Albert studied the picture with a magnifying glass and narrowed eyes for hours at a time. A stamp on the back confirmed: it had been taken in 1983, the year of Albert’s birth.
He showed it to Fred.
“Who’s that?”
“Who?” asked Fred.
“The woman next to you, what’s her name?”
“She’s pretty. The Red Lady.”
“Does she have a name?”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“Well?”
“Fred, who is she?”
“She’s the Red Lady.”
“Do you know her real name?”
“No.” Fred rolled his eyes. “But maybe it’s in the encyclopedia?”
“Were you in love?”
“With the encyclopedia?”
“With the woman, Fred, the woman.”
“She’s pretty …”
“Did you … kiss her?”
“Mama says you shouldn’t kiss girls.”
“But she was a woman, right? And pretty. And if you really love someone, then you definitely kiss them. You even give me a kiss, sometimes.”
“Sure, but you aren’t the Red Lady. You’re Albert.”
“Did you kiss her, or not?”
“She kissed me.”
“Did you do anything else with her?”
Fred wrinkled his brow.
“Did she touch you?”
“Sometimes.”
“Down below?”
“Below where?”
“Down there.”
“No!”
“Fred?”
“M-hmm?”
“Can you tell me where the Red Lady went?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Of course, really!”
“Where?”
Fred pointed to the front door.
When Albert was brought back to Saint Helena after an escape attempt and for punishment was forced by Sister Alfonsa to tie his shoes two hundred times under strict supervision — knots, bows, double knots, unpick them, and start again from the beginning — the thought of the Red Lady gave him the strength he needed to keep going. At fifty knots, you hit that prickly border, the sound barrier of penitential shoelace tying, after which your fingertips go numb, skin begins to tear, laces dig into the sore places. With the image of the Red Lady in his head, Albert was able to continue with inflamed hands, never breaking off before the stipulated number. He held the record for the orphanage. If you added up all his offenses, by the age of fourteen he’d reached over four thousand knots — not including the regular ones he had to tie so as not to trip. What with the innumerable little scars that covered them, his hands looked like those of a craftsman. That he’d managed to survive this time, as he believed today, because the Red Lady in the photograph had filled him with strength — that was for him the decisive evidence that she must be his mother.
Not to mention the fact that Albert’s hair was as red as hers.
But even more precious to him than the photograph was a bottle-green barrette in which a pair of auburn hairs had snagged. He had lost one of them at Saint Helena, when he fell asleep holding it one evening, and on waking couldn’t distinguish it from the numberless others, his own, lying curled on the mattress. The second hair he kept in a homely makeup compact he’d bought at a flea market, and which he carried always on his person, like an asthmatic does his inhaler. At lonely moments, especially during his trips to visit Fred and back to the orphanage, he ran his hands across it, and it made him itch — like when a wound is healing.
That spring, when Albert discovered the photograph, he wiped it clean with a damp sponge and slipped it into a transparent plastic folder, which he carefully sealed with several layers of clear tape before stowing it away, wrapped in two shock-absorbing editions of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, in an attaché case covered with fake alligator skin that he’d taken from the attic, and which zipped shut with a comforting weeep. And with that he walked — optimistically smacking his gum, as only a teenager can — over to Fred’s next-door neighbor. She was a potter named Klondi, who lived rent-free in a huge old farmhouse, badly in need of repairs, on the main street. In return for her housing, she kept the space “in good order”—nobody but Klondi was allowed to set foot on the second floor of the place, because only she knew which boards you could step on without falling through to the first floor. But Klondi — whose passport displayed a less silly, more mundane name — much preferred — when she wasn’t working late into the night, shaping vases and coffee mugs and ashtrays with her hands — to groom the garden behind the farmhouse. During the daytime, even in spring storms and November snow, you’d find her there, transplanting a rhododendron or trimming the hedges.
“Hello?”
Albert stood before a gate some ten feet high, all overgrown with roses. The smell was as overpowering as the incense at Sunday Mass at Saint Helena.
“Anyone there?”
He preferred not to have her name in his mouth. There were words that left behind a stale aftertaste. Klondi was one of them, Father another.
“Yes, someone’s there,” answered a hedge to his left.
Albert spat his gum into an empty terra-cotta pot and, as he followed the voice, pondered how many cigarettes Klondi must have smoked in the course of her life to earn herself such a sepulchral basso. She was down on her knees in a flower bed, cutting up slugs with a pair of gardening shears. Pale slime welled from the severed halves. A cigarette was stuck in Klondi’s ferocious smile, her hair lay bundled over her shoulders in a pair of schoolgirl pigtails, which hardly concealed the fact that Klondi the onetime flower child had long since become a flower woman.
“Do you know why I spare the ones who carry around their own little houses?”
Albert glanced at the dying slugs seeping out on the pavement. “Because they’re nicer looking?”
“I’d prefer to put it thus: survival of the sexiest.” Klondi laughed — or coughed, it was difficult to distinguish. “Want one?” She offered him a half-empty packet of Gauloises.
Albert shook his head.
“Good boy. But you’ll still have to take the gum with you.”
“Huh?”
“That chewing-gum crap. In the terra-cotta pot.” She stood with a flounce, as if she were sixteen, and knocked the dirt from her knees. “I’ve got enough butts lying around already.”
“Okay,” mumbled Albert.
“Is that for me?”
He tightened his grip on the attaché case, which he was carrying under his arm. “No. Yes.”
“Which is it?”
“Can I show you something?”
She waved him forward, and he followed her to a granite table in the middle of the garden, which she slapped with the flat of her hand. He unzipped the case and handed her the photo. She tilted it into the light.
“Well, so?”
“Do you know the woman?”
“No.”
“Sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.” She blew smoke from her nostrils. “Why?”
“Nothing important.”
He wanted to take the picture back, but she wouldn’t let it go. “Albert, in the eleven years you’ve been visiting your father, you’ve never once set foot on my property. Nothing important? I believe that right now there’s nothing more important to you than this photo.”
“Maybe.”
Glancing down, Albert noticed he’d stepped on one of the dead slugs. He wiped his sneakers on the grass.