He had met her at an art opening in Milan. She spoke some English; they had fallen into a conversation about the contemporary Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, and at the conclusion of this she had touched his arm and had asked him how long he would be staying in the city. Her husband owned three or four galleries in the city, and as Ken soon came to discover, she was often left alone in these narrow places, which were more like long halls than rooms, in order to keep an eye on the paintings and talk to potential clients. She was beautiful in an unusual way, with dark brows and lashes, and almost white blond hair. It was this hair that he would look for through the glass of one gallery or another once he began to seek her out in what had progressed from being a cautious to a fervent way. Her hair, he thought, was like a lamp in an otherwise dark room. Her English was good, but not good enough for him always to be able to grasp what she was saying on the telephone, if he was lucky enough to find a telephone in working order, which was seldom the case in Italy. In the galleries, however, he could read, or thought he could read, her expression. And then there was the physical way she had of searching for the correct English term, twisting her arms and torso as if the phrase were lodged somewhere deep inside her and must be released from her mouth, like the banderols he had seen emerging from the mouths of saints in fourteenth-century Italian pictures. He was moved by this. He did not know her age, but assumed she was older than he was, and knew her to be more sophisticated.
Once it was clear that they would become lovers, he had checked out of the hotel where he was staying and had rented a room for a full month in spite of the fact that he had intended to stay for only a week in Milan. Soon, though, she had begun to talk about the lake and the mountains, and he came to understand she wanted a more romantic setting. There was a hotel in Orta, she told him, a hotel on the lake. They could have one, maybe two days there. There were some small shrines in the hills that she wanted to show him, and some stations of the cross. They were peasant art, she said, but art nonetheless, and charming in their way. She wanted him to see them. They could take a small train from Orta, up into the mountains, stopping every ten miles at villages along the way. Some of the villages would have the chapels of the penitents. Yes, she had told him, when he asked, there were Penitenti Bianci, and Penitenti Negri. Or there had been, back in the fifteenth century. And sometimes, even now, there were processions, but not at this time of year, which was early autumn.
He rose from his bed and walked across the wooden floor to one of the windows where he struggled for a bit with the metal clasp that held the shutters in place. Finally the shutters sprang open and the room was flooded with a kind of shocking and beautiful light that revealed mountains, sparkling lake, and pilgrims waiting patiently for the ferry to the monastery island outside, but also cracks in plaster, dust motes, crumpled papers, coins from his emptied pockets, and yesterday’s breakfast crumbs between the floorboards inside. Among the crumpled papers was a schedule of trains, and as he picked this up and smoothed it out on a table beside the bed, he realized that he had no idea which of the three trains she would take from Milan. He would have to be at the station, therefore, for each arrival, unless she arrived on the first. At the moment this thin piece of paper with its tiny, practically unreadable black type was more significant to him than the magnificent view. There was no morning train, but there were two in the afternoon, and the one he himself had arrived on near midnight. Today was Wednesday. He hoped she would be at the station just after noon.
He waited for the first train with eagerness. There would be the exquisite pleasure of lovemaking in the afternoon, followed by the novelty of lovemaking at night, something they had not yet experienced, at least together. There would be long, earnest conversations, with her struggling to find the correct English words. She would wear a nightdress, an Italian nightdress, and he would slip the straps from her shoulders. He found he could not sit still while he waited, so he walked back and forth between the two benches in the station. And then, when the station came to feel too confining, he paced back and forth on the quay. When the train arrived and she was not on it, he walked around and around the exterior walls of the station, worried that he might have somehow missed her.
After about ten minutes of this he wandered back into the town.
Everywhere he went there was the sense of the lake, though often he could not see it. Occasionally the sound of the ferry’s horn reached him, announcing the departure of another boatload of pilgrims. He did not want to take this ferry, though he had no idea why. He ate a plate of spaghetti at an outdoor table in a town square and drank two glasses of faintly bitter red wine. Then, with nothing to do until the four o’clock from Milan, he decided to take a look inside the church, the door of which was open, revealing a velvet black interior, as if there were absolutely nothing inside but a limitless void.
As always in such places, there were murals on the walls depicting obscure religious subjects, many parts of which were missing because of repairs over the centuries, or because, if the painting was a Virgin or a Crucifixion, thousands of hands had touched whatever regions of the paintings were within human reach. It was interesting to him that such damage could be caused by worship. He was thinking about this when he heard a scuttling noise and then the sound of a galvanized pail scraping across stone flags.
At the front of the church, an old woman, dressed entirely in black, was washing the choir stalls, bending toward the pail, wringing out her cloth, then moving her arm in a slow circular motion over the surface of the wood. In spite of her bent back and her squat form, there was grace in her movements and the kind of absorption that spoke to him of tenderness and devotion. She hadn’t noticed him at all, or if she had, she was paying him no mind, and he realized she would take this attentiveness with her to each aspect of the church she was required to clean. Kenneth was struck by this, and years later, working on the Gander mural, she would come to mind. The combination of discrete courtesy toward and rapt engagement with the surface she was working on would be something he would discover in himself when the brush strokes on the wall were going well.
She was not on the four o’clock train. Kenneth returned to the hotel and lay down on the bed that had been made up in such a ludicrously perfect fashion it looked as if no one had slept in it. Not anyone. Not ever. By now the sun was on the other side of the hotel and the room had become sober and remote, like the rooms behind braided ropes he had seen in famous houses all over Europe – rooms in which famous people had slept or died, or both.
He swung his legs around so that he was seated, cross-legged, looking at the headboard, an elaborately carved affair with rosettes, garlands, and two small angels, one on either side. He remembered a song his mother used to sing to him about angels guarding a sleeping child, and it occurred to him that his mother would hardly have approved of the adventure he was about to undertake, though likely not until tomorrow, he conjectured, though he still intended to meet the midnight train, just in case. In the meantime, he would draw the bed, the wardrobe, and perhaps make a watercolour of the view out the window.
As expected, she had not been on the night train, and the next morning he woke quite early with the amoebae swimming on the upper wall rather than on the ceiling, and the word arrival repeating itself in his mind. Unless she arrived on the first train there was not going to be time for more than one chapel in the mountains. Even if she did arrive on the one o’clock train, they would have to depart almost immediately for the mountains in order to get up there and back before sundown. This small journey could be rehearsed by him in the course of the morning so that he would at least know where they would be going, and valuable time would not be wasted hunting for shrines. He bought a sweet bun in a pastry shop that had opened early in the square. It seemed suddenly miraculous to him that there were people all over the world who were willing to rise in the dark to bake morning bread: what sense of vocation drove them to do this? Thinking such thoughts, he headed for the station. Coffee would have t
o wait.
Ten o’clock found him staring at a mural in a Chapel of the Black Penitents. He had had to ask a stranger on the train about the whereabouts of the chapel, and though the woman had looked at him oddly when he had done so, she had asked someone else, who in turn asked the conductor. An incomprehensible conversation erupted – somewhat argumentative, Kenneth thought – during which several village names, or at least what he assumed were village names, were bandied about until one was agreed on and written down on a scrap of paper. Bozano, it read.
The villages were reasonably close together, and the train stopped at regular short intervals. Trontano was reached in just over half an hour. After he left the train Kenneth was required to ask once again about the chapel and wondered at this point why he had not inquired after the White Penitents, believing, perhaps inaccurately, that it might have been a more benign question. This notion was reinforced when he read the soiled piece of paper on a table near the entrance of the chapel that explained, in rough English, that the black penitents had been called upon to attend funerals and other unhappy events and that they had sometimes worn dark cloaks with skeletons embroidered on the back and skulls on the hood. The mural he was looking at was a crude depiction of the seven deadly sins with gluttony riding on a pig, and sloth taking the shape of a fat, slumbering man. Two naked lovers, tied back to back and surrounded by flames, represented lust. To Kenneth’s surprise, the couple looked not at all desperate, as if they had discovered something amusingly arousing about the position they found themselves in even in the midst of their eternal predicament. There was a slightly sour smell of old candle wax and perhaps stale incense in the chapel, and Kenneth was not unhappy to leave it for the open air.
He arrived back in Orta just before the one o’clock train from Milan, and was once again disappointed and by now angry and hurt, convinced, suddenly, that she was not coming at all, had never intended to meet him, and had sent him off on this journey to get him out of her white blond hair. He walked sullenly back into the town until he reached a narrow street where he could hear the nearby lake but could not see it, and where he had noticed there was a bar. Here he settled outdoors at a rusted tin table, ordered a small carafe of red wine and, tired by now of pasta, a plate of antipasto as an act of defiance.
In the next twenty-four hours Kenneth would come to a full understanding about waiting and its sister, hope, how even as you lie in an empty bed at two o’clock in the morning, even when the room you have rented is yours for only three more morning hours, hope will still cross the room to meet you, if only to keep you turning on the spit. You argue her away from you only to discover that some semblance of her remains in the shadows where the light of the lamps doesn’t quite reach, or just behind a door where a knock might be heard at any moment. There is also a suggestion of hope in the breathing sounds of a body of water that you have never properly looked at, or a departing ferry you have never taken.
There would be no water in the Gander mural, not even a hint of water, though all who looked at it would have crossed, or would be about to cross, an ocean. The figures on the wall would always be landlocked, perhaps listening to the sound of water they could not see. Landlocked and waiting, always waiting, for the arrival of something, or someone they were never going to meet again.
Painting the bright sun-drenched sky of arrival, Kenneth realized that the woman from Milan would always be the absence on this waiting room wall, the pale, curving path strewn with leaves, the vacancy of a deep blue, limitless night. It was a decade later, and he was in Gander, Newfoundland, and yet he suddenly recognized her atmosphere in such things, though he hadn’t thought of her for years, and could not even fully remember her name. Yes, she was there in the mural, the one significant event that never happened. The path that hope had walked and the corner that she turned.
It was his place, Niall had often reminded her, his peninsula. He had known these winds, this rain since infancy, he told her: he, the expert of weather. What was an English toff like her doing there anyway? He would smile then, laugh, but behind this apparent playfulness she could feel something else, something that wanted her gone from there.
Without a multi-generational history she could never actually be a part of the surroundings. “It’s in the genes,” he told her. She could imagine she was happy here, but that was all it would be. Imagination. “You English are only here for the view,” he said once. “There’s no reality in it.”
There was nothing to keep her there, he insisted with the playfulness gone from his voice, and one day, if she was smart, she would realize this and vanish in the night. She was fortunate she had that former husband somewhere, and a father, who provided her with an unearned income. Otherwise, she would never have been able to stay.
“You people,” he said. “You people never have to work for a living.”
He himself worked with the landscape, he explained; he interpreted and recorded its moods. I own this, he might just as well have said. And you are an interloper.
“Well, Mister Weather,” she said, “sometimes I think that you’re just a front blowing through. And maybe this isn’t just the first time. Maybe I’m part of a repeating pattern. Who is next? Someone else who is only here for the view?”
He had turned toward her then, his face white with anger. “What do you want from me, Tamara?”
“Please,” she said, “please just tell me something, anything about who you are, what you feel. Are you happy, Niall, are you ever really happy? How am I supposed to know you? You tell me nothing.”
“I’m happy,” he said. “Maybe there is nothing to tell and it is only you who imagines that there is.”
“I want more of you,” she said. “How can there be anything so wrong with that?”
He became fiercely protective of his wife at times like this, her innocence, her loyalty, as if any act of self-revelation on his part was a further betrayal of her. He became overtly expressive of the terrible thing he was doing to her. Tam believed he wanted her to be conscious of this as well, her part in it. She wouldn’t say it, wouldn’t ask, and what does your wife do, exactly? How does she work for a living? She would not defend her own role, whatever that was. There would be no explanations coming from her about how it was she came to be there with him in her arms. She would not remind him that it was he who knocked on her door or called her in the mornings. And she would not bring Teddy into the argument, would not point out that she came as a partner into this world of his.
Feigning kindness suddenly, a hand on her arm, he said, and not for the first time, “You should make a life, a family of your own.”
She could feel her age when he talked like this, the passage of time and the arc of the relationship. Her age and his own and the weight of the secret they held between them.
“I love this cottage,” she told him. “I love that mountain,” she said, pointing out a window. “And that one. I know the names of every dog from here to the pass.” She wanted him to believe it was the landscape and everything else that was alive in it that held her, not him. “The people here know me,” she said. “I have been in their kitchens.” Which, she might have added, was more than he could say, wheeling out here from the town with a profession under his arm and a feeling of superiority in his mind.
He had never wanted his life to be like this, he began again. He had never wanted to harm his innocent wife. He had not been looking for this, he said, insinuating that somehow she had been looking and had sized him up and hunted him down and had remained, stubborn, demanding, insisting that he appear. And then, as if out of concern for her, he told her she was missing her real life, that there was a life she was owned by and that this life was going on across the channel, without her. As if there was a drama somewhere, in hiatus, the stage set, waiting for her to walk on so the curtain could go up. As if she had wickedly abandoned everything, which, though she would never admit it, she almost had.
“This is my life,” she told him. “I know the people in
the town shops. I know how the grass grows in the middle of the road.” Her drawings lay on the table in the next room, but she couldn’t bring herself to cite them. If he chose to dismiss them, she would not argue.
“Can’t you see how good your life would be?” he said. “Think of the country house weekends. All those drawing rooms, the children home from the right kind of schools for a day or two, servants in the hall. You could stop drawing the planes and concentrate entirely on wildflowers. The English love wildflowers, I’ve been told.”
“Don’t,” she said. “Just don’t.”
“Why don’t you see it would be so much better for you, Tam?” he said. This from a man who only an hour before had been so intimately encircled by her the walls of their bodies had seemed to dissolve. “Better for all of us,” he said, hell-bent on bringing his wife right into the room.
After a session like this she would storm through the three rooms of her empty cottage, weeping, unable to contain the rage and desire. She would pull out the old photos of Teddy and wilfully try to mourn him, but she knew her tears were not for that boy who had never caused her grief and only for the man who had, who did. She wanted Niall to come back to console her. She wanted to slap his face. She wanted his hand between her legs and his mouth on her breast in the angriest of ways. She wanted to break the unspoken contract that was between them, the one she had been forced to accept without ever being apprised of the terms. She wanted to tear the power out of him, to humiliate him. She wanted to watch him through the window, locked out of her house, her life, begging to be allowed back in.
The Night Stages Page 25
