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  Before the elderly guard could reach him, he walked off.

  * * *

  An oasis in the desert! The garden of the thousand and one trees. The garden of deep shadow and a hundred lighter shadows that dance in the sun. The garden full of bitter and sweet fruit, a kind you have never tasted. You step up close to the garden gate. No, you have to keep your distance. They might see you from the windows of the white house, and there is still plenty of time to go before the hour she appointed for the meeting. Here they have garage space for several cars. The garage doors are closed, you don’t know if they have guests. How does Patricia live? Alone? No. With a husband and children? Yet she seems so untraditional, so unconventional … What must her studio be like? Does it have windows that look onto the garden, or is it one of those that doesn’t have an opening at eye level, so the painter doesn’t get distracted, leaving her captive like a medieval princess who’s been locked in a castle tower by her cruel father, the king? You walk around the house and the garden … and you begin to feel like a guard dog; so you take the path leading off to the left, toward the valley in which a ditch marks the existence of a stream. Everything is dead, made of stone. It is the end of life, the end of the world … not after the Flood but rather after a fire.

  * * *

  It wasn’t too difficult to get Patricia Pavloff’s address: Vadim went to see her art dealer and asked his advice regarding the planned biography about her and her work.

  “Start working on it as soon as you can!” the dealer said enthusiastically. “You are just the right person for the job: an American or European wouldn’t be able to fully understand her Russian roots; but you can.”

  “But …”

  “But what?”

  “She’s forty, tops. Does it make sense to write a biography about such a young artist? I’m not so sure. At forty, you haven’t lived long enough, you’re at the stage where you’re still finding out who you are.”

  “That might be the case when you’re forty. But Patricia Pavloff is fifty-three years old.”

  They heard the bell of the church opposite: fifty-three tolls on the hard copper, majestic tolls like the blows of a drum announcing the name of the new king on the main square. Fifty-three years old. Eighteen years older than him. Bang, bang.

  “Right,” he said, somewhat uncertain of himself, “so a biographical sketch would be justified.” He looked at the address. Spain. Why had Patricia abandoned her native Chicago to go to Spain? The address was a P.O. box number in a town called Sitges.

  “It’s about twenty-five miles south of Barcelona, by the sea. But she lives inland, quite a way out of this town, Sitges,” the dealer explained.

  Vadim wrote a long letter to Patricia in which he told her about his project and many other things. He wanted to correspond with her. He didn’t get a reply. He wrote another, shorter, letter. Nothing. A third one, sober, concise. No response at all. He sent her an e-mail, and yet another, with the same result. He couldn’t get started on this project that he was growing more and more enthusiastic about as the days went by. Everything seemed to have come to a halt because of the painter’s unavailability, so Vadim thought, and he closed the folder containing his project.

  * * *

  Olive trees that look like old women with arthritic joints, olive trees like black monks, olive trees—ghosts of the desert. And the cry of the ghosts: the racket of the invisible crickets. You say a few words and the breeze tears it out of your mouth before you can so much as hear it. The sun blinds your eyes painfully, that savage, terrible sun, yes, terrible, because it lights up everything and burns and destroys. Under this scorching sun, only the trees with arthritic arms and thick leaves stay alive, even though they seem to crouch under the flaming beams. Yes, a little like when in winter, the bushes and the woods from where you come from, there in the north, send their prayers to the sky begging for a sign of mercy in the form of a cozy blanket of snow. Il faut connaître les pays dans leur saison violente, someone once said. That’s true. Only when you get to know a country during its harshest season can you understand the essence of the land and its people. Patricia knew Petersburg like that, and you are now discovering the Mediterranean at a time when its flowing landscape is being cruelly punished.

  * * *

  Sitges … you’d imagined it differently. As if it were a fishing village. In Petersburg, in a travel agency, you saw a photo of the blue sky against which the golden tower of the church stood out, together with the green sea and the white beaches, with splashes here and there of colorful boats and fishing nets spread under palm trees that were forever laughing. A typical travel agent’s image. But … one of those palm trees winked at you: like a little demon, like a girlfriend you just met, it winked at you with its right eye as it raised the right corner of its mouth and wiggled its upturned nose. At that moment, you knew that it was giving you a sign, and that it would not be long before you set off on a long journey in search of its invisible shadow. You knew that this advertising image had well and truly gotten to you.

  During the long journey from Petersburg to Prague and from Prague to Barcelona, you imagined that the sea, that sea that you had just seen in the photo, was stuck to the beach and that you would unstick it: quite simply, you would take a hold of it with your fingers and unstick it from the white sand and have a look at what was hiding under that carpet woven with little grinning waves. And then you would take a teaspoon, as if you wanted to taste that reign of Poseidon; you thought about Ulysses and his shipwrecks and about Ariadna and her desperation. You promised yourself that every day you would get up at dawn to go and taste the sea, in spoonfuls, as if it were peach jam, as if it were walnut and chocolate ice cream. Good morning, Mister Dalí!

  * * *

  Vadim spent whole days walking along the beach and the promenade, under the palm trees. He was searching obsessively for his palm tree and his painter: when he wasn’t looking upward he looked the summer tourists straight in the eyes to see if he could find the black pistils of a tulip in them. Some of the people who were spending their vacation there had noticed this, and they started calling him the lunatic. He also searched for her in the local galleries. They knew her, certainly, they pronounced her name in the Catalan fashion, Paulòf, with an open ‘o’ and a veneration that was almost religious. Both things made him laugh. Until one day, in the library, of which Patricia was a member, the librarian, who had short hair and red-framed spectacles, smiled like a naughty girl and gave him Patricia’s phone number, and, what was more, wished him a good vacation.

  He dialed the number ten times a day, but all he got by way of an answer was an unknown voice, recorded on the answering machine. In English and badly pronounced Spanish. A couple of times he left his name and the phone number of the guest house where he was staying. Ten times a day he asked the receptionist if anybody had left a message for him. The woman burst out laughing as soon as she saw him and called him a lunatic behind his back. The Russian lunatic, hee hee hee!

  One day, when he was out having a walk, he noticed a terrace restaurant that had a tulip on every table. Blue, made of plastic. With black pistils inside. He remembered the red tulips that had been taken down a while ago from an art gallery in Saint Petersburg, he imagined that chapel of fire in which he had immersed himself like a pilgrim seeking refuge from the wind in the ruins of a monastery. He took it as a sign. He stayed there, waiting.

  And that was when he saw her. First he noticed her blonde hair, scattered by the breeze. Tanned skin the color of milk chocolate, a narrow black ribbon around her neck, a black camisole with narrow straps. Now she was no longer Cleopatra. More like Diana. An Amazon woman. She was having lunch on the terrace of a restaurant, accompanied by a dark-skinned woman, from the south of Spain, perhaps, or rather from some North African country or from Turkey, and by a couple who never stopped laughing.

  Although he had a table reserved for lunch in the dining-room of his guest house, and two Irish women who lived on the first floor
were waiting there for him, although he was wearing nothing but a bathing suit that could be taken as a pair of shorts, Vadim decided that he preferred not to have lunch and to let the midday sun burn his skin rather than move away from her, now that he had found her. He walked up and down on the opposite side of the pavement, while the sun set everything on fire, even though it was already five in the afternoon. Up and down and back again, whole mountains of waves with white hats, the church behind, surrounded by houses and palaces that reminded one of Italy, the smell of suntan cream … the dolce far niente of all the European nations on vacation. Up and down, to the other end of the beach, and then back again along the promenade … his hair clung to him like a bearskin, streams of sweat burned his cheeks … Up and down, up and down, to and fro, while the Amazon woman sat and laughed, with a cigarette in one hand, and tasted her white wine with little sips under the shadow of a great white umbrella that was open over the table. Il faut connaître les pays dans leur saison violente … up and down, and back again … even the swallows seemed to have hidden themselves under the eaves, more intelligent than the bodies getting toasted on the beaches. To and fro, to and fro …

  Finally, they got up from the table. Six in the afternoon, he thought. Patricia looked straight at him. She had probably been warned that there was a man who was marching around her like the Queen of England’s royal guard; the only thing missing was his busby. The couple had gone on ahead. Patricia walked arm in arm with the dark-skinned woman. Vadim went up to them, timid and trembling. The Arab woman unlinked her arm and walked a little apart, discreet. Patricia didn’t remember him.

  Of course, that was it! Then, in winter, he was white as snow, like all people who come from the north. In Sitges, on the other hand, the sun had transformed him into a chestnut fresh off the grill. And he’d lost weight, with all that heat. Vadim reminded her of their brief encounter in Petersburg, but she couldn’t find it in the drawer of her memory. He was hoping that her painter’s eye would pick out a man who she’d met. But in fact … in fact they’d only spoken a little through the grille of the Arab door, and she hadn’t really seen him. Now she was talking to him in a friendly, natural way, but treating him as someone she was meeting for the first time in her life.

  Patricia stopped walking, and asked, “How come you don’t have any hair on your body? Men usually have loads of disgusting hair, and you have nothing at all, not a single hair!” and she laughed like a schoolgirl.

  “That’s because my ancestors came from Siberia.” Vadim hoped that the brown of his tan would disguise the blood that was rushing to his face. “But you wouldn’t see that by looking at my father, his features were pure Slav. Sorry, are, are pure Slav.” He corrected himself and became even redder.

  “From Siberia!” Patricia repeated with a sudden interest that Vadim found inexplicable. “Yes, of course, your eyes are a little almond-shaped.”

  Patricia saw that her friends were waiting for her. Quickly, she said to him, “Come and see us one of these days!”

  Us? he thought, but he answered immediately, “You always leave the answering machine on …”

  “Leave your phone number or e-mail address.”

  “And how will you know who it’s from?”

  “Say it’s the Japanese man!” she said, and waved goodbye. To and fro, to and fro, like a pendulum.

  The Japanese man, she said. How does she know? How could she have guessed that, before having to leave university and become a computer salesman—for economic reasons, of course—he had been studying Japanese culture? Vadim’s face filled with admiration. Patricia was the only person who didn’t look at his hair, as blonde as that of any Hollywood actress, or his green eyes with their long, golden lashes, washed by the sun and the sea. She perceived that which nobody was able to see: that slight lengthening at the corner of his eyes.

  The painter was already sitting in a large, white, convertible sports car, which was taking her along the beach.

  Patricia. A legend.

  THE GARDEN OF DELIGHTS

  Now you’re in front of the fence and you don’t dare ring the bell; you consult your watch and find out that it’s five o’clock, the time she told you to be here. You observe the trees in the garden closely, as if noticing which pine tree is white and which one red, or whether the fig tree has borne fruit yet and if the figs are green or already ripe, was going to make a vital difference in some way to your life. And this cypress, straight and rigid as a soldier, nods at you, slightly, so that only you can spot it, and it gives you an idea … You could climb over the fence and jump into the garden, like you did when you were ten years old, in Komarovo, near Petersburg, you clambered up the neighbors’ fences to pick … what was it you picked? It couldn’t have been cherries or any other sweet fruit, because in the sandy soil of that part of the world fruit trees grow with great difficulty. Apples, yes, it was small, sour, bitter apples that you picked.

  To climb over Patricia’s fence and climb up the fig tree, hiding yourself in it, sitting comfortably on a branch, in the shade, stuffing yourself with figs and savoring the summer taste of this garden of delights on your tongue … what a dream! And then to climb down from the tree, stretch out underneath it on the grass and sleep sweetly, and then to wake up in the middle of the night and drink in the sight of the stars smiling at you through the branches, and to listen to the rubbing and the ticking of the cicadas. And to sense, merely sense, the whispering of the leaves and guess at the branches as they swing, those feminine branches, as comforting and tender as a woman’s embrace, up and down, now I’m away and now I’m back, coming back to you, like a pendulum, like the wave of Patricia’s hand.

  “Good morning, I’ve come to see Patricia Pavloff.”

  “She’s not in.”

  “I’m, I’m sorry?”

  “She’s not at home.”

  “She asked me to come at five.”

  “Well, she isn’t in.”

  He certainly wasn’t expecting that. Vadim looked the woman—probably the housekeeper—in the eye, and tried a different tactic. “I know that Patricia’s at home, because they’ve told me she is.”

  “Who told you?” asked the woman, immediately blushing.

  In other words, yes, she’s in. He has won the first round.

  “Someone in Sitges told me. Someone who saw her here just a short while ago.”

  “But nobody’s come! I mean … Ms. Pavloff isn’t in. Come back another day.”

  She closed the door in his face.

  “I’ll be back in half an hour.”

  He went for a stroll by the stream. It was so hot that he had the impression the stones in the ditch were melting and flowing, instead of the water.

  After half an hour, he rang the doorbell.

  “She’s not in,” said the intercom next to the bell. This time the housekeeper hadn’t even bothered to come out into the garden. She’s not in. And now what? He was about to turn around to go.

  Just then, the door of the house opened and the Arab woman who was sitting next to Patricia on the day of the lunch came out. She was wrapped in oriental fabric from the waist down, after the fashion of a sari or sarong. Long silver earrings were swinging from her ears. Vadim felt the last drop of his self-confidence ebb away, because this woman was absolutely stunning. He had to summon all of his willpower to keep his eyes from dwelling on the her cocoa-colored belly, or her curved, shiny shoulders.

  “My name is Radhika. Please come in,” she said, but he wasn’t listening to her. He didn’t want to hear her, because her stretched, nasally voice and obvious American accent didn’t suit her.

  Radhika turned to the door. He watched her nude back and felt a strong desire to brush his hand over it.

  * * *

  You are one of those beetles that make little balls of manure; you are dragging your stinking ball over a white tablecloth, laid for a festive summer lunch. You are a cartload of manure that they have mistakenly dumped in the bedroom of the bride who is g
etting ready for her wedding night. Could it possibly be that you haven’t thought about your sweat, that it hasn’t crossed your mind that, after such a long walk, you would stink of sweat and dust? Your T-shirt is soaked and your hair is clotted in thick locks; your eyes are puffy from the dust and sunlight, and, as if that wasn’t enough, you’ve forgotten to shave this morning.

  In the hall, behind Radhika’s back, you look at yourself in the mirror and are horrified by what you see. Now you begin to understand why the housekeeper didn’t want to let you in. Look at you, your knees are covered in dust that looks like dried mud. If only the ground would swallow you up! Get out of there! There’s still time. Yes, get out, before Patricia sees you!

  You turn and head for the exit, but it’s locked. So you have no choice but to walk toward a room from which you hear several voices. You have the sensation that you’re made of wood, that you’re a heavy piece of firewood, a wooden doll; a scarecrow that farmers place in the middle of the fields to scare off the birds. A clownish doll, a laughingstock … that’s what you are!

  Before going in, with a quick movement, you wipe your sweaty palms on your T-shirt. Next time, you think … But, in the fraction of a second before you go into the room, it strikes you that, after this ridiculous entrance, there won’t be a next time.

  * * *

  And then … little angels with silver hair gave off a breeze by flapping their golden wings; from the sky they threw white buds and filled the universe with perfumed flowers to the gentle rhythm of a mandolin. That was the effect—oh, that kitsch imagination of his—that the gentle shade, the pleasant aroma, and the soothing melody of classical guitar had on him. That was what the room he had just entered was like: the lowered blinds let in a gentle breeze, on the table stood a chilled bottle in a bowl full of ice cubes.

  The first thing that Vadim noticed in the half-light was the paintings of gigantic flowers hanging on the walls. The flowers, many of which were white, were portrayed in the shade, in twilight or the light allowed in by lowered blinds, and they exhaled melancholy and calm.