The Truth About Death

by Robert Hellenga

  “Marco?”

  Too far out for comfort.

  “Marco, there’s something I want to show you, something I want you to explain. Something I hope you can explain. Something that has upset me very much. I can’t tell you how much.”

  “Jesus, Graham, can’t it wait? I’ve got to take a leak in the worst way.”

  “You can take a leak over the side, Marco. We’ll swing around to the starboard side of this little cabin cruiser here so no one can see you. Except me, of course.”

  “Graham, forget it. Let’s just get to the Esperanza, for Christ’s sake.” But Graham with a single stroke of the paddle had given the canoe a ninety-degree turn and was thrusting forward with long smooth strokes.

  They went out farther and farther, putting the cabin cruiser—the Wait ’n’ Sea—between them and the Esperanza. DiVita tried to imagine someone coming out of the cabin yelling at them, offering drinks. But the boat was all trussed up like a chicken waiting to be roasted.

  “You can take your leak now.” Graham brought the canoe to a standstill. “Better stay down on your knees.”

  As he knelt sideways in the canoe, DiVita glanced at Graham, trying to read his intentions without meeting his gaze. He fumbled with his zipper and extricated himself with some difficulty from his underpants. His penis had shrunk under Graham’s gaze to the size of his little finger, to the size of a carrot stick on an hors d’oeuvres tray. He waited, his knees pressing into the bottom of the boat so sharply that the front end was forced up into the air like the prow of a Viking ship. When he raised his right leg to shield himself from Graham’s gaze, his left knee thrust down even harder and the side of the boat dipped under the water. He tried to shift his weight again, to pull back from the side of the canoe, but before he knew what had happened, he was tilting forward, as if the floor on which he was kneeling had suddenly given way. The lake rose up to meet him, offered only a slight resistance, a thin shock of cold which supported him for a moment, like a skin of ice, before giving way. He moved in slow motion, struggling against the heavy clothing that carried him down, his corduroy pants, his Princeton rugger shirt, his badminton sneakers. When he surfaced he threw his arms up over his head, frantically, not knowing whether, in the brief interval that had been allotted him, to take in more oxygen to prepare for the ensuing struggle, or to use up the little store that remained to let Graham know that he was drowning, that he really could not swim.

  “Help, Graham. Help,” he cried, his fear overcoming his faith that in spite of everything Graham would save him. It was embarrassing to cry out like that, humiliating; but he had to let Graham know, make him understand. He went under again, lungs bursting. When he surfaced he could see Graham sitting silently not ten feet away, like a hunter in a blind. Their eyes met for an instant—a fraction of a second, no more—during which Graham seemed to hesitate as he might have hesitated on the badminton court, waiting till the last possible moment to play a difficult shot that was probably going out anyway (but you couldn’t be sure, and if you played it you’d never know).

  When DiVita went under again he relaxed slightly, waiting … Waiting for Graham to play the shot, to return his volley. Waiting for Graham, for a chance to explain. And he thought that Graham might be waiting too, waiting for him to lose consciousness lest, in the rescue attempt, DiVita grasp him with a terrible and unbreakable grip so that he, Graham, should drown too. DiVita was unbearably tired. In his heart oxygen was rapidly being replaced by carbon dioxide. The heart itself was pumping dark venous blood into his circulatory system. The veins gorged with blood. He imagined himself dead, his corpse lifted softly by invisible currents, turning and turning in slow motion, describing passionless hyperbolas.

  But he was not dead, not yet, and he made a last fierce effort to climb to the surface, as if he were scrambling up a rockfall with his pockets and boots full of stones. When he reached the summit, he gasped and started to churn the water in a ridiculous dog paddle, heading not toward Graham but toward the Wait ’n’ Sea.

  Graham started after him, pulled the canoe alongside him just as they reached the Wait ’n’ Sea. Graham raised the paddle, and DiVita, shoving the canoe away, took a glancing blow on his shoulder.

  “Oh my God, oh my God,” Graham cried out, bellowing like an animal.

  DiVita grabbed onto the ladder, freezing, nauseous from the water he had swallowed.

  “Let me get alongside you,” Graham shouted.

  “Fuck off, Graham. Don’t come near me.”

  DiVita managed to climb onto the narrow gunwale of the Wait ’n’ Sea. He could see the Esperanza but couldn’t raise his right arm to wave. His shoulder was numb.

  Graham, below him, looked up without appearing to see him or hear him or to understand the simplest language.

  “Get away, Graham. Get away.”

  But the rubber nose of the canoe bump-bump-bumped against the ladder as Graham thrashed the water with the paddle. DiVita, like a seasick passenger, leaned over the railing and vomited.

  Within ten minutes—though it seemed like an hour—the dean had picked him up in the dinghy. Graham followed them back to the Esperanza in the canoe. Belowdecks DiVita stripped, slipped on the dean’s lightweight parka, and wrapped himself in a wool blanket. He warmed himself with hot coffee, which the dean had cooked on a Coleman stove. He spread the contents of his billfold out on the bed: credit cards, a fifty-dollar bill, notes, addresses, telephone numbers, identification, three feet of emergency dental floss wrapped around a slip of thin cardboard. He heard Graham and Mrs. Singleton coming down the ladder and Mrs. Singleton saying, “This way.” The door—the hatch—of the master stateroom at the other end of the companionway opened and closed.

  The water DiVita had swallowed upset his stomach, irritated the lining, but once on deck he began to talk animatedly to the dean about his inability to swim, even though he was, as Graham had said, such a good athlete; and he brought the conversation around to famous people who had drowned: Edward King, Margaret Fuller, Percy Bysshe Shelley.

  All this to prove …? That it was Graham, not he, who needed to be looked after. And it was true. “He’s very upset,” the dean said. And the dean demonstrated how Graham had been holding his clutched fists over his chest. “Mrs. Singleton’s with him,” the dean said, “down in the master stateroom.”

  The dean went below and returned with more coffee. Mrs. Singleton followed him up the narrow ladder, her tweed skirt hiked up around her thick hips. “Graham wants to see you,” she said, settling herself in a deck chair and arranging her skirt. “He’s very upset now. You could have drowned, and he thinks you blame him.”

  Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner? DiVita wasn’t so sure. If he began to explain, where would he stop?

  “You should have come back in the canoe with him,” she continued, “instead of calling for my husband. It’s as if you didn’t trust him anymore.”

  After two cups of coffee DiVita felt somewhat recovered. Even so, in the pocket of Graham’s blue blazer, which was hanging on the back of Mrs. Singleton’s deck chair, he could see the outline of what must be the incriminating photographs, and he began to toy with the idea of showing them to the dean and his wife. Wouldn’t that be something? Better (or worse) than flinging off the Pendleton blanket that concealed his lower parts? But what did he want? Simply to startle the living daylights out of these good people? Or to be seen as he really was, and to be forgiven? Or condemned?

  “He’ll get over it,” he said, standing up and stretching.

  “Don’t make it hard for him. You’re all right, after all. There’s no reason to kick up a fuss.”

  DiVita smiled. “I won’t.” He picked up Graham’s jacket, tossed it over his shoulder—the numbness was giving way to a burning sensation that was not entirely unpleasant—and went below; but before going in to see Graham he ducked into the head. He knew that the balance of power had shifted; the hunter had become the hunted. He no longer had anything to fear from Gr
aham. But he wanted to have a look at the photos.

  As he was adjusting himself on the cool seat of the commode, a line from Shelley popped into his mind: Life, like a dome of many-colored glass / Stains the white radiance of eternity.

  Poor old Shelley, he thought. They’d burned his body on the beach at Spezzia (or was it Viareggio?); Byron had been there, and someone had snatched the heart from the flames.

  The color snapshots, all twenty of them, were in a plain white envelope. DiVita turned them over, one at a time like a man playing solitaire, discarding those that were too dark, too light, too blurred, till he was down to a half dozen or so, all more or less the same: Rosalind’s bare chest thrust forward like the figurehead of a ship; his own face inclined toward the camera, animated by a smile that he could not remember now. Such a smile, under the circumstances, must have been doubly provoking to Graham, proverbial insult added to injury, though it hadn’t been intended that way.

  Did rational human beings, he asked himself, really do such things? Risk their jobs, their careers, their friendships, the esteem of their colleagues, for such moments? Of course they did. And not infrequently, either. But what could they possibly say for themselves when brought to judgment? How could they excuse themselves? How could he have smiled like that?

  Judgment. Bound in nylon fetters, DiVita awaited the judgment of the wise and the good, the philosopher kings and blessed saints whose august presences seemed at that very moment to fill the tiny room with contending vapors, with strands of hair combed carefully over bald pates, with all the cumbersome paraphernalia of wisdom and goodness—scrolls and tablets and books and hooded gowns and hair shirts and strange instruments of discipline to make the senses quiver. They exchanged reproving remarks as they passed the photos back and forth, smudging and crinkling them with eager fingers. But where was Graham? It was not Graham who interrupted the excited hum and buzz, but Apollo, the lord of music and song, the giver of prophecy, the healer of bodies, the inspirer of poets, the god of light, the eye of heaven: “Hermes, my friend, how would you like to be trussed up like Marco and straddled by golden Aphrodite?”

  “Wouldn’t I though?” the great Wayfinder replied. “Tie me to the bedposts with woolen stockings three times as strong as these flimsy nylons; invite the wise and the good to see the fun; only let me lie beneath the pale-golden one!”

  DiVita stood up suddenly and shook himself. Even the wise and the good, he thought … He rewrapped himself in the blanket and flushed the photos down the head, which he had to pump vigorously, before going to see if he could do anything to make it easier for Graham.

  I SPEAK A LITTLE FRENCH

  It was December and I was forty-nine years old. I tried not to let it get me down, but when my daughter wrote to say that she wouldn’t be coming to Florence for the holidays, I didn’t see how I could hang on in Italy for another seven months. On the other hand, I didn’t see how I could go home before June without losing face. After all, hadn’t I always carried on about Florence as if it were the Garden of Eden, the earthly paradise, the promised land? How would I explain? What would I say? That I was lonely? That there was no one to talk to? That I had fallen from grace?

  I needed to talk; I needed to get things into words, needed to get them out into the open where I could hear them. When I was a boy I had so much energy I used to say that my legs hurt from not running. That’s the way I felt. My whole being hurt from not talking. So I talked to myself, told my own story to myself as I walked along the Arno in the morning on my way to the Uffizi, or on my way from the Uffizi to the British Institute in the afternoon, using a sort of aria parlante; and in Italian the story of my wife’s affair with, and subsequent marriage to, our family dentist took on an operatic dignity that it lacked in English. The cramp of jealousy was relaxed; the sting of humiliation drawn; the ache of incomprehension eased.

  Coming back to Italy after the divorce had seemed like a good idea, but things hadn’t worked out the way I’d expected. The dollar was down, rents were up, and I was on leave without pay. Instead of walking home at night through narrow streets to my own little apartment in an old palazzo—inconvenient but interesting—I found myself living in a furnished room—no cooking privileges—in the very upper left-hand corner of the map, an hour’s ride from the Piazza dell’Olio, where I picked up the number twenty-three bus. I sent postcards to everyone in Italy with whom I’d ever exchanged addresses during a sabbatical year, but by the end of October I had received only two invitations. Instead of juggling a busy social schedule, I found myself eating salami sandwiches in my room. I entertained myself with the fantasy of finding an Italian wife, someone stunning and raven-haired, someone who still believed in the sanctity of family life, someone I could talk to. But no such someone materialized, and I found myself stretched out on my bed looking through the personals in La Pulce:

  RAGAZZA 38enne, carina, colta, sensibile, estrema pulizia morale, cerca uomo stessi requisiti, per un rapporto affettivo serio ed eventuale matrimonio, gradita foto restituibile e telefono. F. P. C. F1 P.A. 281.901.1/P

  But at the last minute I lost my nerve; instead of sending the photo that I’d taken of myself at one of the automatic machines outside the station, I signed up for cooking lessons in the basement of the Istituto Culturale, where I learned to prepare a number of elaborate dishes, including pumpkin soup and truffled capon, which I’d never eaten before and have never eaten since.

  I’d reserved a double room for Alison—my daughter—at the small Albergo Medici on the Arno, not far from the Biblioteca Nazionale, but I put off canceling the reservation till the very last minute—till the night of her intended arrival, in fact. The night clerk, Volmaro, with whom I’d discussed her visit several times, refused to return my deposit, and we had a regular Italian argument with shouting and gesturing. Afterward, nervous and upset, I took one street and then another and soon found myself at the little Piazza San Pier Maggiore, where I had a drink at the bettola under the Volta di San Piero—a vaulted passageway containing part of the medieval city wall. It was one of the few places in the city where men gathered to drink in silence, as they do in American bars, though the bettola was so small that the patrons had to stand outside.

  I drank a glass of cheap red wine, then another, and then a third. From where I was standing I could see the friggitoria where Bill—Bill is my son—and Alison had spent their pocket money on French fries and hamburgers; I could see the bakery where I’d bought bread every morning and the latteria and the pizzicheria and the lit windows of our old apartment. I had another glass of wine and then I had one of those revelations that come from time to time to almost everyone who drinks more than occasionally: everything suddenly becomes sparkling clear, like a fruit tart painted with apricot glaze; you see things as they are; you experience viscerally what you’ve known all along: that you should return good for evil; that material possessions aren’t important; that in the light of our mortality what’s really important is love.

  At least that’s the way it was with me that night. I was overwhelmed with love for all humankind: for my six or seven drinking companions who, like me, had their collars turned up against the cold, for distant friends, for my children, for my enemies (i.e., my wife and her husband, D.D.S.).

  Spurious? Undoubtedly, but my immediate problem was that wisdom of this sort demands expression. The emotions become too big for the body and need to be released through the mouth.

  Which I opened and said, not addressing anyone in particular, “That Baggio is really something, isn’t he?” (Baggio was a sort of Florentine Michael Jordan; I didn’t really care for soccer, but I read the sports pages in La Repubblica so I’d have something to talk about.) “Three goals in three minutes,” I said. There were some grunts of agreement in response, but no actual words. “Against Napoli,” I said. “Must be some kind of a record.”

  I was about to order another glass of wine when I noticed a young woman crossing the piazza dragging the largest suitcase I’d
ever seen. The suitcase had wheels on it so that you could pull it down long airport corridors, but the wheels were too small for the rough paving bricks of the piazza, and the suitcase kept tipping over like a large dog that keeps flopping itself down. She wasn’t able to go twenty feet without the suitcase falling, and it was so big and heavy she had trouble setting it upright again. I stepped out from under the volta to get a better look, and when she saw me in the light of the piazza, she cried out, “Acqua, acqua.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. After all, there were two bars in the piazza, in addition to the bettola. We were in the center of a modern city, not in the middle of the desert.

  “Acqua, acqua.”

  I could hear the tears in her voice.

  “Acqua Arno,” she said, and it dawned on me that she was looking for the river.

  “Right down Via Verdi,” I said in Italian, pointing in the direction of Via Verdi and indicating that she should turn to the right.

  The suitcase tipped over again and this time she left it. “Acqua Arno,” she repeated.

  “Parla Italiano?” I asked, helping her right the suitcase.

  “Acqua Arno.”

  “English?”

  “Je suis française.”

  “Ahi,” I said. “Non parla italiano? O inglese?”

  “Française,” she repeated. “Je suis française.”

  I’d had two years of French in college and said the first thing that popped into my head. “Je peux parler un peu de français.”

  “Dieu merci.” A look of relief rose to her face. “Je cherche l’Arno, s’il vous plaît …” She kept going, but too fast for me to follow. Quite naturally she expected more, but unfortunately there was no more. To her rapid questions I could make only a single response: “Je peux parler un peu de français”—I can speak a little French—which I kept repeating, hoping that something would click. But nothing clicked. I was imprisoned in a single phrase. What had looked like an open door was a trompe l’oeil.