When she began, it seemed her words also sounded inside me, as if I were speaking them — which may be why now I can’t distinguish what she said from what I was thinking. Besides, it won’t be easy to put together all the words she spoke at different times and I may have to mix in quite a few of my own.
“Four years ago, when I left Switzerland, I couldn’t stand the noise of the train, so I got off at a small town in Italy. .”
It seemed she was about to tell with whom she had gotten off, but she stopped. A long while went by and I thought she would say nothing more that night. Her voice had dragged unevenly, like the trail left by a wounded animal. In the stifling silence full of tangled branches, I decided to go over what I had just heard. It crossed my mind that I had no right to do what I was doing: relieving her of her painful memories so I could fondle them later on when I was alone. But then, as if someone were forcing me to let go of that idea, others sneaked in. The someone must have been him: they had once been in that small town in Italy together. She had left Switzerland — after losing him there — perhaps without realizing she had not yet given up all hope (Hector had told me the remains were never found), until the noise of the train carrying her away began to drive her mad. So she had decided to stay in the area and had gotten off at the small town in Italy. But there, no doubt, everything had brought back memories that made her even more desperate. “She can’t tell me all this right now, it’s too private. Or maybe she thinks Hector has already told me the whole story. But he didn’t say she was this way because of the loss of her husband, he just said: ‘Maggie’s always been a bit batty’; and, according to Mary, what’s addled her brain is ‘too many books.’ Maybe they can’t see the real problem because she hasn’t confessed her sorrow to them. I wouldn’t have understood a thing myself if Hector hadn’t let something out, because Miss Margaret has never mentioned her husband to me.”
I went on turning these ideas over in my mind and, when her words started up again, it was the night of her arrival in the small town in Italy. She was installed in a room on the second floor of a hotel. She had been in bed for a while when she heard the sound of water. She got up and looked out the window of a gallery leading into the courtyard. There were some gleams of moonlight and other lights. Then, suddenly, she saw a fountain — and it was as if she had met a face that had been watching for her. At first she could not be sure the water was not playing tricks on her, showing her only the dark face of the stone fountain, but it looked innocent enough, and she went back to bed carrying it in her eyes, careful not to spill it. The following night there was no sound, but she got up all the same. This time the water was a murky trickle, but back in bed she felt it watching her again, as it had done the night before, only now it was through leaves caught in the sluggish flow. She went on seeing it inside her own eyes, then it seemed she and the water were both contemplating the same object — so that she could not tell whether a premonition she had a moment later had come to her from depths in the water or in her soul. She had almost fallen asleep when she felt someone trying to communicate with her, sending her a message through the water, and understood why it insisted on looking at her and being seen by her. She got up in a daze and wandered barefoot around her room and up and down the gallery. But now the light and everything else had changed, as if someone had breathed a different air and another sense of things into the space surrounding her. This time she dared not look out at the water, and when she got back in bed she felt real tears, at long last, falling on her nightgown.
The next morning, surrounded by shrill women whose loud talk seemed to have caught its interest, the fountain ignored her and she decided the silence of the night had been playing tricks on her: the water could never have transmitted a message or put her in touch with anyone. Listening carefully to what the women were saying, she heard only empty chitchat. But then she realized the water was not to blame for the silly words dropping into it like wastepaper: she must not allow the light of day to play tricks on her now. To get away, she went for a stroll — and came on a poor old man with a watering can. When the old man tipped the can it let out a skirt of spray, which rustled as if a pair of legs were walking in it. She was moved and thought: “No, I can’t leave the water. It must have something to say if it’s so insistent — like a little girl struggling to make herself understood.” That night she avoided the fountain because she had a violent headache. She decided to take a painkiller. But the minute she saw the water in the glass, suspended in the dim light, she imagined it was the same water somehow reaching out to put a secret on her lips, and she said to herself: “No, this is serious. Whoever it is knows the time to bring water for the soul is at night.”
Early in the morning, before anyone was up, she went out to the fountain to study her connection with the water more closely. As soon as she rested her eyes on the water she felt them drop a thought into it. (The way Miss Margaret phrased it was: “a thought I don’t care to discuss right now,” and, after elaborately clearing her throat: “a shapeless thought, limp as a rag that has been wrung out too many times. Slowly, it started to sink, and I let it settle on the bottom. And there it broke into reflections that I drew back into my eyes and soul. I realized, then, for the first time, that water is the place to grow memories, because it transforms everything reflected in it and it’s receptive to thought. In moments of despair you shouldn’t cast your body into the water but rather your thoughts, which will come back renewed and change your whole outlook on life.”) Those, more or less, were her words.
Then she got dressed and took a walk. Some distance ahead, she saw a stream. At first it meant nothing to her, until she remembered streams carried water, and that water was the one thing in the world only she could communicate with. But when she sat by the edge of the stream, letting her eyes follow the current, she had the sudden notion that this water was not addressing her and might even carry her memories off to some faraway place, wearing them down. Her eyes made her concentrate on a leaf that had just fallen into the water from a tree. It drifted for a minute, and, just as it went under, she heard a heavy tread like a dull throb. She felt the pounding of vague fears and premonitions and her mind went dark. The tread turned out to be a horse approaching from the other side of the stream. It had a jaunty gait and looked tame and a bit bored as it sank its muzzle in the water to drink. The water enlarged its teeth, as if she were seeing them through a pane of wavy glass. It raised its head dripping water from every hair but without losing its dignity, and she thought of the horses of her own country and of how different the water they drank must be.
That evening, in the hotel dining room, she recognized one of the women who had been chattering by the fountain and kept an eye on her. The woman was with her husband, whose adoring look she met with an ironic smile, and when she raised a glass to her lips Miss Margaret thought: “The water doesn’t care what mouth it’s in.” She was so upset she went straight back to her room and had a fit of tears. Then she fell into a heavy sleep. At two in the morning she woke up tossing in bed, her soul filled to the brim with the memory of the stream. Now her thoughts argued in its favor: “Stream water is like blind hope flowing through you, beyond your control. If it’s a weak stream it can easily be swallowed up in a hole and trapped there. Then it will become sad and stagnant, full of muddy silence, like a madman’s head. But I must let my hopes run on and carry me along, blindly, if possible, not worrying too much about where they will lead, like water simply following its instinct, until my thoughts and memories become an irresistible current. .” On this quickly rising tide of thoughts, she got up, packed her bags and started to walk up and down her room and the gallery, not daring to face the water of the fountain. She was thinking: “Water is the same all over the world. I can watch my memories grow in any water anywhere in the world.” She was in an agony of anticipation until she had settled into her seat in the train. But then the clatter of the wheels depressed her, and she felt sorry for the water she had left behind in the hotel fountain. She remembered the night it had been murky and clogged with leaves, like a little beggar girl offering her something, innocently but with a touch of natural malice in her innocence, as if to warn her that the hope or promise she held out would remain unfulfilled. She buried her face in a towel and cried and felt better. But she could not take her mind off the quiet fountain water “standing still in the night,” she was thinking, “as I prefer it, slowly sinking into silence and sleep, full of tangled plants: that’s what the water inside me is really like.” And, closing her eyes, she imagined herself as “a blind woman reaching out to the surface of the water, vaguely remembering a pond with plants she saw as a child, when her eyes still had some sight left in them.”