The Journeyer

“You are just about exactly the same age now, Donata, as I was on our wedding day. Was I old then?”

“You were in your prime of life. Stalwart and handsome. But women age differently than men do.”

“Not if they do not wish to. You only desired to hasten past the childbearing years. And you need not have done. I told you long ago that I knew simple things that would prevent—”

“Things not fit to be mentioned by a Christian tongue, or heard by Christian ears. I do not wish to hear them now, any more than I did then.”

“If you had listened then,” I said accusingly, “you would not now be an Autumn Fan.”

“A what?” she said, looking up at me for the first time.

“It is a very descriptive term the Han have. An Autumn Fan means a woman past her years of appeal and attractiveness. You see, in the autumn the air is cool and there is no necessity for a fan. It becomes an object without use or purpose or reason for existence. Just so, a woman who has ceased to be womanly, as you deliberately did, solely to avoid having more children—”

“All these years,” she interrupted, but in a very soft voice. “All these years, have you thought that was why?”

I stopped, with my mouth still open. She laid down her needlework on her black bombazine lap, and folded her yellowed hands atop it, and fixed me with the faded eyes that had once been bright blue, and said:

“I ceased being a woman when I could no longer deceive myself. When I wearied of pretending to myself that you loved me.”

I blinked in bewilderment and disbelief, and had to grope for my voice. “Donata, was I ever anything but tender and caring? Did I fail you in any way? Was I ever less than a good husband?”

“There. Even now you do not speak the word.”

“I thought it was implicit. I am sorry. Very well, then. I did love you.”

“There was something or someone you loved more, and always have. At our closest, Marco, we were never close. I could look into your face and see only distance, far distance. Was it farness of miles or of years? Was it another woman? God forgive me for believing this, but … was it not my mother?”

“Donata, she and I were children.”

“Children who are parted forget each other when they are grown. But you mistook me for her when we first met. On our wedding night, I was still wondering if I might not be just a substitute. I was a virgin, yes, and innocent. All I knew to expect was what I had been told by older confidantes, and you made it much better than what I had expected it to be. Nevertheless, I was not oblivious and obtuse, as one of our empty-headed daughters might be. In our cleaving together, Marco, there seemed to be … something … not quite right. That first time and every time afterward.”

Justifiably affronted, I said stiffly, “You never made complaint.”

“No,” she said, looking pensive. “And that was part of the seeming wrongness: that I did enjoy it—always—and somehow felt I should not. I cannot explain it to you, any more than I could explain it to myself. All I ever could think was: it must be that I am enjoying what should rightly have been my mother’s.”

“How ridiculous. Whatever in your mother I was fond of, I have found also in you. And more. You have been much more to me, Donata —and much more dear to me—than she ever was.”

Donata moved her hand across her face, as if brushing away a cobweb that had fallen there. “If it was not she, if it was not some other woman, then it must have been the sheer distance that I felt always between us.”

“Come, my dear! I have scarcely been out of your sight since our wedding day, and never out of your reach.”

“Not in your physical person, no. But yes, in the parts of you I could not see or reach. You have been ever in love with distance. You never really came home at all. It was unfair of you, to ask a woman to vie for your love with a rival she never could best. The distance. The far horizons.”

“You exacted a promise about those far horizons. I made the promise. I kept to it.”

“Yes. In your physical person, you kept to it. You never went away again. But did you ever once talk or think of anything but journeying?”

“Gesu! Who is being unfair now, Donata? For nearly twenty years I have been as passive and compliant as that zerbino by the door yonder. I gave you possession of me, and the saying of where I should be and what I should do. Are you now complaining that I gave you no authority over my memory, my thoughts, my sleeping or waking dreams?”

“No, I am not complaining.”

“That does not exactly answer the question I asked.”

“You have left a few unanswered yourself, Marco, but I shall not pursue them.” She finally took her mourning eyes off me, and picked up her needlework again. “After all, what are we arguing about? None of it matters anymore.”

Again I was stopped with my mouth open and words unsaid—words unsaid by both of us, I imagine. I took another ruminative turn or two about the room.

“You are right,” I said at last, and sighed. “We are old. We are past passion. Past striving and past strife. Past the beauties of danger and the dangers of beauty. Whatever we did right, whatever we did wrong, none of it matters any more.”

She sighed also, and bent again to her sewing. I stood for a while in thought, watching her across the room. She sat in a shaft of September afternoon sunlight, where she could see best to work. The sun did not much enliven her sober attire, and her face was downcast, but the light did play in her hair. There was a time when that sunshine would have made her tresses gleam as golden bright as summer grain. Now her bowed head had more the sweetly melancholy glow of grain in the sheaf, a quiet, drowsy dun color, rimed with the first frost of autumn.

“September,” I mused, not realizing that I said it aloud.

“What?”

“Nothing, my dear.” I crossed the room to her and bent and, not amorously but only in a fond fatherly sort of way, kissed the top of her dear head. “What are you working on?”

“Parechio. Trifles of apparel for the wedding, for the luna di miele. No harm in getting started on them well ahead of time.”

“Fantina is a fortunate girl, to have such a thoughtful mother.”

Donata looked up and gave me a wan, shy smile. “You know, Marco … I was just thinking. That promise you made—it has been well kept, but it is near its expiration. I mean—Fantina about to be married and gone, Bellela betrothed, Morata nearly full grown. If you did still yearn to begone somewhere …”

“You are right again. I had not been counting, but I am very nearly at liberty again, am I not?”

“I freely give you leave. But I would miss you. Whatever I said before, I would miss you dreadfully. Still, I keep my promises, too.”

“You do, yes. And now you mention it, I might just give the matter some thought. After Fantina’s wedding, I could go abroad for—oh, no more than a short journey, to be back in time for Bellela’s wedding. Maybe go only as far as Constantinople, see old Cuzin Nico. Yes, I might do that. As soon as my back is better, anyway.”

“Your back is ailing you again? Oh, my dear.”

“Niente, niente. A twinge now and then, no more. Nothing to fret about. Why, my dear girl, one time in Persia, and again in Kurdistan, I had to get on a horse—no, the first time it was a camel—and ride despite having had my head near broken by the cudgels of brigands. I may have told you of those occurrences, and the—”

“Yes.”

“Yes. Well. I do thank you for the suggestion, Donata. Journeying again. I will indeed give it some thought.”

I went into the next room, which was my working chamber for when I brought home work to do, and she must have heard me rummaging about, for she called through the door:

“If you are looking for any of your maps, Marco, I think you have them all stored at the Compagnia fondaco.”

“No, no. Merely getting some paper and a quill. I thought I would finish this latest letter to Rustichello.”

“Why do you not do it in the garden? It is a tranquil and pleasant afternoon. You should be outside enjoying