The Japanese Lover (20 page)

“How could I forget? A relationship like yours was almost impossible; you would have regretted it, Alma. Prejudice would have destroyed you both in the end, and killed your love.”

“Ichimei knew that, and never asked me to do it.”

After a long pause while the pair sat contemplating the hummingbirds eagerly hovering over a fuchsia bush, and while Irina was deliberately taking her time over drying Sophia with a towel and then brushing her, Lenny told Alma how sorry he was they had not seen each other for almost three decades.

“I knew you were living at Lark House. It's a coincidence that forces me to believe in fate, Alma, because I put my name on the waiting list years ago, a long time before you arrived. I kept postponing the decision to come and visit you, because I didn't want to stir up dead memories,” he said.

“They're not dead, Lenny. They're more alive now than ever. That's what happens with age: stories from the past come alive and stick to our skin. I'm so pleased we're going to spend the next few years together.”

“It will only be six months, Alma. I have an inoperable brain tumor. I don't have much time left before the worst symptoms begin.”

“My God, I'm so sorry, Lenny!”

“Why? I've lived enough, Alma. I could go on for a little longer with aggressive treatment, but there's no point putting myself through that. I'm a coward, pain scares me.”

“I'm surprised they accepted you at Lark House.”

“Nobody knows what I have, and there's no reason they should, because I won't take up a place for long. I'm going to put an end to myself when my condition starts to worsen.”

“How will you know?”

“For now I have headaches, I feel weak and clumsy in my movements. I no longer dare ride a bicycle, which used to be my life's passion, because I've fallen off several times. Do you know I've crossed the United States on a bike from the Pacific to the Atlantic three times? I intend to enjoy the time I have left. Soon I'll be vomiting, find it hard to walk and speak, my eyesight will fail, the convulsions will start . . . But I won't wait that long. I have to act while my mind still functions.”

“How quickly life passes us by, Lenny.”

Lenny's declaration did not surprise Irina. Death by their own hand was discussed quite naturally among the most lucid of the Lark House residents. Alma's view was that there were too many old people on the planet, people who lived much longer than was necessary for biology and possible for the economy. It made no sense to oblige them to remain prisoner in a painful body or a despairing mind. “Very few old folk are happy, Irina. Most of them are poor, aren't healthy, and have no family. It's the most fragile and difficult stage of life, more so than childhood, because it grows worse day by day, and there is no future other than death.” Irina had commented on this to Cathy, who maintained that before long euthanasia would be a right rather than a crime. Cathy knew that several people in Lark House had what they needed for a dignified suicide, and although she understood the reasons for making such a decision, she had no intention of bowing out like that. “I live in constant pain, Irina, but if I don't think about it, it's bearable. The worst was the rehabilitation after the operations. Not even the morphine dulled the pain; the only thing that helped was knowing it wasn't going to last forever. Everything is temporary.” Irina suspected that thanks to his profession, Lenny could call on more expeditious drugs than those that came from Thailand wrapped in plain brown paper.

“I'm not worried, Alma,” said Lenny. “I enjoy life, especially the time you and I have together. I've been getting myself ready for a long while; it isn't going to catch me unawares. I've learned to pay attention to my body. Our body tells us everything if we only listen to it. I knew about my illness before it was diagnosed, and I know any treatment would be useless.”

“Are you afraid?” asked Alma.

“No. I suppose that what comes after death is the same as before birth. What about you?”

“A little . . . I imagine that after death there's no contact with this world, no suffering, personality, or memory; it's as though this Alma Belasco had never existed. Something may transcend it: the spirit, the essence of our being. But I confess I am afraid of giving up this body, and I hope that then Ichimei will be with me or that Nathaniel comes to search for me.”

“If as you said the spirit isn't in contact with this world, I don't see how Nathaniel can come searching for you.”

“Yes, it's true, it's a contradiction,” Alma laughed. “We cling so tightly to life, Lenny! You say you're a coward, but it takes courage to say good-bye to everything and cross a threshold without any idea where it leads.”

“That's why I came here. I don't think I can do it on my own, Alma. I think you are the only person who can help me, the only one I can ask to be with me when the time comes. Is that asking too much?”

October 22, 2002

Yesterday, Alma, when at last we could meet to celebrate our birthdays, I could see you were in a bad mood. You said that all of a sudden, without us realizing it, we have turned seventy. You are afraid our bodies will fail us, and of what you call the ugliness of age, even though you are more beautiful now than you were at twenty-three. We're not old because we are seventy. We start to grow old as soon as we are born, we change every day, life is a continuous state of flux. We evolve. The only difference is that now we are a little closer to death. What's so bad about that? Love and friendship do not age.

Ichi

I
t did Alma Belasco good to have to systematically remember things for her grandson's book, as at her age her mind was starting to fail her. Previously she would ramble on, and was unable to recall precise details, but now in order to provide Seth with satisfactory answers she tried hard to reconstruct the past in an orderly way, instead of jumping all over the place as she did with Lenny in the many idle hours they had at Lark House. She visualized different-­colored boxes, one for each year of her life, and stored her experiences and feelings inside them. She piled the boxes up in the large armoire in which she used to take refuge as a child to weep floods of tears. These virtual boxes, overflowing with nostalgia and a few regrets, contained her deepest childish terrors and fantasies, as well as the wild extravagances of youth and the struggles, hard work, passions, and loves of her mature years. With a light heart, because she tried to forgive all her mistakes, except those that had made others suffer, she pieced together the fragments of her biography, spicing them with touches of fantasy, allowing herself some exaggeration and white lies, since Seth could hardly contradict her own memories. She did this as an exercise of the imagination rather than because she really wanted to create a false impression. The one thing she never talked about was Ichimei, unaware that behind her back Irina and Seth were investigating this most precious and secret aspect of her existence, the one thing she could not reveal, because if she did Ichimei would vanish, and with him her only reason to continue living.

Irina was her copilot on this flight into the past. Not only did the photographs and other documents pass through her hands, but she was the one who classified them and compiled the albums. Her questions helped guide Alma when she drifted into dead ends, which allowed her life gradually to become clearer, better defined. Irina plunged herself into Alma's existence as if they were in a Victorian novel: the aristocratic lady and her female companion trapped amidst the boredom of endless cups of tea in a country house. Alma claimed we all have an inner private garden where we can seek refuge, but Irina did not like to peer into hers, preferring to replace it with Alma's, which was far more pleasant than her own. She got to know the melancholy little girl disembarking from Poland, the youthful Alma in Boston, the artist and wife; she knew about her favorite dresses and hats; her first painting studio, where she worked alone experimenting with brushes and colors as she defined her own style; her old-fashioned worn leather suitcases, covered in labels, the sort nobody used anymore. These images and experiences were so clear and precise it was as if she herself had existed in those times and had accompanied Alma every step of the way. She found it marvelous that it took only the evocative power of words or a photograph for them to become real, and for her to make them her own.

Alma Belasco had been an active, energetic woman who was as intolerant of her own failings as of those of others, but as she grew older she was softening, and had more patience with her fellows and with herself. “If nothing hurts, that means I woke up dead,” she would tell herself as she opened her eyes and had to stretch her muscles to ward off cramps. Her body was starting to become frail: she needed to find ways to avoid stairs or to guess the meaning of a sentence she hadn't truly heard. Everything cost her more effort and time, and there were things she simply could no longer do, such as driving at night, putting gas in the car, opening a bottle of water, carrying bags of food. That was why she needed Irina. By contrast, her mind was sharp; she could remember the present just as well as the past, provided that she didn't fall into the temptation of jumbling things up; neither her memory nor her reasoning failed her. She could still draw and had the same intuition for color; she went to the workshop but did not paint much because it tired her; she preferred to delegate this to Kirsten and the assistants. She never mentioned her limitations, confronting them without fuss, but Irina was aware of them. Alma detested old people's obsession with their ailments, their aches and pains, a subject of no possible interest to others, not even doctors.

“There's a widespread belief no one dares mention in public that we old people are redundant, we take up space and use resources that productive people need,” she used to say.

She did not recognize many of the people in the photographs, fleeting faces from the past who could be done without. In others, the ones Irina stuck in the albums, she could appreciate the stages of her life, the passing years with their birthdays, parties, holidays, graduations, and weddings. These were happy moments, as nobody took pictures of the unhappy ones. She herself hardly featured in them, but by early autumn Irina was better able to appreciate the woman Alma had once been. Nathaniel's photographic portraits of her, part of the Belasco Foundation's legacy, were discovered by San Francisco's small artistic world, and a newspaper dubbed Alma the best-photographed woman in the city.

At Christmas the previous year, an Italian publisher had brought out a selection of Nathaniel's photographs in a luxury edition. A few months later an astute American agent organized one exhibition in New York and another in the most prestigious gallery on San Francisco's Geary Street. Alma refused to take part in these projects or to speak to the press. She said she preferred to be seen as the model of those years and not as the old lady of today, but confessed to Irina that this was out of not vanity but caution. She didn't have the strength to reexamine that period in her past; she was afraid of what the camera might reveal that was invisible to the naked eye. Yet Seth's insistence finally overcame her resistance. Her grandson had visited the gallery several times and been impressed. There was no way he was going to let Alma miss the exhibition: to him it seemed like an insult to Nathaniel's memory.

“Do it for Grandfather, who'll be turning in his grave if you don't go. I'll come to fetch you tomorrow. Tell Irina to come with us. The pair of you will be surprised.”

He was right. Irina had leafed through the Italian edition, but nothing prepared her for the impact of those enormous portraits. Seth drove the three of them there in the family's heavy Mercedes-Benz, since it was impossible for them to fit either in Alma's car or on his motorbike. They went at a dead hour of the afternoon, when they thought they would find the gallery empty. The only people they saw were a hobo stretched out on the sidewalk by the entrance, and a couple of Australian tourists to whom the Chinese porcelain doll of a gallery assistant was trying to sell something. She barely glanced at the new arrivals.