Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire. José Manuel prieto

way I can describe my impression. She was not in direct light, it was filtered through the umbrella over her table and fell gently around her like a halo (no exaggeration)—like a photo shoot, with a model lit by floodlights, which are softened by umbrellas, and a life-size picture for a backdrop, (for example) an Istanbul street scene. But this background was real and changing. A crowd flowed by—looking almost European, but unmistakably Turkish, when you slowed it down and looked carefully: a butcher in a leather apron, indistinguishable from the stream at one moment, then moving into focus; Turkish women, many in headscarves; their husbands in sports coats that barely meet across their bellies, wearing two vests, one on top of the other—and in front, set off against this backdrop, the splendid woman who had caught my eye. I could not see her legs, which are generally the first things I check in the women carried my way by the river of humanity in a busy street. With some sixth sense I register a sort of overall perception of a beautiful woman—face, eyebrows, cheekbones—and immediately, even before I confirm this strong and virtually foolproof first impression, I form another impression (again, always or almost always right, at least in some crowds, some cities, some countries) of legs that are absolutely outstanding. Confident, steady, onward come those legs, and above them, borne aloft like figures in a holy procession, the faces that I study like a part from which I can reconstruct the whole. I submitted the young woman who was sitting (or posing) at the next table to this procedure. Since I could not see her legs from where I was, her arms had to fill that role: firm fresh arms exuding frankness. They spread out slightly from elbow to shoulder (she was in a sleeveless blouse), then joined to form a perfect arch, a shrine to the patron saint of arms, to be kissed reverently. Her shoulders, deep anatomical soap dishes, appeared from under the loose cut of her beige, nearly white blouse. She was not looking at me, her eyes were fixed on her plate, and she was eating her breakfast hungrily. The skin of her neck reacted promptly to the first movements of her jaws, which were working furiously. An earring dangled from her earlobe, and with my eyes on the soft curl of her ear I whispered: “Turn around and look,” and she turned and looked but did not linger on me since it was the waiter she wanted, and he was at the table behind me. Seeing her this way, head on, hardly inspired painful thoughts. She did have a pretty stiff spine, it’s true, like the water-seller in the print, walking away from the the fountain without spilling a drop. And the friendly look in her eyes was undercut, belied by a perennial scornful smile, tight-lipped.

      During our week together in Istanbul some real feeling, a real look, a real spark sometimes flashed between us (in the space between our physical bodies), but she would try to hide her feelings, afraid of losing this real chance of escape, of staying trapped in the Saray (the nightclub with dancers and strippers—prostitutes really—where we met). Like a bean sprout shooting up through layer after layer of clouds, this letter had opened a path to me—passed from sack to sack, tumbling around inside mail trucks, eventually coming to me in Livadia. It was no angel, as I had imagined in the Post Office, no, it was a plant, a bean sprout, that had slowly germinated and finally got to me.

      It was growing lighter every moment. I slumped forward, put my head on the table, and fell into an uncomfortable sleep. I had not written a single line. I woke up in misery. Out the window was the deep blue of daybreak. I picked up her letter, held the pages to the window, watched them turn as red as the glass. I had moved the table near the window, wanting to shed more light on the butterflies, the bottles holding the butterflies, and Stuart’s illustrated guide. Now the light was shining through the layers of papers, and I sought in them a sliver of strontium, some chemical element radiating brilliantly, like a technician scanning an X ray, deducing from its shadows the healthy functioning of your kidneys, the oiled mechanism of your internal body—or (readjusting my focus) my own anxious eyes in the glass.

      I went out into the world.

      I didn’t head straight for the gravel path, like I did most mornings at eleven (with less apprehension), no, I did what I had intended from the first: I turned right and walked to the wall behind the house, which looked out to sea. The garden in front of the pension stretched for ten or fifteen feet to a double row of beech trees, with the road to Yalta beyond. At the end of the row—if you turned left, not through the garden—was the path to the veranda. I usually cut through the garden to go to town, and there were signs in the wet grass that others did too. Only the oldest boarders, I noticed, took the path, which circled too far away from town. But you could take it to the beach, going out to the road and then through the woods, coming out a few yards away.

      The pension had six windows on the first floor, seven on the second, all painted (in about, say, 1935) pale green like the downspouts. My room’s was the first one, at the corner, and I had a second on the other side (two windows, lots of light). The building was set on a foundation of solid stone, its mortar white behind the acacias. There were rusted tin cans, cigarette butts, and old newspapers in the grass. It was a great place to sunbathe: I could lower a chair right out the window or spread a blanket on the lawn. The women who rented rooms in the house, most of them single, tanned themselves on this strip of grass. I walked through the shadows to the other end of the house, as far as the path, but I didn’t take it. Instead, I cut through the garden and went to town.

      I sent a telegram to Vladimir Vladimirovich in St. Petersburg. I just dashed it off, using the model letters, the samples under the glass on the desk, copying word for word, my hand not shaking at all. I merged one wishing a happy new year with another announcing: “Tanya and the girls. Coach five. July 7. Moscow at 17:00. Kisses.” I skipped easily between the two telegrams, finding all the right words, the proper expressions. I had planned to ask him to send me a list of collections of letters to consult in writing my answer to V., but instead I asked him to send everything he could find, to general delivery in Livadia. The books started arriving that week, brown-paper packages, tied up with string, sealed with wax: letters, mainly in Russian, French, English, and in Spanish, my own language.

      Among the first he sent was one that was not much use to me, except here, as an example. Its title: A Treasury of the World’s Great Letters from Ancient Days to Our Time, Containing the Characteristic and Crucial Communications and Intimate Exchanges and Cycles of Correspondence of Many of the Outstanding Figures of World History, and Some Notable Contemporaries, Selected, Edited, and Integrated with Biographical Backgrounds and Historical Settings and Consequences.

SECOND LETTER

       1

       LIVADIA

      The girl in the Post Office handed me a second letter from V. She watched with a smile as I turned it over in my hands, incredulous. Out in the street, a cloud of children swirled around me, Greeks, Armenians, Tartars with biblical curls. A youthful chorus asked the time, but I opened the envelope, oblivious to their cries, as if I had jumped up to close a door, shutting out music that was too loud. V.’s greeting resounded in my ear, like in those movies where the offscreen voice descends on a character, getting too close for comfort. Or like that old tapestry (in the north wing of the Hermitage?), an angel unrolling a parchment for a boy in a saffron toga and sandals, his bowed lips at the ear of the rapt youth. When my eyes had made their way to her name on the last page, after reading a letter perhaps more beautiful than the first, I stood stunned for a moment, scarcely aware of my surroundings, immersed in absolute silence, her words of farewell ringing in my ear like a glass bead bouncing around the walls of a seashell, speeding through the spiral chambers. My eyes lifted from the page, darting around, where was I? where had my walk taken me? not really a walk, a glide past walls, entrances, standing at the crossroads, watching two cars go by, then a wagon, pulled slowly by a Percheron (its flanks and feet covered with long hair), as if I was running on automatic pilot, like ships use on the high seas, functioning only enough to move forward, to get around without bumping into things. I blinked and my eyes were caught by something vertical, which got bigger and bigger; then I was hit by a wave of images, breaking over me in a dizzying flood, indistinguishably. They were clear signals of where I was, but only images, no sounds, and they slid past my retina so fast my head spun, each vision of the place rushing past before a single thing, any detail, could pull up on my memory bank. I knew that I must order my ears to reconnect