At some point, after spending a few days in Dubrovnik, they had entered Bosnia. From Mostar, they would continue on their route to Sarajevo, but since they felt like they had a few days to spare, she had suggested stopping in a town or small city somewhere halfway between Mostar and Sarajevo to get to know the country better, an idea he had been immediately on board with. It had occurred to her just then to ask the waiter. The waiter was in his thirties, skinny and with a shaved head, who smiled sweetly at the end of every sentence, which he pronounced in rough but understandable English. She had to ask him to repeat the name of the city, and after two further failed attempts at making it out, she asked him to write it down in her notebook. The waiter bent over and leaned on the table, and the image of a reed bending in the wind, far beyond its imagined breaking point, immediately popped into her head. When he returned from his brief stroll through the cemetery, she opened the notebook to the page where the waiter had written the word KONJIC in wobbly handwriting. She held it up to show him.
I have to say, it seems like the war only ended a couple of weeks ago, he mused as they were getting off the bus. She shot him a reluctant smile, irritated by the dried sweat coating her entire body like a fine film. As soon as she set foot on the ground, she crouched down to make sure she had all of her photography equipment. The station in Mostar turned out to be a shabby-looking place where they were greeted by elderly women offering rooms to tourists and brandishing crumpled cardboard signs with their business proposals scribbled in black marker. They refused the offers and walked towards the city centre, after asking for directions in a café. After they’d eaten dinner, a man in his forties came over to offer them accommodation. For some reason, they didn’t immediately refuse and listened to his proposal, perhaps because it was becoming fairly urgent to sort out where they would sleep that night, or perhaps because the incredibly smiley man—who wore a striped polo shirt, had a military haircut, and expressed himself in flawless Spanish—seemed particularly nice and instantly earned their trust. He led the way to his house, a spacious building with a garden, located in a residential neighbourhood not far from the city centre, where he’d built a small apartment in an annexe, equipped with all the basics. That was where he put up his guests. They decided to stay. It was much better than anything they could have hoped to find by that time of night. They agreed on a price without much fuss, after some brief haggling. The man’s name was Ado, and he’d worked for many years as a line cook at the Spanish military base in Mostar. On the short walk from the town centre to the apartment, he asked him a couple of seemingly offhand questions. Ado openly introduced himself as a Muslim. No, I never cross over to the other side. Before, I would occasionally go over there for a drink, but that was years ago, when I was young. But not since the war. Now we live like we’re in two separate cities, each to his own, said Ado, pointing to the Catholic area on the other side of the bridge.
During the two and a half days they spent in Mostar, she photographed the bridge at various times of the day, each time in a different light, along with several cemeteries (Catholic and Muslim) and shrapnel-pocked walls and façades all over town. While she stopped at her chosen location, studying the light and trying out different angles until she’d found the most suitable one for her tripod, he preferred to sit down and wait somewhere, or he’d settle down at a nearby terrace café and calmly sip a coffee or beer, read a book, or simply observe the scene from a distance, giving her the time she needed to finish her work. Both days they had dinner in the centre, and even had time for one final beer as they sat by the riverbank, around midnight, beneath the illuminated bridge. On that last night, when they left the bar, they walked back to Ado’s house. She was wearing a floaty, light-coloured dress for going out that evening, which she’d slipped on in the late afternoon after she’d finished taking pictures. All he had to do was lift it gently, like someone peering through a net curtain, to penetrate her on the sofa, in the living room of that small tourist apartment, which Ado had told them he managed to rent out every day of the summer to Spanish, Italian, German, Austrian, or French tourists. He thought fleetingly of Ado and his family, slumbering on the other side of the garden, as she panted, and he panted, although he wasn’t very aware of his panting because one never really is. It ended with her straddling him, bouncing like a weightless balloon, eyes half-closed, mouth half-open and trembling, arms straight as taut cables. Soon after, they were both breathing in the same exhausted unison; their bodies, clammy with sweat, sticking to the fabric of the sofa, and their hands dangling in the air a few inches off the floor.
Here’s how it began: he went to Madrid to take part in a thesis committee. He’s a professor of visual culture and contemporary artistic creation at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Barcelona and some of his colleagues from Madrid, with whom he has maintained an ongoing working relationship over the years, ask him from time to time to participate in the thesis committees they oversee. He is always delighted to accept. He was still married when he went to Madrid, although his marriage was already going through a significant rocky patch. A rocky patch he believed was insurmountable, which proved to be true when they separated only three months later. Perhaps fuelled by all this, he decided to stay on in Madrid that weekend instead of going home on Friday evening, as he used to do whenever he was there on business. Although he refused to openly admit it, he preferred being away from home and from his wife, and perhaps also from Barcelona. Put bluntly, he preferred being away from his own life, and, if possible, from himself as well.
He was, on the other hand, quite happy to attend the party organized that Friday night by the former student who had been granted the title of doctor that morning. Some of his colleagues from Madrid’s Faculty of Fine Arts were also there. In fact, the whole committee had been cordially invited after giving the grade. It was an exceedingly average party, mediocre even, where nothing memorable was said or done, apart from it being the place where he and she met for the first time, though they were unable or unwilling to speak to one another that night. It wasn’t long before he’d picked her out, before he’d visually separated her from the crowd of party-goers, convinced that there was something indescribable that made her stand out, and he soon found himself following her with increasingly nervous glances, which he thought were discreet but were in fact fairly obvious, as if he were marvelling at the erratic trajectory of an uncontrolled particle moving around in a viscous, uniform fluid. She also noted his presence, and before long she sensed she was being watched by him, which didn’t perturb her in the slightest. Quite the opposite, in fact: she took the opportunity to study him thoroughly, with subtle glances he hardly noticed. The following day, he went to the exhibition opening of a friend (one of the professors of Madrid’s Faculty of Fine Arts who, professional involvement aside, is also a good friend). He soon realized that she was also among those in attendance. Recognizing that these things don’t just happen by chance, he quickly seized an opportune moment to ask his friend about her. Though he was of course extremely occupied with the commitments of the launch, his friend called out to her from across the room, raising the hand in which he held a tilted half-full glass of wine, and introduced her to his loyal old friend, a professor of visual culture at the University of Barcelona, in a sudden move that struck both parties as slightly brusque, though ultimately well-meaning.
Despite the age difference, they immediately hit it off. This could have been because they were both going through difficult times and rather than isolate them in their respective solitudes, it made things easier. In the months that followed, he left the final stage of his marriage behind, and realized that everything he’d experienced up to then, which he’d believed to be the inner realm of conjugal hell, had been no more than a rough outline, a vague sketch, merely the periphery of all the intimate pain to come, the pain he had yet to suffer, punctuated with fierce arguments in which everything rose to the surface, everything they knew but had never said aloud, and that was why it had been buried for years beneath tons of silence. During that whole time, the dates with her were his only relief, an oasis he could turn to when he needed.
He took advantage of some of his trips to Madrid to see her, to the point that, over time, the professional aspect became little more than a pretext. She also went to see him in Barcelona and would stay over in the tiny bachelor pad he’d just rented, still cluttered with moving boxes. Other times they decided to meet in Zaragoza, halfway, mostly for a change of scene and to forget about their lives in their respective cities for a while. They were thrilled by the game of pretending to be other people. The high-speed rollercoaster of emotions throughout these entire weekends rejuvenated him, or at least prevented him from ageing too fast after the break-up of his marriage and the state of emotional stasis in which he’d been existing. He always recalled scenes from those Sunday afternoons in Zaragoza, the two of them killing time by walking around the pavilions and empty, abandoned structures in the area surrounding the station, on the outskirts of the city. The image of that concrete and iron skeleton blasted by the sun and wind, a sad symbol of Spanish turbocapitalism, was so clearly etched in his memories that it erased everything else: the messy hotel rooms, the old town with that smell of early morning in the air, bookshops and bars, parks and churches, bridges and rivers, alcohol and desire.
When his friend introduced them at the exhibition, he said she was his best, brightest Ph.D. student. This made her blush. Knowing his friend and how sparing he was with his compliments even in moments of drunken elation, it instantly put him on his guard. The subject of her thesis was the destruction of Europe, or rather, artistic discourse on the destruction of Europe. Her enthusiasm for the subject of her work often bordered on obsession. It was the focal point of many of their conversations. He was used to it, though, as he had experienced a similar obsession himself during his time as a Ph.D. student, and had relived—was still reliving—it every day in his dealings with his own students. So he resigned himself to it, and in part he was pleased, because after all, he could consider himself lucky not to have fallen for a student who was writing a thesis on, say, the crisis of the viewer in the age of pornography, a topic which—his ignorance aside—barely aroused his interest or a desire to discuss it. So it was she who had suggested he go with her that summer to the Balkans, where she intended to photograph various locations as part of her artistic research. He saw the trip, and his relationship with her in general, as an opportunity to carry on getting his life together and escaping the stagnation he’d fallen into. It was thanks to the trip that he regained his habit of compulsively reading books related to his travel destination.
The Balkans are the sewer of Europe, the drains clogged with other people’s shit, she said as they took in a panoramic view of Mostar’s old town from the top of the central mosque’s minaret. The river cut a channel through the two halves of the city, and the Mostar Bridge, finally rebuilt, resembled a perfect archway joining the two souls of Herzegovina. He thought that the statement, uttered in those circumstances, seemed slightly affected in its form, as if conceived beforehand so that it could be pronounced with this dramatic setting as a backdrop, but ultimately lacking substance. It could be, he said after a while, that the kind of metaphysical tourism that we’re trying to engage in is just a morbid way of observing other people’s suffering for our own enjoyment, or, being more honest about it, out of plain old curiosity. I’d be happy with that.
The bus pulled up in the middle of a highway flanked by mountains, and the driver informed them they’d arrived in Konjic. They were the only ones getting off at that stop. There wasn’t even a bus station, just a shelter with a hanging sign bearing the name of the town in Cyrillic and Latin lettering. They started walking instinctively until they came across an open restaurant after crossing a modern bridge over the river. They quickly realized that English wasn’t going to be of much use in Konjic. They finally made themselves understood and managed to order some food. It was midday and very sunny, the kind of mountain sunshine that illuminates everything with a pale clarity, that warms but does not scorch. After they’d eaten, they looked for a place to stay. They found a hotel on the other side of the river—a wooden building decorated all over with Tyrolean designs, where they were welcomed by a woman in Tyrolean dress—but it seemed pricey to them. They carried on looking. They asked some local guys who happened to be passing by, jabbering away in fairly decent English. They explained that there was another, cheaper, hotel back where the town started, not too far from where the bus had dropped them. They showed them the way. As they walked in pairs along one side of the road, he asked the guys about the red graffiti he’d seen in Mostar and many times on the columns and façades of abandoned buildings. The tags belonged to a radical group of football fans. That’s Croat stuff, one of the guys said with a look that wavered between disdain and disgust. They left them at the door of the Konjic Motel, an old building that had been designed according to the aesthetic assumptions of socialist architecture and now seemed to be in a state of neglect. The guys assured them that the motel was still open for business, then rushed off, as if they were suddenly in a big hurry to get going. The dusty glass door, which appeared to be unusable, opened with astonishing ease. From behind a wooden counter emerged a smiling, grey-haired man who accompanied everything he said in Serbo-Croat with flamboyant hand gestures to make his words more intelligible, but they were nothing more than useless choreography. His short hair was swept back in a sort of quiff, an old-fashioned hairstyle from the seventies or eighties, perhaps. His clothes also looked like they were from a bygone era. He immediately imagined the (remote and unsettling) possibility that this was an old Yugoslavian, trapped, frozen in time in this crumbling motel.
That first night, after animatedly exchanging opinions in a corner, they decided to leave the gallery as soon as possible to escape the launch party, where both of them felt like outsiders. After strolling along for a while, they went into several pubs and the night stretched on as a long succession of drinks, which they drank intensely and slowly between truncated conversations that never reached the central core of their unhappiness, but made both so aware of the other’s discontentment that they could feel it themselves. That first night was also a series of random walks through Madrid’s most upmarket neighbourhoods, where they both felt equally out of place, handing themselves over to fate as they decided to embark on their stroll. From Justicia to Chamberi, then into the Salamanca neighbourhood—the bars blinking in the night like lighthouses or waystations—they traversed the nocturnal flow of Paseo de la Castellana via the pedestrian crossings, like bridges painted on the ground.
She had lost her sister only two months earlier following a tragic illness, and she was still getting herself together, trying to find her new place in the world, and perhaps trying to reconcile herself with life and put aside the futile anger she felt towards death. Naturally, he chose not to tell her his story that night, for fear of overwhelming her with his sorrows. Nor did he mention his wife, or any other specific aspects of his life apart from his status as professor of fine arts. He sprinkled in three or four banal anecdotes, peppered with a typically academic humour that helped them to establish common ground, that of the ubiquitous university bubble, which, like a comforting narrative, gave meaning and coherence to their lives. There was an unspoken agreement between them, as if neither wanted to say too much, and they were mostly content with these omissions, with the ghostly presences that floated around them without ever taking shape. And it was upon those fresh defeats, which they barely had the strength to talk about, that they began to build their dysfunctional relationship, founded more on silence (on emptiness itself) than on words or concrete facts, as if air were more impervious to erosion than solid bodies, and desire the most perfect form of antimatter.
They parted ways at dawn, that first night, at the entrance to the metro station. After he watched her make her way down the stairs, he started walking back along Gran Via to his hotel. The pavement glistened, still wet from the ritual hosing-down that cleanses the city in the early hours of each day. The buildings were outlined sharply against a metallic blue sky. They’d exchanged phone numbers just before they said goodbye. By the time he arrived at the hotel it was nearly daytime. Even so, he managed to sleep for three hours, fully clothed. He dreamt that he was in a boat travelling down a fast-flowing river. He made the first move, once he realized that she wasn’t going to make it, letting three weeks go by before he called her. She picked up after the third ring. Hi, she said calmly, as if she’d been expecting his call. Hi, he replied.
The aforementioned Konjic also has a river with a bridge over it, built entirely from stone, with several semicircular arches between the pillars that hold it above the Neretva, the same river that runs through Mostar. Almost all of Bosnia’s towns have a river with a stone bridge connecting the two banks with their divided communities of different religions and nationalities, and during the various wars that devastated the region over the last century, these were often blown up.
She, of course, immediately decided to photograph the bridge as part of her project. This time, they don’t wander around the town looking for cemeteries from the war years. Neither do they pay much attention to the shrapnel-pocked façades or the derelict buildings. She has gathered plenty of material in Mostar and plans to carry on doing so in Sarajevo. Sarajevo’s cemeteries are impressive, she says, as she wedges her tripod between the rocks, and he automatically sees slopes covered with the graves of people who died between 1992 and 1995. For a moment, it’s as if he’s witnessing a cruelly magnified version of the landscape he saw yesterday in Mostar, when, in the middle of dinner, he crossed the street to stroll through the cemetery and found himself surrounded by headstones engraved with the names of people his age. At a time when, in his city of Barcelona, they were enjoying life with abundant optimism; a time he was still a university student trying to appear moody and depressed, because the happiness around him back then seemed—as things sometimes do—like the vulgar sneer of a city drunk on self-satisfaction. He’d never really noticed it during that period, but now, visiting all those places, it has returned to remind him that during the years when he was so preoccupied with the vanity of being young and doing it his own way, other boys from the same continent were being killed on the TV in his parents’ living room, while he was attempting to recover discreetly from his colossal hangovers.
Once she has finished with the bridge, she strips off her clothes until she is down to just her underwear. He declines to go for a swim in his boxer shorts and sits on the rocks on the bank to wait for her. There are two boys down there, near the bridge. She gingerly enters the water, bracing herself for the cold. She stays kneeling for a while, the water up to her waist, before submerging herself. He watches her from afar, framed by the bridge and the whiteness of the afternoon, in a still, perfect scene that takes him back to the days they spent in Dubrovnik at the beginning of that week. It seems so long ago now that they were both swimming in a sea such an intense blue that it almost seemed unreal. The yellow light of those sun-filled days now makes him question his memory. As she comes out of the water shivering and wraps herself in a towel, he tells her about a film he saw weeks before he set out on the trip. At the start of the film, the narrator says something that he is reminded of now. What did he say? she asks, drying herself off as the afternoon turns to evening and it becomes less pleasant to be on the riverbank. I was born in Yugoslavia, he quotes, a country that no longer exists.
They find a terrace café not too far from the riverbank, where they have something to eat, and drink a few beers until it gets dark. Then they walk back to the motel. When they arrive, they are met at reception by the same grey-haired man as before. He smiles enthusiastically as if for a moment he’d thought that they weren’t coming back. Once more, he tries to exchange a few words with them, but he only speaks Serbo-Croat and can’t understand anything they say in English other than a few basic, internationally used words, so whenever they try to string together a sentence, however simple, they lose him again. He persists in Serbo-Croat, uttering fairly long sentences to his and her complete stupefaction, because it’s clear that there’s no way they can understand him. But the receptionist persists, and for a moment appears to think that by repeating the same sentences with slight variations he’ll manage to make himself understood. He even adds what seem like clarifications and additions in his own language, as if that might somehow be useful. The three of them are standing there in the decadent lobby, with its seventies or eighties decor, as if the years have not passed there, or as if they have, which is worse, much worse, because everything is old and about to be abandoned, and the motel is still there, like a remnant of a shipwrecked era, like a ruin on the verge of collapse. Suddenly he says to her: how many people do you think are staying in this motel? Are we the only ones? It doesn’t look like there’s anyone else here. I don’t know, she says. Who knows? But no, I don’t think there’s anyone else. It doesn’t look like it. But he suddenly feels the pressing need to know exactly how many people are going to be sleeping there that night, and so he tries to formulate the question. Obviously English is no use. The receptionist stares hard and scrunches up his face as if he’s making an enormous effort, but after a while he relaxes, just smiling politely and shaking his head. He then randomly gestures a few numbers with his fingers: five, three, seven, eight. The receptionist gives a satisfied nod, and a contented chuckle, as if they have finally managed to understand one another, and they both agree on seven, the number is seven: there are seven people sleeping that night in the motel, according to that mimed exchange.
A couple of hours later, when she is about to fall asleep, he heads down to reception with the intention of smoking a cigarette. The lobby is dimly lit. He cannot see the receptionist anywhere, so he steps outside and smokes in front of the glass door, just a few feet away from the highway now erased by the night. Coming back into the motel, he hears a muffled sound. In one of the wings of the lobby, somewhat hidden, is a small lounge with a sofa and an old television set in it. Carefully peering inside, he glances at the TV emanating the flickering lights of images which, from where he is standing, he can only guess at. A faint voice accompanies the flickers. On the sofa, wearing the same clothes but with his shoes off, the receptionist sleeps, curled up with his hands beneath his head as a pillow. Again, he immediately thinks of the absurd image of an elderly Yugoslav who has been trapped there; the guardian and prisoner of a wreck, of which this motel is the last remaining piece of driftwood.
When they are woken at seven o’clock in the morning by repeated and increasingly insistent knocking on their door, he crawls out of bed to open it and finds the grey-haired receptionist, smiling, almost euphoric, holding up seven fingers and nodding hysterically, as if seeking a gesture of approval from him. He realizes that seven was not the number of guests staying in the motel that night, but the time at which they’d unwittingly requested a wake-up call.
They manage to sleep for a couple more hours after this incident, drowsiness sweeping it away until it blends with sleep. When they wake up, the event feels like a dream. Down in the dining room, they find several tables where people are seated, in front of enormous windows with the morning light streaming through. They take a seat at one of the few empty tables and are greeted by a young waiter who speaks surprisingly good English. They order coffee and toast. He looks around for the receptionist from the previous night but cannot see him. Perhaps he only works nights, he thinks. As he looks around, he meets the eye of several of the motel staff. Two or three young waiters and a woman in her fifties who looks like she’s the manager. They are in the middle of a bustling service. Most of the tables are occupied by Germans or Austrians. Others by French, English, or Italians. Families and groups of young people. A few pensioners. Everything happening around him that morning really does have the muted texture of dreams. But who’s to say that yesterday wasn’t in fact the dream? Or last night? In any case, deep down they know, or believe, that the odd sensation of unreality is largely the product of their still-fragile state of wakefulness, still so close to sleep. Strange, isn’t it? he says. Yesterday the motel seemed empty and abandoned, besides that loon, and I thought he might just be posing as the receptionist at one point. She smiles as she fiddles with the camera, and replies, yeah, it’s pretty weird. Outside the large window, on a back terrace which they hadn’t noticed the day before, a group of young Brits are knocking back beers, regardless of the fact it’s not even lunchtime yet. Their table is a landscape littered with empty bottles, and the green glass glitters in the sunshine, creating unusual reflections. You could photograph all of this, he says. I could, she says.
