Lost Paradise Read Free

‘There’s a shadow inside you.’ ‘How can you tell?’ ‘I can see it in your eyes, beneath your eyes, on your skin, everywhere.’ ‘But what is it?’ ‘It’s your secret.’ I looked in the mirror that night and didn’t see a thing. Or rather, only my face. I’m not sure I have a secret. ‘That doesn’t matter,’ Almut said. ‘You are a secret, even if you don’t realise it. No one ever knows what you’re thinking. When you say something, the words don’t seem to match the expression on your face. It’s as though you’re holding something back, a kind of “Trespassers Beware”. It’s bound to get you into trouble one day, but don’t let it frighten you.’
    I don’t remember how old we were when we had this conversation – probably about fifteen – but I have never forgotten it. Another thing she said to me was, ‘It’s as if you’re not alone, as if you always have someone with you.’ Almut and I did everything together, to the despair of our first boyfriends. We spent hours lying in the hammock on the porch, discussing our future. We were going to study art history – that had been decided already. Modern art for her, the Renaissance for me. ‘All those Crucifixions and Annunciations make me sick,’ she would say. We never agreed on this point. I could do without the Crucifixions, though it was fascinating to see how various artists dealt with the same subject, but it was the Annunciations that I adored. I have this thing about angels. Raphael, Botticelli, Giotto – as long as there are wings. ‘That’s because you wish you could fly,’ Almut says.
    ‘Don’t you?’ ‘No, not me.’ Her walls were lined with Willem de Kooning and Dubuffet and all those disintegrating figures and faces of the cubists that I disliked. Mine were lined with angels. Almut referred to it as my ‘aviary’. ‘What I hate about angels,’ she often said, ‘is that you can’t tell if they’re male or female.’
    ‘They’re male.’
    ‘How do you know?’
    ‘They have male names: Michael, Gabriel . . .’
    ‘It would have been much more logical for a woman to have come and told Mary she was going to have a baby.’
    ‘Women fly differently.’
    Which was absurd, since I had never seen a woman fly, but you know you are right about some things. Giotto, for example, got the idea for his swooping angels from seeing a comet. His angels fly through the air so fast that their feet are swallowed up in a trail of light. A woman would never fly like that.
    ‘Every so often I dream that I’m flying,’ Almut said. ‘I go very slowly, so you may be right. How do you think angels land?’
    I remember that moment with perfect clarity. We were in the Uffizi in Florence, looking at my favourite painting: Botticelli’s ‘Annunciation’. Almut had just finished saying that she had had enough of creatures with wings.
    ‘You’ve dragged me all over Europe to look at angels. Why don’t you put yourself in Mary’s place? There you are, sitting peacefully in your room, knowing nothing of what is about to happen, and suddenly you hear the flapping of wings, as if a giant bird is going to land. Have you ever wondered what it must have sounded like? You can hear the wing-beat of a dove, so imagine the flapping of wings a hundred times bigger. The noise must have been deafening: “Crew, prepare for landing.”’
    But I didn’t want to listen to her chatter. I have always been able to tune people out. The moment something touches my inner self – my secret, as Almut would call it – I retreat into my own world. I know other people are out there, but no matter who they are, they no longer exist for me.
    ‘There’s something creepy about it,’ Almut once said.
    ‘You’re no longer there. And I know you’re not bluffing.’
    ‘It’s concentration.’
    ‘No, it’s more than that. It’s absence. I might as well not be here. I used to feel insulted. There was something contemptuous about it. It was as if