The town was sleeping.
Someone is always up in a big city but in a small town everyone goes to bed around the same time. That’s something I found out after I got here.
I was sitting under a towering eucalyptus tree on the main street, on one of those old-fashioned benches with names and hearts carved into its dark wooden planks.
I’d wanted to sit there ever since I came to town, but that night was the first time.
I leaned back.
I looked up at the sky.
They were all sleeping, dreaming. Dreaming together.
I watched their dreams slip out through windows, doors and chimneys. I watched them rise up into the clouds, flaunting their colours; I could almost see them, talking, laughing, sobbing, making love. There they all were, entwined in deep embraces on velvet-curtained stages, in stables and on dark streets, in sitting rooms and by the sea. A neighing horse, two women kissing, a tearful child racing through the night, a horde of golden coins, a glistening knife. Sometimes I caught sight of a man or a woman vanishing from their own dreams to haunt the dreams of others.
I watched the town dreaming.
I wasn’t drunk, or at least not from drink.
I had just taken a life.
I remembered it like a dream.
But I couldn’t remember much. I remembered an arm – my arm, though somehow it was severed from my body, wandering far away, beyond my grasp. It was holding a gun. I don’t remember pulling the trigger; I only heard the shot. And then I saw a mouth opening, as if to speak, a face contorted, one hand in the air, the other clutching the wound. And then a body falling, but no blood.
What is it people feel when they kill another human being? My body was taut, seized by a fear I had never known before, and then it seemed I had drifted off to sleep.
I left the house and made my way here.
I don’t remember thinking about anything in particular.
I sat down. What a careless novelist I was, no different from God.
A good novelist doesn’t build on coincidence, or stoop to coincidence to get out of a corner.
But God has a savage sense of humour. And coincidence is his favourite joke. And life is nothing but a string of coincidences.
You see, I was a stranger in town.
I came from a big city, far away.
I stayed there to write a book about murder. And so what if I turned out to be the killer? I’ll simply put it down as God’s work, another one of his cruel coincidences, taunting his own creation.
The entire town was steeped in dream.
I was the only one awake. Or was I dreaming?
The time has come to tell you what happened.
But the story isn’t really mine, and if it is savage beyond belief it is because it comes from the hand of a cruel and indifferent God.
II
I remember everything about the day I first saw her.
We met at a little airport nestled between low hills and the sea.
At first I couldn’t really make out her face, blurred by a faint, gauzy light, and I was transfixed.
Later I came to appreciate its beauty, and an almost blinding brightness in her eyes. She knew she was beautiful. When she was a young girl she learned how to use the enchanting powers of her eyes.
I could imagine what happened: she was chased and showered with gifts, which she would accept almost disdainfully, and then, grateful for the attention, she would only receive more – I’ve met men who gave away their lives.
I never saw her grieve for anything that slipped away; in fact she seemed to collect people and things so that she could throw them away. And I never quite understood how she could collect so much without ever lifting a finger, and when in her heart she really never dreamed of holding on to anything for very long.
She was calm, her serenity drawing people to her. Sometimes it even seemed like she moved objects.
It was raining that day.
Through the window I could see an endless grove of olive trees, turned greyish-green by the rain; their gnarled trunks bursting from the earth, they looked like an ancient army, waiting for the command to march.
Our little plane was late for take-off.
The departures lounge was on the first floor of the building. The control tower was on the second. Four other people sat behind the broad glass windows that looked out over the tarmac: a crop-duster pilot, two wealthy locals with badly knotted ties, and the woman.
She was sitting alone, listening to the pilot a couple of seats away from her. They seemed to know each other well. And I saw her nod to the other two men.
Then she stood up and walked over to an old coffee machine in the corner, slipping past me like a flash of light.
I was reading a newspaper but I could feel her passing behind me.
On her way back she stopped and put her coffee down on the table in front of me. Then she leaned over and picked my raincoat up off the floor and draped it over the chair beside me.
‘It was on the floor,’ she said.
Her voice was soft, almost a whisper, demanding attention, and I was caught off guard.
She treated people, and men in particular, as if they were children who needed special attention. Sometimes I got the feeling she thought men were disabled in some way. I didn’t know that then.
She picked up her coffee, flashed me a smile and then she left.
I watched her go.
These are the moments we can later appraise with hindsight. Reliving the moment now, I feel clairvoyant. But at the time I had no idea what would come to pass.
Sifting through the past on that bench, I could see how my life veered dramatically in the direction it did.
I dashed through the rain and boarded the plane.
There were only three rows of two seats on each side. Big cardboard boxes had been carefully stowed in the back two rows.
I sat down by the window in the front row and watched her walk unhurriedly towards the plane, oblivious to the rain, her head buried in the upturned collar of her coat.
She seemed amused by how we had raced to the plane.
Through the curtain of raindrops that ran down the scratched and pitted window, I thought I could make out a smile on her face.
She was soaking wet by the time she boarded the plane and she really was smiling.
Before she could sit down next to the pilot she had been speaking to earlier, a young man with headphones around his neck emerged from the cockpit and called out, ‘Come on, we can talk on the way.’ And he saluted the young woman with a nod before the two men disappeared into the cockpit.
She hesitated for a moment then sat down beside me.
She felt like she had to explain herself: ‘I’m afraid of flying.’
‘But you seem to know all the pilots,’ I said.
‘I do. They’re actually teaching me how to fly. The pilot you saw in the airport is giving me lessons in his crop-duster. His name’s Tahir.’
‘Aren’t you afraid then?’
She shrugged.
‘I am.’
The plane lurched forward as she took off her raincoat and placed it on the seat behind her.