She didn’t look Swedish – whatever that means. There was something Semitic about her features. But of course she could have been born in Sweden even so; our country is based on immigration and emigration. My own ancestry can be traced back to France and Germany.
I nodded to her, smiled, and asked if she was looking for someone. She didn’t seem to understand what I said. She swayed from side to side slightly, and sat down – or rather, collapsed onto the visitor’s chair with its worn armrests. She leant back and closed her eyes.
It dawned on me that she was very ill. The earth was already pulling her down, despite the fact that she was so young. Her tiredness was pure exhaustion: she was already half gone, leaving life behind.
Then the door opened again. A woman in her fifties came in. She merely glanced at me before gently taking hold of the girl on the chair. She was speaking Arabic. I couldn’t understand what she said, but she was obviously the girl’s mother.
Then her father appeared – a short, timid-looking man with a furrowed face. He took no notice of me either as I lay there with the infusion dripping into my arm. All the pair of them cared about was their daughter. With extreme tenderness they helped her up and supported her as they left the room.
I didn’t exist. All that mattered was their sick daughter.
The door closed. It echoed in a way reminiscent of a heavy church door. Death has paid a visit, I thought to myself, and didn’t try to overlook the fact that the encounter with the girl and her parents had scared me. Why had the girl opened the door to room number 1 in the first place? What was the message she had brought with her? Was death in the habit of sending out couriers?
When one of the nurses came to connect the next bag of cytotoxins, I couldn’t resist telling her about the unexpected visit I had had. I said I had the impression that the girl was very ill. She nodded as she changed the bag and checked that the new infusion was flowing through the plastic tubing as it should.
Then the nurse confirmed that the girl was indeed very ill. She said it in such a way that I understood death was just around the corner. But I didn’t ask exactly what cancer she was suffering from. Nobody speaks about other patients. Everybody has their integrity.
But I couldn’t help asking one question that wasn’t directly connected with her illness.
‘Why did she come to room number 1?’
I assumed there would be no answer, but there was.
‘She was moved here when there was a leak in the room she usually uses. There are no spare beds in the intensive care wards. She was in here for a week before she was able to move back to her usual place.’
And then came something I shouldn’t really have been told.
‘Her brain has been affected by her illness. She disappears sometimes. Her parents look for her until they find her. They are always here. She is their only child. Their other children have all died in some war they came here to get away from.’
I was told no more. I don’t know if she had a brain tumour or if her mental confusion was due to something else. But in any case, it doesn’t matter. When she came into my room she was on her way to somewhere but didn’t know where.
As far as she was concerned, even though I was lying there on the bed, the room was completely empty.
I never saw her or her parents again. I don’t even know her name. Nor do I know if she is still alive.
But every time I return to room number 1 for chemotherapy or a blood transfusion, when my blood counts have become so poor that I can’t stand up without losing my balance, I think I can see her there, sitting in the visitor’s chair with its worn-out armrests.
There was something she wanted to tell me, this courier sent to me by death. But I still don’t know what that message was.
35
The road to Salamanca, Part 1
It was 1985. I was thirty-seven years old. I had set off two days earlier at four in the morning, from the Algarve in southern Portugal on my way back to Sweden. I spent the first night over the workshop of a petrol station north of Lisbon that rented out a room smelling of diesel and engine oil. The car I was driving was small and light; I didn’t need to put it in a garage overnight as hardly anybody would have wanted to steal it, or even to break in as it was almost empty. All my belongings fitted into a suitcase that I took with me to my room.
The next day I continued my journey northwards. It was August, and very hot. Traffic was heavy because the European holiday period had just begun, and the big cities emptied out as lots of people travelled to the south – to the Riviera, the Spanish Costas and the Algarve. I was on my way home with a manuscript that was almost finished. I had rented a flat from a waiter at a cafe in Albufeira, where I had a view over the sea as I sat writing.
I had got quite a lot done. A circus was pitched nearby for a month: I got used to the music and the applause. I was present at their last performance. The following day, the circus and I both gathered together our belongings and left.
I listened to the news on the car radio, with reports coming and going from all over the world. Nothing important seemed to have happened. But on the other hand it was claimed that lots of important things had happened. As so often, the news broadcasts were more or less incomprehensible.
I had decided to turn off eastwards before reaching Porto, and drive over the mountains into Spain. I would have to wait and see where I spent the night, but I was counting on driving quite a long way.
At the time I was in charge of a theatre, and thought a lot about how I came to decisions. I could see in the rear-view mirror that I was suntanned, but my thoughts were white. Or at least, pale. I had spent the whole summer struggling with a nagging worry: how could I summon up the strength to be in charge of such a difficult and complicated operation as a theatre always is and probably has to be?
I drove along the winding mountain road that forms the border between Portugal and Spain, and by the afternoon I had got as far as the endless plains that lie in the west of Spain: mile after mile of dead-straight road through a scorched landscape. On one stretch I drove over thirty kilometres before coming to a slight, almost indiscernible bend in the road, which then continued in the same never-ending straight line again.
At one point I stopped and sat in the shade of a parched tree. I ate the food I had brought with me, and spent some time fighting off the flies before continuing.
In the evening, when darkness had already fallen, I arrived in Salamanca where I decided I would spend the night. I drove around the town centre and eventually found a hotel that didn’t look too expensive, with a car park quite close by.
The room was very narrow and had probably once been a corridor in a rich family’s home that had been converted into a hotel. But the bed was comfortable. I had a shower, changed my clothes and lay down on the bed. I heard the faint sound of two people quarrelling very quietly – I could only make out the occasional word. They seemed to be bickering over what everybody argues about: money.
I slept for a while and dreamt about the long way I had travelled that day. But there was something odd about the dream, it wasn’t simply a straightforward reproduction of the journey I had made a few hours earlier. The car was the same, as was the landscape; even the news on the radio was a repetition of what I had heard already.
But I wasn’t alone in the car. There was somebody in the seat beside me. There was probably somebody in the back seat, too, but I never dared to turn round and see who it was.
I was driving the car, but I was also sitting in the passenger seat. Myself as a teenager. Neither of us spoke.
I lay there on the bed and tried to work out what message the dream had been trying to convey. I believe that whatever one dreams about is always about oneself, even if there are different people in the dream. This was a message to the effect that myself as a young man was still important for me as an adult. I became increasingly convinced that it was also me sitting in the back seat – but perhaps I hadn’t dared to check in case it was
me as an old man? I couldn’t know for sure.
It was high time for my dinner. I wondered if I ought to ask the receptionist, an elderly man with a club foot, if he could recommend a nearby restaurant, but when his telephone rang I desisted and went out. It was a warm evening. The darkness was as silkily smooth as it can be in southern Europe and Africa. I strolled around the streets, where the evening noises were just the same as everywhere else: laughing or simply loud young people, cars, dogs barking, blaring music from some bar or other. And church bells suddenly penetrating the blanket of sound.
There was something timeless about that evening in Salamanca. I felt relaxed as I usually do when absolutely nobody knows where I am, or who I am.
From Sveg to Salamanca, I remember thinking. A long way from a snowy and melancholy little town in central Norrland to the ancient Spanish town of Salamanca. The journey had taken many years. Nobody could have foreseen that eventually, one warm evening in August, I would be wandering around here looking for a restaurant.
I hesitated in the doorway of several establishments but kept going until I came to an eatery that looked as if it were a sort of local bar, patronised by people who lived in the area and not primarily a restaurant for tourists. I went in and was shown to a rickety little table and chair in the corner. The waiter, who was dressed in black and white, came up and suggested that I might like to eat veal. It was the evening’s best dish, he assured me. He realised that I didn’t speak Spanish but understood a fair amount, and was careful to speak slowly and clearly. He recommended a local wine. I said yes to all his proposals. He was in his sixties, roughly as old as I am now as I write this. His hair was thin, he had a grey moustache and a nose that was strikingly large and pointed. He moved from table to table seemingly unaffected by all the work he had to do.
I ate my veal steak, drank my wine, which was a bit on the sour side, and then had a cup of coffee. Customers started leaving; more and more tables became empty. The long journey and the concentration I had needed to cover the endless stretches of straight road safely had left me tired; I can’t remember a single thought I had while at the table.
—
Suddenly a quarrel broke out at one of the tables. An elderly man and a younger woman began complaining to the waiter in loud voices. There was something wrong with the dessert that had just been served. The man pushed it away angrily and – I think – claimed it was inedible and the fact that it had been served at all was scandalous. The waiter stood there listening, without saying a word – not with his head bowed like a schoolboy ashamed of himself, but all the time eyeing the couple at the table. When the man seemed unable to think of anything else to say, the woman joined in. Her voice was shrill, and as far as I could tell she more or less repeated what the man had said.
All the time the waiter was holding his tray balanced on one hand; it contained used glasses and coffee cups destined for the dishwasher.
What came next happened very quickly. The woman was still complaining in her shrill voice when the waiter suddenly lifted the tray up over his head then flung it down onto the floor, smashing all the glasses and cups. Then he calmly took off his white apron, threw it onto the floor and walked away. He left the restaurant in his shirtsleeves, didn’t turn round, and disappeared.
The silence in the restaurant became even heavier. The chef had come out from the kitchen, but the man at the cash desk hadn’t moved. He shouted to a black man, who emerged from the kitchen wearing rubber gloves and began picking up the bits of broken glass and china. Then the man at the cash desk stood up and apologised to the few remaining customers for what had happened. They all hurried to finish their meals and pay. In the end I was the only one left. The kitchen hand swept up the remaining fragments. I paid the man at the cash desk; he flung out his hands in a gesture of resignation, but still didn’t say anything.
I went out into the Castilian night. On my way back to the hotel I passed through the Plaza Mayor, one of the biggest town squares I have ever seen. There were still a lot of young people around – after all, Salamanca is a city where one-fifth of the residents are students.
Just as I turned off into one of the streets that led to my hotel I saw the waiter who had thrown down his tray and discarded his apron. He was standing in front of one of the travel agencies, studying their illuminated window. He was smoking a cigarette, and seemed to be deep in thought. I stopped and observed him. The window contained posters advertising journeys all over the world.
When he had finished his cigarette and stamped on the glowing butt with his heel, he walked off. I watched as he disappeared into the shadows between two street lamps. I never saw him again.
That night I lay in bed awake for a long time. It was as if the waiter’s sudden violent outburst, his indication that he had endured all he could take, and his determined exit from the restaurant amounted to a challenge for me as well. I was in the middle of my life, at the point one usually reckons is the time when both risks and opportunities are greater than at any other period.
I could see more clearly than ever before that I really must make up my mind how I was going to spend the rest of my life. My allotted time was not as long as it had been ten years previously.
As I lay awake until dawn broke, I flung my symbolic tray onto the floor, took off my apron and went out into the warm night.
It seemed to me that the only really important stories were about breaking free. The breaking free of individuals, or the liberation of whole societies via revolutions or natural catastrophes. I decided that writing was shining my torch into dark corners and doing my best to reveal what others tried to hide.
There are always two types of storyteller who find themselves in constant conflict. One type buries things and hides them, the other digs things up and exposes them.
I eventually fell asleep as dawn broke, and dozed for a few hours. When I woke up I had a sore throat and a temperature. The thought of driving a couple of hundred miles to Milan and then to the coast, northwards towards France, was not attractive. I decided to stay for another night at the reasonably priced hotel.
That evening I went back to the same restaurant. But I didn’t go inside. I could see through the window that an entirely different waiter was working there that evening.
I continued my journey the following day. The road from Sveg to Salamanca had been very long, but now there was also a journey from Salamanca and I didn’t yet know how it would end.
A tray is thrown onto the floor. China and glass are smashed to smithereens.
There is a breaking free. A question is asked.
36
The man who dismounted from his horse
My illness has made me more forgetful than ever. I don’t know how much time I spend every day looking for spectacles, papers, my mobile, packets of tablets, books and half-eaten apples.
But I spent many years looking for a tree without being the slightest bit forgetful.
It was supposed to be somewhere along the old main road between Cambridge and London. There was even supposed to be a plaque marking the spot where a young man dismounted from his horse and sat in the shade of a tree in order to make a life-changing decision.
I never found that tree. Mainly because I never gave myself enough time to search in earnest. I regret that. But I know that it is there, preserved as a memory of somebody about whom history has more or less forgotten.
The man’s name was Thomas Clarkson. Thomas was six years old when his father died. From then on he lived in poverty-stricken circumstances, but received help so that he could study in the Theology faculty of Cambridge University. Nobody doubted that he was very talented and had a deep-seated faith. His future as a clergyman in the Church of England seemed assured.
The modest scholarship Thomas Clarkson had been given was only sufficient to cover the basic necessities. He was always forced to raise money in other ways in order to get by.
One day he saw an announcement about a competition for clergymen requiring
entrants to write an essay on slavery. This was in 1785. The French Revolution would soon take place and proclaim the inhumanity of slavery. In England it was particularly the Quakers who protested more and more vociferously about the assumption that anybody could own other human beings and exploit them accordingly.
Thomas Clarkson decided to take part in the competition. What attracted him most was not the theme, but the possibility of winning a sum of money that would help him to pay his way through university.
Clarkson travelled to Liverpool and interviewed managers of slave-ship companies, and their skippers. He also met in secret slaves who had escaped and now lived extremely difficult lives in the city’s slums.
Not everybody was keen to talk to him. The slave trade had a huge financial turnover, and those who made money out if it were not prepared to risk their lucrative incomes. On one occasion some unidentified people tried to throw Clarkson off a jetty into the sea.
But Thomas Clarkson could no longer fight shy of the facts he had in front of him. His thoughts about the attractive sum of money he might win began to fade, and instead he became obsessed by the sordid lives African slaves were forced to lead on the sugar plantations in the Caribbean or in the cotton fields of the southern USA.
Clarkson wrote in the evenings with a paraffin lamp as his only source of light. In the shadows he could hear the voices of the people he had spoken to and picture the faces he had seen. Among them was the arrogant ship owner who regarded the Africans as just one more form of cargo. Perhaps they were living creatures – but so were goats and exotic animals. He remembered the words of slave-ship captains to the effect that brutality and strict discipline were necessary to ensure that the cargo of black people didn’t cause chaos and unrest, didn’t take part in mutiny or commit suicide by jumping overboard.
But he thought most of all about the slaves who managed to escape and now lived their lives in terror, fearful of being traced and captured and returned to their ‘owners’. How they would be flogged before being placed on a new ship and transported to a destination where they would be auctioned off.