So I Am Glad

by A. L. Kennedy

  “How long this?”

  “I don’t know. Half an hour maybe. An hour.”

  “Fuck. And they’re all fucking Italian. Biased.”

  “He’s Spanish.”

  “Yeah, but who’s heard of him? Is that Richard Attenborough?”

  “What?”

  “There, with a beard, playing the oboe.”

  “Looks like it.”

  Arthur was dismembering a pizza in the hall.

  “Art, did you see Savinien?”

  “Sorry.”

  “But he came in here.”

  “No, he went out for some air.”

  “He just came back.”

  “Then you know more than me. Sorry. Isn’t that a wonderful noise? The singing.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s all over the world. The entire planet is waiting and listening to one man sing.”

  “Yeah, great.”

  Savinien wasn’t upstairs. I had the very clear feeling that I had been constantly one or two minutes behind him.

  “Hey, Jen! Come in and see what’s left of Gene Kelly.”

  “In a while.”

  I sat on the stairs while somewhere in America brittle celebrities were hoisted up by careful young women in good suits to wave and face sympathetic ovations whenever their signature tunes were roared out. Never mind that the voices singing could rip through any melody lighter than Offenbach and reduce it to nothing but passion and insanity. “We like to be in America” fountained up like a direct proclamation from a lunatic God.

  Ahead of me, the partly opened front door let in a dark breeze. I went out.

  BEYOND OUR HOUSE, the night was wholly still, a regular pattern of windows was blue with television light and something achingly choral hooped and bounced and multiplied down and down until the deep end of our street was cut by another and went out. I could smell cooling stone and a sweet breeze from the park. Of Savinien there was no sight, no trace, no sound.

  I made an effort not to move without thinking. They would need privacy. If they were together now, Savinien and his man, they would be looking for a place to find each other undisturbed, like lovers. A free place, a dim place, somewhere not overlooked.

  No one would be outside to disturb them, not now. They could hide in the plain sight of the dark. Free. I was more and more certain I would find them in the park. Unless something had happened to check his instinct, Savinien would have chosen his ground in the park. I began to make a run uphill for the back gates, the blood already high in my head, prepared to beat away thought.

  Better to walk, though. I shouldn’t become a distraction. I shouldn’t be seen. I shouldn’t be noisy. I should be calm. Even if I understood that to be safe my lover would have to win absolutely. Even if I was certain I wanted all of that absolute, to see that playing out. Even if I felt and felt and felt until emotions were peeling and furling away my brain. I was to hold calm.

  In the air about me, images were transmitted, arias were released in relay, their singers embracing and running, perspiring and praying between simulated pillars, palms and rainbow-shaded waterfalls. Lunging for the lectern, they caught the peace before the next assault.

  The tiny lane that ended in the park was black with dense hedging and trees. I found it hard to judge my distance to the fence. I listened. I stood. I stepped closer, closer, closer. I listened again.

  Steps muffled in grass. Swung motion, light, gentle night sounds. I knew what they meant. It had begun.

  But in the park, the two men were all that there was. Like the tenors scalding with music, standing on tiptoe, sweating and braced, barely keeping their balance in the rush of roles and words that raged up about them like flame, the two men became what they wished to become. So Domingo sang “Vesti la Giubba” and wept as honestly and irreconcilably as if he were quite unobserved. So Savinien and his opponent made their own wet metal heat between them to extinguish everything but will and death and life. They were not noble or redeeming or anything I ever should have seen.

  Moving in and out of deep shadow, all points shifted round the lock of their attention. In the grey light between the trees, both wore anticipation in the mindless half smile I must have seen in a thousand photographs, paintings, news bulletins. They smiled the “I know a secret you don’t know” smile of liars everywhere. Because they were liars. Their secret is only death and everybody knows that.

  Real duelling is theatrical but not in the way the theatre might make us believe. In the place where drama is indistinguishable from mystery and religion, living bodies tear against each other. They are faster and more terrible than understanding, every instant cuts itself free of sense, but in the sum of completed actions there is a kind of spectacle. A fight follows its course from beginning to end like a fatal disease or a funeral service, there is no stopping it.

  And I write all of that so I won’t have to tell you how good Savinien was. Oh, the other man—James—he knew what he was doing, but he didn’t know enough. After a while, I realised he was left-handed, that the wink of metal always showed from an unexpected place. His right hand was wrapped in something—I couldn’t tell what. He covered the ground well, long-boned, lean, whipping hands, armed with what looked like a cavalry sabre, light ringing palely down a home-sharpened blade. But I knew he wouldn’t make it. A sour, thick joy started to burn at the back of my throat. I knew he wouldn’t make it.

  Savinien had taken off his shirt and was swaying it from his left hand; his right held something dull and solid like a length of pipe. He was hardly well defended; he had, effectively, no weapon, but as soon as he slipped forward I could see he was thinking only of death and how to make it. He was fast and economical, not entirely without grace, and he knew precisely what to do.

  He knew when to feint with his shirt so it shone out a distraction.

  He knew when to catch a stroke before it fell and when to slide by one and aim his pipe end for the joint of the striking arm.

  He knew to keep his head because the only useful anger is cold as clay.

  He knew how to jab at the ribs while the opposing blade was rising.

  He knew the sabre was made to kill but tricky to manipulate on foot.

  He knew how to slash for the eyes and open the forehead in a blind of blood.

  He knew how to break for the forearm and fingers.

  He knew to be unaware of the pattern of sweat and saliva, a little blood moving and shining on his skin.

  He knew how to tangle the legs with his shirt and catch his opponent’s throat as he folded.

  He knew how to elbow and kick a body flat to the ground.

  He knew how to bend piping by striking it over legs and head and back.

  He seemed frustrated by the inability of his weapon to win him an outright kill. I noticed my voice calling out, when he stamped down again on the hand that still held the sabre and reached for the one thing he might use to finish his job.

  His head snapped round and the body beneath him lurched up. There was a surge of movement before Savinien fell back and his man struggled to stand. Savinien seemed confused, even dazed, while the other figure stumbled towards the perimeter railings. He looked back through the dark at where he guessed the voice had come from and I was almost afraid that he would come now for me. Instead, his head ground slowly back to fix on the black shape, still trying to run away.

  Savinien stood and waited. His opponent slithered against the railings, buckled, tried to brace himself, fell. Savinien stood and waited. Another attempted climb slewed away and down, leaving an ankle jammed clumsily in ironwork. Savinien began his stroll downhill to the fence.

  I couldn’t say anything. My legs had cramped underneath me and were numb and clumsy when I straightened myself and moved to stand at the back gate. Perhaps I wanted Savinien to see that I was there, to realise he couldn’t kill this man if I was watching. Still he kept walking, arms loose, head level, slowly dipping down the slope and away from me. I came to believe that I would se
e a murder soon and I did not know what I should do.

  And something in me wanted to see that man finished. Something wanted to see our victory made complete.

  Savinien stopped by the railings and I heard the man make a thin little noise and then a kind of squeal before he was lifted and pushed and finally tipped over the fence. For a while when the body landed, it didn’t move, but then it began the struggle to rise again, managed a few steps.

  Apparently checking its progress, Savinien walked alongside it for a little while with only the thin metal bars to keep them apart. In time he turned away up into the thick of the trees where I could no longer see.

  I rested my forehead against the wrought iron of the gate and liked that it was hard and cool. I suddenly felt the need to be sick and to go, to go home.

  AS I WENT UP to bed, the house was being snuffed out around me. I remember it was maybe one or two in the morning and the last of the visitors had taken themselves off. Doors and windows were closing.

  Arthur stopped me on the stairs. “Did you find him?”

  “Hm?”

  “Savinien.” He tipped his head, frowned faintly. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, don’t I look it?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, maybe I’m not then, I don’t know.”

  “I don’t think he was avoiding you—when you were looking—it’s just this garden business upset him, that’s all. You know.”

  “I know.”

  “He was out the back for a while, but he’s upstairs now.”

  “Upstairs.”

  I looked at Arthur; his soft-collared shirt, his sensible eyes; and I wondered if I could have walked from the park and what had been there into this good house where I usually lived with this reasonable, ordinary man. I thought it sensible to expect that more than a short walk would be necessary to make such a change.

  “Upstairs, yes. I don’t suppose he’s asleep yet. I don’t know. None of my business. ’Night. Oh, Brazil won, by the way. Penalties.”

  “Mm? Yes, sorry Arthur. It’s just kind of too late to think, isn’t it?”

  “Ach, there’s a candle that isn’t out. Have to deal with that. Night night.”

  “Okay.”

  I knew without looking up that Savinien’s door would be open by the time I reached the head of the stairs. He was waiting for me, his hair still spiked and dark from washing and his skin visibly fresh. Dressed in a clean sweatshirt and German Army moleskins, he seemed the man he always had been, the one that I loved and remembered, intelligent, gentle, humane.

  In the heart of his eye there was light again and no emptiness and I wanted to ask if he was hurt in any way, to be glad that he was there, to be angry that he had risked himself, to be repelled by what he had done, appalled, revolted, happy, afraid and anxious for the skin beneath his clothes.

  “I am the man I always have been.”

  I think I was a little too confused to listen. I think he had to repeat himself before I understood.

  “I am the man I always have been.”

  “You would have killed him.”

  “I cannot unknow what I know. But if I had meant to kill him, I would have.” He ran his hand through the hair at the crown of his head and winced very slightly. When he lowered his hand one finger was oiled with blood. “Hah. What must I . . . I feel I did right. Jennifer. Please. Come in here.”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “We can’t talk this way. I have nothing I intend to shout in a corridor.”

  I am very unsure of all these matters, even now, what goes on between people, but I was certain that if I went into his room we would make our situation seem all right and I really didn’t know if it should be all right. Still, I knew what frightened me in him was only what I recognised of me; we both needed to catch up the edge and then throw it away. There were times when we couldn’t help ourselves.

  “You said you weren’t ever going to do those things again.”

  “Come in.”

  “No.”

  “Then I will not tell you. Then I shall not speak. These are words I will not whisper and I will not say where we are not alone, do you understand? Jennifer, do you understand?”

  And I did understand, I understood more than I could say, more than I can tell you.

  “Come here.”

  “No, you come here.”

  We stood together lightly, cradling, trying to catch our breath. I heard Arthur pass us quietly, going to bed, perhaps relieved to see us so clearly together, perhaps not, it didn’t matter at the time.

  “Now.” I sat on the edge of his bed and tried my voice, it was steady and comfortable and low. Savinien lowered himself into his chair; his muscles were starting to stiffen.

  “Now tell me. What do you want to say?”

  “You need not have, should not have seen.”

  “Why, because you said you wouldn’t do it again?”

  “This was not again, this was . . . something no person I love should see. Do you imagine I have never seen men killing and wished death here and life there . . . out of love? Death should never come out of love. I do not believe it must. Not any more.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “He would not have let me be. You and the household would have been always in danger.” He said this too quickly, too easily, and I waited for the truth. “Yes, well, then I was angry. How can . . . if you’ve never known—in the presence of this man I had no power. Like being a child, like being nothing inside a child. He did things to me that no one has ever done. I would go on my knees for what he could give me, for the Atties, the Eggs, for the crying and the flying. I gave him my soul. A man cannot be without a soul.

  “Tonight I did nothing I have ever done before because I have never had to fight for my soul, only sometimes for my dignity. This is my life begun—free to be yours. So that you will understand me I will say that my heart is clean and that now I can give you access to my soul. My soul. I can be private with you here for our first time because I have my privacy.”

  What else we chose to say, I won’t write here—small measures of comfort, confirmations of content. I charted his bruises and cuts, the fresh dressing on his arm. We had already left aside any scales and regulations I found familiar and I felt it was only reasonable and natural for me to unfasten, unbutton, uncover what Savinien was and borrow his privacy.

  Between the closed door and the curtained window I stood in thin air and waited for the tiny impacts of meeting skin. Before we had kept to the light and the half light and now we were safe with the dark.

  And he shone, you know. He really shone. We had the brightest bed in the world. I remember how quickly I caught his fire and the two of us burning and gleaming between electric sheets. We were enough to read and write by. We were altogether enough.

  No need to say how effortlessly we subsided into sleep, nothing left of us but animal laziness. It was lovely.

  Until we both dreamed a dream together of green leaves and narrow treetops, moored in a sky of impeccable, screaming blue.

  FOR THE NEXT few days I scanned the newspapers and my broadcasts carefully. A handful of men had been admitted to accident and emergency departments around the city, none of them named as Jim or James. I waited for justice to fall on us, but it didn’t make a move.

  Savinien assured me that he’d thrown both of the weapons into what I gathered must have been the skip at the back of the bingo hall. He had walked through the candlelit garden with his coat buttoned over the bloodstained shirt I later machine-washed and then hid for him in the last bag of rubbish left after the party. These measures should not have protected us, but they did. In fact, they were probably quite unnecessary. No one who’d been at the park had any intention of being found out. It was quite possible for us to get away with this.

  Only a week or two later I found myself discussing the assassination of a Colombian footballer. He had been shot twelve times not long after returning home, having sc
ored the own goal that finished his country’s hopes of victory in the World Cup. His murderer was alleged to have drawn his attention to this fact.

  A rather close friend of Steven’s, I can’t remember her name, announced that this was all we could expect of a third world country with a ruined economy dominated by foreign powers and undermined by high-ranking corruption and drug abuse. They had nothing left to hope for but their football team, no wonder it became a matter of life and death.

  In other words, just like home. None of our island’s teams were playing in the Cup and this may well have been a very good thing. Even my one small city took its games more than seriously and beyond the games we had everything to let a duellist feel at home.

  My duellist padded in the garden, slept out the afternoons, wrote occasionally in what I later learned was antiquated rather than eccentric French. Any possible fight seemed to have gone from him. The reticence in his walk which I’d thought showed nothing more than the after-effects of the park became almost permanent. Still, no matter when my shift ended, he was always awake and live for me. I became quite unused to spending a night in my own bed.

  “You don’t have to wait up for me, you know. Not when I’m so late.”

  He stroked his hand on my stomach. “I would rather not miss anything.”

  “But then you get tired.” The hand stopped. “Don’t you?”

  He lay apart on his back. “No.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “Eh, I cannot exactly say. Do you see the trees?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you sleep, do you see the trees?”

  “I suppose I do. Yes. I do.”

  “How often?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “How often?”

  “Every night now. You?”

  “Every night. I think this is making me ill.”

  I told him, “No one gets ill from a dream. It doesn’t happen, not even to you,” but I was not in the least convincing, not even to me.

  We held each other clumsily, too hard, as if there were a storm outside our window. So that we need not sleep he talked to me about his father, his brother’s house, his brother, the morning when he sat on his nurse’s lap in the courtyard and a cloud pressed all of the sunlight away. He had cried because he couldn’t understand the sudden cold.