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WHEN IT WAS about to rain, Matilda was always uneasy
about the world outside. Her body felt like a thirsty
plant, while her eyes would claim their perpetual
right to exchange their own blue light with that of a pure sky. This
afternoon, back from work, she was busy preparing topics for projects
in Australian Geography. Her students had no idea she was a painter:
she didn’t care to betray anything so personal —as personal as her
sentimental life, or rather her sentimental disaster— in front of them.
However much she grew attached to some of them, she had to keep
this distance, the privacy and secrecy of a supposed “real self ”, which
was indeed the one life had denied her, at any rate one buried so deep
in the crannies of her twisted past that she would never be able to dig
it up and proffer it for all the world to see. Jacques had never written
about her after their parting, for all she knew, but she liked to think
that, had he made her the central character of a novel, both realistic
and abstract or symbolic, as Mr. Oki’s A girl of Sixteen, in Kawabata’s
Beauty and Sadness, he would have described her mood in these precise
words: “a self buried so deeply in the crannies of her twisted past...”.
Maybe there was something slightly clichéd about it, but then, was not
her very life story heavily clichéd insofar as her flight from her only
lover, and the permanent sadness —with its constant rhythm of quiet
despair and sudden pangs of pain— had arrested its course at the very
moment when it could develop into something radically unconventional?
Even now, at thirty-nine, nearly twenty years after the event, she was
unable to determine whether she had curled back from the blinding,
burning shine of the happiness they would have enjoyed together, from
the afterworldly completeness of that bliss, with their four children
(she had said “four”, and he had accepted it) playing on the grounds or
on the beach, cycling along the twisted streets of the Pittwater shaded
hills, with poetry, painting and music as their faithful companions, or
whether she had shrunk from the terrible blow that it would be to realize
that such perfection was not meant for human beings after all: what, if
he grew tired of her, if he preferred to go with another girl, a younger,
more socializing female, after ten or twenty years? What if he abandoned
her, as he was ready to abandon Sylvie for her sake? What if his or her
talent dried out in the constant confrontation of their identical taste
and artistic impulses? What if one of the children was not handsome,
was handicapped or of frail health? What if his European nostalgia had
the better of her present seduction, of his unacknowledged passion for
this silent, secretive land, and pitted him against her, the obstacle to
his return? She was sure she could not live in Europe; it would be like
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