Alma began by making the two of them promise they would keep her secrets until after her death and repeating what she had already told them, because she decided it was better to weave the tapestry of her life from the very beginning. She recalled saying farewell to her parents on the quayside at Danzig, her arrival at San Francisco and how she had clutched Nathaniel’s hand, intuiting perhaps that she would never let it go; she went on to tell them about the precise moment she met Ichimei Fukuda, the most persistent of all the images stored in her memory, and then advanced along the path of her past with such clarity that it was as though she were reading aloud. Seth’s worries about his grandmother’s mental state evaporated. Over the previous three years when he had wormed material out of her for his novel, Alma had demonstrated her great skill as a narrator, her sense of rhythm and ability to keep up suspense, her way of contrasting luminous events with the most tragic ones, light and shade as in -Nathaniel’s photographs, but it wasn’t until that afternoon that he had the chance to admire her in such a marathon of sustained effort. With a few pauses for tea and to nibble at some cookies, Alma talked for hours. Night fell without any of them realizing, as Seth’s grandmother told them all about her life and they listened attentively. She told them about how she met Ichimei again at the age of twenty-two after twelve years without seeing him, and how the dormant love they had felt in childhood now knocked them both out with irresistible force, even though they knew it was doomed and it did in fact last less than a year.
Passion is universal and eternal throughout the centuries, she said, but circumstances and customs are constantly changing; sixty years on, it was hard to understand the insurmountable obstacles they had to face back then. If she could be young again, knowing what she now knew about herself, she would do what she did all over again, because she would never have dared reject convention and commit herself fully to Ichimei; she had never been courageous and had basically abided by the norms. Her only act of rebellion had been when she was seventy-eight and had abandoned the house at Sea Cliff to come and live at Lark House. At the age of twenty-two, suspecting their time was limited, Ichimei and she had gorged on love to enjoy it to the full, but the more they tried to exhaust it, the wilder their desire became, and whoever says that every flame must sooner or later be extinguished is wrong, because there are passions that blaze on until destiny destroys them with a swipe of its paw, and even then hot embers remain that need only a breath of oxygen to be rekindled. She told them about Tijuana and her marriage to Nathaniel, and of how it was to be another seven years before she saw Ichimei once more, at her father-in-law’s funeral, years she spent thinking of him tranquilly since she never expected to meet him again, and another seven years before they could finally consummate the love they still felt for one another.
“So, Grandma, my father isn’t Nathaniel’s son? In that case I’m Ichimei’s grandson! Tell me whether I’m a Fukuda or a Belasco!” exclaimed Seth.
“If you were a Fukuda, you’d have Japanese features, wouldn’t you? You’re a Belasco.”
THE CHILD NEVER BORN
During the first months of married life, Alma was so caught up in her pregnancy that her anger at having renounced her love for Ichimei became a bearable inconvenience, like having a stone in her shoe. She settled into a placid, ruminant existence, secure in Nathaniel’s tender care and the shelter the family provided. Although Martha and Sarah had already given them grandchildren, Lillian and Isaac were expecting this baby as if it were royalty, because it would bear the name Belasco. They set aside a sunny room decorated with children’s furniture and Walt Disney characters painted on the walls by an artist brought specially from Los Angeles. They devoted themselves to looking after Alma and satisfied her every whim. By the sixth month she had put on too much weight; her blood pressure was high, her face blotchy, her legs swollen, and she lived with a perpetual headache; she could not fit into her shoes and was forced to wear beach slippers, and yet from the very first signs of life in her belly she fell in love with the creature she was bringing into the world. It was not Nathaniel or Ichimei’s, but entirely hers. She wanted a boy, to call him Isaac and offer her father-in-law the grandson who would continue the name of Belasco. She had promised Nathaniel that nobody would ever know they did not share the same blood. She remembered, with stabs of guilt, that if Nathaniel had not prevented her, the child would have ended up in some Tijuana sewer.