Time: late 20th Century

Characters: a professor from the midwest united states; his mind has deceived his body into thinking it is as young as it once was. his wife of twenty years, a woman whose grey hairs had all but consumed her head, but whose eyes emitted a fierce glow of unrelenting intelligence.

As the train rumbled down the tracks, it was all he could to stare out his window in awe. He had paid fare for the entire cabin so that he and his wife could relax. He needed this time to assimilate all that his senses had acquired over the last few days. India was proving to be as much, perhaps more than he had set out to challenge himself with. He had wanted to be jarred, his cage to be rattled. The thing he was most afraid of, more than anything else, was settling into some sort of melancholy docility that too much pipe-dreaming and tunnel-vision can cause. He had wanted to be battered with inexorably unremitting reality: He wanted to be slapped in the face again.

The last time he had done this was when he was still a young man. Fresh from his first publication, with the gleam of success in his eyes, he had decided to venture into Africa. The experience had never left him, he saw it as clearly as he could see the sculpted lines of his wife's hand on his. He had gone expecting adventure, expecting some anti-empirical romanticism that might remind him of who he was. He had found it. The fiscal poverty amidst vast fortunes of culture seemed so dichotomous that it had remained etched in his mind like so many stick figures in the caves of Lascaux. It had changed his life forever.

He had returned from that venture a sort of stunted half-ling. He had grown so accustomed to the unforgivable charity practiced by people who had little enough for themselves, that to come back to the states was giving up a part of himself. He had grown to call that small portion of hopelessness incarnate his grotto, to where he could never return. He had returned to find the piece of himself that he had left behind for the changing, only later realizing that it was forever lost with his maturing, much in the same way he had lost Africa to the years.

He had met Fiorenza the following years later, after he had become a sort of hero and determined to find anonymity again in a small town that had not forgotten what the years were like before the war. She was working toward a doctorate in theology. She spoke three languages and was a realist with a utopist heart. Her parents were Sicilian in heart, but years of mind-numbing and back-breaking work had all but erased their proud memories. The first time he saw her, she had been bent over several texts with a number two pencil, sharpened to the perfect point. He had run in terror.

He recalled her approaching him one morning. She was dressed in a pair of khaki slacks, a white blouse, with her voluminous hair tied up in a tight bun and plastered to the back of her head. She carried a briefcase and wore stylish pumps. His heart had been pounding.

"Share with me, mio amore." His trance being broken, he realized she had been watching him for some time.

"Writing my memoir, darling."