In a Strange Room: Three Journeys Page 0,42

distract his mind. He can already feel the next few days stretching away in these aimless and awful walks of his, there is nothing more sordid than having to use up time.

But then suddenly he is off, running the other way through the crowds. Where does this movement come from, it takes even him by surprise, he is looking for a taxi but none appears out of the dense traffic. He arrives at the bus-station with only minutes to spare and then he has to look for the bus. When he finds it the engine is already running, a man at the door tells him there’s still space. Go in, get a seat, I give you a ticket now. No, no, I want to say goodbye to my friends.

They all get off, assembling at the edge of the road with a dejected air, none of them quite looking at each other. He would like to say something, the perfect single word that contains how he feels, but there isn’t any such word. Instead he says nothing, he makes half-gestures that die before he can complete them, he shakes his head and sighs.

Goodbye, he says.

You will come in Switzerland, yes, Jerome says again.

All of this is spoken flatly, there is no trace of feeling in the whole little scene, and by now the driver is hooting impatiently at them. We have to go, Christian says. Yes, I say, goodbye. I lean forward and grip Jerome by the upper arm and squeeze hard. I promise you I will see you again.

Goodbye.

He and Alice smile at each other, then she turns and goes up the steps. Roderigo reaches out to embrace him, my friend take care of yourself, the odd one out is the most effusive of all.

He walks slowly back through the racket and chaos. It hasn’t dawned on him yet what’s happened. When he gets back to the hotel he pays the proprietor downstairs for another night, and while he’s fumbling through his wallet for change he feels a furtive hand tugging at his fly. He jumps back in fright, the hand belongs to one of the prostitutes, perhaps the same one he saw kissing in the street last night, her vivid lips smile at him in the gloom. I’m just trying to help you, she says.

I don’t need help.

The vehemence of his tone is startling, she makes an ooing noise to mock him, he breaks away and goes up the stairs. Somehow this incident has set his feelings free, a thin column of grief rises in him like mercury. He goes into his room and stares around, then goes out along the balcony to their room. It’s all as it was, the three beds, the fan turning listlessly overhead. He sits down on the edge of a chair. There are bits of paper crumpled on the floor, envelopes, notes, pages from a book, which they dropped while cleaning out their bags, and these solitary white scraps, drifting in the wind from the fan, are sadder to him than anything else that’s happened.

Jerome, if I can’t make you live in words, if you are only the dim evocation of a face under a fringe of hair, and the others too, Alice and Christian and Roderigo, if you are names without a nature, it’s not because I don’t remember, no, the opposite is true, you are remembered in me as an endless stirring and turning. But it’s for this precisely that you must forgive me, because in every story of obsession there is only one character, only one plot. I am writing about myself alone, it’s all I know, and for this reason I have always failed in every love, which is to say at the very heart of my life.

He sits in the empty room, crying.

He’s not prepared for how bad the next few days turn out to be. He spends a lot of time lying on his back on the bed, staring up at the fan on the ceiling. Then he suddenly can’t take it any more and jumps up and goes out into the streets, striding along as if he has a purpose and a destination, but these walks always peter out at some point, often in an alley at the edge of the sea, where he stares into the haze, at a dhow going past.

He goes back to the antique shop a couple of times. The expat, whose name is Charles, is always vague about his plans, but