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By Root 665 0

exile. Was now on the main bookshelf in the house on the Rue Asseline. She needed to have those books always in sight, within reach. She liked the way they weighed like arks or flagstones. They contained all the others. All the deceased books from 12 Panadeiras Street. When she agreed to act the part of King Lear in her early seventies, she reread the play in one of the volumes that had been saved. Ran her finger along each line. In Madrid, her father had a secretary who read books she loved like this, churning up words with her long varnished fingernail. Her finger ploughed the furrow of words as if she were reading not only with her eyes, but also by touch. María had heard her father mention a captain in the army who learnt Braille so that he could read in the dark when on campaign. She felt darkly pleased when they suggested she represent King Lear. The same feeling she had during the end-of-summer storms, when the rafters of the sky over Paris gave way. Finally the clouds of the Atlantic carrying the sea were here. Écoute, Paris! She was carrying the storm on top of her head. The unsettling joy of the first downpour after the drought. It’d been more than fifty years since she left Madrid and went into exile. The first thing she did was pull down the volume and run her eyes along the rail of her index finger:

The weight of this sad time we must obey;

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

The oldest hath borne most: we that are young

Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

María can see the faces in the audience, faces determined to believe in the truth of the legend, convinced that what’s been said has something to do with the times they live in.

The audience? She always chooses a face. Her mark, she calls it.

Gabriel’s convinced she’s looking at him. Some actors use this method. Seek out a reference point, a face they can address in the audience. But why him of all people? He’s sitting in the third row. Is tempted to look away. Perhaps it’s a false impression. Perhaps María Casares’ look deliberately has this vague precision. Is able to take in each and every face in the audience. That must be it. But no. She’s looking at him. He’s sure of it. He can feel the parcel on his thighs, under his folded coat. A small package containing three books and the report written in 1955 by the Inspector of Archives for the Northwest, a civil servant who seems punctilious, but omits his name. All he needs is for the contents to move, to give off smoke. In the hotel, he went over everything. In preparation for the symbolic return.

She, Lear, stares at him:

Thou art the thing itself:

unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare,

forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings!

come unbutton here.

That night, as she left Gennevilliers National Theatre, María Casares was handed several letters and notes from spectators. And a parcel. It could be said she had a premonition, but not enough time to give it shape. The first thing she saw, in large letters, was the return address: ‘12 Panadeiras Street’. And, by way of stamp, a drawing of a ladybird.

Working for Eternity

‘You’ve a visitor, Francisco!’ shouted Aphrodite from the door. She and the porter wheeled a bed into the other half of the room. Polka saw everything in large blots verging on diffused clarity, exactly the opposite of what he’d always imagined blindness to be, a progressive and definitive sinking into darkness. What he perceived of his new hospital companion was a white head and nothing else. Then Aphrodite, as he called the nurse, that woman who had the grace to be cheerful and pleasant, drew a curtain between the two beds, creating two compartments.

‘He’s a bigwig,’ the nurse whispered to Polka, ‘a judge. Had a heart attack too. Has just come out of Intensive Care. Will soon get his own room. He has influence. He’s a chosen one.’

Polka fell silent after hearing this but, when the nurse made to leave, said in a loud voice, ‘If you need a gravedigger, here I am, girl! Working for eternity.’

He wasn’t