Page 599 - A Little Life: A Novel

he would instead write Jude messages, which seemed more appropriate
anyway, more pilgrim-like, and in the morning, he sent him pictures of his
breakfast (black bread with caraway seeds, yogurt, cucumbers) and of the

stretch of road he would walk that day. Much of the road cut through busy
towns, and so in places they were rerouted into the countryside. Each day,
he chose a few white pebbles from the side of the road and put them in a jar
to take home; at night, he sat in his hotel room with his feet wrapped in hot
towels.
They finished filming two weeks before Christmas, and he flew to
London for meetings, and then back to Madrid to meet Jude, where they

rented a car and drove south, through Andalusia. In a town on a cliff high
above the sea they stopped to meet Asian Henry Young, whom they
watched trudging uphill, waving at them with both arms when he saw them,
and finishing the last hundred yards in a sprint. “Thank god you’re giving
me an excuse to get the fuck out of that house,” he said. Henry had been
living for the past month at an artists’ residency down the hill, in a valley

filled with orange trees, but unusually for him, he hated the other six people
at the colony, and as they ate dishes of orange rounds floating in a liqueur
of their own juice and topped with cinnamon and pulverized cloves and
almonds, they laughed at Henry’s stories about his fellow artists. Later, after
telling him goodbye and that they’d see him next month in New York, they
walked slowly together through the medieval town, whose every structure
was a glittering white salt cube, and where striped cats lay in the streets and

flicked the tips of their tails as people with wheel carts ground slowly
around them.
The next evening, outside Granada, Jude said he had a surprise for him,
and they got into the car that was waiting for them in front of the restaurant,
Jude with the brown envelope he’d kept by his side all through dinner.
“Where’re we going?” he asked. “What’s in the envelope?”

“You’ll see,” Jude said.
Up and downhill they swooped, until the car stopped before the arched
entryway to the Alhambra, where Jude handed the guard a letter, which the
guard studied and then nodded at, and the car slid through the doorway and
stopped and the two of them got out and stood there in the quiet courtyard.
“Yours,” Jude said, shyly, nodding at the buildings and gardens below.
“For the next three hours, anyway,” and then, when Willem couldn’t say

anything, he continued, quietly, “Do you remember?”