Free Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel García Márquez Page B

neck that belonged in a barbershop rather than a dining room, but it was the only way to keep him from taking a bath in sauce. That day at Carvalleiras was typical. He ate three whole lobsters, dissecting them with a surgeon’s skill, and at the same time devoured everyone else’s plate with his eyes and tasted a little from each with a delight that made the desire to eat contagious: clams from Galicia, mussels from Cantabria, prawns from Alicante, sea cucumbers from the Costa Brava. In the meantime, like the French, he spoke of nothing but other culinary delicacies, in particular the prehistoric shellfish of Chile, which he carried in his heart. All at once he stopped eating, tuned his lobster’s antennae, and said to me in a very quiet voice:
    “There’s someone behind me who won’t stop looking at me.”
    I glanced over his shoulder, and it was true. Three tables away sat an intrepid woman in an old-fashioned felt hat and a purple scarf, eating without haste and staringat him. I recognized her right away. She had grown old and fat, but it was Frau Frieda, with the snake ring on her index finger.
    She was traveling from Naples on the same ship as Neruda and his wife, but they had not seen each other on board. We invited her to have coffee at our table, and I encouraged her to talk about her dreams in order to astound the poet. He paid no attention, for from the very beginning he had announced that he did not believe in prophetic dreams.
    “Only poetry is clairvoyant,” he said.
    After lunch, during the inevitable stroll along the Ramblas, I lagged behind with Frau Frieda so that we could renew our memories with no other ears listening. She told me she had sold her properties in Austria and retired to Oporto, in Portugal, where she lived in a house that she described as a fake castle on a hill, from which one could see all the way across the ocean to the Americas. Although she did not say so, her conversation made it clear that, dream by dream, she had taken over the entire fortune of her ineffable patrons in Vienna. That did not surprise me, however, because I had always thought her dreams were no more than a stratagem for surviving. And I told her so.
    She laughed her irresistible laugh. “You’re as impudent as ever,” she said. And said no more, because the rest of the group had stopped to wait for Neruda to finish talking in Chilean slang to the parrots along the Rambla de los Pájaros. When we resumed our conversation, Frau Frieda changed the subject.
    “By the way,” she said, “you can go back to Vienna now.”
    Only then did I realize that thirteen years had gone by since our first meeting.
    “Even if your dreams are false, I’ll never go back,” I told her. “Just in case.”
    At three o’clock we left her to accompany Neruda to his sacred siesta, which he took in our house after solemn preparations that in some way recalled the Japanese tea ceremony. Some windows had to be opened and others closed to achieve the perfect degree of warmth, and there had to be a certain kind of light from a certain direction, and absolute silence. Neruda fell asleep right away, and woke ten minutes later, as children do, when we least expected it. He appeared in the living room refreshed, and with the monogram of the pillowcase imprinted on his cheek.
    “I dreamed about that woman who dreams,” he said.
    Matilde wanted him to tell her his dream.
    “I dreamed she was dreaming about me,” he said.
    “That’s right out of Borges,” I said.
    He looked at me in disappointment.
    “Has he written it already?”
    “If he hasn’t he’ll write it sometime,” I said. “It will be one of his labyrinths.”
    As soon as he boarded the ship at six that evening, Neruda took his leave of us, sat down at an isolated table, and began to write fluid verses in the green ink he used for drawing flowers and fish and birds when he dedicated his books. At the first “All ashore” we looked for FrauFrieda, and found her at