An Unnecessary Woman Read Online Free PDF Page A

immigrated to Brazil and one of their scions had recently become the governor of São Paulo. The girl left without ever showing her countenance in the bookstore. The second didn’t show up either; she married and no longer needed or wished to be employed.
    Had either of these women made an appearance, my life would have been altogether different. I didn’t realize how the fate of those two had influenced mine until a few years ago when the owner mentioned it in passing. He hadn’t thought for a moment that I could do the job. He credited my success to his diligent training.
    I worked for the paperback dilettante for fifty years, and mine was the only face anyone associated with my bookstore.
    That huge, darkly stained oak desk I once longed for now sits comfortably in my reading room, behind it a window letting in early evening darkness, and next to it my overfilled bookcases. When the owner, my boss, died four years ago, his family closed the bookstore, sold the books and inventory for a pittance. I ended up with my desk.
    How safe I will feel once I begin my translation, how sheltered, seated at this desk in the dark night, as Sebald as Jacques Austerlitz described, seated at this desk “watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity . . . from left to right”—right to left, in my case—“line by line, over the ruled paper.”
    On this oak magnificence I place the new notepad, next to the pencils, next to the pens. I unscrew the primary pen, an old Parker, and inspect the ink. The walnut-shaped inkwell, a fake antique of porcelain and copper, is lushly full. It is always a delicious thrill when I prepare for a new project. I feel at home in my rituals.
    The real antique on the desk is a comic book, an illustrated A Tale of Two Cities in Arabic, wrapped in red cellophane. Its value is sentimental only. It was woefully damaged—four pages missing, two torn, others water stained—when I received it some sixty years ago.
    It was summer, I was ten. My mother took her children to the public garden of Beirut. I had only three half brothers by then, I think, the youngest still in the pram. I may not remember my siblings clearly, but I do the day and I do the dress I was wearing, my best one, a blue taffeta with white trim. It came with a white plastic handbag that wouldn’t unsnap and was, in any case, too small to hold anything but a lonesome stick of gum. I remember clutching it to my right hip at all times. I remember the sky as clear and breezy, the whitish sun lazy and indifferent, neither too warm nor too bright. My mother—hunched over, her knees touching, both feet on the ground—sat on a wooden bench that was painted an overworked brown and was missing a board in its backrest. My half brothers and I clustered around her, planets orbiting our tired star. Shoo, shoo . She wanted us away. We weren’t used to being around strangers.
    In tentative steps with tiny feet I did separate, slowly and hesitantly, but I did.
    A chestnut-haired boy, plump and pale, with eyes the color of newly pressed olive oil, sat forlorn, all alone on a bench, longingly watching gaggles of dizzyingly loud children rush about on bicycles, tricycles, and those topless, floorless miniature red cars. The lonely boy looked a few years younger than I. Rolled up in his hand was the comic book that lies on my desk right now.
    I envied him. I wanted that comic book more than I’d ever wanted anything.
    I asked him if he wanted to play. I used the word play, I remember that, giving him the option of choosing what game he wanted. He lit up, flushed as if he’d drunk a glass of Bordeaux. He did want to play, most certainly he did. He nodded and nodded and nodded. I asked if he was willing to share his comic book. He didn’t mind at all, he let me hold it. My dress had no pockets because it came with a purse that didn’t open. I gave it to him, my purse. A fair trade, no? He