Miss Vermeer (2) 
Why and how did you come from Delft in Menton?
"To you I might as well say it now but all this is old ... so old.
The boss brought us a brandy and left us alone. She swallowed a mouthful: "I'm
Catharina Bolnes. Bolnes was the maiden name of wife of Vermeer. Catherina and her name. What a coincidence-
for Dutch, "I remarked amused.
Catharina Bolnes, he repeated, turning it into his glass in his hands, probably served as a model for his painting to Vermeer Girl with a Pearl Earring . ... Sometimes I feel like his reincarnation. See, I have the same blue turban.
-Are you kidding me.
Not at all.
"Then," said my neighbor, I do not know what happened. I felt ... well ... that time is fetched ... yes, that's it ... like the cloak falling from a peg. It seemed a whirlwind blew over the roof, shaking the very walls of the restaurant. This storm was followed by a sudden silence. Stars shining in the sky. Around me there were more houses and landscape that presented itself to me would be the one that existed two or three centuries before, that of a fishing village.
Catharina was gone. I do not understand what was happening and put my amazement on on account of drunkenness. Then after a moment I saw her again. There was no doubt it was this time: the girl with the pearl . I recognized the same look in his eyes moist, the pearl in his left ear lobe, the same way to keep the sensual lips open. I touched his face and tried to kiss her but she blocked my mouth a conclusive index.
following days, the same scenario repeated itself. At the restaurant, after lunch, guests eclipsed one after the other. Then she sat at my table. Then night came, clear and constellations. We stood there staring at the waves came crashing on the shore, listening to the lapping of the harbor and Catharina spoke of his former life in Delft, the children she had with the painter, the paintings she had inspired. She revealed that her face was in many tables: the same arched eyebrows, straight nose, wide-set eyes in the same Woman in Blue, Woman balance , The young woman writing a letter . I listened, spellbound and definitely, you will understand with a heart full of love. At various signs, I realized that this feeling was shared by her.
My life was turned upside down now, the hour down in the same ritual. There was this moment where the lunch with the clients, I called ironically MISS VERMEER night and then fled when two hearts in a world that belonged to them. I see her: she was then further coats of faded jeans, overalls and seersucker robes Indian who changed so many of her short skirts the south.
Yes! ... I was madly in love, insisted in a tone more strident the young man. I had some love but all the women met once looked like now to me these beautiful flowers that have retained their petals have lost their fragrance. After my troubles present and those to come, the world seemed ugly, dirty and fake, muddy but her .... Catharina was a rose in a field of nettles. DO NOT SMILE! begged he continuing his story with such sincerity that he eventually captivated me. Both men have indulgence for a merry and admit that one can hardly speak of a serious tone of intimate secrets of nature, that voice far from a perfect world that wants to be . For me, what seems demonstrative of divine and mysterious nature of love, what are its spontaneity and strangeness. The science shows that two molecules alone in the world, at some distance from each other they are assumed in space, can get going to meet. It's the same over time. Beings can reach across the centuries. Love knows no nonsense. So I am sure that Catharina came from his seventeenth-century Dutchman to find me.
He was silent, a prey to the liveliest emotion., Hid her face in his hands as he continued staring at me: "Listen
... I so want you to believe me. ... One evening, it was three days ago, she accepted my kiss, and since that moment when I thought of faint happiness, I have not reviewed. It disappeared. The patron of the bar-restaurant was the first surprise. "It was not his style to Catharina" she nodded. I was desperate for myself when last night, opening my computer ... the first image that came to me was his ... I mean that of Catharina, in short, Girl with a Pearl Earring , is the same thing, with a watermark that word: "I'm back ... wait for me! "... Then I come home. Who knows ... it might be after this trip but I am afraid of having betrayed by talking to her.
"She will forgive you, no doubt," I replied, not knowing if, in these words, I wanted to console an unhappy soul or get rid of a madman. ... A fool ... I write the word with hesitation because I had felt in spite of myself drawn into his story through a strange empathy.
That, he says! That's all!
I can not say how many times had took these incredible secrets.
The train arrived in Lyon. The man ran down the dock, his laptop shoulder. I watched him to the subway entrance when I saw him get behind a big girl not slender. She looked in my direction ... a look full of tender irony, then she caught my neighbor's arm. A few seconds later, they hugged and kissed passionately, as if they had not seen for centuries.
The girl was, of course, wearing a blue turban and wearing a pearl earring.
Epilogue
I forgot the history of this crazy encounter if, a few days after that trip, the picture above is me mysteriously and suddenly appeared on the screen by opening my computer . It was the same photo seen on the laptop of my neighbor in the Paris-Menton.
Later, browsing an interesting biography The Double Life of Vermeer I read these lines the author, Luigi Guarnieri , that: "For Proust , Vermeer's women are a way to talk to him indirectly himself, to work a kind of oblique autobiography, to paint the reflection of a buried me, dark, secret ... By surveying himself in them, he sees images of dreamlike beauty, passion, eternity of what everyone looks confused and unconsciously without ever succeeding "
Really, I thought, Proust has all the answers.
