Remembering Light and Stone

by Deirdre Madden

  I had a feeling that I would have to give account of myself to Ted, later on that day, and over lunch I decided that I would tell him about what happened when I was in France. Over a couple of plates of spaghetti alla carbonara, Ted kept asking me about Ireland. He couldn’t understand why I’d left. ‘Everybody says it’s such a beautiful country.’

  ‘It is,’ I said, ‘but sometimes that isn’t enough.’ I had had my own reasons for wanting to go away. I found life at home too homogeneous. Almost everybody I knew there had been to the local convent school, their experience of life was within a certain limited ambit, and I didn’t like that. My leaving had been premeditated, and deliberate. I had studied languages so that I would be able to move to another country with more facility. But on another level, my leaving was purely instinctive, as automatic as the new-born animal’s search for food, as mysterious as the migratory impulse of birds. It was all painfully clear and simple. I had had so many unhappy experiences in Ireland, that I wanted to put distance between myself and that place. There was a day a few months after I’d moved to France when I was lying in bed late one night, half asleep, when I suddenly realized what I had done, what I had succeeded in doing. Here I was in a little apartment in Paris, a place so unlike where I’d grown up, and the room was full of my clothes, my books, my things. It was extraordinary that they belonged to me, because this was what I had wanted so much, and it was hard to believe that I had actually got it.

  It didn’t last. The human capacity for irrationality, for breaking up things which you’ve worked so hard to build, is remarkable.

  ‘So how long were you in Paris?’ Ted asked. I told him that I had been there for three years. After college in Ireland, I had done a course in Paris to become a translator. I had been given a placement in a small factory, which went well, and became a full-time job. I rented an apartment in an unremarkable part of the city, and I worked very hard. The weeks were quiet and dull, but I made a point of enjoying the weekends. I used to go to exhibitions and galleries, and sometimes I would get right out of Paris, to the woods or to the coast. I went to Chartres and to Rheims several times, and I visited all the cathedrals in the city as often as I could. My life was much as it was to be later, when I was living in Italy. I did have a few friends, but it was very much a solitary, internal life, the life of someone without great ambition, someone who wanted peace and privacy, above all the life of someone who just wanted to be left alone.

  And then, after I had been there for two years, I did the most stupid thing. I fell in love.

  Well, it wouldn’t have been so stupid if I really had loved him, but as it turned out, I didn’t.

  ‘This man was an American too,’ I said to Ted. By this stage we were eating fruit, and had ordered coffee. I was carefully cutting up a pear. When I was much younger, I was wary of men, as wary as a dog that’s been beaten. I couldn’t understand women who wanted to get married, couldn’t understand women who thought that a man could make them happy. Then I met Bill. He was interested in all the things that I liked too: painting, music, architecture. We went to concerts and visited galleries together; we used to sit in the Luxembourg Gardens and talk, or walk through the streets late at night in the rain, looking at all the people and speculating on their lives, laughing at silly things. It gives me no pleasure to remember all this now. I have no happy memories from that time, instead it makes me feel ashamed to think of how stupidly I was taken in. He was doing a language course when I met him, and was in France indefinitely. Before long, he moved into my apartment. Bill was from Missouri, and he told me all about his family, about how his parents had divorced when he was ten, about his mother’s drink problem, about other girlfriends he’d had in the past. I trusted him completely, and told him all about my life too, things I had never been able to talk to anyone about until then. When it was all over, I realized that he was like a lot of Americans, that he’d have told his most intimate life history to someone on a bus, to the newspapers, to any stranger. His confidences didn’t mean a thing. But mine did.

  Then one day he came home and told me that a guy he knew was going down to Aix-en-Provence, and had asked him if he wanted to come along. This friend knew a painter living just outside Aix, there was room in his house for Bill too. He was delighted. He’d always wanted to see Provence. I had spent a holiday there, and had told him all about it. He told me now that he’d had enough of Paris. City life was beginning to get on his nerves, he was glad to be going to the country. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t believe it. I had thought he loved me. I had thought that because he had moved in with me and we had been so close that he was in some way committed to me, and when that word ‘committed’ came into my mind, suddenly I understood, and saw what a fool I’d been.

  Later, what I regretted most was how predictable and clichéd everything was that happened next. The scene I created, all my stupid tears, ‘But you said … but I thought…’ all that nonsense that’s been said a million times in the past, and that’ll be said a million times again. I couldn’t believe that I was being so wounded by something that was so banal. I hated myself for crying, for having been so stupid as to have let all this happen, for not having seen it coming.

  Bill was amazed. He said that he had had no idea that I would react like this. He thought that we could still be friends, which meant that he thought he could rely on me for free meals and accommodation next time he was passing through Paris. I told him to get out of my apartment immediately, but I didn’t tell Ted how I had persuaded him to go: by picking up a kitchen knife and saying, ‘Because if you don’t go now, I’ll kill you.’ I said it like I meant it, and he left.

  When he came back for his things the next day, I punched him in the face as hard as I could. It wasn’t that I lost my temper, it was completely premeditated. I had spent all night thinking of how much I wanted to hurt him, really hurt him, to get my own back. I’d been afraid I’d fudge it, but I didn’t. I cut his lip against his teeth, and got great satisfaction from the look on his face when he saw the blood. Ted listened to all this quietly. ‘How do you feel about him now?’ he asked me. I said that I still hated him. If I heard that something terrible had happened to him, that he was seriously ill or even dead, well, I wouldn’t actually be glad, but I wouldn’t be at all sorry either. ‘So it’s stupid to think I ever loved him, isn’t it?’ I said.

  After Bill had gone, I realized that he’d ruined my life there. I had always liked my apartment, but now I associated everything in it with him. He’d contaminated it for me by his presence. It was the same with all the places I liked to visit in Paris and the things I enjoyed doing. They no longer held any pleasure for me, because they reminded me of him. I thought of the life I had so carefully built up for myself and how I had let it all be destroyed. I hated him, but he was gone. I hated myself, but I couldn’t escape from myself. I had thought that he was helping me to overcome all that, and now it was worse than ever it had been. I blamed myself for having been so gullible, and trusting. Even now I can hardly bear to think of how bitter and lonely I felt at that time.

  A few months later, in the summer, I had holidays to take from work. My mother wanted me to go back to visit her in Ireland. I didn’t want to go, I was afraid to go back. I was afraid that if I went there, I would really see what a failure it had all been, my attempt to make a life for myself, to mend things. I could hardly bear it in Paris, but to think of these things back in County Clare would be overwhelming. Maybe I would be trapped into staying there. So even though my mother pleaded with me, by letter and by phone, I said no, and set off for two weeks in Italy.

  It restored me, to some extent. I went to Florence, then down to Umbria, to Assisi, to S. Giorgio. Only when I was away from the city did I realize how exhausting the daily round was, how crushed I had become by the endless journeys on the Metro, by the crowds, the work, the whole life I led there. I had no interest or energy left to do anything at the weekends. I had stopped going to the galleries after Bill le
ft. But in Italy I was looking at paintings again, and they meant a lot to me, I realized that I needed that in my life. I visited the frescoes in S. Giorgio, and then sat down at a café in the main square and had an ice-cream. While I ate it, I felt lulled by the sunshine, the palpable softness of the life going on around me. I realized that I dreaded going back to France, that my life there was dead, and held nothing more for me. Then, in a window above the grocery shop on the other side of the square, I saw a bright pink card, on which was written, ‘Apartment to rent.’

  Within a month I was living there. Within two months, I realized that I had made a big mistake.

  Perhaps in the long term things worked out as well as could be expected, but at first it was so difficult. I had acted completely on impulse. I gave up a good job in Paris, through which I had accumulated reasonable savings. These were rapidly eaten into when I moved to Italy, much more than I had expected. I’ve always known how vital it is for a woman to have enough money, and it worried me to see it melt away like this. I had foolishly hoped to find another translating job, but it turned out to be much more difficult than I had expected. For months I had to scrape by on whatever I could find, translating, teaching English at all hours of the day just to make ends meet. It was such a struggle and I was so worried about money that at least it took my mind off worrying about other things, like mere loneliness. I had no car at first, because I couldn’t afford one, and I felt trapped in S. Giorgio. I had visited it only in summer, and I couldn’t believe how quiet it was off season. I stood out much more than I cared to, and the locals couldn’t understand what a young woman was doing living there on her own. Franca and her family took a liking to me, they helped and befriended me from the first, and that made a big difference, but I didn’t make friends with any of the other foreigners living in S. Giorgio.

  Then my mother died. I felt guilty, because she had wanted me to go home to see her and I hadn’t gone, and now I’d never see her again. I went home for the funeral, and I felt that everyone there, including my brother Jimmy, felt I had been selfish and heartless to stay away. Jimmy was older than me, we had never had a lot in common. He lived up in Dublin, and now that our mother was dead the family home down in Clare was empty. He pretended to be all surprised when I said that I wouldn’t move home now, as if that was all I had been waiting for, for my mother to die so that I could have the house. I could feel the disapprobation of everybody because I hadn’t been the warm, loving daughter, or rather, because I hadn’t behaved as they thought a loving daughter should. I didn’t get on with my father at all, but I had been fond of my mother. I regretted any pain I caused her, but I don’t see how things could have been different. When I got back to Italy and looked at my life there I thought: Was it worth it? I had made such a huge effort of will to make a life of my own, and what had I ended up with? A rented flat, a few sullen students, being snickered at in bars in the village.

  Things got better: I suppose they had to, I felt that they couldn’t have got much worse. I decided that I would do best to stay put for at least another six months, to try to make a year of it in S. Giorgio. I had enough sense to realize that I had made a hasty false move from Paris, and I knew that I couldn’t afford to make another. There was no place to which I felt particularly drawn. I had no reason to be in S. Giorgio, but I had no better reason to be anywhere else. I couldn’t go back to France, and for now there seemed to be no other openings in Italy. I decided to keep going throughout the winter, and then in spring I could reconsider the situation.

  But by spring, things had changed. By an odd set of circumstances, my life began to improve. A woman called Fabiola started to have English lessons with me. She took a liking to me – God knows why, for I barely registered on her consciousness. She thought I was carina, simpatica, which shows how little she knew me. Fabiola had one of those smiles which makes no connection with the person being smiled at, its sole function to state ‘Aren’t I lovely!’ From the first she irritated me, with her gold pencil, her leather briefcase, bought specially for her English books, the way she dressed up for lessons with me as if she were going to a wedding. That struck me as particularly foolish, as the lessons themselves were such a complete non-event. She was by far my slowest student. Although she had studied English at school for five years, we had to begin again at zero, and in all the time I taught her, she never made much progress. Her husband owned a clothing factory down on the plain below S. Giorgio, and Fabiola had no financial worries, her only problem in life was to fill her empty days.

  One day, at the end of the lesson, we were talking about a suitable time to see each other again, and Fabiola remarked, ‘If my husband knew how well you spoke Italian he might give you a job in his factory. He needs someone to translate letters and things for him.’ I immediately pursued this throwaway comment, but Fabiola tried to dismiss it. She said airily that he was looking for a translator, ‘But if you get the job, maybe you won’t want to give me English lessons any more, and where would I find another teacher as sweet as you?’ She smiled radiantly, picked up her briefcase, and was about to leave. I couldn’t believe it. I blocked her way. ‘Of course I’d go on giving you lessons‚’ I said. ‘Even if I stopped teaching everybody else, I’d still teach you, if I was working in your husband’s factory. You will mention it to him, won’t you?’ I did my best to give her a big smile – in truth, I could hardly keep my hands off her. She was quite liable to let this chance pass me by, for some stupid whim about lessons, which she could lose interest in at any time. ‘If I tell Pietro he has to give you the job, then he has to give you the job‚’ she said. I knew she was perfectly capable of forgetting all about it as soon as she left my apartment, but Pietro got in touch with me two days later, and in a short while, to my enormous relief, I was back in regular employment.

  Things got better then. I had a steady income, regular hours, and I could take on as much or as little extra work as I wanted. I was more used to S. Giorgio by that stage, and S. Giorgio was more used to me. I decided to stay for a couple of years, to establish myself again financially and to get some work experience, and to build up a life for myself, as I had done in Paris. Almost five years later, I was still there. It wasn’t that I loved Umbria so much, rather I got caught up in the gentle, soporific round of the years, which can be as hard to break out of as a dream. By late 1989 I was certainly thinking about moving on, but had made no definite plans to do so. I felt I ought to go, if the rest of my life wasn’t to drift by in a haze.

  ‘So that’s it,’ I said to Ted. It was a strange experience talking to him in this way, even though I didn’t tell him everything, and there were some things I couldn’t express, like the anger of those last months in Paris. I couldn’t explain to him the rage that there was in me, that was always there, no matter where I was, a force stronger than myself, and which I didn’t fully understand. It was interesting for me to look back over my past like that. I didn’t often do it, and it was strange to consider it, after all those years, to see what had changed and what hadn’t. It interested me so much on my own account that I hardly took any notice of what effect the things I was saying had on Ted. But he could never say that I had pretended to be something other than I was – he couldn’t say that I had taken him in.

  The table in front of me was covered with the leftovers of a meal – broken bread, an empty carafe, fruit peelings, two crumpled linen napkins, two thick white cups, ringed inside with coffee. Ted said, ‘I know it must have been painful for you, but I’m sure that guy in Paris didn’t mean to hurt you as much as you think he did.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m out of step with everybody. That’s what people I knew in Paris told me at the time. The way people relate to each other has changed. But it’s not just as if you can change like that – I couldn’t, anyway.’

  The hanged woman was still lurking in the corner of my mind. They say that you’re responsible not just for everything you do, but for everything you see. I felt as if I had seen this
woman, had broken some taboo by looking at her, and this was to be my punishment. The dead woman would haunt my mind. I made a huge effort to look across the table and focus on Ted. I wondered how much he had understood of what I had said – that is, I wondered to what extent he saw it as I saw it. It probably looked very different to him. He had most likely had relationships like the one I had described, the difference being that they had been with women who had not thought as I had, women who were capable of being close to someone without putting too much emotional commitment into it, knowing from the first that it was a transitory thing, and that it would be foolish to feel aggrieved when it ended. And I could see too that Ted wasn’t a wicked person. Far from it: he was a much better person than I would ever be, and perhaps the man I’d known in Paris wasn’t wicked either. But he had been the cause of such pain to me, and I felt that he should have known it. I could never forgive him, I didn’t even want to try.

  When we came out of the restaurant, it was still very quiet in the streets. That lunch-time hush that descends upon Italian cities was still in effect, the shops closed, the streets deserted, so we went to Ted’s apartment. He lived near the centre of Florence, in a few attic rooms in a high yellow building. It was a simple, untidy place, with papers and books scattered around. I was glad to see that. I did try to hide the thoroughness with which I was taking everything in – the cream jug on the window sill, the crumpled envelopes with letters sticking out of them, the ailing potted plant on the shelf. I don’t like tidy homes, and I just can’t stand places that have been subject to interior design. The sort of things you see in homes and gardens magazines and that people really drool over, I absolutely hate. I don’t, for example, like Fabiola’s house, although I’m sure she thinks that I do, because it’s a beautiful place by conventional standards, therefore everyone should like it. That’s just what I have against it. She’s got a marble-topped table and a lamp that just looks like a plain steel pole and some angular black chairs. There are marble floors, and everything else is black, white and silver, made of leather, chrome or ebony. Everybody oohs and aahs about it, but I think it’s sterile and uncomfortable. Fabiola herself only likes it because it’s what she thinks she’s supposed to like. She hasn’t a thought in her head that hasn’t been put there by social and commercial forces. I liked the small-scale scruffiness of Ted’s apartment. I told him so, and he laughed. He said that although it wasn’t very big, he had been lucky to find something he could afford so close to the centre. I asked him how he had found it.