by Nino Ricci
Just past the border into France I finally nodded off. When I awoke it was to darkness, the train quiet and stilled, the compartment deserted. I felt the panic again, more acute, my mind scrambling to make sense of things, where I could be, stopped at a station perhaps, but there were no station lights and no signs, only the darkness and the silence. I made out the ghost of another train through the far window, also dark and still: I was in a train yard. The train must have reached its destination and been shunted off here. I felt a shame go through me at having been forgotten like this, at having been left behind as if I did not merit the kindness it would have taken for someone to wake me. I walked up the aisle to one of the doors, heaved it open – there were more darkened trains, a great expanse of empty tracks. In the distance, a cluster of lights: the station. I climbed down from the carriage, bag in hand, and slowly made my way across the empty tracks toward the light.
It was the following night before I reached London: there had been rain and rough sea across the Channel, and then a haze that slowly thickened to fog as the train entered London’s outskirts. It seemed days, weeks, since I’d slept, bathed, had a proper meal, since I hadn’t been living my life on trains and station benches, moving toward a destination that seemed now, as I passed by the blocks of soot-blackened row houses that flanked the rail line, like an arrival at nowhere, as much the end of the world as any place could be.
I stood outside the station thinking I might simply collapse there on the pavement: this was the end, there was nowhere further to go. I could hardly remember now what instinct had brought me here, if I’d imagined that Rita might somehow appear to me out of the whole anonymous world or if I’d simply needed to reach this point where there was no going on, where I was sure of that.
Someone had come up to me, there in the fog, a tall, stoop-shouldered bird of a man in a raincoat and spectacles, eyes blinking. He seemed an apparition, some phantom my sleep-deprived mind had called up.
“Are you looking for a hotel?”
I ended up following him through the foggy streets to a quiet sidestreet of slightly derelict Georgian townhouses, discreet hotel signs strung out along the length of it. Though it was barely eleven the street was deserted: we might have been in some quiet, elegant suburb except for the faint boarding-house look of the hotels, the peeling paint, the telltale bits of garbage at the bottoms of stairwells. The man had kept up a mumble of distracted conversation, seeming not quite entirely in his wits.
“There’s private bath if you’d like, though it’s a bit more expensive, of course.”
The hotel he led me into had a stale, animal smell like a private home, a doorway off the narrow lobby leading back into what looked like living quarters, the furnishings crammed tight and the walls overladen with photographs and cheap-looking paintings. The man took out a register and bent in close to scrawl in the details from my passport.
“An Italian name, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“My wife’s Italian, you’ll meet her in the morning.”
I took the room with private bath. He led me up a narrow staircase to a small, musty room on the second floor, faded red velour curtains covering the window and a narrow, thick-blanketed bed pushed up against the wall. Above the bed hung a sentimental watercolour: madonna and child.
He handed me my key.
“Can we expect you for breakfast?”
The question threw me into confusion.
“No. Thank you.”
The bathroom was stuffy and cramped, the bare wooden floor there discoloured and warped, seeming to roll beneath my feet as I stepped over it. A short ball-and-claw tub, streaked brown under a steady drip from the faucet, had been wedged between an air shaft and the toilet; above it, on a triangular ledge, sat a squat electric water heater. I reached up and flicked a black switch on the heater’s side; a red light came on, and the heater began to gurgle.
The water would be some time in warming. I went to the window in my room, pulled back the curtain; but the mist outside held the world back like a veil. A couple of taxis passed by on the street, dim forms pushing through the fog to emerge briefly black and solid below me before disappearing again in the other direction.
I sat down on the edge of the bed. I could hear the drip from the faucet; it seemed more insistent now, had sped up slightly or taken on a kind of asymmetry. I sat listening, my eyes following the floral pattern of the room’s wallpaper as if somehow to use it to force the drip back to its regular rhythm. But no, the wallpaper too had quirks and irregularities, roses giving way to flowers I couldn’t name, these to small, bent figures in frocks and kerchiefs, my vision beginning to blur with the dim, tiny detail of them.
Almost as an afterthought I took a packet of razor-blades out from my toiletries bag, the double-edged kind that were not much in use any more – I had had them since Africa, had packed them against some special need and then they’d remained there in my bag for years, till I took them out now. I had noticed them in passing while packing my things to leave the village; though perhaps the thought had already begun to form then at the back of my mind, required only that I should have come to the proper end of things, that all possibilities be exhausted. I set the package in a wire soapdish that hung down inside the tub, then placed the tub’s plug into the drain and tested the water. It was warm but not hot; it would have to do.
I undressed while the tub filled, unaccountably taking great care to fold my clothing and pack it back into my bag. When I’d finished I sat down on the edge of the bed again to wait, naked, my skin tingling. It felt good to have my clothes off after my days of travel, of smelling my sweat. I ran my hands up and down my thighs, my calves, feeling the muscle and bone there, the heat of my blood. This was my body: for a moment I understood with perfect clarity what it meant to have a body, the wonder and the tyranny of it, the strangeness. For a long time I sat exploring the textured surface of my skin, the lines on my knuckles and palms, the hairs and moles on my chest and arms. I had carried a body for so many years and yet wasn’t on familiar terms with it – it might have been some strange thing washed up by the sea, sprouting limbs whose purposes, lost in the recesses of time, would never be known.
A sound of splashing: I turned to the bathroom door to see a sheet of water spilling like curved glass over the rounded edge of the tub. It took me an instant to register the meaning of this, to undertand that the overflow valve must have clogged, that I ought to turn the water off. I rose and shut off the faucet, then reached into the tub to release some excess into the drain. A thin layer of water had collected on the floor; it seeped quickly into the floorboards, turning them a wet grey.
From the bathroom doorway I looked around the room again, at my bag on the floor, at the picture over the bed. For the first time, perhaps, I grew aware that I would do the thing, that I had only to follow out the chain of events I had set in motion, and it would come to pass. I stood naked there, staring out, and could only think to have the thing over, to have the courage, the energy to bring it off – there was no larger thought in me than that, as if the matter were merely some small, unpleasant chore to be got through, and this as much as anything, to be at the brink without an insight, to have learned nothing, made me wish to get on with the thing, and have it done. I turned, stepped into the tub, and lowered myself slowly into it, the water rising in counterpoint to my descent, coming up once again to near the tub’s rim. The water was tepid; it chilled me as I sank into it, stripped me down to a second layer of nakedness.
I reached for the package I’d placed in the soapdish. It was soggy now, the water had got to it; it fell apart in my hands as I opened it. Inside, the blades clung together from the wet. I cut my thumb prying one free, and instinctively brought it to my mouth to suck on the wound.
I held one of my wrists slightly submerged and gashed it with a blade, hard, not across but along, as I’d heard it was right to do. I lost heart then, at the blood – there was an instant when I seemed to black out,
when there was only the panic, the animal pounding of my heart. I closed my eyes and a kind of calm returned, but I couldn’t face that instant’s panic again, to see the blood’s first pulsing out; and so I sat there with my single cut wrist thinking, it would do, the cut had been clean and deep, I had not made such a mess of it.
With my eyes still closed I lay back in the tub, sinking until I heard water spilling over the tub’s sides again. Something was ebbing away from me, I had the sensation of that, though it was not my very self, not the essence of me, merely the waking part, or so it seemed, merely what I could after all do without. I could hear the drip of the faucet at my feet, could feel the slight tremor in the water’s surface as each drop fell. The drip seemed to set the timing of my breathing, of my heartbeat, forming little ripples in my mind that then stretched themselves out over the surface of my thoughts, and died. I felt myself slipping toward sleep, felt it beckoning before like a country to reach, like home. Young maidens in kerchiefs and frocks were waiting for me there, had made me a bed of roses and daisies and angels’ tears, if only I could get to it, could hold on.
The drip had grown faint and plodding now, moving at the pace of dreams, each sound surrounded by long, lazy silences that threatened to stretch out endlessly. Time had slowed almost to the point of stopping: I could breathe or not breathe, my heart could plod on or stop, it didn’t matter. Someone would come, though, in a moment, to sit at the end of the tub and give me a word, a shibboleth. I could hear him knocking already at the door, and calling me by name – the water, he says, and I tell him I died once before, in that way, my corpse already wasting away on the ocean floor.
I was in a cave, in a warm dark pool. One by one their frocks and kerchiefs fell away and they stepped down beside me. They held me in the water and caressed my calves, my thighs. Luisa was there, and Rita, and another too, the third, though I could not make her out; I wanted to bring a hand up, to run it over the smooth curve of breast, of cheek. At the mouth of the cave, rough white pillars tapered down from the ceiling and up from the floor.
They were knocking again. Two of them, two voices, a woman and man – they had broken the window with their pounding, the fog was coming inside. But I wanted only to sleep, those last few precious moments before the clock wound down and began its wild ringing, and it was time to rise. My father would be waiting for me in the fields – there were miles and miles of beans to be hoed, and tomatoes too, we would do them together, laughing and talking and stopping at ten for cheese and homemade bread. All that and more was waiting.
Someone was standing over me.
My god, he said, my god, but I could not hold on for him now; and then the room, the face and voice above me slipped away, and my mind went dark.
Tell me your dreams, she might have said, and I would have told her, I dreamt I wrote you a letter and in it was everything. That is what I have wanted, to hold every nuance and hope, every smell, every bit of sky, though there hasn’t been a single line I’ve written here that hasn’t seemed untrue in some way the instant I set it down.
Sometimes I awake in the middle of the night and there is an instant when a dream or just the residue of all the images my memory has churned up during the day makes me imagine that I’m back in some moment of the past, a child again in my mother’s bed or rising up on a summer dawn on the farm or in my corner apartment in Toronto, listening for the clack of the streetcar or the drifting late-night voices of passersby. There is always the effort my mind makes then to hold the illusion, to work into it the sound of the wind outside, of a branch against the roof, the dank, sweat smell of the bedsheets, as if it is the mind’s job not so much to see things as they really are but simply to make some sort of sense of them, to fit them into whatever general order it has already arranged for itself. In its way, the time I have spent here now writing these words has seemed this same hovering between waking and dream, this effort to hold intact an illusion; except in memory there is no final awakening to the actual truth of things, only the dream, only the little room the mind makes for itself with no doorway to the outside.
I have beached up on an island off the Kenyan coast that I visited once during my years in Nigeria, just a sliver of sand and bush at the far edge of a continent. I do my writing on the verandah of a flat I’ve rented above a food shop in the island’s single town, with a view of a harbour where every day bare-backed men unload boatfuls of mangrove timber that they’ve culled from along the island’s shoreline. Once, I was sitting here trying to describe my childhood departure from Valle del Sole when I suddenly remembered the rain, how I’d heard it building at dawn, how every aspect of that day had been suffused with it though I’d almost forgotten it; and when I looked up then from my writing to see the workers sweating at the docks and the sun reflecting cleanly off the harbour, for an instant I could hardly grasp the meaning of what I was looking at, so much had my feelings got caught up in the swell of remembered rain. But thinking the scene over again afterwards, I realized there was something else I’d forgotten: the photograph of my mother and me that Marta had preserved, taken that very day, or so Marta said, though there is no sign in it of the rain. There is some simple explanation, surely – maybe there was no rain, after all, or maybe the photo was taken at some other time. But the fact remains that the real story is forever lost to me, that I cannot now, or ever, account for the rainless instant that the photo represents. Perhaps there are always these moments that can’t be accounted for, that can’t be made to fit, as if the story of a life, to verge toward the truth, should always imply at every instant the dozens of other versions of things that must be suppressed to make way for a single one.
When I first arrived here, after two weeks in a London hospital, I thought I had made a mistake in coming, to simply another destination where I was anonymous, where I had no reason to be. But in the end my anonymity has grown on me, is perhaps the thing I will have to fight to abandon as I try to work my way back to my life. It was only after a month here that I was able to write to Rita, and then it was a month more before she replied: she was back in school by then, seemed to have fit herself back into the normal flow of her life, though she was no longer living with Elena. She didn’t elaborate except to say that some money had come through from their stepmother, and that they were managing; and then at the end of the letter there were just the briefest few lines that mentioned, as if in passing, that John had moved back to Germany. There was something in her restraint that made me certain that she’d known everything, had known from the start, in some way, not only who John was but that he would go, that it would somehow come to that. At bottom I don’t know what she has made of all this, and perhaps never will, since there are doors in her now that appear forever closed to me; but she seems to have accommodated herself to his going as if she’d understood all along that her time with him was simply a sort of gift to him. Of John himself I know even less: he is one of the darknesses in this story that may never be fully plumbed, the point where it recedes back into the unknown. Maybe our paths will cross again and things will be different then; or maybe he will always be the unfinished thing that both Rita and I must contend with, what was never quite understood.
I have had two other letters from Rita since the first, in reply to my own. There is still an intimacy in them but it is clear now that we are moving apart, as if we are growing our own skins again, extricating ourselves from each other; and soon it will be difficult to imagine the point of closeness we once reached, perhaps even to bear the thought of it. I have told her nothing about London; and she, for her part, has not asked me why I am here or how long I will stay, even if there is always the unspoken question between us of what follows, of what we will be to each other when I return. In the meantime I set things down, placing them one after another like links in a chain that might finally pull me back to the world, though there remain always those things, perhaps the most important ones, that are not quite captured or that are held back, where ability fails or where ev
ery fibre rebels at the betrayal of putting a thing into words. Language seems sometimes such a crude tool to have devised, obscuring as much as it reveals, as if we are not much further along than those half-humans of a million years ago with their fires and their bits of chipped stone; though maybe like them all we strive for in the end is simply to find our own way to hold back for a time the encroaching dark.
The moonlight here in this place where I’ve landed is a kind of narcotic: in it, everything seems itself and not, distilled to its essence but also transformed, as if at any instant some great secret must be revealed. One night, looking from my verandah toward the peninsula of bush and sand that the harbour trails around to, I made out in the moon’s glow dozens of fishing boats pulled up along the shore, and on the beach the first flames of a bonfire that perhaps a hundred fishermen stood gathered near, small silvered silhouettes against the black of the forest behind them. As the flames rose higher a sound of drums came across the water, and then just the barest chorus of voices like prayer; and then one by one, the bonfire still burning, the little fishing boats began to set off from the shore into the half-daylight of the moon-crusted sea. It took a long time before the last of them had put out, the sea by then dotted with them to the dark line of the horizon, this strange moonlight flotilla like some whispered night-time setting out for the beyond.
Afterwards, the episode had the hazy quality of a thing that you are no longer quite certain actually occurred, that you hesitate to recount for fear that its reality will be diminished. But that night I had a dream: I was walking along a mountain path, and behind me the shepherds had gathered in their flocks and pitched their tents and started their music because the night was coming on, but still I continued to walk, with that peculiar feeling of lightness the mountains give, the sense that just ahead some new vista will be revealed or some new freedom hitherto unimaginable be offered out. The path I was on was neither gentle nor steep, the darkness that was gathering was not the black of blackest night nor yet quite without threat; and the music drifting out from the shepherds’ camp had an ancient, primitive sound as if some great sadness was at once contained in it, and lifted away. Then, as I walked, small flickers began to appear in the valley beneath me: bonfires like the ones we would light on Christmas Eve when I was a child, the little messages we’d send out to join ourselves with the scattered villages and farms throughout the valley. There was just a handful at first but then more, spreading across the valley like code, a slow wordless coming-together, and I stood watching from the slopes as the valley lit up with them, ten thousand of them burning away, sending their sparks up into the night that floated an instant, then died, as if bidding goodbye.
