by Simon Mawer
She laughs. ‘How can a woman explain that to a man?’
‘Tell me how it feels when you make love.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘Or when you have a baby.’
‘Painful. You’re being idiotic.’
‘I want to understand you.’
‘Men cannot understand women.’
‘Italian men can. Maybe not German men, but Italian men can.’
‘German men are no different from Italian men.’
‘They are very different. German men murder children.’
‘They do not!’ Her voice has risen now. The ghostly, mangled Venus has ceased to matter. She is suddenly angry, her face flushed, her nose, that not-quite-classical nose, sharp and white with a kind of tension. ‘That is a disgusting thing to say!’
He is grinning at her reaction. ‘Oh, but they do. Jewish children.’
‘Lies! I will not have you saying that kind of thing!’ Momentarily, guiltily, she thinks of her husband. The argument flares and dies, but the mood is ruined just as the stadium around them is ruined. She turns and hurries away from him. There is an opening in the wall ahead, and a tunnel. He follows her into the darkness and through into another bright sunlit space. ‘Gretchen,’ he calls after her. ‘Gretchen …’
She stands in the middle of the space on the patch of dusty grass, looking up and around. Cliffs of brick rise up like the walls of a prison compound, up to the bright sky and the scudding clouds, a Poussin sky of flake white and ash grey and ultramarine. ‘Where are we?’ And the question is flung back by the walls – ‘Where are we? Where are we? – the senseless echolalia of stone because they know exactly where they are, on this Roman day of 1943 with the tramontana blowing and the clouds shifting overhead: the peristyle of the Palace of Augustus. They wander through the maze, climb stairs that might have been built for Augustus Caesar, enter rooms awash with shadow where Domitian may have dined, where Nero may have fiddled, where Titus may have lain with Berenice, come back into the great peristyle once more.
‘What if …’
‘What if what?’
He has regained the mood, recaptured the sense of game. ‘What if you were an empress …’
‘And you?’
‘And I were your slave.’
Laughter, and the sudden catch of a hand. ‘Francesco!’
‘But what if?’
‘Let me go.’
The place is silent but for the two of them, a wilderness of derelict flowerbeds sunk below the level of the plateau as though sunk back into the past. ‘Tell me,’ he demands, and pulls her towards the side of the space, towards the shadow of the columns that encircle it.
‘Let me go!’ No longer is she laughing.
‘Tell me! If I were your slave …’
And despite her pulling away from him they have reached the shadows. There is a vault of brickwork over their heads and the exhausted air of the centuries around them and dust on the floor two thousand years old. ‘Do you know where we are? We are in a nymphaeum, a place where the nymphs used to play throughout the hot summer months. And you are my nymph.’ He grins as she tries to pull away from him. ‘Come on, tell me. If I were your slave and you were a nymph …’ And he has stopped against the wall and pulled her towards him so that from the waist downwards their two bodies are pressed together. ‘Francesco!’ Her tone is of subdued panic, the panic of the captive, the panic of the claustrophobic, the sharp panic of a victim.
‘You touched me,’ he says suddenly, startlingly. ‘When I was ill and you came and found me, you touched me.’
She is still, as motionless as a captive bird, only her breathing giving her movement: the soft, subdued breathing of panic. ‘I bathed you. You had a fever. Only what a nurse would have done.’
‘You touched me. There.’
She is silent. She has not denied the fact.
‘You touched me,’ he repeats, and now he has pulled her hard against him, so hard that she cries out: ‘Please!’ She says the word in English. And ‘please’ again, and it is not clear by her tone whether she is pleading with him or not, whether she wishes to deny him or beseech him to continue. ‘Please, Checco. Please.’ Does she move her face so as to avoid his mouth? Or is she merely allowing him to explore her cheeks, the line of her jaw, her neck, the wisps of hair at her temples, her eyes? Matters are equivocal. ‘Please,’ she cries again. Does she struggle as he pulls her skirt upwards, over silk stockings and white, shameless suspenders? ‘Please,’ she says again. But her hands are powerless to push him away, if that is what they are trying to do. He grabs her against him, supporting her buttocks on his hands (no great weight, and he is strong), turning and holding her against the wall, ignoring what may be faint whispered protests, thrusting his hips against her as she seems to wrestle with him. The act that began by possessing a kind of athletic grace, such as you might see in two dancers involved in a complex and intense modern dance, ends up looking plainly absurd and rather sordid, he with his trousers round his ankles, she with her skirt hitched up round her waist and her legs up round his thighs and her knickers pulled open. It began with a sinuosity, a certain tension and drama, it ends with cries and grunts and an awful discord of body and body, and Gretchen calling to her god, repeatedly, a drumbeat in the claustrophobic space – ‘Oh God, oh God, oh God!’ – the sound going nowhere, merely absorbed by the ancient brickwork.
How often in those rooms and corridors, one wonders? How many blows, how many cries, how much overflowing desire?
And then it is all finished, and he lets her down slowly as though she has become a burden to him, and she turns away, averting her eyes from his and wiping at herself with a fragile scrap of lace handkerchief, distractedly pulling at her clothing and trying to get it back into some kind of order.
‘What have we done, Checco?’ she whispers, and the collective pronoun is plain to both of them. We. ‘Oh God, what have we done?’
If she is looking for consolation in his answer, she finds none. ‘It is only what we have both wanted.’
‘What if someone saw?’
He smiles and touches her cheek. ‘There’s no one. The place is closed to the public. The Palace of the Caesars is ours.’
She shakes her head, runs her fingers through her hair, and the gesture lets fall the short sleeve of her frock so that he can see into the shadows, see the deft curl of hair in her axilla. ‘And what happens now?’
Herr Huber and his wife, confronting one another in his study. Herr Huber is a powerful man. He seems to dominate his wife across the carpet. The carpet is Persian, silk, woven with exotic and sinuous patterns within which one may descry things sensual and organic, the writhing of limbs and the twining of tendrils. A face that is not a face peers out through foliage like a Bacchus half glimpsed in a garden.
‘Where have you been?’ Herr Huber demands. His voice is not loud. It is a cold, sharp thing, like a knife. ‘Where did you go with that … teacher?’
The Alfa Romeo is outside, parked near the entrance to the Villa. The owner is nowhere to be seen.
‘Francesco took me to the Palatine. We have been exploring the imperial palaces.’
‘His job is to take Leo to such things, not you.’
‘I don’t see why he can’t do both.’
‘Because you should not go out alone with a man!’
‘I go out with precisely whom I please.’
‘You are behaving like a silly little girl who has lost her head to a gigolo.’
‘I am what?’ Outrage is written all across her face. How can this man, twelve years her senior, be so appalling, so insensitive? ‘How dare you impugn my honour?’ Oh, a good response, a fine use of language – a shade archaic, reminiscent of gentlemen and ladies and duels – coupled with a most satisfactory disposition of expression: wide-eyed disbelief, stark with outrage, fiery with fury. Her mouth, often lovely, often a thing that can express amusement and affection, is ragged with anger, as though it has been carved
out of the lower part of her face with a blunt instrument. ‘What in God’s name are you accusing me of?’
‘The way he looks at you.’
The shift of emphasis has not been lost on her. It is he not she. But her expression does not relax. ‘What do you mean by that? How can you blame me for how he looks at me?’
‘He looks at you as though––’
‘Yes?’
He is forced to formulate his idea into words. ‘As though he wants you.’
The dismantling of her expression is a careful process, as though, were she to make a false move, the whole thing might collapse and reveal the vulnerable interior. A smile metamorphoses out of the anger like a delightful butterfly emerging from a dull, dry chrysalis. ‘He wants me?’
‘He lusts after you. Impure thoughts. I see it in his expression.’
She laughs. The amusement is genuine. ‘And you think that they don’t all do that, Hansi? Your colleagues, for example. When they see me play, don’t you think they are all taking my clothes off as they watch? Don’t you realise that? Why should Checco be any different?’
‘Checco, is it?’
‘Oh shut up.’ Her tone is bantering now, teasing him in the way she teased him from the start, when they made their first assignations in the spa gardens in Marienbad, she a mere sixteen-year-old and he almost thirty, pursuing some attractive widow and finding instead a young girl who could taunt him into doing exactly what she pleased. ‘You just mustn’t be jealous, Hansi, don’t you see that? Jealousy clouds your mind. They all want me, they all wish to see me … as only you are allowed. You have married an attractive woman, that is the simple truth of the matter.’ And she puts her head on one side to regard him with the look she used on him from the very start of their acquaintance, the one that has a hint of invitation haunting it, a hint of bruised innocence, a hint of dissipation. ‘And now, if you are very good, and only if you are very good, I will let you kiss me … there.’
Two figures on a narrow bed, swathed in shadow, glowing with heat and sweat – a writhing laocoön of limbs, a living, lucid laocoön, the twin bodies strangled by the serpents of their own creation, the struggle finally yielding no victor but two vanquished figures, lying apart like spent swimmers, their shared seed glistening like pearls, her ragged hair matted with it, his belly wet with it. Their fingers, only their fingers now, are entwined together on the ragged pillow.
Her breasts slop across her chest as she turns to him. ‘I must go. He will be wondering where I’ve been.’
‘We could go to Switzerland.’
‘Don’t be idiotic.’
‘We could be there the day after tomorrow. I have a friend who has a flat in Geneva. I could get the key.’
‘You expect me to believe that? And anyway, what would we live on?’
‘You could play.’
‘On the streets?’
‘You could teach.’
‘And what would be your contribution?’ She gets off the bed and goes to the basin in the corner of the room. He watches as she splashes water under her arms and flannels herself between the legs, watches the heavy shift of her buttocks, the absurd clumsiness of her hips. ‘What am I going to do about my hair?’ she asks as she rubs herself with his towel.
‘I could write my memoirs. “Women I have known”. You could help me with the technical details.’
‘You’re absurd.’ She pulls on her knickers and shrugs herself into a thin, sweat-stained shift – both of them gifts brought back from Paris by her husband. Peering into an inadequate mirror she tries to do something with her hair, combing it, pulling it back from her face and fixing it with hairgrips.
‘I’m in love with you,’ he says.
She has hairgrips between her lips. ‘Damn,’ she mutters as her hair escapes from her control. There is something businesslike about her manner as she peers into the mirror and curses her errant hair. She feels quite normal, as though all this were a mere matter of course, even a transaction of some kind. Looking into the mirror and seeing her unconcerned reflection, she wonders where remorse lies. ‘You are in love with no one but yourself,’ she tells him.
Gretchen in church, the German church, Santa Maria dell’Anima, Our Lady of the Soul, with the marble glistening and the woodwork gleaming and candles flickering in the shadows like small bright tongues, the tongues of Pentecost, tongues of fire, tongues of gossip. Overhead the decorated vaulting smiles with the dull gleam of gold. The two-headed eagle of the Holy Roman Empire is perched up there in the shadows.
Gretchen is not praying, not even kneeling; she is merely sitting in the back of the church in the incense-scented atmosphere, looking. She is wearing modest grey. Her hair, that splendid, golden hair, is demurely covered by a veil (black lace with gold edge, Neapolitan, a bit of a treasure). She looks at the distant altar, at the sanctuary light glimmering like a ruby in the dull velvet of the shadows, at the tortured Christ. She looks, and her eyes are glistening in the subdued light, brimming with tears, clouding with tears. It is all most satisfactory.
8
‘Where have you been?’ Her voice on the phone, quiet and anxious.
‘You know where I was. In Jerusalem.’
‘What was it all about? Why the mystery?’
‘A scroll. They’ve found a scroll.’
‘It’s always a scroll. Scrolls, papyrus, God in heaven can’t you get your mind away from it?’
‘It’s devastating.’ The word seemed both inadequate and absurdly overstated. The scroll was no more than a piece of rag, a scrap of plant pith, a mere scrawl of letters.
‘Devastating? You don’t know what devastating is. Leo, can we meet?’
He saw an abyss before him, and the ground beneath his feet sliding down into the gulf like the scree on the crater of a volcano. The volcano shook faintly and grumbled far away in the depth.
‘Meet?’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake! Look, I won’t give you any trouble, please believe me. But I must see you.’
And in some vaguely defined way, he had to see her. When you stand on the edge of the abyss you need someone there beside you. So they arranged to meet on neutral ground, outside a bar tucked in a mediaeval alley in the centre of the city, just opposite the Palazzo Taverna, 14° secolo. Leo got there first and settled down at an outside table with a glass of beer and a copy of a magazine. Behind a small barricade of potted laurel bushes, the aromatic laurel that the English call bay, the pagan laurel that crowned the heads of heroes, he sat and watched and waited.
The occasional tourist passed by. So did the minutes. The owner of the café – a languid, middle-aged man with a carefully cultivated bohemian look – began a discussion about holidays with the girl who was serving behind the bar. Would she go away with her boyfriend or with him? It started as a joke and metamorphosed into a bitter little argument.
And then Madeleine appeared: a bright, sharp figure at the far end of the alley, walking down the gunmetal grey paving stones towards him. Leo waited to be disappointed in her: in her purposeful stride, upset momentarily as her heel caught between the setts and she almost tripped; in her manner, which was of nervous laughter, the kind that speaks of anxiety and insecurity; in her look, which was pale and tense, as though smiling were a strenuous exercise; in the way she pushed a strand of hair from her eyes and smiled at him with desperation. He wanted to be disappointed, but he wasn’t. He was frightened of her, but he wasn’t disappointed.
‘I’m late,’ she said, sitting at the table. ‘I took a bus and the bloody thing broke down, and we all had to get out and catch the next one, which of course was already full, and then there was this gypsy that someone said had picked his pocket, and God knows what …’
‘What would you like?’
‘Coffee. I want a coffee. Or a stiff gin. I think I want a coffee, but I need a gin.’ She laughed, shaking her head and running her fingers through her hair in a gesture that was purely, startlingly female. ‘I’ll take a coffee. Just a coff
ee.’
The conversation between bar-girl and café owner broke off for long enough to provide the coffee, and was then resumed in slightly louder tones now that there was competition. Madeleine drank the thimbleful of dark liquid and replaced the cup on its saucer with care. ‘I thought you’d run out on me,’ she admitted quietly. ‘I thought I’d frightened you away and you’d run out on me. I wouldn’t have blamed you, you know that? I’m sorry, Leo. I’m sorry about everything. I mean, I could have just kept quiet, couldn’t I? I should have. I should have shut up and continued to see you as a friend of the family, a guide round the holy places, all that kind of rubbish, and instead I had to do the full confession thing. That’s the Irish in me. Can’t resist offloading her troubles on to a priest …’ Her mood lurched dangerously from misery to laughter, so that the bar owner and his girl paused in their argument and looked across. ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated. A caricature of confession, a travesty of an act of contrition: ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Christ, I told myself I wouldn’t do this sort of thing. I told myself I would be contained and collected and all those other anal-retentive things that a well-bred diplomat’s wife should be, and now look at me. I’m crying.’ And to his surprise Leo saw that she was crying, that her eyes were blistered with tears, so that she turned away towards the laurels in a pathetic attempt to keep the fact from him. ‘Damn, damn, damn,’ she whispered to the laurels. ‘Damn, damn, damn.’
He wanted to touch her, that was the unexpected thing, that this need could be so plainly and simply physical. He just wanted to touch her, even shifted his chair round so that their knees could meet, so that they sat almost side by side and his hand on the arm of the chair could reach out to hers. She smiled and returned the grasp clumsily and tightly, patching her composure together as though out of component parts. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Better. Much better. A big grown-up now.’ Her eyes – mere organs, mere globes of gristle with a reflective costume jewel in the very centre – considered him. ‘Now tell me.’
‘Tell you?’
‘Your bloody scroll. If that’s what it was all about, tell me what it was. Devastating, you said.’
