Castro's Dream (12 page)

Astrid looked at Kader’s sleeping back. From the doorway she could see it rise and fall with his breath. She looked at the smooth, golden skin and the purple shadow made by the deep indentation of his spine. She looked at the back of his head. His face was turned to the window and she could see the hairline tapering into a V at the base of his neck. A brownish light from the lamps in the car park cast warmth over the dreary room with its white textured walls and its grey carpet that reeked of household insecticide. She hesitated at the open door, put down her bag, took out the disinfectant, four compresses and a roll of sticking plaster for his wound and set them on top of the TV at the end of the bed. Then, without looking back, she picked up her bag and left the room.

In the reception she pressed an electric bell that buzzed intermittently until the door behind the reception desk opened and a middle-aged man with an ashen face stood blinking sleepily at her while she explained that she wished to pay the bill for rooms 201 and 203. When she stepped out into the night, she found she was a little breathless. She stood for a moment facing the parked cars. The breeze was warm and smelt of lavender. Then she crossed the car park, grateful for the purposeful sound of her heels on the tarmac.

At the gate Astrid was forced to press the intercom and rouse the man a second time. He did not answer when she apologised but simply raised the barrier and hung up.

As she drove out through the gates she looked ahead at the sky turning pink on the rim and at the black lake set in its pale valley. She held her eyes wide open, letting them absorb the beauty of the world. The warmth spreading in her chest was gratitude. That boy had stepped into the stale room of her life and made her see its contours, shown her how ugly it was and how urgently she must leave it. She pulled out onto the motorway and accelerated hard.

The night before they had had dinner in the hotel dining room. He had told her, leaning forward confidingly, that he had never been anywhere this smart before and Astrid had let herself become infected with his delight, had felt laughter gathering inside her as she watched him tease the waiter, a pompous, jowly old man with dyed, auburn hair.

But then she had said joylessly:

We’re not going to have sex, Kader.

And he had looked up at her and given her a dull, unseeing look and gone back to spearing his chips:

I can wait, he had told her.

After dinner they had gone upstairs and he had hovered beside her as she opened the door to her room.

Let me come in. I won’t jump you, he had told her. Promise, he had said, lying his hand on his heart. And she had let him in because she found to her dismay that she did not want to be alone. He had sat on her bed watching loud TV while she changed into her nightdress in the bathroom. As she climbed into bed, he had averted his eyes.

She was on the dual carriageway that cut through the vast pine forest of Les Landes. She would have liked to show Kader the magnificent beach that swept unbroken from Bordeaux to Bayonne. He would have enjoyed the German bunkers dotted along the sand dunes. He would have marvelled at their indestructibility. She considered her meeting with Kader, saw how quickly and securely he had become woven into her life. In just twenty-four hours they seemed to have acquired a past. She remembered why she had for so long put up a wall between herself and other people.

Kader had asked her if he could hold her again and she had said, No. And he had not pushed it but nor had he moved from his place on the bed beside her.

She had told him that she wanted to work and he had immediately turned off the TV and lain there with his arms folded across his chest.

I’ll watch over you, he had said.

And Astrid had not chased him away. Instead she had found herself working beside him, drafting a letter to the
Lancet
about the Council of Europe’s recent stand on primate organ donors.
She had been improbably happy then, with Kader falling asleep fully clothed beside her.

He must have woken in the middle of the night and taken off his clothes and climbed into bed beside her. She had slept through it all. In the morning his skin gave off a warm, faintly rubbery smell. She knew that it was partly the act of tearing herself away from the pleasure of this presence beside her, the old habit of renunciation that had goaded her and filled her with this heady power. Now she drove fast. The accelerator was on the floor and the steering wheel was vibrating in her hands.

She pulled into a service station. As the attendant wiped clean her windscreen, she blocked her nose against the smell of petrol. Her father had driven an old, pale-blue Simca, which must have had a leaking petrol cap. No other smell, no other thought or sensation brought her father to mind like the smell of petrol.

The tables beside the coffee machines were at elbow height. She stood opposite two French truckies and drank scalding coffee from a plastic cup going soft under her fingers.

She plucked her ringing phone from her bag.

Yes?

Astrid?

It was Chastel.

Let’s get out of here, the wiry man was saying to the tall truckie. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s listening to people talking on their fucking mobile phones.

She thought that he must be on speed. The tall truckie smiled apologetically at her, then followed the wiry man out of the shop.

I’m sorry, Jacques. I can’t talk to you now. I’ve got to get on. Lola’s waiting for me.

I’m calling to tell you about an offer of a posting in Kosovo, Chastel said. Jean thought of you. If you want it you just have to say the word. It occurred to me that I might be holding you back. That you might …

You’re not holding me back and I have no desire to go to Kosovo.

Why not?

Because I hate those people.

Which people? The Albanians?

No. The Medecins sans Frontières people.

May I ask why?

I hate their self-righteousness. They’re all overgrown adolescents trying to hide their disappointment. They depress me.

Surely all that is beside the point. They need surgeons.

Who needs surgeons? The refugees? They don’t need surgeons. They need to go home.

Obviously, but …

It’s as simple as that. The refugees need to go home and they’re being held hostage by a group of self-righteous bourgeois intellectuals wanting to feel … human. The problem is that ‘humanitarian’ is not human.

Astrid, I think you’re burnt out.

Of course I’m burnt out. Why? You don’t think you’re burnt out? I haven’t seen the smallest spark of genuine enthusiasm in you for years. When I think about it, you were already burnt out when I met you. That’s why you latched onto me. Because I was young and full of faith and enthusiasm.

Why are you so aggressive? Where’s this coming from?

I
am
burnt out, Jacques but at least I know it. I’ve spent the past year and a half in an impasse. Not because of bad science but because I can’t get the most rudimentary equipment. When it comes to my own research there’s no money and no equipment. This I have learned.

Come on Astrid, you know I fight for your research.

You don’t. You fight for me when I’m doing
your
research.

That’s not fair.

I have spent nearly two years trying to build a machine that already exists on the market. Vincent and I have lost thousands of rats just because we can’t get the pump to work properly. The blood levels fluctuate and the animal dies.

I did suggest you use bigger animals.

Like what?

I told you the people from the Natural History Museum would let you have some of their primates.

They’re SIV-positive, for God’s sake!

Not all of them.

Listen Jacques, I’m not asking for anything. I’ve accepted the idea that I’m basically a plumber. Transplantation is plumbing for me now. And I accept that. But don’t ask me to play at science.
I won’t research this conference for you. I don’t subscribe to your ideas any more. I hardly believe in my own but I definitely don’t believe in yours.

You’re quite bitter. It’s terrifying.

He sounded terrified.

Yes, she said softly. Because I think I’ve wasted my time.

Why? Why have you wasted your time? Without me …

Don’t! she shouted. Don’t even
try
to say that. It makes me sick. How dare you? I had a good head and boundless energy.

You did and we’ve done some remarkable things together …

We aborted a child.

She stopped, as appalled as he was.

She heard the silence and in the silence hung his hatred.

Today that’s all I can remember, she went on.

But he had gone.

Astrid looked about her uneasily. But no one had appeared to notice her. The shop seemed unnaturally quiet. A woman sitting behind the till was peering at a large transparent egg filled with small, multicoloured eggs and trying to work out how to open it. A man in a tan leather jacket with epaulettes was hovering in the pornography section. Astrid swallowed. Her mouth was dry and she was perspiring. She wanted to leave but was not sure that she could reach the door. Walking had suddenly become unfeasible. She had evoked the child. For the first time she had thought, not of the act of abortion but of the child itself. Now it felt as though a great dam inside her was breaking. She did not know where to go. She had lied: Lola was not waiting for her. She had not called. Perhaps she had found Mikel. Astrid looked at the lino floor, glowing in the sunshine. She began to cross it, unsteadily, one foot in front of the other.

Painfully thin was an English expression that Lola knew from her mother who, whenever she used it, always wore a look of impatience rather than compassion. Painfully thin was what her mother had become and Lola found that she now felt the same exasperation. As she lifted the tray from her mother’s lap, she inwardly recoiled from the thought of the birdlike legs beneath the covers, their swollen knees and their scaly skin.

You haven’t eaten any of it, Mummy.

Lola looked down at the greenish soup she had made from a packet, at the plain yogurt and the glass of water, and saw how unappetising it was.

What would you like? Is there anything you really feel like?

There was always a delay in her mother’s response these days, as if she had to drag herself away from a more alluring world.

Mummy?

At last her mother looked at her and gave her one of her closed-mouth smiles. What? Lola asked. Tell me.

But her eagerness triggered some alarm for her mother retreated to wherever it was that she went.

Lola put the tray down on the upholstered bench at the foot of the bed. Then she went and sat down beside her mother and gently held her forward with one hand, rearranging the pillows with the other. As she did so, she caught the sickly smell of her mother’s body, like rancid butter. She helped her mother lie back against the big, square pillows.

Can I help you have a bath, Mummy?

Her mother began to smooth the bedclothes with her hands, meticulously taking out all the folds until her legs were encased in a perfect cloth sarcophagus. Lola took this as a sign of displeasure. She waited until her mother had finished, then picked up her hands and held them. She looked down at the purple veins that ran so close to the surface of the pearly skin.

Mummy?

But Margot Hamilton Arnaga was stubborn. If she wanted to answer, she would. Lola knew there was no point in goading her. She held her mother’s hands and watched the pendulum of the carriage clock on the chest of drawers, swinging back and forth. Lola had always disliked her mother’s things. Now that she had lost her mind, they seemed gloomier than ever.

The greatest shock to Lola this time had been the sight of her mother so physically diminished. Margot Hamilton had always been tall. She had towered over her husband and both her daughters. Lola saw her as a young woman again, during that interlude of happiness before Josu’s death. She pictured her standing in the window of the dining room of this house, arranging purple flowers in a vase. It was early summer so they must have been lilacs. Her mother smoked cheroots in those days that Angus would have sent to her from somewhere exotic. They came in small boxes of blanched wood that she and Astrid would fight over. That vision of her mother silhouetted against the window, arranging the lilac branches, a cheroot between her teeth and smoke hanging about her head like a veil, had stayed with her ever since. She remembered standing in the doorway absorbing what she saw, overcome with joy at the idea that she too would be beautiful. In the end dancing had become her way of overcoming the shortfalls of her physique, an attempt to achieve in motion the grace that her mother achieved standing still.

What’s the joke, Beatrice? her mother asked.

Lola had never recognised herself in her real name. Lola was the name Astrid had given her as soon as her mother had brought her back from the hospital. Everyone except her mother had always called her Lola.

Nothing, she said.

Where’s Astrid? Margot asked suddenly.

She’s in Paris. Working. She has an important conference to prepare …

Lovely girl, the old woman mused. Such difficult hair, though.

I was always jealous of it, Lola said.

I gave a lock of my hair to Josu before he left for Madagascar, Margot said. He insists on carrying it with him always.

Lola smiled.

You know, I do think I’ll have a spot of smoked salmon.

Knowing that there was no smoked salmon in the house but relieved for the excuse to leave, Lola stood up.

I’ll go and see if I can find you some.

Lola left her mother looking at a copy of
Paris
Match,
dated April 1967. It was one of her favourites because of the photographs in it of Princess Grace of Monaco at the Cannes film festival wearing a black-and-white Dior dress. Lola wondered at the multiple faces of her mother’s lunacy; a fascination for the Grimaldi family being the most recent.

Lola hated the kitchen of this house. It had been decorated by her mother in the early seventies and the driving principle at the time had been, in her mother’s words, ‘gay’. For Lola, the result was the opposite of gaiety, just as
The
Sound
of
Music
was the opposite of gaiety. This kitchen with its varnished pine and its frilly red-and-white checked upholstery, from the small check of the ‘Vichy’ curtains to the large check of the gingham tablecloth, had for some reason always reminded her of Nazis. When she brought Mikel to live here, the first thing she would do would be to change the kitchen.

Lola looked in the fridge. The smell of rotting cheese wafted out. She registered the contents: a jar of pâté, three white eggs wrapped in a red-and-white checked tea towel, a piece of Brie congealed on a plate. What did that woman Gachucha do for two hours every day? Perhaps she could ask her to clean the fridge. Lola shut the door. She wished Astrid were there to fill the fridge with proper food and cook meals.

Lola sat down at the kitchen table and pressed the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. She tried to think of Mikel as he would look now, but could only see his face as it had been when he went to prison, without the deep vertical lines cut into his cheeks, the thin mouth, the dark shadows under his eyes. Last time she had seen him she reached out to run her fingers through his wiry hair and he had caught her gently by the wrist and smiled at her.

I’m an old man, he had said.

I like the grey.

Don’t.

Don’t what?

But he had let go of her hand and folded his arms and looked
at her as he sometimes did, with a benign detachment that made her want to cry. She knew better than to press him for an explanation.

Lola held her hands clamped to her eyes. She found herself inwardly calling for Astrid again, as if Astrid could help her this time.

She stood up suddenly to dispel her thoughts. She held her head straight, fixing her gaze on one of the tiles on the wall above the sink, red and white of course, with a cherry motif. She raised her arms, holding her elbows a little higher than her hands, letting her fingers curl and open, curl and open, with the slow movement of seaweed in the tide. And then she began to move from the waist down. Keeping her head and chest perfectly still, she moved, and the motion began with the gentle step and kick of her feet, flowed into the more complex roll of her knees and thighs and fed the ripple of her hips and back and arse.

While Lola danced she saw Astrid’s face as she sat in the box listening to the verdict. Lola knew before the judge said it that Astrid was going to prison. Everyone in the courtroom seemed to know, not so much from a logical appraisal of the trial but from the expression on Astrid’s face, which wore the resignation of a martyr. Lola had looked at her big sister, sitting about four paces away from her in the raised box. She looked at the pale cheeks, the calm black eyes, and the dark brows drawn on so beautifully that Lola would often run her fingers along them in wonderment. It was such a lovely face, but so intended for sadness that when the verdict came and Astrid was sentenced to five years in prison and through Lola’s fault, it felt, in so many ways, right. As Astrid was led from the courtroom, she had looked back at Lola and her look had been one of anxiety, not for herself but for Lola, whom she was leaving behind. It was the same look Astrid would give her when she dropped her off at kindergarten. And Lola had cried, because the sight of Astrid’s solicitude made her feel vulnerable and not because Astrid was going to prison instead of her.

Lola went on dancing until she could feel the sweat dripping between her breasts. The moment she stopped moving, all the grace vanished. She was human again, subject to the laws of gravity and decay. She went to the kitchen door, unlocked it and stepped out into the evening. She walked along the stone path
that ran beside the old kitchen garden, past her mother’s seat that overlooked the hills, now covered over with brambles. There was nothing left of the vegetable garden now but the ragged, knee-high box hedge that had framed it. The smell of it reminded her of Josu who had planted rows and rows of it around all her mother’s flower beds. Lola hated Josu for what he had done. His death had ruined her mother and this place. She believed that only her own child could chase him away.

The latch on the gate had rusted and would not lift. Lola grazed her knuckles trying to force it. Clutching her bleeding hand, she gave up and walked round to the gap in the hydrangeas. Her mother had once sprinkled slate dust at their feet to turn them blue but they had reverted back to an ugly pink. As she stepped through, a bramble caught her on the thigh, tearing her skin.

Lola found Paco at the bar of Txema’s café. She relaxed when she was sure that Txema would not appear.

He’s in Donostia tonight, Paco said.

How do you know?

Everyone always knows what Txema is doing. Well, up to a point.

He raised his glass.

To your return. He took a sip, keeping his eyes on her. What will you have?

He ordered her a beer and they went to sit down.

The café was empty but for two young boys, playing pinball in the corner.

They’re Txema’s nephews, Paco told her. They’re always in here. Pain in the arse, both of them.

Lola looked at the boys. Both had the same haircut: dark, shiny helmets. The younger must have been about ten. In the elder one’s stoop, his dog eyes, was the shame of puberty. He slammed his groin angrily into the machine, then stepped aside to let his brother have his turn.

How did Txema afford to buy this place?

He exports Basque linen into Argentina, Paco said, raising his eyebrows.

Is that lucrative? Lola asked.

Must be. He has an expensive mistress and a four-wheel drive Mercedes.

What are you saying, Paco? Is he corrupt?

Paco raised his glass again.

Is Txema corrupt, Paco?

Paco leaned back in his chair.

Some people think he gets money from the organisation but I don’t believe that for one minute. You know how badly they pay their people.

That way they know you aren’t doing it for the money, Lola said.

Paco laid his big hands on the table.

Have you been running? Paco asked. Your cheeks are flushed.

Dancing, she said.

Lovely.

He peered into his beer, then took a gulp.

I can’t stay long, she told him.

Of course not. His cheeks flushed.

It’s because Mum’s alone. I let Gachucha go early. Lola smoothed out the creases in her lap. I need your help, Paco. I asked Txema to help me find Mikel but he refused. He said he thought Mikel needed time. He said that he had nothing to give me. She paused. Paco kept a respectful silence. I think he might be in France. He wouldn’t leave Euskadi. Do you know anyone he might go to for work?

Paco leaned back. The chair creaked under him. He looked towards the bar, caught the attention of the barman and pointed to his empty glass.

Another? he asked her.

Lola was sucking on her bleeding knuckles. She shook her head.

I’ll ask a driver I know on the other side. He has a friend who used to help refugees find housing.

Oh, Paco. Thank you.

Don’t look so sorry for me, Lola. Lola looked down. I’m your friend, he said.

I know you are, she said, looking up at him.

She sat with him while he drank his beer. She watched the big hand on the glass. He had the broad, sketchy hands of a simple man. She wished that she could have loved someone like Paco.

Don’t you want to have kids, Paco?

Of course.

Maïté would have made a good mother.

No doubt.

His black eyes were shining. For the first time, Lola saw anger there. She knew not to apologise. She stood up.

I’ll wait at Mum’s.

I’ll come after my shift. Around six.

Lola held out her hand. He pressed it to his lips, keeping his eyes on her.

I’m solid, Lola. Don’t start being careful with me now.

Lola smiled.

Thank you, Paco.

As she walked out, the two boys burst into laughter. On the steps of the café she swept her hand over her arse. She had torn her dress in the hydrangeas and her knickers were showing.