On his way back, he felt at peace.
This was the first time that he’d felt that way in as long as he could remember. His soul had been in a state of tumult for so many years now that he’d become accustomed to that basso continuo of pain, regret, remorse, and incompleteness that had given his life the color that it now possessed.
Preparations for the festival were reaching their feverish finale. The quarter was teeming with frantic activity, everyone seemed to be carrying something from one place to another, hanging up festoons, applying ornaments.
Along the way he’d looked around him with the greatest possible watchfulness: it would have been a terrible twist of fate to be robbed now of all times. But everything had gone perfectly, according to plan. It had taken three extra days, that was all. To complete his masterpiece. But everything had worked out perfectly.
As he walked his usual route, one step after the other, he breathed deeply. He took the baking hot air, freighted with odors, into his lungs. He felt no sadness whatsoever, none of the sadness he’d expected; he’d preferred not to think about it, choosing instead to remain focused on the work he was completing, in accordance with the plan he’d sketched out first in his soul, and then in his brain.
Readying, completing, and fine-tuning every detail—it was the first thing he had done for himself in too long. Now that he was walking, avoiding the busy pedestrians, now that he was striding past places he’d known since his childhood, he didn’t regret a thing. Not even the words he hadn’t spoken—he didn’t regret them either. They wouldn’t have done a bit of good. They wouldn’t have changed the course of his life, they wouldn’t have added or subtracted a thing. Better to remain silent, then.
The thought formed before his eyes. The usual face. Like every other time, every single time, a hundred times a day for years and years. He walked along the wall, and instead of tasting the air, instead of looking out at the sea or climbing the hill to admire yet again the silhouette of the mountain against the blue of the sky, he reconstructed her face. Not the way she was now, her features marked with hardness and sorrow. No, her face the way it had been then. The way it had been the night of the festival, years ago: when he’d walked with her on his arm, fiercely proud of her smile, of her white dress.
They’d been beautiful together. The rest of his life wasn’t long enough to remember her light pressure on his arm, her hand, the hand that was like a light-winged butterfly.
Someone called out to him, from a stand on the street. In this moment of peace he’d now attained, he thought about his people, about the struggle against hunger and privation. He thought of the faces of those who had stayed; he’d never thought about those who had left in these terms, and there had always been a light in his eyes, even in the midst of the blackest sorrow. Those who had stayed behind, on the other hand, no: that light, many of them had never had it.
He caught a few surprised glances from the women seated in the strip of shadow from the apartment building. After years of precision, of absolute predictability, here he was overturning all his routines. But it was necessary to complete that last step. Without the delivery, you couldn’t say that a job was finished.
He opened the door and went in. He pulled the heavy door partially shut and allowed a shaft of morning sunlight to filter through. Not that he’d need it: in that cramped space which he knew so well, he could move around in pitch darkness without even brushing against furniture and objects; still, he decided to light the lamp. Its warm golden light had kept him company so often: it seemed right to him that it should illuminate this as well.
He went back to the door and locked it from inside. He looked around, the way he did every night before leaving.
Before leaving.
Everything was in order. He felt serene, contented. Full of hope, absurdly enough. He felt like those about to embark and leave. As if he too, now, were one of them. The sea, then America.
He went over to the workbench. He took the strongest of all his tools and made the last engraving. Then he picked up the rope he’d had ready for the past two days, stepped up onto the wooden surface, and ran it over the rafter.
He was at peace. His eyes went to the steamship on the wall.
He put his head in the noose and hauled himself up with both hands. He thought about her the way she had been, seated amidst the ropes and hawsers, watching the ship and the sea. There you are, at the bottom of my heart. There you are. I just wonder if I’m there too, at the bottom of your heart.
And at last he set off on his voyage.