With a sigh, Miss Prim turned around and sat down cautiously on the third rung.
“I’m warning you, I don’t know, really, how to explain it,” she began. “Let’s just say there are days—fortunately not many—when it feels as if the inside of my head is whirling like a spin dryer. I’m not very pleasant to be with then, and I don’t sleep too well either. It’s as though there’s a void in my mind, a void where there should besomething, but where there’snothing, absolutely nothing, just a deafening noise.”
She paused, saw her employer’s look of concern and smiled gently. “Don’t make that face, it’s not serious. Lots of people have it. It can be controlled with pills. But you say you’ve felt it. You should know what I mean.”
“Why do you think it doesn’t go away?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
The librarian tied her hair back neatly at the nape of her neck before responding.
“Sometimes I think it has to do with loss.”
At this she hesitated, but his intently interested look made her go on.
“How shall I explain it? In some ways I’ve always considered myself a modern woman—free, independent, highly qualified academically. You know, we both know, that you look down on me for it.” The Man in the Wing Chair made a gesture of polite protest which she ignored. “But I have to admit that I’ve also always felt burdened by nostalgia, by a desire to stop time, to recapture things that have been lost. A sense that everything, absolutely everything, is on a journey from which there’s no return.”
“What doeseverythingmean to you?”
“The same as it does to you, I assume. All of life, beauty, love, friendship, even childhood, especially childhood. Before, not so long ago, I used to think I possessed a sensibility from another century. I was convinced I’d been born at the wrong time and that that was why vulgarity, ugliness, lack of delicacy all bothered me so much. I thought I was longing for a beauty that no longer existed, from an era that one fine day bade us farewell and disappeared.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m working for someone who effectively lives immersed in another century, and it’s made me realize thatthatwas not what my problem was.”
The Man in the Wing Chair gave a burst of such happy, infectious laughter that she flushed with pleasure.
“I should fire you for that. I told you I knew what I was doing when I said I’d have to forgive you on more than one occasion.”
Smiling, Miss Prim stood up and began meticulously dusting a battered edition of St. Anselm of Canterbury’sMonologion.
“Your turn now,” she said. “Why did you hear the clamor?”
He took a few moments to reply.
“For the same reason everyone does, I suppose. It’s the sound of war.”
“That metaphor is so typical of you,” she interrupted, laughing. “But what caused your war? You have to admit there’s always a cause: an illness, a moral failing, sometimes an unmanageable temperament or unstable personality, or fear of death or the passing of time... What is it with you?”
“You’re wrong, Prudencia, it’s just due to one thing, not many. And it’s not something but rather the absence of something, a missing piece. And when a piece is missing, from a puzzle, for instance, when the key piece is missing, nothing works. Do you like puzzles?”
“I’m like most people when they’re not good at something; I don’t enjoy what I can’t master.”
“People who love puzzles,” he went on, “can spend whole nights trying to fit a single piece. My sister used to do that. You could wake up at dawn and find her still engrossed in a puzzle. Obviously I don’t mean a child’s jigsaw, but one of those wonderful pictures with thousands and thousands of tiny pieces. Do you know what I mean?”
“Of course I do.”
“Well, what I’m trying to explain is that there are people, Prudencia, who suddenly realize that they’re missing a key piece of the puzzle and can’t complete it. They feel that something won’t work, or maybe that absolutely nothing will work, until they find or, better still, are allowed to find the missing piece.”
“That sounds like esotericism or Gnosticism,” she murmured.
“Not at all; it’s not about obscure knowledge, wisdom only for the initiated. Instead, it’s the kind of discovery that Edgar Allan Poe describes inThe Purloined Letter. Have you read it? Yes, of course you have. Well, in the story, the missing piece or purloined letteris there, in the room with you,right in front of you, but you can’t see it, you’re not aware of its presence. Until one day...”
Miss Prim shifted uncomfortably on the stepladder.
“I must get back to theMonologion,” she said, recovering her calm, distant professional tone.
