Galicia

Illustration by CHLOE SCHAFFE

Antje came to Spain three years ago. She worked as a hotel maid in San Sebastián, where she met Mathis and married him. He was a manager at the hotel. He was eight years older. She was twenty-four and had left Germany after her mother died. Her mother had been in Kabul, serving as an engineer in the Bundeswehr. Antje had never traveled abroad before.

Mathis lived in a bungalow in the hills. It was a single room with a small backyard and a partial view of the coast. Every morning he went for a run and then they went to work together at the hotel. It was on La Concha Bay and ten stories tall. Each room had a balcony, a large flat-screen television, and seashells in a glass bowl by the bed.

Sometimes she passed Mathis along a corridor. They kept their relationship to themselves even though everyone knew. Once, she heard two maids mention how dull he was. How plain. She admitted to herself that they weren’t entirely wrong but it was what she wanted.

Mathis was kind and responsible. Considerate. He was from Paris, where his family was, and he was handsome, with his pale eyes and his trim beard. They were often together. They swam, cooked, shopped at the markets. He took her to restaurants and bought her nice lavender soap tied with a ribbon. He showed her how to garden. They left food and water out for the stray dog that sometimes visited the backyard.

He hated to read. So she lay beside him in the evenings and read to him, practicing her Spanish, and without telling him she veered away from the story and invented her own. Some nights he noticed, pinching her. Other nights he didn’t.

It never bothered her that he was older. She was still in awe of how different her life was now, how far away she was from her solitude and her boredom, a town she never felt was hers but her mother’s, and now her mother’s ghost’s.

Mathis told her she didn’t have to work any longer if she didn’t want to, that he would care for her. But she liked the work, it kept her busy, and she liked heading down to the hotel with him every morning, riding on the back of his motorbike.

For a while they were happy. He wanted to start a family. So they did. They had a child, a boy, but they lost him after only a week. The doctor said there was something wrong with his heart. Or that was what she remembered him saying as she walked out of the hospital alone, past an ambulance rushing someone in, past the courtyard and the garden.

Antje walked and walked. She walked out of the city and along the coastal roads. She was barefoot and she walked for hours. The weakness and the pain of her body grew numb. She was bleeding from somewhere but she didn’t notice. She heard cars speeding by and felt a kind of emptying, like parts of her were being unfurled into the air. It was difficult to move her eyes. The road and the sky became a single point she couldn’t break through.

Then, when she couldn’t go on any longer, she felt a shift inside of her. A restructuring. As though there was something new inside, somewhere beneath her ribs. Or something old she never knew was there.

When she looked up it was evening. She was sitting in the train station with her hands on her chest.

Mathis was beside her, holding her shoulders.

“Let’s go home,” he said.

He stood and she followed him, and they returned home, and she didn’t think the days would pass, but they did.

She continued to work at the hotel. Mathis did, too. They rode down on his motorbike every morning as they had done before. She accompanied him on his errands and they went...