AGURRA

“What do you want to do, then, just leave it?” said Larrea. He was having a shower and the hot water was reddening the skin on his arms and shoulders.

“You know I don’t” she said from the stool in the bathroom. She was wrapped in a large towel, and was smoking a cigarette.

“I don’t think we’ve got much option,” said Larrea, turning off the shower. ”I can’t ask you to join my organization, and it’s the same with you, you can’t ask me to join yours. No one would take it seriously. Besides, I really don’t think they’d let me in.”

The geranium on the other side of the window appeared and disappeared depending on Larrea’s movements in the bath.

“The way you put it, we only have two alternatives,” she said. “We can either disobey the order and stay together, or we can say goodbye right now.”

For the first time since that meeting in the aristocrat’s house, there was tension between them.

“We mustn’ t go thinking we’re Romeo and Juliet. We’re not a couple of adolescents,” said Larrea, picking up a towel and drying himself. He was smiling, but it wasw as if he were smiling to himself.

“How old were Romeo and Juliet?” she asked him. The decision they were about to take made her voice sound hoarse, huskier than usual.

“I don´t know about Romeo, but Juliet was about fifteen or sixteen.”

“Then it’s true. They were much younger than we are. Anyway, I’m going to get dressed.”

She got up from the stool and left the bathroom.

“I suppose you think I don’t mind,” Larrea said as she was walking down the corridor.

After that, the scene in the dream changed again, and moved from the bathroom to the Plaza Condorcet, where the house was. She saw Larrea leaving to look for his car while she, standing on the pavement, was wondering what would happen next. Would he leave immediately, without saying goodbye? Ever since that first time, when their hands had met in the darkness, their goodbyes had always followed the same pattern: Larrea would wind down his car window, and, a few yards before he caught up with her, he would stretch out his arm and she would reach out too and their hands would lightly touch.

Larrea drove out of the car park and, keeping to their ritual, he opened his window and put out his arm. For her part, she stepped out on to the road and prepared herself for that gesture of farewell. But for some reason, it didn’t work that day. Their two hands didn’t touch.

Larrea braked, as if he were going to stop in order to repeat their goodbyes, but in the end he drove on. She didn’t know how to react either and simply watched him drive off.

She would never again see her love. He would die about a fortnight later trying to disembark on a beach in Vizcaya. According to the rumours, the police had set a trap.

Zeru horiek, Bernardo Atxaga