Shroud (29 page)

As time went on the matter that had brought her to me in the first place came up between us with less and less frequency. When I thought of it I would make a renewed effort, more or less determined, to get her to disclose the full extent of what she knew about me and my shady, not to say shrouded, past, but always without success. Why would she have told me, when she thought that my not knowing what she knew was the hold that she had over me? I admit that more than once I resorted to force in trying to extract a confession from her. I can see her still, in the hotel room, crouched in the narrow space between the bed and the wall where I had pushed her to her knees, her face, pale with pain, turned back to look up at me as I lean over her, with my horrible grin, twisting her arm past the level of her shoulder blade and threatening to break it if she will not tell me all – all, mind! – that was told to her that day in Antwerp by Schaudeine the fixer. How curiously calm she is, how solemn-seeming, despite the hurt that I am doing to her. It was, of course, a game that we were playing. By now, what mattered was not what she might know about my paltry misdeeds. Whatever I may say, all along I had been waiting for, hoping for, someone to spring out at me like this with my secret held in her hands and threatening to show it for all the world to see. What is the good of a secret, where is the power in it, if no one knows of its existence? In peril now of imminent exposure, and the disgrace, revulsion and general mockery that would inevitably follow, my attitude was one not of dread so much as a sort of jaunty fatalism. Where before I had skulked in trepidation, afraid and yet not knowing exactly what it was I feared, now I saw myself as besieged, stalwart, a roundhead suddenly become a cavalier. I felt, I confess it, quite the dashing villain.

But let me try, once more, a last time, while the mood is on me, to describe how it really was between Cass Cleave and me. I propose a series of scenes, as in a frieze, depicting a pale girl capered about by an old man, against the background of a marble cityscape. The oldster is in motley, masked and plumed, pinned all over with diamond patches, with a monstrous codpiece strapped under his belly. In each of the panels he is striking an elaborate attitude for the girl's benefit. Now he is the gay blade, hand on hip, now the demon lover, rampant, irresistible, now the unresting scholar with his taper and his book. The girl stands before him gazing upon these antics with a patient expression, forbearingly, a dreamy Columbine, waiting for him to doff the mask and motley; how eerily he reminds her of her father, playing his parts. See, here they are now, in the heights across the river, on a narrow, upwardly curving road overhung by dark trees. It is a deserted, sultry, knife-grey evening, and Franco Bartoli, that lugubrious Innamorato, has invited them to dinner. They are alighting from a taxi. She helps the old boy with his walking stick and his useless leg. She tries not to let him see her seeing the palsied shaking of his big, white-knuckled hand clamped on the handle of the stick. A waft of warm wind sways the trees, silvering the leaves; she thinks again not for the first time how the city seems to breathe, wearily, like a living, ancient thing. She takes the old man's arm and they set out across the road. For a second she sees him looming naked above her, huge and scrawny and sagging, hair wild and eyes ablaze, his old mouth open. Then she sees herself holding him; she is like the anatomically impossible Madonna in that painting they saw somewhere, cradling a giant Christ on splayed knees with no more effort than if she were dandling a babe.

The apartment building where Bartoli lives is old but instead of a front door there is a sheer pane of plate-glass that at first they take to be black and opaque. Vander flourishes his stick and presses the doorbell with the point of it. They hear the bell's nasal buzzing far off somewhere inside. They wait, blankly contemplating their own faceless shadows standing before them in the glass. In the sombre, wind-tossed air of evening she is for a moment suddenly someone else. Light floods the hall – the glass is clear, not black – making it a stark white cell, with Franco Bartoli stepping into it. At sight of him Vander begins to breathe heavily down his nostrils, as if he had just ceased from punching someone. "Behold!" he says with a snicker.
"A shape all light…!"

Nimbly the little man advanced toward them, like a clockwork toy in a toy-shop window, seeming as always to fleet along on the tips of his toes, and perkily smiling. He paused within and pressed a button in a panel on the wall and the glass door slid aside smoothly. He welcomed them with a gesture of his body that was part curtsey and part pirouette, and reached up and seized Van-der's upper arm in a manly grasp, while simultaneously bending to brush his warm, dry lips over the back of Cass Cleave's hand. "Two of you!" he said. "What a good surprise." Cass Cleave had not been invited, but Vander had insisted she must come, and here she was. Bartoli shooed them ahead of him down the hall, flapping his tiny hands. He was wearing a tight little suit and a white shirt with big stiff cuffs and a tie of sky-blue, shiny stuff. Vander trailed his stick along the floor, making the rubber tip squeal on the marble tiles. Now a steel door thick enough to seal a vault confronted them. Bartoli rapped the metal with his knuckles, remarking proudly what an effort and expense it had been to have it installed. Vander was peering at him closely with a frown. "The beard!" he said now, and laughed. "You have shaved it off!" And indeed he had, revealing babyishly plump, pale cheeks and a prominent button chin with a notch in it. He blushed and lowered his eyelids bashfully, and turned aside and pressed something and the steel door opened. All inside, in contrast to the glass and marble and metal of the entrance hall, was old worn wood and thick brown drapery and uneven, creaking parquet. The lighting was low and yellowish, seeming to emanate weakly from the walls themselves, and there was a faintly unclean, elderly, old-fashioned smell. They heard voices from a farther room. They moved along a book-lined passage, picked their way across a mysteriously unlit space where unidentifiable dim objects loomed, and entered a lofty, narrow dining room crowded with large pieces of furniture, overpowering and dark. Seated at the dinner table, their faces lifted expectantly, were Kristina Kovacs, and a burly, self-consciously handsome, middle-aged man with a swept-back mane of oiled, iron-grey hair. As Vander and Cass Cleave were being led in, there entered simultaneously through an opposite door a tiny old lady swathed in black lace, whom they took to be Bartoli's mother. Fixing on Bartoli, the old woman launched at once into voluble speech, lifting a pair of trembling brown claws. Bartoli too held up his hands, shushing her, and sought to introduce the large man to Vander and Cass Cleave, but his efforts were drowned by the old woman's unstoppable cawing. Taking her by the shoulders he turned her about and gave her a firm little shove, and she tottered out of the room through the door where she had entered, still gabbling. The large man rose and reached across the table and shook hands vigorously with Vander while bending on Cass Cleave a keen, appraising glance. Bartoli was moving around the table fussily, pulling back chairs and straightening the cutlery. Vander leaned down and said something to Kristina Kovacs, and she smiled up at him and patted his hand where it rested briefly on her shoulder. Cass Cleave stood canted awkwardly with one foot crossed on the other and her hands behind her back, staring blankly into an abyss. Bartoli now was rapidly clearing an extra place for her at the table, and the grey-haired man and Kristina Kovacs had to shift their chairs, and for a moment all was confused movement and murmuring, while Vander looked on in smiling, large enjoyment. There entered then a second old woman, smaller even than the first. Her round little face was perfectly smooth, and she had a tiny, sharp, curved nose like a finch's beak. This, it turned out, was the real Signora Bartoli. She stood in the doorway and looked upon the company with an expression of placid enquiry, sweetly smiling, as if she had heard their voices and had wandered in to see who the strangers might be. Her son shouted at her to be seated; she was quite deaf. The grey-haired man was offering Cass Cleave a cigarette from a silver holder. Bartoli, having manoeuvred his mother to her place, stood beside his chair at the head of the table, beaming. Now the first old lady reappeared, bearing aloft in both frail hands a broad platter of rice. Bartoli poured the wine. The rice exuded the under-arm aroma of wild mushrooms. The tiny cook retreated to the kitchen. They sat. They ate. He said. She said.

Human occasions, how strange they are. And yet, why do I say so? What are the unstrange occasions against which I measure them? The human is all we have. And people are simple, too much so. Consider Franco Bartoli, now, perched brightly there at the head of the table, with his newly smooth jowls and his little bluish chin, indecently cleft. He is quick, he misses nothing. He can engage in one conversation while listening to another. Tonight he is safe at the centre of his little world of women, smiled upon by his happily vacant old mother and fussed over by Maria the cook, with Kristina Kovacs on his right hand and Cass Cleave opposite and me safely off at the table's other end. The grey-haired fellow too is a source of assurance for him, speaking with loud, guttural authority on a diverse range of subjects, quaffing great draughts of wine and shooting in my direction the measuring, menacing glance of a hired heavy. I have still not discovered who or what he is, and will not. His huge hands are markedly unsteady; he seems to be labouring under a suppressed, general rage. He bears a striking resemblance to the poet Montale, but when I enquire if he might perchance be a relative of the great Ligurian, he merely stares at me, frowning darkly, as if I have said something insulting. His initial flare of interest in Cass Cleave quickly fizzles out; no sooner has she begun to tell him about her latest obsession, the commedia dell'arte and its origins – Susarion and his players, the Roman circus, Plautus, pilgrim plays, and, if I heard her correctly, something about the Mohammedan invasions – than his eye wanders back speculatively in the direction of Kristina Kovacs. But Kristina too will not hold his vigorous attentions. She would have, once, but no longer. That hollowed-out look she has is more pronounced than ever, it seems that if one were to touch her with a fingertip her skin might break up and fall from her in powdered fragments. She has grown vague in manner, too. For extended periods she and Signora Bartoli will sit in silence, with the same expression, gazing at the tablecloth without seeing it, not quite smiling, not wholly here. In the midst of these marionettes Cass Cleave is speaking earnestly and fast, while trying inexpertly to smoke another of Montale's cigarettes. "The ancient
phallophori
," she is saying, staring desperately into his face, "daubed with soot and adorned with the phallus, would leap upon gourds, performing all manner of obscene acrobatics." This is really aimed at me, and I recognise it; she has been reading my books again. I smile at her sternly. Mon-tale frowns, nodding, baffled, drinks another draught of wine. She laughs unsteadily; tears sparkle on the rims of her eyes. All stare at her, even Kristina Kovacs, even Bartoli's vague mother. Although I too am looking at her she will no longer look back at me. Now say that… Now say…

Say what? I am running out of things to say. There I am, as usual, with my glass of drink and my cigarette, smiling about me savagely, entertaining my old Caligulan dream of a world with a single neck for me to wring. My kind should be rounded up and corralled off somewhere, Madagascar, say, although I do not like the smell of cloves. Or is that Zanzibar? She wrote:
I am going to America.
The jolt, like an electric shock to the heart, as I stood there in the mild autumn light in Franco Bartoli's garden room with the scrap of paper in my trembling hand. That word, heart. I am like a stoker in the bowels of a ship, at night, on a raging sea, with only the thinnest skin of metal to save me from the black weight of waters. I look at my hand, catch sight of my old, my so old hand, and am halted. The falling flesh. Today, over our spiked coffees at the Caffè Bicerin, my new friend Dr. Zoroaster permitted me to see the numbers tattooed on his wrist. It was coy but quite deliberate, the way he turned up his hand that was holding his cigarette and let the cuff of his fine silk shirt fall back, like a stage magician pretending to show that he is hiding nothing. I made no remark, and nor did he. I was shaken, however; I still am. I have the disquieting sense that something that was dispatched to me a long time ago and went astray has suddenly turned up, something I would have been loath to take delivery of then and need even less now.

Somehow I got into an argument with the truculent Montale. Well, no, to be honest, I knew very well what I was doing. I was bored, I wanted amusement, I wanted to put on a show for Cass Cleave. The source of disagreement was some fashionable scribbler whose work Montale insisted on loudly trumpeting and whom I dismissed as a charlatan. Montale at once became heated, his face going puce under its playboy's tan. He said he believed I had not read the wretch's stuff, which was true, for all that it mattered. The rest of the table sat silent as we strove there, two moth-eaten warriors lunging and parrying with our greatswords. Franco Bartoli looked back and forth between us, his neck at each swivel seeming to grow longer and thinner, as if there were some kind of corkscrew mechanism inside it. Kristina Kovacs, her head inclined and eyes downcast, was absently rolling and unrolling a corner of her napkin under the palm of a flattened hand. Bartoli's mother, who from the first had taken Cass Cleave to be my daughter, would turn to her at each new feint of mine, and smile at her, and nod, with lips compressed and eyes widening, mutely congratulating her on her papa's fine turn of sharp-edged phrase, although I am sure she could not hear a word of what I was saying. Cass Cleave, meanwhile, was fixed on me with what I took to be an almost ecstatic intensity, her eyes alight and her fists clenched in front of her on the table, more and brighter unshed tears standing in her eyes. How I swirled and skirled for her, flashing my blade, captivated by my own ferocity and fighting skill. Franco Bartoli at last spoke up. Yes, Bartoli, that puny manling, from somewhere found the nerve to interrupt me. "Professor Vander," he said, addressing Montale and smoothly smiling, "holds that every text conceals a shameful secret, the hidden understains left behind by the author in his necessarily bad faith, and which it is the critic's task to nose out. Is that not so, Axel?" I hesitated. I considered. Montale, like his host, was smiling now, nastily, flexing his shoulders and shooting his cuffs. I took a deep, a calming breath. "I have been re-reading," I said to Franco, gazing up thoughtfully into a gloomy corner of the room, "those essays of yours on Shelley." Now, Shelley is Franco's specialty. He has got the poet wrong, of course – child of nature and champion of revolution, Apollonian prophet, drunken imbiber of the sublime, the usual Romantic claptrap – as I have tried to make him see, on more than one occasion. Self-deluding rhetoricians such as Bartoli are the monumental stonemasons of our trade. Over the buried bodies of the mighty dead they erect their marble statues, the frozen, idealised images to which I never miss the opportunity of taking a ten-pound hammer, as, for instance, now. I had squared my elbows and leaned forward to deliver the first withering blow when something… some thing happened. Grown old, the imagination, as I have been finding out, tends to play unnerving tricks. Visions that in youth or even middle age would seem no more than daydreams, mere dawdlings along the margins of fantasy, reify into what feel overwhelmingly like actual and immediate experiences. The familiar will shift and slide, will change places with things never seen before. A known face will turn into that of a stranger, a window will open on to a vista, menacing and dark, that was not there a moment ago. So it happened now. Under the dim canopy of brownish light in which I sat, attended by the silent sentinels of big black sideboards and looming bookcases, I saw the top of the table ripple and sway, and through this suddenly liquid surface something broke which seemed at first a submerged root or stump of tree. Up it came, and up, slowly, effortfully, a bloated, faceless thing with horrid head and straining shoulders and dripping chest, all hung about with fronds of water weed and wrack. There were no sounds, only the speechless shadows pressing in upon the darkling place, and the dark waters moving. The figure, although featureless, was facing me, and struggling, as it seemed, to frame a question, meant for me. The visitation, hallucination, whatever it was, lasted no more than a second or two, and was gone. I looked about. All was as it had been, Bartoli blackly frowning, and Mon-tale's double clenching his fists, and Kristina Kovacs rolling die corner of her napkin, and Bartoli's mother maundering, miles away. And then, all at once, without warning, Cass Cleave gave a terrible, high, hair-raising shriek and turned her eyes up in her head and slid from her chair and with an awful clatter disappeared under the table. Now came another flash and in it I saw again the skidding lorry, the girl spinning, the blood dripping from the porcelain of her ear.