Excerpt:
It’s late. My wall clock reads about 4:15. A beautiful piece that once belonged to my grandmother, later passed on to my mother, now decorates this grimy little room where I spend my nights writing in solitude, accompanied only by cheap cigarettes that roughen my voice.
As usual, I’m out of good ideas; the pages I produce end up in the trash. Nothing convinces me. I open a bottle of whiskey. Being unemployed and selling very few of my writings, I can’t afford a fine one—but the one I have will do. I set myself to write a love letter. When I was young, I used to write some for my classmates. I never signed with my name: I always left my initials at the bottom, convinced no one would ever notice. Later, I wrote them less and less; there were no girls who interested me, nor was I of interest to them. I wrote letters to women I would never meet, pretending to carry on an active correspondence. I decorated them, perfumed the envelopes, and then burned them. Women today use cell phones, and I cannot stand the passing of time.
“My dear,” perhaps that is a decent way to begin—or “Esteemed lady”… “Beautiful young woman.” How fervently I wish this letter won’t intrude on her busy day; I shall simply leave here a few thoughts that keep me awake at night and try to capture them in these modest lines. I’ve admired her for months, and her presence—fleeting yet radiant—does nothing but deepen my desire to enjoy her company a little more. I know she takes tea in that ladies’ salon she visits with such joy. I know this because I began working at the pawn shop across the street. When I saw her walk into that place, my heart began a relentless race, and my thoughts started orbiting around her. Night after night, thinking of her.
She placed her delicate hand, covered by a white glove, upon the items she had come to part with, and her eyes met mine. That day, the light pouring through the pawn shop windows seemed determined to cut her out from the rest of the world—as if she were the only person worthy of being seen. I remember that when her gloves brushed the counter, a faint tremor ran through her wrist, perhaps from the weight of what she was leaving behind. I, clumsy and mesmerized, barely managed to ask if she needed assistance, though the only thing I truly needed was time: time to look at her, to absorb her every gesture, to understand why her presence made that old shop feel almost sacred.
I don’t know if she noticed, but when she laid those objects upon the wood—a small brass box, an aged brooch, and an embroidered handkerchief—I understood for the first time that beauty could carry a trace of sorrow. For in the instant she gave me that mischievous initial, that tiny letter that fell from her lips like an involuntary confession, I felt as though a secret had been drawn between us. Something that was not quite speech, and yet not silence either: a brief suspension of the world, a tacit agreement that we would pretend, even for a moment, to belong to each other’s lives.
I asked her name and she let an initial slip out, laughing like a schoolgirl. She asked for mine and I played along. She never guessed it, but I did manage to learn hers. It torments me not to know anything else about her. No one in the city knows her; she never returned to the tea salon, nor to the pawn shop. She left me only her beautiful eyes carved into my heart. I searched everywhere and found nothing but an empty silence that wounded me. I know she does not love me; her eyes were never meant to rest upon someone like me. But allow me, now that I’ve learned who she is and where she lives, to state publicly that I am in love—that nothing in this world would make me happier than her perfume enveloping me while her arms slide around my neck and I take her by the waist to the rhythm of a waltz in a darkened room...
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