Bowl of Fruit

by Panayotis Cacoyannis

  ‘Mary wasn’t really my mother. Is that one of the things you didn’t already know?’

  ‘No, I knew.’

  ‘I thought you might say that. We were born on the same day half a world away. Same city, same hospital.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Are you my sister?’

  ‘Your twin, you mean?’

  ‘Is that why we both have these eyebrows?’

  ‘No, I’m not your twin sister.’

  ‘You’re not?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And our eyebrows? I think mine are my father’s. My father was my father, right?’

  ‘Yes, he was.’

  ‘But he wasn’t yours.’

  ‘No. And my eyebrows are a mystery. Compared to mine, my parents’ were practically threadbare.’

  ‘So we’re not related.’

  ‘No, not even remotely, at least not by blood, and try not to look so relieved.’

  ‘But I am relieved. So relieved that I could kiss you, Anna Tor!’

  ‘You can if you want.’

  ‘I haven’t kissed a girl since the only girl I ever kissed, and I only ever kissed her once.’

  ‘There, now you’ve kissed another girl… and now you’ve kissed another girl a second time.’

  ‘In a cemetery...’

  ‘And the other girl’s just kissed you again to keep you quiet.’

  ‘This is consecrated ground, not Lovers’ Lane,’ someone yells.

  The truth about the truth

  There are some things that, even as you experience them palpably, persist in being hard to believe. The ghost and I are holding hands. We are ambling blithely along dusty pathways in a cemetery which minutes ago I considered akin to a moral offence, and which has now become enchanted as the place where I kissed Anna Tor. As we pass him again, we both salute Karl Marx, and wisely I refrain from further trichological remarks – although from this distance I notice that the broad sweeps of hair that cover the sides of his head bear a striking resemblance to a hairy pair of floppy poodle’s ears. But then I do seem to notice striking resemblances everywhere.

  To enjoy the present and keep dangerous thoughts of the future at bay, we continue to dwell in the past. Anna has just asked me about Mary. How had it made me feel, finding out that she wasn’t my mother?

  ‘When I said it before, that Mary wasn’t my mother, I still wasn’t sure if it was true. I think that at the back of my mind I’ve always known, but I’ve always half-refused to believe it – I suppose I didn’t want it to be true.’

  Anna squeezes my hand. ‘But that’s the most natural thing in the world,’ she says.

  ‘And now I know it’s true I feel relieved.’

  ‘The truth is always a relief,’ says Anna, the contours of her mouth faintly trembling as she speaks the words. There is a trace of iridescence in her eyes that when it catches the light seems to speckle their brownness with gambolling gold dust, but now as she shades them from the sun with her hand, a redolent layer of brightness recedes, as if out of fear, or sadness, or love. Magnificently adept at concocting a spell, unless I’m mistaken the magnificent ghost has herself fallen equally under its sway.

  ‘I feel the relief but I also feel anger. Anger and shame all mixed up.’

  When I look at Anna, I don’t see a painting, which is all the more striking considering Anna’s exceptionally painterly face, more suited to Picasso than to any other painter I can think of. Although I know this in an abstract, instinctual way, the further mental step, so familiar to me, of translating what I see into an image put together with paint, is in Anna’s case altogether lacking. When I look at Anna, the only thing I see is a beautiful woman.

  ‘Life has a way of taking its toll,’ offers Anna speculatively. And then, as though to offer a counterpoise on life’s behalf: ‘Mary told you beautiful stories.’

  Dwelling in the past, as a means of navigation between Scylla and Charybdis, is perhaps not the stroke of the greatest genius. The duality of its purpose makes it toxic, a volatile compound of two parts of truth (unknown to each other) and a third incompatible part of postponing all the pitfalls that may lurk in a fanciful future. But the past has now become the present, and it needs to run its course unimpeded. Until the two parts of the truth coalesce, the present is suspended and the way to the future is blocked.

  Imaginary scraps of truth colliding and carnivorously preying on each other like piranha fishes swimming in my head make it seem like a good time for a temporary moratorium on the tenses, as well as for a lovely pint of beer and some lunch. At least I had Luigi’s very special scrambled egg, and past, present and future are all very well, but Anna has had nothing since breakfast.

  ‘It’s after three,’ I say, ‘you must be starving.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Are you sure? I mean, did you even have breakfast?’

  ‘Really, I’m fine, and yes I had breakfast. Let’s stay here a while longer, then maybe we can grab a sandwich and sit in the park.’

  Holding a momentous bouquet of white roses nonchalantly over her shoulder, a girl in an unusually short skirt that accentuates the largeness of her rather large behind overtakes us in a purposeful trot, and when I catch myself thinking that I find her inappropriately dressed, it’s like a prod that again sets in motion a recently recurring train of thought.

  ‘You see that girl who just passed us? The first thing I thought when I saw her was that her skirt was unusually short. But I didn’t think it in a good way, and I’m not sure if it’s because we’re in a cemetery, and people should dress down if they’re visiting a cemetery, they should dress down and they definitely shouldn’t kiss, so obviously it’s not because of where we are, it’s because she’s got a fat behind, which brings us back to the girl who had hair on her legs, and you know what’s just hit me? With my foreign-looking oddness and my scary bushy eyebrows, I’m actually my neighbourhood’s girl with hair on her legs. You’re laughing but it’s true. Not literally, obviously, I mean I’ve never played tennis in my life and I happen to be a man, but for some reason my neighbours have taken a dislike to how I look, and probably they also think I’m weird because I’m anti-social, and so apparently I’m known as the neighbourhood freak. And I feel an even bigger fool that knowing this I still judged Federico by the shape of his eyebrows.’

  ‘No, you’re not known as the neighbourhood freak, you’re pulling my leg.’ Anna makes us stop and we stand at the edge of the path. People walk leisurely by us in both directions, mostly chatting cheerfully in couples or groups, perhaps keeping their voices down a little but otherwise no different than as if they’re on their regular Sunday stroll.

  ‘I’m not sure if I still am, but I definitely was. Really, I’m not pulling your leg. And you know who stood up for me? The Chief - a builder who was doing some bits of work for me at the time. First he thought I was gay – don’t ask why – and he was trying to be all liberal and with-it, and I was saying that it so happened that I wasn’t, when suddenly out of the blue his own son came out and said that it so happened that he was.’

  ‘You mean liberal and with-it?’

  ‘Not liberal and with-it, gay!’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Of course his dad couldn’t think what to say, you could see the news had hit him like a bombshell, and it was tense between them for a while. But then one day Billy bragged about his dad going on the warpath when some dumb electrician apparently told them I was known as the neighbourhood freak. They nearly came to blows, Billy said, but in the end the Chief, after outing his own son in my defence, had argued the guy right into the palm of his hand, where he squirmed while he ate humble pie. They have the best relationship now, the Chief and his out-and-proud son. He’s a great kid, Billy, and very bright, he wants to be a writer one day. He still visits me now and again, hopefully one day you’ll meet him.’

  ‘By all accounts your father was also very bright.’

  Anna wants to stay in the past; she has
its thread between her fingers and she won’t let it snap. And the past in one big breath is better than the past in an interminable sigh of miniature gasps.

  ‘Yes he was, he was very bright. He taught English like George in your book, except I don’t think he’d have noticed if a girl playing tennis had hair on her legs. And all those things we said about him – he beat his wife and was indifferent to his son – they weren’t just lies, they were actually an inversion of the truth. It was my father, not Mary, who came to my room every bedtime to tell me a story, who made me breakfast and walked me to school every morning, who sat with me fretting whenever I was sick. It was my father who encouraged me to paint and who recognized my “gift”, if we have to call it something. And then, when I painted my first Picasso, it was my father I showed it to first...’

  ‘Bowl of Fruit (1907),’ Anna Tor reminisces. ‘It’s one of only a handful of your paintings I’ve managed to see in the flesh. I absolutely loved it.’

  ‘It’s a shame you can’t congratulate the artist,’ I say, but Anna brushes off my bad temper with a gentle tug of my arm (she still hasn’t let go of my hand), which I interpret as a nudge to go on.

  ‘I remember his expression of terror and awe when he saw it. And then, without asking if the painting was finished, he picked up first the orange then one of the apples from under the bowl where I’d placed them with such care, and he held them both up in the harshness of the light that at that time of the morning fell across the table almost in a gesture of violence. “Catch!” he cried out, and already the orange was high up in the air for me to catch as it fell, and as I snatched it with one hand my father took a bite out of the apple. “I suppose you know what this means,” he said.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘If I’d known then what it meant, I’d have torn that canvas to pieces with my teeth. Instead the three of us went abroad to look at Picassos. And quite soon after that my father left.’

  ‘You say your father left…’

  ‘And what would you say?’ The past in one big breath is exhausting, and I draw in as much air as I can to fill my lungs. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘I didn’t mean to snap. Anna, I’m not sure if this is such a good idea. I’ve just met you, but already I feel like…’

  ‘You’re doing just fine,’ says Anna. ‘The only way to leave the past behind is to own it.’

  ‘To move on by tending its grave.’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘The truth is always a relief, life has a way of taking its toll, you’re doing just fine, the only way to leave the past behind is to own it. They all seem like words with no meaning.’

  ‘Platitudes.’

  ‘I’m sure you mean well.’

  ‘But that’s just it,’ says Anna sadly. ‘You’re not sure at all, and why should you be? Just because we’ve kissed doesn’t mean you know me. If anything it’s one reason more to suspect me. If I were you and someone called me in the middle of the night offering to help me write my story, I wouldn’t even have agreed to meet them.’

  ‘It’s quite a story. This, I mean.’ As I raise our threaded fingers we both tighten our grip.

  ‘If this is quite a story,’ Anna wags our common fist, ‘then yours is quite a story and a half.’

  ‘I used to paint Picassos, it’s not really that much of a story.’

  ‘That’s just part of your story, which I think is huge, and we both know it doesn’t entirely belong to the past. But we’ll come to that later. There are parts of your story that are also parts of mine.’

  ‘The personal parts.’

  ‘Including the unbelievable coincidence of this part - of us, here, today. I’ve known about you almost all my life, and I did often think about looking for you, but I wasn’t looking for you when I found you, I found you completely by chance, or almost completely by chance. And now that I’ve found you I do want your story, but what I want even more is to know you.’

  As I begin to expel the cold air that has gathered again in my lungs, I hear the frozen echo of the words that are formed as they beat across my chest in a dull and monotonous rhythm.

  ‘Mary was the drunk. It was Mary who beat me. And every night when she fought with my father I tried to escape into the story my father had just told me. I’d bury myself under the covers and play in turn the fabulously impoverished king, or the blundering dragon defending a city under siege, or the prince who had grown old because no one had loved him, until a seamstress fell in love with his kindness and his youth was restored by a kiss.

  ‘Once I overheard my father telling Mary that she wasn’t my mother, and Mary didn’t care – she just laughed in his face when he said it – but I don’t think he was saying it to her, I think he said it hoping I could hear. And I heard him, but I hated him for saying it and I didn’t believe it. If Mary really wasn’t my mother, then nothing made sense. And everything was his fault, not hers. Because my father was a good man, and how could a good man have made such a life for his son if he loved him. The truth about the truth is that I couldn’t get my child’s head around it. I can live with it now, but to survive it as a child what I needed was not to believe it. And I believed it even less when he left. When I say he left… I think you must know this already, but you want to hear me say it, to make sure if I know. I do know and I’ll say it: “he left” as in “he took his own life”. And “he left” as in “he left me with the woman he knew wasn’t even my mother” – with a stranger who beat me.

  ‘But still I couldn’t hate him, so I made myself believe that Mary was my mother, and I loved her. We had never been poor, and my father left us less poor when he left, so he must’ve been planning to leave for some time, which makes it... Anyway, the house was Mary’s, there was money in the bank, and more money for me when I turned twenty-one. But already I was painting Picassos, and the money he left us was nothing compared to the money that would soon start coming in from the paintings. And not just from the paintings. I was the boy who was painting Picassos. I was news. And Mary started spinning a yarn, and making sure she was a big part of the story - the hero who had rescued her boy from the darkness, the one who had known how to nurture his gift. She was a different woman for a while, single-minded and sober, and we both just got on with it, I with the Picassos and Mary with embroidering her fabricated version of the truth. She basked in the attention while I painted, prolifically but not quite as prolifically as Mary would have liked – every new Picasso meant a fresh wave of the attention she was hungering for – because the effort was truly prodigious, and little by little it drew out of my pores almost every ounce of Jack Faro. Until one day I knew I had to stop, and I did.

  ‘I planned to give Mary most of the money and then leave. But she fell sick. She’d never seen the face of a doctor in her life, and suddenly without any warning her body was riddled with death. In less than a month she was gone. When my father… when he died from an overdose of pills, Mary had him cremated. “Your father was cremated this morning,” was how I found out. She never told me what she did with his ashes. Maybe I didn’t ask. When I had her cremated I didn’t even pick up her ashes. Nor did anyone else. No one else was there. There was no one else. Later, of course, I felt guilty. Mary wasn’t all bad, she was who she was, but she was also the only mother I ever had.’

  ‘I have something for you,’ says Anna Tor.

  7

  Dear Jack

  Lovers

  The sealed rectangular envelope is in my inside jacket pocket.

  When Anna handed it to me, face up so I could see on it “Jack Faro” boldly handwritten in my father’s unmistakeable scrawl, I held it for some seconds in the palm of my hand, as though by its weightlessness alone I could measure its substance precisely – I knew already by its thinness that it couldn’t have contained more than one sheet of paper, which I was picturing my father folding into two in that deliberate but delicate way he always had with his hands.

  ‘You don’t have to read it now,’ said Anna, when already
I had mechanically re-enacted that vivid image by meticulously folding the envelope in half, and was equally mechanically putting it away in my pocket. And then, as though apologizing for an imposition, ‘I don’t suppose you have to read it at all, if you don’t want to.’

  ‘Has anyone read it?’ I asked.

  ‘My mother read it,’ said Anna. ‘It arrived unsealed the day after your father…’ She paused to run a finger faintly from corner to corner all across my lips. ‘And what would you say?’ I had asked her before, and now she was unable to decide.

  ‘Don’t worry about the words,’ I said, ‘I know which day you mean.’

  Anna snapped a glance at me as if to scold me for my brusque reassurance, but then she erased it shyly with a smile and carried on: ‘It arrived the day after with a letter for my mother, which I read many years later, when it was time for my mother to let go of her secrets. Among other, more personal things, your father asked my mother to read what he’d written in the letter I’ve brought you today, and to make the decision for him.’

  ‘Whether I should have it or not.’

  ‘I think when, rather than whether. He thought you were too young at the time, and too much under Mary’s influence.’

  ‘And too busy painting Picassos.’

  ‘My mother was so upset with your father, so hurt by what he’d done, to her and to you, that she nearly destroyed both letters. The anger with your father soon passed, but...’

  ‘But I was still too busy painting Picassos.’

  ‘But then very publicly Mary started vilifying your father, her stories getting worse as you got older, and my mother was incensed that you didn’t stop her, that you just carried on painting as if you couldn’t have cared less. She felt betrayed on your father’s behalf, so she held on to your letter and the years just passed. And when Mary died you disappeared, and my mother felt guilty that that she’d kept the letter from you for so long. She thought her own grief had blinded her to yours, and she was sad that she’d judged you so harshly. Her heart was very weak and she could hardly speak, but she told me all this just days before she died, and I promised her I’d find you and give you the letter myself. It was sealed when she gave it to me; she’d sealed it as soon as she’d read it. In her few possessions there was also a Jack Faro scrapbook, with the hundreds of cuttings my mother had collected through the years. She’d carefully blacked out every reference to Mary, her face from all the pictures as well as all her lies about your father – and that’s an awful lot of painful blacking out. I’d known already about Jack Faro, who had the gift of painting Picassos, but what I didn’t know was that his father, who definitely wasn’t my father, and my mother, who definitely wasn’t his mother, had been lovers for years.’