Vertigo

by Joanna Walsh

  We had come to spend some time here.

  Vertigo is the sense that if I fall I will fall not toward the earth but into space. I sense no anchorage. I will pitch forward, outward and upward. It is worst driving up the mountain to the guesthouse, where the road turns rollercoasterward, only avoiding an unseen drop by a corner, skirting logs scaled like the tortoises glued by gravity to the road.

  At the turn of the road, willing the world to continue a little space, there is a man, a woman, and a child. They are not tourists: there are few here. From the outside, the man is greater than the woman, who is greater than the child. The child is brighter than the woman, who is brighter than the man. Of their insides, we know nothing, because we cannot understand the words that turn those insides out. I grasp at words in this language with other languages I know, languages other than the one I mostly speak, as though one foreignness could solve another.

  Apart from the ascents, it’s the nights that are hard, under lead blankets. The dark leaves replay over the light, then night falls curtainwise. I say “falls,” weighted—nothing to stop it—outwards and upwards as well as down. No streetlights of course: no streets. Heat doesn’t linger. Cold drops with (like) the dark.

  Dinner? Only for the interruption of the boredom that replaces blank space in which I would usually make the family food, and which is now filled by drink. Beer first, not wine; I will get drunk more slowly. Drunk. Something that happens to you, like a glass of water, and that happens in the past tense, even as you are drunk in the present, as the action taken to provoke the state was taken in the past. You drink and then you are drunk. That’s all there is to it. But I drink more slowly when I become used to bridging this space, like you. You do it every day.

  I turn discretely to take the last of the wine dregs filled with something like tea leaves.

  The red lead blanket with white crosses, a disaster blanket. I like to have it near me.

  People forget how far things are. When we returned in the evening, the owner of the guesthouse was disappointed that we did not walk to the limit of the ruin. At first we feel disappointing, but then we notice how old she is. She is tough, but she cannot have walked to the limit of the ruin, or not for a long time.

  At the ruin, the light-colored people do different things from the dark-colored people. The light-colored people sit in the debris of the ruin. They look, from there, at other buildings in the ruin. I cannot tell whether they are happy or not. Sometimes they take out a bottle of water, some bread, some tomatoes, some salty sheep’s cheese, some crisps, some olives, and spread these out beside them on the stones.

  The dark-colored people sit on plastic picnic chairs between the ruin and the hut. They do not enter the ruin; they do not look at the ruin. They work there. Sometimes they sit with things they are selling, sometimes with glasses of tea or (or, and) cigarettes. They do not eat, or if they do their food is on a plastic table, not balanced on a rock.

  The light-colored people wear light clothing that does not cover their bodies. The dark-colored people wear dark clothing that covers their bodies entirely and sometimes also their heads. The dark-colored people do not acknowledge the strangeness of the light-colored people, in fact they do not acknowledge them at all but dwell by them as peaceably as by the sheep or cattle that also sit, and eat, in the ruin.

  From the middle of the ruin a whisper can go anywhere.

  We sit in the ruin, each reading a book, or three of us read out of four. Three different voices speak to us. We have taught the children to read again this week. Here, where there is no voice, apart from ours, they are desperate for any other. They will even sing to themselves, sometimes. The boy whistles. He makes his voice croak. He sings the same thing again, but breathing in. A bird echoes the first notes of Vivaldi.

  I wish you hadn’t told me about the stone. Of course I also wish it had been me. I had already dreamed of a piece of acanthus leaf, unobtrusive egg-and-whatever carving, a perfectly single pebble, pocketable among the ruins—but I’m not the one who found it. As I searched, my glance purposely turned to smaller stones, to twisted wood. The ground here has an air about it, a purpose: it focuses on the fallen. It’s to do with vision, seeing straight. My eyes turned away from my mind’s purpose—or toward it, which may also have been away from it. My mind does not tell me everything it thinks.

  My mind thinks, furiously, you must know I will have to leave you, will have to go with the children when they catch you, my duty to go, at the gate here, at the airport. You are a fool. You will risk yourself for it, the stone, and you do not belong to yourself. You will risk yourself selfishly, for you are also yourself-in-us. My mother catastrophes in me. I hear her shrill: “They will throw him into a dirty foreign prison!”

  You will probably get away with it but I will know that you have risked all that.

  The people working in the field beside the ruin come and go. We can see them because they wear dark colors: the men always at a distance, carrying something, the women, brighter and more complicated, stooping over by the buildings, sweeping or cleaning.

  Would it matter if you took it? Would they ever miss that stone? The pillars are laid out in rows in their field hospital. In this section the stones have tumbled, are frozen, falling. When will they follow? They will choose their moment.

  “Don’t touch,” I tell the children. My mother says in me: “Prison! They will fine you.” Out loud I say, “THOUSANDS.” The children say, “No, hundreds. They wouldn’t charge that much.” They are right. I am ridiculous as her, a fool indeed. My own children told me I must be wrong, and I was. I am ashamed to have thought anything so stupid, to have thought it without thinking, but there it is. I am a good cook, and I can keep the house clean. I have a job, even. But, sometimes I see no more than is in front of me. There are times I should just keep quiet. That’s what the younger generation teaches me. They take the words out of my mouth, which I tasted for such a short time after I snatched them from the generation before. I’d thought the words were mine. My children have reminded me I was wrong.

  The boy shouts wordlessly: “O Tannenbaum” (or “The Red Flag” if you prefer), “The Blue Danube,” Vivaldi’s “Spring.” He’s heard them on the adverts.

  The men who studied mothers and sons, had daughters. Freud was a case in point. Did he study her? No, he pretended she had not occurred.

  In any case love must be passed on with no return. Not even with feedback.

  It is cruel to expect me to be both mother and daughter—such different expectations. My daughter tosses her hair. I see it from far away, as someone who does not know her will see it, a man. She is twelve years old. It is the same gesture she used at nine, at ten. One day it will become sexual. Is it yet? I don’t know. Why am I frightened by this progress? It will happen. It must happen. And it happens in only one direction. She will gain power, but it is not much. This is power with no balance. I can weigh nothing against it. She cannot stop becoming powerful. She is not powerful yet. When she becomes powerful, it is not a power she will know what to do with. There is not much that can be done with this power, not by its possessor.

  Some women take power in a country by souveniring. I try to imitate them, look only for what I can buy, but my heart’s not in it. The bargain is the thing to treasure: the leap of possession, of which the keepsake is only the echo. And maybe for you it has been the act of stealing. I can’t tell you not to take the stone; it is so beautiful. Your eyes have allowed you to see it out of place already, on your desk perhaps, a shelf. Now, even if you put it back, it would not be where it was before. I have been tempted, seen one carving balanced on another behind the rope, about to fall—an acanthus leaf detaching from its finial—but I couldn’t have taken it. Happy with a tourist’s herded pleasures, really I’m helpless without you. Could I ask for anything more? Yes, but only what you don’t see within these safe parameters, and secretly. To enjoy the smallest allowed thing, to take these pleasures privately—is this an act of rebelli
on?

  It is something I can take away that you cannot.

  We’ve been invited to transgress, in any case, continually: to cross inefficient barriers, to enter without paying, not to pay for the children, or to offer the smaller price for them because that was demanded last time.

  How big is a find, anyway? Yours is pretty big. Other pieces that look like nothing may also be finds—pebbles with no carvings may be equally missing from the whole. And, if you leave it, someone else will take it, of course …

  I say nothing. I think you take nothing. As we go, I think we leave: a lolly stick, some peanut shells. They will biodegrade.

  In the car park of the ruin, no other tourists, only a man loading into his car brightly colored squat plastic horses for children to ride. They are beautiful! Or not. On holiday it is so difficult to judge. Should the ornamentation on the fire hydrant be admired like the ornamentation on the finial? It is very similar. But is it authentic/typical of the region/linked to a social/political/cultural event/unique/historic, or is it found everywhere?

  In the car, I drive, he speaks:

  “What did you enjoy most?” he asks the children.

  They weigh only the things he suggests.

  As for me, I enjoyed the people, ate them up. I do not say it; no one else saw me do it. There are three of them, now, farmwomen, stooping in the furrows behind the tractor, as though looking for dropped change. Then a man kneeling by his motorbike in a lay-by. Here no one will help. You have to fix it yourself, or push the bike a long way.

  TUNA PREFABRIK homes rise up, pink as tinned salmon. The cliffs remain as unimaginable as a picture. The restaurant we passed said, OPEN ALL THE YEARS.

  The drive up the mountain now consists of stretches of road that have been memorized, can be linked together, until almost every meter of the road is expected—and as it becomes expected vertigo decreases.

  Last journey up. How much of my fear is put on? To give you some perspective, my teeth feel like cliffs to my tongue.

  The man in the row of seats in front says, SHIT. He does not look or sound like the sort of man who says SHIT often, and I am shocked to hear the word come out in his pleasant sixty-year-old voice. He is arguing with the airline stewardess about exchange rates while paying for coffee. The stewardess says she will check the exchange rate for him. I do not know whether the exchange rate is SHIT, or the coffee.

  The man’s t-shirt. Khaki. Between the seats, a glimpse: across the back just by the neck, a small logo, LIFE IS GOOD.

  She realized she was happy and it was terrible to be happy with anything so ordinary. It was like looking down from a height on nothing in particular, only the feeling of being able to see it all at once, and the feeling of falling, which was not falling, and the irritation at being provoked to that feeling by nothing in particular. She swatted it away but the happiness would not leave. She was surprised to find things went on just the same beside the happiness, which did nothing practical, like make the stewardess arrive sooner, or the children behave better.

  A pregnant child passes along the plane. No, she is a woman. I am used to the coarse skin of those my own age. Even the very old begin to seem normal.

  The stewardess. No, I am not hungry. I will deny it very quickly, almost as soon as I feel it, or rather as soon as I feel the not being hungry, which is not the same as feeling nothing. I will deny it out loud so I don’t feel it, or rather so that I feel what I say—which is an absence, or rather an absence of the absence that is hunger: so that I don’t feel the absence. And, no, I am not one of those women who has learned how not to eat, only how not to want. And it is not food only.

  She said when the children were small she was not happy, but the children had already escaped what they were, made away with the evidence. All she had left was the declaration. So why continue to be unhappy? It was almost impossible to be unhappy now. To hold onto the unhappiness would be absurd. But to let it go …

  Children who are bigger than their parents are folded into the seats behind, their limbs bent in all the wrong directions, a padded girl (fifteen?) clutching a fat cushion decorated with the photo of a pug sitting on a drawing of a heart.

  When she tried to brush the happiness away, it buzzed back around her. In her son’s drawings she could see how complexity might develop and, from it, how the Book of Kells was made, Icelandic woodcarvings, those tiles in the Blue Mosque. It seemed masculine, this pursuit of pattern, or she ascribed it to masculinity because it was something she did not do herself.

  Geological faults. From the plane we look down on things that would do us harm were we to encounter them. She felt no vertigo although she could have dropped a hairpin onto the canopy of cloud and it would have fallen through as though there had been nothing there, which there was not. On the other side of the window, ice particles kissed the glass, which was not glass but was made from the same material as her kitchen blender that broke, even though it was made from the same material as aircraft windows.

  The third person. There was no sign of this happiness on the outside, she knew. She was bored by this happiness that seemed out of place, impatient to get rid of it. The feeling was less pleasurable than she had imagined it might have been, less well-defined, and when she felt along its strings she found it was not easily traced or attached to the objects she thought it might have been attached to. Perhaps it was not attached to anything at all.

  Could her husband have been the cause of her happiness? She thought of him but her thoughts refused to alight on one feature that might anchor that feeling. She tried the physical: his eyes, his forearms, his cock and balls … they all seemed much as they had been, she could think of any with equanimity. Perhaps it was something he did, some quality of mind? No, none of these.

  How long does a thought take to form? Years sometimes. But how long to think it? And once thought it’s impossible to go back. How long does it take to cross an hour? The plane crosses the map so slowly, though it goes at how-many-kilometers-per-second. The plane desires, as its passengers desire—hoping the luster below might be the sea—to come to an end, but its desires draw it across the land only by inches.

  If we were flying from Paris we would just have left. The flight would be short. She tried to persuade herself to forget the hours of flight already passed, so it would be as though the plane had just left the runway, but it was impossible. Why was it impossible to forget what had happened, impossible to look at time only one way?

  Holidays are about returning, losing. You should come back lighter than you went. I know some people think different, collecting fat and souvenirs, but I have lost something. Why was it important, this having to get back? She had forgotten already. The objects that returned with her would be happier, she knew, when she reached the end of her journey. The tweezers would return to a place in which they knew their place, or one of their many places. The clothes would fall back on their cycle of washing and ironing, would breathe a sigh of relief.

  When he gets up, something in his back pocket traces a square along the lines worn by his wallet. It may be his wallet; it may be the piece of stone. I do not ask. He does not volunteer. He withholds its power. I allow him to.

  The land tips away from the plane. No vertigo. Too high.

  And, after the third descent, the departure of the idea of anything bad happening.

  YOUNG MOTHERS

  It’s not so much that we were young, because some of us were already old, old enough for gray hairs. It’s more that our children had made us young. Already in the youth of our young motherhood our children had given birth to our function. We hardly knew we were born of them, before we were named: Connor’s mum or Casey’s mum but never Juliet, or Nell, or Amanda, not for years anyhow, by which time we had skipped the remains of adulthood and were only old.

  But for a while we were young. You could tell because we acquired new things made from young materials. Our things were smooth, plastic, round-cornered, safe: clearly designed to be used by the ver
y young. It was necessary that we did not hurt ourselves, we young mothers, though the temptation was so very great. We were needed, and the plastic things were needed so we mothers, who had become our own children, did not hurt ourselves. See how patiently we taught ourselves to use the new things. You could call it nurturing.

  It had not started there, at our birth: our youth went further back. Pregnant, we already wore dresses for massive two year olds: flopping collars balancing our joke-shop bellies, stretchmarked with polka dots. After we were born into our new young motherhood our trousers sprouted many pockets for practicality. Khaki was good (grass-stains, tea-stains). You could put them through the rinser. Fleece was warm and stretchy for growing bodies. Shoes were flat for running, playing. Colors were bright, so our children did not lose us, so we could not lose each other, or ourselves, no matter how hard we tried.

  See how we looked after our young selves, awarding ourselves little treats—cakes, glasses of juice, or wine—never too much. If we noticed ourselves crying in a corner, we went to comfort ourselves. Sometimes we left ourselves alone to toughen up a little, but always with a watchful eye. Truly we were well cared for. Look how carefully we introduced ourselves to new environments: on our first day at playgroup we may have been reluctant, tearful even, to be herded together by virtue of situation and approximate age, but we remembered the manners we had taught ourselves: a good grounding. Seeing ourselves shyly approach each other we looked on with approval, breathed a sigh of relief.

  Then we had to remember how to play.

  We young mothers sang nursery rhymes. We had not sung in years. It came hard to us, sitting on the floor cross-legged in colored tops and practical trousers, singing about crocodiles all together, toddlers flopped in our laps. We had nothing else to sing. You would have thought we could have invented, for this fresh generation, the newness it deserved. But we were tired.