Since the early nineties I’ve been thinking, researching, making notes that explore the hidden version of my background, that my mother was Italian. At least five escapades are in progress. Not all will attain completion. Not all will undress themselves. Or be disrobed.
what we look for in a narrative is drama, not a scenic effect.
Pavese
(A:) stretched behind, nothing new about that
Seated at the village
fountain. Two men and a woman approached. I could hear the female voice talking
before I saw her mouth moving. One of the young men, the darker of the two,
made me feel uncomfortable. It was a slow awakening, a snake against the wall.
There must have been a death.
That thought was fleeting. My mother was with me, she sat close at hand, she
had tried to calm the mood. I had never been there before, and I did not know
strangers were often held up to ridicule.
All this happened without me.
I was without guilt.
This time the waiter had to
prise my two fingers from the handle. I was shaking the cup like a bell in the
saucer. “Take it away,” I insisted.
“You have to let go first,”
he repeated.
I was seated farther away
this time, on a bench against a wall, watching the woman. “He is very fond of
his mistress,” I could hear, another repetition. “She is very attractive.”
I didn’t doubt his opinion,
or his view. I could have stayed on the other side of that window all
afternoon, the heat was unbearable. I was able to.
Eventually she rose and
walked away, her hips swaying. It was happening as I had seen it in films from
the past. There was a smear of red across her face, the sun distorted her
mouth. It was open. Almost. I felt the insinuating tone as she asked me,
standing before me:
“Shall it be this side or do
you want to show me where?”
All I could see was myself
with my beginnings. Again there was no one like that to warn me. Much later I
had taken the ring off her finger. It was not good gold. It vanished when I
tried to rub it. We were both getting angry at the thought that there might
well be a contradiction at play.
“Am I to show my legs?” she
asked. She pushed me in the chest and told me to follow her. “Come on, keep
up.”
There was a room, another
room. There was no door to the building. It was higher, taller than any I had
seen before in this place. I knew that she wanted me to enter, but I stayed
outside.
She handed me an ultimatum. I
was to consider her offer before she hit me on the head. “Like this,” she said,
as she stared straight in my eyes and brought the answer down with a whack.
My response was to try and
make her calm down. It took a while. She had a distorted, somewhat ugly look on
her face.
I returned another afternoon,
but this time I was accepted straightaway. There were no unseemly remarks. “Who
says you did it?”
“I do,” I replied and I threw
the glass of wine in his face.
He explained that I had
misunderstood the whole event and that I would later believe that living has
its reason. He had known that in order to respond to the woman I would have had
to allow myself to climb back through the window. I had to realize she had been
married before. To him. And that sometimes one could get one’s judgment wrong,
it wasn’t always the fault of the sun.
Perhaps I would have liked
him in time. I should have liked to be like him, perhaps. I don’t know.
“Victory,” she offered.
“You needn’t think I am
worthy of respect,” I said. There were others who had a more distinguished look
about them. I was on the look out to see whether I would be discovered as I
leant forward to kiss her neck.
(B:) stumbled a bit, the day I speak of
I spoke. I was speaking. I
held my hand out. I spoke. I held my hand out again. I took what was hidden. I
was speaking and anxious, anxious for the woman as there was no justice, and
not only was there no justice, they were against justice. That which is
injustice is not true, it can’t be true. I spoke, I was speaking.
Whether it had always been
like that, I sought in the fleeting hints in the conversation I was
overhearing. He gave me what he had never meant to give. I would again, or
should be again, my own man, for attempting to witness I had declared a sudden
brusqueness that I felt must go beyond the feeling that by leaving I had taken.
I could not help feeling that
these were only then as though there was an intuition, there had been an
intuition of my idea of Rome. There is always the feeling, the need for a new
way to experience the feeling, one that everyone has and becomes weakened by.
That day she will make me
become the summary of what was pinned to the board. After shaking myself free
and trying to maintain reasons why I did not want to know so many things, I
rested my head down on the tablecloth, I said, I was saying, “why do you want
to know so many things?”
She had merely spoken a few
words, she had showed clearly how within she was weeping, creating the purpose
as if to intend, as if to have an intention to make what I want you to say, “to
stay,” I said. But not to stay here. This was like implanting another within
the walls, a canal to the right and an expanse of green to the left.
The first place had found her
speaking of the essence of what isn’t that which she hadn’t wanted to say, to
say what he had wanted her to do, only to become troubled and I had always to
grab the truth of her emotions, what was to be stilled
for some reason
indifferent and apathetic and
in a way to be convened
what do you mean?
On the contrary, time had given
me the whole day to sit in front of myself and confront myself with the force
of smallness. So soon I said. “I had a whole day to consider it.”
His directness hardened. I
was saying, “I had a whole day to consider it.”
To take into account: “I don’t
know what I mean, just what I say, that it would be my whole pride and
justification, that I was bound by what is the situation in which I found
myself. I’ve never believed it, I thought I was saying, “You’ve opened onto
it.” It was a close net, a quivering of sparkles that went further.
(C:) he has memory, so he went
Hatred and persecution, and
the distinct possibility that my signature exists on the picture postcard of
the village. That’s right, to tell you that there is one thing more that I want
to relate, and yet I am almost sure that what is being suggested, what he
suggested, was that I arrive in the evening and that we sit down at the table
and let stupidity take over.
“Always with a sense of
solemnity?”
Those were his words. I could
hear them singing in their own language, something that those close to him
didn’t know whether I was struck by the thought that one of them ought to be
always seen. What was worse was that those villains had no sense of fear,
because in that water we all knew that lead was in his body.
“You want to be brought up
like that, according to our customs?”
Drinking is what we would
have liked. It’s only for those who are foolish, that warning is a bad thing,
nor for them to see again.
She was in fact being
understood as someone who could push it open.
“And the child’s head?”
I said that her goodness
can’t be allowed at English tea tables.
Her response was drowned out
by the jet that streaked across the sky, not far above our heads.
“These birds know that in the
meantime men go one way and nature another.” I had described what wove them
together, wove them into what the woman from across the road had said was the
agreement of the families. This was more than a surprise. I did not protest. It
would be seen that I was not entirely wrong. That had to be said for her
family. She did not come back, and this was no surprise either.
I went out to pour a bucket
of water over my head, it was that hot. It took away from me the confrontation,
the face to face with the female who was now the only one that we had brought
back from the city. What is the coat you wear? She stood there, flustered. It
was his waist jacket she wore. She had a couple of skirts across her arm. And a
scarf of red that fluttered around as she agitated.
She was deserted, like the
beggar in the street. “Yes,” he said. “Of course you can brave the midday sun.”
We had left the shade now. We
had walked into the mountainside, awe-inspired by what comprised our native
land.
I removed her dark glasses,
for they were too dark.
She was still sleeping. I had
given her an extra half an hour. I stood with my hands in my pockets, looking
down at her naked body barely covered by the sheet. I asked her what was the
phrase that my mother had said when the argument had started. What had she
meant?
I repeated the word, trying
to catch an aesthetic to our manner of talking. Although she looked frightened,
she was not prepared to attack the lawyer once more. The radio announced the
time. Others moved out of the bar. I confirmed that even if I was trained in
exasperation, I would be painfully weary, if not ravenous to be reached by
another passing, another going down covered with dust.
There was the quest for
bones, whatever size could be found. Deception was even worse than mockery. We
went once more to pay a visit to the lawyer whose place was other than at the
back of the church. Where they could throw themselves down on the rocks, be at
the mercy of the walls and the muddy floor beside the small fountain.
To hold onto the memory of
the crackling sound, a noise that refused to stop. It seemed that everyone was
shouting and you were asked to report within the hour, to tell all or if you
prefer, to let the least pollution be every time I speak.
She awoke finally. When
daylight was full, we left the room. Who could be like us and spend almost a
year in the house, be locked up like the soldier on patrol? Who had helped us
the day before? He was at the wheel. He was as English as any offence was made
to fare. And all his strength had then to be allowed to roar on account of our
common blood. This was already taken into account. I knew it was. There were
contradictions. So much so that nevertheless I am not perfect. At any rate it
was better than being born here. People like myself could die as an
embarrassment, our young reach that certain frost and now the partnership is
dissolved. Then, for the first time all that indifference will be the shit on
the floor, and the whirling around our heads.
Again he was driving in the
rain. Even at that hour of the morning the animals had reached the farthest
edge of the village. It was no longer wide and green. The last moment, and it
was in a way the only passage.
(D:) free and passionate, the diversity of instance
Eyes turned.
“But I am not good looking,”
she said, “because I seem to recognize any howls in respect of this looking.”
From a long way away, the
woman who loved to adorn herself with the drops of pearls found ruin in the
church. Blackness clustered and was expensive.
After a further moment of
silence she said she would meet his friend. “She will treat you right.”
Over martinis we played at
cars and coachwork flavours. The old care for the other hand took the blade
from the windscreen, and wiped the place. Colours suddenly seized with the
sparsity of furnishings, the unruly untidiness that each knew nothing about.
“He didn’t want to.”
“Are you still friends with
nothing to sit upon?”
Again I was trying to close
the door after her, she made this curiosity even though close to us, and an
easy conclusion. It revealed a greater simplicity, not that there remained
anything with me from that day onwards. I thought I do not love her, as she was
after all my feeling of attraction towards the house, once again I didn’t ask
her. Are you a friend of his? was the next time I had such a thought and I knew
that the encounter in the piazza was too great for a couple of months.
The sofa after intercourse
left her flat on her back. Conversations were the pattern on her bottom.
Finally my eye spread her legs wide apart and wiped themselves on what it saw
itself kissing.
“What do you think you should
kiss?”
Furthermore there was the
phone that seem to perfectly hand itself to questions. Ceasing to be calm and
at length, if it were a good bottle of wine, it would be some sandwiches
wrapped in silk with more and more stupidity growing.
I looked at her again, for
there was a misdirection, a nicety that purchased the certainty of those who
came to stay here. The need to imprison her was the confidence, as was her need
for this silence. This meant that lying and unfaithfulness were barely memories
that depended as in the past on the realization that the relationship between
her and the singing while I was asleep can be added to the book.
“But do you know that
something came to light to contradict what you are supposing?”
Showing her stockings, she
concluded that perhaps her beauty was the permissibility to say that she saw
there was not a single case for them that isn’t bored with conversation. She
suggested we should make love.
It was hot and suffocating
inside the room. The door opened and she came back in. We finished dressing in
silence then she tripped on the carpet. Again I was barely conscious that
loving her in this new way would also mean to see this aspect of my life as a
doubt not to be grasped.