Break.up

by Joanna Walsh

  Married? So much goes on in the shadow of that tall word, unspoken, unwritten. Married. Did I call that love? Yes for a long time, then, no. Depends if you think love is the weight of years or of an instant. Where would you put the marker: first sight, six months, five years, ten? Tell me if you know because it’s not something I can tell you. All I know is that there is a difference between love and being in love. If there wasn’t a gap, we wouldn’t need to say both. And there must be an instant of love in order for loving to be repeated though, like other clones, it can mutate unexpectedly. I’d known you for only a few months when I could say, love, or thought I could claim it as our story.

  The dialectic of repetition is easy, because that which is repeated has been, otherwise it could not be repeated: but precisely this, that it has been, makes repetition something new. Kierkegaard, Repetition

  There are so many stories about love, but so few stories about marriage, only stories about what happens before it and, sometimes, after. Marriage sucks all stories into its black hole to pump them out through the next generation. Even when you say it in the present – ‘I’m married’ – that ‘ed’ drags it back into the past, a story told. I’m still sent wedding invitations to the marriage of… as though I might be witness to the whole intimate tableau: each morning’s breakfast table, the way he holds his knife, the way she sips her tea, the small habits of tenderness or un-tenderness – so much like life – the sex, the rows, the making up, all of it. The married state they still say in some wedding services, a solid state, the opposite of action. There are no moving parts in the solid state disk that runs the new laptop I have brought with me. It stores data ‘persistently’ and constantly rearranges its memory in non-linear patterns, recycling the past as the present. Its information cannot be permanently overwritten, except by special procedure but, when it breaks, more often than not, all data, the whole story, disappears. I can’t begin to describe the silence at the heart of marriage, and I’ve been there. I’m still curious as to what replaces the words. No wonder I preferred romance, the internet, correspondence, the airless twitter in which people have no husbands, wives, families. Would it be possible to live there always? Yes, if you like writing. Just press

  Return

  return

  Return.

  It’s hot, hot. I guess it’s somewhere near 6pm. I look for something to sit on, and find another block of stone, repurposed. I have no idea what it once was, just what use it can serve now. I take out a cigarette, designed as an affront to the sensible couples with their packed snacks. I want to look like their opposite, a maximum artery assault on all fronts. Without the structure of lunch and dinnertimes, I smoke more. Eating on holiday is the management of time, of boredom; a cigarette an excuse for an equivalent pause, but travel licenses me to eat badly, and to smoke. I have been warned by smoker friends not to smoke, but with a sly smile. They want me to join their club, which is the death wish club, the opposite of marriage. Away from home, where what I am doing is not life-like, death can’t touch me; cholesterol neither. I don’t feel like eating, anyway. I’ve hardly eaten since Nice although waiters outside the restaurants step in front of me, grab me by the arm: Hello! Bonjour! Signora, scusi! What used to make me hungry now makes me full, and hunger doesn’t manifest as hunger. I feel empty, but it’s not physical emptiness. I’m synaesthetic, like people who see sound as colour.

  On the street Rome offers me a succession of party foods: pizza, biscotti, granita. They’re quick hits, though. Romans don’t stop outside cafés for long, and their favourite treat is ice cream, which you can eat as you walk. I buy a granita con panna (frozen coffee with whipped cream) from the shop on the corner of the square, the one I used to breakfast at when married. All that caffeine and sugar and nicotine makes me want to move, and my emptiness makes me light as whipped cream pumped through with air.

  I have been brought up to take myself lightly, to appreciate that hard-edged, weightless thing called fun. The hard-edged thing included holidays, nice dinners, visits to places away from home, and other treats, all of which were to be enjoyed, if done the right way, because they were not home. A little of what you fancy does you good. Oh, but only a little – that’s the good life: a little of this, a little of that, don’t get too passionate about anything. And, if I did not enjoy the treats, if I found any other emotion occurred, I was not to say so. Who was I to talk? A word out of place could ruin everything for everyone. And I never wanted to complain because, if I did, how would I know when to stop? I have no idea how much of anything is enough. It’s easier to be empty, silent. And because I cannot eat, I walk, and I walk.

  I walk from the Piazza della Rotonda (I remember the route) across the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, through the vicolos and stradinas until I reach the Campo de’ Fiori where the traders packing up the market are trampling fruit and flowers. In the square between here and the Tiber, walking with my husband, I remember that, in the garden of the Palazzo Spada, we found a short narrow corridor painted to look like a long wider corridor with, at its end, a statue the size of a garden gnome, that appeared monumental. I stop just outside the Palazzo, in the Piazza Farnese, where there are fountains like huge stone birdbaths. Some of the Palazzo’s cornicing is painted on to resemble marble, but this is ancient fakery so counts as genuine. By the birdbath fountains an old woman feeds pigeons, another woman alone. She wears a black velvet dress with embroidered cuffs, too heavy, too formal for the heat and for what she is doing, but it is not worn or dirty and her hair is cut in a neat silver bob, so she can’t be a crazy woman. No one arrives to meet her. I watch her carefully, wondering whether she is the woman I could become. She crumbles something from a brown paper bag. She does not stop until it is empty. She must do this every day.

  I have no sense of proportions. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

  Marry me, you said.

  There was a gap: I knew it was a joke. But such a very short gap, like this:

  Mind the gap: I thought there was something in it.

  I walk and walk further, until the afternoon turns blue and the buildings are lighter than the surrounding night. I have gone so far from where I should be, I don’t know if I can find my way back.

  ‘You’re lost,’ you told me, that same afternoon. As if I didn’t know it.

  Where in the world would I be without you?

  Not here, I know.

  Something keeps me off the main streets. In vicolo after vicolo all the windows are blank except the lit windows of restaurants. In Rome, do as the Romans do. Romans eat, but they don’t drink in public, not without food – and not tapas, full dinners! You won’t get away with a single course. I pass bar after bar, outside them chalkboards listing massive sharer plates or set menus: aperitivo, antipasto, pasta, zuppa, primi piatti, secondi piatti, dolce. I’d eat something, somewhere, if I could only find the right place, if I could only find somewhere that didn’t demand too much of me. I pass restaurants where the menus are laid out thick as bibles on lecterns, novels nobody reads. These restaurants are the empty ones. I do not want to eat at this kind of restaurant. I also pass restaurants like glass bricks of light, large groups and family parties displayed in their windows. How we can stuff them in! say the restaurants, and how we can stuff them! I want to eat neither at the restaurants that are too full nor those that are too empty. I don’t want to be too full as, were I not content, being already full, I would no longer be able to blame my hunger for my empty feeling. Without hunger to occupy me, grief might rush in to fill the gap. I need one gap to prevent the other.

  ‘Leave or stay,’ you said that afternoon, ‘but don’t poison it.’ Poison’s a woman’s weapon, used on family, intimate as food and drink, and family is the easiest thing for a woman to destroy, apart from herself. Calling me a poisoner was a drop of poison. You dropped it in my ear and it poisoned me against myself. When I left, all my actions seemed to stink of it.

  No wonder I’m not eating.

  The people who are ea
ting in the glass boxes all look like tourists. I am angry with the restaurants that make them perform their intimate family dinner in public, and I am angry because these are the only buildings where non-natives can eat. I guess Roman families are all eating at home. Home.

  When I got married I’d hoped I could be married in a different way from all the marriages I’d seen before. A tall order but, when building something bigger and better, why settle for less? I must have thought marriage was something you build, like those couples in the telly programmes who construct their dream home under the eye of the camera, adapting an ancient structure, a barn, or a chapel, keeping the original features they choose, making the rest as modern as they like. I didn’t realise that marriage is something you inhabit, something built by someone else to a plan drawn by people who lived differently, centuries ago. Marriage is made from old stones shaped by an ancient technology we no longer understand. All we can do is cement the gaps until we have something that looks like somewhere we could live. To me it no longer looks like home. It looks like a pile of rocks.

  I stopped living in living rooms long ago, but didn’t seem to be able to find a way to live without them. There was a living room in my house, the house where I’d lived while married, if I want to take responsibility for it which, undoubtedly, I must. I had problems with that house, which became like a house in a murder story. It had so many rooms whose uses were obsolete, unimaginable – in the ballroom, with the candlestick, in the library with the lead piping – though they were not ballrooms or libraries, just regular rooms in a house whose function had crumbled. As I avoided the rooms I could no longer use, the house got bigger, and I got smaller. It was cold the winter before I left but I would not put the heating on, not in such a big place, just for one. I worked in bed and my living shrank to its size and shape, and from it I could hear what went on the other side of the wall: noises of the telly and cooking. It was reassuring that the other houses were used and that life went on, somewhere, in the way it was meant to, while my house remained a carapace of home – and, from the outside, it looked fine, but I didn’t repair the curtain rail, or paint over the marks on the wall, or weed the garden. I prepared for my own ruin.

  My home had become dismal to me precisely because it was the wrong sort of repetition.

  Kierkegaard, ibid

  But I don’t want to get lost in too roomy a metaphor. Marriage isn’t a house I was shut into, or that fell down. It works more like the way Freud wrote about Rome, the layers on layers of culture and history that can’t quite be seen all at once, as though there was no such thing as time or forgetting.

  I’m lost now near the Piazza della Repubblica. All the restaurants are closed – they close early in Rome – and every clock shows a different time. All those ghosts. I imagine what your arms feel like round me, then I imagine my ex-husband’s, then those of other men I have known. I try to observe what effect each of these imaginings has on me, but I find I can hardly distinguish one from another, just the feeling of loving, and being loved, being touched… and you have been in touch with me, have recommenced – however virtual – that connection.

  A city is a priori unsuited for a comparison of this sort with a mental organism.

  Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

  The observer would need merely to shift the focus of his eyes, perhaps, or change his position, in order to call up a view of either the one or the other. Freud, ibid

  I walk (I dance!) through the Piazza Navona. Around the white Triton fountain, which, like the station, is dressed in plissé plastic, beggars are selling small shining toys: plastic sycamore keys that light up and scream as they whirl higher and higher into the black sky.

  I want the huge, the stupid, the democratic, the touristy, the monumental, the clichéd, the trashy. Clichés have an easy beauty. So does love. I feel weightless, like I’m falling. Again? The last time I fell, I was dropped. How can I be dropped from a fall?

  Roma II, Trastevere

  28th April

  Next morning I’m still in Rome, though I didn’t expect to be. I was going to take the train to Brindisi, then the overnight ferry to Patra, but the ferry isn’t running. It’s a bank holiday, and a religious holiday, and I expected neither. All night on a deck, I’m sorry to miss that. It was something I’d imagined doing. I try not to imagine too much of what lies ahead, but some images do form. There’s some kind of pleasure in dismissing them, in escaping myself.

  ‘How are you?’ you asked. I still haven’t answered your email, have carried not-answering with me, in all its potential. Well, how am I? I have the habit of loneliness now. I am comfortable with it. I get up, get out of my hostel, get a coffee at the bar in the Piazza at the end of the street. Coffee implies breakfast goods and I find I can live on the implication, on watching other people eat, other people love. My stomach has settled, I’m content with a cigarette, my only drive, the desire to stay away from the attentions of the restaurants lining the square, to cheat choice, to refuse to choose. Not eating robs me of energy: my gaze dampens. I can look only down at what’s under my feet, but my pride in self-limiting is lively enough. Like the bag I have packed, I find I have got to need so little. The only problem with being as good as full is that it leads me to demand nothing more.

  As I have spare time, and no desires to fill it with, I return to the centre of Rome to repeat the bits of yesterday I liked. I have to repeat, it’s part of understanding where I am. I try the same route – fountain, vicolos, Pantheon – but the bits of yesterday I liked are disappointing. My granita melts too quickly. I am anxious about the ratio of cream to ice. I am being slowed down.

  The only thing that repeated itself was that no repetition was possible.

  Kierkegaard, Repetition

  I decide to give myself a task: I will buy a new notebook, which will allow me the pleasure of looking and refusing, or choosing, as well as exchanges with shopkeepers, whose sense of purpose makes them so friendly and cheerful that these are almost real encounters, though they can be dismissed, on either side, with no love lost.

  There are few chain stores in the centre of Rome, only two or three big international brands that reproduce the same thing they do everywhere, and give a feeling of – what? – European-ness, stability, a guaranteed repeat experience? Each small shop sells a single type of object, often something so recherché as to be outdated, amusing: watches, gloves, corsetry. They open at odd times of day, some in the morning, some in the evening, and their windows contain every example and variety of this one thing, but where is the rest? Where are the shops selling groceries, cleaning fluid, toilet rolls? Rome’s city centre is an accessory: the basics of everyday life are not here. I find a fancy stationer’s that sells pens and paper, plus rubber stamps customised with elaborate figures, name, or address, and books for sorting life in different ways: a ‘cellar book’, a book for shopping lists… It also sells address books to slice up friends along arbitrary, alphabetical lines. The books are finely made, their covers marbled, giving the illusion of stone, or the illusion of the illusion of stone like the painted-on marble of the Palazzo Spada and, oh, they are expensive! I don’t think I could buy one but the problem’s not the price. I no longer have a home address to write in the specially printed section on the flyleaf of one of these books. No, this is not the shop for me.

  When the desire comes upon us to go street rambling the pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say: ‘Really I must buy a pencil,’ as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life.

  Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting

  At the end of the vicolo is the Tiber. I cross the bridge onto an island, then cross another bridge. I’m in Trastevere, and I am amazed.

  When I first visited Rome with my husband, we booked a hotel in Trastevere, because we’d heard it was the cool part of the city, but when we arrived the hotel manager explained there was a problem, and we would have to move to a room across the r
iver, off the Piazza della Rotonda. When we returned to Rome, we rented an apartment in Trastevere but again something happened, and we were taken to ‘better’ rooms behind the Piazza Navona. One day we decided to walk to Trastevere. From the Piazza del Popolo, we took the Via del Corso, which looks like a main street on the map, because it is so straight and long. We imagined it wide and light, and found it was dark and narrow, but then we weren’t familiar with Rome, and this was before Googlemaps: the only way to know the city was through our guidebooks, which we had forgotten to bring out with us, and the Via del Corso went on and on until it ended with the white palace built by Victor Emmanuel II, which the Romans call the Zuppa Inglese because it looks like an enormous cream dessert, and which masks the dirty broken meringues of the Forum. We weren’t far from Trastevere. In fact we were heading in the right direction, but for some reason we gave up.

  What if a person arrived in Rome, fell in love with some small part of the city that was for him an inexhaustible source of pleasure, and then left Rome again without having seen a single tourist attraction?

  Kierkegaard, ibid

  Instead we turned back and went into the Vatican where we looked at Michelangelo’s ceiling women, who looked like men, and, through ranks of photographers as thick as the crowd by the fountain you throw coins into, we glimpsed a corner of the same artist’s Pietà, white as the Zuppa Inglese, and it didn’t look piteous, or pious: it looked like something else altogether. That night I dreamt that a white papal statue pursued me across a chessboard, which looked exactly like the cold tiled floor of our apartment.

  But here is Trastevere, finally. What had seemed so difficult to achieve married is, on my own, laughably easy, as easy as crossing a bridge. Get over it: I shouldn’t be so surprised. Rome is full of illusions. On the Via Piccolomini (teeny-tiny-street?) the dome of Saint Peter’s appears to shrink as you get near to it and, in the church of Saint Ignatius, a hollow ceiling appears to recede into a flat roof. I am surprised I tire of Trastevere so quickly. Its non-monumental smallness has been so thoroughly enclosed for tourists. There are no vistas, there is no room for views. Saint Peter’s might survive the hordes but you need grandeur for that.