Remembering Light and Stone

by Deirdre Madden

  It wasn’t other people who bothered me, it all came from inside myself, and the feeling was so strong that it was as if there were another person inside me, a dark self who tormented me. My self was split in two, and one half threatened the other, the weaker half.

  And then, there in the apartment while the rain hammered down, the strangest thing happened. I felt that this other self was no longer in me, but felt secure enough of her tight hold over me to risk slipping outside, to show me she was real and powerful. Now she was there in the room with me, standing behind me. I felt as you do when you go into an empty building, and you know that it’s not really empty, that there is someone else there. You can sense their presence, even though you can’t see or hear them. I thought that if I was to turn around, I would see her standing there right behind me, that other person. I could imagine that physically she would look completely unlike me, with an expression on her face somewhere between merriment and malice. ‘But what’s wrong with you? Frightened of your own shadow, just like you always were. Still a coward? Still frightened of your own self? What is there to be afraid of? Don’t you know me? Don’t you recognize me?’

  The door bell rang. I didn’t want to answer but it rang again. It was the bell immediately outside the apartment, at the top of the stairs, so I knew that it must be Franca or some of the family. I got up. The creature behind me melted away.

  It was Lucia. She had borrowed a dictionary from me earlier that evening to do her English homework, and she had come to return it. As I spoke to her, I hoped that I was hiding efficiently what I was feeling. It was like someone who is held hostage in their own home, and is sent to the door to pay the milkman, but is warned not to tell him what is happening, or give any indication that something is wrong.

  I looked at Lucia as if she were a being from another dimension. She seemed to me more unlikely than the person I had thought was standing behind me. I looked with wonder at her happy face, from which you could plainly see that she did not know torment, that she would never understand what it was to feel haunted. Her thick dark curls were pinned back with a plastic clip, with a white artificial flower attached to it. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that said on it in English ‘Winter Warmth’, against a background of russet and orange leaves. There was a thin coloured Brazilian good-luck charm around her wrist, that some boy had given her, and which she always wore.

  ‘Tutto bene, Aisling?’

  I said that I was fine. She smiled and left.

  I slept badly that night, and had terrible dreams. I often have nightmares, but even by my standards these were exceptional. Towards morning, I dreamt that I was combing my hair. My scalp was very itchy, and I didn’t know why. Then I saw that impaled on the teeth of the comb were two big fat maggots, and I realized that the pain was coming from their gnawing my scalp. So I took a brush and brushed and brushed to get them out, and I did it so violently that my scalp was torn to pieces, my hair seeping with blood. And then I woke up.

  I was in my room. It was still raining, it had rained all through the night. I looked at all the things around me – the clothes I had taken off the night before draped over a chair; a basket on the dressing table full of hairslides and bows; a long regular row of shoes; lipsticks and jars of face-cream and perfume bottles and hairbrushes. It struck me that I wouldn’t be there for ever, and I wondered how I would ever find the energy to move. I thought it would be easier to just walk out of it some day and leave everything there, start all over again from scratch somewhere else. Then I remembered leaving Paris, and I knew that it couldn’t be done, you couldn’t slip out of your life like a snake shedding a skin. You could try, but at the end of the day, you’d still be the same person. It was myself that I wanted to get away from, and you can’t do that just by abandoning a few pairs of shoes and some old cosmetics.

  I made myself get up, and washed and dressed. It was still dark when I left the house, and walked through the narrow streets to the bar. In spite of the dream, in spite of having slept badly, I felt a bit better than I had done the night before. I was at a point when I felt it could be useful to go where there were other people, other things, where it was bright and warm and comforting, and where I could sit quietly for a while.

  What was I going to do about this? I had already tried so hard. I had tried to be sensible, rational, told myself that I was depressed, that it was an illness like any other, and should be treated like any other.

  The doctor I’d gone to see had a black leather bag with a long metal bar across the top and a complicated lock, the sort of bag that doctors were traditionally supposed to use to carry new babies to their parents. The doctor himself was staring at the bag while I spoke to him. He heard me out, and then gave a magnificent shrug.

  ‘È la nostalgia,’ he said, picking up his pen. ‘Homesickness.’

  The best thing to do, he said, would be for me to go back home to where I came from, back home to my mamma. I told him she was dead. He frowned, but went on writing and said that I should probably go back anyway. I could see he thought I was being unreasonable. If I went away from my own home, what could I expect, only unhappiness and loneliness? Until such time as I did return, he said, I could take these, and he handed me a prescription for some tranquillizers. I got them from the chemist, but I hardly ever used them. I didn’t like the effect they had on me, and of course they didn’t solve the problem. They couldn’t make me feel less unhappy, just dulled, as if I had been hit on the head with something. Sometimes I was grateful for that.

  So what was I to do? I still hoped that life itself would cure it. I thought that to go back to Ireland wouldn’t help at all, because it was something that had been caused by my early life, it was a northern problem. I had tried to help myself as unhappy North Europeans had tried to help themselves for years: by going south. I wanted to believe that it had helped. It wasn’t that the doctors of the south couldn’t cure me – and of course they couldn’t – but I couldn’t be cured either by being close to what had hurt me in the first place.

  I thought of the fresco of the man vomiting the devil. I thought of Don Antonio and his pendulum. If I had been living in some countries, I’d have been taken out to the edge of a wood, and left there, so that the dark things could come in the night and take away my evil. But I knew what caused my troubles. I had always known. The thing was, to try to change it. I had, I thought, spent all my adult life trying to work to that end, but on a night like last night it seemed to have all been in vain. I just didn’t know what I should do instead.

  I looked at my watch. I had to go home and get my things ready for work, or I’d be late. I said ‘Ciao’ to Adolfo, and he said, ‘See you tomorrow.’ I thought, ‘I hope not.’ as I walked out into the rain.

  8

  ‘This is the story: St Martin was riding along one day in winter, when he met a poor man who was begging by the side of the road. St Martin had no money to give as alms, so he took his cloak and he cut it in two, and he gave half of it to the poor man. And at that, the clouds suddenly rolled back, the sun shone, and it was warm. And ever since then, on the feast of St Martin, the 11th of November, the legend says that the weather will be unseasonably warm. It’s called St Martin’s Summer.’

  Ted said that it must be true, for that day the sun had shone, and the sky had been clear. ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘legends are always true, you must always believe them and take them seriously.’ I told him that it was also called the Feast of Cuckolds, although I didn’t know why. Italians love the idea of infidelity, they think it hilarious, particularly men being cheated on by their wives. They just like the idea, of course; they wouldn’t like the fact of it happening to them any more than anyone else would. But it didn’t surprise me that they had a feast for cuckolds. I just didn’t understand why it should be associated with St Martin. If he was a saint, he was probably never married – saints never are – and even if he was, I don’t think that it would be remembered in that way, I don’t think he’d be held in es
teem if he’d been betrayed by his wife.

  There’s a tradition, too, that on the feast of St Martin you drink the first of the new wine from that year’s harvest, and eat roast chestnuts. That’s what we were doing as I told him the story of the cloak. Ted had come down to S. Giorgio for the weekend, and Franca had given me a couple of bottles of very good new wine, from someone she knew who had a vineyard. She also gave me the loan of a pan in which to roast the chestnuts. Franca was one of the best people to know around S. Giorgio, because she knew everybody, and in Italy it’s the private contact that opens doors. She was adept at getting the best of everything – wine, cheese, truffles, wild mushrooms, and she was always generous with me about such things. I think that she felt sorry for me in my ignorance when I arrived, and enjoyed watching me develop a taste and fondness for good wine and food. She knew that her gifts were appreciated and treated as they should be.

  I opened the second bottle of wine so that it could breathe for a while until we were ready to drink it, and as I did that, I asked Ted to shake the pan over the fire, because I could smell the chestnuts burning. They smoked and rattled as he shook them gently. They had begun to swell a little, and you could see the white flesh showing through the cuts I had made in them earlier. They smelt good.

  ‘More wine?’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’ He said that the wine was stronger than he had thought it would be.

  ‘That’s a mistake it’s easy to make.’ I said. ‘Just because it’s new wine doesn’t mean that it’s weak. Far from it. And because there isn’t any label with information on it, there’s no way of knowing how strong it will be. Look at this, it’s still cloudy.’ I held a bottle of new white wine to the light, so that Ted could see how turbid it was.

  The room was quite hot from the fire, and we were listening to a record of Sibelius that I had recently bought. I liked my apartment very much, it could be very comfortable, especially at night. We didn’t talk all the time. I never feel at ease with people if I can’t sit in silence with them for long periods of time. He drank some wine, and I started to prepare the next batch of chestnuts, so that they would be ready to go on the fire when the first lot came off. One by one, I took them from the bag. They were big and fat and shiny, and one by one I cut a slit in them with a serrated knife. I like chores like that. I like the repetition and the slow rhythm of it. While I worked, I could feel that he was watching me, and I wondered what he was thinking. I didn’t ask.

  The first batch of nuts was ready. I tipped them into a cloth, and put on the second lot, and all the time I could feel him looking at me. Suddenly, I realized how nervous I was. All the things that I thought were so well hidden – my own sense of desperation, all my terror – were things that he could see clearly, because he was looking at me in a way that people rarely did. He wasn’t taken in by the manner I cultivated, he could easily see through that. He had listened to all the things I had said that day, and I now saw how long it was since that had happened, how rarely I had what could be termed a real conversation. You couldn’t buy Ted over just by listening to him. One thing I learnt early in life is that people love to talk about themselves, and you can easily use this to deflect attention from yourself, if you so desire. I had noticed this most particularly with Fabiola. She could happily walk away from me (and no doubt from many other people too), thinking she had just had a conversation about marriage or families or holidays, without realizing that it had been a monologue, to which I had made no contribution whatsoever. I could even stay completely silent, it wasn’t necessary to nod my head and say ‘Yes,’ or ‘How true,’ or anything at all, it was simply enough that I was there. Franca was more shrewd, but after all the years I had been there, she took me according to her own lights. She didn’t see me as others did, didn’t accept the image I projected, but had her own version of my strangeness which was closer to the truth, but still not the whole picture. So it really unnerved me to be with someone who was determined to get beyond the smoke screen, and to know me. I kneaded the cloth with the chestnuts in it too much. They don’t need that much pressure to loosen the skins, and I realized that I had been mashing them relentlessly for some time now. I unrolled the cloth and offered them to him. The chestnuts held the heat of the fire in them, and were hard to hold. He topped up my wineglass. I was drinking a lot out of nervousness.

  ‘Isn’t it nice all these traditions they have here in Italy? I’ve never seen another country like it in that respect, there seems to be no end of festivals and celebrations.’

  Ted said that he had never taken much interest in things like that up until then. Even Thanksgiving and Christmas didn’t mean much to him, he told me that he would have been quite happy to spend them alone. ‘Because I work with Americans, we usually do get together at Thanksgiving and have a turkey dinner. Last year one of my students asked me why it was Italians never celebrated Thanksgiving. I told him to think real hard about why we celebrate it. No, I guess it is fun to get together, but if we didn’t, I could do without it.’

  I said that I thought that was a pity. ‘Those things are so lovely. You need little celebrations in life. If you took away all those things, life would be grey. There’d be nothing left but necessity. I bet you haven’t had a birthday cake since you were small.’ He said that he hadn’t.

  ‘It shouldn’t be like that. Life’s hard enough. When I asked Franca could I borrow the pan for the chestnuts because I had a friend coming to see me, she asked, “Is he Italian?” When I said, “No, American,” she handed it over at once and sighed and said, “Ah, these poor Americans. We have to do what we can for them, because they have nothing of their own, no food worth talking about, no festivals, no fun!”’

  ‘America isn’t that bad!’

  ‘Franca thinks it must be. She’s always shaking her head and saying “Questi poveri Americani.” She said to me once, “You know, Aisling, it’s much worse for the Americans than it is for the Germans. They at least can get on a train, or get in a car and drive down to Italy. America’s so far away.”’

  ‘Has she ever been there?’

  ‘Franca? Are you kidding?’

  Ted shook his head, and said that that was always the way. People were always sounding off about the States, but if you asked them, you usually found that they hadn’t been there at all, that they were going on nothing more than a few loud-mouthed tourists, and some of the worst television. He said that people should visit the country before they judged it. Parts of it were really horrible, he admitted, and he was glad that he wasn’t living there any more. But there were, he said, great things about it. Even apart from whether you liked it or not, he felt that it was good to see America because ‘it has such a big influence on the rest of the world that it’s worth going there just to check it out.’

  ‘I’d like to visit America,’ I said. ‘Do you know the part of the autostrada here just after you join it, near the lower part of S. Giorgio? The road we were on this afternoon? That always makes me think “This is what the States must be like.” That big wide road, and all along the side of it all those factories, including the place where I work. They’re all flood-lit at night, and there are huge signs with the names of the firms on them. There’s even a motel, with its name in English – The Maple-Leaf Motel. The scale is inhuman, you can’t walk anywhere around there, you can only get to those places by car. I can’t imagine anyone could ever feel a sense of fondness or belonging for a place like that. I sometimes think that a lot of America must look and feel like that part of the autostrada. But I could be wrong.’

  ‘Listen, Aisling,’ Ted said suddenly excited. ‘I’m probably going home for a week or two in the spring. You should come with me, just for a vacation. It would be a good opportunity for you to see the States. And I’d really enjoy your being there.’

  ‘If I can afford it, and can get the time off work, I’d love to.’

  ‘Then maybe we could do it the other way around, and the next time you go to Ireland, I could go with you.’r />
  I laughed and said, ‘You’re still mad keen to get there, aren’t you? Maybe we will do that sometime. Franca is always saying to me, “Never say never, Aisling.” I don’t have any plans to go in the immediate future, but who knows? If I was going there, it would be nice to go with you. Sometimes I think I would like to go back, more than I used to.’

  Then I remembered that there was something I wanted to tell him. ‘The loveliest thing happened this week, Ted, on Tuesday afternoon.’ I had just got back from work, and I saw a dark shape over on the window sill. I saw that it was a bird, which was odd enough in itself, for the hunters had killed or driven away almost all the birds locally. But this was too big to be a sparrow or a finch, and when I went over, very quietly so as not to disturb it, I saw that it was a young owl. It had a thick feathery neck, and round yellow eyes, which disappeared into black slits when it blinked. It looked in at me, but without seeming to see me, then it turned its head and looked out over the roofs of the town. It had big clawed feet, which looked out of proportion to the rest of its body. Its claws and its eyes made you know it was a predator. The most sentimental person couldn’t have thought it was cute, for all its soft feathers and its littleness. I liked it for that, for its otherness, its pride. It was a thing you had to respect. It stayed there for about half an hour, sometimes looking blankly through the window, sometimes sitting with its eyes closed for periods of time. And then, at last, it spread its wings and flew away.