I pay for the English language book, along with a boy's story, Adrift in New York, by Horatio Alger, which begins auspiciously, "Uncle, you are not looking well tonight," as well as the pastoral postcard that I hope to mail but could also tack on my wall, and the shopkeeper nods her head under the stiff hat and mutters that her costume smells of mothballs, and, in a sweeping, balletic gesture, shucks off the stiff hat, revealing her flattened hair, which makes her seem childlike, hairless like a newborn, though some are born with full heads. I don't ever wear a hat, though I might if I'd been ordered, lost a bet, or was paid a million dollars. I look silly in them. My vanity is exhausting, it sits uselessly in me, since the body lies, certainly the eye does. Ruskin wrote, "All literature, art, and science are vain, and worse, if they do not enable you to be glad." Veins and vanity lie deep beneath our skins but can be more visible and on the surface in some of us. The pale blue veins on the backs of Contesa's creamy beige hands delineate her script, since she believes much of life is told in and by the body, with which, in a sense, I concur, but her mysticism isn't mine. She believes mostly in what can't he known or seen, which also can't be entirely dismissed, and in the numina which establish their spiritual, ghostly, or ethereal presence wherever she is, and this reality is confirmed and evinced by the fact that, when she found her Kafka, who died of tuberculosis, she contracted pneumonia, and her lungs inflamed in a physical emulation of her intimate tie to him. Now she has the beginnings of emphysema.
I haven't told her about the tarot card reader. His oracular statements echo and vibrate internally, just for me, and their truths or falsehoods are also mine, that is, I know I am also, I live as, in some sense, my arbitrary selection of his predictions. The tarot card reader's blemishes weren't distracting, they were not even notable, it was mostly his hands and lopsided mouth I watched when he announced, portentously, Ah, let's see what happens. He contemplated the three rows of cards and explained that there was the past, present, and future. The high cards were in the middle, the past on top, and there were the qualifiers, the details, he said, which he explained but which I didn't catch even as he spoke. A woman sat in the middle, he said, that's you, but he didn't look at me then, for which I was glad. He told me that fives were not bad, since they were in the middle range, and I had two fives on either side of the present or the past, but I remember he said: Coins dot the table, you have more of those than anything else; and logically, I thought, he started at the past, where, he said, lifting up a card, there was the last judgment. Look, the angel is blowing his horn into the skies and the dead are rising out of their coffins.
Even now this harrowing image sits inside many others, but maybe it won't come to pass too soon.
It was the recent past that the cards showed, which was behind what lay before us, like a settling of accounts after which you could clear the table. I liked this idea of clearing the table of the past. I also like tables, but not as much as chairs. This suggests, he continued-he looked me in the eye-some epoch has closed. I thought of many things, including the man who no longer lived with me whose presence was a comfort and a bother, or comfort itself was a bother, as I fear complacency, and so I threw out the baby with the bathwater, when I should have, I'd heard, kept the bathwater. The reader now said, You may he starting something new-it is not a break, a rupture, but in the sense we use the word now, a closure or resolution, and so the thing has been completed and makes some ground from which to proceed. These characters are resurrecting into a new life in heaven. They're not just finished. But this period is done for you.