One evening, as I was soaking in the bath after one of those hellish days when, for some banal reason, your anger overflowed and levelled everything, you knelt down next to the tub and begged forgiveness, and as you ran the bath mitt over my back, you told me about one of your old lovers. She was a dancer in the corps de ballet of the Státní opera Praha. Before she met you, she had been in love with a dashing Italian, a Florentine from a rich family who wooed her intently, then asked her to marry him. Her name was Milena, she had enormous light-blue eyes and long blond hair, the kind of Slavic beauty you can’t find anywhere else. She lived in Prague in the Mala Strana with her mother and grandmother, like all young people who don’t leave home until they’re married. He lived in Florence in his father’s house. He gave her a mobile phone that was to be used only for their conversations. They soon decided she would leave to be by his side in Italy, she would forswear the ballet and marry him. Her departure date was set.
The evening before, the company threw a big party for her. Music was played and songs sung to wish her a fond farewell. The young ballerinas choked back their jealousy, but kissed her and wished her happiness. Milena didn’t sleep a wink that night, she dreamed of the man awaiting her in a new country, the green valleys of Tuscany and the bachelor apartment in San Gimignano, the Prada fashion shows, the cocktails they would sip at Canova’s on the Piazza del Popolo before going back to make love at the Hotel de Russie. Very early on the day she was to leave, her mobile phone informed her that a text message had arrived. She glanced at the clock and saw her suitcase by the door. She pushed the button and the message appeared. Her heart froze. “Wedding impossible. Sorry.”
She immediately called Fabio or Francesco or Massimo, but no one answered. For hours, then days, then weeks, she dialed the number over and over again. For months, she waited for her lover to come to his senses and send word. In the evening, in the kitchen with her mother and grandmother, they agreed that the father’s authority was behind everything, he had thrown a wrench in the works of love. They ripped and sewed the story back together endlessly, evening after evening, wanting to believe that love was still there, untouched, and it was only a matter of time before Prince Charming would return.
With her tail between her legs, Milena returned to the ballet, hoping to get her spot back. When she presented herself in the rehearsal room, the once-jealous ballerinas were delighted. They embraced her wholeheartedly, but they were chortling inside.
Years later, the former lover surfaced. The mobile phone had long since disappeared, thrown into the Moldau in a fit of rage. The Italian ended up writing to her. Her mother and grandmother wanted her to answer, maybe it was better to believe in him than not believe at all, maybe there was a lot of money to be gained in the end. But Milena refused. She would have nothing to do with him.
When I heard that story, I thought of the message I almost sent you one day when I was sick of your hesitations, all your I’ll-come-I-won’t-come-and-live-in-your-country that you repeated like a mantra, when the ups and downs of your moods were beginning to take up too much room in my life. During the months of purgatory that were a foretaste of the hell you would put me through later, I opened a window in my email program and typed these words: “A mandarin was in love with a courtesan. ‘I will be yours,’ she said, ‘once you have spent one hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool in my garden, beneath my window.’ Which is what the mandarin did, until the ninety-ninth night. That night, he got to his feet, slipped his stool under his arm, and walked away.”
I wrote those words, and read them, and read them again and, lacking in courage, I did not send them.
Later, when you were living in Montreal, one rainy autumn evening when we were walking down St. Catherine Street on our way to the movies, I told you that story and laughed at my cowardice. In that tone of voice that could have been sincere or mocking, you said, “You should have sent it to me!”
I looked at you, dumbfounded.
In the end I figured it wouldn’t have made any difference; you enjoyed that intimate violence enough to keep making me suffer. Your provocation was the best way to feed my resistance.
You left Montreal after living here eight months, refusing the whole time to get interested in the place, acting like you were above all that, he who must be desired because he is handsome, intelligent, an artist whose talent will be recognized one day, especially since he is always threatening to head for the door. You were the one to be desired but never trusted, people had to walk on eggshells around you, so great was your sensitivity, as if you were some precious object that had to be protected. God’s gift to Western women.
You left after eight months of destruction and crisis, eight months of rage and contempt for all that had been given to you, me, this country, without saying if you would come back one day and live here for good. All that remained was the dream of spending time together in Prague, to save our love. When you left, the idea was still in the air, I offered to come during the summer, in a final attempt to forestall failure, in the mad hope of building one last bridge between us, if I came to you one final time perhaps you would be appeased.
But when you left Montreal, when I put an end to us, I traded in the Czech Republic for Italy.
You thought it was an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, I was refusing to come to your country out of revenge. But it was really about survival, I had turned in the circles of hell long enough and the idea of visiting them again with the Prague sun setting behind the thousand towers and thousand steeples wasn’t going to change anything, the old main square and its astronomical clock wouldn’t soothe your tormented soul nor your desire to keep me under your thumb, submissive to your will, and a stroll on White Mountain wouldn’t make me forget the price I had to pay to live with you, you whom from the first instant I had fabricated with all my strength, whom my love had invented since I had been unable to see reality and now I would have to live with that side of myself, the face of a woman blinded by passion.
You left like a bubble floating over the ocean, convinced that all I needed was your desire and I would open my arms again when you were ready. You left like Ulysses thinking I’d be Penelope, patiently weaving your return. You never suspected that once the house was emptied of your presence, I would realize that bars had surrounded it the way vines climb walls by digging into the mortar, that once you left the wind would begin to blow once more. You never imagined for a minute that I would not be that bird in a golden cage, and that you didn’t own me, I wasn’t your object, I wouldn’t take you back in my bed no matter what.
You sentenced me to wait so you could go on defining my world, but I put an end to it. You were a hurricane, you flattened everything in sight, but instead of cowering in the basement, I moved away. I traded Prague for Rome, the castle for a rooftop deck with flowers, St. Nicholas for St. Peter’s from the window of my room.
The day I left for the Eternal City, I wandered through the Montreal airport like a ghost who didn’t know what she’d died of. I wandered through the interregnum of the airport, you on one side and the Via Candia on the other, yearning for both, though I knew which would come out on top. I was like a robot. I put my pain on the back burner, and with it all the heaviness that might keep me from moving forward. I imagined I was someone else. I was going to leave, nothing could stop me, least of all my own cowardice.
Print the boarding pass. Check the suitcase. Go through security. Take the computer out of the backpack. Take off my shoes. Put my shoes back on. Put the computer in its case. Walk to Gate B51. Wait for the boarding call. Board the plane. Lean my head against the window. Watch one film, two films, three films. Eat a lousy meal. Doze off a while and try not to let my head fall onto the shoulder of the bald guy sitting next to me. Wake up in the dazzling, surreal light that my body resists because it isn’t the right time. Exit the plane. Take the shuttle to the terminal. Get my bag. Take a taxi to the Via Candia.
Thirty degrees in the shade. Wait in a café with my first cappuccino. Climb six floors with the girl from the agency who came on a motorbike to give me the keys. Drop my suitcase. Open the windows. Plug in the fridge. Hang up my clothes. Take my computer out of my backpack. Plug it in. Turn it on. Start to write.
When I arrived in Rome, I emerged from absence. I was transposed. I am luxuriating in the Roman sun, a silken glove upon my skin. The heat soothes me, the green of the plants, the white of the jasmine, the pink of oleander. The rooftop deck is a paradise, and from its height I can hear the rumble of cars, sirens, and horns, children laughing, dogs barking, couples quarrelling, the shouts of merchants and passersby. Close by, the gulls’ cries speak of the sea. From the window, I look across at the other apartments, the teenage girl wearing a cellphone as an earring and opening her blouse to look at her new breasts, the young man throwing open his shutters wide then coming back a moment later with a tiny newborn on his shoulder. The smells of the restaurants and food being cooked rise up to me.
At the end of the day, the sun sinks over the city, but the wind never sleeps.
All roads lead to Rome, and ours led me there too. I alighted, with thousands of pilgrims, near the Vatican and its Pope. Priests are served up in every manner possible. You see pictures of them in barbershop windows with their fashionable haircuts, their young sacerdotal style.
You used to say, in disgust, that Quebec was a place empty of all spirituality, and that was a fatal flaw, and if one day you had to bring up children in this rotten country, you would make sure to give them a god, prayers, and ceremony. Those were the last words I heard you say the day after you went back to the Czech Republic. Sitting in front of your face on the computer screen, I listened to you talk, and it was the coup de grace. I couldn’t listen anymore to the accusations you made against my country, condemning its atheism, I couldn’t listen to all the insults you spat at me. That time was once too many, I couldn’t close my eyes on reality anymore, you were a bastard, you were out of second chances.
You didn’t understand what happened that day because for you it was perfectly normal, my job was to tolerate everything you said, I owed it to you because you’d crossed the Atlantic to be with me and a sacrifice like that has its price, that’s what you wrote in a text message the summer before you came, you’d make me pay for the hell I put you through by asking you to leave Prague though nothing was keeping you there, nothing outside of the vague idea that something might remain. Asking you to leave Prague to come and live with me, the woman who loved you, and since that had no price, I would pay my whole life through.
You wore my love like a favourite shirt, worn thin from being washed, like a new garment, its cut attractive, and its pattern, its fabric, but that soon grows pale, unravels until it can’t be repaired, it’s a shame it hadn’t been better looked after.
Before you went away the last time, you left your clothes, your books, your CDs, everything in its place, your shirts in the closet, your socks in the drawer, your pyjamas under the pillow. It was as though you’d gone out for the day. You claimed your territory the way a wolf does, and in your absence, no one had the right to enter it.
You never stopped proclaiming that this place wasn’t yours, you weren’t at home and never would be, but once you left, you made sure you remained its sole proprietor. You were the missionary sent to a hostile land to civilize it. Once the mission is accomplished, he returns to his country, leaving behind newly sown seeds and the belief that a new world has been born by his hand, and it belongs to him. He turns his back fearlessly, convinced that his work is done, and that History will remember him.
With the American Indians gone, you declared it was the end of a cycle, they had left the circle of their hell, their sojourn on this earth was coming to an end and next it would be our turn, we American Whites, this inferior race that was next in line to suffer its destiny.
In that dim bar in Kahnawake where we ended up by accident because the highway we were on passed by it, I could read astonishment on your face, then something closer to contempt. The beers piled up in front of the men at the bar in the middle of the week, on a late morning. The scene made you think of a Western. Totem poles stood at the entrance, the place had a saloon feel, and the only woman was the Native barmaid who gave us a long look as she handed us the menu, then kept smiling at you, shooting me a sideways glance from time to time, the way she flirted was to play you against the other men, the ones from her community, her eyes went from their faces to yours to see if a conflict would break out between the “savages” and the missionary, if you’d get scalped or Christ would triumph. You were tall and graceful, with a pale, cold beauty cut from flint. You held yourself straight, one foot on the stool and the other on the floor, a posture that allowed no doubt as to your sovereignty.
When it was time to leave, you pulled yourself off the stool noisily, scraping it against the sticky floor. Bottles at their lips, silent, the men turned in your direction. With a sly smile, the barmaid waved and whispered, “Bye-bye, cowboy.”
You would say that the movies took place in real life, and reality had no value for you. America was a skimpy cardboard set, of no interest to you. You enjoyed mapping its decline, dreaming of its disappearance in the storm of the century, a towering tsunami, a pitiless seismic displacement, the year 2012 held all of that in store for us according to the brainless stories you got off YouTube and the mindless declarations of gurus whose main objective was to foment fear in order to rope in the scattered tribe. You joined their chorus, predicting that this depraved continent would be the hardest hit, we had better leave it as quickly as possible, since salvation could be found only on the far side of the Atlantic.
Completely self-assured, as if no argument were possible, you told me how your friend Alexander, facing the Mediterranean, had experienced the streaking flash of a vision: his world was being swallowed up by a wave. He told you, “I was there, on the beach, when suddenly, just as real as the sand beneath my feet, I just knew that soon none of this would exist!” You believed him, and ever since you looked to that story to prove that danger was imminent. Floods, earthquakes, terrorist attacks, all these catastrophes lined up to serve your belief in the apocalypse, the end of the world that you seemed to be impatiently awaiting, since you talked about it so much. I couldn’t tell whether you saw it as punishment or liberation, divine retribution or the chance to save the human race, but it was your way of escaping, once again, the demands of love, escaping the mirror that life kept putting in front of you so you might see the pain you should have tended to, and that no one, not me or any other woman, could soothe between the sheets.
Danger was a good alibi. To continue with your life, you had to dream of the risk of dying. Sometimes I thought your world was simply an enormous projection, what you saw around you was no more than what you felt. Death was your preferred subject.
When you contemplated the boogeyman of 2012 and the threat of the end of the world, you said you needed to escape because you wanted to survive. I didn’t see the point of being the last human being on the planet if the world ended. I listened to you, dumbfounded, at times lured by what you called your Slavic mysticism, the system of superstitions your mother had handed down to you, though most of the time I was worried by the irrational strength of your convictions, you were supposed to be so cultivated, educated, you quoted writers and philosophers at every turn, so how could you believe such nonsense? When I decided to sift through the Internet to try to understand, I was divided between the desire to agree with you out of love, and the opposite pull to prove you were wrong, because unlike you, I believed in the existence of palpable reality, for me what is real is not a relativized set of data, it exists outside of the way we perceive it.
Now I wonder why you weren’t able to predict the end of us. Maybe our fall was unexpected, like that of the Roman Empire.
The heat of Rome shrouds me, it covers me with a s
econd skin, a sticky film of sweat, sun, and pollution. In Roman antiquity, women wore flowing dresses sewn from diaphanous fabric that revealed their form. Nowadays, they wear jeans and Birkenstocks like in Berlin and New York, and I blend right in.
Gazing down at the Forum, with the voices of fake gladiators calling to the tourists around me, I try to imagine how it was, the smells, the fires burning, the screaming crowd, the blood flowing down to the Tiber. The centuries passed. Vertigo strikes me when, inside the Basilica, I look upward, to the dome of St. Peter’s designed by Michelangelo.
The details of the monuments don’t interest me, what does is how I move through them, how, my head down, I give myself to Rome and so much beauty.
I walk the cobblestones. I walk for hours not so much to cover distance as to add up the steps, as if their number could widen the space between you and me. A way of urging time forward, giving it a topography. The more I turn through the labyrinth of streets, the more I turn away from you.
Once a day, I photograph St. Peter’s Basilica and the crowd in front of it. Sometimes I stand in the middle of the Via della Conciliazione or sit under the colonnade, other times I perch on the window ledge of my studio, looking at the dome above the buildings, among the trees. Sunday morning, in the scorching heat, I join the tourists awaiting the Holy Father, learning along with them that he is on vacation in Castel Gandolfo. I mingle with the disappointed pilgrims waiting in a pool of shade, then wander St. Peter’s Square, my steps like a prayer. I go out in the scalding sun.
The Last Bullet Is for You Page 3