Neither Onofre nor his little girl realised, at first, that their hostess was nowhere to be seen when they arrived in the capital.
After retrieving their single shared suitcase from the carousel at Vienna International Airport, father and nine-year-old daughter steered themselves towards the exit.
The last confirming WhatsApp message from Julia K. had arrived that very morning, just before take-off, so nothing suggested that when the opaque glass doors slid open she would not be standing among the crowd of expectant relatives.
After a thorough sweep of the arrivals hall, Onofre—long accustomed to Julia’s disappearances in years past, usually the prologue to one of her escapes or one of her imaginative juggling acts—decided to take it with good humour. Without offering any explanation to his daughter, so as not to alarm her, he led them to the nearest café.
Julia appeared with that slippery movement of someone who materialises without anyone quite seeing from where. She sat down at their table as if nothing at all were out of the ordinary and began speaking to Onofre with perfect naturalness, as though their conversation had merely been paused for two minutes, as though more than fifteen years hadn’t passed since they last said goodbye in this same city.
The oddness of the situation reminded the art restorer of Luis Mateo Díez’s novel Vicisitudes, in which a wedding in the imaginary town of Solba turns on a single enigma: the groom’s intermittent disappearances.
In the car Julia had left badly parked at the airport entrance sat a boy—Marisa’s age—frightened, while a security officer questioned him about the whereabouts of the vehicle’s driver. Onofre assumed Julia would walk over to clear up the misunderstanding, but, surprisingly, she was no longer beside him.
Onofre didn’t know a single word of German; mustering his best English, he offered the necessary apologies and added that they were just about to leave. Moments later he found himself holding a fine, and the stout officer—already well into middle age—had produced a card reader from her rucksack. “Discount for immediate payment,” she said, in impeccable English; Goethe’s language seemed unnecessary for that part.
Julia drove along the motorway talking incessantly, of everything and nothing of consequence. Onofre, seated beside her, turned round to check on the children. Somehow they were already getting on, speaking in a hybrid jargon, half English, half Spanish. The fine lay hidden in the inside pocket of the madrileño’s jacket: funds were limited, but dignity persisted.
“And you? Still alive, skin and bones?”
She tapped his thigh.
“What’s become of you?”
The cheerful question was accompanied by a slap on his right thigh.
“Quiet life. Repainting old pictures, looking after the little one. You know.”
“So have I!” Julia replied quickly, almost nervously, her whole body tensing while her gaze remained fixed on the road.
And since Julia said not another word until she dropped them at the door of the modest hotel Onofre had booked online, the restorer concluded that the thirty-something blonde, her long hair tucked into casual denim, was fully aware that he was lying too.
Once settled into the hotel, Onofre realised they had made no plans at all with Julia and her son. “Is there a husband somewhere in the background?”
When he had asked Marisa where she wanted to spend four days of holiday, she had said she wanted to see the German Christmas markets. Onofre knew no one in Germany, but on Instagram he had stumbled upon Julia’s account, full of posts about Spanish traditions—Spain being a country she knew well, as a secondary-school Spanish teacher. She still lived in Vienna, and Austria isn’t Germany, but once upon a time it almost was.
She WhatsApped to say that, in an hour, they would head to the Christmas market on Rathausplatz—just in front of Vienna’s city hall—and that, if they wished, they could meet there, stroll around a little, perhaps have something to drink afterwards.
Silence.
By eight o’clock, dragging a bulging bag of presents, Onofre and Marisa were settling down to dinner at Gasthaus Pöschl, a typical Viennese restaurant.
For Marisa he ordered a Wiener Schnitzel mit Pommes—breaded cutlets with fries, to put it plainly. He himself asked only for a Viennese Märzen beer; he knew the girl would leave half her portion untouched. It wasn’t surprising that she was absorbed in her phone, but who, exactly, was she talking to?
“It’s Karl, Dad! We met on Roblox. We’re doing missions together!”
Onofre pulled from his coat the novel he had brought from Madrid: La méduse noire, by Yann Queffélec. It told the story of a young French soldier repatriated from Algeria on 27 April 1962, aboard a ship that smelled of vomit and tears. He is barely twenty; for two and a half years he has done nothing but war, and no one is waiting for him when he docks in Marseille.
No one had waited for Onofre outside Soto del Real either, when—after serving a year—he was granted third-degree parole.
Eddie Puojol, the novel’s protagonist, boards a night train of sleeping compartments without a ticket, destination: Paris. Cornered by the ticket inspector, he is rescued when a young woman, white socks and all, emerges from the lavatory; startled by the commotion, she offers the sleeper ticket of her lover—the very man who had just kissed her goodbye on the platform, apologising for not accompanying her at the last moment.
Onofre closed the book. The coincidences between literature and life were becoming excessive. He too had met Julia on a cheap overnight train, all compartments and bunks, in the café carriage, Madrid to Algeciras.
The main purpose of the weekend had already been fulfilled, and Onofre knew that, at nine years old, museums are mostly tedious. So the next morning he suggested taking the metro to the Zoo; at the very least, Marisa would glimpse Schönbrunn Palace from outside.
In the metro, Julia and Karl joined them unexpectedly.
“Your old black leopard died of old age, you know—it was in the papers!” Julia announced out of nowhere, referring to what had once been Onofre’s favourite animal.
The shared memory warmed the madrileño a little.
“Well then, let’s see what creature they’ve put in its place.”
To Julia’s astonishment, in the vast glass enclosure, perched on the same artificial log, slept no different feline at all, but the very same black leopard—lazy, indolent—as the one she and Onofre had visited so many years before.
At lunchtime, Onofre was finally able to give Julia the book he had brought from Madrid—Montalbano’s New Year’s Eve, a recent Salamandra release.
“With Montalbano it’s not the crime that matters, but the atmosphere — the food, the habits, the whole Sicilian air.” he said, reinforcing the intention behind the gift.
“Yes, yes…” she murmured, leafing through it, “but better in the original language. The immersion is something else.”
“Non sapevo che tu parlassi italiano!” Onofre retorted, annoyed by the lukewarm gratitude.
Julia merely pulled a face. After ten minutes of tense silence, she stroked the back of Marisa’s neck.
“Children’s day,” she declared. “To the Prater.”
The Viennese funfair remained a blend of the old and the modern, the sort of place that seems to exist both in reality and in recollection. Historical attractions—like the famous Ferris wheel from The Third Man—coexisted with virtual-reality simulators. The Christmas decorations lent everything a kind of uniformity: an eternal fairground wrapped inside a miniature country.
When they reached the Geisterbahnen—those old-fashioned haunted houses—Julia, jokingly, reminded Onofre that, since he was much older than she was—nine years, to be precise—it fell to him to take the children inside. She, meanwhile, had things to do.
She vanished, agitated, phone glued to her hand, and Onofre was not in the least surprised when she failed to reappear at the exit.
The mistake had been that Onofre won only a single, absurdly oversized teddy bear at the darts stand—the kind that won’t fit through the doors of a metro carriage. It took another half-hour, and the squandering of a small fortune, to secure a second one for Karl. Only then did the phone vibrate, as though the message were some secret instruction permitting them to advance to the next level of the game:
“Go home. Karl has the keys in his backpack. There are pizzas in the freezer.”
Onofre opened his palm to catch the first snowflakes drifting down. Dusk was falling; they needed to find a taxi quickly.
The district of Neubau, near the museum quarter, was labyrinthine: narrow streets that opened without warning, interior passageways, shops that changed every two months, neighbours no one truly knew… Exactly the kind of neighbourhood that suited a woman who existed only halfway.
Julia’s flat was on the second floor of a nineteenth-century building, with no lift: high ceilings, a handsome balcony overlooking a courtyard cluttered with bicycles, creaking wooden floors that betrayed every footstep, and the inevitable old stove that probably heated only when it felt inclined.
No luxury, no pretence: shelves and bookcases crammed with books and files. The only photographs were of Julia: sometimes with Karl, sometimes alone. In one of them, crudely cut, she stood happy on a beach.
Who, he wondered, had been standing beside her?
By midnight, the children were asleep in the flat’s only bedroom, the two giant stuffed animals standing guard. There could not have been better sentinels in all the city.
Onofre browsed the bookcase. Skipping the German section, he found the Spanish selection enviable—better, in truth, than his own—and, to his surprise, the Italian shelf was none too shabby either.
“Old friend,” he thought, “once again you’ve opened your big mouth for nothing.”
On the bedside table lay a thriller with a bookmark: one of those Christmas-season releases, The Sun Cage, by Fran Cobos.
He stretched out on the sofa in the living-room to glance through it. Belfast, the 1980s: a Catholic boxer fleeing at night, carving his way through British checkpoints. Suggestive.
Onofre’s life had been a Belfast as well, and looking at Julia’s, it seemed hers still was. No longer the Salamanca neighbourhood, no more the grand museum job. Now he lived in Lavapiés, restoring old furniture—most of it devoid of any artistic value—in a run-down workshop near the Rastro.
He peered in again at the sleeping children.
“At least this one,” he thought, “I did get back.”
He returned to the sofa and drifted into a nap.
When he awoke in the small hours, Julia’s jeans and jacket, drenched, were drying on the radiator.
Julia herself, in her underwear and wrapped in a blanket, had curled into the little space left on the sofa beside him. Her breathing was heavy.
Onofre rose to fetch a cushion and his overcoat. He arranged her more comfortably and covered her better.
He sat in a small armchair opposite and, before sleep claimed him again, whispered:
“You shook off the Brits. You’re home now. That’s what matters. Rest.”
When morning came, he would suggest they return to the Zoo, to see whether the black leopard was still there.
José Vicente Rubio Eire
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