215

* * * * * *

When I was little I wanted to become a nun like Maria von Trapp. I don’t think I ever told you that. I wasn’t drawn to life in the convent but I saw her passage through the church as necessary for all that came later. Soon I transformed my desire to be like her into the desire that someone like her would appear in my life, knocking on our door, suitcase in hand. Every night I would kneel by the bed, facing the window, and bring my hands together to pray that a Maria would show up in our lives. I was convinced my father needed a woman like her. I fantasized about Captain von Trapp and his daughter singing “Edelweiss” to the strumming of the guitar. I adapted that confirmation of Austrian patriotism into a love spell. The most obvious and necessary solution was to find someone for my father. There must have been women I never got to meet. Later, one day when I came home from secondary school, I crossed paths with one, her hair very dishevelled, in the hallway of our home. I never asked him about her and kept waiting for Maria, until one after the other all my myths came tumbling down.

As I fill up a glass vase with water and stand a eucalyptus branch in it, Lídia shares her opinion that at this point the most obvious and necessary solution is for me to find someone, to not be alone, I’m not saying you have to have 216somebody move in with you, Paula, but you could use a little joy. I momentarily flee into the striking landscapes of the Austrian Alps and bite my tongue to keep from saying that there have been new men since you, men who were supposed to bring back joy and pleasure, and who did in some broken way, and if in the future there are more men (I also keep this to myself, although I know it’s true) joy and pleasure will return mutilated like soldiers from this new war of mine.

I would give anything to know what’s going through your mind, whether you think I’m exaggerating, to talk it over with you now that we wouldn’t be a couple creating memories together anymore. I trust we’d have learnt to be good friends and that you’d sometimes come by the hospital to pick me up the way you used to, and I’d be able to explain to you that the obvious and necessary solution isn’t finding someone else, not before reconfiguring myself as a person.

Then I would tell you all that stuff about The Sound of Music and you’d crack up laughing, and when we got home, I’d have invited you for supper, you’d turn up the thermostat because you’re always cold and you would scratch your head as you searched for a botanical treatise on the shelves of the room that used to be your office, and you’d pull it out in that careful way you had with books, turning the pages until you found one that showed that flower which looks like white candyfloss and, raising your voice so I could hear you from the other room, you’d say yes, Paula, it’s the flower from the Asteraceae family that grows in small clusters on high, rocky Alpine fields. Leontopodium alpinum, can you hear me? 217And I would be sitting on the bed taking off my socks, and I’d smile to myself and release a contented sigh, and things between us would be at peace and as they should.

Lídia talks and talks and rearranges the eucalyptus branches and inside me there is only the echo of “Edelweiss”, wrapped in that scent of endless winter.

* * * * * *