I felt absurd, dragging my suitcase-on-wheels by its strap, like a child with a wagon, into the main square of the town and setting it to rights every time it toppled over on the cobblestones. I couldn’t carry it because my shoulder already ached from the manuscript I was toting in the satchel under my arm. Besides, the suitcase was weighed down by a huge dictionary and thesaurus.

     I ducked into a doorway under a sign that read “Caja de Correos—post office—but found a cramped souvenir shop instead, with no sign of a proprietor. After hesitating a moment, I called out timidly in Spanish and was answered by the postmaster-shopkeeper-teller from the “bank” next door.

     “Can you tell me where to find the English brothers Aaron and Eben?” I asked.

     He bobbed his head half a dozen times as he approached and grabbed a postcard off a rack. “Under the double arches just around the corner,” he said, jabbing a finger at it. “Number four.”

     I followed his directions to a narrow lane—on either side the ancient Catalan apartments forming a single whitewashed façade running the length of the short block, punctuated by sets of green double doors with metal rings, and the upper levels festooned with purple bougainvillea that cascaded from tiny wrought-iron balconies. I knocked a long time at number four. When no one answered, I let myself in—the door was unlocked—and climbed three flight of stairs, calling out at each landing.

     I found Alana on the fourth floor, sweeping the brick floor of the bedroom—entirely naked. She greeted me casually, asking about my trip from Madrid. Her pastel brown skin was flawless from hairline to heel—not a mole, not a freckle, not a vein. She had small, firm breasts and finely honed knees, as smooth as polished wood, and her shoulder-length hair stood out from her head in gauzy waves. She looked so natural to me that from then on clothes would seem incongruous on her. Whether lounging in a doorway, which she did now for a moment, or reclining by the ocean, as I would see her later, she was unselfconsciously at ease with her own beauty. “Do you have a place to stay?” she asked solicitously.

     A few minutes later I was flopping my suitcase on one of the three iron beds in Alana’s neighboring apartment and discovering that the little purse I carried in my satchel had apparently been snatched on the bus from Figueras.

                                                                               …

     “Alana…” I would write. “Crinkle-eyed when she smiles, and lithe, her hair and skin and eyes all shades of brown, like a doe’s. She is gentle and studiously kind, with a warmth that is democratic, impersonal… A tick-infested old dog, a beggar woman collapsed on a corner—she ministers to all impartially.”

     She sat wearily on her up-ended suitcase on the dusty shoulder of a two-lane highway, across from a rustic gas station and bar. A sailor with his left hand inside the breast of his blue shirt stood a short distance up the road, wagging his right thumb at the non-existent traffic. A truck finally came by, then stopped up the road, though it passed with such a blast of wind, it nearly rocked her off her suitcase—and when she glanced around, she saw the sailor chasing his hat into a field.

     There were two metal rungs to one side of the cab door, and she climbed these and grabbed the top of the door to hoist herself into the head-high seat. She hadn’t wanted to ride with a truck driver—had promised herself she wouldn’t accept a ride unless there was a woman in the car—but the afternoon was wearing on and she was beginning to feel desperate. It turned out there was a divider between the seats that separated them by almost a yard, which reassured her—somewhat.

     “You’re American?” he shouted in Spanish when they were underway, louder than necessary over the rumbling engine. She nodded. “My truck is American!” he grinned, as though that established a bond between them.  He went on to tell her he had two brothers in San Francisco, a lawyer and a butcher, and that he was a bachelor.

     He was a hefty man, with grizzled hair on his forearms and head, good-looking except for the large gap between his front teeth.

     The ride was slow and rough, and for a while she watched ruefully a couple of small cars whizzing around them and disappearing in the distance.

     “Cuando llegaremos a Barcelona?—When will we get to Barcelona?” she asked anxiously.

     “A las tres,” he answered.

     Three. Too late to cash a traveler’s check, and she had only a hundred pesetas in her purse. But she didn’t want to bother him with stopping to let her off so soon after he’d let her on, so she didn’t say anything.

     Over the miles they established a curious pattern of communication. They would drive along in silence for a long while, then he would bellow a question at her. She would answer two or three times—he never understood her first efforts—her voice getting shriller with discouragement at each repetition. After a while she pulled some wedges of foil-wrapped cheese out of her satchel, and he offered her warm wine—which she refused—from a plastic bottle he kept next to his seat.

     Eventually she explained her dilemma to him.

     “There’s a bank in the next town,” he reassured her.  “We can stop there.”

                                                                          …

     When she had cashed her check and climbed back into the truck, he said, “Ahora puede andar mas tranquila—Now you can relax.”

     And she did. She rolled down the window, so the glass didn’t dim the vividness of the view, and watched the countryside unfolding before her, as picturesque as travel posters—ancient stone walls and squat stone huts along aimless muddy rivers, colorful patchworks of cultivated plots, wild fields streaked with red poppies, and an occasional crumbled castle on a hill.

     “I’ve never seen red poppies before,” she told him.  “In California, we only have gold ones.”

     “Would you like to pick some?” he asked unexpectedly.

     She stretched out her stiff legs, flexing her feet to acute angles.  “Yes!”

     She crossed the highway and followed an eddy of red flowers around the foot of a hillock. It must be past their season, she thought—most of them were black and curled around the edges, as though they’d been scorched by the sun. She picked only the freshest ones. The truck driver followed her and picked a few himself, which surprised her a little.

     “Here!” he said, extending his bouquet to her when she turned back. But as she reached to accept it, he grabbed her roughly.

     “Dejeme en paz!—Leave me in peace!” she cried, since she couldn’t remember the word for “let go.” He ducked his head and tried to kiss her breast, at the same time pinning her arms behind her back.

     “Dejeme en paz!” she screamed again, freeing one hand and hitting him wildly in the face.

    “Don’t strike me,” he hissed menacingly, trying to throw her off-balance.

     It’s come, then! she thought with a shock of fear and recognition—a transcendent knowing, as though this memory had always existed in her consciousness, as though she’d always shared it with women throughout the ages. Time slowed, and her thoughts became hyper-clear.

     Go for his eyes, she thought. Only she couldn’t. Yet. Amid the wrenching and blows, there was an instant when they both froze, she with her hand back to strike, he with his elbow up to ward it off—and their eyes locked.  They stared at each other in stark, bestial confrontation.  His eyes were opaque, depthless—like something on a taxidermist’s shelf.

     “I like American girls,” he whispered hoarsely. 

     She gave a scream and a violent twist…and suddenly she was free—running through the tall grass—around the hillock—down the dashed line of the highway, waving her mangled poppies like a flag—directly into the path of an oncoming truck.

     When it pulled to a screeching halt, she looked up into the face of the driver with supplication, wondering whether he would be her deliverer or someone else to be delivered from.

     “That man…that man!” she shrilled, with a violent gesture, as though pushing him away from her, though he stood now on the other side of the road.

     “I wasn’t going to do anything,” her attacker muttered through clenched teeth as he pulled her suitcase out of the back of his truck.

     On the passenger side of the second truck, she hoisted the suitcase over her head and shoved it halfway onto the high seat. But the next instant, she felt all the energy drain out of her. Her knees buckled and she dropped, limp though still conscious, to the ground. And when the suitcase started to slide out on top of her, the driver caught hold of it just in time.

     Reading the journal I kept throughout my trip, I see that this short story is accurate in all its particulars except for the moment my attacker paused and we locked eyes. In reality, there was no pause—I kept fighting till I broke free.

I’d gone back to Madrid, excited to see what changes democracy had wrought. What I found was a modern-day city with modern-day problems, as harried and impersonal as the place I’d come from, its small-town quaintness and intimacy vanished without a trace. I was astonished to see pornography plastered on newsstands on every other corner, to learn that the crime rate was soaring, to find that my fellow roomers at the residencia, where I stayed again, now kept to themselves—no longer ate meals together or went visiting from room to room. On the plane I’d met a young woman from the Bay Area—Alana—who told me about a fishing village north of Barcelona called Cadaques, where she’d lived with her enigmatic lover the year before…until she became ill and had to return to the states. Lonely and disillusioned after only a week in Madrid, that was where I headed. And to save a little money—I was traveling on a shoestring—I decided to hitchhike instead of taking the train.