TE16 Turkish Delight

Our Best Love Story not disconcerted by this sentiment, the ancient longing in that phrase. Yet against all hope, in the room where he’ d come to live in different texts in the name of utterly disparate resentments, he found his reflection in the mirror anxiety-inducing and even downright frightening. He would have liked to speak of his age, of his elderliness, but was not able. Then he tried to smile once again, remembering that for years he’ d chased the same theme and the same poem and had sought sanctuary in the same smiles or treacherous joys; imagining himself once more on a departure, some small beginning, a story left half-finished. A melancholy summer’s evening, for instance, was transpiring in Sintra just now, and he was the passionate protagonist of an unpredictable path in a faraway land. In the story he’ d pictured possibly having dinner in this tiny city, on an evening like this, with themysterious woman he hadonceglimpsedontheSalamanca–Lisbontrain,whose imagehe’ d kept to himself in spite of all the years that had passed since. The calmfragranceof anall-too-familiar lonelinessandanunparalleled plant life seemed to abruptly descend upon his surroundings. The dreamlike person before him was in fact his own reflection, or illusion, or even his defeat. It was a game of minutiae: a game that could be played and interpreted in different ways depending on the varying flow of time. Now, for example, they spoke to one another of distant climates, the moods and resentments that had engendered them and that they’ d soon return to, merging into one another in an aged, full-bodied intoxication, rediscovering wine and music as though they had never parted ways, dreaming of losing themselves anew in an instant of eternity. Wine and music indeed. That may have been the evening that he was introduced to

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