1

They had met in the cinema. In one of those enormous auditoriums you hardly ever see any more. It was a screening of Apocalypse Now, Coppola’s poignant parable based on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. During the scene when the helicopters advance on the Viet Cong to the rhythm of Wagner, the auditorium filled with light from the napalm explosions. That was the first time they saw one another, when the shadows gave way to light. That was when she said, naturally, sincerely, with the cool assurance of a woman who knows she is a builder of dreams:

‘Let me hold your hand. I feel kind of shaky.’

‘Sure. Don’t worry. I’ll be here till the end of the film,’ Francis replied with a rush of confidence.

They sat there, holding hands, focused on the screen and glancing at each other only occasionally, but with a good feeling. One beside the other. The other beside the one. Together. Hands entwined. Lives shot through by an invisible arrow. Presumably happy.

When they left the cinema, hands permanently entwined, kissing every now and again, stopping every few steps to gaze at one another, to make sure the earth wasn’t moving beneath their feet, to reassure themselves that reality was still there, just as they had dreamed and contemplated it, astonishing and close to perfection, a more intimate knowledge seemed to exist between them, with more history and more harmony than any couple that ever lived. Some people have a name, a label for this kind of instant passion – or perhaps all passion is instant in a way, stopping time and marking out a before and an after. Rose spoke of infatuation. It could have been. Francis said apaixonamento, which means the same thing, but in his native Galician, something like fascination or a feeling of being bewitched by the other person, or perhaps uncontrolled passion, or some other form of agreed submission, of biocoenosis created from a ray of light. Perhaps it was. Perhaps, too, they were made for each other, like in the romantic novels sold by the sack load from dockside kiosks, to be read by far-away sailors or girls awaiting the return of their salty princes, where the lovers seem to be predestined, where impossible love affairs exist between siblings separated by a grim childhood of alienation or migration. Perhaps it was simply a coincidence, fruit of the purest chance, the kind trusted only by aficionados, or those illuminated by the irrational stigma of belief, or even sitting, waiting for love in an enormous auditorium, the sort you hardly ever see any more.

There were no grand words or stereotypical declarations of mutual admiration. There were none because they were superfluous, because their bodies said what words dared not, or could not, or knew not how to express. After all, despite what the physicists or the most timorous rationalists might say, falling in love alters times and co-ordinates in such a way that imperceptibly, almost without realizing it, they began to walk towards the hotel where Rose was staying – the shortest of holidays, a long weekend – more out of politeness than as a sign of the intentions each was shyly concealing beneath an epidermis burning with desire. Simultaneously they offered each other a cigarette, as if there was an astral conjunction or something magic between them, as if they had always known each other or perhaps had powers of divination.

‘See you tomorrow,’ Francis had said. He tried to sound detached, but it came out aggressively and with too sudden a change of rhythm to be sincere.

‘You really don’t want to come up to my room?’ Rose had said, barely recognizing herself in this repeated seizing of the initiative, this laying herself open to chance, this demolition of the usual blocks and complexes.

‘OK. Just for a cigarette and a chat. Tomorrow is Saturday so I do not have to work.’

They crossed the hotel threshold furtively, without greeting the receptionist, a Chinese man with a round, bald head who was slumping sleepily over the reception bell, mesmerized by the images on a miniscule television set that was showing a repeat of a classic western (Lee Marvin drunk as a skunk, caterwauling the chorus of some ballad or other).

Upstairs in her room it was all discoveries and revelations, caresses and tenderness. It took them some time to undress, as if they wanted to delay the act itself, but after a thousand kisses in the most accessible places, on lips and cheeks, shoulders and neck, they moved to undress one another, slowly, so very slowly, with a burning desire that oozed from every pore and was suggested in every movement, hanging like a heavy mist in eyes bursting with shared purpose. Francis toyed with the buttons on Rose’s camisole, playfully squeezing the mounds of her breasts as she slid her hand into the crevice that separated his trousers from a belly sculpted by thousands of crunches, where each muscle marked out a field, and there were no curves or discontinuities. Before long, their clothes were falling, one by one, to the floor. And now they were naked, San Diego Bay observing them in the distance, the stars hanging in a magnificent sky, eyes illuminated by the light, like the eyes of a cat poised to pounce. They shifted to the horizontal position, tried out impossible angles and various contortions in the gymnastic ecstasy of passion, until they found a position that suited them and that while classic – Rose squatting on her heels and penetrated from beneath – was no less satisfactory for that. Francis stretched out his arms in search of Rose’s breasts, and she gave herself up to him, arching her back in a contorted spasm. After the first orgasm – gazing hard at one another, sweating their passion, rising as one, with the confidence of those who have had many previous assignments, entirely soaked through – they went to shower together.

The bathroom was huge with a blinding excess of light. Under the stream of water, surrounded by a dense mist, they fell into the laid-back conversation of a pair of grown-ups, affectionate and relaxed, as unhurried as if they knew the night would continue, that there were not, would never be, any demands or pressures at all.

‘I have always liked bathrooms,’ said Francis as he massaged Rose’s back with a touch of serenity and a great deal of wheatgerm gel.

‘I like them too, with all the light and the mirrors, the smell of lavender soap and tropical fruits; the combination is so impossible, but the idea is so exotic.’

‘Doesn’t all that light bother you?’ asked Francis, his eyes half open beneath the curtain of water.

‘Sometimes I like to make love in the dark as well, but I prefer the light. I don’t know why, but I prefer the light.’

‘Me too, but not this much of it,’ said Francis, putting his hand in front of his face.

They changed places and then it was Rose who soaped Francis, sliding her lubricated hands over his most intimate areas, moving her palms in ever increasing circles, playfully prodding him with her fingers, scratching with her nails, inventing a relaxation technique or recreating a lesson learned on her own flesh. These massages awakened the desires weakened by the steam from the hot water. They carried out another attack, perfumed by the scent of the shower gel and the fragrance of the rose petals that flooded everything, attaching itself to the inside of their noses so neither of them was able to think of anything that wasn’t roses and sex, an olfactory association, preconscious and happy. The steam had misted up the mirrors that now reflected only shadows, and it clung to them, dimming the light even further. They delighted in the moist passion of the tectonic movement of their bodies – plates shifting over the heat of their internal magma –happy and natural, a perfect combination of senses and flavours, tensions and the lightest of touches.

They dried themselves with the immaculate white towels that had the name of the hotel embroidered in relief. They put on the bathrobes, also white, with the hotel monogram on the left breast, and went to sit and shoot off intimacies like darts, to recover from the physical fatigue and reinforce their mutual enchantment. They were soon comfortable, one in front of the other, stretched out in an arc, hips against the seat and leaning on the arms of the sofa, so their connected sexes were the only point of contact. Meanwhile, they gazed at each other like two prone, dead figures, eyes lost and empty, like figures painted by Mantegna. Then Francis noticed the coffee maker on the side table, a regular feature in American hotels, and part of the standard equipment in the rooms at the Hotel Radisson, where Rose had booked herself in for her weekend in San Diego.

‘Coffee?’ said Francis as he took a cigarette for himself and leaned forward to offer the pack to Rose.

‘That’s not a bad idea.’

‘Where is the coffee? I found the coffee maker, but not the coffee.’

‘It’s all here, sweetheart, in the drawer underneath.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ agreed Francis, rummaging through the drawer.

‘Maybe it’d be better if you made something weak. I have to sleep.’

‘Didn’t you say coffee?’

‘Yes, but if there’s some decaf it’d be better. I’m tired. If it isn’t decaf it’ll take me ages to get to sleep. If it gets to an hour I won’t be tired any more, and then I just can’t sleep, however tired I am.’

‘OK. There is some here. I will get water from the bathroom,’ said Francis, disappearing and reappearing right away with the coffee jug full of water from the tap.

The conversation lasted through two coffees and four or five cigarettes. They told each other their life stories or, at least, a significant and colourful portion of their life stories. They spoke more of the present than the past, which at times like this always goes by the wayside a little, tacitly agreeing to keep quiet about the extent of relationships and other commitments.

That had been their first encounter, facilitated by the balm of coincidence, by the complicit darkness of the auditorium, like a spark that had ignited two meandering souls, shipwrecked and rudderless in a vacationing San Diego. Now, the next morning, they continued the conversation in the gardens of Balboa Park, eating Alaska crab and chicken with tofu, drinking Mexican beer and telling each other chapters of their life stories.

Rose had recently been in Ireland, visiting the numerous assorted relatives that any Irish expatriate has back home. She spoke joyfully and incessantly of Galway, the city of canals and islands, of the sharp, intermittent, but ever present rain, of the hundreds of trout and carp ploughing along the river Corrib, where there were always Dickensian ruffians, short of stature and skilful in their use of the rod, fishing for carp brought from the nurseries of Asia, alongside vigorous men in tweed caps, unrestrained beer bellies and elastic-waisted trousers, setting hooks in flight to catch trout in the Eglinton Canal, and elderly retired gentlemen, with arthritic wrists and rhinophymic noses, wrestling with the salmon in the currents around Ballyknow Quay. And on and on she talked, with that apparently Celtic passion for speaking of the island as an Edenic paradise, while fleeing from it as if from a hell of hunger and no prospects. Francis looked at Rose with the wonder of a child blinded by the light in the eyes of a virgin, the beloved eyes of a fairy-tale princess, unblinking above a perfect, everlasting smile.

After listening to her – startled and somewhat disorientated by the lack of sleep – Francis told her anecdotes of his childhood on the outskirts of the Galician town of Padrón, when on summer evenings, which back then seemed infinite, and now so long ago and so sad, they went swimming in the Sar and sailed down the river, in a boat like the ones used for the extraction of sand, until they reached some wells that were called Os Fondóns, because they were so deep, where it was said (in those days we were very keen on mysteries) there lived a monster with seven heads and a dragon’s body, with iron scales and a steel sting on the end of his powerful tail. Whenever they all went there – he would never go alone, thanks to the prudence that others might call fear – they had to evade the rising current, a maelstrom more imagined than real, dragging them towards the inside of a whirlpool where, it was said, lived an amphibious beast that would devour them one by one, chomping lazily with sharpened, poisonous canines, which, according to another schoolbook mythology, are supposed to be characteristic of such antediluvian creatures. He couldn’t really explain why, but, despite the fear, he always went back to the same place, as if attracted by the songs of the Nereids.

‘But that can’t be true. You’re telling me fibs. You’re talking about a made-up world, it’s just a collection of tall tales, and not very skilfully put together either,’ said Rose, exchanging her frank smile for a more ambiguous one, somewhere between indignant and amused.

‘It might not be true now, but when it happened, when I was a sad and fearful child, inhibited and not much of a talker, then it was the only truth.’

‘Truth? Don’t make me laugh,’ snapped Rose in a tone that unleashed a torrent of fervour from Francis.

‘As true as the blackness of the waters where the skeletons of shipwrecks ebbed and flowed with the tide; as true as the darkness of the steps where the water rats would scamper, those chimerical beings, half rat, half fish, who darted across the river, in among the layers of leaves embedded in the riverbed, the size of rabbits and with sharp pointed teeth like sabres from a chivalric romance.’

‘Stop right there, Francis. I believe everything you’re saying, but don’t keep making things up. It must have been a terrible childhood,’ Rose went on ironically.

‘As true, I was saying, as the mussels in the milky sand of the river, the goblins who lived in the hazelnut trees or the tender, affectionate nymphs who would comb their silvery hair on magical spring nights, just as real as the fox who used to visit my grandfather’s fields or the potions the wise old woman of the mill used to make, or…’

‘You’re a fantasist, the worst kind of pedant and a liar, but you amuse me. It doesn’t matter if you’re telling me the truth or making up stories of fairies and avenging knights, of champions or of mushroom-dwelling dwarves. I don’t want to know about your past. It doesn’t matter to me.’

‘Doesn’t matter to you?’ Francis sounded slightly annoyed, as if her revelation was a highly evolved form of treason.

‘Don’t get me wrong. It amuses me, but it doesn’t really matter to me. I’ve got other priorities. What I really want to know is what’s going through your mind now. At this moment. What are you thinking?’

‘Now?’ asked Francis, surprised.

‘Yes, now. What’s going through your mind now? Not when you were a boy, not a year ago, not even yesterday, but now,’ said Rose with a certain mystery and a great deal of conviction.

‘Lots of sensations. I couldn’t say how many. There’s the smell of the tofu mixed up in this chestnut sauce, there’s the chatter of those tourists on their way to the zoo, in their perpetual holiday uniform, brandishing their cameras like a battle standard, there’s those eyes of yours seeing my confusion and laughing, the feeling of touching the grass where I’m sitting, that gentle breeze, like an imperceptible gust from San Diego Bay… What’s passing through isn’t important, Rose. What’s important is what stays, what will one day blossom into the archives of memory.’

‘That’s a lot of sensations to process all at once,’ said Rose, getting up from the ground and gesturing towards the gates of the zoo, as if looking for a way out, tired of the conversation. ‘We could go and visit the zoo. I heard there are some really cute pandas.’

‘Cute, how?’ Francis asked ironically.

‘Cute like you, if that’s what you were hoping to hear. Come on. Let’s go.’

They got up reluctantly. Beyond the sheltering shade of the brambles where they had been sitting for their own special picnic, there was a sticky heat, a great deal of humidity and little possible respite. A stifling heat, like a slow grilling, constant sweating and heaviness in the legs and breath. They picked up the leftovers and drank the last drops of mango juice from the bottom of the carton.

On the way to the entrance, Francis stripped to the waist, showing off his smooth, muscled chest, the result of early-morning stretches and never-ending crunches, the cult of the body and a great deal of narcissistic effort.

They paid sixteen dollars a head for some entrance tickets with the logo of the Zoological Society of San Diego: two elephants beneath a tree in the savannah, a snake, and an eagle silhouetted in the branches of the tree. All very epic and very cold, like nouveaux riches sated with material things, but with a thirst for heraldic shields, caught up in the most unsettling confusion and anxious to acquire roots and breeding. It was two in the afternoon and they had plenty of time for a complete circuit of the park, which wouldn’t close its gates until well past seven.

As they were about to go through the gates there was a minor incident, but one that changed the mood entirely. A female guard in a paramilitary uniform (white soldier-style shirt with captain’s armbands, blue trousers with a vertical black stripe, name tag on her shirt pocket with a diminutive that was absurd for such a great bulk) stood in Francis’s way and told him he had to put on his vest, because they couldn’t let him into the park with his chest on display.

They stood to one side as people went through in tightly knit groups. The guard was watching them mockingly out of the corner of her eye, sure of her superiority and control.

‘Well, maybe there’s a law,’ said Rose resignedly.

‘A law? What kind of law would that be?’ Francis yelled at Rose in surprise.

‘Be a good boy and don’t get in a fight over something so small. It’s as if you’ve forgotten where you are. Except for the island of epidermic liberalism up in San Francisco, this is the state of restrictions and neo-conservatism,’ Rose said with some conviction.

‘Well, maybe they can go fuck themselves in the ass,’ Francis mumbled as he wrapped himself in his vest. ‘You’ve only got to look at that woman’s great lumbering body, like some kind of pinniped. Very appropriate for a zoo. Yeah, maybe that’s why they chose her as a guard.’

‘Don’t get annoyed. We want to go in and there are rules. Come on, behave like a grown-up, even if it’s just for a moment. I know it’s hard and it doesn’t suit you, but make an effort.’

Francis smiled as he calmed down slightly. They rejoined the queue, longer now.

‘She wouldn’t be able to wear a vest. Even the alligators would flee in terror,’ Francis insisted.

‘Come on, sweetheart, don’t go on about it,’ Rose soothed, mollifying him now they were approaching the turnstile.

Rose took Francis by the arm and whispered something in his ear, to avoid an exchange of inappropriate words between Francis and the sea-lion guard, the fishwife guard, the completely inflexible, mastodon-like guard, who had stood in their way with such an inflexible attitude. The guard let them pass, but not before looking them up and down just to emphasize the power differential.

The incident resolved – acceptance of inevitability and rules, denial of freedom of dress, pragmatic position of renunciation – they went into the zoo, following the migratory flow of hundreds of other tourists, all enthusiastic and happy and enjoying their free time.

Although it wasn’t easy to push their way through all the crowds worked up with zoophilic passion, they eventually came across a sign with a picture of a tiger’s head. Without giving it any more thought – they shared a curiosity for deciphering coded messages in the stripes on the big cats’ coats – they walked in the direction indicated by the sign. They went down a slope that snaked between dwarf palms and luxuriant vegetation – doubtless a microclimate created by an environmental engineer, who had studied at Harvard or Columbia, to help tropical species adapt to San Diego’s mild climate – reaching an area marked out by a ditch and a rail, and supposedly occupied by the fearsome Bengal tigers.

In front of the railings there were mountains of people, working their cameras to death and sweating buckets because the damned microclimate was so accurate (tragedies of technique), but between skips and laughs (techniques of tragedy) they managed to create a space among the families of Mexicans and Taiwanese, who seemed to be multiplying like hordes of foul-mouthed ants. The disappointment was huge. The tiger, or the tigress (because there was only one specimen to be seen and the sex wasn’t very clear), wasn’t moving and didn’t even deign to look at the public, a disdain that would make Borges himself pale, lover that he was of tigers and the messages they carry written on their sides.

They carried on walking, sweating and somewhat cowed by the excessive humidity, and they went from one disappointment to the next. A polar bear decided he didn’t want to bathe in the pool in front of his cave into which, contravening the formal instructions, the tourists were throwing all sorts of fruits and treats. Further on, in their tiny cages, some haughty birds avoided being photographed, ostentatiously displaying the damaged behaviour of psychotic animals. Next, some cobras, unmoving, with the supposed intelligence of wily assassins – a paradigm created from ignorance and fear – were huddled against the glass walls of an enormous terrarium, and it was heartbreaking to see them there in the immensity of almost empty space and perpetual inaction.

The list of disasters didn’t stop with the cobras’ terrarium. There was more, a chain of absences and divergences. So there were also stinking tapirs snuffling through their own excrement; neurasthenic macaques, victims of an obsessive passion; unhappy hippopotami in their tiny pool; giraffes with their necks skinned by frenetic scratching against the branches of an acacia; panthers with sharpened canines; bulimic orang-utans blackened with scabrous marks; rhinoceroses with mutilated horns; alligators who had lost their ferocity with the change of diet; immobile gazelles paralysed by the absence of open spaces; near-blind manatees, their eyes inflamed by the excess of chlorine; albino kangaroos, tendons atrophied from lack of jumping; hyenas who had stopped laughing, who could only cry over their misfortune as caged animals; pangolins with their scales bleached by the deficiencies of their surroundings; androgynous lions; diving lizards, and other aberrations of animal behaviour arising from prolonged and perspective-free captivity, a planned and summary torture – Dachau farm, Treblinka farm – an omen of a future that would alienate standardized hominids, all well trained in following rules and perverse in their flights into the future.

Francis was beginning to get twitchy with all the mental paralysis and contagious neuroses.

‘What the hell are we doing here? I’m getting depressed,’ he said despairingly.

‘Calm down a bit. We came to see the pandas. Be a good boy and don’t get annoyed. The only one who’s suffering is you.’

Rose assumed this conciliatory role without much conviction, but she couldn’t deny the idea had been hers, the insistence on seeing the pandas, like a good little tourist brought up on tourist office triptychs.

‘OK. But after the pandas, we are having a change of scene. It’s starting to get me down.’

Francis set off on a digression about the cruelty of confinement, about the futility of an institution like this now that technical advances meant you could see the animals in their own environment, on webcams or those great wildlife documentaries. There was no need – no need at all – for such ignoble captivity. What’s more, all you’d ever see there was a pale reflection of a panther’s elasticity, a false image of a giraffe’s gracefulness, a pathetic imitation of a buffalo’s power…

Rose, nervous of discovering a negative aspect of Francis that she did not want to explore, cut him off with a playful suggestion.

‘Let’s go and have an ice cream, and then we’ll get straight in line to see the panda cubs. I can’t wait!’

‘You have to wait in line? Will it be long?’ Francis murmured with little or no enthusiasm.

‘Not long. It says it here. On this poster. They open the doors for the visit after four in the afternoon. Just for two hours.’

‘Two hours?’

‘Yes. Two hours. Apparently they’re very sensitive animals.’

They had no choice but to get in line at the ice-cream kiosk. Two families of Mexicans had captured the attention of a single inexpert vendor with massive orders and combinations of flavours that were all but impossible (the combinations, not the flavours). This obstacle overcome, ice creams in hand, they changed line to join the one for the visit to the panda enclosure. To their surprise and discomfort, in the few minutes they had spent buying the ice creams, the line for the pandas had grown so long that now they couldn’t even see the entrance door.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Rose soothingly. ‘It’ll move quickly. They don’t let people stay for more than a couple of minutes.’

‘That’s all? Just two minutes and we have to wait like idiots for all these people to go through?’

‘Yes. It’s like seeing and not seeing. It hardly gives you any time to focus on details, but it’s an image that will stay with you for the rest of your life. An image that will always come back to you, like first love and melancholy.’

‘It’s too much. Sixteen dollars to spend two minutes looking at a panda cub. At least melancholy is free.’

‘Some people like to see the animals and spend the whole day here. We’re the weird ones, nothing seems to means anything to us and we spend the whole day complaining about everything,’ said Rose reflectively, as if in a ritual of self-criticism.

‘Maybe you’re right,’ Francis agreed. ‘It’ll be better to get excited about the pandas. To think it’s a unique spectacle and all that. Maybe even forget the stifling heat that’s making this ice cream melt so damn fast.’

‘You’ll see when they open the door how quickly it’ll move,’ said Rose.

It was true, as soon as they opened the door of the little garden where the pandas were kept, the line began to move rapidly, in fits and starts, in groups of ten or twelve people. The guards followed a well-worn routine. They opened the door, let a set number of people go through and began to time two minutes. When just over a minute and a half had passed they invited those present to have a final look – photos were prohibited – and immediately cleared the way for another compact group.

When their turn came, with two Taiwanese families at full pitch, talking ceaselessly in their language of rising and falling tonics, Yu Bain, the female panda, offered them a circus act they weren’t expecting, doing a somersault on the end of a branch and gracefully peeling a bamboo shoot. It was all they managed to see after a half-hour wait, a strawberry ice cream and a leisurely conversation about the panda’s thumb and the revealing works of Stephen J. Gould, the king of popular science writing. The experience was positive and worth the wait. It served to bring together their plans and to construct a magical moment between Francis and Rose, which was certainly worth something.

After the panda micro-show – two brief but intense minutes – they weren’t up for looking at any more neurotic animals. And so they decided to find a seat on a terrace under the shade of an umbrella that would protect them from the sun, order some drinks and free their neurosis – and this time it would be their own, not the stupid anthropomorphization of animal behaviour – smoking a few cigarettes amid date palms and wrought-iron cages, where one imagined dangerous animals given over to the tedium of the visits, fearless wild felines and leathery-scaled reptiles, more fitting for a nineteenth-century lunatic asylum than for a zoo at the end of the twentieth century.

Tired as they were of seeing animals caged and family hordes mechanically repeating the same movements as other family hordes before them, soon to be automatically followed by ever more disorientated tribes, torn between what they liked to do and what they understood they ought to like to do to fill their free time, regularly confusing free time with consumption, they decided to get back in the blue cabriolet and get out of the zoo as soon as possible, leaving Balboa Park behind them.

As they weren’t in a hurry and had no need to be back anywhere – it was a bit early to eat or to go back to the Radisson – they decided to visit one of the solitary coves that line the road north, on the way to Los Angeles (Ell-Ay, the locals said), out past the town which, with that strange American pronunciation, they call La Jolla (actually they say la hoya, but such technicalities don’t go down so well over there). They felt free and energized, in love and full of illusions and life. Rose was driving with excessive care, but better that way, thought Francis, who wasn’t in the mood to be jolted and was willingly doing the job of co-pilot, picking over the secrets of a large-scale road map.

After twenty minutes they saw the sign that indicated a ‘Detour Ahead’. Francis began to sing an arrangement he knew from a Billie Holiday CD (‘slow down, before you crash and break your heart… Oh, lucky me, that suddenly I saw the light… smooth road, no detour ahead…’).They decided it wasn’t a bad idea to follow the sign and took the detour. The track – to call it a road would be lexical overkill – led down towards the sea and, rounding a curve, they discovered a marvellous place, one of the many that garlanded the south California coast.

It was a little horseshoe-shaped cove bordered by solid rocks and cliffs that marked the edges of a sandy cove only visible at the lowest tide. The place was surrounded by acacias and eucalyptus and by a herbaceous carpet permanently damp from the mist that came up in aerosol form from the Pacific. The sun was on its way down and they decided to go down to the sand to watch the sunset. It seemed the most appropriate end to such a romantic evening, overflowing as it was with certainties and surprises.

From the beach, which stretched out before them for no more than a couple of hundred feet, they could see, in a V-shaped gorge previously hidden from view by acacias, between two rocky walls, a horsetail waterfall some fifty or sixty feet high. The sight left them dumbstruck.

Once over their initial awe they walked for a bit until they reached the foam from the waves that rose one after another up the slope and on to the sand. The greenish-blue sea had changed imperceptibly to a greyish blue. There was a bit of an undertow and they decided not to risk going too far in, staying close instead to where the waves were breaking. The inconvenient absence of light and the isolation of the spot caused them to take additional precautions. They splashed around a little and looked for shells with the foolishness of lovers for whom all nature’s wonders seem unique and unrepeatable, for their eyes only, a cause for joy and erotic rapprochement. They talked, too, of trivial things – the last show at the theatre, the records they had bought the day before, a report in National Geographic on Angkor or on whale sharks, a book by Gore Vidal, or the two-way relationship between advanced informatics and industrial beauty – perhaps to forget other things, the important ones, the ones that mean hard work and commitment, that inspire fear and anticipate decrepitude. It certainly worked and that’s how they felt, ever more invulnerable, like they did when they were adolescents; or avenging angels of justice, like they did when they were children; or simply immortal, like they did at that tender age when adults keep children as far away as possible from death.

Francis left the water and started to draw in the sand with a twig, distantly, as if thinking about something located beyond Rose, beyond the beach, beyond himself. Rose watched him from the water, seeking explanations for his remoteness.

‘Do you love me?’ Rose asked suddenly, emerging from the water and revealing the full glory of a fine-figured Irishwoman.

‘What kind of a question is that?’ said Francis, looking her in the eye.

‘The kind you don’t ask.’

‘You’re right. If you don’t know the answer don’t ask that sort of question and if you do know the answer then you don’t need to ask,’ said Francis, starting to put on his vest and socks.

‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe we have very different backgrounds. In Ireland we ask that sort of question. That’s what we’re like.’

‘Don’t generalize. Don’t speak for a whole country. Speak for yourself.’

‘I am. I asked the question. It might be the kind of question you don’t ask, but I asked it.’

‘The best thing now is to go back to San Diego. I’m hungry and it’s starting to get cold.’

‘You’re right, Francis. I hadn’t realized, but now I can feel the cold of the night.’

‘Give me a kiss.’

‘Do you love me?’

‘Don’t go on about it. Let me keep a bit of discretion, even if it’s only with words.’

It didn’t take them long to dress and climb up to the side of the track where they had left the car. The ride back was silent. An Elis Regina CD and a few words exchanged in praise of past and present landscapes, going over the day’s events and the moments they had shared.

Back in San Diego they found a Japanese restaurant – Rose had a certain preference for what she considered exotic without considering the image she projected to the Japanese, or the Mexicans, or even to Francis, for whom Rose was, without doubt, exotic – for a light dinner before what they foresaw would be a carnal assault of some importance.

In a shopping centre they found a sushi bar that looked good from the outside. It was still a bit early and there weren’t many customers. The waiter approached them solicitously and offered them the menu. They didn’t waste a second and ordered Sapporo beer and a soup of the day to start. When they brought the soup, which was sublime, Rose took the initiative and ordered uni (sea urchin eggs), taco (octopus), eel and yellowfin tuna, which came with a skilfully mixed sauce of spicy radishes and soy sauce. They rounded off the celebration with a shot of hot sake, which brought on an urge to talk. They were happy lingering over the conversation, defining an inventory of shared interests in which they also included Japanese food, hot sake, Sapporo beer and the jasmine tea with sugar lumps.

From the restaurant they went straight to the hotel. They were tired and content just to go back over a few intimacies, to mark out territories and expand their mutual knowledge. While they were talking, they exchanged languid caresses, desire contained by tiredness.

Francis talked of his previous occupation as a teacher of Hispanic literature, while he was living in Chicago, on the shores of Lake Michigan, of his friendship with Andy, his most loyal friend – he declared – and how difficult it had been for him to adapt to California, of his little house on San Rafael beach and his work for a publishing house in San Francisco.

Rose talked of an abortive relationship, when she was still very young and living in Boston, of how she had moved to live in California, working in an IT consultancy, of her apartment in San Francisco, to which, by the way, he had a standing invitation, and of how disappointed she had been about the pandas.

They smoked two cigarettes and drank vast quantities of water to avoid a hangover and flush out their kidneys, so they could carry on talking and clear their heads.

Despite all their predictions, that night they didn’t make love.

It was the first weekend they spent together. Later there would be many more, until they had woven a web of meetings and commitments, dependencies, security in routine, everything that apparently constitutes the core of every relationship.

2

It was the beginning of spring. The house was sad, empty of sounds and living beings. Francis had arrived home from the hospital, from finding out his test results. With a routine, automatic movement, secure in the action and the familiar territory, he connected the hi-fi cable and pressed the ‘random’ button to play an arbitrary mix of tracks from two CDs (Jorge Ben and Margareth Menezes). He stood there, shocked, looking out at San Rafael beach. Shocked and deaf. There was music, but Francis wasn’t listening. Francis had pressed the button, but Francis was dead. Or, rather, Francis wasn’t really alive.

He went to the bathroom and found the scissors. Those curved scissors, so comfortable and so effective. He began cutting the nails on his left hand, which was easier for him. As he attacked the nails on his right foot, he let out an unsettling wail, as if he were an orphan child who had lost his adoptive parents, as if nobody could silence that wailing that came from deep within, from sadness and rage, from the most intimate and dramatic part of him.

An indeterminate period of time passed, it could have been long or short, depending on who was measuring. A time in which Francis was visualizing his future as a countdown. The months would turn into weeks, days, hours, minutes, thousandths of a second on a knife-blade of perception and then nothing, res, rien, nada de nada, never again, black on black on a black background. He spent a while imagining what would happen to him. He would press on his eyeballs, see a green stain around two red spots, feel his most intimate structures shut down forever, say a final goodbye with an implosion like the one you get when you turn off the TV, and then nothing: adieu, black will be black forever. Forever. No remission. The green stain. Turned off. Nothing. Maybe not even dreams.

A phone call opened the window to another life. Francis was alive and listening to Brazilian music on his hi-fi, looking hopefully at the waves of the Pacific and cutting his nails in the white-and-blue-tiled bathroom. He had the scissors in his hand and didn’t know what to do with them, whether to put them on the bidet or keep hold of them. He went to the phone. On the way to the bedside table he put the scissors on the shelf of a dresser, swallowed his tears and took a deep breath, as if he wanted to scare off all the obsessions gnawing away at his brain. As if nothing was real but the phone call, the shiver he got hearing the phone ring, the cat skulking with feline rhythm between the bushes in the garden.

On the other end was his publisher, Martin, the one who assigned him the urgent translation jobs, which put food on the table, but also brought out his chronic anxiety, like a Pavlovian rat or a kitten injected with alkaloids.

Martin was talking in a rush, as if anxious or nervous, or as if something had disturbed him terribly. No. Straight away. No. It couldn’t wait until tomorrow. The project he had on his desk was an absolute priority. Absolute. Did he understand? Absolute. And he insisted again and again that as far as he was concerned there was only a single meaning of the word ‘absolute’, he wouldn’t admit any other meaning.

Francis tried to get him to calm down a bit and talk calmly about the reason for the call. He tried, with no joy, to get him to focus on the subject and talk about it on the phone, to be more explicit and less ambiguous. Impossible. No. We’ll talk in the office. Don’t keep on. It’s not the kind of thing you can talk about on the phone. The phone is for other things, for the messages and sweet nothings of the first days of romance, for finding somebody or leaving messages, not for discussing work projects. Goodbye. Martin had hung up, categorically and impetuously pressing the button that disconnected his mobile phone.

Martin almost always behaved violently by phone, as if he hated having to talk at a distance. If he wanted to make contact he would leave a message; he insisted on talking about everything in private, face to face, as if he barely considered the phone an appropriate medium for business. He wouldn’t get into discussions or give explanations. It was a philosophy shared by many people in the publishing world, they didn’t have much confidence in long-distance deals, and they considered the phone an instrument for lies. Fine if you’re the one who has to lie, but terrible for deals and negotiations. Martin wanted to have his interlocutor in front of him, whoever it was, to analyze his gaze and movement, to be able to capture the weakness in every nervous response, from an excess of sweat on the forehead to a light dryness on the lips and in the mouth, from excessive gesticulation to a tendency to look away when talking, so typical of people unsure of themselves or tormented by some socially unacceptable difference.

His philosophy of work and the negotiation of business conditions was very simple. Talk about things face to face and then, straight away, agreements written down in a document and signed at the bottom, in duplicate, as is necessary in these times of lawyers and mistrust, of the negation of any ethical commitment and so much treacherous competition. He had been in business for many years and learned many lessons that spoke to the uselessness of altruism in any part of life.

After the news from the hospital, Francis wasn’t in the mood for hurrying, but work was work and his work situation was too complicated to reject a commission. These people lifted you to the top or dropped you to the bottom with terrifying ease. He would have to work like a demon and save like an ant for when there was nothing. He would have to get in the car and go to the publishers’ office, in San Francisco, to see what could be such a priority, so urgent and so secret to get Martin in such a state. It would almost certainly be a last-minute translation, for a conference on neurology or genetics, botany or cultural anthropology, some foreign researcher who wanted to present a paper or give a speech and who wanted somebody else to revise his unacademic English stuffed full of neologisms and unsuitable constructions, so typical of the immigrant brain, unsure of syntax.

The tears he had shed before the phone call, so apparently definitive and yet barely consoling, the uncontrolled weeping and shaking, had given way to an agitated inaction in which Francis was debating with himself, not knowing what to do, who to ask for help or advice, which way to turn at that crossroads where the paths forked, crossed over, became entangled. There were various options, but his mind was moving as slowly as the most lethargic tortoise. He could pick up the telephone and make some therapeutic calls: to his girlfriend; to his friend Andy who lived in Chicago, but was always there when he was needed. No. And Rose? How would he tell Rose? Impossible. Impossible to do it by phone, not to mention barely courteous given that she was the woman with whom he was aiming for – or at least she was convinced they were aiming for – bigger and more solid commitments, a home and a couple of kids chasing butterflies in the garden, dogs and mortgages, holidays on some third-world beach or at a fashionable ski resort. And what about Andy? He couldn’t tell Andy either. It definitely wasn’t the easiest moment to tell him something as serious as that, the poor guy was going through a depression, after his mother’s death. Better to take the car keys – always left where you least expect them – turn off the hi-fi and close the patio doors.

Francis was in a trance, as if possessed by a magnetic force that was pinning him down, thinking with his eyes wide open, his gaze reflected in a concave mirror, in astonishment or fear. He shrank into himself. A samba or a bossa nova was playing, hardly appropriate for his state of mind, or maybe it was the best alchemy, highly protean and liberating, the fog where he could hide from his misery and fear.

By the time the convertible pulled out on to the beach road, Francis was in another world. In a funnel that was narrowing, that was becoming darker and less familiar, moving automatically and mentally relaxed. His mind was letting the countryside pass by unobserved, without storing it in the electronic labyrinths of his glial cells, concentrating exclusively on its most recent obsession: illness. An illness without a name. Without a label. Without an identified cause. That would leave him blind. Lost to the world and blind. Like a mole. Like an albino cave lizard. Like an eyeless fish dwelling in karstic labyrinths.

How could he tell his lifelong friends, his lover with all her projects? How could he tell any of them, without disintegrating like a sandcastle, that he was ill, sentenced to death, irretrievably condemned? How to deal with it? How not to give up? How not to feel the curse of Juno? How not to succumb to madness like Oedipus, tearing out his own eyes, for their uselessness, defectiveness, sinfulness? How not to feel himself an unfortunate Atlas condemned to a lifetime of supporting a world that isn’t, that escapes, viscous, from between his hands?

He mentally picked over the crust of reality, playing out scenes of clandestine meetings and pathetic declarations, enormous silences and animated, tragic reactions. Why now, just now when he had a girlfriend and a job, projects and a present? Why him? What had he done, God, what had he missed? Questions he had always said he would never ask, which seemed absurd and ridiculous, a denial of probability and chance, but which welled up, automatically, after the first moments of bewilderment and incredulity, of blushing and wandering around, a soul in torment touched by the gods.

He had found out days ago, just by chance in a routine medical check, about the problem with his eyes. ‘A degenerative condition of the retina,’ the doctor had said. ‘A very unusual condition, we don’t know the cause – perhaps a virus, but we aren’t certain – and nor, of course, the treatment.’

Just like that, so blunt and cold, such a clear-cut prognosis and so little hope, out of place as a hedgehog on a silk sheet, as if losing your sight was something banal and unimportant, inane and not at all tragic, something that can happen every day and on account of which we therefore shouldn’t really be affected.

‘Six months from now you’ll be completely blind. There’s no cure. It’s all I can tell you. There’s no known cure.’

Not even a ‘yet’, which could suggest a possible solution, or open a miniscule window to a ray of confidence, a bridge leading to a way back, an environment that could become bearable through self-deception, a mirror image to give the lie to an appearance of truth. Nothing. Not even a possibility. A clear sentence, like a barber’s blade, dissection and rupture, cold lightning.

At the start there had been only defensive and self-interested incredulity, so necessary to carry on living, to stop the hand of destiny, to withdraw into himself and think about a future in chiaroscuro, in filmic fusion until the terrifying blackness of optical oblivion. He still hadn’t noticed any symptoms, except – perhaps this was the first symptom – a discreet photophobia which he had initially interpreted – erroneously, he sensed now – as a passing allergic reaction to the spring sunlight, which is apparently very malign and which always appears without warning, sudden and intense, like cancer and melancholy.

How stupid! he thought. There wasn’t even the faintest hint of spring sunshine over there. He was still thinking in terms of what in Europe they call the continental or Atlantic climate, so clear about the seasons and their sequence. Now he lived in California, the Golden State, where the sun was always shining – in real life and in songs – and where there were rarely surprises in the turning of the seasons, but instead a continuity without surprises, like weather designed not to inconvenience you, to allow you to live a slow, easy life, carefree and soft, a life of pleasure and contemplation.

In the beginning had been incredulity and doubt about the diagnosis, reinforced, obviously, by the absence of any serious symptoms and by his hesitation to believe in doctors as the shamans of a foreign, reactionary culture, and especially in what they say, a magical and hermetic language, far from reality. ‘It must be a mistake,’ he repeated mechanically until reaching a spiritual state of scepticism, of incredulity, of substitution by a single idea, of sectarian blindness that wants to see nothing outside the Cartesian universe, miserably Euclidean and inflexible, reductionist and profoundly pathetic.

Then, and without a perceptible shift, he had reached desperation, terrible disconsolate weeping, the constantly repeated vision of an imperfect future of strange silences – the sound of claws and joints, the itching of bugs behind his eye sockets, physical pain in the swollen hollows, the vast impotence of a dismasted ship, of a skinned animal, a trunk eaten up by fungi, asphyxiated by ivies, rotted by the plague of termites, dried out by the chemical death of its roots – of being condemned to the absence of known stimuli.

Now, after an ambivalent interlude, his soul fluctuating constantly between the most childish and ingenuous incredulity and the least balanced and not at all reflective desperation, everything was different. There was a tacit formal acceptance, ambiguously resigned and somewhat sceptical about the prognosis. Francis was driving his convertible along the coast road, from San Rafael to San Francisco. A light breeze came up from the sea, too soft to make him put the hood up, and it brought him memories of journeys and romances, of marvellous visions and epic reflections, amazed gazes and pleasures that entered through the eyes before being tested through touch, the tips of his fingers travelling across an entire body; through smell, sniffing the secretions that moistened the most intimate corners; through taste, his taste buds sampling the sweetness of nipples and the saltiness of hips, the acidity of armpits and the bitterness of the lips of the unrepentant smoker; through hearing, lovers murmuring an interminable series of huge words – Je t’aime/I love you/Gosto de ti/Ti amo – of promises made to be broken – Toujours/Para sempre/Forever, ever, ever… my love – of betrayals of reason and feeling, of whispers and sobs – Mon amour/My love/Cuore/Carissimo – that weren’t always sincere or well judged.

On the beach some lads were floating on their surfboards, elastic as angels or contortionists. For them life seemed a soft place, where everything was waves and sea, beaches and sand, physical fitness and lots of sex. Lots of sun. Lots of beach. Not too much love and plenty of sex, which always have been and always will be different things, with clear boundaries and agreed rituals. A soft and relaxed life, without a doubt. An ambiguous indolence. A lifestyle to explore, to invent and reinvent each day, with more twists and turns than Francis could imagine, anchored in the Cartesian rationalism of a man at ease in the system.

He, Francis, also lived a tranquil and harmonious life. A good job at the publishing house where he worked as a translator and, sometimes, even as an editor, compiling texts or looking after the technical aspects of the edition. He had found a nice and very affectionate girlfriend, who looked after him and made him really happy. He had some magnificent friends, the sort who never let you down and are always around when you need them, as faithful and loyal as could be, firm, constant, sure, sensible and discreet.

He too had a soft and relaxed life, like those lads who sometimes went surfing and sometimes swimming and enjoyed a fabulous lifestyle, mostly sitting on the sand, watching the waves come and go, dreaming of a world that floated around them, in their universe of marijuana and no worries, sunbathing for countless hours, innumerable days, forever.

He thought that if you looked at it closely, his whole life had been a perpetual holiday. Family. Studies. Travel. Love. All perfect or nearly perfect, exceeding the most optimistic expectations of a boy born at the end of the earth. A loving family, somewhat reticent when it came to talking about problems, but where everything happened with a tacit order, without overstatement or drama. Happy schooldays, camaraderie and lots of shared secrets. Some magnificent travels, solitary as a wolf on the steppes or in the best possible company. And love affairs, few but well structured, full of discoveries and rediscoveries, experimentation and change. No. His life had never been and wasn’t now any worse than that of those boys who went straight from the cradle to the skateboard and from school to the surfboard, and from there, with whatever the judge decided in their parents’ divorce and a part-time job in a pizzeria or a workshop, to university, or to travel the world in search of waves, from Hawaii to Tarifa, Australia to the Maldives, with no responsibility other than to be young and to stretch out their youth as long as possible, with no aim other than to be famous and committed activists, archangelic ecologists, defenders of filmable utopias, and artists as well, dreamers of marine gargoyles, of amphibious men and chimerical animals and curly-haired boys stretched out on the foam.

That damned illness with no precise definition – ‘a very rare condition we don’t know the origin of and have no cure for. Possibly a virus, but we’re not sure’ – had come to destroy all that harmony, all that tranquillity, all that calm, real or imagined. Perhaps one of those lads also had a serious health problem. Something that would sentence him to life in a wheelchair or plugged into a respirator – like a vegetable, the old folk would say, keen as darts in their careful cruelty, precise as kingfishers swooping in for food, certain in their terrible diagnosis, almost always right in their evaluation of the final consequences – or to die slowly from an expansive, metastatic cancer. Something terrible, signifying a definitive outcome, no way back, permanent disability and a life dependent on others, blinded forever to the pleasure of free will.

Life was like that, merciless with established plans, as unpredictable in its duration as in its circumstances, terribly determinist and, at the same time, guided by fate, by what can’t be controlled, by what makes men so vulnerable and so rarely masters of themselves and their destiny.

Where in the past there had been fields of figs and oranges, on what Americans called ‘the Peninsula’, there had since 1970 developed an industrial community based on the most advanced information technology. That was where Rose worked, caught up in endless programming sessions, in tedious meetings where everybody was the manager of something, of the unit or the sector, marketing or finance, programming or personnel. He thought about Rose, about how he would tell her what he could no longer keep to himself, about what was going to be a gash in their relationship, in their future, now so imperfect, an ex-future, with so few possibilities. That was when he drove on to the Golden Gate Bridge, the city’s favourite picture postcard since it was built in 1933, a marvel of technique and engineering, emerging from the ubiquitous fog, so characteristic of San Francisco’s microclimate, which seemed to produce a permanent mist, clutching to its heart every cloud that came in off the Pacific.

He thought about Rose, about blindness, sun, photophobia, the doctor’s cruelty, the surfers, Rose again, and carried on across the bridge, which seemed to float in the mist, as on so many days in that tranquil, liberal, half-European and almost perfect city that was San Francisco.

3

He was thinking about all this – the sun, the photophobia, the incredulity, the doctor’s unmitigated cruelty, Martin’s phone call, the surfers, the urgent translations, fate, if such a thing exists, his girlfriend Rose, his possible future, friends, Andy, especially Andy, embodiment of ex-futures shut off once and for all – when he reached the door of the publisher’s office.

He took the stairs two by two up to the first floor. The stairs to the second floor, he took more slowly and with less energy. The years had not passed in vain and since he left Chicago he had broken off all contact with the gym. He would have to start exercising again. He needed it. He could feel it. It was down to laziness and lack of incentive. With Andy it was different. Andy encouraged him to look after himself, to smoke less, to drink little or nothing, to do exercise, to wear aftershave – Banana Republic, his favourite – to think about his choice of clothes and shoes, to pay attention to himself and his body, to take his antioxidant pills every morning, the right amount of fibre, his daily fruit and vegetables and all that. Rose was different, perhaps for her he tried to take care of his dress and his appearance, but when it came to the rest of it she was more Irish and decidedly anarchist, drinking was good and healthy, smoking a pleasure and it didn’t matter whether you ate lobster or octopus, what counted was eating and looking good.

He was totally at ease as he went into the office, greeting everybody with the appearance of being in a contagious and enduring good mood. Some apprenticeships prepare you magnificently for every occasion, for weddings and funerals, for a job interview with some balding foetus who thinks he’s better than you because he has two master’s degrees from Harvard and a few words of French (you speak Portuguese, a little Romanian and Dutch and a few words of Arabic, but this doesn’t interest him, it isn’t a master’s degree from Harvard and so means nothing), or for a cocktail party at a European embassy, soused in French wine of indefinite origin and some minute portions of absurd canapés, which are trying to pass for beluga caviar, but turn out to be lumpfish eggs dyed in squid ink or a toxic aniline that could destroy your kidneys without you realizing it, or at the presentation of a book by some fashionable author, easy prose for indolent romantics, or for illiterate idiots of both sexes who have fallen in love with the author photo, with its angelical face or protective appearance, depending on the circumstance. Some apprenticeships serve to get you in and out of anywhere, as if you were on your own turf. At the best and worst moments. There are always mirrors which deform, whose distorting image models or conceals the most miserable and least presentable reality, or which alter even our own self-perception. And if there are none, we invent them, concave or convex, full-length or half-length, it doesn’t matter, but mirrors that deform, miracles of light and fantasy of opposites.

Martin – the director – is expecting you, the secretary announced automatically and respectfully as she foraged away in her computer, where she seemed to swim with the passion of a dolphin saved from the nets of an enormous fishing boat.

Martin called him in over the intercom, briskly and with no concession to his secretary with her ecological hobbies, stupidity and other deficiencies, both physical (despite repeated surgery on her gigantic breasts and hips), and psychological (that flaky mystical-naturalist tendency that is so common throughout California, destroying lives and presaging millenarian catastrophes).

Martin was against dolphins. He said people should eat them, that anything that comes from the sea is edible. In this he seemed not Anglo-Saxon but Chinese; it was a phrase he repeated often, ‘everything that comes from the sea is edible’, to which he now, since he had detected his secretary’s pro-dolphin stance, added, ‘even dolphins’. Martin had recently read an article by Natalie Angier, a science journalist who published portentous essays in The New York Times, saying dolphins are highly cruel and savage, that they carry out rapes on the females of other schools, collectively violate kidnapped females and abandon the babies after their mothers have given birth. Since then nobody had managed to get him to shed a tear – not a single one – for a dolphin or a whale. He had passed from one radicalism to another, as so often happens in life.

Francis had barely got through the door when his hand was grasped in an automatic ritual of greeting and declaration of good intentions, and Martin began to talk without delay, leaving no time for preambles or ceremony, with the passion of a chronic psychopath afraid of silence. Of silence and formalities.

Francis expected this and sat down without ceremony and without waiting for Martin’s invitation – he knew from experience Martin wouldn’t stand to greet him, that after the squeeze of hands he wouldn’t invite him to sit down or offer him a coffee or let him get a word in edgeways until he’d got out everything he was storing up inside – so he lit a cigarette, also without waiting for permission, and enjoyed the blue smoke that wheeled and pirouetted around him. Martin was smoking as well and although he had been trying to give up recently – abusive propaganda in the media by those for whom tobacco was the source of all evil, some kind of satanic creation or vengeful recourse of Beelzebub, but also family pressure from his youngest children and from the company, which had a clear anti-smoking policy, for reasons of conscience, from social pressure and, ultimately, from the unequivocal pressure from his own body which demanded to be looked after – he was in solidarity with smokers.

There was a Portuguese writer who was almost certainly going to get the Nobel Prize. That was the core of his speech, which came across to Francis as verbal diarrhoea, with chaotic, complicated syntax, rapid gestures and a great deal of unresolved agitation. If it wasn’t this year it would be next year or the one after or the one after that. It wasn’t quite clear if this was guesswork or rather a piece of information acquired through the tortuous channels of intellectual diplomacy. The fact was that Martin was utterly convinced of his premonition/assertion/prediction, and he said so vehemently, his words charged more with conviction than with reasons.

Once he had got it all out, he then seemed to take a moment, lit the cigarette he had taken from the packet through contagion, through association of ideas, automatically, as when bombs explode out of sympathy, instantaneously and impulsively, with the pure drive of a trapped animal and little of one’s own volition. Then he took up his speech again. This writer, by the name of Saramago, had been named for several years on an unofficial list of possible winners. There were so many petitions and expressions of support, so many translations into Swedish and French, Japanese and Russian, that it was unstoppable. It was an irreversible process. He was sure.

The precise issue – and now the speech was winding down – was that this same writer had recently published a novel, which was already a success on the international market. It had awoken an interest unprecedented for a Portuguese writer, given as they are to a leaden, overcomplicated and none-too-lucid style. At the Frankfurt Book Fair, the great European shop window for books, the market for the buying and selling of authorial rights, the publishing heart of Europe, various publishers – German, French, Spanish and even Romanian – had bid for the novel and his publishing house had managed, not without effort and with the provision of rather too much money for a writer who was still considered a minority author in the Anglo-Saxon world, exclusive rights to the translation into English of his most recent work to date, Blindness. The English edition couldn’t wait. He had thought of Francis for the job. He was the best translator they had on the books and he couldn’t let them down.

Francis wrinkled his brow, indicating that he was going to make a foray into this conversation that had turned into a monologue. Martin didn’t give him much choice. He knew very well he was busy with other projects, he said, but this was an absolute priority. No possible delays or postponements. Now. Right now. As soon as possible. They had to get the book on sale in record time. He knew it was a pain and even a rather unpleasant plan. He couldn’t let them down now. He owed Martin lots of favours, from when he had arrived in California and didn’t have a job, from when they advanced him payments to get him out of a financial hole. From way back when. Lots of favours. Now was the time to call in those favours. He couldn’t let them down now. He’d taken a personal gamble. It was time to play for his place.

Francis felt uncomfortable with all this pressure. He liked slow and steady work and planning, knowing in advance when he would have his vacation and how much time he had to do his research. He shifted in his chair and stubbed out his cigarette; he tried to speak but couldn’t, thinking to himself and, of course, explaining to Martin what Martin already knew. A translation was not simply the word-for-word transposition of a literary text. You had to familiarize yourself with the author, with his lexicography, with his syntax and his diapausic rhythms, like a larva or imago, a coleopterous panzer or a writer with a rock in his head, an endogamous insect or a parthenogenic or polymorphous monster. You had to put a lot of work in first to learn about it all and orientate yourself. That could only happen with experience and a great deal of effort, endless days and lots of going without. The writer turned into an obsession, an insane passion or a figure of irrational hatred, with a little altar at the front door or a target to shoot him in one eye or in the middle of his forehead, in the crack of his mouth or in his heart.

Francis paused to gather energy and Martin seized the conversation. It hadn’t always been like that, Martin insisted, at least on the early jobs. Back then it was all more about routine and less about feeling, due perhaps to the anxiety of youth and the imminent need of a salary, and his translations hadn’t been all that professional, not to be too offensive about it. Now it was different. He had a well-deserved professional responsibility, to his publisher and his readers, out of respect for the writer and respect for himself…

Francis agreed, flattered by the excessive praise that almost made him give in, but he had decided. He couldn’t be doing with improvisation games and unwanted pressure.

He thought about the surfers, the beach, Rose, Andy, that damned doctor, the translation, the beach again and the surfers, the waves and his illness. He looked at Martin and the fear passed. Martin was expecting a quick and enthusiastic response, words flying like darts, like a teenager about to go out and devour the world. Francis was trapped, he had to leave the parade of images and start negotiating the conditions of the job. He had to drag himself out of the slough. By any means possible. The illness didn’t exist except in the tortured mind of the oculist. He still hadn’t noticed anything particular about his eyes. He had even begun not to believe what the oculist had told him, through spite and fear, but also through self-defence and denial of reality. He had to put all those thoughts to one side and concentrate his resources on the job. On the job and on Rose, with no other priorities. He wasn’t ill. Or even tired.

He looked at Martin and began to talk about numbers and time, about limitations and shifting other commissions to colleagues, about commitments and money, lots of money and about urgent needs, trips, interviews, bonuses and other stipends.

The conversation was fluid and impersonal, generic and without much focus. Martin had read the reviews of the novel in Spanish and French newspapers and was sure it would be a success, not because of the novel in itself, he said – he certainly liked its basic idea very much, although it was no better or worse than many others he had read that year – but rather because of the imminent – and he stressed that word – circumstance of the Nobel. It was a slam dunk. The Portuguese couldn’t wait any longer without a mutiny (an intellectual mutiny, of course). They occupied a very important place in the list of the world’s most spoken languages and theirs was a very important literature, with a great deal of history and a great many works. What’s more, it would have to go to Portugal first of all, to the metropolis where everything had begun, in that kingdom separated from Galicia and Castile in the battles that characterized the times of the Iberian reconquest. In Brazil there were more writers, and better ones, perhaps, but the Swedish Academy was an Academy for a reason and Jorge Amado, the great man of Brazilian letters, the poet from Salvador da Bahia, would have to wait for time to pass and perhaps he would die without the honour of an award that would give him his place on the writers’ Olympus, which he deserved as much as Saramago. They were political choices and the Academy, like every academy in the world, was conservative by vocation and in practice. The award of the Nobel to a Portuguese writer would force a change in the public’s habits; they would begin to demand the works of this all-but-unknown writer who had been given the prize to beat all prizes.

The novel was too serious to be a publishing success in the Anglo-Saxon world, which tended more towards minor works prefabricated in the best-seller laboratories, designed to be adapted immediately for cinema, a fevered process based on industrial demand and little literary substance. People wanted action and base passion, not parables and philosophy. But there was also a large proportion of readers who only read the Nobel or Pulitzer winners, a sort of preselected product, or if they didn’t read them, at least they bought them, which was what mattered to them, possession of a library well stocked with prestigious names, with which to impress visitors. Typical nouveaux riches, who drink tea with strawberry jam and little cucumber sandwiches, the emerging classes where the only residue of culture was the money accumulated in a thousand fraudulent transactions, of cattle or baseball players, houses up for auction or land miraculously reclassified by means of a substantial percentage to council employees, and the craving for power, omnipresent and omnimodal, the size of the pool in the garden, or the name of the college where the children would be spoiled rotten. Success was founded on the part of the population with the greatest purchasing power and fewest cares at the point of purchase, to whom you had to give everything pre-chewed and ready-made, who couldn’t explore for themselves, but were guided by presenters on the most important TV channels (crucial cradle of literary benevolence), by the best-seller lists (what sold most was good by definition) and by the accumulated prizes (if it won a prize it must be good), who purchased a great deal of books and read rather fewer.

According to commentators – to call some of them literary critics was to do them an undeserved favour – said Martin, repeating himself, the novel was a parable, a type of literature that wasn’t too common, a subtle and at the same time raw reflection on contemporary society, its collective insanities and its dehumanizing limitations. It spoke too of the human capacity to inflict pain on our fellow beings. The original was called Ensaio sobre a Cegueira and they had to hurry. It would have to be ready for publication when they distributed the new books at the beginning of the autumn. It was a commitment that the whole editorial board had in its sights.

They couldn’t afford to make a mistake. That had already happened with a couple of authors, with Kenzaburo Oe and somebody called Cela, and it had been embarrassing. They were a market-leading publishing house and they had to be ahead of the announcement of the prizes, foresee everything, even if that meant having to poll every member of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation, since nobody was so innocent these days as to believe financial interests played no part in the dispensation of those prestigious awards.

Prestige was power and power wasn’t doled out by the handful to just anybody. Everything was measured, agreed and calculated beforehand, to satisfy the demands of capital. If they had given a Nobel to Kissinger – my God! – member of a cabinet of imperialists who had supported the filthiest military dictatorships, or Arafat, an armed terrorist, defender of armed conflict with the Jews, then you could hardly expect a reputation for purity and clarity, altruism and justice, from such a tarnished institution. How could they have let Borges die, blind and weak, without receiving the prize? Why not Lezama, an alchemist of words? Why not Cortázar, a world in himself?

Francis didn’t try to counter the arguments, tell Martin the Nobel Peace Prize was given by the Norwegian Academy, not the Swedish one, since this sort of thing wouldn’t go down well with a boss who considered himself always and infallibly correct. Besides, he basically agreed that the prize decisions were political rather than strictly literary. This meant that after the disquisition from Martin, who had a natural inclination for South American narrators against the chauvinist Anglo-Saxons, the conversation suddenly switched to the business at hand, pushing to the maximum and finding hidden solutions, asking for more than you expect, in order to get what is at the limit of dignity. Francis said six months and two interviews with the author, to go over the problems and find solutions, to penetrate the author’s most intimate universe, and to do a job he could feel satisfied with. Martin offered three months and the author’s address, to write as many letters as they liked, but with no chance of visits, which were very expensive.

In the end, after several coffees and a few more cigarettes than usual, they agreed on four months and one visit before the submission of the first proofs, to resolve any outstanding queries.

They sealed the agreement with a handshake while Martin asked the secretary to prepare the contracts, which they would send as soon as possible, signed by the publishing house, for him to sign them as well, keep a copy and send the other to the publisher’s offices.

They said goodbye in the foyer, under the watchful eye of the dolphin-defending secretary. They had talked of everything, everything except for Francis’s imminent blindness.

Text © Xavier Queipo

Translation © Kirsty Hooper

This title is available to read in English – see the page “Novels”.