She looks at him, then shakes her head. She sighs and closes her eyes.
In Siena, she doesn’t study Italian. How could she study Italian? She can’t speak any language.
Slowly, after many months, she doesn’t remember how, she finds her way to the Accademia di Belle Arti, the university art school, housed in a thirteenth-century Franciscan convent with high vaulted windows looking out over the hills to infinity. And there, silently, she begins to make shapes in clay. At first she destroys everything she makes. Then she begins to shape a woman’s head. Day after day she goes and works on it, moulding and pressing it until the professor tells her it is done. She should cast it in bronze.
She thinks back. Such good work, the slow remaking of a life. She begins to talk to him, a few halting words in Italian. Grazie. Come faccio? Grazie, speaking of grace. Then more. Slowly she learns to speak again. The new words, the Italian words, feel clean. Golden. Usable. Safe. Like the brimming over of a golden liquid. She rejoices in this new language, in its wonderful crisp sounds the meaning of which still often evades her. Cinquecentocinquanta-cinque. Terontola. Castruccio Castracane.
She never learns it formally, as a comparison to another language, finding parallels in grammar and meaning. No. It is something separate. She learns it in the street, as it were; pointing to something she is told its name and that becomes it. Mela has no connection to the word apple and all its implications. It is just a fruit. And it tastes and smells of mela. Her two worlds are separate. Even today she finds it almost impossible to translate from English to Italian and vice versa.
Slowly she learns to seek out the other, or at least not to withdraw, like a sea anemone, at the touch of a hand. Dust. Clay. Mud. Remaking herself.
One day she walks out and the grass is green. Green, so startlingly green and beautiful it makes her gasp. She didn’t know there was so much beauty in the world. It is just a scruffy patch of grass on the side of a road, edging out from dirty melting snow, but she remembers it as one of the most important turning points of her life.
Life feels infinitely interesting now. She decides she wants to understand things. She registers for a long-distance degree in Anthropology and Psychology through the University of South Africa and studies Arabic and Zulu as part of the course.
At the same time she applies to study Philosophy at the University of Bologna and is accepted on condition that she pass a language test in Italian first. She passes the test, to her great joy. There is a choice of Ancient, Medieval or Modern Philosophy. She chooses Ancient because she thinks she will have enough background for that.
She attends her first lecture – it is on Plato’s Republic and she is sure she will cope, having read the Penguin paperback edition of the Socratic dialogues after lights-out at boarding school under her blankets with the aid of a torch. The whole lecture is conducted in Ancient Greek. The students ask questions in Greek and read from their books in Greek. She doesn’t understand a word. At some point, the professor notices that she is struggling and turns to her in Italian and kindly tries to include her by asking her about the South African republic. He asks her about the constitution. She remembers her embarrassment at having to explain that South Africa didn’t have one. It is her first shuddering awareness of how limited her education has been.
She applies for a transfer to Modern Philosophy instead.
She meets a boy from Libya who is studying medicine in Bologna. Ahmed is his name. This is just after just after Qaddafi has come to power and has set up a bursary scheme for poorer students to study abroad.
Ahmed renames her; for the three or four years she lives with him she becomes Samira, no longer Anna. It is strange how happy she is to adapt and shift her identity to match other people’s needs. When she thinks back, it seems to be something she has often done.
It bothers her a bit now. This question of names and naming and language. As if the label had no importance. As if there is a reality below language which is where she exists.
The room is completely silent. Suddenly afraid, she opens her eyes to see what he is doing.
He looks at her penetratingly, then smiles.
She closes her eyes again quickly.
She learns Quranic Arabic and applies to the Al-Azhar University in Cairo to study letters and is turned down because she is not Muslim. She feels relieved. She discovers Dante. And through him she hears echoes of Eliot shifting through herself. And she thinks of home for the first time. She asks the South African consul in Rome if her friend can apply for a visa to visit Cape Town. The consul explains that the application will have to go via Pretoria and that its success will depend on whether her friend looks dark-skinned or light-skinned in the photo. He explains that there is no automatic racial classification for Arabs; while the Chinese are coloured, the Japanese are honorary white, and the Turks are white, Arabs go on a case-by-case basis. She laughs.
She feels she belongs to his group of friends but she also feels excluded at the same time, because of course she isn’t one of them and can’t speak their language well, and they are all male – she is the only girl. They eat mbekbka nearly every night, sitting on the ground in a circle, and drum and clap and sing afterwards. They are treated with hostility by many Italians who call them Turchi or Marocchini and won’t let them an apartment or trust them in any way.
She drives around with them at night, sitting in the back seat of the car with her face covered, to the streets where the prostitutes work. They take delight in asking the women the price of their services, but it never goes any further than that, at least while she is in the car.
Bologna is different from the Italy she has known until now. The people are dry, witty, practical, interested in reality and good food rather than mysticism. She attends lectures in the Faculty of Philosophy, but when she is free she also attends lectures in the School of Medicine with Ahmed. Everything interests her. She goes to an anatomy lecture and watches the professor and his assistants dissect a large bloated human body that is turning green and purple in places.
He sits forward, clears his throat and looks at the clock. She gets up.
Session 8
The usual room, the usual time.
It is a dark cold November evening in Milano. Shop lights reflecting dully, yellow and oily on the wet cobbles. Fog touching the skin, reaching up into the sleeves of her sheepskin jacket. She has come up from Bologna on the afternoon train and booked into a cheap pensione near the consulate, where she will go to write an exam the next morning, and has gone back out to find somewhere to eat. She peers into two restaurants but they look formal and expensive. Then she notices, across the street, between racing taxis, a trattoria. She crosses over and pushes open the doors. Warmth and good smells and a buzz of conversation spill out into the street.
She steps inside and looks around. Simple, unpretentious, but full. Every table is taken. On the far side she sees a woman sitting alone at a table, and, tired from the journey and reluctant to go back out into the cold, she crosses the room and asks if she would mind if they shared. The woman smiles and pulls out a chair. They fall into light conversation.
It feels like so long ago. But her mind is drawn back to that night, something about it unresolved still.
They chat idly, chance acquaintances in a big city. Then suddenly he arrives. She is embarrassed, an intruder, she motions to get up and leave them alone, they press her to stay. She stays. The conversation flows and ripples around the table, playfully, flirtatiously, she can feel the sexual undertow drawing her in; she allows it, curious to see where it will go. At midnight the trattoria closes, he invites the two women to his house for a drink, they exchange glances, accept.
The portinaia sticks her head out briefly as they stand waiting for the ancient lift to stagger to a halt on the ground floor, sees him, nods and withdraws. They laugh as the lift carries them up. They alight and he opens the door.
She wonders if it was the beauty of the apartment that made her stay. High ceilings
, frescoes, walls covered with a dazzling collection of modern art – she recognises works by Modigliani, de Chirico, Guttuso, intermixed with rococo portraits of ancestors, a monsignore, a bishop – colours, shapes, insinuating, surrounding, holding. She realises she has unexpectedly walked into one of the most refined corners of the European intelligentsia. She feels the way Ali Baba must have when the door opened into the treasure cave.
She pauses a moment, thinking. Would she have found him so attractive if he had lived in an ordinary apartment and led an ordinary life? The question keeps bothering her, pulling at the edges of her consciousness.
They talk and talk. At last she tells them she must go. The invitation to go further is there, but she withdraws and it is fine. They accompany her back to her hotel.
When she gets back to her room she realises she has left her umbrella in his apartment. So after her meeting at the consulate the next morning, she goes back, expecting to find only the portinaia and hoping to be able to persuade her to recover the umbrella. But he is there, has taken the day off work.
He is delighted to see her and invites her in. Prepares a salad and omelette for their lunch. They sit in the kitchen with the scent of cooking in the air and drink wine from Orvieto, and the conversation meanders and they talk about art and politics, and he shows her the lithographs by Tono Brancanaro of the prostitutes of Padua, the Belle del Prà, whose eyes watch her knowingly. And he shows her the heavy oak armoire with the hastily scribbled message across the inside of the door – Oggi il diciassettesimo giorno di novembre 1632 al tocco e mezzo è morto il parrocco, Don Luigi Sforza. She agrees not to go back to Bologna until the next day so that he can show her around Milano. Late in the afternoon the woman, Laura, arrives from work. Somehow, over more food and wine and laughter, they find themselves in bed together. All three. She decides not to go back to Bologna the next day either.
But eventually she has to leave.
He writes to her, long letters on green paper in green ink. She has never forgotten the strangeness of finding the green envelopes in her letter box covered in his spidery untidy handwriting. She checks the box several times a day. He writes that she must return. He tells her this meeting is something out of the ordinary. He mentions Nietzsche. Al di là del Bene e del Male. Beyond Good and Evil.
A few weeks later she travels to Paris and stops over in Milano to change trains. He is waiting for her at the station.
And now it is just the two of them. And a deeper undertow, something inexpressible, is between them, an intensity that seems to underscore every word. Often their eyes meet and hold. And he talks, about history, about his family, about literature, and she listens intently. He doesn’t notice that she doesn’t talk about herself. She mentions a boyfriend in Bologna. They leave the bed only to fetch some fruit, panettone, a glass of wine. He asks her to come and live with him. She agrees. They have met twice.
But back in Bologna Ahmed weeps and begs her not to leave, and eventually she gives in. And she sends a letter to Milan, calling it all off.
Those grey days after Christmas in the student apartment in Bologna. She wonders whether she has made a huge mistake. She tries to focus on the figure she is sculpting but her head is empty. There is a knock at the door, she opens. He stands there holding an enormous bunch of flowers in his arms.
She wonders why he has chosen chrysanthemums of all flowers. She’s never liked them. The Italians call them i fiori dei morti – the flowers of the dead. Perhaps because they bloom in November when people visit their dead in the cemeteries.
He tells her he has come to fetch her. It is not a question. She can’t say no. She packs a small overnight bag and her collected works of Shakespeare and leaves a note on the kitchen table for Ahmed:
‘I am sorry. Goodbye.’
She leaves behind everything else, her motorbike, her books and records, her memories, her life.
She often wonders what she would have chosen to do if both he and Ahmed had stopped putting pressure on her and had left the choice to her. She thinks she would have gone with him. But she wasn’t asked. So she has never made the choice.
She sighs.
And so she moves in with him. He knows nothing at all about her.
They walk out that first evening in Milano, around the Castello Sforzesco, in the misty cold night air. He tells her about the war, about how the Germans used to execute captured partisans up against the wall here in the moat. He shows her the bullet holes in the brickwork; she touches the tiny cavities with her fingers, softly, softly. Her threadbare corduroy coat is too light for this far north; she feels the cold creeping up her sleeves. He tells her about the Great Betrayer, il Traditore, Mussolini, his dead body hung upside down by the feet in Piazzale Loreto with his lover Clara Petacci. And the rawness of the fierce anger and hatred of the people of Milan.
She remembers how foreign and rootless she felt.
Thinking about it now, she realises he refashioned her to fit his needs. But she was happy to become whatever he wanted her to be. She had no clear idea who she was or what she wanted from life. She was willing to be moulded, shaped, like a ball of clay.
He tells her she will need clothes. They go to an atelier overlooking the Duomo where they sit on a sofa sipping wine while the assistants bring item after item for them to view. He selects four outfits.
– It’s a start, he says.
He teaches her to cook, standing behind her to help her stir, his body cupped tightly against hers, like a limpet against a rock, while the scent of garlic and basil overwhelms her senses.
At times they feel like companions, like two male friends out on the town. On one occasion they end up in a bordello and share a woman after the revelries of the night. They laugh. Nothing seems impossible. She would do anything for him, become anything he wanted.
Everything seems exciting, colours brighter than she has ever known them, flavours and smells overpowering. It feels like – and she supposes is, in a way – a very special life. He shares everything with her; she feels as if she would die without him.
She accompanies him on hunting trips to Hungary and Serbia and Bosnia and the Soviet Union. He makes her his bearer and she walks behind him carrying spare guns, ammunition, cognac. He gives her a bunch of leather thongs bound together on a hook to hang on her belt. Each thong ends in a tiny noose that fits around the necks of the birds he has shot. Ducks, geese, doves, blackbirds, songbirds, woodcocks, snipe. She feels the softness and warmth of the bodies brushing against her thigh as she walks.
She looks up. Outside the window, a starling lands on a branch and looks at her with its shiny black eyes, turning its head from side to side to scrutinise her.
The years in South Africa, the hospitals, the muteness feel like something from another life, remote. Yet of course they aren’t. They are there, underlying it all. She knows that at some point she will have to tell him about her past. But it never seems to be the right time, and he doesn’t seem at all curious to know about her. Of course she knows all about his childhood, and it is almost as if his memories have become her memories.
She stops to think. How is that possible? Memory is who you are. You can’t have someone else’s memories. But in a way she almost didn’t exist.
Occasionally someone will ask her why she left South Africa, and she always struggles to answer. She has no words to describe what she has been through, and no understanding of it either. People often assume that there must be political motives behind her choice, but that feels untrue. She was not an activist and she is not in exile. Eventually she finds it easier to just avoid the question and pass for British. She looks British, her accent sounds English, and if anyone asks where exactly she comes from, it is easy enough to talk about London. But it feels like another level of falsehood. Another layer of confusion about who she is.
The longer she waits, the more difficult it becomes to tell him. And she doesn’t know what she could tell him either that would make sense. She doesn’t understand
it herself. At some point it no longer feels possible for her to tell him about her past. The window of opportunity has come and gone. Even at this time of greatest intimacy, when it feels as if these moments of intensity will go on forever, when it feels as if they share everything, she finds she cannot. She needs to hide parts of herself that feel too raw, too shameful, too private, too vulnerable. And there is her deep need for privacy, her need to withdraw even from him. There is a level where he does not exist, where she cannot let him in, where she is totally alone. It is a perversely sexual, autistic sort of place.
There are little disappointments. Little betrayals. Slight rejections that feel unbearable, and then are forgiven. But not completely. So that a sensitivity to new rejections remains. She begins to withdraw, to fall more silent, each day a little further. Closing in on herself.
And then one day she summons the courage to talk, to tell him about her past. Oh, just little bits of it, not the whole story. She tells him about her father. She tells him about the psychiatric ward. She doesn’t tell him about Luke, or the men in Rome. It is as if she has to show him that she exists. If she has a past, she exists. She isn’t just an extension of his imagination. She thinks it might help him to understand, she thinks perhaps they will be able to recover the closeness they had once had.
But he feels cheated. He tells her he would never have taken her seriously if he had known. He says she must be mad.
One day they sit at the dinner table with friends, and she sees him lift his finger to his temple and make that circular movement that means crazy, means mad, means mal, and point at her.
Perhaps she does go mad at that point. She could have tolerated anything else, but not that. She is not sure why. Perhaps she has always been afraid of that.
She packs an overnight bag, takes her collected works of Shakespeare, and leaves. For a while she wanders.
And then she comes to the island.
3
Book of the Future
The Story of Anna P, as Told by Herself Page 14