eleven

One day my solitude had been enough to content me. The next, a door had opened off to its side and I had walked straight through into a void. The vision of Justine had made the difference. In other ways my life, on the surface, remained the same. The artefacts of my choice still stood around me. Creamy marble boys and ebony heads continued in their silent observation of me. However, the knowledge of Justine was with me now and it stuck to my life like a shadow.

The height of summer had arrived with a vengeance. The central private gardens of my square dried up over night, the grass turning to the colour of her hair. Half-naked children stumbled over the spiky grass like those bottom-heavy leaded toys that always return to the upward position, whatever happens.

Justine was not there, everywhere I looked. Her absence paralysed my flat, paralysed the air, paralysed the point to living. Trees turned black, as if charred by the night. I could not comprehend the power that one sighting of her had had over me except to explain it in terms of my Destiny. The portrait of Justine had come to life: the vulgarity of a simple coincidence could not explain it away.

Once I had seen her, there was no longer any alternative. Other women became impostors. Walking down the street I recognized the back of her head often, her hair glinting like the gold of a Byzantine mosaic. But the face was never hers – it was scared and hooked, dumb and malleable, or petulant and conceited. These faces had stolen her hair to frame their own expressions. When I saw what these strangers had done, appropriated part of her beauty for themselves, I wanted to reclaim her locks, slash them off with a sharp blade, carry the sashes of her hair home. The thieves of Justine’s hair should have been punished. These women should not have been allowed to walk down the streets bearing their booty, exhibiting their lush tresses, letting it fall down their slender backs, Justine’s hair.

However, even worse was the impudent theft of her face. These strange women wore her face like a mask, but I saw that they had even prised out her eyes, the exact shade of jade, and placed them like precious stones into the rings of their own sockets. And in horror, I imagined her, the blank where her face used to be, the serrated edges of flesh, encircling her high forehead, chin and jaw where the skin, the soft white skin that had once been Justine’s skin, had been pulled away to reveal the structure of the bone beneath.

Sometimes it was only her gestures that were appropriated. A woman put her hand to the back of her neck in thought. These gestures had been snatched from Justine and used by strangers promiscuously in the street. My resentment turned to pity for it was in ignorance that these women performed these impersonations of Justine. They were puppets going through the motions, vehicles for the true justification of their existence, of the beating of their hearts, which was that they lived as clues, traces, bodily mementos of Justine.