great story that freaked the HELL out of me. Enjoy!

[Mark Thibodeau]

https://theeveningrednessinthewest.wordpress.com/category/a-woman-seldom-found/


William Sansom (1912-1976), was an English short story writer,
novelist, travel writer, and author of children’s books. Sansom’s
short stories are characterized by his minutely detailed descriptions
and depictions of people confronting extremities of experience. Eudora
Welty said that "the flesh of William Sansom’s stories is their
uninterrupted contour of sensory impressions. The bone is reflective
contemplation." In his short story “A Woman Seldom Found,” a
disillusioned young man holidaying in Rome meets a mysterious and
beautiful woman and begins to believe that there is such a thing as
“the perfect encounter.”



a woman seldom found
by william sansom



ONCE a young man was on a visit to Rome.



It was his first visit; he came from the country but he was neither on
the one hand so young nor on the other so simple as to imagine that a
great and beautiful capital should hold out finer promises than
anywhere else. He already knew that life was largely illusion, that
though wonderful things could happen, nevertheless as many
disappointments came in compensation: and he knew, too, that life
could offer a quality even worse — the probability that nothing would
happen at all. This was always more possible in a great city intent on
its own business.



Thinking in this way, he stood on the Spanish steps and surveyed the
momentous panorama stretched before him. He listened to the swelling
hum of the evening traffic and watched as the lights went up against
Rome’s golden dusk. Shining automobiles slunk past the fountains and
turned urgently into the bright Via Condotti, neon-red signs stabbed
the shadows with invitation; the yellow windows of buses were packed
with faces intent on going somewhere — everyone in the city seemed
intent on the evening’s purpose. He alone had nothing to do.



He felt himself the only person alone of everyone in the city. But
searching for adventure never brought it — rather kept it away. Such a
mood promises nothing. So the young man turned back up the steps,
passed the lovely church, and went on up the cobbled hill towards his
hotel. Wine bars and food shops jostled with growing movement in those
narrow streets. But out on the broad pavement of the Vittorio Veneto,
under the trees mounting to the Borghese Gardens, the high world of
Rome would be filling the most elegant cafes in Europe to enjoy with
aperitifs the twilight. That would be the loneliest of all! So the
young man kept to the quieter, older streets on his solitary errand
home.



In one such street, a pavementless alley between old yellow houses, a
street that in Rome might suddenly blossom into a secret piazza of
fountain and baroque church, a grave secluded treasure-place — he
noticed that he was alone but for the single figure of a woman walking
down the hill toward him.



As she drew nearer, he saw that she was dressed with taste, that in
her carriage was a soft Latin fire, that she walked for respect. He
face was veiled, but it was impossible to imagine that she would not
be beautiful. Isolated thus with her, passing so near to her, and she
symbolizing the adventure of which the evening was so empty — a
greater melancholy gripped him. He felt wretched as the gutter, small,
sunk, pitiful. So that he rounded his shoulders and lowered his eyes –
but not before casting one furtive glance into hers.



He was so shocked at what he saw that he paused, he stared, shocked,
into her face. He had made no mistake. She was smiling. Also — she too
had hesitated. He thought instantly: ‘Whore?’ But no — it was not that
kind of smile, though as well it was not without affection.

And then amazingly she spoke.



"I — I know I shouldn’t ask you… but it is such a beautiful evening —
and perhaps you are alone, as alone as I am…"



She was very beautiful. He could not speak. But a growing elation gave
him the power to smile. So that she continued, still hesitant, in no
sense soliciting.



"I thought… perhaps… we could take a walk, an aperitif…"



At last the young man achieved himself.



"Nothing, nothing would please me more. And the Veneto is only a
minute up there."



She smiled again.



"My home is just here…"



They walked in silence a few paces down the street, to a turning the
young woman had already passed. This she indicated. They walked to
where the first humble houses ended in a kind of recess. In the recess
was set the wall of a garden, and behind it stood a large and elegant
mansion. The woman, about whose face shone a curious pale glitter —
something fused of the transparent pallor of fine skin, of grey but
brilliant eyes, of dark eyebrows and hair of lucent black – inserted
her key in the garden gate.



They were greeted by a servant in velvet livery. In a large and
exquisite salon, under chandeliers of fine glass and before a moist
green courtyard where water played, they were served with frothy wine.
They talked. The wine — iced in the warm Roman night — filled them
with an inner warmth of exhilaration. But from time to time the young
man looked at her curiously.



With her glances, with many subtle inflections of teeth and eyes she
was inducing an intimacy that suggested much. He felt he must be
careful. At length he thought the best thing might be to thank her –
somehow thus to root out whatever obligation might be in store. But
here she interrupted him, first with a smile, then with a look of some
sadness. She begged him to spare himself any perturbation; she knew it
was strange, that in such a situation he might suspect some second
purpose; but the simple truth remained that she was lonely and — this
with a certain deference — something perhaps in him, perhaps that
moment of dust in the street, had proved to her inescapably
attractive. She had not been able to helpherself. The possibility of a
perfect encounter — a dream that years of disillusion will never quite
kill — decided him. His elation rose beyond control. He believed her.
And thereafter the perfections compounded.



At her invitation they dined. Servants brought food of great delicacy;
shellfish, fat bird flesh, soft fruits. And afterward they sat on a
sofa near the courtyard, where it was cool. Liqueurs were brought. The
servants retired. A hush fell upon the house. They embraced. A little
later, with no word, she took his arm and led them from the room. How
deep a silence had fallen between them! The young man’s heart beat
fearfully — it might be heard, he felt, echoing in the hall whose
marble they now crossed, sensed through his arm to hers. But such
excitement rose now from certainty. Certainty that at such a moment,
on such a charmed evening — nothing could go wrong. There was no need
to speak. Together they mounted the great staircase. In her bedroom,
to the picture of her framed by the bed curtains and dimly naked in a
silken shift, he poured out his love; a love that was to be eternal,
to be always perfect, as fabulous as this their exquisite meeting.
Softly she spoke the return of her love. Nothing would ever go amiss,
nothing would ever come between them. And very gently she drew back
the bedclothes for him.



But suddenly, at the moment when at last he lay beside her, when his
lips were almost upon her — he hesitated.



Something was wrong. A flaw could be sensed. He listened, felt – and
then saw the fault was his. Shaded, soft-shaded lights by the bed —
but he had been so careless as to leave on the bright electric
chandelier in the centre of the ceiling. He remembered the switch was
by the door. For a fraction, then, he hesitated. She raised her
eyelids — saw his glance at the chandelier, understood. Her eyes
glittered. She murmured, "My beloved, don’t worry — don’t move …"



And she reached out her hand. Her hand grew larger, her arm grew
longer and longer, it stretched out through the bed-curtains, across
the long carpet, huge and overshadowing the whole of the long room,
until at last its giant fingers were at the door.



With a terminal click, she switched out the light.



—from The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Ghost Stories, ed. Michael
Cox, Oxford University Press, 1997
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l