I was with Mary, dedicated expert
buyer, and great collector, who,
in her house in Morton, had an entire floor
filled up with massive checkered plastic purses,
the whole repertoire of Miyake lying around
in scattered heaps along the ground. It was like
a cemetery, crowded and forlorn. But then
she’d open them, and they would come to life:
raggedy things, crumpled corpses, eaten by moths
now resurrected and restored to their true form.
Mary would look them over, hold them to her
chest, play with them a bit to warm them up,
and then the lucky ones, for a minute or two,
she’d wear. Then back to the piles, bye bye,
see you later. What else was she to do?
There were too many. But a few at least
got stuck in your head.
*
Me, collect things? As in, curate collections that welcome everything democratically, as long as they belong to the same species and genus? Collections that are inclusive and compassionate? Unending, undiscriminating? No: I don’t collect anything. I can’t stand collections, I find them excruciating; either you keep the items in drawers and dressers and so never see them at all, or else you have them always on display and, as a result, stop seeing them for what they are.
All I wanted was a pair of shoes, the shoes I had seen the day before, as the shop was closing, behind the storefront window. No price, not even the most unreasonable, could have dissuaded me from buying them. Those shoes . . . lavender, Amalfi-lemon yellow, fresh rust, in wide, unequal stripes, like the folds in a painting by Pontormo. Even just gazing at them from afar I felt an aristocratic shudder, which started in my feet and rose along my legs; up and up it rose and reached my shoulders, and then, flitting across the back of my neck, it skimmed the circumference of my head, and then began to descend the front of my body, finally coming to rest radiantly in my heart. If a pair of shoes can pull off a loop like that, they’re no ordinary shoes, that’s for sure!
My friend Mary knew about my intended purchase, and she insisted on coming with me to the store. “Hey, those are my toys, you’re not gonna play with them without me, are you?” Oh no, certainly not, heaven forbid. So there we were, arm in arm, crossing the threshold. But as soon as we were inside, I slipped away from her: I wanted to reach the target of my obsessive reflections with all my energies intact, and I was afraid of Mary’s hesitations and her tiresome lingering; and anyway she was already heading off to wander among the shelves and display cases with that withdrawn listlessness which always preceded her most unrestrained outbursts of acquisition.
A sales clerk approached me: even before I could point to the object-cause of my impatience, there he was, on his knees, slipping on just the right pair of shoes, in just the right size. How thrilling and comforting it is to have one’s shoes tied! He tied the shoes with such a delicate firmness that, after the final knot, my feet, buzzing with joy, began to dart about in a celebratory dance, this way and that, to the front, to the back, to the left, to the right, till I reached the mirror. There I stopped, completely still, and announced: “I’ll take ’em!”; and then a melancholy calm descended upon us, or at least upon me. Here I am, I thought, with these beautiful shoes—they’re mine, they’re on my feet, I even danced in them—and yet, instead of relishing that pleasure, relishing it at least until the moment of going to bed, now I’m taking them off and having them put away, closed up, in a box.
Why, why are we never ready for happiness when it manifests itself so clearly? What is this horrendous shyness, this foolish modesty, this disgusting inertia, that makes us turn away from the beloved object, from its quivering joy, and, only after having subjected it to the test of distance and privation, do we welcome it back into the sphere of our intimacy? What is this conscientious desire, which suppresses the gluttonous and ingenuous impatience of pleasure, and prefers the calm ceremony of possession? What were we organizing here—a wedding? a betrothal of a bygone era?
I was immersed in these half-formed thoughts, more a heap of embarrassed feelings than a series of rational reflections, when the salesperson handed me the shoes neatly arranged in their box, and, with a bow, declared:
“These are on the house. A gift from the store to you.”
“Really?” I said, eyes wide.
“Really! Please—a gift from the store.”
“Wait, really?”
“Yes, really. They’re yours,” he insisted, with another bow.
“Oh, wow, well, thanks, then! What incredible kindness!”
Did I believe it? Sort of. On the one hand, it was clear that those shoes belonged to me by natural right; I for my part, moreover, certainly had not been sparing in exclamations and praise. And is it not traditional, in a store such as this, to offer as a gift that which the client admires? It must seem rude to them, I thought, to make me pay for them. It wasn’t impossible. But it also could have been an indirect way, more elegant than the usual discount, to show thanks to my friend, who had spent absurd sums of money in that store. I went up to Mary to get some clarification:
“They want to give them to me for free . . . what’s going on?”
“What are you talking about?” she replied, distracted, her gaze flitting about, tugged in every direction.
“The shoes . . . they’re giving them to me for free.”
“Well take them, then! . . . Aren’t you happy?”
“Of course I am! . . . But why give them to me for free? Isn’t it odd?”
“You think it’s a big deal to them? They can afford it.”
“They’re doing it for you, that’s what it is. A sort of reward . . . a sort of bonus for your expenses. You already knew about it, tell me the truth.”
“No! No way . . . But it doesn’t surprise me at all . . . The truth is that they’re tired of all the proper ladies from the Upper East Side . . . they’re all the same . . . The salespeople get bored . . . When somebody different, like you, comes by . . . you were even dancing! It’s such a relief for them to escape from their routine! They see the grace you have, the charm, the eccentricity, the creativity, the energy, the enthusiasm . . . and right away they’re filled with the desire to make you a gift. They’ve got to have some fun too, every so often, poor guys!”
I found the explanation very convincing; in fact, I’d say, definitive. All that remained was for me to go home and boast about it, in part because Mary’s arms were overflowing with merchandise—it wasn’t in her nature to point; she touched, grabbed, held—and if I were to stay, I ran the risk of feeling nauseous.
“Look at this!” I said to the friend hosting me in New York, as I pulled out the shoes. “They gave them to me for free.”
“Who?” she asked, amused.
“The store.”
“Forget about it.”
“I’m telling you, they gave them to me for free.”
“Forget about it. Those guys don’t give anything away for free. It was Mary, probably.”
“No, the store gave them to me for free, they do it every once in a while, when somebody really charming shows up . . . ”
“Forget about it. Those guys don’t do anything out of kindness. They don’t give things away. They wouldn’t give away a tissue. Mary paid for them, I’m sure of it.”
Even if it were true that Mary had paid, the pleasure of owning these shoes certainly wouldn’t be diminished for that reason. And yet the pride that had accompanied me as I walked home, the certainty of having earned the shoes for the sole reason that, when I had them on, my feet moved in celebration this way and that—this pride, this certainty, began to waver: it wasn’t a public gift rendered for my undeniable merits, but rather a private gift, granted out of personal affection. I soon found out that this was precisely the case. The next morning, Mary admitted that she had paid for them, she admitted it immediately, since, anyway, she said, it was obvious, anyone could see what had happened. It was the salesperson’s fault. He didn’t play his role well: he’d been awkward and in a hurry, whereas he ought to have accompanied the gift with a series of irrefutable arguments, in accordance with her explicit and precise instructions. Sadly, it hadn’t been the right salesperson for the job, the right one wasn’t in that day, and she’d been quite perturbed about it.
I’ve had the shoes for about ten years now. They still look like new. In fact, even though they’re quite comfortable, I only wear them on special occasions; which occasions, however, I’d be hard-pressed to name precisely, since, in general, I wait for the occasions to make themselves known, on the spot, as being special—which, to be honest, they do rather infrequently. This doesn’t upset me, though, because the less I wear them, the less I get used to them, and I would never want to get used to these shoes. What a sad day that’d be, the day in which I was no longer amazed by those unexpected colors, by those revelations and ringing peals of yellow. And how melancholy it would be, if I were to stop feeling blessed by that shape, that shape of mannerist elegance, which binds my feet tenderly, firmly but tenderly, and which gives to my feverish and vain footsteps the lightness of all that’s good, so that they reach their goal almost noiselessly, almost floating through the air!
