Questions of Travel

by Michelle De Kretser

  Two nights before she left for Naples, she was with him when the phone rang. He said, “That’s for you.”

  Meera Bryden was so sorry she hadn’t been in touch sooner, a million things had come up, she had no idea why she had ever agreed to edit this magazine, she must have been bonkers. But she had loved Laura’s piece about the cathedral in Strasbourg. Had she said how utterly chilling she found it? And so original. She loved it, really, and was so sorry she couldn’t run it, they had done the city’s famous Christmas market last year. But now it appeared that Laura was going to Naples, how clever of her, the Mezzogiorno was the coming destination. Meera would love to run a feature on Puglia or Sicily—something a trifle less cerebral than Laura’s Strasbourg piece, a touch more sensual? At the magazine they had been thinking about food, the simple, earthy dishes of the south, people adored reading about eating in exotic locations and you could run such glorious photos. Was Laura by any chance tempted…?

  Theo insisted on accompanying her to Heathrow. When Laura’s flight was called, he produced a parcel from his pack. “Not to be opened before Naples.”

  She tore at it as soon as her seatbelt was fastened. The steward, touching the back of each row of seats as he passed down the aisle on a last check before takeoff, paused when he spotted the passenger cradling something red. He realized that she was crying quietly over a teapot. The things people brought on board! That spout could very well put out an eye.

  Laura, 1990s

  THE LAST BAG FROM the London flight was claimed in Naples, and Laura was left alone. The carousel looped past again, a melancholy rubber stream. She might have stayed there forever, or taken the first flight back, but a uniformed figure approached. Officials spoke into walkie-talkies; Laura filled out forms; it was foolish, she was telling herself, to think in terms of signs. Then a panel in the wall slid open like magic: a man in overalls emerged. He handed Laura her case. It had been retrieved from the tarmac where it had fallen, unnoticed, from a trailer.

  By the time the airport bus pulled in, Naples stood in a brownish, benzene dusk. What had Laura expected? Arias, gunfire, the ghosts of centurions perhaps, certainly her pocket explored by the expert hand. Circles of traffic tightened and hummed. Just a short walk, said the letter Vivienne had sent with a map. But there were two men beside Laura, one offering a Discman, the other a mobile phone. She shook them off and began to make her way through the crowd, between folding tables on which were set out socks, combs, pocketknives, cheap, useful things. A shadow came whispering of hashish and a hotel. Laura walked faster, tried to look purposeful and knowing. An enormous square had been dug up and barriers erected around the excavations. She had to cross it—but how? An iron hand seized her arm: it had prevented her from stepping in front of a bus. Laura thanked, wanted to cry, fled into a narrow street. The evening had deepened. Large spots of rain came padding. A bouquet of umbrellas materialized, thrust at her by a dark man. There were few streetlights and no pavement. She put up the hood of her jacket. A cat cried thinly under a parked car. The rain slanted and steadied. Laura’s shoes were sodden, then her feet. Her wheeled case lurched over flagstones, always one heavy step behind, a club-footed stalker from an evil dream. A shining electric eye flew straight at her—she flattened herself against hard-hearted stone. The Vespa sped past, spraying laughter. Then there was a shrine enclosing a rouged and solid Infant: a trashy brooch pinned to a wet, black façade. Its neon illuminated the name of a piazza that Laura spent minutes failing to find on her map. She went on, past the sound of someone coughing. There was always another square or another crossroad, there was always a scooter coming fast out of the dark.

  A photograph of Sophia Loren adorned the window of a pizzeria. To enter would require courage, because the restaurant was crowded and Laura was wet. She trudged on, and came to a door, flush with the street, that swung noiselessly back. There was fragrance and gilt: a seraglio or a church. Laura turned a corner and before her, like a vision, a flight of shallow steps led to an archway surmounted by a bell. She knew that she was lost. She knew that she loved this place.

  Laura had time and occasion enough, during the months that followed, when she was lonely, when the temperature and her spirits dipped, to marvel at her sympathy with the city. It was inexplicable. Naples was indefensible: a callous city, a raddled grande dame with filth under her nails.

  Vivienne’s flat, reached across a courtyard filled with motorbikes and cars, was on the fourth floor of a former palazzo. A mechanic’s workshop gave on to the street. Ghost voices slipped under the noise of revving. Since you consult only your emotions, Vanessa, I must urge you to consider the nature of Salvatore’s relations with our grandmother. Between advice about spare keys and plumbing, Vivienne’s letter had mentioned a whispering wall. It just means Signora Florescu’s watching one of her soaps. Her living room’s bang up against mine, and she watches telly at all hours with the sound turned right up. She’s from Romania or one of those places—harmless and quite mad.

  Bea Morley came for a visit, and it was plain to Laura that her friend was appalled. She could be formidable, tall Bea. She pushed her long fair fringe away from her face and stalked about the streets saying little and sucking in her cheeks. Her mood was catching. Wishing to convey the city’s attractions, Laura found herself enumerating flaws. The traffic didn’t stop for pedestrians, the post office had run out of stamps, she had lost her sunglasses to a pickpocket, damp afternoons brought the scent of drains, the traffic didn’t stop for red lights, there were battalions of stray dogs, she had lost her keys to a pickpocket, rubbish lay rotting on the pavements, the traffic didn’t stop for ambulances, the headlines were proclaiming another Mafia murder, and the window in Vivienne’s bathroom was stuck.

  On Bea’s last morning, they walked past newsstands patchworked with images of a dead woman. Bea had described the hillock of flowers outside Kensington Palace. “You couldn’t joke about it. People you’d have sworn were sane took offence. But the funeral was brilliant—about the time they were getting to the abbey, I drove from Notting Hill to Battersea in only fifteen minutes. I must say I wouldn’t mind a royal shuffling off every week.”

  They were on their way to a collection of pictures housed in a monastery. Afterwards, Laura opened a door at the foot of a flight of stairs. They went through into a cloister. It was lush with overgrown oranges, loquats, figs. Weather, working at the walls, had turned them a creamy yellow—the color of fading gardenias, said Laura. The leaves of the orange trees were as glossy and distinct as if cut from green tin. That evening, on the station platform, surrounded by shouts, clanking, an aria oozing from the tannoy, the squeak of sneakered feet, Bea said that she would always remember the cloister. “A wonderful place.” She couldn’t understand why Laura kept complaining about Naples. “You’re so lucky to live here,” said Bea.

  Other cities—Venice, Rome, Florence—offered riches to the casual eye. Naples chose secrets and revelations. Laura learned to follow the dingy street, to descend the unpromising stair. There would be a vaulted ceiling, or a family feasting on melons under a pergola, there would be the trace of a fresco or a damaged stone face. A dull thoroughfare brought a red-robed saint with an arrow in her breast—Laura turned her head and saw the painting propped in the window of a bank. So it was to be a day bracketed by Caravaggios: she had sat before another in the cold blast of a church that morning. There was no end, it seemed, to these stagings of discovery. Wrong turnings took Laura to an industrial zone near the port; every truck, slow with freight, coughed in her face. Then came a row of grimy archways and, waiting in the depths of each one, the sea. It was polluted and shining. Laura remembered the treasure hunts of childhood: mysteries, astonishments, gifts that weren’t delivered but earned.

  Donald Fraser, passing through London that Easter, had amazed his wife, his daughter and himself by presenting Laura with a digital camera. Over the years, he had sent Laura checks at enigmatic intervals for inscrutable sums: £27, say, followed, fi
ve weeks later, by £1143. What calculation they represented not even Donald could have said; an impulse would, over two or three days, become an imperative before which he meekly gave way. On the latest occasion, he had gone into a duty-free shop at Changi Airport intending to buy himself a camera. He went on believing this until the moment when the sales assistant asked to see his boarding pass; as he handed it over, Donald realized that he was going to give the camera to his daughter. He had seen Laura four or five times in ten years, usually in London, once in Geneva. Now came the lacerating thought of his child far from reach and defenseless in the grinding world. Lines from a poem learned as a boy roamed about his brain: “Come back! Come back!” he cried in grief, / “Across this stormy water…” He was a scientist, a rational man. But he had buried one of his tall sons. At the duty-free counter, stalked by air-freshener and electronic pop, Donald felt the weight of that coffin on his shoulder. It brought the conviction, lunatic and absolute, that a digital camera would keep his girl safe.

  Jet lag, diagnosed the anesthetist when he confessed. She remarked that she had some very nice perfume samples that even Laura would love. But Donald—although he took the hint and bought his wife a pint of Poison on the London leg of their flight—held to his intent.

  Reunited with his child in a hotel in Kensington, he was overcome by a familiar distaste. Distance diminished and enhanced his last-born. She shrank in memory, an illusion instantly dispelled by the sight of her too, too solid flesh. Her hair was cunningly piled and fastened with opalescent combs, but as she bent her head over the duty-free bag, Donald saw that it was threaded with gray. It was, at first, a sign that made no sense. A full five seconds passed before he grasped that the runt was no longer young. And by some runtish trick of transference it was the desertion of Donald’s own full-bodied prime that she thus contrived to convey. She was smiling at him, and delight placed a girlish mask over her face. But the finger hooked across the camera displayed a ridged nail. A trapped thing in Donald’s chest was hurling itself against its cage.

  That year the camera was often in Laura’s hands, a weighty silver charm. In Naples, she applied a pearly coral polish to her toenails and photographed the unflattering result. She photographed her red teapot and a yellow dish of blue plums. From day to day, she recorded the changing, textured splatters of pigeon shit on the crinkled tiles under the kitchen window. There was a compulsive quality to all this. Laura photographed Vivienne’s Indian quilt: lilac flowers on a cucumber-green ground. She photographed the dancing bronze god on the TV, the mirrorwork cushion on a chair. Meera Bryden sent her to Sicily to write about the island’s sweets. Oh, Palermo, capital of ice cream and murder! In streets end-stopped by a stony mountain, Laura Fraser breakfasted on cannoli. She photographed them first, along with sweet, pistachio-flavored couscous. There were almond biscuits, cassata, and a pig’s blood and chocolate pudding—but she couldn’t photograph the pudding, it was out of season.

  Images uploaded and viewed on a laptop had a particular luminosity: colors fresh from the brush, radiant and wet. Rather shyly, Laura emailed Donald Fraser a few photos of Vivienne’s flat. There was no reply. Messages came in from Theo, from friends here and there on the planet, from the Wayfarer, from strangers offering get-rich schemes or sex. A new form of suspense had come into the world: everywhere, the profits of telephone companies increased as more and more people dialed up and watched a screen, waiting to see if an electronic mailbox filled with a sequence of colored squares.

  In Lincoln, Vivienne Morley’s father recovered from surgery, grew strong. But Vivienne had fallen in love—deeply, life-changingly—with a girl called Gin. She was to have returned to Naples at the end of the year but now wondered if Laura would like to stay until the following summer. Laura’s emailed reply carried a photo of an ecstatic bronze dance.

  An anniversary came, the first day of Laura’s thirty-fourth year. Birthdays are a time of reckoning and wishes. Laura spent hers writing about marzipan and a cake called the Triumph of Gluttony. “Luna Rossa,” played on an accordion, was persecuting diners at the end of the street. Long after she shut down her laptop, Laura’s thoughts were still of transience and sugar. She ate a pastry cloud stuffed with cinnamon-scented ricotta. Then she ate another. On waking, she had photographed the view from her bedroom: a concrete wall on a dank day. Why had she bothered? She owned three rings, a silver band, a lump of amber, a round red sparkler of faceted glass. Wearing them in the street was asking for trouble. She turned them on her fingers. The evening held the knowledge of passing unnoticed in the world. Where was the gaze that would gather up her worthlessness and invest it with loving sense?

  In the courtyard, a man was whistling. Phantom insinuations arrived through the wall: But, Assunta, my dear, we are all strapped to fortune’s wheel. Why do you speak of betrayal? On the day the world learned of Diana’s death, someone had banged on Laura’s door. Beyond the safety chain, an old woman scarcely taller than a child stood sobbing. Signora Florescu’s Italian, stressed in all the wrong places, was a puzzle in which the dead woman’s name recurred. She was crying for her: that much was plain. Laura put her arm around her neighbor—the bent neck was surprisingly thick. Placed in a chair and offered tea, the signora only cried harder. She picked up a cushion and blotted her face; afterwards, snot glistened on the mirrorwork. Laura put a saucepan of water on to boil. It took forever, and she wanted to weep. Signora Florescu had reverted to her own tongue, but Laura knew exactly what she was saying. Diana didn’t come into it: she was only shorthand for the unbearable sadness of being. Laura could tell, because the same shapeless grief was working in her. “Back teeth together!” she urged. She had intended a light note, audible only to herself, but it came out ringing. The water changed its tune, and Signora Florescu raised her white head—she really was powerfully ugly. A wrinkled child, she stuck out her tongue.

  On Laura’s birthday, the signora’s TV kept up its whispered assault: I may be your teacher, Massimo, but I am a woman first. And now another year has ended. Laura countered it by cranking up the volume on Vivienne’s boombox. A boy sang, Hallelujah! Hallelujah! His voice had always been unearthly; now he, too, had joined the dead. Laura Fraser sat alone, and turned her heavy rings, and wished what everyone wishes.

  Ravi, 1990s

  HIS FRIEND NIMAL COREA had been headhunted away from the university by an online agency that found accommodation for tourists in local homes. RealLanka was the creation of one of Nimal’s former students: a singularly dull boy, a surgeon’s son. His father had provided the seed funding and introduced the boy to backers who promised more. Nimal abandoned his master’s degree, and moved to Colpetty to design and develop the agency’s website on twice what the university had paid him. That still wasn’t very much, but he was unable to help boasting that his stock options would make him rich when the company was floated. He posted a back issue of Wired to Ravi and swore that they would work together again on web design. “Our portals will capture the most eyeballs,” he enthused.

  There was another unsettling development. An Englishwoman had arrived to take up an executive position at the NGO, and one of those sudden, intense friendships had flared between Malini and the newcomer. Freda Hobson’s father was English, and she had grown up in Surrey, but her mother’s people were Jaffna Tamils. “She’s one of us,” said Malini. But she corrected herself at once: “No, she’s different.” Then she laughed.

  She had her lovely wavy hair cut short. The size of her ears was revealed. Contemplating itself in the mirror, her smile was a little forced.

  She had new clothes—jeans, a silky blouse—that had once belonged to Freda. There was also a skirt, blue with orange pockets and an orange band around the hem. It was perfectly decent and it suited Malini. But Ravi didn’t like seeing her in it. Acknowledging this was unreasonable, he disliked the skirt even more.

  Whenever Freda was mentioned, Ravi pictured a white woman with red elbows. Then they met, at last. The eyes were even darker tha
n the skin, but their brown was haunted by purple. A hand covered in rings squeezed: “Ravi! How super! I’ve been simply longing to meet you,” said Freda Hobson. And, “Malini, darling, we’ve had masses of support for your idea for the refuge. Repeat after me: I am a genius and a goddess.” Her beauty was as extravagant as her way of speaking, and Ravi mistrusted both. He had recognized her at once: here was another rearranger.

  Ravi’s research into fractals was progressing slowly—he couldn’t see the point. Nimal was confident that the following year, or the one after that, Ravi and he would be able to set up their web development company; their user interfaces would be unbeatable, stylish yet powerfully simple. But Professor Frog-Face wanted Ravi to apply for a scholarship, so that he could do a doctorate abroad; he kept Ravi standing in his office while he described his future. Ravi understood that if he spent his life at his desk and bullied his colleagues for thirty years, he stood a very good chance of turning into Frog-Face.

  The professor liked to select protégés among his students: young men who were bright but not overly so. He treated them with light scorn, and expected obedience—they were his sons, in other words. He had directed each step of Ravi’s career, even intervening to ensure that the university’s website was entrusted to Ravi and Nimal. It was not that Frog-Face cared about websites, for he held all applied science in contempt, but he was delivering a snub. Who could stand the head of Computer Science? The man was in the habit of folding and unfolding his hands! A note was carried to the vice-chancellor’s office reminding him that a website involved the prestige of the university, and that Mathematics took precedence over modish, upstart disciplines. The vice-chancellor had married Frog-Face’s daughter—he was in a weak position.