The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

or those pages, you’d understand.
I’d be grateful if you could send your response to me here, care of the above address. In case I’ve already gone by the time it arrives the concierge will forward my mail.
    Yours eagerly,
Jacob Marcus
     
I thought, Holy cow! I could hardly believe our luck, and considered writing back to Jacob Marcus myself with the excuse of explaining that it was Saint-Exupéry who’d established the last southern section of the mail route to South America in 1929, all the way to the tip of the continent. Jacob Marcus seemed nterested in mail, and, anyway, once my mother had pointed out that it was in part because of Saint-Ex’s courage that Zvi Litvinoff, the author of The History of Love , could later receive the final letters from his family and friends in Poland. At the end of the letter I would add something about my mother being single. But I thought better of it, in case she somehow found out, spoiling what had begun so well, and without any meddling. A hundred thousand dollars was a lot of money. But I knew that even if Jacob Marcus had offered almost nothing, my mother would have still agreed to do it.
29. MY MOTHER USED TO READ TO ME FROM THE HISTORY OF LOVE
     
“ The first woman may have been Eve, but the first girl will always be Alma ,” she’d say, the Spanish book open on her lap while I lay in bed. This was when I was four or five, before Dad got sick and the book was put away on a shelf. “Maybe the first time you saw her you were ten. She was standing in the sun scratching her legs. Or tracing letters in the dirt with a stick. Her hair was being pulled. Or she was pulling someone’s hair. And a part of you was drawn to her, and a part of you resisted—wanting to ride off on your bicycle, kick a stone, remain uncomplicated. In the same breath you felt the strength of a man, and a self-pity that made you feel small and hurt. Part of you thought: Please don’t look at me. If you don’t, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me.
“If you remember the first time you saw Alma, you also remember the last. She was shaking her head. Or disappearing across a field. Or through your window. Come back, Alma! you shouted. Come back! Come back!
“But she didn’t.
“And though you were grown up by then, you felt as lost as a child. And though your pride was broken, you felt as vast as your love for her. She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you’d grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.
“For a long time, it remained hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you felt for a woman would have been impossible without Alma. If it weren’t for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.
“Of course there are certain cases in which the boy in question refuses to stop shouting at the top of his lungs for Alma. Stages a hunger strike. Pleads. Fills a book with his love. Carries on until she has no choice but to come back. Every time she tries to leave, knowing it’s what has to be done, the boy stops her, begging like a fool. And so she always returns, no matter how often she leaves or how far she goes, appearing soundlessly behind him and covering his eyes with her hands, spoiling for him anyone who could ever come after her.”
30. THE ITALIAN POST TAKES SO LONG; THINGS GET LOST AND LIVES ARE RUINED FOREVER
     
It must have taken another few weeks for my mother’s reply to arrive in Venice, and by then Jacob Marcus had most likely gone, leaving instructions for his mail to be forwarded. In the beginning, I pictured him as very tall and thin with a chronic cough, speaking the few words of Italian he knew with a terrible accent, one of those sad people who are never at home anywhere. Bird imagined him as John Travolta in a Lamborghini with a suitcase of cash. If my mother imagined him at all, she didn’t say.
But his second letter came at the end of March, six