My tutor at the university had obtained a grant for me, but it barely covered my expenses. And so, with some of my savings, I bought a Pashley bicycle and applied to work as a delivery girl for the neighborhood fruit and vegetable market. The owner, Don José, accepted me right away. He was the son of Spanish immigrants who had arrived on the Winnipeg in 1939. He’d never lived in Spain, but he still had a Spanish accent, which he must have inherited from his parents. He wore a beret, a mustache, and a pair of suspenders, with his stout belly protruding between them. You entered the shop by going down three steps, on one of which a black cat was usually lying. Every morning after making my deliveries, I’d ride my bicycle to the Bombal Library on Condell Street.
The first day, a small, slender woman opened the door. Although she wasn’t extremely old, she walked with a stick and her hair was white. As soon as I came in, she showed me into a room almost entirely occupied by a mahogany desk. Light barely entered the room through some long, heavy, velvet curtains. Everything there seemed to have been in place for a long time, and colors and objects blended into a single, uniform substance.
The library had been founded by a wealthy heiress in the 1950s. Its mission was to collect and recover texts composed by Latin American women who were storytellers and poets, but it also held a collection of poems and letters written by anonymous women of Anglo-Saxon origin in the nineteenth century.
“My name is Rosa Espinoza. Tell me how I can help you,” she said after we were both sitting down, she at the desk, which was loaded with books, and I across from her.
I wondered about her name, “Thorny Rose.” Either her parents had given it to her on purpose—which would have been cruel—or they hadn’t noticed what they were doing.
Without waiting for my reply, Mrs. Espinoza proceeded to ask me a string of questions: address, age, contact information for my professors in France, course of study. Things like that. Using an antiquated computer, she slowly and sternly recorded my responses while scrutinizing me through her eyeglasses as though I were hiding a bomb in my backpack.
“And what do you propose to do here?” she asked in conclusion.
She removed her glasses, closed them, and held them like a pointed weapon as she crossed her arms on the desk. I was finding it difficult to understand what was going on. Horacio Infante had insisted that all I would have to do was to show up at the library and start working.
“You really don’t know?”
The woman shook her head. Her pearl earrings shed sparkles on her shoulders. She was dressed in bright colors that played off against her white hair. I sat there in silence. I didn’t want to tell her the real reason that had brought me there. I kept that closed up inside me, where it had no limits. To name it, on the other hand, would have been a way of imprisoning it and mutilating it. Therefore, I had come up with a project that would serve as a screen: to catalog the papers and archives Vera Sigall had donated to the library two years ago and which, according to Mr. Roche’s inquiries, had remained untouched ever since.
“Perhaps you might like a cup of tea before you explain.”
A strange gleam shone in her eyes, which were surrounded by wrinkles.
“I’d love some tea,” I said, and she disappeared.
Through the small opening between the heavy curtains, I could make out the bare branches of the trees, standing out like filigree against the gray sky.
“A world of trees without stars,” I murmured. Those were the last words spoken by Javier, the main character in Vera Sigall’s first novel.
Mrs. Espinoza returned, followed by a man carrying a silver tray with a grayish-blue teapot and two cups of the same color. The man placed the tray on the desk, took Mrs. Espinoza’s stick, and helped her sit down.
“Thank you, Efraín,” she said with a smile. “Efraín is the gardener, my chauffeur, and the guardian of all this,” she added after he had disappeared.
The fragrance of tea and spices filled the room. Mrs. Espinoza served us both, frugally.
“It’s rather hot, be careful,” she said. After a pause, she went on: “And now, perhaps you can tell me the purpose of your visit to this place.”
She raised her head, hoping that something unexpected but at the same time familiar would arise from my words, like a pigeon from a magician’s hat.
“What I want to do…,” I said, and stopped.
“Come now. Speak.”
Her voice sounded kind but firm.
She leaned her head against the back of her chair and fixed her uncosmeticized eyes on mine.
“Well, what I want to do is to analyze the different meanings that the stars and the planets have in Vera Sigall’s writing. To discover their origin. That’s in very broad terms. I’ve studied this topic for some time without getting very far.”
I don’t know why I did it, but in front of that woman I articulated, for the first time, the reason that had brought me there. That had given me the strength to cross the pond. My intuition told me that something was hidden in Vera Sigall’s stars. Something that went beyond the fiction, beyond the characters and the stories. And the words too. I also sensed that if I could find it, I’d find something of myself. This was a perception so vague and elusive that it often faded away. I lowered my eyes. My hands were perspiring.
“As soon as I saw you, I knew Horacio Infante must have been mistaken, I knew your real purpose couldn’t be to catalog Vera Sigall’s work. You don’t look like a cataloger.”
I didn’t know how to hug people. But I wished I could.
With her as my guide, I toured the library, a two-story building in the English style. The large reading room on the ground floor was at the scholars’ disposal. A stool that had belonged to Alfonsina Storni stood in a display case in one corner. As Mrs. Espinoza explained, Alfonsina used to take that stool with her on her long walks on the high plateau so that she could have something to sit on when she stopped to think. The library itself was on the upper floor. There were three large rooms, in one of them a large card catalog with drawers classified by authoress. I managed to make out some of the names: Clarice Lispector, Elena Garro, Silvina Ocampo, and Alejandra Pizarnik.
A short while later, I was sitting in a room on the first floor, in front of one of the boxes Vera Sigall had donated to the library. A group of photographs bound with black ribbon drew my attention. There aren’t many pictures of Vera Sigall. The press and the publishers of her books always printed the same one, in which she seems to be trying to hide her beauty behind a scathing seriousness. I undid the knot carefully. There were five black-and-white photos. Four of them were of people I didn’t recognize. The fifth was an oval-matted photograph of Vera with her parents, Arón and Emma Sigall. The thick-faced, coarse-looking mother gazes at the camera with a concerned expression, as if she knows fate has a difficult future in store for her, and she’s anticipating it unflinchingly. The father, wearing a humble suit of clothes appropriate for someone accustomed to hard work, gives the camera a strict, determined stare. Vera, a little girl no more than seven years old, has an uneasy, melancholy air about her.
In one of the most important books published on Vera Sigall’s work, its author—Benjamin Moser—points out that everything having to do with her biographical details is ambiguous and often contradictory. Nobody knows for certain how old she was when her parents made their escape from the town of Chechelnyk in Ukraine, fleeing the pogroms. According to what Moser was able to verify, they arrived in Moldavia on the Dniester River, traveling by canoe. The exact date when they reached Romania and the journey they made afterward to arrive in Chile are lost in the mist. Throughout her life, Vera surrounded herself with enigmas, and in the few interviews that she agreed to, she generally hid behind a reiterated response: “My great mystery is that I have no mystery.”
I remember the first time I read one of her texts. The language changed in her hands. Words reflected and reproduced one another, like images in crossed mirrors, creating a sensation of uncertainty.
I put the photograph on the table and closed my eyes. I needed to assimilate the emotion that being in Vera Sigall’s world aroused in me. I thought that maybe I’d finally found my place, within those old walls, within the souls of all those women. Nobody could reach me there. Nobody could demand what I could never give.
I got back on my bike before darkness fell. The rays of the sun were crossing the sky like darts, bouncing off the windows of the tall glass buildings. I was climbing the stairs to my rooftop apartment when I ran into my ninth-floor neighbors. They introduced themselves as Juan and Francisco. Juan was tall and dark-haired; his demeanor was easygoing, his clothes fastidious and elegant. Francisco was short and stocky, with stiff blond hair and lively eyes; his worn-out jeans and his sweater bore traces of paint.
“You’re Emilia Husson, right?” Juan asked me. With friendly formality, he held out one big, swarthy hand. I nodded affirmation but didn’t take his hand. Maybe he could read in my eyes that my refusal had no disdain in it, for he disregarded the offense and went on: “As you see, we’ve been interrogating the super. You’re Emilia, and you come from Paris.”
“Well, not exactly Paris. I live in Grenoble, but I don’t suppose that makes much difference right at the moment.”
The two men gave me unambiguously friendly smiles.
“It’s been more than a year since anyone lived on the roof. We were worried about who might move in. I’m glad it’s you, Emilia,” said Juan, taking some keys out of his pocket.
“Hope we see you again soon,” said Francisco, and they disappeared into their apartment.
In my rooftop home, I washed the plates left over from dinner and then turned on my computer. I had a long email from Jérôme. He was leaving the next day on one of his mountaineering expeditions; this time he’d try to reach the top of Mount Elbrus. After reading his message, I wrote him back and told him about my meeting with Mrs. Espinoza, about the dusty smell, about Efraín, the solemn gardener, about the aromatic tea that changed the order of things like a magic potion. I also told him about the photograph of Vera Sigall I’d found, and about her uneasy eyes, which seemed to be waiting for something.