Under the Rose

by Julia O'Faolain

  He looked tired. ‘Go on. Make yourself a good conscience. Blacken me. Do whatever it is you have to do.’

  ‘Do? What should I have to do? You’re so suspicious!’

  ‘I’d be a moron if I weren’t. Una … why don’t you go and see a doctor? I can’t get out, can I? Go and visit Dottor Pietri. You needn’t tell him what you’ve done to me, just that you’re feeling … depressed, nervous. Get him to give you a checkup.’

  ‘Carlo, it’s not me! It’s you! Why do you think I had to do this?’

  ‘I DON’T KNOW!’ he shouted. ‘TELL ME!’

  ‘Because you never saw me. Because you treated me like an automat, a penny-in-the-slot machine. Kiss it or stick your penis in it and it goes “mmmgh!”, hit it and it goes “ow”, set it for the dinner-at-eight schedule and it will comply. In case of breakdown send it to Dottor Pietri.’

  ‘You are mad.’

  ‘Well that’s convenient, isn’t it? Much easier to assume the trouble’s all in me than have to assess your own life.’

  ‘Are you enjoying this?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what’s the point of the exercise?’

  There wasn’t any. I realized this now. But it was too late to stop it. My power over Carlo was purely negative. I couldn’t make him think or feel differently. He’s cast in your mould. Doubts are alien to him. But releasing him straightaway would be too great a risk. What happened some days later underlined that. They had been uneventful days. Carlo ate, listened to his transistor radio, sulked, tried wheedling me a bit, had a tantrum, sulked, wheedled me again. His moods went in cycles. He was getting more anxious, however, as it became clear that his office had accepted my letter and that there was no immediate prospect of anyone discovering what was going on. He had been in the cellar ten days when Giovanna rang up. You and she were off to Austria next day on your skiing holiday and she wanted to give me your address there and say good-bye. I must have been a bit constrained on the phone. Carlo, I of course told her, was out. I’d tell him she’d rung. No, no point ringing back. He’d been invited to go duck shooting with some friends and was spending the night with them. He might be away two days. They were not on the phone. Duck shooting? Yes, I said, he’d just taken it up. These friends had introduced him to it. People we’d met at a party. They had no phone. He would certainly write and tell her all about it. Giovanna said oh, well, OK, give him our love. I said enjoy yourself. She bridled. The skiing holiday is part of your get-Giovanna-well-married campaign and she knows I know this and is touchy. Also she knows that Carlo and I could do with some of the money you spend like water – but this is by the way. I only mention it to show how she came to associate the constraint in our conversation with herself and her concerns rather than with me and mine. ‘I wish I weren’t going,’ she said at the end, ‘but you know how la Mamma is!’ She had accepted the duck-shooting story easily. I went down and told Carlo.

  I suppose this made him despair. It meant I had three weeks ahead of me during which I need have no fear of discovery. It must have seemed like an eternity. He was complaining of cramps already. Now he began to complain again of the chain on his neck. His complaints distressed me. I have already mentioned that I had begun to feel motherly about him. After all: I cleaned, fed, babied him. Perhaps I felt as you do towards him? I don’t know. My resentments were gone. (Who can call a baby to account?) My mind swung between terror at what he might – would – do to me if I let him loose and horror at what I was doing to him. Yes, yes, I had begun admitting to myself that eventually I would have to go and, from some safe distance, telephone someone to come and set him free. But go where? Telephone who? The world outside our house had become unreal to me. I felt bound to this nasty riveting nest of my own fabrication, could not bear to go leaving such a memory behind. My possessiveness grew with his dependence and with the odd morbid gratitude – it may just have been cunning – with which he thanked me for my efforts to make him less uncomfortable. Usually, I took care to keep out of range of his hands which were, as I told you, free. On this day too I tried to examine his neck from a safe distance, but he seemed to have gone limp from exhaustion and his lolling head concealed the area which was being rubbed by the chain. I leaned closer. Suddenly his hands sprang up and grabbed my throat. They squeezed. I tried to shout but couldn’t get my breath. He squeezed again, crushing my windpipe, railing at me (‘Stronza, turd, mad bitch! I have you now!’) and his eyes were stark and crazy. He had pulled the chain tight on his own neck which was in fact rubbed raw, but he seemed now to be unaware of this. Slowly his hands relaxed and he began to cry.

  ‘I could …’, he sobbed, ‘I could … Una, what have you done to us both? We’re mad! We’re both mad! This is degrading. It’s valueless. It’s against every value. Una, we were normal people, we … listen, Una, ti prego, I’ll make any promise you like. But let me out. Look, I realize, I really do, that I must be to blame for some of this. As much as you. I was insensitive, I … But, look, this is destroying us both. Can’t you see that? Can’t you, Una? Una, say something.’

  ‘You’re choking me.’

  ‘What use is there in this, Una?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Listen,’ his stranglehold had turned into a sort of caress, but he was still holding me tightly and his own arms were held tightly to the bed so that our movements were restricted. ‘I could kill you,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t you know that?’

  ‘What good would that do you?’

  ‘What good is any of this to anyone?’

  His nervous excitement had found the usual outlet, he had begun trying to make love. But he was afraid to let go my neck. ‘Unbutton me,’ he whispered. I did. We managed to make love. I only tell you this, Signora, to show how hopelessly tangled up our emotions were: his as well as mine. We lived in a fetid bubble of dependence and rancour.

  ‘Do you hate me?’ he whispered now.

  ‘No.’

  ‘We must trust each other.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Fuck,’ he said, then, and then: ‘you’re liking it. Go on: say it. Say it! SAY IT.’

  Was that strategy, Signora? I don’t know, do I, any more now than I did then. I was enjoying it as I always did with Carlo. I was venting the pent humours of ten days. Slowly, his fingers uncurled so that I could move freely above him. At the end he was not restraining me at all.

  ‘Carlo!’ I wanted to weep.

  ‘Where are the keys?’

  ‘Upstairs.’

  ‘Go on up’, he whispered, ‘and get them. Go on, Una.’

  I went upstairs to the kitchen and opened the drawer where I kept the keys. My neck was hurting where he had squeezed it. I turned to look in the kitchen mirror and saw the blackberry-juice outline of his ten fingers on my throat. I closed the drawer, leaving the keys inside and did not go back to the cellar again that day. Next morning I reconsidered the risks of releasing Carlo. They did not seem to me any less than before. I went down and told him I did not intend to release him.

  He didn’t talk to me for thirty-six hours after that. He also refused to eat. But I did not, of course, give in. I won’t say I was firm. Every moment was a flea’s leap of doubt – but the effect was the same as if I had been stubbornly wedded to decision: Carlo did not get released. After the thirty-six hours, he asked for a drink. I gave him wine in which I had dissolved several sleeping pills. When he had been asleep for some time I approached him with great caution, blasted the transistor radio in his ear, poked him from a distance with a piece of wood and – lest he might be fooling – dangled a realistic trick-shop plastic scorpion close to his face. He did not wake up. I got my keys, unlocked the padlock on the chains which held his arms and neck, unlooped them and pulled him down to a supine position. Then I got my second set of fetters, pulled his wrists through them, fastened them in place by pulling the bar through the lower pair of holes in each fetter, laid the entire contraption across his thighs so that his arms were parallel to his body, threaded
the chains through the ends of the bar and padlocked them together under the bed as I had already done with the foot-fetters. This meant Carlo could now actually move more. He could sit up or lie down by displacing the bars whose attaching chains were fairly long, and could edge over to the side of the bed to use his slop bucket. His hands, however, were free only from the wrist. It would be harder for him to make a grab at me. While he was asleep, I brought down a basin of water and washed him all over. Then I powdered him with Roberts talcum powder. He was turning more and more into my baby: my battered baby. It humiliated me since it must him. I, who resent the body’s weaknesses – remember; the source of all our trouble was my lack of muscle – had now inflicted intolerable bodily constraints on Carlo. Ironically, that very day, I found one of my own constraints had gone: my overdue period arrived. The pregnancy – my fetter – had either never been or had terminated itself. Who knew? One knows so little about the biological processes – and when I say ‘one’ I don’t just mean ‘I’. Doctors are as vague as any female. ‘Maybe you had a little miscarriage and mistook it for a heavy period,’ they’ll say when questioned. ‘Maybe you are just irregular?’ Shrug, smile; what does it matter? Get on with it. It’s the curse of Eve. I saw a meaning here, however. My release was a nod from Fate, old ignis fatuus who lurks in the madder mathematical corners of my mind making his own kind of sense. This was a quid pro quo. Fate helps those who help themselves. Fetter your husband, said the sign, and Fate will unfetter you. The equation comes out evenly if X is added in one place and subtracted in another. I had been approved! I have to break into my narrative here, Signora, to remind you that superstitions are only metaphors. I am no madder than you when I make my own signs and patterns – they are a filing system for otherwise unrelated perceptions – no madder, I say, than you when you accept holus-bolus the ready-made metaphor of your religion. No, don’t be angry. I am really trying to get through to you, not to mock you. Let me say it another way: the arrival of my period, the abrupt flow of menstrual blood, had come too perfectly on time to be chance. Maybe something in myself had set it off: perhaps some nervous convulsion had caused the miscarriage of a real pregnancy or released the dam of a false one? Either way it had happened because of what I was doing to Carlo. The message was clear: my interests and his were in opposition. I must cut the knot of our love/hate. I must go.

  I put off going. This was the twelfth day and Carlo was still asleep. It was the thirteenth when he woke up and found the new fetters on his wrists. I think that then a sort of apathy seized him. He had tried everything, it must have seemed to him: anger, reason, threats, appeals, tears. He had refused to eat. He gave up scheming now. He had grown meek and constipated; he claimed to feel constant nausea.

  ‘I’ll give you a glycerine suppository.’

  ‘OK.’

  He let me stick it up his anus with my finger, giving no signs of shame or vindictiveness. As if I’d been a nurse. But was he apathetic or testing me in some way? I did not discover.

  ‘Will you eat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll have to feed you.’

  ‘OK.’

  His apathy was more wearing on my nerves than his sulks or tantrums. Inaction was telling on us both but perhaps more on me since the choice dangled constantly in the corner of my brain: I could put an end to this. Release him. Go. But then the whole thing would have been a failure. Sometimes it seemed to be more fear of anti-climax than fear of Carlo which kept me there. I told myself I must hold out. Something might even now click in his brain. By using force on me he had invited like treatment. Since my use of force had resolved nothing, might he not see – glimpse, allow – that it never could or did? But if he saw this, would I believe he was seeing it? I would not. Yet craved an absolving word.

  ‘What are you using for money?’ he asked finally.

  It was the fifteenth day. I was keeping notes carefully. This letter is based on them. Putting in time, I shopped, cooked, cleaned more than I ever had, wrote and rewrote drafts for this letter, packed, tried to keep away from Carlo. I felt occasional urges to hurt him, frequent ones to harangue him. I was sexually hungry for him. At night he filled every dream. I was leaving, however. I had prepared a telegram summoning you from Austria. Alternatively I might wait and send you a letter after you got back. I wrote that, too. It must be sent, if the telegram had not been, a few days after your return from Austria, a month after I first tied Carlo up: my last possible date for departure.

  ‘What are you using for money?’

  ‘I got some from my mother. I wrote and told her it was an emergency. It came last week.’

  ‘You can’t earn any, can you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So chaining me up didn’t change much, did it? You’re dependent still. You can’t run our life.’

  He had me there.

  Days went by. Carlo read Gramsci’s Letters from Prison which he had – theatrically, I thought – asked me to buy him. Gramsci, he told me, did gymnastic exercises every day in his cell to keep fit. Gramsci, I pointed out, was in prison for years. Gramsci, Carlo said, recommended the cultivation of a sense of humour. Prisoners were in danger of becoming monomaniacs. As I was one already, that, he said, would make two of us. Well, we were both prisoners.

  On the twentieth day Carlo told me he had had a dream. He had dreamed of his grandfather whom he had never known but whose portrait used, he told me, to hang in your villa at Forte dei Marmi. The grandfather, Nonno Bevilacqua, a Bolognese with whiskers, had been angry with Carlo in the dream for reasons which he couldn’t recall and had perhaps not understood. Carlo interpreted his dream. It meant, he said, that he was feeling guilt for having neglected the patriarchal virtues, let down the ideals of his ancestors, married a foreign female and failed to keep her in line.

  ‘Basta!’ I shouted. ‘You made that dream up. Anyway, dream-interpreting is a stupid bloody habit you could leave alone. You have enough nineteenth-century quirks without picking up the nineteen-thirtyish ones.’

  ‘Power corrupts,’ said Carlo. ‘Now it’s censorship. Revolt breeds tyranny, I see. I am cultivating my sense of humour.’

  I started to leave the cellar.

  ‘Turd!’ he shouted up the stairs after me. ‘Stupid, nit-brained female!’

  ‘I could hurt you, you know. Badly.’

  ‘Nit-brain! What do you think you’ve been doing all these weeks? Do you think my bones don’t hurt? Do you think my muscles don’t ache from lying in one position? And all to no end: a nit-brained, anarchic, feminine gesture. You’d better not let me out’, Carlo yelled, ‘or I’ll give you the hiding of your life! I won’t leave a postage-stamp worth of your skin intact! I’ll cut off your clitoris. Then I’ll have you committed. For the good of society! You shouldn’t be loose! You’re a dangerous nit-brain!’

  I rushed upstairs and out of the front door, banging it behind me just in case he could hear. I hadn’t been out except for quick shopping since this thing had begun. Now, I needed to get out, anywhere, to breathe. I walked with brisk aimlessness to the edge of the city walls. It was about 4 p.m. on a bleak day. It had been raining and everything shone. The massy giant blocks of stone in the Etruscan gate made the town itself look more like a prison than Carlo’s cellar and I had a more oppressive sensation now than before I came out. I had trouble breathing and my breath seemed to strangle in my throat. A few schoolboys in black pinafores passed on their way home from school. They carried heavy briefcases, leaning sideways, their shoulders already half deformed by the habitual weight. It was cold and they passed smartly, not dawdling. All life was inside the houses. Flowerpots, washing-lines and bird-cages had been taken in. Doors were shut clam-tight. The whole grey, wet town, clinging to its jagged hill, was like a bereaved clam-colony whose inhabitant molluscs had migrated to richer waters. The streets were empty as river-beds. The alabaster shops which cater to summer tourists were shut. Whatever life there was was behind closed doors and, as I had no friends in Vol
terra, there was no door on which I could knock. I walked into a chrome-cold bar and ordered a coffee. I asked when the next bus left.

  ‘For where?’

  ‘Siena,’ I said, ‘or Florence. Livorno even.’

  ‘Ma Signora, those are different directions. Where do you want to go?’

  I mumbled something about connecting with a train and left. It seems I strike people now as odd. Perhaps I am a trifle? One wouldn’t know one was oneself, would one? Carlo may well be becoming odd too. I don’t like his dreaming and making threats. It reminds me of me. If only there were a memory-drug – didn’t I read about such a thing somewhere sometime? In a science-fiction tale perhaps? – that would induce amnesia in Carlo, then we could wipe the slate clean, begin again. A blow on the head could induce amnesia. Could, yes, but how be sure it would? A blow judiciously … Christ, I was at it again! Fantasizing and, worse, about blows. Enough, oh yes, enough of this.

  I was home by now. I went into the kitchen, made myself some coffee and wrote some more of this. Vacillation has become my rhythm. Telegram Austria now? Wait nine days more till you come back? Yes? No? Which? With all this, I had forgotten to buy food. My mind might well be slipping and if it did, even momentarily, if something happened to me, say, what would become of Carlo? Who would ever let him out? Better post the note to you in Florence. You won’t get it right away but will get it. It will be Carlo’s insurance against an accident and meanwhile I’ll still have a little time to

  The foregoing unfinished letter was found by Giovanna Crispi two weeks after her sister-in-law’s flight to London. Whether she read it or not is unknown for she simply put it in a yellow envelope and posted it off without comment in a parcel containing a number of her sister-in-law’s personal effects.