The Wanderess

by Roman Payne

  Chapter Nineteen

  Why do we mortals wonder if it is through human chaos or through divine perfection when the world guides us to some magical event? In either case, is not the result the same? Is the result not divine perfection?

  Dusk had already fallen when I reached cobbled streets of the Barrio Gòtico. The lanterns were lit. I passed the Cathedral of Sant Jaume where a shabby red scarf was tied to one of the ironbarred windows. I wondered if the old man was right about my dropping my foulard in front of the hotel. If so, why didn’t he pick it up and chase after me to return it to me? A likely story!

  I was drawn back to that square where the hotel was and through the narrow streets I walked and it was now fully night. This was the first moment I realized that I didn’t have to sleep in that filthy room at the Urquinaona at all. I could take one of the new vacancies at the Hotel Sant Felip Neri. I would have a bath, and sleep tonight in a good bed. Why had I just then thought of that? What is the harm in taking a dead man’s room, so long as it’s clean? I got angry at myself for not taking a suite after the accident, and for being so slow to react to new opportunities that presented themselves. Over the past few years, it had become a habit that was proving dangerous to my well-being. My thoughts were interrupted, I heard the sound of a guitar. Over the last couple days, my biggest disappointments had come in the shape of guitar players, and I assumed this one would be as lame and shabby as the others. I then heard the words sung as I entered the square, they were in English…

  Ceylon, Ceylon... So Long, So Long… To your far distant shores

  To that long away time

  When our eyes were for the heavens And our lips were for each other And our flesh was for the world

  And our dreams kept us wandering on…

  “Saskia!” I cried, my eyes falling on her standing on the iron wrought balcony two stories above the Plaça Sant Felip Neri. There on the balcony of the hotel, wearing a pale nightdress, was my friend: the lost orphan-girl, holding her guitar, singing ‘Ceylon’ into the night. She heard my voice cry her name. Her eyes grew wide, she looked at me; and she set her guitar down and disappeared from the balcony. A moment later, she came running to me through the square, from the hotel…

  “Saul,” she cried, “you came back! Just like that!” She threw her arms around me. I picked her up so her bare feet no longer touched the ground. Her feet flapped and she sobbed and between sobs she asked, “Why did you run off from me? I went to buy the foods that you said you love! And coffee, and wine too! But you left!—just like that!”

  “I felt sorry for you, my dear Saskia. You were a little housecat sleeping on the floor of your room every night. It was time for me to give you your bed back.”

  “You felt sorry for me! You should have felt sorry for me these last few days, not being anywhere where I could find you…”

  “You’re crying, Saskia!… I went looking in your neighborhood for you… I spent most of the day everyday looking, but I couldn’t find your balcony, I couldn’t find your house…”

  She pulled away from me, then looked up into my eyes, “Did you really come looking for me?”

  “I looked and looked! First, I tried to take my hotel room back, so you could come to me when you wanted, but they gave it to someone else.”

  “I know, they told me. They told me which suite had been yours and so this morning when I found out it was available all of a sudden, I booked it indefinitely. You chose a beautiful hotel. It’s ours now. We can sleep here tonight. Come on….”

  She took my arm and we started walking towards the hotel. “You know that I keep hearing songs,” I told her, “played on the Spanish guitar. I walked and walked this whole week through, constantly thinking of you.”

  “And?!”

  “And… I was wondering why I ever left your apartment. I missed you. And so I listened. I hoped I would hear you somewhere, hear you playing your guitar.”

  “And you did hear me. Promise me you won’t leave again.”

  I then made a million promises as we entered the hotel. The concierge was a new one whom I’d never seen. He was courteous and didn’t show astonishment at a girl so young being dressed in so light a nightdress coming in from the square at night. I noticed her hair was arranged, as though she had been expecting a visitor, she looked older than she did at her apartment, and more beautiful. We ordered some food to be brought up to our room and inside the room she cleared her guitar and clothes from the dining table.

  A waiter from the hotel restaurant came and placed our dinner on the table. There were Spanish cheeses, some grilled pescaditos, a loaf of bread, a bottle of cold wine. We drank a glass and I said that I had a strange feeling after seeing Saskia playing her guitar on the balcony of the hotel, as though there were some destiny at work after all.

  Saskia’s voice then turned serious, and strange… She told me that I should get used to my strange feeling, because there would always be destiny at work for us. She told me then that she would never let me disappear again. She said she needed me.

  “Oh, my poor girl!” I told her, “It can’t be this way—not this way!” I got up from the table and began pacing the floor with thundering feet in that enormous room… back and forth, I walked, shaking my head, blowing steam, until I took the girl firmly by the shoulders and looked her in the eyes and said, “Listen to me closely, Saskia. You cannot talk to a man you’ve only recently met like this, telling him you need him; it won’t do! You will frighten him away!…”

  She just laughed, “You men! You are frightened so easily!” She then freed her shoulders from my hands, “but it’s good that you teach me these things,” she said, “I have so little experience in these matters.”

  “I have quite a lot of experience in these matters. Look,

  Saskia, when a man meets a woman, he needs to feel like he is the hunter, like she is the prey. She is a wild prey that looks good to eat, like you… But if his prey just hops into his hunting net and says: ‘I am yours, let’s travel together!’ he feels like he hasn’t earned his prey through honest ‘hunting’; consequently, he doesn’t feel like a man. When a man doesn’t feel like a man, neither sexual feelings nor romantic feelings can emerge in him.”

  “Have you checked your net recently, my good huntsman?, because I didn’t hop anywhere near it!” She laughed again and had the nerve to roll her eyes.

  “Remember that this hunting expedition was mine, the net of concern was my net, and when I said ‘we are going to travel together’ that was me telling you what’s going to happen. You would be a fool not to obey because your life depends on it… But in any case, I am a long way from being in your net, Monsieur the hunter… in fact, I think your prey just outran you.”

  With these final words, Saskia shot me a cold, firing look with her eyes that showed both irony and condescension. In one swift move, she overwhelmed me, she blew me across the room. A thunderclap of feminine power charmed and diminished me. I remember thinking then that this was the first time in a long time—where it concerned my dealings with women—that it was obvious I needed to go back to school. I told her I was impressed. She asked me if I knew why she wanted me in her net. I told her it was odd that I should be so important to her.

  “I want you to help me find my friend.”

  “Find your friend?”

  “I know it is a selfish reason, but you have to help me. She is my best friend. Her name is Adélaïse…”

  Saskia then explained to me her story: “Ever since my uncle died, I have been wandering around Europe. I even went to Asia. I wandered all the way to Ceylon. That is where I wrote the song I sing. And all the time I wander because I don’t know why I should stay any place? What’s to stop me from wandering? I haven’t had any reason to do anything in this world, or not to do anything. Money comes to me every few months without fail— more than enough to live on, plenty enough to amuse myself with, so I don’t need think about money or managing a household. I never liked that concept… wha
t they call ‘the household.’ The word alone is horrible, industrious and binding. I think I am a nomad by nature… but that aside, what should stop me? I have no family, no friends whatsoever, never a lover… Adélaïse is all I’ve had. She is the only person still living with whom I’ve shared my heart. When I went back to the boarding school in London after my uncle’s death, I was told that she had already left our school to return to her parents’. They wouldn’t tell me why she left, but I thought I overheard the dean mention something to his administrator about how, because of her parents’ divorce and all the legal fees, etc., they no longer had enough money to pay her tuition. Anyway, I did find out from them that her father was living in Marseille near the Place de Lenche, and that her mother lived in Paris on the Île Saint-Louis1. They refused to give me exact addresses of either. So with that information, I went to both cities: to Paris and Marseille, and hung around waiting to run into my friend, to bump into her on the street or something, but I never did. Once, while wandering that quiet, little residential island they call Île Saint-Louis, an old gardener woman sweeping leaves in a garden apron, called to me. She wanted to tell me something. She looked like a witch with that broom and that apron covered with leaves, and her dark, deep wrinkles. She told me she could read my life. And what she told me about is you. She knew all about you, Saul!…”

  “How could this Parisian witch know all about me? I have never been to Paris.”

  “She didn’t know your name, of course, but she knew all about you, and that you could help me reunite with Adélaïse. She told me if I went to Barcelona, I would, quote: ‘find a man sleeping in the street in fine clothes.’ She said that his destiny is intertwined with mine. She said a lot more things. But don’t you see how I feel Saul? I feel like I need something or someone from my past to make the present make sense to me… Adélaïse is the only person from my past I want to see again. If I don’t see her, I don’t know ‘why it is’ that I should stay alive!”

  1 ÎLE SAINT-LOUIS: The smaller of the two naturally-formed islands in the Seine that are located in Paris, in the center of the city near Notre Dame. Unlike its larger neighbor, the Île de la Cité, the Île Saint-Louis is a quiet sanctuary, almost strictly residential, and proudly void of noisy markets and stations, and large institutional buildings.

  “So that explains why you always talk about how you were meant to find me just as you did: ‘sleeping in the street in fine clothes,’ …You know this ‘in fine clothes’ thing made me think you might be totally nuts. But Saskia, why did you choose me of all the people who pass-out in your street? It seems that the men here in Barcelona drink so much that on any given night, one can trip over a dozen of them sleeping in the street …and in fine clothes too!”

  “It wasn’t a sleeping drunk I was supposed to find. And I cannot tell you any more, Saul. The woman in the garden said that if you learn too much of the puzzle before it’s solved, my work will have been for nothing. You and I both will be doomed. I, of course, know the whole puzzle in its entirety, but I cannot tell you more. I promise I will tell you all though—just as soon as we find Adélaïse.”

  I wanted to know more about this puzzle before we found her friend, but Saskia wouldn’t tell me any more.

  “You are a crafty girl,” I told her, “You know, I was once overly-confident about my hunter’s net. Since I was five years old—that beautiful age when I became actively interested in the female sex—I thought my net was good enough to catch virtually any prey. But now I see that it isn’t going to be enough to catch a creature as wild as you.”

  To this, the rascal simply smiled at me. She then said, “You can try other weapons, you know …other than that stupid net of yours.”

  * * *

  We both felt heavy from the food we ate. Now that we were finished, the dinner table resembled a battlefield: carcasses of fish, spines and skins, rinds of mouldy cheeses. My body ached and I felt hollow and exhausted from the past days of self-isolation and alcoholic depression. My body was like that table: a half-eaten battlefield, filled with bones and skin torn apart. I told Saskia I wanted to rest a moment. “I just want to close my eyes for a minute. It’s still long before midnight. I won’t go to sleep for the whole night now.” But I didn’t realize how truly drained I was. I fell into a deep sleep the instant I lay down, and it was well after dawn when I awoke.

  The white sun flooded into the hotel suite. I glanced over at Saskia. She was beneath the sheets as I was. The bed was made when I fell asleep on it the night before, and I knew that Saskia had put the sheets over me. We were lying far apart. No one observing us that morning could say we were lovers. I was fully dressed—she hadn’t dared to take off my clothes—while she wore pajamas. She on her side, I on mine, were tucked-in as innocently as two young children who’ve not yet learned of the existence of the sexual body.

  I was glad I didn’t try to kiss her or touch her the night before. And glad that we hadn’t made love. For this morning we didn’t have anything to feel embarrassed about. And what was better, we didn’t have to worry that terrible worry: the worry that we’d begun the game too early, and that consequently, we would have to end it early. That was a worry only I would have had. Saskia was too inexperienced to have that unhappy worry about her relationship with me. I was glad she had trusted me enough to sleep in the same bed as me, instead of suffering on a mound of clothes on the floor like a cat.

  I went back to sleep. And when I awoke, Saskia was at the dining table eating a pastry, drinking coffee. I stirred and got out of bed, and then I went over to her to say good morning.

  “Thank you for letting me sleep.”

  “It’s normal. You were tired,” she said, “I think that your tiredness has been following you around for many months demanding a night’s sleep like last night. Finally you gave in.” She took her guitar from where it stood by the door and asked if I minded if she played. “Your fingers are made for the strings,” I told her, “Please play me something.”

  “How did you know about that?!” she ask me, frightened. “Know about what?”

  “Fingers are made for strings? The… the gardener woman in Paris… she said just that… ‘Your fingers were not made for keys but for strings,’ were her exact words. I had never met her, I didn’t have my guitar with me, yet she said to me, ‘you love song and you sing.’ How could she have known that if she couldn’t read my life?”

  I urged her then to sing and to play. She sat on the edge of the bed and played for me the song she wrote in Ceylon…

  Ceylon, Ceylon... so long, so long… It was then in the springtime

  She explored in the orchards

  Where the trees gave her fruit

  and the streams bathed her body while the sun warmed her skin

  and her youth bore her dreams

  then when night came a falling

  Her lost lover came down to her dreams.

  Saskia set her guitar aside. “I was so young when I wrote that. Do you like the words?”

  “That depends on who your lost lover was… the one who came down to your dreams…”

  She laughed. “I guess he was the lover that all fourteen year old girls dream about… I went to Ceylon for three months, on a whim, after my uncle died. It was three years ago, seems like forever ago. Everyone thought that fourteen was too young to be travelling alone, but I didn’t care. I was a wild girl. I found Ceylon to be the most magical country on earth, I wanted to immortalize it in my memory: the vibrancy of the colors, the humidity that allows trees of all kinds to produce splendid fruit…

  “…As for the lover, I certainly didn’t have anyone in mind. I think girls always dream up love stories, though—no?”

  Her innocence made me smile. She was innocent to the very fibre of her, and I didn’t want to damage that innocence. This was the first time in my adult life that I was near a beautiful female whom I didn’t feel the desire to make love to. She was too young to have the feminine charms that mature women possess and us
e so beautifully, for as I grow older I find that the charms of adult women ripen to perfection as they age too. Saskia was still a great beauty, and I should have lusted after her like after any woman; yet I thought that morning, waking up beside her, ‘Sooner would I protect her as my child than as my wife.’ This was probably for the best. Unless I was in love with her, I would often tire of a woman as soon as I’d slept with her. I did not want to tire of Saskia, and I knew that if I didn’t make love to her, I would never grow tired of her. I wasn’t sure then if I would ever love her like a woman, I hoped I would love her someday. I wondered if she wanted to leave right away for Marseille, and then for Paris, where we could try our luck together in the search for this lost friend of hers, Adélaïse.

  “Marseille is useless,” she said, “I spent one month in that city, asking all around for information about Adélaïse’s relatives. I knew that Adélaïse had the same family-name as her father; I found out that there was only one Monsieur Letheux who was old enough to have a child and who lived in the second arrondissement of Marseille, where the Place de Lenche is. I found out that, if this man was in fact her father, he left Marseille during the time I was there to take up residence again in Paris. So it’s fair to say that unless Adélaïse is off at another boarding school somewhere she’s with one of her parents in Paris.”

  “So we will leave for Paris then, kid. I was just heading there myself anyway…”

  “Yes, but Saul, my dear, after we finish our breakfast… I have to leave you for a little while… I won’t be able to come back to see you until the day after tomorrow.”

  “The day after tomorrow!”

  I was taken aback by her words. ‘The day after tomorrow?’ Was this sudden indifference to our knowing each other coming from the same girl who played her guitar every night for nine months so she could find me?… the same girl who was so obsessed with me during my illness that she never took her eyes off me day or night?… I remember, I thought she was going to be a burden to me during my adventures, and that I’d never get rid of her… but now it was she who was abandoning me!