The Wanderess (28 page)

I slept alone that night, I woke up alone. Saskia had not come to
bed. We always shared a bed, her body, not far from mine,
although I never touched her at night. She sometimes rested her
face on my bare shoulder before we slept. Sometimes she laughed
and put her nose against my neck and put her arms affectionately
around me. But that was the extent of our nocturnal caresses.
She never cried in bed, since neither of us had ever any reason to
be sad while we were together and close beside; still sometimes
she would be taken by a pensive mood—when she thought about
her dear friend who was lost, or about a country or city she
missed, or something else that touched her from her past—and
she would lie with me on the bed, rest her cheek on my chest, and
with her arms around me like that we would fall asleep, only to
find that in the morning we lay far apart.

On this night following our argument in the Piazza del
Campo, Saskia didn’t come to bed. The morning after I went into
the kitchen to make my coffee and I saw her asleep on the sofa. I
took my coffee through the bedroom and out onto the courtyard
so as not to wake her, and to feel the morning sun on my face. I
was only outside for ten minutes; but when I came back, she was
already gone and she didn’t come back home again until very late
that night. I was in bed alone again all of that night. Around
dawn, I heard her sneak into our bedroom. I pretended to be
asleep but I opened my eyes to catch a glimpse of her. She was
wearing her pyjamas, her hair was tousled from sleeping, and she
sneaked on her tip-toes. I kept pretending to be asleep while she
placed an envelope on my chest. A moment later she was gone.

I had a fearful realization as I sat up alone in our bed and
tore open the envelope. I heard her leaving then. I heard her
stepping out of our front door, her footsteps grew fainter and
fainter as she walked away from our villa. I was afraid and I knew
what the envelope contained: a letter from her saying adieu…
“Goodbye forever, Saul.” It was the worst fear I had suffered in
years. It was with trembling hands that I finished tearing the
envelope apart and unfolded the paper. When I read the first
paragraph, a flood of intense happiness filled my heart. It was not
a letter of farewell. It was a letter to bind us closer than ever
before. The first paragraph read…

My Dearest, Dearest Saul, I will be back home later today!
In the meantime, I wanted you to read my fortune, the one
I’ve been searching for, the one that concerns you… You
see, now that you know who gave me my fortune, there are
no more secrets between us—at least there are no secrets
that I am keeping from you. So, I can now freely share with
you my entire fortune. I don’t have to leave anything out.
So here it is, my entire fortune as I received it in Málaga
four years ago…

The Fortune Of Saskia
“You are a Wanderer searching for something, or ‘someone’
rather.

You were raised by the people of the north, but you are not
one of them, as you belong to no people and have no
country.

Your name means clear, bright, and celebrated.
Your fingers were not made for keys, but for strings.
You love song, and you sing.
I see you travelling.
In three year’s time, you will be in Catalonia.

There, through your music, you will make a man drunk
from love and beauty,
So much so, that he will come close to dying.
You will find him sleeping in the street, in fine clothes, in
Barcelona.
You must save him and protect him, for your destinies are
entwined.

His death will mean your death.
You will find what you are seeking only when you enter the
country of his birth and the home where his father was
raised.

There you will find your true fortune, your destiny, your
salvation.”

Reading her fortune brought me both joy and suffering. I laughed
many times thinking back on all our interactions that were
obviously influenced by this… the “
sleeping in the street in fine
clothes,”
especially. It showed me why Saskia had been so
determined to have me in her company, and why she panics if we
have to be apart. You could say that our relationship finally made
sense—that is, if relationships can ever make sense. Dragomir
impressed me with his talent, I admit; her fortune was extremely
well-told. He’d said that he made a lucky guess about the
meaning of her first-name… but how did he guess that she played
a stringed instrument? That she loved song and she sang? In
neither Pulpawrecho’s nor Dragomir’s account of that night in
Málaga was Saskia said to have carried a guitar case.

The first part of the fortune astonished me because in five
short phrases, he touched on the most important aspects of
Saskia’s life and character. He listed the essential elements of her
condition, as though he had known her already. It was the first
line that said she was ‘searching for someone.’ Of all things that
drove Saskia in this life, nothing came before her
search for her
lost friend.
Adélaïse was at the top of the list. I was impressed
that this Spanish charlatan actually had a gift. Before I read this
paper, I could not fathom how any ‘fortune’ could dominate a
person’s mind and life entirely for several years. Now I
understood why she considered this her destiny. I, who
disbelieved in mystic clairvoyance, would have been just as
obsessed as Saskia, had I’d been given a similar fortune that
described so accurately the aspects of myself and my character. I
would have declared such a fortune my destiny.

As for the rest of the bonne aventure… that which begins
with: “In a three year’s time, you will be in Catalonia…” it was
simply a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now that the fortune teller had
won Saskia’s faith, he was free to instruct her to go on errands.
The more she accomplishes using her fortune as a guide, the more
she is working to prove her own fortune correct. The fortune read
that in three year’s time she would be in Catalonia. Any
coincidence that she
was
in Catalonia? She was given a date and
was obliged to show up…

Of course, Dragomir is a good businessman. He knows
that if you want the buyer of a fortune to be satisfied, you must
assign them tasks to undertake to realize their destiny. Like the
labors of Heracles, the tasks should be numerous and they should
take years. Imagine a fortune teller who guesses things about
your life, the meaning of your name, etc., but doesn’t construct a
roadmap for your future—just a fortune that says who you are and
where you’ve been… No, the one thing that the people who
consult clairvoyants all have in common, is that they all are
uncertain or afraid of their future. They search for a symbolic
roadmap to tell them that they are on the right path. And a
roadmap of the future could interest no one more than Saskia,
who has unlimited freedom in her life, but who doesn’t know
what to do with her freedom.

What caused me suffering when reading her fortune was
this second part, the roadmap part. I don’t know how I came to
be the unlucky man who happened to lose consciousness beneath
her balcony—in that neighborhood, on any given night there
must be a good deal of young men who pass out in the street after
leaving bars. I just happened to be the first man to pass out
beneath
her
balcony, and so she believed I was
the one…
And
now, according to her fortune, she was supposed to enter the
country of my birth and the place where my father was raised…
This made me suffer. I believed she would sooner or later find
out, and she would ask me to go with her. I would say no. And
she would have to go alone. I planned to stay in Europe at all
costs. I told myself over and over: there was no way that I would
ever return to Tripoli, to Libya, or anywhere near it. I wouldn’t set
foot again on the African continent. Not in Alexandria, not in
Cairo, nowhere. ‘She would have to make that voyage alone,’ I
thought, ‘and if she does, I doubt she will ever come back.’

Chapter Thirty-one

I had all day to think about Saskia and her fortune, and I came to
some conclusions. She returned that evening, just as she said she
would. She was happy to see that I was in a good mood. She was
in a great mood. There was a man with her. He was short, had
bad teeth, was dressed shabbily.

“What’s he for?” I asked.
“He works at the market down the street. I bought twelve
bottles of prosecco, and he carried it for me.”
I took the case of wine from the little man and gave him
three soldi
¹
and said goodbye.

“I also bought you a present,” said Saskia. So saying she
handed me a large package. I opened it with delight and was
excited to find a giant tablet of beautiful ‘laid paper
²
,’ together
with a wooden box containing an assortment of pastels—every
color of nature, all colors of the Tuscan landscape, from the beige
of grain to the blue of azure. “It’s to keep you busy when we
travel …while I play my guitar!”

“Thank you, little rabbit,” I said, kissing her forehead
affectionately, “And thank you for the note this morning. I was
happy to receive it… relieved is the word… the mystery of your
fortune has been weighing on me since we met.”

“Me too, I am relieved. I missed you today.”

We put a bottle of prosecco on ice and walked out to the
courtyard. The moon was out and waxing, so I could be free with
the wine. And we were free. We drank and we laughed and we
told stories. It was not long before Saskia brought up the
conversation I would have preferred to avoid. But I did my best to
keep it light…

“One thing you didn’t explain to me, Saul… How do you
think that Pulpawrecho fell in love with me when we never met?”

“I never did tell you the story of how Pulpawrecho came to
meet his master,” I said, and then recounted the story to Saskia of
how this common huckster, thief, and pervert, followed her in the
street that night four years ago. And how, not being able to find
her, and wanting her more than anything, he sold himself into
slavery as a servant of Dragomir with the hopes that Dragomir
would someday lead him to find her. Pulpawrecho didn’t doubt
that Dragomir would know
where
to find her—not because he
believed Dragomir gave her a “roadmap” to follow; but simply
because Dragomir was a clairvoyant… thus he could see into her
life and her future.

“So it was because of me that Pulpawrecho became
Dragomir’s servant.”
“And he was a perfect servant,” I said.
“And it was because of Pulpawrecho, whom you met on
the street, that you came to meet Dragomir.”
“Yes.”

“It’s strange, this life of fate and destiny. Our meeting, for
example… if one of a million flukes didn’t occur, we would never
have met.”

“Here’s to our flukes,” I said and raised a glass of prosecco.
We toasted and drank, and I thought about what Saskia had said:
‘It’s strange this life of fate and destiny,’ and I felt sad again. I was
sad because this fantasy of a fortune meant so much to her. Now I
knew that to realize her fortune, to go to the very end of it, she
would have to go to Tripoli. I remarked that I’d done well to
conceal from her all this time the name of the country where I was
born and the city where my father was raised. I realized though
that in concealing this information, in keeping her ignorant about
the place of my birth and home of my family, I was guarding a
secret. I was being deceitful in the same way I considered her
deceitful when I learned that the ‘garden woman’ on the Île SaintLouis was a fabrication and that Dragomir was the real witch.

“I was wrong to blame you last night,” I told Saskia, “I
don’t know why, but it hadn’t occurred to me then that
I too
am
hiding things from you. Since I am not telling you where I am
from, nor where my father came from, why should you have been
expected to tell me that your fortune teller is Dragomir?”

“So now you will tell me where you are from?”

“I don’t know. Will you first answer a question for me?
You have been saying to me all along that the most important
thing to you in this world is your destiny. And last night, I said to
you in my anger, ‘how can I ever trust you again,’ and you replied,
‘You
can’t
! You
shouldn’t
trust me!’ After all that’s been said, I
want to know where your allegiance truly lies… is it to me and
your friend Adélaïse? Or is it to your fortune?”

“Saul! My fortune
is
my destiny… and without a destiny I
wouldn’t be alive. How can I neglect destiny? It’s impossible!”

‘What kind of reasoning is that?’ I wondered. “You could
forget your fortune now,” I told her, “and you will still be alive.
And all that happens to you in the future will be your destiny. We
will find Adélaïse, we will live wherever you and I want to live, we
will be happy. And soon you will laugh when you remember this
drama about your fortune. You will laugh when you discover that
you have a beautiful destiny all the same without it.”

“Saul, will you help me? Will we go to your country? To
the place your father was raised?”
“No, we will not.”
Saskia looked at me in horror. “But you said you would
help me realize my fortune!”
“I said I would help you find Adélaïse. Until this morning,
I didn’t even know what your fortune was.”
Saskia grew flustered. “Why won’t you help me?”

I told Saskia then that she would have done better to keep
to her lie about the garden woman. I admitted that Dragomir was
a clever man, that he was even a brilliant and gifted man who has
a knack for reading people, and for knowing their weaknesses and
their fears… I told Saskia that his fortune was so well-conceived
that I agreed with her for believing in it. “It’s a perfect fortune,” I
said, “you would be foolish not to believe in it! Only a true
visionary could know these things about you on first sight.”

But I went on to say that in spite of this, I could not
support her continuing the search for this Dragomir-conceived
destiny. “My opinion of Dragomir,” I said, “is that he is a villain.
He is a very clever and ingenious villain, but he is a villain all the
same… He constructed your fortune with brilliance, but he gave
you steps for you to realize your destiny that I cannot go along
with because they involve me, and to what end, I don’t know. He
gave you instructions for you to follow so he could watch you
dance—just as he came to me at the hour before dawn with a
pistol so that he could make
me
dance. If he wanted to keep
Pulpawrecho from raping you, he had a million ways to prevent it
other than choreographing that drama with me firing bullets at
him from across the courtyard. Moreover, he had some reason to
have me kill his servant which eludes me. He didn’t prevent the
rape out of concern for you or for me. He wanted his servant
done away with and he didn’t want to do it himself...

“Lastly, who else would have broken into our apartment in
Paris? Andrea was dead somewhere on the Riviera when it
happened. It had nothing to do with your inheritance. You
noticed that nothing was stolen?, that they only rummaged
through our papers?… I think what happened was clear:
Dragomir happened to be in Paris at the same time we were
there… He first saw us on the Île Saint-Louis, then at the theatre,
then he had us followed and found out where we lived…

“He had met each of us in Málaga, and knew our
personalities, so we made for an interesting target. He knew he
could make you dance by telling you your fortune. He saw that he
could make me dance when he sent me on an errand to poison his
friend Penelope Baena in Barcelona. So when he found out where
we lived, he organized the break-in so that he could read our
papers, diaries, letters and what-not, to have information about us
that he could use to his advantage. If he knows more about your
personal life, he can better tell you your fortune the next time you
two meet…”

“No, no, no,” Saskia interrupted, “I’m sure it was friends of
Andrea who broke in to our place. But it doesn’t matter. All of
my fortune has come true so far… to the point where I found you
sleeping in the road in fine clothes. Now I’m supposed to go to
visit the place you are from, so I will go visit it.”

“Again, I ask you Saskia… where does your allegiance lie?
Is it to me and Adélaïse? Or is it to your fortune?”

“Again, Saul… my fortune is my destiny. It is
our
destiny.
My allegiance is to you, of course; but it you don’t choose to help
me, don’t be surprised if one day you find me gone. You asked me
how you can trust me, and I said you couldn’t. I said that you
shouldn’t… I’ll never lie to you, but I have been faithful to my
destiny ever since I was a little girl, as you are faithful to yours.
Don’t ask me to cheat on my destiny.”

“You have spoken, Saskia.”

That conversation ended our happy time in Siena,
although that was not the worst calamity that struck us. It
disturbed me to think that Saskia would choose Dragomir over
me, yet that conversation was only the first gust of wind that
signaled the hurricane.

Here’s a funny incident that I’ll tell you about to take the
edge off after hearing so many stories of treachery and
disillusionment… It was a couple of weeks after the fateful
conversation I just narrated. It was the beginning of fall, a time
we were preparing to leave Siena to live in Florence… we were out
for a walk together when we met a poet on the lawn of the
University of Siena…

The poet was sitting in a bathtub on the lawn. He was
bare-chested, garlanded with ivy and flowers, and while he sat in
his tub, he recited lines from
The Iliad
with such a fervor that I
had to approach him. I needed to see what kind of man this was
who appreciated so much the eternal Homer—father of beauty
and god of literature…

The poet greeted us with exceptional friendliness. He was
slightly younger than me. He was handsome of figure, strong of
build, and had such a heroic and noble way in his conduct, that I
asked him if he was related to the hero Theseus. He replied to me
with a great effusion of apology, saying that he was not in any way
related to the hero Theseus, but that he was in fact a direct
descendant of the immortal Sappho. Saskia had by now also
taken a great interest in him, although it was not so much his
beautiful appearance, nor the fact that he recited ancient poetry
while seated in a bathtub on the lawn of an Italian university…
rather, she was attracted to
one certain poem
he had written.
After his Homeric soliloquy, I asked him for another verse. He
leafed through his papers, tempted by his translations of Horace,
until he finally settled on a poem he wrote to a girl he loved. Her
name was Adélaïse.

It was a fine poem, and Saskia couldn’t contain herself.
She asked him a million questions… “
But what is this?! Who is
your Adélaïse…?!
” The poet responded, “She is my English lady,
Madame.” But she has to be French,” Saskia said, “with the name
‘Adélaïse!’” To this, the fine poet said, “I know not. We only
spoke English together. But she spoke such beautiful English…
and with a wonderful English accent, that I was led to address her
as ‘my English lady.’”

“My, that is something!” Saskia then asked him where his
Adélaïse was now, upon which, he wept tears of lament and said
‘that she had gone'… simply…
‘that she had gone.’
Saskia told him
not to worry, that we ourselves would find her. She asked the
poet then where we could find him again, once we found Adélaïse.
He said that he would be here—in his bathtub.

“I was on my way to Rome to meet the pope,” he told us, “I
doubt in all truth that I could win his favor, faithful as I am to the
almighty Zeus. Alas!, it’s hard to find patronage in our time…
Here in Siena, I am lucky. Like Diogenes, I have this bathtub to
sleep in. Only the company of my English lady do I lack...”

“Don’t worry, we will find her!” Saskia said, almost crying,
so full of emotion was she. I then asked the poet how we were to
call on him when we returned, and he told us his name. It turned
out that our Homeric bathtubber was none other than the great
poet, Pietros Maneos. Both Saskia and I greatly admired his
poetry that was famous throughout Europe, and we told him so…
and with that we were gone!