Paris Letters #52

Snow had ridden a thousand miles on a bus through rural Canada just to visit me. Stepping into the cold and bright air she looked bewildered, and then she put her arms around me and said: Sensei. But I was no longer her teacher, and she was no longer my student.

Walking through the sleeping town with her, I reflected on the ironies. I had left Japan, but now Japan had found me. With our feet hanging over the dark waters of the peer, I held an imaginary fishing pole, and she asked me what I was doing: Fishing of course, I replied. There wasn’t much to do in this town, and, in any case, it was better to do imaginary things than what most people are up to.

“But what the hell are you really doing here”? she said, looking down into the dark cold water. “There is nothing here.” St John’s, Newfoundland wasn’t exactly Tokyo.

“I like nothing,” I told her. “And besides. C left me. I came here to start over.”

She was drunk on red wine and tears fell from her hot dark eyes.

“Why did she leave you? You were perfect.” She said. Her heart was in knots.

It occurred to me she that she might have been in love with C too, that we represented some kind of illusory freedom to her. Eventually she would have to go back to Japan, marry her childhood sweetheart, work in some high-end company, and look after her elderly mother. I looked into her doll-like face, which seems shattered in a million pieces. So many guilty love affairs and betrayal.

“I am not innocent like her”, she told me.

“Your hair is so black, like a raven”. I said.

“Shut up! Don’t put me in your imagination. Don’t love me. Let me love you. Hate me!” She begged like some Japanese pop song. No poetic half-truths were welcome here. There was a fury in her eyes — it was attractive, to say the least.

Out on a boat, we watched dolphins doing arcs in the water, near a place called ‘Dead mans cove’—the dolphin seemed to be her animal. Our bodies were close as the Atlantic lifted us up high in its swells and then crashed down again.

We agreed to meet in Montreal, in 10 days. She had some money and would buy us a ticket to South America, and we would run away together. If I was late she would return to Tokyo.

I gave her a little porcelain turtle to remember me by: “So you come out of your shell”, I told her. But that would be too naked, too terrible — her broken doll face seemed to say.

What am I doing? I thought to myself. Will I fall for another young princess, and end up like some broken Casanova in the Salvation army men’s hostel, drinking milk from a tin can?

The sisters of mercy they are not departed or gone, sings Leonard Cohen, who knows everything about such matters. They come in legions to nurse your wounds, they laugh like bells in your ears—they show you new continents.

Postscript:

When I arrived in Montreal, Snow was in the bus station crying. I was a day late and she had waited. We had one night together, during a heavy snowstorm. Holding her naked body I felt a happiness that I had forgotten. But I was too gentle to her, she told me — she would like to be maltreated. I didn’t really understand what she meant. She lit a cigarette — her skin shining like razor blades. And then her face looked sad, unbearably sad.

She turned away from me and pirouetted. It was dawn and she walked stark naked out on the balcony into the blizzard. Snow against snow.