I don’t know how long I spent wandering around. I wondered if they had started searching for me. Or if they hadn’t called the register and noticed that I was absent. I didn’t have a best friend who would miss me. I hadn’t lived in the town with six cinemas for long enough to have made a best friend.
I don’t think I became really frightened that evening. Perhaps the gathering dusk was scary because it made it all the more necessary to find my way as soon as possible. But I’m not sure. Anyway, I continued searching because there wasn’t really anything else I could do.
I suddenly heard voices. I stopped and listened. It was a man and a woman speaking Finnish to each other. The voices drew nearer. Then I noticed a path going right past where I was standing. I ducked down behind a fallen, half-rotten tree and saw a couple in their forties carrying two paper carrier bags. I remembered now that on the way to the yellow conference centre we had passed a few newly built houses that seemed to have been scattered at random in the forest, and I had wondered if all the dressmakers from Finland who worked at Algots clothing factory in Borås might live there.
When the Finns had passed by I followed the path and duly found the conference centre. The bus we had come in had left now, and the yellow building seemed deserted. But then a man emerged onto the stairs, smoking a pipe. He must have heard me walking over the crunching gravel.
‘The Prodigal Son!’ he said. ‘Did you get lost?’
‘I must have done.’
‘Because you took a short cut?’
‘Yes, I couldn’t find my way.’
‘Short cuts can be dangerous,’ he said. ‘You can get there quicker, but you can also get lost and never get to where you want to go.’
‘Have they been looking for me?’
‘They waited for a while, then I said I’d find you.’
He drew on his pipe and whistled softly. A dog came trotting out of the building.
‘Stella can find anything or anybody,’ he said. ‘She has a fantastic sense of smell. I thought I’d wait for half an hour before letting her out, but you’ve managed to find your way back yourself. I’ll ring your teacher and then call a taxi – the school has paid for it.’
I soon forgot about the goings-on in the forest. A bit of teasing from my classmates and a stern look from my teacher was all that happened. I suppose I thought the incident wasn’t that significant.
But many years later I suddenly started dreaming about that yellow conference centre and my wanderings through the forest. In the dreams it was all very scary. The Finnish-speaking man and woman became a threat who would attack me if they saw me. The trees and the soft ground underfoot concealed old mantraps that could open up at any moment. When I came to the conference centre it was deserted. Everything was locked, and I couldn’t get in. Then it suddenly became very cold, as if spring had faded away and it was midwinter again with severe frosts.
The dream kept coming back over and over again. I tried to interpret its message as if it had been a traumatic experience, but deep down I didn’t believe it.
Now that I have cancer I understand that feeling of being lost. I am in a labyrinth where there are no ways in or out. Being stricken with a severe illness is to be lost inside one’s own body. Something is happening over which you have no control.
Some years ago I went back to look for that yellow conference centre. It took me a few hours to find it, but it was still there – just as yellow, even if the paint was flaking off a bit. Now it belonged to an evangelical church. I strolled around for a while. The forest path had been replaced by quite a large road following a slightly different route, but the trees and blocks of stone were still where they had been. And the houses scattered around were still there as before.
I wondered what had happened to the Finnish dressmaker and her husband. Were they still alive?
I don’t know, of course.
So many questions. So few answers.
43
The road to Salamanca, Part 2
In my dreams I can still drive along those long, straight stretches of road from the mountain border between Portugal and Spain.
In the dreams the road is just as long as it was in reality: the dream hasn’t shortened the distance.
My memory of that day and night in Salamanca is not restricted to the incident of the waiter who suddenly decided he’d had enough and took off his apron. I have another recollection, just as remarkable in its way.
It happened the following day. It also took place at a cafe, one that served a few dishes in a room whose walls were covered in colourful photographs of handsome-looking racehorses.
I sat down at a pavement table. It was shortly after breakfast had finished, and a lot of chairs were unoccupied. I ordered a cup of coffee and began thinking about my onward journey. I thought if I had the strength I would drive as far as Lyon that day – but I realised that in that case I ought to have set off several hours ago. I told myself that passing over the French border would be far enough. I wasn’t in that much of a hurry.
Haste is nearly always an outcome of imagined human necessity.
I noticed a lady in her sixties sitting alone at a table. She had a large glass of milk in front of her. Next to it was a glass of sherry. I watched her pour the sherry into the milk, then stir it with a long spoon.
She was elegantly dressed, with a sparkling bracelet and necklace – I couldn’t tell if they were genuinely expensive jewellery, of course.
Then I noticed that she was frightened – so much so that her hands were shaking. I could see that from as far away as my own table. Or if she wasn’t afraid, she must be in considerable pain, I decided. In any case, it was disturbing.
She was completely absorbed in her own emotions. She seemed not to be aware of passing traffic or people walking along the pavement. Her shaking hands marked the border of a world that was not hers at all.
She didn’t touch her glass of milk. I’m still not sure why she fascinated me – perhaps her unapproachability and my curiosity as to why she so obviously wanted to shut out the rest of the world?
A police car with screaming sirens raced past, but she didn’t react at all.
I must have been sitting there watching her for ten minutes when a waiter went up to her table and said something to her. She jumped to her feet and almost knocked over the glass of milk, but the waiter managed to catch it. She was inside the cafe in a flash, and when I turned to look I could see through the window that she had hastened up to the bar and taken a telephone receiver from the barman. She listened intently without saying anything herself.
It was a short call. She put down the receiver and flopped down onto a chair. I now had an explanation: she had been waiting for a message and was afraid of what it might say, but now she had received it and it was as bad as she had feared.
But I was wrong. I learnt there in that cafe in Salamanca that expressions of happiness and sorrow can be identical. Joy can appear to be relief, sorrow to be resignation – the person’s reaction is the same.
She returned to the table with the glass of milk she had laced with sherry, sat down and drank half of it in one gulp. Her hands were no longer shaking. The whole of her face radiated relief – I have seldom seen anybody exuding such calm and yet jubilant happiness.
She was suddenly in a hurry. She placed some money on the table, left the remaining half of the milk and sherry, stood up and walked quickly off along the pavement.
Then I did something that still surprises me although I freely admit that I can be very curious about things that are none of my business – curiosity is an important source of inspiration for me. I beckoned to the waiter and asked him in my poor Spanish if he knew who the woman was that had been sitting there with the glass of milk. He nodded.
‘Señora Carmen,’ he said. ‘She usually comes with her husband, but he is very ill. She just heard on the telephone that he’s not going to die. Now she’s gone off to her hat shop in order to open it up for customers. I’m so pl
eased for her. They have no children, only each other.’
I paid and left. An hour later I managed to worm my way out of town via the complicated web of roads and set off northwards.
That happened almost thirty years ago. I have never returned to Salamanca – but I sometimes think I ought to. As a sort of pilgrimage. We all have our Meccas, which don’t necessarily have anything to do with religious thoughts and emotions.
In Salamanca I saw somebody cause an incident and make a break with his life so far. But I also saw that calm, almost invisible happiness on the face of a woman who learnt that she wasn’t going to be left on her own.
I was about thirty-five at the time. Now I am almost twice that. Much in my life is still uncertain. There is of course no doubt that I have lived over half my life, nor that the most important decisions have already been made. I am not going to change my profession. There might be various hiccups, of course, but I can quite confidently tell myself that this is what my life will have been like.
I shall never visit Salamanca again. Other people will sit at a cafe table and watch somebody drink a glass of milk laced with sherry. Or visit a local bar where a waiter suddenly decides he’s had enough and takes off his apron.
Growing older involves looking back. The memory of events and people can be experienced in different ways – like when you reread a book that you have read several times before. You always discover something new.
Since I was diagnosed with cancer I find myself more and more frequently noticing something unexpected in the memories that come to mind. It is only now that I see the waiter and Señora Carmen with the glass of milk with such clarity. Earlier their contours were blurred, but no longer. They have become images frozen in great detail. The waiter’s apron has stood still in the air, like a broken-off wing. Señora Carmen’s shaking hands stick out like claws.
Life is a tumult constantly changing between what frightens me and what brings me joy. If we are lucky we are able to create good memories during our lives – even if there are far too many people in the world who are forced to forget in order to live.
I shall never return to Salamanca. Nevertheless it feels as if I am always on my way there. In secret.
PART III
THE PUPPET ON A STRING
44
The earth floor
I once sat by a bed in which a seventeen-year-old girl was fading away.
The bed was a mattress covered by a tattered sheet. As it was very hot in the room she had only a thin piece of cloth over her. The mattress was lying on the earth floor.
There was no electricity. When I entered the room I was carrying a flickering candle.
Her mother and her siblings were sitting outside the little house in front of a fire on which they were preparing their food: a rice and vegetable stew.
None of them seemed to realise that their eldest sister was dying. They hoped I would take a look at the girl and assure them that she would soon be fit and well again.
She had been infected with HIV, and now it had developed into Aids. In the poverty-stricken African country where she and I lived at the time there was no chance of helping her. It was before the antiretroviral medication had been created.
She had a boyfriend who worked in South Africa, and had caught the disease from him. Now she was going to die.
I squatted down beside her in the darkness. She was lying with her eyes open, as if staring at some distant goal. Or perhaps she couldn’t see anything at all? She was so exhausted that her mother and siblings had to carry her whenever she needed to go to the latrine.
I remember the first time I ever saw her: that was three years earlier, and she was fourteen. She was already very beautiful.
But she was not beautiful any more. She was emaciated, and her face was covered in sores from countless attack of herpes. Her hair had started to fall out.
It’s now twenty years since she lay there, staring at some mysterious unknown goal. In my memory it is a faded black-and-white photograph. The image of her face is slowly fading away.
I have occasionally thought about her over the years. About how old she would have been if she had lived, what she would have done with her life, what she would have looked like.
I’ve thought about her as I have done about others who have died. I’ve never understood why you should have to stop mixing with dead people or having them as friends simply because they no longer exist as living beings. As long as I remember them they are alive.
Carlos Cardoso, the brilliant African journalist, was murdered in the street in broad daylight in Maputo fifteen years ago. He had exposed and challenged the widespread corruption among politicians who mixed with criminals. They condemned him to death and executed him.
I speak to Carlos almost every day. The conversations take place inside my head, but he is there and still of great significance as one of my best friends.
But this spring, when I received the first cycle of chemotherapy in what is called my ‘basic treatment’, I often thought about that girl who died. More often than ever. I started to wonder if I saw my own death in hers, even if it was hardly likely that I would conclude my days on an earth floor in a dark room with only a candle as a source of light.
In my memory I return over and over again to that evening when I saw her for the last time. Perhaps there was something there which I found meaningful for myself?
—
Nobody had invited me to the little village outside Maputo where she lived. I had got to know her and her family by chance after meeting one of her younger sisters who had lost both legs in a horrendous accident when she stepped on a landmine. I wrote about that girl, whose name was Sofia, in several books. Whenever I visited Sofia and her family, the older sister, Rosa, would be out in the distant field tending the vegetable patch the family lived off.
On this occasion, I had been sitting in my damp-ridden flat in Maputo, preparing for rehearsals we were going to have at the theatre the following day. The urge came from nowhere. Suddenly, I simply knew that I had to drive out to the village that same night. So I did.
In the end it dawned on me why I so often think about Rosa now. I remember sitting down on the floor next to her mattress and pressing the candle down into the earth floor to keep it steady. We said nothing. The only sound to be heard was the murmuring of her family as they sat round the fire outside their hovel. And her own panting breath, as if each one caused her almost intolerable strain. I tried to imagine what she was thinking, and what she might be seeing in the darkness.
When she eventually turned her face towards me and I could look her in the eye, I heard myself asking her a question.
‘Are you afraid of What’s in store for you?’
I could have bitten my tongue off. You don’t ask a dying person, especially a seventeen-year-old who has not yet even had the chance to start living seriously, if they are afraid.
I think she smiled when she replied.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not afraid. What should I be afraid of? I’ll soon be up and about again. I’ll soon be well.’
A week later she was dead. One of her younger sisters had hitched a lift into town in a lorry and was waiting outside the theatre when I concluded the rehearsals. She mumbled in her low, shy voice that Rosa was dead.
I wasn’t surprised, of course. Nevertheless, I burst into tears. Some of the actors who came out through the stage door were scared; they had never seen me cry before. Perhaps they thought that white men never cry?
I understand now, as I fight my battle with cancer, that I keep asking myself the same question that I put to Rosa. How afraid am I? Do I also reject the fact that death is always standing in the wings, as a possibility, once a cancer diagnosis has been made?
I don’t know. But I think I try to be true to myself. No doubt I am afraid. High storm waves could come from nowhere at any moment and crash against my inner and outer coastlines.
I have tried to build up defences to ward off what scares me.
If the worst should happen, if the cancerous tumours multiply and can’t be stopped, I shall die. There is nothing I can do apart from summoning up the same courage that is necessary to lead a decent life. One of the most important arguments for maintaining this dignity and trying to stay calm is that I’m not seventeen years old and doomed to die before I’ve even started living seriously. At sixty-six I have lived longer than most people in the world can even dream of doing. I have lived a long life, even if sixty-six is not as old as it once was.
When I leaf through an old copy of the magazine När Var Hur (‘When Where How’) from 1964 and read about ‘those we have lost this year’ I find that the majority of them were aged between sixty and seventy. There are a few eighty-year-olds, but not nearly so many as there would be today.
One thing that can be frightening of course is that death can be painful. But there are fewer reasons to fear that than there were ten years ago. There are not many pains that can’t be kept in check nowadays.
There is also a final way out that makes me feel secure when I think about it. If an intolerable pain cannot be prevented, I can ask to be put to sleep. Then I would fall asleep and bid farewell to life and the world. Rather that than feel myself compelled to commit suicide. I don’t want to do that for the sake of my nearest and dearest. If I were alone, that could perhaps have been a possibility: but not as things are now.
My deepest fear is something quite different. Silly, childish. I’m afraid of being dead for such a long time. It is a pointless fear, almost embarrassing. In death there is no time, no space, no anything. My role in the long-dance of death will be over. I shall have fallen off the staircase of life on the final step.
But perhaps that is the most confidence-inspiring aspect of death? That my fear is based on a meaningless presumption that death will be reminiscent of life? That the same laws and same concepts would apply? Which they won’t.