Owen Marshall Selected Stories

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  His isolation was broken by knocking on his door, and he went inside and opened it. The woman from number four was there. ‘Mi puo aiutare, per favore?’ she said. ‘Ho bisogno d’aiuto.’ Paul didn’t understand. ‘Help,’ she said in English, and beckoned with her hand palm uppermost.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

  ‘Help,’ she said again, and went down the hall to her own door, pausing there to gesture to him. When he went in he recognised that the floor plan of her apartment was the same as his, but congested with an abnormal mode of living. The first room had sofas and chairs, but also wood and aluminium contraptions that reminded him of a gymnasium, and a bedroom into which the woman quickly led him had a pipe frame over the special bed, with suspended handgrip and dangling straps.

  On the floor was the reason his assistance was needed, and the explanation for his never having heard any man entering, or leaving, the apartment: a naked man of two halves in a twisted sheet. His upper body was well developed in a fleshy way, and his lower half pitifully wasted. ‘Did he fall out?’ asked Paul, surprised into such a obvious remark.

  ‘Maria doesn’t have any English,’ the man said. His pronunciation was good, his voice calm. Lying naked and deformed before a stranger, he retained a curious dignity and self-respect. ‘Maria was giving me a bed bath and we turned suddenly,’ he said.

  Even with two of them to lift, it was difficult to get him back onto the bed, and when he was there, Paul noticed the sweat on his face and surmised that he must have felt some pain in the fall, or in being lifted, despite the paralysis. Paul had regained enough composure to address him directly rather than Maria when he spoke next. ‘Can I do anything else?’

  ‘I’ll be fine now. I’m all right in the bed, or my chair, but if I ever get stranded, as I did now, I’m too heavy for Maria. Pacciale Sarzano would help, but the family is not there tonight.’

  They both looked at Maria, and she smiled, hearing her name and seeing them turn to her. For the first time she met Paul’s eyes directly.

  ‘My name’s Giancarlo,’ the man said, and Paul turned and took his outstretched hand while Maria quickly laid the sheet over her partner’s hips to cover his cock in its thicket of dark hair.

  Giancarlo’s clasp was quite strong, and Paul could feel calluses on the underside of the fingers from the handgrip suspended above the bed. The folded sheet emphasised the physical dichotomy: the heavy, white upper body, and the emaciated legs, the shin bones without flesh so that the flat surfaces showed, and the feet permanently curled in and with contorted toes. Maybe Maria shaved his torso, for it was almost hairless, yet on his wasted legs the hair was darkly vigorous as if it benefited from nourishment there which was useful in no other way.

  ‘What is your name?’ asked Giancarlo. He had an intelligent, handsome face, though slightly puffy and with unusual creases at the jaw line because of his posture. ‘We’ve been meaning to make contact as good neighbours, and now our laziness has found us out, and we’ve had to ask your help before introducing ourselves.’

  Maria brought another chair through from the other room, and Paul accepted Giancarlo’s invitation to have red wine. She helped her partner put on a loose top and covered his legs with a yellow blanket. She took away the large plastic bowl which she’d been using for his bed bath. With her foot she pushed the clean bedpan out of sight. Paul expected her to sit down once she felt the room and Giancarlo were ready for a visitor, but after bringing wine and glasses, she left the room.

  ‘What work are you doing here?’ asked the Italian. He seemed eager to hear of anything happening outside the apartment, and yet was to prove well informed also. ‘I read everything,’ he said, ‘but see very little. It’s so difficult for me to go outside.’

  Of course it was: an apartment on the second floor, for God’s sake, when he was wheelchair-bound. It seemed an absurd situation to Paul, but he was a stranger and didn’t like to ask why they weren’t somewhere more convenient. Giancarlo knew about the reservoir project from the papers, and encouraged Paul to talk about it. When Paul complimented him on his English, he said he’d taken it as a subject for his degree, and he’d taught economics at the university where English was used a lot. He said he still did assignment marking, and Paul was again puzzled for there seemed no reason why he couldn’t continue to give lectures. There were vans with devices to load wheelchairs, and there was Maria to wheel him about campus. And this time Paul did ask. ‘It’s difficult for us as a couple,’ said Giancarlo a little vaguely. ‘That outside world’s not for us.’

  Paul didn’t stay long despite Giancarlo’s friendly interest. He’d entered their apartment as a stranger appealed to in emergency, rather than someone whose company had been sought by choice. Giancarlo thanked him, and called out in Italian to Maria, who came from one of the other rooms to take Paul to the door.

  ‘Grazie,’ she said, and held out a box of the local chocolates, which Paul refused to take. They had been closer when lifting the naked Giancarlo onto the bed, but there at the door they were two, not three. She didn’t smile: she seemed to look for something in his face, and Paul found in hers sadness, apprehension even, rather than gratitude, or interest. The box sank with her hand; she held it as if she was holding the neck of a goose. ‘Grazie,’ she said again. As she closed the door he saw Giancarlo’s wheelchair at the far end of the room, and the equipment which had surprised him. He supposed Giancarlo worked on it to keep upper-body strength. He remembered the one time he had heard them laughing. How wrong he’d been in his interpretation of it.

  Four days later there was a note from Giancarlo under his door when he came back in the evening. He was invited for a meal on the next Friday. Although he spent many nights alone, Paul at first thought he wouldn’t go. The reaction was more clear-cut than any reasons he could give for it. Maybe it was because he knew Maria had a partner, maybe it was Giancarlo’s disability and the packed paraphernalia that bore witness to it, maybe it was just the possibility that the invitation came only because he had been of use to them. But he went. He went because he was personally unhappy at his work and had not much to do with his nights; he went because Giancarlo was intelligent and spoke good English; he went because there was something about Maria that drew him.

  They ate in the small room opening to the balcony. Paul hadn’t seen it on his first visit. It was familiar, however, in being structurally exactly the same as the balcony room in his own apartment — and surprising in its décor. In that room there was nothing at all to hint at Giancarlo’s condition except the wheelchair he sat in. The floor had light blue tiles and one wall was crowded with spread book covers. They were not highly pictorial, and all Paul could make out of the titles was that they were scientific.

  ‘It’s Maria’s job,’ said Giancarlo. ‘She’s a book designer for the university publishers. That’s where I met her. It’s good because she can work from home most of the time. She uses this table,’ and he tapped on the white tablecloth in which fold creases were sharp. He wore a blue shirt not much darker than the tiles, and he gesticulated with his strong, pale hands when he talked. Above the table he was powerful and handsome, and it was easy to forget those useless, clenched, hidden legs.

  Giancarlo was a skilful conversationalist. He talked engagingly about himself and his country, but also drew Paul out with genuine warmth and curiosity. Every now and then he’d break off to give Maria a rapid resumé in Italian of what was being said, and she would smile at them both, and make quick comments of which Giancarlo approved. Sometimes she would cheerfully interrupt to offer more food, or wine, then listen again. Late in the evening, when Paul had been enjoying himself by exaggerating Dr Matteotti’s faults, and paused to join in laughter with Giancarlo, he realised that he had been talking for a long time and that nothing he had been saying was intelligible to Maria.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s very rude of me to be going on in English all night.’

  Giancarlo translated and Maria held up
her hands, shrugged.

  ‘She’s glad there’s someone for me to talk to,’ said Giancarlo. ‘She grows tired of all my stories over and over.’

  ‘I’m embarrassed that I don’t know Italian,’ Paul said. ‘I should be going to classes, or at least listening to the tapes the company gave me, but all I know are the names of the things I like most in the restaurants, and enough words to buy a ticket.’

  ‘Well, your firm could send you to Turkey next, and you would be back where you started without the local language again. Italy can be breathed, tasted, heard, seen and caressed without an understanding of the language. Maybe, however, I’ll teach you just a few special insults to use for your Director Matteotti when next you’re in argument.’

  The balcony wasn’t big enough for Giancarlo’s wheelchair, but after the meal Maria and Paul sat close together there, and Giancarlo ran his chair half through the balcony door and was almost with them. While the conversation continued between the two men, and Paul enjoyed it, he was conscious too of Maria’s physical presence although she said little. The light from the blue tiled room behind Giancarlo caught the line of her bare shoulder, lit one cheek and made the red wine in her drooping glass glow softly. People were coming past on their way home from the restaurants. As always they didn’t think to look up, and so were unaware of being overlooked and overheard. They talked loudly and candidly. Paul thought of the many nights he had sat on his own balcony in such a way, while, unknown to him, Maria would have been on theirs, and Giancarlo as far into the night as his wheelchair would allow.

  ‘People are happy now that they’ve forgotten work and had good food and wine,’ Giancarlo said. ‘After the patrons there’s a lull and then the restaurant workers come past too: the waiters, cashiers and cooks. They come quietly, singly, because they’re tired and it’s just been work for them.’

  Paul hadn’t seen them, and realised that Giancarlo, maybe Maria too, stayed up much later than he did. What did they talk about, he wondered, when even the night workers were going home to bed.

  ‘And I must be on my way, or I’ll still be here when they come past tonight,’ he said.

  Giancarlo wanted him to stay longer, but Paul asked him to thank Maria for more than his ‘Grazie, grazie’ could convey, and she went with Paul to see him out. Giancarlo had wheeled back to allow them from the balcony, but he didn’t follow from the blue-tiled room with book covers and white tablecloth. ‘We want you to come again,’ he called. Paul and Maria went through the room with Giancarlo’s equipment, and Paul thought of all the drudgery associated with that and the specially adapted bed he had seen on his first visit. How often did she have to leave her own room to tend Giancarlo; wash him, prise those twining legs apart, turn and toilet him, dress the pressure points, help him grapple with the exercise machinery they were passing. As he thanked her at the hall door, she looked down so that he saw the sweep of her smooth hair rather than her expression. What sort of a life for her, but then Giancarlo seemed a man worth devotion.

  Giancarlo and Luca Matteotti — what poles they represented in the reaches of the Italian character, and increasingly Paul sought the company of the former as a compensation for the perpetual guerilla warfare of his job. Matteotti instigated an audit of Paul’s expenses. He held a party, at his house in the countryside outside the walls, to which Paul was expressly not invited, and then spent much of the project managers’ meeting talking about it. He sent criticism of the consultants to their London office. None of that seriously threatened Paul’s position in the firm, especially as Jeremy and even some Italian scientists were supportive, but it diminished the satisfaction the job otherwise gave him. If you reacted to the director’s animosity as a victim you were increasingly treated like one. Paul didn’t have a victim mentality: he could cope with Matteotti’s dislike as long as he was left alone to do his work.

  ‘Threaten to pack it in,’ said Jeremy, who’d talked of doing it himself, even though he was less in the firing line. ‘That might smarten him up. Consultants are part of the deal and he can’t get the work approved without us.’

  ‘Maybe, but I’m thinking that a crude Kiwi response might be more effective. Something that affects his pride and shows him up in front of others. That’s what would hurt him most and make him think twice about knocking me all the time.’

  ‘What, a truckload of sheep shit delivered to his door?’

  ‘Not quite that crude,’ said Paul.

  ‘You know, I like to watch his face at meetings,’ Jeremy said. ‘Each expression is so calculated I think he must practise before a mirror. Don’t you think?’

  ‘I bet he does, yes.’

  He was in Jeremy’s office where they had been assessing computer-generated graphics of water pressure distortion on various natural fills. The view from Jeremy’s window was of new Perugia on the flat. It was much the same view as Paul had from his own office, and always if he looked out he thought of the old part on the hill where he had his apartment: the massive gates and walls which had been fortifications in ancient times, the nonsensical alleys, the whisper of the past, and the pigeons resting in the niches of decaying plaster, lizards basking in the morning sun on perpendicular surfaces. The stepped streets which in an afternoon might be crowded with temporary market stalls, and at night cleared again, with just the scents of vegetables, cheeses and cured meats in the warm, lingering air, and leaves and torn ribbon on the cobbles. The orange tiles once moulded on the thighs of women perhaps, and the beaked stone gryphons both worn and fierce. And often he thought of Maria and Giancarlo, citizens of the old city yet rarely venturing into it, the only Italian people whose real life was gradually opening to him.

  He invited them for drinks and they accepted. On that Sunday he set out fruit and three cheeses with the wine, all spread on a white tablecloth not unlike Maria’s, which he had sought out in the shops, and in the duplicate balcony room too, although there were no lovely blue tiles, just floorboards, and no design work on the walls, just one speckled print of Venice. The difference between an apartment owned and one of casual, transient occupation.

  An hour or so before they were to come, Paul found a note pushed under the door. Giancarlo wrote that they were very sorry, but illness prevented them coming, and he hoped Paul would forgive the late notice. Paul noted the wording, which gave no indication which of them was unwell. He surprised himself with the disappointment he felt. He ate the cheeses by himself over a week of evenings, but it was only the Tuesday when Giancarlo came to his door. Paul hadn’t seen him out of his own rooms before. He wore a red top promoting the Perugian soccer team. It was close fitting and accentuated the purposeful development of his upper body; his legs were covered by a pale blanket tucked at his waist. The chair seemed all stainless steel and plastic handles; very modern, but without a motor.

  ‘We’re embarrassed about Sunday,’ he said. ‘It was something we looked forward to, but health is a fragile thing in our home.’

  ‘That’s okay. We’ll arrange it again sometime soon.’

  ‘Maria and I want you to come to dinner again.’

  ‘It’s my turn.’

  ‘It was your turn and we let you down, so now it’s our turn again. Maria likes me to have company. The only thing is, we hope you won’t mind if she works after the meal while we talk. I don’t know why she hasn’t picked up more English, but she’s selective that way.’

  ‘So am I,’ said Paul.

  He went at least once a week after that. He got used to postponements, assuming Giancarlo had some complication that made it difficult for him, maybe some procedure that depended on the irregular visits of a nurse. Giancarlo liked being seated in the blue-tiled room with the book covers on the wall and the door to the balcony open to the warm, slow-moving air. After the meal Maria would often clear the table and work there, while Paul sat on the balcony and his friend ran his wheelchair into the opening, or, less often, both of them would go into the room Paul didn’t like, the one with the special eq
uipment, and he would help Giancarlo into a chest rest with his legs in a sling so that pressure points were relieved.

  And always they would talk: about their countries and their lives, about food and wine, about their work and the things they would rather do. They would talk about things quite commonplace to one, but strange to the other. In their conversation they became not only friends, but equals. Paul hardly noticed the wheelchair any more, and was accustomed to Giancarlo suspended in the other room to free him from sitting, the stalks of his legs in loose trousers swaying a little. Sometimes he would do arm and shoulder exercises as they spoke, flexing and swaying while discussing the prevalence of cheating at the university, or asking Paul about time spent in New Mexico and Australia. Often, before he left, Paul would help his friend into his bed, because Maria found the task difficult. Giancarlo would grip the stirrup hanging above his bed and heave himself up, the muscles flexing on arm and shoulder, but someone was needed to assist and guide his useless legs.

  Giancarlo had come from a poor family in Rimini. Hardship had sapped the love the family members had for each other and driven them apart. Although he had won through to a university education by talent and application, the early days had scarred him. ‘Most people are comfortable to live with comparative failure,’ he said, ‘but for people like me there is the spectre of absolute failure, dying alone in a dilapidated rat hole behind the shunting sheds.’ Because he came from a fortunate country and along an easy path to a professional career, Paul found such a fear hard to imagine. ‘My worst dreams are of poverty,’ said Giancarlo, ‘not my legs.’

  ‘You don’t walk in your dreams?’ asked Paul.

  ‘Everybody walks in their dreams, or flies. And I’m this way because of an accident, not from birth.’

  ‘What was the accident?’ Paul felt able to ask when he’d become a friend, but Giancarlo was vague.

  ‘I was hit by a car,’ he said, ‘and have little recollection of it.’