He wants me to care as he does, that’s all, and I can see how I must exasperate him.
Yes, I say, I do believe they’ll let me out. The problem is, it might be today or it might be tomorrow, or next week, or in almost three years time. I think if they were going to send me some place else or bring me to trial, they’d have done so by now. They’re just waiting until it’s politically acceptable to let me go.
Why would they send me elsewhere?
Some of the beards have been in here since before I arrived, so they can’t be that important. But the prisoners that disappear – I don’t know if they’re released or sent to some place else. I tell him if I was that important, I wouldn’t still be here.
He protests.
Not important to the people keeping me here, I say. They’ll let me go whenever they let me go. Hoping or waiting to be released will only drive me crazy.
But if I don’t have a clear idea of what to do when I’m released, I’m likely to make the same mistakes all over again.
It’s what I do, I say.
But it doesn’t have to be.
I don’t know if the Padre and I are talking about the same thing; I figure not.
“Sometimes I get so angry at what is happening to me, that I don’t behave as well as I might. And then I get angry at myself for behaving badly and my behaviour gets worse. I know how it looks and I don’t want to be that person. I don’t want to spend what limited time I have being that person. I want to be fun and friendly and popular, but I end up alienating everyone around me by being such a bitch.”
“What is happening to you?”
“My lungs are being destroyed.”
“And is there nothing they can do?”
“There are lots of things that make it easier, yes.”
“Such as?”
“My diet; I need lots of protein, and fats and energy foods, because I can’t absorb the nutrients in what I eat. I have to take enzymes with every meal to help me digest my food. If I’m upset, I take it out on not eating properly, and that’s the reason I get sick – or sicker than usual.”
“Is that what happened the other week?”
“More or less; it’s never just the one thing. I pick up a lot of infections, yet still forget to take my antibiotics. Or I refuse to do my physiotherapy exercises. When I lose it, everything goes wrong.”
“And you end up in hospital?”
”Yes, only sometimes that can make things worse. I’m likely to catch a different infection if there’s no isolation unit or, if they don’t know I have CF, they’ll try to give me some medication that could kill me. I can’t go anywhere without making sure the local hospital knows all about me.”
“And is there no cure?”
“No.”
“So, long term, what will happen to you?”
“There is no long term, Brendan. This is it.”
He says he knows I think I’m doing fine, but that I’m not. I don’t see why he’s so keen to undermine me. I’m here and there’s nothing I can do about it. I have to find a way to cope. I will get through this. It will end. These are the tenets of my life – what more does he want from me?
Says it’s not healthy or normal to just accept the situation I find myself in.
He makes me so tired on days like today. He wants me to rant and rave. He wants me to lose it. He wants me to break down. He wants me to crack. He wants me to cry. He’d even be happy for me to take it all out on him – but I just want to sleep.
What would he have me do?
He wants me to care about my life.
Which life – this life or my previous life?
My future life.
I have no future life.
He says that if I believe I will be released, I must also believe in some future life.
I tell him that if I imagine a possible future life I won’t be able to get through this one.
This is no life.
It’s the only life I’ve got.
Says I’d have to be alive to call it a life and I’m not.
I’m living it the best I can.
I’m living nothing, he says. I’m dead.
I’m living it the best I can. I’m surviving.
I’m dead. Or rather, I barely exist. And when they release me, he wants to know, when they let me go – what will I do?
Whatever I have to do.
Why?
What does he mean – why?
Why would I bother? What’s the point?
Make up your mind, I tell him. I’ll do whatever I need to do to survive.
And that’s it – survival?
That’s all I have.
All I shall ever have?
Who knows?
The Padre weakens me. Just answering his questions weakens me and leaves me less well equipped to cope with being held in this place. After each visit, I have to regroup, to tell myself all over again that this is it, there is nothing else. He wants me to believe – in the future, in myself, in anything – but I don’t.
He asks me to tell him about my previous life. He asks questions to which he already knows the answers, such as when did my previous life end and this present life begin?
He knows; I’m sure he knows.
My life ended when I lost the custody of my daughter. Or – my life ended when I agreed not to contest the custody of my daughter. Or – my life ended when I agreed never to see my daughter again. Or – my life ended when I agreed to take a lump sum of cash in exchange for never seeing my daughter again.
Or – I had a life. It ended. That’s all folks.
Maria has reverted to her natural hair colour, or what she tells me is the closest to her natural colour she can find in a bottle. She joins me each day in the library before siesta. If we’re alone – which is mostly the case – we talk. She hasn’t stuck to speaking in only Italian. I guess if she wants conversation, she knows it has to be in English. Her being around stops me dwelling too much on myself and it seems to make her happy. Knowing what I now know about her, it would be churlish to resent the intrusion into my space. I still have my cell if I want to be alone.
“The blonde wasn’t really you,” I tell her.
All her colours are earthy – her eyes, her hair, her lips, her skin – made all the more so by her seemingly unlimited supply of white dresses. This is her look for whenever she’s not working in the Refectory.
“I did it to irritate my mama. She flew straight over when I was taken into hospital.”
“And you paid her back by dyeing your hair?”
“It was my way of telling her when it was time to leave.”
“Nice.”
“I know; I’m not proud of myself. And I’ve spoken to her since and apologised.”
“Didn’t you want her around?”
“When I’m alone and so sick I can’t speak or lift my head off the pillow, and strange doctors are making bad decisions as though I’m not even there – as though because I’m the patient I’m somehow also an idiot – then yes, there’s nothing better than Mama coming in and taking charge, telling them what they can and cannot do.”
“But there always comes a point when you want her to leave?”
“Yes, and it’s hard for her to take after she’s come such a long way.”
“She wants to stay to look after her baby?”
Maria looks up sharply and I wait for the diatribe, but it doesn’t come.
“Yes,” she says, “I’ll always be her baby. No matter what age I live to be, I’ll always be her baby.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“It’s something, yes. The problem is, I’m twenty-two and I need to live my own life.”
“And being here, working at the Villa – is this you living your own life?”
“No, not really; this is a compromise with Papa. He found me work here for the summer, before I start at the University in Pisa.”
“So how is it a compromise?”
“I wanted to study
for the summer in Rome and support myself while I was there. Papa wasn’t happy about my coming to Italy at all, so he arranged this job through the Church knowing there’d be people here who could watch out for me.”
“That doesn’t seem so bad.”
“There’s a difference between people watching out for you, and people keeping an eye on you. And there’s nowhere to study here – no texts, I mean. He promised me this library, but there’s nothing here I can use.”
“It’s . . . limited, that’s for sure.”
“It’s okay if you’re studying for the priesthood, but I’m not. I have to prepare a thesis on Italian foreign policy since 9/11 and there’s not much on that in here.”
“No. Was that what you were huffing and puffing about the afternoon you were taken into hospital?”
“Huffing and puffing?”
I’m an idiot and I apologise. I consider telling her how hard I find it – just talking to people again – but there has to come a time when I stop hiding behind my solitary life, my life in solitary. We sit in silence for a while.
“I was raging at Papa,” she says. “Raging at the books in this library and raging at myself for being here.”
“Isn’t your papa delighted that you want to study in Italy.”
“He might have been, if I’d chosen to go to Naples, but he’d have me stay with his family and I wouldn’t be allowed out the door.”
“It sounds like he’s just concerned.”
“He wants to control me, and I won’t be controlled.”
“No, I guess not.”
“He uses my illness as a way of keeping his little girl in check, and I’m no longer his little girl.”
“Maybe he can’t stop thinking of you in that way.”
“Well, he’s going to have to. I’ll stay here for the summer, but after that I’m out on my own in Pisa and there’s nothing he can do about it.”
“Where do your parents live?”
“In the arse-hole of Scotland.”
“Does it have a name?”
“Ardrossan.” She spits out the name.
“The only thing I know about Ardrossan is that it’s where you catch the ferry to Aran.”
“Then you already know everything.”
“Is it that bad?”
“Worse.”
“We all have to come from somewhere, I guess.”
“Papa thought it would be a good place for business. He has a fish and chip shop on the main street.”
“But why Ardrossan?”
“You’d have to ask him that. He’s from Naples – or from a small fishing port just outside Naples – and he viewed the map of Britain like an upside-down Italy. Scotland was to London what Naples was to Milan, so he figured Ardrossan would be similar to what he knew.”
“And when he got there?”
“If he ever realised how wrong he was, he’s never admitted it. Pig-headed doesn’t even begin to describe him.”
I reckon some of that pig-headedness might have rubbed off on his daughter.
“Why did he leave Naples – to find work?”
“That’s the story but really; the west coast of Scotland?”
“You think he was running away from something?”
“Or someone – who knows? I haven’t been told and I’m never likely to be – certainly not by him.”
“What about your mother – your mama?”
“She’d never go against Papa. The only time she makes a stand is when it comes to my illness, like when she visited me here in hospital the other week. That was a huge thing for her to do.”
“And you dyed your hair blonde to thank her?”
“I dyed my hair blonde to thank her.”
“Didn’t your papa want her to come?”
“Papa and I aren’t talking since I insisted on going to university in Pisa.”
“How long will that last – him not talking to you?”
“I don’t know, but he took it pretty hard. He’ll come round. I know he loves me; he just has to learn to let his little girl live her own life.”
“Families, eh?”
“Families is right, Brendan; families is right.” She looks up at the books on the library shelves, probably figuring how much she should tell me. “Because it’s a genetically inherited disorder, Papa thinks he’s to blame for making me ill. He believes it’s his fault whereas it took both my parents to make me this way as they’re both carriers of the gene. They were lucky with my brother and my sister and unlucky with me.”
“They didn’t know – obviously?”
“How would they have known? It’s not something you automatically think about. So many people are carriers, yet the gene isn’t always passed on. By the time my sister was born, they knew I was CF, but they still had no clear idea what it might mean. I was just a very sickly baby.”
“And your sister’s okay?”
“Yes, thank God; she’s completely free of the gene. That would have been terrible for Papa – if Bea was sick after they’d been told about me. Even then, I think Mama was pregnant with Bea before I’d been properly diagnosed, so there wasn’t much they could do.”
“But they got lucky?”
“They got lucky.”
“And your brother?”
“Lucha’s one year older than I am and is just a carrier.”
“So it’s just you who’s sick?”
“Bummer, eh?”
The Padre asks if I believe in God and it’s so unlike him that it’s funny.
It’s a simple question, he says.
Yes, but why ask? And can’t he guess the answer? I’ve come to think too much of the Padre to believe he’d try to bring me back into the fold. He knows me too well. He must have been told to bring it up. I forget sometimes that he’s acting under orders.
No, he’s not here to bring me back into the Church – back into the human race maybe, but not the Church.
I never believed in God – not as a rational, adult being.
The Padre looks away, disappointed.
I tell him I’m not deliberately trying to offend him.
He knows.
So, again – why ask?
He shakes his head. He doesn’t know. He gets down sometimes. Says he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
Turning up is enough, I say.
He looks me in the face.
Is it?
It’s enough for me. It’s enough for now.
Says it doesn’t feel that way.
I tell him we’ve been here before. He’s expecting too much from himself – and from me. I tell him we’re here and we’re talking, when only a few short weeks ago I wanted to kill him; that that’s a minor miracle, right there.
Finally, he smiles. He’s a good man and he means well. He’s just in the wrong game.
I listen to the birds while I lie in my bed. They’re mostly sparrows, but Italian sparrows are a lot louder than their English or Irish relations. There’s one bird in particular making a lot of noise, flying around and asking the same questions over and over again. What’s the story? What’s happening? Where’s the food?
I’ve seen him, my sparrow – I’m guessing it’s a he – and it’s hard to believe that so small a bird could make so much noise, could be so loud. He’s a plucky little fucker, I’ll give him that. There are other, larger birds just itching to take over his patch but he’s having none of it. I love him and I love that he’s the start of my day.
When the dogs join the birds and start howling their morning chorus, I give up trying to sleep and open the window. It’s still dark, but I don’t switch on the lamp until I have the mosquito screen in place. I like to get down to the Refectory to make myself a cup of tea before the rest of the Villa is awake – or, at least, before any of the monks start to stir from their cells. My guess is that Brother Michael knows I steal down for this pre-dawn cup of tea and he waits for me to return to my cell before he goes for his shower. I think he understands how I need my routi
ne, which made the morning I slept through the storm all the more surprising.
The dogs belong to a house about two kilometres away, in the opposite direction to Giovanni’s cottage. They’re big dogs and friendly, only I didn’t know this when I first met them. I was out walking one Saturday afternoon and, as I turned a corner, they came bounding and barking along the lane. I talked to them and held out my arm, offering them the back of my hand to sniff and hoping to God they didn’t bite it off. Their wagging tails were a bit of a giveaway, but that didn’t stop my heart from pounding. One dog was an Alsatian and the other a Doberman so they could easily have over-powered me. It took a few minutes for the relief to kick in and the experience was a reminder of how rural and isolated we are up at the Villa. Stepping outside the grounds is like stepping into a different time.
I drink my tea and listen to the dogs and the birds, to the monks leaving for Matins and to the staff starting up in the kitchen. Each of these sounds reminds me how lucky I am and I say my own prayer of thanks – not to any god, but to the Padre for having got me here once I was released.
It had to happen. I knew there’d come a day when the Padre couldn’t make it – for whatever reason, it doesn’t matter. He’s out there and not visiting me is hurting him more than it’s hurting me. If he comes tomorrow he’ll be full of remorse and I’ll tell him I understand. It’ll be the easiest way to get him to shut up; let him believe it’s no big deal – it’s fine, don’t worry about it.
But I should have been more prepared. I’m going to miss him. He wouldn’t understand what he’s done to me. He wanted me to know that someone cared and now, having let him in, I’m more alone than ever before. This was the risk. If I think back to when he first arrived and the physical repulsion I felt towards him, I could have said no. What was it – the chance to shake things up a little, to break out of that cycle of twenty-three hours plus one in the yard? I didn’t take much persuading. And from a man of the cloth; he may not have been ordained but that faith was just oozing out of him. Who was he anyway, this almost-priest, and what did he want – to save me or something?
And where does this leave me now? I relaxed, didn’t I? I stopped concentrating. I need to get back to where I used to be. Okay, so I was a mess, but it was my own mess. Once I let in the Padre, I let everything else in too. It’s no longer just me in here; it’s everybody I’ve ever known, everybody I’ve ever loved, everybody I’ve ever hurt, everybody I’ve ever loved, everybody I’ve ever hurt.
Dancing to the End of Love Page 22
