Dmitri looks down through the port window of the Space Station. He observes the cloud strewn coasts of Southern Spain and Northern Africa. Although this is his third voyage into space he has never been to the land where his grandmother had wished to be buried. He recalls a verse from the 14th-Century Arabic poem that Rosario, exiled to Moscow after the Spanish Civil War, had taught him. Is it my separation from Ainadamar, that stops the pulsation of my blood? Its water moans in sadness like the moaning of one who, enslaved by love, has lost his heart. Ainadamar was the name of a spring found near the village of Viznar in the province of Granada. The Moors ascribed special powers to its waters and had directed its flow through stone pipes and aqueducts to the Sultan’s summer palace built above the Alhambra.
Well into his fourth month aboard spacecraft, Dmitri is bored with weightlessness and weary of the claustrophobia and bad smells that have done so much to erode his enthusiasm for earth orbit.
His two comrades deal with their isolation through protracted chess games and videotapes of favorite soccer matches played and argued over ad nauseam. Alexi is an extrovert from Ukraine, trained as a fighter pilot. Leo, another military man, is a thick set Slav who tells complicated pornographic jokes in tones of deep solemnity. Dmitri, a slender Muscovite who spent his post university years studying literature and teaching physics before applying directly to the cosmonaut corps, reads a slim volume of letters written by Turgenev in Capri.
Annabelle makes love to Philip for the last time in a hotel suite ten miles north of Cape Canaveral. Though reluctant to say so she has reached that point where it is suddenly clear she is not going to have an orgasm. Philip is doing his best and has already resorted to a second tier of amatory tactics known to work with her from time to time. They have sought to increase the seductive thrill of seeing each other like this, so close to her launch date, so against the rules laid out by NASA, by turning off the air conditioning and allowing the thick, moist, outside air to penetrate the screens. But the air smells of stunted shrubs pushing up through the surrounding desiccated swamp beds, sickly green on chalky brown, of newly poured tar wafting over from a nearby exit ramp, and cocoa butter tanning lotion rising up from the hotel pool, and they can hear the ceaseless whisper of coastal traffic whooshing like blood along the interstate.
Both of them are sweating, but neither of them is turned on. After another minute he stops. "This isn’t going to happen is it?” He says, supporting most of his weight on his right elbow, staring into her hazel eyes. "I thought it might, back there a bit,” she says, “but then it left for good.” “What a send off,” he says. “I don't mind,” she says, “I’m having a fine time. I'm just too keyed up is all.” She kisses him with affection and in appreciation for his concern and in the hope he will not belabor the issue.
The call from the Space Agency last year excused them from having to decide about moving in together and they have been secretly relieved these past six months with the separation the mission enforced. The relationship had reached a stage where little lies were easier to articulate than larger, more complicated truths.
When the animals raised in Annabelle’s neurobiology lab at Rockefeller University were sought to go aboard a shuttle mission, she asked to go with them, half seriously, half on a lark. NASA reviewed the request and then interviewed her numerous times before finally giving the go ahead. The decision was based as much on public relations as anything else. Basically they just needed someone who knew how to take care of and monitor the animals. But her striking looks and sophistication contoured well with something else the agency was looking for. Shuttle flights had become routine over the years and the public had lost interest. The second John Glenn flight had rekindled some awareness but mostly from aging baby boomers awash in nostalgia. The dull routine flights to the new space station were threatening to alienate taxpayers definitively. They were casting around for something contemporary, something with sex appeal.
Long after the accident flight director Gerald McKinley would oftentimes recall the meeting in Houston when the media consultant from New York had spoken his mind. "She's got tits n' class ... When was the last time your astronauts had that Gerry? ... She's completely unpretentious, comes from old New York money, is an unmarried only child and she's got a solid boyfriend with a good job.'" McKinley had found the remarks disheartening and had felt old just listening. "She's even got her own pilot's license and her own seaplane for Christ's sake. Show this woman dropping out of a helicopter with your spacemen during training and she will provoke a national erection.'
Dmitri's grandfather, Diego Martinez, had been a poet who worked as a schoolmaster in a small village an hour's carriage ride from Granada. This intelligent ancestor had lost a leg while boarding the newly inaugurated, smartly painted tram that ran from the capital to the upper villages of the Sierra Nevada. Of that painful event Diego had only been able to recall the face of the woman he had been helping up the metal stairs when the brake slipped. She had looked down at him with tears in her deep set eyes, unable to scream, as others screamed around her. And he remembered the sight of his leg just before he fainted, resting apart from him, reddened and still, on the wooden ties that held the rails. Rosario helped nurse him back to health. She had insisted on being present the day he was fitted with a prosthesis, an expensive and recent model paid for by the tram company. Carved from Asturian pine with simple joints and hinges manufactured in Bilbao, it was crowned with a leather harness tanned in Jerez. When she fled Spain years later with her two children Rosario took a strap from one of the spare harnesses with her. In Moscow one night, in the flat they shared with two other Spanish families, she cut and plaited the leather and made three bracelets; one for herself, one for her daughter Elena, and one for her son Alejandro. When she died Alejandro transferred the bracelet from his mother's wrist to Dmitri’s, his first born, who wore it to this day.
As the Shuttle boosters ignite Annabelle's innards tug down towards earth and she finds herself thinking suddenly of Jack and of how kind he had been to her in his own selfish way. She remembers a shower they took years ago in his house near Ronda. His large bathroom was covered with thick testaceous tiles, earthen, ochre versions of the ones that covered her spacecraft. The shower was recessed and had a large ledge on which to sit. It did not have a curtain and it faced tall open windows looking out at low green mountains. She remembers sitting on the edge of the ledge with her legs apart, the water falling on them and Jack on his knees in front of her, skillfully tonguing her, and how when she came, in loud raspy cries made louder still by the wet tiles, she was staring at a goat herd across the way feeding on grassy slopes covered with almond trees. As the Shuttle clears the launch pad she remembers his description of their lust as having been unnatural. But what was natural she wonders? Was this natural? Being strapped into this complicated seat, along with six other people, atop a rocket shaped like Montmartre Cathedral, being blasted into space, sick with fear and strangely glad to be leaving earth behind?
Keegan is the crew member she feels most attracted to. He is a distillation of her late father and Philip. He is outdoorsy like Philip but tougher, and free of Philip’s irony laden New York whine. In much the same way that Philip had been her unofficial co pilot whenever they flew together in her Buccaneer up in Maine it felt like she had been Keegan's during training. Like her father, and unlike Jack, Keegan would never cheat on his wife. He was safely married to a San Antonio history teacher and they had three kids. Though somewhat dim intellectually, he was a real man, a cowboy scientist with a poet’s touch in the cockpit. Keegan flew planes the way Philip cast dry flies in the cold currents of Vinal Haven, the way her father once danced to Lester Lanin’s fox trots at the Maidstone Club, the way Jack had fucked. They have had an innocent flirty thing going on that has provided them both with an extra little pizzazz. Combined with what remains of her relationship with Philip she has felt no need for new men.
So when they dock with the Space Station and meet the Russians, Dmitri makes no special impression on her. He is clearly the best looking of the three but his shyness and quiet manner make it easy to overlook him at first while Alexi and Leo take center stage. Their smuggled vodka, their bad but endearing jokes, their solemn declarations of friendship, the songs, messy checklists and over stretched jogging pants corner the Americans' attention.
Some days later she floats into the lab and finds Dmitri talking to her mice without any self consciousness. He is sticking his fingers between the thin bars of the cages, stroking ears and white furry abdomens. As she enters he turns and looks right at her. "Is it so important what your experiments will prove?" He is unsmiling, but not unfriendly. "I think so," she replies. "I hope so." This makes him grin. "I like this second answer," he says. "This is the scientific, true answer.” "To me it sounds like a really dumb answer," she says, wondering all of a sudden if she might be blushing, a reaction she was sometimes prone to that irritated her. "And will they be killed?" His Russian accent is thick, old world, made for early morning ballet classes given in drafty, mirrored belle epoque, salons bereft of heat. "Sacrificed is the word we prefer to use,'' she says. "Sacrifice." He pronounces it carefully, giving each syllable its due, but dryly, without any show business. "Sacrifice is almost worse, no?" "Perhaps," she says. "Perhaps it is just a nicety, but it implies that their deaths will count for something. That it will further a cause." "I see," he says. "And will you be doing this sacrificing?" She can see he is looking her over now, man to woman. But there does not seem to be anything furtive or coy about it. "Some of it, yes…" she answers. "Good." He says, with absolute sincerity. "Why good?" She asks him, prepared to be annoyed. "Because I can tell you will be careful not to be cruel."
It is the Russian VCR that causes the fire. It breaks down one night while Alexi is replaying a World Cup semi final for Mamood Nair, the Indian satellite specialist, and for the Space Shuttle Commander, David Woods who was based once in Germany where he developed an interest in European football. Woods is confident he can fix it and within a few minutes most of the crew has pulled and bounced their way from the core module into the technological module and from there into the Shuttle’s main cabin where he gets to show off his nifty electrical repair kit. The American astronauts get into the project with boyish enthusiasm, relieved and amused to have such a mundane problem to solve. The machine, manufactured mostly in North Korea with some Russian components, is dated, and its primitive innards become the butt of numerous bad jokes, especially by Keegan. Woods is careful to prevent any hints of condescension from seeping into his banter. A fighter jet engineer and former flight instructor with a professorial mien, he has traveled the world some and developed a nose for diplomacy. But Keegan, getting some laughs from a few of the others and sheepish snickers from the cosmonauts, ignores his superior officer's example and does not let up. "This thing run on electricity or Smirnoff ... Look here, I think the specs are written in Albanian."
Annabelle is close enough to hear some of these comments. The jingoism oozing from the object of her innocent crush, new to her but not entirely surprising, casts an unpleasant pall and she cools to him instantly. She decides to exit what feels like a force field of testosterone, with, as it happens, little time to spare. When Annabelle emerges from the docking tunnel back into the Space Station she and Dmitri hear the piercing bleats of the fire alarm coming from the shuttle. Dmitri, safely ensconced at the far end of the Space Station near the Soyuz connection where he has been reading and monitoring systems indicators, reacts at once.
It happens quickly. Perhaps a spark or a dropped soldering gun has somehow found its way to a ready surface unprotected by fire retardant. Annabelle starts pulling herself back to investigate, to offer help. But David Woods, sensing immediately the fatal possibilities and playing his centurion's role to the end, is already closing the shuttle's docking hatch, hoping to contain the damage. As it shuts in her face she sees Mamood and Alexi on fire and Bill Keegan's jumpsuit catching flames as an oxygen tank explodes. The flames expand horizontally. The screams that follow are so intense and disturbing even the most experienced flight technicians on the ground, in Houston and in Baikur, remove their headsets until it is over. They just stare, eyes frozen on the grainy video feed coming in on the large monitors as flames and smoke mercifully obscure their burning men.
The extreme heat causes one of the shuttle's fuel tanks to ignite and the explosion sends chunks of metal tearing into the Space Station. Everything seems to fail at the same time. Annabelle and Dmitri are plunged into darkness. Over the loud alarm they can both hear the scary hiss of their oxygen escaping into space. Annabelle flips on the little flashlight she carries with her and its narrow beam permits them to make their way to the Soyuz spacecraft in order to initiate an evacuation. It takes them over a minute to disconnect the cables running into the Soyuz before they can get in and close the hatch. Dmitri pulls himself into the pilot's seat and makes sure key systems are still operative. Then a second, larger explosion occurs. The Soyuz and its human cargo buck up and backwards with a violent kick. But it remains pressurized. And in less than twenty seconds, all is quiet. Not even the faintest hint of static can be heard over the radios.
DAY ONE:
I don't want to believe any of this has happened. Dmitri and I talk to each other and review our options, attempting to be rational. We regard the situation as if it is under control, as if it is something we have planned and trained for. It is our only defense against panic. I write this so that some of my thoughts might be left behind. But in all likelihood, if I die, these pages shall disappear with me. I try and keep my mind clear. I try to remain aware and optimistic. But it is hard to erase the sight of Mamood and Alexi and the others' burning flesh. I never knew flesh could burn quite like that. I cannot get the screams to go away either.
It seems the Soyuz has survived. We have power and oxygen and food, for now. What remains of the Shuttle is still attached to what remains of the Space Station. All of the men have disappeared into space. We have no radio contact with earth. Mission control cannot hear us or know where we are. They will have logically assumed we have perished with the rest. Dmitri and I are surely being mourned right now on earth along with our crew.
Our oxygen supply should last for four days. Dmitri says he needs all that time to try and figure out how to re enter the Earth's atmosphere and land safely. I imagine, in truth, that we could initiate a re entry trajectory plan sooner. But it is the re entry that may kill us. The angle is crucial and it is up to us to determine it and then correctly sequence the procedure. So I expect we shall wait until the last moment to attempt it.
Dmitri has not been trained for this, or only briefly, and over two years ago. The emergency drills they put me through on the shuttle have only a limited value in this spacecraft. He curses to himself, quietly, in Russian, as he pores over the manuals. He obsessively checks and rechecks all vital life support systems.
DAY TWO:
The wrecked Space Station/Shuttle ensemble spins below us like some macabre ride at a county fair. I can see it clearly, about 80 yards away. Surrounding the devastation, moving with it through space, is a spray of debris; supplies, ripped pressure suits, helmets, clip boards, and Keegan's Nordik treadmill machine. This latter object, for some reason, claims my attention more than anything else. It moves as a satellite in its own right, orbiting the earth at 17,500 miles an hour, pitching gently forward, hundreds of miles above the Pacific forlornly out of place. I feel what a diver must feel when he comes across a hand bag or some child's toy while exploring the site of a crashed airliner at the bottom of the sea.
Taking care to use as little fuel as possible, both Dmitri and I have taken turns handling the Soyuz controls. It has taken some getting used to but I think I have the hang of it now. He seems to have accepted without any visible irritation that I have better piloting skills and he has decided that it shall be me who puts the Soyuz into the re¬entry trajectory when the time comes.
Soon after the civil war erupted in the summer of 1936, three black shirted conscripts came for Diego and detained him. He was transported in a hot and noisy truck to Granada along with the village notary, the librarian and three landowners known for their Republican sympathies. He was not mistreated at first. Rosario came to Granada and did her best to portray her husband as an invalid out of touch with politics. But her entreaties proved useless against a military Governor determined to "...clear the province of all its bookish scum."
Less than a week later he was sent to Viznar. Throughout the night before his execution Diego attempted to derive some solace from thinking about what had been going on in his life before the tram wheel had severed his leg. He and Fatima had been on their way to bathe in their favorite hiding place, far from the eyes of her husband and farther still from the eyes of Rosario and from anyone who lived in his village. He tried to recall the feel and weight, the ripe firmness of Fatima's breasts filling with the milk she would give to the child growing in her womb that day, her first, which they had made and that her husband thought to be his. He remembered the way the nape of her neck often smelled, like crushed apricots and sea water.
DAY THREE:
Dmitri and I have been talking for hours. We have left the wreckage behind. I am very taken by him and I am overwhelmed by the fact that, of the 10 human beings who were alive up here just two days ago, it is precisely he and I who have survived. I watched him sleeping for a while a short time ago. I felt an urge to kiss him. The stirrings of eroticism I have felt ever since liftoff are now, insanely, increased. Perhaps it is the nearness of death combined with the scary distance from home. I, who put no store of any kind in the concept of fate, marvel at this situation. Have I met the man of my dreams, up here, alone in a damaged and creaking spacecraft 250 miles above the Earth, or have I just invented him so as not to die from fear, a version of what we all do with love?
The Soyuz is not well set up for water landings and so we must be careful to try and land somewhere flat, un populated, but not too isolated. We both know this will be almost impossible to control without any help from the ground.
Diego tried to make sense of it, tried to make the remaining seconds count, to study the bit of earth he stood on, to avoid looking at the killers. And then the guns went off. He went down with hardly enough time to feel much of anything. His last sensation was the noise of the fuente up above. And then he was gone, reduced from the man he had been to a constellation of waning cells wrapped in summer clothing, laying atop earth still damp with morning and on stones that had rolled down from the hills. Just below there was a grove of olive trees that had been planted by the Romans. The dawn light made the trees look black. One of the shooters cursed aloud and looked away from the dead man and stared at the trees and at the careful way the earth beneath them had been cleared and raked.
DAY THREE:
I tell myself this is not a bad way to end. Better this than old age or a car accident or some slow, debilitating cancer like the one that took Jack. Better to be incinerated here, to be mistaken for a comet by some innocent star gazer, than to be cremated at a Long Island funeral home some winter's afternoon like mom and dad, under a low, pewter sky with cars parked outside stained with soiled highway slush and a Burger King glowing across the way. I can still appreciate the beauty of this experience even with all that has happened these past two days. I look to the left, past scuffed switches and dials labeled in Cyrillic, and through the small thick window bolted in place I can see from Tangier to Baltimore. I can see Iceland and Cuba, Ireland and Montauk. And it is real. Down there, through the ether, all of western history has taken place. Along those shores are cities and towns, fields and vacant lots, highways, forest paths, empty leaf strewn swimming pools, darkened basements, millions of people and creatures. The sea is filled with swarms of fish. Far below us airliners ferry travelers between the continents, each one of them occupied with their own thoughts, unaware of our still living presence up here above them. It is absolutely real.
I can see Long Island. Somewhere there towards the tip of it our house sits on Dunemere Lane. Its storm windows face the dunes this very moment. My tennis racquets rest in the hallway closet next to dad's old golf bag and a crushed, mildewed pair of mom's Belgian loafers. The old gray Willy Jeep sits in the garage this very second, smelling of oil and cracked leather next to old lawnmowers still crusty with last summer's dried grass. Somewhere there in Manhattan is my apartment with my music, my books, my clothes and papers, my underwear and jewelry. My refrigerator, covered with sushi magnets and New Yorker cartoons holds my film, muesli, brown eggs from the Union Square market, an ancient bottle of Hellmann's mayonnaise, rock hard Hagen Daz, coffee beans from Balducci's, a plastic liter of Volvic mineral water, an opened, re corked bottle of partly drank Macon Village. On the shelf next to my bed this very minute among the rows of VHS cassettes is a rolled section of tape encoded with the scene from La Regle du Jeu in which Renoir falls upon Nora Gregor's bed in his overcoat, starving for breakfast, filmed one day in some chateau outside Paris, some early spring day in 1939 with Citröen film trucks and thick cables for the big primitive lights snaking along the lawn and through opened doors causing drafts the actors having a fine time, with plans to return to the city that evening, dinners to attend, lines to memorize, baths to be drawn, lovers to meet, all the reality of what that day was, encoded there and deeply hidden within the cassette case on my shelf... and I think of it here, speeding through space, seated next to a Russian man with beautiful hands. In half an hour's time we'll be looking down on Malaysia, India, the mountains of Afghanistan.
I told Dmitri the things I shall miss most are silly, stupid things, like being able to walk in the country, to have breakfast reading the N.Y. Times, to swim in the Atlantic very early in the morning or very late in the afternoon, to lie in bed on Sundays listening to NPR. He tells me he will see to it that I can do all of this still. He says we cannot have survived such a terrible accident only to die ourselves some days later. But I know worse things have happened to people. Far crueler things have happened. He knows it too.
On her father’s side Annabelle’s ancestors came from a small village on the Atlantic coast of Ireland called Spanish Point. Eight years earlier, when she was twenty-three, she had recalled this bit of lore to try and explain a feeling of entrancement that invaded her on her first journey to Andalucia. She had been on her way to visit her father's younger brother, Jack, who was in his forties then and living off his trust fund in Ronda. Apart from her parents' memorial service in New York which he attended at the last minute, she had not seen him since she was little. Her father had been the older, responsible brother who had made money with his money, who voted in elections and chaired boards, who put his daughter into solid private schools and contributed to liberal causes. Jack had flunked out, dropped out, or had been thrown out of numerous New England schools before running off to Europe in his early twenties. He had spent 25 years reading and cooking, drinking and sleeping with different women. She would sleep with him herself just two days later.
She had left her rented car parked off a narrow, rural lane and she was wading through a shallow stream bed that wound its way through acres of fertile farmland below the Serrania de Ronda. As the cold water of the stream penetrated her sneakers and the legs of her jeans, she felt an intense sensation of familiarity. Spanish Point derived its name from the dead and half-drowned sailors who had washed up there in 1588 when Felipe II's armada broke to pieces.
Some of the Spaniards were arrested and hung by the English, some were taken in and protected by local inhabitants until they were strong enough to try and make their way home, and some took brides and stayed. It was Annabelle's fancy that some comely Rondeño, pressed into service through a sense of adventure, bad debts, or simply bad luck, had pertained to this latter group and that he had fallen in love and mated with one of her womenfolk back in County Clare. It was as if Jack had come home without knowing it. She pictured the DNA from these imagined ancestors resting within the nucleus of all her cells. She imagined its protein structure as having been forged in a poplar grove like the one that shimmered next to where she was wading. She felt the rise in her heart of the old green mountains just to the west whose slopes looked out on the currents sweeping in past the Pillars of Hercules. It was a gene that had been moistened and softened when it mixed with the woman's wet Shannon greens, damp peat and briny kelp.
DAY THREE:
Dmitri and I have been discussing our Spanish roots, his real ones, and the ones I once imagined. In a fit of giddy recklessness we have decided to try and land there, under the cover of night, and if we survive re entry and the landing we have sworn to sneak away from the Soyuz undetected and to find a place to live together. He says he does not want to return to his family. "Let them mourn me and think well of me," he says. He claims he is not in love with his wife nor she with him and that he feels strangely disconnected from his two young children. And what have I to go back to? Philip and my classes at Rockefeller? I realize now that even as far back as when I applied for this job I was looking to leave them both.
Perhaps we'll land upon a plain in La Mancha, within one of those vast dehesas between Ciudad Real and Córdoba blanketed with pastures and dotted with gnarly alcornoque trees, dragging in heavy suspended by the chutes, skimming in over a watering pond, scaring boars and startling bulls. Or we'll come down through an olive plantation northeast of Jaen, pummeling poppies closed up for the night, battering branches rich with their dark maturing little fruit, ruining the Zen patterns of carefully plowed earth that is the color of rust, maroon velvet, dried blood. Or we might land in the south, dragging to a halt in the desert of Almeria, or come down in orange groves planted along the banks of the Guadalquivir between Palma del Río and Carmona, scorched Russian steel soothed by azahar blossoms. Or maybe it will be Galicia, to the northwest, lumbering in at night over one of the fjords, over Noya's ria, over the mussel beds and heavy fishing boats anchored for the night in the cold clear sea water, felling pines and horreos and apple trees and landing on spongy wet fields near Serans, just short of the dunes and the dangerous Atlantic tides. We will pop the hatch, take in the cool night air filled with the smell of wet Iberian earth, with traces of chimney smoke coming from a house in the distance. We will fold the Soviet era parachutes and bury the Soyuz and run. We will begin a passionate affair. We will hitchhike to some provincial capital where I will teach English and he can tutor university students in physics. We will make ends meet. We will have a new life.
The craziness of the idea, its wild impracticality and its highly questionable ethics all have a deep appeal. We started talking about it just to distract our nerves, not taking it very seriously. Then I kissed him. I leaned over, looking at his mouth, and kissed it. We got very quiet after that.
Mule hooves scraped the cobbled street below, reverberating in the night mountain air against the chipped white walls of the narrow street. "Why does this feel so good?" she asked him, collapsed on top of him, his cock still hard inside of her. Jelly Roll Morton's voice crackled from a battered stereo speaker resting atop three old books. "It's sin," he said. "The delicious swoon of sin." "I suppose this is some kind of mourning thing," she said, still enjoying little post-orgasmic vaginal spasms, resting her head upon his chest, relieved to note he smelled nothing like her father had. He put his arms around her. "Some dark mixture of unconscious stirrings I should think. The god Pan come out of the woods and moving through us."
The woman he was mostly seeing that autumn had returned to London to rejoin her husband. Jack’s fatherly advice, his looks, good meals, and the sudden intimacy of living in the same house with him had played on her emotions. Her vulnerability titillated his predatory libido. She saw him less as a real blood uncle and more like a substitute man, suddenly there for her. "What do you think we should do?" She asked, studying a framed print of the port of Cádiz. He weighed the question carefully while running his hand over her smooth, bare ass. "Enjoy it," he said. "And then let it go, for everyone's sake."
Fátima's trip to Venice fulfilled a promise her husband had made years before when she had asked him to take her there some day. In truth she had wanted to go alone, but she had not the courage to say so. On those rare occasions over the years when Juan inquired as to the why of Venice, as opposed to Rome or Florence or Paris, she had answered with the same cliched phrase, "Because it must be the most romantic city in all the world." Uncomfortable with the implications commonly associated with this term they had both elected to interpret her response in a literary way. Juan ascribed her unwavering desire to visit the place as yet another touching eccentricity. Her taste for books he had little knowledge of or interest in, the careful way she spoke, the fastidiousness with which she maintained her toilette, set her apart from many of the people they saw in Barcelona. It was something he had the good sense to admire rather than censure. Her devotion to their daughter Luz and to their son Juanillo, and the careful manner in which she managed their two households, came with an insistence on protecting small areas of their life together for herself. Her sexual indifference, an indifference he sometimes suspected as being limited to he alone, was a part of life they had come to accept, almost from the beginning. In some ways it had made her more attractive to him. Her body never thickened the way most women's did with time and he often thought he could sense a hint of sexual hunger in her looks and bearing. But rarely had it led to acts of passion between them. Never a rake, he had made his peace with this situation early in their married life and he had only resorted to other women from time to time when his own desires grew too tiresome.
Fátima's wish to visit Venice derived in fact from a singular, innocent memory. She had first laid eyes on Diego in an heladeria in Granada popularly known as Los Italianos. The family who owned it were Umbrians come to Southern Spain through a chain of chance events. The shop's logo however, printed on extraordinarily thin and virtually useless paper napkins and on the somewhat thicker coasters that were placed on the long marble counter to absorb beads of condensation from glasses of water or horchata, depicted a small tableau of Venice: an empty gondola tied to a candy striped mooring next to a grand palazzo. It was on one of these napkins that Diego had written her his first love note. (She preserved it in her purse till the day she died, folded and parched like some long pressed rose petal.) As the years went by and her life settled into what some might have called its pre ordained destiny, she had time to surround and embellish the memory with extensive reading. By the time the trip took place in 1955 she had become an amateur scholar of Venetian lore and had learned a good deal of Italian as well. She came to identify with Juliana Bordereau, the protagonist of Henry James' The Aspern Papers, a solitary woman living in Venice who fiercely guarded her correspondence with the man, a famous poet, who had been the love of her life. In the translated edition Fátima owned there was a preface by James in which he described those who seemed drawn to Venice at the turn of the century. It was a group for which she felt a distinct kinship … "The deposed, the defeated, the disenchanted, the wounded, or even only the bored..." One day, in a collection of James's correspondence, she came across a note the novelist had written upon the death of a woman friend who had also lived in Venice. One phrase stayed with her: "... that incredible past in which we once lived ... not knowing that we were fantastically happy." And when reading one summer's morning in the breakfast room of their country house outside the town of Palafrugell, casually leafing through a tome of memoirs she had purchased in a basket on the Ramblas, she was struck as well by the following commentary, written in 1924 by an obscure Venetian poetess named Pia Mora: "Sei appena riuscito a sfiorare un mondo che é l’ombra di quel che avresti voluto vivere. " (You have barely touched a world that is an echo of one you would have wished to live in.)
As they left their hotel on the morning of their last day there, Fátima and Juan, Luz, who had turned into a nineteen year old beauty, and twelve year old Juanillo, passed a crowd gathered near the edge of a canal. A film crew had set up there and David Lean was about direct Katherine Hepburn's fall into the brackish water. Rossano Brazzi sat in a canvas chair looking bored in dark glasses as an anxious wardrobe woman and ten tanned technicians wearing white shirts and baggy flannel trousers stood off camera. Juan and the children were mesmerized and saw no small chance of getting an autograph. Fátima took advantage and left them there.
Promising to return soon she went off on her own to find the 15th century palace where James had placed the original Signorina Bordereau to live in such splendid and enviable isolation. It took her hours to find the "quartier perdu "where it sat, contemplate it and then make her way back to an angry spouse and two worried children. But the effects of the excursion made her impervious to their consternation. She suffered their protests and recriminations with an equanimity her daughter found intriguing and that her husband found exasperating. That night he made a silent attempt to seduce her, wondering if perhaps it might be that she missed and was holding against him. But she turned away from him and cried herself to sleep. She imagined, as she drifted away, snow falling gently on the pink marble arches and gray pilasters of the Palazzo Cappello looming over the Rione della Marina, its dark and tomb like interiors abandoned and softened by time.
DAY FOUR:
In ninety eight minutes Dmitri will fire the small external rockets that will brake our progress about the earth. We will lose orbital momentum and angle down towards the atmosphere; that fragile halo of gases so kind to lungs and sails and chimney flames. Resistance and friction will increase dramatically and it will be up to me to steer us on the right course throughout the re entry in order to avoid burning up. He has found the proper coordinates for us, listed in a manual, and though the margin of permissible error be slim, it is doable as long as nothing unforeseen intervenes, as long as the rockets continue to function, as long as the vibrations do not exceed the strength of my wrist and the steadiness of my fingers.
We made love a short while ago. It was uncomfortable, very gentle, and very powerful. When I came I screamed. This is not something I normally do. I had no control over it. And then I cried afterwards. After Dmitri came and we let each other go, some of his sperm came out of me and it floats about us now in pearly little gobs. He is embarrassed by it, but I am moved and strengthened by its presence.
Juan suffered a fatal heart attack in 1974 while sipping brandy and smoking a cigar in the somewhat rundown, ornate lobby of the Hotel Oriente. He had been walking down the Ramblas not feeling quite himself after a rich and boisterous meal with friends and the thought of sinking into one of the hotel's big velvet sillones to read the Hoja del Lunes before continuing on home seemed just the thing.
Luz came down from Paris with her UNESCO employed Danish lover and Juanillo drove up from Madrid in his Seat sedan with his wife and children. They sat with their mother and with their father's corpse in the main salon of the old apartment on the Passeig de Gracia, flanked by tall thick candles and accepting condolences whispered in Catalan. Then they accompanied the coffin to its niche in the Cementiri del Sud Est on the very day Francisco Franco slipped into his final coma. After Juanillo returned to Madrid. Luz and her Dane stayed on a few days more with her mother. Fátima felt a need to go to the house in the country to pack up the remaining items of clothing belonging to her husband. As long as his suits and his hunting jacket and his loden cape hung in the closet and as long his shoes, polished and ready, rested on the closet floors, she could not believe he had really gone.
The three of them drove north on a beige and gray November day insulated from the bleakness by the warm leather interior of the dead man's Peugeot roadster. Fátima drove and sang villancicos from Andalucia and Luz, seated next to her, chimed in as best she could remember. The Dane slouched in the back wrapped in a camel hair coat he had purchased the month before, after his second viewing of `Last Tango in Paris'. He had his window lowered just enough to accommodate his languid volleys of Gauloise smoke. As they moved past the industrial zone between Barcelona and Badalona, as ugly as it was crucial to the province's wealth, the Dane selfishly hoped Luz's own mourning and her involvement with her mother's state would not put a damper on their sex life again that evening. For some reason the sudden change of scenery, the Spartan, lugubrious Spanish rites, his very marginality in this culture they had suddenly come to, spiked his libido. This feeling was helped along as well by the Indian Summer-like surge of passion he was feeling for Luz now that a younger French woman had sneaked into his life in Paris. He fell asleep with an erection imagining what it might be like to make love to Luz and the French girl at the same time, both women absurdly content to share him. His neck, exposed to the draft from the window, grew stiff as well as he fell asleep. The landscape eased. Factories gave way to empty hills and then to well pruned boulevards in passing towns and then to carefully tended farmland and well kept stone houses with Mediterranean views.
Fátima thought to tell Luz about her true origins. It seemed a good time, now when their world was still atumble, to reveal what she had kept secret for so long. But still she found it difficult to actually speak the words. As they went through Juan’s possessions at the house where they had spent so many summers and holidays they laughed and cried recalling the dead man's quirks and foibles. To confuse her daughter's mourning with drops of another man's seed seemed selfish and unnecessary. On the two occasions when she had finally gathered enough courage to introduce the topic, to offer it as a sign of the love and trust she felt for her daughter, taking the risk of confessing her betrayal so many years before, on both occasions the Dane appeared as if on cue. Once he returned unannounced from a walk theatrically extolling the wonders of nature and once he awakened from a nap, grumpy and disoriented.
The moment did not present itself until a year later when, all of a sudden, it seemed the most natural thing to mention in the world. In the intervening months Fátima had surprised her children by selling the cavernous apartment in the Eixample and leaving the country house near Palafrugell to them. She moved back to Granada, back to her tierra as she put it. She bought a small carmen in the Realejo section of the city with a view from its upper balconies across the city's southern fringe. She could see the sun set behind the steep hills that rose up to the snow of the sierra and down towards the asphalt road that wound its way through the lower Alpujarras to the coast. Luz had recently separated from the Dane and come down to visit with her mother. Late one night they sat on low caned wooden chairs around the fire talking of men. Fátima told her daughter about her affair with Diego and all that had come of it as an example of what surprises life can bring. She told her to try and explain how there were different kinds of love one could feel for men and that it was rare they all converge upon a single person. Luz cried. She cried for herself, for her dead fathers and for the painful weight her mother had carried around for so long. They drove to Viznar and hiked up to the stands of pine where so many men had been shot. And one day they drove up into the sierra and found the spring where Fátima and Diego had gone to swim. It was early April and still cold. A Fanta can and a Cerveza Alhambra bottle floated at the water's edge but the place was still hidden and preserved. Fátima tried to project her memories of what she and Diego had done there upon the large smooth rock and the close cropped clover grass protected by thick chestnut trees. But it did not seem as real to her as the place and time she remembered in her head. Even her romantic, literary fantasies felt realer to her than this actual place that had once meant so much to her. All she felt was old, the weight of the years, and resentment towards the persistence of trees and stones and earth.
During her third visit to Granada a year later Luz was offered a job designing covers for a small publishing firm dedicated to contemporary poetry. Eager to leave Paris and reluctant to return to Barcelona, a city too intimately associated with her youth, she accepted the position even though it paid very little. Fátima was so pleased by the news she made a point of not insisting that her daughter move in with her. Instead she provided the necessary down payment for a newly renovated attic apartment on the Calle Anton in the center of town, in Puerta Real, just down the street from the Café Bar Suizo. Like the Romantic travelers of the 18th and 19th ¬centuries, Luz had come to associate Granada with lyrical light and subterranean passions. She had also lived long enough in cosmopolitan cities to take its parochial drawbacks in stride.
In time she found herself attracted to Paco Parra, a gentleman who paid for the publication of his own books of verse at the firm she worked for. He was a professor of medieval studies at the university, a married, spoiled, handsome man in his fifties and the father of twin, adolescent boys. Luz found it better this time around to be the newer, younger woman in the trio, unencumbered by the responsibilities of domestic life. When the affair reached the stage requiring declarations of mutual love she took special care to insist and assure he keep their relationship a secret. She developed admiration for Paco's wife and consistently encouraged him to pay his spouse more and better attention. She said and did these things with sincerity, inspired by a healthy selfishness. She liked things the way they were. She liked her independence. She had little desire to raise a family herself and less desire still to see her relationship with this man damaged by the trauma of a wrecked home and then crumble under the weight of prolonged cohabitation. For as long as he lived he was always glad to see her, and she him. Their lovemaking remained vigorous and affectionate and was regularly blessed by the power derived from what is secret and forbidden. That she had come to live the sort of life her mother might have wished for herself with Diego fifty years earlier was not lost on her. Fátima who sometimes approved of her daughter's independence and who sometimes envied it and expressed that envy as worry about Luz becoming a perpetual ‘other woman’, died in her sleep in the spring of 1986. Paco Parra died of liver cancer seven years later. Luz, aged 57, orphaned and ‘widowed’ sold her place on the Calle Anton and moved into her mother's carmen. She leaned it out and stripped it down, blending a self-conscious but refined sense of modernism with an amateur historian's respect for the house's Nazarene Arabic roots. The carmen became a mecca for the city's better poets, writers, professors and painters. Those who regularly attended her rambling late dinners and Sunday meals came to feel great affection for her impatience with generalization and for her modestly stated insistence on drawing distinctions. The city's second tier of creative luminaries, a vulgar, specious group of provincial wounded, thought her a snob, a foreigner and a fraud. In 1997, the same year her brother's son Felipe moved to Granada to study, she made love again, to a 30 year old German painter who worshiped her with a fervor she soon grew weary of and put a stop to. All it made her feel was sad and lonely for Paco.
She did not learn of Dmitri's relation to her until the accident. Although the cosmonaut's Spanish heritage received its due in the local press at the time of the Shuttle launch it appeared in a section of the newspaper she hardly glanced at anymore. She did not own a television on principle. Her nephew Felipe, unaware of his grandmother's connection to Diego Martinez but who might have made mention of the Spanish/Russian spaceman as part of the chatter he brought with him to lunch each Saturday, was away at the time, skiing with his girlfriend. But once the accident occurred the story was everywhere. One of Luz's neighbors told her about an extensive report Spanish TV had done on Dmitri which included interviews with his relatives in Moscow. The neighbor also mentioned how the relatives had spoken of Granada and the Civil War and of the cosmonaut's one legged grandfather who had been shot in Viznar two days before the poet Garcia Lorca was executed in the same place. Luz then bought all of the newspapers she could find and followed the story closely until she was sure the dead Russian hero was her own flesh and blood. She told no one.
DAY FOUR:
We have emerged, charred and bruised, but alive. The first chute has opened. It is a miracle. To say I feel born again seems an embarrassing but precise cliche. The darkness that has surrounded me since a few minutes after liftoff last week, and which Dmitri has lived in for many months, has been suddenly replaced by brilliant sunlight that streams through the scorched windows. Gravity pulls upon our limbs. Dmitri congratulates me over and over. I am still too afraid to cry. God knows where we may land.
Numbers never lie. Sometimes they bring bad news, sometimes good. But numbers work. Once Dmitri found the proper coordinates in the manual to program a landing in Spain, he entered them into the only working computer. And now, lo and behold, what would have appeared in space as a minor speck of dust, a chunk of nothing, bears down, heavy and seared, through the atmosphere. All of the chutes are open. It swings back and forth, attached to the brilliant cones of air filled silk by a single cable. It misses a grove of trees by a few meters. It skims by the upper floor of a three story country house. It hits the ground, bounces, and then hits again, in a stretch of flat green fields outside the town of Ezcaray in La Rioja at three thirty eight PM, local time. The earth is moist and muddy under new grass and forgiving of the swishing scar the spacecraft tugs along its surface. The fields run parallel to the road. The road is lined with trees. On the north side of the road, where the spacecraft has landed, there are a few houses, sparsely spaced, and then, moving farther away from the town, the open fields climb up into the hills.
The Russian Strategic Air Command did not notice their appearance in the skies. The screens are old and poorly manned. The controllers are bored and badly paid. But the Americans took notice of the intrusive craft a good minute before it entered the atmosphere. Fighter jets on the deck of the carrier USS Eisenhower, cruising off Sardinia on its way to the Gulf, took off prepared to blast whatever it was out of the sky. Calls were made, red phones uncradled, and positive identification was made as the Soyuz came down over the Mediterranean between Nice and Barcelona. The jets went with it, descending in wide circles before losing visual contact somewhere south of Burgos. And by then helicopters belonging to the Spanish military were in the air and a convoy of ambulances and army Land Rovers had been dispatched from the nearest base.
Dmitri and Annabelle unstrap themselves, dizzy with the cease in motion. They make sure they are sound of limb before hugging each other. They open the hatch. Air comes in, cool, misty, smelling of bark, wet gravel, new leaves. They pull themselves out and onto the cold, damp ground. They shelter their eyes from the glare of the sunny afternoon with thin white hands and note their difficulty in standing up straight. They sit down and lean together against the blackened hull of the spacecraft. Annabelle promises herself she will write a letter to the workers in the factory where the Soyuz was built to express her gratitude and admiration for the toughness and reliability of their handiwork. She turns and looks at Dmitri, smiling and crying at the same time. "Comrade," she says, "What do we do now?" He smiles back at her, "We live a long and happy life." She nods in agreement and takes his hand. "I guess we're not going to be able to hide this thing very well, are we?" He looks down, and then back at her. "You saw the jets following us down no?" "Yes", she says, "I saw them." "Do you still want to run away with me?" he asks. She looks at him. "I think I would. Even if we were to end up going our separate ways in the end. And you?" " I would too. I really think so. But I can't do it now. I am a member of the Russian military. I am about to be surrounded, interrogated, tested and prodded, flown home, decorated and paraded with my wife and children for a bedraggled public hungry for heroes.’
She nods in agreement. "Sounds pretty bad." "Let's see how we both feel once they finally leave us alone." "Sounds good," she says, taking his hand in hers and kissing it. He leans in to her and kisses her on the lips as they hear and then see two olive green patrol cars pull off the road. Three local Guardia Civil emerge, two men and a woman. And then a black car pulls up as well, driven by the rotund local doctor who's lunch has been interrupted, and who suddenly realizes he will be seen on the evening news by almost everyone in the world.
Philip and Annabelle's reunion took place in a well appointed Parador, in Santo Domingo de la Calzada, crawling with Russians, Spanish officials and NASA personnel. Once alone, it became clear to them that something had definitely shifted, something alluded to during their last encounter in Florida. Holding and smelling her again flooded him with love and nostalgia for their past.
But they both knew it was over and deep into the night she told him of her attraction to Dmitri. She spared him the revelation of her weightless act of love and cited the attraction as an example of something that probably would not have occurred had they still been committed to each other. Hearing this did not disappoint him or cause him to feel jealous but rather it complimented his own feelings on the matter and it provided him with a measure of peace. The relief they each felt at not being the heavy permitted them to rejoice in finding each other still alive on the earth. These positive emotions and their physical closeness in the dark calm room almost ended in a commemorative, pre dawn fuck. But the juice was simply not there. Philip remembered thinking as he held her sleeping body in his arms, as light first penetrated the hotel curtains and small birds swept in from the surrounding hills, that life was grand and complicated.
It seemed the public, or at least the press, needed their story to conclude in a more conventional way and it did not take kindly to the contrary evidence that emerged. At a press conference, held jointly with Dmitri in the hotel's large refectory dining hall, Annabelle stunned everyone by announcing her intention to remain in Spain indefinitely. NASA reacted with irritation and petulance. Their appeals to her patriotism and then to her scientific reputation did not sway her. Even a call from the President of the United States failed to change her mind.
She simply wanted out, then and there. She did not want a parade, or a photo session in the White House planned around a Senate luncheon attended by men with strange hair and red ties. She wanted to go for a walk in the woods. She wanted to sit in some cafe in some little andalusian town where short, cheerful, hypochondriac women tossed mop pails of hot water diluted with ammonia out onto the street in front of their doorways. She wanted to be left alone to sit with her legs extended in the sun reading about Dmitri in the newspapers, to be able to call him at night from the house in Ronda as spring arrived, to just kick back and live off her inheritance for awhile like Jack used to. Philip supported her decision and attained some prominence by excoriating reporters for their intrusiveness and their maudlin questions. Network news anchors who had flown over with expensive flotillas of gear and crew were flabbergasted by their lack of access. With an appealing mix of sarcasm and humor he articulately denied Annabelle's having any obligation to tell her tale at all, and this became a story in its own right.
At the press conference Annabelle met Dmitri's mother, and his wife and children. Both women were wide boned, Slavic and hearty, and both children had the wife's beautiful dark eyes and pastry flour complexion. After an exhausting and tense debriefing with NASA that lasted two days, she called it quits. Philip helped her find a moment alone with Dmitri shortly before the Russian delegation returned to Moscow. It was just a few minutes secured at the end of a hotel corridor of numbered doors. They said their farewells by a window that looked down on a small back patio where Parador chambermaids and groundsmen parked their motorbikes. He took the leather bracelet his grandmother Rosario had made and put it on her wrist.
Philip rented a car and spirited Annabelle away in the middle of the night. He insisted on accompanying her to Ronda before returning to Manhattan. They drove local roads heading west towards Valladolid and Zamora, and then south towards Salamanca. They stopped at roadside bars and filling stations and, as the kilometers sped by, she told him all she could about her experience in space. Sometimes they would stop the car and go for walks in vast plowed fields to stretch their legs and breathe clean air. It was the sort of journey, lean and furtive and unexpected, that lovers make good use of, and though each of them entertained passing fantasies of rekindlement, they felt more like siblings in each other's presence now. Annabelle's libido still resonated with memories of the Soyuz.
They got stuck behind long, heavy trucks packed with sheep and wide orange trucks laden with dented tanks of butane gas, and fast driving, rattling trucks ferrying liters of mineral water from town to town. They made their purchases in cash and met friendly people along the way. They avoided the nicer hotels and Paradors and rested instead in hostels that were clean and sparse and anonymous. She loved the glasses the coffee was served in at the highway bars. The barmen in wrinkled white aprons placed them gingerly down on the counter atop little white Pyrex saucers with cheap little spoons and wrapped cubes of sugar. She liked the tapas and the hunks of Manchego that sat under the glass near revolving metal racks of gaudy, inexpensive music tapes and the displays of macabre key rings bearing likenesses of Franco, Jesus, and Che Guevara. The coffee was delicious and the bread always fresh and she learned to pour olive oil on the bread and then to sprinkle sugar over it.
She was relieved to see how no one paid them any mind or seemed to recognize her. But in a small town between Merida and Sevilla, where she bought some apples to eat along the way, the woman handing her change spoke to her as if she was a long lost friend. "Quedate aquí en la Tierra hija mía, y no to vayas más pa ya arriba." Annabelle squeezed the woman's hand and promised not to. She returned to the car and resumed driving as Philip remained asleep. Biting into one of the apples with a smile she sensed that one of her admittedly romantic theories might actually be true: that Jack, and now she herself, had come home somehow.
Eleven months later Dmitri returned to Spain retired from the space agency and divorced from his wife. The official reason he offered was a wish to set foot in Granada, a place he had only seen from the Space Station. He wanted to walk the village his grandparents came from, see the Alhambra, and pay his respects near the stand of pines in Viznar where Diego Martinez had been shot through the heart. Annabelle arranged to meet him there, unobtrusively, and afterward they planned a slow drive to Cadiz so that they might become reacquainted.
She had spent the year reading and gardening. She studied Spanish with a tutor and astronomy via the internet and she kept a diary written by hand in thin, faded blue notebooks she purchased with great pleasure in the local papeleria. The papeleria represented some of what she remembered from her first visit to Spain. It was dark, even on the brightest days, and illuminated by a single bare bulb that hung from a ceiling made of wooden beams that were painted a deep añil blue. The proprietor was an elderly, elegant gentleman with thick, tortoise shell glasses and careful hands who wore felt slippers, gray trousers, an olive green cardigan sweater and a frayed white shirt buttoned at the collar. In his throat was a hole neatly covered with a band of gauze he spoke through. From behind the wooden counter he sold merchandise from a Spain that was gradually disappearing. Bolts of textiles and wreathes of yarn gathered near wooden dish racks, proletarian boots and shoes, thick heavy sacks of gesso and animal feed. Boxes of detergents sat on plain metal shelves next to cartons of candy, rolls of twine, and stacks of cigarettes made from black tobacco. The owner would calculate each bill with a short pencil wrapped in a rubber band, slowly writing his old numbers on scraps of cardboard. The store smelled of linseed oil and furniture wax, musty wood and the owner's Alvarez Gomez cologne.
She joined an air club and flew all over Andalucia. She acquired a second¬hand Renault 4L and two wire haired Daschund puppies she took on long constitutions. She drove down below the town, into the vega where she had first experienced her epiphany with that part of the world. She let the dogs off their leads and watched them run through the poplar groves and she would sit and listen to the water flow over the stones in the shallows. And on the way back up to Ronda she would often stop for a coffee in a simple bar that had a beaded curtain made from bottle caps. Muddy tractors parked out front, and farmers drank cognac and anis inside playing cards around a cast iron stove.
She told friends that she enjoyed living alone. At the end of the summer she had a three day affair with a French anthropologist who was passing through and she felt odder afterwards than she had expected. Around Christmas she made a quick trip to New York traveling incognito to spend the holidays with her aunt and to see her dentist and gynecologist, her bankers and lawyers, and to set things right with her university and her landlord. She also visited privately with the families of some of the astronauts who had died on her mission and she spent a long and satisfying evening with Gerald McKinley in Houston. Philip returned with her to Ronda and stayed for a week.
On Valentine's Day she wrote the following in her diary:
I live in Jack's 18th Century finca like an aristocrat, mostly surrounded by people who have to get up and work hard. My funds come from stocks invested by others in more than a few companies engaged in questionable practices ... stocks bought with money my father earned working all his life and with money he and I inherited from a line of dour, Protestant industrialists who did the same. And yet I rarely think of this. This year I am spending it like play money come to me as if by magic. With few exceptions I put it to no good use save my own pampering and diversion. Part of me feels guilty and compelled to justify my time here, and part of me simply gives in and feels content to enjoy my good fortune. Part of me says fuck it for now and just wants to tend to the plants, to brew the coffee, to scent the bath, to read the book and cuddle the dogs while waiting to see what might come to pass with Dmitri. It's hard to know what to do now and I simply go on from day to day content, counting on the future to reveal itself.
Luz was enough of a rationalist to know that the disquiet she felt when visiting Viznar came with her and projected from her onto the landscape. It was knowing the truth of what had happened there during the late summer of 1936 that gave her pause and that accounted for the chill in her blood.
The crowds with their cameras and cars had been gone for almost an hour. In the end she had not approached her nephew from Russia but she thought him a fine looking young man and she felt better about everything that had happened now that she had seen him up close, and seen him there of all places. She only regretted that her mother had not lived long enough to see him there as well.
She sat outside in the fading light of the afternoon in her old tweed suit on a white plastic chair at a white metal table covered with a sheet of white paper. There was no one else around. Even the waiter had disappeared and joined the few remaining stragglers to watch the telediario in the bar. The paper was held fast to the tabletop with four plastic clips. A corner of the paper blew anyway when breezes coming down through the pines whispered across the patio.
A small bottle of Lanjarón water and a glass remained at arm’s reach before her. Some of the water had spilled and formed a moist ring on the paper about the circumference of the bottle. Some pine needles, brown and dry, and an ant, had found their way onto the paper as well. Luz looked at the glass, and the bottle, and at the ring of moisture, and at the ant and the pine needles and then she looked across to where she had parked the old Peugeot, up against the retaining wall that circled the Fuente de Ainadamar. She remembered the first time she had seen it, many years earlier, even before she had gone to live in Paris, driven by a slim and frisky version of her father, her other father; turning into the driveway in Palafrugell on a June afternoon when the light had been very similar to the way it was now. Crying, she moved some strands of gray hair away from her face with delicate fingers that looked to belong to a much younger woman.
