Forever Twilight
A young man in a hotel bar sits down for a drink…
*NOTE: What follows is a “sidebar” to the story of Graceful Gale published in Easy Reader on Thursday, October 27, 2016*
Graceful Gale, one of the characters of Queen Mary’s “Dark Harbor,” reminded me suddenly of a vignette I’d penned a few months earlier. It takes place in a coffee shop in São Paulo, Brazil, and numerous men and women, some fictional and some not, are telling one another their ideas for stories or novels they hope to write. The following tale is told by a young musician named Emeric who lives in Rio de Janeiro. He promises “a tragedy, written in stone.” It follows a vignette about an ugly woman (Ismênia, see below) who gives birth to the most handsome child imaginable, and precedes a fable about Beauty and the Beast, after the original fairy tale ends, but before the Prince begins to find himself reverting to his animal-like form. In short, these are all stories about transformation, and they’re part of a longer manuscript. But enough; let’s move our chairs closer to the table and listen in.
“I was barely out of my teens,” Emeric said, “but times were hard for my parents and siblings and so I sat in with various combos that entertained tourists in the hotel lounges or piano bars, both in Ipanema and Copacabana, occasionally Leblon. Le Méridien, for example, the Luxors, Sofitel… After one such gig of soft bossa novas the pianist and the bassist quickly packed up their gear. Tomorrow night, 9:30, they called from the exit. Because the bartender had made it clear that when we played our drinks were on the house, I sat down for an Antarctica before walking home.”
“He was offering you the run of the bar and all you could ask for was a beer?”
“Well, being poor I didn’t have expensive tastes,” Emeric replied. “Anyway, in the dim lighting I hadn’t really noticed her, but a woman was hunched over her glass, sitting three stools to my right. A young couple and an elderly businessman had gotten up and left, and maybe that was when I became fully aware of the woman for the first time. She was dressed in serious colors, with a shawl of shadows, an all-encompassing dark mantilla, I guess it was, as if she’d been attending a funeral. Well, I didn’t mean to stare, and I wasn’t thinking of making any moves on her, too lacrimonious, if that’s a word (“It isn’t,” said João Ubaldo), but she must have sensed – as women do – that she was being studied, and so she briefly turned in my direction. It was only for a moment, but I received quite a shock.”
“Sounds like you encountered Ismênia,” laughed Luiz Alfredo.
“No, just the opposite,” said Emeric. “Although her eyes were cold, like cut stone – hard, sharp, multifaceted – her face was remarkably well shaped. What took me aback, however, was the tint of her skin; it was very pale, a chalky white. At first I wondered if she wasn’t an albino, but then I decided it must have been the contrast between her dark veil and her natural tonality…”
“A contrast, of course,” said Friedrich. “Just as the Moon is enhanced by the clouds in the night sky. After all, what is the Moon at midday? Pale and washed out, that’s all, and certainly not Romantic. Go on, young man.”
“Me, I’m guessing she was Swedish,” said Jô Soares; “or maybe a Dane. They too have cold eyes.”
“A few minutes later I noticed that the glass in front of her was empty, and yet she didn’t move or request another drink. So I beckoned Ricardo, and when he came over I said as softly as I could, Please give that woman a refill, but don’t say it’s from me. Ricardo then took down a clean glass, poured in a small amount of liquid gold, and placed it gently in front of the silent woman. It’s from the guy to your left, he said.
“My jaw dropped open when I heard what tumbled from his lips, but the woman didn’t even look over. I thought she’d at least throw me another glance, but no; no nod, no smile, nothing. Well, she continued to sit there and now, rather intrigued, I too stayed put. Half an hour went by. Might as well send over another, I thought, and again I beckoned Ricardo. This time he didn’t say it was from me but she knew, and she turned her head sharply in my direction. What is this? she said. What are you hoping for? and there was such a chill in her voice that I froze, I simply sat there dumbfounded.”
“A poor guitarist, nursing his warm beer. Go on.”
“However, instead of returning to her drink and her private thoughts, she regarded me intently for several seconds. To be scrutinized in this way, I have to admit, made me feel very uncomfortable. And I knew she was aware of how shaken I was. Did it give her pleasure? I have no idea. Perhaps a minute went by and she said, You were one of the musicians, weren’t you? I stammered yes, how did you know? She didn’t reply, but kept her eyes on me, cold eyes, the ones like cut stone. I was thinking that it was time to thank Ricardo, leave a few coins for his trouble, and head for home. Come sit here, the woman said, and I knew she meant the stool next to her. I also knew it wasn’t a flirtatious invite. Far from it; I’m no fool, Jô Soares.”
“Aw, c’mon, I never said you were.”
“I slowly stood up and now, almost reluctantly, moved three feet which somehow seemed more like one hundred. Richardo was pre-occupied, but the next thing I knew he’d placed two new glasses on the counter, one in front of the woman and one in front of me. For a few moments, neither of us said a word nor made any kind of movement. In fact, she was as still as could be. Finally, she reached for her glass and I noticed – even in the dim lighting of the bar – just how white her hand was. I hadn’t been imagining it. I then ventured a quick glance at her facial features, although they were largely concealed.
“What I saw was that she was not a young woman, and it puzzled me that I couldn’t guess her age, not even an approximate age, but it was evident that she’d once been quite attractive. I mean, even more attractive. Now, the last thing I wanted was for the silence to become deafening, so I took a long swallow of beer and then said, You must be visiting from out of town. Are you in Rio for business? For pleasure? No answer. I’m sorry, I should have introduced myself, I’m Emeric; and your name?
“Why do you want to know my name? she replied, and I was stunned. After all, she’d just invited me to sit beside her.”
Luis Fernando laughed. “At this point I’d have grabbed my hat, Nice chatting with you ma’am, and bolted for the exit.”
“Don’t think that didn’t cross my mind,” Emeric said. “It was then that Ricardo, giving me a wink, placed a new drink in front of her, and the woman carefully took a few sips, and then a few more. To this day, I wonder if Ricardo didn’t add something to it because the woman seemed to let down her guard, albeit briefly, and after a moment she said, My name is Paphos. I had to ask her to repeat it, then spell it, because I’d never come across a name like that.”
“A name like that,” echoed João Ubaldo. “In his novel, On Heroes and Tombs, Sábato writes something like, In the old days they used to give people names like that. But Paphos, that doesn’t sound Scandinavian; maybe Greek?”
“Perhaps she was a Greek goddess,” joked Luiz Alfredo, “akin to Androgeny, the twins Amnesia and Amnesty, and Apostrophe.”
Everyone smiled or grinned except for Emeric. “You’re closer to the truth than you imagine.”
“Is that right? So she wasn’t Scandinavian after all. But Greeks don’t have pale white skin.”
“I didn’t know much about mythology at the time,” Emeric said, “still don’t, but I had heard about Pygmalion and Galatea because when I was a kid I’d seen an amateur production of My Fair Lady and then was told the basis of the musical, which wasn’t entirely, as I thought, Bernard Shaw.”
“Sure, we know the story,” said João Ubaldo. “Pygmalion was a sculptor, and something of a misogynist, so he carved his ideal woman out of ivory, fell in love with it, with ‘her,’ nearly pined himself to death, until Aphrodite took pity on him and breathed life into his creation. He and Galatea lived happily ever after; end of story. And so your Paphos was in an acting troupe, in Rio to star in one of the lead roles, and when you met her she still had on her stage makeup.”
“Almost,” said Emeric. “If you read up on the myth you’ll discover that Pygmalion and Galatea had a child, a daughter, and that her name was Paphos. That’s all she is, just a name, a passing reference. But tell me, what happened to the girl, who grew up and became, as you can imagine, a very pretty young woman?”
At first no one said anything.
Werner Herzog sat up and leaned forward, and José Saramago grinned: “Well, now we’re getting somewhere!”
“When she was eighteen or thereabouts she fell in love and was engaged to be married. However, on the eve of her marriage Paphos suddenly turned into an ivory statue. It needn’t be said that her fiancé was distraught, but at least he had the wherewithal to acquire the statue, which he kept with him through the many years that followed. But one day, perhaps it was thirty years later, the ivory softened, became warm, and Paphos opened her eyes.
“What she found, when her senses came back to her, was that her parents were dead and that her once-youthful fiancé was now a tired old man. They would sit across from one another and he would gaze at her with such sadness, with sorrow and regret so overwhelming that it flooded the room and flowed throughout the entire house, that in the end she thought, I’m suffocating here, and so one day Paphos got up, opened the door, and never returned. She managed to fend for herself, eventually accepted the proposal of another man, a young man of perhaps thirty who believed Paphos to be in her twenties, and then the same thing happened again. She turned into a statue. Only this time, when she awoke, she was dusty, dirty, and in a storage shed, and it wasn’t so easy to shove aside boxes and crates and then break open a window so she could crawl out like a common thief.
“Half a century had passed. She never learned what had happened to her second fiancé, nor did she make much of an effort to find him, recalling how painful and awkward it had been the first time. After a good soaping down, Paphos still looked twenty, despite two or three ‘chips,’ but she was now aware that because of her lineage, that is, her mother having once been a statue, she herself was cursed with a genetic makeup that was prone to sudden reversals between malleable flesh and hardened ivory. In short, she was unable to live a normal life and was fated to remain forever an outsider, an outcast.”
“I’m drawn to stories of outsiders,” said Werner Herzog, as if we didn’t know.
“In her biography of him,” said Eugène de Panthémont, “Ragna Stang quotes Edvard Munch, We do not pass away – the world passes away from us. This seems to have befallen your own ‘my fair lady.’”
“She was an exceptionally beautiful woman,” Emeric continued, “and she was never at a loss for suitors, but she forced herself to reject them. Against my will I am often indifferent, she said; I smile sadly when people accuse me of having a heart of stone. And so I never stay in one place for long; I’m always at sea, a ship with no port.”
“Just like the Dutchman in Wagner’s opera,” said Werner Herzog, “but with no Senta to redeem her.”
“Perhaps our Emeric was her redeemer. So what happened next?”
“Nothing. What could happen? I listened, spellbound. Her story sounds fantastic, I’ll agree, but I had no reason to doubt her.”
“Maybe you should have pinched her or spilled your beer to see what would happen. Get a little rise out of her, you know?”
Emeric didn’t smile. “Even in human form, the statue in her was always present. This was an exceptional encounter, perhaps the encounter of a lifetime, but I knew where it was going. Who doesn’t? At the end of her story she looked at me with those cut-stone eyes and commanded that I go away. Leave me, she said; leave me. and. do. not. return. Paphos was holding her glass with both hands, and they were incredibly white; and incredibly lifeless. I got up without a word and I obeyed her. I never looked back.” ER
