Instead he tried to get at her with words again, both spoken and written. And she let him try. And since the oral modality suited them both better, she also agreed to a meeting occasionally; by now it did not matter to her where — so long as it was not in her house — sometimes for dinner, and also at her office.
At such times she was the one who ordered food or picked up the tab (he accepted it as a matter of course). And that was not the only factor that would have led an observer to conclude that their relationship must be based on some collaborative project, with her making all the decisions and him merely taking orders from her. Some thought they were witnessing a medical consultation, or saw the man, sitting there with the woman, as her research subject. At such moments, the idiot of the outskirts — at the time of this story the idiots lived on the outskirts, where they belonged — would be crouching nearby, as her protector, and indeed everyone’s, listening in silence, eyes wide open, and thus assisting her.
Only the suitor spoke. And onlookers would never have guessed that every time he spoke exclusively of her. Viewed from the street or from the kitchen pass-through, he sat there looking like someone who was revealing his innermost feelings to a chance acquaintance. And she seemed to be all ears, saying nothing, as could hardly be otherwise in such a case. His many gestures, flowing one into the other, seemed to refer only to him. They underlined what he was saying. Would the woman listening have followed them so attentively otherwise, even the smallest of them, her attentiveness concentrated in the corners of her eyes, as she read his words from his lips?
From the outside, a passerby one time could see him talking and talking at her, making an expansive gesture, pointing outward and upward to the outdoors. He swung his arm so vigorously that his sleeve slipped back. And she followed his index finger without specifically focusing on it, simply by widening her eyes and face somewhat. And in fact there was something to see in the direction in which he was pointing: it was summer, a thunderstorm broke out, from one minute to the next, and over there, on the far side of the plaza outside the restaurant, a mighty old cedar suddenly toppled over, coming to rest at an angle, then a jerk, and another; and then, as its roots were ripped from the ground, it came crashing down on the plaza, just missing a family running to take cover; the two children laughed out loud at the fallen tree, while the parents …
But the man talking and talking in the window had not noticed the tree coming down, and had gone on talking without a moment’s pause, his apparent pointing giving way to a plucking and tearing at his own hair, while the woman took in the tree’s fall but at the same time maintained her listener’s pose — as if that were the way to bring the stranger to his senses? to placate him?
For his gesticulating directly contradicted what he was saying. Every time they met, she was his exclusive topic. Yet he never pointed at or indicated the woman he was wooing; he even avoided looking at her as his eloquence poured forth. He squeezed his own throat with both hands and said, “Everything about you is ugly. Your house is ugly. Your car is ugly. Your toes are ugly.” He poked his fingers in his eyes and said, “The one who will be the loser is you. You have already lost. Just as your parents were losers and your daughter is a loser, you must become a loser, too.”
Each of his meetings with her ended with his reviling her; predicting or asserting the worst possible outcomes for her. Sometimes he began with compliments or pleasantries: “This morning the wind carried your name to me …”—“Today I would like to intone a gentle psalm …” —“Only you know your secret, evasive companion …”—“It was on a morning in April, O woman with the warlike eyes …” But after a few such sentences he invariably began to scold her, which just as invariably gave way to swearing and cursing, during which he might box his own ears, strike his chest, or bite off his fingertips. Yet the scolding and cursing was never completely devoid of meaning. Among the empty phrases he stammered out, there was always one combination that hit home, revealing unsuspected acts and omissions, committed, she had thought until then, only in a dream. An act of cruelty, of forgetting, of malicious desertion — had actually occurred.
In the period just before her departure, the suitor/neighbor’s vilification of her had applied exclusively to the future. Not that he threatened her — threats were out of the question with her — he spat out imprecations. What began like a poetic traveler’s blessing (“Thou shalt find flower-strewn paths …”; “The dark and lowering sky will enrapture thee one night”) unfailingly ended with an unvarnished curse. She would lose what was most precious to her. She would never return. She would be done in. Let mountain lions devour her, her still quaking flesh! — When the author asked why she wanted to have this tale of confusion included in her book, she said only, “The more confused the tale, the clearer the pain.”
Where was her rejected suitor now, on the morning of her departure? Where was he standing, recording her final rounds? And what if this were indeed her last journey — something less to be wished for than to be feared? And at what moment had the owls stopped hooting amid the crescendo of morning sounds? And at what moment had the moon ceased to shine — casting light and shadow — as its disk sank silently into the sky, pale and without reflection? And at what moment did the last of the stars become invisible, leaving not the faintest flickering at the spot where it had just been shining on the horizon, already bright with day? And at what moment had the weather changed, the crisp, silent frost that had held the area in its grip for weeks now giving way, from one instant to the next, to a mild breeze?
How exciting to experience, with disarmed senses, without instruments and machines, all these transitions occurring in a speck of time, and yet, even if one seemingly succeeded in doing so—“Look! Venus is still there, no, now, no, now, now, yes! all gone!”—the awareness afterward of having missed the critical moment again, and that it had always been that way, and would be that way to the end? Having missed even that modest moment when, after stepping into a forest, one grew conscious of oneself as a complete being, surrounded by forest?
Unexpectedly, so the story goes, the “world champion of global finance” (as she had been dubbed in a magazine article) found herself whisked to the midst of the wooded slopes on the outskirts of the riverport city, borne through the morning air as if on the wings of the portion of the story that had already been told, and especially the portion that was yet to be told. And it was as if her journey had already begun; as if she were moving, as previously in the orchard on her property, in widening spirals, gathering impetus for setting out. No one but her in the forest that early, tremendously alone. And why was she alone? Where was her suitor? Was he asleep? He could not be sleeping through this, could he, missing her and this morning?
As she mounted the slope, she repeatedly wound up to throw one of the chestnuts she had gathered along the way and stuffed into her pockets. (Maroni! Wouldn’t they give away her geographical location? No, by now these nuts grew almost everywhere, they were practically ubiquitous on the continent.) She wound up without throwing. “Just the act of winding up and setting one’s sights on a target,” she told the author, “brings this target into view — a hole in a tree, a crack in a cliff — as an image, together with its surroundings. Winding up without throwing: another way of generating images from one’s own stock. But what is the point of such an image? With my target images I defend myself without defending myself — I attack without attacking — I wage war without having to wage war.”
Marvelous walking: beneath her feet the hoarfrost, still sole-deep, crunching and crackling as no snow could ever crunch and crackle (not only much quieter but also much farther away, or more dreamlike) — and overhead in the crowns a new pliability and a transformation from hoarfrost-white to trickling-water-black in the gentle thawing breeze. And in the bare chestnut trees the spiky fruit husks, long since split open, but now and then releasing a chestnut that had been held there for months by the husk, a lighter brown than those strewn over the forest floor, and not soft or rotting like them but firm and healthy, with fresh, pale-yellow flesh. What, edible chestnuts in January? Yes. She to the author: “What is time? I am still as puzzled by it as long ago in the village.” The magical emptiness of a Monday, the emptiness of the week’s onset in the forest.