Hunting Midnight

firm voice, “Yes, it would be wrong for you to let our renewed friendship delay you. We can talk at far greater length — and with greater ease — when you come back and start designing your tile panel.”

At a shipping agency on Broadway, I learned that the journey to Alexandria would take only three days if we were blessed with good winds. I signed on to the Exeter, a frigate leaving the following day.

That evening, after supper, I told Violeta of my imminent departure. I should have liked to speak of many things before going — of Francisca and the girls most of all. I also wanted her to tell me about her life, but she went pale at the news of my leaving so soon. When I went to comfort her, she told me that the excitement of having me in her home had left her nearly sleepless and she needed to go to bed before she fainted from exhaustion. She pushed my hands away roughly, then apologized.

“Please speak to me,” I pleaded. “Tell me what you are thinking.”

“I cannot.” She moved her hands into a position of prayer. “John, have mercy on me.” She slipped out of my grasp and rushed up to her room.

I awoke near one in the morning, having dreamed of Midnight standing before my bed, speaking in sign language with whirling hand gestures. I could understand nothing of what he wanted to tell me.

After a moment, I heard Violeta stepping down the stairs. When I heard her open the back door, I went to my window. By the moonlight, I could see her threading her way through the weeds in her garden. I’d have sworn she was naked.

XXXVII

The night air in Violeta’s garden embraced me with its damp warmth as soon as I slipped outside. It was as though I’d entered a liquid dream. I crept in my bare feet, wearing only my dressing gown. After about ten paces, I spotted her, sitting on a low wooden bench, gazing up at the sky. Scattered moonlight blanketed her in leaves of darkness and light. She might have been a goddess of night. Her long hair shimmered silver and black down her back. I knew then that I’d been waiting for her to remove her bonnet not just since the moment of our reunion but ever since I was eleven. I stood very still, unwilling to compromise her modesty, but she must have heard my breathing, because she started in fright.

“It’s me,” I rushed to say. I stepped forward and held my hands up to apologize. “Just me.”

“John, dear God, you nearly made me shriek.” She shook her head and patted the bench next to her. “Quick, sit here where no one can see you.”

She made no attempt to conceal her nakedness. I dropped down next to her, careful not to brush against her. She pointed up to the starry sky. “Right there is the Archer,” she told me. “He can find things, John — even tiny beings like you and me. So whenever I am feeling unsure of myself, I look for him.”

She spoke to me in Portuguese using the informal you, as though we were once again intimate friends.

“Midnight said that all the stars are hunters,” I told her.

With her fingertip, she reintroduced me to the constellations. Then, caressing my cheek with the back of her hand, she said sweetly, “If there is anything I can do to help find Midnight, then you must tell me — anything at all.”

The suggestive smoothness of her skin made me shiver. So true to her youthful self was she in the starlight — so forthright and good of heart — that I was left speechless. I was confused: How could I ache with longing nearly every night for my wife and yet feel so fortunate at being near Violeta?

“It is quiet out here in the early morning,” she whispered. “One would almost believe we were back at our tarn in Porto.”

Facing me, she guessed the cause of my shame and grinned. “John,” she said, slapping my thigh, “do not be such a baby. I am not inconvenienced by your desire. The only ally I have ever had among men has been their physical need for me. It is the only thing I’ve ever been able to trust in them.”

“I don’t seem to understand anything of what has come to pass in my life,” I confessed. “Why Daniel died, how I got to this precise moment, why you and I have again met.”

She looked at me gravely. “I have no answers for you. None.”

Warm breezes swirled around us. Relief at being with Violeta’s old self made me smile. “It’s as though we are hiding from our parents.”

“My mother will never find me here.” She stole a look toward her house. “The weeds are too high for her to see me.”

“And the house too dark.”

“Night is good for me. I see less then. Let night have its dominion.”

“Violeta, except for now, you seem to be wherever I am not.”

She took my hands and stood up. “Sing,” she pleaded. “Any of the old songs. Please, John, sing for me.”

I sang the first verse of “Ae Fond Kiss,” her favorite song by Robert Burns: Ae fond kiss, and then we sever, ae farewell, and then forever…. She gazed away forlornly toward wherever my melody was taking her. “John, you would like me to be the same, but I can never be,” she said. “That is why I have been so silent and difficult at times.”

“You mistake my wishes. I only want your happiness.”

She looked down at me with a pained expression. “John, we come from different worlds. Happiness ceased being my purpose many years ago. Now I merely wish to have my own life. If that means that I must be lonely at times, then it isn’t such a high price to pay. Maybe it’s no price at all.”

“Is that true? Is having your own life really enough?”

“If you were a woman, you would not need to ask that,” she declared.

“I cannot believe men and women are so different.”

She sighed. “John, if you were me, you would also wear a bonnet all the time — just to keep men’s eyes from you. If I were to tell you that there are women my age who dream of their husbands dying young so they might be their own person, so they might have their own property and friends, would you think me mad?”

“Is that true, Violeta?”

Replying with a solemn nod, she said, “Come…. Come with me now and I’ll tell you what you’ve wanted to hear. It’s a story that no one but you will ever know.”

She led me inside and took a crocheted blanket of green and gold stripes from her sofa, wrapping it tightly around herself. We sat next to each other at her oval table and, by the light of a single candle, she began to tell me of her life since we’d last been friends. She spoke first of working for a chandler in Lisbon and living in a tiny room above his workshop, where she had a view over Graca Square. “I was so happy to be free of my mother and brothers that even my loneliness was a blessing. I belonged only to myself. And my hair” — she gathered her tresses around to her front and breathed in their scent — “grew back. I would let no one cut it.”

“Did you know how much I loved you back then?”

“I did. But you were just a small lad. And I was becoming a woman.”

“How I wish Daniel had lived. He might have changed everything.”

I’d have liked to say much more, but the subject of the past seemed too dangerous.

“Perhaps the dead can be generous,” I observed hesitantly. “Daniel might be glad that we’ve found each other again.”

“Perhaps. But others, John — others can be unforgiving…. Let me continue before I lose my courage.

“John, the chandler I worked for was a good man — very clever and kind. Then one day I saw my uncle Tomas in Graca Square. After that, I peeked out of my room and our shop only on rare occasions. He was looking for me, to take me back. He was probably sent by my mother.” She shivered and clutched her blanket around her neck. “A few weeks later I was approached by an Englishman promising work at a woolen mill near London. I left with him. Uncle Herbert, I called him. He said that I would be working with other girls from Portugal and Spain. He was kind to me at first.”

“But when you arrived in England, you discovered he had lied.”