The Fugitivities, стр. 74
When she decided, two days later, to go and see his address, Salvador seemed to anticipate her arrival. Before she had a chance to decide whether she would ring he had sprung outside coming into the street to greet her. Solemnly, he ushered her inside for tea. The house was large and well appointed. Salvador’s taste in beautiful things was refined and one could tell that he took pride in their display. They took tea in the kitchen, which was tiled with smooth warm-colored tomettes like those she had loved as a child in her grandparents’ house. Afterward, he took her to his studio. It was a beautiful open space, with old windows facing the inner courtyard. At first, she was very stiff. But the sound of the charcoal became soothing and after a time she got used to it. When the session ended, he pressed a pile of bills into her hand. It turned out to be an extraordinary sum, so much so that her worry about ulterior expectations nearly brought things to a halt. But the experience had not displeased her, and there was something about Salvador that she found unexpectedly attractive, she said. So, she returned. By the third week, she was posing entirely nude. At the conclusion of a long evening session, when he made a proposition, it was not the one she had prepared herself to answer. Salvador said that he was going to be away in Argentina for several weeks, that if she wished she could stay at his place. He would leave money and keys and she would agree to care for the house until his return.
That was how it began, she said. Having such a beautiful place to herself for long stretches of time, totally independent and with no concern for money, meant she could try something she had been thinking about all through her depression: the idea of writing. Now she had the means and a place to do so untroubled, in a city that she had fallen, however oddly, in love with. Salvador was aloof, an aesthete, but mostly harmless. Besides, he would regularly go away for weeks at a time, and when he came home, all he would ask of her was to sit for him so he could paint. She had so much time to herself. In the courtyard she could sit by the lemon tree in the sunlight and read books for hours without hearing a word or a sound besides the chittering of the birds and the lives of the insects. Salvador was often her only regular companion. Despite passing time together, she was never sure she knew him well. She had worried that he would ask her for sex. But he didn’t, and after a while she stopped worrying that he would. Sometimes he had other models come to the studio, always young women, sometimes young in a way that made her uncomfortable. But artists are wont to surround themselves with the beautiful. The girls who came to the studio were certainly that. She knew he liked to gaze. Sometimes she would catch Salvador watching her from another room. One time over coffee, he said that she had a mannish quality to her face, that she reminded him of a close friend whom he had lost in the Falklands. She wanted to ask more about it, but the way Salvador spoke she thought it better not to.
Her writing continued to fill up her journals, she said, and the time of the world slipped away. Everything would have been perfect if it hadn’t been for the nightmares. They were always similar and very regular now. It started with a conviction that Salvador was at the door watching her sleep. She would feel a deep powerlessness, her body paralyzed, and then wake up in a cold sweat. She always checked to see if Salvador was in the room or lurking outsider her door. But he never was. Outwardly, there was nothing wrong, as far as she could tell. But increasingly, she noticed that people fell silent around Salvador in a manner she had not noticed before. Worse, she said, sometimes she found herself doing the same thing, as though merely being in his presence made her lose her voice. Or she would become uncertain as to whether or not she had spoken. And she began to get visits at night from a tall blue bird. It would land on her head and grip her skull with its talons. She would stay very still and beg that it go away. But the sharp talons dug in. Just when she thought she couldn’t take it anymore the bird would take off with a clapping thunder like the sound of a helicopter, and sometimes she was convinced it was a helicopter, or a great plane passing low overhead and moving out to sea. Then she would wake. People looked at her funny in the street, she said. As if they knew something about her, as if she was guilty of something terrible. “But all I’m guilty of is wanting time,” she said. “Of needing space. Does anyone know how hard it is, even in this day and age, for a woman to live free of any attachments? Free of the need to work? To have a good place to live and write and not owe a man anything, not money, not sex, not the raising of children, nothing!”
There was a momentary quiet. By now the few other diners had long gone. Miguel was standing at his lectern nearby, but Jonah couldn’t tell if he had he been listening. Oscar was somewhere in the kitchen, presumably washing up.
Laura was looking directly at Jonah. Their