When I was twenty-six, I met a mute woman ten years my senior. She struck me at first by her vitality and physical beauty. Then I realized that what appealed to me so much was the delicate attention with which she listened to the other guests at the reception.
More people seemed to talk to her than to anybody else, eager to pour their concerns into her ear, heedless of their inability to return the favor. The intelligence in her dark eyes answered their meaningless and desperate chatter better than any words. I could not understand her apparent interest in the talkers’ petty obsessions yet she was far from displaying the meekness of those who, accustomed to being imposed upon, absent-mindedly indulge the meanest of people.
This woman, it was instantly clear to me, had a will stronger than anyone else’s in her vicinity and her gracious endurance of mediocrity was enigmatic to me. I was eager to make her acquaintance. When dinner was announced, people scurried here and there, and she was alone for a moment so I stepped in and introduced myself. She shook my hand and released it immediately, thereby giving me the fleeting sensation of a caress.
At dinner I was not in the mood to talk. Side by side we silently ate our consommé and once in a while I would raise my eyes and meet hers or she would lift hers and find mine recently affixed to her face. Conversations, kindled, interrupted, and rekindled, droned around the table while we mostly sat in meditation next to each other.
After dinner, cognac was served in the sitting room and a box of Cohiba cigars was passed around. She took one, that I lit for her. After a few minutes she got up and walked over to the piano, standing for a moment sculpted in her ivory gown that flowed in columns to the floor and touching the yellowed keys with her fingertips. Hearing a murmur of encouragement from our hostess, she sat down and prepared to play.
The chords of Satie’s Gymnopédies slowly filled the room and, with a captive audience, she embarked on a journey into a dream world. At the end of a Schubert Klavierstuck, her hands lay still and graceful on the keys, and she seemed to rouse herself from a profound rêverie. The guests, who had sat in silence to hear her play, began talking again. Night had fallen and the evening had been a success. She walked up to the hosts, kissed them lightly on the cheeks and, with a squeeze of her hand, said goodnight.
I followed her out and took her light silk wrap from the hands of the coatroom attendant. A few people called out goodbye and so I learned that her name was Sylvana. The valet had brought around her car and I dismissed him to open the driver’s door myself. Her gown and shoulders shimmered for a brief instant in the dark as she got ready to take the driver’s seat. I was about to speak when she smiled a little mischievously and handed me a neatly folded napkin, which took me by surprise. She quickly started the car and drove off with a little wave of her right hand. I unfolded the napkin and saw on it an e-mail address.
That night, as I lay in bed looking up at the stars, I thought about this woman and my nostrils still held the scent that had emanated from her at one particular moment as I sat very close to her, a clear whiff of fresh lemons with a touch of musk. The scent was very faint and, for a fleeting instant, it made me yearn to place my lips on her bare shoulders next to the dark fabric of my evening suit.
I was a penniless high school teacher and I had been invited to that evening’s reception in thanks for one of my students’ admission to a prestigious East Coast university. I wondered if Sylvana would want someone like me or if she was used to a lifestyle that I would not be able to share. I sank into deep sleep without the answer to my question.
During the week, I rediscovered the Arab world with the students in my honors course on 20th-Century wars. On Thursday, my class period being the last in the afternoon, we had a screening of Lawrence of Arabia. I was always curious to see my students’ reaction to the movie and was surprised every time I saw a few of them spellbound.
After class I drove to Sylvana’s house and the maid invited me to pour myself a drink while she called her employer. The living room was minimally furnished with comfortable chairs, a deep sofa in front of a fireplace, and a large rug. A few works of art graced the walls and low bookcases held works written in different languages. Along one wall, a cocktail tray on a credenza displayed six crystal glasses. I opened the credenza and found a collection of single malts next to a miniature fridge. I chose an Islay single malt and settled comfortably in a chair nearby.
Five minutes later, Sylvana opened the sliding doors of the living room and we shook hands a little stiffly. I asked if I could take her out to dinner on Sunday and she nodded pensively. We sat for a half hour while I told her about my course work and she showed me a few treasures from her library, books written in Arabic and in Latin, which she knew how to read.
Several months later, October and my birthday came around. Sylvana conversed with me through the music she played for me, the books she lent me and, most of all, the multitude of expressions on her face. After looking at the photographs she had collected of the places where she had lived or she had visited, I felt that I knew Sylvana’s essence but that something important eluded me.
She cooked dinner for my birthday and we ate in the small garden at the back of her house. It was getting colder but we both liked the outdoors and knew the days were counted before the first signs of winter. That Saturday the weather was splendid, the cold sun shining brightly in a cloudless sky and leaves pulsing on trees with blood-filled energy. We ate early and sat outside until the sun began to set. A dark shadow momentarily fluttered over Sylvana’s brow and, with a sort of animal instinct, I knew she was in the secret place where lay the explanation to what escaped me about her.
I found great pleasure in our occasional Sunday afternoon walks through the woods. There, her grace and vitality seemed to find their natural context. Of all the words that I had spoken or that had been spoken to me until then, none communicated as much as the silence and tacit agreement between us that day.
Months passed and the first winter frost arrived. Christmas came and went, my students brought back with excitement accounts of their activities over the break, and January’s snow covered all traces of the past year. I stood on my porch, a bowl of steaming coffee warming my hands, and the world felt new and clean. My students and I were pursuing our journey through the struggles that mapped and remapped the Western world in the 20th Century.
Winter evenings descended early, and those spent with Sylvana glowed with the warmth of the fireplace in her sitting-room and with the sweet smell of chestnuts, Glühwein, and clementines. At winter’s end, some snow clung in patches to the ground while the rest turned into mud. The weather alternated between drizzles and clouds but for me, filled with the positivity of someone who has found companionship, spring had begun.
We celebrated the first anniversary of our encounter by drinking champagne standing in her garden. I looked forward to another year spent much like this one, as though years now began on the date of our first meeting. I was a little excited and nervous because Sylvana was going away the next day for a month, and I was so used to seeing her regularly. She had become part of my existence and I am attached to the few elements that are utterly dependable in the revolving cycle of time. Just as we expect the earth to circle the sun and the seasons to follow one another, so I rely on habits and rituals that mark the passage the time.
Sylvana was going to Italy in search of her family tree. She had planned to spend two weeks each in Genoa and Venice, where she hoped to find records of her ancestors. Her parents had her live in a kind of emotional stranglehold throughout her childhood and she knew very little about their families. Consequently, Sylvana had always felt orphaned of grandparents, uncles and aunts, and cousins. She had promised herself a journey of discovery before the age of forty.
The month went by surprisingly fast thanks to my book project and one evening I went to the airport to pick up Sylvana. The minute I saw her familiar face, I felt the pieces of my life falling back into place. In the car, Sylvana confessed to not having found out everything she had hoped to discover but her account told me that she was making sense of the fragments of family tapestry she held between her hands.
With the middle of June came her birthday, which we celebrated in the company of her brother and his wife. The four of us ate at our favorite Italian restaurant, where the owner always reserved the same table for our party, whether we were two or four as on her birthday. Sylvana looked particularly young with two bands of dark hair falling over her eyes because she was growing them out. When she lifted her champagne flute to her lips, I admired her strong and graceful left hand with nails trimmed short to play the piano and a single pearl poised on the middle finger.
Sylvana worked as a freelance translator and I knew that a large part of her income, the house, and the household staff’s salary came from her late husband’s estate.
When I first learned that Sylvana was a widow, I was surprised because there was not a single picture of her husband around the house. Among all the photos she showed me of her life there were, similarly, no pictures of her late husband. I did not know if she kept his memory alive in the sanctuary of her bedroom, which I had never entered.
Sylvana was not a neglectful or forgetful person, and I sensed she somehow kept alive people and stories that had deeply affected her life. There was an explanation for her former husband’s disappearance from her life, which I was not keen to discover because I believed secrets were best left buried.
After summer’s heat arrived, we often went out boating after dinner. We took turns rowing and enjoyed the regular muscle movement of dipping and lifting the oars. When it was my turn to row, Sylvana liked to lean back and let her hand run through the cool water where it left a miniature trail similar to the large trail left behind by our boat. The evening always ended with a glass of cold lemonade and music, and we sometimes danced slowly with the weight of the langorous hot air over us. Most days, my mind was absorbed by a book I was writing on the 1905 Russo-Japanese war and I enjoyed emerging from my biographies and maps for a vigorous run before our evenings together.
Another autumn and winter passed before the night in February in remembrance of which I began writing this brief account. It was a Wednesday night and we had enjoyed a candlelit dinner of chili, country bread, and red wine at the big wooden table in her kitchen. We repaired to the living room and its bright, crackling fire for an after-dinner drink. Sylvana handed me a glass and raised hers with an air that seemed to request silence. She put a forefinger over her lips and I could have sworn I saw her ears perk up as if she were a wild animal in the woods.
Her eyes became profoundly sad and she turned her gaze toward me, looking into my eyes and past my being. She shivered and for a moment seemed to be transfixed by something far away behind me, and I would not have been surprised to see her extend a hand to try and reach someone who was obviously there.
The moment passed. Sylvana was with me again, and she looked at me with kindness and compassion. She led me by the hand up the stairs that led to her bedroom.
Strangely, that room was exactly as I had imagined it. A large, four-post bed with pale yellow covers and pillows presided in a corner of the room by a large window. The bed curtains were pulled up. Sylvana’s cat was sleeping at the bottom of the bed, curled in a circle. There were night tables and reading lamps on either side of the bed, and on one of the tables stood a small picture of a fair-haired man smiling confidently at the world. In the other corner of the room, below another window, was a circular table with a dark blue cloth that fell to the floor. On the table was a short vase filled with yellow roses, and a pair of gloves. I sat in the opposite corner diagonally across from the bed.
On either side of the door were two low bookcases where Sylvana kept mementos: photo albums, a tidy row of notebooks marked “Journal,” and valued objects. She looked thoughtfully at the shelves for an instant and stooped to pull out one of her journals.
She sat down on the ottoman at my knees, opened her journal to a page near the middle, and put it in my lap. Her eyes gravely went from the journal entry to the photograph on the night table, before returning to and settling on me. I began reading.
Sunday, February 3, 19—
It is impossible to recount the horror of that night without a deep feeling of disgust at the human race…the disgust I have tried for so long to overcome and that I pray every night will be replaced one day by forgiveness.
Are some acts forgivable? I forgive our aggressors. I cannot forgive my fellow human beings for forsaking me when I was reduced to the lowest depths of misery.
My husband Andrés and I came home that fatal night, and surprised our aggressors in the act of robbing our house. Two pathetic crack addicts looking for money and jewelry in a beautiful suburban home…how could it all go so wrong?
Violence begets violence. But Andres lost his mind in a frantic attempt to protect his wife and the six month-old embryo in my womb… A gun was drawn, knives flashed, I suddenly couldn’t breathe. A ray of lightning blinded me and I lost consciousness.
When I came to, I was lying in the street, a sorry mess. Maybe I should just have lain there and looked helpless. Instead, I got up and staggered down the street until I could find an open bar. Men and women, busy talking and carefully ignoring one another, dressed in trendy clothes…all looked at me as if I was deranged and dangerous, recoiled, and kept on staring. I knew I’d just lost the two beings I cared the most about and in those hundred eyes was the cruel stare of normalcy reducing my misery to the experience of a wild animal at bay…
I closed the journal and lowered my head, devastated. I looked up and Sylvana’s eyes met mine with infinite pity.
That night, we became lovers and our daughter was conceived. Tonight, I’ve returned from the grave of my wife Sylvana, who died a year ago exactly…
I am fifty-one but, tonight, I have the heart of a twenty-six year-old.
