by David Plante
He was thoughtful again. “Yes, I think she has. I know she was once asked by an editor to do an article, and she was very enthusiastic, but when she submitted it, it was found to be unpublishable. This was a great shock to her. She believed, then, that she didn’t have the talent.”
“I wonder if her realization that she didn’t have talent changed her from the bright, charming, young woman everyone says she was to the dark woman I know her as.”
“She lives in terms of others’ creativity. She has no illusions about being creative herself.”
I said, “I suppose she’s simply killed it in herself.”
While Sonia was on one of her business trips to London, a mutual friend rang me to say that she was in hospital. He wasn’t sure what had happened; she’d been in terrible pain, was taken to hospital, operated on and found to be bleeding internally, but the doctors didn’t know what caused the bleeding. However, the friend said, it wasn’t grave. Sonia didn’t want anyone to visit her in hospital. I realized she would not want anyone to see her suffering, even, perhaps, to know she was suffering.
When, weeks later, she came to dinner, she hardly spoke; she drank two glasses of wine and smoked two cigarettes. She left early.
Then I heard she was in hospital again.
Out of hospital, she moved into a hotel. I rang her there. Her voice sounded alarmingly like that of a little girl. Anxious, I went to the hotel. That little girl’s voice told me to come in when I knocked on her door.
She was in bed. She was very thin. In her gaunt, distorted face, the skin around the sockets of her eyes sunk in, her teeth were large and yellow. Shocked, I leaned towards her and kissed her and I sobbed. When I drew back she was smiling; her entire face appeared to be a smile. She suddenly looked very beautiful.
I sat by her bed. I did not know if I should refer to her state, if she’d prefer I didn’t; then I thought she of course would have seen it, would have seen it as a fact that had to be accepted for what it was, and I might ask her about her condition as unsentimentally, as matter-of-factly as she had accepted it. I asked, simply, “How are you, Sonia?” “Well,” she said, “either I’ll survive or I’ll die, and though of course we’re all faced with either, in my case the either/or will be decided in a very short time. Now tell me about the house in Italy.”
I told her stories about the house to make her laugh. When I invited a mutual friend to come stay with me, I told her, he had said, “I think I’ll wait till after Sonia’s second visit.” She laughed, perhaps out of appreciation of my wanting to make her laugh.
Then she said, “I’m very tired.”
From Tulsa, I wrote letters to her, one long one about Germaine Greer, who was also at the University of Tulsa.
In early December, in Tulsa, I received a telephone call from London to tell me that Sonia had died that morning. The mutual friend who called was hardly able to speak for weeping. Sonia had bequeathed her organs to the hospital for research; apart from that she had left no instructions as to what was to be done with her body after her death.
I couldn’t do anything during the day. In the evening, I went to a friend’s for dinner. Germaine was there.
I said, “Sonia died today.”
Germaine said nothing. All evening, while I silently listened, she and our friend sang madrigals.
GERMAINE
1
The year Sonia stayed with me in Italy, I did not see Germaine again, after we visited her, until the end of the summer. When I did, she suggested to me that I drive back to London with her. She said, “I’m going to go non-stop, not even to eat. We stop only for petrol and to pee.” I had a plane ticket, which I sold for £20.
She said I should close down my stone house and join her in hers on the other side of the mountain for the few days before we left. I waited for her under the pergola of my house, my duffle bag packed; she drove up a road like a rutted dry river bed to collect me, then she drove on similar roads over the mountain.
Her house, long and narrow, with window boxes of white petunias, was high up, in the midst of its beautifully tended garden of all-white flowers. From the garden you looked out over the lower chestnut-covered mountains.
When we arrived we found a baby, about a year and a half old, at a table under the fig tree, playing with finger paints. The baby was slopping green paint on to a shiny piece of wet paper, her hands covered to the wrists; some of the paint was on her face. She was preoccupied and didn’t see us until Germaine, standing over her, shouted, “That’s not the way to use fucking finger paints,” and the baby stared up at her with a look of shocked awe that there was a wrong and a right way to use finger paints.
I went into the house while Germaine taught the baby the use of finger paints. The inside of the house was as beautifully kept as the outside.
The young American mother of the baby was reading a women’s magazine.
Germaine shouted to her from outside, “Where the fuck are you while your baby is making a fucking mess out of the fucking finger paints I paid fucking good money for?”
Half smiling at me, the mother dropped her magazine and ran out.
As I didn’t know what room I was to have, I waited in the small living room, by the fireplace. I didn’t sit. When Germaine came in she looked at me as if I had suddenly appeared in her house, and she seemed about to ask me what I was doing there; she frowned. I smiled. I smiled to remind her who I was, and that I hadn’t forced myself into her house, but that she had invited me. I had not even presumed to sit down.
“I’ll show you to your room,” she said.
The lintels of the doorways were low, and, being tall, she had to bend to go through. I looked at her long legs, long torso, long arms, and her long, curved neck. I followed her through, into her room. It had a large bed, the iron bedstead painted what she called penis pink, and it seemed to me to be the only piece of furniture in the room. She took me through to the next room, my room. Off it was a tiled bathroom.
She laughed. She said, “To get into your room you have to come through mine, and for me to use the bathroom I’ve got to come through yours.”
“That’s fine,” I said.
“I’ve put you here intentionally.”
Again, I smiled, but more broadly. I didn’t ask her what her intention was.
Now, a year or so before, I had been told, severely, by another woman writer, that I was a cunt teaser, and I’d better stop it. I’d not been aware that I was a cunt teaser, and this made me wonder. She said, “You hug women, kiss them, are always pressing against them, and then, of course, you don’t follow up in any way on what you make women feel you’ve promised them.” “I don’t do that,” I said. “You do,” she insisted; “study yourself the next time.” I hugged her and kissed her, as if on impulse. This writer set her jaw and looked at me closely, then she said she would be able to accept my hugs and kisses, my bodily contact, if I were straightforward; but she thought I was truly duplicitous because I wanted women to imagine me to be a way I wasn’t, and this was not only duplicitous, it was perverse. I mustn’t do it. I mustn’t play with women.
Conscientiously, I stopped.
For all her stature, Germaine was very huggable and kissable.
In my bedroom in her house, it was she who put her arms around me, kissed me at the side of my mouth, and squealed.
I thought: I mustn’t cunt tease.
Then she sat on the edge of the bed and said, with a deep sigh, “I don’t know what to do with that girl and her baby. I’ve done everything I can. I invited them out here, paid for everything while they’re here, bought special food for the baby, even clothes. You’d think that the least the mother might do is get off her fat ass and watch the child while I’m not here. I’m tired, I’m tired and I’m fed up with taking care of them. I’m always taking care of helpless and hopeless people.”
I wanted to do something immediately to show her I was not helpless and hopeless.
I wanted her to think I was quit
e as efficient as she was.
Before I could think of anything, she got up from the bed and said, “I’ve been so done in by them, I’ve become crude. Here, you’ve just arrived in my house and I haven’t even offered you a glass of wine.” She sighed again.
We went into the living room, where, on the hearth rug, two sleek white cats had appeared. With a long scooping gesture of both arms, Germaine leaned and took them up, and she buried her face in the fur of one, then the other, saying, “Oh, momma’s darlings, momma’s beautiful, beautiful darlings.” The cats closed their eyes.
I said, “I’ll open a bottle of wine for us.”
While I opened the bottle, she played with the cats.
“Did you feed them?” she shouted out of the window.
A timid voice responded. “They didn’t seem hungry.”
“I knew it,” Germaine said. “She won’t do the fucking simplest thing I ask. She won’t even feed the cats. No one ever does the simplest things I ask for, but everyone asks me for the world, the moon, the stars, the whole universe, and my money.”
I hoped I conveyed to her by my look that I myself was not asking for anything. Though, perhaps, in some way I was. I felt that I was.
The living room was partly kitchen. Germaine opened the fridge door and looking in said, “What do I have for my darlings? What do I have for my darlings to eat?” She reached inside. The cats had their noses into the bottom of the fridge. “Oh darlings,” she said, “you’re so lucky. Here’s testicle.” And she took out, in her hand, a large, yellowish lump with fleshy tissue hanging from it and threw it, with a soft wet thud, on the big wooden chopping block on the table at which I was standing with the open bottle of wine.
“Where’re glasses?” I asked.
“In there.” She nodded to a cupboard.
As I poured out three glasses of wine she chopped up the testicle with a knife. The cats were mewing at her feet.
I brought a glass of wine out to the American girl, who was sitting quietly by the baby, holding her hand and rubbing one stuck-out finger, green, across the clean sheet of paper. The baby was learning how to use finger paints. Her mother was whispering to her.
Inside again, the cats were eating the chopped-up testicle and Germaine was preparing dinner at the long marble-topped table.
“Is there anything I can do?” I asked.
“You can integrate all the ingredients for a pesto sauce in the mortar.”
She was frowning, and I wondered what she was thinking. It occurred to me that she might have been thinking: Here I am, again, preparing a meal for guests.
I pounded the wooden pestle into the marble mortar.
At least, I thought, I can be of some help.
The pesto reduced to a fine bright green, I said, “I think this is done.”
“Let me see,” Germaine said, and plunged the pestle up and down. “It’s not at all done. It’s nowhere near being done. If you’re not going to do it properly, why offer to do it? Now I’ll do it. I always end up finishing, or putting right, or completely restarting what others do badly. I’ll do it.”
“Is there anything else I can do?”
“No. I don’t think you could. Sit and drink your wine.”
From a wicker chair, I watched her pound the pestle. She wore a red dress, and through the knit I could see her bare flesh; her bum, her hips, her tummy, her breasts shook. As I didn’t want to disturb her concentration, I was silent. She pounded and pounded, then pushed the mortar aside as if she could no longer bear the look of it. Her hands on her hips, she looked at the table, then about the room, again as if she could hardly bear what she saw; then she looked at me.
“What the fuck are you doing sitting there, drinking wine,” she said, “while I’m here doing all the work?”
I smiled, but she didn’t smile.
“All right,” I said, “you tell me exactly what to do, and I’ll do it.”
“But you won’t do it well.”
“I’ll try. I really will try.”
She didn’t tell me what to do, but, an assistant to the chef, I kept order as she, preparing, caused disorder on the table. She accepted my assistance and I was rather pleased with myself.
The mother came in, fed her baby, and put her to bed.
As it got dark, Germaine lit the paraffin lamps.
With everything I ate my sense of taste was brought to fine attention by the fine attention Germaine had given to the food: spaghetti alla Genovese, roasted pigeons and small roasted potatoes, salad from the garden, pecorino, grapes.
After dinner, Germaine lit a fire, as an autumn chill was falling.
In my lamp-lit room, naked, I was sitting on the edge of my bed, quietly, when Germaine came in. There was a curtain in the doorway between our rooms which I had not bothered to close. She said, “Oh, I’m sorry,” and turned away, but I said, “I don’t mind,” and she turned back and passed through the room into the bathroom.
She left the door open, and I saw her sitting in the bath, which had burning candles along the edge. Her neck, her shoulders, her breasts shone in the candlelight; she lifted water in her cupped hands to pour it on her, and the splashed water appeared to flame lightly about her.
I remained where I was on the bed, from time to time glancing at her. It was as though I had been living a long time with her, because there was, I felt, a domestic intimacy between us, she in the small bathroom, I in the bedroom off. For the first time I recognized that Germaine could do that: could create a sense of intimacy between herself and another which you’d have thought came only after a long time together, and she did it in a moment, suddenly, and without reference to anything that had recently happened or not happened.
In the still silence the water splashed in her bath.
I got into bed and was all at once very happy, feeling that being with her was and would continue to be all right; I quickly fell asleep, and was unaware of Germaine turning off the paraffin lamp on the little table by my bed.
•
In the morning I found her, at the table in the living room, doing careful detailed drawings for a dovecot she wanted to build from bricks and roof tiles. To make the drawings, she had proper drafting paper, a proper drafting pen, a ruler, a bottle of india ink.
I said, “It looks as if you’re designing a whole palazzo.”
“I’m simply doing it the way it should be done,” she said.
The mother and the child were playing outside in the sunshine.
I went with Germaine to buy the bricks and tiles. She had two cars, one a battered Cinquecento which she used on the rough, steep part of the road to her house, and, kept parked halfway down on a terrace, a Ford. We got out of the Cinquecento and into the Ford.
As she drove, she thought there was something wrong with the Ford, and she said she wouldn’t drive it to London unless she were absolutely sure it was in perfect order. We drove in short, fast bursts, then stopped abruptly. Clouds of dust from the dirt road billowed about us. It was a shock absorber, she said; she was sure it was a shock absorber. She’d take the car to the garage the next day, and if the fault couldn’t be found we’d have to fly to London.
I thought: But I’ve sold my fucking plane ticket.
She said, “I’m not going to risk the lives of that mother and daughter in any way.”
The man in the builder’s yard didn’t have the proper bricks. Germaine talked to him at great length, and I wondered how she knew so much about bricks. She had her drawing, and she discussed it with the man, who because she knew so much about building, took her seriously. She knew, in Italian, all the technical terms.
Afterward, we went to a café at the centre of the small modern town in the plain below the small ancient mountain town. We sat among oleanders flowering in wooden tubs. Germaine said her stomach was upset and ordered Fernet Branca, and as I had never had it I did also. It tasted of the juice of rotted weeds, and I could not imagine how it settled the stomach.
I asked he
r, “How is it that you know so much about bricks?”
She laughed.
Her dress was short, and she was sitting slouched back in her chair, her legs stretched out and open. About her neck she wore an African woman’s cache-sexe of red and blue beads. I looked from the cache-sexe down and saw that she was not wearing underpants and that her cunt was visible. She was looking about at people passing.
I knew she had an Italian lover whom she met often at this café.
She said, “I thought I might see my gentiluomo here.”
“I’ve never met him.”
“Not that I want to see him,” she said. “I don’t want to.” She laughed. “The last time I saw him here we had a fight and he hit me across the face. One day he’ll kill me.” She shrugged. “But it doesn’t matter. I don’t mind if he kills me. I honestly don’t.”
About her love life, I knew nothing. An article had appeared in an Italian newspaper describing her as a famous women’s liberationist who lived in a house on a mountainside, from where she telephoned, at whim, men to come up and service her. She was suing the newspaper on the grounds that she had no telephone, and she was, in the Italian court, acting as her own defense. The newspaper wanted to settle out of court, but she refused.
There was a lot of talk among the foreign community about Germaine.
On the way back to the house we stopped in the workshop of a coppersmith, a little man with one tooth and a sweat-stained fedora. In the midst of his shop, Germaine did a drawing for him of what she wanted, a copper hood to go above her fireplace, and he examined it gravely, frowned, spoke, then Germaine spoke, and after a long discussion he agreed to do the job. I did not understand much of what he said, and I didn’t understand Germaine, either; I thought for a moment that her Italian had gone peculiar, until it came to me that she was speaking to him as he spoke, in the local dialect.
Outside, I asked, “But how do you know the dialect?” “Don’t you?” she asked. “You live here. Shouldn’t you know the dialect?”
“But I don’t know Italian, really. Where did you learn your extraordinary Italian?”
