Pío Baroja*

The Unknown

Husband and wife settled into the carriage. After stowing away their luggage, he donned a light grey overcoat, pulled on a cap, lit a cigarette and sat staring indifferently up at the ceiling, while she stood gazing out of the window at the autumn dusk.

From the carriage she could see the small coastal town, with its dark houses huddled together against the wind from the sea. The sun was gradually withdrawing its light, which glinted metallically on windows, scaled rooftops blackened by the damp air, then rose up the dark church tower until it lit only the metal cross on the belfry, which stood out triumphant and red against the grey of twilight.

‘Well, we certainly had quite a wait,’ he said, blowing out a cloud of smoke. He spoke in the mannered tones of a Madrid dandy.

She spun round to look at her husband, briefly studied him and his pale, beringed, manicured hands, then turned back to the window.

The station bell rang, giving the signal to depart, and slowly the train began to move with the sigh made by chains and iron forced out of their inertia; the wheels made an infernal racket, clattering clumsily over the turntables outside the station; the engine gave a wild, energetic whistle; then the motion of the train grew more regular, and there began the parade of villages, orchards, cement factories, windmills and then, with vertiginous speed, hills and trees, linesman’s huts, empty roads and hamlets barely visible in the gloom of dusk.

As night came on, the landscape changed; the train stopped occasionally at isolated wayside stations surrounded by threshing floors on which stood piles of burning stubble.

Inside the carriage, husband and wife were still alone; no other traveller had joined them; he had closed his eyes and was dozing. She would have liked to do the same, but her brain seemed to insist on summoning up troubling memories that would not let her sleep.

And what memories they were! All of them so cold and charmless.

Of the three months spent in that seaside town, all that remained were stark visual images, but nothing intense, nothing heartfelt.

She could see the town on a summer’s night, beside the broad river estuary, its waters flowing indolently along through green maize fields; she saw the empty beach, washed by the sea’s languid waves; she recalled August sunsets, with the sky full of red clouds and the sea stained scarlet; she recalled the steep hills thick with yellow-leaved trees, and, in her imagination, she saw joyful dawns, blue skies, mists rising up from the salt marshes before dispersing, towns with elegant towers, bridges reflected in rivers, huts, abandoned houses, cemeteries hidden in the folds of hills.

And in her head she could hear the sound of drumming, the sad voices of the peasants driving their cattle, the solemn lowing of oxen, the creaking of carts, and the slow, sad tolling of the bells for the Angelus.

And along with those memories came other images from the land of dreams, echoes from childhood, thoughts that rose up from her unconscious, the shadows formed in her mind by lost illusions and dead enthusiasms.

Her memories glowed inside her, like the stars illuminating the fields with their pale light, cold images imprinted on her retina, but leaving no trace on her soul.

Only one truly touching memory stepped down from her brain to her heart. It was the night she had crossed from one side of the river to the other in a boat, without her husband. Two tall, strong young sailors, with the typically stony faces of Basque men, were rowing. To keep time, they sang a strange, monotonous but terribly poignant song. When she heard it, her heart was filled with a strange, unwonted languor, and she asked them to sing more loudly and to head further out to sea.

The two men rowed hard away from the land and continued to sing those serene Basque folk songs that cast their mournful notes upon the splendid evening light. The water trembled and shimmered blood-red, tinged by the dying sun, while the restful sounds dropped into the silence of the tranquil sea and the rise and fall of the waves.

And when she compared that memory with others from her life full of otherwise all too predictable sensations, when she thought of the dull future awaiting her, she felt an intense desire to flee the monotony of her existence, to leave the train at one of those country stations and set off in search of the unknown.

She made a spur-of-the-moment decision and waited for the train to stop. She saw a station approaching as if emerging new-born out of the darkness, then, stopping before her, its empty platform lit by a lantern.

She lowered the window and reached for the handle.

As she leaned out to open the door, a shiver ran down her spine. There was the darkness, watching and waiting. She drew back. And suddenly, seamlessly, the night air restored her to reality, and all her dreams, memories, longings vanished.

She heard the signal to leave, and the train resumed its mad race through the dark countryside full of shadows, and great sparks from the engine flew past the windows like brilliant eyes suspended in mid-air …