“This is too hard,” I recoiled at last. “You have no idea how painful this all was.”
“Then do you wish to stop?”
Perhaps I was fearful of her contempt. Perhaps, more positively, I had a dim sense of possibilities that would be extinguished once and for all if I refused this challenge. Either way, I shook my head, though I could glimpse the enormity of what lay in wait. But I said, “I just don’t see what you expect me to do with it.”
“Only to accommodate the pain,” Gabriella insisted, “to own it as your own creation.”
And so, for as long as I could, I pressed on, staying with the tension of each remembered crisis, doing my best to own as mine each clumsy failure of the heart. For a time, I spoke as nakedly as I dared about some of the black places to which my mind had taken me – as a man in London and elsewhere; as an undergraduate when things first slipped out of control at Cambridge; as a terrified boy at Mowbray College, and earlier with that frightening experience as a child in Africa. At last – it seemed like hours later – I tried to speak about that devastating year in which all things seemed to conspire to overthrow my sanity. The year in which my marriage ended; in which I was betrayed – unforgivably, I believed – by my closest friend; in which my mother was driven to her death; and in which I saw my father as the egotistical monster I had always feared him to be.
Staring into the waters of Clitumnus, I stared again into that dark chamber of the mind where I had remained too lucid to let madness rule my life and too cowardly for the act by which I might put an end to it. But as I tried to speak of these things now, the effort proved more than I could bear. I broke off, lifted my head, opened my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I said, “that’s it, that’s as far as I can go.”
The sun had moved across the sky, lengthening the shadows of the poplar trees. The gate to the gardens must have been reopened, because people were now strolling across the other side of the lake in ones and twos. Gabriella was seated where she had been throughout, a little behind me, out of sight. She had not spoken for a long time. Now she said, “Do not be sorry. You have achieved much.”
“But I failed at the end. I kept expecting you to interrupt me.”
“It was not necessary.”
“Even though I kept breaking the rule?”
“If we do not break the rules sometimes, then how shall human life progress?”
Puzzled, I turned my head to study her.
Evidently untroubled by contradictions, she added, “Also, when one attempts the impossible, it makes no sense to speak of failure. Only of more or less gain.”
“When we began,” I reminded her, “you said this was difficult – not impossible.”
“If I had said it was impossible, would you have begun?”
“Have you ever done this before?” I asked with sudden mistrust.
“Like this? No. Never before.”
“Then I don’t understand. Why pick on me?”
“Because something was necessary. We were all agreed.”
“We?”
“Myself. Lorenzo. Marina.”
“Marina was in on this?”
“Of course. But the responsibility is all mine.”
I glanced away, beginning to see just how much preparation might have gone into this encounter. I imagined conversations assessing my condition. I remembered puzzling things that Marina had said, and Gabriella’s provocative remarks at the cocktail party. Then I was wondering whether Meredith Page had also been involved, whether the astrologers had even been asked to study my horoscope. I felt the hot afternoon swirl around me. It was stationary and swirling at the same time, like the columns on the tempietto that were carved to resemble water. What had seemed the impulsive events of an extraordinary day were now revealed as a carefully staged operation to transform my life. And if the intention had been benign, the methods now seemed humiliating.
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” I said. “It just leaves me feeling manipulated. As if this has been some kind of experiment for you. A game, even.”
“Do you take me for so capricious a person?” And when I did not answer, Gabriella said, “If you have sensitivity as an actor, you will know the difference between those times when you have ceased to pretend and have become instead an instrument through which the play performs itself. I mean the times when the god has entered you. Today, for a while, I think you were more even than such an actor. You were also the author here. You were the play itself. And in that sense you are right – it was a game. But a serious game. A game of transformation. In any case, I think it is as I said.”
“What? What did you say?”
“That a tremendous thing might happen here. Qualcosa di irrevocabile, yes? I think already it has begun.”
“As far as I can see, all that’s happened is that my ghosts have come back and I don’t know how I’ll ever lay them at rest again.”
“No,” she said, “I think that is not all. You have numbered the ghosts and owned them as yours. You have seen that these ghosts are of your choosing, that they are the needful occasions of your suffering, not the cause of it. For that we must search deeper. For that we must ask who is the one that has chosen them. The question now is whether you can remember who it was who made these choices, and why they were made, and whether you are yet ready to be worthy of them.” She pressed on before I could protest. “You have already risked much, but you must continue to be truthful with yourself, or all will be in vain. Now you must discover whether you are worthy to be possessed by the god, or willing to become so? If so, then everything can change. If you are not,” – she shrugged without glancing away – “our business here is done.”
She lay stretched on the grass, slightly tilted away from me. This woman was crazy, no question about it. Crazy as a hare. Yet her voice, its edgy absolutism, filled me with an almost sensual appetite for change.
I gazed back down where the bubbles simmered upwards in the spring. Perhaps this was a game after all, a game playing itself out at many levels. A game such as the one Marina and I had played with friends as children, that game called “Truth, Dare, Force or Willing”, the object of which was to push us beyond safe boundaries, sometimes merely into pranks and scrapes but, more scarily, into saying or doing things we secretly wanted to say or do. It was a game that brought desire and fear very close together, a game that made real things happen; and it always carried an undercurrent of excitement.
“Suppose I turn out to be worthy, as you put it,” I said, “what then?”
Alert to the change in my eyes and voice, she smiled before saying, “I think you will find that a number of astonishing things become clear.”
“Such as?”
“If I try to say more, it can make no sense to you. Also I do not presume to speak for who you might become.”
“Then speak for yourself. What difference do you think it might make between you and me?”
“As I said before,” she insisted, “we should take one thing at a time,”
“Surely we’re not thinking in straight lines here? If I understood you correctly, the oracle isn’t a railway station. It doesn’t keep timetables.”
“Nor is it an express.” She countered my smile with her own. “Sometimes we must be patient for answers. Besides, you have not yet made the oblation.”
“Tell me what it is.”
“An offering. An offering to the god.”
“Of what?”
“Of yourself. But you must make some sacrifice as a sign of it. You must surrender to the spring something that is precious to you.”
“I haven’t got anything. Nothing of value. That last disaster stripped me bare. I came here penniless. I’ve been living at Marina’s expense. That’s what I’m reduced to. That’s the ignominy of my condition.”
Firmly she shook her head. “Everyone keeps a thing that is dear to them if they can. For you I think it was possible.”
“There’s nothing,” I insisted.
Sighing, Gabriella got to her feet. “Then we must wait until you have something that you do not wish to lose. Come to me again when you have such a thing.” She brushed down her skirt and replaced her sunglasses. “I will drive you back to Fontanalba,” she said, and began to walk away.
She must have gone six or seven yards before I called, “Wait.”
She turned, tilted her head at me.
“There is one thing,” I said. “But I don’t think I can part with it.”
“What is it?”
“A coin.”
“You are attached to money?”
“Only to this coin.”
She stepped back towards me, held out her open hand. “Let me see.”
Without moving, I stared back at the black lenses masking her eyes.
She said, “You do not trust me?”
“It’s not that. This thing was given to me by my mother. A long time ago. It’s all I have of her.”
“Your mother is dead. A coin cannot buy her back.”
“That’s a hell of a thing to say!”
“Marina is my friend. I care for her very much. We are speaking also of her mother, yes?”
“I see. Did Marina tell you about the coin?”
Ignoring the question, Gabriella looked out across the shimmering span of the pool, then back to where I sat at the water’s edge. “Come. You had this coin from the dead. Is it not time that you gave it back to the dead? It will make a suitable oblation.”
“I can’t. I feel that as long as I have it…”
“Yes? What then? What is the magic of this coin? Do you think you have your mother in your pocket?”
“It was precious to her as well.”
“Then return it to her.”
I got to my feet, but stood unmoving, remembering that snow-bound Christmas long ago at High Sugden, how Grace had given me the ancient silver coin, knowing how long I’d coveted it. I remembered how I had vowed to treasure it always, and had done so for a time, then put it away and forgotten it until the time of her death. Since then I had carried it with me everywhere.
“Come, let me see this coin,” Gabriella said. When I still made no move, she glanced at me almost in disdain. “Don’t worry, you shall have it back. I cannot make the sacrifice on your behalf.” So I took the battered leather purse from my trousers’ pocket and fished out the coin. Gabriella held it up to the sunlight to inspect its eroded inscription. “Ah! L’imperatore Adriano,” she exclaimed, turning the coin over in her hand. “And here, on the other side, his lover, for whom he grieved so much that all the world was made to honour him as a god. Antinous. Was that not his name?” She glanced back up at me. “But do you think even an emperor can keep a loved one from death by locking memory inside a piece of metal? Even if it endures two thousand years?” When I failed to answer, she closed the silver coin in her fist and held it to her breast. “About Antinous,” she said abruptly, “tell me: do you know how he died?”
Still I said nothing.
“I think you must know that he drowned in the Nile,” she said, “while all around him the Egyptians were mourning the day of the death of Osiris. I think you must also know that Antinous was a fine swimmer. That it would have been hard for him to drown in the mud of the Nile, unless…” She removed her sunglasses again. “His clothes were found folded on the bank. Earlier he had made a sacrifice in the temple of Osiris. It seems he had already decided to make a sacrifice of himself.” She opened her fist, stared down at the coin, and then tossed it across to me. I snatched out a hand to catch and grip it. “Release her,” she said in strict tones that shocked me with their coldness. “Free yourself. Give this silver back to the underworld.” Almost as if my hands had been pressed against my ears to shut out every word she said, I could feel the pressure building inside my head. “Do it,” she said quietly. “Be done with her now.”
“My God!” I gasped. “Do you have no feelings at all?”
“Yes, I have feelings.”
“Well, right now I’m finding it hard to believe. You seem to have made up your mind to take away every last thing that matters to me. I don’t understand any of this. What do you want from me?”
“Everything that can be taken from you.”
I stared at her in silence, beginning to understand just how absolute her claims were. I turned away to stare down into the pool. The coin was gripped in my hand. I turned it over and over, feeling its substance, its worn surfaces and edges, its obstinate ability to survive. I remembered how often, at moments of uncertainty or stress, I had tapped it for solace without conscious thought. It was the single holy thing in my unholy life. I could not conceive of parting with it.
At my feet the surface of the water rippled and shone.
“Make the oblation,” Gabriella said quietly at my back.
“You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“Do you wish her to haunt your life for ever? Let it go.”
“I can’t imagine what I’d become if I did.”
“That’s exactly right,” Gabriella answered. “You will become that which you cannot yet imagine.”
Her presence was no more than a chilling whisper inside my head, a voice that might have been that of the water of Clitumnus, rising fresh and clear in each utterance of bubbles after its long journey through the underworld.
I must have held out and opened my fist, but it felt as though the coin my mother had given me delivered itself of its own desire to that clear spring. I saw it turn and sway and shine. I saw it drowning as it fell. Then it vanished in a blur of mud and light.
Eventually my eyes cleared and my breathing slowed. I stared at the water into which I had poured my life. In the stillness between my face and the reflection of my face I became a moment of pure vacancy. Time slipped by. And then, to a sound that might have been the throbbing of the universe, there came the inrush of the god.
12
Decision
I came awake to a soft knock and the sound of the bedroom door swinging on its hinges. A crack of daylight split the room. My eyes opened on the green binder of Adam’s manuscript lying beside me. The bedside lamp was still lit.
Lifting my head, I saw Angelina carrying a breakfast tray towards the bed. Her chirpy “Buongiorno, signore,” was followed by a mutter of disapproval at the sight of me sprawled across the brocaded counterpane, still wearing my clothes from the night before. With a shake of her head, she put the tray down on the bedside table before swaying across the tiled floor to throw open the shutters onto the loggia. The morning light wafted into the room on a wave of heat.
I drank a strong espresso, took a shower and lay back on the half-tester bed in a borrowed bathrobe. Then I reached for the folder and glanced quickly through its pages, trying to decide once again why Adam had decided to inflict them on me.
I had read the document the previous night with growing unease. At first I was amused by Adam’s satirical description of the gathering at the villa and his account of the visit to the barber. But amusement soon gave way to disbelief – not so much at Gabriella’s behaviour at the tempietto, which seemed quite consistent with her tales of oracles and omens and the scaly-legged sibyl in her underground boudoir, but at the outrageous demands she made once she and Adam had arrived at the springs. The guarded young man I’d first met at High Sugden would have run a mile sooner than submit to such an ordeal of self-revelation. Yet Adam had gone along with it.
Knowing that I must be implicated in any disclosures he made, I had prepared myself for more, and for worse than his account obliged me to feel. He hadn’t even mentioned me by name in what was, admittedly, no more than a brief summary of the most painful crisis of his life. I featured only in passing as the friend – the closest friend – who had betrayed him. Who had betrayed him unforgivably. But brief as the reference was, that last word had pierced me. It did so again as I reread it now. Was this Adam’s way of telling me that if I had come to Umbria looking for reconciliation I was on a fool’s errand?
But what else did I expect? Hadn’t I said as much to Hal back in High Sugden?
Or had Adam’s intention been more challenging? Evangelical even? You may have made me suffer abominably, he seemed to be saying, but I have transcended all that. I have re-imagined my life. Dare you do the same?
I looked again at the first page with its questionable five-point manifesto. Well, if this flaky talk of gods and oracles and sacrificial rituals was Adam’s way of re-imagining his life, of putting his fugitive heart at ease, then he was welcome to it. I wanted no part in it. Again I wondered why I hadn’t trusted my own judgement enough to refuse to come looking for him here in Umbria. I would certainly have preferred to live without the knowledge that he had so foolishly relinquished the rational powers of a mind I’d once admired. Or that his will had been so far corroded by despair that he was incapable of resisting a woman who was – he acknowledged it himself – as crazy as a hare.
And what about Marina? I’d lain awake half the night, yearning for all that had been lost between us. But it was clear from everything I’d seen and heard and read in this place that the people I’d known and loved no longer existed. They had changed so much it felt as though we no longer lived in the same universe. So why was I wasting my time here when my own real life was elsewhere?
Throwing the pages aside, I fished for my mobile phone in my jacket pocket. I’d switched it off during the previous evening’s dinner party, and had been so eager to read what Adam had written that I’d forgotten to check it afterwards. Waiting for me was a voice message from Gail, a message filled with reproachful hesitations.
“Look, I’m sorry I was short with you earlier,” she began, “but I was feeling… well, you know what I was feeling. I think we’ve reached the end of the road… Anyway, I can’t sit around here waiting for you to come back and hurt me again. So I’m taking that flight after all… I don’t expect you to come after me. In fact, I don’t want you to come after me. I really don’t… And I won’t be back, not this time… Let’s face it, Martin, we’re through. We’ve been through for quite a while now. We just didn’t want to admit it, did we?” After a longer silence she sighed, “Oh what the hell!… Believe me, Martin, not all the memories are bad…”
Water Theatre Page 22
