She is punctual.
She turns the corner at 3.05.
Bent forward in a stride
that has no grace;
her gaze inward,
there’s no reading of her face.
She never smiles
as if that might delay her.
Always the same deliberate pace,
unhurried but not slow,
arm swinging wide,
hair moving side to side.
Winter and summer
only the clothes change,
her square cut style the same.
And then she’s gone.
Somewhere a bus or train
awaits her now,
a mother, husband, friend …
Who knows
where she comes from
where she goes.
But …
She is always punctual.
And alone.
For any
writer, the city offers daily possibilities of conjecture, fleeting portraits
of people as they pass. A girl in a red hat becomes the heroine of a short
story or a novel. A snatch of conversation overheard between two people on a pavement becomes the seed of a drama. An artist
that I knew of used to sit at his window and watched a street where people
passed and were gone in less than thirty seconds, then he tried to capture the
character of that person in a sketch.
For the
writer, at least, these portraits are a thousand times more rich, ambiguous and
lasting than a photograph, which I say with the greatest respect to the art of
photography which I both love and admire in its own right. But the imagination
has its own rules, and captures “photographs” altogether more subtle and
malleable which have the potential to flower into totally conjectural
worlds.
The
creative openings of these non-encounters are multiplied endlessly if you see
the same person in the same place at a certain time, and this is what I have
tried to capture in the piece above. The repeated sighting of an unknown person
simply lends more and more mystery, more and more questions arise, more and
more imagined scenarios present themselves to be played with in that garden of
musing where creativity lives and works.
The Spanish
novelist Javier Marías enjoys this creative conjecture in a thread running
through his Negra Espalda del Tiempo, where a girl and a man seen
regularly from his window at a bus stop below become more and more involved in
possible histories, both known and unknown.
Puede ser esa mujer que veo desde mis ventanas en este
amanecer que me encuentra despierto, esa mujer no muy joven que espera el
autobús con su temprano cansancio y a la que hoy se ve sonreír levemente …
Just a hint of a smile can
open the treasure chest of inquiry and speculation, a process in which the
writer can come to know his or her “character” better than they know
themselves.
CJM June 2012
