Kudos (21 page)

‘I did, however, receive another call,' Felícia said, tilting her chair back and resting her head against the wall, ‘which was from my mother, saying that she was
tired of storing certain boxes and small pieces of furniture that she had agreed to keep for me, and that if I didn't come and get them by the end of the day she would be putting them out on the street. I reminded her,' she said with her strange half-smile half-frown, ‘that since I am staying in the apartment of a friend I have nowhere to put these items, and neither do I now have a car in which I could come to collect them, while in her house there is a big attic where they can sit disturbing nobody. She said she was tired of having my things in her attic, and repeated that she would be putting them out on the street if I didn't come and collect them by the end of the day. It was not her fault, she said, that I had made such a mess of my life and that I didn't even have a proper home to live in. You came from a nice home, she said, and yet you expect your child to live like a tramp. I said to her, Mama, it was different for you, because Papa took care of everything and you didn't have to work. And she said yes, and look at what all your equality has done for you – the men no longer respect you and can treat you like the dirt on their shoe. Your cousin Angela has never worked, she said, and she has been divorced two times and is richer than the queen of England, because she stayed at home and took care of her children and treated them as her asset. But you don't have a house or any money or even a car, she said, and
your child goes around looking like an orphan on the street. You don't even get her fringe cut, she said, so it covers her eyes and she can't see where she is going. And I said, Mama, Stefano likes her hair that way and he insists that I don't cut it, so there is nothing I can do. And she said, I can't believe I brought such a woman into the world, who allows a man to tell her what to do with her own child's hair. And she repeated that she no longer wanted my possessions in her house and she put down the phone.

‘Last night,' Felícia said, ‘a friend came to visit us at the apartment, a woman friend Alessandra hadn't met before. We were talking about my work, and Alessandra suddenly interrupted. Mama's always talking about her work, she said to this friend of mine, but in fact it isn't work – what she calls work is what other people would call a hobby. Don't you agree it's a bit of a joke, Alessandra says to this friend, to call it work when all she is doing is sitting reading a book? And the friend says, no, she doesn't agree, and that translation is not only work but also an art. Alessandra looks at her and then she says to me, Mama, who is this person in our apartment? She isn't very well dressed, Alessandra says; in fact she looks like a witch. My friend tried to laugh but I could see she was very upset at being spoken to in this way, especially by a five-year-old child, and I couldn't explain
to her in front of Alessandra that this is how Stefano is finally getting his revenge, by poisoning my own child against me and filling her with his own arrogant nature. I remember,' Felícia said, ‘when Stefano and I first separated, Stefano took her away with him one day and didn't bring her back. He was meant to have her for only a few hours, and he kept her for ten days and refused to answer my phone calls and messages. During those ten days I nearly went mad with grief: I don't think I slept for more than a few minutes at a time, and I paced around and around our apartment like a trapped animal, waiting for the situation to end. It was only later,' she said, ‘that I understood that the pain I endured during those days was not the pain of responsibility. It was not a consequence of my fight with Stefano but rather was the result of calculated cruelty, to the child as well as to myself: his theft of Alessandra was a show of strength and a way of proving his power to me, that he could take her away and bring her back when he chose to. If we had fought physically,' she said, ‘he would likewise have won, and this was what he was making clear to me by removing the child at will, that if I thought I had power – even if only the old power of the mother – I was completely mistaken. I had not, moreover, found freedom by leaving him: in fact what I had done was forfeit all my rights, which he had only extended to
me in the first place, and made myself his slave. There is a passage in one of your books,' she said to me, ‘where you describe enduring something similar, and I translated it very carefully and with great caution, as if it were something fragile that I might mistakenly break or kill, because these experiences do not fully belong to reality and the evidence for them is a matter of one person's word against another's. It was important I didn't get any of the words wrong,' she said, ‘and afterwards I felt that while you had legitimised this half-reality by writing about it, I had legitimised it again by managing to transpose it into another language and ensuring its survival.'

‘We survive,' Paola said, tilting her empty wine glass to look inside. ‘Our bodies outlive their use of them, and that is what annoys them most of all. These bodies continue to exist, getting older and uglier and telling them the truth they don't want to hear. The Buccaneer is still pursuing me even after all these years,' she said, ‘making sure that whenever I show a sign of life he is there to crush it. My head is whirling with wine,' she added, with a crooked, mischievous smile, ‘just like he used to whirl me around by my hair, except that now it doesn't hurt. That is revenge, no? It used to hurt so much when he pulled my hair,' she said, ‘so it is good to talk about these things when your head is whirling with wine instead, and with the picture of the
man's severed head on a plate before my eyes. What I don't understand,' she said to me, ‘is why you have married again, when you know what you know. You have put it in writing,' she said, ‘and that brings with it all the laws.'

I hoped to get the better of those laws, I said, by living within them. My older son had once made a copy of that painting on the wall, I said, except that he had left out all the detail and merely blocked in the forms and the spatial relationships between them. What was interesting, I said, was that without those details and the story to which they were associated, the painting became a study not of murderousness but of the complexity of love.

Paola slowly shook her head.

‘It isn't possible,' she said. ‘Those laws are for men and maybe for children. But for women it's just an illusion, like the sandcastle on the beach, which after all is only how the child proves his nature, by building the temporary edifice until he too can become a man. In law the woman is temporary, between the permanence of the land and the violence of the sea. It is better to be invisible,' she said. ‘It is better to live outside the law. To be a – what is the word in English?'

‘An outlaw,' Felícia said, grinning in the shadows.

‘An outlaw,' Paola said, satisfied. She raised her
empty glass and clinked it against Felícia's. ‘I choose to live as an outlaw.

The taxi driver had pointed the way to the beach from the place on the road where he dropped me, making sweeping gestures with his arms to convey the necessity for continuing to walk out beyond the boardwalk, which curved away among the dunes out of sight. The blank, heavy heat of the afternoon had begun to break down and a soft bruised colour had come into the sky. The white cement of the low wall bordering the sand held the residue of the day's glare against a sharp line of encroaching shadow. The muffled sound of the water rose from beyond the dunes, and there was suddenly the sea's feeling of weight and extension, despite the fact that it was out of sight.

My phone rang and the screen showed my younger son's name.

‘There's been a bit of a disaster,' he said.

Tell me, I said.

It happened late last night, he said. He and some friends had accidentally started a fire, he said. There had been some damage and he was worried about what the consequences would be.

There was no point phoning you because you were away, he said. But then I couldn't get hold of Dad either.

I asked him whether he was all right. I asked him how on earth it had happened, and what he had been thinking of.

‘Faye,' he said fractiously, ‘will you just listen?'

He and another boy and a girl were at a friend's flat for the evening. The flat was in a block that had a gym and a swimming pool in the basement. At around midnight the three of them had decided to go swimming, and had gone with their towels and their swimming costumes downstairs. They had used the changing rooms, but when the boys had left the men's changing room the door had swung shut and locked behind them. The other boy had left his towel in there, draped over a heater. Within a few minutes, they saw through the changing room window that the towel had caught fire. There was a pool cleaner with a long handle leaning against a wall, my son said, and so I grabbed it and I broke the window and I managed to hook up the towel and pull it back through the window and we put it out. There was broken glass everywhere, he said, and the whole pool house was full of smoke and then an alarm went off and all these people started to come running in. They were shouting at us and accusing us of vandalising the building and we kept trying to explain what had happened but they wouldn't listen to us. The other two had stepped in the glass, he said, and their feet were bleeding
and they were crying because they were so frightened, but these people just kept shouting in our faces. One of them was talking about his children, he said, who were asleep in the flat on the floor above, and he kept saying how traumatised they would have been to wake up and find there was smoke in their bedroom, even though they hadn't actually woken up. They took our names and addresses and said they were going to call the police, he said, and then they went away. We stayed there and I cleared up all the glass and I spent hours picking the pieces out of the other two's feet. They were both really upset, he said, and after a while I told them to just go home, and that I would wait there for the police to come. And I waited and waited, he said, but the police didn't come. I waited all night, he said, and in the end I just left and went to school.

He began to cry.

All day I've been expecting someone to come and call me out of class, he said. I don't know what to do.

I asked him whether it was permitted to swim in the pool at night.

Yes, he wailed. People do it all the time. And it wasn't our fault about the door, because my friend told me it was broken and that they were meant to be fixing it. I know we were stupid to put the towel on the heater but there wasn't a sign telling you not to and we didn't realise it could catch fire. I don't know why
the police didn't come, he said. I almost wish they had, because I don't know what to do now.

They didn't come, I said, because you didn't do anything wrong.

He was silent.

In fact, I said, you ought to be congratulated, because it was a good idea to use the pool cleaner and the building might have caught fire otherwise.

I've written a letter, he said presently. I did it during break. It explains everything that happened. I thought I would take it there and leave it for people to read.

There was a silence.

When are you coming home? he said.

Tomorrow, I said.

Can I come over? he said, and then he said: Sometimes I feel as if I'm about to fall over the edge of something, and that there'll be nothing and no one to catch me.

You're tired, I said. You've been awake all night.

I feel so lonely, he said, and yet I have no privacy. People just act as if I'm not there. I could be doing anything, he said. I could be slitting my wrists and they would neither know nor care.

It isn't your fault, I said.

They ask me things, he said, but they don't connect the things up. They don't relate them to things I've
already told them. There are just all these meaningless facts.

You can't tell your story to everybody, I said. Maybe you can only tell it to one person.

Maybe, he said.

Come when you feel like it, I said. I can't wait to see you.

The sky had turned a dull red and a breeze had picked up that made the dry grasses amid the dunes sway back and forth. The boardwalk was deserted and I followed it until I came out on to a stretch of beach. It was wild and strewn with litter and the sea was roiling and crashing where the beach shelved downwards to the water. The wind was stronger here and the dunes were sending their lengthening, mountainous shadows across the rough greyish sand. Amid the shadows I saw human figures, crouching or standing or sitting. They were arranged mostly in pairs and they were either still or moved around intimately and absorbedly as if bent on some primitive task. A short distance away there was a fire made of driftwood and the wind sent the smoke whirling upwards. There were more figures gathered around the fire and the lit ends of their cigarettes made piercing orange points in the dusky light. I could sometimes hear the low sounds of conversation, which the wind and the sea's crashing then blotted out.

I began to walk amid the figures up the beach. They were men, either naked or sometimes wearing a simple loincloth. Some of them were hardly more than boys. They were mostly silent as I passed, and either looked away or seemed not to see me, though one or two stared at me frankly and expressionlessly. A boy of startling beauty glanced into my eyes and glanced away again, burying his face shyly into the thick muscled shoulder of his companion. He was kneeling and I saw the rounded shapes of his buttocks beneath the other man's large hand. I walked on, past the group who were gathered round the fire and who turned to look at me like animals surprised in a grove. The strange red light had spread across the sky in a great stain tinged with yellow and black. Far in the distance the buildings of the dock and the suburbs stood dimly in a smudgy haze of surf. I found an empty stretch of sand and I began to take off my clothes. A few feet away the sea heaved and churned, brimful and restless, streaked with red and grey. The wind was stronger beyond the dunes and a fine rain of sand blew against my skin. I went down to the water, pressing quickly forward through the barging waves. The beach shelved so steeply that I was quickly sucked out into the moving mass, whose density and power seemed to keep me effortlessly on the surface so that I rose and fell along with its undulations. The men
had turned to watch me. One of them got to his feet, a huge burly man with a great curling black beard and a rounded stomach and thighs like hams. Slowly he walked down towards the water's edge, his white teeth faintly glimmering through his beard in a smile, his eyes fixed on mine. I looked back at him from my suspended distance, rising and falling. He came to a halt just where the waves broke and he stood there in his nakedness like a deity, resplendent and grinning. Then he grasped his thick penis and began to urinate into the water. The flow came out so abundantly that it made a fat, glittering jet, like a rope of gold he was casting into the sea. He looked at me with black eyes full of malevolent delight while the golden jet poured unceasingly forth from him until it seemed impossible that he could contain any more. The water bore me up, heaving, as if I lay on the breast of some sighing creature while the man emptied himself into its depths. I looked into his cruel, merry eyes, and I waited for him to stop.