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Madness is contagious, thought Amalfitano, sitting on the
floor of his front porch as the sky grew suddenly overcast and the moon and the
stars disappeared, along with the ghostly lights that are famously visible
without binoculars or telescope in northern
Sonora
and southern
Arizona
.

After a week Imma still wasn't back. Lola imagined her
tiny, impassively staring, with her face like an educated peasant's or a high
school teacher's looking out over a vast prehistoric field, a woman near fifty,
dressed in black, walking without looking to either side, without looking back,
through a valley where it was still possible to distinguish the tracks of the
great predators from the tracks of the scurrying herbivores. She imagined her
stopped at a crossroads as the trucks with their many tons of cargo passed at
full speed, raising dust clouds that didn't touch her, as if her hesitance and
vulnerability constituted a state of grace, a dome that protected her from the
inclemencies of fate, nature, and her fellow beings. On the ninth day the owner
of the boardinghouse kicked her out. After that she slept at the railroad
station, or in an abandoned warehouse where some tramps slept, each keeping to
himself, or in the open country, near the border between the asylum and the
outside world. One night she hitchhiked to the cemetery and slept in an empty
niche. The next morning she felt happy and lucky and she decided to wait there
for Imma to come back. She had water to drink and wash her face and brush her
teeth, she was near the asylum, it was a peaceful spot. One afternoon, as she
was laying a shirt that she had just washed out to dry on a white slab propped
against the cemetery wall, she heard voices coming from a mausoleum, and she
went to see what was happening. The mausoleum belonged to the Lagasca family,
and judging by the state it was in, the last of the Lagascas had long since
died or moved far away. Inside the crypt she saw the beam of a flashlight and
she asked who was there.

Christ, it's you, she heard a voice say inside. She thought
it might be thieves or workers restoring the mausoleum or grave robbers, then
she heard a kind of meow and when she was about to turn away she saw
Larrazabal's sallow face at the barred door of the crypt. Then a woman came
out. Larrazabal ordered her to wait for him by his car, and for a while he and
Lola talked and strolled arm in arm along the cemetery paths until the sun
began to drop behind the worn edges of the niches.

Madness really is contagious, and friends are a blessing,
especially when you're on your own. It was in these words, years before, in a
letter with no postmark, that Lola had told Amalfitano about her chance
encounter with Larrazabal, which ended with him forcing her to accept a loan of
ten thousand pesetas and promising to come back the next day, before he got in
his car, motioning to the prostitute who was waiting impatiently for him to do
the same. That night Lola slept in her niche, although she was tempted to try
the open crypt, happy because things were looking up. The next morning, she
scrubbed herself all over with a wet rag, brushed her teeth, combed her hair,
put on clean clothes, then went out to the highway to hitchhike to Mondragon.
In town she bought some goat cheese and bread and had breakfast in the square,
hungrily, since she honestly couldn't remember the last time she'd eaten. Then
she went into a bar full of construction workers and had coffee. She'd
forgotten when Larrazabal had said he'd come to the cemetery, but that didn't
matter, and in the same distant way, Larrazabal and the cemetery and the town
and the tremulous early morning landscape didn't matter to her either. Before
she left the bar she went into the bathroom and looked at herself in the
mirror. She walked back to the highway and stood there waiting until a woman
stopped and asked where she was going. To the asylum, said Lola. Her reply
clearly took the woman aback, but she told her to get in nevertheless. That's
where she was going. Are you visiting someone or are you an inmate? she asked
Lola. I'm visiting, answered Lola. The woman's face was thin and long, her
almost nonexistent lips giving her a cold, calculating look, although she had
nice cheekbones and she dressed like a professional woman who is no longer
single, who has a house, a husband, maybe even a child to care for. My father
is there, she confessed.
 
Lola didn't say
anything. When they reached the entrance, Lola got out of the car and the woman
went on alone. For a while Lola wandered along the edge of the asylum grounds.
She heard the sound of horses and she guessed that somewhere, on the other side
of the woods, there must be a riding club or school. At a certain point she
spotted the red-tiled roof of a house that wasn't part of the asylum. She
retraced her steps. She returned to the section of fence that gave the best
view of the grounds. As the sun rose higher in the sky she saw a tight knot of
patients emerge from a slate outbuilding, then they scattered to the benches in
the park and lit cigarettes. She thought she saw the poet. He was with two
inmates and he was wearing jeans and a very tight white T-shirt. She waved to
him, shyly at first, as if her arms I were stiff from the cold, then openly,
tracing strange patterns in the still-cold air, trying to give her signals a
laserlike urgency, trying to transmit telepathic messages in his direction.
Five minutes later, she watched as
 
the
poet got up from his bench and one of the lunatics kicked him in the
 
legs. With an effort she resisted the urge to
scream. The poet turned around and kicked back. The lunatic, who was sitting
down again, took it in the chest and dropped like a little bird. The inmate
smoking next to him got up and chased the poet for thirty feet, aiming kicks at
his ass
 
and throwing punches at his
back. Then he returned calmly to his seat, where the other inmate had revived
and was rubbing his chest, neck, and head, which anyone would call excessive,
since he had been kicked only in the chest. At that moment Lola stopped
signaling. One of the lunatics on the bench began to masturbate. The other one,
the one in exaggerated pain, felt in one of his pockets and pulled out a
cigarette. The poet approached them. Lola thought she heard his laugh. An ironic
laugh, as if he were saying: boys, you can't take a joke. But maybe the poet
wasn't laughing. Maybe, Lola said in her letter to Amalfitano, it was my
madness that was laughing. In any case, whether it was her madness or not, the
poet went over to the other two and said something to them. Neither of the
lunatics answered. Lola saw them: they were looking down, at the life throbbing
at ground level, between the blades of grass and under the loose clumps of
dirt. A blind life in which everything had the transparency of water. The poet,
however, must have scanned the faces of his companions in misfortune, first one
and then the other, looking for a sign that would tell him whether it was safe
for him to sit down
on the bench again. Which he
finally did. He raised his hand in a gesture of truce or surrender and he sat
between the other two. He raised his hand the way someone might raise a
tattered flag. He moved his fingers, each finger, as if his fingers were a flag
in flames, the flag of the un-vanquished. And he sat between them and then he
looked at the one who was masturbating and said something into his ear. This
time Lola couldn't hear him but she saw clearly how the poet's left hand groped
its way into the other inmate's robe. And then she watched the three of them
smoke. And she watched the artful spirals issuing from the poet's mouth and
nose.

The next and final letter Amalfitano received from his wife
wasn't postmarked but the stamps were French. In it Lola recounted a
conversation with Larrazabal. Christ, you're lucky, said Larrazabal, my whole
life I've wanted to live in a cemetery, and look at you, the minute you get
here, you move right in. A good person, Larrazabal. He invited her to stay at
his apartment. He offered to drive her each morning to the Mondragon asylum,
where
Spain
's
greatest and most self-deluding poet was studying osteology. He offered her
money without asking for anything in return. One night he took her to the
movies. Another night he went with her to the boardinghouse to ask whether
there was any word from Imma. Once, late one Saturday night, after they'd made
love for hours, he proposed to her and he didn't feel offended or stupid when
Lola reminded him that she was already married. A good person, Larrazabal. He
bought her a skirt at a little street fair and he bought her some brand-name
jeans at a store in downtown
San
Sebastian
. He talked to her about his mother, whom
he'd loved dearly, and about his siblings, to whom he wasn't close. None of
this had much of an effect on Lola, or rather it did, but not in the way he had
hoped. For her, those days were like a prolonged parachute landing after a long
space flight. She went to Mondragon once every three days now, instead of once
a day, and she looked through the fence with no hope at all of seeing the poet,
seeking at most some sign, a sign that she knew beforehand she would never
understand or that she would understand only many years later, when none of it
mattered anymore. Sometimes, without calling first or leaving a note, she wouldn't
sleep at Larrazabal's apartment and he would go looking for her at the
cemetery, the asylum, the old boardinghouse where she'd stayed, the places
where the tramps and transients of San Sebastian gathered. Once he found her in
the waiting room of the train station. Another time he found her sitting on a
seafront bench at La Concha, at an hour when the only people out walking were
two opposite types: those running out of time and those with time to burn. In
the morning it was Larrazabal who made breakfast. At night, when he came home
from work, he was the one who made dinner. During the day Lola drank only
water, lots of it, and ate a little piece of bread or a roll small enough to
fit in her pocket, which she would buy at the corner bakery before she went
roaming. One night, as they were showering, she told Larrazabal that she was
planning to leave and asked him for money for the train. I'll give you
everything I've got, he answered, but I can't give you money to go away so I
never see you again. Lola didn't insist. Somehow, though she didn't tell
Amalfitano how she did it, she scraped together just enough money for a ticket,
and one day at noon she took the train to
France
. She was in
Bayonne
for a while. She left for Landes. She
returned to
Bayonne
.
She was in
Pau
and in
Lourdes
. One morning she saw a train full of
sick people, paralyzed people, adolescents with cerebral palsy, farmers with
skin cancer, terminally ill Castilian bureaucrats, polite old ladies dressed
like Carmelite nuns, people with rashes, blind children, and without knowing
how she began to help them, as if she were a nun in jeans stationed there by
the church to aid and direct the desperate, who one by one got on buses parked
outside the train station or waited in long lines as if each person were a
scale on a giant and old and cruel but vigorous snake. Then trains came from
Italy and from the north of France, and Lola went back and forth like a
sleepwalker, her big blue eyes unblinking, moving slowly, since the weariness
of her days was beginning to weigh on her, and she was permitted entry to every
part of the station, some rooms converted into first aid posts, others into
resuscitation posts, and just one, discreetly located, converted into an
improvised morgue for the bodies of those whose strength hadn't been equal to
the accelerated wear and tear of the train trip. At night she slept in the most
modern building in Lourdes, a functionalist monster of steel and glass that
buried its head, bristling with antennas, in the white clouds that floated down
from the north, big and sorrowful, or marched from the west like a ragtag army
whose only strength was its numbers, or dropped down from the Pyrenees like the
ghosts of dead beasts. There she would sleep in the trash compartments, which
she entered through a tiny door. Other times she would stay at the station, at
the station bar, when the chaos of the trains subsided, and let the old men buy
her coffee and talk to her about movies and crops. One afternoon she thought
she saw Imma get off the train from
Madrid
escorted by a troop of cripples. She was the same height as Imma, she was
wearing long black skirts like Imma, her doleful Castilian nun's face was just
like Imma's face. Lola sat still until she had gone by and didn't call out to
her, and five minutes later she elbowed her way out of the
Lourdes
station and the town of
Lourdes
and walked to the highway and only then did she try to thumb a ride.

For five years, Amalfitano had no news of Lola. One
afternoon, when he was at the playground with his daughter, he saw a woman
leaning against the wooden fence that separated the playground from the rest of
the park. He thought she looked like Imma and he followed her gaze and was
relieved to discover that it was another child who had attracted her madwoman's
attention. The boy was wearing shorts and was a little older than Amalfitano's
daughter, and he had dark, very silky hair that kept falling in his face.
Between the fence and the benches that the city had put there so parents could
sit and watch their children, a hedge struggled to grow, reaching all the way
to an old oak tree outside the playground. Imma's hand, her hard, gnarled hand,
roughened by the sun and icy rivers, stroked the freshly clipped top of the
hedge as one might stroke a dog's back. Next to her was a big plastic bag.
Amalfitano walked toward her, willing himself futilely to be calm. His daughter
was in line for the slide. Suddenly, before he could speak to Imma, Amalfitano
saw that the boy had at last noticed her watchful presence, and once he had
brushed a lock of hair out of his eyes he raised his right arm and waved to her
several times. Then Imma, as if this were the sign she'd been waiting for,
silently raised her left arm, waved, and went walking out of the park through the
north gate, which led onto a busy street.