Spanish Boots of Spanish Leather

The letter came again that November afternoon, though not the letter itself, which had come years before and lain ever since among old receipts and yellowing newspapers and the other small debris by which a life marks its passage through time, but the letter as memory comes, suddenly and entire, called forth by some accident of weather or light, by the sound of wind moving through trees beyond the window or by the faint smell of salt carried inland from a sea too distant to be seen and yet never distant enough to be forgotten, and sitting there in the gathering dusk with the paper unfolded in my hands I found myself once more reading the familiar lines, I don’t know when I’ll be coming back, it depends on how I’m feeling, though whether those had been the only words you wrote or merely the only words memory had preserved I could no longer say, because memory is not a ledger but a tide, carrying some things away while leaving others stranded and gleaming upon the glistening shore, and always, whenever I read those words or thought I remembered reading them, there came before me not an image of you writing them nor the years that had passed between our parting and their arrival but the harbour itself, the old harbour beneath the pale morning sky, remember, older than the warehouses and pilings, older than the town that had grown beside it and would one day decline beside it, a harbour from which generations had departed believing departure and return to be opposite movements rather than different names for the same surrender, and there I stood again beside you while the tide moved darkly beneath the wharf and the gulls circled overhead and the ship waited beyond them with the patience of something already knowing what neither of us yet understood, and I asked whether there might be something I could bring you from across the sea, some gift from the place where I would land, and you answered no, and I laughed a little because the answer seemed too simple and asked, Nothin’? and you said, Nothin’, the word lingering between us while the wind moved through the rigging overhead and then because silence seemed unbearable and because men and women are forever attempting to bargain with absence as though absence were a thing that could be measured and purchased and reduced by sufficient effort, me speaking again of silver and gold and the distant cities toward which the sea led, Madrid, Barcelona, names which even now seemed to me less places than conditions of longing, asking what if I brought you something fine, something beautiful, something fashioned by foreign hands beneath foreign skies, and turning then from the water to look at your expression I afterward remembered more clearly than your face itself, not pity exactly nor sadness exactly but some mingling of tenderness and sorrow, as though you were listening not to me but to some primeval human hope speaking through me, and saying that if I possessed the stars from the darkest night and the diamonds from the deepest ocean you would surrender them all for a single kiss, because that, you said, was all you wished to own, and afterward through all the years and cities and harbours that followed it was that word, own, which remained with me, detached somehow from the conversation that had produced it and floating through memory like driftwood upon water, because at the time I had believed we were speaking of gifts while perhaps you had already understood we were speaking of something else entirely, of possession and impermanence and the witless futility of confusing one with the other.

The bell from the ship sounding then, somewhere beyond us voices calling, ropes creaking, the old harbour carrying on its ancient business of separating people from one another, and me saying that I might be gone a long time and you answering that you knew, and me saying perhaps a year and you answering that you knew, and perhaps more and again you saying that you knew, until at last I asked that if I must be gone then let me at least send you something by which to remember me, and you lowering your eyes for a moment before asking how I could ask such a thing again, not angrily but with the weary patience of someone already carrying a burden the other has not yet noticed, telling me that the thing you wanted today you would want tomorrow and the next day and the next, and then looking directly at me and saying simply, you, and afterward that word too remaining with me, not because of what it promised but because of what it failed to promise, though it would take me years to understand the distinction if indeed I ever did, because later, reading the letter in distant rooms while the wind pressed against unfamiliar windows, I would ask myself whether you had known even then what neither of us could yet name, whether the sea was already between us before the ship departed, whether there are departures that begin long before anyone reaches the pier, or whether these were merely questions invented afterward by grief in order to provide itself with explanations, since grief prefers causes even when none exist; and the ship departing then, or perhaps never fully departing, because even now it seemed to me sometimes that it was still moving beyond the harbour mouth while you stood upon the wharf diminishing slowly against the shoreline, memory preserving the moment in endless suspension, the sea widening and widening between us, not another sea but that sea, always that sea, beneath storms and sunlight and years, while around it gathered all the subsequent years, not arranged one after another but existing simultaneously as memories do, ports and mountains and cities bright beneath foreign suns, strangers whose names vanished almost before they were learned, taverns and boarding houses and decks wet with rain and salt spray, Madrid perhaps, Barcelona perhaps, all of it uncertain now except the persistence with which your figure remained beside the water, though even that persistence had become suspect with time, because perhaps you had not been standing still at all, perhaps you had already begun moving away while I imagined you waiting, perhaps the wandering that would one day carry you beyond me had already begun, invisible as a tide turning far beyond sight.

And then the letter itself arriving years later from another harbour beneath another sky, and I unfolding it with no premonition of what it contained, and finding there those words which seemed at first so simple and afterward so inexhaustible, I don’t know when I’ll be coming back, it depends on how I’m feeling, and reading them once and then again and then a third time while outside the window the wind moved among the trees with the same voice it had possessed years before among the harbour rigging, and gradually, not through revelation but through repetition, through the slow erosion by which certainty yields to fact, coming to understand that the question was not whether you loved me or had loved me or would love me again, because perhaps you did and perhaps you did not and perhaps those possibilities were less contradictory than I had once believed, but whether love itself had ever guaranteed return, whether the heart, like the sea, obeyed currents deeper than intention, and whether all those years before when I stood asking about silver and gold and gifts and keepsakes you had already known that there existed no object capable of standing in place of a person and no promise capable of preserving a moment against time; and perhaps you had known it, or perhaps you learned it later among foreign streets and foreign voices, or perhaps neither of us knew anything at all and wisdom was merely the name given afterward to wounds that had ceased bleeding, because even now sitting with the letter in my hand I could not say with certainty when you had begun to leave me, whether on the day you wrote the letter, or the morning we stood together above the tide, or before either of those things, because memory kept returning me to that harbour where everything seemed somehow already present, the farewell hidden within the greeting, the letter folded invisibly within the farewell, the sea already moving between us while we still stood shoulder to shoulder listening to the gulls and the whorls and baroque curlicues of waves thrashing in the wind like old receipts and yellowing newspapers impaled on a leaning barbed wire fence.

So at last I took up a pen and began to write, not to accuse you and not to plead and not even, I thought, to hope, but simply because language remains after certainty has gone and because the wind outside and the sea within memory seemed to demand some answer, however inadequate, and writing of the western wind and the stormy weather and the old dangers of the sea, though whether I intended those words as warning or blessing I myself could not have said, and then pausing for so long that darkness gathered around me and the page itself grew difficult to see, before adding that yes, there was indeed something you could send me, and finding myself writing the words almost before I understood them, and yes there is something you can send back to me, and afterward staring at them while the years seemed to fold inward around the room, the harbour returning, the tide returning, the gulls returning, the letter returning, until I could no longer distinguish between the object and what it represented or what it failed to represent, because by then you and the country from which you wrote and the distance separating us had become inseparable in memory, and it seemed to me that all the intervening years had been spent learning what perhaps you had already understood while standing beside me on that harbour morning, that there are gifts which cannot be sent and promises which cannot be kept and journeys which end elsewhere than intended, and that sometimes all that arrives from a lost future is a pair of Spanish boots of Spanish leather lying quietly beneath a bed while outside the wind moves through the darkness and the sea continues its patient motion beyond the edge of sight, beyond the edge of memory, beyond the moon and the edge of whatever name one chooses to give to the lost loves of youth.