We were moving. How?
I raised my head fully, my knees still drawn up, and saw Villanelle, her back towards me, a rope over her shoulder, walking on the canal and dragging our boats.
Her boots lay neatly one by the other. Her hair was down.
I was in the red forest and she was leading me home.
Four
the
ROCK
They say the dead don’t talk. Silent as the grave they say. It’s not true. The dead are talking all the time. On this rock, when the wind is up, I can hear them.
I can hear Bonaparte; he didn’t last long on his rock. He put on weight and caught a cold, and he who survived the plagues of Egypt and the zero winter died in the mild damp.
The Russians invaded Paris and we didn’t burn it down, we gave it up and they took him away and restored the monarchy.
His heart sang. On a windy island in the face of gulls, his heart sang. He waited for the moment and like the third son who knows his treacherous brothers won’t outwit him, the moment came and in a salty convoy of silent boats he returned for a hundred days and met his Waterloo.
What could they do with him? These victorious Generals and self-righteous nations?
You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play.
The end of every game is an anti-climax. What you thought you would feel you don’t feel, what you thought was so important isn’t any more. It’s the game that’s exciting.
And if you win?
There’s no such thing as a limited victory. You must protect what you have won. You must take it seriously.
Victors lose when they are tired of winning. Perhaps they regret it later, but the impulse to gamble the valuable, fabulous thing is too strong. The impulse to be reckless again, to go barefoot, like you used to, before you inherited all those shoes.
He never slept, he had an ulcer, he had divorced Joséphine and married a selfish bitch (though he deserved her), he needed a dynasty to protect his Empire. He had no friends. It took him about three minutes to have sex and increasingly he didn’t even bother to unbuckle his sword. Europe hated him. The French were tired of going to war and going to war and going to war.
He was the most powerful man in the world.
Returning from that island the first time he felt like a boy again. A hero again with nothing to lose. A saviour with one change of clothes.
When they won hands down a second time and chose for him a darker rock where the tides were harsh and the company unsympathetic, they were burying him alive.
The Third Coalition. The forces of moderation against this madman.
I hated him, but they were no better. The dead are dead, whatever side they fight on.
Three madmen versus one madman. Numbers win. Not righteousness.
When the wind is up, I hear him weeping and he comes to me, his hands still greasy from his last dinner, and he asks me if I love him. His face pleads with me to say I do and I think of those who went into exile with him and one by one took a small boat home.
They had notebooks with them mostly. His life-story, his feelings on the rock. They were going to make their fortunes exhibiting this lamed beast.
Even his servants learned to write.
He talks about his past obsessively because the dead have no future and their present is recollection. They are in eternity because time has stopped.
Joséphine is still alive and has recently introduced the geranium to France. I mentioned this to him, but he said he never liked flowers.
My room here is very small. If I lie down, which I try not to do for reasons I will explain, I can touch each corner just by stretching out. I have a window though and, unlike most of the other windows here, it has no bars. It is perfectly open. It has no glass. I can lean right out and look across the lagoon and sometimes I see Villanelle in her boat.
She waves to me with her handkerchief.
In winter, I have a thick curtain made of sacks that I drape twice over the window and fasten to the floor with my commode. It works well enough providing I keep my blanket round me, though I suffer from catarrh. That proves I’m a Venetian now. There’s straw on the floor, like at home, and some days when I wake, I can smell porridge cooking, thick and black. I like those days because it means mother is here. She looks just as always, perhaps a little younger. She walks with a limp where the horse fell on her, but she doesn’t have to walk far in this little room.
We get bread for breakfast.
There isn’t a bed, but there are two big pillows that were stuffed with straw too. Over the years I’ve filled them with seagull feathers and I sleep sitting on one, the other propped behind my back against the wall. It’s comfortable and it means he can’t strangle me.
When I first came here, I forget how many years I’ve been here, he tried to strangle me every night. I lay down in my shared room and I’d feel his hands on my throat and his breath that smelt of vomit and see his fleshy pink mouth, obscene rose pink, coming to kiss me.
They moved me to my own room after a while. I upset the others.
There’s another man with his own room too. He’s been here almost for ever and he’s escaped a few times. They bring him back half drowned, he thinks he can walk on water. He has money and so his room is very comfortable. I could have money but I won’t take it from her.
We hid the boats in a stinking passage where the garbage tugs go and Villanelle put her boots back on. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen her feet and they are not what I’d usually call feet. She unfolds them like a fan and folds them in on themselves in the same way. I wanted to touch but my hands were covered in blood. We left him where he lay, face up, his heart beside him, and Villanelle wrapped me to her as we walked, to comfort me and to conceal some of the blood on my clothes. When we passed anyone she threw me against the wall and kissed me passionately, blocking all sight of my body. In this way we made love.
She told her parents all that had taken place and the three of them drew hot water and washed me and burned my clothes.
‘I dreamed of a death,’ said her mother.
‘Hush,’ said her father.
They wrapped me in a fleece and put me to sleep by the stove on a mattress of her brother’s, and I slept the sleep of the innocent and did not know that Villanelle kept silent vigil beside me all night. In my dreams I heard them say, ‘What shall we do?’
‘The authorities will come here. I am his wife. Take no part in it.’
‘What about Henri? He’s a Frenchman even if he isn’t guilty.’
‘I will take care of Henri.’
And when I heard those words I slept fully.
I think we knew we’d be caught.
We spent the few days that followed cramming our bodies with pleasure. We set out early each morning and rioted in the churches. That is to say, Villanelle basked in the colour and drama of God without giving God a thought and I sat on the steps playing noughts and crosses.
We ran our hands over every warm surface and soaked up the sun from iron and wood and the baking fur of millions of cats.
We ate fish fresh caught. She rowed me round the island in a pageant boat borrowed from a Bishop.
On the second night incessant summer rain flooded St Mark’s Square and we stood on the edge watching a pair of Venetians weave their way across by means of two chairs.
‘On my back,’ I said.
She looked at me in disbelief.
‘I can’t walk on water but I can wade through it,’ and I took off my shoes and made her carry them while we stumbled slowly across the wide Square. Her legs were so long that she had to keep hitching them up to stop them trailing in the water. When we reached the other side I was exhausted.
‘This is the boy that walked from Moscow,’ she taunted.
We linked arms and went in search of supper and after supper she showed me how to eat artichoke.
Pleasure and danger. Pleasure on the edge of danger is sweet. It’s the gambler’s sense of losing that
makes the winning an act of love. On the fifth day, when our hearts had almost stopped knocking, we were almost casual about the sunset. The dull headache I’d had since I killed him had gone.
And on the sixth day they came for us.
They came early, as early as the vegetable boats on their way to market. They came without warning. Three of them, in a shiny black boat with a flag. Questioning they said, nothing more. Did Villanelle know her husband was dead? What happened after she and I left the Casino so hurriedly?
Had he followed? Had we seen him?
It seemed that Villanelle as his lawful undisputed wife was now to be in possession of a considerable fortune, unless of course, she was a murderess. There were papers for her to sign concerning his estate and she was led away to identify the body. I was advised not to leave the house, and to make sure that I took this advice a man stayed at the water-gate, enjoying the sun on his forehead.
I wished I were in a bright green field staring at the bright blue sky.
She did not return that night nor the night after and the man by the water-gate waited. When she did come home on the third morning, she was with the two men and her eyes were warning me, but she couldn’t speak and so I was led away in silence. The cook’s lawyer, a wily bent man with a wart on his cheek and beautiful hands, told me quite simply that he believed Villanelle to be guilty and believed me to be an accessory. Would I sign a statement saying so? If I would then he could probably look the other way while I disappeared.
‘We are not unsubtle, we Venetians,’ he said.
And what would happen to Villanelle?
The terms of the cook’s will were curious; he had made no attempt to rid his wife of her rights, nor to apportion his fortune to another. He had simply said that if she could not inherit for any reason (absence being one), he willed his estate in its entirety to the Church.
Since he must never have expected to see her again, why had he chosen the Church? Had he ever been inside one? My surprise must have been evident because the lawyer in his candid mood said the cook loved to watch the choirboys in their red clothes. If his face showed the hint of a smile, the hint of anything other than an acceptance of a religious disposition, he hid it immediately.
What was in it for him? I wondered. What did he care who got the money? He didn’t look like a man with a conscience. And for the first time in my life I realised that I was the powerful one. I was the one who held the wild card.
‘I killed him,’ I said. ‘I stabbed him and I cut out his heart. Shall I show you the shape I made in his chest?’
I drew in the dust on the window. A triangle with rough edges. ‘His heart was blue. Did you know hearts are blue? Not red at all. A blue stone in a red forest.’
‘You’re insane,’ said the lawyer. ‘No sane man would kill like that.’
‘No sane man would live like he did.’
Neither of us spoke. I heard his breathing, sharp, like sandpaper. He laid both hands over the confession ready for me to sign. Beautiful manicured hands, whiter than the paper they rested on. Where had he got them from? They couldn’t be his by right.
‘If you are telling me the truth . . .’
‘Trust me.’
‘Then you must stay here until I am ready for you.’
He got up and locked the door behind him, leaving me in his comfortable room of tobacco and leather with a bust of Caesar on the table and a ragged heart on the window-pane.
In the evening, Villanelle came. She came alone because she was already wielding the power of her inheritance. She had a jar of wine, a loaf of bread from the bakery and a basket of uncooked sardines. We sat together on the floor, like children whose uncle has left them in his study by mistake.
‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ she said.
‘I told the truth, that’s all.’
‘Henri, I don’t have any idea what comes next. Piero (the lawyer) thinks you’re insane and will suggest you are tried as such. I can’t buy him off. He was a friend of my husband’s. He still believes I’m responsible and all the red hair in the world and all the money I have won’t stop him hurting you. He hates for hate’s sake. There are people like that. People who have everything. Money, power, sex. When they have everything they play for more sophisticated stakes than the rest of us. There are no thrills left to that man. The sun will never rise and delight him. He will never be lost in a strange town and forced to ask his way. I can’t buy him. I can’t tempt him. He wants a life for a life. You or me. Let it be me.’
‘You didn’t kill him, I killed him. I’m not sorry.’
‘I would have and it doesn’t matter whose knife or whose hand. You killed him for my sake.’
‘No, I killed him for myself. He made every good thing dirty.’
She took my hands. We both smelt of fish.
‘Henri, if you are convicted as insane, they’ll either hang you or send you to San Servelo. The madhouse on the island.’
‘The one you showed me? The one that stares over the lagoon and catches the light?’
She nodded and I wondered what it would be like to live in one place again.
‘What will you do, Villanelle?’
‘With the money? Buy a house. I’ve done enough travelling. Find ways of getting you free. That is, if you choose to live.’
‘Will I be able to choose?’
‘That much I can afford. It’s not up to Piero, it’s up to the judge.’
It was dark. She lit the candles and propped me against her body. I laid my head on her heart and heard it beating, so steady, as if it had always been there. I had never lain like this with anyone but my mother. My mother who took me on her breast and whispered the scripture in my ear. She hoped I’d learn it that way, but I heard nothing except the fire spitting and the steam rising from the water she heated for my father’s wash. I heard nothing but her heart and felt nothing but her softness.
‘I love you,’ I said, then and now.
We watched the candles make bigger and bigger shadows on the ceiling as the sky became completely dark. Piero had a palm in his room (got from some cringing exile no doubt), and the palm cast a jungle on the ceiling, a tangle of broad leaves that could easily hide a tiger. Caesar on the table had a profile to recommend him, and of my triangle nothing could be seen. The room smelled of fish and candlewax. We lay flat on the floor for a while and I said, ‘See? Now you understand why I love to be still and look at the sky.’
‘I’m only still when I’m unhappy. I don’t dare move because moving will hasten another day. I imagine that if I’m absolutely still what I dread won’t happen. The last night I spent with her, the ninth night, I tried not to move at all while she slept. I heard a story about the cold wastelands in the far north where the nights are six months long and I hoped for an ordinary miracle to take us there. Would time pass if I refused to let it?’
We didn’t make love that night. Our bodies were too heavy.
I stood trial the next day and it was as Villanelle had predicted. I was declared insane and sentenced to life imprisonment in San Servelo. I was to go that afternoon. Piero looked disappointed, but neither Villanelle nor I looked at him.
‘I’ll be able to visit you in about a week and I’ll be working for you, I’ll get you out of there. Everyone can be bribed. Courage, Henri. We walked from Moscow. We can walk across the water.’
‘You can.’
‘We can.’ She hugged me and promised to be at the lagoon before the grim boat sailed away. I had few possessions but I wanted Domino’s talisman and a picture of the Madonna her mother had embroidered for me.
San Servelo. It used to be just for the rich and mad but Bonaparte, who was egalitarian about lunacy at least, opened it to the public and set aside funds for its upkeep. It was still faded splendour inside. The rich and mad like their comforts. There was a spacious visitors’ room where a lady might take tea while her son sat opposite in a strait jacket. At one time the warders had worn uniform and shiny boots and any
inmate who drooled on those boots was shut away for a week. Not many inmates drooled. There was a garden that no one tended any more. A matted acre of rockery and fading flowers. There were now two wings. One for the remaining rich and mad and one for the increasing numbers of poor and mad. Villanelle had sent instructions to have me put in the former, but I found out what it cost and refused.
I prefer to be with the ordinary people anyway.
In England, they have a mad King that nobody locks up.
George III who addresses his Upper Chamber as ‘My Lords and peacocks’.
Who can fathom the English and their horseradish?
I did not feel afraid to be in such strange company.
I only began to feel afraid when the voices started, and after the voices the dead themselves, walking the halls and watching me with their hollow eyes.
When Villanelle came the first few times, we talked about Venice and about life and she was full of hope for me. Then I told her about the voices and about the cook’s hands on my throat.
‘You’re imagining it, Henri, hold on to yourself, you’ll be free soon. There are no voices, no shapes.’
But there are. Under that stone, on the windowsill. There are voices and they must be heard.
When Henri was taken to San Servelo in the grim boat I set about procuring his release straight away. I tried to find out on what grounds the insane are kept there and if they are ever examined by a doctor to see if there has been any improvement. It seems that they are, but only those who are no danger to mankind can be let free. Absurd, when there are so many dangers to mankind walking free without examination. Henri was an inmate for life. There were no legal means of having him freed, at least not while Piero had anything to do with it.
Well then, I would have to help him escape and ensure his passage to France.
For the first few months that I visited him he seemed cheerful and sanguine, despite sleeping in a room with three other men of hideous appearance and terrifying habits. He said he didn’t notice them. He said he had his notebooks and he was busy. Perhaps there were signs of his change much earlier than I recognised, but my life had taken an unexpected turn and I was preoccupied.