The Catastrophe

by Ian Wedde

  My palm is solid as rock

  Scratching whoever touches it

  And to me the most delicious food

  Is olive oil and thyme.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That would be true.’ He wiped his finger on the oily plate again and licked it. ‘If it comes to that.’ And then again, ‘Let’s go.’

  His manner was even a little surly, as if he felt he had been outwitted. Philippe was still sipping his coffee in a leisurely manner, so the driver’s impatience was also impolite.

  ‘And yours?’ she asked Philippe, to smooth the moment.

  In quiet Arabic also, despite his own instruction, Philippe recited some lines.

  The conquerors have arrived

  And the former conquerors have gone.

  Difficult to remember my face

  In the mirrors ...

  ‘That is also Darwish,’ he said. ‘But who can have a favourite star in such a firmament? And the favourite food? The food of love?’ He lifted the small cross on its chain around his neck, and kissed it. ‘What one has just eaten, thank God.’

  Then they were both looking at her. She felt the moment as a farewell, so that her throat swelled against what she tried to say.

  ‘At the funeral of Darwish in Ramallah the streets were hung with banners, with his image on them and one word: Farewell. For me it was as though everything he ever wrote was in that word. Always that leave-taking, one exile after another.’

  She refrained from telling them that her favourite food was not Arab or Italian, but would always be Argentinian, the rich joues de boeuf that she and Abdul Yassou would eat at Le Baratin, in that false present from which she had now gone forward.

  She knew that her face was hard with the effort of controlling her emotions, but even so the driver smiled at her. His teeth were very bad and usually he concealed them behind his hand, but now he displayed them as if to say, what have we to hide?

  ‘Yes,’ said Mafouz. ‘Farewell. ‘Ma’a as-salaama.’

  Then he stood and walked towards where the car was parked, two or three streets away from the bustle of the market.

  Philippe sat in silence for a moment before lifting his hand for the bill. He was watching the driver disappear without fuss in the crowd of people arriving at the market. They were becoming more numerous now, and there were some municipal police and carabinieri also beginning to appear in the street. They were known to check the papers of Arabs and blacks, or those who resembled them, or those who looked away too quickly.

  Soon the two of them would follow Mahfouz to the car and then, before long, they would arrive by the autostrada at Genoa.

  ‘He has the instinct of a great thief,’ said Philippe. ‘He will not be seen and therefore he will not be caught. Never.’ He looked at her and smiled, and she felt his affection and approval warm her face in a blush. ‘But you, Doctor – you survived his investigation I think. Thank you. This is very hard to do, as I know from experience. As do others.’

  Then, after finding the money for their breakfast, he looked at his watch, and then at her, tapping the face of the watch. She at once knew what he was doing. Piece by piece, move by move, along the route, through the time it would take, and always leaving behind the only place from which to go forward, he was approaching the end of the game.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Doctor Habash. There is the piece left behind. Always, the piece left behind.’ He took her arm, and they walked back towards the car, the prosperous-looking elderly man in his fine Italian coat with the striking woman who might have been his wife or perhaps his mistress of many years.

  She knew that Philippe was directing her in a performance for the eyes of others. The handsome carabiniere officer looked at her with manly approval, and she saw that he was impressed by the manner in which la signora ignored him, so that as she passed he touched his fingers to his cap with regret and admiration.

  CHAPTER 10

  Nana Gobbo’s superannuated border collie would sit imploringly outside the glass door to the verandah with a foam-dripping twig in his mouth. Beyond him was the river that ran down to the wide bay, with the untidy lines of white breakers at the bar, through which Uncle Antonio used to angle his battered Parkercraft at speed. Sometimes he would appear next to the imploring dog on the outside of the glass door, holding up a wriggling crayfish by the back of its shell. Both he and the dog had similar expressions of helpless longing on their faces, and both were bearing gifts with which to win entry to Nana Gobbo’s house. Both usually got in, but they had to work hard for it.

  It was Uncle Antonio who taught him how to clean and fillet fish and how to make a fish stock with the heads and bones, which you could always eat as a soup if you couldn’t be bothered taking the thing any further. Uncle Antonio drank too much and it was the drink that one day caused him to miscalculate his speed run at the white water of the bar beyond the rivermouth, so that his old Parkercraft flipped and he washed up halfway down the beach hours later at low tide.

  Christopher got the news from the cousin who’d pinned him on his back in the scratchy grass up in the orchard. She was the one who kept in touch, with short humorous letters that always ended ‘Hope you are keeping well’. In this letter she’d written, ‘Piss-head Antonio finally chugged the big one.’

  He woke from a dream of a wide expanse of water, and the memory of the imploring dog and uncle was almost a part of the dream, but not quite – it followed as he woke with a stripe of sunlight across his face, having just been flying low in his own body across sea that was at once the ruffled blue of the bay out from Tolaga and the milky blue of the gulf off Chiavari. The boats that were crossing the gulf were like the little squidders that came back across Tigullio to Chiavari in the pink morning, and they were also like Uncle Antonio’s cray boat. He flew low past their wakes with his mouth open and the wide expanse of the blue space funnelling into him. He flew across the watery space, consuming it, and felt a wake spreading out behind him, but not on the surface of what he was crossing and swallowing into his weightless body, but rather a kind of void, empty and tranquil.

  And then, as he woke with a dry mouth and a stab of discomfort from the light in his eyes, came the memory of the dog with its drooled twig, and next, of optimistic Uncle Antonio with his struggling crayfish. They were on the outside looking in. The glass door of the verandah was somehow where the dream and the memory met.

  So, it was morning. He’d slept without expecting to. There was a damp patch on the pillow where he’d dribbled a little; his sleep must have been deep. He was dying for a piss, and desperate for water. There was half a bottle of mineral water on a table at the end of the bed, and a towel over a chair. He drank from the bottle, imagining the woman’s sarcastic lips gripping it. The towel retained a faint trace of her perfume, and he hung it over his shoulder and took it to the door. There he banged hard with the flat of his hand on the grubby paint and shouted.

  ‘Hello! Il y a quelqu’un?’

  Suddenly the panicky thought that they might have gone already and he hadn’t heard them. The little bag in the woman doctor’s hand, her grand overcoat. He banged again, and then began to rattle the door by its handle. And then he just turned it, and the door opened towards him.

  Why hadn’t he thought of doing that first? He went quickly across the landing, feeling the sheepish grin on his face as if he’d been watching himself make the assumption that he’d still be locked in. But why wouldn’t he assume that? He pissed with enormous relief into the squat toilet, which he saw had been thoroughly cleaned, and then threw water over his face and head at the basin, which was also clean. Then he dried himself with the towel scented by Dr. Hawwa Habash.

  Where was she?

  He knew the feeling that now began to invade his guts – an apprehensive nausea that made his palms and his top lip sweat. He pushed it away with a deep breath and focused on where he was.

  The other door to the landing was open, and he could see the green armchairs and the table in the dim
interior of the room where he’d first been locked up. He went in and opened the window and the shutters, revealing the eastern walls of buildings lit by the early morning sun, and the hillsides north-west of the city standing out against strong shadows. So he had some idea of where he was, facing roughly north-west.

  He didn’t feel any need to hurry. It seemed clear enough now that the woman and whoever else had been in the house had already left – the driver with the thick, sweating neck and the quiet elderly man who had appeared from time to time – but he checked every room on the floor below to be sure. The doors to the rooms were open as if to make his investigation both easy and unnecessary: two bedrooms and a smaller, dirtier lavatory than upstairs. The whole place smelled grubby, of cigarettes and old cooking, and the bedding and towels seemed hastily abandoned, thrown aside as if expecting a cleaning service. But there was no sign of any kind of individual use, no clothes or personal belongings. The squirms of nausea continued, but he moved on as if to keep ahead of the panic that awaited his surrender.

  On the ground floor was a larger room with a table and chairs, a fridge, and a dirty stove. Some used glasses and coffee cups had been left in the sink; a rubbish bin spilled over with oily paper food wrappings and chicken bones. There was a pot on the stove: he lifted its lid and found the cold remains of the scorched chickpeas he remembered smelling the night before. A short passage led to a street door, which was locked.

  He hesitated for a moment at the locked door with his trembling hand on the latch and then went back to the kitchen room. He remembered having originally come in through what smelled like a garage. Maybe that would be a less conspicuous way to leave.

  But he knew he was also hesitating and delaying something – ‘dithering’ was Miss Pepper’s word. It had always made her top lip lift off her teeth.

  Because it was true: he felt shakily apprehensive at the thought of going out. As the woman had been at pains to tell him, he was now carrying a bag of dangerous shit. He had to think this through. What if the house was being watched? And by whom?

  But there was another, vaguer question, which was more difficult. Why was he leaving? What for?

  And what was all that about having to send a message to TG? ‘Food is love.’ Along with his memory of the blissful look on her face when she put the first forkful of joues de boeuf in her mouth at Le Baratin, he’d always remember her saying, ‘What is it, Christopher?’ when Luigi put the Cappon Magro in front of her at Boccadasse and he burst into tears. What is it? It was love, Pepper, crazy love. The words he’d wanted to say had swelled up in his throat and he couldn’t get them out. He’d felt like a complete fuckwit, seeing her lovely neat head tipped a little to the side like a bird, that row of white nippy teeth just showing in what was probably a smile but you couldn’t ever be sure.

  ‘Don’t be a dolt, Christopher.’

  Yes, but also he’d seen what it had cost her to hold something back that night, that tightness in her face, her stare that dared him to get it wrong, when he’d finally blurted out the words, ‘Will you marry me?’

  At the Santa Chiara in Boccadasse, Luigi thought she was hot, but Luisa had asked, ‘Are you sure, Chris-tuh-fuh?’

  Yes, he was.

  But now he was dithering, trying to come to terms with the dumb feeling of disappointment and abandonment that had moved up on him as he explored the empty rooms. What had been the point of his crazy exploit? Had he really expected that the rush of his first impulse, when he’d run past the maître d’ with his ‘No! No!’ or ‘Go! Go!’ expression, would keep pushing him forward?

  The answer was, he hadn’t known what to expect. Look, here he was, wandering around, opening cupboards and looking into abandoned rooms, for fuck’s sake. The truth was, he couldn’t explain what he’d done or why he’d done it. ‘Why did you do it!’ The rage of the tall, bony woman that made the question into a curse, that left a fleck of froth on her lip. To escape the present he was stuck in, was what he’d said. She’d seemed to understand what he meant. Maybe she’d understood it better than he had. But what was next, now that he was free, now that he was in the place from which he could move forward?

  He remembered her expression as she left the room he’d fallen asleep in with one nostril pressed to the faint trace of her aroma. Her disdainful face was closed, yes, but closed against something. She was ready to go, with her bag and her large Italian coat, but there had been some kind of goodbye behind her shut face, a message. One she’d decided to keep to herself, unlike his absurd food is love spilled out there shamelessly. What might she have wanted to say? ‘Good luck?’ With what – his future? ‘Run for your life?’ Yes, the bag was full of danger, but what in the end did that have to do with him?

  Or: Why don’t you come with us?

  He pushed his nausea down with a groan. Of course that’s what he’d begun to hope for. That he might amount to something else, working with her, with the children.

  And then there was the matter of the maître d’. If he’d understood Doctor Habash correctly, the guy was part of the whole thing. He was one of them. And he’d be coming around to this house, or so she’d insisted. So why had they left without him, the hairy fucking maître d’, one of the gang?

  Now he was getting really pissed off. He walloped a cupboard with the flat of his hand and a paper bag of dried chickpeas fell out and spilled across the floor. Fucking mess! It was a total fucking mess, the whole situation. He didn’t get it.

  On the other side of the kitchen room, through a door with a pair of filthy overalls hanging on a hook, was a small, cluttered pantry or passage. Off the passage was another open door, from which came a stink of diesel and also something like the acrid chemical smell he’d noticed the night before. He found the light switch and under bright industrial lamps saw a large empty garage with an oil-stained floor, a workbench cluttered with tools, a block-and-tackle on a gantry mounted under the high roof, a couple of heavy-duty wheeled jacks, and what looked like a lube pit covered with steel plates. He investigated a wheelie bin. It was the source of the chemical smell, stuffed with sheets of masking paper and tape sprayed with red paint.

  All this seemed to confirm was that they’d gone. Buggered off. They’d been preparing to go the whole time the doctor sat with him in the upstairs room trying to get information from him, but also trying to explain something to him. But never really letting him in on what they were doing. Well, why would she? He was her ‘problem’. Again, he had the humiliating sensation of observing his own absurdity – his pangs of disappointment and anger at being excluded from their plans, the car-painting, the getaway schemes. All his rage slumped into the disappointment. Why couldn’t he have gone with them?

  ‘For fuck’s sake, get a grip,’ he said aloud, as he tried the small door in the side of the garage. It was locked, but he found the catch and unfastened it. That lurch of apprehension again in his guts. A space opened out and he peered into it. There was an empty concrete yard with a few battered chairs arranged around a table, against a white, plastered wall. The shabby courtyard was filled with early morning sunshine and looked inviting after the smelly interior of the house, but he closed and relocked the door and went back to the kitchen.

  There, he stood with his eyes shut and his hands pressed flat on the table. He made himself breathe deeply, and relax. That fluttering in his chest, the nausea, and a burning sensation like dyspepsia in his stomach where, not so long ago, there’d been a pleasant calmness. What had that been about? The sense of leaving behind a kind of shop-window dummy propped up in the restaurant window – the sense of having escaped from himself.

  Something similar had happened when he arrived in Chiavari the first time, with his paltry scraps of Italian and a phone number for some kind of cousin. Rain and wind were blasting in from the sea, and grey waves were surging across the breakwater along the beach. Mi chiamo Christopher, he’d practiced even though he no longer felt like the Christopher who’d assisted Uncle Antonio across the back ya
rd to the shade awning, after his famous farewell lunch at Nana Gobbo’s place in Tolaga Bay.

  ‘Mi chiamo Christopher,’ he said aloud, now, and began to cry without restraint in the kitchen of the empty house with its unnervingly deserted feel and its stink of car paint. ‘È un piacere conoscerla.’ I am very happy to know you. His own deserted feel, like the house. A sordid emptiness. He let the grief take over and bellowed, feeling the snot running over his lip, down his chin.

  He’d gone with the ‘cousin’, an elegant middle-aged woman who’d dressed with care to welcome him in a fine coat with a silk scarf, to a house up in the hills behind Chiavari. There, with more ‘cousins’, he ate a winter soup of veal-stuffed cabbage parcels in clear veal stock, chestnut gnocchi with pesto, potatoes and pumpkin, roast rabbits with mushrooms and olives, and pandolce fruit cake with sweet, sticky wine. At each course he was toasted, until his face began to ache with smiling. Then they all drank a few rounds of grappa and began to sing. It was familiar, just like the get-togethers and singalongs at Nana Gobbo’s place back at the Bay. He’d sung his Dean Martin standard to loud applause.

  Then he’d slept in a comfortable double bed which had been warmed with hot water bottles and whose pillows had been sprinkled with lavender oil, and only when he tried to go out for a tipsy pee during the night and got lost in the house did he realise that his ‘cousin’ and her husband had given him their bed and were sleeping on a fold-out couch in the room where they’d all had dinner. In the morning they sent him off with a handwritten list of places to go and eat in all the way back along the coast from Bocca di Magra to Genoa.

  His secret Bible. Pure gold.

  But now it was time to move on again. His fit of weeping had passed and, as usual, he looked back at it and saw it for what it was, just something he did. Self-pity, TG used to call it, but she didn’t know about the feelings of loss that his occasional floods of tears opened him up to.