A Neverending Affair (9 page)

The n
ext morning, she was set at keeping the distance to Olaf. “This will not do,” she told herself. ”Keep away from him.”

They met for breakfast. Ronia chose a business-like style for the conversation. Olaf tried to steer it toward more personal things, but also felt that this was not the right time for a deep conversation in any case. “Will you join me for a more serious dinner tonight? Last night was the easy fast-food stuff, but Belgium has some serious cooking, you know. They can match France without a problem. In my view, Belgian cuisine is perhaps even better than the French. At least, it is more generous, and I’m still growing, you know,” he said and stroked his belly. “Can I take you out, please?”

“Olaf, that is nice of you
—to ask me out—but perhaps you should take care of your wife instead of taking care of me,” slipped out of her mouth. She could hardly believe that she said something so rude. It was true, of course, but it was hardly something you said to a new acquaintance.

First he wanted to argue, to refute
her words, but then he realized it would be pointless. He decided to ignore the remark. “Anyway, you don’t have to decide now,” he said. “We have a whole day of work ahead.”

They walk
ed together, in silence, to the FairArtFair, which was held in a smaller hall of the Flanders expo. Olaf thought about the evening before and the morning and drew the conclusion that Ronia was a bit infatuated by him, but that she felt that his marital status was a serious obstacle. And of course, she was right.

At the same time, it was actually she
who had moved them ahead, who had increased the stakes. First, by saying that thing about spending the night in Arusha and now this time by kissing him first on the check and then on the mouth. And now she seemed to back off. It didn’t make sense to Olaf.

And how could it?
Olaf wondered. If your feelings don’t make sense for yourself, how on earth could the signals you send to someone else make any sense to that person? Aren’t we almost bound to misunderstand each other? Especially our minds and thoughts? Our bodies are more likely to understand each other, our lips find the lips of another person and very soon the lips have told each other what they feel, the tongues will take over and confirm that feeling. It is not our thoughts, our logic or our intellect and our mind—whatever the difference is between then—that then urge us to undress, to unite in love making. But then, if we did listen to our bodies all the time, what would the world look like?

Ronia wondered if Olaf was just one of those wom
anizers that never have enough, one that needs affirmation and confirmation of his appeal for women again and again. But she felt he was not like that. And honestly, it was not him pushing for physical contact, was it? On the other hand, he was flirting. A married man should stay faithful and not mess around with other women.

But then she thought about her fa
ther. He had had several affairs during his marriage with Ronia’s mother. She didn’t find out until the last one. She had bumped into her father and this woman, considerably younger than her father, but also—thank heavens—considerably older than herself, at a jazz club. The way her father had twirled a curl of the woman’s hair, and how they were looking at each other when Ronia saw them, left no room for misunderstanding. It had been a total shock for her—and for her father as well. She just stared at him. The woman saw her staring and said to her father, “Victor, there’s someone looking at you, at us. Do you know her?” in an almost inaudible voice.

He came quickly to his senses and excused himself to his girlfriend,
Valerie, and asked Ronia to follow him.

First she refused
, hissing at him, “Who do you think you are?” and “Get your hands of me” when he took her by the elbow, drawing some attention from the bystanders.

“Please
, Ronia, this is our chance. Don’t blow it,” he pleaded and she yielded.

They we
nt to a café and sat there until the owner chased them out. Her father tried to explain that even if he loved his wife, there was something missing in their marriage, a passion and excitement without which he had a half-life. He said he had three options: separation, suffocation, or adultery. Suffocation might be noble but was in his opinion unacceptable. After all, his whole devotion in life was to indulgences and beauty; he was a jeweler. Separation had long been a real alternative, and he had raised it several times.

But she didn’t want to. She preferred to be married
to him even knowing that he had affairs. “As long as your razor and toothbrush and your bank account are here, I feel safe and can cope with it. As long as you don’t bring any of your whores here or let them interfere with our social life in other ways,” she had said, according to him. Of course, Ronia’s mother never liked it, and there were times she had made a lot of trouble about it. At the time, she had been slowly wasting away to cancer, and she needed his care and his attention and his love, but not his body anymore. Her father was very glad that he had another woman who could comfort him. He said it gave him strength to care for Ronia’s mother, a statement that was perhaps half truth and half excuse.

Ronia never fully liked or even accept the betrayal of her father, but she would not go as far as to condemn him. Why would she judge Olaf harder
? she asked herself.
You don’t know anything about his conditions. Perhaps his wife is a real bitch. Perhaps they have an “open marriage” to which they both agreed. Perhaps she has some serious disease that changed her, schizophrenia, bipolar disease. I guess I should find out,
she thought. She almost asked him about his wife, but realized that they were at the entrance of the fair and that it would be futile to start an interrogation at that point. A second thought was
Does it really matter how his wife is?
 

The day passed with no surprises. Ronia took Fatima and Rachel around to see the supply, the competition, trying to explain what was good and what was less good. Of course, in the end, she had no clue what sold or didn’t when it came to African Fair Art. The buyers seemed to apply very different criteria than that for “normal” art, whatever normal art could be. She bought a coffee and sodas for the two artists.

“Is this your first time in Europe
?” she asked.

“As a matter of fact
, I’ve lived in Denmark for a year,” Rachel said. “I came from Rwanda, fleeing from the genocide.” Ronia didn't ask more, the fair cafeteria was certainly not a place for such deep discussion.

It would explain th
e scar I saw when Rachel was adjusting her scarf, she thought.

Fatima had never been in Europe
. As a matter of fact, she said her experience in other countries were limited to some courses in Nairobi. “I thought it would be colder,” she said and added, “I hadn't imagined that there would be so many old houses. On TV, you only see big houses with swimming pools and everybody driving cars. Here, houses are small and narrow and most people walk or go by the tram.” Rachel nodded her consent, but also said that in Billund, in Denmark where she lived, “where they make the Lego blocks,” it was quite different than in Gent. Much more modern and wealthy.

Fatima was surp
rised that so few people spoke English. Ronia explained that there were many European tribes, even if they were classified as nations or ethnic groups. But essentially, she saw little difference between the European ethnic groups and African tribes. “But then, I am no specialist or anthropologist,” she shrugged. 

They enjoyed her company, and at their urging,
Ronia agreed to go out with them that night.

“Will you bring Olaf?” Fatima asked.

“No.”

“We thought you were a couple
,” Rachel said with a smile.

“
Or that you should be one,” Fatima giggled. Ronia tried to look cross at them, but their friendly smiles won.  

After lunch, Olaf joined them. He had organized meetings with some potential buyers. Ronia felt useless in those business meetin
gs and went back to the stand to see if she could be of some service. She was a bit irritated by all the students and journalists and others visiting the stand and thought there were very few real buyers there. At five, Olaf asked her again if she wanted to join him for the evening, but she declined politely, stating that she would go out with “the girls.” The next morning, they saw each other for breakfast before both left for home. None of them made a move to continue where they ended the day before, or take up a new thread. 

“I do have another thing I want to ask you about; this Maria with the bazaars, is she is friend of yours?” Olaf asked Diana. 

“Sort of, not very close.”

“Who is she?”

“She worked for years in a center in Italy, with kids from Bosnia suffering from post-traumatic stress, from 1998 to 2006, I believe. They worked with drawings, painting and other art as a method to process the experiences. Then the center closed down. I mean, the war had been ten years earlier, and the kids grew up. I know she went to Bosnia, but I really know nothing of what happened there. She came back to Italy about two years ago. And she’s been helping with our bazaars since. But she’s very closed when it comes to her background. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, sorry, this is a purely
personal matter. I have reasons to believe that she is an old acquaintance. Is she French? What does she look like?”

“Yes
, she’s French for sure. She speaks good Italian, but with an unmistakable French accent.”

“Which probably mean
s that it’s Marie and not Maria?”

“Could be
,” she said. “She’s quite tall, good looking. Her hair is a bit wild when she lets it out. She often wears a scarf, sometimes tied like a Muslim woman’s headscarf.”

“High cheeks, somewhat of an oriental or Slavic look, gree
nish eyes, marked eyebrows?” he asked. He could have asked about the big birth mark under her left breast, or her very large areola, the wart next to her navel and other intimate things, but certainly Diana would not know those details.

“Yes, for sure, that
’s what I thought of the first time.”

“Diana, can I ask you a favor
?”

“Sure
.”

“I think this woman, Marie, is an old friend of mine. There are many reasons I believe that
. One was that in my hotel there were three paintings that the manager bought from this center for traumatized children from Bosnia, and I know they were painted by her, but the manager said the name of the painter was Marie de Grove. Her second name was Marie and her mother’s was de Grove. Both your descriptions of her looks fit quite well.

“What I would like you to do it to contact her and tell her what I told you, and that I would like to meet her. That I
’m staying in Hotel Amorina up to tomorrow evening. This is my number and this is the address of the hotel,” he said while writing on a napkin. “Can you read it?”

“And if she doesn’t want to meet you?”

“Then there’s not much I can do about that,” he said. “I have to respect it.”

“I guess you
’re right. She is quite a special person.”

“One more thing, please tell her that I
’m married and have a twelve-year-old daughter. Do you know if she has somebody? I mean if she’s in a relationship?”

“I don’t think so, and from the way she looks
, she either has nobody or has somebody that is more like a stable old friend.”

“How do you know?” he
asked.

“Fem
ale psychology. Women normally do small things to make themselves look attractive if they have a lover or someone they want to impress. It would only be in a relationship that is based on friendship and very little physical attraction that she would drop that kind of behavior, even more so if she is from the Eastern parts of Europe, where she must be from, even if she lived in France.”

After that
, they talked a bit about their family situations and shared some reflections on the implications of Italy leaving the EU, and then they bade each other farewell. Diana promised to speak with Marie that night. But before they parted she asked, “Why didn’t you ask about her phone number and simply call her yourself?”

“I don’t want her to feel that trapped
. Please make her understand that I will let her be. It was just too much to have this double coincidence of proof of her existence here in Rome. Tell her that I thought there must be a divine interference here. She never liked my religious belief,” he said with a smile.

Ronia saw on the display that it was Diana calling. She hesitated, but finally picked up. Diana said that she was sorry to disturb her, but there was a matter she needed to raise.

“
Go ahead,” Ronia invited.

Diana told the story as
Olaf requested. She added a few of her own reflections of how sympathetic he was. Ronia asked about the daughter, if he had said that the woman he lived with was the mother of the daughter. Diana thought he hadn’t but wasn’t sure.

“Did he say why he wanted to meet
?” Ronia asked.

“No
,” said Diana, which was true.

After hanging up, she was thoughtful, thinking about the first time she kissed him, in Gent 1996. Ronia switched on her computer and looked for the file. She had not opened it in a long time. It was t
he file she had kept with her notes and important communication between them. It was far from everything, since they had sent so many messages between them. Anyway, her first entry in the file was a description of their first encounter in Arusha. It was drier and more factual than she remembered now. But it also contained many more details, such as the fact that the moon was full when she left the hotel on the way to the airport; that she had been surprised how cool it was in Arusha. And a description of how she saw Olaf.

“He is the same
height as me, normal—for a man, that is—average fit, has quite small hands but a big nose and medium feet (we know what that means, don't we?). His hair is blond and his eyes have a beautiful blue color. His smile is kind and sweet. He has a soft humor and looks after his company well. Not sexy but attractive.”

A week after Arusha
, she had gotten an email asking how she was, and what the weather was like in Savoy. She had responded after two days that the weather was fine and that she was also fine. She asked about his trip home from Africa. He responded rapidly, although she didn’t see it for three weeks. There was a thunderstorm, and it wrecked her modem. When she finally got the thing to work again, there was not only that message, but five more messages. One asked her if she hadn’t gotten his messages. The subsequent just told her that he was fine, that spring was finally coming to Gothenburg, that he had booked his ticket for the Geneva conference. The next one asked if she was still cross or embarrassed over what had happened in Arusha. Then there was one saying that he was a bit disappointed that she hadn’t responded. The very last message, written a week earlier said:

“I am sorry that I sent you so many
emails. I understand that you want to be left alone. All the best.

Olaf”

She remembered
how she hadn’t known what to do. She wanted to explain to him that her modem had burnt. She wanted to respond to his messages. But at the same time, she asked herself,
Why would I do that? He’s nice and he can be a friend and a colleague, but I think there’s an undercurrent in his messages, an undercurrent of something that more. Of course, I’m flattered, and I do like him—kind of—but the guy is married.
So she did nothing. But then she realized that the meeting in Geneva was coming up, and that she would meet him there. It would be awkward meeting him without having responded. So finally she wrote:

“Hi Olaf,

I am sorry that I haven’t responded. This email thing is still new for me
, and you know I am an artist and not an office person. Another, less mythical, explanation is that my modem blew up in a thunderstorm. It took the PTT almost a month to fix it. The weather is nice and the snow is gone everywhere, apart from the Northern slopes of the high peaks. I will arrive in Geneva on 12 June midday, so I guess we’ll see each other in the Palais des Nations the following day. Hope everything is fine with you and your family.

Hugs
,

Ronia”

She had called Selma and told her that she would
arrive on the twelfth. She asked her to book her a room in the “same hotel as the rest of the crowd.” Selma said that she would book her in the hotel La Belle. Ronia thought a bit about the Geneva meeting.

She hadn’t had a man for years. The last one was Antoine, a local guy involved in tourism.
He had visited her to see if her place should be included in the
Savoy Guide for the Art Lover
. He had called beforehand, and she had been rather negative, saying that she didn’t have any exhibition of the paintings at the farm, so there was really nothing for the art lover to see. Antoine had insisted, “I have an errand to Mr. Montreaux about a sculpture for the municipality in any case, so I will be close by.” She reluctantly agreed. As she wasn’t keen on the idea, she intentionally didn’t make any arrangements. She even made it look messier than it normally was. Ronia was a tidy person and not at all the typical bohemian that people think artists should be. She hadn’t had a real visitor for months, so she thought it could be a bit stimulating. Of course, she greeted the villagers when they met, and she did go to Lyon once every month where her agent had her office.

Antoine came and introduced him
self. She immediately liked him and trusted him. He was a natural. Everything was easy with him and for him, she thought. No sorrows, no real deep thoughts, but nice and harmonious. He again explained the purpose of the visit. She showed her
atelier
, the studio, where she painted. In there was one bigger painting and two smaller ones in the making. The studio had a nice view over the valley and Lake Bourget
.
The paintings were positioned so that she would turn her back at the landscape. He asked why.

“I
t’s a lovely view, but it’s too pretty, too harmonious for me to look at, and it distracts me. Now I have it as a refuge when I get stuck, when I need to rest and unwind, but not as a distraction when I paint. You see, Mr. Subaru, this is not a place for tourists. There is not much to see. All my paintings that are ready are shipped to Lyon, and the idea of having onlookers when I paint completely terrifies me. I once had a friend, a boyfriend, who insisted that he should watch me painting, as it would help him to understand me better. That ended in total tragedy. He realized I was someone else than he thought, my painting was ruined and I told him to leave and never come back.” She couldn’t understand why she had told him this private thing that she hardly revealed to anybody. Perhaps just because it came to her mind, perhaps because she really did trust this nice-looking guy.

“I am sorry to hear
that, Ms. Davla.”

“Please
, call me Ronia.”

“Call me Antoine then. I am sorry to hear
that, Ronia, but even without that background I realize that this isn’t a place for tourists. I believe it’s too personal. I can’t explain it, but it’s as if the paintings and the house together are showing too much of yourself to expose it.”

“You surprise me, Antoine
,” she said. “How could you know that? I hate to sell my works because I think they reveal too much of my inner self, and the thought that some complete stranger, perhaps a guy that beats his wife in front of my painting every evening, will
own
a part of me in that sense is terrifying. That is another reason why I never sell anything myself. I don’t want to know who has my paintings and even less do I want them to know me,” she started to move towards the kitchen, saying in passing, “Can I offer you a cup of coffee?”

“Yes
, please.”

She passed him close enough to
catch his scent. It was a male smell with some animal traces.
Perhaps he has a dog at home,
she thought.
No aftershave, no deodorant, no smoking, no drink last night, all good signs,
she told herself, smiling. She all of a sudden felt the urge, and she felt naughtier than she’d felt in years.

“So what more do you do
besides trespassing on female artists?”

“I bug male artists as well
,” he said. She laughed over her shoulder, pouring water in the percolator. He continued, “You know, it’s a municipal job, and it comes with all kinds of nonsense. Suddenly, the Mayor has some brilliant idea, and I’m commanded to take care of it, even if it has nothing to do with my job description.”

The coff
ee was brewing, which was the only sound for a while. She poured coffee. They sat opposite each other.

“What do you do when you don’t work
?” he asked.

“Oh, I read, I take walk
s, I go to the stable of the Chamareau and visit my goats.”

“You have goats
?”

“N
ot really, but I call them my goats, as they graze on my land, and when they see me they greet me.”

“
You never go out dancing or anything like that?”

“Not really
.”

“Dining?”

“When I go to my agent in Lyon, I normally stay overnight in her flat, and she takes me out. Sometimes to the Michelin star places—when we sold well—sometimes to simple neighborhood joints. Most of the time, she has a man hidden somewhere, like the son of the restaurant owner, or one of her male friends that shows up ‘by coincidence’. She has made it her mission to find me a mate, which is quite fine once a month. You don’t really
need
men more often than that,” she said with a playful smile.