Either way, when it got to be evening and we started feeling tired we’d get a drink at some bar and look through our guidebook, trying to decide where to go for dinner, and maybe ask the bartender for advice. In Mendoza, this style of life didn’t seem the slightest bit extravagant; it felt perfectly natural.
Oddly enough, that idea I’d had of a Buenos Aires honeymoon . . . well, however you looked at it, this trip could no longer be that, and yet somehow our days in Mendoza felt a lot more like a honeymoon than the days we had spent going to see tango shows and looking at all the different-coloured buildings in La Boca, which is the sort of thing people usually do on their honeymoons. We felt an odd kind of satisfaction, a feeling we wouldn’t have had if we had been living a similar life in Tokyo. The town and the climate and the old buildings all worked together to create an atmosphere that lent our serene day-to-day existence its special colour. The coldness, the mountain air, the great height of the sky. And then there was the way the big leaves of the trees lining the streets just kept dropping from their branches, dancing down in the wind . . . how the sight of it sank straight down into your heart. It felt as if we had been living this way, here in this town, for ages, and day by day our life in Tokyo just kept slipping farther away.
My husband’s parents had lived in Yamanashi. There was no one we knew left in the prefecture now, so we never went there.
“Something about the air and the colour of the sky here is really similar. It’s funny, there’s nothing special about this town at all, but I just never seem to get tired of it.”
I guess not, I thought, and once again found myself facing the unfamiliar scenery that stretched away into the distance. Back before my parents even began to consider having me, my husband had a place in the midst of scenery like this, lived and worked in a culture unknown to me.
Of course, my parents were opposed to our marriage, and my husband’s only relative, his older sister, had been against it too. I think that’s natural.
I had gone out with younger people a few times, but I couldn’t stand all the energy they had. No matter how much fun I was having, I’d always end up letting my attention slide over to the darkness on the windowpane, the silhouettes of birds dissolving into the sky on their way to someplace distant, the wings of a moth fanning open and then closing again, lightly resisting the wind – things like that. Even people who began by wrapping this penchant of mine in a blanket of warmth would eventually come out and say that being with me made them feel lonely, that being around me wasn’t any fun, that kind of thing, and even if they never came out and said it, they would have the kind of expression on their faces that showed they were thinking it when they left.
As for my husband, there was no denying that he was a dirty old man with a taste for younger women, but even so you could sense something quiet in him, maybe because of his age. Though he didn’t have much class, and there was a side to him that was energetic and short-tempered, the impression he left you with was always very quiet, very still. And his clothes always exuded this nice smell that called up all kinds of memories. It was the same smell I’d encountered in the wardrobe at my favourite grandfather’s house. When I was little, I used to go over to his house to play, and I’d climb into that wardrobe and huddle there surrounded by that smell, giving myself a rest. And in the dark of the wardrobe, though I was still just a child, I would think about how I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the smell anymore after my grandfather died, and since I knew he didn’t have much longer, I’d make up my mind to inhale as much of it as I could while I still had the chance. When I thought about that kind of thing, I’d always start to feel terribly alone, and I’d start to wonder if there was anything at all in the world that went on forever. And then I discovered memory. I decided that the dried-out scent had penetrated so deeply into my cells that it must be eternal. Thinking this thought in the darkness of that wardrobe, I began to feel a little stronger. I wasn’t worried about what happened to people after they died. The wonderful aroma that I’d breathed in so vigorously would embrace me for as long as I lived. Once I was able to think that way, the darker the darkness became – the more it frightened me to know that eventually a day would come when I’d no longer be able to emerge from the wardrobe and find my grandfather’s beaming face waiting for me – the more assured I became of my own existence.
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