Voyassitude

Very much in sync with what happens to Daniel Sempere in Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s acclaimed novel The Shadow of the Wind, I’m waking up unable to remember a woman’s face. I can still evoke how her eyes followed my hands or the delicacy of her words through the streets of a distant city, but her features are getting blurrier and blurrier, swallowed by the black hole of my past.

That’s why I’m coming to meet her one last time at the edges of my memory. The end of the year always brings an ominous sense of finality to me, so it feels as if these words are a farewell to that girl at Cornwallis Beach before moving on with a life in which I will no longer be sure if she’ll wander the alleys of my mind. But for a few hours, on a rainy afternoon on the precipice of the world, she was my only certainty and this is how it unfolded.

•••

She looks at my hands, tracks their every movement as I talk, each word accentuated by gestures I didn’t know I make so often. Her attentive stare makes me self-conscious, I want to hide my arms and I wish for her to simply look me straight in the eye because I cannot get enough of the tranquil energy emanating from her gaze. Her blue eyes (blue? Bluish-green?) are not electric, they do not evoke storms; they are an ocean of peacefulness, a gentle brush that warms me, enthralls me, absorbs me. I’m sure they could spark and hit like thunder, set the whole island ablaze, but for the most part they remain a stream of calmness one could forever navigate in.

We’re at a coffee shop sheltering from the nocturnal winter wind battering the city. Twelve hours ago we were strangers, but now we give the impression of long-term friends reminiscing about home and past trips. Twelve thousand kilometers from where I was born and some eighteen thousand from where she grew up, we build with words and tales a bridge to cross into each other’s lives. We happen right there, oblivious to everything.

•••

We met at a tour involving some twelve to fifteen people plus a very experienced guide, but they were secondary actors in a show with just one main character, the one that seized my utmost attention the moment I stepped onto the tour bus. At the first big stop I committed the sin of making up a half-truth to speak to her, and from then on we connected while the tour group, the location, and the world itself slipped from my hands as I sank in that blue ocean of hers.

The natural location we visited was so prone to rain that we were given raincoats before our main hike began. The landscape was precious, the smell and sounds of the earth in their purest form were enchanting, and yet the two of us would occasionally ignore this miracle before us, lost as we were in the magnificence of our own anecdotes made more vivid thanks to the background surrounding us. I’m unable to recall one single detail the guide mentioned during the hike, but I can perfectly picture her shoes valiantly surviving the mud provoked by the heavy downpour upon us, the direction I walked to as she spoke of her worst trip, the crack somewhere in my chest the instant she mentioned her fiancé, her voice blending with the natural musicality of a perennial location to produce a reverberation still echoing in my body. I never neglected a tour guide so much in my life, and yet when I exited that place I felt all the wisdom and joy of the world buzzing inside me despite her mention of a loved one.

•••

She carries a scent I only perceive at the coffee shop. As soon as she removes her scarf and coat I detect it. It seems a combination of perfume with the smell of her clothes, her hair, and that extra touch from the earlier rain. It is a cozy fragrance, timid but warm and endearing, the kind of exceptional aroma that spellbinds you, one you inhale once in your lifetime, one you wish to bottle and treasure forever. God, these lines are meant to bring back her face but now I equally long for her scent and it pains me to think I will never be able to sense that perfume again.

•••

There were more locations to visit during the tour, affable sceneries to cement the grandiosity of this tiny, marvelous nation, and yet she was the only destination I desired. I eagerly awaited each new stop because it gave me the chance to approach her, to resume our conversation in new and more mesmerizing landscapes made out of dams, beaches, and forests.

Once we were back in the city the tour guide started dropping tourists at their hotels until there were three of us left at the final stop. She was one of them. After she approached the guide to thank him for his services, I did the same and then, mustering every ounce of courage I could, I asked her if she’d like to grab a drink.

•••

Zafón also wrote once that we only remember what never really happened, and now that many more details about the encounter with that girl reemerge, I’m starting to wonder if she ever truly existed. Each of the forty-eight hours I spent there on the margins of this planet is touched with a chimerical aura, turning every moment into a magical realism occurrence that casts upon her an almost legendary status because how, how did we happen so far away? And why, why did she happen to me?

There is a video, a fifteen-second sequence featuring her for the first two seconds. Occupied as I was filming the movement of a tidal channel at Cornwallis Beach, I inadvertently captured a fragment of her life that I discovered many days later when the trip was over. I’m watching it again, screen by the keyboard, a window into that gelid afternoon in which she’s oblivious to the camera, to the tourists, the hint of a smile hanging from her lips as she absorbs the resplendence of Manukau Harbour. How curious that what should become the irrefutable proof of her existence is actually deepening her air of fantasy.

•••

Parks, souvenir shops, a bookstore closing soon. These were the stops of our own impromptu downtown tour, rush hour livening up the place at sunset. As we searched for a coffee shop we talked and smiled and reminisced, and even though I was scheduled to leave the country in twelve hours and still had a few things on my itinerary to complete, I could’ve stayed indefinitely listening to her, to her apologies every few minutes whenever her English betrayed her, thoughts running faster than words, an all too familiar issue of mine. Darkness settled in by the time we found the cozy café we took refuge in.

•••

Her coffee, my wine, a table; that’s all that separates us. And here’s what I can say about the girl at Cornwallis Beach sitting in front of me at the coffee shop, where I inevitably end up condemned to fall for her: Her lips draw a perfect, round ‘O’ when adding an “Oh my God” to her anecdotes or my home stories; she smiles quite often, easily and earnestly; she takes care of her image, you can tell by the rings she wears, her neat, polished nails, the stylishness in her attire, the vibrancy of her hair. Does she wear makeup? I cannot tell. Her cheeks glow with a reddish, seductive color but I’m not sure if it’s because of the warmth inside the place or some cosmetics to contrast with her paleness.  She brightens when speaking of her mom and saddens when talking of her dad. She laughs, she listens, she dreams, and she’s a dream herself, making me dread the moment I have to wake up and end the illusion of her company. Which eventually happens, of course. The goodbye arrives. A hug, a picture, our own different paths; that’s all that separates us.

•••

I am now able to remember her face once again, conjuring up her features, whispering her name like a spell as if to seal the reality of her existence because there is that growing fear that she just never occurred, that she is blending with the fantasies in my memory, the ghost in the back of my head mentioned by Foals in their song Spanish Sahara, and every attempt at reaching her, even if just for a final goodbye, only seems to move her farther away. So for now, at least one more time, I’m revisiting the video with her two-second appearance to hold on to every little detail hoping that she indeed exists.

And there she is. The black of her shoes, pants, and scarf with an arctic blue coat, blonde hair tied to resist the force of the breeze, a half-smile suspended in her face and the radiant tranquility of her blue eyes contemplating the waters of a harbour opening out into the Tasman Sea. Tall and magnificent as reality and myth all at once, there stands that girl at Cornwallis Beach.