The Wanderess

by Roman Payne

  “I think I’m already drunk.”

  I chuckled at this, and Saskia began to cry. Instead of her cries growing fainter as my chuckles grew faint, her tears only increased. Then there came a moment when she broke completely. Her head plummeted into her hands and she lost all control. She cried and cried, tossing tears around, beginning sentences that had no beginning, saying apologies that had no end. Her last apology went like this… “I’m sorry, Saul, I am so sorry! You will never trust me again… I’m scared about what I have done… for six months I have lied to you—six months! I told you before that I cannot lie to you. ‘It won’t work,’ I said, ‘it won’t work!!’”

  “Saskia, please… settle down… Now tell me what on earth you are talking about.”

  “It’s me, Saul!… I am Clara!… I am Clara! Dragomir wasn’t confused… Dragomir is never confused! I was the one who was lying when we spoke in front of you. He and I both knew that I was Clara and that I was lying to him. I’m just glad he didn’t insist I was a liar and an evil girl to make me confess in front of you both… But trust me, Dragomir is never confused…”

  “So you are Clara?!”

  She grabbed my hands and held them tight… “No, Saul, I am Saskia!… I was born with the name Saskia… Please promise me that you will never call me Clara. I never wanted to lie to you, Saul. I promise. The only thing was that I was forced to lie because I needed you to believe that I had never met Dragomir in my life. You, yourself, know the reasons why no one should know that I met Dragomir… So, yes. I had to tell a lie these last six months—ever since that hour before dawn at that hostel when I denied I was Clara.”

  “You were born Saskia?”

  “My parents gave me the same name as Rembrandt’s wife. I was always happy with this name. Then when my parents died, my uncle came to pull me out of a future of misery. He offered to take me to Italy, and he made me what I am today: ‘Wanderess,’ as you call it, an orphan, a wild girl, but free!… No need of money, no need of people, the only thing that ties me down and makes me submit is the uncertainty of it all… where should I go? What will become of me? It is my destiny that intrigues me, yet it is my destiny that rules me, unfortunately…

  “My uncle put forth that I assume a role during his lifetime, and that I assume another role after his death. After his death, his wish was for me to remain faithful to him and not to attempt to erase his memory in the arms of another man. It’s ridiculous, I know. They say it’s incestuous, a condition like that put on you by your own family member. They say a condition like that should make me erase my memory of him. In a healthy situation, it would be in the arms of another man that my memory of him as my loving uncle would be strengthened. To be honest, Saul, I don’t understand the taboo of incest, I never saw his love for me as a bad thing; but perhaps I don’t understand life. No, I’m too young and unsettled to understand life. Yet my uncle, for all his money and all his years, he lived and he died without understanding life.

  “…The role I was to assume during his life: be a good, loving niece and a perfect example of a virtuous young lady of the haute-bourgeoisie. He wanted me to lose all memory of my parents, separate myself from the past, and forget my childhood in Holland… what he called my ‘vulgar upbringing.’…

  My uncle had been in love once in his life: to an upperclass Spanish woman named Clara. Years later when my mother was pregnant with me, he asked his sister to name me ‘Clara.’ My mother said he was furious when I was born and she and my father named me Saskia instead. He thought that Saskia was a good first name for a savage girl—that was the term he used: a savage girl. The day I came to live with him in Italy, he announced that he was going to call me ‘Clara’ from then on, which is the only name I went by in Italy, and even afterwards. I asked him why he didn’t name me ‘Chiara,’ rather—the Italian form of ‘Clara.’ He didn’t tell me about the Spanish woman he was in love with. He just said that ‘Chiara’ was a suitable name for a cheap schoolgirl whore. Whereas the Spanish form, ‘Clara,’ he said, is an elegant name for a lady; and therefore, that is the name he chose. I was thirteen when I met Dragomir in Málaga; and at that time, I only called myself Clara. Two years after my uncle’s death, at age fifteen, I went back to being Saskia.”

  “Clara means ‘clear, bright and celebrated,’ doesn’t it? Dragomir guessed this. Is that why you believe in your fortune so much?, because he guessed your name correctly?”

  “That’s not all he guessed correctly. I don’t think he guessed any of it… I think he knew!”

  “I still don’t understand why you didn’t tell me the fact that you used to be called Clara when Dragomir called you Clara in front of me. It’s as if you didn’t want me to know that Dragomir is your fortune teller.”

  “I’m afraid that’s exactly why. I thought if you knew it was Dragomir who told me my fortune, and you knew that the crucial part of my fortune is you; and if I told you that our destinies are entwined, you would laugh and blow me off as a ridiculous, incredulous fool for listening to a madman like Dragomir, whom you would call a ‘false clairvoyant…’”

  “You are right,” I told Saskia, “ I would have written you off as being a ridiculous fool. But why would you have imagined that I would think of Dragomir as a madman and a false clairvoyant? You told me about this made-up ‘garden woman’ long before you knew that I knew Dragomir… long before the incident with Pulpawrecho at the hostelry. You told me she told your fortune before we met Dragomir together, before we learned what kind of man he really is… a man without morals, rotten in the head, a man who is mad …or else simply evil! Why then, if this was before the Dragomir drama, would you think I wouldn’t take you seriously if you told me of your fortune as predicted by him?”

  “Because he is a man!” she said, “I knew you wouldn’t want to follow me around while I’m following the instructions of another man. That is why I made up the story about the garden woman on the Île Saint-Louis.”

  “That’s right!” I exclaimed, “I’d completely forgotten about that particular lie you told me… there were so many lies! Tell me Saskia, hearing all this from you now, how can I trust you in the future? Why should I trust you?”

  “Why should you trust me? I never said you should trust me! You can’t! … you shouldn’t!”

  “Well, you have spoken… goodbye, Saskia.”

  With that, I stood up from our table in the Piazza, fished in my pocket for some money to pay the meal and the wine, left it on the table, and left Saskia sitting there—she looking at me, stupefatto1, mouth agape. I walked then to our villa alone, anxious to sleep and forget this night.

  Chapter Thirty

  1 STUPEFATTO: (It) “stupefied.”

  I slept alone that night, I woke up alone. Saskia had not come to bed. We always shared a bed, her body, not far from mine, although I never touched her at night. She sometimes rested her face on my bare shoulder before we slept. Sometimes she laughed and put her nose against my neck and put her arms affectionately around me. But that was the extent of our nocturnal caresses. She never cried in bed, since neither of us had ever any reason to be sad while we were together and close beside; still sometimes she would be taken by a pensive mood—when she thought about her dear friend who was lost, or about a country or city she missed, or something else that touched her from her past—and she would lie with me on the bed, rest her cheek on my chest, and with her arms around me like that we would fall asleep, only to find that in the morning we lay far apart.

  On this night following our argument in the Piazza del Campo, Saskia didn’t come to bed. The morning after I went into the kitchen to make my coffee and I saw her asleep on the sofa. I took my coffee through the bedroom and out onto the courtyard so as not to wake her, and to feel the morning sun on my face. I was only outside for ten minutes; but when I came back, she was already gone and she didn’t come back home again until very late that night. I was in bed alone again all of that night. Around dawn, I heard her sneak into our bedroom.
I pretended to be asleep but I opened my eyes to catch a glimpse of her. She was wearing her pyjamas, her hair was tousled from sleeping, and she sneaked on her tip-toes. I kept pretending to be asleep while she placed an envelope on my chest. A moment later she was gone.

  I had a fearful realization as I sat up alone in our bed and tore open the envelope. I heard her leaving then. I heard her stepping out of our front door, her footsteps grew fainter and fainter as she walked away from our villa. I was afraid and I knew what the envelope contained: a letter from her saying adieu… “Goodbye forever, Saul.” It was the worst fear I had suffered in years. It was with trembling hands that I finished tearing the envelope apart and unfolded the paper. When I read the first paragraph, a flood of intense happiness filled my heart. It was not a letter of farewell. It was a letter to bind us closer than ever before. The first paragraph read…

  My Dearest, Dearest Saul, I will be back home later today! In the meantime, I wanted you to read my fortune, the one I’ve been searching for, the one that concerns you… You see, now that you know who gave me my fortune, there are no more secrets between us—at least there are no secrets that I am keeping from you. So, I can now freely share with you my entire fortune. I don’t have to leave anything out. So here it is, my entire fortune as I received it in Málaga four years ago…

  The Fortune Of Saskia

  “You are a Wanderer searching for something, or ‘someone’ rather.

  You were raised by the people of the north, but you are not one of them, as you belong to no people and have no country.

  Your name means clear, bright, and celebrated.

  Your fingers were not made for keys, but for strings. You love song, and you sing.

  I see you travelling.

  In three year’s time, you will be in Catalonia.

  There, through your music, you will make a man drunk from love and beauty,

  So much so, that he will come close to dying.

  You will find him sleeping in the street, in fine clothes, in Barcelona.

  You must save him and protect him, for your destinies are entwined.

  His death will mean your death.

  You will find what you are seeking only when you enter the country of his birth and the home where his father was raised.

  There you will find your true fortune, your destiny, your salvation.”

  Reading her fortune brought me both joy and suffering. I laughed many times thinking back on all our interactions that were obviously influenced by this… the “sleeping in the street in fine clothes,” especially. It showed me why Saskia had been so determined to have me in her company, and why she panics if we have to be apart. You could say that our relationship finally made sense—that is, if relationships can ever make sense. Dragomir impressed me with his talent, I admit; her fortune was extremely well-told. He’d said that he made a lucky guess about the meaning of her first-name… but how did he guess that she played a stringed instrument? That she loved song and she sang? In neither Pulpawrecho’s nor Dragomir’s account of that night in Málaga was Saskia said to have carried a guitar case.

  The first part of the fortune astonished me because in five short phrases, he touched on the most important aspects of Saskia’s life and character. He listed the essential elements of her condition, as though he had known her already. It was the first line that said she was ‘searching for someone.’ Of all things that drove Saskia in this life, nothing came before her search for her lost friend. Adélaïse was at the top of the list. I was impressed that this Spanish charlatan actually had a gift. Before I read this paper, I could not fathom how any ‘fortune’ could dominate a person’s mind and life entirely for several years. Now I understood why she considered this her destiny. I, who disbelieved in mystic clairvoyance, would have been just as obsessed as Saskia, had I’d been given a similar fortune that described so accurately the aspects of myself and my character. I would have declared such a fortune my destiny.

  As for the rest of the bonne aventure… that which begins with: “In a three year’s time, you will be in Catalonia…” it was simply a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now that the fortune teller had won Saskia’s faith, he was free to instruct her to go on errands. The more she accomplishes using her fortune as a guide, the more she is working to prove her own fortune correct. The fortune read that in three year’s time she would be in Catalonia. Any coincidence that she was in Catalonia? She was given a date and was obliged to show up…

  Of course, Dragomir is a good businessman. He knows that if you want the buyer of a fortune to be satisfied, you must assign them tasks to undertake to realize their destiny. Like the labors of Heracles, the tasks should be numerous and they should take years. Imagine a fortune teller who guesses things about your life, the meaning of your name, etc., but doesn’t construct a roadmap for your future—just a fortune that says who you are and where you’ve been… No, the one thing that the people who consult clairvoyants all have in common, is that they all are uncertain or afraid of their future. They search for a symbolic roadmap to tell them that they are on the right path. And a roadmap of the future could interest no one more than Saskia, who has unlimited freedom in her life, but who doesn’t know what to do with her freedom.

  What caused me suffering when reading her fortune was this second part, the roadmap part. I don’t know how I came to be the unlucky man who happened to lose consciousness beneath her balcony—in that neighborhood, on any given night there must be a good deal of young men who pass out in the street after leaving bars. I just happened to be the first man to pass out beneath her balcony, and so she believed I was the one… And now, according to her fortune, she was supposed to enter the country of my birth and the place where my father was raised… This made me suffer. I believed she would sooner or later find out, and she would ask me to go with her. I would say no. And she would have to go alone. I planned to stay in Europe at all costs. I told myself over and over: there was no way that I would ever return to Tripoli, to Libya, or anywhere near it. I wouldn’t set foot again on the African continent. Not in Alexandria, not in Cairo, nowhere. ‘She would have to make that voyage alone,’ I thought, ‘and if she does, I doubt she will ever come back.’

  Chapter Thirty-one

  I had all day to think about Saskia and her fortune, and I came to some conclusions. She returned that evening, just as she said she would. She was happy to see that I was in a good mood. She was in a great mood. There was a man with her. He was short, had bad teeth, was dressed shabbily.

  “What’s he for?” I asked.

  “He works at the market down the street. I bought twelve bottles of prosecco, and he carried it for me.”

  I took the case of wine from the little man and gave him three soldi1 and said goodbye.

  “I also bought you a present,” said Saskia. So saying she handed me a large package. I opened it with delight and was excited to find a giant tablet of beautiful ‘laid paper2,’ together with a wooden box containing an assortment of pastels—every color of nature, all colors of the Tuscan landscape, from the beige of grain to the blue of azure. “It’s to keep you busy when we travel …while I play my guitar!”

  “Thank you, little rabbit,” I said, kissing her forehead affectionately, “And thank you for the note this morning. I was happy to receive it… relieved is the word… the mystery of your fortune has been weighing on me since we met.”

  “Me too, I am relieved. I missed you today.”

  We put a bottle of prosecco on ice and walked out to the courtyard. The moon was out and waxing, so I could be free with the wine. And we were free. We drank and we laughed and we told stories. It was not long before Saskia brought up the conversation I would have preferred to avoid. But I did my best to keep it light…

  “One thing you didn’t explain to me, Saul… How do you think that Pulpawrecho fell in love with me when we never met?”

  1 SOLDI: A soldo (plural: “soldi”) is an Italian coin minted in copper (originally in silver). It�
��s value is approximately 1/20 of a lira.

  2 LAID PAPER: A fine-quality paper possessing a ribbed texture to hold the imprint of pastels. Used by artists since the 12th century.

  “I never did tell you the story of how Pulpawrecho came to meet his master,” I said, and then recounted the story to Saskia of how this common huckster, thief, and pervert, followed her in the street that night four years ago. And how, not being able to find her, and wanting her more than anything, he sold himself into slavery as a servant of Dragomir with the hopes that Dragomir would someday lead him to find her. Pulpawrecho didn’t doubt that Dragomir would know where to find her—not because he believed Dragomir gave her a “roadmap” to follow; but simply because Dragomir was a clairvoyant… thus he could see into her life and her future.

  “So it was because of me that Pulpawrecho became Dragomir’s servant.”

  “And he was a perfect servant,” I said.

  “And it was because of Pulpawrecho, whom you met on the street, that you came to meet Dragomir.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s strange, this life of fate and destiny. Our meeting, for example… if one of a million flukes didn’t occur, we would never have met.”

  “Here’s to our flukes,” I said and raised a glass of prosecco. We toasted and drank, and I thought about what Saskia had said: ‘It’s strange this life of fate and destiny,’ and I felt sad again. I was sad because this fantasy of a fortune meant so much to her. Now I knew that to realize her fortune, to go to the very end of it, she would have to go to Tripoli. I remarked that I’d done well to conceal from her all this time the name of the country where I was born and the city where my father was raised. I realized though that in concealing this information, in keeping her ignorant about the place of my birth and home of my family, I was guarding a secret. I was being deceitful in the same way I considered her deceitful when I learned that the ‘garden woman’ on the Île SaintLouis was a fabrication and that Dragomir was the real witch.