Wild Gestures

by Lucy Durneen

  ‘Don’t you speak any Spanish?’ Claudine said. ‘That’s kind of the point of being here, no?’

  ‘Would English be okay? I’m just more comfortable with English.’

  ‘Of course you are. You can take the British out of the Empire but you can’t take the Empire out of the British.’

  ‘I’m sorry, what?’

  ‘What? I didn’t say anything.’

  Technically you are not British because your father is from Salmon, Idaho, but this is a moot point that you sensed would impress Claudine L. less than allowing her to believe you the embodiment of imperialist evil. Needless to say you were now regretting the fact that for various reasons largely centring around the presidency of George Bush you did not opt to take US citizenship on your eighteenth birthday. Come back! you wanted to shout as she left the building. Claudine! Por favor. But she did not turn round. It was the coldest July for thirty years and she went out into the hard, bright air, blowing on her tiny hands, stamping those feet that you wanted to feel pressed against the small of your back in the night. There was even talk of snow that July. You wanted to give her something warm: your hat, your heart. But because you could not, you just waved after her, as if it was all part of the ritual of opening mail.

  When you think about it now, it does seem strange that Claudine L. should have chosen to confide in you above everyone else who might have seen the light. You have never heard it said that way before, i.e. aloud. Seen the light. You wonder if it is a signifier for something bigger, something to contradict everything that is known about creation. Even now you think that humanity might be too quick to cling only to things that can be proved. You have always found the significance of opposable thumbs to be faintly alarming, in the same way you never quite came to terms with the truth about Father Christmas.

  And you cannot deny semantics. You saw the light. You were standing at the studio window and outside there was the sky, like mercury, or a dangerous dream. There is nothing more unfamiliar than the sky on the other side of the world, and the loneliness made you want to sing just to hear the voice of a human being. From this dark sea came the light, raining down into your room with no warning. It would not be a cliché to describe it in the same terms as water. It was not one light but many lights, concentrated into a single point that hovered on the wall above your head, and what you felt was a terrible, prehistoric kind of fear that extended from a time when if you didn’t move fast enough you’d be eaten.

  The light moved slowly, as if scanning the room and you wondered if this was happening all across the world. You would at least try to make a case for the human race. On Earth we have all these amazing things, you would say. Telephones the size of a credit card. Biros. But nothing happened. The light changed its mind, withdrew, vanished. You remember now how the rhythm of your heart changed in the fraction of a second before the darkness returned, as if your heart was outside your body, in your hand, and you were watching it beat. You wanted to phone somebody, your mother. You wanted to hear the words, I love you. Or, Sweetie, everything’s fine. We’re just going shopping. Take care, honey.

  In the morning there was a letter in your mailbox for Claudine L. This would have been an amazing coincidence if you had not run into the concierge the night before and offered to help him catch up on the backlog caused by the weather. You waited for her by the front door of your building, assuming a casual position that suggested you had the luxury of choosing whether you would ever go out into the cold; only when you saw Claudine L. in the hall would you look up and move. But it is hard to hold a nonchalant position for more than twenty minutes. More than that, it is hard to be nonchalant when you have witnessed what could well be the Beginning of the End. English or Spanish, every available word you knew seemed ridiculous in the wake of the green light. ‘Hey, Claudine, I think this is yours,’ was as nonsensical as a limerick.

  And yet. As she descended the stairs and you held out the letter you knew straight away this was exactly the right thing to have done. Not one right thing, but the last move in a chain of right things. Sometimes we are faced with decisions that rely on an ancient intuition, as if that moment of extending your hand towards Claudine L. was the culmination of twenty three years of making that same gesture, as if the very first time you stretched your arms in the womb was in preparation for this. She looked right into your eyes. Her look said: she had never seen you before. No. Weren’t you—? The one Claudine L. insulted a few days ago. Or maybe you were just The One. This was what you willed her to think. But you had to remain quiet. It was like when you have cheated on a quiz and have to be very careful not to shout out the answers before the question has been asked. If you spoke first, it would be the end. So you waited it out. As soon as she said ‘This is a weird question,’ you knew it was only a matter of time. When you heard the words ‘green light’, it was like winning the lottery.

  ‘Do you want to go up to my room and talk, Claudine?’

  ‘Talk? What about?’

  ‘I think it would help. I was really scared. Were you scared?’

  ‘Are you kidding? I was fucking horror-struck. Horror-struck? Is that the right way to say it?’

  ‘It’s the best way to say it, Claudine. So do you want to see my room?’

  When you were seven, you saw another light. It was Christmas Eve, and it was also the year your best friend’s cousin fell out of a window and died, when you had the traditional fascination with death of all seven-year-olds. At seven, death is no more than a secret form of life. The potential annihilation of humanity was therefore not something that particularly alarmed you, although you remember a certain mild anger that it all might disrupt the filling of stockings.

  You lived in a much bigger house then, with fields beyond the garden fence. Your father’s indiscretions on the living room sofa and your new, exclusive life with your mother were yet to come. As you were looking out of your bedroom window, scanning for reindeer, you saw the light way out in the field, colourless, blinking. You remember a thrilling breeze at your neck. Strange thoughts came to you like bright stars, obvious and old, as if not only had these thoughts been waiting too long to be inhabited but you were the single person they were destined to find. This would be how it would happen. First the lights, then shadows with enormous heads. Tractor beams pushing through gunmetal clouds. A subtle manoeuvre while everyone opened their presents around the world.

  Your father told you later that it was just a workman’s lamp. The fields were being prepared to make way for a housing estate and the lamp must have been kicked over and forgotten while the site was closed for the holidays. It remained in the garage, still flashing, until your mother cleared the place after the divorce. But this version of events never entirely satisfied you because there are some things about that night you still cannot explain. The urgency of your father’s movements as he went out into the snow. Your mother’s voice saying, ‘See what it is, Brian, for God’s sake!’ You don’t really know if it happened the way you are telling it now but you have a feeling there are things even seven-year-olds instinctively know to be true. For a long time afterwards this was the picture you carried of your father: a lone figure striding out across the field with a bat swinging against his leg, the snow alight and dim in alternate beats.

  Once she was in your room you could detect a lack of satisfaction in Claudine L. too. She touched plates and books like a blind person, trying to feel who you were. But this was just a room in which until the night before, nothing amazing had ever happened and there was not much to feel. She paused at the photograph pinned above your desk. ‘You like Humphrey Bogart?’

  ‘That’s my father!’

  ‘Shut up! Well, here’s looking at you kid.’

  ‘What? Oh, right.’

  ‘Hey, you did see it, didn’t you?’

  ‘I guess if you squint…’

  ‘No, asshole, the light.’

  You were not used to being called an asshole, but you put it down to Claudine L. being F
rench and didn’t hold a grudge, which showed just how much she was doing to realign your core beliefs. When she asked if she could stay with you tonight there was only one answer and it had been waiting light years to be said aloud.

  Together you and Claudine L. considered the options. Neither of you knew if the Aurora Australis was visible from the city, and the light was too low for a plane. Claudine suggested terrorists, but these are the things you ask at the time. Later you realised the light was not actually airborne. It was a grounded light, you guessed maybe two blocks away. That left the one thought neither of you could say aloud, and it was two blocks away. It was knowledge that if spoken had the power to become truth, like when you told your mother about your father and the Polish cleaner. It’s obvious now your mother knew about that all along but it was okay, because if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, everyone knows it doesn’t make a sound. Then along you came with the trumpets. You had no intention of making the same mistake twice. So instead you said, ‘I once knew someone who fell out of a window.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘He died.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘I’m just telling you because these windows don’t look safe. You should sit over here, on the bed.’

  Claudine rolled her eyes. ‘Are you high? I could use something right now, if you had something.’

  You had something. But Claudine didn’t have any money, so she offered to make you dinner instead. Her world famous salad.

  It was only potatoes and sweet corn, but it was good. Something about the prefix world-famous made you see it differently. Superlative potatoes. Never had there been such a creamy mayonnaise. ‘It’s a secret recipe,’ Claudine L. said. ‘My grandmother’s. I could tell you, but…’

  ‘…then you’d have to kill me.’

  She stabbed gently at your arm with her fork and your chest moved like there were wings beating under your ribs. ‘I heard some guys talking this morning. That Italian kid with the fucking hideous death metal jacket? He saw it. But I thought I was going mad, until you.’

  So that was how it went. She was too afraid to be alone and you had wanted this since you arrived in Buenos Aires. Or maybe not exactly this, but the first rule of life is that you take what you can get. You were like a bodyguard, without the guns, but you didn’t mind, because the bodyguard always gets the girl as long as they wait long enough and don’t make any sudden moves. You slept together in the same bed, but there was only one bed. You shared vivid intimacies, but the studio really was just one room and it’s hard to use a toilet quietly in the night. She was gone every morning to her class in San Telmo and every hour until the evening was unique only because of its varied proximity to her return. In the morning there was no reason to eat or even get out of bed; dinner time and it was like you had been given permission to breathe. The vibrations of the air as she walked about your room, the smell of potatoes boiling, these things became Buenos Aires, which had never looked less like Paris, or even Buenos Aires. You actually hardly knew what the city looked like. You hadn’t been to class in two weeks. You knew every inch of your shitty little room, every cockroach out in the hall, but you had not seen a Milonga or wept at Eva Peron’s grave. It didn’t matter. For years to come you will be able to recall Buenos Aires with a clarity that goes infinitely beyond geographical precision.

  You once knew a girl who told you that she fell in love with people, not men, not women. You didn’t know what this really entailed, this wild, undefined model of attraction, but when she asked you to go to after-work drinks with her, you said yes, just in case. That night you had too much tequila and would have kissed her if one of your older colleagues hadn’t come along to warn you off. This warning travelled with you through the intervening years, alerting you not just to the dangers of the girl who fell in love with people but the whole world, every possible scenario where love might exist. But love did not exist that way here. Whatever it was that Claudine L. felt for you, it depended entirely on the light, and fear, and not knowing. It was almost the exact opposite of a relationship, where the goal was to remove fear and attain a state of complete understanding. Each night you willed the light to return, because the light was the new kind of love. It was more extraordinary even than love. But it didn’t come back and there are only so many ways to make mysteries out of ordinary things.

  ‘We should call each other by secret names,’ you said, after Claudine L. had been staying with you two weeks. ‘I’ll be Silver. What about you?’

  ‘Elisabetta. No. I’m not sure about this.’

  ‘Elisabetta?’

  ‘My Mamie’s name.’

  All the talk of secrets made you feel a little crazy, so when Claudine L. straightened the blanket on the bed you told her your own grandmother had crocheted it while imprisoned by the Nazis. Claudine L. said her grandmother Elisabetta had been in the camps too and maybe that was why you two seemed to have a connection. She said ‘the camps’ in such a way that you knew she meant one particular camp, but there are some things you can’t retract, no matter how hideous. And it connected you! To this day Claudine L. must think of your grandmother defying Hitler with her yarn and needles. But there is no way back from that kind of lie; distraction is the best you could hope for. So you asked, ‘Is that the grandmother who makes the amazing salad?’ and she told you no, no that was the other one, this grandmother was shot on the Death March through Poland; the recipe was from her mother’s side, the side that didn’t know such suffering.

  And it could have gone on that way, forever, but in every romance, even the unromantic ones, there is a test, and yours came after three weeks, via Claudine L.’s laptop and the BBC World Service. You learned that plane tagging was a big problem in the cities. Kids were shining handheld lasers into the cockpits of landing aircraft. An arrest had been made in California, but it was not just America. It was everywhere. It was England, it was Buenos Aires. The point was: the lasers were green. The light was kids. It was okay. It was not. Not the thing you were both afraid it would be. But the relief was Claudine L.’s only. She could still stay with you, you wouldn’t stop her. But she no longer needed a bodyguard. She didn’t need your room or its unacceptably intimate sanitary arrangements. ‘I guess I can go home now’ hurt as much as a lance in the side.

  Claudine L. hunted through the studio, removed eyelash curlers, twenty Gitanes, a box of tampons. You were going to help but instead you grabbed her by the shoulder. ‘Stay’, you said, and her dress became static, like the fabric was part of your skin, moving in time with your blood. For as long as she stood there, you might still live.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stay, Elisabetta.’

  ‘There’s no need. You heard what they said. Lasers can’t hurt you, right?’

  ‘Maybe the lasers are not what we saw,’ you said. But in this sentence you gave something away, something essential, perhaps in the sadness of the words we, or maybe, or lasers, or not. Or in the way you did not say: I will die if you leave now.

  ‘They could be wrong about the lasers, Elisabetta.’

  ‘Stop it. They’re not wrong. And it’s Claudine. That name thing was dumb.’

  They weren’t wrong. And the name thing was dumb. The speed of her departure made you feel dark and mad, like Hamlet, and not for the first time. There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Claudine, you wanted to shout behind the slamming door, but really it was just you, alone in a room in which genuinely, nothing amazing had ever happened, and Shakespeare could only ever sound pretentious.

  So it ends like this, what happened to you two summers ago, the thing you have chosen to talk about today. It ends with you bumping into Claudine L. in the hallway the morning before the midterm exam you were not ready to take because of this story. She was with the Italian kid in the hideous death metal jacket. ‘You remember Alessandro?’ she said. ‘We’re kind of together now.’

  ‘You’re together?’

  ‘We’re going travelling. Thailand, ma
ybe.’

  ‘Thailand? I want to say be careful. You know, of disease.’

  ‘That’s thoughtful.’

  ‘And don’t let anyone carry your luggage.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I hope you’ll be very happy. Together.’

  ‘I hope you’ll be happy -’

  ‘It’s all right. You can say it. Alone.’

  You went upstairs. You opened your door, walked inside. You shut it tight, not the door, your heart. You sat on the seat by the perilous windows, looked into the middle distance, towards the place where the green light had been and whispered, If you come back, take me. If this were a film, the tragic music would have a reached a crescendo at that moment. Maybe rain would have lashed at the window and your reflection would have dissolved in the weight of that rain. You don’t know why people have such a problem with clichés. Clichés are about the truest things you know. It is as if the world is simultaneously nodding when you hear the words the rain lashed at the windows. It says: your loss is enormous. It says: even the weather is crying for you. You would have to be living on Mars not to know this.

  Your reflection in the window seemed hostile. If you were honest, heartbreak was a disappointment. What you actually wished for at that moment was for your father to be in the room so you could punch his fucking lights out, an ugly desire accompanied by the same exhilaration as when you look at a petrol gauge blinking red and realise that there is either one mile or fifty miles until the next stop. You could pull over now, but still you will drive. The moral of the thought is: perhaps all hatred is like this, a wager in constant, wild need of being defied. Certainly hate accounts for something like seventy-five per cent of your current patient list, people who wake up in the night with a crazy fever to even the score with a more attractive sister or the man who stole a childhood sweetheart. Or mothers. So often it is mothers. You have always been okay with your mother, but it’s by no means true of everyone. The Oedipus thing isn’t even the half of it.