To Consuela, he looks torn in two, like a man with one foot in the present and one hesitant foot in the past. He’s off balance, dizzy, muddled by reality. It’s an appropriate disposition for a man who spent most of the last year insisting he was Columbus-a man with one foot in the Middle Ages and one foot firmly in the Renaissance.
“I know,” she says. “It’s all right.”
He half smiles, an awkward, painful gesture, then finds almost firm ground. He shakes his head and looks down at the flowers on the table, then back up at Consuela. “No, you don’t know, Consuela. The feelings… Columbus’s feelings. They’re
Consuela can’t remember the last time she cried. There’s no stopping these tears and she doesn’t care. She can barely breathe. “Mine, too,” she says.
EPILOGUE
He takes a deep breath. It seems he’s alone at the Cape Race lighthouse on the southeastern shore of Newfoundland. Alone with the dusk. Alone with the rain. Alone with the shushing sound of the ocean. In between the waves, he thinks he can hear his own heart beating.
Julian arrived in St. John’s, Newfoundland, yesterday morning. By noon, he’d stowed his gear on board the tall ship the Dolly Varden, he’d met the captain, a few of his fellow crewmen, signed some papers, and then had a couple of days before the ship embarked.
He had persevered for two months in the house in Montreal. He’d tried. But he couldn’t go into his daughters’ rooms. He could not sleep in his own bed-instead, he slept on the couch in the den. He was eating every two days. He was drinking before noon every single day out of a green coffee mug. He hurt his back moving all three cases of the chardonnay, a gift from a co-worker, from the basement to the bottom half of the fridge. Julian added painkillers, for his back, to the mix. He ignored the telephone with a passion and was abruptly hostile when friends attempted to visit. There was no movement. No healing. He felt like a ghost, an apparition who imbibed-never quite drunk but never truly sober, never truly there. Julian felt like he was starting to disappear-soundless, swallowed. There was no evidence of a life. There was only scant evidence of consumption.
One night, at around 2:30 A.M., while playing Scrabble against the computer the word thole came up. He ignored it, trusted the computer, but then no, he opened his dictionary:
In his last night in the Montreal house, he dreams the girls are making him pinkie swear his love-“Pinkie swear that you love us,” they giggle, holding their pinkie fingers in the air. “Do I have to?” he says, playing with them, teasing them. He turns away for a second, and when he turns back, they’re gone. They vanish. There’s nobody there to hear and he so yearns to say he pinkie swears his love. He wakes up empty and silent, in a cold sweat. He crawls into the shower without turning on the bathroom light, and cries until the water runs cold.
Twenty minutes before his taxi arrived to take him to the airport, Julian placed Rashmi’s journal on the bed, their bed, and closed the door. He had not opened the book. He does not know how it got into his bag. He opened the doors to each of the girls’ bedrooms-stood silently for a few minutes in each entranceway.
A friend from the university was coming next week to pack up these rooms and put the house up for rent.
The road to the Cape Race lighthouse goes bad fairly quickly. It crosses twenty kilometers of barren land, virtually treeless and gloriously inhospitable. It feels windswept. It is desperately beautiful. Puddles dot the road like shallow bowls filled with silver.
At the lighthouse, he parks the car, pulls a sweater out of his bag in the trunk, and walks toward the ocean. He doesn’t bother locking the car. He bypasses the lighthouse and moves toward the shoreline where huge slabs of scarred rock drop into the water-a gray, sharp-angled descent. It’s not raining now but it must have been earlier- the ground is wet, the grass is wet.
Out to sea, clouds obscure the horizon into an estimation of where it might be. The sky is a gray-white sheet, unremarkable and dull, pathetically hung out to dry. There are no sandy beaches here. There is nothing soft about this meeting of land and water. These rocks razor into the ocean and the water looks frigid.
Julian lets down his walls. He finds a patch of grass, sits down, and lets his walls dissolve. It feels okay to be unguarded here. It does not take long for Rashmi to come and sit beside him on the grass. He keeps his eyes on the ocean, thinks he can smell vanilla.
He slips back in time twenty years. He had never expected to travel all the way to Pamplona. He was in Paris, on vacation before going back to university, and found himself with an extra week. He’d had to phone his parents to get them to deposit some money on his credit card-told them it was a good opportunity to practice his Spanish. Really, he wanted to go to the bullfights in Pamplona. He wasn’t into the running-with-the-bulls macho thing-it was the bullfights that appealed to him.
He was in a bar near the Plaza de Toros, on his third bottle of beer, when she came in. She stumbled in the doorway, and as she fell, hit her face on the edge of his table. This memory has always been slowed down. It took an eternity for her to fall. Her expression was not so much shocked as bemused and surprised that she was, in fact, falling. She managed to get one arm out but only enough to partially break her fall. Her head glances off the edge of the table. Julian can’t move. It’s as if he is in some sort of nightmare in which he can’t move his legs or his arms. Normal time comes back only after she hits the floor with a thump.
Julian helps her up. He offers his hand, and she takes it. Her eyes are sparkling, azure, and kind. They’re the kindest eyes he’s ever seen. There is a deep cut underneath her left eye. Blood drips onto her dress, the droplets disappearing into the black fabric. He gets a cloth from the bartender, folds it neatly, and puts it on her face-tells her to hold it there, put pressure on it.
He picks up her shoe and a book. He hadn’t noticed she was carrying a book.
“I’m afraid the heel of your shoe is broken,” he says. “Your book is fine, though. I’m Julian.”
“I’m embarrassed,” Rashmi says. “Embarrassed and clumsy. I’m pleased to meet you.” She pulls the cloth away. The blood seems to have slowed but she places it back over her wound anyway. Then she smiles at Julian for the first time. Even as a young woman, lines formed at the edge of her mouth when she smiled-more pronounced on the left than the right. It made her smile a bit uneven, almost unsure. It was an old-soul smile in a young woman. Julian was young enough to be in love almost instantly. The next day he found a bookstore and bought everything by Hafiz. She was reading Hafiz, so he would read Hafiz. It was his first exposure to ghazals. He found these nonlinear stepping-stone poems much to his liking. He and Rashmi, in the months and years that followed, explored Hafiz together. Hafiz was an inspiration for Rashmi’s own poetry.
Julian used to tell the girls that their mother fell into his life. He would grin and lean back in his chair: She saw me and immediately felt woozy with love. Then she stole my heart with one smile-one beautifully awkward and crooked smile.
Rashmi would say her smile was crooked that day because she was applying pressure to the cut under her eye. She was following his instructions. She thought Julian knew what he was talking about. She put pressure. She probably should have had stitches.
Eventually Julian mentions he’s going to the bullfights tomorrow and would she like to join him. It takes him a while to meander around to this. He wants to know about her first. Where does she work? Where does she live?
