I don’t know what madness drove me to take a house opposite hers. A house with six storeys like hers, with long windows that let in the light and caught the sun in pools. I paced the floors of my house, never bothering to furnish any of them, looking in her sitting-room, her drawing-room, her sewing-room and seeing not her but a tapestry of myself when I was younger and walked like an arrogant boy.
I was beating a rug on my balcony when I finally saw her.
She saw me too and we stood like statues, each on our balconies. I dropped the rug into the canal.
‘You are my neighbour,’ she said. ‘You should pay me a call,’ and so it was fixed that I should pay her a call that evening before supper.
More than eight years had passed, but when I knocked on her door I didn’t feel like an heiress who had walked from Moscow and seen her husband murdered. I felt like a Casino girl in a borrowed uniform. Instinctively, I put my hand to my heart. ‘You’ve grown up,’ she said.
She was the same, though she had let the grey show in her hair, something she had been particularly vain about when I knew her. We ate at the oval table and she seated us side by side again with the bottle in between. It wasn’t easy to talk. It never had been, we were either too busy making love or afraid of being overheard. Why did I imagine things would be different simply because time had passed?
Where was her husband this evening?
He had left her.
Not for another woman. He didn’t notice other women. He had left her quite recently to go on a voyage to find the Holy Grail. He believed his map to be definitive. He believed the treasure to be absolute.
‘Will he come back?’
‘He may, he may not.’
The wild card. The unpredictable wild card that never comes when it should. Had it fallen earlier; years earlier, what would have happened to me? I looked at my palms trying to see the other life, the parallel life. The point at which my selves broke away and one married a fat man and the other stayed here, in this elegant house to eat dinner night after night from an oval table.
Is this the explanation then when we meet someone we do not know and feel straight away that we have always known them? That their habits will not be a surprise. Perhaps our lives spread out around us like a fan and we can only know one life, but by mistake sense others.
When I met her I felt she was my destiny and that feeling has not altered, even though it remains invisible. Though I have taken myself to the wastes of the world and loved again, I cannot truly say that I ever left her. Sometimes, drinking coffee with friends or walking alone by the too salt sea, I have caught myself in that other life, touched it, seen it to be as real as my own. And if she had lived alone in that elegant house when I first met her? Perhaps I would never have sensed other lives of mine, having no need of them.
‘Will you stay?’ she said.
No, not in this life. Not now. Passion will not be commanded. It is no genie to grant us three wishes when we let it loose. It commands us and very rarely in the way we would choose.
I was angry. Whoever it is you fall in love with for the first time, not just love but be in love with, is the one who will always make you angry, the one you can’t be logical about. It may be that you are settled in another place, it may be that you are happy, but the one who took your heart wields final power.
I was angry because she had wanted me and made me want her and been afraid to accept what that meant; it meant more than brief meetings in public places and nights borrowed from someone else. Passion will work in the fields for seven years for the beloved and on being cheated work for seven more, but passion, because it is noble, will not long accept another’s left-overs.
I have had affairs. I will have more, but passion is for the single-minded.
She said again, ‘Will you stay?’
When passion comes late in life for the first time, it is harder to give up. And those who meet this beast late in life are offered only devilish choices. Will they say goodbye to what they know and set sail on an unknown sea with no certainty of land again? Will they dismiss those everyday things that have made life tolerable and put aside the feelings of old friends, a lover even? In short, will they behave as if they are twenty years younger with Canaan just over the ridge?
Not usually.
And if they do, you will have to strap them to the mast as the boat pulls away because the siren calls are terrible to hear and they may go mad at the thought of what they have lost.
That is one choice.
Another is to learn to juggle; to do as we did for nine nights. This soon tires the hands if not the heart.
Two choices.
The third is to refuse the passion as one might sensibly refuse a leopard in the house, however tame it might seem at first. You might reason that you can easily feed a leopard and that your garden is big enough, but you will know in your dreams at least that no leopard is ever satisfied with what it’s given. After nine nights must come ten and every desperate meeting only leaves you desperate for another. There is never enough to eat, never enough garden for your love.
So you refuse and then you discover that your house is haunted by the ghost of a leopard.
When passion comes late in life it is hard to bear.
One more night. How tempting. How innocent. I could stay tonight surely? What difference could it make, one more night? No. If I smell her skin, find the mute curves of her nakedness, she will reach in her hand and withdraw my heart like a bird’s egg. I have not had time to cover my heart in barnacles to elude her. If I give in to this passion, my real life, the most solid, the best known, will disappear and I will feed on shadows again like those sad spirits whom Orpheus fled.
I wished her goodnight, touching her hand only and thankful for the dark that hid her eyes. I did not sleep that night, but wandered the unlit alleys, taking my comfort from the cool of the walls and the regular smack of the water. In the morning I shut up my house and never went there again.
And what of Henri?
As I told you, for the first few months, I thought him his old self. He asked for writing materials and seemed intent on re-creating his years since he had left home and his time with me. He loves me, I know that, and I love him, but in a brotherly incestuous way. He touches my heart, but he does not send it shattering through my body. He could never steal it. I wonder if things would be different for him if I could return his passion. No one ever has and his heart is too wide for his skinny chest. Someone should take that heart and give him peace. He used to say he loved Bonaparte and I believe him. Bonaparte, larger than life, sweeping him off to Paris, spreading his hand at the Channel and making Henri and those simple soldiers feel as if England belonged to them.
I have heard that when a duckling opens its eyes it will attach itself to whatever it first sees, duck or not. So it is with Henri, he opened his eyes and there was Bonaparte.
That’s why he hates him so much. He disappointed him. Passion does not take disappointment well.
What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?
Henri is a gentle man and I wonder if it was killing that fat cook that hurt his mind? He told me, on the way home from Moscow, that he had been in the army eight years without so much as wounding another man. Eight years of battle and the worst he’d done was to kill more chickens than he could count.
He was no coward though, he’d risked his own life over and over again to get a man off the field. Patrick told me that.
Henri.
I don’t visit him now, but I wave from my boat every day at about this time.
When he said he was hearing voices – his mother’s, the cook’s, Patrick’s – I tried to make him understand that there are no voices, only ones of our own making. I know the dead cry out sometimes, but I know too that the dead are greedy for attention and I urged him to shut them out and concentrate on himself. In a madhouse you must hold on to your mind.
He stopped telling me about them, but I heard
from the warders that he woke up screaming night after night, his hands round his throat, sometimes nearly choked from self-strangling. This disturbed his fellows and they had him moved to a room by himself. He was much quieter after that, using the writing materials and a lamp I brought him. At that time I was still working for his release and confident of securing it. I was getting to know the warders and I had an idea that I could buy him out for money and sex. My red hair is a great attraction. I was still sleeping with him in those days. He had a thin boy’s body that covered mine as light as a sheet and, because I had taught him to love me, he loved me well. He had no notion of what men do, he had no notion of what his own body did until I showed him. He gave me pleasure, but when I watched his face I knew it was more than that for him. If it disturbed me I put it aside. I have learnt to take pleasure without always questioning the source.
Two things happened.
I told him I was pregnant.
I told him he would be free in about a month.
‘Then we can get married.’
‘No.’
I took his hands and tried to explain that I wouldn’t marry again and that he couldn’t live in Venice and I wouldn’t live in France.
‘What about the child? How will I know about the child?’
‘I’ll bring the child when it’s safe and you’ll come here again when it’s safe. I’ll have Piero poisoned, I don’t know, we’ll find a way. You have to go home.’
He was silent and when we made love he put his hands to my throat and slowly pushed his tongue out of his mouth like a pink worm.
‘I’m your husband,’ he said.
‘Stop it, Henri.’
‘I’m your husband,’ and he came leaning towards me, his eyes round and glassy and his tongue so pink.
I pushed him off and he curled in the corner and began to weep.
He wouldn’t let me comfort him and we never made love again.
Not my doing.
The day came for his escape. I went to fetch him, running up the stairs two at a time, opening his door with my own key as I always did.
‘Henri, you’re a free man, come on.’
He stared at me.
‘Patrick was here just now. You missed him.’
‘Henri, come on.’ I pulled him to his feet and shook his shoulders. ‘We’re leaving, look out of the window, there’s our boat. It’s a pageant boat, I got that sly Bishop again.’
‘It’s a long way down,’ he said.
‘You don’t have to jump.’
‘Don’t I?’
His eyes were troubled. ‘Can we get down the stairs in time? Will he catch us up?’
‘There’s no one to catch us. I’ve bribed them, we’re on our way out and you’ll never see this place again.’
‘This is my home, I can’t leave. What will mother say?’
I dropped my hands from his shoulders and put my hand under his chin.
‘Henri. We’re leaving. Come with me.’
He wouldn’t.
Not that hour, nor the next, nor the next day and when the boat sailed I sailed it alone. He didn’t come to the window.
‘Go back to him,’ said my mother. ‘He’ll be different next time.’
I went back to him, or rather I went to San Servelo. A polite warder from the respectable wing took tea with me and told me as nicely as he could that Henri didn’t want to see me any more. Had expressly refused to see me.
‘What’s happened to him?’
The warder shrugged, a Venetian way of saying everything and nothing.
I went back dozens of times, always finding that he didn’t want to see me, always taking tea with the polite warder who wanted to be my lover and isn’t.
A long time later, when I was rowing the lagoon and drifting out to his lonely rock, I saw him leaning from the window and I waved and he waved back and I thought then he might see me. He would not. Not me nor the baby, who is a girl with a mass of hair like the early sun and feet like his.
I row out every day now and he waves, but from my letters that are returned I know I have lost him.
Perhaps he has lost himself.
For myself, I still bask in church in the winter and on the warm walls in summer and my daughter is clever and already loves to see the dice fall and to spread the cards. I cannot save her from the Queen of spades nor any other, she will draw her lot when the time comes and gamble her heart away. How else could it be with such consuming hair? I am living alone. I prefer it that way, though I am not alone every night and increasingly I go to the Casino, to see old friends and to look at the case on the wall with two white hands.
The valuable, fabulous thing.
I don’t dress up any more. No borrowed uniforms. Only occasionally do I feel the touch of that other life, the one in the shadows where I do not choose to live.
This is the city of disguises. What you are one day will not constrain you on the next. You may explore yourself freely and, if you have wit or wealth, no one will stand in your way. This city was built on wit and wealth and we have a fondness for both, though they do not have to appear in tandem.
I take my boat out on the lagoon and listen to the seagulls cry and wonder where I will be in eight years, say. In the soft darkness that hides the future from the over-curious, I content myself with this; that where I will be will not be where I am. The cities of the interior are vast, do not lie on any map.
And the valuable, fabulous thing?
Now that I have it back? Now that I have been given a reprieve such as only the stories offer?
Will I gamble it again?
Yes.
Après moi, le deluge.
Not really. A few drowned but a few have drowned before.
He over-estimated himself.
Odd that a man should come to believe in myths of his own making.
On this rock, the events in France hardly touched me. What difference could it make to me, safe at home with mother and my friends?
I was glad when they sent him to Elba. A quick death would have made him a hero straight away. Much better for reports to seep through of his increasing weight and bad temper. They were clever, those Russians and English, they did not bother to hurt him, they simply diminished him.
Now that he’s dead, he’s becoming a hero again and nobody minds because he can’t make the most of it.
I’m tired of hearing his life-story over and over. He walks in here, small as it is, unannounced and takes up all my room. The only time I’m pleased to see him is when the cook’s here, the cook’s terrified of him and leaves at once.
They all leave their smells behind; Bonaparte’s is chicken.
I keep getting letters from Villanelle. I send them back to her unopened and I never reply. Not because I don’t think about her, not because I don’t look for her from my window every day. I have to send her away because she hurts me too much.
There was a time, some years ago I think, when she tried to make me leave this place, though not to be with her. She was asking me to be alone again, just when I felt safe. I don’t ever want to be alone again and I don’t want to see any more of the world.
The cities of the interior are vast and do not lie on any map.
The day she came was the day Domino died and I have not seen him. He doesn’t come here.
I woke that morning and counted my possessions as I do; the Madonna, my notebooks, this story, my lamp and wicks, my pens and my talisman.
My talisman had melted. Only the gold chain remained, lying thin in a pool of water, glittering.
I picked it up and wrapped it around my fingers, strung it from one finger to another and watched how it slid like a snake. I knew then he was dead, though I do not know how or where. I put the chain around my neck, sure that she would notice it when she came but she didn’t. Her eyes were bright and her hands were full of running away. I had run away with her before, come as an exile to her home and stayed for love. Fools stay for love. I am a fool. I stayed in the army e
ight years because I loved someone. You’d think that would have been enough. I stayed too because I had nowhere else to go.
I stay here by choice.
That means a lot to me.
She seemed to think we could reach her boat without being caught. Was she mad? I’d have to kill again. I couldn’t do that, not even for her.
She told me she was going to have a baby but she didn’t want to marry me.
How can that be?
I want to marry her and I’m not having her child.
It’s easier not to see her. I don’t always wave to her, I have a mirror and I stand slightly to one side of the window when she passes and if the sun is shining I can catch the reflection of her hair. It lights up the straw on the floor and I think the holy stable must have looked this way; glorious and humble and unlikely.
There’s a child in the boat with her sometimes, it must be our daughter. I wonder what her feet are like.
Apart from my old friends, I don’t talk to the people here. Not because they’re mad and I’m not but because they lose concentration so quickly. It’s hard to keep them on the same subject and, even if I do, it’s not often a subject I’m much interested in.
What am I interested in?
Passion. Obsession.
I have known both and I know the dividing line is as thin and cruel as a Venetian knife.
When we walked from Moscow through the zero winter I believed I was walking to a better place. I believed I was taking action and leaving behind the sad and sordid things that had so long oppressed me. Free will, my friend the priest said, belongs to us all. The will to change. I don’t take much account of scrying or sortilege. I’m not like Villanelle, I don’t see hidden worlds in the palm of my hand nor a future in a clouded ball. And yet, what should I make of a gipsy who caught me in Austria and made the sign of the cross at my forehead saying, ‘Sorrow in what you do and a lonely place.’
There has been sorrow in what I have done and if it were not for my mother and my friends here, this would be the most desolate spot.