by David Plante
She said, “I’m glad I overheard that. I didn’t know you were capable of getting angry in that way. It’s a revelation and, in a strange way, it’ll make travelling with you easier.”
I wondered, then, if she was worried about travelling with me.
I said, “I’ll try ringing again in an hour.”
We went back to our tea and the maps which Sonia continued to study closely.
With a pencil on the edge of the map she made a calculation.
“Wait,” she said, “wait. I’ve got a nought too many. The car doesn’t have to be serviced.”
I learned that Sonia was very bad at calculations.
Exhausted, Sonia nevertheless helped to prepare dinner.
The next day, she, our host and I went to see the Roman ruins at Glanum. It began to rain, and we stood under a tin roof which protected a mosaic. The ruins—great stone slabs, blocks, columns, carved pediments on the ground—went black in the wet.
Sonia was silent when we got back and sat in the living room drinking tea. Our friends played Scrabble. Sonia’s silence frightened me a little, and I tried to get her to talk by asking her questions about Paris; but, as I couldn’t presume to ask her specific questions about her life the questions were general, and she answered them in brief though absolute comments about Parisians, whom she believed to be the most civilized people in the world. I knew I was straining my attention towards her; I couldn’t bear her silence, and I felt it was my responsibility to bring her out of it. But I knew, too, that she would resent my imagining I had that responsibility. I saw Sonia as an unspeakably unhappy woman. I was in love with the unhappiness in her, and yet reassured that, no matter what I did, what I felt it my duty to do, to lessen that unhappiness, I couldn’t: Sonia wouldn’t allow me to. Sonia reassured me in her frightening unhappiness. It was her secret.
After a silence, she asked me how many bedrooms there were in the house in Italy. I said three. “Then we can ask others if they’d like to join us,” she said, her voice all at once spirited. “Of course,” I said, and thought: She wants others to join us, she doesn’t want to be alone there with me. “Ask anyone you’d like,” I said. I, too, was suddenly spirited. Perhaps I didn’t want to be alone with Sonia; and yet I was dispirited at the same time, as though she had found me in some way inadequate, immature. She asked our hostess if she might use the telephone, and rang three friends in London, proposing to each in turn that he should come to Italy; each friend said it wasn’t possible. The friends were members of her London family, without whom I imagined Sonia felt completely alone. I was not enough of that family to make her feel contained by it. With me she seemed to feel exposed to a world she was uncertain of entering, and I had the momentary impression, when she came back from the telephone to sit at the other end of the sofa from me, that she resented my making her do what threatened her; but it was too late to draw back.
•
The night before we left for Italy, she took a sleeping pill. Her room was next to mine, and I heard her turning listlessly in bed, getting up often to open or shut her window.
We left early Sunday morning before our friends woke.
It was hot, and the empty Provençal roads glared.
There was no traffic until we were diverted from the autoroute and had to go over the Grande Corniche, where the cars were jammed up against one another. Sonia became ill-tempered. She said, “This is just what I didn’t want to happen, but, of course, it would.” It occurred to me that Sonia’s most constant temper was ill temper. What I had to hope for was that, after this, everything would be all right so she wouldn’t have any reason to be ill-tempered, but I knew that, of course, nothing would be right. Sonia was naturally ill-tempered, as if just having to live, day after day, were reason enough.
I thought ahead to the house, which was very simple, as I had told her. It had doors and windows, electricity and water, and beds. She said it sounded as though it had everything one needed. I told her that the summer before I’d arranged with a local contractor to whitewash the inside walls, but I was sure that hadn’t been done; no work was done, ever, when I wasn’t there. She said that didn’t matter. I didn’t tell her that I imagined the house, closed up all winter, would have broken windowpanes, cobwebs, dirt, and the bodies of dead birds and little animals all over the floors.
Once we crossed the border into Italy, I felt that I was responsible to Sonia for the entire country, but I would not be able to do anything to make the country pleasant.
There was with Sonia the sense that she knew beforehand everything that was going to happen, and there would be no great surprises; everything would be awful.
At lunchtime we turned off the autostrada into an ugly modern seaside town. I asked a man selling watermelons by the side of the road where we could eat well, and he pointed across a flat, bare area strewn with old bags of hardened cement and automobile tires to a group of stern cement apartment buildings.
Sonia parked the car with difficulty (as it was a new car she was very careful with it), and for a moment was irritated and frowned deeply; but as we walked over the field to the restaurant, in the bottom of one of the apartment blocks, I saw she became a little, a very little, excited. Part of her excitement, I was sure, was that the restaurant was working class. It was crowded, but a large, dark, blunt-looking man invited us to join him at his table, where he was alone. He offered us some of his wine.
Studying Sonia, he said, “You were born in August.”
“Yes,” she said, smiling at him.
“You’re a Virgo.”
She smiled more, with that smile which suddenly, unexpectedly, parted her lips and teeth, drew back her cheeks, and opened her eyes wide.
She said to me, “Ask him what sign he is.”
“Scorpio,” he said.
“I wouldn’t have known,” Sonia said.
(I was reminded that Sonia was very good at reading palms.)
The Italian said, “My two interests are astrology and driving fast around curves. I drive around curves with passion.”
They talked about astrology and driving.
Big, dark, blunt-featured as he was, he was gentle, even delicate in his words and manners towards Sonia, who, herself, became gentle and delicate. She laughed lightly.
As we walked back to the car across the field, I noted that Sonia’s face retained an openness, as from the pleasure of meeting what she called a really European and civilized working-class man.
I knew that she would, from the encounter, imagine she had an insight into the working class in Italy.
I thought: Italy interests her.
We stopped for petrol, and, waiting, watched a man pay out a stack of thousand-lire notes, one at a time, to the garage man; the stack was about six inches thick, and the man counted them out slowly.
Sonia’s narrowed eyes expressed a barely suppressed impatience; her whole face narrowed.
I thought: Italy bores her.
She found it exhausting to drive in and out of the tunnels through the mountains along the Ligurian coast.
She became exhausted quickly.
In Lucca, where we decided to stop for the night, there was only a double room in the main hotel. When I told Sonia this I wondered, for a moment, if she might say we could share the room. I thought to myself: I wouldn’t mind. She said nothing. I quickly rang friends who lived in the hills outside Lucca to ask them to recommend another hotel, and they said, “Come here, you’ll cheer us up.” I was worried, as we drove off to find the villa, that Sonia, there, would get drunk. I lost the way, and Sonia said, “Now I can’t try every fucking road in Italy.” I said, “Turn left.” It was the right turn.
As we were driving off in the morning she said, “I was so frightened on my way there. Was I all right? I always think that, especially with people I don’t know, I’m going to say or do something awful.” I said, “You were marvellous. I know they liked you very much.” Sonia said, “I’m like that woman in a short story by Che
khov who knows she is about to say something awful, and tries to stop herself, but can’t. You’re quite sure I wasn’t awful?” “I promise you,” I said. She frowned deeply.
Driving up the mountain into the walled town of Cortona, I said, “I love this place.”
Sonia herself hardly expressed in person the warm emotions she expressed in letters, but she liked people with her to express emotions—of course, towards other people, places, things, and never towards herself. Feelings expressed to her for her made her angry.
I wanted her to like Cortona. As we walked down the narrow medieval main street in the high bright coolness after the flat heat of the plain, she said nothing. I did not know if she was impressed by the town or not.
(Later, she told me she hated it.)
In a restaurant, we had a lunch of roast pigeons, then we started on the drive into the mountains to the house. I thought: Oh God, the road’s so long, so winding, and what state will the house be in? I saw her face become more and more set, her eyes more and more narrow the more curves we took. Once she said, “I think I took that curve with passion.” I wondered then if she were in fact having a good time and joking, or if she were angry.
We got out of the car by the river, crossed the rickety bridge, went up the path. The house was half hidden by weeds; a part of the roof of the pergola had fallen. I looked at Sonia, who, I imagined, winced.
The first comment Sonia made was, inside the house, “It’s filthy dirty, and I can’t live in filth.”
I didn’t think it was filthy.
She immediately got out a bucket from beneath the kitchen sink and filled it with water, then took up a broom and a thick, rough floor rag. The sleeves of her pink smock rolled up and wet, she shoved the rag about the tile floors with the broom.
“What a holiday,” she said.
I thought she would become more angry if I apologized.
We had a silent supper and went to bed early. She got up early, and I heard her in the kitchen. I lay in bed wondering if she’d be in a bad temper. I got up and found her preparing coffee. In a slightly hoarse voice she said, “You know, I woke this morning at dawn and looked out of the window of my bedroom, and I thought, This is one of the most beautiful places in the world. Then I looked around the house and I thought, This could be a very pretty house.”
She found herself in a situation that was unpleasant to her, I thought, if not unbearable, and her only way of making it, not pleasant, but bearable, was to help make the house pretty.
I followed behind her writing out a list as she went through the rooms showing me what had to be done: curtains here, cushions there, a table here, walls whitewashed.
The contractor came with a huge demijohn of wine on the back of a tractor. I embraced him. Sonia said, “Is this the man responsible for redoing the house?” “Yes,” I said. She lit a cigarette, put one foot forward, and frowned at him. Sonia said, “Then tell him—” and she made me repeat, in Italian, everything she found wrong: cracks in the plaster, a windowpane broken, electric outlets in the wrong places, on and on. He was stunned. He left quickly, and didn’t come back all the while Sonia was there.
I decanted the wine into large two-litre bottles, and Sonia and I began to drink.
She said, “Well, the wine is lovely. It’s light, and one can drink and drink it without any worry.”
We drank bottle after bottle of it as we discussed what had to be done to the house; she repeated her list obsessively, and I agreed.
Then we went out, the next few days, to buy furniture. I had some money. We bought a dining-room table, a madia, and we drove off to the Zona Industriale because someone had said there one could find good cheap chairs, but Sonia thought they were too expensive, and, after days of looking, she finally allowed me to buy six chairs from a wholesale dealer. She made me buy material for cushions, kapok, a big cooking pot, a salad basket. She had me make, each morning, a list: lining paper for drawers, drawing pins, towel rails, a new broom. Often, I thought the items weren’t necessary, but I put them on the list. She insisted I go and ask the widow in the next farm if she’d help clean the house, which she would, and if her son Candido would sickle away the weeds and restore the pergola and do some whitewashing of walls. At lunch and supper, always with big bottles of wine, we talked of nothing but the house. I sometimes found her replacing dim bulbs with brighter ones, polishing a table top. She was always active for the house; when, seldom, we sat out in deck chairs under the pergola in the evening and continued to drink wine, she talked about the house, as if, even in her talk, she were obsessively active.
She was of course always exhausted.
There were times, looking at the house through Sonia’s eyes, when I hated it.
One Saturday afternoon, while I was whitewashing the upstairs sitting room with Candido, an American friend who lived up the valley came in. Candido was on top of a ladder which was on a table, and the American just under him. The ladder slipped, Candido fell into the American’s arms, and the bucket of whitewash on top of both of them. Sonia ran upstairs to see what had happened. Downstairs in the kitchen, she filled a tub of water and told the American and Candido to take off their clothes so she could wash them. While the American and Candido were in their underpants, Sonia washing their shirts and trousers in the tub, I pouring out wine, an aged Italian neighbour arrived, mopping his neck and face with a white towel, and carrying, in a knotted bandana, a bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, and about two kilos of sausages. He had come to welcome us to Italy.
I introduced Sonia to him as la zia, which she liked. She kept calling herself la zia.
The old man’s politeness impressed her. She liked politeness.
When, in the freshly whitewashed sitting room, I began to put out a kelim and pillows, Sonia rushed in. She said, “I knew it. I knew you were doing the fun part without me.” She told me which way to lay out the kelim, where to place the pillows.
There were, I thought, spirited moments.
We went off to Città di Castello for the morning market. She said to me, “You don’t know me in the market.” It sounded like a threat. I had to run after her as she went from stall to stall, still buying for the house. Her way of getting the price down was to pick up something—a ladle—look at it, frown deeply, put it down, and half turn away. The man in the stall would lower the price, and Sonia would say to me, quickly, “Buy it.” We had a long lunch, and ate dishes we had never had before, and we drank a lot of the light local wine she liked so much. Outside the restaurant, I turned in one direction, Sonia in another. I said, “This is the way.” “No,” she said, “this is.” I insisted, she insisted. “All right,” she said, “you go your way, I’ll go mine, and we’ll see who gets to the car first.” I was determined to get there first, and raced through the empty, sun-filled streets; when I turned a corner, I saw Sonia leaning back, one hand on the car, one on her hip, and as I went to her she tossed back her head and smiled at me.
But even the small spirited moments seemed to me to rise out of and bring Sonia back to a sense of something vast and unspirited which had to be endured.
When she wasn’t working on or for the house, she read, in the hammock strung up under the pergola, a book by an American woman who lived near by. On our way to have lunch with this woman in a restaurant in Cortona, I saw that Sonia was worried as usual about meeting someone she didn’t know. We arrived first, and I ordered wine before anything else; I knew with the wine and her cigarettes Sonia would feel a little secure. She was drunk when the writer came in. I introduced them, then sat tensely, listening. The writer mentioned friends of hers whom she assumed to be friends of Sonia’s. Sonia said, “They’re swine.” “Oh, come now,” the writer said. I tensed more, and thought: Well, you can always write about this later. But I saw that the writer’s authoritative “Oh, come now” made Sonia sit back; it was as if she had recognized, in a moment, the strength of the other woman, and was, in that moment, reassured by it. Sonia, I realized, deferred to wom
en stronger than she. I saw in her face that she liked the American woman suddenly, and that the luncheon was going to be a success. I relaxed and listened to them talk on and on. Sonia nervously drank a great deal, and smoked cigarettes one after the other, but she didn’t, as she would have if her nervousness had gone out of her control, talk without stop. The two women embraced before Sonia and I went off, back into the mountains.
She was very drunk, but she insisted on driving the tight curves. Her concentration, it seemed to me, centred more and more, not on the curves, but something that made her increasingly angry.
Back at the house, she continued to drink. She insisted on helping with supper, a chicken casserole. She drank as she helped. She drank through the meal.
All the while her anger, I felt, was growing.
After supper she went up to her room to put on her nightgown and housecoat and slippers, and pull her hair to the top of her head with an elastic band, and came downstairs again. As I sat at the cleared table, she, drinking out of a greasy glass, walked up and down the room, sometimes pulling at her hair.
She said, “You’ve been wanting this conversation. I haven’t. But as you want it, I’ll tell you what I think about you. I’m not interested in getting to know you any better than I do now, though I suspect you want to get to know me better. Well, I’ll tell you one thing about myself: I’m not as frivolous as you think I am. You think I’m frivolous. I’m not. And I’ll tell you this about yourself, though you may not want to hear it: you are. And I’ll tell you the difference. I think. What you don’t do is think. I do think. You don’t think. I like being among the French because they think. Why don’t you think!”
I thought: Well, it’s true, I can’t think. But I tried to tell her that I didn’t trust thinking, that writing, I believed, didn’t come from drawing conclusions.
She shouted, “Conclusions! There are no conclusions! You don’t understand. You’ll never understand. I’m talking about good hard thinking, about thinking things through, about seeing something in every possible way. You won’t be a good writer until you can think things through.”