Journey to Ithaca

by Anita Desai

  Giacomo looks at her from under his heavy brows. He would like to believe her.

  Isabel sees she has him in her hold. She crosses her legs nonchalantly. ‘We can pack some clothes in a tablecloth,’ she says, ‘and steal bread and cheese from the kitchen. And run away at night, after they go to bed. You can unlock the door, Giacomo.’

  He nods, yes. He wants to believe, but it is for what comes after that he looks to her in appeal.

  She sees his look and reaches out her hand. At first it just lies on his knee, damp and not very clean. When she feels it trembling a little, she begins to pat and stroke it as Grandmother does the dough when she is making bread. Like bread, it rises and grows larger. Giacomo feels its weight; his whole leg aches for her stroke, her touch. The ache travels up to his groin, where it is a pain, a throb. With a small sigh, he lies down against her side, burrows into her lap, snuffling like a puppy, breathing in her damp, female smell. His face in her lap, he nuzzles her, breathing her, and she puts her hands on either side of his head, pulling him in, closer. ‘Down,’ she mumbles, ‘down here, Giacomo.’

  They make programme cards with stiff pieces of yellow paper they have cut out and pasted over with butterflies from one of Grandfather’s books in the library. Their skill in spelling is too rudimentary to give the audience any idea of what to expect.

  What they see, when they settle onto the dining chairs the children have dragged into a row, is Giacomo in velvet shorts kneeling before a gilt Buddha he has brought out of the marble fireplace where it stands amongst potted plants in the summer when they do not light fires. He kneels and bows and prays in a low mumble while from behind the curtain which is a tablecloth draped low over the edge of the dining table, Isabel’s voice hisses directions. In response to them, he picks up the bell with which Grandmother summons the maid at meals, and rings and rings.

  Instead of the maid – who is standing in the doorway, giggling so hard that every now and then she snorts inadvertently and has to cover her mouth with her hands – it is Isabel who appears with a flourish of a peacock feather fan. As she prances around, the audience discovers that she is quite naked except for the maid’s apron that she has tied around her neck and that falls to her feet in starched folds of muslin. While Grandmother and the maid gasp and Grandfather blinks his eyes almost audibly behind his spectacles, Isabel begins to dance. Giacomo, remembering his role, dives under the tablecloth and frenziedly cranks up the gramophone. The music that issues from it, rustily but loudly, is Anitra’s Dance from Peer Gynt. To its exotic and vaguely eastern rhythm, Isabel gyrates and gestures theatrically, revealing her bare bottom to muffled shrieks from the maid and a harsh intake of breath from the grandmother. She has just come to a standstill and raised her arms and opened her fists to let fall handfuls of geranium petals on Giacomo – who has resumed his kneeling posture before the Buddha – when Grandmother rises to her feet with a great thump and shouts, ‘Stop! Stop at once. Isabel, go to your room. At once!’ Her voice is like a rent torn through a dress. The child falters, gathering the gauze of her apron about her. Giacomo turns around to study the effect of their performance on the audience. He had warned Isabel but she had not listened. ‘Mama lets us dress up and dance,’ she had said, but Grandmother is approaching her with an outstretched hand, preparing to smack the shameless bottom. When the smack descends, it is Giacomo who howls. While Isabel goes red and silent, he wails, ‘We’re only acting a play, Nonna, about India.’

  ‘A fine play!’ she turns upon him. ‘A fine play!’ The look in her eyes is not only terrifying for Giacomo but terrified. ‘This is what your father and mother brought you up to do, is it?’

  This is so unfair – it seems years since he lived with his parents, years and years – he begins to snivel.

  Isabel, her hands over her smarting bottom, backs away, blazing. ‘I’ll write and tell Mama what you did. I’ll tell Papa.’

  Grandmother watches Isabel as she lifts her cup with both hands and drinks deeply, leaving behind a moustache of chocolate on her upper lip. For some reason, she refrains from passing Isabel a napkin to wipe it off; instead, she pushes a plate of pastries across the table to her and watches while the child chooses gravely and after deep deliberation.

  Isabel knows she is being given a bribe to make up for Giacomo’s departure that morning. What Grandmother does not realise is that it is too early for sorrow or loneliness to have set in; half an hour ago Isabel was standing on the gravel driveway by the magnolia tree, waving as her brother was driven away to his aunt’s home in Milan, and now already she was being given hot chocolate, pastries and a pink ice in a black glass goblet: they add up to a pressure, a weight that sits on her belly – too rich, too sweet. She burps uncomfortably.

  Grandmother smiles faintly, pretending not to mind. She sits upright at the table under the single palm tree in its circle of paintbox-coloured primulas. She is wearing a hat that has been smart in its time: now its grey flannel brim and its pheasant’s feather look a bit pathetic. Isabel might even feel a little sorry for her but what she cannot bear is the long thin fur that is lying on her shoulders and hangs down on either side, limply, so dreadfully dead.

  When Isabel has chosen her pastry and is nibbling at its crust, Grandmother relaxes and leans back in the sun that gilds the cream-coloured walls of the Hotel Metropole and the small glassy waves of the lake before them.

  ‘Giacomo will soon settle down,’ she says, as much to herself as to Isabel. ‘I know it – he is not rebellious like your father.’

  ‘Papa?’ Isabel halts the inroad she is making into the soft almond paste that fills her pastry, and waits, listening.

  ‘Matteo could not stand the school from the first day to the last,’ Grandmother continues, almost proudly. ‘He couldn’t take orders from the teachers. They could not make him do his lessons or sing or play football, it didn’t matter what they did to him.’

  ‘What did they do?’ Isabel asks in a stifled voice. She feels the hot chocolate and the almond paste come together in her throat and rise in protest.

  ‘Oh, they complained to his uncle and sent notes. Maybe gave him a smack on his knuckles now and then, nothing more,’ Grandmother says, gaily almost, aware of the effect she is having on the child. ‘In those days that was not so uncommon. But Matteo could not take it at all. Now Giacomo is different.’

  Isabel is not at all sure. She gulps at the thought of Giacomo being threatened or intimidated. She knows he is not brave.

  Her silence makes Grandmother forget her presence. She talks on, less guardedly. ‘The football was the worst. Matteo would not play. He would get knocked down and trampled and he would not get up and play,’ she recalls. ‘His uncle minded that most – his sons were all such first-class players.’ She taps her tiny cup of espresso with a small spoon; it rings out clearly, with a melancholy air. She looks at Isabel, remembering her. ‘Now Giacomo will be happy there, playing football with the other boys. He had no one to play with here.’

  ‘He had me,’ Isabel reminds her bitterly. She is breaking the pastry crust into crumbs on the plate, and has lost all her appetite.

  ‘A boy needs company of his own kind. He will have that in Milan, in his aunt’s house and at school,’ Grandmother explains. ‘For your father, we got a tutor when he came back from school, and that was not good. It was not a good idea. I would not want that for Giacomo.’

  ‘Why?’ asks Isabel.

  But Grandmother has opened her purse, she is taking out coins, paying the bill. Isabel follows her to the car and climbs in beside her. The chauffeur starts it and they begin to climb up the hill to the villa. Isabel watches the view of the lake with its fringe of flowering oleanders and the white façade of the hotels fall away below them, then turns to ask, ‘Why won’t you have a tutor for Giacomo, too, Nonna?’

  Grandmother gives her an irritated look very far from the look reserved for the hotel and the waiter and the guests sipping coffee and eating ices at tables in the sun. She fidge
ts with the fox fur – it is too warm for it. ‘Because it would not be a good idea,’ she repeats.

  ‘Did the tutor smack Papa?’

  ‘No, no, he did not beat him at all,’ Grandmother snaps and looks out of the window as the car sweeps past the wrought-iron gates of a neighbour’s villa with a view of a bank of pink camellias. More thoughtfully, she murmurs, ‘He was a Booda – a Boodi – what’s it called?’

  ‘A Booda?’ Isabel’s eyes grow dark and grave. ‘Like the one in the fireplace?’

  ‘Oh, something eastern and foolish,’ Grandmother cries, thoroughly irritated by now. ‘They have them in the east.’

  ‘In India?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ Grandmother snaps. What made her take the child out for a chocolate? What a mistake all this fussing and spoiling is; much better have done a spot of gardening instead. ‘I know nothing about India.’

  ‘I was born there,’ Isabel reminds her accusingly, and suddenly tears well up in her eyes. She dips her face down so Grandmother will not see. She tries to keep the sniffling to herself and yet the tears run, she has no idea whether for Giacomo or for her disregarded birth or the nausea which is a result of eating too much cake and chocolate. Searching in her pocket for a handkerchief, she finds a button she had meant to give to Giacomo as a keepsake, a brass button with a greenish dragon on it. Now the howls break from her unrestrained, and the button falls to her lap.

  ‘That is the button from my sewing box,’ Grandmother cries, snatching it up. ‘Where did you find it? Why are you crying? Do stop, Isabel.’

  Early in the mornings now Isabel creeps into her grandmother’s room when she knows Nonna will be sitting up in bed with the cup of coffee the maid has brought her on a small tray painted with golden grapes and silver birds. Her feet chilled by the marble squares of the floor, she jumps into the bed and snuggles against Nonna’s flannel sides. ‘Oh Isabel,’ Grandmother gives a sharp cry, ‘you are so cold.’ Then she pulls the quilt up to the child’s chin and says severely, ‘You must get warm.’

  Isabel’s toes curl up; she lies against the pillows, feeling herself surrounded by warmth and softness. The light that comes in at the french windows that open onto the balcony is still pale, almost silvery. This has become her time for talking about Giacomo. Now that he is away in Milan, living in his aunt’s house and going to school there, she feels the urge to recreate him through speech, and since that has its limitations she stretches the attempt with questions regarding their father, who had once done much the same. She realises she has a double prey and stalks them carefully, prowling along in search of secrets.

  *

  To begin with, Matteo cannot be separated and made to stand clear of all the uneven surfaces, the subtle colourings and the shadowy interweavings that construct the house and their family. He dwells in them, a part of the pattern of the Chinese silk screens in the bedrooms, no more than a grey and white moth’s wings brushing across the ivory silks, and the merest shadow in the tapestries in the hall, thickly woven forests of blue in which birds hang suspended in silence and apples redden sunlessly. He hides from Nonna, and from Isabel, in the rushes of the lake in the great tapestry that hangs over the table in the hall, together with a stag that has been driven into its waters by baying hounds while the huntsman blows his horn to summon the hunter with the knife for the kill.

  Frightened out of hiding, Matteo leaps up into the chandeliers like a small monkey, and hangs there, no more than a velvet tassel, of olive or mahogany silk, or a spray of bronze ivy or mistletoe or leaves of crystal that catch the light and separate it into fragments of ice.

  If Isabel tiptoes in to find him, if she catches at a corner of the tapestry and shakes it or pushes a brocade-upholstered chair out of a dusty corner or draws a forbidden book off a shelf in the library, Matteo flees, as thirty years previously he had fled from his mother. The garden has even greater possibilities for hiding for one so skilled. Isabel knows it well but Matteo knows it better. In the pergola of orange and lemon trees, he hides under the leaves while her eyes are drawn to the bright globes of fruit. He does not hide in the fountain where water spouts from the dolphin’s mouth but under the lily pads, with the frogs and their floating threads of spawn. In the hothouse he sits with the crickets under the upturned flowerpots, silent while they sing. The terraces fall further and further down the hill till they come to the red brick wall that separates the garden from the village. In that brick wall there is a wooden door. It is kept locked and Isabel does not have the key.

  *

  Everywhere Mama followed him and found him. Matteo did not know that he had left tracks, spoor that she could spy: the moth-wing silk patterns blurred, the tapestries disturbed – the startled eye of a parrot on the pomegranate tree, the stag’s head turned in a direction other than the baying of hounds – and the chandeliers faintly tinkling, or merely jarred, with so minute a sound that no one heard but Mama. Then, in triumph, she cried, ‘There you are!’ Matteo stood frozen, and did not know if he was glad she had come to put an end to his flight, or if it meant a defeat and he was captured. So he locked one leg around the other, put his finger in his mouth, and looked uncertain. ‘What is wrong, child?’ she cried, and seeing him start, lamented, ‘Child, child, what will we do with you?’ She had her ways of catching and holding him: the doctor brought in to look down his throat and peer into his ears with a minute torch-light, cups of warm milk and woollen stockings, beef stews and soups, cold baths and dips in the lake. These were like nets and traps with which she held him but she could hardly be unaware how he squirmed. ‘Who would believe you are a child of this house, that this house belongs to you?’ she cried in vexation as he struggled.

  Only when she did not try so hard did he come to a standstill. Then, to her own astonishment and joy, she would find she had him in her hands. In bed with one of his frequent colds, he sat up against the pillows and she did her sewing on a chair beside him. It was his pleasure to have her sewing box open across the quilt on his knees, and to lift off its lid – the satin-wood intricately inlaid with a pattern of vine leaves, and at its centre an oval of ivory painted with the picture of a lady clinging to a shadowy tree on which a peacock sat trailing its golden tail down the branches onto her shoulders, where it mingled with her open golden hair. Inside, the box was as fascinating as outside for it consisted of trays that could be lifted off each other, and each was divided into a series of compartments – one for needles and thimbles, another for reels of thread in every shade of colour, a third for a plump velvet pincushion and a long slithering tape measure, and more than one for a glorious collection of buttons that Matteo never tired of sorting into groups across the silk coverlet. There was one he never placed in any group but kept always separate – a brass button carved with a green dragon that seemed too splendid to put in with the lesser ones of shell and wood. His eyes streaming, his nose snuffling, his chest rasping with a cough, and shivering in an icy fit of fever, he would play with these objects with such silent concentration, no one could guess what they represented for him. Mama would start to tell him the story of Bluebeard or Cinderella but would become aware that he was not listening and fall silent, sighing as she stitched a lace collar or mended a stocking, only now and then reminding him to pull her shawl over his shoulders, and seeing to it that he did so, hitching up the faded ivory wool with its pale blue stripes, so old that it felt like silk to the touch, or aged skin.

  If his sister Caroline came in to fetch the dress with the lace collar or the mended stocking, and saw him, she would cry, ‘Oh, you look like a grandmother sitting in that shawl with the sewing box!’ and burst out laughing. ‘Doesn’t he, Mama, doesn’t he?’

  He would look up at her, shrug, sniff, and say nothing. He had nothing to say to either her or Mama. His entire presence seemed made up of his silence.

  When Caroline left for the convent school in Milan, Matteo stood at the chest of drawers in her room and looked at himself in the misty, silvered mirror that hu
ng above it in a copper frame, green with verdigris. He opened the drawers one by one and found each had something left behind in it – a small satin sachet, a brooch of jet and crystal, a flat box of powder. Picking up a piece of limp velvet, he dipped it in the pink powder and raised it to his nose, close enough to breathe it in: it smelt equally of violets and perspiration, the one sickly and the other stale. Suppressing a shudder of revulsion, he rubbed it onto his face with the velvet pad, spreading it gently and thoughtfully. When it grew too thin, he dipped the pad in again and raised another layer of the perfumed, tickling powder. Then he rummaged around and found a smaller, round, flat box that contained a blue paste. This he rubbed onto his eyelids with his finger. He found a thick black pencil and drew circles around his eyes, very slowly and carefully so as not to stab his eyes with its point. He had never seen Caroline, or his mother, do this but he had seen the carnival masks in the shops in the village with their eyelids coloured blue and outlined for dramatic effect. He even found a sequin in the crack of one drawer, dug it out with a fingernail and, with a small dab of spit, stuck it to his cheek, below an eye, exactly like Pierrot’s. At last he came across a tube containing a stub of plum-red paste, and with this he was painting his mouth when Mama walked in and let out a scream so loud that it seemed to rip the mirror from the wall so that his face slid out of it, an exotic painted lily sliding into disgraced oblivion.

  So then Matteo too was sent to school. With a box that had broad leather straps to keep it closed on the pile of white shirts and grey shorts. His uncle would keep him at home in Turin and send him to school along with his own sons: that would be best. Matteo too had to be driven, like Caroline a little earlier, down from the villa and around the lake, the chauffeur braking sharply whenever he saw another vehicle coming so that Matteo was shaken and sick by the time they reached the plain.