Triple Bagger

by Mari Reiza

  I like the way in which your account often makes the reader feel as if you yourself were in the process of being convinced. Some readers like the writer caring about something without showing his emotions, as if that were the mark of a true master, a way in which the reader is constantly led, but by the time he reaches the end he thinks he has discovered it all by himself. But you instead are helping the reader feel that, at some point during the process of investigation and configuration, you have surprised yourself in finding something new.

  Then, there is your language, that needs to have sentences perfectly judged so that even when describing the banal they would still have me bewitched. But on the other hand, you need to be clear, to tell readers what you want them to believe. In your plain English. We are writers and love the beauty of words but do not let them get in the way. Make the reader feel that they can love your words because they are so beautiful and carry your story to make it immortal, that there is hope against death because with your very words some things will stay alive forever.

  I know the jury is still firmly out on you as a writer. (I’m offering a professional opinion.) But I also definitely feel you have earnt dispensation from the menial tasks of fetching food or building shelter, to take all the freedom you need, all the liberty of the artist, erase the disparity between your conscious and unconscious and persevere in your quest to achieve some peace. You see, so much of what an editor does is flattery, not only torturing.

  I urge you, though, to cut down on the ramblings in our letters (weren’t you a businessman in your previous life, were you paid by the word?) and to put all your energy into finishing your story.

  You want to put it into context, you want to take artistic licence with your characters, and you want to scrape to the bottom of things, I understand, but there is no need for three pages of long words to explain that to me every time, unless this meandering helps you in your quest to keep writing.

  Then I’ll endure it, because that is part of my duty, so you can reach my heart.

  Your devoted correspondent,

  Ms. Nuria Friedman

  14

  The Triple Bagger 3. Atahotel Executive, Milano, August 2014

  She has been rushing in the heat of Milan, none of that wood fire burning English summer evenings. When she opens the door to the hotel room he is there, long on the bed.

  Looking at him asleep, she has to laugh with heartfelt satisfaction. For one, he has come to see her once more. And secondly, she feels for him, she cannot deny it. This marvellous, precarious, unsettled human being peacefully resting, in spite of the load of life. His two personalities, directionless and serene, live so happily apart, but it is a strain for him to share both. And he has a good puffy face as he wakes up in front of her, so that for a few minutes the serenity occupies that other part of his life than his sleep, and she feels that she hasn’t had enough time to savour her gratitude.

  ‘You look wonderful,’ he says to her as she sits on a chair in front of him.

  It’s a V-neck, billowing, Peter Pilotto frock, in red silk with a blue graphic print of flowers, Andy Warhol’s flowers, decorating the two front drapes. The fabric comes from a Japanese company that does fantastic print research, she thinks it but doesn’t say it. She knows beautiful clothes have to be worn as if they fell out of the sky on your person whilst you were innocently passing by. No need for explanations. ‘When I am in Milano,’ she says instead, ‘I have to dress up to look the part and avoid people embarrassing themselves, taking me for someone that I am not.’ She sighs as if thinking back to a time in the past when this had happened. ‘Clothes are everything here,’ she adds. Then she wonders how simple it would be, a world where clothes were everything.

  He is still looking at her, savouring her like an oil portrait in her bright dress, lighting a fag. Wine-stained teeth, ruffled hair, even a couple of extra pounds he can discern. It is like a déjà vu, one of those Recuenco models made to resemble Picasso paintings, the one with the lady in a large conic hat, the smoke drifting up from her lips. No, he takes his thoughts back, like a second Frida Smoking by Juan Jose Espinoz, against this hotel pantomime of a room which is so approximately furnished. Would she like it if he bought the portrait for her, or despise him even more for trying to pay for her attentions?

  They sit looking at each other, him on the bed, her on the chair, a bad copy of Jacobsen’s Swan chair. (Seriously? In Milan? What about Italian design?) The clock radio on the bedside table flicks through the minutes, eating at the borders of their half hour of freedom. The smoke goes up to the ceiling, silence and stares moving up with it.

  ‘I have read your short stories,’ he breaks the silence. ‘You have a real talent for writing.’

  But she is suddenly feeling acerbic. He has broken the spell, that precise magic moment where the smoke was defining their lives.

  ‘I did not know that you had time for reading. Or did you skim through someone's review on the cover?’ she asks.

  ‘What do I have to do to make you love me?’ he seems sad all of a sudden.

  ‘Get a personality transplant?’ she replies with a question. ‘I can’t but imagine how you work all day in one of those places where people churn at their existence without thinking, just making money,’ she adds.

  ‘And what you cannot stand is that they may actually be happy like that.’ He could not give in so easily.

  ‘I am scared of people who are able to suspend what they feel, part of their lives, to think that they are happy. I do not know what they may come out with,’ she says. ‘They could end up building a fictional moral high ground where they are victims turned into heroes, who should be loved because they are saving the world... I can’t stand priggish.’ She is definitely vitriolic today. ‘A patron of the arts, a mentor of the young. Is that who you want it to be, your triple bagger?’ she asks him after a short pause, as if changing the conversation. She wants to go back to his story. ‘So when your little blind woman asks questions about who he is, is that what he tells her? That he is sacrificing for the world? Or does he tell her that he is beautiful and hides his scars? That he is happy. Which part of reality does he suspend? What fiction does he tell?’ She is unstoppable, as if the red silk of her dress has turned into flames, scorching the flowers on the fabric.

  ‘The man may tell her lies or he may try to keep things hidden, only because he loves her. He is not a bad man. It was not his choice to be a member of that elite, and he has paid for it in his life.’ He has offered his reflection.

  ‘But you said from the start that he is a sniggering, powerful and malevolent man,’ she says. ‘He enjoys his malice. You know that he is bad and that he has cadavers strapped to his back in a version of Dante’s hell.’ Then looking straight at him, ‘Is that what you are guilty of? Your crime?’

  ‘You expect so much out of people,’ he fights back. ‘I bet that you are forever disappointed.’ He knows that she resents the extent of his power. It has not caused his image to grow but rather to slim against the background, and he resents and loves her all the more for her total lack of regard for it, how she acts mildly surprised that the man in front of her could be anything at all. His apparent success has made him deplorable whereas she is less successful in his world but full of merit. She has never given in to that success. She has never compromised her freedom for power.

  ‘And you think giving up is the clue to stopping a life of disappointment. Do you?’ She will show her teeth. ‘Settling. Your blind girl, she should settle like your ugly man, adjourning reality to live a lie,’ she says. Her mistrust has put her in a savage mood and the triple bagger is to pay.

  He could drop it here, pretend not to know a thing, just to enjoy how she is imagining him imagining her. But she is not going to let it go.

  ‘Surely you see my point and my need to make you see things the way I do? she says to him.

  ‘Yes,’ he does. ‘I know you feel a kind of happiness in being mad about the world. But this man, the tripl
e bagger, maybe he was not malevolent from the beginning. Perhaps it grew on him when he was denied love. Maybe the joy is not from the malice but from the relief from the pain that comes from it. Would you really like the blind girl to deny him too, like everyone else before?’ He looks at her with a perverse smile. ‘I would be careful if I was you,’ he adds. ‘You may grow into an irritable, quick-witted, energetic old woman, locked in a bitter intelligent loneliness.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she shouts at him. ‘Make her love him if you dare. Stories are dreams one dares to write down, right? Do you even know how to write about love? Think of all that you have overlooked in your life because it was too menial, too detailed and you were too busy. Because it was going to drag you down.’

  ‘You are cruel,’ he says.

  ‘The triple bagger is a fake and a coward and he will never love her. He has been in the company of people who have spent their lives in a certain kind of atmosphere, where it is taken for granted that their existence is to be related to a central wisdom where there is no space for love. Am I not right?’ She pauses. ‘There was a mother in the lift at the hospital the other day; her baby had been in an accident and had burnt feet and hands, four fingers were missing from one hand, no toes on one foot. She kept looking around her audience in that lift for understanding, overpowered by the weight of our judgement. A young man, with a badly broken leg, accompanied by a policeman, was pretending that the only problem he had was the heat. A Spanish grandfather was lullabying his granddaughter, two days old. Where was the mother? He cuddled that baby as if she was the only thing he had left in the world. And you sit here cold as death, talking about being a hero turned sour by lack of love. People are heroes every day because they fight to feel.’ She catches her breath. ‘When you need someone else's suffering to release you from your own pain you know that the world has gone wrong. You have gone wrong. I want to love you but find nothing. You keep your closets and drawers well locked. Nothing to find, nothing to betray. You have been too busy all your life. And in the end, back I come. I really can’t understand why. There is no use resisting it. I am flattened out by you. Why? I enter the darkness of my own heart. I forget my name to exist outside my own boundaries, just to have another half hour with you.’ She feels exasperated. ‘You want the girl to remain blind,’ she says almost crying. ‘What’s your currency? There is more to you than the sum of your parts and there is that one thing that makes me come back wanting to believe in you. But I cannot put my finger on it. No. I do not know what it is. What material, how it feels, what it smells of or if it has any colour. But I can’t. I can’t quite do it. I can’t quite believe in you. And my brain wins me back. Sorry for not letting you be a good person.’

  He looks slightly baffled but his eyes are warm, and she immediately feels that she has gone too far. She has tried him for trying.

  He can’t, she thinks. Those eyes can’t be looking at me like that if his heart is thinking of leaving me.

  She gets up and takes a step towards him. ‘Maybe someone else will,’ she adds almost in a whisper, her speech clipped but her tone soft now, ‘maybe someone else will believe in you enough to love you.’

  But he mutters to himself, sufficiently loud for her to hear, that that someone else will never come back. He now looks himself poised for a portrait, like a young Botticelli in the Adoration of the Magi, deceived by the world. ‘You are as much reflected gloom as you are embraced glow to me,’ he adds.

  Reflected gloom, embraced glow, like the aura of some divine presence, she thinks.

  After a minute or so, she picks up her jacket slowly. She had looked forward to that half hour as if it were the last puff of a dying man. Why did her morals always have to spoil everything? Why could she not trust this man and trust her feelings? Why could she not be blind? But the words could not be unsaid now.

  She thinks of kissing him but does not know whether to do so on the cheek or on his lips, so she leaves the room, hesitantly, turning her head back once the door has closed because she knows that she should have touched him. She feels cold.

  He looks for his briefcase on top of his roller bag, and thinks of taking his laptop case out. A bag in a bag on another bag, all black. He is so tired. The weight of all that vanity, fear and control. He puts his jacket and sunglasses on and leaves the room, rolling his luggage out.

  15

  The Shortest Way to Happiness. Of years 2013-2014. Demise (I)

  In which endurance reins as virtuosity and everyone yearns to become a humble hero.

  I decided I could make death my final project...

  The virtuosity of endurance

  In which Vittal is lonely; Bev is leaving; Hammi dies of a heart attack; and Peter retreats to the Hamptons.

  We praised endurance. The (Catholic) fetish with suffering was both uncomfortable and exciting, to exert ourselves and remain (barely) active for long periods of time, to withstand, recover from and gain immunity to fatigue and trauma. It was a skill that we needed to master. We were always looking for that disagreeable place to pass through, a sort of masochism. Virtue was not in reducing turbulence but in coping with it. Something that was not hardship could not be good.

  Enterprise was about the journey, which needed to be arduous, the journey as home. We needed to be put to the test and attain merit by surmounting adversity. The idea of ‘Doing what the patient had requested with the least effort and go home’ was definitely not the spirit. ‘Work hard, play hard’ was not part of our ethos either. Constant endurance was at the centre of our lives, it created resilience and strength of character. It made us better men. And so we learnt to enjoy the repeated relief of trauma endured and survived.

  Vittal is lonely

  March 2013. I arrived home from Switzerland one morning. It was cold, dark and silent. The fridge was empty. It looked like the flat had been ransacked. The drinks cabinet stood desolate. When I threw myself on the bed, I did not recognise the pillow as mine. The sheets had a sweet smell, like abandonment, short of rot. They missed the heat of a human being. Not that Miriam had ever smelled of anything other that arabesque wood and Moroccan tea scrubs; I would have preferred the smell of woman’s sweat, sweat and onions.

  Then I saw the iguana in her box in the corner, stomach up, limbs rigid. ‘Not even a fucking iguana wants to live with me, like me!’ I shouted. I was losing it.

  Even she preferred to die. And I thought how this made her into a superior being as far as I was concerned.

  ‘What the FUCK!’ I shouted again.

  Where and what had I come to? Was this my success fee? Was this what it cost to be successful? I called to check into The Ritz. I did not want to enter the Elgin apartment ever again. I would call some movers, those fancy ones that brought in a clever geek to take pictures of your underwear (and socks) and fold them back the same way in your new pristine antiseptic apartment with whitewashed walls. Miriam would have loved that.

  Was this the way of my life? Was it really the shortest way to happiness? It felt more like Larkin’s Shropshire, the hole of toads’ turds. It felt like I was lonely, surrounded only by people who were depressed, psychotically angry and scheming, manipulative bastards. It felt like sinking under a haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy and that could never be me.

  Hammi’s heart attack

  The next day, at the office, Lucy knocked on my door and put her head in. ‘Hammi has died of a heart attack in Rome,’ she said, ‘collapsed at his desk.’

  I was not registering.

  ‘Life extinct,’ she repeated. ‘He has carked it.’ Apparently that was short for carcassed it.

  ‘Damn. Fuck!’

  Hammi could not be dead? He was immortal.

  ‘Clara was with him,’ said Lucy, ‘with him.’

  How could it be that at the precise moment I was telling my heroin-chic barista this morning not to shed a tear for the rude bitch that had made her cry at first light without me stopping it, and thinking that Hammi would have loved h
er loins, the man was dying?

  I was on the next plane to Rome.

  By the time I arrived at the office in Rome on that mild afternoon, Clara was a wreck, scared that death had passed so close to her. I had made some calls from the airport to check who else would be coming, but Peter was nowhere to be found.

  Clara could not stop talking from the minute she saw me.

  She had been working at the desk outside Hammi’s office and heard the conversation drop, next she saw him on the floor gasping for air and tried to call one of the assistants, but there was hardly anybody in. ‘Someone brought in an Enterpriser who had been a heart surgeon but he was unable to revive Hammi,’ she said, ‘to save the day.’ We could save entire corporations but we couldn’t stop death for a single man when it counted.

  The first ambulance arrived after what Clara said felt like an eternity and did not have a defibrillator. ‘And the second one was too late,’ she added. Of course, the history and the beauty were such advantages of living in Italy, but it was not a good place to die.

  Clara told me that the men carrying the defibrillator were walking much too slowly, in her opinion, into the office building, across the crowd that had formed outside. ‘They looked like ghostbusters, lapping-up the attention,’ she insisted, ‘as an over-efficient Enterprise assistant kept shouting to make space for them to advance forward, screaming that it was not a show.’