October 22, 2002
Yesterday, Alma, when at last we could meet to celebrate our birthdays, I could see you were in a bad mood. You said that all of a sudden, without us realizing it, we have turned seventy. You are afraid our bodies will fail us, and of what you call the ugliness of age, even though you are more beautiful now than you were at twenty-three. We’re not old because we are seventy. We start to grow old as soon as we are born, we change every day, life is a continuous state of flux. We evolve. The only difference is that now we are a little closer to death. What’s so bad about that? Love and friendship do not age.
Ichi
LIGHT AND SHADOW
It did Alma Belasco good to have to systematically remember things for her grandson’s book, as at her age her mind was starting to fail her. Previously she would ramble on, and was unable to recall precise details, but now in order to provide Seth with satisfactory answers she tried hard to reconstruct the past in an orderly way, instead of jumping all over the place as she did with Lenny in the many idle hours they had at Lark House. She visualized different--colored boxes, one for each year of her life, and stored her experiences and feelings inside them. She piled the boxes up in the large armoire in which she used to take refuge as a child to weep floods of tears. These virtual boxes, overflowing with nostalgia and a few regrets, contained her deepest childish terrors and fantasies, as well as the wild extravagances of youth and the struggles, hard work, passions, and loves of her mature years. With a light heart, because she tried to forgive all her mistakes, except those that had made others suffer, she pieced together the fragments of her biography, spicing them with touches of fantasy, allowing herself some exaggeration and white lies, since Seth could hardly contradict her own memories. She did this as an exercise of the imagination rather than because she really wanted to create a false impression. The one thing she never talked about was Ichimei, unaware that behind her back Irina and Seth were investigating this most precious and secret aspect of her existence, the one thing she could not reveal, because if she did Ichimei would vanish, and with him her only reason to continue living.