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But love is always new. Regardless of whether we love once, twice, or a dozen times in our life, we always face a brand-new situation. Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere. We simply have to accept it, because it is what nourishes our existence. If we reject it, we die of hunger, because we lack the courage to stretch out a hand and pluck the fruit from the branches of the tree of life. We have to take love where we find it, even if that means hours, days, weeks of disappointment and sadness.
The moment we begin to seek love, love begins to seek us.
And to save us.
When the Other left me, my heart once again began to speak to me. It told me that the breach in the dike had allowed the waters to pour through, that the wind was blowing in all directions at once, and that it was happy because I was once again willing to listen to what it had to say.
My heart told me that I was in love. And I fell asleep with a smile on my lips.
WHEN I AWOKE, the window was open and he was gazing at the mountains in the distance. I watched him without saying anything, ready to close my eyes if he turned toward me.
As if he knew, he turned and looked at me.
"Good morning," he said.
"Good morning. Close the window--it's so cold."
The Other had appeared with no warning. It was still trying to change the direction of the wind, to detect shortcomings, to say, No, that's impossible. But it knew it was too late.
"I have to get dressed," I said.
"I'll wait for you downstairs."
I got up, banished the Other from my thoughts, opened the window again, and let the sun in. Its light bathed everything--the mountains with their snow-covered peaks, the ground blanketed in dry leaves, and the river, which I could hear but not see.
The sun shone on me, warming my nude body. I was no longer cold--I was consumed by a heat, the heat of a spark becoming a flame, the flame becoming a bonfire, the bonfire becoming an inferno. I knew.
I wanted this.
I also knew that from this moment on I was going to experience heaven and hell, joy and pain, dreams and hopelessness; that I would no longer be capable of containing the winds that blew from the hidden corners of my soul. I knew that from this moment on love would be my guide--and that it had waited to lead me ever since childhood, when I had felt love for the first time. The truth is, I had never forgotten love, even when it had deemed me unworthy of fighting for it. But love had been difficult, and I had been reluctant to cross its frontiers.
I recalled the plaza in Soria and the moment when I had asked him to find the medal I had lost. I had known what he was going to tell me, and I hadn't wanted to hear it, because he was the type who would someday go off in search of wealth, adventure, and dreams. I needed a love that was possible.
I realized that I had known nothing of love before. When I saw him at the conference and accepted his invitation, I'd thought that I, as a mature woman, would be able to control the heart of the girl who had been looking for so long for her prince. Then he had spoken about the child in all of us--and I'd heard again the voice of the child I had been, of the princess who was fearful of loving and losing.
For four days, I had tried to ignore my heart's voice, but it had grown louder and louder, and the Other had become desperate. In the furthest corner of my soul, my true self still existed, and I still believed in my dreams. Before the Other could say a word, I had accepted the ride with him. I had accepted the invitation to travel with him and to take the risks involved.
And because of that--because of that small part of me that had survived--love had finally found me, after it had looked for me everywhere. Love had found me, despite the barricade that the Other had built across a quiet street in Zaragoza, a barricade of preconceived ideas, stubborn opinions, and textbooks.
I opened the window and my heart. The sun flooded the room, and love inundated my soul.
WE WANDERED FOR HOURS, through the snow and along the roads. We breakfasted in a village whose name I never found out but in whose central plaza a dramatic fountain sculpture displayed a serpent and a dove combined into a single fabulous creature.
He smiled when he saw it. "It's a sign--masculine and feminine joined in a single figure."
"I'd never thought before about what you told me yesterday," I said. "But it makes sense."
"'And God created man and woman,'" he quoted from Genesis, "because that was his image and simulacrum: man and woman."
I noted a new gleam in his eye. He was happy and laughed at every silly thing. He fell into easy conversation with the few people we met along the way--workers dressed in gray on their way to the fields, adventurers in colorful gear, preparing to climb a mountain peak. I said little--my French is awful--but my soul rejoiced at seeing him this way.
His joy made everyone who spoke with him smile. Perhaps his heart had spoken to him, and now he knew that I loved him--even though I was still behaving like just an old friend.
"You seem happier," I said at one point.
"Because I've always dreamed of being here with you, walking through these mountains and harvesting the 'golden fruits of the sun.'"
The golden fruits of the sun--a verse written ages ago, repeated by him now, at just the right moment.
