And much that I could not have imagined here beforehand has revealed itself to me and put me on the alert or made my eyes open wide, and that will continue, not only as long as there are children, who hardly miss anything when they are playing; as if the same thing were true of the bay as of the largest borough of New York, about which someone once said, “Only the dead know Brooklyn.”
But even though at that time I stumbled upon my house in just that way — so to speak in the footsteps of the children out playing — in a spit of the bay that had previously eluded me, to this day I have not been able to track down another structure related to it. And yet I am certain that somewhere there must be another house of this sort, designed by the same architect almost a century ago.
Be that as it may: on that long-ago spring night, after I had turned off for the first time to look at the house I had always overlooked, which I knew instantly would be mine, I forgot for the time being my plan of writing down day by day my year in the area. I stood in the half-darkness up on the railroad embankment, the only person waiting for the last train to Paris, and imagined that after moving in I would do nothing but live there for an indefinite period, and I saw that as an activity that would occupy me completely. Furthermore, no one, not even my friends, was to know where I was. No one in the world would visit me here, and this image, empty and at the same time spacious, branching out, gave me the sensation of being showered under my arms, and I felt wondrously refreshed.
From the beginning I thought of myself as alone with the house, also without the family that we had become once again at that time. Just me and these night-black rain puddles, as at a railroad station on the border, and all my kith and kin over the hills and far away. To inhabit the house and the place in this exclusive way, to do nothing else, also to make no new acquaintances — how robust that seemed to me, how I could picture myself caught up in such a project.
The following months we spent waiting for the house to become avail-Table; we were living in one of the painter’s Paris apartments, with a tree-rustling inner courtyard, in the midst of the city, the broad Seine right around the corner, crossed by the Pont Neuf, the bridge on which the woman from Catalonia and I had once agreed we could spend our lives, going from one bank to the other.
But I was already feverishly looking forward again to my move into the suburb beyond the ridge of hills, and every day spent the entire morning hiking out to my property; when I skipped that, I saw the day as lost.
I made a point of approaching the house from all possible directions, and then walked past it without stopping. A glance out of the corner of my eye at the place, barely visible from any vantage point, and the day had taken on color.
And each time I set out alone. No one was to accompany me, not even Ana, who had said that the house in its wide, hummocky hollow of a yard looked like something out of a fairy tale, by which she meant she felt closed off from the world there.
From the list of previous owners the lawyer had given me, I knew that the house had been occupied almost exclusively by retired folk — a general, a plumber, a professor of ancient Greek, a gravestone maker. My immediate predecessor certainly appeared to have been constantly busy in every room, with shelves of binders, computers, specialized maps of the most distant parts of the earth. But I later learned that he had been unemployed for years. Along with the house I bought the garden tools from him, not only rakes, shovels, and hoses but also the power equipment — lawn mower, chain saw, hedge clipper, even something like an edger — only Flaubert knew the proper name for it — the smallest of the power tools, which at the same time made the most noise, and that was how it was meant to be, as I was told later by a neighbor who worked in a factory that manufactured such tools.
I did this with the firm intention of taking care of things as much as possible exactly like those before me and those around me. Yet to this day I have not even started up most of these instruments, and various neighbors, seeing me hacking away again with my bare hands, have offered their help with the words “I have power tools!”
Am I entitled to call that first evening in the house “ours”?
On the one hand I saw myself as having arrived as never before — the opposite of what the woman from Catalonia had hinted about the building and its location — in the external world. On the other hand I felt hostility toward the presence of my son and my wife. I wanted to be alone with the house, bare yet livable, the doors and windows wide open to the warm July night, its darkness so uncitylike. Or at least no one, not even one of my near and dear, was to obstruct with face and voice the admission of the outside world into the house, the lights from the transmitter flashing in from the eastern hill, the rustling of leaves in the garden and of the trees in the forest wafting toward the house, late trains chiming in, the coolness from the pond waters drifting by.
I turned off all the lights in the house. Valentin went up to his room. I sat at some distance from Ana, on the floor by a window. I had forgotten those entrusted to me. They did not exist.
From the darkness outside the silence spoke to me, on and on, and breathed in, from room to room. That was how it should go on speaking forever. And my house should continue to be as empty as this. And on this night I would not touch that beautiful strange woman somewhere over there.
It did not work out this way, however, and even before winter the house had lost its initial emptiness. If during those first weeks my only connection with the everyday world had come from listening to that transistor radio no bigger than my hand, and then almost exclusively Arab music from Radio Beur, from the metropolitan nowhereland beyond the hills, from time to time we came together of an evening in front of a television set; the turning of the pages of a newspaper, even if it was my own doing, sounded to me like the crack of a whip; books piled up wall-high, when I had wanted to have an armful of them at most in the house, and those as much out of sight as possible, in the closet under the stairs or in one of the many wall niches, of which I still cannot keep track; my wife’s things spread from one bare spot to the next; on the table the tiny little garden flowers and wildflowers were elbowed out by florists’ bouquets, which, furthermore, against my intentions, were purchased not here in the suburb but in the metropolis; and the lamps, hardly larger than clothespins, and also like them clipped on here and there — a temporary arrangement that I as usual had thought of as permanent — were replaced by lanterns, “remember the ones on the bridge between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez?” and a chandelier from a plantation house in the American South.
A friend (the carpenter, the painter, the reader?) on his second visit praised the improvement in livability; one could feel a woman’s hand at work. Yes, I had not kept to my resolution not to let anyone in here, or into my new region at all.