Invisible

by Jonathan Buckley

  Mr Morton raises the recorder halfway to his face, then directs his eyes towards her. One eyebrow moves upward a fraction, as if he were revising his opinion of her, perhaps unfavourably, but perhaps not. ‘You could call it that,’ he replies.

  ‘It’s none of my business. I interrupted you,’ she apologises. ‘I’ll let you get on. I’m sorry.’

  ‘No. It’s OK,’ he reassures her.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. It was a welcome interruption.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I’m sure,’ he says, with a smile that isn’t the smile of someone who is merely being polite. ‘I wasn’t making great progress. Going round and round in circles.’ Holding the recorder between finger and thumb, Mr Morton pats it on his palm, as if wondering what he should do with it.

  ‘Progress on what?’ she asks, and winces at her rudeness. ‘Oh fuck. That’s so nosy. I’m sorry. And I’m sorry I said fuck as well. But I’d like to know. I’m interested. I really am,’ she gabbles. ‘A poem by –?’ she begins, but she cannot recall the name.

  ‘Leopardi. Yes, a poem by Leopardi. Called “Il sabato del villaggio”: The Village Saturday, Saturday in the Village.’

  ‘“Il sabato” –?’

  ‘“Il sabato del villaggio”.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘A Saturday evening in a village. You want a summary?’ he asks, apparently pleased to provide it.

  ‘Please. Yes.’

  Settling back into the angle of the bench, he raises his hands towards her, describing a shape in the air. ‘It’s sunset. A girl is walking through the fields, carrying flowers she’ll wear tomorrow. An old woman chats with her friends on her doorstep, recalling days when she used to dress up to go dancing. It’s getting darker. A church bell rings. Children are playing in the village square. A farmworker returns home to his supper, thinking about his day off. Darkness falls,’ he announces, his hands floating down. ‘Everything is quiet, except for the noise made by the carpenter, who’s working late to get a job finished before the morning. Saturday evening, when everyone is anticipating the day of rest, this is the best part of the week. Tomorrow the hours will pass too slowly and everyone will start to think of the work they have to do in the coming week. And then he addresses one of the children: “Garzoncello scherzoso | Cotesta età fiorita | È come un giorno d’allegrezza pieno | Giorno chiaro, sereno, | Che precorre alla festa di tua vita.”’ Talking to a place a short distance to the side of her, Mr Morton speaks these words in a voice that is tender and comforting, and unsettling too, because it seems that the child in the poem has suddenly become vividly present to him, as real as she is. ‘“This springtime of yours | Is like a day of rich delight, | A day serene and clear | That comes before the holiday of your life.”’ He raises his face into the broken sunlight once more, appearing to contemplate the imaginary clear day. For a moment he says nothing, then he turns to her again. ‘That’s where I was, when you turned up. “Alla festa di tua vita.”’

  ‘“The holiday of your life.”’

  ‘Festa. Festa, festa, festa,’ he repeats, shaking his head like a parent exhausted by a misbehaving infant. ‘One little word, so many headaches.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because in Italian every Sunday and every festival is a festa. Every holy day is a festa, but holy days and holidays aren’t the same thing. Gaity and solemnity are both in the word festa. It has connotations of liberation and of devotion.’ His hands swoop in small curving motions at the height of his chest, as if he were trying to mould a shape out of smoke. ‘How do you get all that in English, in a single word? No English word is the twin of festa. Holiday is too secular, too carefree. Feast is too ecclesiastical or too gluttonous. Festival suggests extravagance and rarity, whereas you get a festa at least once a week. But what’s left? Sunday? Too chronological, too much of a label, too literal-minded, but perhaps the best approximation. Then again, festa crops up five times in this poem. Five times in fifty-one lines. And five Sundays in fifty-one lines is two or three too many. So sometimes festa is Sunday and sometimes it isn’t. Perhaps that’s the best we can do. But as for the pattern of the poem, the pattern of sounds –’ he goes on, spreading his arms wide, signifying a hopeless cause. ‘Sometimes festa rhymes with another word, sometimes it doesn’t. But I have to abandon rhyme altogether. “Pien di speme e di gioia: | Diman tristezza e noia”. What on earth can I do with that? I can’t do anything with it except show what it means: “Full of hope and of joy: |Tomorrow sadness and boredom”. I can’t devise a rhyme in English, not without bending the meaning. Try to retain the sound and you lose the sense. But the sense must not be lost. The music can go, but not the sense. Sense must prevail,’ he decrees, forefinger raised, as if acting the part of a politician.

  ‘Gladness sadness,’ she proposes, in a sing-song voice, to make it plain that she’s kidding.

  ‘Gladness isn’t joy; sadness should precede boredom; and gladness sadness is a pop song rhyme,’ Mr Morton objects, with an air of apology for finding fault.

  ‘Fun glum.’

  ‘Fun is worse than gladness.’

  ‘And there’s no poetry in glum.’

  ‘None at all,’ says Mr Morton, shaking his head at the space between them, as if the word were a poor bedraggled thing that had deposited itself on the bench beside him.

  ‘It’s complicated. I can see that.’

  ‘Impossibile,’ he declares, making his lips pop on the second syllable.

  ‘Like wrestling with smoke,’ she suggests. ‘Or writing with ink on wet paper. You put something down and straight away it goes all fuzzy.’

  ‘Exactly. Nicely put. Ink on wet paper.’ His hands make diffusing gestures, spreading outwards from his face, and he smiles as if seeing rainbow colours radiating from his fingers.

  Touched by the compliment, she tries to recall when she last met someone whose conversation she so enjoyed, someone with whom she could be pleasant without having to make an effort. She cannot think when it might have been. ‘I’d love to speak Italian,’ she tells him. ‘It must be great to be fluent.’

  ‘It must be,’ he laughs.

  ‘But –’

  ‘I’m not fluent, Stephanie. This is what you might call a labour of love. I can’t think in Italian, not spontaneously. There’s always a gap between me and the language. You understand what I mean?’ he asks, and it seems to matter to him that she should.

  ‘It’s more a costume than a skin.’

  ‘Precisely. Precisely,’ he congratulates her. ‘It’s a costume. A costume I enjoy wearing. I like the way it obliges me to move, I like the way it changes the way I conduct myself. But it’s not a skin, as you say. It’s something separate from me. Whereas German, on the other hand –’

  ‘You speak German?’

  ‘I do. You sound appalled. You have something against German?’

  ‘Well –’

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘No. I’m surprised, that’s all.’

  ‘Why surprised?’

  ‘Because. Well, because Italian sounds so nice, and German –’

  Mr Morton scowls, perhaps genuinely affronted. ‘You speak German?’

  ‘I know what it sounds like.’

  ‘And what does it sound like?’

  ‘Like barking. Auf auf auf.’

  ‘Nonsense. Utter nonsense,’ he rebukes her, but almost gleefully, smacking his hands on his thighs. ‘You can’t hear the sound if you don’t know the meaning.’

  ‘Yes you can.’

  ‘No you can’t. It sounds different when you know the meaning. It’s a beautiful language. Listen,’ he says, lifting a finger as if alerting her to a faint noise in the garden. ‘Oak – die Eiche. Acorn – die Eichel. Squirrel – das Eichhörnchen. Meaning “little oak horn”. From the shape of its ears. That’s the red squirrel, not the grey. It has pointed ears, I believe. Like horns.’

  ‘What’s the word again?’

  ‘E
ichhörnchen.’

  ‘Sounds like the last drops being squeezed out of the shampoo bottle.’

  ‘OK. OK,’ he says, rubbing his hands at the challenge of persuading her, then he recites, ‘“Die Ros’ ist ohn’ Warum, sie blühet, weil sie blühet, |Sie acht’t nicht ihrer selbst, fragt nicht, ob man sie siehet.” Now, does that sound like barking?’ he enquires genially. ‘Does that sound like the dregs of the shampoo bottle?’

  ‘What’s it mean?’

  ‘“There is no why about the rose, it blooms because it blooms, | It pays no attention to itself, and doesn’t care if anyone sees it.” Or words to that effect.’

  ‘Right,’ she says, baffled by the banality of the words, which perhaps she was supposed to hear as a piece of advice, because they were spoken like advice. And again she is troubled by the thought that her father and Mr Morton have discussed her, but troubled only until Mr Morton, assuming a pose and expression of bittersweet resignation, folding his hands on his lap and resting his head on the back of the bench, begins to address the overhanging leaves, in a lighter, quieter voice.

  ‘“Wo wird einst des Wandermüden | Letzte Ruhestätte sein? | Unter Palmen in dem Süden | Unter Linden an dem Rhein?”’ He smiles to himself, seeming to listen to an aftersound of the words. ‘“Where, when I’m tired of wandering, will my final resting place be? Under palm trees in the South? Under lime trees by the Rhine?”’ Now that’s nice, isn’t it?’ he asks, ingenuously, as if he wanted to know that she too had liked the taste of something that he had found delicious. ‘A most melodious kind of barking.’

  ‘Yes. I withdraw the allegation,’ she says, and then she notices a ridge of red in the folds of her sleeve. Surreptitiously she rolls the cuff back over the bloodstained plaster.

  ‘Wandermüden,’ Mr Morton muses, entranced by the word.

  ‘Wandermüden,’ she repeats, teasing the plaster off her arm, exposing the flap of blue-white skin, like a fish’s gill, that covers the longest cut. A gluey little maroon lump comes off with the plaster, and a sudden tear of fresh blood springs out, streaking down to the jutting bone of her elbow.

  ‘Not any old tiredness, you understand. Wandermüden. The specific tiredness that comes from wandering.’

  With her hand clamped to her arm, she edges forward to rummage in the bag for her tissues, and finds there’s only one left in the packet. ‘Mr Morton, I’m sorry,’ she says, pressing the paper over the plaster. ‘I have to go. I just noticed the time.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I have to meet my father,’ she explains.

  ‘Of course. Don’t let me delay you.’

  ‘It was very nice talking to you.’

  ‘And to you.’

  ‘You’re leaving tomorrow?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I hope we bump into each other before you go.’ She blushes and almost swears aloud, appalled by what she’s said, but Mr Morton smiles broadly, giving her his hand.

  ‘I hope we do,’ he tells her, and he closes his other hand lightly over hers. ‘Off you go.’

  At the point on the path where the rose bushes close the bench from view, she looks back and sees Mr Morton, sitting straight-backed with his head held erect and his hands overlapped on the handle of his stick. He appears rather forbidding from here, like a dignitary sitting for an official portrait, and it occurs to her that they would never have talked to each other if he were not blind. Then he puts the stick aside, raises the recorder to his lips and starts speaking, and she walks away.

  In his room, later, Edward writes:

  I am not surprised that the professors have chosen you. You are the perfect person for the job and it’s the perfect job for you. You must accept it and we must talk. I’ll be going home tomorrow, some time in the early afternoon, I think. I expect to be home around five or six o’clock. Could you ring me? I’d like to talk before you go.

  With a spasm of anxiety at the thought of another fractious conversation, his concentration falters. He lifts his hands from the keyboard and, with some effort, recalls what has happened today.

  Work proceeds at a limp, as do I, but the pain in the ankle is lessening by the hour. In the morning I should be able to cast away my stick. I talked to Malcolm’s daughter this morning, in the hotel garden. I liked her, I must say – she’s refreshingly direct, and bright, and she seemed at ease with me right away, as her father did. And she sounds like something of a worrier, as does he. ‘Intense’ was how he described her. He seemed quite proud of this quality, and also a little daunted. They haven’t seen each other for many years. I suspect he’s not finding it easy. When he introduced me to her yesterday I could hear some tension between them. Early days, though. I’m sure it will work out. Somehow I ended up delivering a speech on the allure of the German language, with examples. I think I bored her in the end. She departed rather suddenly.

  He stops typing and plays back what he has written so far. The paragraph about Stephanie is nothing but a chain of remarks. He considers rewriting it, or deleting it, or recounting how he came to be talking to her, then resumes:

  I’ve been remembering our day in Perugia.

  Having stopped again, and jabbed the Delete key thirty or forty or fifty times, he gets up from the table and goes over to the window. Standing in a tepid breeze, in an exiguous fragrance of roses, he recalls their day in Perugia, the city where Claudia has been this week, the city in which she may soon be living. They walked slowly, hand in hand, around the fountain by the cathedral and as they circled the fountain she told him what was carved on its panels. The Labours of the Months, he remembers, and in December a pig is being slaughtered. She described the Palazzo dei Priori, the colour of its stone and its handsome windows. From the stillness of the air in its lee, from the way the voices broke on it, he perceived the bulk of the building. On Corso Vannucci the city seemed to fall open. The sky felt wide and clear above him, and was heavenly blue, said Claudia, the blue of the Virgin’s gown. They passed a hubbub of voices – a group of students, celebrating – on the broad, straight Corso Vannucci, and by a garden they turned to stroll back towards the cathedral. Later in the day they went into a café, somewhere near an arch that covered an alleyway. As he stands at the window, his face pressed into the musty fabric of the curtains, he can hear Claudia’s voice, shouting at the dog that kept shoving their legs as they sat at the table. He can hear her voice so well, it’s as if he were remembering something from this morning, but he would willingly sacrifice this memory, with all these other fragments of that day in Perugia, and thousands of others, in return for one image of Claudia, for the memory of the sight of Claudia as she walks down Corso Vannucci, where they once walked together, amid sounds that have become a swirl of scraps in his mind, mere flakes of sound that are blown around in his mind, signifying Perugia.

  eleven

  Eloni counts the money one last time: with the change that she should have given Mr Morton, and Mr Laidlaw’s tip, there’s now £500. She wraps a rubber band round the bag, then puts the bundle to one side and on an envelope she writes Francesc’s name, and the name of the shop, and its street, bearing hard, as if composing a curse. On a plain white postcard she writes the message: ‘I know where is Eloni Dobra. What is the number of your phone? Please send it to –’ Very carefully, pausing after every letter, she copies the e-mail address that David has given her, then seals the card inside the envelope. She reads the name and the address, and sees in her mind the window of Elite Books, the window of purple glass with nothing in it except a pile of paperbacks on a sheet of silver paper.

  Nauseous, as if it were happening again, she can feel the grip of Francesc’s fingers when he led her through the curtain of silvery chains, which hissed like snakes as they slipped off her shoulders. On the stairs the carpet was straw-coloured and spotted with black patches of chewing gum, like the scars of old sores, and at the turn of the stairs there was a poster taped to the wall, of an Italian motorbike with a naked woman sitting
on it. She sees the purple door with the handle that wasn’t fitted properly, and remembers the sickening smell of patchouli and baby powder when the door was opened. ‘This is yours,’ Francesc said, as if she should thank him for it. In one corner there was a shower, with sliding plastic screens that were streaked with mould, and the window was so dirty she thought she was looking at clouds. There was a metal chair and the only other thing in the room was the bed, its mattress wrapped in a black plastic sheet. It reminded her of a shroud wrapped round a corpse, and as she looked at it she understood, or could no longer pretend not to understand. And then the man came in, and she can see him now as if he were here: his hair combed sideways over his scalp and the backs of his hands and his arms all tattooed, and his horrible round belly sticking out like a soft white balloon. Francesc, his leg braced against the doorway, looked at her and lit a cigarette, then he took her bag away, everything she had brought from home, and straight away the tattooed man was grabbing at her breasts.

  She weighs the packet of money in her hand, the money she has gathered like a prisoner scraping at the walls of a cell with a spoon, digging out crumbs of brick every day. She hides it, and drops the envelope into her bag. The sound of an explosion makes her look up. On the TV a girl in an inadequate red bikini is standing on a beach, looking at a motor boat which is cruising through sparkly water, close to the shore. The camera admires her body, moves in for a closer look at her face, and the boat explodes in a ball of fire. Pulling at her hair, the girl runs towards the water.

  All the time she has been conscious of her parents watching from the photograph on the wall. Now she faces them. There they are, standing side by side in a street near her father’s workshop. Her father, serious as a statue, is holding a bottle of olive oil in both hands, while her mother shields her eyes from the sun and tries to smile. In the shadow of her hand her mother’s eyes are narrowed, as if what she saw was not her daughter holding the camera but her daughter walking away, far off. In the background there is the bridge and goats are grazing on the other side of the river. In the picture the grass is the colour of sand and the sky is white with heat. When she closes her eyes she can see the mountain trembling under a sky so bright you cannot find the sun in it; she can hear the sound of the goats’ bells, the ceaseless distant clanking, and she can remember standing with Filip and peering at the herd through the shimmering air, before they went home, where her parents’ friends were gathering. The mother and father of Spiro, who was living near Florence, they were there, and the parents of Andreas, who was in Belgium somewhere, and the mother of Alex, who had phoned from Naples and later from Düsseldorf, and then nobody knew what had happened to him. For half a year there had been not a word and his mother had started to become strange because of it. Whatever Alex’s mother was doing, you could tell she was thinking of her son. You saw her sitting on the step of her house, staring at a page of a magazine, or in the shop, reading the words on a jar for minutes on end, or simply standing in the street, looking at nothing you could see, and you knew that she was thinking of him. At the end of the meal Alex’s mother took her arm and guided her to a corner of the room, where she kissed her and told her that she would pray for her. They both started crying and that was when her own mother started crying too. Perhaps something has been heard from Alex by now, she hopes, and she tells herself that she must write a letter to her parents this week, instead of waiting until she has some money to send. She must write to them, even though she will have to tell them lies in her letter, and it always shames her that she cannot tell them what her life has been in England, just as it shames her that she cannot send the money she promised she would send, and it shames her that she does not long for her home as often as she thought she would, when all those people came to her parents’ apartment and they talked about the day when she would come back.