This was always the moment that she would be taking herself apart, her personality being dismantled before my eyes. In some settings, it would happen in the mornings over breakfast when she, waffles in her pupils, would lead me to understand that she was no longer who she was a moment ago. In Singapore it was always at night, and always with an exquisite attention to detail I could never be sure if it was partly in my head, or completely an act of witnessing, free of my own perceptions. And there was that day, that peculiar day, when I knew it would be more extraordinary than others. Like an Italian film I can no longer remember, I woke up and she was already floating outside the window, attached to a string she had thoughtfully tied to the bedpost.
I’m not always drawn to details, but I have found a way to admire bedposts in foreign countries, and it is mornings that begin like this that remind me of why I like to travel. One can always learn, and when there is no more to learn, a veil gets lifted and there is a new and unknown world again before your eyes. This day would not be about any deep learning, however, because it was only the Bocelli concert that was holding the day together. For her, something maybe, for me, only ghosts. She was following his Asian tour, when she found the time to land, and this was an important day for her, but she wouldn’t say why.
For me, I was always caught up in numbering and counting, and I counted seconds, because it was a nervous afternoon, and before long I was counting steps to the Italian restaurant where we met our first accordion player, the one who would accompany us and make music whenever we walked anywhere else in the world. It was over linguini with clam sauce that I realized how strong she resembled Bocelli, at least in that light, and at that moment, everything changed. I would never again be able to think of her without seeing the Italian tenor in my mind, and I also saw, by the way she was floating out of her chair, that she was visiting a Singapore that I could never know.
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