The Unsteady Step

She must have been about fifteen, sixteen. I don’t know. She’d give me these looks and, oh, an at once delighting and painful erotic sensation would brim up, a danger for one at my age, and then there’s my social position to consider. She was a young neighbor, endowed with a bold and precocious beauty that would wipe down those condescending and indulgent smile reserved for the young and show you up to yourself as you were – me, a respectable forty-five year old with children of her age.
Later on, when she was seventeen and had started to drive without a license, she would pass right by my window with that proud look in her eyes. Her eyes…they displayed an ironic self-confidence, they were almost provocative.

No, let me put it another way… She must think I’m a wanker, since I’d only steal glances at her and make out to be a serious upstanding adult in accordance with the prevailing conventions. Even though I’d stare surreptitiously at her legs under the steering wheel, long and alluring, visible right up into her short skirt. Above all, those knowing eyes penetrated me. Where did she get the audacity to consider me on a par with her, of her own age? I don’t know what her schooling was or how she makes her living. Whatever she did those years one thing is certain: she had not been contaminated at all by intellectual pursuits. You could see it in her full, sensual presence. And as she gets older there’s something almost vulgar and at the same time distant, even disdainful, in her attitude and bearing, and this unsettles me.

I wonder about these changes, things that struck me only the other day. They must have taken place through the years, but I just hadn’t noticed! I suppose I was confined, absent behind my walls.

Even now, she still reverses noisily out of the garage. She usually wears sunglasses, so her eyes are hidden from my view. In any case, she avoids looking at me. Her nose is a little bigger now. Her beauty still intact. This slight “defect”, I must confess, is most likely me feeling “sour grapes”. She must be about twenty-five now and most probably has a boyfriend who knows intimately what she likes. I too am ageing, approaching sixty. It is as I leave my footprints in the snow for the wolves that follow, evidently sensing from a distance the unsteady steps of those who are slowly departing… Their howls rouse me from sleep in the morning when she leaves at full throttle. If by any chance sleep comes again, I may see her in the forest - in a hut, where the memories burn like firewood warming the longings left too long out in the cold…

February 2008

Translation: Stephanos Gee