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Hardcover
First published January 1, 1994
‘And in her eyes there seems to be a realisation that she is also trapped with me—in the infinite and almost eternal mirror of our bodies. I think she recognises me. And I feel absurdly happy. I am starting to believe that distance is a punishment that can also be a form of destiny. And I am also starting to believe that we’ll fix—our little problem, when we get together.’
‘My love, I’m barely sure of my own existence.’
‘Many will think that you are also making all this up, again compensating for not having been able to help him, again looking for a way to write one story that has a good, decent man at its core. But who is to say—as I hear him now, across time and death and language, did not call to me from a moment before my birth, who is to say he did not exist as we have dreamt him?’
‘Because I cannot stop asking myself if we had been born at another time—I cannot stop asking myself if perhaps everything would not have been different. Or is it inevitable that this last scene between you and me—be repeated over and over and over again through the centuries every time someone like me dreams—someone like you? Or could it be that our misfortune does not depend on the time when we were born but rather in what particular body we happen to inhabit in that time, what destiny we were given to live, what power we had at our fingertips, how ready we were to use that power?’
‘The world’s never been in worse shape. And as it grew worse and people became more vile—we were alive only because we were lucky enough to be able to escape into exile, the possibility that you might make an appearance seemed to get further and further away: I had dreamt a world of wonders to greet you, without men exploiting other men, without hatred.’
‘And yet there you were. So if I lost my bet that the world would be a better place, on the other hand I had won my personal bet, I had managed to turn my bad luck around, your presence was in defiance of the worst odds, the statistics that proclaimed that we had no chance whatsoever of finding each other.’
‘Among the thousands of millions of women who have lived and will love in the future on this earth, all the women I could possibly have dreamt, imagine the joy it meant that I had stumbled on one who was really and truly breathing the air of my very planet and time and country and language. And that wasn’t all: it was a woman I could find. She’d find a way to keep the rest of her promise.’
‘And those of us who cannot go back—it is our duty to help—in any way we can. With these two eyes, with these two ears. This—is going to be won the same way we won the other one.’
‘Salmones: a way of differentiating them from those exiles who could not go back home, perhaps a way of reminding them of the clear, turbulent, cascading rivers of their homeland, so they wouldn’t forget they were destined to return to their place of birth to hatch new life like salmon do. You told yourself that here was a story lived by people from a country such as your own, far away—far from where you now try to register this story—with a past nobody seems to remember.’
‘I already told you that privacy in a world like ours is an illusion—Private life is an illusion in our world, Barbara. When you can torture one person, private life ends for everybody else.’’