Memory and Desire

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Desolation settled over him. ‘When will you be back?’

  She shrugged again, ‘A week, a month, two. I’m not sure.’

  ‘But you’ll be back. I have to know.’ Pain gripped his throat.

  She had not responded, simply kissed him lightly, fraternally on the lips.

  For the first two weeks of her absence, he had managed well enough. She had left all the clothes he had bought her. He consoled himself with the fact. And he was busy. Had to go to Rome, to Bari, do location work on his film which had been bubbling into readiness. And then, in the course of the third week, depression had hit him. She wasn’t back. She wouldn’t come back. He grew listless. Energy, of which he usually had a large store, left him. He was interested in nothing, could concentrate on nothing.

  Except on Rosa, who was gone. He thought of hiring a detective to trace her, but put aside the thought when he imagined her anger at being found. He tried to understand what had made her the way she was. He knew so little about her, still. The family seemed ordinary enough. A father who had been part of the Communist Resistance. A mother who kept house, a much younger brother. It explained nothing of her fire, her stringent idealism. She had told him little of friends, of former lovers, though he realised these had not been lacking. In a way, he hadn’t wanted to know, and they had been so caught up in each other that the past meant nothing.

  But now, now he needed to know.

  Alexei spent days and nights brooding on Rosa, replaying their conversations, their lovemaking, and as the weeks passed, despairing of her return.

  And then, one chill December night, he had opened the door of the apartment to find a lamp alight in the sitting room. Over the edge of a high winged-back chair, he saw a single strand of red.

  ‘Rosa,’ he uttered hoarsely, ‘Rosa.’

  She leapt up with a cat’s grace. Alexei gazed at her. She was radiant. Beautiful. More beautiful than he had remembered her. Her hair lavish, her eyes deeply lustrous. For a moment he had the impression she had just been to bed with another man. There was that feline look of both excitement and satiation about her.

  And then she had flung her arms around him, kissed him ardently, ‘I’m back,’ she mouthed, making him forget everything, tugging at his coat, his shirt, kindling his passion until they fell together, there on the floor and made urgent, endless love.

  Afterwards she laughed, ‘I guess I’ve missed you.’

  ‘There was no one else?’ he eyed her sceptically, smoothed her shirt over her bared breast.

  She shook her head, still smiling.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he queried.

  ‘Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies,’ she made a small moue, teased him.

  He grimaced, got up. ‘Can I get you a drink?’ he said politely. But he was angry. Her insistence on silence made a nothing of his despair over the last weeks. He poured some wine, handed her a glass. It was then that his eyes fell on the stack of newspapers by the chair she had been sitting on.

  ‘Catching up on your reading?’

  ‘Mmmn. We live in exciting times.’ She came to sit on his lap, stroked his hair. ‘You grow more handsome with the months,’ she scrutinised him. ‘My absence must be good for you.’

  ‘I dare say,’ he muttered, looked at her intently. ‘I could say the same for you. Where have you been, Rosa?’ he had to know, the need gnawed at him.

  ‘What does it matter? I’m here now.’ she laughed, her tone excited, her face alight. She snuggled closer to him.

  But he stiffened against her, moved away as if in retribution. He picked up one of the scattered papers. A photograph showing a union leader sprawled on a sidewalk in Turin. One of a number maimed by Red Brigades. Another photograph of a fascist bomb attack in Brescia. A headline about the release of a magistrate kidnapped by the Red Brigades. Alexei threw the newspaper back on the floor.

  ‘Bah. You call these exciting times? They’re disgusting times. Terrorism on the right. Terrorism on the left. Lives destroyed. People murdered.’

  ‘I’m happy to be back, Alexei,’ she said softly, deflecting him.

  But he didn’t want to be deflected. He was angry at her, couldn’t bring himself to rage at her directly, so he baited her. ‘And the terrorists on the left? It’s incomprehensible what they’re up to. They’ll ruin the hopes of any kind of democratic socialism in this country. They’ll run us right into a police state as everyone shouts for protection against blood baths, against anarchy,’ he railed at her, as if the responsibility were all hers.

  Now she met him on it, her face aflame. ‘Ha. You used to call yourself a child of Marx and Coca Cola. Now the Coca Cola has taken over altogether. Long live the multinationals and their culture of placebos. You’ve turned into a real Gismondi,’ she pinioned him with contempt, hurried on. ‘When was there ever a revolution without blood? And what system has ever been toppled without a revolution?’

  They had argued about this before. But as he looked at her now, he thought he heard a new vehemence in her tone, a cold, hard rage, mingled in with the ideological purity. If he had cast her in one of his films now, it would have been as a Diana, burning with the ice of high principles.

  Alexei responded softly, his own questions pitted against hers, ‘And where has revolution ever got the People? Those very people you pretend to care so much about?’

  As he murmured the words, he had a sudden, swift and certain realisation. He glanced at the newspapers again and then looked at her sharply. ‘That’s where you’ve been,’ he breathed. ‘You’ve been with them. The brigades. How stupid of me. Tell me, Rosa. Tell me,’ he gripped her arm.

  The colour drained from her face. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she struggled away from him, raced for her room, slammed the door. He heard the turn of a key in a lock.

  Alexei paced. Of course. He had been blind. He hadn’t listened to her, hadn’t heard. Her sudden inexplicable appearances and disappearances. Her refusal to tell him how she spent her days. He remembered seeing her in the street one day, wandering aimlessly, looking into shop windows, her consternation when he had approached her, the abrupt way she had looked over his shoulder. She must have been following someone. Of course. That was one of the things she did with her days. He remembered too her adamant refusal to meet his friends or have him meet hers. He had thought in part it was a desire to be only with him, in part a refusal to be talking with the supposed enemy. But her secrecy had another motive.

  He had a sudden devastating sense of unreality. Everything he had felt, had experienced in the last months was thrust into cataclysmic doubt.

  He poured himself a whiskey, gulped it down. The heat in his gullet was real. Nothing else. He had told himself a story about Rosa and the story had no grounding, no truth. He, he who prided himself on his powers of observation.

  What was he to her but a cover? A mere cover. An address where she could rest. Where she wouldn’t be suspected. A comfortable address that provided the occasional fuck.

  Alexei marched to her door. Banged on it. ‘If you don’t open this, I’ll break it down,’ he shouted, not recognizing his voice.

  She opened it.

  ‘That’s the truth, isn’t it? That’s where you go? And I, I’m just a cover? A convenience?’

  She turned from him, went to sit in an armchair by the window. ‘Believe what you like,’ she said coldly.

  Alexei stared at her, saw a fragile figure with a pale face beneath a blaze of red. His rage was strangled in his throat.

  ‘Who drove you to this Rosa? Who? Who’s forcing you to it? I’ll beat him up. You can’t carry on like this. It’s dangerous,’ he was babbling.

  Her eyes grew icy, green. ‘Why do you say who? Why don’t you ask what? Why do you assume it’s a man? I’m quite capable of thinking without a man. All I have to do is look around me. Oh no, not here, not in this beautiful Gismondi apartment. But out there. Where you never see.’

  Sorrow filled him. She had admitted it now, inadvert
ently. ‘You know that’s not true, Rosa. I see, just as well as you. I just draw different conclusions,’ he murmured.

  The admission sat between them like an insurmountable boulder. They looked at it in silence, examined it.

  She took the first step. ‘What are you going to do now? Turn me over to the police?’ she asked with a small laugh.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You know me better than that,’ he barked.

  She scrutinised his features, her own serious. ‘I’ll go in the morning. First thing,’ she sighed, a fleeting sadness. Then she was brisk, efficient, ‘We’d better get some sleep now.’

  He nodded, unable to rise.

  She turned back the coverlet on the bed, paused, looked at him again.

  He rose slowly.

  ‘Alexei,’ she called after him. ‘I didn’t just use you. I loved you. Loved you in my own way. But as I told you once, there are things more important than love. Love, revolution, they’re not in the same order of things.’

  She loved him. She had never said it before. ‘Oh Rosa,’ he gathered her up in his arms. ‘It’s madness. Give it up. Stay with me.’

  Her eyes resisted him, stern. ‘I can’t now,’ she kissed him lightly, moved away. ‘I’ve made my choices.’

  ‘You can do more useful things. Not this terrorist lunacy.’

  ‘We’re not lunatics,’ she turned on him. ‘Half the things the press attribute to us aren’t true. We’re very specific in our targets.’

  He gazed at her, wanting her, despite everything. That tone of utter conviction in her.

  ‘And if my turn were to come up. Or Giangiacomo’s?’ he suddenly said.

  She wouldn’t let him finish his thought. ‘Who knows. I might even be able to protect you,’ she laughed, suddenly bright, as if the question had already been considered, answered. ‘Goodnight Alexei.’

  He didn’t move. He didn’t want to be left alone with his thoughts.

  ‘Still here?’ she searched his face. ‘You’re not by any chance wanting to share a bed with a terrorist?’ she was impish.

  ‘I was prepared to share my life,’ Alexei murmured, embracing her.

  She had left him in the morning, despite his protests that it was safe to stay here, to stay with him, that he would never breathe a word.

  Two days later he had come home to find the apartment in a shambles. The door had been broken into. Everything was topsy turvy. He had looked round in dismay. Called the police. And then strangely, when he had checked each room more carefully, he hadn’t been able to find anything missing. Yet drawers and cupboards had been turned out, mattresses lifted from beds. A shambles. The break-in worried him, gave him an uncanny feeling. He had told Giangiacomo about it the next day.

  His uncle had looked at him queerly. ‘Sounds as if whoever it was was searching for something. Have you got any company files at home? Documents?’

  Alexei shook his head. ‘It’s just what I thought. But I can’t imagine what anyone could have been looking for.’

  Giangiacomo shrugged. ‘Let’s be grateful it wasn’t worse. But keep a watch on things. A watch on yourself. These are not easy times.’ He looked at his son sceptically. ‘Be wary of some of the company you keep as well.’

  Alexei had only seen Rosa one more time.

  It was early on a rainy morning at the beginning of March, just before he was due to leave Milan. He was dressing when the bell surprised him. Giuseppa had her own key and it wouldn’t be her yet. He looked through the spyhole the police had recommended he have put in, saw a hatted figure he had to look twice at to recognize.

  ‘Rosa,’ he tried to embrace her but she walked past him. She looked thin, weary in the man’s hat that shrouded her hair. A loose jacket fell round her shoulders. Her face had the angular translucence of a sick youth’s.

  ‘I need money,’ she said grimly by way of greeting. ‘I need money for an abortion.’

  Alexei’s face dropped. He didn’t answer for a moment, allowed the fact to sink in. He tried to take her coat, but she shook her head.

  ‘Coffee?’ his lips formed round the single word with difficulty.

  She shook her head and then, seeing his face, changed her mind nodded. ‘I haven’t got long.’ She paced the length and breadth of the living room restlessly, stopping to look out the curtained windows, the first, the second, the third in an unconscious staccato rhythm.

  He busied himself with the coffee. A refrain echoed in his head. ‘Whose was it? Whose was it?’

  She took the coffee gratefully, sipped it quickly despite its heat.

  At last he brought the words out. ‘Whose is it, Rosa?’

  Only then did she look at him. ‘What do you want me to say, Alexei?’ Her voice was tired. ‘Will you give me the money if I tell you it’s yours or if I tell you it’s not?’

  ‘Tell me the truth,’ his tongue felt clumsy, dry. ‘I need to know.’

  She sighed, pulled her hat off. The red blaze tumbled round her face.

  ‘If you know, that is?,’ a demon in him prodded her.

  The jibe elicited an instant response.‘Of course, I know.’ She was adamant, the old Rosa.

  She studied his face, lowered her eyes. ‘It’s yours.’ She said and for emphasis counted on her fingers, ‘December, January February and now March. It has to be done quickly.’

  He walked towards her with the curious swaying motion of a dreamer. ‘Have it Rosa,’ he pleaded. She let him take her hand. ‘Have it. Please. Come back. Live with me.’

  She pressed his fingers. Heavy eyes. ‘That’s kind of you, Alexei. But it’s too late now. Too late.’ Her voice was weary, polite. It bore a weight of finality. She tried a smile which didn’t succeed. ‘I wouldn’t have come to you, but I need the money. I need it. Now. Right away.’

  He could feel her urgency. ‘Shall I come with you? To have it done?’

  She shook her head vigorously. ‘That’s not possible.’

  He went to find his checkbook, had the sense of a script being written in his presence with an ending over which he had no control. Like a bad dream moving inexorably to its end. He wrote out a check for a large sum, handed it to her.

  She stood without looking at it. ‘Thank you.’ A shadow passed over her face and then she rushed into his arms. ‘Thank you, Alexei.’

  He held her, feeling her fear, a slight trembling, her body chill. ‘Are you being followed?’ he asked.

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’ She murmured something under her breath about the police, Milan, about not wanting to implicate him.

  He suddenly remembered the break in. That, too, could have been the police, looking for her, traces. He didn’t mention it, held her more tightly. ‘Are you sure, Rosa? Sure it can’t be otherwise.’

  ‘Sure,’ she nodded, her face bleak.

  He didn’t know whether she had raised her face to be kissed or he had sought out her lips, but they met for a brief instant. And then she was gone, her hair folded back under her hat, another murmured thank-you.

  He had watched her from the window, a slight boyish figure, darting across the street, mingling with the morning crowds.

  He had not seen Rosa again.

  Alexei drained his second Campari, scanned the passers-by in the Piazza di Spagna. He felt like an archaeologist digging for fossilized remains. Remains which would give him back Rosa. Give him an insight into the troubled culture which was his own, its extremes, its passions, its conflicts. Remains which crumbled into nothingness at his touch.

  He couldn’t revive the past, give it a different present. He rose. It was getting late. He was due back in Milan tomorrow. Due back in the apartment where Rosa’s presence still roamed.

  The road round Lago Maggiore winds through clusters of villas and ancient pines. At night, lights flicker like will o’ the wisps through the scented air. Shadows loom in a heavy stillness, broken only by an occasional cry, a bark, the rev of a motorbike, too loud in the awesome antique quiet.

  The set of Alex
ei’s features as he drove along the road to the family villa was stern. He was musing about his country. Its natural beauty so wonderfully tempered by human hands through the course of the centuries that this lake and its environs had been turned into a vast landscaped garden, nature and architecture at one. But now in this latter half of the twentieth century, there was strife in the land, guerilla war between left and right. Thus far, it was an urban phenomenon. Milan, Rome, Bologna were like cities under occupation. Yet the countryside seemed untouched.

  He was pleased that he had come here. Restlessness covered him in the Milan apartment. He had felt trapped, trapped between waiting and mourning in a space where there seemed nothing to fill his imagination except Rosa’s absence. And when he went into the street, every corner gave rise to police, each one reminding him of the fate which inevitably awaited Rosa. He had needed to get away for the weekend, away too from prattling friends and telephones and invitations.

  He pulled up in front of the villa and decided to take a walk before going in. The night air was chill. It braced him. He had walked here with Rosa in the brief days of their idyll. It was here that he had asked her to marry him. But she had loved her beliefs more than him. It was strange to think of it in that way, to pit oneself against a rival that didn’t bear a human form. It made his own existence insubstantial. Yet, though he couldn’t follow her into the world of her beliefs, it was the very fire of her convictions that he had first loved in her.

  He wondered whether that fire was still with her, whether it was fanned by the life she was leading. He remembered the pallor, the tension in her face when they had last met. He worried, walked back towards the house.

  As he reached the portico, he heard the crunch of glass underfoot. Odd. A window must have been broken somewhere. He hadn’t alerted the caretaker of his visit, but he made a mental note to report it to him tomorrow. The man was getting old, only really saw to the house in the summer months.

  Alexei let himself in, switched on the hall lights, moved towards the sitting room. Suddenly arms grabbed him from behind, lifting him almost off the ground. He cried out, struggled. Saw the blur of a man’s face before a blindfold obliterated it. A gag forced its way into his mouth. He retched, kicked, flailed his limbs. A thud landed behind his left ear and with it a wave of overarching pain. And then nothing.