‘My dear sir,’ she had written him. ‘Your questions and their formulations have instilled within me, I must confess, complete and profound trust. A person who knows what he’s asking is someone who can expect an answer soon. Perhaps what you need is that proverbial pinch that tips the scales.’
He wondered what sort of pinch she had in mind. He checked the dictionary thoroughly. He didn’t know any proverbs that had to do with scales and pinches. She had taken her husband’s last name, but her first name was fairly exotic – Taina. Which might suggest she came from some distant land and equally exotic language, in which both pinch and scale worked perfectly fine as proverb. ‘Needless to say, it would be best for us to meet. I’ll try to examine your dossier and all your articles in the meantime. Please come and see me. This is where my husband worked right up until the end, and his presence is still felt here. This will no doubt aid us in our conversations.’
It was a small seaside village stretching down the shore, belted by a straight asphalt highway. The taxi pulled off just before the last sign with the village’s name on it, heading downhill, towards the sea, and now they passed wood houses, pleasant to look at, with terraces and balconies. The house he was looking for turned out to be big, and the most elegant along this gravel road. It was surrounded by a wall of medium height thickly covered with some local vine. The gate was kept open, but he asked the driver to stop on the road and, taking out his wheeled suitcase, he went up the gravel-strewn driveway on foot. The focal point of the neat yard was a magnificent tree, clearly coniferous, but with a deciduous aspect, like an oak with leaves that had somehow been stunted into needles. He’d never seen such a tree, its almost white bark looked like an elephant’s skin.
No one responded to his knocking, so for a moment he stood there on the wooden porch, unable to make up his mind; he summoned his courage and turned the handle. The door opened, admitting him into a bright, spacious living room. The window opposite was completely taken up by the sea. A big orange cat came up to his feet, meowed and slipped outside, completely ignoring the houseguest. The doctor was sure there was no one home, so he set down his suitcase and went out on the porch to wait for his hostess. He stood there for a quarter of an hour or so, examining that mighty tree, and then he slowly started to go around the house, which was encircled, like the others in this area, by a wooden terrace, on which (as in every other place in the world) stood lightweight furniture with throw pillows. In the back he found a garden with a meticulously mown lawn, densely planted with flowering bushes. In one of them he recognized a fragrant honeysuckle, and guided by a path lined with smooth, round rocks, he discovered a passage he thought must lead straight to the sea. He hesitated for a moment. Then he set forth.
The sand on the beach seemed almost white; diminutive, clean, dotted here and there with white shells. The doctor wondered whether he should remove his shoes, because he realized that it might be rude to walk onto a private beach with shoes on.
In the distance he saw a figure emerging from the water in silhouette – the sun, already low, was still intense. The woman was wearing a dark one-piece bathing suit. On the shore she reached out for a towel and wrapped herself in it. With one end of it she rubbed her hair. Then she picked up her sandals and began approaching the startled doctor. He didn’t know what to do now. Whether to turn around and leave or to in fact walk towards her. He would have preferred to meet her in the calm of an office, in a more official setting. But she was already upon him. She held out her hand by way of greeting and said his last name in an interrogative tone. She was of average height and must have been getting close to sixty; cruel wrinkles shot across her face – you could tell she didn’t skimp on sun. Had it not been for that, she would probably have looked younger. Her short, light-coloured hair stuck to her face and neck. The towel she had around her reached her knees, below which were her evenly tanned legs, and her feet, marred by bunions.
‘Let’s go inside,’ she said.
She told him to take a seat in the living room and disappeared for a few minutes. The doctor flushed out of anxiety – he felt as though he had caught her in the bathroom, as though he’d walked in on her cutting her nails. This encounter with her nearly naked old body, with her feet, her wet hair – it threw him off completely. But she didn’t seem to be bothered by it at all. She came back after a while in light-coloured trousers and a T-shirt, a fine-boned woman, with flabby arm muscles, her skin teeming with moles and birthmarks, ruffling her still-damp hair with her hand. This wasn’t how he had imagined her. He’d thought the wife of someone like Mole would be different. Different how? Taller, more modest, distinguished. In a silk blouse with a jabot and a carved cameo at her neck. Someone who didn’t swim in the sea.
She sat down across from him, rolled up her trouser legs and slid a bowl of chocolates towards him. She took one, too, and as she ate she sucked in her cheeks. He looked at her, she had bags under her eyes, hypothyroidism or perhaps just a flabbiness in the musculus orbicularis oculi.
‘So it’s you,’ she said. ‘Could you please remind me exactly what you do?’
He hurriedly swallowed his chocolate whole – it didn’t matter, he’d grab another one. He told her who he was again and talked a little bit about his work and publications. He reminded her of his History of Conservation, which had been published recently and which he had included in the dossier he’d sent her. He praised her husband. He said that Professor Mole had engineered a veritable revolution in the field of anatomy. She watched him attentively with her blue eyes, with a slight, content smile, which he might have taken as friendly or as ironic. Despite her first name, there was nothing exotic about her. He suddenly thought that maybe this wasn’t her, that maybe he was speaking with the cook, or the maid. As he finished with his background, he wrung his hands nervously, although he would have liked to keep himself from displaying such obvious evidence of nerves; he felt bedraggled in the shirt he’d worn to travel, and she leaped up, as though reading his mind.
‘I’ll show you your room. It’s this way.’
She guided him up the stairs onto the dark second floor and pointed to a door. She went in first and pulled back the red curtains. The windows gave onto the sea, the sun lit the room up orange.
‘You can get settled in while I make us something to eat. You must be tired. Are you tired? How was your flight?’
He gave an off-handed answer.
‘I’ll be downstairs,’ she said and left.
He wasn’t quite sure how it had happened – this woman of average height in her light-coloured trousers and stretched-out T-shirt had with some imperceptible gesture, perhaps just by her eyebrows, arranged anew the whole space and all the doctor’s expectations and fantasies. She had rid him of the whole of his long and tiring journey and prepared speeches, possible scenarios. She had introduced something of her own. She was the one who dictated the conditions. The doctor gave into it without batting an eyelash. Resigned, he took a quick shower, changed his clothes and went downstairs.
For dinner she served a salad with croutons made of dark bread and baked vegetables. So she was a vegetarian. It was a good thing he’d had that fish at the station. She sat opposite him with her elbows on the table, crumbling what was left of the croutons with her fingertips, and she talked about healthy food, about the harmfulness of flour and sugar, about the nearby organic farms where she bought her vegetables, milk and maple syrup, which she used instead of sugar. But the wine was good. Blau, unused to alcohol and tired, felt drunk after two glasses. Each subsequent sentence would form in his head, but she always got there first. By the end of the bottle she had told him the story of her husband’s death. A motorboat collision.