11. “Miraflora”

On the day when Madame Nashiru arrived at the boarding house on Scheller Street, with a little music, a light step, a narrow waist beneath lace trim, underskirt, petticoat and skirt and over that against the cold a tight blue suit blue beret blue ankle boots, Madame Esther sang almost silently to herself returning home happy in the afternoon, imagining itineraries through the darkening city almost as a dance, as exploration and surprise, better yet as an enigmatic path, a backstep instead of a river, a turn, a deceptive pas-de-deux, trois, quatre, foule, a crowd, the more people the better starting with the murmur of discrete voices, Madame? Sir? that filled the salon at “Miraflora” in the elegant business neighborhood on the wide airy street opposite the offices of Geschrei. Miss Esther Zaira Schleuster, hidden in a profusion of flowers, concealed and stealthy, lady of the blooms, observant and respectful, walked through the late afternoon city with shadows of eaves and architraves against imposts and archivolts at the doors of potters and cabinetmakers, of seamstresses and necklace beaders down Olmuz Street toward the riverbank; she would have preferred being solitary, mistress of her own savings, life, and will, to be a painter, courtesan, governess, thief, perhaps an actress or lion tamer: she would have been sketched as a portrait of a silent woman in shadowy golden light, eyes half-closed, dyed jet-black hair tied in a chignon at the back of her neck, decorated with a spray of chrysanthemums in a landscape of gray rainy lake country; she would have ridden in a luxurious coach with the curtains raised to let in the sun and would have seen the back of the faint empty silhouette slipping through the doors into the house on Scheller Street and forgotten it in less than an instant, immediately, with a surprising change in posture or expression; she would have arrived at the New World in a caravel and would have gone on to live majestically and cautiously in the golden palaces of Alagoas and Oruro, where servants with dark skin and almond eyes and earrings of bone and silver would shut the curtains tight at midday and would have leaned at the waist over wooden balustrades to see His Majesty’s horsemen; she would have jumped like a tiger or the wind or a falling stone on a woman leaving a coach who distractedly held herself in the doorway with a foot still in the air, would have surprised, assailed, robbed her, taken her purse, pearl necklace and earrings, would have pushed her and fled at her shout, losing herself in the crowd, because someone was waiting for her alone in an alley, at a crossroad, an avenue, she would have recited

  I met a lady in the meads,

    Full beautiful—a faery’s child,

  Her hair was long, her foot was light

    And her eyes were wild

on a stage blinded by the white light so she could not see the abyss of faces and eyes impertinently fixed on her, their binoculars, cigarette cases, jewelry, two thousand hearts, air confined by corduroy and camphor; she would have hunted ferocious animals in the jungle, the king vulture with a crown of feathers like diamonds that laid five brown eggs that smelled of civet on mountain peaks, or silky tigers or the Dramanabad panther; she would have had scratches, scars, and bruises, an injured and rigid hand but eyes like beasts; she would not live in the boarding house on Scheller Street, which was a pity, she liked the house, but would have lived in an attic apartment with glass roofs and the scent of turpentine along the top of a very old building at the end of a narrow little street; in Gefte Street traversed by closed coaches and inhabited by women who wore Damascene halters with rubies like boulders from Afghanistan, facing the Main Square and the palace with its shades always drawn; here and there looking back over her shoulder; near the Classical Theater in a mansion in Hundszunge Street, where it was said Friedrich Schröder lived with Sofia and Guellermina during the entire 1807 opera season; in a green-painted covered wagon with yellow trim and bright red flowers over its little windows.

She walked slower when she saw the dark line of park trees far away: if she kept walking at that speed, with a little music in her throat and fast feet, she would arrive too early, meet no one, enter the doorway alone and climb the stairs alone, walk down the corridor, pass the first door without turning her head, looking straight ahead at the second, turn right impassive and autocratic, and just few steps ahead would see her own door. She would already have her key in hand, and perhaps she would have taken off the beret and then would hear with what pleasure the lock mechanism move, shift, slip, open, the door swinging toward the shadows inside, lamps waiting in the blurry light, hardy any light entering from the garden through the window. Her room was above the suite of that new guest she had heard about but had not seen, although her own room was not as big or complete; it was no suite with a salon, bedroom, and bath, two hearths and doors to the garden. Hers was a little less than the size of the bedroom downstairs but likewise had a window to the garden. And it had another window to the hall and a third, smaller one to the air shaft where young Gangulf’s window opened along with the window in the corridor that passed alongside the empty room in the front. One floor down, Mr. Pallud’s false balcony faced this air shaft, and a window of the large suite at the end of the corridor, and a window of the dining room. If she looked out of it, which she did not and only out of the one facing the garden, she could have seen the back of a chair in the dining room; the lower shelf of the case almost like a shop window where Mr. Pallud kept his miniature toys; a painting that hung on the wall of the corridor next to the vacant room by Ziem of lilacs in a vase at a window through which could be seen a summer landscape in a complete contradiction because blue, lilac, violet were colors for winter flowers, according to Mr. Celsus; and a portion, hardly any of young Gangulf’s room, an armchair, the corner of a wall and the jamb of one of the doors, because his room was the only one that had two doors; she would see no more because even leaning into the air she could not have seen inside the lower suite. Madame Esther did not ever lean out of that window and preferred the window to the garden because she liked trees, plants, paths, and no one else’s window facing hers. Someday, not in caravels which was a daydream but in a trans-Atlantic ship, she would go to live in a country in the Americas where she could lean out of the window and see infinite green, the untempered yellow of the sun, the gray of sea mist, the reddish sunset, the interminable white salt marshes, or the leaden, granite-gray sea. Her father had talked and talked on long afternoons, hurried mornings, after mass in sunny walks, on sleepless nights, and even as he evaded the face of death, about leaving like his brother Manfred to go to those countries with jungles, flocks, swarms, herds, estates without end, cities that grew swallowing up prairies and estuaries, to make his home in the countryside amid a settlement of compatriots between two rivers or in a neighborhood that would reproduce the streets of his childhood, buy a machine on credit, two if he could, open a printing shop and, if God willed, later buy a house with the earnings, set up another business, marry off his daughter, grow tanned under the sun, smell of ink, stain his fingers, trim his mustache, take afternoon walks with his hands in his pockets, and sit in a café beneath the shelter of trees from which yellow pollen and transparent petals drifted down, with long-tailed birds high in the sky, large godlike night cats keeping watch from roofs, and devilish guitar players, loud and fast. Madame Esther never wondered about the names of flowers, had treasured her father’s face but not her mother’s whom she never knew, and had also kept the music, the beat, the rhythm of an ocarina or xylophone, a cadence, symmetry, a metric of words and movements that she could not awaken with a piano or violin but she reconciled with time, in which time was a wave, arms that rocked her, a name and resonance in the most enigmatic moment of time, sheltered by Lola’s almost physical wisdom or Katja’s shadows, like the light on the pearls around the neck of the woman who had just arrived at the house on Scheller Street. Very slowly she neared the corner, turned, and managed to see him on the unlit street, and, so he would see her, she raised her hands to take off her beret, touch her hair, pat it, smooth it a little, affirmed and protected in this part of the world. Young Gangulf stepped aside with a smile so she could enter ahead of him: in the vestibule, the lamp next to the mirror winked, vibrated, exploded, and rose to the heavens, and there shone for ten thousand years, and the applause and the whistles deafened her, skewered her with needles of ice, platinum, mint, and snow in her throat and deep inside, and she said good evening and thank you as she took off her gloves and opened the chancel door to the corridor. Young Gangulf also said good evening: “The new concept of man’s difficulties now places us high above useless metaphysical speculations. Nowadays attention, observation, and analysis of material deeds as dispassionately and objectively as possible are the inevitable preparation that must precede all careful investigation. The scientific approximation of intellectual activity convinces us that in the intimate correlation of chemical processes is found the secret of thought at whose doors the naive scholars of the past knocked without response.” The warrior in this expedition that is life, the exploration of the minimal to reach the superlative, young Gangulf thought, is not the one who fights battles but he who lives peace like war, rest like attack, obscurity like rescue, indifference like passion, he who is not defeated, he who cannot be vanquished. Madame Esther said that the first chills were in the air and young Gangulf agreed but added that he preferred this weather because it was easier to concentrate on his studies in his room than with the windows open in summer. She agreed in front of the door to his room but he continued: he asked if she would permit him to accompany her and open her door, and she, taking a clumsy step but not quite tripping, squeezing to the key before giving it to him, almost reaching again to take off her beret, just said yes, that was very kind of him.