Christmas is about the only festival I don’t like. Sometimes I even think that you’re not supposed to like it, that it’s been deliberately planned to be as difficult as possible. It falls at the end of the year, in the middle of winter, when your resistance is low, and your defences are weak. Then there’s all that stuff about family and children. Well, I don’t have any family or any kids, and I’m not a child myself any more. But Christmas acts like an emotional cattle-prod on me, and makes me aware of how alone in the world I am. That’s something I can ignore or cope with or even enjoy at other times of the year. My parents are dead, Jimmy and I will never be close again. For some reason, it can upset me at Christmas to realize that. But I always fight against easy nostalgia, because it’s a pack of lies. Eventually everything has to become the past, because life goes on, as it must. You can’t hold on to the past, and if you try to do that, especially if you try to hold on to your childhood, you find that it goes anyway. And the punishment is that you don’t have any life as an adult and you find out too late that you can’t hold on to your childhood either, and so you’re left with nothing. I’ve seen that happen to people and, whatever else, I’ve fought to make sure it doesn’t happen to me.
Fabiola’s party had been six days before Christmas, and Ted was to come down from Florence on Christmas Eve. I thought that the days until his arrival would never pass. After the party, I felt as if I had lost a layer of my skin, and that I had no defences left against anything. There was a strange atmosphere that year because of all the things that had happened in Eastern Europe in the preceding months. I hated reading those gloating articles in the papers about the happy shoppers from East Berlin going home through the Wall at dusk with all their brightly coloured packages. Then when I read about the revolution in Romania and about the young people in Timisoara being shot, I cried, and it didn’t help to know that I was really crying for myself.
We watched the news reports on television in Franca’s apartment on Christmas Eve night. She had invited us up to eat salt cod with her family, and she was unashamedly curious about Ted. Although in the past she had always poured scorn on America and Americans, I could see that in his case she was prepared to make an exception. Ted was one of those nice guys everybody likes. Davide’s mother and Lucia and the whole family took to him. Every time his back was turned, Franca grinned and winked at me with delight. She had been working hard in the shop right up until dinner time, and she was tired. They had done a good pre-Christmas trade, she told me, and now she was determined to do nothing but enjoy herself for a couple of days.
Christmas Day was sunny and mild in S. Giorgio. I remember the olive groves on the slopes below the walls of the town, and how from a distance they looked a sort of smoky purple colour. I remember the light on the façade of the church, and all the crowds of people milling around, dressed in new clothes. In Romania, they shot the Ceausescus. We heard later that they showed the bodies on Romanian television many times that day, and played Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ over the pictures. I rang Jimmy. When the kids came on the line to thank me for the presents they both sounded shy. I could hear Nuala prompting little Michael in whispers. They probably didn’t know what to make of me. I suppose it was easier for them to believe in Santa than in this faraway Aunt they never saw, who was just a fancy present and a voice coming out of a telephone.
In the coming weeks, we were to read about the Ceausescus’ Christmas presents, found wrapped in spangly paper under a Christmas tree. There were cards on the mantelpiece ‘to darling Mummy and Daddy’. They’d tried to make the whole country think of them as Mummy and Daddy; many of the secret police turned out to be orphans who’d been chosen for that very reason. They’d been taught to be loyal to the Ceausescus not in the way you’re loyal to a national leader, but as you’re loyal to parents.
I cooked a chicken for dinner. I asked Ted did he want to ring his parents, and he said no, that they wouldn’t be expecting to hear from him, that if he rang they might even think that something was wrong. That night we opened the bottle of Calvados I’d been saving up, and I drank far too much of it.
11
‘When I was a child, I couldn’t understand how telegraph poles worked. I thought all the words went down the wires, and if you cut a wire, language would drip out of it like water from a broken pipe.’ Ted laughed. We were on a train somewhere north of Bologna, and the flat land was foggy, as it usually is there for most of the winter. The telegraph poles fled past the windows. We were on our way to Venice for the New Year. I was glad to be away from S. Giorgio for a while, glad to be on a train. Sometimes I like being in public, anonymous places, because it’s easier to talk there. Later, if I came to regret what I said, or if something bad happened, I wouldn’t be reminded of it every time I looked at a certain corner of my own room. There was only one other person in the compartment with us, a middle-aged woman who was sitting opposite me. She was asleep.
Ted and I started to talk then on the train about things we had thought when we were children, things we hadn’t understood, words that we had been confused about. Then we began to talk about dreams, the sort of dreams we had had when we were children, and then the dreams we had now. I always think you have to know someone really well before you can tell them about your dreams – well, given the way I dream, it’s best not to buttonhole total strangers with them, or they’d run a mile. I tried Ted with one of my least-worst nightmares, and he said ‘Wow,’ then I risked a more graphic one. I told him about the dream of the maggots eating my head, and this time he didn’t say anything. I looked out of the window. We were still fog-bound.
I carefully worked my way around to what I had wanted to talk about when I introduced the whole question of dreams, and asked Ted did he ever have waking dreams. He looked at me carefully, and asked me what I meant. Before I could reply, we heard a ringing sound – a food trolley was coming up the corridor. The woman sitting opposite me woke up, and bought herself a coffee and a ham roll. The smell of coffee filled the compartment. Ted and I went on whispering to each other in English.
I told him I meant when you get an image fixed in your head – an image, rather than an idea, and it’s not the image of something you’ve seen, but it’s as powerful as a dream, and you can’t get it out of your mind. He said no, that never happened to him. Sometimes he got thoughts stuck in his head, memories of things he’d seen or done, particularly things he didn’t like, and felt bad about. He might feel guilty, but he knew it was too late to do anything. He asked me what sort of thing I meant, and I told him about the hanged woman, who had come into my mind at least three times since the night of Fabiola’s party. I told him it wasn’t me that was being hanged, and I didn’t feel suicidal when I had this image in my mind. I felt troubled, but not so much on my own account. It worried me because it seemed such an unhealthy thing to think about, and I told him that I did try not to dwell on it. The woman opposite me had finished her coffee and roll. She took out a little tin box full of tiny liquorice sweets, and offered them to us. We each took one, smiled and thanked her.
Ted asked me if I had told anybody else about this, apart from him. I said that I hadn’t. He asked me, didn’t I think I ought to? I said I probably should, but I had been to doctors before, and they didn’t seem to be able to help, especially here in Italy, that I felt too different. He asked me, aren’t you worried about this, and I said, well, I supposed I was. The woman appeared to have fallen asleep again. I’m always struck by how vulnerable and innocent people look when they’re sleeping. I told Ted not to worry, and he looked angry and whispered, ‘Jesus, Aisling, how can I not worry?’ I looked out at the fog again. It’s amazing how, if you never tell anybody anything, you can convince yourself that the weirdest things are normal, or that they’re at least a lot less bizarre than you would consider them if they were happening to someone else. I had embarked gingerly on this conversation, as if I had half thought he might accept it as normal, and not pass much comment. Maybe I had thought
he might reciprocate with some strange and violent mental movies of his own. But now I knew that that couldn’t have happened, for if he had ever given any indication, however slight, of being violent or disturbed, I would never have taken up with him, I would have been too frightened. Then I could see that perhaps he was frightened too. Certainly, he was worried. I stroked his hand to reassure him, but I don’t think it made much difference.
We were to stay in the apartment of an old friend of Ted’s who lived in Venice. He told me her name was Maria. He had suggested to her that they exchange apartments for a few days, so that she could stay in Florence. She had already made other plans, and was going to New York, but said that her apartment would be empty, and if we wanted to borrow it, we were welcome. She was to leave for Milan shortly after we arrived, and would fly to the States the following morning.
The train arrived in Venice on time. I always like going to Venice, I like it when you go out of the railway station and there’s a canal where there should be a road. I know it’s corny, but I do like it. I can understand why millions of people visit Venice every year, and why they think it’s the most beautiful city in the world.
We went by vaporetto first to St Mark’s Square, and then we made our way by foot through the narrow streets and over the tiny bridges until we got to the right place. Ted rang the bell, and a voice spoke through the grille by the door. ‘Chi c’è?’ Ted said his name, and the door buzzed and clicked open, we went up a flight of wooden stairs, where a woman was waiting by an open door.
I disliked Maria as soon as I saw her, and I felt sure that she didn’t like me. One day, when I was complaining to Ted about one of the other women in the factory where I worked, he had remarked that it was strange how I got on much better with men than with women. I immediately denied this, but later when I thought about it, I was forced to admit that he was right. I got on much better with Pietro than with Fabiola, and I still didn’t feel at ease with my sister-in-law Nuala, not even on the phone. With men I rarely felt that instant animosity on first meeting which I so often felt with women, and which I now experienced towards Maria.
She wasn’t at all what I had expected. I had asked Ted if she was American, and he had said, ‘No, she’s from Scotland.’ If he hadn’t told me, I would never have guessed it. She spoke in a neutral accent, in which I could distinguish no apparent regional differentiation or inflection, apart from the odd mid-Atlantic word or phrase, which puzzled me even more. Like me, she had taken on the protective shell of Italian elegance, but she had done it more successfully because she had more money. From a glance at her clothes, her opulent apartment and the pile of Mandarina Duck luggage at the door I could easily tell that she wasn’t dependent on factory discounts. But what disconcerted me most of all was that Ted had called her a ‘friend’, and as soon as I saw them together I knew there had been more to it than that. Even I could see that the jealousy I felt at this was irrational. While it was clear that they had been lovers it was also clear that it was over now, and the relationship had tapered off into friendship. It bothered me because it was a situation I couldn’t understand. I tried to imagine myself five years later, lending the apartment in S. Giorgio to Ted and some other woman for a week, making coffee for them before I left, as Maria did now. I knew that I could never do that, and it was beyond me how she could do it.
When we went into the kitchen, I walked straight over to the window, which overlooked a narrow canal. ‘It must be beautiful to live here,’ I said, more from nerves than sincerity.
‘Beautiful? Here? Are you serious?’ Maria said, banging the coffee pot against the side of the bin to knock out the damp grounds. ‘Living in Venice is hell. It’s like living in a theme park. If you just come here for a visit it’s hard to get a sense of how unreal it is, even what a strange place it is. There’s no real community here, you do realize that, don’t you? All the real Venetians moved out years ago. There’s nobody left but a bunch of old money-mad contessas, asking outrageous rents for a few damp rooms in some crumbling old dump of a palazzo. They don’t give a damn about culture, they don’t even give a damn about Venice. All they want is to make as much money as possible, and to have their picture taken with Jack Nicholson during the film festival. And then there are the tourists. Sometimes I don’t blame the Venetians for ripping them off, they really do ask for it. The vulgarity of it can get you down, the endless swarms with their video cameras and their gondolier’s straw hats, pestering you to know how to get to St Mark’s Square every time you step outside.’
‘Yeah,’ Ted said. He was putting out cups and sugar, and he knew obviously where everything was kept in the kitchen. ‘Bigger cities like Rome, or even Florence, manage to absorb the tourists they attract. The areas tourists go to in any city are always really limited anyway. The majority just stick with the main sights, so there are always quiet areas, if you just know where to look for them.’
‘You’ve come at a good time, though,’ said Maria. ‘It’s usually quite quiet around the end of the year, although of course the weather can be bad.’ She poured out the coffee and while we were drinking it, she started to interrogate me. That’s the only way I can describe it, and it wasn’t the first time it had happened to me either. When I was growing up I had always been taught that it was rude to ask too many questions about people, but I had started to notice that lots of people now felt free to cross-question others, and to consider that the process passed for conversation. Where did I live? What was my job? How long had I been living in S. Giorgio? How long had I been in Italy? Where had I lived before that? Had I liked living in Paris? Why then had I left it? I gave her vague, abrupt answers, my tone becoming colder and more openly impatient with each one. The problem is, that when people are crass enough to grill you like this they either don’t notice or don’t care how infuriating you find it. Far from backing off, Maria was even a bit nettled by some of my sullen responses, and became even more persistent. For instance, when she asked me why I moved to Italy, I shrugged and said, ‘I just did it.’
‘Oh, come on,’ she said, ‘people don’t just move about like that.’
‘Well, I do.’
‘Did you have to leave Ireland?’
‘Of course not. I chose to.’
Suddenly she became quite hostile. ‘I can’t understand the way some people choose to live nowadays, really I can’t, wandering about all over the place the way they do. Years ago people had the right idea. They were born in a place and they stayed in it. They had their kids there and they died there. If they wanted to go on holidays they went to the nearest bit of seaside, and if you ask me, they were all a lot happier then. I get sick of people haring around all over the place. You see them here, all these crazy, mixed-up people, misfits in their own countries, people who basically have something wrong with them’ (she was staring hard at me as she said this). ‘And so they leave their ordinary little town, as if by going to some equally ordinary little town thousands of miles away they’ll solve something. The nonsense you come across! I see people here in Venice, maybe the husband Italian and the wife American, and they have kids who are bilingual. Then they’re sending them to classes to learn, I don’t know, German or French, and they’re taking them all over the place for holidays, to see grandparents on the other side of the world. Children only need one language, and to grow up in one place. If they feel rooted and happy there, then they’ll stay there and be happy. I don’t think I’ve ever met a bilingual person who couldn’t be described as inarticulate in two languages.’
To my amazement, Ted laughed. ‘Hey, Maria, lay off that stuff, will you? Still on the same old story. People like me and Aisling, we know what we’re about. You’re just spoiled, that’s all. You sure you want to go to New York for New Year’s? Sure you wouldn’t like to go to somewhere like Poggibonsi instead?’ He was smiling as he said this, and she smiled too. She let him defuse the situation because she was still fond of him, and because she was still fona of him, I reasoned, she was jealou
s of me. She looked at her watch, and ground out the cigarette she’d been smoking. ‘I’d better go, if I’m not to miss the train.’ Ted wanted to help her take her bags to the station, but she insisted that she could manage on her own. She gave us a few brief instructions about light switches and watering plants before she left. When we were saying goodbye to her, I was able to wish her the best, because I knew that a few hours later I’d be in her bed with Ted, and I knew that she knew. So I thanked her for the loan of the apartment and I gave her a great big smile, and suddenly she looked lonely and vulnerable. I felt very small minded, which I know I often am. I was glad when she had gone.
We listened to her descending the stairs, and then Ted said, ‘Poor Maria. Take no notice of her; she’s a sweet person, but she has this hang-up about belonging somewhere.’ He told me then that her Scottishness was a fairly tenuous thing. Her parents were both from Edinburgh. Her father had been a business man whose work took him all over the world, and the family had always gone with him. Maria had told Ted that she knew it had had a disastrous effect on her. She was born in Kuala Lumpur, and until the age of twenty, she had never lived longer than two years in any one country. She learned to walk in Sydney, started school in Tokyo, and during her childhood lived in Stockholm, Paris, Hong Kong and Manila, amongst other places. Her parents decided not to send her to boarding school in Britain, so she attended international schools where they existed, and local schools where they didn’t. ‘The first time she told me about it,’ Ted said, ‘I thought it sounded great, but she said, “Well, it wasn’t great. It was hell.” She went to university when she was eighteen. Her parents had always told her that she was from Scotland, so as soon as she had freedom of choice, she headed straight for the place she had been taught to think of as home. Perhaps it’s not surprising that she hated it. She didn’t feel that she belonged there,’ Ted said, ‘and that was always a big thing with her, this need to feel at home. I used to always tell her what a drag home can be, but she never believed me. She had been convinced that she would feel she belonged in Scotland, and she was stunned when she didn’t. The other students didn’t regard her as Scottish, and no wonder. She’d hardly ever been there until she started college. At the end of her first year she dropped out, transferred to Paris, and did her degree there. She told me that she didn’t “belong” in Paris either, but she never expected to, so it was no big deal. It was just like the rest of her life had been up until then. But she’s never lost that idea that there’re some places and some ways of living that other people can tap into but which are closed to her, and that if only she could find a place where she felt at home, she’d be happy.
Remembering Light and Stone Page 12
