Finding Again the World

by John Metcalf

  Set on the stone surround of the scallop shell were two pots of geraniums and from the shadow of these now appeared another lizard, smaller than the first, not as dark in colouring, dun rather than black and with not a trace of the shimmering peacock green—compared with the male a scrawny creature drab and dowdy.

  This lizard waddled down into the curve of the stone basin where she stopped and raised her head as if watching or listening. Or was she perhaps scenting what was on the air? I’d read somewhere that snakes “smelled” with their tongues. Were lizards, I wondered, like snakes in that? Would they go into water? Was she going to drink?

  I was startled by loud rustlings in the hedge near my chair. A bird? A bird rootling about in dead leaves. But it wasn’t that kind of noise quite. Not as loud. And, I realized, it was more continuous than the noise a bird would have made—rustling, twig-snipping, pushing, scuffling. The noise was travelling along inside the hedge. Slowly, cautiously, not wanting to frighten away the lizards on the stone scallop shell, I bent and parted branches, peering.

  And then the noise stopped.

  As I sat up, I saw that the stone bowl was empty, the brown lizard disappeared behind the geranium pots again. The green lizard was still motionless where he’d been before. Every few seconds his neck pulsed. Suddenly I saw on the wall level with my knee a lizard climbing. Every two or three inches it stopped, clinging, seeming to listen. It too was green but it had no tail. Where its tail should have been was a glossy rounded stump.

  Lacking the tail’s long grace, the lizard looked unbalanced, clumsy. About half the tail was gone. It was broken off just below that place where the body tapered. The stump was a scaleless wound, shiny, slightly bulbous, in colour a very dark red mixed with black. The end of the stump bulged out like a blob of smoke-swirled sealing-wax.

  Just as its head was sticking up over the edge of the stone shell, the other lizard ran at it. The mutilated lizard turned and flashed halfway down the wall but then stopped, head-down, clinging. The pursuing lizard stopped too and cocked its head at an angle as if hearing something commanding to its right.

  Seconds later, the stubby lizard skittered down the rest of the wall, but then stopped again on the flagstones. The pursuing lizard pursued but himself stopped poised above the wall’s last course of stones. It was like watching the flurry of a silent movie with the action frozen every few seconds. And then the damaged lizard was negotiating in dreamy slow motion dead twigs and blown leaves on his way back into the hedge. He clambered over them as if they were thick boughs, back legs cocked up at funny angles like a cartoon animal, crawling, ludicrous. His pursuer faced in the opposite direction intently, fiercely.

  Peculiar little creatures.

  I signalled to the waiter for another beer.

  I sat on in the sunshine, drifting, smelling the smell on my fingers of crushed geranium leaves, listening to the sounds the water made.

  And then the noises in the hedge started again.

  And again the lizard with the stump was climbing the wall.

  And again the lizard on the top was rushing at it, driving it down.

  By the time I was finishing my third beer, the attacks and retreats were almost continuous. The stubby lizard always climbed the wall at exactly the same place. The defending lizard always returned to the exact spot on the stone surround of the scallop shell where the attacking lizard would appear. The stop-frame chases flowed and halted down the wall, across the flagstones, halted, round an urn, into the hedge.

  But with each sortie the damaged lizard was being driven further and further away. Finally, the pursuing lizard hauled his length into the hedge and I listened to their blundering progress over the litter of twigs and rusty needles in the hedge-bottom, the rustlings and cracklings, the scrabblings travelling further and further away from my chair until there was silence.

  The sun had moved around the crown of the tree and was now full on me. I could feel the sweat starting on my chest, in the hollow of my throat, the damp prickle of sweat in my groin. I glanced at my watch to see how long she’d been sleeping. I thought of strolling back to the hotel and having a shower, but the thought of showering in the boxed-in bathroom inside the glass device with its folding glass doors like a compressed telephone booth—the thought of touching with every movement cold, soap-slimy glass . . .

  I lifted the empty Becks bottle and nodded at the waiter as he passed.

  A dragon-fly hovered over the pond, its wings at certain angles a blue iridescence.

  I wondered about my chances of finding a Roman restaurant or trattoria serving Abbracchio alla Romana, a dish I’d read about with interest. And while I was thinking about restaurants and roast lamb flavoured with rosemary and anchovies and about poor Helen’s risotto and about how long I’d been sitting in the garden and Helen worrying there in that plywood room heavy with exhaust fumes . . .

  you might have been killed . . . you know I only nap for an hour . . . I got so scared . . .

  . . . while I was thinking about this and these and listening to the water’s trickle and looking at the white, heavy plumes of the pampas grass, there on top of the wall, my eye caught by the movement, was the lizard with the stump.

  I studied the face of the wall, scanned the bottom of the hedge, looked as far around the base of the urn as I could see without moving, but there was no sign of the other lizard, no sound of pursuit.

  He stood motionless on top of the wall just above the scallop shell where the scrawny brown female still basked. The stump looked as if blood and flesh had oozed from the wound and then hardened into this glossy, bulging scab.

  The coast’s clear, Charlie!

  Come on!

  Come on!

  He was clinging head-down to the wall inches above the stone shell.

  The female had raised her head.

  Now he seemed to be studying a pale wedge of crumbling mortar.

  Come on!

  And then he waddled down onto the stone surround and seized the female lizard firmly about the middle in his jaws. They lay at right angles to each other as if catatonic. The female’s front right leg dangled in the air.

  Come on, you gimpy retard! Let go! You’re biting the wrong one. It’s the GREEN ones we bite. The brown ones are the ones we . . .

  The waiter’s voice startled me.

  I smiled, shook my head, picked up the four cash-register slips, leaned over to one side to get at my wallet in my back pocket. When he’d gone and I turned back to the stone scallop shell, the female had already vanished and the end of the stump, somewhere between the colour of a ripening blackberry and a blood blister, was just disappearing into the shadows behind one of the pots of geraniums.

  I got up slowly and quietly. I was careful not to scrape my chair on the flagstones. I set it down silently. I looked down to make sure my shoe wasn’t going to knock against one of the table’s tubular legs. One by one, I placed the coins on the saucer.

  * * *

  No, I told Helen on Sunday morning, not the Forum, not the Colosseum, not the Capitoline, the Palatine, or the Quirinal. I wanted to be lazy. I wanted to be taken somewhere. But not to monuments. Trees and fields. But not walking. I didn’t want to do anything. I wanted to see farmhouses and outbuildings. What I wanted—yes, that was it exactly—a coach tour! I wanted to gaze out of the window at red and orange roof tiles, at ochre walls, poppies growing wild on the roadsides, vines.

  At 10 AM we were waiting in a small office in a side street for the arrival of the coach. The brochure in the hotel lobby had described the outing as Extended Alban Hills Tours-Castelli Romani. Our coach was apparently now touring some of the larger hotels picking up other passengers. The whole operation seemed a bit makeshift and fly-by-night. The two young men running it seemed to do nothing but shout denials on the phone and hustle out into the street screaming at drivers as coach after coach checked in
at the office before setting out to tour whatever they were advertised as touring. Commands and queries were hysterical. Tickets were counted and recounted. And then recounted. Coaches were finally dispatched with operatic gesture as if they were full of troops going up to some heroic Front.

  As each coach pulled up, we looked inquiry at one or other of the young men. “This is not yours,” said their hands. “Patience.” “Do not fear. When your conveyance arrives, we will inform you,” said their gestures.

  We were both startled by the entry of a large, stout man with a shaved head who barged into the tiny office saying something that sounded challenging or jeering. His voice was harsh. He limped, throwing out one leg stiffly. Helen sat up in the plastic chair and drew her legs in. Something about his appearance suggested that he’d survived a bad car-crash. He leaned on an aluminum stick which ended in a large rubber bulb. He was wearing rimless blue-tinted glasses. His lip was permanently drawn up a little at one side. There was a lot of visible metal in his teeth. He stumped about in the confined space shouting and growling.

  The young man with the mauve leather shoes shouted “no” a lot and “never” and slapped the counter with a plastic ruler. The other young man picked up a glossy brochure and, gazing fixedly at the ceiling, twisted it as if wringing a neck. The shaven-headed man pushed a pile of pamphlets off the counter with the rubber tip of his aluminum stick.

  A coach pulled up and a young woman in a yellow dress got down from it and clattered on heels into the office. They all shouted at her. She spat—teh—and made a coarse gesture.

  The young man with the mauve leather shoes went outside to shout up at the coach driver. Through the window, we watched him counting, pulling each finger down in turn.

  . . . five, six, seven.

  Further heart-rending pantomime followed.

  Still in full flow, he burst back into the office brandishing the tickets in an accusatory way. Peering and pouting into the mirror of a compact, the girl in the yellow dress continued applying lipstick. They all shouted questions at her, possibly rhetorical. The horrible shaven-headed man shook the handle of his aluminum cane in her face.

  She spat again—teh.

  The bus driver sounded his horn.

  The other young man spoke beseechingly to the potted azalea.

  “Is that,” said Helen, “the Castelli Romani coach? Or isn’t it the Castelli Romani coach?”

  There was silence as everyone stared at her.

  “It is, dear madam, it is,” said the horribly bald man.

  “Good,” said Helen.

  And I followed her out.

  We nodded to the other seven passengers as we climbed aboard and seated ourselves behind them near the front of the coach. They sounded American. There were two middle-aged couples, a middle-aged man on his own, rather melancholy-looking, and a middle-aged man with an old woman.

  “Here he comes goosewalking,” said Helen.

  “Stepping,” I said.

  The shaven-headed man, leg lifting up and then swinging to the side, was stumping across the road leaning on the aluminum cane. His jacket was a flapping black-and-white plaid.

  “Oh, no!” I said. “You don’t think he’s . . .”

  “I told you,” said Helen. “I told you this was going to be awful.”

  The shaven-headed man climbed up into the bus, hooked his aluminum cane over the handrail above the steps, and unclipped the microphone. Holding it in front of his mouth, he surveyed us.

  “Today,” he said with strange, metallic sibilance, “today you are my children.”

  Helen nudged.

  “Today I am taking you into the Alban Hills. I will show you many wonders. I will show you extinct volcanoes. I will show you the lake of the famous Caligula. I will show you the headquarters of the German Army in World War II. Together we will visit Castel Gandolfo, Albano, Genzano, Frascati, and Rocca di Papa. We will leave ancient Rome by going past the Colosseum and out onto the Via Appia Antica completed by Appius Claudius in 312 before Christ.”

  He nodded slowly.

  “Oh yes, my children.”

  Still nodding.

  “Before Christ.”

  He looked from face to face.

  “You will know this famous road as the Appian Way and you will have seen it in the movie Spartacus with the star Kirk Douglas.”

  “Oh, God!” said Helen.

  “Well, my children,” he said, tapping the bus driver on the shoulder, “are you ready? But you are curious about me. Who is this man, you are saying.”

  He inclined his shaved head in a bow.

  “Who am I?”

  He chuckled into the microphone.

  “They call me Kojak.”

  Cypresses standing guard along the Appian Way over sepulchres and sarcophagi, umbrella pines shading fragments of statuary. Tombs B.C. Tombs A.D. Statuary contemporaneous with Julius Caesar, of whom we would have read in the play of that name by William Shakespeare. It was impossible to ignore or block out his voice, and after a few minutes we’d come to dread the clicking on of the microphone and the harsh, metallic commentary.

  You will pay attention to your left and you will see . . .

  A sarcophagus.

  You will pay attention opposite and you will see . . .

  “Opposite what?”

  “He means straight ahead.”

  “Oh.”

  . . . to your right and in one minute you will see a famous school for women drivers . . .

  Into view hove a scrap-metal dealer’s yard mountainous with wrecked cars.

  You will pay attention . . .

  But despite the irritation of the rasping voice, I found the expedition soothing and the motion of the coach restful. The landscape as it passed was pleasing. Fields. Hedges. Garden plots. The warmth of terracotta tiles. Hills. White clouds in a sky of blue.

  The Pope’s summer residence at Castel Gandolfo was a glimpse through open ornate gates up a drive to a house, then the high encircling stone wall around the park.

  Beech trees.

  In the narrow, steep streets of the small town, the coach’s length negotiated the sharp turns, eased around corners, trundled past the elaborate facade of the church and through the piazza with its fountain by Bernini.

  The famous Peach Festival took place in June.

  At Lake Albano we were to stop for half an hour.

  No less, my children, and no more.

  The coach pulled into the restaurant parking lot and backed into line with more than a dozen others. The restaurant, a cafeteria sort of place, was built on the very edge of the lake. It was jammed with tourists. Washrooms were at the bottom of a central staircase and children ran up and down the stairs, shouting. There was a faint smell of disinfectant. Lost children cried.

  In the plastic display cases were sandwiches with dubious fillings, tired-looking panini, and slices of soggy pizza that were being reheated in microwave ovens until greasy.

  The man from our coach who was travelling with the old woman sat staring out of the plate-glass window which overlooked the lake. The old woman was spooning in with trembling speed what looked like a huge English trifle, mounds of whipped cream, maraschino cherries, custard, cake.

  Helen and I bought an ice cream we didn’t really want. We stood on the wooden dock beside the restaurant and looked at the lake which was unnaturally blue. There was a strong breeze. White sails were swooping over the water. I felt cold and wished we could get back in the coach.

  “So this was a volcano,” said Helen.

  “I guess so.”

  “The top blew off and then it filled up with water.”

  “I suppose that’s it.”

  The man from our coach who was on his own, the melancholy-looking man, wandered onto the other side of the dock. He stood holding an ice-cr
eam cone and looking across the lake. He looked a bit like Stan Laurel. We nodded to him. He nodded to us and made a sort of gesture at the lake with his ice cream as if to convey approval.

  We smiled and nodded.

  The engine of the coach was throbbing as we sat waiting for the man and the old woman to shuffle across the parking lot. The stiff breeze suddenly blew the man’s hair down, revealing him as bald. From one side of his head hung a long hank which had been trained up and over his bald pate. He looked naked and bizarre as he stood there, the length of hair hanging from the side of his head and fluttering below his shoulder. It looked as if he’d been scalped. The attached hair looked like a dead thing, like a pelt.

  Seemingly unembarrassed, he lifted the hair back, settling it as if it were a beret, patting it into place. The old woman stood perhaps two feet from the side of the coach smiling at it with a little smile.

  And so, my children, we head now for Genzano and for Frascati, the Queen of the Castelli . . .

  We did not stop in Genzano which also had Baroque fountains possibly by Bernini in the piazzas and a palazzo of some sort. Down below the town was the Lake of Nemi from which two of Caligula’s warships had been recovered only to be burned by the retreating Adolf Hider.

  The famous Feast of Flowers took place in May.

  “Why do I know the name Frascati?” said Helen.

  “Because of the wine?”

  “Have I had it?”

  I shrugged.

  “I had some years ago,” I said. “Must be thirty years ago now—at a wedding. We drank it with strawberries.”

  “Whose wedding?”

  “And I don’t think I’ve had it since. Um? Oh . . . a friend from college. I haven’t heard from him—Tony Cranbrook . . . oh, it’s been years.”