At first, Isabella seemed to look at the landscape around her with an expression of bemusement—the mystified expression with which a beautiful wife confronts the face of a vulgar mistress, the face of her betrayal—but gradually I realized she was looking not with wonder but with hatred, the same enmity the wife always comes to feel for the mistress. She would hate this place for the rest of her life, until the day she died. As I stepped forward with my hands outstretched—we embraced, but cautiously, as though we were both incalculably fragile—I understood that although she had always hated me, her hatred had now dissipated and found another object. I had taken him away from her but never completely, not like this.
Almost the first thing she said, once she had been shown to her room and the door had closed behind us (she had sent Mark out on a mission, obviously invented, to the local chemist, she claimed to be suffering from upset stomach, from nausea, motion sickness from the drive), was, Why did he come here? She was standing by the window, Kostas had put Isabella and Mark in a suite, although not the one that Christopher had occupied. I looked at her, I couldn’t remember the last time we had been alone with each other. She looked back at me, for a moment it was as if the primary relationship were between us, the men having died or been sent away. Perhaps now that was true.
I don’t know, I said. I didn’t find him in time, I was too late.
She shook her head, the muscles around her mouth tightened. It would have been about a woman, Christopher never could keep his cock in his pants.
I was stunned, I had never heard her use such vulgar language and I had never heard her speak about her son in such aggressive and critical terms. She spoke not as if he had died but as though he had merely run away, as if she would be giving him a lecture upon his eventual return, I saw that she was in a state of complete denial.
She stood by the window, she was staring out at the water with a fixed expression, a woman filled with rage, at the situation, at the place, at the fact of her son’s death, which she could not accept. At her son, who’d had the audacity to die on her, to put her in the unnatural position of outliving her only child, the nightmare of every mother. It was horrifying to look at her face, which had collapsed beneath the grief she was unable to directly express, I was entirely sympathetic to her predicament, and yet as she continued to speak, I wished she would stop.
I think nowadays they call it sex addiction. Men who can’t stop chasing women, even when they are making fools of themselves. It gets worse with old age, you know. There’s nothing worse than a panting old man. Of course, you must take some responsibility for the situation, she said. But I don’t blame you, I know my son, I’m not sure that any woman would have been able to keep him from straying.
Her eyes suddenly filled with tears, as if she were speaking not of her son’s infidelity but of his death—that was what she was really talking about, and she was right, no woman could have kept him from dying. Things must have been strained between you, Christopher never said a word but I felt it. She paused. If only Christopher hadn’t had reason to come to this place.
He came here, I said, to do research, to finish his book.
Isabella shook her head sharply. The book was only the excuse, she said, Christopher was never serious about his work. He was always running away. He always had somewhere to go, he made his life very busy. I think he was worried that if he stopped, he would realize that his life was empty.
This was unfair—although she loved him to excess, Isabella had never been able to take her son seriously. Now that he was dead, she would never have to acknowledge the depth of his ambitions, the fact that in death he had left things undone. She was not looking at me. I said that he had been close to finishing his manuscript (a lie), that I had read whole chapters (another lie), that in fact there was a critical link (even the phrase sounded false) in the book that could be made through the research he had been doing here in the southern Peloponnese.
Isabella did not respond, perhaps she did not hear me. Standing by the window, she looked like the saddest woman in the world. At any rate, she said, still looking out at the sea, you loved him. Despite his flaws. And that is something. He died loved. She did not look at me for affirmation—perhaps it was not even necessary, it was understood that I loved Christopher, what wife didn’t love her husband? Even when her husband gave her sufficient cause not to? There was an appreciable pause, which Isabella seemed not to notice, before I said, Yes, Christopher was loved by many people, there is no doubt that he died loved.
But he was loved by you, she said insistently, the love of a wife is different, it’s important.
More important than the love of his mother? I asked. I immediately regretted it, I would have taken the question back if I could, the woman’s son had just died, if I could not be generous to her now, when would I? But she replied, somberly, Yes, it is the most important love, the love of the mother is a given, it is taken for granted. A child is born and for the rest of his or her life the mother will love the child, without the child doing anything in particular to earn it. But the love of a wife has to be earned, to be won in the first place and then kept.
She paused, and then added, although I thought without malice, You don’t have children, perhaps it is difficult for you to understand. And I said in reply, Yes, I loved him, Isabella, he died loved, and she said, Ah. That’s all I wanted to know.