Agathe was smiling when she stepped off the tram and walked into the Town Hall. The morning mail was waiting on her desk ready for sorting—a heap of ordinary-looking letters for Mayor Krovic, a grey cardboard file from the Town Clerk, a couple of tender documents to do with roof repairs at the abattoir and, underneath it all, placed in the middle of her desk before the mail boy arrived, a sheet of paper with the Mayor’s handwriting. It said, “There is a note on the door of The Golden Angel saying ‘Closed due to bereavement.’ Please find out what’s happened and if there is anything we can do.” And it was signed “K.”
HREE YEARS HAVE CHANGED A LOT OF things in The Golden Angel. The little wedding photo in its finger-worn frame, the one that used to stand on Mamma Cesare’s dressing table, hangs now in a place of honour in the parlour. And above it is a larger one in an ornate frame of gold showing a middle-aged man with suspiciously black hair and a dark-eyed woman in a jelly mould of a dress. It is Cesare and Maria, his much younger wife who feeds him pasta every day and tells him every night that she likes Dot, even if it is cold and far from the old country.
Maria has not come alone. There is little Cesare now—he can almost climb out of his cot already, which is good since little Maria will be needing it when she arrives soon. And there are the “uncles,” Luigi and Beppo, Maria’s brothers, who looked down a dried-out well on a two-goat farm and decided that waiting tables in their new brother-in-law’s faraway cafe might not be such a bad thing.
Cesare was astonished at how quickly his reputation as a millionaire businessman had spread in the old country but, he reasoned, family was family and, if it made Maria happy, it would make him happy.
It made him miserable. Luigi and Beppo hated each other and they were fiery—not at all the sort of men Cesare would have hired to stand like Swiss Guards around the Vatican of his cafe. They jabbered at each other from one side of the room to the other and no amount of eyebrow flashing from Cesare could persuade them to stop. Sometimes—thank God Mamma hadn’t lived to see it— he had been forced to step out from behind the coffee organ and speak to them—actually speak to them—before they would shut up. But it never lasted. Before long, they were hissing and spitting like cats or jabbing fingers and jutting chins and biting thumbs in vile gestures which, happily, meant nothing to the quiet, untravelled customers of Dot.
“This won’t do,” he told Maria.
“Put one of them in the kitchen with me. Tell them it’s a promotion. That’ll sort it out.” And she kissed him.
So, first thing next morning, Cesare tapped Luigi on the shoulder and said, “Good news—you’re being promoted. Report to Maria in the kitchen. There’s no pay rise.”
But it was a mistake. Maria had always liked Luigi better and Beppo knew it. From the time they were little children, when Beppo went out to catch lizards or to watch the men killing a pig or to throw stones at little birds, Luigi was always at home with Maria, making dolls out of a bit of knotted cloth or picking flowers in the orchard and giggling. Now Beppo saw this imagined promotion as another rejection, just one more chance for the two of them to huddle together in the kitchen and talk about him.
Beppo fumed. He started to take a perverse delight in ordering the wrong things from the kitchen only to bring them back and say, “They changed their minds,” or, “They say the minestrone tastes like sewage. Luigi must have made it.” And then there would be another explosion of babbling and a crashing of plates and a banging of shutters.
“This can’t go on,” said Cesare. “Our beautiful home has turned into a battlefield.”
But Maria just kissed him some more and said, “They are brothers. It’ll sort itself out.”
She didn’t help. She worked hard on the menu and when, one day, she invented a new pizza, she called it “Pizza Luigi.”
“What about me?” Beppo asked. “When are you going to make a Pizza Beppo?”
“I will, I will,” Maria said, “just as soon as I get enough arse-holes for the topping!”
That cost The Golden Angel another cup and half a dozen plates.
“Take them out for a drink,” Maria advised. “If they could just sit down over a few beers, they could sort this out.”
Beppo was eager to go, even if it meant cutting into his own, private drinking time but Luigi never would. Every night after work, he hung up his apron and hurried back to the little flat he shared with Zoltan, a whey-faced waiter with a thick moustache who looked out at the world from beneath a long lick of dark hair. They never invited anybody round. They never went out.
Cesare wondered what they found to do with their time.
“They play mummies and daddies,” Beppo snorted and Maria smashed another cup on the wall behind his head.
“Many a true word,” Cesare thought.
And it wasn’t very many days afterwards that he came in to the cafe and found Zoltan slouched at a corner table with the mop bucket steaming, unused beside him.
“What’s wrong with you?” Cesare said.
“I got a letter. My parents are coming on a visit.”
“Why is this a bad thing and why does it stop you mopping my floors?”
Zoltan stood up and leaned on the mop. “My parents hate me.”
“And you’re upset because it’s your job to hate them, is that it?”
“They hate me because I wrote home and told them I was living with a girl. Now they are coming to meet her.”
“And you’ll look foolish because there’s no girl. Serves you right. Why on earth would you tell them such a stupid, cruel lie?”
“So I wouldn’t have to tell them something even worse,” said Zoltan and he slopped the mop on the floor and began to scrub.
“Get on with your work,” Cesare said. He went and stood by the coffee organ and pretended that he hadn’t understood.
But there was no pretending when the door swung open a few minutes later and Luigi walked in. To be fair, he looked wonderful and Cesare found himself watching, swivel-eyed, as this dark-eyed beauty, all curls and heels, swayed into the cafe but, when she spoke—“I am Louisa and I’ll be working here from now on.”—Cesare gaped in astonishment. In fact, he was so astonished that he never even moved from his spot by the coffee organ and “Louisa” walked on, through to the kitchen, with no more than a wave at the smiling Zoltan.
The pigeons on the cathedral dome rose up in a cloud when they heard Maria’s scream and she came running from the kitchen, her apron thrown up over her face, crashing blindly into the tables and howling as she went.
Only Beppo was calm. “I knew it all along,” he said. “How could you not know?” He went to the kitchen and said, “Welcome, sister—I love you.”
Come away from there now. Come away from The Golden Angel and down Castle Street and across White Bridge and through City Square, up the green marble staircase of the Town Hall and into the office of Good Tibo Krovic. See him now, just as you saw him on that first day, flat out on the floor of his office, lying on the carpet, squinting through the gap under the door and hoping for a glimpse of Mrs. Agathe Stopak.
And then, after he has seen her passing by, after he has gazed with love on her little pink-painted toes, after he has reassured himself that she is at her desk and well and close to him, Mayor Krovic can get on with his day.
That day began as all his days began—with standing up and brushing the carpet fluff from his suit and sighing. And then Good Tibo Krovic sat down at his desk and sighed some more. Sighing was an improvement for Tibo—an advance. These days, he merely sighed. He was no longer a slave to helpless, broken sobs. Tibo had learned to adapt, the way that a dog with three legs learns to more or less run, learns always to lean against the lamp post before it pees. He no longer lost himself in unexpected fits of crying. He found that he no longer had to leave notes for Agathe, giving her orders or asking for her help with this or that. He could bring himself to talk to her and his voice stayed calm and level. He could even look her in the face unless, by some cha
nce, she turned those deep, dark eyes on him and he had to look away. But, like the three-legged dog, Tibo was an amputee. Something had been wrenched out of him and it would never grow back.
It was a weakness. He blamed himself for it. He blamed Agathe for it. He blamed himself because, in spite of all his stern resolutions—“I will be happy by New Year,” or “I will be over this by my birthday” or “September marks two years and two years is enough”—he found that he still loved her and he hated himself for that. He found himself ridiculous, mourning for years over something which had lasted for months and which he had acknowledged for only moments before it ended. But, he reasoned, that would be like denying a life simply because it was brief. A baby dead in the cradle, a baby stillborn, was still a baby, still to be valued and treasured, and this was still a love, however short.
So the pendulum swung back and he gave himself a pat on the back, applauded his unchanging, steadfast love, recognised it as proof of his own nobility and her weak faithlessness. It was Agathe’s fault that he had never healed—her fault that he was forced to endure the daily wounds of her beauty, her scent, her great dark, sad eyes.
And every day, when he was with her and never mentioned his pain, never gave her the slightest clue, never breathed the tiniest recrimination in all those three years, he knew, in his heart, that she took for indifference what was a constant, day by day, act of love. It pained him that she failed to notice everything he did for her but it made his martyrdom all the sweeter, except on the occasional days when he noticed himself glorying in the lash of her coldness. Then he would hold his head in his hands and mutter, “Pitiful,” at himself. It was pitiful to find the courage to say nothing now when, three years ago, he had lacked the courage to speak until it was far, far too late.
Tibo endured the usual fantasies of the abandoned lover. He imagined himself dead and yet, somehow, still able to watch and enjoy the delicious, bittersweet sensation of Agathe kneeling by his grave and soaking it with her repentant tears. He imagined, again and again, the day when she would come to her senses and appear on his doorstep, pleading for forgiveness, admitting her mistake, acknowledging him as the master of her heart. And then the joy, the bliss of that moment when he could snatch her up in his arms and kiss away her tears and lead her to his big old bed. Even after three years, Tibo had yet to decide whether the thrill of it could ever rival the sheer delight of slamming the door in her face.
But Agathe was not repentant. She never once begged forgiveness and, though Tibo was sure he read a certain pained sympathy in her eyes, she never spoke a word of concern to him. That was her gift to him when, every day, she longed to pet him and mother him and reassure him but didn’t and, instead, stayed distant and aloof because she hoped it would cure him. That was what she did for him and he took it for unkindness.
It wasn’t unkindness. Agathe was incapable of unkindness. She meant it as a courtesy. She was offering him the same comfortable, protective blanket of secrecy that she had drawn about herself.
Agathe never said a word about her life outside the office to anyone—least of all to Tibo. She never mentioned the flat in Canal Street, never discussed Hektor or what he had done, never said a word about the last picture he had abandoned, unfinished, or the next he was about to begin, soon, because these things can’t be forced and it’s not like laying bricks or delivering milk bottles. If Hektor got a job, she said nothing. She said nothing when he kept the money for himself and spent all of hers too. She said nothing when he was out of work again—and he was always out of work again, before too long. She never admitted to the gnaw of disappointment that had settled in her chest quite early on and stayed there, quietly, unless she looked at it, when it would show its teeth and turn into something like fear. She never admitted that—especially not to herself—and she said nothing of the nights and the days and the nights she spent in Hektor’s bed, whole Earth turns when she refused to get up for even as long as it took to eat, in case she missed a moment of him. She never spoke of that—especially not to Tibo. She was quiet and private and discreet. It was a protection for her and, from politeness, she offered it to Tibo too, never asking anything, pretending not to know. She was calm and brisk and businesslike, as cold and beautiful and unchanging as marble.
And Agathe was looking particularly beautiful that morning when she knocked on the door of Tibo’s office.
“Come in, Mrs. Stopak,” he said.
She arrived, bringing drifts of “Tahiti” and echoes of distant angel choirs in her wake and, when she spoke, Tibo concentrated very hard on the tiny mole just above her top lip, a little full stop to her sumptuousness. But it didn’t help. His mind was flooded with so many things. Agathe eating lunch with him as she used to do. Agathe naked. Agathe by the fountain. Two snails in tiger-stripe shells he discovered on the lighthouse path, aching their way from one grass fringe to another which they could neither see nor imagine, crawling on over an endless, infinite, horizon-bending vista of gravel, a jagged Pacific of dust which they had three quarters crossed before he picked them up and placed them at their destination. Agathe naked. Agathe walking down Castle Street. Agathe naked. The smell of her, the sound of her, the way she had fitted against him as they stood by the gate of Copernicus Park. Agathe naked. And why? What did it mean? What did any of it mean? Two snails crossing a path and his life without Agathe—which was more meaningless? And why did it matter?
“This morning’s post,” she said and placed a leather folder carefully on his desk.
Tibo said, “Thank you.” But it was automatic—he wasn’t aware of having said it and, had he been on oath and facing the lawyer Guillaume, he could not have sworn that he said it. “Just close your eyes and think lovely thoughts,” he told himself. But his eyes were open. It didn’t work. “To die will be an awfully big adventure”—one silly observation seemed to follow another and Tibo found himself cursing the Library Committee of a generation before. If they had never bought that copy of Peter Pan, if he had never read it, maybe life would be better now. Or maybe not.
“There’s nothing remarkable about it,” she said.
“No.”
“The post, I mean.”
“Yes, I know. No.”
“It was just, I thought. Well, I didn’t know if you were …”
“Well, I was,” he said. It annoyed him that, even now, they could read one another’s minds, finish one another’s sentences.
“Right. Of course you were. Sorry.”
She put another folder on the desk. “Today’s diary. Planning Committee at eleven. Lunch is clear …”
“It always is,” Tibo thought.
“You’re opening the new gym hall at the Western Girls’ School at 3 p.m.”
“Ribbon cutting?”
“And a gymnastic display. Not you. Just the girls. Then there’s nothing until the full council meeting this evening. The agenda’s in there.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Stopak,” he said, looking firmly at his blotter and, when she stood still at the other side of the desk, he said, “Thank you,” again. Without moving his head, Tibo raised his eyes from the desk and let them linger on her as she left. “Oh, dear God,” he whispered. “Oh, Walpurnia.”
Tibo busied himself at his desk. There were bits of paper to read, bits of paper to write on, bits of paper to look at for a long time or move round on the desk from here to there, from this folder to that. He reached for a paperclip but the little dish where they were supposed to be was suddenly, unaccountably empty. He opened his drawer. Long experience of desks had taught him that every drawer in every desk in every office in the world contained at least one dusty mint, a blunt pencil, an out-of-date railway timetable and a paperclip. He reached into the back of the drawer and, under two of last year’s promotional calendars from Weltz’s garage, his hand found a dry crinkle of paper. He had forgotten the postcards from the museum, of course, but touching the bag made the memory come alive again.
There was no reason not to take
the bag out, no reason not to look at the card he knew would be inside, no reason not to think whatever thoughts looking at that picture again might bring. But Tibo somehow felt that would be wrong—a self-indulgent picking of the scab which he had resolved to leave alone so he lied to himself and pretended not to recognise the bag’s autumn-dry rustle for what it was.
“Well, now, I wonder,” he said and stopped. There was no point, no audience to fool but himself and he was not fooled. With the tips of two fingers he slid the postcard from the bag and let it fall on the blotter. The beautiful woman beside a gushing fountain. Diana. The baleful goddess flashing fire and ice from her eyes. Agathe. Three years had not altered her. She was unchanged, unfaded. Tibo sighed. He tore the card in two, then tore it again and dropped it in the wastepaper basket beside his chair. There should be nothing left, he decided, no scrap of evidence that survived, nothing. But even nothing was something. The fact that he had destroyed that postcard was proof of something and it existed now—like the other one, the one he had sent—as much by its absence as it ever had at the back of his drawer. Like the soap he had bought for her, now long ago washed down the sink, like the Turkish delight long since eaten, like the disappointing lottery tickets long since thrown away. After three years, there was still a gap where they used to be, like the shape of a picture faded into wallpaper, the indelible sign of something that wasn’t there.
The Good Mayor: A Novel Page 28