Knife Party at the Hotel Europa

by Mark Anthony Jarman

  A village appears an hour later and I want a drink, a really big cold bottle if possible. Under a long pier the black water seems alive with jellyfish, our seas heating up and jellyfish made happy by the warming. They have lovely oscillating blooms, jellyfish the colours of stained glass, like big Tiffany lampshades, glowing by the dock and pulsing under our kayaks. Swimmers can’t relax near them and local fishermen slash at the jellyfish, trying to kill them, but more and more arrive, thriving on violence, unease, warmth.

  A Canadian pilot died along this shore in the war; so warm now, but it was Christmas when the pilot parachuted into the freezing sea. They found him quickly, plucked him dripping from the waves, but he was already frozen blue, another cold body in the sea, his girlfriend on Charlotte Avenue waking with a chill and when he didn’t come back the other pilots calmly divided up his kit, his socks and tea and tobacco. All the tea tins and forgotten names who fall like harriers from sky to sea.

  The sun is low and a jellyfish stings Eve’s small breast and she holds herself where my hand has held her. I hold her on a beach, a kind of venom in the stingers. I’m hungry and thirsty and we must climb to find a room, a meal, see if we can buy some ointment and Tylenol or painkillers.

  From high on a cliffside path we look down and can still see the three men’s crow-like coats in the foaming flood, twa corbies, three travellers drowned in the night and still lying on the beach, strange sunbathers. What are the names of these young mustached men? These Adams in a new world moving to imaginary jobs and city apartments and city lives in Lyon, in London, to Eccles cakes and curry takeaways in the new world, wanting what I take for granted: decent shoes, a roof, and fruit and food for your children, for the girl with the dripping braid.

  I move for work, my parents moved for work, my grandparents moved for work, and some for war. My great-grandfather was an Irish cavalry man and dowser, finding water with a forked branch, and my grandfather a cooper, crafting beautiful oak barrels in steam and smoke, and my father an artist and a coal clerk in Oxford; they are gone and their trades all vanished. Horse and wagon selling milk and blocks of ice in the brand new suburb, pickers of rag and bone, gaunt wanderers sharpening my mother’s scissors and knives — all those worlds of work vanished along with the tinkers, all the exiles expelled from such modest yards and gardens.

  The world does not stay the same, the world rearranges and turns inside out, old lives washed up and whooshed away like my father’s bent jetty or a skiff dashed into pieces with you in it, water pouring over lapstrake planks and rocks revealed in their iron-green troughs, in their lair where the jellyfish wait to lay their red welts. We gamble on our arrangements of patches and sticks, we settle down for a suburban moment and forget we are nomads, forget that our particle-board ranch houses are constructed over hidden kindred underworlds, forget that we are racing engines, a race of émigrés, una faccia una razza, the Italians say, one face, one race, shoved about the world on strange currents like horses in a swift mountain river.

  Our illegal aliens have escaped the future, left the flat desert, found water like a dowser, like me, found a beach in Italy, found the curve of Eve’s breast. Her pretty green eyes in my room, her curves everywhere in my eye, her name on my lips, my narrow interests, our delicious after-tremors. They drown in the surf and her period arrives, generous with blood the colour of my best geraniums.

  “I can put a towel down under us.” The towel is dark blue.

  “There is too much blood. In a day or two we can,” she says, “but not today.”

  There is one kind favour I would ask of you.

  “Usually I don’t like this,” she says. “Why do guys like it so much?”

  She arranges herself on the bed in a pleasant businesslike manner as if agreeing to learn a new card game at the cabin. She sits and I stand before her, but who is supplicant?

  She stops, says, “I’ve always hated this, but I actually like the taste of yours.”

  I stand over her, but she controls me, moves me with her mouth and hands, my body a big doll tilting forward and back, a balloon animal moved this way and that, feeling closer, closer, a low gravitational force moving up from the floor through my ankles and knees, through my thighs, a concussive conclusion nearing, and sweet is the death that taketh end by love. I rock three or four times in involuntary motion until my legs sag under me and she has to hold me up. The feeling is far more powerful when standing up than if lying in bed with her, but I don’t want to convey that information. Both of us are surprised, we are related, we are bound.

  Bound to each other with dripping ropes, villagers move like line dancers in the surf; ropes tighten and go lax as the villagers walk the surf together, a row of living men and women and children searching the water in case there are more aliens hiding in the sea.

  Sunburnt and spent we return from days rented on the water. Wet ropes lie coated with sand.

  “Do you have any lotion?”

  “Your poor skin. I think I have some.”

  Eve sleeps on the bus, her face so peaceful in sleep, her nerves relaxed; refugees hit a wall of cliffs and surf while we move so easily through Italy. I love her peaceful face as our bus corkscrews through tunnels and mountains, the driver’s horn as musical as a trumpet at the blind turns.

  We’ve been in the city and country and sometimes she says, That’s it, and she leaves me. She leaves me and comes back, leaves and comes back. Times I can’t relax with Eve, wondering what’s next, she keeps me on edge in my own rooms. Perhaps that’s good, perhaps that’s what I need.

  Tunnels and faith: that moment when you enter a tunnel, when you move from bright light to darkness, you can’t see a thing, but you keep going with faith that the pathway is safe, that there is not a wall there, but an opening and a lane, and the same hope when you burst from a tunnel into blinding light, wondering what is beyond. That the grill of a bus isn’t filling your lane, that the earthquake didn’t drop that small section of the road, that your children will be happy, that their lives will be good.

  Like skiing in a blizzard, the light declines and you can’t make out the dips and moguls and start wiping out, but you have to ease yourself down the mountain, find a route a foot at a time, or the light returns and you didn’t know how much you loved the light, needed it. And when you ride a scooter, enter a party, a club, buy a cellphone from a crack addict, ease your doll-like head out the open train window — that moment of faith as night and wind flow and you offer up your face to the forces.

  At a wooden table in the courtyard two Italian children laugh and slurp soup from yellow bowls. An adult made the soup, the children would die without the adult, but the children laugh and the adult does not exist. How long since I saw my own children? I don’t carry a phone, but I email them and they sound happy in their summer pursuits.

  An American woman stands by her car, yelling to another woman.

  “I cain’t find him,” the woman complains in a loud nasal voice. “I call and call and he won’t answer. I’ll try calling him again.” How many of us are hiding from that voice, that place, that jagged coast. They can’t find the vanished bodies, the submerged swimmers.

  Before my cousin left the last time, she read to me, read lines from a strange guide to speaking Italian, a guide she found in a hotel lobby.

  “Who wrote this? Ha spesso le palpebre gonfie? Do you often have swollen eyelids? Who the hell travels to Italy to comment on swollen eyelids? Con l’età siamo diventati un po’ sordi anche noi. With age we too have become a little deaf. Ti ama alla follia. She loves you to the point of insanity.” She stops to consider. “Or would that be folly rather than insanity? Follia?”

  “I like that last line. Say it again.”

  “Ti ama alla follia.”

  “I like that.”

  My cousin and her lotion in a room so small we end up on the bed. Three bodies lie so close on the beach. They do not proceed to the luggage carousel to retrieve their bags. The red Zodiac offshore dangling
ropes in the water, keeping the bodies close as family. Her pyjamas washed to indifference, translucence.

  She says, “I had a dream in which you were very mean to me.”

  “Eating too late cause dreams like that. How is your beautiful little pussy?”

  “It’s been lonely,” she says.

  We move on the map. Are my polite old dead relatives watching us, uncles and aunts and sweet grannies? I hope not. Does she really have MS? She told me she did, as if it was a minor matter that might affect her driving at times, but she seems fine.

  She was down by the village graveyard and I followed her, fog rolling over us into lovely dark green parkland and evening’s dendroid silhouettes, a sweet season with green hath clad the sylvan hill, the sunny peak and the valley depth so close together and my hand on her. I know we shouldn’t be together, but she is better than meth, than mirth.

  She was mad that I made fun of Sylvia Plath, but then at the bar she says happily, “Vodka goes right to my vagina. I’m going straight to video. Or to hell.” She went to a piano and played “The Crystal Ship” and the room applauded. Time passes, a city of gold awaits us, an eternal city, an eternal question: are my eyes on the prize? Hell if I know.

  She goes out walking. Does she really mean to meet me later in the village, or did she know when we spoke that she would not be there? When does she have to be back in Switzerland? I don’t know anyone with MS; what are the symptoms? I worry that something might happen if she drives alone on the coastal highway, all the tunnels.

  But this is not the first time she has disappeared, tried to save me or save herself; she comes and goes. My cousin was mad at me a week or two back, complained that she was almost my age but I was treating her like a fourteen-year-old, treating her like a call girl. Why did she say fourteen? She walked away, but a day or two later, she showed up saying, Let’s go upstairs, ordering me to follow her and I did so.

  No parley or preamble, no chance to reconcile, no polite chit-chat or cup of tea. She walked to my room and I followed her. I’ve never met anyone like this. Back in bed I called her my fourteen-year-old call girl and she laughed. It’s almost puzzling how much we enjoy our time in my bed; we do nothing weird, nothing kinky, but we seem so compatible, nesting dolls, perhaps the best ever, her face in my face and her bright eyes so close, her eyes looking startled as it builds, her body closer and closer, and that one time her teeth biting the pillow so those in the hall won’t hear.

  Taxis, movement toward or away from stimulation, from her crosswords. She is gone this minute, but on my sheets I am left a bloody imprint the shape of a butterfly; I treasure the faded menstrual imprint, my shroud of Turin.

  Like my sheet, like a clamshell, we add layers and insurance policies, we accrete. I am a measly planet struck by passing worlds and haunted chords and fragments of silver moons, a long process of erosion and addition and meat draws and comp lists. My pocked outer casing, dusty craters, but a smooth child buried inside, strange weather inside us and furnished rooms and a rat inside us reading Proust (such memorable pastry!) and perhaps a rat nesting inside your inner rat.

  In town it’s strange to see such a massive red Buick in Italy, a big convertible shipped from North America by a Milanese car collector before the economic storms and cutbacks and collapses. Eve wants to drive it by the sea. I daydream there might be cocaine hidden in the doors, all for me, perhaps a taste for the Cobalt Woman whose hair caught fire. The motorcade speeds up, but you’re no Jack Kennedy.

  That bomb by the river in Rome, at the embassy: we never found out who was trying to kill themselves or attempting to kill us, was it domestic or foreign or from flying saucers, the message is never clear.

  Before she left, my cousin said, “I think I’m getting addicted to you.”

  Is that so bad?

  Yes, this addiction worries her.

  I notice that she hugs me tighter when she is about to leave me. I need a change, she said. She cut her hair into bangs that made her look like Pippi Longstocking. Using my scissors in the bathroom and singing softly, something about the desert where she can’t remember her name.

  Then the handwritten letter and envelope sliding under the door when she knows I am not in my small room, when I’m out at the internet café, where no one writes me.

  I’ve had to make some hard decisions, her letter claims. But, it’s been wonderful, true mad deep abiding stockinged scattered love.

  She’s come and gone before, but this time she seems serious about no communication, no attempt at contact. I admit I laughed when I saw the letter on the floor, saw my name. Not again! I thought. But I’m not laughing now. Now she is under my skin. They say you must separate sex from love, that they are not the same; I’m slightly confused on that matter.

  The thought of never seeing you again is intolerable, but might be best. You do make me happy, but I can’t seem to feel calm.

  Beyond the pale curtains there is traffic and the earth wobbles so quietly on its bent axis that you barely notice. By the river some gypsy kids sniff glue from a Kleenex, they don’t know how to mend tin pots and pans. My worries mean nothing.

  Eve said I was detached, difficult, maddeningly stubborn.

  I thought I was easygoing.

  No, you’re difficult.

  Me difficult? Well, this is certainly news to me.

  Natasha said, You’re so lovable, but then she left me.

  Always these exits and always this question: should I follow to make peace or go the other direction? Should I follow Eve’s footsteps along the seaside road, or let her go alone with her fear of spiders? Each way seems the wrong way. I want to move, ride a buzzing red scooter, see the shimmering Amalfi coast and cliffs, one foot in the sea and one on shore. I worry something might happen to her; how would she tell me? Once Eve almost fainted using the phone in my room. Am I attracted to affliction? Or is affliction attracted to me? The East German woman said I was calm. Eve’s note said, The time I spent with you was some of the happiest of my life, I hope you’ll always be happy.

  I like a kayak’s separation from shore, moving away from established things. This movement reminds me of fast downhill skiing; I feel more accepting of the exhausting world, movement helps when things don’t go my way. I ski over a ridge and get some air and the view goes forever. At this altitude flowers may take years to blossom. I must stop on this high table of land and look and catch my breath and rest my legs. There are legions of dark pines and far below are lit glass triangles by the tranquil river and I am alone in a swerving sky, the soft powder a dream.

  When skiing I work tiny patches of a giant mountain; I map it out and add all the parts together: ski to the right to avoid the hidden rocks, then veer to the left and hug the treeline for untouched powder, drop down that bowl and up that lip to fly off the round white cliff and don’t land flat, keep my balance and keep my gleeful speed and keep my ass off the ground.

  My kayak is so low in the water that I feel the sea’s pressure on my rump. Water drips into my lap from the raised paddle so I tuck a towel over my legs like a skirt; this works perfectly. With no keel or rudder the kayak zigzags (by indirection directions find out) side to side with each paddle dug in the water, no choice, paddle on the left side and go right, paddle right and go left, as if waddling across to that opposite beach. A keel may help, steering my life crookedly, hither and thither. Sometimes I am direct, sometimes not.

  On my own in a seaside village, she is gone, but I refuse to be sad, I rent a glamorous wooden speedboat, art deco lines, no charts, no maps, no problem, I’ll follow the coast to the next available village and tie up for a tasty meal and a drink and assemble my rakish reptile thoughts in a clean well-lighted place with a sympathetic waiter or waitress, but I fail to notice that the coastline I follow is an island and islands can be round and all the glowing cliffs look alike because I’m passing the same cliffs over and over and where the hell is the stupid village and café, going around and around in a circle until the sp
eedboat sputters out of fuel, and my little wooden boat helpless into the rocks and the rocks grind into my ears with a sound like a frailing banjo. I’m sure my dead uncle is laughing at me. They do not laugh at the rental kiosk.

  “Was the hull damaged when we gave it to you?”

  “It may have been. I did not think to inspect the hull. It may have been weak, undermined by mussels or worms.”

  “No, I assure you, no worms, the boat was not damaged. You were careless with what was not yours.”

  “I was not careless.”

  “Perhaps so. But tell me, who will pay me if not you? Will the rocks pay us? No, a rock will not pay.”

  I think he is losing steam, but it’s like arguing with a movie star; there is no point. Round and round we go, round we go day after day, my life, the same beautiful coves, boats getting nowhere.

  Silver cliffs stand in the sea’s frenzied cities and you rode upon a steamer. Azure, aqua, cobalt: how to describe such deeply pleasing paisley colours of the warm sea? Delicious greens and prism blues mixed in curves and lines over a shimmering sand bottom and sunlit mica rocks. But how does anything grow on such jagged rock?

  Boats tilt, water leaps in over the gunwales, the transom, over something, and the passengers choke on water. From the cliffs above, helpless villagers ran to open their salt-bleached sheds, blindly threw cork life jackets down to the drowning aliens, enemies and sudden allies. I am a simple animal: I feel bad when things are bad, feel better when things are good. I love you like towns under wet smoke, rooms that never dry out.