Turning Back the Sun(49)
An hour later Rayner glimpsed the sea; then the southern suburbs of the capital gathered round and a minute afterwards the train was easing into the station. He disembarked onto the same platform—even, he imagined, the same space—where Miriam had never said farewell. As he swung his suitcase through the barrier, the police stopped him only cursorily, and stamped his residence permit without a question. The old tension seemed to have gone. He was not even asked to register.
As he walked out of the station, his dread that the city had changed enclosed him again. But opposite him, in the young sunlight, there rose up at once the terraced and balconied mansions he remembered, with their whitewashed pediments and frail lunettes above the doors. The town he”d just left had grappled and swarmed over the earth, but this one hung in the sky with a serene assembly of spires and gables. Even the colors of its fa?ades were pastel blues and greys, blending with cloud and air.
His memory had held true.
The street where his aunt and parents had lived was barely ten minutes” walk away. He went there in a euphoria of recognition. He felt he was breathing deeply, fully, for the first time in years. The names of all the streets and squares came back to him, and of half the shops which ran out white awnings over the pavements. He might have been sleepwalking. The whole city—avenues, lanes, crescents—shimmered a little out of focus, as if his present-day eyes could not anchor it clear of his memory. At any moment, he felt, he might encounter his teenage self swinging down the street arm in arm with Leon or Gerhard. Yet the city now was inhabited by other people. It was bewildering.
He took countless detours on the way to his aunt. Sometimes he just sat on his suitcase on the pavement and gazed. After the rumbustiousness of the town, the restraint of passersby was restful and a little strange. The cars never hooted. The height of buildings and the breadth of parks seemed to touch the inhabitants with quietness. Their history was remembered in statues, museums, even antique shops. He gazed with satisfaction at the Corinthian arcades of the State Assembly, and even at the corbels and lintels of ordinary houses. He noticed more gardens, and the steepled brick and whitewashed churches were everywhere. He thought of sitting in a coffeehouse, just to savor the languorous singsong of people”s voices, but did not.
It occurred to him with astonishment that as a youth he had inhabited this place blindly—and soon, he knew, he would do so again. But for the moment he felt outlandish. He even tried to curb his flailing foot as he walked. His clothes must brand him an outsider, he thought. Yet nobody seemed to notice him, and the people were dressed little differently from those back in the town. A few men sported linen jackets and tropical suits, and the town”s bush hats were replaced by panamas. Some of the women carried parasols and little gilded fans, which at first he thought an affectation; then he noticed, above everybody”s head, a wavering column of gnats which neither settled nor went away.
He turned at last into the street he best remembered. It was unchanged. All the balconies and verandahs frothed with wrought iron, which trickled its shadows over the peeling walls. The fa?ade of his parents” house had been repainted in café au lait, but he craned over its railings at the same garden of jasmine and roses. Their mingled scent, sharp with the tang of the distant sea, was the fragrance of his childhood. On the lawn two fat girls were playing.
He walked on seven more doors to his aunt”s house. He could remember her from childhood already living close, mewed up in mystery, yet capable and authoritarian. He had not understood her then, and could not guess at her now. If she had any secrets, Rayner”s father had not told them, and his mother had always been afraid of her.
The door was opened by a nurse, who led him upstairs. He remembered the interior less for itself than as a facsimile of his parents” home. All color had been strained out of it by sunlight, leaving it husk-dry and mellow with fawns and golds. It resembled a sepia snapshot. The rugs, the curtains, the cane and wicker furniture—all seemed bleached to the same autumnal pallor. Vases of dried flowers and potpourri stood in niches like funerary urns, and pervaded the house with a half-dead sweetness. Even the ormolu mirrors appeared to hold in themselves nothing but a clouded, secondhand sunlight. Rayner could not believe that this house could ever be his.
“Aunt Birgit.” He was unsure how to greet her. He could not remember if he had ever kissed those cheeks.
She was sitting on the edge of her chair. Her hand, when he took it, was a sheaf of bones. All the aquiline power of her face had shrivelled to a delicate scaffolding of discolored skin. She said, “I wouldn”t have recognized you.”
He guessed she had cancer. But he realized at once that only her body had withered. Her mind glittered out through two bruised-looking eyes. “The last years have been hard,” he said.
“Have you eaten? You cannot have eaten. The nurse will get you something in a moment, and then she”ll show you to your room. It will be a great scandal in the street that I have taken in a man.” Her laughter was like a cough. Her voice came rasping and thin, transforming the capital”s lisp to the sound of a broken wind instrument. And this was how he was to hear it during the next two weeks—so frail, so harmless-sounding: but each word a small incision.
She had arranged everything. Tomorrow in the law courts they would finalize her will: it required only his attendance and a signature. “If you decide to live in the capital,” she said, “you may stay here at once. It”s as you wish.” It was impossible to tell if she wanted this. In her voice was no hint of either plea or concession: only convenience. He wanted to thank her, but did not know how. It was like thanking someone for his resurrection. But in the end he took her hand and blundered out his gratitude in a confusion of thoughts, while she only smiled a little and at last said impatiently, “Don”t thank me. I”m not depriving myself of anything. I will not be here.”