Metempsychosis, M.A. (4)

A tune she once composed begun reverberating in her mind. The sound only she could hear motivated her to get up and move to another scheduled errand. Fortunately, it was the only piece of furniture left to polish, a handsome, minimalist nineteenth-century slant-top writing desk with a cute little drawer on the right side, originally designed to hold a fountain pen and inkwell, and a generous storage space in the middle where she kept spare writing paper and the manuscript of her diary.

'My inner child, my youth, my fleeting rebellions, my acquiescence, my idealistic zeal, my queer discrepancies, my love, my sorrow, all at peace, relegated to the ever-mounting pile of memory...' Once completed, she tried to destroy it, but never found enough courage. It was an integral part of herself, like the books, like the desk she acquired in Ghent, like the plants in the attic.

The plants... She will tend to them later while upstairs - to make sure they have all they need before her body is discovered. Now, on a freshly polished desk, she only need to write the final letter to her beloved niece explaining what was about to happen.

Her thirty-year-old niece was the only blood relative she kept close contact with. The affection was boundless and mutual. The only child of her sister Agnes, her niece adored her quirky eccentric aunt more than anyone in the family divided by years of conflicts, tensions and misunderstandings, most recent being the quarrels over property inheritance Kora knew all too well her aunt never wanted to have any part in. The saga lasted nearly a decade exponentially widening the void between Johanna and her two siblings. She did not need any extra money, and most certainly did not want to upset the ever-brittle truce between them. Nonetheless, the idea that despite featuring in her mother's testament as one of the three beneficiaries - something which considering the past was far from obvious - she wished to be excluded from the proceedings, caused even more anguish and discord than the outrageous claims of her brother to get the house all for himself. It was true that Anton invested heavily in its renovation and all the improvements their ailing mother needed, but that he should inherit the whole lot as a result of his efforts, was, to say the least, unfair. After months of persistent evasion, in yet another unexpected response to his aggressive greed, Johanna changed her mind yet again and informed her lawyer that the third part of the estate's value assigned to her should fall entirely in the hands of her sister's daughter, Kora, who at the time of the quarrel was still a child unqualified to inherit. When Anton realized it will take four additional years to close the case he got furious, but Johanna, without a slightest hostility, refused to concede. The more the external world agitated her composure to step outside and deal with matters of excess and triviality, the more she tended towards her inner self. The diary strongly reminded her of it; she began writing it at that very time - chiefly to cope with the bereavement and the subsequent trauma.

Now, with her life almost done, she only needed to write a few words to Kora, to explain why, and that whatever was in Johanna's possession was now hers: all the precious belongings, the viola, furniture, art, the pregnant bookshelves, collection of gem stones and crystals, her botanical micro-laboratory, the palm house with no palms – nonetheless, an optimal place for the study of nature, including the destructive palm moths she found out about on her last trip to the Ligurian coast, Paysandisia archon and Rhynchophorus ferrugineus, also known as Red Palm Weevil. She was puzzled by the local authorities' inability to cope with the pestilence, gradually and without obstacle devouring and killing large amounts of palms. We can't afford to be separated from nature, she used to say to Kora, not even in the city; we must protect it, cultivate its diversity and understand what diseases challenge its well-being. Kora used to come quite often and sought her refuge here. She loved the garden and its tranquility as much as her aunt. Johanna hoped that she will move here after she's gone and continue looking after the place. There was no one else she could trust. Not the way things went between her and all the people she knew...

As to the books, she wasn't entirely sure whether her niece, holding PhD in analytical biochemistry, will benefit from the hefty library with a collection of rare and much sought-for though otherwise perfectly obscure books dealing mostly with esoteric and pre-scientific subjects, including early prints of Paracelsus, Sendivogius, Fludd, the Rosicrucian writings of Michael Maier, or lost scripts of Heinrich Khunrath. What is their value beyond historical insight into the state and advancement of human knowledge? The genuine curiosity for the alchemist perspective she used to hold dear has gradually peeled off, leaving Johanna disenchanted with religiously informed manifestos, considering some of them as misguided and even bigoted as any other servile and irrational exultations straight from Ulrich Seidl's documentary, not to mention the veneration of the relics, like the finger of Saint Catherine, still on display in the San Domenico Basilica in Siena. Thinking of it now, thinking how far her worldview expanded, she gets uncomfortable to the point of embarrassment. 'When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child. When I grew up and became whoever I am now, I did away with childish things...' She remained kind to her youthful self though - finding the naive reverence she used to manifest amusing. All considered, she was relieved that when she first visited the place with her family at the age of eleven, she didn't manage to take a good look at the saint's severed and embalmed head proudly displayed in the basilica, only few steps away from the finger. Most likely, it would hunt her in graphic nightmares no child's fragile imagination should ever be visited upon. The bygone fixations aside, she still attached great sentimental value to the charming beautifully designed volumes she collected over the years. After all, she spent her childless, unmarried life dedicating most of her spare time and resources to what she called “the distillation of the essence,” of which bibliophilia was an integral part, even though her involvement with the arcane seemed increasingly like a distant, perhaps even completely separate existence - her soul travelling to entirely different regions in the guise of another personality, carrying with it an entirely different conclusion to life's unending quest for understanding.

She looked at the front page of her diary containing an inscription from Vergil's Aenneids: "With far different pains you shall pay for your trespasses, next time...”

She put her hand on the notebook as if searching for its pulse. 'Next time, my ass - she invoked - there won't be any next time.' After a brief moment, the notion of the letter she was meant to write came back. She reached for the pen and the sheet of paper, closed the top of the desk and begun writing.

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