The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [52]
As she walked through the apartment, Isolde turned on the lights. Light, light, she needed light. She went into her bedroom and closed the door. Sitting down on her bed, she checked her cell phone in case a message or a call had come in she hadn’t heard. Nothing. Loneliness overtook her. It sunk deep inside her, into her bones, as damp weather can. Or it felt like a gray box. She was shut inside. When people spoke about the pleasures of melancholy, she didn’t understand it. There was no pleasure here. The loneliness sunk further. It chilled her chest. She felt that she had been alone her whole life. No one had ever actually come near.
She thought with longing of a past she hadn’t had, a house full of people and bounding dogs. She saw the dim wet house of her childhood, her mother’s shabby attempts at glamour. Her mother had valued glamour too, but had had neither the means nor the exposure to the vision to make it a reality in her home.
Isolde did have a vision. Or at least she had had one. What had happened? The obsession with Diego had entirely derailed her. It was as if she had been on a fleeting silver train, the TGV streaking through the French countryside, and suddenly, instead of getting off at her proposed destination, against all her carefully laid plans, had disembarked at a dingy stop. It looked okay from the outside, like most of those station stops in the French countryside, with petunias in the flower boxes, humble but clean, only in this case what she found, when she went around the corner of the station building, was something else. A run-down house, filth collecting on the walls. The people who lived there had gray faces, their clothes looked greasy. They had no sense at all of glamour or beauty, no urge toward these things, no understanding even of the words. Isolde was meant to live here. Her destiny, it had been decided, was among them, cleaning, cooking, scraping the garden to grow what little they could. The soil in this particular patch was not very fertile. Though she might fight against it, time would tell. Her hair would lose its sheen, go back to dishwater blond. From the work and malnutrition, her skin would go gray, slowly, never maybe entirely as gray as that of the others, but still. At first, scrubbing the house vigorously—she couldn’t bear to live in a filthy place—she would gradually desist, it was too much work and what did it matter? There was no one to see. Dirt would begin to collect again on the walls.
Isolde heard Claudia leaving. She felt scared. She went back out into the kitchen. No one. She couldn’t stay here. She had to go out.
She walked down the hill to the grassy stretch beside the museum, buying a newspaper on the way. The lilt of spring was settling into summer, at the height of which the days would be sweltering, people trying to move as little as possible, their clothes, when they did, dark with humidity. Beginning with the holidays and through the months of January and February, whoever could would find a means of escape, to the gray-sanded wind-beaten beaches of Argentina, where the water was choppy and cold or, for the flusher, the more golden ones of Uruguay and, for the very few, the pristine paradisiacal white stretches of Brazil. But not yet. It was still early December, the spring flowers drooping and falling from the trees, everyone beginning to shed their clothes. People took to the parks with even more abandon, in couples, groups, families, flinging themselves down on the grass.
The lack of solitary figures pointed up Isolde’s loneliness to her. She sat down on a bench and tried to absorb herself in her newspaper, looking for an interesting cultural event. It would have to be something free, like a gallery opening. Next she would have to summon cheer in her voice, pick up her phone and make some calls. “Hellooo, would you like to join me this evening ...” She thought for a moment. No, she couldn’t do it.