Without Blood by Alessandro Baricco Read Free Book Online

silent. It was as if it had suddenly become tremendously difficult to go on.
    “He was found with a bullet in his back, face down in the manure, in front of his stable.”
    He looked up at the woman.
    “In his pocket they found a note. On the note was written the name of a woman. Yours.”
    He made a light writing motion in the air.
    “Doña Sol.”
    He let his hand fall back to the table.
    “It was his handwriting. He had written the name.
    Doña Sol.”
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    The three musicians, at the back, struck up a kind of waltz, dragging the tempo and playing very softly.
    “From that day I began to expect you.”
    The woman had raised her head and was staring at him.
    “I knew that nothing could stop you, and that one day you would come to me as well. I never thought that you would shoot me in the back or send someone to kill me who didn’t even know me. I knew that you would come, and would look me in the face, and first you would talk to me. Because I was the one who had opened the trapdoor, that night, and then closed it. And you would not forget it.”
    The man hesitated a moment more, then said the only thing he still wanted to say.
    “I have carried this secret inside me for my whole life, like a disease. I deserved to be sitting here, with you.”
    Then the man was silent. He felt his heart beating rap-idly, in his fingertips and in his temples. He thought how he was sitting in a café across from an old woman who was 71

    mad and who, from one moment to the next, might get up and kill him. He knew that he would do nothing to stop her.
    The war is over, he thought.
    The woman looked around and every so often glanced at her empty plate. She said nothing. From the moment the man had stopped talking she had stopped looking at him.
    You would have said that she was sitting at the table alone, waiting for someone. The man had let himself fall back into the chair. Now he seemed smaller and tired. He observed, as if from a distance, the woman’s eyes wander about the café and over the table: resting everywhere except on him. He realized that he still had his overcoat on, and so he sank his hands in the pockets. He felt the collar pulling at his neck, as if he had put a stone in each pocket. He thought of the people around, and found it funny how no one, at that moment, could have any idea of what was happening. Seeing two old people at a table one would find it difficult to imagine that at that moment 72

    they were capable of anything. And yet it was so. Because she was a phantom and he a man whose life had ended a long time ago. If people knew it, he thought, he would be afraid.
    Then he saw that the woman’s eyes had become bright.
    Who could say where the thread of her thoughts was leading?
    Her face was without expression. Only, the eyes were at that point.
    Was it tears?
    He thought again that he wouldn’t like to die there, with all those people watching.
    Then the woman began to speak, and this was what they said to each other.
    “Uribe picked up the Count’s cards and let them slide slowly between his fingers, revealing them one by one. I don’t think he realized at that moment what he was losing. Certainly he realized what he was not winning. I didn’t count much for him. He got up and said goodbye to the company, politely. No one laughed, no one dared say a 73

    word. They had never seen a poker hand like that. Now, tell me: why should this story be any less true than the one you told?”
    “ . . . ”
    “ . . . ”
    “ . . . ”
    “My father was a wonderful father. Don’t you believe me? And why?—why should this story be less true than yours?”
    “ . . . ”
    “No matter how you try to live just one single life, others will see inside it a thousand more, and this is the reason that you cannot avoid getting hurt.”
    “ . . . ”
    “Do you know that I know everything about that night, and yet I remember almost nothing? I was there beneath the trapdoor, I couldn’t see, I heard something, and