Page 45 - WTP Vol. XI #6

turned in her chair, and, the gift for the moment neatly settled in her lap, glanced up at her friend from so far away with moist, shining eyes. “Parsons... Parsons!” she had murmured in pleasure. As if admonishing a child who, if not altogether naughty, was rather testing the bounds of allowable behavior.
First Encounter
Nothing momentous, he had said to the professor in offering that story of his time in the Abruzzi. And indeed, looking back, it would appear to be, on balance, a fair enough characterization. Nothing momentous, considering the slow and incremental way of things, their accumulating nature... It was curious, it struck Parsons, how life’s decisive moments—likely fewer
in number than they were commonly thought to be— tended to embed themselves in inconspicuous acts,
or dispersed themselves in fragments across a broad enough canvas that their “meaning,” such as it was, or rather, came to be, was left to be extracted, deciphered, only later. And who knew but that those acts of subsequent “reconstruction” were colored, unavoidably, by events in the present, themselves indecipherable,
or ambiguous enough? It sufficed, he considered, to offer gratitude to life, and to be humbled by it. Not that life wouldn’t land blows plentiful enough (he’d had his share), but some of them, he reflected, were
of momentary import, vivid in the instant because concussively felt, and yet, thereafter, seen to have been of moderate weight.
What stood out, above all, as punctuating life’s events was the unexpected element—the altogether fortuitous turns things might take, and the element of surprise that accompanied such turns. Such was the story of how he’d first become acquainted with the Rinardis as a family and had subsequently entered into friendship with them. It formed a chronicle, that story, as circuitous as the back roads that had carried him up to the refugio so long ago, on that winter afternoon, with Federico and Liliana.
A fortuitous beginning!—not even on Italian soil. In Switzerland, rather.
In Geneva. Of all places.
~
Parsons’ European publisher was a small Swiss firm,
a select enough house that published, with care, his academic volumes, including some of those devoted to other than European subjects. He’d arrived in the city for a week of business with it in the early part of June. The association was a long one, and Parsons had been
T
soon piloting through sharp, dizzying drops and tight, twisting turns, uphill and down, in a roller-coaster
ride through a wholly blackened landscape.
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he town left behind
them, Corrado was
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