Shroud (32 page)

How is it that men are always astonished by the phenomenon of conception? It might have been understandable in primitive times, when we believed it was the wind that got women with child, but what excuse is there for us in this jadedly over-informed age?True, in the course of a long life I had slept with many women without once, so far as I was informed, impregnating a single womb. What prankster god of fertility had decreed that at the very end I should be allowed to shoot one of his potent arrows straight to its secret and palpitant home? Who would have thought that my dry old seed could still sprout? What an embarrassment! How foolish I felt! And yet, how grateful, too. I saw at once, you see, the implications, the possibilities, what I shall call the saving grace, of this absurdly wonderful happening. Let me be clear; it was not I who would be saved. For once, perhaps really for the first time, it was others I was thinking of. Growing already inside this girl was the enfolded bud of what would be a world reclaimed. Out of the unimaginably complex coils in the hollow heart of the blastula I had set swelling in her belly there had already sprung the new beginnings of my people, my lost people. It was as simple as that. My gentle mother, my melancholy father, my siblings put to summary death before they had lived, all would find their tiny share in this new life. Oh, fond old man! How could I have thought this world would allow for such redemption?

The final postcard bore a brightly tinted picture of a church on a rock in the middle of an improbably berylline bay. She sent it in a package, along with her fountain pen, of all things.
Dearest Svidrigailov
-
I
am going to America
-
Your Cassandra.
She had posted it in the town of Chiavari three days previously. She must have calculated that it would take just that time, no more, no less, to reach me. I marvel at her faith in the reliability of this country's postal system, although it proved remarkably well founded, for it was a mere ten minutes later, as I was standing helplessly by the window in the garden room with the postcard in one hand and her pen in the other, trying to think what to do, that Franco Bartoli tapped at the door and put in his head warily and whispered that there was a person –
una persona
– on the telephone who wished to speak to me.

Of all the traditional characters of the Italian comedy, Harlequin is at once the most individual and the most enigmatic. Who is this inexplicable being? Are his head and his heart made like our own? If an effigy were to be raised to him it must be made of rubber, for only rubber could receive the impress of his fierce and subtle spirit, created by the gods in a moment of incontrollable mirthfulness and malice. He is called by many names, and no one can say which was rightfully and originally his; many authorities maintain his name was first of all a sobriquet. He is without doubt of divine essence, if not, indeed, Mercury himself, god of twilight and the wind, the patron of thieves and panders. He is Proteus, too, now delicate, now offensive, comic or melancholic, sometimes lashed into a Jrenzy of madness. He is the creator of a new form of poetry, accented by gestures, punctuated by somersaults, enriched with philosophic reflections and incongruous noises. He is the first poet of acrobatics and unseemly sounds. His black half-mask completes the impression of something savage and fiendish, suggesting a cat, a satyr, an executioner. Consider how he is viewed by public opinion, and try to conceive, if you can, how he could ignore this opinion or confront it! Scarcely have the authorities assigned his dwelling, scarcely has he taken possession of it, when other men move their houses elsewhere so they no longer have to see his. Here he lives alone with his mate, whose voice is the only voice he knows and without which he would hear only groans. The day comes. A dismal signal is given. He sets out, with a black hue and a red eye. It is morning. He arrives at a public square packed with a pressing and panting crowd. He is thrown a poisoner, a parricide, a blasphemer. There is a thrilled, a terrible silence. He seizes the condemned one, stretches him on the rack, then takes and breaks him on the wheel. The head dangles down, the hair hangs on end, the mouth, gaping like a furnace, emits a bloody word, begging for death. It is finished. He steps down; he holds out his bloodstained hand; he is thrown from afar a few gold coins, which he carries away through a double row of men drawing back in horror. He returns home, sits down to table and eats, then goes to his bed and sleeps. Awaking on the morrow, he thinks not at all of what he did the day before. Is this a man?Yes. God receives him in his shrines and allows him to pray. He is not a criminal and yet no tongue would say of him that he is virtuous, that he is honest, that he is admirable. No moral praise seems appropriate for him, since this would suppose a relation with other human beings, and he has none. He has none, this Harlequin.

So this, she saw, was where it would end. There was nowhere farther for her to go, and she was glad. She had watched from the deck of the little ferry boat the five towns receding into the evening vaguenesses of sea and sky and the humped night rising plum-blue behind the headlands, and thought how she too was disappearing, into the dark. That was how it had been all along, since she had left Turin, if not before, if not long before, a secret, gradual process of thinning and fading. The world was letting her go, as he too had let her go. She understood clearly what was happening, what must happen, so that the pattern would be complete. She had tried to explain it to Kristina Kovacs, the way everything was a part of everything else, the way it was all ordained, but Kristina had not understood. Kristina, she saw clearly, was trying to save her, as once she in turn had thought it was her task to save him. But that was not it, that was not it at all. Now they were docking, and she had a moment almost of bliss as the boat glided in silence toward the quayside, where vague figures waited, strangely still, until an old man in a seaman's cap stepped forward nimbly and caught the rope one of the sailors threw to him. The water swayed, smooth as oil, its surface running with coloured lights, peach and mauve and rose. Bats flitted in the sombre air. There were cafés and bars and little restaurants all along the quay, and, behind that, the village climbed the hillside, lamps in the windows of the houses, so many lives. There was a lamp too, or a lantern, above the door of the church that stood on its jagged promontory outlined against the darkening sky. A sailor from the ferry carried her bag all the way up to the hotel. How simply everything was happening.

She wrote again in her notebook, calm now, sitting under a lamp by the open window of her room, a moth making its tiny soft racket around the bulb and the small waves breathing below on the shingle.
Columbine is sick. The Doctor is called. Oh, save me, save me, Dot-tore! Columbine is going to have a baby. The Old Man is angry.
She smiled and put away the notebook and folded her arms on the table and laid her head on her arms. She felt herself slipping gradually down a dark, immense incline. That is time, she thought, time is the curve, it steepens. Everything she had ever done, her smallest acts, even in earliest infancy, had brought her to this moment, these unavoidable moments, the last. So strange, and yet so simple. She lifted her head with an effort, for she was tired, and sat for a while, listening to the drowsy noises of the night. She had gone to see the doctor, the elegant old doctor with the dyed hair. He had been kind, moving his priestly hand over her belly, sighing. She saw the numbers on his wrist and understood. He had wanted her to go into a clinic, to end it, to have it ended. "What will you do?" he had asked. "Where will you turn?" And he had looked at her for a long time. "Ah,
signorina!"

The postcard would arrive tomorrow. She was glad she had sent him the pen along with it. She wanted him to know all that she knew.

In the bedroom in Franco Bartoli's apartment after she had collapsed that night Kristina Kovacs had got into bed beside her. So hot, there, and airless, and yet how cool Kristina's hand had felt, resting on her heart. She had slept, knowing the woman was lying awake, watching over her. She could feel Kristina's fear, it was like a living presence, a third person lying with them, veiled, silent, unappeasable. Later she woke, and Kristina had talked to her, soothingly, as if she were talking through an open window to a madwoman out on a ledge. Well, what else are you, she asked herself now, what else are you, but a madwoman, on a ledge? She smiled into the darkness outside the window. She had looked in Kristina's handbag and found a phial of sleeping pills and thought of stealing them, but did not. She knew Kristina was watching her. She wondered if that was what he had asked her to do, to watch over her, and make sure she did not take the pills, or leap from the ledge.

She opened her guidebook at random and read about Shelley's death. He had been to Livorno to see Lord Byron. The schooner was the
Ariel.
The poet, and Edward Williams, and a boy to tend the sail. Why did they give the other names, even the name of the boat, and not say what the boy's name was? They burned Shelley's body on the beach. She put the book away and rose from the chair and stood a moment motionless, listening; not a sound, anywhere, except the little waves. She went out and locked the door behind her and went as quietly as she could down the stairs and out into the night. Who was it she was afraid would hear her, try to hold her back? There was no one. The man at the desk with the grey hair and the moustache did not even lift his eyes as she went past.

The air outside was warm, and had a strong, astringent smell, like the smell of iodine. It was the sea. She could taste salt on her lips. All these vivid things, as if they knew they were the last. She walked down through the hushed streets to the harbour. She knew where she was going. On the quayside people were out strolling, not many, the last of the tourist boats had left long ago. She was aware of glances, women's, mostly. Did they know, just by looking at her? Would they remember her? The sea was invisible, just a blackness, with no horizon, as if half the world out there had fallen clean away. Tomorrow the sun's eclipse, tonight her own. There were no voices in her head any more; they had said all they had to say, had done all they had to do. She imagined them behind her, the horde of them, standing back, big-eyed, their hands over their mouths, staring in gleeful expectation, unable to credit that she was doing at last what they had been urging for so long that she must do.

She climbed the steep, cobbled hill to the church. The lantern was still burning over the stone lintel. The door was open, the doorway hung with a heavy leather curtain worn smooth along one edge by the generations of hands pushing it aside. Penny candles, a vaulted roof, stone floor, a statue of the Virgin all blues and pinks and creams, her eyes uplifted in a transport of sorrow. Such quiet. She sat in the corner of a bench. Every tiniest act, all adding up, bringing her to this. A priest came in, an elderly man, short and fat and perfectly bald. He looked at her in surprise and went out again. Father. There was a door at the side behind the altar. She rose from the bench and went forward. The door was old, its wood chill and damp to the touch, slimed by the night air. It opened, squealing on its hinges. How simply! Here was a little square stone balcony under a gaping sky, with white water snarling around the rocks far, far below. She scrambled on to the parapet, dislodging a piece of stone and grazing her knee. A night breeze pressed her skirt against her legs, so cool, so soft. She put her hands over her womb, feeling the warmth that was not hers. If only she knew the boy's name, the boy on the
Ariel.
He was drowned too. All the lost ones. Her knee smarted where she had grazed it; so insistent, everything, demanding to be noticed, to be noted. She heard someone enter the church behind her and say something, she did not understand the words. Hurry, now. She saw herself falling before she fell, falling down that quickening curve. Someone right there now, it was the priest, the old priest, she saw the light glint on his bald brow and remembered the waiter, the statue of the horseman in the dark; remembered everything.
Signorina!
She took a big breath, and for an instant was a child again, her father behind her, saying,
Jump.
Slowly, swooningly, her eyes ecstatically lifted, like the eyes of the statue of the Madonna, she leaned out into the nothing, as the priest at her back in vain reached forward his restraining hands. Time. Night. Water.

Franco Bartoli drove me in his little car all the way down to that far corner of the coast. When we got to La Spézia we buzzed hotly through the town and on to Lerici, from where I was to take a boat across the bay. It was past dinner hour when we arrived, however, and the boats had stopped running. I would have to stay the night. I chose the Hotel Shelley, to Franco's tight-lipped disapprobation; I might have lodged at the Albergo Lord Byron. Poets, you have not lived in vain. Franco offered, in a wan sort of way, to stay and keep me company, but I said no, he must go back, his
dolce mama
would be fretting. The truth is, I could not have borne his company for another minute. He departed, casting a last commiserating look at me through the windscreen as he briskly turned the car on the quayside and shot off into the gloaming. I telephoned the hotel where she had been staying a few short leagues away across that deceptively innocent-looking sea, and was told they were still searching for the body. I ate a queasy dinner and retired to my room with a bottle of whisky and one of Kristina Kovacs's most powerful bromides, and at once plunged into a series of outlandish nightmares with themes from Hokusai in his most outrageously lascivious marine mode, through which there bobbed at intervals the image of a drowned and bloated poet adrift on a burning sea. When I came out on the harbour next morning I found that the ferries would not be running until the afternoon; that eclipse was to take place presently, and it was considered bad luck to sail before it was past. I crawled back into my sour bed and slept until noon, missing the eclipse, unless a terrified, eventless dream-passage through a region of radiant murk was not a dream at all but a half-waking glimpse of solar occlusion. When at length I woke fully I was sprawled steaming in a bolt of sunlight falling unhindered and full upon me through an open window, and for a few blessed moments I did not know where I was or why I was there.