After showering, Marie made herself a tea, which she drank from a big bowl on the terrace, then she went to have a look in the toolshed. She dug through a pile of junk in search of a few tools, moved aside a wheelbarrow, and returned to the garden with a pick, a rake, and a pair of clippers sticking out of her pant’s back pocket like a comb. She began working in the garden, she clipped the creepers and bramble, whose scraps she raked into neat piles. She wore her father’s old straw hat, a pair of jeans, a white shirt, and rather kitschy flip-flops, with a plastic daisy in bloom in between her two big toes. Pulling up weeds, tearing out some fuller’s teasel, she cleaned up around where her father’s tomatoes had been with her bare hands. Standing on her toes, she rerouted long branches of honeysuckle, careful not to break its vines, which she transferred from the wall to a trellised espalier. Then she watered the garden, pensive, slowly moving around the enclosure while dragging behind her a rolled yellow hose, which slithered along like an obedient snake.
Below the house the horse’s paddock had been untouched since the previous summer. Marie crossed the old fence and went down formerly cultivated plots of land, now overgrown, their surfaces bumpy, rocky, uneven, where grass had shot up in irregular tufts around the ruins of small stone walls. She walked three hundred feet or so before stopping in front of the sea and gazing down at its expanse, blue, still, slack, its surface slightly ruffled at times by an imperceptible heaving. The sky met the sea at the horizon, and their two blues fused there, the deep blue of the sea and the paler, slightly hazy blue of the sky. All was calm around her, the silence of nature, the occasional chirping of birds, the flight of a butterfly, the tall grass of the property bent gently by a languid breeze.
Marie spent the summer alone at La Rivercina. Occasionally, in the early evening, returning from the beach, she’d wash her hair in the small garden, standing against the gate in her bathing suit, her bare feet in the soil or planted on a blue duckboard, her hair lathered with a soapy white foam whose vanilla scent seemed to hang in the air around her, and she ran her hands through her hair under the hose’s spray of warm water. She’d bend down to turn off the water and roll her hair up in a big white towel, after having let it drip at length, her head hanging upside down above the ground. She’d return to the house, her flip-flops slipping off her feet, barely attached, sliding on the ground and scraping against the terrace’s large, irregular flagstones. She’d lower the straps of her bathing suit one at a time, slide it down her hips and leave it carelessly on the kitchen floor, proceeding up the stairs naked, turbaned in white, her flip-flops clacking, daisies between her toes, her naked body pearled with beads of water glistening in the sun and trickling off her at each step.
Before leaving La Rivercina the previous year, Marie had boarded her father’s horses at the equestrian club of La Guardia. When her father was still alive, Peppino, the manager of the club, would see to the horses’ health, coming by La Rivercina at least once a month to check on them, inspect their coats, examine their teeth. Old Maurizio was happy to make sure the horses had water, and Marie’s father would give them a treat sometimes by bringing them an extra share of hay or a bucket of oats. He’d cross the paddock’s fence and walk up to the horses with his bucket, addressing them cheerfully from a distance (ciao, ragazzi, he’d say to them, and he’d pet their necks affectionately with the flat of his hand, and they’d snort and shake, sending swarms of flies away in the dust of the paddock).
Marie had taken a liking to Nocciola, the mare with beautiful eyes that she’d ridden for the first time the previous year, the day of her father’s funeral, when she’d escorted his hearse on horseback through the streets of Elba all the way to the cemetery. This year she’d gone to see Nocciola at the equestrian club at the beginning of July, and she’d wanted to ride her. She rode her at a slow pace, gently going around the riding stable, under the passive surveillance of Peppino’s daughter, a glum adolescent straddling the fence, a telefonino at her ear, speaking with a lilt that she punctuated at times with a brief salvo of eloquent gestures made with an upturned hand. The equestrian club comprised a scattered set of stone cottages spread around a sort of clearing, at one end of which lay a dusty track with a single building for the lounge and reception, a shed for the saddles and various harnesses, as well as simple stables with sheet metal roofs and wooden frames, reinforced with planks, where the horses spent the night. From outside the stalls, the dark manes of the horses could be seen waving in the air, while their legs were still under the stable doors, as though their upper and lower halves belonged to different animals. The riding stable felt at once closed and opened, surrounded as it was by white barriers and at the same time leading directly into the coastal scrub. On horseback, one’s view stretched far into the surrounding countryside, past the wild olive trees, all the way to the hill’s barren crest, where wind and successive fires had consumed most of its vegetation. It wasn’t long before Marie needed no help riding Nocciola, she saddled the mare herself when she arrived at the club, leading her by the bridle, mounting the saddle, and riding around the paddock at a slow pace, then, firmly kicking the horse’s sides, riding at a trot, and, after a week, at a gallop.
One morning, at the end of August, Marie, casting aside the old clothes she wore for riding or gardening, did herself up, she’d put on makeup in front of the mirror. Before leaving her room, she carefully applied her lipstick, which she softened by pressing her lips to the soft center of a toilet paper roll, leaving the silent vestige of a red kiss on the roll as she placed it back down on the marble counter. Marie left the property in her father’s old open-bed truck, and she drove serenely through the winding roads of Elba, the sea below her, blue, still, with warm air blowing through the truck’s open windows. Next to her, on the seat, sat a bouquet of wild flowers she’d arranged the night before in the kitchen, with a sense of refinement she demonstrated time and again when dealing with colors and fabrics, never forcing novelty or originality, just a small gesture, simple, confident, natural, bringing together, in a vase, the obvious and the impossible, three sprigs of fennel culled on the side of the road, two branches of a young eucalyptus taken from a tree in the garden, and a few clippings of bougainvillea with royal purple flowers she’d stolen from the terrace of a seaside residence.
Before arriving at Portoferraio, Marie had turned onto a small winding road that led to the cemetery where her father was buried. Once there, standing motionless, she bowed her head in silence a moment in front of his grave. She placed the bouquet of wild flowers on his grave and left without looking back, she returned to the car and took off without delay toward Portoferraio. She’d driven into the city proper and continued all the way to the port, blankly staring out the smudged windshield, its surface covered in a thick layer of dirt and resin from the pine tree under which the old truck had spent the winter. Marie drove along the quays slowly and parked the car by the harbormaster’s office. She got out and left the port on foot to go have an espresso at the counter of one of the many cafés on the esplanade by the docks. She sipped her espresso calmly, it was almost noon, she was in her full splendor, wearing white pants and a slightly faded parma pink shirt, and she watched the ships drift in and out of the port. After about twenty minutes, a boat coming from Piombino came into the port, and I was there, on the deck of the boat.
It was my first time in Elba since the previous summer, almost a year to the day since Marie’s father’s death. I took the same Toremar boat I’d taken the previous year, when I’d come back from China to attend her father’s funeral. As soon as the boat set sail, I took refuge in one of the cabins on the lower deck, and I sat lost in thought in the hot, dark shade of a stiff seat with metal armrests. I ended up falling asleep, dozing in the half-light, soothed by the hum of the motor, details from the night of Jean-Christophe de G.’s death filling my mind, without my trying consciously to put them together into any particular order. No, I settled only on snatches of that night in my half-sleep, making some vague conjectu
res — hypotheses and projected images — calling on different areas of my brain, having recourse to reason when developing hypotheses or evoking corresponding images from dreams. To a few confirmed and proven facts from that night, I added my own fantasies, mixing them together liberally in my mind, linking imaginary acts to real places in my half-sleep, mentally walking around the apartment on rue de la Vrillière, where I’d spent more than five years with Marie, moving in and out of rooms, opening the window and finding the gate around the Banque de France, Parisian streetlamps infusing the whole scene with a yellow light, while at the present moment I was sitting snugly on a boat silently crossing calm seas between the coast of Italy and the shores of Elba.
I knew that night contained its own objective reality — what had really taken place in the apartment on rue de la Vrillière — but that reality would always be out of my grasp, I could only circle it, approach it from different angles, go around it and attack it from the side, but I’d always come up short, as though what had actually happened that night was fundamentally unattainable to me, out of my imagination’s reach and irreducible to language. I could reconstruct that night in mental images with the precision of dreams, I could cover it in words with a formidable power of evocation, all in vain, I knew I’d never reach what had been the fleeting life of the night itself, but it seemed to me that I could perhaps reach a new truth, one that would take its inspiration from life and then transcend it, without concern for verisimilitude or veracity, its only aim the quintessence of the real, its tender core, pulsing and vibrant, a truth close to invention, the twin of fabrication, the ideal truth.
Toward the end of the trip, while the boat approached the shores of Elba, my thoughts began to drift toward another night Marie had talked about, the night of her return from Japan. I hadn’t been with her that night, but I saw in a similar way the events unfold behind my closed eyes, with the main characters materializing and taking shape in my mind, faceless and nameless, and yet they were not inventions or chimeras but real people whose lives must have corresponded to what I saw in my mind. Lulled by the hypnotic hum of the boat’s engines, I watched these characters move silently in my mind, and, even if I was absent from the scenes unfolding behind my closed eyes, even if I wasn’t actively involved, even if I failed to appear physically among the other figures, I knew I was intimately present, not only as the sole source of each evocation, but at the heart of each and every character, to whom I was bound in ways unknown, with hidden and secret ties linking us together — for I was as much myself as each one of them.
My imperfect knowledge of what happened the night of Jean-Christophe de G.’s death, the many murky areas surrounding the events of that evening, were hardly a handicap for me. On the contrary, this forced me to employ my imagination to a much greater degree, pressed me to provide all the details in my mind, whereas had I really been there I’d simply have remembered everything. No, I wasn’t there that night, but I’d followed Marie in thought with the same emotional intensity as if I had been, as in a performance executed without me, not from which I am absent, but in which only my senses participate, as in dreams, where each figure is no more than an expression of one’s self, recreated through the prism of our own subjectivity, sprung from our own sensibility, our intelligence and fantasies. Even if I wasn’t fully asleep, my mind was seized by the irreducible mystery of dreams, that force which allows you to create extraordinarily elaborate images and which then arranges them in a series with no apparent order, with vertiginous gaps, areas that vanish into thin air and characters drawn from our own lives who merge seamlessly, fuse, transform into new beings, and, despite this radical incoherence, these images awake in us, with a blistering intensity, memories, desires, and fears, all of which, as happens rarely in life itself, give rise to true terror and love. For there is no third person in dreams, never, it is always a matter of one’s own self, as in “The Island of Anamorphosis,” an apocryphal story by Borges in which the writer who first invents the third person in literature ends up, after a long process of solipsistic decline, depressed and conquered, renouncing his invention to switch back to the first.
I was among the first to disembark when we arrived at Elba. Marie was waiting for me at the quay, she watched me come down the gangplank, her gaze attentive, veiled, beautiful. There was love the moment we saw each other again, from the first look, even if my arms, my hands, drawn toward her uncontrollably, didn’t act on the impulse my eyes betrayed. Reaching the quay, I simply put my hand on her shoulder, silently, not knowing what to say, letting my hand slide down her bare arm, our first physical contact in two months. It was Marie who’d invited me to join her in Elba, but clearly that didn’t imply any change in our relationship — we were still separated, even if, by sheer circumstance, our relationship had become new, ambiguous, unexpected.
As strange as it may sound, I made Marie happy, I’d always made her happy. Besides, I’d noticed that I made women happy, not all women in general, but each one in particular, each believing herself the only one, by her singular perspicacity, her penetrating gaze, and her feminine intuition, to detect in me hidden qualities no other woman could identify. Each of them was in fact convinced that these invisible qualities, which they’d detected in me, passed unnoticed to everyone except herself, whereas in reality many a woman was the only one to appreciate my secret qualities and to fall under my spell. It’s true, however, that these qualities were far from apparent, and, if too nuanced or subtle, my charm could be mistaken for dullness and my sense of humor as lacking, as only a thin line separates finesse from drabness.
On the way to La Rivercina, I became carsick almost immediately, I felt nauseous as soon as the route began curving. Marie pulled over on a cliffside, and I rushed out of the car to throw up (what a seducer, oh how she must have missed me!). Hands on my knees, sweat dripping off my forehead, with nothing left in my stomach, I continued to dry heave, only spitting out saliva, long elastic strings that swung down at my feet in the gravel. Marie had walked off to pick some flowers along the side of the road, she was wandering idly among the coastal scrub on the cliff side, a sprig of fennel sticking out of her mouth, on whose end she chewed while making a bouquet of wild flowers. I could see her from my stooped position, and I imagined the fresh flavor of the fennel on her tongue. When she came back toward me, I sketched a smile of apology with my characteristic and winning diffidence.
While her father was at La Rivercina, Marie and I used to sleep together on the first floor of the house, and I wondered now which room Marie was going to give me. She led me through the dark rooms on the first floor, and I followed her silently, we passed her father’s empty office, its blinds were closed, I glimpsed a stack of boxes in the half-light. She led me to her room as if from habit, and I was relieved she still wanted me to sleep with her on the first floor. But I had some indefinable feeling as I stepped into the room. Everything was in perfect order, no stray towels or wet bathing suits balled up on the floor, no open drawers, no hair dryers abandoned on the ground plugged into a nearby outlet. No, the room was impeccable, the curtains drawn, carefully tied on each side of the window, a pile of folded towels was placed on a chair as in a guest room. I put my bag down on a chair, and it was only then that I realized Marie wasn’t sleeping there with me, she was staying in her father’s room on the second floor.
Later that afternoon, Marie suggested we go for a swim. We drove to a small deserted cove where the lapping of waves and the hum of insects hardly broke the afternoon silence of the shore. Marie strode up to the water in her bathing suit, she’d picked up a stone and was bent over pulling mollusks off the rocks, which she then popped in her mouth as she continued to amble down the shore, sucking on the shells before throwing them back into the sea with a listless, sideways flick of the wrist. She collected winkles from the cracks in the rocks, holding a small heap of them in her cupped hand. She continued on her way, pensive, crouching at a rock that jutted halfway out of the water, its surface covere
d in moss and green algae and concretions of crenulated shells, a compact mass of balanomorpha, and, gripping her stone tightly, she tried to detach some miniscule mussels, their shells bristling with braided filaments. She walked back over to me and dumped her booty at my feet, spreading her hands wide and letting fall a cascade of wet shellfish that clinked as they fell into a loose pile at my feet (I tried to dodge them in vain by wiggling my toes in the air). Then, leaping over my body on the rocks, she grabbed a T-shirt and a pair of shoes, with which she built a small enclosure for the shellfish, a natural reserve, a fish pool of diverse vongole to add to our spaghetti later that night.
Marie had returned to the shoreline. She stood with her feet in the water and her hands on her hips, lost in contemplation, observing a sea anemone gently floating underwater at her feet, sinking and rising to the surface with the waves, its tentacles deployed and undulating in the current like transparent strands of hair waving in the water. Then, resolute, she entered the water, her arms spread, lifting them high lest the waterline reach her armpits, letting out clipped shrieks of protest, brief sharp cries expressing the thermal difference between her body and the sea, before letting herself fall back into the water joyously, submerging her head completely underwater. She frolicked thus for a bit, then asked me to bring her her snorkeling mask. I joined her in the water, and she began rinsing the snorkeling mask by my side, spitting into it to clean the goggles. She adjusted it and put it on underwater, taking a quick look around under the sea. There are a ton of sea urchins, she told me excitedly, in a slightly nasal tone, her nose pinched by the mask, and, swimming away from me, she dove headfirst into the water, her feet kicking wildly in the air before fully disappearing into the sea. She’d completely vanished in the deep water, only tiny bubbles rising to the surface gave her away. Having no tool, no small knife or fork, she stayed underwater for a long time, surging up suddenly out of breath and glancing around for me, her mask askew, spitting water out of the snorkel like the vertical spray of a whale, with, in her hands, three beautifully mauve and slimy urchins, their quills, still moving, covered with miniscule mineral or vegetal deposits, bits of algae and tiny pebbles, debris of colored stones, shards of broken shells. She got back on her feet and headed to shore, swaying her hips as she pushed against the current, slicing the water with her thighs. She grabbed a large stone from the rocks and opened the urchins, partially, breaking open their tests with blows of the stone, one after another, straightening her arms over the water and then shaking the shells energetically to remove any sea waste. She scooped out an orange-colored strip with the back of her finger and tasted it, first for herself, with a quick flip of her finger, as she brought it up to her mouth, then she offered me one when I got out of the water, still wet, feeding me tenderly two or three pieces (and I delighted in the taste of her wet finger as much as in the fresh and delicious urchin strips that melted in my mouth).
The Truth about Marie Page 9