We Run the Tides(58)
I felt ashamed when we divorced, just as I had felt shame about everything that happened in my final year at Spragg—my alleged disappearance, my expulsion. I had made multiple mistakes, witnessed by many. The geography of California was so embedded in my past, in my missteps, that I decided I had to flee.
I was twenty-five when I arrived in Lisbon and was struck by the extent to which it twinned San Francisco: both cities were built on seven hills, both were proud of their red bridges and cable cars, both had suffered the surprise of earthquakes, and were perched on the precipices of continents. I began working as a translator. It wasn’t a growth market, but it was steady enough work. I translated hotel brochures, menus for restaurants, terrifying religious pamphlets.
In my thirties, I began translating short novels by a Portuguese writer named Inês Batista whose talents were being discovered later in life. Inês’s books were deeply personal meditations on resilience and her working-class upbringing. They were also very funny, as was she. We met more often than most writers meet with their translators—her fortitude reminded me of my mother, who had passed quickly, quietly, a few years after my divorce. As for Inês, she said I was the daughter-in-law she wished she had.
One day, she brought her grown and newly single son, Lucas, to our meeting at a café in the Alfama district. Lucas was handsome and humble, with a faint lisp. He was wearing dark indigo jeans, and as we talked I began to notice that his face, especially the area around his mouth, was taking on a bluish hue. Soon his chin looked like it had grown a blue beard. It was the pants, I realized—they were new and hadn’t yet been washed. His hands were on his lap and then on his face as we ate, transferring the color. Inês and I pointed this out to him and he excused himself to use the restroom to wash up.
I didn’t know what I found more endearing—the fact that he had purchased new pants because, as I learned, his mother had specifically suggested he not wear his usual athletic attire to meet me. Or that when he returned to the table, no longer blue, he was laughing at himself. It was particularly funny, he said, because it had happened before.
A year after that initial meeting, Lucas and I married. At the age of forty-four I returned to San Francisco to live, bringing with me Lucas, and our son, Gabriel, who was a newborn. We found a small but comfortable place on the north side of North Beach, near to my father’s new home. He’d sold the house in Sea Cliff to a family with two ginger-haired boys, who, when I occasionally drive through the neighborhood, I see playing lacrosse on the street. I often send updates about Sea Cliff to Svea, who moved to Uppsala, near Stockholm. She lives close to Linnaeus’ Garden, with her partner, a quiet and considerate Swede.
When I returned to San Francisco, I contacted Faith, who was now a pediatrician. Gabriel was born with an arrhythmia, and I brought him to her office for check-ups. She was attentive to Gabriel as she monitored his rapid heartbeat, and she was reassuring to me and Lucas. One day Faith suggested a walk along Land’s End, just the two of us. On our walk along the high cliffs she told me about her wife and her two daughters, who she sent to Spragg. She said it had been a great school for girls with two moms.
“As you can imagine, it’s changed a lot,” she said and stopped walking. “I still can’t believe you got kicked out and Maria Fabiola didn’t. Her parents must have paid someone off, don’t you think?”
“You’re more upset about it than I am,” I said, looking at her flushed neck. “I think I got used to the glitter Maria Fabiola put on everything.” What I didn’t admit to Faith then was sometimes I missed the glitter, too.
I occasionally saw Julia, who never spoke of Gentle, but whose secure and safe life seemed to be orchestrated in reaction to her death. She was married to a private equity banker and lived in a house in Tiburon that had once been a school. She dressed in clothes that were usually worn by older women of a certain class and era—Ferragamo shoes with low heels and tidy bows, Ann Taylor turtlenecks. She always carried an umbrella if the forecast hinted at rain.
Through Faith and Julia I was reunited with many former classmates from Spragg, even those I hadn’t known well. We sometimes met at the Big 4 Restaurant at the Huntington Hotel where we sat for hours in green leather chairs in front of old posters for the Central Pacific railroad. It was there that we exchanged stories of sadness and small triumphs. We laughed more now than we had as girls, and we found humor in how little we had known.
Almost everyone had returned to San Francisco, it seemed, except for Maria Fabiola. No one knew what had become of her after she’d left for St. George’s, a boarding school in Rhode Island. Her family had moved to the East Coast around the same time. No one could track her down on social media—she had most likely married or changed her name. There were rumors she’d moved to Paris and her husband was a designer. There were rumors she’d moved to Uruguay and started a restaurant on the beach. We were approaching fifty and the speculation that swirled around her had not ceased.
*
IT’S MY WORK AS A TRANSLATOR that ultimately leads me to see Maria Fabiola again. My mother-in-law, Inês, is invited to speak at a literary festival on the island of Capri. Her publisher contacts me, asking if I’ll translate for the English-speaking portion of the audience. Inês is approaching eighty, a widow, and doesn’t like to travel alone.
When her publisher forwards the details of Inês’s event, they include a link to the hotel where the festival’s participants will be staying. I spend half an hour admiring the photos. I’ve never been to Capri—I’ve never stayed in such luxurious accommodations. We meet in Naples and spend a night in a hotel with a view of Vesuvius. Inês’s gray hair is longer than when I last saw her a year ago, her eyes glassy. Her body is slightly more frail but she still has the same distinctive walk: she lifts her knees high and places each foot firmly on the ground, as though snowshoeing. She and I sit side by side on the Naples rooftop. She’s working on a new novel, she tells me, about an older woman who falls in love with a young man. “Você vai traduzir esse livro?” she asks. I tell her of course I’ll translate it. Every book, I assume, will be her last, but sometimes I think she’ll live forever. She has not given up, has ceded nothing.