The Wanderess (12 page)

Chapter Fifteen

The days that followed were filled with fever and nausea, and
during the nights I suffered tormenting dreams. After one such
night, I woke up in panic. I had recalled that when I left the Hotel
Sant Felip Neri on my birthday, I’d filled my pockets with my
entire fortune: all my savings and all my jewelry. I had left
nothing behind me at the hotel. I was awake now and the girl was
standing over me, her hands trembling to press a wet cloth to my
forehead. I panicked, and cursed in French, (French is the nativelanguage of my mother, as she grew-up in royal and diplomatic
circles; thus it is also my native-language in a sense, it is the
language that comes easiest to me when I panic)…

“Putain ! Mais il est où, mon argent ? Je l’ai perdu !”
¹
“De quoi parles-tu, mon cher ?
²
What money?
“My money! It’s gone!”
“What money?”

“In the pockets of my suit! Before I fell in the street… I had
several rolls of gold coins and some bank exchange-letters…”

“Oh?... several rolls of coins and bank exchange-letters…?”
she tumbled her head, then burst into laughter, “Don’t worry, my
little paranoiac, your money is safe…” and crossing the room to
where my suit was hanging on her wall, she took from the pockets
the many rolls of gold doubloons and an equal amount of money
in
lettres de change
for a bank in Barcelona. I looked it over, it
was all there. Nothing had been lost. I was still rich. I exhaled
with relief and felt better all in all, though I couldn’t understand
why she’d called me her ‘little paranoiac.’

“Don’t panic, Saul. Everything is in order. When you fell
in the street, I was the first person that came to you. No one stole
so much as a button from your jacket before I took you inside our
apartment.”

“Wait, girl…”
“What?”
“How do you know my name?”
“You told me.”
“I did?”

“You don’t remember? When you first thought you were
going to die, you told me your name was Saul. ‘I am Saul,’ you
said, ‘the son of Solarus. Please remember my name and
patronymic to pass them on to those who will have survived me.’
…I asked you then to tell me about your father, Solarus, but you
wouldn’t tell me. Will you tell me now? Where did your father
come from?”

“Did the money and jewelry fall in the street when I fell?”

“No, it stayed in your pockets. Will you forgive me for
going through your pockets while you were unconscious? I
thought I might find in them the reason
as to why you were
unconscious
, and that it would help me to revive you.”

“You are a good girl. Take half of the money. It’s yours.”

“No, I don’t want your money.”
She put my gold pieces
and exchange letters back in my pocket and her cool body fell on
my feverish limbs and I felt a great peace with her on top of me.
There was no sexuality in her embrace, only friendship. She asked
me again in which country I was born, and about the home where
my father was raised. Again I dodged the question. This will
come up again. My father’s origins were an obsession of hers.
You will see why in time, I still didn’t know why myself.

I remembered then what Dragomir had said about the
mania parents have about giving their children names that mean
bright, shining,
or
famous,
or all three. I had to agree. Over the
many years of my amorous life, I had had intimate relations with
such creatures of the sweet-smelling sex who were called Alina,
Brigitte, Claire and Clarissa, Eleanor, and Ellen, Helen, Lucy,
Phaedra, and Phoebe, etc., which all meant more or less:
clear,
bright,
and
celebrated
. This is the trick that Dragomir had used to
guess correctly the meaning of the name of the pubescent girl
whom Pulpawrecho had followed through the streets of Málaga.
With that in mind, I scrawled:
‘clear, bright, and celebrated’
on a
piece of paper, and asked my young hostess what her name was.
“Saskia.”

“Saskia?!”
“Yes… Why…? Why do you sound so shocked?”
“Does Saskia mean
‘clear, bright, and celebrated?’”
“What?”
“Is that what Saskia means?,
‘clear, bright, and celebrated?
’”
“Nope, not at all. It means: ‘
from the Saxon people
.’”

Defeated, I wadded-up the paper where I had my
divination written down, and I tore it into little shreds and threw
the shreds into the stove.

A sadness fell over me then. It was not that I hoped to
amaze the girl by guessing the meaning of her name. I just
wanted to relate my new friend in Barcelona to the same
whimsical girl who visited Dragomir and Pulpawrecho years ago
in Málaga, but there was no correlation. I guess I was sad because
that
story didn’t have an end, and I wanted it to. I wondered
where
that
girl was, and if our paths would ever cross.

I looked at Saskia after my eyes drifted away for a while. I
tried to lighten-up. “Saskia was the first-name of the wife of the
painter Rembrandt.”

“It was! I’m impressed that you know that. The only
reason
I
know that is because she had my name.”
“Both you and his Saskia are Dutch.”
“No, I am Dutch, but Rembrandt’s wife was from
Friesland. They are like Dutch people, except they speak funny.”

“So Rembrandt’s wife… that’s
where I’ve heard your name
before. Saskia is a beautiful name.” It was no use. Finding out
that Saskia didn’t mean
‘clear, bright, and celebrated’
, made me
depressed. I was sullen after that and went to sleep for an hour.
When I woke up, Saskia was touching my forehead: “Your fever
has broken, my dear friend. You have recovered. Now we can go
to sleep and not worry.”

You can imagine how I hated it when she called me ‘dear
friend!’

Saskia spread herself on her nest of girlish clothes on the
wooden floor beside my bed and covered herself with a wool
jacket to sleep.

‘It’s too bad she insists on sleeping on the floor,’ I thought
as I drifted to sleep, ‘It’s also too bad her name doesn’t mean
‘clear, bright, and celebrated.’ If it did, we would have a lot to talk
about.’

Chapter Sixteen
Waking up abandoned…

I woke up in a clear, lighted—
and empty—
room. I saw no girl,
received no coffee. Nevertheless, I felt my strength returning—
that renewal of health which healthy men take for granted. I got
up and walked the four steps to the bathroom. It was the first day
in over a week that I got out of bed without help from Saskia. I
looked back on the floor to the nest where she slept, and saw not
a soul, only clothes. I was used to her by now. Where had she
gone? I was suddenly ‘alive and alone’—as hopeless as an
orphan!—“Saskia!”

She was gone.

“Saskia!” I screamed again, “Where are you, my little gypsy
girl?!” I looked for her in her bathroom, then in the empty hole of
a kitchen that was partitioned from her bedroom only by a
curtain. I looked for her on her balcony, though since I’d been
there she hadn’t gone out even once to play her guitar. She
played it several times each day, but always by my bedside. I
started to get dressed, and while dressing, I noticed a slice of
paper on the table, written in neat, legible handwriting:

Dearest Saul, there is absolutely nothing for us to eat at
home. So I went to buy provisions. Back soon! Your friend, Saskia.

‘Hmm… eat!’ I thought, ‘food…’ I rummaged around her
kitchen looking for a scrap of something. I was very hungry. But
more than hungry, I was thirsty for a drink of coffee. I also was
thirsty for wine. True, I told myself, the moon was in its waning
phase and I always avoid alcohol when the moon is growing
smaller or not in the sky at all, but this was a special occasion.
This was the first day I was well after a particularly messy
convalescence. I was well, yes, but I knew I could increase my
wellness with a bottle of strong, bubbling wine! I continued to
rummage around her kitchen assuming the girl must have stashed
at least one bottle
of wine. I was wrong. No wine, no food, no
coffee, no whisky, nothing. “Back soon,” she says, “…went to buy
provisions.” I looked in the pockets of my suit and found in each
the rolls of doubloons and my
lettres-de-change.
“Poor girl, she
could have at least used
my money
to buy the provisions. Why
didn’t she use
my
money?!” I suddenly felt bad for her.

“After all, what are you doing here, Saul?” I asked myself
“Saskia suffers every night on a nest of clothing on a wooden floor.
She would probably like her bed back. She has been suffering in
silence for over a week on the hard floor. She is just like her
parents were, with their habit of ‘suffering privately.’ She has
taken care of me, she cleaned my suit, she bathes me with a warm
washcloth, she depleted her kitchen by feeding me broth when I
was weak; and when I was strong, with large European meals she
cooked with care. And now she is buying us both food with her
own money. I feel bad.”

I decided then that I should leave. I was a burden on the
young girl. It was lamentable. Nothing to do but leave. So I
finished dressing in my fine suit, tied my silk foulard around my
neck, found my shoes, and made to leave.

“Perhaps I should leave her a note?” I wrote a brief
explanation in French and left it on the table…

“Saskia, ma chère amie, je suis parti. Vous m’avez beaucoup
aidé et, grâce à vous, je suis à nouveau en grande forme. A présent
vous devez retrouver la jouissance de votre lit, de votre espace, de
votre vie privée. Ainsi, je vous la rends. Adieu, Saul.”
¹

With that, I made for the door. I went out into a corridor
I’d never consciously seen before, and made to close her front
door which, if it clicked, it would lock. But before I closed it I
thought, ‘Perhaps Saskia would like to know where I’m going.
Would she? Perhaps. Who knows. So I went back inside and
amended my note, writing this postscript in English:

“PS: If you want to see me again, for whatever reason, I am
staying at the Hotel Saint Felip Neri
.
”

With that I left Saskia’s home and wandered through the
bright morning streets of Barcelona, gaiety in my heart for I’d
survived yet another misadventure, no sense of direction as my
mind entertained only visions of soft, bubbling wine and a hot
bath in a real tub at my hotel suite. I crossed Las Ramblas with
haste and felt my money and my future bulging brightly in my
pockets. I was healthy again and wore my destiny like a flower in
my buttonhole. Little did I know then that dark winds of trouble
were brewing on the horizon and they were soon rip my destiny’s
petals clean off its stem.

Being lost, I stumbled on Hotel Sant Felip Neri by fluke,
and greeted the concierge. He was shoveling snuff into his nose
and looked at me strangely, as though he at once knew me but
had never seen me before. I asked for the key to my room and he
stumbled into the back and returned with my two valises and my
case of wine.

“You were gone a week, sir. Certainly you didn’t think
your room would still be reserved for you.”
I was stupefied; I stared at my valises, at the case, and all I
could think of to say was, “At least you didn’t drink my wine.”
“No, sir. I have my own wine.”
I asked him for another room, he said “Impossible. It’s
high-season. We are all booked-up.”

This made me angry. I waved my arms. I insisted he evict
some other guests to make room for me—no avail. He told me
that the entire town was booked-up and I would have a hard time
finding a room anywhere. This made me absolutely furious and I
contemplated beating him across the face. I wanted my bath and
my wine in peace.

The concierge apparently gauged my anger and thought it
was in his interest to cool me down. He said, “There was a
messenger stopped by this morning. He was from the
Urquinaona Hotel, not a very nice hotel... rather precarious place.
He stopped by to say that their hotel had several vacancies and
that if we had to turn any guests away it would be most kind of us
to send them to the Urquinaona. Here is their card.”

I took the card which read nothing other than a street
address, and room-rates which were very cheap. “How far is it?”
“You can walk there. Just go up this way…”

I mumbled some insults at the rat, gathered my valises
and my case of wine, and took leave, my mind set on catching the
next ship out of Barcelona. Dismissing the idea of taking new
lodgings, I walked the opposite direction of this so-called
Urquinaona, going instead towards the Mediterranean. I was
hoping to leave immediately for Florence, via Corsica.

I’d mentioned my plans were to visit Helsinki and then
Saint Petersburg for the white-nights; but in Madrid, my friend
Juhani described to me how fast it is to cross the Balearic Sea and
the Mediterranean from Barcelona by way of the French
paquebots
that sail between Corsica and Barcelona; and Corsica
and Italy. I had a very good reason to visit Florence…

Already fifteen years had passed, from this time I narrate,
since I had last seen my mother. Last time we were together, she
was already white-haired and nostalgic. While there I was, in the
first flower of my youth, in prime physical shape, and was
preparing to leave home to go live in Tripoli to become a fresco
painter and work on the side for money as a gold-leafier, gilding
the city’s mosques, Christian churches, and temples. My mother
would stay behind with the old fisherman and his elderly wife
who long ago delivered me from my mother’s umbilical cord and
raised me, and who continued to help provide for my mother, and
for me my entire life up till that point. My mother fell into my
arms and cried. She wished me luck in Tripoli but begged me for
both of our sakes to save my money and set my sights on
Europe—the continent where life was healthier and a man could
easily reach old age. She specifically wanted me to go to Florence,
the city of art, for at that age I wanted to be a painter.

When she was a child, my mother travelled with the royal
family to Florence and she said it was the most magical city on
earth. While raising me, she often talked of the day I’d be grown
and wouldn’t need her anymore. She would travel alone to
Florence, she said, to finish out her own days in the one city she
loved. When I left for Tripoli, she warned me of the intrigues in
that place: “Saul,” she made me promise, “Remember to never tell
anyone in Tripoli who your father was. But all the while, have
inward pride in the fact that you are
the son of Solarus
—noble
Solarus—for he was a great and charismatic man, a leader of men,
and his greatness cannot be exaggerated. But in Tripoli, your
father has many enemies, and you will be punished wrongly if
they learn you are his son. When you are abroad, however, you
should reassert your self-awareness and spread your
kleos
¹
far and
wide, telling one and all that you are Saul, the son of Solarus. Be
proud, my son. It’s a shame you never knew your father.” My
mother always amazed me with her heroic temperament. She’d
had an aristocratic education, and believed in
kleos
as she
believed in Homer.

Afterwards, my mother talked more about Florence. She
said, “And if you decide to leave Tripoli and you come back here
to our village, and this house still stands but I am not in it, come
to look for me in Florence. I will surely go to Italy come the day
that, from my humble work here in the village, I can afford the
trip.” My mother wove nets that were sold to the fishermen of the
village, earning a few coppers a day.

I embraced my mother then and I vowed to myself to help
her when I earned money in the city. Unfortunately, I was washed
away with personal ambition, circumstance, folly, and the vanity
of youth, all which took me to Malta and kept me from returning
home for a long time—my mother had already left our village by
the time I back-tracked through it. Yet looking in retrospect on
my life in those days, I sigh; the caprice of youth goes with the
wind, I’ve no regrets.

Thus not having seen my dear
old mother in fifteen years,
and the
paquebots
being so fast from Barcelona through Corsica
to Florence, I decided to put my Russian dream of daylitmidnights on hold for a year and venture to Italy to see if my
mother had realized her own dream and was living there, happy.

Thus cursing Barcelona to hell, I walked along the
boardwalk towards the boat docks, where a tall, sun-burnt
seaman informed me that a shipwreck in Corsica would delay all
travel. There were not enough
paquebots
for the demand. Other
travelers had tickets and were waiting. The captain of the searoute confirmed his statement. Since I had no ticket, I would
have to wait longer than the others. I tried to bribe my way ahead
of those honest passengers. No use. Too much impatience all
around, even among the poorest ticket holders. So I bought a
first-class passage to Florence via Corsica; but because of that
damned shipwreck, I would have to wait three more days and
nights in Barcelona. What games fate would play with me under
that Catalan sun! At least I had money, and plenty of wine. The
weather was good. I turned on my heels and returned to the
statue of Cristóbal Colón, and headed up Las Ramblas, asking
here and there for vacancies with no luck whatsoever, until I
reached the bleak quarter of Urquinaona. There, on a shabby
side-street, beneath a dingy awning, I found the Urquinaona
House, which was apparently the only hotel in Barcelona with
nothing but
vacancies
.