Swimming Home Read Online Free PDF Page A

taken to the wrong place against her will. Isabel gazed at the names of residents carved on to brass plaques by the door and read them out loud: ‘Perez, Orsi, Bergel, Dr Ortega.’ There was his name. This was where he lived, even though the woman disagreed.
    She pressed the bell for Dr Ortega and ignored the Russian woman, who was now fumbling urgently in her crocodile-skin handbag for what turned out to be a grubby portable dictionary.
    The voice that came out of the polished brass speaker of the door entry system was a soft Spanish voice asking her, in French, to say who she was.
    ‘My name is Isabel. Your visitor is waiting for you downstairs.’
    A police siren drowned her out and she had to start again.
    ‘Did you say your name is Isabel?’ It was a simple enough question but it made her anxious, as if she was indeed pretending to be someone she was not.
    The entry system made a whining sound and she pushed open the glass door framed in heavy dark wood that led into the marble foyer. The Russian woman in her stained dark glasses did not want to move and instead kept repeating her request to be taken to the port.
    ‘Are you still there, Isabel?’
    Why did the doctor not walk down the stairs and collect the blind woman himself?
    ‘Could you come down and get your patient?’ She heard him laugh.
    ‘Señora, soy doctor en filosofía . She is not my patient. She is my student.’
    He was laughing again. The dark rumbling laugh of a smoker. She heard his voice through the holes in the speaker and moved closer to it.
    ‘My student wants the port because she wishes to go back to St Petersburg. She does not want to arrive for her Spanish lesson and therefore does not believe she is here. Ella no quiere estar aquí .’
    He was playful and flirtatious, a man who had time to speak in riddles from the safety of the door entry system. She wished she could be more like him and fool around and play with whatever the day brought in. What had led her to where she was now? Where was she now? As usual she was running away from Jozef. This thought made her eyes sting with tears she resented. No, not again, not Jozef, not again. She turned away and left the Russian woman groping the banisters of the marble stairway, still insisting she was in the wrong place and the port was her final destination.
     
     
    The sky had darkened and she could smell the sea somewhere close. Seagulls screeched above her head. The sweet yeasty smell of the boulangerie across the road wafted over the parked cars. Families were returning from the beach carrying plastic balls and chairs and colourful towels. The boulangerie was suddenly full of teenage boys buying slices of pizza. Across the road the mechanic was revving his motorbike triumphantly. She was not ready to go home and start imitating someone she used to be. Instead she walked for what seemed like an hour along the Promenade des Anglais and stopped at one of the restaurants set up on the beach near the airport.
    The planes taking off flew low over the black sea. A party of students was drinking beer on the slopes of the pebbles. They were opinionated, flirtatious, shouting at each other, enjoying a summer night on the city beach. Things were starting in their lives. New jobs. New ideas. New friendships. New love affairs. She was in the middle of her life, she was nearly fifty years old and had witnessed countless massacres and conflicts in the work that pressed her up close to the suffering world. She had not been posted to cover the genocide in Rwanda, as two of her shattered colleagues had been. They had told her it was impossible to believe the scale of the human demolition, their own eyes dazed as they took in the dazed eyes of the orphans. Starved dogs had become accustomed to eating human flesh. They had seen dogs roam the fields with bits of people between their teeth. Yet even without witnessing first-hand the terrors of Rwanda, she had gone too far into the unhappiness of the world to