Escape

by Anna Fienberg

  At high school I tried having intimate conversations with Joanna Mulgrade. She was the closest thing I had to a best friend. Joanna told me about her fears of ice-skating when she was little, and how she couldn't get it out of her mind that below the clean white surface there was a hole of dark water that went down forever. When she said that I felt so close to her. I could understand how threatening just the idea of that hole might have been. Sometimes I was invited to her house for a sleepover. It was wonderful to be in a home smelling of floor polish and jonquils instead of sorrow. As I stepped into my friend's gleaming hallway with my overnight bag, I felt the little spring of freedom like when we were let out of school early. Joanna's parents had barbecues with invited guests only, who all politely went home at the end.

  After that dinner with my parents, I realised that Guido's behaviour at my place was just another instance of his being true to himself – he was a private person, no doubt about that, and he'd prickled at interrogation. He'd felt no need to put on a mask and be slavishly polite or unctuously agreeable; he didn't have to play the role of some wet, would-be boyfriend in order to be accepted. Guido wanted to start out as he meant to go on: being himself.

  He might be private with other people, I thought, but I wanted him to be different with me. I wanted to know him, to explore the deep underground rivers that flowed beneath his beautiful skin. Poetry brought buried feelings to the surface – for me it was often a quick piercing, a surge of insight. 'We read so as not to be alone,' someone famous once said. Well, perhaps we could share poetry, and then, our selves.

  When I went over to Guido's place the next day, I brought Gerard Manley Hopkins with me. I told Guido about Hopkins' wrestle with the dark – his strict Jesuit beliefs and periods of spiritual desolation. 'But even if you're not religious, his sense of abandonment by god can be a symbol, you know, for the loneliness of the human condition.'

  I tried to be quiet while he read. Surely Guido would respond to the urgency in those dazzling, newly stamped words of Hopkins': dapple-drawn falcon, thunder-purple, river-rounded. Or maybe the English was too difficult.

  'Well, that one might be depressing,' I couldn't help saying after a while, looking over his shoulder. 'Carrion Comfort I mean. But really, Hopkins found such joy in nature.'

  'This poet is good,' Guido said finally. 'I am glad you showed me.'

  'Oh!' I said. 'And look at this one, "As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame" . . . that's my favourite. See how he changes "self " into a verb? Each mortal thing selves. Isn't that daring? Like he's caught the flashpoint of being alive. Makes me think of someone running for their lives, a moving target out in the open, dangerous!'

  'Mm,' said Guido. 'Is interesting. 'Opkings reminds me of my favourite poet. You 'ave heard of Giacomo Leopardi? Famosissimo, the greatest poet of the nineteenth century—'

  'Your namesake!' I burst out, 'isn't that amazing?'

  Guido waved his hand dismissively. 'A coincidence, yes. Leopardi suffered too, like 'Opkings. He was often ill as a child. In 'is poetry Leopardi expressed a universal sense of pessimismo. 'E said the melancholy is an essential part of life.'

  'Oh.'

  'Of course, 'e does appreciate beauty. Is there in the poems. But nature cheats us – is promising to us great joy when we are young, even though everything is dying, our illusions, our physical bodies, our 'opes. Leopardi cannot believe in the illusion of permanence. This is the shadow behind every moment.' Guido came back from the window and stood over me. 'You should read the poems, Rachel.'

  He bent down and put his lips to my ear, as if he was about to tell me a secret. His breath was warm on my cheek. A familiar ache started in my groin. 'Ma in verità questa vita è trista e infelice, ogni giardino è quasi un vasto ospitale (luogo ben più deplorabile che un cemeterio), e se questi esseri sentono o, vogliamo dire, sentissero, certo è che il non essere sarebbe per loro assai meglio che l'essere.'

  'Is that Leopardi?' I breathed. 'It's like music. What does he say?'

  Guido sat down next to me on the bed and leant heavily against the wall. 'That every garden is a kind of hospital, where all the plants are in the various stages of dying. This is not brilliant?'

  I gazed at his eager face. The ache in my groin dulled.

  'That if the beings in this garden could feel,' he went on, 'they would choose not to be rather than to be. This is the only choice you can make once you 'ave knowledge of the true state of things. Beh – so it goes, Leopardi's universal law of sadness.'

  Guido leant across me to pull out a drawer from his bedside table. He found a bunch of papers and put them in my lap. 'You see, I 'ave translated some early poems of Leopardi, inspired by Dante. You can read them, and I can explain the references.'

  I looked at the papers on my knees. His writing was dense and almost impossible to read. Only the name LEOPARDI at the top was large and bold, with swirls like those ribbons on birthday presents specially curled with scissors. Guido coughed impatiently.

  'You know,' I said, staring blankly at the elegant LEOPARDI, 'I can't get over the coincidence of your name and his.' I giggled stupidly into the silence. 'I mean, I've always thought names had a special significance – don't you think they influence how you turn out? It's as if you have to live up to the label your parents gave you, obey it somehow. You know, did Mr Stitch become a surgeon because of his name? Or Ron Bark a dog trainer?'

  Guido sighed.

  'Could we have a glass of wine?' I asked.

  He got up slowly and found two plastic beer glasses. 'I do not 'ave wine. Did you bring it?'

  I remembered the bottle sweating in my bag. A Lambrusco, an Italian wine that I'd never tried.

  'But this is sweet,' said Guido. 'Is not for the afternoon. And should be very cold.'

  'For instance, look at this name!' I picked up a letter that lay on Guido's bedside table. 'James Heartacher. What a beauty! I love that – let's see if I can guess what profession he has? Something terribly romantic. Maybe he runs a dating agency, or, I don't know, makes love potions or maybe he's a cardiac surgeon!' I finished on a yelp, high-pitched like the yap of the silly Jack Russell dog that lived at number 23. I looked away from Guido's stony face. His teeth had clamped shut.

  I stared at the blue airmail envelope in my hand. 'An Italian postmark! Is this from one of your friends?' The letter was poking out the top of the envelope. It was thick, maybe four pages, five. 'It's all in Italian!' My voice crashed into the quiet. 'But wouldn't James Heartacher be an English name?'

  Guido strode over to the bed. Without a word he took hold of the envelope and the letter fell out. He bent to pick it up as I reached for it. For a moment we both held it in our hands. I couldn't bear to part with it, not yet. Here, between my fingers, was another person in the world who knew Guido.

  'James 'Eartacher is a plumber from Manchester,' Guido said heavily. He folded the letter in two and put it back in its envelope, in the second drawer of his bedside table. As I peeked into the square of darkness I glimpsed another Leopardi anthology and a stack of old exercise books.

  'How did you meet him?'

  'When I was on vacation, in Ischia, or was it Capri. I don remember well. We were teenagers. It was 'is first grand tour of the continent. I think 'e wanted to practise his Italian. Rachel, is all very boring. This James still writes to me after so many years. I do not find ever 'e 'as anything interesting to say.'

  'But Guido, you brought the letter with you from Italy! That was last year's postmark. It must mean something to you, he must—'

  'I use it as a bookmark,' Guido said. His mouth tightened into a reproving line.

  'But . . . but you've known him since you were teenagers! He must be so fond of you. And it must take him a long time to write in Italian – you know, he'd have to do it with a dictionary and all, wouldn't he, with only schoolboy Italian? There were several pages, weren't there? Do you write back to him?'

  'I don reply,' said Guido.

  I gaped at him.
He got up to pour a glass of warm sweet wine.

  'But don't you feel guilty? God, I would. Every time I looked at that letter, any letter, I'd think of James Heartacher and cringe.' I wondered if he was going to pour me a glass of wine, too. 'I mean, I'd imagine him going to the empty postbox, the feeling of rejection and hurt growing—'

  'Life is too short,' said Guido, swallowing the wine, 'for collecting things you don need.'

  James Heartacher wasn't a thing.

  'Could I have a glass, too?' I asked. Guido poured the wine and handed it to me. 'But why has he written to you for so long?' I took a long sip. 'What was so special about the holiday, do you think?'

  Guido looked out the window but I saw his eyebrow sneer in profile. 'I don remember well, Rachel, I told you.'

  'But it's so strange, I mean, so many years writing with no response. What was he like, his personali—'

  Guido crashed his glass down on the bedside table. 'Porca miseria, you really want to know? James was like a slug, Rachel, or what it is, that thing that sucks blood from you.'

  'A leech.'

  'Yes, that one. 'E followed me everywhere I went, always asking questions, running after me, sweating.'

  I stared into my glass. 'He might have been lonely,' I whispered.

  ''E 'ad a problem with sweating. 'E was fat, and 'e sweated like a slug. Have you ever touched a slug, Rachel? In Latin is limax, limacis. The slug is disgusting, it 'as slime outside its body as well as inside. James was like this. 'E would sweat at anything. Quando ha stretto la mano, l'ha lasciata bagnata.'

  'Pardon?'

  'Niente. When 'e shook your hand, 'e left it wet.'

  'Well, he couldn't help that.' I wrung my own hands. 'He was just made that way. I mean, some people just feel a lot.' A prickle of moisture started above my lip. 'Maybe he had a bad heart. That makes exercise difficult.'

  'Uffa, Rachel, not with the 'eart again.' Guido leant over my shoulder and tapped the Leopardi translation in my lap. 'This is someone who understands the 'uman 'eart. Listen, I read it to you: "Silvia, do you remember still that time of your mortal life" – you see the way 'e places "mortal" in there to insinuate already the idea of death . . .'

  Guido's arm brushed against my breast as he pointed to the line. I moved in so that I could breathe the skin of his neck, and the short hairs curling slightly under his ear. It was strange that no matter what uncomfortable things he said, Guido's words never dulled the electric effect of his presence. I wondered if all the women he'd known had felt like this. As Guido talked he drew my breast from my bra and absently stroked the nipple. He pulled at it lightly, shaping it.

  'You see here Leopardi protests, he is crying why does nature not deliver its promises, why does nature cheat its sons?'

  I glanced up at Guido, startled by a sudden change of tone. His hand had stopped moving. He sat, arrested by Leopardi. There were tears in his eyes.

  His voice came back into focus. I wished I had been listening. My nipples were hard, the porous flesh of them opening, a million little mouths, starving for touch. I stirred and my breast flopped out of his hand.

  Guido made no sign of recognition. A tear spilled over his lid, hovering in the well above his cheek. He stared out the window.

  What should I do? My heart was hammering in my chest. Tentatively, I put out my hand. I touched his neck with the back of my fingers. He brushed me away.

  'No, no,' he tutted impatiently. He jabbed at the sheet on my lap, explaining. This last stanza – did I see it? – was the most dramatic of all.

  He talked on, to the air in the still room, to the grevillea bushes and azalea shrubs slowly dying outside. As I listened, I watched the way he burrowed back inside himself, inside the poem. He was like those tiny crabs at low tide moving invisibly down inside the wet sand until there is only the merest ruffle left on the surface.

  Later, when we were married, I noticed how naturally these tears accompanied the poems of Leopardi: they were like punctuation, indicating where to pause. I grew to think of Guido's tears as members of the family he didn't have, marks of sorrow left by people I would never know.

  An extended silence told me the poem was finished. A car tooted outside.

  I picked up the papers in my lap. 'Do you ever write what you see, Guido? You know, write down what happens in your life, what you feel about it?'

  Guido stood up and went to pour another glass of wine. 'Yes, I 'ave written little things all my life. I keep them in many notebooks. But they are not interesting I think to anyone else.'

  The sweet warm wine helped me get up and put my arms around his waist, standing behind him. I could hear my blood thudding in my ears. 'I'd love to read them, if you would translate,' I whispered into his back.

  He didn't move. He didn't sigh or shrug me off . But the muscles across his spine tensed, as if waiting, or struggling.

  I pulled him around to face me. 'You're such a loving reader, Guido. You understand so much from the poet's point of view. Why don't you write about your feelings, your experience, as Leopardi does?'

  Guido stiffened. 'Feelings,' he spat. 'When a person talked about feelings, my father walked out of the room. "Che palle!" he said. He would do this stupid dance of boredom. Yawning, 'is eyebrows going up and down, like 'e was in agony.'

  'But that seems so . . . so un-Italian! I mean, aren't Italians supposed to be—'

  But Guido had gone. After a moment I heard the toilet flush.

  That evening, after I learnt to make spaghetti aglio e olio, we lay together in the narrow single bed. I urged Guido to tell me about his poems, and he chose a couple to read from the exercise book he kept in his drawer under the dresser. The poems were mainly descriptions – winter mornings, the icy church of his school. There weren't many feelings in the poems, but the environment took on the flavour of a character, merciless, austere, unforgiving. It was easy to enthuse; the images of cold soaking up through the boys' feet and the stern faces of the priests were strikingly good.

  'If you want, I translate more for you to read,' Guido said.

  His eyes were glowing in the oval of light from the bedside lamp. His face looked soft and young. I leant over and kissed him. I told him I would love to read everything he wrote and that he was a very beautiful writer. He smiled and began to stroke me, the tips of his fingers drifting across my chest. I pulled his hand down between my legs. Breathless at my own daring, I kept my hand clamped over his, showing him the way I liked, moving in a circle, lightly, over and over. In the stark light of the lamp I saw his watch moving up and down, seconds ticking off , minutes. His watch glinted, shifting position under the light. My eyes were fixed on the glass face. I couldn't read the time. I heard him sigh. Under the sheet he scratched one foot with the other. His hand must be getting tired, he's bored out of his mind, but oh, it was quicker now, harder, his thumb deep inside, his fingers playing along the top, my whole being concentrated in his hand, he would save me, he was going to save me and I was flying through folds of air, oh I was almost there. Please, god! 'Thank you!' I shouted as I exploded in his hand, my belly burning.

  'I am very tired,' Guido said, turning over. He looked at his watch. 'Now we must sleep.' He wiped his hand on the bedspread.

  I lay on my back. My heart was pounding. I hugged myself, staring into the dark. Rubbing my thighs together, I relished the last tingles, like embers glowing. He'd done that for me, just for me.

  For years afterwards, the sight of Guido's watch prompted a stir of excitement in my stomach. I only had to glimpse the gold trim, the manly brown leather band, a little scuff ed, and a dissolving sensation, like hot metal, ran down my thighs.

  Chapter 9

  In the week before school broke up for the summer holidays, I won a trip to Fiji.

  Since the age of twelve I'd been sending off coupons supplied with cornflakes packets, washing powder, soft drinks. But I had never expected to win anything. I'd done it in secret. The idea of going on some extraordinary luxury holiday or
winning a diamond ring was like being invited into a story. You could happily be a princess while reading the advertisements, which provided a magnificent array of settings and characters. The infinitesimal chance of being chosen gave the story that necessary twist of authenticity, the way light brings a three-dimensional quality to a painting. Once a person asked me if I'd ever been to London and without thinking I said Yes! because I could remember so clearly making faces at the Buckingham Palace guards in my mind.

  I'd never won anything, but it didn't matter. Winning would have been a brutal intrusion of real life, anyway, and how could I have told my mother? When she caught me snatching the coupon booklet from the new washing powder she shook her head. 'Oh Rachel, don't tell me you still fall for those advertising tricks? Have you ever heard of anyone winning a prize?'

  I could see her point. Mostly I agreed, and every time I sent in a coupon the voice told me I ought to be ashamed of myself and why didn't I have the sense I was born with?

  It was at the dentist's surgery that I'd found the full page ad about Fiji. Most people complain about visiting the dentist but I never minded, because Dr Crown provided a stack of wicked capitalist magazines for his patients to peruse. Patients usually had to wait at least half an hour to be seen and when my name was finally called I always experienced a little lurch of disappointment. I would never know if Jane Fonda had finally found love or how Robert Redford liked his women.

  At Dr Crown's surgery, three months before I met Guido, I was struck by a picture of dark slender palm trees against a fruit-tingle sky. The water beamed fluorescent turquoise from the page, and the title, written in sweet, wispy clouds like cotton wool pulled into lacy strands, announced: Fiji, to be Free! You and your partner had a chance to go there for a week, all flight and accommodation expenses paid if you wrote just one paragraph about why you should go to Fiji and stay at Rainbow Villas.