Wittgenstein's Mistress Read Free Page A

certain that I remained in New York for at least two winters, before I went looking elsewhere.
    Near Lesbos, I saw that ketch. Or perhaps Scyros.
    Is Scyros one of the Greek islands?
    One forgets. There is a loss of baggage unwittingly, too.
    As a matter of fact I now suspect I ought to have said the Aegean when I said the Adriatic, a few paragraphs ago. Surely it is the Aegean, between Troy and Greece.
    This tea is baggage of a sort also, I suppose. Though in this case I did seek it out again, after that other beach house burned. Little as I burden myself with, did wish for tea.
    And some cigarettes as well, although I smoke very little, these days.
    Well, and other staples too, naturally.
    The cigarettes are the sort that come in tins. Those in paper had begun to taste stale some while ago.
    Most things did, which were packaged that way. Not to spoil, necessarily, but to turn dry.
    As a matter of fact my cigarettes happen to be Russian. That is just coincidence, however.
    Hereabouts, everything stays damp.
    I have said that.
    Still, when I remove it from a drawer, often my clothing feels clammy.
    Generally, summers as now, I wear nothing at all.
    I do have underpants and shorts, and several denim skirts that wrap around, and some few cotton jerseys. I wash everything at the stream, and then spread it across bushes to dry.
    Well, I have more clothing than that. Winter makes demands.
    Except for gathering firewood beforehand, however, I have taken to worrying about winter when winter appears.
    When it is here, it will be here.
    When the leaves fall, generally the woods remain barren for a time before the snows, and I can see all the way to the spring, or even to the continuation of my path to the highway beyond.
    It requires perhaps forty minutes to walk along the highway to the town.
    There are stores, some few, and there is a gas station.
    Kerosene is still to be found at the latter.
    I rarely make use of my lamps, however. Even when what seems the last glimmer of sunset is gone, traces still reach the room I climb upstairs to sleep in.
    Through another window at its opposite side the rosy-fingered dawn awakens me.
    Certain mornings the phrase does happen to fit, as a matter of fact.
    The houses along this beach would appear to continue endlessly, by the way. In any case infinitely farther than I have chosen to walk in either direction and still be able to return by nightfall.
    Somewhere I have a flashlight. In the glove compartment of the pickup truck, possibly.
    The pickup truck is at the highway. I suspect that I may have neglected to run the battery for some time, now.
    Doubtless there are still unused batteries at the gas station.
    Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz. I no longer have any idea who she may have been, to tell the truth.
    To tell the truth I would be equally hard pressed to identify Marco Antonio Montes de Oca.
    In the National Portrait Gallery, in London, which is not one of the museums I chose to live in, I was not able to recognize eight out of ten of the faces in the portraits. Or even almost that many of the names, identifying the portraits.
    I do not mean in the cases of people like Winston Churchill or the Brontë sisters or the Queen or Dylan Thomas, obviously.
    Still, this saddened me.
    And why does it come into mind that I would like to inform Dylan Thomas that one can now kneel and drink from the Loire, or the Po, or the Mississippi?
    Or would Dylan Thomas have already been dead before it became impossible to do such things, meaning that he would look at me as if I were mad all over again?
    Certainly Achilles would. Or Shakespeare. Or Emiliano Zapata.
    I do not remember Dylan Thomas's dates. And anyway, doubtless there was no specific date for pollution.
    One one eight six, the last four digits of somebody's phone number may have been.
    Actually, I have never been to the Mississippi either. Going and coming from Mexico I did drink from the Rio Grande, however.
    Why do I say such things? Obviously I