Read Inez: A Novel for Free Online Page A

war, the lighthouse there is blacked out. To the Lighthouse! ” Gabriel laughed. “No more Virginia Woolf.”
    But she had a different impression of the winter night and of the blazing beauty of the cold but intensely green forested landscape; she was grateful for the tree-covered lanes, because
they protected her from the flaming air, from death from the skies …
    “The really beautiful coast is in the west,” Gabriel continued. “Cornwall, too, is land edged toward the Atlantic Ocean by fields of heather. What happens on that coast is a battle. Rock pushes against ocean, and ocean against rock. As you might suppose, the ocean ends up winning. The water is fluid, and generous in that it’s always offering form; the land is hard, and scarred, but the encounter is magnificent. Granite cliffs rise almost three hundred feet above the sea; they resist the Atlantic battering them mercilessly, but in their whole formation is the work of that incessant attack of pounding surf. There are advantages.”
    Gabriel put his arm across the singer’s shoulders. This cold early morning facing the sea. She did not reject it.
    “The land defends itself against the sea with its ancient stone. There are caves everywhere. The sand is silvery. They say that the caves were smugglers’ dens. But footprints in the sand betray. Best of all, the weather is very mild and the vegetation abundant, thanks to the Gulf Stream, the heating system for Europe.”
    She looked at him, moving a little away from the embrace.
    “I’m Mexican. My name is Inés. Inés Rosenzweig. Why haven’t you asked me?”
    Gabriel’s smile broadened, but it was joined by a frown. “For me you have no name or nationality.”
    “Please, don’t make me laugh.”
    “Forgive me. You’re the singer who rose above the chorus to give me her beautiful voice: singular, yes, but still a little savage, needing to be cultivated …”
    “Thank you for that. I didn’t want sentiment …”
    “No. Simply a voice that needs to be cultivated, like the English heaths.”
    “You should see where the mesquite grows in Mexico.” Nonchalantly, Inés moved away.
    “In any case,” Gabriel continued, “a woman without a name, an anonymous creature who crossed my path one night. A woman without age.”
    “Romantic!”
    “And who saw me urinate in an alley.”
    They both laughed, he longer than she.
    “A woman you bring for the weekend and forget on Monday,” Inés suggested, untying her kerchief and letting the wind whip her red hair.
    “No.” Gabriel put his arms around her. “A woman who enters my life identical to my life, the equivalent of the conditions of my life …”
    What did he mean? The words intrigued her, and for that reason Inés said nothing.
    They drank coffee in the kitchen. The dawn was slow to come, this December day would be short. Inés began to notice what was around her, the simplicity of the house, the rough whitewashed brick. The few books in the living room—most of them French classics, some Italian literature, several editions of Leopardi, of Central European poets. A broken-down sofa. A rocking chair. A fireplace, and on the mantel the photograph of a very young Gabriel, a late-teenager, maybe twenty, with his arm around a boy who was his exact opposite: quintessentially blond, wide smile, without mystery. The two youths weren’t wearing shirts, and the photo stopped at their waists. It was a photograph of a swaggering camaraderie, solemn but proud, with the pride of two people meeting and recognizing one another in their youth, appreciating the unique opportunity to face life head-on together. Never to be separated. Not ever.
    In the living room two wooden stools were set apart at the distance—Inés calculated instinctively—of a body lying full-length. Gabriel explained that in rural houses like this in England twin stools were placed where the coffin of the deceased would be set during a wake. He had found the two stools like that when