The Fugitivities, стр. 73

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“Maybe with a question,” she said. “Because who I am is not so simple, and even very difficult to say if one expects the name of a country to suffice. For instance, I am Armenian by heritage. Born in Beirut. Speak French and Spanish and Arabic. You could say I am a métèque, like Moustaki says in his song. My education was French. I was a student at the Sorbonne before I left it all. I lived for three years in Mexico City where I fell in love with a young lawyer who wanted to marry me. Another man I had to desert. I returned to France to be with my family.”

She tended to her father who was dying a long time. And then her mother, who started to decline soon after. She cared for them with the help of Rosemarie, a Catholic from Guyana who came by to help before her night shifts at the hospital. After her mother’s death, she fell into a depression. She took up part-time work at a travel agency. They were very nice and did their best but she was a terrible employee and they fired her soon after. She wasn’t working for the money anyway. Her parents had left her enough, not a fortune, but more than she had expected, especially once she sold their apartment.

That was the beginning of the second fugue. A flight to Buenos Aires, with vague plans to stay for a few months. The men she met there were intolerable, and most of the women too. But then in Quilmes she met two friends who were different from the others, who she discovered were not porteñas at all, but Uruguayans who lived in Buenos Aires where they could find work. They insisted she should discover their hometown. Her initial impression of Montevideo was that it was the ugliest, saddest-looking city she had ever seen. Nothing in its appearance should make one want to stay. And yet, for the first time in as long as she could remember, she started to feel alive again. Something about the city’s unrelenting air of sadness alleviated her own. For so long she had stopped trusting the faces of men. As the fog of depression lifted, she could see them again, but differently. She felt at ease and no longer sorry. She enjoyed defying them. The roughly whiskered drunks in their caps who inched along through the market streets of the Ciudad Vieja or sat on the seawall along the Rambla staring at the long breakers. She felt neither fear nor desire as she crossed paths with young men shouting and knocking into each other. Their world was so gray and melancholy that her own life in comparison stood tall. The weightlessness of afternoons became addictive.

Still, it might not have lasted. She had, in fact, been considering returning to Paris and would have if she hadn’t entered one night into a tavern called El Vasco for a late meal. “That was where I met him,” she said. Salvador Aussaresses. When she took a table, he was already quietly dining by himself. He was at first glance fairly ordinary in appearance, though she could tell from his brightly colored scarf that he liked to dress. When her food arrived, he rose in a grand manner and approached her without an invitation. “Forgive me, but a woman should never dine alone,” he said, in Spanish, and she knew immediately from his accent that he was Argentine. His attitude was off-putting, but charming enough that she felt it unnecessary to dress him down. He ordered more wine for the table and introduced himself as a successful local painter. He was disappointed that this information left her unimpressed. But when he learned that she was from Paris the conversation lit up. He knew it well. Had many gallerists who carried his work there over the years. Had not been back for at least a decade but had an undying admiration and love for the French and their art. He was a man who had been very handsome once, even if something had worn in the better features she could tell he had once possessed. When