Learning by Heart (31 page)

All those things signify you. I see you standing in the street as the Easter processions pass us; I see you turning your head as the bands come down the street again at midnight. I feel your hand in mine, your mouth on mine. I feel the aftermath, the ending that I should have foreseen, and the violence of the loss. If I had been a little older, if I had had a little more wisdom, I might have avoided that violence and taken the warning seriously
.

But then I wonder if I would have liked myself if I had been a man who could override his passion
.

This is a house of soft voices. While I lie here, all sorts of women look after me. They think it is appropriate to walk about talking in whispers as if they were in church. I get them to play music, which they do with bad grace. I want the music playing and all the windows open
.

Some I have known and others are strangers. The nurse, for instance, until she started to laugh when I told her stories. I tell her all kinds of things. Some are fiction. Some are true. I like to hear her laughing, and I like to see her putting her hand over her face because she thinks it’s not right to have fun in a house where a young man is dying
.

I say a young man, although I am fifty in two weeks’ time
.

But I don’t feel old, so what am I? I am as young as the day I met you. Younger. I seem to have regressed in this strange interlude to all the things of my childhood. I remember running up and down this street whenever we came to visit family here. And I ask the nurse for the same things to eat: I ask her to go out for pastries, and I want
zabaglione
and
zuccotto,
the treats I had when I was a boy
.

She indulges me. I suppose she’s heard everything about me, or what the other women suppose to be true about me. If she has, she hasn’t told me. I am supposed to have had a hundred mistresses. Other people’s daughters, other people’s wives. Italian women, Sicilian women, dark women, light women, whores and saints, friends, and friends of friends. I wonder how I ever had time. I don’t bother to deny it. How else, they reason, could I know what women think and how they feel? How else could I read them, unless I had known a legion
?

But you don’t need to bed an army of women to understand them
.

You only need to know one
.

You don’t know this house: I bought it fifteen years ago. It’s on one of the streets behind the cathedral. The garden is overgrown; it has a balcony running the length of the first floor, and one of the tenants I rented it to painted it red, the shutters, too
.

So I lie in a red shade. I told the nurse it was not good for me, that I wanted someone to come in and paint the shutters yellow, for the sun. Do you know what she told me? She said that the mere perception of a red colour raises the human metabolism by thirteen per cent. She said it in all seriousness, word for word. I asked her where she had found it out, and she said that she reads magazines people leave on trains. So, I am subject to knowledge gleaned from the carelessness of strangers. I listened to what she said, and then I burst out laughing. She laughed too. That’s what amuses us: the idiocy and randomness of the world
.

Rosso.
The colour of bullfighters’ capes, even though the bull is colour-blind
. Rosso,
the colour of Germanic gods. Thor had red hair. And Wotan, the god of the hunt. And things we distrust, too. The devil, for one
.

I wonder if there is a devil
.

I wonder where I shall go when I leave behind this treacherous flesh. One of your British philosophers said that the rising to a great place is always by a winding stair; so, I hope to see a winding stair in front of me at the last. I shall run up it. I have run at things all my life, and even if I had it to live again, I would not change a second, or slow to a walk
.

Red was supposed once to have magical properties. Vermilion and mercury were supposed to be the first steps to the philosopher’s stone, whose owners were thought to have magical powers. So, perhaps I shouldn’t wish to change the shutters, and lying here in what looks like a red pool should make me feel that I possess the secrets of the ancients
.

I don’t think I ever saw you in red; I remember everything you wore and there was a blue dress, and a white one, and a white shirt and jeans. No red. But I close my eyes and see you in the Syracusa house, the little cottage of my father’s, and for some strange reason I have red in my mind. Maybe it’s because of John Gray’s roses, ‘the roses, every one, were red’…

Thirty years ago I planted a white rose by the window. Do you know what has happened to it? I wish you could see it. It survived. It grew very tall and now it swamps the side of the house, and everyone remarks on it, a kind of miracle there in the hot sun. Although perhaps it had something to do with the trees that were planted in the same year. Eucalyptus trees that grew taller than the roof, much taller, and now give shade to the English rose
.

After I had planted it, after that year had passed, and after I knew that you were never coming back, and that I should not see you again, I went back to my studies in Rome. I finished the course and I qualified, but I never took up the job my father had prepared for me. Because you were still in my mind, and I kept thinking about what you had said that day in Ortigia. You said I would be more suited to being an artist, and you were right. I went travelling, and I told my father I needed to go before I settled down
.

But you know what, Cora? I never did settle down. I lived the life you had predicted for me. I kicked off my shoes and lived through the first summer in Cyprus. I crewed on a boat, although I knew nothing about sailing. But I learned. And I took a job at the end of the summer crewing for someone who had another boat in Greece. And I never did come back to my father’s business. One of my sister’s husbands took on his accounts, and I began to think of a book of my own
.

I was wondering the other day if you had seen it
.

I was wondering if you had read it
.

If you did, I hope you forgave me
.

Only three people in the world would have guessed that it was about you, even though I called my character by a Sicilian name. I hope that you were not offended, and I hope that Richard was not offended, although it was twelve years after I met you that the book was finally published. Richard would have been seventy-three. Did he mind? Did he care? Did you show it to him
?

You know, there is something strange about
The Light.

When I was in London to speak, a man came up to me at the ceremony. He was an agent called Bisley – not that I knew him: someone told me his name afterwards
.

He was an old man; he had a copy of my book in his hand. Not unusual: everyone in that crowded room had it that night. But he was smiling, and he stared at me with such curiosity
.

And do you know what he asked me? He asked if I had ever heard of a poem, and it was the poem you taught me, ‘I warmed my hands before the fire of life’
.

And he put his hand on my arm. ‘I’m glad to know,’ he said, ‘that she met you at last
.’

I don’t know if he knew you, Cora
.

I don’t know if that was what he meant
.

I have puzzled over it so often since
.

I still wonder what went on between you and Richard
.

You must have agreed to stay together, or, if you did not, you must have decided not to stay with me. I don’t blame you, after all this time. You were in an impossible position. I don’t pretend to be proud of my part in the dilemma. But the boy I was could not have got himself out of that situation. To have done so I would have had to take on another personality, one that I did not then, and I suspect I do not now, possess. The kind of personality that does not want to be swept up in the wave
.

I wish I had seen you just once more, Cora
.

Despite everything, despite all the mistakes
.

I wish I could look into your face now and see that you have forgiven me. Forgiven me for loving you, and for writing that I loved you. Forgiven me for being nineteen and irresponsible. Forgiven me for a lifetime of wanting you back
.

I think of you, and wonder what you are doing. You will be sixty-four this year, I think. Sixty-four. It does not seem possible. I can’t imagine you at sixty-four. Are you well? Are you alone? I wonder if Richard is still alive. Is there anything I could do to help you, if I knew you? Would you want me to come to you
?

I would come even now. Get up from this cursed bed. It would be worth doing; it would be worth the last effort to see you finally
.

I have come to London, you know, London and Paris. I have been within an hour or two of where you used to live. Do you know that, a few years ago, in Paris, I rang your telephone number? I don’t know what was in my mind. Some selfish wish to disrupt you again. It was an impulse
.

So I rang the number; I was a little drunk, maybe. I had won a prize that evening. I thought I was a pretty good guy. I thought I was all right to know. So, full of champagne, I rang you. But the number was wrong. The line gave the sound that meant the number was unobtainable
.

When I mentioned it to a colleague, he said that the English telephone numbers, their area codes, had changed. But I didn’t try to find the new code. Because by then I had decided that it was a sign. I was not, after all, a pretty good guy. I was not, after all, all right for you to know. You had not tried to speak or write to me in all those years. And that was what you wanted. And it was a sign that I should respect it
.

It is evening. I am tired with writing all day
.

But I will tell you one last thing
.

I have left you the house below Syracusa, the cottage on the coast, which my father left to me
.

I have asked my lawyer to send this journal and this news to you after my funeral. I hope that you are at the same address or, if you are not, that the package will find you
.

And I hope that you might come here, finally
.

If you do, please go back to Syracusa. Please go and stand at the Temple of Apollo again, and go back to the cathedral and stand in the street where we stood
.

I felt you change as I drew you into the shadow there. I wondered if I should kiss you; I knew it would not be right. Or, at least, I thought I did. But when my mouth was on yours, I knew that there was nothing more right, and I felt you move to me
.

There had been other girls. A girl from my village whom I was supposed to marry: we had been childhood friends, and had been together as teenagers, and our families knew each other and it had always been supposed that we would marry. But she went to Verona and I went to Rome, and we decided against it. She was glad, I think
.

And there was a girl at college. This was something different; I took her to bed. She was American. She was careless in her lovemaking: it was routine to her, like cleaning her teeth or washing her face. It was nothing special to her, and we enjoyed ourselves, but it was like running a good race, or watching a good film. It was pleasant. But it was not love
.

Not until I had you in my arms did I understand that these two things sometimes come together, the heart and the body. And sometimes, once in a lifetime, if we are lucky, it will happen. I opened my eyes and saw myself in another place, the same but different. The same street and the same town, but different. A different world from the one I entered when I kissed you. I discovered what I had always been sceptical about before that kiss, before I had seen you walking towards me that morning; I discovered that love cannot be judged or stopped. It is like a law of physics, where two elements that have been parted inevitably revert to the original unity. I felt that, until then, I had been missing some essential component, and that by touching you I had regained it. The world that had been so imperfect before made perfect sense
.

After you there were other women, Cora. I am a man and I could not live all my life alone. There was a woman in Greece who came to work on the boats with me; she was English, like you. She was very pretty and she liked music. She was talented, she could play, and we had a small apartment for a while, part of a larger house, and in the house there was a piano. Sometimes at dusk, before we went out, she would play. I was quite happy with her, but the playing made me feel so bad. She had a little piece – she told me the name: it was Romance from Piano Concerto No. 1 by Chopin – and it struck something inside me, as if the music had reached into me. I would think then, in front of this girl, that I would become insane if I could never see you again. I did not tell her about you, but I think she knew. And I think she was in love with me as I had felt for you, which made it so much worse when we parted
.

Cora, I don’t know now what possessed you and me, but I have never believed it was wrong. That sounds unreasonable, as if I have indeed lost my mind. But I wonder if you know what I mean. It was not wrong. I was with another man’s wife – which I have not done since, I want you to know – but I couldn’t feel it was wrong
.

I was glad, so glad, to have known you, and I have been glad all my life. I will take the images of you to my grave with a light heart. I will relive our times, few as they were. The time in Ortigia and in Enna, and the days after Easter, when we went away
.

We thought we were running away together, but it did not last. We had four days of happiness before you told me that you had to return with Richard. That you had to go back to England with him, to sell the house, to arrange your affairs. And I don’t think you were lying to me, Cora. I think you were sincere in every word. But something happened once you were back with him. Something in his reaction made you change your mind. Or something when you got home. I don’t know. I will never know. I will die not knowing the answer to that question
.