Telescope

by Jonathan Buckley

  Bologna minus Maria palled surprisingly, and when a friend from her days in Athens contacted her from Madrid, enthusing about the city and the school in which she was working, Celia was soon on her way once again. Madrid too was good, though the former friend had changed in ways that were not conducive to the continuation of the friendship – she had acquired, for one thing, a predilection for recounting, in company, incidents from their time in Athens that often did not reflect well on Celia, and which Celia rarely recalled as having happened quite as related. The nightlife was of course wonderful, yet Madrid did not have quite the same kind of buzz as Barcelona, and on the other hand it had more buzz than Celia could cope with: she was already beginning to feel too old to keep pace with her colleagues, and she still remembers vividly her first intimation of middle age, at the age of just 28, at 3 a.m. on a hot July midweek night, in an alley behind a Madrid club, as friends conferred about where to go next, just a few hours before they’d be starting work. And an argument involving half a dozen sixty-ish men in a bar near Plaza del Sol – an overheated exchange with much roaring and table-pounding; perhaps a show intended for the entertainment of themselves and their audience, but with explosions of what seemed to be genuine rage – made her think (and acknowledge that such thoughts had been lurking under the surface for some time) that she would never be on quite the same wavelength as people who could whip themselves up into such a passion in a disagreement over a football match that had happened thirty years previously. So now it was farewell to the heart of Spain and hello to the heart of Portugal.

  Ask Celia what she thought of Lisbon and she’ll say it was fine. The men were a little on the short side, fado was the most tedious music on earth, and she pretty soon reached a point where she never wanted to see another platter of shellfish as long as she lived – but Lisbon was fine. She never tired of the sight of the river. The Port Wine Institute was fun. There was some nice countryside nearby. But Lisbon was rarely exciting, and from time to time she saw herself not as a woman who had taken a stand against inertia, but as someone who was merely drifting. She worried that she was losing her nerve. Her brain was too full of Spanish and Italian and fragments of Greek to make room for Portuguese, and she was mugged one night (a black eye, because she wouldn’t relinquish the bag; most of a week’s wages gone; photos of boyfriend (name momentarily unavailable) thrown into the Tagus, along with her keys). And of course there was the clobbering from the cop. As soon as a decent stretch of free time became available, she took a trip to Genoa to visit Maria and her husband (Moreno the marine engineer, whom she had met – he was on holiday – not long after her mother had died) and the recently arrived baby Marta. The week was delightful in all respects but one: several times a day Maria would implore Celia not to deprive herself of the joys of marriage and motherhood, and refused to believe Celia (who could, Maria had often pointed out, have any man she wanted) when she said that her unwedded and childless condition was less a matter of choice than of chance. ‘No, I think you’re afraid,’ said Maria. And: ‘You would be a beautiful mother. I always thought so. Always.’ (This was not true: Celia could recall the subject cropping up just once, when a now-haggard colleague came into school with her yowling newborn, and Maria’s reaction had been even more emphatic than her own. ‘No, no, no!’ she wailed, as they walked home. ‘We will wait. We will wait for ever.’) Maria’s ceaseless proclamation of the blessings of maternity created some strain, but temporarily; at the next visit the advocacy was less intense, and within a few years she had entirely ceased striving to win her over, perhaps concluding – seeing Celia so gentle with the girls (Cecilia, Celia’s god-daughter, was born a year after Marta) – that still-single Celia really wasn’t unmarried by choice, and was fated, as some very attractive women mysteriously are, to remain alone. Celia left Genoa, after that first visit, more convinced than ever that the obligations and anxieties of motherhood were to be avoided, a conviction from which she has hardly ever wavered.

  Intermittently pining for Bologna, for her former life with unmarried Maria, Celia persevered in Lisbon, but she was reaching thirty with just a few hundred pounds in the bank, and lacking true attachment to the place in which she was living. (The lack of true attachment to any particular man was not problematic, it should be noted.) Back to London she came again, where she was soon earning a decent salary and leading a life that was not without its delights even before her involvement with Matt, and yet – prior to Matt – there were days when the sprawl and gloom of London revived a longing for Bologna that she now knew was a longing for the city itself rather than for a life that had gone forever. And though this yearning ceased for the duration of the affair with Matt, she came to feel that the idea of Italy was constantly present in the depths of her mind, like a slow, strong current in steady motion underneath the incidental activity of the waves. Thus, when things with Matt worked out as they did, and she found herself again on her own, it was – as Celia described it – like being adrift on a boat at night, and when you wake up in the morning, after hours of worrying over what you would do when daylight came, you find you’ve been carried close to the shore, but not the shore from which you’d departed.

  To Italy, then, but not to Bologna (no jobs at her former school, where Cipolla was now in charge): first to Lucca (confirmation almost at once that she’s in the right country for her; somewhat slower acceptance that demure Lucca isn’t the right spot); then on to Pisa (getting closer: swarms of students a good thing, but problematic aura of provinciality); then to Florence, and an immediate sense that final landfall has been made. And now, at last, we’re only one step away from the present. (Antonio. The Lisbon boyfriend was called Antonio. He’d once had a trial for Benfica, he said, but his friends laughed when she reported what he’d told her.)

  When living in Lucca and Pisa she’d made forays to Florence with a frequency that increased as it came to seem inevitable that she would move there, and long before the right job was found she had selected the quarter in which she would be living (in the vicinity of the flea market), where, thanks to Elisabetta, a tiny flat was quickly found, only to be vacated a few months later in favour of her current address, two blocks away.

  Elisabetta – let’s do Elisabetta while we’re at it. Elisabetta is Elisabetta Cecchetti, née Voltolina. A proficient linguist (MA in linguistics from University College London; fluent in English, Spanish and French; capable in German), she was contemplating an academic career when she met, at a tedious dinner in a villa outside Prato, the beguilingly unusual Simone, who, though trained as an archaeologist, and still fascinated by certain aspects of the subject (their first holiday together, in Cairo, would be spent mostly in museums), was now a director of a textile factory in the city, a change of career that had come about through one of the factory’s former bosses, a family acquaintance, who, upon hearing that ancient textiles were something of an obsession of Simone’s, had informed him that his own son, Gino – who was then starting out in the business – would like to meet him, having developed an interest in the early history of the industry. Simone and Gino met, and got on well. Introduced to creative young fabric technicians and crazy clothes designers and a seductive industrial chemist called Carla, Simone found himself drawn to the world of textile production and accepted a temporary placement at Gino’s factory, a placement which evolved at great speed into a profession, as Simone gave proof not only of a superb eye and a sure grasp of the technologies of fabric manufacture, but also of mercantile skills previously unsuspected by anyone, himself included. He had recently returned from a mission to Tokyo (where his understanding of Japanese business etiquette and his knowledge of Japanese fashion – he appeared to have committed to memory every garment ever created by Rei Kawakubo, Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto – had proved invaluable) when Elisabetta (not long back from London; doing bits and pieces of translation work while she pondered her next move) met him. Marriage followed within a matter of months, and two children within as many years. Eli
sabetta stayed at home until the younger child had started school, taking on as many translations as she could manage (about three times as much work as any normal multilingual woman could have found time for, says Celia) and somehow finding time to formulate her own methodology for teaching a second language to adults, a methodology she introduced, with excellent results, at the institution of which she was the director of studies at the time she interviewed Celia. (The institution from which Mr Mascarucci, finance director, would one day abscond.)

  Elisabetta took to Celia strongly on first sight, and vice versa. It was in September that Celia began work in Florence, and by Christmas she’d been to the home of the golden couple several times. Home was a vast apartment near the Trìnita bridge, furnished in impeccable taste: sleek and modern, but not pretentiously so. A decade Celia’s senior but an exact contemporary to the casual eye, thanks to expensive and subtly applied cosmetics (brands obtainable from outlets known only to the cognoscenti) and an assiduous exercise regimen, Elisabetta is a woman who is not merely successful in everything she does, but successful without any manifestation of effort – a quality which Celia, lacking it, admires hugely. Elisabetta possesses (persuasive photographic evidence has been produced) an unostentatious elegance and sharp-edged beauty. She is graceful and urbane, and, though her life is exactly as she would want it to be, she never appears complacent. She’s grateful for the good fortune that has brought her a husband who’s intelligent and desirable and faithful (to the best of her knowledge), and two talented and loving children: Alessandra (architect) and Gianni (metallurgist). And though money will never be a problem in the Cecchetti household, one has the impression that she would take in her stride any downturn in the family fortunes, being the daughter of a librarian and an archivist of limited means, who throughout her childhood had impressed upon her the worthlessness of pecuniary (as opposed to spiritual) wealth, illustrating its transience and moral taint with frequent invocation of the case of some tenuously related individual by the name of Massimiliano, once the owner of a construction company, who had devoted his youth and middle years to the accumulation of money by means that at best were barely legal (becoming in the process a man so unpleasant that other crooks were his only companions; no woman would go near him, except women with no self-respect), only to lose it all when one of his buildings fell down and his firm went bust, leaving him as poor and lonely and bitter as an ogre in a folk tale.

  It should be noted in passing that Charlie, citing Celia’s adoration of the style-goddess Elisabetta, has long maintained that there is a fundamental contradiction in his sister’s world-view: she belittles him as a capitalist lackey, but has a penchant for the trappings of the good life, as long they come with a veneer of creativity.

  ‘I had hoped for a more enthusiastic response,’ I tell Ellen. ‘Best part of three days, that lot took me.’

  ‘How would Celia feel if she knew I was reading this?’ she says.

  ‘She wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘I think she’d be embarrassed.’

  ‘And I know she wouldn’t.’

  ‘Have you told her that you’re doing this?’

  ‘No need. There’s nothing here she wouldn’t tell you herself.’

  ‘Well, it’s one thing for her to tell me; it’s something else for you to tell me. There are things here she might prefer to forget about. We’ve all done things we’d like to forget.’

  ‘Speak for yourself, missus.’

  A hundred yards beyond a flattened rabbit (macerated and pressed into the tarmac so thoroughly that one plump paw and an upraised ear are the only unequivocally rabbitty features of the fur-pat) the torch beam catches a beige hummock on the verge: a deer, young. A foreleg, snapped between knee and hoof, is angled the wrong way, but otherwise it presents a profile which is more or less that of the live animal standing. Evidently it has been placed on the grass with care. The tongue, blood-spotted, is touching the grass lightly, as if to taste it; the eye towards us, wide open, is steel-coloured. Insects are chewing at the lips and eyelids, trotting up the tongue and onward to the interior. Activity can also be detected in the under-tail region and within the fur of the flank: here and there, individual hairs vibrate. In the gravel at the edge of the road lies a moist pink pile of skull-contents, and here a company of bugs is hard at work. I select a single scavenger and track it for a minute with the torch, as it sprints back and forth across the slick little mound, stopping every few seconds to carve itself a portion of meat, apparently oblivious to the light that’s burning above it. It is so pleasant and so healthy to set oneself down in solitude, face to face with eternal things.

  From the back bedroom we are afforded a view of the older part of town. Not a greatly uplifting prospect, but today it’s looking as good as it can. The russet expanses of undulating clay tile are weakly pleasing. A thin skim of cirrostratus to the south gives some form to the sky. The church spire’s weathervane twitches an inch or two in the breeze every now and then. In the middle distance, chaffinches are firing themselves in and out of an oak. Down in the garden, Janina works her way along the flowerbed, fork in hand, imposing order on the vegetable matter. The only other visible human activity is taking place in one of the gardens that backs onto the opposite side of the stream: a girl, seven or eight years old I’d guess, in red dress and with a red band in her hair, is running round the perimeter of the lawn, arms outstretched. Another girl joins her and they whirl in the centre of the lawn, making their hems fly. They spin together, eyes shut, until they fall. Lying side by side, hands joined, they drum their feet on the grass. I have them both gathered in the circle of glass when Ellen, on her way upstairs, comes upon me.

  ‘How did you get that down here?’ she asks.

  ‘Sheer willpower,’ I answer.

  ‘What’s to see?’

  I tell her I’m watching the kids in the garden, and step back to invite her to take a look.

  ‘Lovely, aren’t they?’ I remark.

  Ellen takes a look. ‘Yes,’ she agrees, uneasily.

  I assume a lyrical mood. To a child, I muse, the garden is a tumult of colours, not an arrangement of things with names.

  ‘I suppose,’ says Ellen.

  ‘No notion of categories,’ I maunder. ‘No ideas about who they are.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I was wondering who they are. Haven’t seen them before.’

  ‘Neither have I,’ Ellen replies. ‘I’m going to sit in the garden for a few minutes,’ she says, ‘unless you need me.’

  ‘No,’ I tell her, taking hold of the eyepiece. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Come down with me,’ she cajoles.

  ‘In a while.’

  ‘It’s nice and warm outside.’

  ‘It’s nice and warm inside,’ I point out, but the tease has gone far enough and a few seconds later I’m following her.

  I scuttle from the pergola to the shade of the tree, and thence to the cover of the bushes at the far end of the garden. The girls are inaudible. Ellen, having pegged the day’s laundry to the line, joins Janina at the shrubs; I assume she’s reporting on me. Applying the secateurs with a surgeon’s delicacy, Janina makes no visible response, other than the slightest of nods, but as she hands a cutting to Ellen she looks over at me. I adopt what I hope is a wistful posture, but I can’t be sure I’ve got it right. Janina resumes her labours, frowning intermittently.

  ‘You’re bothered, aren’t you?’ I say to her later.

  ‘About what?’ she asks, though she knows.

  ‘The kids. The girls.’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ she insists. ‘I don’t like the idea of you hauling that thing downstairs on your own, that’s all.’ I pretend to believe her. ‘When are you going to write something more for me to read?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I answer. ‘The Muse is fickle.’

  Janina leaving to play tennis – the squeak of her new tennis shoes on the wooden floor sets me off. I must set aside time to write about it: th
e quality of quietness in a hospital at night; the occasional groan, the occasional sigh, above the low soft chorus of breathing; the squeak of shoes, as the nurses walk from bed to bed, checking on us; the muffled flurry of an emergency at the end of the ward. The gorgeous nurses, and the one who didn’t like me. I could tell she thought I was a big-head. This was a relief, because most people felt obliged to like me. To this nurse, though, I was the same as any other big-head. What was her name? Karen? Kerry? And the students: the ones who touched me as though prodding a bear through the bars of a cage; the ones for whom I seemed to be little more than a teaching aid; the ones who looked as though they might faint. The doctor who couldn’t disguise how delighted he was to have come across such a remarkable case. My skin was ‘spectacular’, he said, as though congratulating me on growing it. But I liked him; he talked to me as to a collaborator on a special medical project. He was called —? This information appears not to be available to me. Janina’s legs are remarkably lissom.

  It hadn’t been possible for Christine to talk to Celia properly before, but now Jack has gone away and it turns out that Christine is in need of advice. Christine regards Celia as a woman of superior life-knowledge, a misperception traceable to their years at primary school, when Celia could be relied upon to avert punishment for nearly all misdemeanours through a mixture of charm and highly inventive lying, and to repel the attentions of undesirable boys with an aplomb to which those oafs could find no riposte. Most of the boys were undesirable, but Jack was one who was not. Christine and Celia and Jack became a trio at around the age of ten, and remained a trio even after their dispersal to different secondary schools. Upon reaching the hinterland of puberty, the girls wasted no time in acquiring boyfriends – a succession of boyfriends, of whom Jack was never one. Nevertheless, whatever the girls’ other commitments might have been, the trio spent at least part of most weekends together, and so it continued for three years or so, then the gatherings became less regular and the girls became a pair, with Jack as an increasingly distant satellite. This change was attributable chiefly to Jack’s attachment to Katrina, a highly intelligent and immensely unrelaxed girl who didn’t much care for rowdy Celia and her pretty but tongue-tied little sidekick. (Sound and Vision, as she nicknamed them.) Katrina followed Jack to university, where her drunken liaison with the comically masculine captain of the rugby team promptly put paid to their relationship. At home for the summer, broken-hearted Jack took solace from Christine, who was herself in shock after being ditched by a boyfriend who had more or less informed her – in response to her admitting that she’d found I, Robot so boring she’d stopped reading it after a day – that perhaps they weren’t quite on the same intellectual level and he needed to be with a girl who was a bit more comfortable with advanced abstract thought. (He did have the good grace, though, to send her a letter the following week, to soften the blow. He hoped that, when they had both recovered from their dissappointment (sic) at what had happened, they could still be friends. Christine never spoke to him again.)