A flashback to the year 20..

The alleys of Ederthal in the late light. The sky fills with rose hues. The Eder floodplain glows as if dipped in liquid amber.

Nana wears a sombrero de palma, a wide-brimmed straw hat with a black silk ribbon. This is no mere hatband, but a ribbon of love and play. With it she binds moments of intimate connection with her playmate Anson. It is a signal of her erotic expansion course.

Nana’s emerald-green top is made of muslin; the narrow straps rest feather-light on her shoulders, the fabric itself scarcely more than a breath—spun light.

I briefly tell the story of her shorts.

Flashback — London a few weeks earlier

In a shop window on Marylebone High Street, Anson spots a pair of sand-colored linen shorts. He imagines taking them off Nana, hears her giggle, sees her in her slip, savors her seductive appetite on the tongue of memory. Her happiness lies close to his heart.

The shop smells of leather and patchouli. The lone saleswoman seems as if she were from another planet, as though she had hidden herself among the stacks until some interstellar countdown. Anson notices a nose piercing and tribal tattoos that make him think of Mad Max.

“Looking for something specific?” she asks, mockingly. Her hair is a wild cloud of silvery strands. Anson points to the object of his desire. The saleswoman relents: “She’ll look beautiful in them.”

Nana knows the London fantasy. She loves to acknowledge with precision the attention born of Anson’s erotic inventiveness. She nestles up to him, takes his hands and places them on her hips. She kisses his neck. It animates her to feel him so—no need to say how. In her mind she says this and that to make him even hotter, though she still doesn’t dare speak the words that would unleash so much.

…

They choose the Spaniard on the town-hall square. They order berenjenas con miel—fried eggplant, golden brown, sliced paper-thin, lightly salted—with a thread of miel de caña, sugarcane honey. A fino to start, then they drink Verdejo.

“Mineral. Andalusian,” Nana tastes the wine.

“What does Andalusian taste like?” Anson asks.

The most beautiful game in the world — Nana in her own words

Here I lie. A cloth on my hips, nothing more on my body. It is written so in the script of our love. You can’t get enough of the arabesque magic, and neither can I. I enchant you with a bliss that comes straight from the genes. I turn your head, crawl under the duvet… it is the most beautiful game of my life. The truth is, I have played it with very few men. The initially shy and then neglectful arousal of most, set against your permanent fireworks, makes for a stark contrast.

I thank you every day for your love and for the pleasure you give me with such wonderful endurance. You’ve sent me on a trip; long since I’ve become addicted to the hormone cocktails we keep mixing for each other with ever greater refinement.

From the omniscient perspective

Nana lies almost naked on the hotel bed. A silk scarf meanders across her hip. The scarf, too, has a story. Nana found it at a bazaar in Jaipur—amid a tangle of spice stalls, food stands, and other robustly itinerant vendors. Turmeric was weighed like gold dust.

The scarf carries colors reminiscent of a South Seas sunset: carmine, golden orange, a hint of violet at the edges, as though someone had rolled the horizon into it. The merchant said it was bandhani—a traditional Indian dyeing technique. It was scarcely more than air, yet seemed to store warmth. A fleeting magic.

The magic evaporated on the flight home. Nana sometimes wears the scarf in public. It belongs to the game and can therefore also be used as a sign. To another man she might have said:

“Do you remember? Back then in Delhi—the blackout—when I wore it for the first time?”

Anson stands at the window. His voice reaches Nana as if in a dream, even as he speaks with an undertone of determination about his new novel.

The novel is about a woman who does not know whether she is pursuing the echo of her own memories—or the shadow of a man who once played the leading role in a botched, perhaps missed, love story.

“Are you telling a ghost story?”

“Not in the classic sense. More a story about what remains when passion goes—and what returns when you don’t expect it.”

“Where is it set?”

“Between London and Cádiz. She’s a translator, he an ethnologist. He disappears without a trace. At some point she begins to find sentences in his notes that he could never have written—sentences she recognizes. Because they belong to her.”