The road that leads to Boscana Valley is winding and shady. It’s been almost an hour since I left Barcelona, I don’t move with ease outside the city and I’m feeling a little dizzy. It makes me nervous not knowing where I am and the GPS seems to have gone crazy since I left the last town behind. The big rock bellies stick out more and more over the side of the road and I can’t shake a feeling that danger waits around every bend. I find it strange to take this unfamiliar route with the previous night’s unreal physicality still so close to the surface.
“I’ll expect you tomorrow.”
Pep left me his address jotted on a piece of paper on top of the console table in the hallway.
Coming back from the hospital, we tried to say goodbye in front of my building, still in the car, we kept leaving our sentences hanging unfinished in the air, not really knowing what direction to take. Pep provoked a different energy in me, an intrepid impulse that made me invite him up without thinking too much about it.
We slept for four hours during the day, he blamed it on jet lag and I blamed something like resurrection. In between stretches of sleep there was sex, coffee, a few grams of 190unexpected normality and an attempt by me to apologize that was cut short by his index finger.
“Whatever it is, we’ll have time to talk about it later. You’re exhausted and so am I.” He pushed a lock of hair out of my face. “I’m spending New Year’s Eve with some friends, if you want to join us. They don’t live far from here. I’d love it if you came.”
“Oh… I already have plans.”
I had turned down two or three offers for New Year’s Eve. I’d told them all that I was working but, really, the only plan I had was visualizing Pep in Barcelona, seeing him disembark from the plane and typing in my number, keeping that gap in my agenda just in case. And now I was backing out and I surprised myself by saying no, I couldn’t spend New Year’s Eve with him. This new tendency of recent months worried me, the habit of postponing everything, of plotting out a shield of lies to protect the solitude I felt I both needed and needed to censure.
He shrugged and pulled a comically disappointed face, but I had already seen the low blow reflected in his gaze.
“Your loss, doctor. I have a second proposal. Tomorrow, when your hangover is gone, why don’t you grab a small suitcase, fill it up with warm clothes and hiking boots and come spend a couple of days with me?”
“A very seductive offer. I’ll think about it. And what are you going to do now?”
“Now? Go home, sleep a little, unpack and go buy some food in case you decide to accept my proposal.” 191
“Stay.”
He shot me a naughty look.
“Sleep here for a while. I know it sounds strange, but I’d love it if you did.”
“Do you snore?”
I laughed, showing all my teeth.
“Do you?”
“A little, but gracefully.”
In the bedroom, the half-lowered blinds played with the sun, drawing a spider web of light and shade. He commented on a painting by Coco Dávez that rested on the parquet.
“It was a gift.” As the words came out, I felt a burning sensation scatter across my diaphragm like a fire spreading along petrol-soaked ground. It was acrylic on paper, an indigo blue background with four red strokes insinuating a knot. Mauro had given it to me when I turned forty. The flames continued, moving in a chain reaction to lick the photograph of Midsummer Eve on the table by the bed, and spreading out to the terrace, which had become a desert, the failed battleground of my attempt to resuscitate Mauro’s plants. But the fire was focused on the bed itself. Only Mauro and I had slept in that bed, and Lídia’s daughters for the occasional nap when they were little. Deconsecrating the altar of the bed. That must be a step. Giving it new uses, allowing Pep into it and yearning for the cedar scent of his skin to impregnate the pillowcases, sheets and every nook of a space that was already beginning to smell of neglect. 192
He glanced at the photograph out of the corner of his eye when we sat down on the bed, but he didn’t say anything.
The art of lying requires concentration and I can’t allow myself to weaken over a few objects from my past.
“Do you mind if I take off my shoes?”
“My sleeping invitation is the full package, you can take it all off.”
We curled up under the duvet in just our underwear.
“Oh, the treachery! Your feet are freezing! I didn’t remember you had ice cubes for feet!”
And amid laughter, the soft down on his arms and hands, and bright banter, we remained facing each other and I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to face a truth that throbbed insistently at the hidden depths of everything: Pep’s body filling Mauro’s side of the bed. A man desired but not loved, a new man and one who is no longer there. A man with an easy laugh. A bluff in the shape of a man, and I knew it.
He studied my eyes, searching for my approval. I had him so close and yet it was still so unreal, that sudden happiness. I touched his hair. I kissed his eyelids.
I didn’t want a New Year’s Eve party, I wanted the precise affection of a friend, the warmth, to sleep and turn off all the voices in my head. I recognized how awkwardly his body fit into mine, but I felt filled with confidence. We made love for a long time and I acted as if it was all completely normal, him licking me, him pushing my arms back roughly, him separating my legs assertively, and I let him do his thing, he didn’t give me the option of taking the initiative and I was 193fine with that, I was fine with it all, being body, flesh, desire, and nothing more. I wasn’t set aflame, I couldn’t feel the heat, I was too focused on something better: feeling alive and desired.
When we had finished I turned my back to him and came up against the photograph where someone had immortalized Mauro and me laughing, surrounded by the atmosphere on the shortest night of the year, unaware even of the camera’s presence. The photo is proof that Midsummer Eve existed, that Mauro existed, and that at some point we had been at peace with each other. It happened and we were happy. I rested my gaze on the only remaining evidence of that.
Pep placed a hand on my hip.
“Paula…”
“Hmm?”
“You’ve lost a lot of weight.”
I should have told him then, I could have reduced the loss and pain to a short, objective sentence, I could have said something like “my best friend, the man who was my partner, died in an accident. But before he did, he left me for another woman. It’s been a rough year”. But I let him think whatever he wanted to. I was sure he wouldn’t imagine a sudden death, and every other response was preferable to that noxious, awkward pity. I took in a breath and released it with a loud sigh.
“Now that you mention it, I might have. I’ll have to come and taste everything you learnt to cook in Boston, see if you’re really as good as you claim.” 194
Silence. Lungs working deliberately, matching the rhythms of relaxed breathing, the wind outside whistling, wanting to alert me to something. Don’t think, Paula. Sleep.
“So, you’ll come tomorrow?”
“Yes, I’ll come tomorrow.”
The road is gorgeous, the shoulders on either side lead into forest thick with oaks and holm oaks. I pull over to call Pep and tell him I think I’m lost but there’s no service and the only other people there are a family with kids stretching their legs and they’ve never heard of the valley, so I keep going forwards, the only direction available, towards kilometre fourteen as indicated on the wrinkled paper, and after extending my neck to see the end of an endless bend, a discreet sign on one side welcomes me to the national park I believe the valley is in. Seeing it sends a wave of relief through me, and then I feel pure joy at having got this far.
The sand road snakes through trees and reveals a gentle crest with a farmhouse in the distance, stretches of vines dressed for winter, and rosemary and heather everywhere, still flowerless.
The gravel crunches under the car’s tyres when I park in front of a stone house that must be his because I haven’t seen any others. It’s right at the fork in the road, as Pep drew on the map he gave me yesterday. I turn off the engine and get out of the car. The silence is broken only by distant barking and the rustle of the wind through the bare branches of 195poplars around the house that signal the forest that begins right behind it. Before my eyes can take in all the beauty of the surroundings, the door opens and Pep rushes out to welcome me.
“Come in! You can drive right in!” he shouts from a small porch.
But I leave the car where it is and dart over to him with all the anxious energy of the trip. My legs are trembling. He doesn’t understand what a big deal it is that I asked for four days off from the hospital, called up Santi at night and wished him a happy new year and then lied saying fine, he was right, I needed to stop. To pretend I’m a chastened good girl and keep my desire to flee from coming through in my voice. It’s a physical desire, impossible to stifle, the same desire that compelled me to quickly pack a suitcase, rescue my least functional underwear from the back of the drawer, look myself in the mirror and practise smiling, rehearse lowering my eyes and emptying all trauma from the depths of my pupils. No, without knowing the whole truth he can’t understand or grasp that I’ve heroically travelled through time to be here today and to be myself, not that other woman who staggers through the shadows. I can’t think about her now because that would turn her into a victim and I’d feel bad about marginalizing her. Keeping her silent is closing a chapter and having the courage to leave her past behind, and I love that past, I love it the way you love the darkest, most secret things.
“Hey, doctor… everything OK?” 196
“Everything is perfectly fine.”
I turn to observe my surroundings. Take in a breath. I’m in a small stone house in the middle of a lush forest. A river skirts it like the bow on this surprise gift. I’ve seen it hundreds of times in fairy tales, the stories with wolves and red hoods, and the prospect of spending the night there is thrilling.
“Welcome to my home.”
He has me bundle up and gives me an enthusiastic tour. He’s been letting the place for three years. Before that it was the home of some tenant farmers who moved into the town only a ten-minute drive away, he says, pointing to the road. They allowed him to renovate a little and turn a shed into his workshop. We go inside and I sense he’s somewhat nervous when the three fluorescent ceiling lights flicker on to reveal a work table covered in blueprints, compasses and all sorts of tools I couldn’t name. To the back are a few pieces of furniture and a machine I’d call a chainsaw, that’s the best I can do. It smells of wood, resin, glue and varnish.
I run my hand over the back of a dresser that’s in the middle of the room.
“Be careful, don’t get a splinter. I still have to sand it down.”
He puts his hands in his pockets and looks around proudly.
I pick up a tool from on top of a metal filing cabinet.
“This is the first time I’ve been in a carpenter’s workshop.”
I stroke the handle that holds a steel blade.
“There’s a first time for everything.” 197
I nod and smile.
“What’s this called?”
“A gouge. For cutting. Come here, look.”
He takes it from my hands and sinks it into a square piece of wood. He shows me a precise cut on the surface, blows the furrow to get rid of the sawdust and then places the tip of my index finger there. It fits perfectly.
Now I understand that Pep belongs in this space, now I see that clearly. The man I could only sense and have been imagining all this time appears before me like an unexpected clearing, and my heart warns me about something but I banish the thought, I need to believe that I can be here, that it’s OK to be here today.
I hit bottom, he comments, and I remain silent to obstinately keep the promise I made to myself. His sincerity cannot alter my lie. He told me a year ago that he was divorced, I gave him no details about my life and he didn’t ask, so relax, Paula, you don’t have to give him any now, either. He quit the consulting office where he worked, tired of the grey, stress-laden atmosphere.
“I used to say that one day I would hang it all up and go to the mountains and raise a few pigs. I don’t know how, but I pulled it off.”
“You have pigs?” I ask, bewildered.
The question makes him laugh long and hard, a contagious laughter with the ability to transmogrify into a damp kiss that opens a thousand doors and jettisons any chance of backing out. 198
“No, doctor, I don’t have pigs.”
He traces my eyebrow with a finger as he looks at me as if for the first time.
“Pep, I… I’m really sorry that I asked you that before, to stay away. I must have seemed rude and you can’t have understood why.”
“Very rude.” He smiles.
“Do you forgive me?” I ask in a thin voice.
He doesn’t answer immediately. In fact he even closes his eyes for a moment. I don’t know what images he has stored there inside, what information he’s searching for; I have no idea what he’s revisiting, what he’s doing, if he’s pulling my leg, what he tells himself, what he thinks, what he’s running from or to, if my body is enough for him and he has no interest in my words, maybe he’s making a wish, or just clinging to the meaning of my apology. My heart is beating so hard that I’m afraid something will happen to it. My cheeks burn with shame, aware that my speech lacks the key phrase crowned by a black word that can put paid to the magic of every fairy tale.
I don’t know him well enough yet, all I know is that he’s a simple man, strong and fun, that his vocabulary contains treasures such as gouge, that we’ve been together in this strange way for forty-eight hours and he isn’t questioning me, a man who came out of nowhere, like opportunities or those ropes thrown out so you can grab a hold and keep from drowning. I also know that a lie isn’t the way to start out on a good footing. Ultimately, I think, a lie is a way to 199make certain things invisible, and if there’s nothing to see, at the very least it undermines death’s authority.
“If you help me clean and chop the vegetables I won’t hold it against you,” he finally murmurs into my ear. But at the same time he takes my hand and squeezes it firmly, in a gesture that belies the frivolity of his joke.