It is a time of reflection, almost silence. It is a time of living frugally, surrounded by bare essentials, saving energy and material comfort for a time when, perhaps, it will finally be shared. It is an uncertain time, an uncertain world, an uncertain life. But wasn’t it always like that? The problem with aging is that one begins to worry about actual uncertainty, so it becomes less of an adventure and more of a concern.

In moments like that, my attention turns more to literature, and that radar that sends me out on bookstore excursions activates itself suddenly, as if it had a purpose. The first finding was this novel by an author I totally ignored called Brady Udall. The title of the book caught me by surprise…The Lonely Polygamist. I read the blurb (which American books do very well with, unlike French books such as Amelie Nothomb’s Le Voyage d’Hiver, which has no indication whatsoever of what it could be about…but does Nothomb have to prove herself before I grab one of her books? No, she does not). Udall’s book is about an anti-hero, Golden Richards, father of 28 children and husband to four wives living somewhere in rural America. The story is about Golden falling for a woman outside the church, outside the Principle, and getting caught in the trap of actually choosing love, instead of letting it be imposed on him. The story is about the impossibility of sharing wifely duties without feeling less worthy than the others, less valued, less loved. The story is about being a lost child in a numerous family that  is stranded in limbo, no longer recognizing itself and its members. Well, I would argue that one does not need to have 28 kids to get lost in limbo and lose track of oneself…it so often happens in the typical four-member family.

It is amazing how a good author can make you feel you are inside the story, even when the environment is totally foreign to the reader. Udall does an excellent job, particularly at entering the mind of a pre-pubescent boy who is an outcast in that world, who is aware of how unfair and deterministic that limbo is, and who will pay the price for wanting to subvert the dysfunctional order set out by others. I related so viscerally to Rusty, that lost child sitting on the window sill and looking out; I understood the inevitable failure of trying to be like the others when you are simply different, beautifully so although you don’t know.

It was a hard novel, a difficult read, perhaps because it was familiar in an odd and undesired way, a reflection of the polyamorous loneliness that I wish I could escape. I can’t, and I am still sitting here, like the viewer of a movie that I know will end badly but I can’t help continuing to watch. Who knows? Perhaps at some point relief will come for me as it did for my favorite character in that book, and my own Trish will know what to do.

It must have been that Orlando had been brilliantly coded by Mrs Woolf to give Vita some form of ownership after her beautiful childhood home of Knole was repossessed by the male family line. It must have been that her larger loss of a home with English ancestry bleeding from every wall paradoxically mirrored my minimal family betrayal at the hands of a brother. It must have been the “land” inside the word Orlando, the modern history of Vita as Woolf re-wrote it and installed it as a classic of all times, or simply the fact that I miss those days of piecemeal research and the promise of a finding, somewhere, that would give the work its originality.

Regardless of the remoteness or lucidity of these memories, today it all came back to me, as it can happen at times when some episodes of one’s own soap opera become bad karma. It must be that, years later, I still do not own the land that is rightfully mine, but I do have the vision.

The country habit has me by the heart,
For he’s bewitched for ever who has seen,
Not with his eyes but with his vision,
Spring
Flow down the woods and stipple leaves
with sun.

(“Winter”, from The Land)

By the way, for those who want a peak (or an “ear”?) of Vita’s voice, here’s an excerpt of this poem, read by the authoress herself.

I have spent most of my weekend classifying books and deciding what to keep and what not to keep. Like an obsessed librarian, I was forced to open my own catalog of reading, my chronology of life through books. Moving out is certainly a time-consuming process, but it is also enriching. It forces us to pause when we cannot, because we are fighting our own lack of time, to look at what we are leaving behind. Some people are fortunate (or unfortunate?) enough to take themselves with them in their journeys. This time I am not. I have made a decision to take only the necessary part of me. Some of these books will make it to Houston initially, but others will have to wait for me to either take them, leave them or retrieve them if life sews a more permanent path to good ol’ Texas.

Yes, I decided to travel light. I want to live with less instead of more. I want to find the glass. I have been wanting to do that for quite a while, but something stopped me…it must be the reluctance of all human beings to change, or the fear that if we let go of things, of people, we will feel the emptiness. As I look back on the half-empty bookcase, I would say that it all depends on how you leave. It is not so much about the act of departure but about the way in which we go. Most of the time we escape — and believe me, I have been there — but sometimes, if we do the homework that life sprinkles here and there between the pages of our own mysterious book, there is a fair chance that leaving will be an action of growth instead than a side door to more of the old self.

The two bookshelves that remain to be cleared before they find a new home at my mother’s contain the effort of growth that stemmed out of the need of fleeing far away, where no old ghosts of bad family love could find me. Something good came out of escaping, but it only did when I had the courage to come back and face the demons I thought I had left behind.

The weekend found me looking for the right package to send a little something to someone on the west of me on Saturday morning, as the Houston sun promised another scorching summer day. A sudden thought had me calling the San Jose hotel in Austin at around noon, to find out they were fully booked. The second option was the standard OMNI chain, which turned out to be worse than a teenage campsite, with metallic American voices resonating down the hallway at 4.00 am, accompanied by drunk knocks on my door a few minutes later. However, even while the night was not as accomplished as I had wished, the day was good. Maybe because 45 minutes of my drive were spent on the phone with her, talking, laughing and missing each other — maybe it is time to acknowledge that distance and estrangement is part of an unspoken deal here — and because Austin’s 6th street was fun to stroll up and down.

In the early afternoon of this Sunday, which will mark my last night spent on US soil, before I started driving back to a makeshift “home” of sorts down McCue Road, across from the Galleria Mall, I stopped by Austin’s famous Town Lake park. I like the way the US does some things, suddenly offering enormous amounts of nature for free to the city dwellers and their visitors. People walk down the shady paths, sit down by a generous cliff overlooking the lake where casual rowing boats design capricious shapes, or simply ride their bikes down the trails, which still offer some rest from the burning sun. I took a short walk left of the entrance, and caught glimpses of the lake hiding behind overgrown trees. The path went down, and at some intersections the odd bench would be found. Now I realize I chose the third one, and it had this especially dedicated plate. I thought it would be a good place where to start a mission that I had not really planned. The book I had just finished reading is Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Since I bought it in Buenos Aires, I read it in Spanish. I left it on that bench, sheltered in the shade, until someone hopefully would pick it up in good faith, and enjoy it.

I am beginning to like the exercise of leaving some things behind…