“Your father was my first and greatest love,” she said, once they’d left the café. “And I’m still very happy with him. When I was younger than you are now, I had everything I could have dreamed of. At the time, my friends and I believed that love was the only reason for living. If you failed to find someone, then you could never claim to have realized your dreams.”
“Stick to the point, Mum.” Brida was impatient.
“I had other dreams, too, though. I dreamed, for example, of doing what you did, going off to the big city and discovering the world that lay beyond my village. The only way I could get my parents to accept my decision was by telling them that I needed to follow some course of study that wasn’t available locally.
“The sleepless nights I spent, thinking about how to broach the subject with them. I planned exactly what I was going to say and what they would say in reply and how I would answer.”
Her mother had never spoken to her like this before. Brida felt a mixture of affection and regret. They could have enjoyed other such moments, but they were both too caught up in their own worlds and their own values.
“Two days before I was going to talk to my parents, I met your father. I looked into his eyes and saw a special light there, as if I’d met the person I most wanted to meet in the world.”
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“Yes, I’ve had the same experience.”
“After I met your father, I realized, too, that my search was over. I didn’t need any other explanation of the world. I didn’t feel frustrated to be living here, always seeing the same people and doing the same things. Every day was different, because of the great love between us.
“We started going out together and then we got married. I never talked to him about my dreams of going to live in a big city, of discovering other places and other people. Because suddenly, the whole world fitted into my village. Love became my explanation for life.”
“You mentioned someone else, Mum.”
“Let me show you something,” her mother said in reply.
They walked to the bottom of the steps that led up to the Catholic church in the village, and which had been destroyed and then rebuilt over the centuries. Brida used to go to mass there every Sunday, and she remembered that, as a child, climbing those steps had been really hard. At the beginning of each stretch of balustrade was the carving of a saint—St. Paul to the left and St. James to the right—rather worn by time and by tourists. The ground was covered in dry leaves, as if autumn were about to arrive, not spring.
The church was at the top of the hill, and it was impossible to see it from where they were because of the trees. Her mother sat down on the first step and invited Brida to do the same.
“This is where it happened,” she said. “One afternoon, for some reason or other, I decided to come here to pray. I needed to
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be alone, to think about my life, and I thought the church would be a good place to do so.
“When I got here, however, I met a man. He was sitting where you are now, with two suitcases beside him, and he looked totally lost, desperately leafing through the book he was holding. I thought he must be a tourist in search of a hotel and so I went over to him. I even started talking to him. He seemed a bit startled at first, but then he relaxed.
“He said that he wasn’t lost. He was an archaeologist and had been driving north—where some ruins had been found—when the engine packed up. A mechanic would arrive soon, and so he’d decided to visit the church while he waited. He asked me about the village and the other villages nearby, about historic monu-ments.
“Suddenly, all the problems I’d been grappling with disappeared as if by magic. I felt really useful and started telling him everything I knew, feeling that the many years I’d spent in the region at last had some meaning. Before me was a man who had studied peoples and societies, who might hold in his memory, for the benefit of future generations, everything I’d heard or discovered when I was a child. That man sitting on the steps made me understand that I was important to the world and to the history of my country. I felt necessary, and that’s the best feeling a human being can have.
“When I’d finished telling him about the church, we went on to talk about other things. I told him how proud I was of my village, and he responded with some words by a writer whose name
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I don’t recall now, something about how understanding your own village helps you understand the world.”
“Tolstoy,” said Brida.
But her mother was still traveling in time, just as she herself had done one day, except that her mother didn’t require cathedrals adrift in space, subterranean libraries, or dusty books; she needed only the memory of that spring afternoon and a man sitting on the steps with his suitcases.
“We talked for quite a while. I had the whole afternoon free to spend with him, but since the mechanic might arrive at any moment, I decided to make the most of every second. I asked him about his world, about excavations, about the challenges of spending his life looking for the past in the present. He spoke to me of the warriors, wise men, and pirates who had once inhabited our country.
“Before I knew it, the sun was low on the horizon, and never, in all my life, had time passed so quickly. I sensed that he felt the same. He kept asking me questions to keep the conversation going, not giving me time to say that I had to leave. He talked nonstop, telling me all about his experiences, and he wanted to know everything about me, too. I could see in his eyes that he desired me, even though, at the time, I was nearly twice the age you are now.
“It was spring, there was a lovely smell of new things in the air, and I felt young again. There’s a flower that only blooms in the autumn; well, that afternoon, I felt like that flower. As if, suddenly, in the autumn of my life, when I thought I’d experienced everything
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I could experience, that man had appeared on the steps purely to show me that feelings—love, for example—do not grow old along with the body. Feelings form part of a world I don’t know, but it’s a world where there’s no time, no space, no frontiers.”
She remained silent for a while. Her eyes were still far off, fixed on that distant spring.
“There was I, like a thirty-eight-year-old adolescent, feeling that someone desired me. He didn’t want me to leave. Then all of a sudden, he stopped talking. He looked deep into my eyes and smiled. It was as if he’d understood with his heart what I was thinking, and wanted to tell me that it was true, that I was very important to him. For some time, we said nothing, and then we said good-bye. The mechanic had still not arrived.
“For many days, I wondered if that man really had existed, or if he was an angel sent by God to teach me the secret lessons of life. In the end, I decided that he had been a real man, a man who had loved me, even if only for an afternoon, and during that afternoon, he’d given me everything he had kept to himself throughout his whole life: his struggles, his joys, his difficulties, and his dreams. That afternoon I gave myself wholly as well—I was his companion, his wife, his audience, his lover. In a matter of only a few hours, I experienced the love of a lifetime.”
Mother looked at daughter. She hoped her daughter had understood, but deep down, she felt that Brida lived in a world in which that kind of love had no place.
“I’ve never stopped loving your father, not for a single day,”
she concluded. “He’s always been by my side, doing his best, and
