by David Szalay
In the morning he feels more or less normal. He has, which he didn’t quite have before, a normal awareness of his surroundings. He is in hospital. He is very much aware of that now. Already this year he has spent many weeks in hospital. He has already spent more time in hospital this year, he thinks, than in his entire life up till now. And here he is again. He is sitting on the edge of the tall bed staring at the scuffed grey floor. And there’s just going to be more and more of this, isn’t there? Hospitals. Doctors. His only purpose in life now, it seems, is to stave off physical decay and death for as long as possible. His life, in terms of any sort of positive purpose, would seem to be over already. He feels very depressed. Amemus eterna et non peritura. The words pass through his mind from somewhere. Painfully, he eases himself off the bed and plants his pale feet on the floor. The sink is two light-headed steps away. Over it there is a mirror. His face is a shock. No one told him about that. ‘Fucking hell,’ he says, furious. He stands there for a few seconds, leaning on the sink until his head stops spinning. The tap is weird – a horizontal lever about six inches long. He fiddles with it until water starts to flow. Fills one of the plastic cups and lifts it to his split, disfigured lip.
He is still looking at himself in the mirror. At his monstrously enlarged face, his partially shaved head. At the overall patheticness of the figure he presents.
Those words again.
Amemus eterna et non peritura.
Pomposa.
Memories of the hour or so he spent there materialise in his mind. It is almost disconcerting, the way they are just suddenly there. Walking through the plain spaces of the abbey. The inscription in the porch: Amemus eterna et non peritura. And the thoughts he had while waiting for his soup, his minestra di fagioli, and staring through the window at the still, winter day outside, winter daylight on leafless trees.
So what is eternal?
Nothing, that’s the problem. Nothing on earth. Not the earth itself. Not the sun. Not the stars in the night sky.
Everything has an end.
Everything.
We know that now.
6
Joanna drives him home in a car provided by the insurance company. She has already sorted all that out.
He had so looked forward to leaving the hospital. On the drive home, however, his spirits are low. He isn’t sure, now, what he was looking forward to. It is snowing lightly, ineffectually. Small flakes that won’t settle, that melt as soon as they touch anything.
They arrive at the house.
They stopped at the Lidl in Argenta first and they take the shopping in, Joanna doing the heavy lifting.
‘That damp patch needs seeing to,’ she says.
‘Yes.’
‘And you know that we have mice?’
‘Yes.’
They sit down to have lunch together. It is strange, them being here together like this, in this house. It has been many years since it was just the two of them, here.
‘I have to leave tomorrow,’ Joanna says.
‘Okay.’
‘I spoke to Cordelia,’ she tells him. ‘She’s going to come and stay with you for a while. A week, she said she might be able to manage.’
He tries not to show how pleased he is. ‘That really isn’t necessary.’
‘I don’t think you should be on your own.’
‘I’ll be fine.’
‘She’s already got her plane ticket, Tony.’
‘Well, it’s very kind of her.’
Joanna says, picking at potato salad, ‘I’m sorry I can’t stay longer myself.’
He sort of waves that away with his fork.
They eat, for a minute or two, in silence.
‘It’s a shame about the Passat,’ he says, obviously perked up by the news about Cordelia.
‘Oh, come on, it was ancient. It was time to junk it, anyway.’
‘I liked it.’
‘So did I,’ Joanna says.
‘Remember we used to drive down in it?’
‘Of course.’
‘That was fun.’
She says, pouring herself some more wine, and in a tone which is almost drily flirtatious, ‘It had its moments.’
They used to drive down in the Passat – and before that in an old Volvo 740 – down through France, through the Mont Blanc tunnel and out through the Valle d’Aosta into Piedmont, the shimmer of Lombardy. He always particularly loved driving through the Valle d’Aosta – the drama of the valley, and the way that heightened the sense you had there of passing from northern to southern Europe.
How wonderful those long drives seem now. Thinking about them makes something ache in him.
Memories of fresh damp air.
He has a sip of wine. Notices that his hand is shaking.
Anyway, that all stopped when the Passat was domiciled in Argenta, about twelve years ago. It was already fairly old then.
Joanna is telling him something: ‘Cordelia’s going to help you find a new car, she says.’
‘Is she?’ he asks.
It seems there was a hint of scepticism in his voice – Joanna says, ‘She does know about cars.’
‘Yes, she does,’ he agrees.
‘She’ll help you find something. In Ravenna, I suppose.’
‘Or Ferrara,’ he suggests.
‘If you like. Have you finished?’
He nods, and she takes his plate, with hers, to the kitchen.
Outside, it has stopped snowing – it’s just miserable. A frozen, damp day. Joanna spends some time on the phone. He doesn’t know who she’s talking to. She speaks to several people. It sounds like work, he thinks, eavesdropping from his wing chair with Clark’s Sleepwalkers on his lap. He’s not making much progress with it. He’s just not that interested, is the main problem. Things just don’t interest him as much as they used to.
She asks him, when she has finished on the phone, if he wants to watch a film.
‘A film?’ he says, slightly as if she’s interrupting him, as if she’s distracting him from something important. ‘Alright.’
He notices the full glass of wine in her hand. She’s drinking a lot of wine, he thinks. She’s uneasy, with them here together like this. ‘What film?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know. We’ve got all these DVDs.’ She is at the shelf, in her voluminous woollens, starting to look through them. ‘Groundhog Day?’
‘We must have watched that,’ he says unkindly, ‘twenty times.’
‘Okay. On Golden Pond?’
‘No.’
‘The Bucket List?’
He snorts.
‘How about Driving Miss Daisy?’
‘God, no.’
She makes some more suggestions, all of which he irritably dismisses.
‘Why don’t you choose, then?’ she says, starting to lose patience. ‘Come here and choose something yourself.’
‘Joanna …’ He is still sitting in the wing chair. He puts his hands together, the points of his fingers, as if about to offer her some wisdom.
Then he just sighs, and says, sounding put-upon, ‘What else is there?’
‘There are loads. About Schmidt?’
He sighs again.
‘About Schmidt?’ she half-shouts, turning from the shelf.
‘No!’
‘Do you actually want to watch a film?’ she asks.
‘Not really,’ he says, with a sort of defiance.
‘Why didn’t you say so, then?’
‘Where are you going?’
She is leaving the room. ‘I have things to do.’
‘What things?’
‘Work. I’m supposed to be in New York.’
That infuriates him. ‘I didn’t ask you to come here,’ he shouts after her.
Alone he puts his hand over his eyes – feels the tenderness of his damaged face, which he had forgotten about.
Then she is there again, standing in front of him.
‘Look,’ she starts, making an effort, ‘I’m here becau
se I thought you needed help …’
‘I don’t need your help,’ he hears his own voice say.
There is a moment of ominous silence.
‘Well, fuck you, then,’ she says quietly.
He hears her walk up the stairs, the sound of her door shutting.
After a few minutes he stands up, stiffly, and follows her. He feels dizzy on the stairs, has to stop for a moment.
Softly, he knocks on her door. ‘Joanna?’
Nothing.
‘Joanna … I’m sorry.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says again. ‘I’m not myself today.’
He doesn’t open the door – that’s not allowed, hasn’t been allowed for years.
‘Please come downstairs,’ he says to the painted wood, which was once white, probably. ‘I’m going to make some tea,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry – I mean it.’
Downstairs, he makes the tea – in a warmed pot, the old-school way. People just don’t do that any more, he thinks sadly.
When he enters the sitting room – when he shuffles in with the tray – he is surprised to find her already there. She is on one of the sofas, with her large unfeminine feet on the pouf, looking unsentimentally at her own hands. ‘It’s just so depressing,’ she says.
‘What is?’
He puts down the tray.
‘I mean, I’m only here for two days, and something like this happens.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘It was my fault.’
‘Yes, it was.’
He sits down in the wing chair, flops down into it, so that his legs swing up slightly. He sits there, panting.
‘How are you feeling?’ she asks.
He says, ‘Okay. A bit dizzy. I’ll be okay.’
‘You shouldn’t be doing anything,’ she says. ‘The doctor told me you shouldn’t do anything for a few days. You should have let me deal with the tray.’
‘I’ll be okay.’
She stands up and pours the tea.
Then they watch The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
He starts wheezily snoring about halfway through.
7
One always imagines that there will be some sort of serenity at the end. Some sort of serenity. Not just an awful sordid mess of shit and pain and tears. Some sort of serenity. Whatever that might mean. And what that might actually mean becomes problematic up close. Amemus eterna et non peritura. That would seem to be sound advice, if serenity is what one is after. The same problem, though – what is eterna? What is eternal, in his world? Wherever he looks, from the loosening skin of his weak, old man’s hands – which somehow don’t seem to be his, since he does not think of himself as an old man – to the sun shedding white light on the flat landscape all around, wherever he looks, he sees only peritura. Only that which is transient.
Joanna has left. She had an earlyish plane and left just as the late dawn was lightening the sky over the poplars of Strada Provinciale 65, a field or two away. The taxi was outside, vapour spewing from its tailpipe. She had hauled her suitcase downstairs and in the entrance hall she had stopped for a moment and said to him, ‘Cordelia will be here this afternoon.’
A minute later he was alone, in the kitchen, trying not to succumb to an unexpected flood of emotion, with trembling hands spooning coffee into the percolator.
How little we understand about life as it is actually happening. The moments fly past, like trackside pylons seen from a train window.
The present, perpetually slipping away.
Peritura.
He sits in the wing chair with his iPad.
Tap.
Tap. Tap.
Emails. No new emails, other than the spam and semi-spam that never stops.
He still hasn’t written to Simon about his poem. He will do that now. First he has another look at it.
The portrait shows this – his eyes fixed elsewhere,
Mehmet the Conqueror holds a rose
To the Turkic scimitar of his nose.
The engrossing necessities of money and war,
The wise politician’s precautionary
Fratricides, the apt play of power –
All proper activities in his sphere,
And he excelled at them all. So why the flower?
A nod, perhaps, to something less worldly;
Not beauty, I think, whatever that is,
Not love, not ‘nature’,
Not Allah, by that or any other name –
Just a moment’s immersion in the texture
Of existence, the eternal passing of time.
That final phrase. It didn’t make much of an impression on him last week.
He stands up and fondles the radiator, fondles its warmth with his stiff hands.
The passing of time. That is what is eternal, that is what has no end. And it shows itself only in the effect it has on everything else, so that everything else embodies, in its own impermanence, the one thing that never ends.
Which would seem to be an extraordinary paradox.
Claudia says, ‘Good morning, Signor Parson.’
Startled, he turns. ‘Oh, Claudia. Hello. How are you?’
‘I’m okay, Signor Parson,’ she says, not trying very hard to hide the fact that she is tired and fed up. She also has problems with her joints in this weather. They have talked about it.
‘Where you like me to start?’ she asks.
‘The kitchen?’ he suggests. ‘Or upstairs? I don’t mind.’
He is trying to hold onto the feeling he had, a moment ago, of everything as the embodiment of something endless and eternal, of the eternal passing of time. For a moment he had felt it. Felt it.
‘Okay,’ Claudia says. ‘I start upstairs, okay?’
And that through its very impermanence.
Only something as paradoxical as that, he thinks, has any hope of … Of what?
He says, ‘Fine. Thank you, Claudia.’
He is still standing at the window.
Of helping.
For a moment he had felt it, and it had helped.
*
Cordelia arrives at four o’clock, just as it is getting dark. She is forty-three now. It seems incredible. ‘Hello, Dad,’ she says, when she has dismissed the taxi. He is waiting in the doorway, waiting to help her with her suitcase, which she does not let him do. In the sitting room they drink wine. He wishes now that he’d saved the fine Barbaresco to share with her. He tells her about the accident, what he can remember, that he was at Pomposa abbey. He thanks her, again, for coming to stay.
When he thanks her she just smiles, and stands up and looks at the books on the shelves. She is tall like her mother. ‘I’m reading Clark’s Sleepwalkers,’ he tells her, from the wing chair.
‘Oh, yeah? Interesting?’
‘Very,’ he says.
‘Tell me about it.’
He tries to explain, what he understands of it – how Europe stumbled into this near-death experience – and then says, when it’s obvious he isn’t making much sense, ‘I haven’t finished it, of course. I’m less than halfway through.’
‘M-hm.’
With donnish interest, he asks, ‘What are you reading?’
‘Bring Up the Bodies,’ she says. ‘Finally.’
‘She’s good on the politics,’ he tells her, like someone who would know.
‘I’m enjoying it,’ she says.
Then she starts to talk about something else: ‘How was it with Mum?’
The question is just perceptibly loaded.
‘Fine,’ he says vaguely. And then, with more emphasis, ‘It was very sweet of her to come. She was supposed to be in New York or something.’
‘I know.’
Somehow too solemnly, he says, ‘And thank you, Cordelia, as well. I know how much you’ve got on …’
‘That’s about the fourth time you’ve thanked me,’ she says. She is smiling. ‘You can stop now. I feel fully thanked.’
‘Okay,’ he laughs, as always hugely enjoying her manner.
/>
He is somewhat in awe of her.
‘So it was fine with Mum?’ she asks, pressing on with that.
Joanna must have spoken to her, he thinks, phoned her from the airport and told her something.
‘It was fine,’ he says. And then again, trying not to sound so threatened, ‘It was fine.’
There is a short silence.
To end it, he asks after Simon. Says he read the poem she sent.
‘And?’ she wants to know. ‘What did you think?’
‘I was impressed,’ he says, and Cordelia looks pleased. That was his aim – to please her. He says, ‘He and his friend were out here in the spring, of course.’
‘Yes,’ Cordelia says, ‘I know.’
‘What was his friend’s name again?’
‘Ferdinand.’
‘That’s it. A very entertaining young man.’
‘Yes.’ The proposition seems to make her uneasy, slightly. ‘I suppose.’
‘I liked him.’ He is sort of staring off into the middle distance when he says that. ‘We had some very nice talks,’ he says, smiling at her.
‘You and Ferdinand?’
‘And Simon, of course.’
He asks, after a few moments, ‘Is, er, Ferdinand up at Oxford too?’ There is something strange and deliberate, she thinks, about the way he says the name. And, actually, about the way he keeps talking about Ferdinand.
‘Yes, he is,’ she says.
‘Same college? As Simon.’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Simon’s at St John’s, isn’t he?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well,’ he says, a little wistfully. ‘It was fun to have them here for a few days. What do you want to do for dinner?’ he asks.
‘I thought we might go out.’
‘Now that’s an idea. Where?’
‘That place in Argenta?’
He knows the place she means – they have been going there for years. ‘Sure. That’d be very nice. I’ll phone them up. Reserve us a table.’
‘Do you want me to do it?’
‘No, I think I can manage,’ he says.
The phone is on a sideboard. Next to it is a tatty little notebook full of handwritten numbers. He turns the pages until he finds what he is looking for. Then he picks up the phone and very slowly and deliberately punches the number into it. While he waits for them to answer, holding the phone to his ear, he inspects his slumped, jumpered image in the dark window.