Trials of the Monkey

by Matthew Chapman

  It took me less than a year to get thrown out of the next school, a small secondary modern in a nearby village. I have few memories of the place. It was ugly, it was school. I don’t even remember why I was expelled, but when I asked my father if he could remember, he thought for a moment and then said, ‘I think it had something to do with a bus.’ And I think he was right. I remember an altercation of some kind and the face of a startled middle-aged woman with permed hair and pointed glasses, but that is all. The vivid memories I do have of that year, as you will probably have come to expect by now, are of a sexual nature.

  But I won’t go into them in any detail. Suffice to say, the school ‘slut,’ so named for wanting what everyone else wanted and getting it with honesty and enthusiasm, became pregnant after an encounter with me in a haystack. She was the daughter of a lorry driver and not a great beauty above the collarbone.

  An abortion was clearly indicated, but I visualised my father’s strained but polite face as he looked from me to the girl and back again while I explained my urgent need for money. Nor was it hard to imagine, once the excruciating encounter was over, the scathing comments from my mother, as soon as the necessary libation had been uncorked and consumed.

  I sent away for a book, available through Exchange & Mart, which listed merchant ships in need of crew. Ever the hero, I had decided to bolt.

  Figuring the girl was pregnant anyway, I had her as often as I could. I told her I was working on an abortion plan and daily checked the mail for news of ships leaving out of Southampton. Whether my ever more vigorous (desperate) lovemaking brought on an early miscarriage, or if it was a hysterical pregnancy in the first place, I do not know, but one morning I arrived at school to be told that all was well again. I gave up plans for a life in the Merchant Marine and set about destroying the last remnants of an education.

  Whatever caused me to get kicked out must have been relatively serious, because I was already in the educational gutter. To get washed into the drain took some doing. In my case, the case of a spoiled middle-class boy, the drain came in the form of the Università Per Stranieri, an exotically named language school operated out of a cubic palazzo, the Palazzo Galenga, in Perugia, Italy.

  My parents had given up. In less than a year I could go to work. Here was a place to tread water.

  The school was attended largely by young Americans and English either in between school and university or, in the case of some females, as an alternative to the more expensive European finishing schools.

  At first I lived with a family, an old couple who had a beautiful twenty-three-year-old daughter. About a month after I was there I discovered a small circular shaft connecting my room and the bathroom next door. It was an empty pipe through which a speaking tube had once passed. On either side of the thin wall were two metal caps, retained in a bracket by a single twist. There was even a handle on each cap to help you get it off. I removed the one in the bathroom, hid it, and placed some items around the hole to distract attention but not to obstruct my view of the bath. I went to my room and ran a test. With the cap on my side removed, a two-inch-diameter cylinder provided an excellent view of the bathroom and in particular, the bath.

  It was still light when I heard the daughter go in to take her bath before going out for the evening. I slowly unscrewed my cap, slid it down the wall a few millimetres and, through a wary crescent, watched as she undressed. As the crescent was so small, I assimilated her in sections, but, as I put the pieces together, it seemed she had the body of Italy itself, timeless and classic, the form of a statue in the Uffizi: a long slender neck, sloping shoulders, small breasts, a high waist swelling to broad hips whose sweeping outer line had all the elegance of a swan. She was so beautiful I began to sweat. I wanted to see more, wanted to see her whole. She stepped into the bath. I lowered the cap and pressed my eye closer.

  I felt the cap sliding from my fingers.

  I fumbled for it. It scraped against the wall and fell. The daughter’s head snapped toward me. Her elbows flew toward each other across her breasts. I had drawn the drapes in my room, but they were thin. If I removed my eye from the hole, light would shine through from my side and make the hole glaringly visible on hers. However, if I kept my eye in place, light from her side might be powerful enough to penetrate the tube and illuminate my terrified eyeball at the other end.

  She stared at the hole, unmoving, intent. I stared back. The expression on her face could have been one of uncertainty or ‘I see you back there, you filthy little testa di cazzo, and I’m going to stare at you until you take your eye away from that hole and cap it.’

  Thirty seconds passed like this. I was afraid to blink. Her stillness, the intensity of her expression, her attitude of outraged modesty was a magnificent rebuke, if she could see me; but I still wasn’t sure. Finally, out of courtesy to her, if indeed she was seeing me, I looked away to study another part of the bathroom. The movement of my eyeball must have sent a reflection back down the tube because it was at this point that she began to scream.

  I capped the hole and went out for the evening.

  In the morning, the hole was glued shut and the atmosphere was chilly. The daughter had left for work already. The parents moved about, their heads bowed, their eyes never meeting mine.

  That day, before they could write a letter to my parents, I met an Italian student who was looking for someone with whom to share an apartment. I called my parents and conned them into paying my half. The Italian was almost never there, he had a girlfriend he stayed with most nights, so at the age of fifteen I essentially had my own place. It had a large kitchen at the back and two bedrooms at the front divided from each other by a wood partition which stopped a few feet short of the ceiling so that both rooms could benefit from the single fan swaying on its stalk above.

  I settled in to enjoy the remaining months of my education.

  Perugia was a town perched on a series of hills overlooking the Umbrian Valley. In one form or another it had been there since at least 300 B.C. Once you had climbed up its winding streets you reached a plateau. The main street ran from a cathedral at one end to a small park with views of the valley at the other. In the evening, for an hour or two before dinner, the inhabitants of the city and the many students (there was also an Italian university in the town) promenaded up and down this street, stopping now and then for coffee or a drink at one of several outdoor cafés. It was, for younger people, an extended flirtation conducted by the play of eyes, the torment of feigned indifference and the relief of an over-the-shoulder glance, a one-second flash of teeth, dark eyes fixing on you, and then the hair again. And on she walks, her final message of solace and encouragement sent by the sway of her large hips.

  I learned enough Italian to get by and then started to travel the country. It was hard to hitch out of Perugia because the roads that came down off it, like veins from the pupil of an eyeball, had no final intent. Only when you reached the base could you find the road that led to the highways. To walk down off the hill was exhausting so I took to stealing scooters, which I would ride out of town until they ran out of gas. I would then hitch wherever the mood took me. I started with small trips, to Florence and Rome, both of which were only a hundred or so miles away, but eventually I hitched the country from one end to the other, up to Venice in the north and down to Naples and Sicily in the south. Often I went alone, sometimes with friends, once with two English girls. I drank wine until I vomited and hitched until I fell asleep. I saw hills sparkling with fireflies and skies alive with shooting stars. I woke with the smell of Italy in my nostrils, farm land, eucalyptus, wild rosemary, heat.

  It was one of the most vivid periods of my life; but it was also hard. I was younger than the other students, fifteen to their eighteen to twenty. The women were old enough to be intimidating, but not experienced or confident enough to want a boy lover.

  I only slept with three and three-quarter women.

  One was a striking American, one was English, and one was a be
autiful French girl. The last was a woman from Australia whom I met in the final week of my stay.

  She was pretty, if a little overweight, and I remember thinking as I sat drinking with her in a bar, how kind she seemed. We came back to my place and it was only when I had her on the edge of the bed and pulled up her skirt that I noticed one of her legs was an odd shade of pink and had a hinge in it.

  ‘Is it going to bother you?’ she asked, looking at me with a hopeful but slightly ashamed expression, as if she should have told me before we came up the stairs.

  ‘Not at all,’ I replied gallantly, partly out of politeness, partly out of genuine compassion, and partly—well, she was willing and I was fifteen and one leg more or less was both literally and figuratively beside the point. She unstrapped the limb and slid it off the stump. It was a plastic limb and made a skittering noise as it hit the wooden floor.

  On I jumped and was, I’m sure, as clumsy as usual, with less to cling to, more so. However, she at least was grateful if not satisfied and afterwards we lay for a long time in each other’s arms, two incomplete people staring at the ceiling.

  I had the fear.

  Not fear in the specific—not a moment of explicable fear— but a malaise as physical as mental, a constant unease, fear like that vast fungus which extends for miles underground.

  By way of illustration:

  Carlo was a student at the regular university, one of those demented Italian intellectuals, intense and fanatical one minute, full of seductive bonhomie the next, Communist one month, anarchist the next. He had a twitchy, defensive charm that went well with his lank dark hair and black beard. People found him odd, but they liked him.

  One day, Carlo did not turn up for class. For several days, none of his fellow students saw him. No one knew where he was. Before passeggio, as the evening walk was called, students gathered on the broad steps of the cathedral. Sometimes there would be a couple of hundred divided into groups, discussing the potential of the oncoming night. One evening, a week after Carlo’s disappearance, a friend of his, Guiseppe, came up the steps toward us. He was accompanied by a young man. Both looked sombre. Guiseppe informed us that Carlo was dead. He had been killed by a car while riding his motorcycle home to visit his mother. The young man, a friend of Carlo’s from his hometown, had brought the news. We were shocked and sad. For all his intensity, there was, thinking of him in retrospect, something frail and vulnerable about Carlo. He had the quality of a neglected child, impudent not out of arrogance but out of necessity.

  For the next few days Guiseppe and his friend were often around. The friend was clean-shaven and always wore a beret and dark glasses. When you spoke to him, he smiled and shrugged but rarely said anything. Sometimes when we talked about Carlo, it was with affection, at other times with humour.

  After a week or so we stopped talking about him and a few days after that the clean-shaven young man came up the steps of the cathedral and removed his dark glasses and beret.

  It was Carlo.

  The whole thing, he told us, had been an ‘intellectual exercise.’ He wanted to witness the effect of his own death, wanted, as it were, to attend his own funeral. It was amusing, nothing more. I did not believe this. I believed his purpose was to assess his value in the world, to see if he could see himself reflected in the mirror of our grief. He needed his funeral eulogy in advance when it could still do him some good.

  I could have used an affirmation of some kind myself, something to repudiate my growing conviction that I was, and always would be, completely insignificant. I looked at the future and saw no place for myself out there. I was middle class but had, by rejecting education, closed the doors which would otherwise have led to opportunity and contact with my own. I had fewer qualifications than the average factory apprentice, but unlike him was denied the fellowship of the working class.

  As the time approached for my return to England, to return a man ready for work, my nerve was failing me. I travelled the country alone, often through areas infested with rural Mafia, and, . in spite of often blistering reviews, continued my attempts at coital adequacy, but for all this, and all my public display of arrogance and bravado, when I was alone, I could no longer hide from myself this great unease. I was a prisoner who had struggled for ten years to escape. Free at last, I found myself bewildered, an agoraphobic awash in space: how could I know which way to run when there was no wall to bash my head against?

  I lay there with my incomplete antipodean, thinking about these last six months and the ten-year war preceding it. In most respects I’d won. For someone my age—never mind a descendant of Charles Darwin—I was staggeringly ignorant. I couldn’t spell or do long division, and if you asked me if Vladivostok was the capital of Poland or a Russian poet, I’d be completely, well … stumped.

  Yes, I’d done okay. Here I was, after all, rewarded for my academic failure by a six-month sojourn in Italy. But, putting aside justifiable pride in my anti-achievement, I had also, though I hated to admit it, been hurt. What charm I’d had as a child was replaced by the alternating cowardice and drunken swagger of the lost. That was the victory of the schools.

  Through the open window, I could hear a boisterous group of English and American students making their way up the steep street below. These were young men and women with prospects —you could hear it in every self-assured laugh, in every braying shout; these were the good children, captains of teams, winners by reflex, the entitled. And I would never be one of them, never join that community of ease. At least in mind, I’d always be elsewhere, lying in the dark with a cripple in my arms.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Sediment in the Mouth

  Gale Johnson looks like one of those young moms you see in commercials selling washing powder. She’s in her thirties and the prettiest woman I’ve met in Dayton so far, blonde with big eyes set among freckles. She has kept herself in shape.

  We are having lunch at the Peking Palace on the highway and I’m secreting charm from every moonshine-and-guilt-polluted pore in the hopes of wresting a script or video from her which will allow me to pretend—if I have to—that I saw the play. But there is a gulf between us. She is nervous and defencive and my charm machine is not operating at full capacity on account of my hangover. I sense—and this will later be confirmed—that Gale has ‘lived,’ and has in consequence developed a certain intuitive suspicion of men like me. I am in my best clothes and I am shaved, but the sinner is still visible to Gale and it reminds her of things she’d rather forget.

  Gale and her husband, Carter, are Presbyterians, as William Jennings Bryan was. She was born in Abington, Pennsylvania, but when she was eight moved with her family to Fort Lauderdale, where her father owned a TV repair shop. She and Carter have been in Dayton for seven years, having been sent here to ‘plant’ a church. They don’t have a church building of their own yet, renting one instead from the Methodists. When she first came here, she found it dreary. They were outsiders and had a hard time attracting a congregation. Their congregation is now around eighty. It’s been eighty for a couple of years now.

  One of the elders in the church said maybe they were trying to ‘grow corn in a bean field,’ meaning Rhea County is a Baptist and Church of God area, which makes Presbyterianism a hard sell.

  There are two branches of Presbyterianism, she tells me, Presbyterian Church of America and Presbyterian Church, USA. Their branch is the former, referred to as PCA, and is the less liberal of the two. In trying to describe what her branch believes, Gale mentions Calvin and the five points of Calvinism.

  ‘What are the five points of Calvinism?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, there’s the TULIP. Let me see if I can remember them, ’cause I was raised as a Baptist and came to this late in life … Total depravity of man …’

  ‘That’s the starting point?’

  ‘That’s the T of TULIP, yes.’

  We’re in trouble here. Total depravity of man?! This is too close to the bone.

  ‘The U is
er … unconditional … I’m not sure what the U is … I wish my husband was here, he could tell you.’

  ‘Unconditional something,’ I offer.

  ‘Anyway, where we differ from Baptists is in the idea of election—that man left to himself would never choose God because in his unregenerate state he has no desire for God and so God in his grace and mercy reaches out to you … There’s a drawing of the Holy Spirit and you can’t resist it.’

  ‘You think that’s true?’ I ask. ‘Seems to me man has a great desire for God.’

  ‘Do I think that’s true?’

  ‘Well,’ I say, laughing, ‘I guess you do, of course.’

  Gale says she believes God put a desire for a general kind of spirituality in man, but that’s very different from wanting Jesus Christ. ‘And so they’ll search to fill that void and that’s where you get some really wacky philosophies and religions, false religions.’

  She tells me about her own life, how as a child in Fort Lauderdale, she went to church, but when she got into high school, she rejected it all.

  ‘Were you a wild kid in high school?’ I ask.

  ‘Yeah,’

  ‘Drugs, pre-marital sex, the whole thing?’

  She nods affirmatively, but moves quickly on, telling me how she became an actress, did some dinner theatre, and then went to New York. She found New York exciting, ‘a lot of incredible beauty and talent, but I couldn’t handle the pain that I was seeing, the people sleeping out on the park benches with a newspaper for a blanket.’ It got so bad she couldn’t ride the subway anymore. She says God intervened and led her to question the meaning of life and of her part in it. She would go to auditions and there would be 5,000 actors trying out for a single part. She imagined herself in twenty years, living in a tenement apartment, having achieved nothing. ‘And so I turned my back on theatre and I gave it up, I came back home to North Carolina, where my family was living. I spent a long time searching and praying, ‘What do you want me to do with my life?’