In Another Country, and Besides

by Maxwell Jacobs

  As for us, I now need time and space to digest and go through that process. I know it’s something I have to go through alone. These last days, I went through my life three times already and as my love for you is within me and I carry it around every single moment, it can’t harm anything if we don’t see each other for a while.

  I do hope you understand and if you don’t, well—that’s the risk I take. I don’t want to lose you again darling, so please stay strong for us.

  As for David, well, he really has started to scare me. He has tried too many times and it’s getting tiring. We went out for lunch together on my last day before coming to Venice and he pushed me into the cloakroom and tried to grab at me. I pushed him back of course but he really frightened me. Even now, in Venice, he does not stop.

  He wrote this morning saying he will come. I know this is not easy for you to hear but I want to tell you everything and be so completely honest with you, as we always have been. I just wish he would stop all this. But he does not listen. What would his wife think, if she knew? Poor woman. When I return I will start to look for another job as you once suggested, but my fear now is that my leaving will not stop him in his obsession.

  Liv talks about you often and still sleeps with your donkey every night. I just want you to know that we both miss you dearly and dream of a day soon when we can all be together and live our love once more. I love you my darling.

  MARIA.

  I could feel the tears as she wrote it. I felt happy and relieved that it had come from her and I wouldn’t have to go on a crusade to win her back. She loves me and everything is fine.

  On the thirtieth of July I wrote to Maria and told her I was in France after some time alone on the coast and that I had left Zurich almost six weeks ago. I thanked her for the honest letter and told her that I understood her situation and reasoning completely. I told her that I loved her and missed them both deeply, and despite how we left things, when she was ready I would very much like us to be together again. I had mentioned I was not yet ready to come back to Switzerland and decided to take an apartment in Arles for some more weeks, but had not yet found a suitable place. I finished the letter with words that flew straight to the heart.

  I miss you more than you can imagine, and the idea that we won’t see each other for several more weeks gives me a heavy heart, but I understand the necessity of space and the time apart. I know that in the end it will bring us closer together. Please give my love to Liv along with a big kiss. I love you my princess.

  HARRY.

  It was a letter full of love and good humor and it felt good to say these things. It was a warm and compassionate letter, but said essentially nothing about David.

  —————

  I found a large apartment on Rue Genive in Arles on the banks of the Rhône, five minutes’ walk from the Place de la République. The apartment had a large living room, a bedroom, a kind of sitting room, kitchen, and bath. It suited the respectable neighborhood.

  The first night in a new bed always took some adjusting. I no longer dreamed of storms, or women, or Viola, or great occurrences, or fights. I only dreamed of new places now and Maria was always there.

  The first thing I thought of when I woke up was Maria. I reached for the telephone and realized I didn’t have her Venice number. I had a terrible feeling that she was in trouble of sorts. I went upstairs to the kitchen and opened the door to the terrace. The hot early-morning air rushed into the cold damp house.

  I dressed and put on one of my new light traveling suits, and walked out into the early morning and headed to the shop on the corner of Rue Genive.

  It was a nice morning. High white clouds hung in the blue sky above the houses. It had rained a little in the night so it was fresh and cool in the shadows and hot in the direct light. I felt good and I felt healthy and happy to be here in Arles on this summer’s day.

  I bought a couple of local newspapers, coffee, filters and a pack of cigarettes.

  In the distance I could see a line of stalls where the brocanteurs had set out this week’s priceless relics—old linen, crockery, ragged posters, café ashtrays, chairs on their last legs, amateur Cézannes, the contents of a hundred households.

  I walked down and saw more stalls sprawled along the bank of the river, some laden with cheese and flowers, others with olive oil and herbs, cheap clothes and sturdy pink brassieres and corsets that only seem to be sold in provincial French markets. I remained silent, taking in the colors, the smells, the good-humored jostling of the crowd, and enjoying the lightness of Arles.

  I got back to the apartment with some olives and sat out on the terrace waiting for the coffee to be ready. I sat there with the sun on my face and smoked a cigarette. I closed my eyes and felt the sun warm my face and thought about Maria and Liv. Then my eyelids became warm, and after a while I could only see red. Tomorrow, I thought, I would commence my tourism of the city properly, but this moment was glorious. I stared over the balcony onto the dusty arches and façades and rooftops that have stayed the same for hundreds of years.

  I smiled to myself, then focused on the day’s problem I had yet to solve. How to write my experience into a fictional novel. I got up and went downstairs to the bathroom and took a long hard stare at myself in the mirror. My posture looked terrible. I straightened myself up and gave myself a long, hard full-teethed smile. There you go, Harry. Much better.

  Now, for sure, there was a danger in doing this. But what had I always said? Risks were there to make life more interesting. However, am I really willing to risk everything for a book? Reality and fiction do come very close, but do they actually touch? If I did write this, the Italian police would have a field day, especially the inspector. He would certainly wonder what the hell I was doing and it would most definitely give him the motivation to come after me. But that’s why murdering David had to be so flawless and so perfectly executed. It would have to be the definition of a perfect murder. Even though I would not kill him with my bare hands, I would put him in a situation that would almost certainly result in his death. That way the evidence could never come back to me. There would only be speculation and these events would then simply inspire a story.

  I took my hat off, ran my hand through my hair, giving myself another big-toothed smile. I could write about the murder in Venice, about Maria, and I could even write about murdering Viola if I did it in an intelligent way.

  Hiding behind fiction creates a respite from the truth and by simply changing the names and storyline; I could make it into whatever I wanted. The idea gave me goose bumps.

  The possibilities were speeding through my subconscious and I could already feel the story start to take shape. I went back out to the terrace and picked up a pencil and started to write. It began:

  MY name is Harry Hoffman and I am writing this story, not—as I believe is unusual in these types of cases—from a desire of “confession” being a Roman Catholic; I feel I must set things out as accurately as possible, not for the good of some future generation or from any other moral urge, but because I believe it is a good story that must be told.

  I did not want to tell this story in the first person but I find that I must. I wanted to stay well outside the story, or better still, bury it deep inside so that I could not be touched by it ever again. I did not want to run through the emotions and hurt for a second time, by trying to handle all the people in it with some form of irony and pity that is so essential to good writing.

  I even thought I might be amused by all the things that are to happen, but I made the unfortunate mistake for a writer of actually having been the main character of the story. So it seems that this is not going to be splendid and cool and detached after all.

  Yes, I could feel the words being written already. Of course, I would have to change my name to something else.

  I lit another cigarette and pondered that and the word murderer. It’s funny to think of oneself as a murderer. It’s not something you ever set out to be.

 
I took a shower, dressed and strolled out into the afternoon sun. Across the plaza was a great cathedral influenced by the Romans. I remembered reading about it in a guidebook. I walked in and thought about going to confession. The coolness inside brought a welcoming relief from the outside humidity. I stood there in the entrance for a moment and felt uneasy. I’m a terrible Catholic, I thought. I decided in that moment confessing my sins in French would be practically impossible and therefore the whole idea was not as interesting as it had sounded in my head some minutes before.

  I walked over to café Bistrot Arlesenne. It was happy hour and leather-faced men dusty from the fields were lined up at the bar of the café, loud and talkative, their accents as thick as the smoke from their cigarettes. I ordered a Ricard and found a seat in the corner, feeling pale and foreign. From where I sat, I could see a game of boules in progress, the players moving slowly and noisily from one end of the court to the other. The sun slanted across the square, painting the stone houses with a coat of honey-colored light.

  One of the players was about to throw. His feet together, knees bent, brow furrowed in concentration, and pitched his boule in a long and deadly arc that knocked aside two other boules before coming to rest within a hairbreadth of the small wooden target ball, the cochonnet. Voices were raised, shoulders were shrugged, and arms spread wide in disbelief. There seemed to be no immediate prospect of the game continuing.

  At the table in front of me was a family of four. Both parents each had one of the children sat on their laps. The young boy must have been around five and had long curly hair. He was silent, watching his baby sister across the table, who was stood up on her mother’s knees, poking at her face. The parents were not talking, just sat in front of each other with two glasses of red wine, both untouched. The father smelled the little boy’s hair. They seemed like a sweet family, and wondered where they came from. As nobody was talking, I couldn’t know for sure. Perhaps Italian, as the mother had thick dark hair and wonderful bright eyes and dark olive skin. The father threw me off a little. He was fair, which explained why the little boy was so blond. I felt a faint sadness now and wondered what their story was and how they met. I imagined the man was me and the girl was Maria, and there we were, here in Arles, on a family vacation. The only difference would be that we would look happier together and be enthralled in some deep and interesting conversation.

  The waiter came out wearing a thick dark blue apron, picked up a metal stick and stuck it in the canopy, winding it slowly down to give some shade from the sun.

  The café was now getting busy. Another waiter came out from inside, carrying more comfortable dark brown wicker chairs and marble-topped tables and arranging them neatly in the shade. I kept my focus on the family, watching the kids play, and suddenly missed Liv terribly. Why was life so damn difficult, I wondered. Why couldn’t everything just be simple? Why did the David’s and Roberto’s of this world have to exist?

  I got up and went to the bathroom, locking the door behind me. I looked in the mirror and could see I was shaking. I ran to the toilet, opened the lid and threw up. I crouched down for a minute, until the feeling had left and then slowly came back to the mirror. I rested my hands down and slunk over the sink. I was still shaking after several minutes. There remained only one more step, I thought. But was it true? Did I really need to murder David to have what I wanted or was it just a fantasy, I had cooked up in some dark moments of despair? Was it really necessary to sin again? To take a life? I fell down to the toilet and threw up again, but this time not getting there quick enough. I lifted myself up straight and ran the tap. What a mess. A knock came and the door handle went down with an impatient squeak.

  I looked at myself. I was now sweating uncontrollably and felt faint. I splashed my face with water and then took some paper towels to clean myself. A knock came again.

  “Ça va monsieur?” it was the voice of the proprietor.

  “Oui, ça va, un instant s’il vous plait,” I called out and straightened myself. I took a deep long breath and unlocked the door, and headed back outside. I sat down at the table and there was a glass of water waiting for me. The young family had gone and that somehow made me angry. It was really hot, even in the shade, and I could feel myself getting agitated.

  I sipped the water slowly and managed to keep the vomit from coming back. I wondered what I should do; what should I do. It had all started to feel like one of those stories told by someone else, or better yet, one of my own imaginary fears, which were never based on fact. Perhaps in a couple of weeks I would feel some form of shame that I could have even conceived of it all. “Why is it so damn hot!” I said out loud. A few people turned and stared, but I didn’t care. My mind was racing. I wondered why this gray-templed, seamy-faced, baldheaded man annoyed me so much, to the point that I wanted him dead. I knew why: it was his presence, negative energy and aura that sank like claws into the nerves of my shoulders and the shoulders of everyone else around him.

  I ordered a brandy and took a sip, looking out to the plaza. I wondered if in another few months my nerves and patience would be able to bear the likes of people like him and if I should just drop the whole stinking idea. I sat there, setting my jaw firmly together, flowing and listening and concentrating. Perhaps I should just let it all go and not let things rattle me so much, causing me to act on my fears in so much as a blink of the eye.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  FIVE MORE DAYS passed calmly. They were solitary but agreeable days in which I wrote in the mornings and rambled about Arles in the afternoons.

  One gloomy day, I took a visit to the colosseum. It looked like a smaller version of the one in Rome. I sat there inside and took out my notebook and sketched the view for no particular reason or purpose. I signed and dated it and put the notebook back into my pocket.

  This day I felt alone. It was not like the sensation of Paris where you can be alone, yet not lonely. I had imagined by coming here that I would have had a bright new circle of friends with whom I would create new ideas, attitudes and standards and they would be far better than my own. I realized now after almost two weeks here that this illusion would not be the case, and I would continue to keep a distance from people.

  Over the past days, I had started to research vineyards in and around Switzerland, and from the information I had found in the public libraries, I had narrowed my search down to just three. I had even called ahead to say I would be passing through on my way to Zurich.

  I walked mechanically down the hill from the colosseum, narrating to myself the story I would create to get David and Thomas to join me at the vineyard. I imagined writing an invitation to them both on nice thick white paper and thanking them for the success of The Blue Room. To show my gratitude and appreciation, I would tell them, I had arranged for the three of us to spend the day and night at a vineyard with all expenses paid by me.

  I walked to the American Express Bureau. There was a cable waiting for me. It was from David.

  FORWARDED FROM:

  AMERICAN EXPRESS C/O HARRY HOFFMAN

  ZÜRICH

  HARRY STOP SALES SLOWING DOWN ON BOOK STOP NEED YOU TO DO MORE PRESS STOP WE ARE WAY BELOW TARGET AND WILL RECUPERATE TEN PERCENT OF ADVANCE FROM YOUR ROYALTY ACCOUNT STOP DAVID

  I felt a tingling at the bottom of my spine, and it worked its way up to the top of my neck. I walked through the narrow streets and sat down in the corner of a café terrace that overlooked the train station and stared at the vagueness and emptiness of the grand station. I was thinking of nothing and felt nothing, except a faint, dreamlike sense of loneliness. Even Maria and Liv seemed far away, and what they might be doing in this moment seemed unimportant to me.

  The waiter came over, smiling, and I was forced to smile back politely and order a drink. I lit a cigarette and as I fixed myself and lifted it to my mouth, I could see that my hands were shaking. A crazy wave of hate, impatience, and frustration swelled within me. It was hampering my breathing.

  It was a sensation o
f an impulse caused by anger and disappointment, and it was an impulse that in the past, usually vanished immediately and left me with a sense of remorse. Now I could only think about the event, every minute, every second, and I wasn’t ashamed anymore. I hated David and however I looked at what would happen, that failing had not been my own, only the result of his inhuman behavior.

  In the beginning I had offered friendship and respect, everything I could have offered to a colleague. And he had responded with ingratitude, hostility and zero respect toward me or the woman I love. I was sick of debating it now and I would kill him one way or another.

  After this acceptance, the simple idea of committing the crime, the danger of it all, even the inevitable craziness of it all, made me more enthusiastic. The how was clear, and the why was even clearer. I just had to make sure that everything was perfectly planned. I smiled largely to myself, amused at this reflection. The man sitting across from me at the next table looked over with concern.

  Horizons had all but shifted now. And I felt it. For months my horizon had been absolutely limited to the idea of killing David, and the summer had all been about that. Now the idea was complete, it was all I needed. It was in that moment I realized my time here was done. I had discovered my exit and it was time to go home. I thought for a moment to drive up to Paris, but then decided against it, as it was too long of a drive.

  The light had changed and I had missed the change. I took a drink and lit a cigarette and missed Paris.

  Paris was a big part of my life and I had enjoyed spending these last month in France and this reflection, in this moment, made me realize just how much. It was such a wonderful country.

  Life seemed so simple in that moment when I had found the summer light leaving. It was time to go and I walked around the town and said my goodbyes to the owners and staff of the cafés and a few other village acquaintances I had made during my stay. To all of them I gave the same story that I was here looking for material for my next book. I said that without a doubt, I would be down here for a visit with Maria and Liv before long.