Land of No Rain Read Online Free PDF Page B

nonetheless you sometimes felt, or dreamt, that you were still the adolescent you once were. You saw yourself as a young man with long hair and a droopy moustache, running through the stations on a radio that would fit in the palm of your hand, in search of those heart-rending songs that were popular in the prime of your youth. That feeling, or dream, did not last long: your wife’s voice, reminding you that this or that needed doing, brought you back to the fact that you were with her, to the conjugal bond and its obligations. And then you’re a solid man. That’s how you appear to those who see you, or how you would like others to see you. Beauty unsettles you. You get excited. You cry. But that doesn’t last long either. You don’t have any obvious tendency to become addicted to anything. And you thought your wife had no doubts about you, was in fact immune to narrow feelings of jealousy, until a certain piece of paper crossed your path.
    A colleague of your wife’s and the colleague’s husband, local people, had invited you to spend the weekend with them in a town in the south where they had a country house. You had visited the town and the area several times. It was famous for its old castle, which reminded you of similar castles in the world you came from, and it was warmer than the City of Red and Grey. You used to go there ‘to free inspiration from its bottle’, as you put it. It was an offhand rhetorical phrase, but of your own making. You would sit on a wooden bench by a small river with sheep bleating on the banks, their tails like dogs’ tails, not like the famous fat-tailed sheep of your country. You would sit there like a fisherman waiting for a bite, with the big castle in front of you and the little rippling river running by your side. You did write, but as for ‘freeing inspiration from its bottle’, that’s a different matter.
    You and your wife took the train, through long dark tunnels and across deep green pastures where you saw cows with their heads to the ground, heavy louring clouds, and horses wrapped in blankets like mules. The people in that country don’t meet their guests at stations or airports, as they do in your country. Your wife’s colleague didn’t live far from the station: a fifteen-minute walk or less. You walked down a long street lined with identical terraced houses with red tiled roofs and marked with numbers. Your wife suddenly bent down and picked up a piece of paper from the ground. You don’t know what made her do that, because she didn’t usually stare at the ground, as you have long been in the habit of doing, looking for things that have fallen from people’s pockets. It must have been your bad luck that made her pick up this piece of paper, or maybe something else. The piece of paper was old. That was obvious from its appearance – the creases and the lined paper. You saw your wife shiver silently after opening it up and reading some lines. When she looked at you out of the corner of her eye, you realised it had something to do with you. ‘What’s up?’ you asked. She didn’t say anything. She thrust the piece of paper at you. The handwriting was similar to your own, which unconsciously imitates a hand you knew well. It was a love letter but you had no idea where or when it was written. The handwriting was very like yours, and your wife knew the name of the woman to whom it was addressed and something of what had happened between you and her. It was an old affair, from the distant past. Nonetheless you had always tried to avoid talking about it with your wife, not because she was jealous of a woman who now had another life far away, but maybe because of your reserved nature, even though you could be talkative when you were interested and in a good mood.
    You can control when you speak out and when you hold your tongue, but how can you control what you say in your sleep? In the dreams and nightmares you have. Those long rambling monologues that your wife