Journey to Ithaca

by Anita Desai

  In Turin the severe angles of the architecture revealed themselves to him like lessons in a geometry book: he had seen nothing like that in his landscape of villa, village, hills, lake. The school was a theorem set within a larger theorem. Matteo, raised on curves, rotundities and irregular lines, felt himself chilled by so much mathematical beauty, defeated by its logic. He put his hand out to the chauffeur in a moment of need. Vittorio knew better what should be done: he gave the boy a slight push and reminded him of who he was and what he was to do – go up the stairs and greet his uncle and Father Giustino, who stood waiting together in the villa by the river.

  The sense of mathematical mystery proved prophetic. Matteo could understand nothing. He rubbed and rubbed at the pencil markings in his book till everything was a grey blur but could come to no solution; none that was accurate. If he was in any doubt about that, he was soon provided by certainty: the angry, slashing lines made across the page by Father Giustino’s pen and the zeros furiously scrawled in the margins.

  Failure followed him up and down the long corridors of the school. In the choir, Matteo learnt that he could not sing. At home he had bellowed out the hymns in San Giacomo along with Caroline and his mother and no one had told him that the sounds he made were not singing. Now he was told. It baffled him, like the geometry and the algebra.

  Matteo had always played by himself. Now he was put into a team and saw that he was expected to play with, and for, the team, not himself. But he did not know how to do that. He watched the other boys from the corners of his eyes and tried to pick up clues but they always proved wrong. He kicked the ball away from the goal, tackled a boy on his own team, not an opponent, whereupon there was a great roar and the captain walloped him across the shoulders, catching his ear with a fist, painfully, and he sprawled in the mud in agony, then felt them trampling over him as they streamed away in another direction. When he got to his knees, he saw them all racing back, towards him, and so – the greatest disgrace of all – he turned his back and ran for his life. No boy ever forgave him for that. Matteo had to be taught a lesson and they set to with a will.

  Matteo told no one – not in his letters to Mama and not to Papa when he came to visit. These were not things one could confess. He hid his scars from his uncle, and when he caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror or a windowpane after the lights were lit at night, his swollen eyes and flattened nose, blue and purple and bronze, seemed to him so grotesque that he looked away. He tried to keep clear of others and to run if anyone came towards him. He ran down the corridors and around the playing fields. On Sundays he ran out into the country, at first along the sides of the dusty motor roads and then along the stone walls separating fields from vineyards. He ran for hours, aching, his muscles functioning like pistons. He looked a rough boy, his hair caked with dust, the muscles hardening with exercise, brushing past people, running and running.

  It was Mama who caught him when he came back to the villa for the holidays and held him at arm’s length and stared. With a gasp of, ‘Matteo, my child!’ she folded him in her arms. He struggled away, offended by her pity. He found the villa with its velvet hangings and tapestries and brocades stifling. He thought the mountains hemmed him in and shut off the view. He was anxious to run, but she held him by his arms and screamed for Papa to come and see.

  Papa came and made him lift up his face and stretch out his hands for examination. Papa did not touch him – his face was pinched with dislike – Matteo could not tell of what. Then Papa made that clear by snapping, ‘What is all the fuss about? The boy has been playing football; he is learning to be a man. Is this something to howl about?’

  Matteo gazed at him. Papa’s face seemed to him entirely round, entirely pink – the skin smooth and glistening, the eyes pale and the hair and eyebrows bleached and colourless. Unlike Mama’s anguished, enraged face with its flush and dishevelled hair. He stared at both of them and felt they repelled him equally. It seemed painful that they should be related.

  He looked away, sulking. He would tell them nothing about the school or his uncle’s household. His answers to their questions were sullen and monosyllabic. He would eat none of the meat and gravy and pastries Mama tried to force on him; he insisted he wanted only bread and water, that was all.

  ‘Perverse!’ Mama exclaimed. ‘Unnatural! I call this unnatural.’

  Matteo gave her a cool look; he said something she was to remember later. He said, ‘You don’t know what natural means, Mama.’

  It made her gasp. It made her determined to get him away from Turin and the school. She set to work diligently, on her husband. Like a bird with a long beak that knocks, knocks, knocks on the dead wood till the insect emerges and she can have it, she worked to defeat him and have her way.

  As a result of her strategies, Papa withdrew him from the school – souring his relations with his brother into the bargain, since it was taken as a criticism of his guardianship – and engaged an English tutor who would prepare Matteo for examinations at home. She had her triumph. If Matteo’s face registered dismay and apprehension, that was part of her reward.

  They were seated at the wooden table out by the camellia tree, drinking cups of afternoon coffee, when they heard the gate open with a long groan, as it always did, followed by a sudden clank as it swung back on its hinges. They could hear the porter turn the key in the lock, and exchanged looks with each other but remained silent, watchful.

  Eventually the visitor came in sight. He was still far below them and they saw only the top of his head, the light brown hair in long curls under a straw hat as he walked slowly up the zig-zagging path that curved whitely up the hillside. They saw him disappear behind some silvery, rustling olive trees, then emerge on the flight of stone steps laid through the thick grass, the blue irises and the brown ground orchids. Then he vanished behind a hedge of box and it was a while before they saw him come out onto the flagstone path between the cypress trees and the beds of pinks. He paused by the fountain and the family leant forward to see if he would sit down beside it to rest – he seemed slow and tired – or if he would wash his face and drink from it, unaware of their watching. But he merely stood with his hands on his hips, gazing at the mossed basin of the fountain and the cold drops trickling into it. When he made a move it was to reach into his pocket and draw out a book which he began to read, seemingly unconscious of their presence, standing there in the blue shade of a cypress within the sound of falling water, a pale blue sweater tied carelessly around his waist by its arms.

  Matteo, who watched most intently of all, let out his breath as if in relief. ‘He is reading,’ he sighed.

  ‘Reading,’ said his mother, much more tartly, ‘while we are all here, waiting.’

  ‘At least we have learnt he can read,’ said Papa.

  For some reason this made Matteo leap to his feet, clutching at his head in a wild gesture that the young man so far below seemed to sense for he looked up and saw all the faces peering at him from over the wistaria that wound along the wooden railing. Matteo lifted his hand to wave and slowly, serenely, the young man waved back.

  When at last he joined them at the wooden table under the camellias and Mama went in for a fresh pot of coffee and the jug of water he had requested, he laid the book on the table and Matteo craned forward to read the title: The Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse. Matteo was confused – what was it, a geography text?

  ‘You can borrow it if you like,’ the tutor said, smiling.

  Papa bellowed, ‘Is it in English? The boy must read English. English is what you must read with him.’

  ‘I will, and we will read it together,’ the young man lightly replied, and took a cream horn from the plate on the table and bit into it without any self-consciousness. Over its ridged crust he gave the watching Matteo a cream-flecked smile.

  From the beginning Mama could see the lessons were not going as she had planned. What, she asked herself, peering out from between the curtains at the window, was going on on the hill
side where Matteo and Fabian were walking with an open book, it was true, but running downhill at times and at others uphill to the ruin under the pines, throwing back their heads to shout to each other like two madmen? She could not of course hear what they were reading or reciting and, if she had, the verses would have made no sense to her.

  ‘Is it that from some bright sphere

  We part with friends we meet with here,

  Or do we see the future pass

  Across the present’s dusky glass?

  ‘Or what is it that makes us seem

  To pick up fragments of a dream

  Part of which comes true, and part

  Beats and trembles in the heart?’

  Matteo read the words slowly and hesitantly but when he saw Fabian beaming at him in encouragement and delight, his voice strengthened and lifted.

  ‘The One remains; the many change and pass,

  Heaven’s light forever shines, earth’s shadows fly:

  Life like a dome of many-coloured glass

  Stains the white radiance of Eternity,

  Until death tramples it to fragments.’

  When he looked to Fabian for explication, his forehead creased with puzzlement, Fabian lifted up his arms and shouted the lines:

  ‘. . . Die

  If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!

  Follow where all is fled!’

  and both burst into shrill laughter and ran downhill into the wind, leaving Mama at the window, aghast.

  Fabian was given permission, when he requested it, to take Matteo in the boat across the lake to Varenna. The day was so still, the boat scarcely moved. They lay in it, bemused by the sun, and Fabian dutifully read from the guide book how the pink and ochre and terracotta houses that clung like the cells of a honeycomb to the looming limestone crags of the mountain had been built by the refugees who fled from the Isola Comacina when their city was razed by the armies of Como in the twelfth century; how the castle had been built on top of the mountain by Queen Theodolinda, wife of the Lombard King Authari, in the sixth century; how, during the Renaissance, it had been one of the principal strongholds of the Fief of the Riviera; and how the church of pink and yellow marble they would visit contained frescoes from the fourteenth century . . .

  But when they reached the shore and, leaving the boat, set off on foot, the steep and stony path leading up through the beechwoods to the cliffs defeated them quickly. Laughing, they fell back, allowed their determination to dissipate, and neither visited the castle nor even entered the church, but wandered through the narrow lanes where the rose-pink and ochre houses had their green and grey and blue shutters closed to the sun and black and white cats dozed beside pots of geraniums, down to the gardens of the Villa Monastero. Here they paced the avenues of dark cypresses and palms till they came to a low stone wall spread with wistaria and, sitting by the edge of the lake where the water washed and washed the pebbles, Fabian read to Matteo from The Journey to the East.

  It was my destiny to join in a great experience. Having had the good fortune to belong to the League, I was permitted to be a participant in a unique journey. What wonder it had at the time! How radiant and comet-like it seemed, and how quickly it had been forgotten and allowed to fall into disrepute. For this reason, I have attempted a short description of this fabulous journey, a journey the like of which had not been attempted since the days of Hugo and mad Roland . . .

  Late in the afternoon, with the sun now invisible behind a heavy silver haze that was reflected dully by the lake so that it had turned to molten silver in which the surrounding hills floated without any substance, mirages of blue, mauve and purple, Fabian was still reading, in a voice that grew softer and lower.

  Brother H. was led to despair in his test, and despair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice and understanding and to fulfil their requirements. Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other . . .

  The light was gone from the silver lake, now dull and tarnished, when Fabian stuck the book back into his pocket and said, ‘Matteo, we must go. They’ll be sending out a search party for us,’ and they ran past the dark villa with its row of curious domes lining the flat rooftop, and all the way to the docks and their boat. While Fabian readied the sails, his face clenched with tension, Matteo murmured to himself, ‘“Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other . . .”’

  When they returned, Mama stood in the driveway, tearing a hydrangea flower to bits in her hands. She said nothing but gave Matteo a quick and bitter look, then went in to order dinner. Matteo looked at the clock in the hall – were they so late?

  At dinner he left it to Fabian to describe their expedition and said nothing himself, eating so little that Mama became angry and demanded to know how it was possible that sailing across the lake had done nothing to improve his appetite. At this, he looked at her, sighed, ‘I’m tired, Mama,’ and was given permission to go to bed. As he passed Fabian’s chair, his tutor slipped him the copy of the book, all crumpled and crushed, so that he might be able to stay up and read it to the end.

  Inside the figures I saw something move, slowly, extremely slowly, in the same way that a snake moves which has fallen asleep. Something was taken there, something like a very slow, smooth but continuous flowing and melting; indeed, something melted or poured across from my visage to that of Leo’s. I perceived that my image was in the process of adding to or flowing into Leo’s, nourishing and strengthening it. It seemed that, in time, all substance from one image could flow into the other and only one would remain: Leo. He must grow, I must disappear.

  Matteo fell asleep with the image in his mind of the two figures ‘transparent and that one could look inside as one could look through the glass of a bottle or vase’, and within them something that could be a stream or else a snake, magically illuminated, flowing from one to the other till both were filled, filled with the dark of sleep.

  A week later Mama walked down the hill to the boat dock and came upon the two of them seated in the boat which was moored by a ring in the wall, going nowhere, their knees touching as they read to each other from Fabian’s book of poetry.

  ‘Oh Rose thou art sick (read Mattco).

  The invisible worm,

  That flies in the night

  In the howling storm:

  ‘Has found out thy bed

  of crimson joy:

  And his dark secret love

  Does thy love destroy.’

  They were not aware of her listening, looming, and went on to declaim:

  ‘Never pain to tell thy love

  Love that never told can be

  For the gentle wind does move

  Silently, invisibly’

  when she broke in: ‘Matt-e-o!’

  He looked up, startled, and she called, more sharply, ‘Come here, Matteo!’

  Fabian gave him a little smile – encouraging, sympathetic – and Matteo climbed up out of the boat and went up the water-washed steps to her, sullen with resentment. She said to him, ‘I call and call and you do not come.’

  ‘I heard you and I came. What is the matter?’

  ‘Nothing is the matter, but I want you to come to the house. Uncle Filippo is coming to see you.’

  ‘Uncle Filippo? To see me?’ Matteo asked in apprehension, but followed her dutifully. He glanced back to see if Fabian had stayed in the boat but it was so far below the wall, he could not see the boat or his tutor. His mother, turning back, caught the look of chagrin on his face.

  To Matteo’s surprise, Uncle Filippo appeared to have come to the house to invite him to visit Como with him, offering him a tour of the family silk factory ‘seeing that you are not at school now’. It was not at all what Matteo wished to see or do, but the look on his parents’ faces made it clear that there was no question of declining.

  When he told Fabian he would have to go, Fabian gave a small twist of a smile that Matteo interpreted as sad. ‘I will be ba
ck by night,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ll see if I can find another Hesse in the bookshop in Como.’ Fabian nodded.

  When Matteo returned, Fabian had left, leaving no note behind for him, no message.

  Mama shrugged. ‘He had to leave quickly. The telegram said he was wanted urgently – he had no time to write you a note. He said to say goodbye.’

  Fabian did, however, send Matteo a gift. A few days after his departure, a parcel arrived at the villa. When Matteo heard of it, it had already been opened by Mama and she was standing at the hall table, her feet amongst the brown paper wrapping, reading with an expression of total incredulity, from Hesse’s Siddhartha:

  ‘She drew him to her with her eyes. He put his face against her, placed his lips against hers which were like a freshly cut fig. Kamala kissed him deeply, and to Siddhartha’s great astonishment he felt how much she taught him, how clever she was, how she mastered him, repulsed him, lured him, and how after this long kiss, a long series of other kisses, all different, awaited him . . .’

  Catching Matteo by his collar, the book in her other hand, she marched into Papa’s room, shouting, ‘Will you come and look? Will you see what this Englishman of yours has sent your son to read? Will you kindly take a look and see if it is fit to place in the hands of a schoolboy? This is the reading, the study the two of them were up to – this! I knew it. I told you, I knew it.’

  Matteo was running once again. They could not stop him – he would not stay in the house or garden, he would climb the walls or over the gate if they locked it, and run and run as if all he wanted was to place a distance between them and himself, a distance he drew out to greater and greater lengths with each run.

  No one was able to hold, or to pursue him. The boat was lifted out of the dock and locked away but Matteo did not ask for it. The family sent the porter to the man at the ferry to ask that he sell no tickets to the young Matteo. The old man snorted in the porter’s face. ‘Tell those high and mighty folk on the hill to keep their noses out of my business. I sell tickets, I run the ferry, not they, and if the boy’s got money to pay, he can ride the ferry, who’s to stop him?’ and he rolled the butt of tobacco across his lower lip and spat out a fleck of it with such disdain that the messenger fell silent and did not pursue the matter. What was more, he became the butt of jokes in the bar where unfortunately the man from the ferry too went to drink in the evenings and told everyone of the arrogance of the folk on the hill and his pithy response to it.