James Salter - Light Years

DEATH TAKES THE LAST STEPS quickly, in a rush.

Nedra was ill. She did not admit it except to feel uncomfortable suddenly in the city. She wanted the open air, she wanted the invisible. Like those anadromous creatures that start without knowing it to their final sites, that somehow, across incredible distances, find their way home, she went—it was the beginning of spring—to Amagansett and took a small house that had once been the shed on a farm. There were some apple trees, long past bearing. The boards of the floor were worn smooth. The village and fields, everything was empty and still. Here she made her ashram, beneath the open skies, by occasional fires, near the continent’s fingery edge.

She was forty-seven. Her hair was rich and beautiful, her hands strong. It seemed that all she had known and read, her children, her friends, things which had at one time been disparate, contending, were quiet at last and had found their place within her. A sense of harvest, of abundance, filled her. She had nothing to do and she waited.

She woke in the silence of a bedroom still cool and dark. She was not sleepy, she was aware the night had passed. The small, gnarled branches of the apple trees were stirring in a soundless wind. The sun was not yet up. The sky to the west was the deepest blue, with clouds almost too brilliant, too dense. In the east it was almost white. Her body and mind were rested, they were at peace. They were being readied for a final transformation she only guessed.

In Rome the old woman who cleaned for Lia sat crying. She was eighty. She was slow but still able to work. Her hands were blunt with age.

“What is it?” Lia asked. “What’s wrong?”

The woman only went on weeping helplessly. Her body sobbed.

“Ma come , Assunta?”

“Signora,” she moaned, “I don’t want to die.” She was sitting on a chair in the kitchen, grief-stricken.

“To die? Are you sick?”

“No, no.” Her face was worn and pleading, the face of an ancient child. “I’m not sick.”

“Well, what are you talking about?”

“It’s just that I’m afraid.”

“Oh, dear,” Lia said gently. “Now, don’t be upset. Don’t be foolish.” She took the old woman’s hand. “Everything will be all right, don’t worry.”

“Signora…”

“Yes.”

“Do you think there’s anything after?”

“Assunta, don’t cry.” How touching old people are, she thought. How honest they are, how emptied of deception and pride.

“I’m afraid.”

“I’ll tell you what it’s like,” Lia said, calming her. “It’s like being tired, very, very tired and just falling asleep.”

“Do you think so?”

“A beautiful sleep,” she said. “A sleep which only those who have worked a long time deserve, which does not end.”

She was warm, she was comforting with the strength of those who have nothing to lose. She could not even begin to imagine an end to life. She had decades before her, trips to Paris in December with her husband, dinners in small hotels near the Place Vendôme, the lights and Christmas decorations outside, oysters—her first—in the cold afternoon, the half-lemons beside them, the small squares of bread.

“A lovely sleep,” she said.

The old woman wiped her eyes. She was quieter now. “Yes,” she agreed. “Yes, that’s it.”

“Of course.”

“Still…” she said, “how beautiful to wake in the morning and have fresh coffee…”

“Yes.”

“The smell is so good.”

“Poor woman,” Viri commented later.

“I gave her some wine,” Lia said.

“She has no family?”

“No, her family is gone.”

That summer Franca came to visit her mother once more. They sat beneath the trees. Nedra had money, she had bought some good wine. “Do you remember Ursula?” she asked.

“Our pony? Yes.”

“She was so impossible. I wanted to sell her, your father wouldn’t permit it.”

“I know. He really loved her.”

“He loved her at certain times. Do you remember Leslie? Leslie Dahlander?”

“Poor Leslie.”

“It’s strange. I’ve been thinking of her lately,” Nedra said.

“But you didn’t know her very well.”

“No, but I knew those years.”

She looked at her daughter, a feeling of envy and happiness swept her, a gust of it thick as air. They talked of the house, of days long past, the hours lay beside them like a stream that barely moved. All around stretched the wide farmland made thrilling by hidden sea. Rabbits were feeding in the dusty fields, there were sea birds on the shore. All this would vanish, it would belong to poodle owners, Arnaud had said. Its remoteness had saved it, but now the farms were melting like ice in the spring; they were breaking, drifting off forever. All this vast endland, this barren province would disappear. We live too long, Nedra thought.

“Do you remember Kate?” Franca asked.

“Yes. What’s become of her?”

“She has three children now.”

“She was so thin. She was almost a boy—a beautiful, wicked boy.”

“She lives in Poughkeepsie.”

“Exile.”

“Her father’s famous,” Franca said. “Did you see the article?” She went inside to find the issue of Bazaar .

“I read something,” Nedra recalled.

Franca was flipping the pages. “Here,” she said. She offered it. It was a long essay. “He had a show at the Whitney.”

“Yes, I remember.”

A large, gray face, pores visible in its nose and chin, stared at her. It was as if she were looking at a kind of passport, the only kind which mattered.

“He’s really a very good painter,” Franca said.

“He must be. He’s right in here with the French countesses.”

“You’re making fun of him.”

“No, I’m not. Well, goodbye, Robert.” She turned the page to vivid, green pictures of the Bahamas, green and blue, long, tanned girls in caftans and white hats. “It’s just that it’s hard to believe in greatness,” she said. “Especially in friends.”

They lay in the holy sun which clothed them, the birds floating over their heads, the sand warm on their ankles, the backs of their legs. She too, like Marcel-Maas, had arrived. She had arrived at last. A voice of illness had spoken to her. Like the voice of God, she did not know its source, she only knew what she was bidden, which was to taste everything, to see everything with one long, final glance. A calm had come over her, the calm of a great journey ended.

“Read to me,” she would ask.

In the tall brown grass of the dunes, a pagan couch that overlooked the sea, she sat clasping her knees and listening while Franca read, as Viri had so often, to his daughters, to them all. It was Troyat’s life of Tolstoy, a book like the Bible, so rich in events, in sorrow, in partings, so filled with struggle that strength welled up on every page. The chapters became one’s flesh, one’s own being; the trials washed one clean. Warm, sheltered from the wind, she listened as Franca’s clear voice described the landscape of Russia, on and on, grew weary at last and stopped. They lay in silence, like lionesses in the dry grass, powerful, sated.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” her daughter asked.

“How I love you, Franca,” Nedra said.

Of them all, it was the true love. Of them all, it was the best. That other, that sumptuous love which made one drunk, which one longed for, envied, believed in, that was not life. It was what life was seeking; it was a suspension of life. But to be close to a child, for whom one spent everything, whose life was protected and nourished by one’s own, to have that child beside one, at peace, was the real, the deepest, the only joy.