With a movement of the eyes he indicates the lodge to one side.
The lodge, put together of prefabricated wooden panels, is stiflingly hot. Inside, behind a small trestle table, sits a man in shirtsleeves, writing. A tiny electric fan blows a stream of air into his face.
'Excuse me,' she says. He pays her no attention. 'Excuse me. Can someone open the gate for me?'
He is filling in some kind of form. Without ceasing to write, he speaks. 'First you must make a statement.'
'Make a statement? To whom? To you?'
With his left hand he pushes a sheet of paper across to her. She lets go of the suitcase and picks up the paper. It is blank.
'Before I can pass through I must make a statement,' she repeats. 'A statement of what?'
'Belief. What you believe.'
'Belief. Is that all? Not a statement of faith? What if I do not believe? What if I am not a believer?'
The man shrugs. For the first time he looks directly at her. 'We all believe. We are not cattle. For each of us there is something we believe. Write it down, what you believe. Put it in the statement.'
There is no more doubt in her mind about where she is, who she is. She is a petitioner before the gate. The journey that brought her here, to this country, to this town, that seemed to reach its end when the bus halted and its door opened on to the crowded square, was not the end of it all. Now commences a trial of a different kind. Some act is required of her, some prescribed yet undefined affirmation, before she will be found good and can pass through. But is this the one who will judge her, this ruddy, heavy-set man on whose rather sketchy uniform (military? civil guard?) she can detect no mark of rank but on whom the fan, swinging neither left nor right, pours a coolness that she wishes were being poured on her?
'I am a writer,' she says. 'You have probably not heard of me here, but I write, or have written, under the name Elizabeth Costello. It is not my profession to believe, just to write. Not my business. I do imitations, as Aristotle would have said.'
She pauses, then brings out the next sentence, the sentence that will determine whether this is her judge, the right one to judge her, or, on the contrary, merely the first in a long line leading to who knows what featureless functionary in what chancellery in what castle. 'I can do an imitation of belief, if you like. Will that be enough for your purposes?'
His response has an air of impatience about it, as though this is an offer he has had many times before. 'Write the statement as required,' he says. 'Bring it back when it is completed.'
'Very well, I will do so. Is there a time when you go off duty?'
'I am always here,' he replies. From which she understands that this town where she finds herself, where the guardian of the gate never sleeps and the people in the cafés seem to have nowhere to go, no obligation other than to fill the air with their chatter, is no more real than she: no more but perhaps no less.
Seated at one of the pavement tables she briskly composes what is to be her statement.
She takes her statement back to the guardhouse. As she half expected, it is rejected. The man at the desk does not refer it to a higher authority, apparently it does not deserve that, merely shakes his head and lets the page fall to the floor and pushes a fresh sheet of paper towards her. 'What you believe,' he says.
She returns to her chair on the pavement. Am I going to become an institution, she wonders: the old woman who says she is a writer exempt from the law? The woman who, with her black suitcase always beside her (containing what? – she can no longer remember), writes pleas, one after the other, that she puts before the man in the guardhouse and that the man in the guardhouse pushes aside as not good enough, not what is required before one can pass on?
'Can I just glance through?' she says on her second attempt. 'Take a glance at what lies on the other side? Just to see if it is worth all this trouble.'
