The Invitation(103)

My destination is a beautiful place – the sort of village in which one might decide to live, even if one was not running away. The foothills of the Alps, with the highest of the peaks still holding that faint tracery of white, a permanent reminder of the winter. But the air is warm, and the light peculiarly bright. It is difficult to imagine the green swards in the valley concealed by snow.

The first shop I come across is a patisserie, and all at once I am ravenously hungry. Until now it has been all about the escape: but now my stomach protests. I have not eaten for twenty-four hours. I buy a loaf of bread, which I take around the corner to a bench and eat like an animal, ripping into it with my teeth. When I think of what those New York acquaintances would think, if they could see the refined Stella Truss now, it makes me smile. When I have taken my fill, I go back into the patisserie, and give his name – counting on it being a small enough place that the woman will know him. She looks at me curiously as she gives her directions. This is apparently not a place used to visitors. I hope she does not remember too much of this. I keep my head bowed.

I am confused, at first, by the appearance of an elderly man at the door. My first thought is that he bears a passing resemblance, but can’t be the same man. Then I realize that it is him. I can’t believe how he has changed. I should have been prepared for this, I know – and yet I am not. My memory has kept him preserved in time, in the same way that it has my father. Would my father be similarly aged had he stayed alive? Impossible to imagine it.

But despite the changes in my own appearance, and the more profound changes in me, he recognizes me straight away.

‘Can it be you,’ he says, moving towards me, ‘little Estrella?’ There are tears in his eyes. ‘I had assumed … I had thought, oh, a terrible thing—’ He speaks in Spanish, and the sound of his voice, unlike everything else about him, is exactly the same.

‘It is me.’ I wait for Aunt Aída to appear behind him, too, but the corridor remains empty.

‘Where—’

‘In Madrid,’ he says, quietly. ‘In the house. There was nothing I could do.’

‘Tino,’ I say, and can’t say any more – but it is enough. My uncle knew him, and loved him, and seeing the shock of it hit him now makes it all new. I loved my aunt. I have come ready with questions, with accusations, ready to lay my pain before him, but now I know that there was great pain for him, too.

He holds out his arms to me and I go toward him, this familiar stranger. And I breathe in the coffee-and-tobacco scent that is so like my father’s, and find that I am crying.

After what could be minutes or hours, he ushers me in, and as we move through the chalet I see that he has filled it with memories of Spain. On the walls are photographs, old posters advertising the toreadors. And there is a photograph …

I look away.

‘It is my favourite photograph of us,’ he says, behind me. He smiles. ‘Of course, sitting next to your father always made me appear fatter and balder than ever.’

I force myself to look back at it. The two men sitting together in our garden. My father, handsomer than even my memory of him. Both broadly smiling for the camera, small cups of coffee on the table between them, the overflowing ashtray suggesting a long afternoon spent in the same spot. I can almost taste that coffee: thick and black in the Turkish style. It was my father’s favourite way to drink it. I remember how he laughed at me when I tried it, and told him it tasted like boiled earth.

There are other photographs. The garden, with the orange blossom in bloom. My father must have been taking the picture, because the rest of us are all there. Tino is very young here. He isn’t looking at the camera. In the corner of the frame I see the thing that has no doubt caught his attention: a furred tail, disappearing out of sight.

Of all the faces in the image, only my uncle and I are left.

He is looking, with me.

‘I sent a telegram,’ I say. ‘I came to Madrid. We came—’ I pause, try to collect myself, ‘We had nowhere else to go, after Papa. The farmhouse wasn’t safe, any more. And I was a child …’

I realize that despite my efforts to remain in control, I am crying again. My life would have been different, I want to say, if you had been there. I know, of course, that this is a false way to think. It was my mistake alone. But I was so young.

‘Little Estrella,’ he says. ‘Peque?a Estrella.’ So strange to hear my name like this, with his use of it tethering the two back together somehow – me to her. ‘I’m so sorry. I had just lost Aída, our house. I knew a man – a Frenchman – who could get me out, but it had to be then. I had a chance, and I took it.’ He puts out his hands, palms facing up, in a gesture of contrition. ‘I can admit that I was afraid. I am not a brave man. I have never pretended to be anything other than a coward.’

‘So you left.’

‘Not before I had tried to make contact with you and your brother. I sent a telegram myself. I had a feeling that if you had survived I would hear of you. Or you would see Gregorio’s book, somehow, and know … and come to find me.’ He looks at me, hopefully. ‘And you did.’

I look at him, this elderly man who is in some ways exactly as I remember him – his short-sighted squint, the uniform of the badly buttoned cardigan with the poorly matched shirt. And yet so terribly changed, at the same time: hunched and crumpled by age, and perhaps a little by his guilt, too.