The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [26]
Now what? The streets were truly gray, washed over with gray. She didn’t want to go back home. She sat down in a café on the corner. The loneliness overwhelmed her. Now it appeared as a dark pit in front of her. She was falling, falling in. She tried to claw her way out, frantically, like an animal. People moved around inside the café. They passed by on the street. No one knew, no one knew anything. She was clawing at the sides of a dark hole. There was nothing she could do. But she had to do something.
She would call someone, that’s what she would do, anyone. In her cell phone she had a list of contacts, assiduously collected at social gatherings. She called a girl who was somewhat of a friend, though she didn’t trust her, Australian, Melody, a complete butterfly. Melody wasn’t there. She left a message. Then she called Melody several more times in case she actually was there. She called me. I also didn’t pick up this time. Next she started calling one by one down her list of contacts, putting on her best voice and upper-class accent, richly melodic in the extreme, “Hello, it’s Isolde. I just wondered what my great friend was doing tonight, I’m free.” Sometimes she’d call twice, or several more times for good measure, throwing away all her manners, ruining, in many cases, all her chances, with this man or that very sought-after society hostess, toppling the delicately assembled social edifice she’d been constructing so carefully over these months. But at least, momentarily, the calling brought relief. The illusion of contact, if not contact itself, soothed her enough, so that she could safely stand up and, braving the pit, leave the café and make her way home.
eight
When I was working for the botanist, he lent me a book one day about the Cambrian Explosion, that pivotal biological point in the history of life on earth when an astounding diversity of animal life, nearly all the species we know now, appeared in the course of a relatively short time. What provoked it? Theories abound. Geochemical perturbations, unprecedented cell structure mutations, a dramatic lift in oxygen levels, allowing animals to radiate spectacularly. But no one explanation has proved conclusive. Those first months in Buenos Aires were something like my own little Cambrian Explosion. In the same way, not just one event, but a combination of converging factors in my life, some interior, some exterior, provoked this situation, some which I can identify, others which remain less clear. Later I would wonder—how important was geography? Would it have happened elsewhere? Would it have happened were I not in that paradoxically fertile posture, on the brink of despair? Whatever the causes, the effect was clear. Buenos Aires, dead, came alive to me. But it was not only that. Through Buenos Aires, I was able to see the universe in a way I had never seen it before.
Gabriel was an important presence. And Leonarda was, of course, a defining factor. It was in her presence that Buenos Aires first came alive, but then as with certain drug experiences that you can reproduce later without taking the drug, the city would stay alive for me or rather, simply, it became a world I could see. So, I began to wonder, what had I been seeing before? A partial view, episodic, not only large parts of the world, but large parts of my brain—is not the brain the world?—in darkness. Suddenly, I became