For a while Martin listened to the palm fronds tapping in the breeze, then he said, “So what are you going to do with yourself? For the rest of your life, I mean.”
Adam shrugged the question away. “I don’t know yet. I haven’t made up my mind. This is a new country. There’s plenty to do here.”
“You think your dad will find you something?”
“I don’t need him. Emmanuel will always help me out.”
“You don’t think he has larger demands on his time?”
“He helped you, didn’t he? Anyway, if necessary I’ll find something for myself. In fact, I think I’d rather.”
Martin took the last sip of his beer. “And what about Efwa?” he asked a moment later. “What does she want?”
“She wants what I want, of course.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Of course I’m sure. That’s why we’re together. We want the same things.”
“How long have you known her, Adam?”
“Since we were kids.” Adam said confidently. “We were already very close back then.”
Uneasily Martin said, “But she’s not a kid any more.”
“No she’s not,” Adam snapped back. “And neither am I, so stop treating me like one. Now do you want another beer or not?”
14
Deal
The Fiat was winding uphill through a steep stretch of forest a couple of miles outside Fontanalba when I rounded a bend and saw two women resting beside the road. Both wore khaki shorts and hiking boots, one was seated on a rock, the other looking down in concern at her companion. Two backpacks lay on the verge beside them. The car shot past them at speed, and it was only when I checked the rear-view mirror that I saw the standing figure waving both arms in the air to attract my attention. I braked and reversed back down the road. When I opened the door to speak to them, I heard the older, seated woman saying, “Dammit, Meredith, we’re almost there! I can make it on my own two feet.”
“I’ve been watching you limp for the last hour, Dottie,” answered the other one. “We’re hitching a ride while we’ve got the chance.” Then she came across to the open door of the car. “Mi scusi,” she began. “Questa signora…” – she indicated her friend, who was shaking her head, and then raised the foot of her own right leg, miming pain as she rubbed the heel. “Noi può dare un…”
“Where do you want to go?” I interrupted, already knowing the answer.
“You speak English!”
“I am English.”
“Great! We’re headed for Fontanalba. It’s not far, but…”
“Okay.” I got out of the car, picked up one of the backpacks by its frame and shoved it into the boot beside my grip, saying, “Can one of you take the other pack in the back seat?”
“Sure, no problem. Let me.” The woman was in her early fifties and wore owlish glasses. Unaware that I already knew other things about her, she tipped the passenger seat forward, lifted her backpack in before I could offer to help, and then climbed in after it. I pushed back the seat for her older friend, who lowered herself in saying, “This is very civil of you and kind of unnecessary, but thanks anyway.” She would not see seventy again, and her face was flushed after a long day’s hiking through the heat, but her voice was that of an unfazeable New Yorker who might have smoked a pack a day for thirty years before the Surgeon General started worrying in public. One of the shrinks, I guessed, who had been at the villa with the astrologers and poets on the night Adam had described.
“Dorothy Ziegler,” she offered. “Glad to meet you.”
I nodded and smiled, concentrating on the road, while the trimmer figure in the back seat leant forward at my shoulder and said, “Hi, I’m Meredith Page. I hope you were going to Fontanalba anyway?”
“I was.”
“Well, it was just great of you to stop,” she said. “Thanks.”
“You want some candy?” Dorothy Ziegler offered me a chunk of the Kendal mint cake she had unzipped from her green leather bumbag. “It’s English. Try it, you’ll like it.” I took a piece and put it in my mouth – an excuse not to speak. Meredith Page declined the offer and filled the silence. “We have friends expecting us there. They said we were crazy to hike from the railroad station. Guess they were right, huh?” I smiled at the face she made behind her glasses as she pushed back a strand of brown hair.
“You staying in Fontanalba?” asked Dorothy Ziegler.
“Yes. Maybe. Tonight anyway.”
“We’ll be around Fontanalba for the next few days,” Meredith said. “We’re here for an event that doesn’t start till tomorrow night, but we wanted to arrive in time to freshen up after the hike.”
“An event?”
“It’s a kind of celebration.”
“Sounds like fun.”
Dorothy Ziegler looked back over her shoulder. “Meredith honey, did you think to pack some bug spray? I plain forgot mine.”
“I don’t use it, sweetie. There’s sure to be some at the villa, if you can hold out till then.”
Dorothy Ziegler grunted. “Won’t get too much sleep tonight then. Not with these bugs gnawing at my cellulite. My own damn fault though.” She shook her grizzled head at me. “Used to have a mind that worked pretty good.”
“She still does,” Meredith put in dryly. “Dottie’s last book won a National Poetry Award.”
“You’re a poet?”
“Don’t sound so surprised, Mister,” the older woman answered. “We come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. And some of us have blisters.”
I glanced into the rear-view mirror, where I saw Meredith Page shaking her head and smiling. “You’re not a poet,” I said.
“Nothing so special!”
“Let me guess,” I said, “you’re an academic,” and watched her blink behind her glasses. “Classical studies, I’d say. Or archaeology perhaps? But then you sound west coast, not east like your friend here, so you might just be into something a touch far out.”
“Where’s this guy get off?” exclaimed the amused, throaty gravel of the voice next to me. “Reading so much into a lousy pair of glasses, which” – she glanced back at her friend – “didn’t I always tell you, sweetheart? – you never ought to wear.”
“Do I gather I’m right?”
“Close enough to be worrying,” Meredith answered. “Is it that obvious?”
“Put it down to male intuition.” I smiled into the mirror and returned my eyes to the road. A minute later I took a sharp bend round a rock face and saw the lights of Fontanalba strung along its hill.
“Guess you were right,” Dorothy Ziegler said to her friend. “At the rate I was hobbling along it would have taken us another hour or two. And I could kill for a shower right now! What d’ya think? Do we owe this guy a meal or what?”
“You don’t owe me anything,” I said.
“Sure we do, Sir Knight. You just rescued us. That right, honey?”
“Why not?”
“Perhaps tomorrow,” I prevaricated. “If I’m still in town. You must both be tired out right now. There’s a crossroads coming up. Which way?”
Meredith Page leant forward between the seats and pointed. “Turn right at the shrine of the Madonna. The place we’re staying is just down the road.”
I saw the tall house that had loomed out of the fog on my first arrival in Fontanalba two nights before. Again the dog began to bark as I pulled off the road, but there was no sign of Franco and his brother. I got out, opened the boot, lifted out the backpack and carried it to the house. Dorothy Ziegler watched me from the open passenger door, where she was standing, while Meredith leant over to drag her own pack from the back seat.
As I walked back to the car, a woman’s voice called out something inside the house, then a door was opened and the boy’s mother stood in its light.
“Ciao, Assunta,” Meredith said. “We made it at last.”
The Italian woman greeted both her guests by name, evidently delighted and relieved to s
ee them. While Meredith crossed the yard to exchange embraces with her, Dorothy asked me, “Do we get to see you tomorrow then?”
“Could be. You never know.”
Before she could question me further, I was reversing the car onto the road. Glancing back as I pulled away, I saw the two women waving in the glare of light from the house, calling out their thanks.
I’d been thrown by the down-to-earth manner with which those two American women had defeated all expectations aroused by Adam’s satirical description of the gathering at the villa. Yet it was with the sensation of being caught in a loop that I turned once again down the track to the cottage. No mist blurred my view this time, so I could see the drop at its edge and the crowns of the fig trees on the slope below. The cottage itself looked as bereft of life as on my first arrival. The yard was empty, the key lay under the stone, but when I opened the door and switched on the light I saw at once that things had changed.
Someone had rearranged the furniture in the living room to make space for an old-fashioned camp bed against the frescoed wall, and when I went through into the kitchen I saw that provisions for guests had been laid ready in the cupboard and the fridge.
I poured myself a glass of water and took it through into the living room. Then I noticed a postcard propped upright against the books on the desk in the little alcove: Giotto’s picture of St Francis giving his sermon to the birds had not been there when I left. I turned the card over and read:
Dear Jago and Sam – It’s great of you to lend a hand with the “backstage aspect of things at such short notice. I hope you’ll be comfortable enough here for the duration. Lorenzo will sort out anything else you might need. I’ve marked the relevant pages of his book for you. Once everything’s in place, please feel free to take as much part in the open proceedings as you wish. I know we can count on your discretion. See you soon.
With love,
Adam
Beside the postcard lay Larry’s Umbrian Excursions with two strips of paper protruding from it. The first marked the passage about Fontanalba I had read earlier. This time the name of the woman who had told Larry the legend of the revenant leapt out at me: Angelina Tavenari, wife to the town barber – and now, I presumed, housekeeper and cook out at Gabriella’s villa. I read the page again, more carefully this time. Then I turned to the second strip, which seemed to have been torn from a sheet of writing paper, because it bore the heading:
THE HEARTSEASE FOUNDATION
Villa delle Meraviglie Fontanalba Italy
The page it marked was from an essay on the ancient mysteries that I hadn’t read before. This paragraph had been scored:
Is it not possible that the Sibyl and her ministers were fully conscious of their own manipulative part in the process while at the same time trusting the impersonal forces that worked through them? Perhaps it might help to think of their operations as a form of sacred theatre where the power of the performance depends on the willingness of the actors to be possessed by the god. When, today, we attend a performance of King Lear performed in that spirit, we know that we are only watching men and women, our contemporaries, act out that awesome pageant of suffering, and that soon the actors will change back into their everyday clothes and go home unharmed. But though the event may be illusory, its power is not. We are moved and transformed by it. We are imaginatively enlarged. For a time our sense of the world is altered. How much more potent then an event in which there is no distinction between audience and protagonist? How much more deeply might one be drawn beyond the quotidian confines of the mind into the realm where changes begin to happen? Already induced into a heightened state of receptivity, the willing participant in such rites descends deeper into the self even as the literal journey takes him deeper into the earth. And though the journey is always inward, the outward journey – down and through and out again – is indispensable, for it is down there, in the darkness of the underworld, that the sun at midnight shines.
I checked the back of the title page and noticed for the first time that the book had been published nearly forty years earlier, when Larry had still been in his middle twenties. A folie de jeunesse, as he himself had called it, characterized by the sententiousness of youth. Yet in those extravagant paragraphs some seeds had been sown that must have come to fruition many years later.
Wondering who Sam and Jago might be, I had just opened another bottle of Adam’s red wine when my mobile phone rang.
“Martin?”
“Yes? Who is this?”
“Where are you?” Many things might have changed about Adam across the years, but his laconic voice was not among them. “Are you still in Italy?”
“I’m in your cottage.”
“You did come back then! I rather hoped you might, but when you ignored my message …”
“Fra Pietro wasn’t exactly clear,” I said. “Something about foxes and dogs. I couldn’t make much sense of it.”
“Dog Fox,” Adam pointed out. “I was talking about Dog Fox. Don’t you remember? The story I told you. Years ago, when we first met. The code name of the agent who went to Auschwitz? It’s part of what I wanted to talk over with you…”
“Adam, you’re not making much sense either. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, I’m fine.”
“I heard you banged your head, and…”
“Nothing to worry about,” he interrupted. “My skull’s still very much intact.”
“What the hell were you doing up there in the mountains all alone?”
“Thinking. Centring myself. Communing. Not so different from what you used to do when you were younger. But something came rather clear to me when I banged my head. That’s partly why I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to apologize.”
For days I’d been wondering what it would be like to talk to Adam again. Anger, resentment, the bitterness of his contempt – for all of these I had prepared myself. Yet nowhere in my expectations had the possibility of apology figured. Not after all that had come between us.
“There’s no need for that. I always knew there was a price for the choice I made.”
After several moments of silence, Adam said in a colder voice, “I don’t think you understand. I wasn’t thinking about that. It’s something else I need to get clear with you. Something that happened between us right at the start, in our first big conversation, that night at High Sugden.”
“Oh yes? What was that?”
“I have the clearest memory of making you feel ridiculous because you had the courage to tell me what you really believed. I want to try to put that right. You were so open with me at that time, so lacking in all the defensive irony I’d got used to at home and at school. And what did I do? I set about turning you into the cold-blooded sort of sceptic they’d made of me, infecting you with the virus of my own disbelief. I watched it changing you then, and it got worse at Cambridge. It still bothers me to think about it.”
I was frowning as I said, “That’s not how I remember it.”
“The truth is,” he continued, as though I hadn’t spoken, “I believed in nothing. Not even in that existentialist bill of goods I tried to sell you. Least of all in myself. That’s why all that heady stuff about anguish and absurdity, about dread and nothingness and bad faith appealed to me so much. I was a prime specimen of all of them. As for nausea – I was sick to death of myself. Sick as only an adolescent narcissist can be. And there you were, holding on to the kind of dream I’d once had in Africa as a child – a dream of nature, of the sacred wholeness of things. You were trying to stay true to the claims of that vision, making poetry from what you heard. And I talked you out of it.”
“That’s not at all the way I see it,” I said.
But his wry snort stalled me there. “I stopped you writing, didn’t I?”
“Well, that was hardly the most grievous loss to English literature since the death of Keats!”
“Maybe not,” he said, “but I killed off the poet in you, and that’s a terrible thing to do
. The minute you started paying attention to me, you stopped listening to the Soul of the World.”
So strange was the assertion that for a moment we were at an impasse. I had no idea what he meant. I wished he was there with me in the room so that I could see what he looked like now, what kind of light was in his eyes. And why were we talking about this when so much else remained unresolved between us?
“That’s your language, not mine,” I answered. “Sorry to contradict you, Adam, but I really can’t remember ever listening to the ‘Soul of the World’. I don’t even pretend to know what you mean by it.”
“You knew back then. You didn’t call it that, but you knew what it was all right. You were trying to speak its language until I convinced you it was a waste of time.”
For a single, vivid instant it was like being dropped vertically down a shaft through time. I was back there, in the shadowy cleft of a crag, listening to the rush of water among ferns and stones, in a state of passionate attention such as I had never quite attained again. Briefly I felt an irrepressible pang of loss for all that was as nameless as it was irretrievable, and so far gone down the years that it resonated through me with no greater force than the muffled plop of a stone dropped down a well. Then I was back in the present, pouring wine into a glass with my free hand, wondering what on earth to make of this.
Water Theatre Page 26
