Owen Marshall Selected Stories

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  Maria was more difficult to get close to. It wasn’t just their inability to talk the same language, or that after the meal she often worked at her book design. Usually she seemed glad to see him, and welcoming in her own way. She would laugh when they laughed, and listen when Paul spoke, with a smile on her face, eagerly take the translation from Giancarlo and quickly make some reply for him to pass on. They were the best times, and Giancarlo was never more relaxed and witty than those evenings when the three of them were on song together.

  But occasionally there were evenings in which Maria was different, when Paul observed, without her being aware of it, the blank sadness of her expression, and there was unaccountably sometimes an absence in her manner which subtly rebuffed him.

  Only once did Paul and Maria go out into the city together.

  He had developed nagging toothache, and needed to see a dentist. Giancarlo arranged an appointment with their own dentist who spoke no English, and Maria walked with Paul up the steep, cobbled walkway from Corso Cavour to Corso Vannucci and the cathedral of San Lorenzo. It was mid-morning, warm and still. Perugia was not a prime tourist target, and large enough to absorb those that came without any threat to its identity. Local people maintained their ascendency and their ways without self-conscious display. Paul enjoyed that. He enjoyed, too, walking with Maria in the streets where he was usually alone, and never before with a woman. Despite the ache in his jaw he was conscious of her attractiveness, and the subtle alteration in the way he himself was regarded as a consequence of assumed partnership: such is the Italian way. He allowed himself to imagine that they were going to a café lunch with wine and confidential conversation, rather than he as patient and she as guide, heading to an appointment with the dentist.

  The surgery rooms were not far beyond the square, towards the university buildings on the slope, above a chocolate shop in a narrow, uneven street. Atop the entrance were carved crossed keys, an elephant with an improbably long trunk, and a gryphon — all with the detail worn away by the centuries. The waiting room was small, and most of the close-set chairs already occupied.

  Paul and Maria sat side by side without being able to carry on a conversation. She read a magazine, and he leant his head back to relax in the heat, conscious of the throbbing of his lower jaw and the flow of Italian from both a mother and son whose knees were close to his own. Any language incomprehensible to him always seemed to be spoken with excessive rapidity.

  When it was his turn for treatment, he and Maria went down a long bare hallway and into a surgery, the one window of which looked into a shadowed and confined courtyard packed with dustbins and motor scooters. Above them household washing hung absolutely without movement. The dentist was a young man who listened as Maria passed on to him in turn the description of Paul’s toothache which Giancarlo had given her after he had received it from Paul himself. The young dentist and Maria talked a lot as he worked on Paul’s tooth, and nothing was asked of Paul except to open his mouth, or rinse. The dentist mimed each of these actions when required, and showed his enjoyment of the little drama by exaggerating the actions, and laughing after each rendition.

  On their walk home, Maria took a slightly different route when they were near the square, pointing and saying, ‘Il Pozzo Etrusco.’ It was the well Luca Matteotti had talked about on the day of Paul’s arrival in Perugia. In Maria’s company it had much greater attraction for him. The well was hidden in the depths of a building old in itself, yet much younger than the well. Maria and Paul went carefully down the spiral steps until they stood to look down into the ancient pit. Electric bulbs above them cast enough light to show gleaming moss on the curving and chinked brick sides, and scores of coins which had stuck there freakishly, representative of thousands more tossed by tourists, and lost far below in the unseen water. The air was cool: Paul could feel it on his teeth made more sensitive by the recent treatment. The place was a testimony to continuity, and Paul imagined the Etruscan women hauling up their buckets there hundreds of years before Christ. And he was struck with the notion that Maria, whose family had been in Umbria as long as they could trace, may well be related to those women.

  ‘Bellissimo,’ he said inadequately, but couldn’t understand Maria’s reply. They were standing close together on the little platform, and he took her hand as an attempt to thank her for bringing him. Her hand was cool and passive, but she smiled at him, realising he liked the place. There was nothing flirtatious in her smile or manner, yet Paul had to resist a wish to put his arms around her shoulders. More than at any time before he wished he had some command of her language. He felt then no physical encounter was possible without some expression of its origins in talk between them. The moment passed without awkwardness, and Maria and Paul climbed back to the modern level of the city, out into the warm sun, and returned to the apartments.

  He continued to feel attracted to Maria, but because of the language thing, her sometimes diffident manner and his deepening friendship with Giancarlo, he only once gave any unequivocal physical signal. And even that was on an impulse more of emotional concern. It happened during one of his many evenings in their apartment. He had left Giancarlo to get more wine, and passing through the short passage to the blue room found Maria’s bedroom open to him for the first time. It was a strict little room barely lit by the hall light from behind him, and Maria wasn’t there. The white cover on the single bed was tight and bare. As he paused and glanced in, he heard Giancarlo still talking from the equipment room, and he turned his head into the light of the hall and made a flippant reply, but he found the sight of that narrow bed, and the thought of Maria nightly there without a husband, powerfully erotic.

  Maria was at the table with no work spread out before her.

  Her back was towards him and he saw the sheen on her brown hair. She had been withdrawn during the meal, and almost without thinking he put his hand on her shoulder and let it slide a little. ‘Are you okay?’ he said, yet knowing she wouldn’t understand. She gave no reaction to his touch, and then she turned and looked at him briefly with an utter lack of interest; not as any sort of message, but as if he were a stranger a long way off.

  Giancarlo was still talking, raising his voice a little to carry down the hall into the balcony room. Paul took away his hand. He went back to the other room, and closed the door of Maria’s bedroom as he passed.

  ‘I said you should ask for a car to be assigned to you, so you can drive to places in the weekends. I could make a list of places you would enjoy,’ Giancarlo was saying.

  ‘Is Maria all right?’ Paul said. ‘She’s just sitting there at the table without doing anything.’

  ‘She gets overtired sometimes and emotionally not good. Is she crying? If you help me back into the chair, I’ll go through to her.’

  ‘Then I’ll push off,’ said Paul.

  ‘Push off?’

  ‘I’ll go, and let you see to Maria,’ Paul said. He wondered if it was his fault, if loneliness in Perugia was making him a nuisance to these neighbours, and he wished he hadn’t seen into Maria’s room; regretted touching her as he had.

  Matteotti became attracted by the idea of an economic overview of the project, convinced that politicians and business people weren’t able to understand the mass of statistical and scientific information that Paul, Jeremy and the others produced, and therefore there was a place for a more general document in plain language. ‘A project manifesto is what we need,’ he told them. ‘Something soundly reasoned, but not technical, and with artist’s impressions showing what the reservoir would look like when completed. People like a picture.’ He had a sample at the first meeting on the manifesto, and he brought it up on his PowerPoint screen — the storage lake sparkling, but inaccurately drawn, and attractive parkland developed on the valley sides. Matteotti was enthusiastic, perhaps partly because it was an enterprise in which he would be largely free of the narrow technical dominance exercised by the practical engineers. He sat by the screen and pointed out obvious thin
gs to the others. How well he chooses and wears a suit, Paul thought with grudging admiration, and the director’s dark shoes shone like obsidian. He was a man of surfaces, and even his considerable intelligence was so often devoted to image and appearance of one sort or another.

  The booklet was a surprisingly big budget item, and the contract for it went to a firm in which the director’s brother-in-law was a partner, though nothing was said of that. When it was completed, the project managers were given preliminary copies. Paul regarded it as a glossy public relations product and only glanced through it, but Giancarlo noticed it on the table when he and Maria came for drinks. ‘Oh, take it away if you like,’ said Paul. ‘The economic guffin it should make good reading for you.’ Giancarlo did take it away and read it with interest, criticising the economic sections with growing delight at their inadequacy. He chronicled the most glaring inconsistencies and falsehoods, and found on the internet original data that had been quite wrongly used in the manifesto.

  He knew of the firm to which Matteotti’s brother-in-law belonged, he said, and their research and findings were not respected at the university. It was an opportunity to ambush the director in a way to which he might find official retaliation difficult. Giancarlo schooled Paul carefully in each area of weakness in the report and provided him with sources and reasoning. He made a game of the preparation: pretending to be Matteotti, or the representative of the brother-inlaw’s firm, and making Paul respond to their counter-arguments. In the week before the presentation of the manifesto, Giancarlo had the flu, but his mischievous enthusiasm continued, and Paul sat by his bed for several evenings while his friend went over it all again, twisting his hand in the overhead grip as he damned the most telling examples of confusion of actual with projected figures, or glib assumptions not economically sound. He passed on also criticisms of the booklet’s design, which were Maria’s contribution to the analysis.

  How Giancarlo would have enjoyed that meeting. The director’s pride in his initiative encouraged him to invite several journalists and councillors to the function, foreseeing no criticism. He grandly introduced the manifesto and praised its colour illustrations and bullet point summaries. He was unprepared for Paul’s deceptively casual but informed criticism. At first he tried to bluff his way out, but when he realised the accuracy of Paul’s points, and that he was insufficiently prepared to cope with them, he turned the questions to the representative of the public relations firm and said little. It all had a calm professionalism about it, and the PR rep thanked Paul for his comments, saying they would be helpful in the revision of what all of them realised was still a draft document. Yet Luca Matteotti’s face had a rigidity of anger and affront which Paul allowed himself to savour as some recompense for the many times the man had given him a hard time. For the remaining weeks they had together on the project, the director continued his animosity, but considerably tempered by his realisation that Paul was capable of striking back. He had no inkling of what part Giancarlo had played in it all.

  Paul wanted to thank his friend for that help, and remembered his idle comment about a car for weekends: he would offer to take Maria and Giancarlo away for a day. The outside world’s not for us, Giancarlo had said at their first meeting, but Paul thought they were cooped up in the upstairs apartment too much. Perhaps that was a reason for Maria’s mood swings.

  Paul went to their door and proposed the trip. ‘I’m going to take you both up to the reservoir site, and you can see where the lake will be,’ he said. ‘All the times I’ve been going on about my work and the place, and you’ve no idea of it. We’ll take lunch and find a spot somewhere with a good view.’

  ‘I don’t know about the chair. The stairs, then getting it in the car,’ said Giancarlo, then quickly spoke to Maria in Italian.

  ‘I’ll get one of the vans,’ said Paul. He didn’t care if the trip provided an opportunity for Matteotti to criticise him.

  ‘These stairs aren’t easy,’ said Giancarlo.

  ‘You’d like to see the site, though?’

  ‘I would like that.’

  ‘Why are you living on the second floor with a wheelchair anyway?’ Paul knew him better now.

  ‘We own the apartment. We’ve been here a long time, since before the accident. And there’s no balcony on any of the lower apartments. Maria must have a balcony.’ Paul could understand that: how many times she must have finished tending to Giancarlo, even with the best will in the world, and then had time on the balcony to which his wheelchair denied him access. No doubt she and Paul often sat out of sight of each other on separate balconies and watched the roof tiles lose their colour, the locals drift into the street, and the pigeons crouch in nooks in the stone or plaster walls like blue-grey apostrophes.

  On the Friday evening before the planned trip to the project site, Paul went to the vehicle yard and signed out a modern van with both a sliding side door and a back hatch, so that Giancarlo’s chair would be bound to fit in one way or another. He drove very little while in Italy, because he had a fear that in an emergency he might instinctively pull over to the wrong side of the road. Once clear of the city, however, he knew there would be little traffic on the way to the reservoir valley, and he wanted his friends for one day at least to be freed from the apartment and be in the sun, in fresh moving air, and among trees and grasses and gardens, and the hills beyond Assisi. It was something he could do before leaving: a token repayment for the many nights of hospitality in the room of blue tiles, and the talk and comradeship.

  The weather was promising that Saturday morning, but when Paul went to Giancarlo’s apartment, his friend seemed slightly apprehensive. He opened the door himself, which was in itself unusual. ‘We had a bad night. Sometimes I get stomach problems and it means a difficult night for us both,’ he said. ‘She’s resting now.’

  ‘Maybe we should call it off?’ said Paul.

  ‘Could we just leave it for another hour and see how she feels? Both of us have been looking forward to it.’ Giancarlo hadn’t shaved, although it was the time at which they’d agreed to leave. Paul had never before seen him in the morning, or unshaven, and his large, handsome face seemed raffish, but older.

  Giancarlo was clean-shaven an hour later, and wore a leather jacket of quality and appeal. Paul wondered for a moment what other things he would discover about his friends merely by moving with them beyond the rooms of his apartment, or theirs. Maria was ready to leave too, although the fatigue of the night showed in the passivity Paul had noticed at other times. She made an effort, however, to match Giancarlo’s deliberately up-beat tone, and replied to Paul’s greeting. They had a small ritual which mocked their mutual language deficiency. Paul would wish her good morning and ask about her work, in Italian, always with the words by rote, and she would reply equally briefly in English with the same enquiry. Giancarlo had almost given up the struggle to interest them in acquiring each other’s language.

  Giancarlo had predicted difficulty in getting him down the stairs to street level. Paul found he was right. His friend was heavy, the chair awkward and the stairs steep and cramped. Paul placed himself below, and Maria was behind to control the descent. Giancarlo had his own powerful hands on the wheels, yet Paul at times had almost the full weight of both man and wheelchair, and he was relieved when they reached the lower hallway. ‘There, nothing to it,’ he said reassuringly, and tried to keep his breathing steady. The next challenge was to get Giancarlo from chair to a seat in the van. They chose the front passenger seat for him: although access was more difficult, the seat gave him more support and he could see ahead clearly. As Paul closed the door and stepped back, he thought how handsome Giancarlo was framed in the van window. His longish, black hair was combed straight back in the Italian way, the leather jacket emphasised the bulk of his powerful shoulders, and his face had a calm intelligence. No one would know that he was physically half a man, that he was so dependent on Maria.

  They drove through the narrow streets, past the civic buildin
gs with their guardian gryphons — those winged lions with fierce heads of eagles. Paul remarked on them again, and Giancarlo said they were one of the most ancient of all the monsters of antiquity, even appearing on the frescos of Knossos. ‘A combination of the greatest power and pride in nature,’ he said, ‘but even the gryphons couldn’t save Perugia from the Romans in the end.’ Giancarlo, the underprivileged boy from Rimini, had developed a great sympathy for his adopted city. He said again proudly that Maria came of an old family in Perugia, with so long a history that she might well have Etruscan blood.

  He loved the fertile countryside of Umbria too, pointing out the various crops to Paul, the maize, beans, tomatoes, gourds and vines, and tilting his head often to say something to Maria, who said little in reply. There were the old rural homes, a few quite grand, most functional and undecorated, with no gardens. There were new homes too, testimony to the growing prosperity of Euro currency Italy. The new homes were not farmhouses, nor were they gracious mansions. They drew attention to themselves with a spurious exaggeration of the traditional architecture. ‘No doubt your favourite, Dr Matteotti, lives in one of those,’ said Giancarlo. He had accepted Paul’s enemy without question as his own, as friends do. Paul knew, though, that Matteotti, with all his faults, had a genuine sense of his own culture.

  As they drew out of the broad valley and into the hills, there were more vineyards and then olives. The olive groves were grey-green, in some lights almost pewter, and the catching nets were spread beneath many of the trees. Some of the ancient stone walls of the terraces had broken down. In small gullies that had no evidence of water flow, grasses and lavenders grew. In one, resting pigs were roughly fenced.

  A bluff overlooked the narrow valley in which the reservoir was to be built. Paul had been there often with members of his team, with visiting politicians, or dignitaries, to point out what was proposed for the scheme. From a coarsely grassed parking place a track of fifty or so metres, which Giancarlo’s chair should cope with, led upwards. Paul and Maria pushed him, and he kept talking about the fragrances in the country air which had become strange to him because he spent all his time in the apartment. From the lookout Paul could show them where the earth dam would be built, where the lake level would rise to along the hillsides, and where there was an especially porous stratum that was a worry to him.