Sweethearts
Manuel Toledano boarded the ship in Venice to travel Trieste-Split-Dubrovnik for the next five days. The vaporetto took him from the hotel on the Grand Canal to the inner harbor, but in the traveler’s eyes, the ducal city remained an enduring, duplicated mirage. Leaving Venice behind, Manuel moved away from a fantasy that was transformed in his memory into a ghost of itself. He thought for a moment that perhaps the specter of Venice had more reality than the illusory municipal reality of streets, canals, squares, and churches.
The established dogana was a memory that all the trappings of Venice — the magnificence of the Pearl of the Adriatic — were the fruit of an ancestral simulation, a long-lasting taste for Italian theatricality. Venice wagered its dramatic stage setting — a sumptuous backdrop — on something that in the end was a commercial center as naked as the dock where Toledano set foot this morning with the sensation of stepping on forgotten solid ground, confirming in this way that Venice was floating, and the traveler there had to become accustomed to the rocking of stone.
The city, however, reserved for him, after farewells at customs, a last illusion, a radiance that rose like a veil over Venice: light, respiration, heartbeat, foam of the air, salivation of the sea.
After settling into his cabin, Manuel went for a walk on the deck. He did not want to miss the arrival in Trieste and the appearance, equally spectral, of Miramare, the longed-for seat of the sad imperial couple, Maximilian and Carlotta.
When the port came into view, Manuel discovered the palace and felt a lightning flash of pity for the innocence and illusion that separated those young princes, at once ingenuous and ambitious, from a life of hereditary tranquility in Europe and hurled them into a death of shrapnel and madness in Mexico.
They were, after all, only two unfortunate sweethearts.
“Look at the palace, baby. . Oh, don’t be annoying. You’re so clumsy!”
There was a calamitous sound of abandoned chairs followed by a resigned sigh that turned into labored breathing. Manuel came around the corner on the deck and saw the woman attempting to pick up a capsized chair. He hurried to help her. The irritated lady could recline once more on her deck chair.
“Grazie,” she said to Manuel.
“You’re welcome, Señora,” Manuel said, smiling, but she didn’t return his amiability; she looked at him with curiosity and turned back to her feigned reading of a fashion magazine.
For an instant, however, their eyes had met with a question that Manuel, returning to his false lookout post at the railing (travelers travel as if the proper operation of the train, the plane, or the ship depends on them), dared to formulate in secret that the lady was Mexican, her verbal localisms betrayed her. Did he know her? Had he seen her before? And she, did she recognize him?
Manuel smiled at Trieste. Too often he had been mistaken, searching in the most hidden little light in aging eyes, in the weariest tone of a voice that had once been fresh, for a friendship from his youth. .
Sometimes he guessed correctly: Are you Borras Barroso, basket-ball champion at the Francés Morelos Secondary School? And sometimes not: Didn’t you sit in the first row in the class on civil law at San Ildefonso? With men, it was a simple matter: yes or no. With women, it was more complicated: Don’t be fresh, Señor, your tactics are stale, excuse me, you’re mistaken and what a shame, I would like to have known you when you were a young man, or frankly, you’re an overconfident old man, very well preserved but a little inappropriate.
Sixty-five well-preserved years. Like marmalade. .
The lady concentrated on her reading. Manuel looked at her out of the corner of his eye. They were probably the same age as well as the same nationality. Perhaps, with luck, at supper they’d be at the same table, there would be an opportunity to approach her naturally, courteously, without ridiculous or dangerous pretexts.
She didn’t appear at supper. The steamer was docked in Trieste all night. Perhaps she went down to a restaurant in the port. She. He kept thinking — had he seen her before? Where? When?
Memory ought to have supplementary lenses capable of superimposing, through layer after layer of skin, the faces prior to the present face, until the final face of death was unveiled. By the same token, this process ought to operate in reverse until it also showed the first profile, the one of a longed-for youth, along with the unrenounceable feeling that we once were young and because of that we once were happy, strong, attractive, unique. .
But the past is a mist that moves invisibly over our heads without our realizing it. Until the day it rains.
Manuel’s heart still throbbed with the sensation of youthful fulfillment. He was not alarmed by that. He was astonished. Calendars, mirrors, above all the glances of those who no longer recognized him, could not vanquish the image that Manuel Toledano had of himself. His interior sight kept alive an anterior sight, that of his youth. It was a vision that he judged faithful, summonable, persistent in a thousand and one characteristics of his face remodeled by time.
If others did not see the Manuel Toledano that had been, he did. He was the best, most knowledgeable guardian of his own true image: that of his youth.
And she? Was his interior and anterior sight that of a memory that preserved, in faithful archives, the faces of his closest relatives, lost friends, forgotten sweethearts?
And she. .
The following day, walking on the deck and avoiding the heroic Adriatic sun with a hand placed like a visor over his forehead, Manuel took advantage of the situation to direct surreptitious glances at the lady masked by her fashion magazine and unmasked by an impatient distraction, as if reading were the disguise for something else, a constantly deflected vigilance, a duty both troublesome and imperative. . The woman turned the pages of the magazine without looking at them. She almost scratched at them as if memory were a sharp nail.
Finally — inevitably? — their eyes met, hers blinded by the glare from the sea, his by the shadow of his own hand. Manuel smiled at the lady. “Excuse me. It’s just that I heard you yesterday and told myself you’re Mexican.”
She nodded without saying a word.
He insisted, conscious that he was engaging in a dangerous piece of audacity. “That’s not all. I have the impression we’ve met before.”
He laughed at himself, half closing his eyes. Now came the resounding verbal slap, no we’ve never met, don’t be insolent and inappropriate, that ploy is very old.