29. Forever

The word forever did not have a special meaning after it had been said and thought through, contemplated like an object or mechanism, like something concrete outside of herself; on the contrary, now it meant nothing, deprived of width, a mere line of meager letters, something secretive or medicinal you placed in your mouth, this word briefly chosen to avoid all betrayal, another to seek improbable consolation: she had resorted to that word like a refuge and closed a door behind herself after finally locating the room filled with distrust and every kind of suspicion and objection, windowless, airless, suffocating, and maternal, like the divan for an over-protected sick woman. She said: I am leaving forever, but she had not said that to anyone and even the excitement of saying it had become self-delusion, a string of letters that had lost their sound and meaning along with their noise and weight, and she did not hear them, they only seemed to be a hint of music, a brief upward trill of a flute when night had fallen, not in a concert but solo, improvised, coming from an upper floor from time to time; above all in the morning seeing someone pass the curtainless glass in the windows, the somber tones of an oboe, a string vibrating with some fickle note cut off as if the bow or hand had given up on it forever, forever and ever. It had been the last lunch forever and ever in the house and it had not been much different from earlier ones; she had conversed with Madame Helena, they had said a few things like oh but is it as far away as Japan, do you remember Madame Nashiru? and they had said the distances are unimaginable for those of us who are older although of course not in Japan where everything is so very small and close unlike the Americas that await you, and finally they had said do not fail to write us and remember us, won’t you? But after lunch, waiting or watching the minutes pass that at some point would become hours in this world that no longer existed for her and which she could no longer touch or brighten, the two open suitcases on the bed, telling herself that all that remained was to put what she needed from her boudoir into her handbag. Time tried to overcome her and hurt her, talcum, comb, powder, to make her weep or lament the now naked walls in the room, tweezers, nail clipper, toothbrush, the drawers smelled of lavender and above all the tea shop that had been a fragment of her life, hand towel, bar of soap, nail file, a long waylay in the presence of noisy gentlemen and solid women who with a toss of their head said yes or no and accepted each other so easily, sensibly, over a cup of French chocolate in winter with their coats over the curved backs of chairs, rose water, lanolin, lipstick, as if it had been a fragment of floral life by Felix Ziem, “maître de la lumière et des couleurs vibrantes” which she could never cut out from her memories about the wall in the second-floor corridor of the house on Scheller Street which she was going to leave forever, forever and ever, or the flowers behind the green leather-topped desk in a corner of the salon in “Miraflora” where Mr. Celsus had suggested not going away alone and hidden like her name, so distant on the misty far side of the world, unknown and mute in a language she would not understand and where no one would understand hers, where great rivers, giant trees, and vast plains confounded the measure of all things, sizable letters taken like medicine and now meaning nothing or they do but they do not know what, only a broken string, the sound of the violin d’amore, the light of other stars all along the journey. The drop that never falls from the spigot, the flame that never dies on the wood, the bluish steam at the spout of the teapot, the grille on the window when the day breaks outside, the first step toward the gangway of the ship, they are also a fraction of an entire lifetime and little things done without thinking, details of a painting like the color of a vase in which autumn flowers wilt before a summer landscape that has already been left behind, a single instant of existence that smells like the black ink of the notes in a musical staff, the music of wisdom interrupting words and closing mouths, the black smell of wick wafting up on a candlelit night. She thought it was like death to leave “Miraflora” in other hands no matter how efficient they were, to shut the suitcases, to cross the gangway genuinely alone, to forget the other things that she now no longer remembered whether they belonged to her or not, if they were things she had carefully done to avoid dying or things like the rest of them that had filled the space of a second, the space where she had decided her life. She left behind all the time she had built, all the music in one note, all the feelings in all the words in a single word, a sleeping girl, a window opening onto the garden, another window she had never looked out of, an atrocious moment when she had closed her eyes as some horses bolted past. She had briefly bid farewell to Mr. Celsus and would not say farewell to anyone in the boarding house, to no one except for Madame Helena who in her role as lady of the house was going to be at the door to say good-bye: she would travel across the round belly of the world and this is what made her feel that she would return somewhere, that she was not leaving forever. Perhaps she would always return to the psalm-like sounds in the first song, the vibration in the ear like a drumhead beaten by clay-colored hands, she would return to the heart, the black smell of black ink impregnating the night and staining the fingers of the father she left behind, the inconclusive memories drawn on maps in her childhood room, other faces and other names, her own name hidden among the flowers garlanding the wall in the instant that it took to leave anyplace in the world for someplace else that would never again be the house on Scheller Street.