The Islands

by William Wall

  It was a hollow kind of knowledge, I saw, a tourist’s précis. It told me nothing.

  A language is a world, I said, the unconscious is a language without a grammar. You’ll never belong here, you’ll never understand these people though you may think you can. You can never experience things the way they do. You can never dream their dreams. You can’t even feel the same sun on your face. You’ll always be a stranger.

  I know, he said, I always have been. And you?

  There was a ticking sound in the garden but everything was still. I knew that whatever happened now had already happened before, that every moment had its double, that in fact every moment was dual, containing both directions, both positive and negative, yes and no, that everything had both happened and not happened. It was true I had never felt at home, but I didn’t want him to know, him of all people. I wanted him to feel homeless. I wanted him to believe that we all had anchors and he was the restless one, drifting through our moorings, alone. Unbidden a line from his book came to me. How did it return after all these years of repression? He wrote: Jane was faithful to nothing and no one except place; not men, not hope, not dreams, but to an island.

  Once there was an island, I said. You weren’t there.

  I meant we had a home once. We had lost it, but it was there in memory. It was our home, not his.

  But he shrugged. All my life you’ve been shrugging me off, Father. But not anymore. There’s no stepping off this island where you find yourself in the end. You’ve had your day.

  You imagined that, he said, you were an exile, we all were, except maybe Jane.

  On a wire that ran from a pole to the roof of the house I saw a sparrow with its wings slightly open. All my childhood he was the one who put us in words. He had the copyright of our most private thoughts. Because he owned our utterance we performed it. In the book that never was he said my mother was a careless woman who brought her children up like animals. He wrote that she was a big-boned, handsome woman, generous in everything, gentle in nothing; copious, unpredictable, like a happening in nature, a storm or a flood or a downpour. It might have been a form of praise unknown to me. She took men when she needed them, he said, and he was one. He never said that she had a brain.

  He wrote that a parent never forgives herself for the death of a child. There was a long passage about blamelessness that was really about blame. He forgave her but she was lost forever in the interstices of guilt and desire. His forgiveness could not pass to her. And there was no return.

  Yet I saw that he yearned most of all to be her lover, gliding in on a breeze, anchoring in the lucid water, taking the woman, making the poems. He wanted more than anything to be an itinerant maker, like an old man we used to see beating old copper cylinders into pots and polishing them, who came and went in the country on some calendar of his own imagining. My father was continually handling beautiful things, exquisite phrases and ideas, but they were borrowed. He poisoned them and they passed from hand to hand, elegant but dangerous devices. Slogans, not poems. When my father wanted to talk about remorse it was unbearable; in the book that never was, it was an obscenity, a human organ grafted to a stone, a pietà stitched with a bleeding breast. Sitting in the train in the burning waterless landscape of 1976, I remember it exactly, it was on the patch of track between between Guildford and Woking, I saw that he had cut me off from her, that I could never be in her thoughts again, that he had waved his witch’s wand and made her an émigré in the islands. He had reduced her voice to a babble. In the book that never was.

  His children? He said we only wore clothes when we were told to. We fought like spitting cats. We killed birds and fish. In the nighttime echoing island we prowled and pried and discovered everything. We inherited her casual sexuality. I was beyond help, but my younger sister could be saved. Our mother’s madness lay before us. He might have said, Intemperance is naturally punished with diseases. He might have said, What good were eyes to me?

  It was a tissue of signs. It was, as always, himself, the book that never was. In a moment, in the sunlight from the high glass roof, in beautiful Waterloo Station, I held his life to be burgled, it was mine to dispose of. All I remember is joy. The bin was full again. I remember there was the bottom half of a dried-up ham sandwich. The yellow of the mustard.

  I said, The simple truth is we all hate you.

  He smiled. It surprised me. He wore a round-necked T-shirt. When he smiled the scalene muscles hung like ropes from his cheek to his chest. His skin was mottled and cracked. There were purple shadows under his eyes. Only his lips seemed to have become fuller and richer and more sensual with age. They were red now, like a girl’s. Only the tip of his nose had not regained its color.

  No, he said, you know that’s not true. It’s what you felt at the time, but you of all people know that the opposite is the case.

  I shook my head.

  We got over all that.

  No, he said again. I gave you a childhood like no other. Jane and I, we created that island, a colony of peace and strength in a world that was about to annihilate itself. You never feared the bomb, like other children. When people elsewhere in the world were building bomb shelters you were swimming in the ocean. You never learned the commodity fetish from television. You were free spirits. You are what you are because of that. It was a gift that few children of your generation were given.

  Hippies, I said. What did you give us? Look at us, we’re the unhappiest family in the world.

  He smiled again. You say that, but you know it’s not true. You, of all people, a psychologist, you know exactly what the balance of happiness and unhappiness is.

  It’s true if I say it’s true.

  He shook his head. He moved the cup on the table. He looked down and up again.

  None of us is a whole person, I said, our hearts are broken.

  Child, he said, you have no idea.

  I saw that his hand was shaking. He moved the cup again and I saw the slightest tremor. We notice these things, a professional skill, we swimmers in other people’s psyches. He was controlling it as best he could. I might have pitied him. At his age pity is the same as love. Or it’s enough. It is the end encoded in the beginning. The end of the law of the father.

  Why did you never have more children?

  He looked away.

  I already had two.

  Three, I said.

  He was silent for a time. Then he looked at me. His eyes were pinched and dry. What was he afraid of? Now, I thought, there will be more lies. But he just turned away.

  I walked the island lanes, thinking it through, thinking about him. It meant I didn’t have to watch him sulk. I climbed through streets that turned into private roads that forced me to retrace my steps and start again, that wound in and out and then stopped unpredictably, that ended in gates, in doorways, in views over the sea or over the edge. The houses crowded down on each other, built across the path, overhanging me. There were external staircases that climbed sharply or doubled back on each other like tricks of perspective; low roofs that I could look down on from the road, rounded half barrels; doors that seemed to let into cliffs; doors set at an angle to the street or the path; square, round, or trapezoid windows; elaborate shutters, doorknockers, gates. Nothing was straight. Nothing was simple. It was a demented geometry. It was as though the inhabitants had built outwards from some conception of the interior, of the heart or the soul, of the placing of furniture, of opportunities provided by shade or by an irregularity in time or space, as though the world did not exist except as a shell for the inside. I thought, if I could do that with my life. Begin at some space that was my own and build out into the light. But I am walled and roofed by other people’s words and the walls grow inwards to fill the space. I am drowning inside.

  If I could only touch someone.

  There were stagnant pools, a smell of stagnant water and detergent. A smell of other people’s food. If I went in I would emerge in someone else’s life. I only needed the courage. But
when I looked down the narrow corridors I saw old women and men impassive as troglodytes. They belonged to an underworld that stubbornly remained attached by life or love and through which doors and light and gifts passed forward and back.

  I walked into evening.

  In the lengthening shadows everyone was out-of-doors. People greeted each other as though they had not met in years. It was a parable of concord. So many people lived here on this little heap of black and pumice stone that if they did not meet for a day they considered each other lost. When they embraced it was an affirmation that existence could be continued invisibly, that one could not imagine everything that might befall a neighbor. Every one of them was part of a web of tensile cousinships, adulteries, parishes, friendships, districts. The relationships stretched backwards to the names on gravestones, forward into putative births, and laterally into the remote distance. I thought: This is how the island makes itself the world; complexity is its signature; without it no one could live here; it would become like the empty islands of home, places where life had become too simple. This was the mirror of our island. There was never an undisclosed action, never an empty gesture, no secret.

  Somewhere my father was brooding, waiting. In his island paradise at long last. Death too. That gentleman was patient. He waited for the next comer in his best suit. But not for me this time. Fathers do not live forever. We wait our turn, but they go first.

  4

  My father’s new wife came. She was a delicate, courteous young woman. She called me cara grazia, delighted that I could speak her language, however badly. At first I thought, a little resentfully, that she was punning on my name. I had forgotten that grace and gratitude are linked by a common root. She dressed in dark neat clothes, her hair cut close to her head. She looked like a bundle of self-composure in a tight package. I had noticed before that Italian women, growing up in a chauvinist society, learned to be either docile or assertive. She spoke English in a limited way. She fed me olives and cool wine. She had heard about my trouble. These matters were so difficult. She hoped everything would be for the best. When I said something long and important about marriage she asked to have it translated. My father, I noticed, spoke in two tenses, the present and the recent past. A lazy grammarian. I could have translated as well myself. He did not look at me. Later, when he had gone to bed, she asked me if I had said something to upset him, he was sad, he was very sad. And angry, too. The Italian word for angry is arrabbiato. People think it has something to do with intemperate Arabs, but derives in fact from the Latin for rabid or raving. We saw the light come on in their room, we saw him close the shutters. I said we had disagreed about the past. She shook her pretty head. Il passato, she said. She made a puffing sound with her lips and a small explosive gesture with her fingers. It meant the past was gone. Young people can strike such poses. I saw its plume blowing away through the lemon grove. She made it sound so easy. I loved her for it. But I knew the ash would settle in the shadows. It would be there to mark us when we had forgotten it.

  My sister came the next day.

  My father didn’t want to—he wasn’t feeling well, he said—so I met her from the ferry and drove her to the house.

  Where’s Daddy?

  I don’t know, he said to collect you.

  He always meets me.

  Well, not today.

  So she had been here before. Her hair seemed blacker. She had my mother’s eyes, black as jet. In the sunshine she had the simplicity of a statue. She was wearing an Armani dress. She picked it up at an airport, she said, Paris, or maybe Rome. Her toenails were painted lime. They looked like one of her precious stones. Would you like a coffee? Yes please, would you mind boiling the milk?

  Then came Bill. He was in tropical kit, he said. He wore his white linen suit. He had finally gotten around to making something with my father in it. He was bringing a documentary crew. They were staying at the Hotel Riviera and he thought he should stay with them but I knew it was because his researcher was there. This was not new. I almost divorced him once, for “playing away,” as he liked to call it, but then my mother died and after that I got used to it. Habit, as someone said, is a great deadener.

  He stayed with us.

  He was excited, he said, about the prospect of finally doing something serious. The old man was a talker and the island would make a great setting. Radical finds peace in idyllic island, the vines, the trattoria, the narrow lanes, you know. He had a whole narrative of how my father’s life had gone, from early political activism to a Zen-like composure in old age. The human interest was overwhelming. He was thinking about music and liked the idea of Bach cello suites, what did I think? They were deep, emotionally moving. He could talk crap like that for hours on end. But he knew his music, give him his due. He could hum the Bach Suite no. 1 in G, he said. This is the Courante—it’ll be perfect. He hummed it now, waving his right hand to indicate the time. He sang in Saint Luke’s Chelsea church choir, of all things. “Te Lucis Ante Terminum,” rendered with gusto as if he believed in a plea to the creator to protect him through the night. Bill the Blessed and his angelic voice. He was probably fucking the sopranos.

  Bald and fattening now, in bed he looked like a dead seal. His skin smelled slightly smoked. I told him he would have to stop wearing slim-fit shirts but he didn’t listen to me. I told him he needed to get out of his car and walk. Precepts that might serve him well in the future.

  Look at you, he said to me, you need to think body image.

  This was how we expressed our hatred. In metaphor.

  Where was the old man?

  I said he was probably in his room. Something was eating him.

  Don’t tell me you upset him, I could do without family issues for god’s sake.

  He’ll get over it, I said. Ask him if he thinks the Greens undermined the left because they gave capitalism a way to save face. Ask him if he thinks the Greens are the vegetarian bourgeoisie—that’s what Mother used to call them. Ask him—

  Oh, shut up, Grace, it’s a bloody documentary, not a show trial.

  Ask him if he thinks vegetables will save the world.

  He chuckled at that. If he hadn’t been such a hopeless shit where women were concerned we might have made a go of it. If his ego hadn’t needed so much feeding.

  The air seemed to settle in my room, a viscous fluid slowly reducing in a hot pan so that the slightest stir left a visible wake. I slept and woke naked and covered in a slime of sweat, sore and slightly panicked, conscious of having passed a troubled hour or two but unable to remember anything other than the feeling of anxiety. In other circumstances I might have called it desire or fear. I took a cool shower. Afterwards the water dried on my skin. The silence of the big hot house. A feeling of fullness, secrecy, intensity, mourning. There were moments, instants really, when I thought someone was about to cry. It might have been me. I thought about Bill and the researcher going at it, the slime of sweat separating them, Bill’s blubbery sex on her tiny frame. My sister probably knew. Father too. His pity. Their amusement. Bill can’t keep it in his trousers.

  I fell asleep eventually and woke at about four o’clock in the afternoon. Some of the brutal heat had gone.

  There’s no time like the present.

  I heard snatches of conversation. Bill was there. He was with the camera crew in the garden setting up for the first interview. Sound, light, color, temperature. The shadow of the olives and the vines and the lemon grove. I heard him say that he was aiming for something biblical, a Caravaggio effect. He had no idea what he was talking about, of course, though it all seemed to be a common language. He could say it and they could make it happen. The terms, properly understood, made the world. The interview would be tomorrow, the morning of my father’s birthday. Bill sometimes talked in terms of restoring my father’s reputation, but he was talking about his own.

  The geckos were still as stones. The cicadas called. There was no birdsong in the sun. There’s no time like the present.

&nbs
p; Across the way the old woman moved through the shade with her hoe and her can. There was a chair by the lemon tree and the ground looked like dust. There was a gecko on her wall, though you would think he was a stone unless you looked long at him. He was perched on the edge as though he were preparing to jump. Goodbye, cruel world.

  I doubt the geckos think much of the world. They have all the appearance of cynics.

  In the early evening I swam to clear my head. I needed to shake the heat from my heart. Swimming made me feel brave. It would give me the courage, I thought. Even from far out I could hear the brassy racket of the cicadas. It might have been time ringing in my ears. I swam out farther than the boats. Out to where I could feel the current of the Tyrrhenian Sea sweep around the headland taking me south towards Africa. Out in the deep sea you take a larger view of things. Continents come to mind, rivers of ocean, rivers of wind. I saw the broken lines of the island, the old volcanic ridges. I saw that there was an islet at one end joined to the rest by a bridge. And at the other was a walled village. I remembered my father saying the name—Terramurata. I saw the fire and ash of a million years frozen in time, the island thrust from the earth, the great maw and the smoke and the bubbling stone. Out I went. I saw my father’s house, high up on the spine of the island, and someone standing outside. Could he see me? I recognized his shape, and, now that I was looking from a distance and could see only the shape of him, I saw that he had developed a stoop. Did he pity me? Poor Grace is married to Bill who can’t keep it in his trousers, he doesn’t even make a secret of it anymore.