B0040702LQ EBOK (12 page)

He looks at her tenderly and she is not afraid, but she does
not move, nor does she throw her arms about him or respond
to his voice. The ghost repeats that dear name:

`Eulalia!'

And she realises that he has blood on his forehead.

`Did you fall?'

She knows that she has just asked this question, but she did
not hear her own voice. He touches his forehead with one
hand and the hand becomes stained with blood.

`Yes, I fell. I was left hanging on by my hands and then the
stone crumbled. I fell from a great height and hit my head on
the rocks.'

`Does it hurt?'

`No. It did at first, but not any more.'

`I told them to go and look for you.'

`They've already left. I saw them going up the mountain.
They'll find me tomorrow when it's light. But don't tell them
that you've seen me. They won't believe you. They and I no
longer inhabit the same life.'

She looks and looks at him and does not dare to say anything. She does not dare to say his name or to fall into his
arms. She is not afraid, because he is her husband, and she
cannot be afraid. But despite his beloved presence in the
room, she begins to feel infinitely alone. He speaks to her
tenderly.

`Eulalia, I've come to say goodbye to you. I couldn't leave
without seeing you again. But if you wait for me, I will come
back one day. I know that I will be able to come back. Wait
for me always, always, always ...'

She is holding out her hand and her mouth is open. but she
cannot move her feet or cry out. The ghost slowly fades, but
does so reluctantly, engaged in a terrible struggle to stay as
long as possible. It becomes blurred. He is now no more than a
vaguely luminous shape. All that are left are two eyes open like
windows onto the infinite. At last, she feels her own heart stop
and she falls to the floor at the ghost's non-existent feet.

The women go into her room first thing in the morning
and they find her lying face down on the floor, unconscious.
They pick her up and carry her to the bed. They rub her
wrists and her temples. She remains for a long time with her
eyes closed and when she finally opens them, she doesn't look
at anyone or see anything around her in the room. A vision
blocks her sight. They call to her and she does not reply. A
dear, distant voice has robbed her of words.

They try to console her and she does not hear them. She
knows that he is dead. She knew before anyone else did. The
dead man visited her in the night to say goodbye. She knows
it, but she knows too that she can tell no one. And she knows
that she must wait always, always, because he will return one
day.

When she comes to, when it is fully light, she asks a
question that surprises the women.

`Haven't they brought him back to me yet?'

The expedition arrives at midday. They are carrying the
body wrapped in a blanket. Four men carry him. They found
him shortly after dawn, hanging from a rock. His forehead has
been pierced by the nails of his climbing boots. It seems that,
as he fell, he performed a strange pirouette.

She receives him in silence. There is no point in hiding
anything from her because she already knows everything. She
cannot cry or speak. They all respect her silent grief.They do
not dare to keep her from her husband's body. She goes over
to him fearlessly and uncovers his face. However, she does not
see his disfigured face, but the face of the ghost who bore only
a bloodstain on his forehead. She will always remember him
like that, alive and more handsome than ever, but with that
one bloodstain.

Then there are long unpleasant formalities to go through.
Some men come for the widow and take her away in a car.
They take the body too in another black car. Everything
returns to normal in Salardu. The men and the women have
another story to tell during the long winter nights.

Twenty years have passed. Eulalia had a daughter a few
months after her husband's death and she has devoted her life
to the girl. They are rich and live in a large house with a
garden, in one of the exclusive areas of Barcelona.

The mother has always kept alive the memory of the husband who died so young on the mountain and who visited
her that night to promise her that he would return. She knows
that it was all an hallucination, but she has never stopped
believing in the dead man's words and has continued to wait
for him. She has never mentioned it to anyone, not even to
her daughter. She knows that no one could understand the
reason for that absurd hope.

The daughter is nineteen. She is lovely, as was her mother,
but there is always something vaguely sad about her. Perhaps
she has caught it from her mother. Sadness is an infectious
disease. The daughter finds men rather comical. She still does
not believe in love, despite her nineteen years. Her mother has
often told her the story of how her father died, and the daughter thinks that the men who flirt with her are not like her
father, even though she never knew him.

She has always liked the story. She found out about it when
she was older. Her mother did not want to tell her when she
was a child, so as not to frighten her. But one day, she told it to her and the daughter has since made her repeat it again and
again. She likes the story. She has never been to Salardu and
sometimes she says to her mother:

`Take me there one day.'

`I don't want to go.'

`Would you let me go without you?'

`Yes, if you go with other people.'

The mother does not like to be apart from her daughter,
but she believes that her daughter's desire to go to Salardu is
out of love for the father she never knew. And she gives in, out
of respect for her daughter's love.

The daughter is also called Eulalia and one day she organises the trip with some friends. They are a married couple
with a daughter and a son. The daughter is the same age as
Eulalia, the son a little older. It seems that the son is in love
with her, but Eulalia is not sure that she likes him. Something
in her heart tells her that this is not the man for her.

Eulalia has a very vague idea of her father. There is a picture
at home in a silver frame. It shows a young man with a pleasant face, but the photograph is rather blurred. It is not the
work of a professional photographer, but an enlargement
made from a smaller photograph, the one that her mother
liked best. Young people do not think about death and have
no interest in having a good photograph of themselves taken,
of the sort that can be kept for ever as a souvenir.

The friends accompanying Eulalia know that her father
died years ago in the mountains and that he fell to his death,
but they do not know that it was there, in Salardu. Eulalia
prefers them not to know and says nothing to them about it.
She just wants to find out where her father died and to be in
the room where her father stayed. She does not know that he
also appeared there after his death.That secret has not been
revealed to her. It was room number 2. Her mother has often
told her that and she remembers it well.

`Number 2, the best room in the hotel.'

That is what her mother always said.

They reach Salardu and the hotel owner, who is older now,
shows them the rooms. The hotel has changed little in twenty years. It has been renovated now and then, but the furniture is
the same. Things change very little in twenty years.

Eulalia says to the hotel owner:

`I would like to stay in room number two.'

`Why?' asks the owner, who is astute and never gives his
opinion without first asking a few questions.

`Some friends of mine stayed here years ago. They told me
that it's a good room.'

`Yes, it's on a corner and has two windows, but all the
rooms are good rooms. Besides, I can't let you have it because
it's occupied. A gentleman is staying in it. I'll give you number
four, which is next door.'

`Is he going to be here long?'

`He hasn't said. He only arrived yesterday.'

Eulalia installs herself in another room, number 4 next door
to number 2. There is a continuous balcony that looks out
onto the river and that connects all the rooms. She leaves her
things and goes out on to the balcony to look. She knows that
they carried her dead father down one of those paths. She
looks across at the mountains on the other side of the river,
hoping to see the peaks that soar to over three thousand
metres. But you can't see them from there. Salardu lies
between two secondary valleys and you have to go through
them in order to reach the peaks. You can see only the
meadows near the river and a slope covered in fir trees.

Eulalia walks along the balcony to the window of room
number 2. The French windows are wide open. There is no
one inside. She sees a suitcase under the bed, a coat hanging
up and a few books on the table. The coat is a man's coat. On
the glass shelf, next to the washbasin, there is a safety razor.
Eulalia is deeply moved to think that, twenty years ago, in that
very room, her mother spent that most dreadful of nights.

She goes further into the room. She is not interested in the
objects, which belong, after all, to a stranger. She is interested
in the room. On the table, next to the books, is an identity
card with a photograph. Eulalia looks at the photo and is
greatly struck by the stranger's face. She even closes her
eyes in order to see it more clearly afterwards. There is an extraordinary similarity between that face and her father's
face in the photograph in the silver frame. She examines the
document and allows herself to imagine that she is going
through the papers of her dead father. She smiles. Her father
would be forty-five now. He would probably be a wonderful
father. She reads the name on the documents. It's a perfectly
ordinary name: Evaristo. She is amused by the name, but she
doesn't like it. It is accompanied by two nondescript family
names. She doesn't like either of them. Her father was called
Felipe.

She looks at his date of birth: 18th July 1926. She closes her
eyes again and then opens them to see better. It is the date of
her father's death. Yes, her father died there on 18th July 1926.
That peculiar stranger who arrived yesterday and took the
room in which her father stayed before he died and whose
face looks like the photograph of her dead father, was born
the day her father died. Eulalia feels a strange presence near
her. She goes out onto the balcony and hears the voices of her
friends calling her.

They want to know if she's settled in. She shows them the
room and the river and the distant trees.

`We should be all right here for a few days.'

`Yes, fine.'

They are all very happy and completely oblivious to the
secret life that drifts through the thoughts of others. They
laugh and go down to the dining room because it is already
supper time.

Eulalia seems distracted at supper. They have to ask her
everything twice and her replies seem rather odd. Her friend
says to her:

`The mountain air obviously doesn't suit you.'

Eulalia laughs to disguise her feelings. It isn't the mountain
air, it's because she is concentrating on the other guests. She is
searching amongst those already seated at the tables for the
stranger born on the very day her father died and she cannot
find him. He's obviously not in the dining room. But Eulalia
doesn't dare to ask for him.

Her friend's brother suggests going on a trip the next day. She says yes, but she could just as easily have said no. She isn't
thinking about what she's saying.

`Apparently there's a lake you can visit.'

`Well, let's go and see it then.'

`It's quite far.'

`We can go in the car.'

`They say you have to walk there.'

`I'm not sure I could manage a long walk. I'm not used to it
and, besides, I've never been into the mountains before.'

Her friend tries to encourage her and says that they could
even swim in the lake. She agrees to everything they say and
they arrange to get up early the next day so as to do the trip at
a leisurely pace.

They linger for a while over dessert and then, suddenly,
the door opens and in walks a young hiker. He is tall, strong,
with long, curly hair. Eulalia recognises him instantly.This is
precisely the image she had of her father. The hiker has a
knapsack over his shoulder and his skin is burned by the sun.
He talks to the owner of the hotel and they both laugh.
Then he washes his hands, puts his knapsack down in a corner and sits at a table set for one person. He doesn't say hello
to anyone and Eulalia thinks: `Of course, he only arrived
yesterday.'

She no longer notices anything anyone says to her. She has
eyes only for this stranger who is so like her father. She
cannot imagine her father looking any other way. That is
how he would have been, had he not died on the mountain.
A little older perhaps, but with the same build and the same
features.

When she says goodnight to her friends and goes into her
room, she says:

`See you in the morning.'

`They'll call you at six.'

`Fine.'

But she has already formulated a plan. She won't get up.
She won't go with them on the trip. All she cares about
is meeting the man who looks like her father. And that
night she can hardly sleep. She has strange visions and holds interminable conversations with the man whom she has only
seen from afar, once, sitting at a table.

When they call her the next day, she doesn't get up. And
when they come to find her in her room, she tells them that
she slept very badly and isn't up to a walk. She begs them to
let her sleep and she stays in bed. But she does not sleep or get
up late. She goes out onto the balcony and sees the French
windows of room number 2 standing wide open. But she does
not dare to look inside. She stays there, waiting. She knows
that the stranger will come out onto the balcony the moment
he wakes up. He can't do anything else.