by Mari Reiza
But arriving at the Maroncelli apartment, I could hear 'I Want to Break Free' reverberating at full volume across the courtyard. The air smelled of trouble.
I rushed up the stairs and opened the door to a madwoman’s sanctuary. It was dark with candles dotted around faking romanticism or maybe death, and I could not see Miriam anywhere. I dreaded opening the bathroom door and had sudden images of my wife with cut wrists inside a bubbling bath. RED. How would I live with that?
Then, I saw her slumped on a kitchen chair crying. The music was still playing full blast. She had an empty bottle of La Grande Dame in her hand.
Suddenly I remembered.
‘HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!’ I am not sure whether she managed to say it in a slurred voice or if it was in my head. After that she collapsed. I put her to bed and she left for London the next morning, before Niccolò came to my apartment to work by the side of my bed. I had a terrible cold. The fucking Church’s had let water in.
A few weeks later, I was back in London, alone but still married. A miracle.
Miriam had gone to spend some time with her mum. My own mum had turned out to be fine, the cancer had been caught early and no chemotherapy was needed. All potential crises seemed to have been averted.
Except that Niccolò had put me on notice. ‘You should mull it over,’ he said, ‘whether you are really made for the place, for Enterprise. I am sure that you will do the right thing,’ he added.
Like skinning your fucking prick and boiling it in a huge pot before serving it to my non-existent dog! I was raging.
Hammi would not answer my panicky calls and Peter was impossible to get hold of for days. ‘Remember Vittal, you are only as good as your latest deed and the people who praise you are not the people who love you.’ I played the words in my head a million times in those two full days of waiting, and drank a lot of whiskey. But I could get no satisfaction, although I even figured out how to play the tune on my sitar, and then drank some more whiskey.
‘How am I going to tell Dad?’
For a brief moment, brief but charged with an intensity that could have turned huge waves back to wherever they come from, I even thought of suicide. Of course, I didn’t mean it. Or maybe I did and was such a fucking coward. Peas don’t have the guts.
Luz, as in the-light-that-takes-you-to-God, kept repeatedly rearranging a call with Peter. In the time wasted by Enterprise assistants rearranging meetings, I was convinced a mediocre individual, not even an Enterpriser, could probably have changed the world from round to square and painted it in a thousand colours. I was anxious. I felt ignored. I burnt with anger. I had been unduly humbled by a jerk and I could only wait to take my fate.
In the end Peter rescued me, offered for me to work for some small Indian bully middle-managing an obscure chamber of commerce in New York, as a redemption project. And I felt such relief, such gratitude to him. This was why we would have done anything to be loved by a Father, because they could save us (or kill us). Our pea lives were in their hands.
A Father could command, instruct, coerce down the non-existent chain of command. This was always done nicely in a nurturing way. We took it on board. We would put together their speeches, write their emails, organise their roundtables and arrange their parties. Everything was an opportunity. Any time near a Father would mean that some of their aura could rub off on us. It was necessary to get things done. No request, no document, no initiative would have any bearing if it did not have a Father’s backing. Truth Leaders and Fathers owned Enterprise. They owned our lives. They could get away with murder. But this time I had lived! I was soon elected to Confrère. The nightmare is over, or so I thought.
Miriam’s luxury holiday
Miriam was back talking to me after my election.
It was August 2005. She was tired of my working. ‘I want a holiday,’ she said.
Fair enough. I could probably relax for about five minutes now that I was officially Confrère.
I agreed.
It was some Fushi or other she was talking about, in a distant atoll. I thought that it was the wrong time of the year to go there. ‘What is the problem with the Mediterranean? We could do something other than Sicily?’ I offered to no avail.
‘Understated barefoot luxury,’ she read from the brochure. ‘No shoes, no news,’ insisted the travel agent.
Was Miriam going to do without her Gina-to-Manolos collection for a whole week?
The real news to me was that it was going to cost me over fifteen grand. I needed to coach Miriam on Enterprise’s pay scale, and explain to her that I was not worth much even as a Confrère, not until I became a Father.
But she still won, and after an excruciating twelve-hour British Airways journey with a baby howling in my ear so hard that I had to put on the film subtitles, and Miriam pointing out all the lovey-dovey hunks in business class, we landed on a narrow stretch of hot hell surrounded by water. This was only Male.
I had been unaware of the need for a sea plane. Miriam knew that I got very sick on small planes, and I certainly did not look like a cool stud by the time we landed on the resort’s beach. Of course, she did not refrain from giving me plenty of stick for it.
‘Great start!’ I said but she didn’t even smile as she hurried in a mood to her villa, breaking the relaxing charm of the place.
It was to be a week of paradise. The water and the nature were exceptional, unlike anything I had seen before, but we spent most of our time arguing (or was it discussing, as defined by Miriam’s new marital guru) in the hot tub by the overheated courtyard of our villa, or at the pool spotting some failed plastic surgeries.
‘If you have problems of your own it’s best to bitch about other people,’ Miriam would say, probably paraphrasing another of her new shrink’s stupid maxims.
We didn’t even rise to the minimum of ‘validatory lovemaking,’ that which is crap but confirms you as a living couple, let alone the heights of ‘holiday pornography’. ‘We should have gone somewhere less romantic like Miami and saved some dosh,’ I said to her, slightly angry by the second day.
Still, I had to admit that someone in this resort had put a lot of thought into redefining luxury.
We had been promised a Robin Crusoe experience, obviously with hot water in the Jacuzzis, fully air-conditioned rooms and mobile coverage.
‘Nothing like Crusoe then.’ Would Miriam ever get my jokes again? She had loved them in the past.
The place was in fact so Crusoe that we would have believed it had they hung a plate saying, ‘Scarlett Johansson may have stayed here.’
The abundance of mod cons meant that I could hear the generator from the service quarters working on all night to keep them going. And the view from our villa was obscured by a large antenna sticking up over the palm trees so we could be glued to our mobiles enjoying indispensable free wifi. Guests wanted to be in contact with insect-less nature so we were fumigated every evening at sunset, whilst sipping upmarket cocktails on our little garden terrace. (At least the fumigator’s noise muffled the neighbours shouting alarmingly close in the room next door, making me glad mine was not the only shit marriage around.) God knows what the pesticides did to Miriam’s skin, when they mixed with her expensive after-sun formula by some specialist dermatologist from the Dead Sea who I cursed for having recently opened an office in Harley Street!
Then there was the ray and baby shark feeding at dusk, with high-heeled (despite the no-shoes policy) residents cheering. They would hardly have left their laptops to venture away from the pool bar into the sea, so you had to bring the sea to them.
One night, as a romantic treat (was it a trap?), Miriam booked the underwater restaurant which reminded me of London’s aquarium, only darker and more overpriced, though I would have thought such a thing impossible. And the same as in the overwater restaurant, any bottle of wine over a year old would be invariably ruined, after having probably endured days stored on a pallet in the middle of the sea under the blazing sun. (The natives didn’t
drink alcohol anyway so they couldn’t tell.) It was fine for Miriam, she would just drink ‘any odd (expensive) Chardonnay, one glass only’. She wouldn’t risk getting carried away because I may sexually abuse her. I resigned myself to cheap beer.
What was left?
Peace and quiet on the empty beaches, deserted but for the increasing number of farcical spectres visiting from new galaxies to stroll on them with luggages full of photographic equipment and costumes.
‘Long live the selfie generation!’ Thank God they seldom spoke English.
They had more kit scattered on the paradisiac sand than Holly Hunter in The Piano, and if you managed to avoid them for a moment and got some peace, the beach-shiner would arrive to interrupt your rest because your sunglasses needed to be professionally cleaned,
‘What is wrong with my own stinky breath or a bit of green spit from last night’s curry?’
He would lose his livelihood, he told me, and I felt sorry for him and let him clean anything he wanted.
‘You can always find some joy,’ Awa (my grandmother) would say, ‘in a good book.’
Wrong again. Not in this place.
Miriam had a friend developing a funky e-reader and had insisted I could not be seen with book-books anymore, but packed her friend’s instrument of torture for me to carry on this wonderful holiday instead. But of course, she forgot the charger in London. And my e-reader was so funky that no one in the whole hotel, probably no one in the whole bloody country, had the right charger. They had never heard of an e-book full stop in this resort. We sent some boat to Male and they came back with nothing but still charged two hundred dollars to my account, and I ended up reading some cheap, watered-down porn from the hotel boutique, and building more unsatisfied randiness.
In the end, I sat most of my days at the bar, idle.
I yearned for a small real fishermen’s town with real fishermen, not a resort, not a tourist trap. Did such a thing exist anymore or had we managed to grow fish in tree plantations whilst I had been busy making myself a better person at Enterprise?
I wanted an old stone house, not the fake stone-looking narrow tiles or look-a-like wallpaper fads revered by five-star designers back in London. I wanted it perhaps in Gallipoli, near Lecce. A modest-ish one-man palace, preferably in front of the sea with a natural swimming pool made of rock that filled with the tides (though there are no real good tides in the Mediterranean...)
Peter had shown me a photo of the Bondi Baths in Sydney. I could even do with something smaller for private use. I was daydreaming, not modest-modest but modest-ish.
The house could have just one bedroom, one toilet and a small ballroom that I would fill with hundreds of book-books that I still needed to read. (Perhaps not so modest-ish after all.) I would send them to the Gallipoli house ahead of time by post, or by private courier, because the Italian post could not be trusted.
I also dreamt of a bar nearby with a coffee machine that made over a hundred coffees a day for all the locals – so both the machine and the barman were masters of their trade – and that served a good aperitivo in the evenings. And a mensa where a fisherman’s wife would cook whatever had just come in.
‘Is that too much to ask?’ The Maldivian barman at my resort bar had no idea what I was talking about. He had never set foot outside his atoll and loved our resort which fed him. For him, he swore, it was paradise.
‘We could change the house in Gallipoli for a small deconsecrated dome on one of the hills in, let’s say, Naxos.’ The fact that my barman didn’t understand me had made me bolder, even more eager to share my thoughts with him.
Naxos still meant nothing to him.
‘I could rent an old moped and speed to a tiny taberna by the sea for a nice feta salad with olive oil a vivid green colour, with Miriam on my back kissing my neck.’ I had forgotten the joys of dreaming, the only luxury left to me.
Next, I asked the barman for a pen and scribbled a wannabe poem, because one has to start somewhere, especially when his real life ambition is not becoming an Enterprise Truth Leader but to write verses where stealing a single sound makes the audience feel like they’ve been robbed of their favourite figs.
a dinghy in the early morning light of the laguna, fresh air on skin bringing a new day; the little balcony run by the two mad sisters over the derelict harbour, boats strolling into the bay; forty degrees, selz limone e mandarin newlyweds fresh out of church in sight, marvelling at the sea and at their own happiness; a trabucco over the rolling waves, under a piece of sky; closing your eyes to the faces of people you love sculpted by time, furrowed by life
‘Why don’t we go to Kingston next time?’ I dared propose on the last day to Miriam.
‘Where?’
‘Kingston, Jamaica, of course,’ she didn’t remember when I used to sing to her that I would need a queen.
‘Vittal, you are not funny.’
I was not even funny anymore.
Vittal is not moving to New York
My response to the holiday fiasco was incomprehensible to Miriam and probably to me too: I wanted to be posted to New York, to work with Peter-Moses who had recently become a Truth Leader.
Perhaps it was defeat, giving in to the place. Or it could have also been renewed energy to reach the next stage at Enterprise.
I should have been able to identify what was happening to me, addiction and its familiar pattern, because there was always something appealing placed for us in reach, in the window, but by the time we got there, it seemed that there was never much left inside the room.
The fact was that I had been going to New York quite often during my last project for Peter, my redemption project, and I kind of enjoyed it, despite having to answer all those questions at customs about whether I had a criminal record, was planning to sell my body or stay permanently in their country: ‘No to all, thanks, but maybe yes to the middle one, if you find anyone who wants it.’ It was unadvisable to joke with US Customs, I soon found out.
For me, New York had always been summed up in T-shirts: ‘New York the Magnificent’, 1920s; ‘Big Apple’, 1970s promotional campaign; sleeveless John Lennon by Bob Gruen, 1974 picture; ‘I Survived the Historical Blackout’, August 2003. I had them all.
Alternatively, I could have thought of the visits to Aunty Nanda when I was young, when we spent our time in hospital with Awa, and Dad cried a lot, but I preferred not to think back to that. T-shirts were good.
And I also loved the way people in New York were all New Yorkers but also from somewhere else, that had always fascinated me… even more than in London. For example, on April 6, 2005, I had landed there for a meeting with Peter and found him in tartan. ‘I thought your dad was English,’ I had said. ‘Yes, from Coventry,’ he had replied, ‘but the wife is American of Scottish descent and our fucking congress passed a resolution in 1998 declaring American tartan day, so there was no other way about it this morning, Vittal.’ Americans were never just American, and Peter looked good, even in tartan.
But the main reason that I wanted to move to New York was because things happened there, and not in the spine-chilling sort of way they had been happening to me in Europe. (Bev’s speeches traumatised me. Niccolò had traumatised me. Trojan’s righteousness traumatised me. Perhaps I needed a change.)
New York was the only place where I had sat in any random buzzing restaurant and had the feeling that people were opening and closing deals and making thousands of dollars as they casually sipped their huge barrels of coke. And they didn’t need to feel ashamed for it; on the contrary: a new drug; an electric car; 3-D printed food; the latest brand of elastic pants or the tennis racket of the future. And everyone seemed to be able to do it, from the seventeen-year-old kid barely out of college, to the superannuated zombie who should have been in a necropolis for years despite having meditated his wrinkles away.
And the truth was, if I was going to fuck up my personal life, at least I wanted to get something back, to become a millionaire. I knew Enterprise,
at least Enterprise Europe, thought that making money was overrated but I needed to experience it for myself.
With my new plan in mind, barely a month back from the holiday, I had already arranged to travel to New York to spend some time with Alakrita, who had been elected to Confrère in the same round as me. I could not trust her completely to shed light on opportunities available, but it was better than asking Nal.
She had agreed to spare some precious time on a Friday afternoon, which meant that I would not make it for Friday night with Miriam in London. Tough call…
Alakrita has been my dick’s desire for long, and Miriam is my wife but hardly, she is still not fucking me, although I admit I have not been home much after the holiday. It was not such a tough call after all.
When I walked into Alakrita’s New York fishbowl, her new Confrère entitlement, I could hardly believe it. She was as much a tantalising fuck as ever and she was smoking, in a New York building! I knew instantly that I had done the right thing.
This woman was at it in her office, a glass-panelled box fitted with the latest fire equipment, overlooking ten American corporate assistants.
‘I thought smoking in your own space, like having any number of children without consequence, had become pretty much a privilege for the aristocracy and the unemployed classes,’ I told her. I had read that somewhere. And I instantly considered that Alakrita was in her own class, not the aristocratic class and of course not the working class, but an undefinable class, the class that does what it wants or bites your head off.