•
I am at the Hotel de Llevant, in room number 12. I arrived at midnight. The room was occupied. I couldn’t have it until noon today. This allowed me time to stroll about and write. It’s almost like a short holiday. I have seen the boulevard with the wisteria and the house. I recognized it because the name is printed in gold lettering on the column to the right of the gate. Before I die, lying on the bed, I endeavor to hear the voices of the man and woman who had loved each other in this room with its art nouveau decor. I know her voice. His is more familiar to me than any other. She called him “Amor meu.” He would make me whisper it to him in the dark, so he could imagine that I was her. At the head of the bed are two intertwined lilies. Two large lilies. They also adorn the top of the wardrobe with the mirror and the back of the chairs. Fortunately, there is a wing chair covered in velvet, a faded garnet color, its armrests worn smooth. I sit down in it and close my eyes. I have all the letters on my lap. All of them. The first three as well. I laughed when I left the house, the briefcase in my hand. I feel like laughing now too, a clear, healthy laugh. Everything makes me laugh: the two of them and me and my regrettable suicide, all of it so passé. The mere fact that someone makes us suffer should send us straight to our deaths. I am alone, the letters on my lap, surrounded by wooden lilies and an almost real hatred. I will die wearing my black crêpe dress and the shoes I adore with the heels encrusted with green stones.
I stand to look at myself in the mirror, filling it with darkness. Slowly, very slowly, my bridal gown floats past, empty, like a spindled cloud, followed by a bouquet of fresh roses. But then it is me in the mirror again, the veritable ghost that I am, and the ghost is thinking, “It’s a shame this girl will die.”
I read the letters, one by one, in order, conscientiously. All of them ridiculous, like love itself. One speaks of Italy, of Florence, of exceptional days in Pisa, and in Venice. How I laughed. With the laugh I used to have when I would suddenly realize in the middle of a lesson that my professor was wearing a dirty tie or looked hungry. My wedding trip was like a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Milan, Lake Como, Pisa, Florence. . Oh, I forgot Venice. Ladies and gentlemen, the water, though full of history, is not transparent. No, it is rather like an opal, disfiguring the faces that it mirrors. I am not indulging in literature. Senyors, all of you should travel to Italy, with a woman friend, with your wife. There will be a mirror for every face. The water flows for everyone.
When you receive this manuscript and packet of letters, Roger, I will be dead. Return the letters to Mârius. They are all there. Tell him that he has the contempt of a twenty-year-old girl. No, don’t tell him. It will be abundantly clear to him. I know these letters will scald his hands. That is all I wish.
ADA LIZ
Ada Liz slowly counted the money she had left. A measly sum. Too little to cover her frustrated yearnings for solitude and silence. She would have to return to the world from which she occasionally isolated herself and await the ships bearing officers and sailors. The former, however, rarely trod the streets where Ada Liz’s steps resounded. The narrow, airless alleys with their wretched houses frightened them.
•
Ada Liz strolls barefoot around the room. She’s left her purse on the narrow bed, which is hardly wide enough for one person. The window stands open, overlooking a square that is lashed by the first streams of daylight. The glass balconies on the houses across the way were filled with moon the night before, and a star had fallen onto the top of the roof of the second house. The first stands at the corner of Carrer Nelson. For the last eight days Ada Liz had opened the window at dusk and leaned on the ledge, not thinking of her youth, which had disappeared in the mists of time. To recapture that period in her life, she has painted her lips in a youthful way.
•
For a few moments the prevailing sound in the tiny room is the jet of water coming from the sink. A face with furiously closed eyes, arms moving under the water, then black hair being shaken, splattering the wall with drops.
What dreams will you dream, Ada Liz?
Her body feels sluggish. No man has held her tightly against his chest today; none could tell her she has bewitching eyes. She is the one who wanders about the port with her strange nostalgia for unfamiliar seas. A warship was docked near the sea-green rocks. The wind has unfurled the flag at the bow and stirred the water, drawing the lights down to the depths.
When Ada Liz walks back to her hotel room, all the cafés are closed and night is fading into rain.
•
Again, Ada Liz mentally counted the money she had left. With tips and all, she could only live on her own for five more days. Feeling that freedom was escaping her, she stretched out her arms to the night and let the raindrops shatter against her open palms. She imagined a ship being born from each drop. As they set sail, she christened them, even naming one after herself: Veloce, Ardent, Ignotum, Ada Liz. The minuscule ships sailed beneath all the skies of the world, across all the seas. Solitary islands awaited them with women like Ada Liz who daydreamed and stored up kisses for the returning mariners.
But Ada Liz — who no longer strolls barefoot around the room, but stands expectant by the window, watching her sea-less vessels suspended in air — saves her money in order to sleep alone, even when maneuvering warships are docked by the rocks at the old port.
So as not to soil the sheets, she dries her feet on the little faded rug. The nights are sultry, and she lies down without covering herself, remembering that a consul, bound for even warmer lands, had once fallen in love with her. Was it Dakar? He was tall and dusky, a strong man of forty. His teeth were white, and he had wanted her three nights in a row. Who knows how long he might have wanted her if she’d agreed to accompany him?
She would have had a house with lovely shutters to keep out the sun and a black servant and a phonograph with lots of music for those hours when the heart desires it.
“No,” she had said. The shutters would be real, not a dream, but what would I do with a servant?
“You’d have love,” he had exclaimed, still intoxicated by the brilliant, wild eyes that three nights in a row had riveted him, driving him mad.
“I don’t want it.”
“What then do you want?”
“Seamen.”
She had lied. Not that she wasn’t fond of Edgar and Raul and Esteve and Jim, who sang sad airs accompanied by the accordion, and Maria Clara, with the little monkey on her shoulder that Ada Liz despised. More than anything, she loved the sea that bound her to the earth. She hadn’t dared ask if Dakar was on the sea, but she felt certain it wasn’t, and inland she’d miss the walks by the still water. More than the port itself.
•
Before falling asleep, Ada Liz gazed at the map hanging in front of the bed: it showed her country. Sometimes, with her index finger, she would wistfully trace the black lines of the rivers. When Jim gave it to her, he had explained the meaning of the words “latitude” and “equator.” He had told her — purely by chance, because he was going there — that Dakar was on the sea.
•
Ada Liz can’t sleep and, like other nights, without summoning them, her thoughts lead her to the memory of a man she had truly loved. Suddenly she takes pity on herself. It had happened some years before, when she hadn’t yet travelled all alone across the sea, nor slept in any country other than her own, or heard the unfamiliar sound of water lapping against battered rocks. And now that same man controls the destiny of her country. In the obscurity of time, her name wasn’t Ada Liz, nor had she learned to undress in front of men. She had entrusted her life to the heart of one who called her “beloved” and placed her destiny in his hands.