I told Ted that all the time, it became more and more important for me to see things like that – not just pleasant, but important, or even just to know that they existed. Sometimes I like to think about seals swimming in the ocean, or of a whale rising out at sea. I like the timelessness of nature, of animals. If you see a seal, it looks as it would have looked had you seen it a hundred, a thousand years ago. I like the otherness, the completeness of animals. Sometimes, I told him, when I’m feeling really down, I like to think about animals and how they live. It makes me feel that there is some beauty and mystery left, something other than the way I live.
I could sense the question that was going to follow: And what makes you so unhappy, Aisling? He didn’t say it, but he was looking at me very hard, and I knew that he was going to ask. I rattled on nervously, so that he wouldn’t have a chance to speak.
‘I even like going to the zoo. I know that’s bad. In principle I don’t agree with it, but a part of me can’t resist it, because I see animals there I would never see anywhere else. I can hardly believe how strange and beautiful they are. The best thing of all is that they’re alive. They’re not like a painting, or a thing that’s been made. The more you know about them, the more amazing they are. You wouldn’t believe some of the ways they’re adapted to their environment, like polar bears have hollow fur. Did you know that? It keeps them much warmer than it would if it wasn’t hollow. I have all these books, see‚’ I pointed to the shelves, ‘books about animals, and plants too. We think we know it all, but we don’t know anything. I’d like to have some animals of my own. I can’t have any here, Franca won’t allow me, but some day I will. A Persian cat and a cockatoo. That’s what I’d like.’
I had started to cry just after I began to rattle on crazily in this way, and in the middle of it, I had gone over to the shelf and pulled out some books, as if that would prove my point. Suddenly I saw myself as he saw me, and it was like waking out of a dream. I was sitting there by the fire, surrounded by shards of broken chestnut shells, which I had spilled from my lap when I stood up. There were a few coffee-table books on the rug – Plants and Animals of the Amazon Rainforest, The Great Barrier Reef in Pictures. I was sitting in the middle of all this clutter, crying, and I could see the bewildered look on his face. Suddenly, I screamed defiantly at him, ‘I could kill someone, I really could! Myself or someone else, it makes no difference, just don’t think I couldn’t!’
He didn’t say anything. He went on looking at me with a sort of fearless amazement, as if he didn’t know how to react, and then he held his hand out to me and said very softly, ‘Hey honey, who ever said you couldn’t?’
I put my arm up across my face as if to ward off a blow, a blow which was not struck. He put his arm around me, and I wept as I hadn’t allowed another person to see me do for years and years.
It meant so much to me to have him there, and I told him so. If he hadn’t been there that night, I would probably have been down with Franca and her family. They were very good to me. Sometimes I appreciated being in the company of other people for a while. I could imagine the scene downstairs on a Saturday night. The whole family would be sitting around the TV, watching some endless variety show, with singers, a lit-up staircase, ugly middle-aged male compères, and lots of young women in skimpy costumes flitting about, sexy in the way an inflatable doll is sexy. I would be sitting by the fire. Franca would be moaning about Davide (while giving him the odd poke with her toe), or about work or Lucia or the people in the village, or whatever, but a large part of my mind would have been locked into my own thoughts. I’d have drunk too much, and then late at night I’d have thanked them and come back up to my own cold apartment, the hearth dead, the whole place empty and dark.
‘Today was fun, wasn’t it?’ Ted said. ‘I liked that a lot. We should do it again, we can go to all sorts of places together, go to the sea, go anywhere you want.’
‘Today was lovely.’
We had gone to visit another hill village in the area, smaller and higher in situation than S. Giorgio. We had driven there in my car, out along quiet roads, and the dark fertile land was beautiful. The twisted vines were bare, and even at this, the bleakest season of the year, the richness of the land was clear to see. The road wound up into the hills, we parked outside the town walls, and looked out over the valley. We could see for ever so far, back across the plain, back to S. Giorgio itself, spilling down the side of a distant hill. The whole scene was washed by an unexpected bright pink light, of the sun late on a winter afternoon. The streets of the town were almost empty; our footsteps echoed loudly. In the church there was a fresco, and the background of it showed exactly the local landscape: the same slender trees, the same all-pervasive softness, the same pearly light. The steep streets of the town were cobbled. A hefty cat sat on the wall which surrounded a small garden; the garden as empty and still as an ornament under glass. The heaped clouds were all pink.
The day had been special to me because it had been so ordinary. We hadn’t done anything in particular, and there were so many similar pretty towns around we could have visited. More and more I had come to treasure the ordinary things of life, and to feel ill at ease with things that proclaim their strangeness, their exclusivity. First-class hotels and smart restaurants unnerve me, not least because I feel that they were planned to unnerve people. Functional things have much more warmth and appeal. And sometimes an ordinary, happy situation can be so hard to find, that when it does happen, when you find yourself in a quiet town on a winter afternoon with someone you like, it doesn’t seem ordinary any more, it seems miraculous.
We didn’t speak for a while. I let the silence run on, took the chestnuts from the fire, poured out more wine, and still he said nothing. I asked him if he was afraid of me, and he didn’t answer immediately.
‘Yes, sometimes I am. I admit that. Maybe a bit less so now. I think I’m beginning to understand you a bit better, and I like you a lot. But you never took me in, though, not even at the start. Do you remember the weekend you came up to see me in Florence, and we met a friend of mine at the station when I was seeing you off?’ I remembered him, remembered how he had grinned and stared at me, the way people look at their friends’ new lovers. I had been my most charming self. ‘That guy teaches with me. I met him in the college a couple of days later, and he said, “That Irish girl I met you with at the station on Sunday night seems like a real sweetie.” And I thought to myself “Oh yeah?” I could see why he thought that, but I know the score. I know you might not like me saying this, Aisling, in fact I know you don’t want pity, but I have to say it – sometimes I feel real sorry for you.’
‘Yeah, well, thanks,’ I mumbled. ‘Saves me the bother of feeling sorry for myself. Things change, though, don’t they, Ted? Some people hate change, they want life always to stay the same, even if it isn’t up to anything much. But for me, I always like to know that things can be different, even that they’re bound to be different in time. Sometimes people tell you they want to change their lives, but if the opportunity to do that presents itself, they just shy away. I always try to be vigilant with myself in that way, I try to be sure that I’m not fooling myself. But it’s hard to make changes happen. Sheer will isn’t enough. I know that now.’
‘I like you. There are lots of things I like about you. I just wish you liked yourself a bit more.’
I suspected that it was Ted who was the sweetie. He couldn’t imagine that life could feel like a winter night, when you walk along a wet street, and you see all the lights and fires in the houses, and you recognize all the faces of the people inside. But if you ask at any door, there’s always a plausible reason, not unkindly meant, as to why you can’t come in. I remember very clearly those two days when Ted came to stay with me, and I think everyone remembers the weekend of 11th November, 1989, when the Germans opened the Berlin Wall, just as everyone remembers where they were during that whole autumn, when things were changing so fast all over Eastern Europe. It was one of those
times like when someone else has a baby, and you can afford to be delighted because you’re not the one who’s going to be changing its nappies or seeing to it when it cries in the middle of the night. A wall across a city is so self-evidently a bad thing that when it came down it was easy to feel a simplistic pleasure, and just enjoy the pictures of people dancing on the Brandenburg monument or Rostropovich giving a concert beside the wall, or young women giving roses to the soldiers and all that. You could console yourself with the thought that it was the end of something bad, without bothering yourself too much about whether it was the start of something good. It was like taking a wedding at face value and confusing it with the marriage to come. Life gives so few opportunities for easy optimism, that when such an occasion presents itself, it’s hard to resist.
On the Sunday morning, Ted went out to get the newspapers while I put on the coffee. While I was waiting for it, I went out on to the kitchen balcony, which overlooked the square. There were two balconies in the apartment in S. Giorgio. The other was in the bedroom, and overlooked the yard at the back of the shop. It was a singularly unpicturesque view. The yard was full of old crates and stuff, and there were also a couple of brokendown Fiat 500s. They were good little cars, so good that they went out of production. Franca had a 500, and had bought the old wrecks in the yard to raid for spare parts, as there was no other way of getting them. Beyond the yard were the backs of some other apartments, many of which could have done with a lick of paint. These buildings also had balconies, and there were usually a few frames of laundry sitting out on them to dry. I actually liked both views, and thought that they complemented each other very well. From the kitchen you could see S. Giorgio as the tourist board wanted you to see it – pretty, quaint, with the church and the café and the little shops full of pottery. Then if you went into the bedroom, you could see another aspect of the town, one less well publicized – its dreariness, its provinciality. I liked the view from the bedroom, because while you can see pictures of the pretty side of Italy, even of S. Giorgio, while you’re still abroad, you’ll only ever see such dreariness if you go to the place itself. It’s why I sometimes think you can get more of a sense of a country which you haven’t yet visited from a batch of badly taken holiday photographs than from a glossy coffee-table book which shows only the most beautiful places, looking better than they could ever do in real life. It gives such a false impression. There are places in Tuscany and Umbria and until you’ve seen them for yourself you wouldn’t believe how drab and dreary they can be.
I watched Ted from the balcony as he walked across the crowded square. I always like watching people I know from a distance, I don’t know why, it makes me feel powerful. I recognized quite a few of the people down in the square that morning, and I scrutinized them after Ted had vanished into the paper shop. Sunday morning is always busy in S. Giorgio, summer and winter. Suddenly I spotted Fabiola and her husband Pietro, who was carrying their baby in his arms. Fabiola was wearing a mink jacket, and the baby was hopelessly overdressed in a velvet cape with a white collar, white hat, and clumpy black shoes. They had just come out of a cake shop, and Fabiola was holding a flat package, wrapped in red paper and tied with a yellow bow. The loose ends of the ribbon had been carefully coiled into long springy ringlets.
I often saw Fabiola and Pietro like this on a Sunday morning: Pietro’s mother lived in S. Giorgio, and they usually had Sunday lunch with her. The scene was repeated all over the square: expensive cars were being parked, the man always in the driver’s seat, the woman in furs, or an elegant suit, their child (there was rarely more than one) stiflingly overdressed. I stared down at Fabiola with rapt attention, as if my look could pierce the veneer of her life. She was smiling broadly and blankly. She knew that everyone in S. Giorgio knew her; knew too that she was the loveliest, the most elegantly dressed, and the most affluent woman in the square at that moment. That was the source of her power. Hers was a life of pure surface, and she felt no pain, because there was nothing inside to be hurt. Her greatest contentment came from the knowledge that others could only aspire to the life she had. That the things she had ultimately bored her was of no importance. The people who coveted her possessions – her jewels, her cars, her money – did not know this, and imagined they must surely make Fabiola happy, and would make them happy too, if they were in her place. Her happiness came instead from being the focus of this envy. Peering down at her, I wished that I could take everything away from her, if only for a moment – her furs, her jewellery, her house, all her make-up and smart clothes, even her husband and child. More than that, I wanted to deny her the right to partake in all these rigidly fixed social conventions – her presence in the square on Sunday, the family lunch, even the obligatory wrapped cake. I wanted to take all these things away, because I wanted to know if, stripped of her possessions and her social context, there would be anything there at all. I doubted it: not even a naked, shivering scrap of suffering humanity would remain.
Suddenly, everything went black. Someone had crept out on to the balcony behind me, and was pressing their hands tightly over my eyes. I screamed and lashed out violently. At once I was free again, and there was a loud crash as the person behind me fell backwards over a potted plant into the apartment. Everybody down in the square heard both the scream and the crash, and were now staring up at me, including, to my mortification, Pietro and Fabiola. I stepped quickly back into the kitchen, and slammed the balcony doors.
Ted picked himself up off the kitchen floor, rubbing his head. ‘Jesus, it was only a joke!’ I said angrily that I hadn’t found it a very funny one, and that I was surprised at his being so insensitive. Then I saw it from his point of view. I said I was sorry and I started to cry. He put his arm around me and said he was sorry too, that it was a stupid thing to have done, and then I started to laugh, because I was in that nervous state when there’s hardly any difference between laughing and crying. But I felt afraid that having let him see how vulnerable I was the night before, I’d never be able to hide my nervousness from him again. And while part of me was relieved by this, part of me was appalled.
9
The day after Ted went back up to Florence, I had a letter from my brother Jimmy in Dublin. I can’t say I was altogether pleased when I opened the post-box and saw it sitting there. I never got on particularly well with Jimmy. At best we had nothing much in common, at worst we fought dirty and vicious to hurt each other in the way only siblings can. I always do a double take when I see a letter from Jimmy, because his handwriting is exactly the same as mine. He also talks like me, and moves like me; we have all the same little mannerisms. If you saw a photo of me and a photo of Jimmy, you wouldn’t say that we look alike at all, but if you saw us together, in real life, you’d know immediately that we were brother and sister.
I had just arrived home from work. Usually I rip open my post and read it on my way up the stairs, but I took this particular letter up to the apartment intact. I was looking forward to lunch, and I was afraid that Jimmy’s letter might spoil it for me if I read it first. While I was cooking and eating, however, I couldn’t stop thinking about him.
I thought it was really unfair that although Jimmy had given my mother far more trouble and cause for worry than I ever had, at the end of her life he was seen as the good son, and I was cast as the selfish and irresponsible one, The Girl Who Broke Her Mother’s Heart. Jimmy’s six years older than I am. When he was eighteen, he took himself off to London and lived in a squat there. We hardly ever heard from him, and when we did, it was never good news. My mother used to cry about him, and there was nobody locally with whom she could share her woes, because she was so ashamed. She invented some elaborate story about how he had a job in London and how well he was doing over there. I remember how people used to stop us coming out of Mass on a Sunday morning, and if they asked after Jimmy my mother would tell them the most blatant lies so artlessly that for a time I was completely confused, and wondered if he really was working in England, and fo
r reasons of her own, she pretended in the house that he had gone to the dogs. She used to complain bitterly on the way home from chapel, and say that on top of everything, Jimmy was guilty of ‘making me sin my soul coming straight from the altar rails’. That in itself was another lie, of course. Later I came to appreciate that my mother was a born liar, that there was a layer of deceit and a facility for fabrication in her that I have seldom seen surpassed. It seemed an extraordinary aberration, because outwardly she was such a pious person, but I came later to see that piety and deceit were not mutually exclusive, as you might imagine. She was also adept at self-delusion, and cherished double standards. Years later, when Jimmy was home again and back in her good books, she remarked casually one day, ‘I never was really that worried, Aisling, and anyway, what sort of a man is it who doesn’t sow his wild oats?’
When he was in England, there was even a period when she wanted to go over and find him, and make him come home, but my father wouldn’t let her go, and he was right. My mother knew nothing of city life: a trip to Dublin every year on the 8th of December to do a bit of Christmas shopping was as much as she knew, and almost more than she could handle. I can hardly bear even now to imagine her wandering around in the Underground, looking for Jimmy.
Remembering Light and Stone Page 9