James Salter - Light Years

He recognized the state he was in. Was I only free for that brief time, he thought? Looking back it seemed deceptively sweet. His life was closed in by ancient walls, families he was unrelated to, customs that would never change. In the small rooms of the flat, in the narrow streets, all Lia’s faults seemed to leap forth, to present themselves for recognition: her nervousness, lack of independence, her insistence on being loved. He learned that she could not amuse herself, that she was desperate without him.

“I love you,” she explained. “I want to be near you, amore . Don’t deprive me, don’t keep me hungry.”

He could not discourage it. He saw in her eyes how much she meant it. Her devotion was too strong, it had a pathetic quality.

They drove to the country for lunch, to a simple place called Montarozzo. It was a mild day, like the first day of a convalescence. She was wearing a navy skirt and a sleeveless blouse. In the fields little girls were playing in communion dresses, white in the sunshine, while their families dined. There were train tracks beyond. Occasionally, drawing glances, there passed a great express.

As usual she ate little, he was used to it. He had finally come to a deep vein of understanding. He was not on a journey, he was to spend his life here, to have this life and this only. Patience, he thought to himself; it will open. The bread was delicious. He dipped morsels of it into his wine like a peasant. This was her sea, this sunlight which fell upon them through the vine leaves. She shined in it. Her hair was short and gleaming, her shyness fell away. The faint circles under her eyes, blue, enduring, made her seem sensual. She was like a refugee, a woman who had seen armies pass, destruction, absurdity. She had survived all this, she had come through alive.

“You are a very good architect. You know, they respect you greatly.”

“Really?”

“They like you very much.”

He smiled vaguely, but he was pleased. “It would be strange, wouldn’t it, having failed in America, if I achieved something here?”

“No. You were meant to come here.”

“I suppose.”

“To discover me,” she said. “Discover you…”

“Yes, like a mushroom. You pushed aside the leaves and there I was.” She seemed calm, submissive. “You have the nose of a truffling pig, amore.”

“Do you think so?”

“You have intuition,” she said. “It’s very strong, well developed. I’m interested in these things, you know, I study them. I will become a mystic in the end,” she confessed. “When the time comes. When the last hungers of the flesh have left me,” she added with a slight smile.

There was a clairvoyant, a woman who lived among animals, she often went to see. Viri accompanied her. It was in a residential neighborhood, a building like any other, modern, cold. The apartment was filled with plants, birds, bizarre paintings, tanks of fish. There were other visitors: couples desiring children, women with sickly sons. Signora Clara touched them. She spoke to them with the voice of someone struggling, distant. The soft bubbling of the air pumps rose behind her. To Viri she said, “Come, look at this. Do you speak Italian?”

They stood before the dim water through which a pearly stream of bubbles rose. She was wearing carpet slippers and an unbuttoned sweater.

“These are my children,” she said.

The fish hung in luminous shadow, their movements curiously abrupt. She tapped the glass lightly.

“Come, children, come,” she said, and reaching into the tank slowly, affectionately, she took one in her palm and withdrew it. It lay quietly in a bit of water in her hand. “All life is one,” she said.

She lived with her maid. She had a husband and family, Lia said, but she had left them to devote herself to her work.

Within you are two seeds, the woman told Viri: one live and one dead. You love the dead one best. He did not know what she meant.

“She can heal,” Lia said. “She knows everything.”

“She seems cold to me,” Viri said. “Very distant.”

“Yes, she is cold. To understand everything is to love nothing,” Lia quoted.

She made tea for him, she kept his clothing in order, she drew the water for his bath. The shelves of the medicine cabinet were dense with her creams and lotions. In the courtyard the bathroom windows gave on, there was never any change. It was evening. When he came out she was lying there, olive skin naked, slim as a line. He brushed his teeth with Italian toothpaste, he ate Italian meat, he was vanishing day by day into the aged streets, the dark-faced crowds. He boarded the great green buses with their silver numbers and passed, noticing them less and less, the worn columns, the statues weeping black. He was lost among them, the passengers, audiences, crowds, condemned just as they to the humblest of daily acts. He turned corners in sunlight, disappeared in the shade of awnings announcing TRATTORIA, lingered before bookshops.

There were hours between afternoon and evening when he desperately wept for his children. He wrote to them feverishly, letters he could barely finish, their faces appeared before him, days they had spent. His hand was like a sick man’s. Be generous , he wrote, know the meaning of joy, carry my love with you all through life .

He was gentle, composed. They went from meal to meal and from place to place, meals that fell silent over empty cups.

“Kari kiri?” she suggested solemnly, taking up the knife.

He managed to smile. “Have patience with me,” he told her. He could think of nothing else.

And late at night she talked to him. She woke him if necessary, and he lay listening.

“Yes,” she said, “you are frightened, I know you are frightened. I know your habits, I know your thoughts. You have married me for my sake, but not for your own—not yet. That will come. Oh, yes. It will come because I will wait. I am a cornucopia, I am overflowing. I am not sweet—no, not in the way one tastes at first. But sweet things are forgotten quickly, sweet things are weak. I have the patience to wait, yes, as long as necessary. I will wait a month, a year, five years, I will sit like a widow, playing a kind of napoleone , because slowly, slowly I will enslave you. I will do it when the moment comes, when I know it is time, that I can succeed. Until then I will sit at your table, I will lie beside you like a concubine—yes, I will give myself to you in whatever way you like, I will raid your fantasies, I will pillage them and keep the pieces to hypnotize you with. I will say, ‘Those things you are dreaming of, I will make them real.’ I will be your Arab girl, I will serve you naked, yes, I will hold food between my teeth for you, I will be your daughter, I will be your whore. You cannot believe what I know—no, never—what I have imagined. Amore , the secret is to have the courage to live. If you have that, everything will sooner or later change.”

He rose and went into the bathroom to find refuge. Her intensity, the loneliness of her voice overpowered him. In the mirror he saw a man with the paleness of someone who has just been awakened. He seemed mortal, weak. He saw clearly that something unthinkable was already expressing itself: he was going to become an old man. He did not believe it, he must prevent it, he could not permit it to be—and yet at the same time it was the meaning of his entire life.

She was tapping at the door. “Are you all right, amore?”

“Yes.” He opened the door. She had put on her robe. “Yes, I’m all right.”

“Come,” she said. “I’ll make you some tea.”

His progress was slow, like the passage of days, but in time he no longer noticed the coldness of terrazzo floors, the shrill ring of the telephone, the taps from which water came without force, as if in the midst of a drought. After endless depression, nights without sleep, realization that the life he had entered was calamitous, without hope, he slowly became lucid, even calm. He was able to read and think. The days dawned quietly. I am through it, he thought. Like the survivor of a wreck, he took stock of himself. He touched his limbs, his face, he began the essential process of forgetting what had passed.