“What you decide to believe is always the truth.”
“Thank you, Ludwig.” Even now, there was no emotion visible in her face. “I owe you one.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “You’re doing better. That’s reward enough.”
“I owe you one,” she repeated seriously.
“What could a young woman like you do for a sixty-eight-year-old?”
Alfonsa suppressed a comment. “Don’t you want anything? Anything at all? There must be something.”
I replied: “Uhh-ehh.”
I should have simply asked her for a smile. Instead I suggested she accompany me on my nightly rides. Around the convent. Counterclockwise.
We kept our conversations superficial, out of fear of giving too much importance to this relationship of ours. We were bound by our common experience of how dangerous it was to let someone get too close to you. That experience had brought us both to this place. We were outsiders at Saint Helena, we felt we’d been cheated out of a better life, but had come to terms with it. In another world, we would have been happier. In this one, we were learning to treasure the greatest possible happiness available to the unhappy: contentedness.
For my sixty-ninth birthday, in May 1982, Alfonsa gave me a cassette with her favorite songs by Frank Sinatra, and I had to confess to her that I didn’t own a tape player, whereupon she brought me her own after our walk that night, and plugged it in beside my bed and pressed “play.” And guess who sighs his lullabies through nights that never end, my fickle friend, the summer wind.
We sat facing each other, I on the wheelchair, she on the stool she always used when I gave her chess lessons, and listened to the music. Alfonsa’s upper body was leaning a bit to the side, her hands were folded in her lap, her gaze fixed on the turning cogs in the cassette player. Even when she was more or less relaxed, she lived up to her name. I suddenly felt that she felt I was watching her, and I shut my eyes so that our gazes wouldn’t meet, and made as if I were concentrating on the music. Now I could feel that she was watching me, and didn’t dare open my eyes until the last track on side A ended with a heavy click. Alfonsa stood, flipped the tape to side B, pressed “play,” and asked, before Frank Sinatra started in again, if she could lie down next to me on the bed, just lie there next to me. I smiled for the both of us and said that wouldn’t work, and she nodded immediately, as if she’d expected that answer, and we went on listening. Take (get a piece of) my (these) arms, I’ll never use them.
The next day when she came to make my bed, Alfonsa found my door locked. She knocked and called my name, but I simply stared at the shadow moving in the gap between the door and the floorboards, and said nothing. After a while she gave up and moved away, and I found the Mother Superior and asked her to assign me a different nun. It wasn’t Alfonsa’s fault, I explained, she simply reminded me of someone I didn’t want to be reminded of. I didn’t say that that someone was myself. The Mother Superior seemed to understand, and I left her feeling I’d done the right thing.
But that same evening, after dinner, Alfonsa followed me back to my room. “Why are you doing this?”
I acted surprised. “What have I done?”
“From tomorrow on I’m assigned to the kitchen.”
“Well?”
“Did you think I wanted something from you? Because of yesterday?”
“Interesting thought. How did you hit on that?”
“You’re old enough to be my grandfather!”
“Exactly.”
I’d never seen her so upset. Her lips were a thin, straight line, and so many unspoken emotions were swirling in her eyes that I would have liked to spend longer staring into them, reading them.
Instead, I asked, “Is there anything else?”
She left my room without another word, and I turned back to the window, through which a sudden gust of wind drove a flurry of light-pink petals. Footsteps approached, and even before I could turn again Alfonsa was standing beside me, leaning down, giving me a rough kiss. Then she plucked an apple blossom from my hair, showed me her smirk for the first time, and left.
I didn’t lock my door that evening. After midnight, when I was already stretched out in bed, I heard the door open, then close again. In the dark I couldn’t distinguish a thing. The sound of bare feet on a stone floor. The covers were lifted and a cool, slender body wrapped in a nightgown snuggled up to me. She laid her hand on my chest. Her breath grazed my throat.
“Sleep well,” she said.
“You, too,” I said.
The next morning I woke alone. I washed and dressed myself, wondering if I’d imagined it all.
At breakfast in the dining hall Alfonsa sat down across from me. “Sleep well?” she asked.
I looked at her. Her face was as expressionless as ever.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. Very well, actually.”
She smirked again. “Me, too.”
This smirk was enough to make me ask myself, ask myself seriously, why on earth I hadn’t ever wanted this. Soon she visited me every night. Until I couldn’t fall asleep without feeling her body next to mine. Like teenagers we hid under the blankets and laughed into the pillows and whispered stories to each other and kissed with half-opened eyes. As aware as we were of the impossibility of our relationship, we were just as aware of the possibility of a bit of happiness. Probably, I thought, it would be the last of my life. Who would have chosen to forgo that?
“Can you feel that?” she asked.
I lay in the bathtub, it was nighttime, the only light came from a solitary candle doubled by my shaving mirror, and Alfonsa, who sat by the tub on the chess stool in her nightgown, rolled up one sleeve, dipped her hand into the water, and touched my ankles.
I shook my head.
Her hand wandered up my leg.
“What about that?”
Again, I shook my head.
“And that?”
This time I nodded.
Whenever we encountered each other by day in the hallways of Saint Helena, we’d make a promise with a nod of the head, one we’d fulfill when we met in secret after dark. It had been so many years; since my accident, I hadn’t touched a single woman like that. So I was all the more amazed at how simple and satisfying it was. Alfonsa came to appreciate the advantages of an experienced man, and I to appreciate her smirk in all its variations. Making love with her was like a gentle dance, not especially spirited, but proceeding in small, even steps, always looking each other in the eye. In me she saw her second happiness, and in her I saw my fourth love. I revealed my real name to her, and she her history to me. And it was only in the mornings, when her hair, so seductively red in the glow of each evening’s candles, turned suddenly traitorous by daylight, so that I had to spend hours searching my mattress for strays that might give us away — it was only then that I asked myself where all of this was leading.
End
It ended as it does so often: with a beginning. During our last evening stroll, in September 1982, Alfonsa told me that she was two months pregnant. As I didn’t immediately react to the news, she said, “You don’t seem surprised.”