His journey to London had been a waste of time. He would have to go back again once he could afford a bigger tip for the clerk. He had no desire to tell the foreign girl any of this. He heard her voice:
‘Do you know if there is somewhere to get a cup of coffee?’
Duncan said he thought there was a dining car further along, and when she asked if he wanted anything he declined. If six shillings was the price of a postage stamp, she could probably afford to buy dinner for the whole bloody train, but Duncan wanted to be alone. He watched her make her way down the aisle of the carriage.
16
Lorenzo had been waiting already for many hours before the woman made her appearance once more from around the corner. Then he followed with his binoculars her moving figure (the swing of her walk, no different from any other pretty girl) until she came past the car, and hesitated exactly as expected. She was looking in her handbag again; rummaging inside it. A set of keys brought out – and she was opening the car door! Lorenzo felt his heart thumping inside his chest. After three days of patient observation, something was happening at last. The binoculars trembled in his hands as he watched her unlock the car door and get into the driver’s seat. Now she was sitting behind the wheel, and adjusting the rear-view mirror. A young woman – soft and gentle features. Adjusting the mirror – through the binoculars he watched her movements. And then as if for no reason she turned her face upwards. What impulse might have prompted this? She turned her face upwards, and Lorenzo found himself staring, through the lenses of his binoculars, directly into her eyes.
That car – half-remembered smell of leather seats. Things swinging inside; the motion of the car. White car, your father driving; the back of your father’s head. Thin slice of memory. Your father’s voice.
She was looking at him. Across that great distance, Lorenzo felt sure that the face which stared in his direction could see him – could see a pair of binoculars poking out from behind a curtain. He felt petrified. Her face – her pretty young face – was turned upwards towards him, and he imagined that he saw now on her lips the curl of a smile. Only the briefest of moments, and yet during it he felt frozen, and exposed. He felt her eyes discovering him, unmasking him, and undoing all his work. Only the briefest of moments, but at last he pulled himself away from the curtain.
The room was dark, despite the bright sunshine outside, and he felt the darkness spinning around him. He felt the danger of his work, and the folly of believing that he could carry it out without the world ever noticing him. When he was once more calm enough, he dared to look again. The car, and the woman who was driving it, had gone.
Approaching the bend. Night. How would they have done it? The brakes perhaps. Car braking suddenly – what was that? Only a rabbit crossing the road. Warm bodies beside you in the back seat of the car. Looking down at your shorts; your own pink legs swinging. Grown-up legs on each side of you. Precious wedge of memory.
For the rest of that day, Lorenzo saw nothing. In his notebook, he recorded the events he had witnessed, but also he gave vent to his feelings of rage and frustration at his failure. He recorded all his theories and suspicions, as if his ingenuity might somehow compensate for such crass stupidity when he had allowed his quarry to escape. During most of the night, he remained awake beside the window, looking down upon a street in which nothing happened.
A sickly dawn broke at last. He got up, and went to the toilet. Standing inside the narrow room, the bright light made his tired head ring, and the sound of his own water thundered in his ears. He felt wretched and nauseous.
When he returned to his room, Lorenzo looked out once more into the street. Nothing had changed; the car still had not returned. He went to take his notebook and record the fact. And this was when he found that his notebook was gone.
The white Morris Commonwealth hitting the barrier, and all his things coming out of the door when it flew open, when it was pulled back on itself and crumpled under the body of the car then reappeared as the car turned again, the door flapping like an injury and the suitcase, the briefcase. The typewritten papers. Your father driving – back of his head. That memory. And trying to make him turn; to see his face, make him speak and live again.
Many thoughts would stream through his mind during the hour which followed – scenes in which he would imagine how the woman, or one of her companions, had entered the room and taken the book. Scenes of the way in which they might now choose to deal with him – a lonely figure, anonymous and unmissed; a figure taken out during the night, unheard by the staff who did not even know his face. Images in his mind, during the hour which followed, of those two people whom he had watched so closely – whom he felt he now knew – taking him, his hands bound behind his back, with a blindfold across his eyes. His terror, a sensation beyond fear – a strange new realm of calm, where he would wait (what sweet images might he try to think of?) until at last the dull thud would meet the back of his neck and he would die without hearing the report of the gun, or smelling the smoke from its barrel in the cold night air, and his lifeless body would feel nothing as they bundled it into the boot of the car.
It would be an hour rich in thought – an hour such as he had never before known. And during that time, he would go once more to the window, and throw back the curtains behind which he had hidden. He would look down onto the deserted street below – the street whose every corner he knew so well – and he would see only the twisted lines of his own handwriting; the meaningless lines which had betrayed him. And in his mind he would recreate again and again that place where they might take him; the woman going into the building first, and then the other leading him blindfold – he would be led stumbling in terrified darkness up unknown stairs. Apologizing perhaps for his own clumsiness. Into the echoes of a bare room, where his feet would shuffle on the floor-boards beneath him and he would hear the cocking of a handgun.
How many of them were there? Difficult to tell – two or three might have been enough. Perhaps one of them would have remembered to check that he had not survived, or would not survive. The back of his head, washed with rain and blood. His head, turned and lifted by a gloved hand. Then they would take out the sheaf of typed notes they had been given and throw them, a handful at a time, into the air so that in the darkness the breeze would catch them and they would fall naturally amongst the trail of clothing, metal parts and other rubbish.
It would be an hour such as he had never known. And at last, at the end of it, what urgent thoughts might fill his head as he gently turns the catch on the window of his hotel room? And what words must remain unspoken – words of explanation and apology as now he lifts himself out into the cool air; eases himself out over the blind, uncaring street far below and balances for a moment, unseen, on the high window ledge? And what fear, or calm joy beyond fear, holds him there now between life and easy death the only escape from the unimaginable torture of his pursuers?
He will fall in that early morning with the swiftness of ripe fruit. And in the street which he has watched and come to know so well, and of which he now becomes a lifeless part, there will be none to see him.
17
The cyclical view of history is a mysterious one, and many have been perplexed by it. That the disasters and tragedies of the world should be doomed to undergo endless repetition – is this not a terrible prospect? Again the rise of ruthless dictatorships; again the massacre of innocent people; again the bloodiest of wars. It is a depressing thought, yet who can wholeheartedly deny it? Was the Great War not described at the time as the War to end all Wars? There was no shortage of hope in those days. All that was lacking was a little imagination.
It is easy to see why the doctrine of reincarnation is such a deeply rooted one. If misery must return again and again, then must it always be experienced by new souls? Can souls not be recycled in the same way as history? And perhaps when our souls return the next time they might fare better.
The cyclical view explains a good deal about our own lives. A man
and a woman meet, they have an affair, and at the beginning they don’t stop to think that what they are experiencing is the same as all the other affairs they have had. Then later on things go wrong, they part, and each feels that things always happen this way. They are reassured by a cycle of their own making.
We then have an image of the world as a certain limited repertoire of patterns with which to make sense of events. We could say that if history seems to repeat itself, it’s only because historians – using the finite vocabulary of history – must eventually repeat themselves. How many words do we have for ‘war’? How many ways do we have for explaining the breakdown in relations between two people, or two nations?
We could take this a little further. Lowell tells us that the brain is made of a huge (but finite) number of cells, and a thought – a ‘state of mind’ – consists of a particular pattern of electrical impulses between these cells. The number of possible patterns is more than sufficient to give us a lifetime’s worth of thoughts and experiences. But if we could live forever, would we not one day run out of new thoughts? Would we not eventually exhaust the finite number of states which our brain is capable of achieving? And then we would surely be doomed to the perpetual re-experiencing of former mental states. If immortality exists, it is an endless, recurring agony of nostalgia.
How often I have had the thought ‘We have been here before.’ It seems to come more and more frequently with advancing years. Perhaps my brain is simply running out of new ways to comprehend the world. Even so, the temptation becomes increasingly irresistible, to view the world as a tangle of overlapping cycles. Do we not look at those younger than ourselves and see in them the replaying of the themes which we have spent our own lives inventing? And if nations could grow wiser as well as older, would they not regard their younger fellows with a degree of wistfulness?
When I first arrived in Italy, I was particularly eager to visit the ruins of Pompeii. Since my earliest childhood, I remembered seeing pictures of the place; it had been a great ambition of mine to visit it for myself – and I was not disappointed. What I recall most vividly was the sense that here was a single moment in history – a single day in the year 79 A.D., which had been captured, forever. A moment which posterity could relive again and again. Just as I had seen photographs of these ruins, now when I saw the ruins themselves I was looking at another kind of photograph. And looking at this image of the past, one could see the sense of pride that this town had felt, a part of the greatest empire there had ever been. Now, that empire was itself nothing but dust and rubble. And the plaster figures in glass cases – the casts of those who had been buried under the ash – here were more instances of time frozen. These had been people, like me, and their world had vanished, just as mine would. Was my own soul nothing more than a part of that great unending cycle which had once given them life?
I had heard that some of the figures were kept from public view, so I asked the attendant if I might see the others, and when I gave him a tip he showed me another case, kept in a storeroom, containing the effigies of a couple making love, who had died while locked together in that final embrace. How poignant, this moment of intimacy preserved forever! Beneath the ash which killed them, their bodies had decomposed so that all that was left was the space where they had been. Then, two thousand years later, plaster was injected, and their shadow was cut out by labourers. Perhaps the labourers had laughed when they saw what they had found. Or perhaps there were only one or two of them present, and they might have allowed themselves to feel, as I did, the sense of terrible mystery which the scene deserved.
But the civilization which inhabits the Italian peninsula, for all its antiquity, can lay no claim to greater wisdom over other nations. The cycles of history are a wiping clean, a purging of the past; like the amnesiac woman who saw her husband every day as if it were for the first time. Again, a convenient – and necessary – component of the reincarnation myth is the assumption that all traces of the soul’s former life should be erased. Which makes one wonder just what it is that identifies a soul, since our only personal identity in the absence of our bodies is our memory.
I remember standing amongst those ruins, in heat of an intensity I had never before known. I had been living in Cremona for three months, earning a living by teaching English, and my weekend in Naples and Pompeii was the first holiday I had been able to afford. I remember it occurring to me as I stood amongst those ruins that the city of Pompeii had suffered the fate of a film star who dies tragically young – caught forever in its ancient youth; eternally fixed in that moment of blossoming. Of course, the inhabitants knew they were living in the shadow of a volcano; they knew that one day it would explode and destroy everything in its path. But they stayed – they were all able to live in the belief that whenever it happened, they would not be around, and in the meantime they were happy to make the most of the good soil. And now some of them are immortalized in glass cases; the rest are gone and forgotten.
That couple in their eternal embrace, those pathetic white figures, remained in my mind as I took the train back to Milan. I was thinking of them still, though trying to read, when Eleonora (as I was to learn her name to be) came and sat opposite me, and we began a conversation, in which she asked me to give her lessons in English.
Is memory a sort of burial in ash? I see our two bodies, mine and Eleonora’s; hers white and smooth, mine – how do I see my own? Indistinctly; since the image cannot come from the memory I carry within my head, but rather from a memory which hovered somewhere above us – I am looking down on the two of us. Perhaps what I see is my present body, my own ageing shell lying next to the smooth white flesh which she still occupied in those days. Not so much a memory, as a photo-montage of how it must have looked, on that Friday evening. Only the second lesson!
Is memory perhaps the injection of substance into a void? I see our two bodies, motionless. Looking as if they would be cold to the touch. Two people begin an affair, and for a while it is like the discovery of a new continent. And then familiarity creeps in; the recognition that things are always this way.
And yet we were married – and the secret of success in our relationship was that we were never in love. Therefore, we could never fall out of it. Not that I didn’t love Eleonora – I did, dearly; and I miss her painfully. I loved her as I might love a certain piece of music; something without which my life would be poorer. And is poorer. I was never in love with her, that’s all. Why should I feel any guilt at the omission of one simple, unmissed ingredient?
I see our two bodies, on the double bed which seemed to fill the bedroom of her apartment. I had achieved, at that stage, only one of my goals.
Watching the movement of her face, her hands, her body as she spoke to me on the train, I tried to imagine what it might be like to be in bed with her. Alongside my struggle for correct Italian vocabulary, there were visions of twisted sheets, fingernails clawing, neatly piled hair falling loose. The woman sitting opposite me had such poise, that I wanted only to see her lose her balance, and collapse beneath me.
And I saw that twin effigy in white plaster, writhing yet immobile; that baroque contortion of limbs long dead. Eternal emblem of futility.
Who lives now in that apartment, I wonder, where I gave Eleonora two lessons in English before we pulled each other onto the rug which some friend had brought from Turkey? Who now lies in that bedroom which I came to know so well? I see them now, their young and hopeful bodies, in an endless, anonymous embrace.
Easy to see why the doctrine of reincarnation has always been so attractive. But if one day my soul should once more meet Eleonora’s, how might I recognize her?
The cyclical view of history is a perplexing one, but comforting. That all our mistakes, although they will be endlessly repeated by others in the future, have also been made countless times before us by our predecessors – this amounts almost to a pardon. Not an explanation, but an excuse for not finding an explanation.
When I was younger, I fe
ared that my life might become no more than the repetition of my father’s; that I was something moulded in his image – the same creased brow, the same receding hairline patiently catching up with his shiny scalp. Inherited mannerisms which sometimes might serve to remind that I was his offspring. When I reached his age, I would be like him. Such certainty depressed me terribly. Yet now that I am drawing nearer to the age at which his own life ended, I regret that I could not have been more like him. The idea that a life could consist of the repetition of another is no longer a depressing thought for me.
I remember how he used to criticize my piano playing; I would read through a new piece and strike plenty of wrong notes. The second time, I would make the same errors – and eventually, as I learned the piece, I would learn those wrong passages as if they were part of the music. If you repeat the same mistake often enough, perhaps it becomes no longer a mistake.
But even if you play a piece a thousand times, no two performances can be exactly alike. My life has been a playing out of themes on which my father had already exercised his virtuosity – how similar in many ways, and yet how different. And if at the end of life there is some kind of da capo, I am sure I shall return to make all the same mistakes once more, in new ways.
And although I have tried my best to begin again the story of Duncan and Giovanna, the situation only seems to be getting worse – I am even further from the story which lived in my mind for ten years, after its abrupt arrival one night while I stood naked in my bathroom. I long to bring those two people together, and yet with each attempt I make, they only grow further apart. Again and again, wrong notes come and send the melody adrift. Even now, it seems, I still feel the presence of that guilt which hung over me through the years while I secretly wrote and rewrote the opening scene in my mind. That sense of betrayal, and the questions which Eleonora would have asked me: Who was this Giovanna? So that I would have had to tell her about that other, unknown woman I once met; and all those speculations of how my life might otherwise have gone. When I return to their story, will I be able to make things go any better? Already this novel, like my life, has set off on a path over which I have only the vaguest pretence of control. But tomorrow I shall follow once more the story of Charles King and Robert Waters, to find out where it might lead us.
Music, in a Foreign Language Page 12
