by Iyer, Pico
“Though limited.”
“I like limited,” she said, and he fell silent.
Then, pulling him away from the dangerous topic, “Let’s play a game.”
“What kind of game?”
“The second-best place in the world.”
“Okay. If you could be anywhere in the world, right now, where would it be?”
“In Cortina,” she said. “High up. On a late-spring day. In a meadow, under the sun.”
“You’ve been there?”
“In my head. You?”
“I’d be in Isfahan. Watching the blue so strong it makes your eyes sting.”
“You’d want to go to Iran?”
He felt a sudden hardening in her limbs, as if the relief had gone away from her. “For what I study, it’s the place to be.”
“But they stone women in Iran. They kill writers who don’t say what they want them to say.”
“That’s the government, now. Persia, though, is different. It’s the home of the mystical romance.”
“You can’t mean that,” she said, and already, without moving, she seemed to be edging away. “You don’t know a thing.”
“I know about the restrictions there, I know it’s unfair to women, and to dissidents. I’m just saying that its poems—the gardens and paintings—moved me once upon a time. That’s why I chose to study it.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment, and he went on: “I know what you’re saying. About the Revolution and its dogmatism, the way they believe what they believe with a vengeance. But when I was growing up, in school, it was just the opposite. The one thing we were taught was never to have belief. Or admit to it, at least. It was a sign of weakness, of delusion; you were allowing people to get at you. As long as you didn’t believe anything, you were safely behind the walls of the castle. Nothing could hurt you.”
She looked at him now, where they lay, and he felt the softness slowly return. Outside, the water dripped down and down, from the roof, from the tall trees, the eaves and windowsills. Her lips, even now, were soft, and her breath was sweet. They put the world behind them once again.
The day drifted on, and the clouds showed no sign of lifting. It was as if they could be there forever, outside the reach of anything. There were no clocks or divisions in the house; it held no memories or hopes. Only the walls that kept them from the world outside, the windows, the different spaces, each with its different configuration of light and silence, the small set of provisions—toothbrush, crackers, cookies, towels—she’d brought in her blue bag. Accustomed to staying in places not her own, she had the gift of making anywhere a home.
They chatted in a desultory way, walked out into the mist, their breath making new clouds, letting the damp air awaken them. She pulled out the bottle she had brought before, candles, a book of Yeats, a small transistor radio on which to play music. The floorboards were cool beneath them, and the rooms were large enough to be filled with anything.
Inside her was another country. After all the time they’d spent shying away from the fences they’d made, turning back at every crossroads, now there was a sense of flooding, and as he looked down at her, face turned, eyes tightly closed, the color rushing into her cheeks and neck, he felt he could see all the people she’d ever been: the girl in the woods, telling herself stories so she wouldn’t have to go home; the young woman turning away from everything that moved her; the woman who hid behind the giddy girl and only came out now, when he ran his mouth along the unexplored places. All her sweetness, her sadness, everything she’d put away and kept in cobwebs till this moment, brought out into the light, and when he moved more deeply, she laughed and laughed and laughed as if walls were collapsing inside her.
After, he fell into a deep sleep, and saw a mosque somewhere: perhaps the Isfahan of which he’d just been speaking. The cry of a muezzin from a tower, men passing through a narrow door. The masses of bodies all turned down, identical, at group prayers, and some strange music that cut at him, and drew blood.
When he awoke she was fast asleep, smiling every now and then in her dreams, and saying words that meant nothing. The fog was all he could see through the great picture windows dominating the room, and the small sounds of rain, the day collecting itself, the afternoon gathering. When he fell back to sleep, he fell into a different kind of dream, a wrenching, and when he woke up his eyes were wild, he knew, and he was sobbing.
“What is it? What’s happening?”
“It’s nothing; I’m sorry.”
“It’s something. You’re shaking all over.”
She held him—happiest, always, when she saw signs of how fragile he could be—and he felt, irrationally, absurdly, that he couldn’t see enough of her. Hungry for her, desperate, though she was right here, and they were spending all the day together.
“You’ve got it bad.”
“I know; I’m sorry. It’s sort of a ravenous need that nothing could begin to fulfill.”
“Thank you for being ravenous.” Though it was the “need” she was happiest to hear.
When she fell back, and into a sleep again, he got up and stood by the window, the world immediately in front of him alight, intense, with everything erased. Somewhere out there the thesis that was going unwritten; the exiles with their complicated hopes; Martine and Nicki and Sefadhi. From the road came the sound of a car—or a truck, more likely—gears grinding as it went slowly round the curves. It could be a rescue vehicle of some kind, like the one they’d summoned months before; it could be the builders, convinced that the fog had lifted sufficiently for them to go on working, even on a Sunday; it could just be a neighbor returning to his house.
He sat against a wall, from which he could watch her sleep, and wrote her a letter, as she liked to do for him. By late afternoon, the mist was climbing up the mountain, leaving behind little strips of road, small patches of hill, as a tailor might leave behind snippings when he’s patching together a coat. In the far distance they could see a small light in the hills, and more cars now were beginning to brave the narrow road.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said. “It’s been a strange day. Momentous, in its way.”
“You’re not thinking about where you should be?”
“Only one place,” he said, and she looked at him warmly, and kissed him for thanks.
“Before last night I was scared to say how much I missed you. In case you never came back, or the plane crashed, or something—I don’t know—happened. It seemed like opening up a space and maybe it would never get filled again.”
“I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. We can’t, in any case.”
The light was fading now, and the fog, though intense, was less close than before: occasionally, as night fell, they could make out small lights, red and yellow, on the mountaintops. Evening became night, and night became early morning. They fumbled, explorers on a new adventure, through different rooms, testing them all for size and shape. In some they could see—or imagine they could see—the faint outlines of the mountains through the windows; in others, the city below, the sea.
As the day began to draw closer—they could feel the dark lifting, and the mist had almost evaporated by now—he heard her return to Los Angeles in her voice. To singleness and fear and a kind of watchful skepticism. She was already in her usual life, and angry at him, at herself, for allowing the transition to happen. In both directions.
“I wonder,” she said, making circles on his arm, pulling the hairs now and then in her distractedness, “what place I have in your life.”
“You have a place right here.”
“Right now I do. But what about later? When you have time to think about things?”
“That shouldn’t change a thing.”
“You have a life,” she said, and there was a trace of envy in her frustration. “Things to do. People to see. You have a thesis to write, an adviser to visit. What about them?”
“I’ll still be with you.”
“I share myself with you and I get the things done. Not necessarily at the same time.”
She went back to picking absently at the hairs on his arm, comparing the colors of their skin, pressing her hand against his so she could admire how well they fit.
“I know you mean it: you really believe we can get the better of things. And you have every reason to think it. But what have I got?”
“You’ve got many things. Sweetness, innocence.”
“If you’re around, perhaps. But if you’re not—you saw me at the airport, before I found you.”
He knew that anything he said would only be a provocation.
“And if I try to be with you all the time, I’ll push you away.”
“Then we have to find you a direction. Not mine, but ours.”
“I don’t want a direction; I just want to be with you.”
A child throwing a tantrum, and saying she’d never come down to dinner again in her life. And he, having encouraged and allowed the retreat from the world, become a child himself, was in no position to say a word.
When they went out of the house at last, the air was fresh and rinsed, with the singing, stinging clarity that comes only after a great storm. The town below looked as if it was being seen through a sharpened lens that had recently been polished, and you could make out every ridge and pattern in the islands far away. Above the mountains there was a silver-and-pale-blue light that gleamed like polished iron.
As they began making their slow way down the mountain road, they watched the world coming to life: occasional disheveled cars poking out of driveways, dusted and begrimed; a creek rushing through the valley where days before there’d only been a dry riverbed; and people looking out of houses like survivors from an earthquake. Each turn put Eden farther behind them, and brought the desk, the campus, a little closer.
“I’m sorry if I spoiled everything. It’s just—”
“I know.”
“I don’t know how to be.” Tears of frustration, as well as something else. “I want to give you everything, but if I do—”
“Just be yourself.”
“You sound like my shrink. That’s what she says, and then the little clock goes off, and my time is up.”
The sea below them was a richer blue than he’d seen before; the town gave off glints and sparkles, as if it were a mirror held up to the sun. He looked at her as she looked out of the window, turning away now, towards the green hills, the shining cars, and wondered how fear could ever be magicked away. If he were next to her for a hundred years, she’d worry about the hundred-and-first. The same way nobody could ever tell him not to be afraid of snakes.
When she looked towards him again, she said, “Thank you for a wonderful time.” It had the knelling sound of a valediction.
“The trick will be to take that time into our daily lives.”
“ ‘The trick,’ ” she said, mockingly, and with a bitterness the house had covered up.
When they got to his home, he said, “I wrote you a letter while you were sleeping before. Do you want to hear it?”
“Thank you. Maybe later.”
“I think I’d better go,” she went on, as he got out of the car. He thought of her sudden disappearance before, and the impossibility of ever finding her once she was gone. It was a pointless mystification she threw over everything, but if she didn’t feel protected in that way, she’d never venture out at all.
“Stay for a while. Just to get your strength back. If it helps, I’ll take myself on a walk and leave you alone.”
“Just for a few minutes, then.”
He prepared the bed for her and went out to the sand. There were unsightly clumps of seaweed all along the space now, pieces of drift-wood, kelp, branches thrown for dogs and never recovered. In a few days of rain, everything had returned to chaos, and he thought of Martine playing at being a cleaning lady in Oxford, “ ‘This room looks like a storm has hit it.’ ”
Here and there, pink shells were glistening in the freshened light, and as he followed the beach along, farther than he usually walked, he came to a place where the sand suddenly cracked, and a small river opened up, just too wide to jump.
He could take the long way round, going all the way up to the road, or he could roll up his trousers and walk through. He thought about it a moment, thought about the nights they’d just spent, and rolled his trousers up, walked across the rivulet, and then, when he came back, walked across again.
When he got back to the house, she was sitting on the sofa, at peace.
“You got a chance to rest.”
“I did. It was what I needed.”
“You’re strange: you wear the colors of the last place you’ve been on you.”
“And you don’t show any trace at all.”
“A difference between us, I suppose.”
“I wrote this for you. You were gone a long time.”
The miniature showed a man with a princess in a pavilion— “lovers in dalliance,” as the captions usually said—and above them, from another window, a woman (the same one, or—given the generic style of representation—another, even a rival?) aiming an arrow at the sun. The princess longing to keep the day at bay? Or her enemy venting the anger that came to her, as she sat within her tower, in a kind of prison?
Inside, she had written, as if it were a poem,
My body water, you flow through me like a foreign river.
Some part of me fire, kindled in this room alone.
The sky inside, above the angry sea,
The silent, raging storm.
He had never found a way to say anything to or about her poems; they showed him the person she was most shy of revealing the rest of the time.
On the back, a shorter offering:
Ice inside me as you pass.
The rocks under sighing trees,
Touch me where I weep.
He looked across at her, fallen in some way, and then she was walking out to her car, and there was the sound of the great beast revving into life.
The very next day, and he couldn’t tell if it was circumstance or pattern (a pattern he couldn’t see), he got a letter from the person he least expected to hear from. As if, far away, Martine had been with them in the house during the storm, watching everything that was unfolding, and now, on cue, as reminder or sanction, her letter peeped out of the mailbox.
John,
I got your present. It was kind of you to remember, thank you. The only way I could think of to reciprocate (you were never the easiest person to buy presents for) is by passing on something Madame Duvalier told us at St. Mary’s. When Montaigne was a young man—she always beamed as she told us this for some reason—he met a man, a man who’d written a book called Voluntary Servitude, of all things. And this man, a stranger, seemed so much like a lost part of Montaigne that both of them were rather turned around.
Of course Montaigne was hardly a radical, being a mayor and all that, so it wasn’t as if anything illicit—Madame Duvalier always had problems with that word—went on between them. But each rang a familiar chord in the other. Montaigne felt as if he were leaving everything he knew for some better, truer place which was the place where he really belonged. At this point, our teacher would be shaking (some girls unkindly thought, with the memory of what she’d lost).
Anyway, soon sonnets began pouring out of this stranger, sonnets so passionate that they might have seemed to come from love. And then, after scarcely four years of fellowship, Étienne de La Boétie, the mysterious stranger, died. Madame Duvalier always looked a bit hysterical at this point. Montaigne of course was devastated, and all he had now, he wrote, was “smoke, nothing but dark and tedious night.” And so, with nothing else to do, desperate to keep the memory
of his absent friend alive in himself, he began to write. Words came out of him as once they’d come out of Étienne.
Does any of this make sense? And do you see why I’m writing it? French lessons from the Sixth Form aren’t what I expected to be sending you, or, I’m sure, what you expected to receive from me. But I thought it would be what you wanted to hear: Nicki said you felt very settled in your unsettled way.
Fond wishes and thanks again,
M.C.
He hadn’t expected enigmas from her, she was right; one of their problems had always been the way her directness glanced off his indirections. And yet she was giving him a present, clearly, of the deepest kind: something that wasn’t of interest to her, but might be to him. More than that, she was all but handing him over to what had always been her greatest, and least trumpable, rival: Rumi, whose story this so clearly reflected. The most selfless gesture of all: she was telling him to keep going, in a way, even if it was along a road that would take him away from her.
He put down the letter and wasn’t sure where to turn: our questions, the stories we carry with us through life, never really change, he thought, even if we wear different clothes for them, and think our circumstances look different. We’re really just in eternal syndication, as they’d say round here, playing the same parts over and over even if we think we’ve left all that behind. Here he was, on the edge of the New World, falling into a new relation—with everything—and he’d ended up, so it seemed, exactly where he’d been amidst the thirteenth-century cloisters in England.
He thought of calling Dick and asking him if he wanted to play tennis at seven o’clock, or perhaps making up the missed Conformist with Alex. He thought of a drive up to the temple in the hills, where he’d always gone to collect himself. But he didn’t want to carry ghosts up, of a kind that temples like that were meant to screen out; and he didn’t want to start talking to Alex or Dick about exactly what he ought to be keeping to himself. He turned on the computer, and decided it would be best just to still his mind by doing some routine work that required nothing from him at all: transcribing notes, perhaps, from one file to another.