Incanto

More about Incanto

The night her hair turned blue, Emilia discovered that the flowers had been keeping the house illuminated for seventy-three years, although everyone continued paying the electricity bill out of respect for her father.

He had founded the power company and would have considered it a personal insult to be replaced by lilies.

She sat beside the window in the black dress she had worn to three weddings and the funeral of a man who subsequently returned to borrow a suitcase. Around her throat hung a necklace of red beads. Her grandmother had forbidden her to count them.

“One always remembers,” she said, “and then you have to begin again.”

Beyond the glass, the city raised its towers into a sky so clear that Emilia could see the stars her mother had described before they disappeared from the official maps.

At eleven, the first piece of light entered through the closed window.

It resembled a fragment of broken glass, except that it had neither weight nor the ambition to wound. Others followed, drifting past her knees, carrying the colours of afternoons she could no longer place.

Inside one she saw a yellow kitchen.

Inside another, a child washed a spoon beneath a garden tap.

The smallest contained the rain that had fallen on the day she was born.

By midnight, the room was full of them.

The maid arrived with a dustpan, studied the floating fragments, and went downstairs to put another place at the table.

Emilia understood then that someone was coming.

She had waited so long that waiting had become a household task, like watering plants or turning the mattress. She performed it without complaint, though lately she had begun leaving the room to buy bread.

A broad sliver of light settled against her palm.

There he was: young, with the uncertain moustache she remembered, standing at a station demolished forty years earlier. He held a paper bag of peaches. On the morning of his departure she had accused him of loving the journey more than he loved her.

She had forgotten the peaches.

Now she could smell them.

The lilies bent toward her. Downstairs, the maid opened a bottle with the furious determination of someone who had already prepared dinner.

Emilia rose, spilling the bright fragments from her dress.

But when she reached the door, she heard no footsteps on the stairs. Only the familiar settling of the old house.

She stood there awhile, then went down to eat.

In the morning the maid found a peach stone beside Emilia’s plate and planted it beneath the kitchen window, where there had never been enough sunlight for anything to grow.