago, and by the rail of the ferry in the middle of the Tagus, in the afternoon sun, with white teeth and the wind in her hair and flashing sunglasses in front of the dazzling façades rearing up behind each other in Alfama and Bairro Alto. I am seldom in the pictures, I took most of them myself, and more than once it has struck me that in a way it was my own absence I was photographing, as when I was in an aeroplane again on my way abroad imagining what they might be doing at home. Rosa on the lawn in front of the sea, naked in the sun with a podgy stomach and wild, wide eyes as she puts a finger over the hose so the water refracts the light around her in a brilliant rainbow fan like the outspread tail feathers of a peacock. Simon with his cheek against the floor boards and a gaze lost in the trafficated microcosm of his toy cars, like a gentle and lonely Gulliver wishing there was room for him on the small empty front seats in his daydream. It had passed quickly, the children were so busy growing as if our lives couldn’t progress fast enough, and even the pictures can’t stop time. On the contrary, they show how long ago it is since Simon played with cars and Rosa played with water. All the same I am glad I took those pictures, even though I often felt a bit awkward squatting down with the camera. I felt I was intruding on their unselfconscious concentration or spontaneous delight, that I wanted to preserve. I don’t know which of the pictures make me most wistful, those where the children don’t realise they are being snapped, as if they were alone, or those where they laugh and look into the camera, completely present as they meet my gaze. In one kind of picture I don’t seem to be there at all, in the other kind it is certainly not me they smile at but the stupid camera I hid behind. Sometimes I think you take photographs instead of seeing, you forget to look in your eagerness to grasp what is seen, capture it in time’s flight. You are absent from your own pictures, not only because you took them yourself, but also because you betray the moments you want to save from oblivion. Before you get the picture in focus it has already become a different image, a different moment. Astrid hardly ever took pictures, she left it to me, she even encouraged me to take them, and when I did, each time I had the feeling of being outside. She is totally present there in the pictures, at one with the moment I plucked out of time’s blind growth and stuck into the fat album like the flowers Rosa pressed and stuck into an exercise book. Withered fragments of our life, where she buries Rosa in sand so only her little grinning head sticks up, or paints lines on Simon’s face that Shrovetide carnival time, when he was an Indian, while I spy on them through the lens, at a distance, like a doting detective in love.

One of the pictures shows Astrid standing alone on the balcony early one summer morning, when the façade is still in shadow. She leans against the wall, which meets the row of trees beneath her in the vanishing point of the perspective. She looks away, out of the picture, I don’t know what at, as if wondering, stopped short between two seconds, between one thought and the next. A restrained musing, perhaps over the years that have succeeded each other so rapidly, over the way her life has taken shape, as if it had happened while she was pondering for a moment as now, occupied in following a bird’s disappearance, a changing cloud shape, the wind’s creased track on the bright trembling membrane of the lake or how the leaves of the trees alternately turn their shining and their dull side to the wind and the light. If she were disappointed, she would certainly not be able to say over what, yet all the same her happiness seems to her in a vague and indefinable way to be a betrayal. Even though she cannot decide, and anyway has not yet tried to decide, whether it is life that has betrayed her, or the other way round. Life. Can you talk of it like this at all? Can you talk about anything else than the life that is hers? This life, which cannot be thought of without the others’, the boy’s, the girl’s and the man’s. Just as she and the others cannot either, as the years pass, be thought about differently, as the years allow her to see them or allow her to see herself in the mirror when she is alone. They are hers, and she is theirs. Is it chance or destiny that has shaped it like this? When was one thing succeeded by another? When did she stop distinguishing? When did it suddenly become too easy and too hard, too all-embracing and actually useless to ask if she really loves the man looking at her through the little aperture of the camera? As when the youngest child asks where space ends.

I sat by the window looking on to the Lakes without lighting the lamp above my desk. The tree-crowns, the mirror of the water and the row of houses on the other side merged together in the darkness, only the lighted windows appeared between the trees like an elongated and uneven, yellow mosaic. Here and there a stone in the mosaic was missing, elsewhere the stones looked as if they had been broken, because a dark ramification of twigs in the foreground splintered the distant square of light. The lighted windows were dimly reflected in the black water, and the folds on the surface made the reflections tremble. As I looked at them from my chair, across the lake, the rows of luminous windows, it seemed for a moment unthinkable that over there behind the dark dolls’ house façades strange people were living out their lives, side by side in row after row of unknown homes. Perhaps some of them were watching the same film on television, perhaps some of them lifted their coffee cups at the same time, perhaps more than one of them stood at this moment before a washing up bowl in a kitchen seeing the soapy water shine violet on a plate in the light of the lamp above the sink, all of this in a slightly displaced synchronicity of trivial and everyday movements. But how many of them were thinking that their little world of repetitions and changes, of trivialities and tragedies and sudden felicity, was merely one world among many in the great mosaic? Did someone perhaps also sit behind a window on the other side looking over the lake, thinking the same thing as I did? Were there two of us sitting and thinking of all those windows, all those views and all those doors, all those possibilities opening and closing on each other? Many years before, when I had just moved into town, young and fresh in the world, I had cycled around in the evening, along the Lakes, for instance, and thought there would surely be enough doors to enter. I had cycled beside the water, under the trees, past one door after another, and I had longed to find a door, the absolutely right door that would open onto something I was not yet able to imagine.

She has hired a car in Paris, somewhere on the Avenue Foch. Then driven south. I have the statement of our account, I can see where she has used her card. She has reached Bordeaux late in the afternoon, and booked into a hotel there. She has driven, beside the river, in the stream of late traffic alongside the sooty façades. While I sat at dinner with Rosa and her boyfriend, she was sitting in a restaurant in Bordeaux observing the other guests and vaguely listening to their conversation, a solitary woman travelling through. She has followed our old route south through Les Landes, through the endless pine forests in the drizzle, down to the Spanish frontier. The hours linked with each other in a long tunnel of grey, misty light, as she sat behind the wheel, unmoving and yet in motion, in a car among other cars in the branched delta of the motorway net. Perhaps she was aware of leaving a trail every time she passed her card through another tele-terminal at the filling stations and services en route. A trail of names she must have known I would recognise, just as I recognised their order. It was the same journey, the same time of year, when Europe fades to a gamut of gold and red-brown and dusty green along the roads, and the suburbs, the factories, the power stations and motorway loops dissolve in the rainy mist among the moving chains of car lights. Perhaps it was even a delayed message she sent me through the computerised statement’s list of places, a reminder of something she wanted me to remember. In San Sebastian she went into a bar at La Concha. I can only imagine San Sebastian in the drizzle, the colonnade beneath the row of hotels looking out on the little bay with its corn-yellow sand and the green water and rocking trawlers farther out, paling into transparence in the Biscay fog. I imagine her standing in a noisy bar sipping her café cortado while by turns she observed the passing umbrellas beside the sea on the promenade and the shaky, gritty and somehow corroded picture on the television screen above the bar of a remote, incomprehensible war between bearded militia in ragged uniforms, driven by an unimaginable hatred, an unimaginable desire to cut someone’s throat or get one’s own throat cut in the Caucasian mud. The same pictures I myself watched on those autumn evenings, alone in front of the screen in the apartment beside the Lakes and later in the hotel room on Lexington Avenue, alone with the numbed feeling that time withdraws from us and divides us in the same movement, unaware of its own face, while devouring its children.

We walked between the columns beneath the promenade and over the wet sand. Even at this time of year there were a few late bathers. Their freezing, glistening limbs resembled strayed summer memories when they ran over the sand, stooping and with arms folded. Astrid jumped away when the tongues of foam stretched out after her on the beach, she laughed euphorically after the long hours in the car, her hair curled in the damp air, and her cheeks were cool and sticky with salt. I told her that concha means both conch shell and cunt, and she laughed again and pushed at me, so the foam from the waves washed over my shoes. It wasn’t as if we felt young again, as they say, it was not a revival of our once unrestrained playfulness. After all, we were the same people we had been the whole time, while everything happened to us at tearing speed. Rosa was eleven and Simon was sixteen, and as I said it was the first time we had been away for more than a week without them. We were apparently the same, and yet we regarded each other with curious, searching and slightly anxious eyes. We were still young, but we knew it wouldn’t last much longer. We made love in the afternoon in hotel rooms, we had not done that for several years. We were in motion all the time from one place to another, and with each town we slept in on our way south we grew a little more alone together, left to each other. I lay with my head in her lap, I felt her stomach rise and sink in time to her breathing, I listened to the rain pattering on the shutters onto La Concha, and she squeezed my head softly between her thighs and asked if I could hear the sea. There were other things she might have asked, but she didn’t. A couple of weeks before we went away, I had come back from New York, it had been my idea for us to go, I suggested it as soon as we got into the car when she fetched me from the airport. She smiled in surprise, considering the idea. It was the first time the children were not between us, conducting our love, and we swayed slightly in the sudden undisturbed presence of each other. We felt our way forward, I did anyway, while I tried to decipher, in the hotels and in the car en route, whether we were still the people I hoped we were. We went on along the Bay of Biscay between the sea and the mountains, without stopping, almost as if we were in a hurry. We stopped only to eat and sleep, Bilbao and Santander were nothing but names in the rain.