Solomon, Hearth, Chaim … You take advantage.”
“Imagine, Inés.” Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara became decidedly insistent. “Imagine that you threw yourself off a cliff rising four hundred feet above the sea—would you be dead before you hit the waves?”
“Were you what he couldn’t be? Or was he everything you couldn’t be?” Inés fired back, angry now, her instinct liberated.
Gabriel’s fist was clenched from intense emotion and intense anger. Inés pried open his hand and deposited an object on the open palm. It was a crystal seal, with a light of its own and illegible inscriptions.
“I found it in the attic,” Inés said. “I had the impression that it wasn’t yours. That’s how I got the nerve to offer it to you as a gift. A gift from a dishonest guest. I went into your attic. I looked at the photographs.”
“Inés, pictures sometimes lie. What happens to a photograph over time? Do you think a photo doesn’t live and die?”
“That’s what you said before. With time, our portraits lie. They aren’t us anymore.”
“How do you see yourself?”
“I see myself as a virgin.” She laughed uncomfortably. “A good daughter. Mexican. Bourgeois. Immature. Learning. Discovering my voice. That’s why I don’t understand why memory comes back when I least desire it. It must be that I have a very short memory. My uncle the diplomat always said that our memory of most things lasts no longer than seven seconds or seven words.”
“Didn’t your parents teach you anything? To put it a better way, what did your parents teach you?”
“They died when I was seven.”
“To me the past is the other place,” said Gabriel, staring toward the far shore of the English Channel.
“I don’t have anything to forget.” She moved her arms in a way that wasn’t hers, that felt strange. “But I feel an urgency to leave the past behind.”
“I, on the other hand, sometimes want to leave the future behind.”
The sand absorbed their footsteps.
He left abruptly, without saying goodbye, abandoning her, in wartime, on a lonely coast.
Gabriel raced back through Yarbury Forest and the heath of Durnovaria, until he stopped at a high, square, clod-filled field near the river Frome. From there the coast was no longer visible. The land was like a protective frontier, an unfenced boundary, an outdoor sanctuary, a deserted ruin with no obelisks or sandstone columns. The sky of England moves so swiftly that you can stop but still think you are moving as fast as the heavens overhead.
Only there could he tell himself that he had never learned to distinguish the distance between a woman’s abject submission and her absolute purity. He wanted her forgiveness. Inés would remember him as misguided, whatever he did … He didn’t deny that he wanted her or that he had to abandon her. If only she wouldn’t remember him as a coward or a traitor. If only she wouldn’t give flesh to the other in the person of Atlan-Ferrara, the companion, the brother, the one who was elsewhere … He prayed that the young Mexican girl’s intelligence, so superior to the concept she seemed to have of herself, would always know to distinguish between him and the other—for he was in today’s world, forced to fulfill obligations, to travel, to establish order, while the other was free, could make choices, could give all his attention to her. Love her—maybe even that: love her … He was elsewhere. Gabriel was here.
But maybe she saw in Gabriel what he saw in her: an avenue
to the unknown. Making a supreme effort to think clearly, Atlan-Ferrara realized why Inés and he should never have sex. She rejected him because she saw another woman in his gaze. But, equally, he knew that when she looked at him she was seeing someone else. And yet couldn’t they, servants of time, be him and be her, be themselves and be others in each other’s eyes?
I won’t usurp my brother’s place, he said to himself as he drove off toward the
“Imagine, Inés.” Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara became decidedly insistent. “Imagine that you threw yourself off a cliff rising four hundred feet above the sea—would you be dead before you hit the waves?”
“Were you what he couldn’t be? Or was he everything you couldn’t be?” Inés fired back, angry now, her instinct liberated.
Gabriel’s fist was clenched from intense emotion and intense anger. Inés pried open his hand and deposited an object on the open palm. It was a crystal seal, with a light of its own and illegible inscriptions.
“I found it in the attic,” Inés said. “I had the impression that it wasn’t yours. That’s how I got the nerve to offer it to you as a gift. A gift from a dishonest guest. I went into your attic. I looked at the photographs.”
“Inés, pictures sometimes lie. What happens to a photograph over time? Do you think a photo doesn’t live and die?”
“That’s what you said before. With time, our portraits lie. They aren’t us anymore.”
“How do you see yourself?”
“I see myself as a virgin.” She laughed uncomfortably. “A good daughter. Mexican. Bourgeois. Immature. Learning. Discovering my voice. That’s why I don’t understand why memory comes back when I least desire it. It must be that I have a very short memory. My uncle the diplomat always said that our memory of most things lasts no longer than seven seconds or seven words.”
“Didn’t your parents teach you anything? To put it a better way, what did your parents teach you?”
“They died when I was seven.”
“To me the past is the other place,” said Gabriel, staring toward the far shore of the English Channel.
“I don’t have anything to forget.” She moved her arms in a way that wasn’t hers, that felt strange. “But I feel an urgency to leave the past behind.”
“I, on the other hand, sometimes want to leave the future behind.”
The sand absorbed their footsteps.
He left abruptly, without saying goodbye, abandoning her, in wartime, on a lonely coast.
Gabriel raced back through Yarbury Forest and the heath of Durnovaria, until he stopped at a high, square, clod-filled field near the river Frome. From there the coast was no longer visible. The land was like a protective frontier, an unfenced boundary, an outdoor sanctuary, a deserted ruin with no obelisks or sandstone columns. The sky of England moves so swiftly that you can stop but still think you are moving as fast as the heavens overhead.
Only there could he tell himself that he had never learned to distinguish the distance between a woman’s abject submission and her absolute purity. He wanted her forgiveness. Inés would remember him as misguided, whatever he did … He didn’t deny that he wanted her or that he had to abandon her. If only she wouldn’t remember him as a coward or a traitor. If only she wouldn’t give flesh to the other in the person of Atlan-Ferrara, the companion, the brother, the one who was elsewhere … He prayed that the young Mexican girl’s intelligence, so superior to the concept she seemed to have of herself, would always know to distinguish between him and the other—for he was in today’s world, forced to fulfill obligations, to travel, to establish order, while the other was free, could make choices, could give all his attention to her. Love her—maybe even that: love her … He was elsewhere. Gabriel was here.
But maybe she saw in Gabriel what he saw in her: an avenue
to the unknown. Making a supreme effort to think clearly, Atlan-Ferrara realized why Inés and he should never have sex. She rejected him because she saw another woman in his gaze. But, equally, he knew that when she looked at him she was seeing someone else. And yet couldn’t they, servants of time, be him and be her, be themselves and be others in each other’s eyes?
I won’t usurp my brother’s place, he said to himself as he drove off toward the
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