The perfect stranger

With the risk of being considered rude, he just couldn’t take his eyes off her. From the moment she sat down before him, in the train compartment, with Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat resting on her lap, he knew. She was the perfect stranger.

When he thought she was too captured by the book to notice his persistent looks, he scrutinized her thoroughly trying to imprison in his nostrils her scent. For some reason, she reminded him of his grandmother’s house:

a warm and comforting smell of

boiled milk,

rum with black tea,

cherry blossom,

cinnamon

and baked apples.

As always, he also knew it then. They would have started talking, first about Omar’s words

"Alike for those who for TO-DAY prepare,

And that after a TO-MORROW stare,

A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries

"Fools! your reward is neither Here nor There!"

then about wine,

"A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread, -- and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness --

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!"

When she thought he wasn’t watching, pretending to absently admire the arid and still snowless mountain landscape, he allowed her to scan him, trying to guess what she was thinking. He knew that most women were attracted by his sensual salt and pepper hair and his indubitable early 40s charm. He knew women. He loved women: their shapes, their lamentations, their tears, their passionate way of being in the world, their moods, and their ups and downs. But moreover, he loved their scent, sniffing their hair as a hungry wolf would sniff his pray. He knew precisely how they smelt when they were sad, happy or excited.

And she, the perfect stranger, had the prefect smell: that of warm skin, and the sweetish flavor of a woman right after she's been satisfied. He felt an imperious and insane desire to taste her.

Then she did something unexpected that made him feel dizzy and lose his precarious balance. With slow motions she opened her handbag and took out a red apple, religiously kissing its shiny and crisp skin before taking a healthy bite. The sound of her bite made him recall the sound of the footsteps in the first layer of a fresh and frozen snow. For the first time since they were traveling together, she raised her face and looked him straight in the eyes, without blinking. She smiled innocently, then she reopened the book and started reading, lifting her head from time to time to look outside the window.

For a while, he imagined, they would have been happy. She would wait for him with freshly baked apple strudels and made love every day. They would consume each other in adoration and their intimacy would have been absolute: he would love watching her while she would be sitting on the toilet, kneeling sometimes before her, and wrapping his arms around her waist. She was so perfect, that not even the less romantic but naturally human habit of urinating didn’t manage to make him think less of her.

He would know in detail

every inch of her skin,

every beauty spot,

every pore,

and the exact number of her eyelashes.

"I sometimes think ne'er grows so red, the rose,

Where some buried Caesar bled,

and every hyacinth the garden rows

dropt' in her lap from some once lovely head."

He would have sensed when she was sad, before seeing her. Their happiness would have been so complete and overwhelming, that at times he would be afraid something terrible could happen, and he knew he wouldn’t survive without her. He would have started a new religion, as he wasn’t sure if he just wanted to devour her or kneel and raise her hosannas.

"Where blooms the rose or tulip-bed,

There crimson blood of Kings was shed'

The violet springing from the Earth

Some Mole of Beauty gave it birth."

Then it happened. With slow moves, she got up and grabbed her bag. The next train stop was hers.

While still chewing on the red apple,

she waved at him and,

as she was exiting the train compartment,

said the only words that had ever been spoken between them:

“Merry Christmas!”