‘It’s not that I don’t believe it‚’ she said. ‘It’s more that I don’t understand it, and what I don’t understand I never have much use for. Even if it does happen, it won’t be for a long time, and even then, it just won’t be the same. The thing is, Aisling, I just love life. It’s as simple as that. I know it’s full of problems, and I moan about it just as much as anybody else, but I can’t see a way to improve it. When we were children, we used to try to think of improvements you could make to the human body. We thought of so many things, but there was always a catch. We decided in the end that maybe people’s bodies weren’t perfect, but they were the best you could imagine. I feel the same way about life.
‘When I was small, I had this book, too, where I used to read all these stories about fairies and Princes and Princesses, and there was always a lot about jewels and riches. There was one story I always remember, about a Princess who had a pair of golden slippers, encrusted with diamonds and emeralds and rubies. I thought that they must be the most wonderful things; I used to dream about having a pair of shoes made of gold. Of all the stories, that was the one I liked best. And then I grew up and I thought about it, and I thought it was the most foolish thing in the world. How could anyone ever wear a pair of solid gold slippers? Can you imagine anything more painful? Golden slippers are useless, Aisling. There’s nothing better than ordinary life, and if I’ve learnt anything from my time on this earth, it’s that, and I want to keep living.
‘Yesterday I was in my room, and it was almost lunchtime. My mother-in-law was cooking in the kitchen, Lucia was just in from school. I could smell the sauce for the pasta, and then your car pulled up outside, same as that time every day. I heard the car door close and you said hello to Davide, and then I heard the crash of him pulling down the shutters of the shop. I thought, “This is what death means: all these things will still be going on, but I won’t be here any more.” And I thought my heart would break.’
Ted was coming to stay with me at Easter. Franca invited us both to have Easter Sunday lunch with the family, and Davide came up to my apartment to plead with me to accept. I’d hesitated because I didn’t want to give them extra work, but he thought that cheerful company was just what she needed. He said that it would be good for her to spend some time with people from outside the family. She seemed very fond of my amico americano, and whatever made Franca happy would please the whole family.
And so Ted and I had Easter lunch with Franca and the others, and everybody enjoyed it. A ham had been sent down from the farm in the hills: meat from the pig we had seen being butchered at New Year. Franca set it up in a big metal frame which held it tightly, then she cut paper-thin slices from it. The delicate flavour of the ham was much commented on. Franca had a great time, teasing Ted, heaping his plate with roast lamb, and explaining how everything was made. She had an unfortunate habit of cramming her mouth with food just before starting to tell him how a particular dish was cooked, with the result that he couldn’t understand a word she was saying. She made him drink lots of vernaccia, and at the end of the meal, a large chocolate egg was cracked open with great ceremony.
Later that afternoon, Ted and I drove up into the hills, parked, and went for a walk. After a while we sat down under some olive trees, and looked down at S. Giorgio, neatly girdled by its walls, and the hazy plain far below.
‘On a day like this‚’ I said, ‘I know why I’m still living in S. Giorgio.’ In Umbria, the dreamy round of the seasons, the festivals, of life itself was so complete that once you had stepped into that charmed circle, it was almost impossible to pull yourself away again. Franca would have asked why anyone would ever want to leave such pleasures, but for me there was something missing. What was it? A sort of wildness. ‘Sometimes,’ I said to Ted, ‘I’m afraid that it’s all like a dream, and that someday I’ll wake up, and feel that I’ve let so much of my life slip by, and with it something important, that I was too drowsy and wrapped in luxury to miss until it was too late. It’s like living in a walled garden here – a fabulous garden, and one so big that you can’t see the walls, but you know they’re there, all the same. And yet on a day like this, none of that matters.’
I was glad that the winter was over, and I was even looking forward to the hot days of summer. I promised myself that this year I wouldn’t complain but enjoy to the full the different atmosphere that falls over the country with the heat. It would be good to come home from work in the middle of a baking hot day, when the whole village would be stunned into silence. I’d have a light lunch: tomatoes, peaches, thing like that. Then with all the shutters still closed, I’d lie down to drowse and snooze for an hour under a cool white sheet, and I’d look at the light of the sun, coming through the slats of the shutter, and falling in long, broken lines on the bedroom ceiling. I’d listen to voices in the square: things even sound different in extreme heat, the way extreme cold throws a silence over the world.
In early May, Jimmy rang me to say that Nuala had given birth to a little girl. They were both delighted, and I was pleased for them too, and glad to hear the news. (I have to confess that I was completely indifferent to the births of both Sinead and Michael.) I don’t really know why I felt so differently this time, but I do know that I was happy throughout that spring, between the time when I returned from the States, and what was to happen at the start of the summer. I was happy with Ted, and I thought I was close to Franca. Now I can see that I didn’t understand her at all. Sometimes when I think of Franca, I think of what Pirandello said about Italians, how they are weeping behind a mask that laughs. No, I didn’t understand Franca. I didn’t see, didn’t want to see, the extent of her melancholy. The strongest sun casts the blackest shadow. I didn’t take her seriously. It’s an age-old mistake. Other nationalities haven’t been taking Italy seriously for years, they see a sort of buffoonery that isn’t really there. I dismissed Franca’s worries as histrionics, as part of a national tendency to over-dramatize things. Now I know I was wrong.
One day in May, Franca called up to see me again. She had bad news. The operation had failed to check the illness. She was going to have to go for extra treatment. She didn’t believe that it was going to help her and, to be honest, by that stage, neither did I. This time I didn’t wheel out any well-worn platitudes to her. I don’t remember saying anything much that day, we just sat with our arms around each other for a while, and she rested her head on my shoulder. After she’d gone down to her own apartment, I went out on to the balcony: not the one which overlooked the square, but the bedroom balcony, which gave on to the back yard. I looked down at the two broken-down cars, the faded houses, the heap of old wooden crates. In the long grass of the overgrown garden, a cat was sitting washing its face. I remember thinking of what Franca had said to me before Easter, and I thought: ‘She’s right. Life is very precious.’
I don’t remember if I was dreaming that morning: I probably was, I usually do. If I wake slowly I remember my dreams, but they get completely wiped out if I’m woken abruptly, for example, by an alarm clock going off, or, as was the case on this particular morning, by someone hammering with their fists on the door of my apartment, and shouting my name. It was Lucia. She was sobbing so much that I couldn’t understand what she was saying, except that it concerned ‘Mamma’. That much I had guessed. Opposite the main door of my apartment was another door, which opened on to a short flight of steps, leading to the attic. Usually this door was locked, but now it lay ajar, and Lucia, still crying, dragged me through it.
What I saw when we entered the attic shocked me so much, because, not in spite of, its being so familiar. The woman’s hanging body, the stillness of it, the heaviness: I felt that same sense of constriction and of terror that I had known for months, when just this image haunted my mind. As Lucia threw her arms around me and wept, I knew that it would haunt her now too, more than I could ever imagine.
*
It was all over the papers the next day, and all over the billboards of the local pape
rs outside the newsagents. The Italian press – and Italian society – take a very different attitude to privacy, compared to what I had grown up with, which probably went too far in the other direction. However, I still felt uneasy at the openness and insouciance with which such things were reported there. Only a few days earlier I had read about a man who had thrown himself off a bridge somewhere in Tuscany. He was on the bridge for six hours before he killed himself, and the paper reported, complete with photographs, how his wife had stood below pleading with him not to do it, holding little Lamberto by the hand, and little Roberta in her arms. It was enough for someone to be killed in a fire in a house for the by-line to run ‘Suicide?’
There was some comfort in knowing that Franca would not have minded in the least having the details of her death all over the paper; in fact she would probably have been quite pleased. I had often seen her read similar cases with relish, down to the last morbid detail. She had said to me once, after telling me a particularly sensational piece of local gossip, ‘You should never try to hide anything, Aisling. If you have a secret, it’s best to tell it to everybody as soon as you can, because they’ll only find out about it anyway, and then it’ll be twice as embarrassing.’ Time and time again she trumped the aces of people who would have talked about her, and so she would probably have been very pleased with the local press for disseminating full details of the circumstances of her death: that she was a shop-keeper, that she had cancer but killed herself because she couldn’t face the long-drawn-out illness, knowing that she was going to die at the end of it. She had thought that it would be better for the family, easier for them like this.
Which, of course, it wasn’t. Davide was inconsolable, and stricken with guilt. In the week before she died, Franca had wanted to sleep in another room. She was often restless at night, and she told Davide that it would be better for him to get a decent night’s sleep, as he had to work in the shop. ‘I told her it didn’t matter, Aisling,’ he said to me, again and again, and to anyone else who would listen. ‘I told her I’d rather she stayed with me, so that if she was sick or needed anything, I could get it for her, but she said no, and insisted on sleeping in the spare room.’ And it was because she was there that she had been able to sneak up to the attic unheard in the small hours, and end her life. ‘I’ll never forgive myself,’ Davide said.
The funeral was hastily arranged, and took place a day later. Even though I had been in Italy for a long time, it was the first funeral I had been to there, whereas when I was living in Ireland I seemed to be going to them all the time. Franca’s funeral struck me as a rushed, unnatural affair, lacking the Irish talent for mourning. You could see that everyone wanted it to be over as quickly as possible. This was in spite of Franca being in a massive, ornately carved coffin, which was placed in a hearse with gold trimmings on the roof. She couldn’t have had more elaborate floral tributes, not if she’d been an Unknown Soldier on Remembrance Day. Don Antonio mumbled his way through the funeral Mass. There were lots of people there whom I recognized, including Michele and Patrizia from the farm, where we’d gone in January. Ted came down from Florence for the day. I found it hard to associate Franca with her own funeral, knowing how she always went her own way, no matter what the Church said. She had certainly gone her own way in death. It didn’t matter to her that the Church said it was a sin of despair to take your own life: Franca had gone right ahead and done it.
Only afterwards, when we went to the high-walled cemetery did I feel some essence of Franca’s self, her personality. I remembered being there with her on the Day of the Dead, and how carefully she had arranged the flowers she had brought with her, and lit the fat red candle. Spiritual things didn’t interest her, but practical things did, and she had tidied the tomb as deftly as she set a table. I had known when Mass was being said that day that her mind was wandering all over the place, that she was thinking about lunch, about how cold she was, about the flowers the women beside her had brought: anything but death. They slotted her coffin into a long space like the top shelf of a cupboard, as if she were being put away for a few months, like a winter coat, instead of for always. Then we all went home.
I rang Ted every single night that week, and then on the Sunday night, just as he was about to ring off, I said, ‘Wait, wait, I have something to ask you. I’m going back to Ireland for a few weeks in June. Do you think you’d like to come with me?’
17
‘Well‚’ Nuala said to me, ‘how does it feel to be home?’
‘Good‚’ I lied. ‘I’m glad to be back.’ Truth was, sitting in Nuala’s gleaming new kitchen I didn’t yet feel that I was home. Nuala and Jimmy weren’t exactly as I’d remembered or imagined them, and I realized this the moment Ted and I pushed our luggage trolleys out through customs at Dublin Airport, and saw Jimmy waiting for us. He had more of a middle-class gloss to him than before: smart grey slacks and a bottle-green v-necked pullover with the crest of a golf club embroidered on it. Golf! Jimmy had always been a mad-keen hurler. It was hard to imagine him sedately tapping a little white ball around a putting green. He looked older too: his hair had gone a bit grey at the temples, and I could see that he was quite nervous at meeting me again. That made me sad; but still, it was a much happier homecoming than my last visit to Ireland. Nobody spoke of it, but I know Jimmy was also thinking about the time our mother died. He’d also met me at the airport then. He’d been dressed in his best suit, and I knew to look at him that he’d been crying. That had shocked me. I’d never seen Jimmy cry before.
My life had been such a mess at that period. I had been in Italy just long enough to feel that moving there had been a big mistake, and I was tormented with guilt because my mother had asked me to go home and visit her, and I had refused, and now she was dead. Jimmy had reproached me bitterly for being away when she died, and I had felt my position indefensible (which hadn’t stopped me from vehemently defending it). There’d been a lot of bad feeling between us when I left to go back to Italy a few days after the funeral, and I hadn’t been back to Ireland since then.
Sinead and Michael had grown out of all recognition. Michael had been a baby, five years ago. Sinead said she remembered the last time I was in Ireland, but I wasn’t convinced. Jimmy was right: she looked at lot like Nuala, but in terms of her character, I couldn’t see that she was like me. She was far more sparky and confident than I remember being when I was ten. And now there was the new baby: and the new house. I tried not to smile when Sinead said guilelessly, ‘Mammy says we used to live in a housing estate, but now we live in a development.’ When Jimmy and Nuala got married, they bought a flat-fronted brick and plaster semi, with a fenced-in front garden. Their new place was far more up-market, with bay windows and a neat porch with a pointed roof. Each house had its own separate garden at the back, but at the front there were no divisions. Nuala proudly showed Ted and me around all the house. You could still smell the paint and the plaster. They hadn’t yet furnished and decorated all the rooms: Nuala said they would do it slowly, as they could afford it, and so have everything just the way they wanted it. There was a microwave oven in the stripped pine kitchen. Things began to fit together for me. Now I could understand Jimmy’s new slacks and golf-club sweater. I could understand why he was going grey too.
Bringing Ted to Dublin with me turned out to be a far smarter move than I’d realized it would be. Ever since leaving home to go to university, I’d kept my private life completely private from my family. To this day, Jimmy and Nuala don’t know what happened in Paris. For years there was nobody in my life, but they didn’t know that, and I think Nuala’s imagination ran riot. If I was so secretive, there must have been something to hide. Like a lot of people whose emotional lives have followed a conventionally mapped-out route, she thought the only alternative to her way of doing things was heartless promiscuity. My own experience was of a messy, painful but sincere search for affection, where the ultimate goal wasn’t a mortgage and a cast-iron marriage contract. Nuala wouldn’t
have been able to understand that at all. She never understood me: or, to be fair, we never understood each other. I probably didn’t make much effort. She thought me strange because there’s so little evident family feeling in me.
When I rang Jimmy to say that I’d be coming to Ireland with an American friend, he said at once that Ted would be more than welcome. Jimmy and Nuala took my telling them about Ted and bringing him home as a rare sign of trust and openness on my part. They were both very nervous when they met him – God knows what sort of man they expected to love me – but within half an hour Ted had completely won them over. Nuala really liked him, and that made it easier for her to get on with me.
Everything was so different on this visit that it didn’t feel like I was at home. On the evening of the day we arrived, the four of us sat at the kitchen table over a Tea Time Express chocolate cake, and a pot of tea. ‘Was Rome packed with people over for the World Cup?’ Jimmy asked.
Remembering Light and Stone Page 19
