How to Paint a Dead Man (21 page)

He takes a breath, grits his teeth, and tips over. He tips from the waist as if attempting to clear his balls over an electric fence. A ‘swan-dive’-isn’t that what the extra-bendies call it? Bastard it hurts! He pauses. Come on, focus, man. Don’t spew up or cack your trousers. Just try again. Turn the dial. He reaches down. Sweat breaks on his forehead, but he stays bent. The pain increases, eating through his cells. He tries to remain there. But some cautious auxiliary lobe in his brain is firing, and any minute now it is going to rescue him by over-riding the decision to self-harm. He can’t. He can’t do it. He lifts back up, his whole body weak and shaking. The walls of the gorge rotate past his eyes, grey stone, grey stone, and he feels himself carousel. He leans against the boulders, waits for it to stop. The walls slow. They slow and halt.

So. That plan didn’t work. But it’s OK. Not long now and it will be light enough to see. Then things will look better. Everything will become clear. He’ll find a way.

When Annette arrives home from the cimitero, the family is in a state of wild excitement. Uncle Marcello has acquired a television set. The owner of the electrical store, who has a small grove of olives next to the greenhouses, and with whom Uncle Marcello frequently plays cards sitting in folding chairs outside the brick office, has supplied it for half the ticket price. ‘It’s because I beat him at poker,’ says Uncle Marcello proudly. ‘It was either that or he put his hand in the till.’ The family is standing in a gracious semicircle around the device, even Tommaso, who is sniffing and coughing with his summer cold, his upper lip red and crusted.

Annette’s mother tuts. ‘I’d like to know what we would have been liable for in this manly bargain of yours!’ ‘Just some compost. It was all very harmless,’ says Uncle Marcello. ‘But that is not the point, Rosaria. I did win. And now we have joined the civilised forty-nine per cent of the nation.’ He puts his hand on her waist, twirls her round, and deposits her back where she was standing. ‘This is excellent! Now I can watch at home in my slippers instead of going to the bar like a peasant and having people talk in my ear while the news is broadcasting.’ Her mother shakes her head. ‘Could you not have got a refrigerator instead, Marcello, or a new Zanussi?’

Annette would like to take hold of Uncle Marcello’s hand and hold it firmly. She has walked home in a state of high anxiety and she would like to feel his strong, soil-lined fingers linked through her own. Or her mother’s, or Mauri’s. She would like to describe the terrible feeling at the cimitero, and the feeling all the way down the steps and along the road, that something was creeping into her. Her heart is curled tight and will not stop quivering. She would like to tell them all that a shadow has touched her. It followed her, and even though she turned the corners in the town sharply, she could not leave it behind. It seemed to crawl up inside her, and deposit its matter, like an insect laying eggs. She would like somebody to go to the window and tell her if there is a black shape at the edge of the courtyard. Perhaps, at first glance, a man dressed suitably for handling the body of the dead Christ, then, on closer examination, a man with horned cheekbones and a dog’s mouth, running with bile. But her uncle is talking excitedly about the purchase of the television, and the family are talking to each other and over each other about it. ‘Rosaria, this will be good for us all. We can play the quiz shows together. Tommaso will have
Carosello
before bed. And with any luck the Pope will give us a Western. Put it there in the corner, Mauri, move the table away from the wall.’

Annette slips towards her mother and reaches for her hand. But her mother seems too agitated, busy with the problems of the television and the rearrangement of the furniture, and she shakes her hand free. ‘Be more careful, Mauri! You’re going to smash something.’ He groans. ‘It weighs a ton! It’s made of concrete!’ Annette stands close to Tommaso. He is wrapped in a blanket and smells of camphor. He rests his head against her arm and she kisses his hair.

Once the television has been positioned and wired they switch it on. Uncle Marcello fusses over the settings, adjusts the dials and the aerial, and finally a rapid, trilling voice can be heard, carried on a flush of static. Then there is the pounding of surf. ‘Aaaah,’ they all say. Uncle Marcello claps his hands together. ‘It is the Pacific Ocean! Look–they’re surfing!’ Mauri clicks his fingers and begins to sing an American song. ‘OK. We need some rules,’ Annette’s mother says, ‘about how long we will watch, and when we will watch, and what is suitable to watch.’ There are groans from the boys and Annette hears Tommaso blowing his tongue. ‘Yes! We must limit our viewing to twenty minutes a day maximum, I think.’ Her tone is firm, but she sounds pleased. Uncle Marcello snorts. ‘Excuse me, let us see who the Stalinists among us really are by the end of the week.’ Tommaso drops his blanket and Annette hears tussling and giggling. ‘Netta, I’m riding Mauri,’ he shouts. ‘I’m surfing.’

And Annette knows, at this moment, that they cannot help her. They will not believe she has been touched somehow by the Bestia, and if she tells them a violation has occurred they will ask who else it was that did it, they will demand a name. She has no evidence. There is no stain against her skin, no wicked print soiling her dress, darkening her breast, for it would have been pointed out when she arrived home and the wire brush would have been taken to the mark. She cannot give them her word and ask to be forgiven. She will simply have to wear the impurity on the inside.

One by one her family take to the chairs. The television talks and hums, hums and talks, like an old aunt. Annette reaches for the table, to memorise its new position. After a while she sits beside the set and puts her hands on the casing of the garrulous new guest. It is a box, bigger than the radio, smaller than the oven. The screen bulges outwards, like a hard bubble. There is a little crackle as her fingers track over the glass, as if she has disrupted a strange hive. The carapace feels warm against her palms. ‘Try not to dirty the screen, Annette,’ her mother calls. ‘I don’t want to clean fingerprints off it every day.’

After the programme about the Pacific, Uncle Marcello sits Annette on his knee and explains the elements and workings and contents of the television set, as he would the tiny filaments of a flower under the microscope. She sits crookedly across his legs. She is too big now to balance there properly. ‘This is what the social revolution has led us to,’ he says with a chuckle, ‘audiovisual propaganda, Vatican censorship, football and fashions on Sunday. It’s not real.’

‘Uncle Marcello,’ she begins. ‘Do you think we might be inside something like a television too? Can other people look in to see what we are doing all the time? How do we know what is real outside?’

‘Ah, little one,’ he says, squeezing her waist. ‘I think you have more brains than the rest of us. It is an interesting philosophical question–we should speak to Kant. Perhaps he would say that nothing is real unless…’ From the corner armchair, Annette’s mother’s voice chimes in to the discussion. ‘That’s quite enough. Tell her the truth, Marcello. God is the only one outside. God can see everything we do. God is always watching. That is the reality and the truth of the matter.’ Uncle Marcello opens his legs and gently lowers Annette to the floor between them. His trousers smell musty, of vegetable roots and nutshells.

For the rest of the afternoon and into the evening the television is kept on, conducting its own theatre, talking and flickering, a mind warming in its shell. No perfume drifts from it, and it emanates no moods. The noises it makes are strangely remote and complete within themselves. And yet it seems to be casting a spell; her family is transfixed. They carry their dinner bowls to their chairs instead of eating outside at the table in the courtyard. ‘For tonight only,’ her mother says. ‘It’s just a novelty.’ Their conversation loops around the conversation of the television. They talk about what it talks about. It is as if a dominant old relative is holding court in the living room, and they are all agreeing with everything she says. No, it is like a politician, like the mayor. Annette wonders what its capabilities are, whether it can recognise the scent of the roses it shows her family, or taste the beans it advertises. At times, high-pitched voltage escapes from the appliance, so elevated and intense it is almost celestial, but quite painful. Annette can feel her ears drums vibrating, and then she must get up and leave the room. She hears her mother worrying. ‘Is it jumping too much, Marcello? Does it need to be re-tuned? Attend to it or we will all become cross-eyed.’

That night, as they prepare to go to bed, her mother covers the television with her special embroidered cloth, as if it is an antique armoire or a Chinese vase, as if they will presently be leaving the house for an extended season by the sea.

Later, Annette wakes to hear strange sounds. For a second she is filled with irrational fear. But it passes, and her heart slows. There are murmurs and footsteps. Someone is in the kitchen, perhaps getting a glass of water, and talking half in their sleep. If it is her little brother, if a bad dream has disturbed him, making him hot and panicky, he will need to be tucked back under his quilt and soothed. She sits up in bed, reaches for the handle of the door and opens it a fraction. Two voices are in intense and quiet discussion a few rooms away–not in discussion exactly, but certainly they are communicating. There are soft groans and whispers, which seem to imply questions asked and replies given, words in a language she cannot understand. ‘Nah…ohf…coh…’

She turns back the covers, wraps her shawl around her shoulders, and goes into the hall. She pauses. The sounds are a little louder now, but still indistinguishable. There is a deep tone and a lighter tone. Now and then she can recognise a phrase: ‘…wait for…want to…oh…and beautiful…’ She wonders if someone has forgotten to turn off the television. Perhaps the button has not been pressed firmly enough, or it needs to be unplugged from the wall. There is snapping and rustling, a hum like the hum of someone enjoying a mouthful of food, a grunt, and a scuff. Then, a bad word, which she has only ever heard Mauri and the men at the pork van use. A voice cries out, ‘No!’ Annette opens the door of the living room. Uncle Marcello calls from inside, ‘Hey. Who’s that?’

‘It’s Netta. Is the television still on?’ She hears scuffling on the tiles, as if he is standing up.

‘No. Yes. It’s off now. It’s OK. Go back to sleep, quickly.’ His voice is hoarse, as if he is getting Tommaso’s cold. ‘Good night.’

‘Good night.’ As Annette makes her way back to bed, she hears, perhaps, though she cannot be sure, a very faint wail, as if a night creature, flying from roof to roof in the town, is calling to another of its kind.

In the cool back room of Castrabecco the following morning, Annette prepares the cuttings. She binds them with twine and loads them into the back of the flower van. Mauri does not say much as they drive through the old walled town. ‘I have things on my mind,’ he tells her when she asks if he is feeling unwell. ‘I have personal matters to contend with. I have inner conflicts. You are a girl. You would not understand.’ She wonders if Mauri is in love. Perhaps he is thinking of joining the army, as he did once before, when Vincenzo left for Argentina. It made their mother furious. At the citadel, he forgets the lug of the wing mirror and it cracks back against the side of the van. She hears a telltale chink as the glass cracks. Her brother curses and punches the steering wheel. Annette flinches. He drops her at the pitch, puts up the canvas stall without ceremony or performance, and then leaves without kissing her cheek. There are no jokes about killing their mother or joining the Foreign Legion. There is no teasing about adoration unrequited or his virility. Perhaps it is Maria from the cinema, Annette thinks, who all the young men are passionate about, or Romana who works at the information cubicle of Civitella, who has notorious flaming hair like the mistress of the mayor.

In the hot sun the flowers begin their mysterious olfactory elicitation. ‘Buy us, buy us, for reasons of marriage or seduction.’ There is the usual bustle and weekend gossip. Elemme tells her there is a new antique stall set up in the market to attract the tourists. It sells clocks, angels made from bent coins, old postcards, photographs and glassware. In old crates are religious wooden icons distressed to look ancient. ‘Most of it is junk,’ says Elemme. ‘Not worth spit. Just rope and springs. But everyone is over there looking for ceramics and Venetian goblets. I’m bored. Do you want some Coca-Cola?’ Her castanet shoes click quickly down the stalls, her heels slipping in and out of the leather hulls as she goes, and the beads in her hair tick-tack. Annette pictures all the people walking past, sipping coffee or eating
porchetta
, carrying baskets, pausing to fix a stocking, scoring a line through a list.

As she waits, she wonders about the new television set. She wonders about its productions and what happens when it is turned off. Programmes are still being fed into it, but what does it do with them? Uncle Marcello says the device is simply a magic box of light and signals, a shrunken cinema in which people might act, but she can’t help imagining all the people it contains lying down to sleep when it is turned off, or going on with their lives in privacy. Perhaps this was the case last night, when she was woken. But do they know that they are being watched? Are they oblivious to their capture and their shrunken size, or do they know they are captives, that it is their duty to jump up and act whenever the silver switch is pressed and the tuning wheel turned? Do they take their cues by walking up to chalk marks scored on the television floor, like school children in the religious plays? And if they are unaware, do they still feel the gaze of people watching them, like an intuition, as she feels the leer of the Bestia?

A breeze passes, bringing with it the scent of peach and pork fat. A woman stops to buy a little posy for a sick friend. The friend has had a hysterectomy, the curse of eight deliveries, the woman says. Not that she agrees with the doctors overseas, practising termination-bless the poor babies. Annette is distracted, she does not follow the conversation. She knows her mother would not approve of such rumination over the television set. She would consider it a vexing realm for Annette to have strayed into. She would prefer it instead if Annette contemplated Good Works. When the two of them become engaged in difficult conversations often she has wondered whether Annette might be better suited in a convent, where life is simple and virtuous and repetitious. ‘You are walking into a maze, daughter,’ her mother has often said. ‘Just how do you think you will get out? Where are you trying to go with this?’ And yet Annette cannot help but think how she thinks, the world being as full of puzzles as it is.

Perhaps the people inside the television might hate being looked in upon, as her mother despises pedestrians in the street casually glancing into the lower rooms of Castrabecco. Perhaps the television dwellers fear the moment when the silver button is pressed to the
OFF
position, because they will be left in complete darkness, knocking on the walls of the television and bumping into each other, banging foreheads and stumbling over each other’s feet. They will be locked up inside the bubble with all the creatures and crimes of the television’s world, and the whole roaring Pacific.