Days pass by until it’s my shaving day, and then the weeks pass by as shaving days come and go. I make the decision to stop keeping track of time. I retreat back into myself. The Padre’s visits become just another memory and they mean as little to me as everything else in my life. It’s easier this way. This is me, alone once more. I can never go back. It’s all just stuff that happened, and every time I try to move on I hurt someone new. No doubt the Padre would say I’m dead inside but so what – he’s not here to say it. I work hard again on my exercise routine, but after a while I give up even on this. I don’t see the point. Time passes. I sit, I stand, I pace my cell; I’m dead, but still alive.
Every day isn’t like Sunday at the Villa. Mass is obviously very important. There are lots of priests here who each have to celebrate Mass, so that’s a lot of services to get through. Breakfast is served until eleven and the main meal on a Sunday is at two in the afternoon. Maria gets a break once breakfast is over and she knows to find me in the library. Sunday is the most oppressively Catholic day for me, and the library is about the best place to hide. I could stay in my cell, but I think the library is healthier – it’s a progress of sorts. Once I’ve met Maria and she’s gone back to work, I often go for a long walk out in the woods before lunch, or I might hang with Javier and the other bell-boys at the front door. Today though, once their shift is over, Ines has invited us to the cottage for a late lunch.
I don’t know what’s happening with Maria. I don’t understand what’s going on. Sometimes she’s a child, and at other times she’s an adult. Sometimes I’m the grown-up she can talk to, and occasionally I’m the infuriating Englishman who doesn’t speak Italian. Most of our conversations now begin in Italian and deteriorate into English. At home, she tells me, they speak Italian all the time. Her English is accented by Italy rather than by Scotland. She speaks both languages perfectly, but finds it hard sometimes to flip from one to the other. Her early antagonism towards me disappeared once I became more than just an Englishman.
“I Googled you,” she told me once, and I mustn’t have reacted in the way she expected. “I looked you up on the internet?”
“I know what you mean; I just hadn’t thought of myself as being on Google.” The idea of Maria – or anybody, for that matter – getting an instant biography on me through a search engine was new to me, but it didn’t take a genius to guess what they’d find. My public life doesn’t amount to much. I’ve resisted the temptation to look because I think it would depress me. I’m just grateful that it prompted Maria’s sympathy rather than her ridicule.
“I’m sorry,” she said, a little chastened. “Everybody does it.”
I can see how innocent, or even prehistoric, I might appear to Maria because of the difference in our age. What I can’t tell her is that the last time I used a search engine it was to find a supply of sulphuric acid to spray in a woman’s face.
Since that conversation with Maria, I’ve gotten into the habit of looking up Cystic Fibrosis on Google to learn more about the illness without having to ask her directly. I guess this is how we learn about each other these days. The access to so much instant information was a shock to me, but not as shocking as what Maria lives with on a daily basis. Like her white dresses, Maria wears her illness lightly. I’ve seen at first hand what can happen when it becomes too much for her, but now she’s adapted to life at the Villa you’d never guess just how ill she really is. She’s light and chatty and breezy; liable to go off on one at any moment but, now I know where these explosions are coming from, they’re almost endearing. She’s a handful. She’s a headache. She’s a nuisance. She’s a life force. She’s the opposite of oppressive, whatever that might be, and I feel a weight fall from me whenever she’s around. She makes me smile, and it’s a long time since I’ve done that on a regular basis.
“Why are you laughing?” she asks.
“I’m smiling.”
“Why?”
I can’t tell her. She’s a good thing in my life that I didn’t see coming.
But what I am to Maria, I haven’t yet figured out.
I don’t get to see the Padre again until they let me go. More prisoners disappear; like before, I don’t know if they’re being released or sent on elsewhere. I do know there are fewer and fewer of us during the exercise hour, and those that remain look more pitiful than ever. When it’s my turn, I’m taken to an inner courtyard rather than the exercise yard and I know immediately that something is about to change. I’m told to take off my overalls and I’m given a pair of trousers, a T-shirt and a cheap pair of runners. There’s a van with its engine running and memories return of previous trips in the backs of vans. I’m rattled, but they don’t handcuff me and for the first time there’s no hood or blindfold. One of the guards opens the back door and pulls down a kind of jump seat attached to the side of the van. I climb in and sit down. Now he does take my left hand and fastens me to a single manacle attached to the jump seat. I don’t feel under any duress. They must have got tired of all the vomit and urine in the backs of their vans. The guard shuts the back door and joins his colleague in the front of the van. It’s dark but not pitch-black, and I can see for balance. I’m on the move.
I’m not indifferent to where they might be taking me. I’ve had a relatively easy ticket these past three years, in that I’ve been pretty much left alone. I’ve watched others cause a fuss and pay the price. The regime I’ve lived under has been one of ‘don’t bother us and we won’t bother you’. I hear the muffled voices of the two rent-a-cops up front, but I can’t make out what they’re saying. All those prisoners that I’ve seen move on: I hope I’m not about to find out where they all went. I still regard myself as different – unusual – and I can’t believe I’d be of any real interest to anyone. The worst case scenario is that I’m handed over to the Americans and this is the one real fear I have. I know there’s absolutely no reason why I should be, but that hasn’t stopped it happening to other prisoners. If all they’re doing is transferring me to another detention centre, I know I can adapt to whatever conditions I find there; but if I get caught up with the Americans, I know enough to fear I might never get out. For all my talk to the Padre about one day being set free, I don’t allow myself to even consider this a possibility.
I hear the jet engines while I’m still locked in the back of the van. Now, I am worried. The van stops and the back door opened. I see we’ve driven directly on to the apron of the airport. It’s a large commercial airport – not a military airbase – and this, at least, is something. The guard unlocks my hand and tells me to get out. I can hardly hear him over the noise of the nearest plane. I know better than to ask what’s going on. He wouldn’t tell me and I’ll find out soon enough. I see the Padre walking towards us across the apron, and for some reason I take this to indicate something bad is about happen. He looks as worried as I feel, as out of place here as he was in my cell. He nods, and turns his attention to the second guard. Asks where he’s to sign. The guard holds out a clipboard and a pen, and the Padre scribbles his signature at the bottom of a printed page. The guard takes out a passport from his inside jacket pocket and hands it to the Padre. The other guard shuts the back door of the van.
Is that it? asks the Padre.
That’s it, says the guard with the clipboard.
I follow the Padre across to the steps leading up to the plane. It’s a Ryanair flight and this adds to the unreality of the whole situation. He hands me my passport, and takes out his own.
What’s happening?
The Padre says nothing.
Are we going somewhere?
He nods and walks up the steps, so I follow. I open my passport and look at the boarding card. It’s for an airport in Italy that I’ve never heard of. I hand it to the stewardess. She smiles and hands it back to me. The flight is already boarded and there are just two seats in the front row for myself and the Padre. As we sit down, the stewardess closes and seals the aircraft door. I look at the Padre and he acknowled
ges my unspoken questions with a gesture of his hand. In a moment, I think he’s telling me. He waits until we’re in the air before going through the terms of my release. I’ve been handed over into the Padre’s care and I’m never to return to Britain. He’s worried about the responsibility of having taken this decision on my behalf. He tells me something about where we’re heading, but I don’t hear most of what it is he’s saying. All I can think of is the fact that this man – this boy, this almost-priest – has somehow secured my release, and that this strange, strange life is about to begin all over again.
I’m heading back out into the world once more.
The sight of Ines and Maria walking along the path that emerges out the woodland at Giovanni’s cottage is something that will stay with me for the rest of my life. They look so happy and so close they might well be mother and daughter. It occurs to me that, in a very short period of time, Maria has become the daughter Ines never had. They step out from the dark of the wood into the bright afternoon sunlight, Ines still in her work overalls and Maria in yet another white dress. Giovanni, sitting next to me in the shade of the cottage, has made an effort and is dressed in a clean white shirt. My clothes are clean, but for the first time since my release I wish I owned a wider selection to choose from. Whatever I was saying, whatever I was trying to tell Giovanni, I stop. He looks over to his wife and nods in agreement with a sentiment I haven’t even expressed: Ines and Maria make an almost perfect scene complete.
Giovanni stands up to greet them in the overly-demonstrative manner only an Italian male can get away with. He kisses Maria on each cheek and stands back in appreciation of Ines’ beauty. Ines gives him the brush off, but she’s obviously delighted. She gives me a little wave, blows me a kiss, and goes inside to get changed.
“So,” Maria says, “while the women are out at work, the boys sit around drinking beer. Why am I not surprised?”
“Thank you for calling us boys,” I say.
I arrived with a bottle of red that I bought from the bar up at the Villa – bought with credit arranged by Brother Michael. Giovanni offered me the usual pastis, but we both agreed a cold beer was called for on such a hot day. He fetches three more beers from the kitchen and we sit down to wait for Ines. Our one job – the boys, the old men – was to light the coals for the outside grill. The meat is marinating in the fridge, along with the salad and a lasagne that Ines prepared before she left for work.
“Life is good,” Giovanni says, as a toast.
“Life is good,” we agree.
I cope well with the language all afternoon and evening. It’s easier, because there are four of us and it doesn’t matter so much if I miss the occasional word or sentence. I can always pick up on the gist of what is being said. I spend a lot of the dinner grinning like an idiot – the food, the drink, and the company are perfect. Maria and I stay late and we all move inside once the mosquitoes get to be too much. Eventually it’s time to leave. There are lots of jokes about me not turning up for work tomorrow, or sleeping through the day again. I try in my best Italian to tell them how grateful I am, but I wouldn’t have the words in English. Giovanni and Ines shrug it off as nothing and they kiss and hug us goodbye.
It’s dark and we have to trust to memory and the sound of our feet on the path to find our way home. Maria links my arm for guidance. Who is this girl and what is happening here? We walk slowly and carefully through the woods.
“Ines couldn’t have any more children after she gave birth to their son,” Maria tells me. “She was devastated – she still is.”
“I can imagine.”
“And now Giovanni is fighting with the younger Giovanni all the time because his son wants to be a doctor and not the gardener at the Villa.”
“I’d guessed there was something going on.”
“It’s the same old father and son bullshit.”
“It might have been different, I suppose, if they’d had more children?”
“Ines says Giovanni’s still hurting; that it’s just his way of showing how he wishes things had been different.”
“You’d imagine he’d be proud of his son.”
“I think he is, but he can’t help being upset. His family have had a connection to the Villa for generations.”
“And now that’s about to change. How do you know all this?”
“Ines told me.”
I know I only have limited Italian, but I can’t imagine Giovanni and myself discussing these things if we worked together for the rest of our lives. A thought occurs to me.
“Is that why Giovanni was so set against having an assistant? Because he wished it was his son working with him instead?”
“You get there in the end, don’t you? A little slow, but you get there.”
“And now – please don’t tell me he’s expecting me to take the place of his son?”
“No, but it’s a measure of how much he likes you that he’s so happy to have you around.”
“Why, I wonder?”
“Are you fishing for compliments?”
“No, I mean it – it can’t have been easy for him.”
“Ines told him to grow up.”
“Are you serious?”
“More or less; plus, she thinks you need looking after – just like me. We’re both surrogate children to Giovanni and Ines, and it gives them the opportunity to act out their role as parents.”
“I’m a little old to be a surrogate child.”
“They still want to look after you. It might look like all Giovanni wants is a buddy to share a beer with at the end of the day – and he does, I agree – but he also gets to play at being Papa again.”
“And Ines gets to be your Mama?”
“It’s nice – don’t you think? Having people care about you?”
We walk along in the darkness. I can smell the damp of the wood, and the sounds are different to those during the day – softer and more muted.
“I worry for anyone who gets to care about me. There always comes a time when I let them down.”
“It’s just a theory, Brendan; it’s just the wine talking. Don’t worry – they’re nice people is all.”
“They are, aren’t they?”
The path leaves the wood and becomes the gravel that surrounds the Villa. The outside lights are still on, and Maria and I separate from each other.
“You can kiss me,” she says, “if you like.”
“I’d like to, but I’m not going to.”
“You don’t want to?”
“Of course I want to, but I don’t think I should.”
“You don’t like me in that way?”
“I just don’t think it’s a good idea. You don’t know me, and I’m old enough to be your father.”
“Actually, I think you might be older than my father,” she says, and laughs.
“Great.”
“I’d like you to kiss me.”
“Yes, but I don’t think you would if you knew everything about me.”
“Isn’t that my decision? I’m not a child, you know.”
“No, but you seem like one to me.”
“I’ve wanted you to kiss me since the first time we met.”
“That’s why you were shouting at me across the vegetables?”
“I didn’t know what else to do.”
“I’m sorry – I can’t.”
“It’s just a kiss.”
“A kiss is never just a kiss. Things happen, and I can’t let them happen.”
“They’ve already happened – for me anyway. I have no choice.”
“You do; you do have a choice. You can turn around and go inside. We’ve had a beautiful day –”
“Hold me then.”
“No.”
“You won’t even give me a hug?”
“Maria.” I’ve done my best to avoid this. “I’m not . . .” I’m not what – not nice? I’m not what I appear to be? If you have a dog, I’ll kill your dog? If you’re beautiful, I’ll throw acid in your fa
ce?
“I don’t care, Brendan. I don’t care what you’ve done.”
“But you should care, Maria, or I’ll find a way to make you care. I’ll find out the best way to hurt you, and I’ll go ahead and do it.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“But you will, if you ever get close to me. That’s why I’m not going to kiss you, or hold you or hug you.”
“You’re wrong, you know. You’re wrong about yourself.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I’ll show you. Not tonight maybe, but I will show you.”
“No, Maria – you won’t.”
II
I don’t hold out for long. How could I? A woman such as Maria tells me she wants to be with me – what else am I going to do? A girl such as Maria; she’s under half my age, so it’s hard to think of her as anything but a child. And her answer to this?
“But Brendan – I’m going to die before you do.”
What am I to do? This girl/child/woman has already had to come to terms with her own death, so who am I to question what she wants? I know enough about her not to underestimate her determination to get whatever that might be, like her choice of Pisa to go to college: an Italian city, away from Naples, with probably one of the best hospitals in Europe right next to the University. Nothing her papa could do or say was going to change her mind.
But still.
“I’m not a virgin if that’s what you’re afraid of,” she says.
“Oh, Jesus!”
We’re together in the library of the Villa, after lunch and before siesta.
“That’s not really the issue here.”
“But you wondered, right? Not that it was anything to write home about.”
Dancing to the End of Love Page 23