Forever Young

by Steven Carroll

  They’re not so bad. She could even get to like them. And they happily let her go her own way. Bank clerks, public servants, farmers and more. They’ve formed groups and each group is currently deciding where it will go during their free time the next day. They have their maps of the city and their guide books, and they are curious. And, although she goes her own way whenever she can, she could almost get to like them.

  Rita is standing in the lobby of the hotel and the touring party she is travelling with is gathered at different tables. They nod and smile when she enters and she nods back. She is talking to the concierge because she wants to know what time it is at home. After some calculation, he tells her it is seven o’clock in the morning. Early. But, she decides, not too bad. It’s a work day and Michael should be up and about anyway. Rita will be his alarm.

  There is a line of telephone booths just off the lobby and the concierge directs Rita to one of them. It will be expensive; she cannot afford to take long, and so must choose her words carefully. And, as she dials, she resolves to speak like a talking telegram. But when Michael answers, she babbles. And she talks into the phone far more loudly than she really needs to, as though the telephone were just some toy and she really had to shout to be heard on the other side of the world. And after saying, ‘It’s me, I’m really here,’ she adds: ‘I’ve done it.’

  Michael, sleepy and possibly grumpy, asks what? What has she done?

  ‘Been to the Trevi Fountain.’

  She has tossed her coin in and it now rests at the bottom of the fountain with all the others. The only penny among them. Until they clear the fountain out and the old coins, the old wishes, make way for the new. And, she adds, her voice carrying beyond the booth into the lobby, it was all so much smaller than she imagined. Or perhaps the fact that she imagined it so grand made it inevitably smaller. And, once again, she understands why armchair travellers stay in their armchairs. All the same, she wouldn’t have missed it. And she then realises she’s lost track of time and that every shared thought is expensive. She will have to hang up soon and her link with the only thing she has in the world will be broken. And, at the same time, she’s recalling those days when she wouldn’t let him out of her sight or her reach, when the hand that held his was hers, and the grip stayed tight while he was little and the world was big and he grew into it. Grew into it to the point that he eventually went out into the world alone, as he was always going to — and now she calls him from the other side of it. But the hand that held his will always be holding on, no matter the distance.

  She will, she says, call from Florence, in a few days. They exchange goodbyes. Except they don’t say goodbye. And when she’s hung up and she’s looking out over the lobby, at the groups now breaking up, she can’t recall how they said it. Not goodbye. Nor farewell. Nothing final. Possibly a ‘see you’. Something that implied they were separated by suburbs and minutes, rather than countries and days.

  After the call she smiles to some of the group then takes the tiny lift up to her room, remarking to herself as the lift door closes that it was more likely to have been ‘talk soon’ rather than ‘see you’ that were their parting words.

  You pay extra to have a room to yourself, and Rita has. And, whereas the old street would have taken that as a snub, the group with which she is travelling doesn’t. She sits by the window. The room is small, and the view, onto a narrow street, is nothing special. But she stays there, sitting at the window, taking in the hanging baskets on the balconies, the rendering falling off the walls here and there, and the late sounds of the street itself: scooters, voices and, not far away, the imagined splash of a coin in a fountain.

  She has traced the bus and rail routes so often that she almost feels as though she is travelling along a map rather than the real thing. For, sometimes, you can stare at a map for so long that you cease to think of these places as real. Just dots on a page. The bus winds down through the hills … the bus winds down … It has been a long journey along freeways, with detours to small towns, stops and traffic hold-ups, and she is tired. She stares out the window at the passing trees and fields and villages. Then, as they emerge from a tunnel of overhanging autumn branches, Florence is suddenly spread out beneath her. It exists! She smiles and sits up. And soon they are in the heart of it, watching their bags being unloaded into the hotel lobby and receiving their room keys.

  After lunch a tour guide calls them together in the foyer and Rita, with the group, takes the short walk up a cobbled street to the Duomo. And again, as she steps out into the street and sees the famous dome in the near distance, she smiles to herself. It exists.

  The summer holiday crowds have long gone from the streets and the area around the Duomo itself. She has a good view of the Baptistery and the Gates of Paradise. Her guide book tells her that these doors must be seen, and should be lingered over. And it even gives her a brief biography of the artist who made them. Ghiberti. She may or may not have heard the name before. Now she has, and she also knows that it took twenty-seven years of his life to make them.

  She lingers in front of them, undisturbed by summer crowds. It’s the least she can do. From time to time she looks back at the bell tower and the cathedral, glowing orange and white against a blue sky, and feels sorry for those armchair travellers who never leave their rooms. Then she looks back at the doors. Twenty-seven years. Almost the whole of somebody’s working life. Time enough to fall in love, find a home, have children, and time enough for the children to grow and leave. Time enough to walk to your work through sunshine, rain and wind. Time enough to grow old and leave something behind — like these golden doors — that says, here, I did this with my time.

  So she lingers because it’s the least she can do. But it’s not just some sense of duty. She feels like lingering in front of them. For the more she looks, the more she sees — the details and skill. And she knows about skill. And craft. She was trained as a milliner. She made, when she was young, hats of remarkable style and colour. All by hand, and all requiring the most extraordinary attention to detail. It was all in the detail. Get the details wrong and the hat was wrong. But hers never were. She always got the details right. So much so that clients came to that small shop in the Block Arcade and asked that the girl, not even eighteen years old, make their hats. So she knows what skill is and she knows it when she sees it. And she’s seeing it right now, which is why she lingers.

  Beside her and around her the members of the group are looking at these doors. And they’re not just doing it because they feel they ought to. There is no sign of restlessness or boredom in the way they look. They, too, are drawn to the detail and the scale of the doors, four times the height of a human, glittering in the afternoon sun. Glittering now and glittering as they would have from the moment they were completed. And it’s not hard to imagine locals viewing the doors for the first time and really feeling they were at the gates of paradise. And the look that must have been in their eyes, she imagines, is in the eyes of these bank clerks, tramway ticket collectors and housewives with whom she’s travelling. Sheep. Baaa, she’d mouthed to Michael as she’d disappeared through the door of international travel. Baaa. Sheep. No, too easy. Too easy to laugh. For, at this moment, she’s convinced they will take back with them memories of more than just their hotel rooms, their buffets and their smorgasbords. They will, she likes to imagine, go back larger than they left. No, it’s too easy to laugh. Like the priest in a book she read before leaving. The priest is English, lives in Florence at the turn of the century, and occasionally takes small groups of English visitors on tours. Pitying them for their reliance on their Baedekers, he relates the story of an American family in Italy. ‘Say, Poppa what did we see at Rome?’ asks the child. ‘Guess Rome was the place where we saw the yaller dog!’ says the father. No, too easy. And as she looks from the doors to the group, she concedes once more that she could almost get to like some of them.

  In time they all drift away from the doors, from those tales of Solomon and Moses an
d David depicted on them, and drift into the cathedral. Under the dome groups mingle with other groups, a swirling pattern of figures moving from one point of interest to another, commentaries merging with commentaries, and whispering waves of sound, like a thousand swallows, rising to the ceiling.

  So, the afternoon passes. And afterwards they all walk back to their hotel where an afternoon tea is laid out for them. And although all of the talk is about the spread, how good the buffet lunches, teas and dinners are, and how they are so beautifully presented, there are also those moments when no one is talking. The silences in between. And a look in their eyes that suggests they may well be dwelling on those doors, that dome and that ceiling — a look that says they’ve been somewhere. Somewhere beyond the borders and confines of their everyday world, the knowledge of which they will take home with them. A look that says maybe, just maybe, they will return larger than they left. Why not? At least, Rita would like to think that. And even though they may not talk about it all that often (because it’s not done to go sounding off about these things), it’s just possible that the memory of this day will return to them in moments of silence, sitting alone in their lounge rooms and kitchens or watering the back garden on some still summer evening. The passionfruit vines along the fence will be golden, distant birds will wheel across the sky to nest, and the Gates of Paradise will glitter again for them.

  There’s this toff on the television. He’s got a tweed tie, and a sort of reluctant smile on his face, and a toffy accent that — not that you can blame him for it — makes you want to turn off the television all the same. But she doesn’t. She knows this toff, she’s seen him on the television before. In the old house, in the old suburb. And, as much as you might have thought that Vic would have hated the toff, it was a constant source of curiosity to Rita that Vic actually liked him. Every week Vic and Michael would sit in the old lounge room and listen to the toff for the hour that he was on and then talk about the show afterwards. He could surprise you like that. Every week he’d sit and listen to what the toff had to say about art, civilisation and history because he was interested. They both were. But as much as Vic might have been interested, he would never have come to the places that the toff talked about. And why was that? He was, after all, interested. And it occurs to Rita that Vic was an armchair traveller. Liked to visit these places for an hour every week from the armchair in his lounge room, but would never have risen from it and taken that twelve-thousand-mile hike to the places the toff talked about and around which he walked as if they all — Paris, Florence, Rome — constituted some sort of vast open-air museum to which he had the keys.

  No, he preferred things — golf club, pub, shops — to be within an easy stroll or a short train ride. And so, as much as she might envy those couples who travel together, she knows that if he were here she’d have that constant feeling of dragging him round from one gallery or museum to another like one of bloody Michelangelo’s statues. No, he would never have come here, and just as well. But he liked the toff all the same.

  Rita is sitting in her hotel room, afternoon sun coming in through the open window, staring at the screen. It’s an English show on the television and it hasn’t been dubbed, which is unusual. The Italian translation is at the bottom of the screen. And, she notes, it’s good to hear English, even if it is oh so English.

  As much to relax as anything else, she’s watching the toff on the television because she’s discovering that you need moments like this when you’re travelling. And he’s talking about civilisation. In fact, he talks about it a lot. The word returns again and again: civilisation and being civilised. But she can’t help but feel that he talks about it in a way that suggests he’s got it, this business of being civilised, and you haven’t. And that’s why he’s talking to you. And he’s not talking to you because one day, if you listen hard enough, you might have it too. It’s all a way, she’s thinking, of putting you in your place. And that’s the whole point of the toff talking to you. Of course, you can’t just put people in their place. It’s not done. At least, not by well-meaning toffs. You’ve got to say it all as if you’re really trying to lift them up and out of their place — when, all the time, you’re really putting them back in it.

  But maybe it’s just the toffy accent doing that. Maybe he really is trying to lift you up and lift you out. And maybe this is his way of doing it. He looks a decent sort, and she even likes the tie. No, it’s good to hear English, and the more you listen the less you notice the voice.

  Then the show’s over and there’s a plump, middle-aged Italian man with two young women in bikinis either side of him selling something or other, and she switches the television off.

  Once again she’s thankful for having paid the extra to have a room to herself. And she drifts across to her window and looks down on her part of the street, content to watch the people pass, taking in that feeling of being here, on the other side of the world, while taking in the view.

  Then she glances down at the itinerary open on the table beside her and notes the following day’s activities. Not a big city. Unusual. A town just outside Florence. A fifty-minute bus ride. A typical Tuscan town, where they will spend the afternoon and the night. A taste of Tuscany, the brochure proclaims. Up there in the hills just beyond the city. A bus winds down through the hills … a bus winds down …

  She leans from the window, the street below her, the prospect of the hills before her. And she feels a long way from the old suburb, the old street, from the old station and the old ticket office she walked through so often on the way home, showing her ticket to the ticket collector who hardly ever looked because he knew everybody so well anyway. And then she’s thinking of Vic, the way she does every day, not a day passes … wondering just what he would have made of all this, if by some miracle she could have dragged him all the way here. But, of course, he wouldn’t have made anything of it because he never would have risen from his chair and left the country in the first place. Not Vic. Then again, perhaps he just preferred to travel alone. To go alone, one of those who should never have married in the first place. Because, in the end, he did rise from that armchair, took trains across the Western Australian deserts by himself, went down mines, stood on top of giant red rocks — and when he’d finished with all that he travelled over a thousand miles north to that harbour town he moved to and from which he never returned. All without her. Better off alone. Perhaps. There’s always a ‘perhaps’ when she thinks of Vic. As though after all those years, all the laughs and all the fights, she never really knew him at all or what plans he quietly hatched in that armchair of his.

  She steps back from the view and lounges on the bed, letting the late-afternoon sounds drift in through the open window before going downstairs for dinner with the rest of the tour group, to a dinner of making conversation with strangers, and suddenly she misses Vic, the best of Vic. Is that possible, to imagine yourself well rid of someone one minute and miss him the next? Perhaps, she thinks, listening to a scooter pass by, it’s just that flat time of day before evening that does this: that leaves you feeling flat too. The time of day that has travellers who go away and never come back wishing they’d never left home. She picks up a magazine from the table beside her, flicks through a few pages, and drops it on the floor. Huh! Then again, perhaps she’s travelled all this way, over land and sea and through one time zone after another to that elsewhere she’s dreamt of going to all her life, just to be bored.

  She leans back on the pillow and closes her eyes. The street sounds below become muffled, even distant, as she drifts off. Thoughts of being well rid of Vic, missing him and travelling with the ghost of him; the strangers she’s with (some of whom she could almost get to like); the Gates of Paradise and these long, long days of planes and buses and early breakfasts; the toff; scooters, wonder and boredom all jostle for a place until she doesn’t know what she’s thinking. The tiredness she didn’t even know was there settles on her and her crowded mind shuts down and drifts into a deep afternoo
n sleep.

  ‘This,’ the Italian tour guide at the front of the bus is saying, ‘is the house of Amerigo Vespucci. Who left from here to discover the New World in 1491. Who gave his name to the Americas. Amerigo. America. This is where he was born.’

  Eyes, Rita’s among them, turn to the door of the house in this hilltop town the tour bus takes them through. ‘And that,’ the tour guide adds, putting the microphone back to her lips, ‘is the family crest above the door. The vespa. The wasp. The emblem of the Vespucci family.’

  She puts down the microphone and gazes upon the door with, Rita imagines, a sort of tired wonder. The gaze of someone who has looked upon this door time and again over the years, with countless busloads of tourists, but who retains a touch of wonder each time. She also speaks, Rita can’t help but think, with the kind of pride that says, that, that is what our towns and villages are like. You pass through and you think there’s nothing there, but look again. Any one of them, that pride says, could be the birthplace of Amerigo Vespucci, da Vinci or Machiavelli. Our towns are like that.

  And when they have paused long enough, when the eyes of the touring party have taken in the crested doorway long enough, the bus moves on, leaves the village behind and takes the narrow, winding road through the vineyards and down into the town below. A bus winds down through the hills. A bus winds down …

  It is the only town they will stop in during the tour; all the rest are big cities. But, Rita notes, they have chosen well. It is a postcard town. The kind of town that people imagine when they think of this part of the world. Of these hills and valleys.

  While everybody is waiting for their bags to be unloaded, Rita looks about the square, noting large colour posters on walls and noticeboards. Even a large drape hanging down from the hotel balcony. And all, it seems, saying the same thing: advertising a festival of some sort — an art festival — and they have landed in the middle of it. There are, she learns later, tents in the park, and galleries here and there, filled with the works of artists from all over Italy — and elsewhere. And as she stares at the posters, she scans a list of names. Mostly Italian, and none of which mean a thing to her — except for one. Not Italian, but English. For some reason, it is familiar. But she can’t understand why. There’s no reason. And she’s puzzled for a moment before she picks up her bag and walks into the hotel — then forgets all about it.