I was wearing my brother’s black suit, the one I’d worn to her dinner, though I’d gotten no farther than her kitchen. I didn’t understand the way I felt, my heart knotted, as if I had suffered a great loss. I barely knew Madame Halevy, and she had never finished her story. Then I understood that when someone begins to tell you her story, you are entwined together. Perhaps even more so if the ending hasn’t been divulged. It was exactly like dreaming the same dream, then waking too soon and never finding out what had happened. I watched leaves fall as the mourning prayers were recited. People here say that means a spirit is walking above you, in the trees, and that once a soul is free to join with them she can walk all the way to the world to come. That was a story I decided to believe.
I OFTEN THOUGHT OF Madame Halevy’s son, lost when he was only a year older than I was, and the second son that she tried to protect from fever by keeping him inside for a year. Time seemed different to me, less spread out in front of me. I saw it now as a box. I was inching my way across that box, and before long I would reach the other side. I often imagined myself as that old man sitting on a stone wall, the one Madame Halevy had predicted I’d be.
I stepped back into my own life. I concentrated on my painting. My mother glared and asked how I thought I would make my living as a man.
“There’s only one thing I want to do,” I said. “I intend to do it.”
“Whoever says that is a fool.”
“Were you a fool to live as you pleased?”
“That’s none of your business,” my mother told me. I laughed at that. After all, the decisions she’d made had formed my life.
I stomped out of the house. If I had only a limited amount of time, I planned to do as I pleased. I painted for hours, finding shelter on rainy days deep in the woods in a shack that had been deserted. I stumbled upon it by accident and immediately decided it should be mine. The woods were green and shadowy, and there were gumbo-limbo trees, whose red bark fell off in strips like skin off a sunburned man. I knocked on the door, and when there was no answer, I pushed it open. No one had lived in this place for a long time. It was as if it had been waiting for me.
I liked the way the light came in through the windows, falling through the trees in slashes of brightness. I painted like a madman, covering the walls of the shack with portraits and then with landscapes, one on top of another. Outside the grass was high and birds swooped down to catch mosquitoes at dusk. I stayed so late I brought candles with me, so that I might paint far into the evening. Colors changed in these conditions. The light flickered as if stars were trapped inside with me. I saw differently; objects became cloudy, then bright. There were all sorts of ancient herbs hanging from the ceiling on lengths of old rope. The scent in the shack was of anise, wood, and mint. Every time I went home I felt as though I were leaving my true self behind, that I was leaving the real person crouched down near a wall flecked with color, whereas the boy who walked through his family’s home was nothing more than a ghost.
One day as I was painting, trying to perfect the definition of a human hand and using my own as a model, I saw a shadow. Marianna was outside. I went out and stood in the grass beside her. She no longer went to school. Her mother needed her in their laundry business. They took in laundry from sailors and often found trinkets in the pockets of their clothes, shells from across the world, keys to hotel rooms in Europe and South America, addresses of women these sailors had once loved. Marianna showed me how she could carry a basket of laundry on her head. She did so perfectly. I tried, and when it fell she laughed at me. I invited her into the shack, but she shook her head, and took a step back. Something crossed her face, an expression I didn’t recognize.
“There was an old man who lived here. He used to put spells on people and save dying men. He could heal people who no one else could, but you had to pay him with something that was dear to you. I wouldn’t go in there,” she said. “And I wouldn’t go with you.”
Our differences were there between us and I hated that. I turned and went inside. She followed me and stood on the threshold. I could tell, our friendship was over. She was too grown up, she told me. Not a schoolgirl anymore. She proved that to me by kissing me. Then she vanished so quickly it seemed she had never been there. I had dreamed it surely. There were footsteps in the grass, but soon they disappeared too. I am embarrassed to admit, I cried, for she had been my truest friend, and she wasn’t that anymore. I’d had the first stirrings of love, but it didn’t matter.
I hoped that the old man who had lived here could heal me. I painted and painted, desperate, hoping for a vision the healer might send me. I sat on the floor and looked around me, and all at once I realized I had my answer. I had sketched my hand as if it was made out of palm fronds and meadows. This island was inside of me. I had captured light, heat, grass, sky. I had it all in my hands.