Chapter 1

I dated a baron once. An Austrian baron, who desperately wanted heirs. I didn't know anything about his lineage when we met in the Sao Paulo airport. I noticed him because he was handsome and had a certain carriage.

I had a four-hour layover from Rio for my flight back to the US, and instead of waiting in the gate area, I went to the main atrium and installed myself at a café table on the second floor, opened my Brazilian fashion magazine to practice my Portuguese reading skills, and ordered a caipirinha. The café tables were set along a railing and facing the main walkway in front of various shops and other establishments. It was here I first saw him walking, slowly, without a destination in mind, a man killing time. He was thin and quite tall, and held his head a little up in the air as he surveyed to his left and right in passing. I had noticed him when he walked by the first time, how he only vaguely looked at the shop windows. When I had taken him in, I turned back to my magazine, wondering if he had a spectacular looking Brazilian wife who was on her way from somewhere to meet him. When I looked up again a good ten minutes later, he was coming from the opposite direction, walking just as aimlessly and slowly. I wasn't sure if he had looked in my direction or if he had even seen me. I turned back to my reading again, thinking he might instead be waiting to board a plane, as I was.

The third time around, I thought to myself, "Poor man. If only he knew that he could strike up a conversation with me and the time would pass so much quicker and more pleasantly for both of us." I told myself that if he came around a fourth time, I would get his attention and invite him to sit and have a drink with me. I busied myself with the items on the table, rearranging the stand up drink menu (caiprinha, cairpiroska, cafezinho, chope, suco de abacaxi, suco de maracuja) and the position of the salt and pepper shakers. I fiddled with napkins. I turned the pages of my magazine. When I looked up, there he was again, this time heading toward me, away from his former path and toward my table. I caught his eye and smiled. He smiled, bent forward in a slight bow and said in German-accented English,

"I told myself if you were still here when I came by the fourth time, I would come and talk to you,"

I laughed and said I had said the same thing to myself, that I would have invited him for a drink if he had come by again. He asked if he could sit down, and did. We quickly established that neither of us was Brazilian - I thought he was a Brazilian businessman - he was Austrian - and he thought I was a Brazilian TV star - much, of course, to my delight.

“Nope,” I said, laughing, “I’m an American assistant.”

“You are so luminous,” he said, his eyes scanning my face,”It was your light that I saw from far away.”

For those who don’t know, mistake a woman for a TV star and call her luminous, and the battle is half won.

He asked me, being an American, what my experience had been of September 11th. It was January, so very little time had gone by. I didn't mind the question as much as I thought I might, and answered that it was personal for me in a way that I didn't quite know what to do with. I hadn't lost anyone, but it made me keenly aware of the people in my life who were important to me, and I tried to contact them all to tell them so. The first person I had thought of, when it seemed that the world itself was dissolving, was the man I still loved, despite everything. I had desperately wanted to hear his voice, to know that he was alright, and I had hoped that the very nature of what was happening would jolt him out of the rigid state he had created and coveted, protecting himself from his emotions for me. He was unchanged, and still afraid of what seemed to me to be, on that horrible day, totally insignificant. Of all days, of all moments, I thought this one would be the one where he would let go and give in to love. It had crushed me that he hadn’t. I also felt very strange and petty and selfish, crying for my lost love story, and at the same time, I had cried for the thousands of people who cried for their dying, dead, missing husbands, lovers, children and parents.

As I shared my reaction, tears came to his eyes. I was impressed at his sensitivity and closeness to his emotions. It takes a lot for a man to be comfortable enough to tear up in front of a woman he does not know who is sharing something personal. I thought his tears showed he understood me. In the end, I said that my country's reaction to the event had disappointed me.

"We always overdo it," I grumbled, citing the forced patriotism, the ubiquitous flags, the maudlin appropriation of others' grief. "We could go for poignancy, but instead - and I don't know if this means the same thing in German as it does in Yiddish - but instead, we go for schmaltz."

He burst out laughing. Reaching in his briefcase he handed me his business card and said,

"You must keep in touch. That is the first time I have laughed like that in many months."

I looked at the card. It was white and simply decorated with a crest-like logo at the top, and his name, "Guenter Fhr. von F..." with the contact numbers below. I remember thinking it sounded like a noble name, but I had no idea what the "Fhr" stood for - I thought is was a middle name or some kind of diploma title. The German speakers, I vaguely recalled, were big on titles, with different ones for different academic degrees. For all I knew, it meant he was a dentist.

I asked him what had brought him to Brazil.

"It was the last place my wife and I were happy, when she was healthy enough to enjoy herself. She died last year of cancer," he answered, smiling sadly, "I came to see how it felt without her. To see if I could recapture some of it. But it wasn't the same, and I couldn't stay. I am now returning to Germany."

As he told me how, when they had discovered she had little time left to live, they had decided to travel the world, he sometimes stopping every hour to carry her to the bathroom, it was I who had tears in my eyes. She had made him promise not to pity her, and she did not share her pain or thoughts of death. They had sworn they would only share happy times, and he carried her and her IVs, her myriad pills, from port to port.

"I do not think I did enough to save her," he said, looking down.

I don't know what made me do it. In an instant, I grabbed his hands across the table, and looking him in the eyes I said,

"She was very lucky to be loved by someone like you, who took her to see the world she would be leaving instead of fussing over how it might hasten her end. You loved and respected her deeply. She would be proud of you, now, for being here, trying, out in the world, when you could be crumpled up in a little ball on the floor, hiding from life in grief and loss. You honor your love for her much more by going on."

I felt it was what she would have said to him if she could have spoken.

"Thank you," he said, simply.

By the time we both had to leave to catch our flights, we had talked for hours. We were standing, with the table in between us, neither of us really wanting to go.

"Well," I said, smoothing my shirt and gathering my things, "I'm so glad you came over. Look how nicely we've spent the time."

"I hope to hear from you soon," he said, taking my hand. For a moment, I thought he might kiss it.

I went to catch my flight. I was in such a daze that I missed my gate completely.