A Separation(16)

The words sounded false as soon as I spoke them, the thinnest of fictions. Had Stefano met Christopher at some point, he would have known the explanation to be untrue, it was highly unlikely that two tourists would be writing two separate books about mourning. But to my surprise and relief, the explanation did not seem especially implausible to Stefano, he appeared interested and even pleased. He said that was not the usual reason why people came to Mani but it was a good reason, an interesting reason that he could understand, much better than the tourists who came for the beaches.

Had I come for the weepers, he asked. And I replied, Yes, exactly. And then could not think of anything further to say. Luckily he continued, had I ever heard a weeper, it was an amazing thing, very beautiful, very moving. No, I said. I’ve never heard one, I’ve only heard recordings—this was untrue and I had no idea why I continued to elaborate the meaningless lie, I had to hope that he would not ask me to describe the recordings, or tell him where I had obtained them, perhaps weepers did not allow their grieving to be recorded and he had known at once that I was not telling the truth.

I would have liked to change the subject but he was too enthused, he said to me that in fact his great-aunt was a widely admired weeper, one of the very best in the region. Sometimes she traveled great distances in order to mourn, people hired her even when there was a local woman available. It was too bad there wasn’t a funeral for me to attend, unfortunately nobody had died in any of the local villages. He said this without a trace of morbidity, he was only being practical. If I had come a month earlier! he said. Several people had died in the fires and the country had been full with the sound of weeping. His great-aunt and a friend of hers, who often sang together, had traveled from funeral to funeral, singing the entire way, they had poured their ululation—the music of grief—into the air.

I said that I was sorry to have missed it, an idiotic thing to say, but he did not seem to notice. It was a dying practice, he said abruptly. None of the younger generation wanted to become mourners, it was not even practiced in very many places outside of Mani. He thought this was a terrible shame. It was not that he was a traditionalist, he said. But nowadays, girls wanted to be famous, they wanted to be on television, they dressed like prostitutes and then were surprised when they were disrespected. He fell into a brooding silence, it was obvious he was talking about someone in particular.

At any rate, your friend Maria does not seem like that, I said, she seems like a very sensible girl. He was silent for a moment—his face had brightened at the thought of the woman and then darkened again, clearly there was some kind of impediment. Yes, he said at last. She is almost too sensible, she is a very practical girl. This is a great virtue but it also can make her a little hard. She does not appear to suffer fools easily, I said. He agreed. That is certainly true, she is sometimes impatient, it shows in her manner, she does not hide anything, she is incapable of being deceitful, and he sounded proud, almost as though he were bragging.

What does such a woman want, I asked, what does she hope for? (Was it in fact my husband?) What does she hope for? he repeated. To get married, to have children, to live in a nice house. His voice was irritated. This was impossible, no woman had so limited an imagination, Maria would be no exception. She had seemed to me ambitious, even if her ambitions did not necessarily mean that she wished to find herself gyrating on national television, even if her ambitions were for nothing more than escape, in some as yet undefined form.

I thought Stefano must know this, he looked ill even as he spoke. The proverbial heart, beating on his sleeve. I expected to feel pity—although I did not know what had taken place between Maria and Christopher, or what was transpiring between her and the driver—but instead I felt an affinity with this man, I had none of the clarifying distance of pity. This despite the fact that the reasons for this affinity—if indeed that was the word—were thin at best, there was nothing we shared other than the fact that we had both, hypothetically, been betrayed.

But only hypothetically, and only betrayal of a kind: we had no claims on these people, or merely partial and imperfect ones. Stefano had no formal claim but he had the weight of his affection; I had the legal claim but not the authority of love. Together, we might have had the right to be outraged or jealous, but as it was we had nothing but a private well of feeling. In my case, I thought, that feeling was increasingly ill-defined, as my life with Christopher began to recede into the past, everything that I learned about him—a meaningless detail from his new life, a revelation from his past one—was a source of potential discomfort, causing a pang of greater or lesser pain, or even occasional indifference. This was the process by which two lives were disentangled, eventually the dread and discomfort would fade and be replaced by unbroken indifference, I would see him in the street by chance, and it would be like seeing an old photograph of yourself: you recognize the image but are unable to remember quite what it was to be that person.

But Stefano—who knew whether his passion would also give in to this lassitude, or whether it would prove stronger and endure. Would he eventually marry another girl—there was another girl, whether or not he was aware of it, aware of her, he was a handsome man and for a handsome man there is always another girl—but still tend to the embers of his original love? People were capable of living their lives in a state of permanent disappointment, there were plenty of people who did not marry the person they hoped to marry, much less live the life they hoped to live, other people invented new dreams to replace the old ones, finding fresh reasons for discontent.