Read Last Train from Liguria (2010) Online
Authors: Christine Dwyer Hickey
Tags: #Christine Dwyer Hickey
She turns to look back over the villa, locating her room at the gable end of the house, the only window not to have green shutters clamped to the wall. And there, the balcony she had stood earlier, looking down at this very spot, and the corner terrace where she saw the nun praying in the lemon grove. She turns away from the house and continues, passing beside a long low wall lined with terracotta urns and marble vases through air that is pampered with lemons and roses.
The archway turns out to be a pergola, longer than expected and much lower, so that she has to stoop through a tunnel of musty odour to pass to the other side. Coming out she lifts her head for light and air, and is surprised to find neither. The air remains ripe, the light dull. Her eyes adjust. Bella almost screams. After a few seconds, a short nervy laugh comes out instead. She is in a statuary. For one foolish moment it had crossed her mind that these figures might be real men, standing around in a large circle looking at each other. She feels like an intruder in a doorway who has stumbled on and silenced a conversation not meant for the ears of strangers. Some of the figures look so real. Naked or near naked men. The prime of manhood in fact. Robust legs and high tight rumps. One of them with a shoulder blade slightly turned as if he is preparing himself to throw a discus. There are cushions of muscle moulded into his long back, a strength and grace to every turn of his body. Vitality. It is hard to believe that should she lay her hand on his back, all she would feel would be cold and stone.
She reaches her hand towards him, then pulls back. She does this several times, before beginning to trace his shape with her palm, starting at his shoulder, drawing down the length of his spine, over his rump, down the curves of his legs. Bella steps into the circle. And now she is standing like a child in the centre of a game she can’t quite grasp. Immediately she wants to get out again, but can see no way through. There is only the stout round thigh, the ready hand, the determined foot. She notices now, there have been a few attempts at modesty: a fig leaf or a swatch of loin cloth. One figure covers himself with his hand, a gesture that seems more obscene than modest. She reminds herself that these are statues and that she has seen such statues before in art galleries or books. They are not real men, with their hairless bodies and pretty bunches of harmless fruit. They will not harm.
As the light continues to deteriorate, she looks up at their faces. She sees eyes that are blank and blind, mutilated profiles, noses corroded to stumps on faces riddled with cancer. Amputees. She is certain that if she remains here, the statues will begin closing in. Her legs are dizzy, her head hot and weak. When a space appears between two figures, Bella closes her eyes and rushes through it.
Out now, on a corridor shaped by high-hedged walls, she passes Roman centurions, Grecian maidens, a private party of nymphs. There’s a monumental stairway ahead, leading under a stone archway. The archway is decorated with a grotesquerie of faces. It is not the way she came in, but is the only way she sees out.
Almost dark. In what appears to be a forgotten orchard, branches claw out at each other, rolls of overgrowth are dense on the ground. A stench, vaguely yeasty, like a gust of air through the street grating of a public house. Beneath her feet windfalls yield and squelch, sometimes with a squeak. Bella tries not to imagine she’s trampling on mice. She makes for the wall, stays with it until an overdrop from the house lights shows an iron gate. She passes through and is back on civilized ground.
The outline of the house is sturdy with shadow. Only the rooms above the loggia are open and lit. From here a chevron of light drops over the balustrade down on the parterre. She’s in the wrong garden - she sees this at once; the lawn, the benches, the cast-iron frog, menacing now under a cuff of light.
Bella slips over to the trees at the side, sneaking along a pathway that winds through them and which she prays may keep her hidden until she finds her way back to the other side of the house. Something catches her eye then, a movement on the terrace. It takes a moment to accept that the woman up there could possibly be Signora Lami. Hair loose and long, a sheet wrapped around her, bare arms and shoulders suggesting that she is otherwise naked. But it is the Signora. Bella sees that now, as she moves into the corner of the terrace to where an old man sits in a bath chair. Bella tells herself not to look, but her eyes keep returning to the terrace. She is afraid or unable to move away.
The Signora draws the chair out of the corner towards the French doors then stops at the threshold, where the light of the room settles about them. Signora Lami then goes into the room to return almost at once with a cushion and something which she hands to the man. The cushion drops from her hand and she kneels down beside the bath chair. The old man then begins brushing her hair. Bella wants to see his face. But he keeps it bent over his task, and the balustrade allows her to see only the hand drawing the brush over the hair, and the hair responding in sprays of filigreed light. Even from here she can see the hands are ancient, as if they’ve been dried and salted. Yet there is nothing feeble in their movement, one hand firmly working the brush, the other smoothing and calming the hair back into place.
After a time the old man leans towards the Signora and says something. She lifts herself towards him, raising her arms, and the sheet slips down a little. Now her arms are around his neck and his old hands are splayed on her naked back. They embrace for a while and speak to each other; the words fall softly and although they are not decipherable to Bella she feels the tone is one of comfort and love.
The Signora stands and pulls the sheet up, wrapping it around her body, tucking it into place. She moves behind the bath chair, twists it on its wheels a little, so that they are now both facing the garden. The chair takes a slight backward dip before they reverse into the room, allowing a momentary view of Signor Lami, his thick silver hair, his thin, fine-boned face. A face that is ready to die.
June
THE DARK REMAINS FOREIGN. Everything else I’ve grown used to: food, smells, sound, speech, even the heat. I wake in the night and still have to think: is this France or Italy? (One time it was Baden-Baden.) But I always know straight away: this is not Dublin, this is some other place.
Only once did I make the mistake; years ago now. About six weeks or so after I’d left. In a long low cafe, bleaker inside than out, where I had ducked in out of the rain. The place was packed but without conversation. There was only the deafening bicker of delft and cutlery; the chomp and slurp of jaw and tongue; a howl at a passing waiter. I looked over the room: greasy moustaches and filthy paws holding sticks of bread like weapons. And the wine. Carafes all over the tables. More of them in a row on top of a nearby counter, alongside which a boy with an urgent face was pacing. When a carafe was emptied, it was thumped off the table, and the boy, hopping to attention, replaced it.
I had little difficulty talking myself into it. My bones were damp and I was hungry enough to want the scuttery stew that a fuzzy-haired sow was slopping out, table to table, from a bucket held to her hip. The rain slobbered all over the windows. I sat and stared at it for a few moments and considered resisting. But what was I to do in a place like this, amongst men like these - ask for a glass of milk?
I could smell it at a distance. Rough, red, almost black. My hand shaking slightly with lust, I reached for it.
Later I woke and there was a hot concrete block on my head. My brain was screaming and my gut swaying in that old familiar way. I got out of bed and made for a door that I was sure would lead me out to the landing and down the side stairs to the outside jacks of the pub, where I could puke away without anyone hearing. Every step of the way was there in my head; past the oulfella’s room, my sister’s room, the rooms that had once belonged to my mother. I was fiddling with the knob of the door, wondering what was the matter with it, how it had managed to shrink, when a voice from the bed asked what I was doing. French, I thought it was - and could only hope it didn’t belong to the fuzzy-haired sow.
‘Jacks,’ I muttered.
’
Jacques? Qui? Qui est Jacques?
’
I opened the door and stuck my head in. A hum of lavender and must. A faint and sweetish sweat. Shoe leather and naphthalene. I was in a wardrobe, gulping on its stagnant air. Not much I could do about it now anyway. Hot vomit lashed out of my mouth, across coat sleeves and dresses, and down on a row of shoes, splashing in and out of their appalled little mouths.
‘Animal,’ I heard the voice say. ‘Filthy pig.’ This time it spoke in English.
That was in Lyons, I think. Lyons or maybe Valence, one of those pointless French towns anyhow. They had all become the same by then. Girls with thick ankles, a cathedral overstuffed with bricks, men with exhausted eyes. Everything crawling along: feet, wheels. Time. And still not a whiff of Barzonni.
A long-ago story. Now that’s what I like. It’s the sort of thing I hope to find when I wake like this, in the middle of the night, when only a story will steady my mind back to sleep. And it’s always in or around the four o’clock mark; a long stretch till daybreak. I used to find the absence of drink cruel at this hour. I used to think, How am I supposed to live the rest of this night, minute by minute? The rest of this stinking life? But you grow used to whatever you have to grow used to.
Not that I don’t, from time to time, slip.
The drink. The trick is not to shit on your own doorstep. Put up a fight, but if you have to give in, then travel away. Like one of those married men with a weakness for boys. Get on a train and keep going. That’s what I try to do anyway. Then find a rooming house. A rooming house where nobody cares; a bar, and if needs must, a brawl where nobody matters. Satisfy the need, overfeed the need, wear it out till it weakens and goes whimpering back to its corner. Only keep in mind that it never quite dies - that’s something I’ve learned the hard way.
My mind. A scavenging vulturous thing, tugs maggots out of the darkness. It pecks and tears, but will not settle. It skips from this to that. It skids. I say, Stop it now, stop for fuck’s sake, if you’d only calm down. Show me a nice slow story.
Here’s one I like: the Barzonni story. Naples, late summer, 1925. Walking away from me, down the Strada di Santa Lucia, where, after over a year of searching, without letting it be known I was searching, I had finally caught up with him. A year of hanging around stage doors in the hope of a glimpse; of buying drink for scene-shifters and carpenters in the hope of a hint; scouring the notices for private tuition in every half-cocked music academy from Torino to here. And there was the bastard, jumping onto a tram, folding himself into the herd and disappearing round a bend in the road.
The air went out of me, and I more or less collapsed arse first onto the ground. There was a low dockside wall at my back where I stayed with my head in my hands until the lightness went out of it and I could stand up again. I leaned my foot on the parapet of the wall and smoked a cigarette. On the far side, the wall dropped fifteen feet or so to a quayside. A shanty town down there, made up of iron sheets or old sail cloth held to the wall by long poles. Fishermen roaring at each other in an uncrackable dialect. A little girl aimlessly wandering, bluebottles fussing around her head. Directly below me a woman was boiling some foul-smelling thing in a pot. Another woman plucked at rags on a clothes line. On the steps a beautiful, filthy young woman crunched snails between her teeth and dropped them in a bowl she was holding in the hammock of her skirt. A bare-arsed toddler was having a shit in the corner. A dog cowered nearby and waited for his chance. The toddler screaming at the dog, ‘
Via! Via!
‘ The stink of outdoor poverty. Of shit and woodsmoke and fish gut. In the background, the beautiful bay was beaming. And I thought to myself, Christ, this Naples.
Up here, at street level, the
scugnizzi
were prowling for tourists and other fools. Behind the backs of two strolling priests, sailors and prostitutes gave each other the eye. Disconsolate, I walked back to my digs off the Toledo, a tall narrow house, divided into any amount of cells, walls rotting from the outside in, and where even the landlord appeared to be on the game.
I found him again. As it turned out Naples was not large, merely compressed. A few days later in the Galleria, he sat at the table next to mine, outside a cafe. I could hardly believe it. He was that close. I could hear his every move, the soft click of his starched shirt front when he lifted his hand to salute an acquaintance, the irritation of his coffee spoon drilling his cup, ticking off the saucer. I could even hear the fucker breathe.
I kept my face behind the newspaper, now and then lifting it as if to glance at the passing crowd. Each time my eye picked out something else: the diamond ring on his little finger, a pigskin wallet on the table, the cufflinks shaped like sea horses. I looked up at the great glass belly of the Galleria ceiling and began to sweat. I felt sure its black iron framework was a cage about to drop down on me. Footsteps and voices were beating into my head. I stood up, threw the price of the coffee down and walked away across the marble tiles. After a moment I recovered myself and stopped under the canopy of the
tabaccheria
- I had waited too long to bottle out now.
Face to the window, as though studying the gift display, I remained until I saw through the glass his reflection skim over mine.