Andor cannot believe he can peek into her life with so much detail available to him. Here she is again, in a spacious living room filled with light, furnished with nice carpets and sofas. There is a dog too. It’s a large white beast that looks like a wolf with blue eyes.
And here she and the blond man are on vacation somewhere warm. It could be India, or Thailand. There is a beach and palm trees and she’s in a bikini. The sight of her bare legs gives him a start. He knows them so well, the shape, the texture of her calves. She and her husband still look fit—surely they must exercise, take classes in a gym, run, maybe do yoga or something, whereas his seventy-five-year-old body has given up after all the work it has been put through. Andor has gained too much weight, he has arthritis, he’s lost his hair. What would Ada’s husband think if he knew that his wife was the lover of such an old man? And would she recoil in shame if she saw him now?
But these are negative thoughts, and he doesn’t like to dwell on them. Especially at his age, when one can count on two hands how much time one has left, he has made a rule never to indulge in regrets but to try to keep the focus on the bright side of things, the happy memories and whatnot. It’s the only way, really.
He tried so hard to make her happy, to possess her (how foolish of him!), but in the end it was this blond man who soothed her and filled the emptiness that had made her so hard. Well, Andor thinks, he seems a nice man. It’s good to know that Ada didn’t get lost: she has a family, she has money, an artistic job, which, perhaps, in part she owes to him. He wonders whether she has reconciled with her parents back in the village.
Up in the right-hand corner there is a private message box he can click on.
Andor is surprised by how easily he composes his message; it’s as though the words have been lodging inside him for God knows how long, exactly in that same order. But—he’s not an impulsive man, after all—he reads it over and over, pruning it here and there.
Dear Ada: It’s been so long! I’m so happy I found you at last. I see you are in Scotland, and you have a beautiful family. And what a beautiful house! Please send me your telephone number—I long to hear your voice. I also want to come and visit you—we have so much to talk about. Right now I’m unable to travel because I have a small cardiac problem, nothing to worry about, but I’m supposed to have an operation in a couple of weeks. I’ll come visit when I feel strong again. The other day I went for a checkup and I told the surgeon that when he’ll cut me open with the knife he has to pay attention because inside my heart he’ll find a little girl curled up on a red sofa, nibbling on her chocolates. I warned him he must be very gentle, so he doesn’t disturb her, because she’s been living inside me for a very long time and I need her to stay there, and be happy and warm.
He looks once more at one of the photos. It’s Ada in a close-up. In the back he can see a portion of a Christmas tree. Her face has gained a few lines but she still looks beautiful. No matter how domesticated her life seems now, Ada’s eyes still retain the same glimmer he recognized when he first saw her under the fig tree, almost twenty-five years ago. That’s how he knew, right away, that the girl must have a power.
He enlarges the image—his daughter has just shown him how to do that—because he needs to get real close.
And yes, it’s still there. On her cheekbone, the blue dot.
ANIMAL SPIRIT
They arrived on the island after a long day of travel, when the sun was lowering and the light glorious. The house stood isolated, on the northern side of the island, in the middle of a golden field shadowed by oaks. A dirt path unfurled in the tall yellow grass all the way to a secluded beach. It was a three-minute walk from bedroom to water, they had read on the rental website, and that’s when Clara said, “Let’s take it, it’s perfect, we can tumble out of bed and have a swim before breakfast. That’s what I call a dream location.” The property owner was a rich woman called Hera, like Zeus’s wife—a detail they found amusing. Hera was an interior designer who lived in Athens and her island house was spartan and exquisite in its simplicity.
The housecleaner spoke a basic Italian; her name was Artemis—another reason for them to be delighted. She showed the four of them how to operate the light switches, the shower, the oven and the TV. When she finally left, they looked excitedly around the house, calling one another from room to room, pointing at each lovely detail: the outdoor shower hidden beneath a banana tree and a cluster of wild orchids, the hammock dangling under the shadow of the oaks, the fine linen sheets.
They were two couples in their mid-thirties: Carlos and Jacopo, who had known each other for a very long time; and Clara and Gabriel, who had met only a couple of months earlier. One couple had known each other for perhaps too long, the other shared no history. Both couples were bound to each other by tendrils that at times felt tenuous–one too worn out, the other too fresh—so that before leaving for the vacation they had been careful to mask whatever anxiety they felt.
Yet, once arrived at the house, each one felt secretly confident that Hera’s house, the sun and the sea, Greece itself, would smooth whatever unease they felt.
* * *
Clara was in love with Gabriel.
A few days after she had made love to him for the first time she had dinner with Carlos and Jacopo, whom she considered her best friends. The idea had been to celebrate the fact that Clara had actually fallen in love after a long period of not wanting to fall in love. Carlos had prepared a delicious dinner for her and Jacopo in his cozy apartment. It was supposed to be a happy celebration, but when Clara turned up she was on the verge of tears.
Clara was a painter who felt she deserved more consideration. Although her work sold well—it wasn’t expensive and its bold, bright colors looked good on the walls—prominent art critics often deemed her paintings too “decorative” and she was consistently ignored by the international art magazines. Somehow the suffering for this lack of recognition had become a recurrent theme in her life.
She had fallen in love with Gabriel so hard, she said, and now all she could see was disaster looming ahead. Eventually—she just knew it—Gabriel would break her heart. She said all this to Carlos and Jacopo while sitting cross-legged on the floor, puffing on a joint half drunk and picking at tiny morsels of Carlos’s perfectly cooked spaghetti alle vongole.
“Two people fall in love and right away you’ve got a corpse right there,” she said. “It’s an unspoken agreement, but it’s clear from the start which one of the two will be the killer and which will be the one to succumb. In order for love to work, one of the two has to pledge, ‘I’m giving myself entirely to you—look, I’m ditching all my weapons,’ and that’s what I just did with Gabriel.”
Carlos and Jacopo told her she was being melodramatic and she needed to relax.