The Rest Is Silence

There she was again, at that same sidewalk table with her husband. Once more she was smiling at him, genuinely, and beckoning for him to join them. He raised his hat, hesitating as if on his way past, although he was not going anywhere, just walking about in the infinite leisure of this place. Then as he turned toward them he realized how greatly he’d desired to find them again, especially her. Approaching tortuously among the crowded tables, he smiled too. And was aware that only she had drawn any such congenial expression from him here in this still strange city of famous sights and pleasures, the city there were so many songs about, the one everybody professed a desire to see, but where for him nothing—not the wide tree-lined boulevards, the magnificent buildings and the statued gardens, nor the mingling throngs of delighted newcomers and satisfied habitues—none of all this had wakened any warmth in him until he encountered her.

That first time he had been sitting, alone as always, at a table not far from theirs when he grew aware of her interested glances. It was more of the encompassing strangeness that this young and beautiful woman should notice him, who knew himself plainly a worn old man. Not that she had been the least coquettish. Indeed it would have been hard to imagine her that with anyone, so intensely did those two young people radiate the air of cherished union. Anyhow, even before he had come on this journey, and earlier, before his recent illness, he had felt himself bereft of all that, would not have looked for the sweet proffer of any intimacy tinged with desire, nor have known what to give in return out of the shards of his illusions. Yet as he approached her once more where she sat smiling, in a dapple of shadows from the linden trees, he felt a pull all the stronger for its difference from any emotion he’d known in earlier life.