Remembering Light and Stone (16 page)

That sense of enclosure I had noticed as soon as I arrived in New York began to bear in on me. The city was like a cement trap. Standing on the intersection of West 57th Street and Madison Avenue, I looked right, left, behind and ahead of me, and saw in every direction long straight streets and towering buildings. I knew that beyond this there were more such streets,
more such buildings, and I longed for space, but I knew that there was no escape. I was trapped in this massive, violent labyrinth.

One evening, when we were looking for a place to have a drink before dinner, Ted suddenly said, ‘What about over there?’ He pointed across the road to The Shamrock Inn, and I think he was a bit taken aback by the vehemence with which I said, ‘No!’ We found another bar.

‘I didn’t mean to be rude,’ I said to him, when we’d sat down. ‘It’s just that fake Irishness is the last thing I could take now. I keep thinking of all the people I knew back in Clare who migrated. I know so well the place they left, and it’s strange now to see where they came to.’

‘It’s the other way round for me,’ Ted said. ‘I still want to go and see the place in Sligo my grandfather came from.’

It was all so arbitrary. It could have been my grandfather who migrated. I could have been born in the States. If I had been born in a different place, at a different time, would I still be my self? ‘I hope you get to see Ireland,’ I said, looking intently at the glass in my hands. I’d never felt lonelier than when I was in New York.

I’d been lonely before, but this was different, and I couldn’t understand it. I looked around the bar at all the other people sitting there, drinking, smoking, talking, laughing. I had a vague sense that the solution to what was tormenting me lay in the lives of strangers, but I couldn’t get through to it. All I could set against this emptiness was the memory of home. I could go back, but it would be different now. I thought of Jimmy, of my father and mother, lost to me now, but they also had their part in what I needed to know. I had all the pieces, but I didn’t know how to fit them together.

I drank three glasses of white wine, and when we went out into the street to look for a place for dinner, I suddenly threw my arms around Ted and kissed him. I was as surprised as he was: I’m not usually a demonstrative person, particularly in public places. It was so cold in the street that we decided to eat in the first affordable place we came to, which unfortunately turned out to be a phony Bavarian beer cellar called The Black Forest. A
waitress wearing a dirndl, an apron and a badge saying, ‘Hi, I’m Shirlee,’ served us bratwurst and fries, and we wondered how many of the huge steins of beer you’d have to drink before you started thinking you were in Germany. Ted explained to me his theory that having a bad dinner in a tacky joint with someone you love is actually much more romantic than a conventionally romantic place with low lights, high prices and candles on the tables, where people just tend to get nervous. He had a point. We finished the night with apfel Strudel, schnapps and a taxi back to the hotel.

The next morning, in the Metropolitan Museum, standing before a painting by Lucas Cranach, I felt oddly guilty. I’d never before seen a museum quite like the Met. Like the Museum of Air and Space in Washington, I felt it had palpable designs upon the people who visited it, but this time I succumbed completely, stunned by the size and the quality of the collections. I had gone there particularly to see the paintings, because painting is my first love, and I hadn’t expected to be so interested in the other things, like the archaeological and ethnological collections, but they turned out to be unforgettable. Masks from West Africa, totems and sculptures from Papua New Guinea, Greek statues and Assyrian bas-reliefs: I went from one to another in complete fascination. It was like the city itself, a vast cultural mix, but here nothing was fake.

In the Met, there’s an ancient Egyptian temple, small but whole, moved stone by stone to America and reconstructed there. It stands in a room with huge sloping windows, through which you can see the trees of Central Park, the skyscrapers and the sky. I sat for a long time before this juxtaposition of the very old and the contemporary, and I wondered what would happen to the temple eventually. It would probably be still there in a hundred years, maybe even another two hundred – but another five hundred? A thousand? To think of your own life ending is easy to imagine but hard to bear. To think of the end of the civilization in which you live is easy to bear, because it’s hard to imagine. Life is so short, and it has its own pace and momentum. What you understand of it at any given time is always out of step
with life itself – at least, that’s how it is with me. I had a vague sense that during the preceding year my life had changed significantly, and the changes were not yet complete, but I couldn’t understand what they were. I still lived and worked in the same place, and although I was fond of Ted, I knew it was only a matter of time until we drifted out of each other’s lives. No, it was little things that gave me hints about a big change. I was on better terms with Jimmy than I had been a year previously. I felt lonelier more often than I used to. I thought more about my family and my childhood than in the past. I tried to avoid thinking about the future, but such questions pressed ever more urgently on my mind. Never mind what would have become of the temple in a thousand years, what would have become of
me
in five years’ time?

Two Italian tourists sat down beside me, and I idly listened in to their conversation. The man was complaining that his feet were sore. Then they started to discuss where they would go for lunch, would they go back to the same place they’d been to yesterday, or would they try one of the places recommended in the book? It was nice just to listen to their voices and to remember Italy. I felt like I’d been away from it for such a long time. I’ve never got used to how, as soon as you go somewhere, it swamps out the place you’ve just left, no matter how vivid or important that place is to you. It may take a little time, but it always happens. A day or two later, I’d be back in Italy, a few more days and Italy would be overwhelmingly real, and America would be a memory. I couldn’t believe it was just a few weeks since I’d been to Siena with Ted, and visited the gallery there. I
remembered
longing to go to America, to be in a place where the weight of history was absent. And now I knew I’d missed the point completely. I looked forward to returning.

The day after we got back from the States was
Carnevale.
When Franca called up to see how the trip had been, she brought with her a dish full of the special cake they make in Umbria for
Carnevale
, a type of fried batter made sticky with honey. Ted was still there when she called. He never ceased to be amazed at the number of celebratory dishes that Franca managed to come up with, it seemed that every time he was in S. Giorgio she was at the door with a plateful of something special for the
festa
of that particular day, and that she celebrated the unlikeliest festivals, such as the Feast of the Dead, with the most unexpected of dishes, such as chocolate cake made with pasta.

‘I suppose this will be the end of the celebrations until Easter, Franca,’ Ted said, lifting a cake from the plate and licking the honey from his fingers.

‘Oh yes,’ she replied. ‘Except for Mother’s Day, and then Women’s Day.’ She told us that Lucia was going to a
Carnevale
party that night, dressed as a rabbit. She had bought herself a set of ears and a fluffy tail, and had been experimenting with
make-up
for days, to try to perfect her nose and whiskers. Franca said that if we opened the shutters that gave on to the square, we would probably see the children from the elementary school coming out in their costumes later that morning. I opened the long glass balcony doors in the kitchen.

I had brought Franca a bottle of Californian wine from the States, and as soon as she saw it, she went into hysterics of laughter. I had known that the idea of Americans making wine would amuse her (but she was forced to admit, two days later, when she’d drunk it, that it had been very good). She wanted to
know all about America: What had it been like being in a skyscraper? When you took a lift up to the hundred-and-first floor, did it feel like you’d left your tummy on the ground? Had I been attacked in New York? Had I seen anybody being attacked? What was the food like, was it as bad as everyone said? Did I get anything other than hamburgers to eat? Ted drank his coffee and ate his cake while he listened, half amused, and, I could see, half irritated. I wondered if perhaps Franca was laying it on a bit thick just to tease him, but it was quite possible that she was being serious. She’d never made any secret of the fact that she thought America was beyond the pale.

When we heard the children shouting in the square, we all went out on to the balcony. Below us, we could see a group of excited little bears and pirates and cavemen and devils, lobbing handfuls of confetti at each other and screaming. Their mothers had come to collect them from school, and we watched until the crowds thinned out, and then the square was empty, but for the paper confetti whirling and drifting in the light breeze that made the curtains billow into the room behind us. The kitchen was flooded with light. I always thought Italy was a lovely country to come back to. I was happy to be home.

Ted took the train back to Florence the following morning, and in the afternoon Franca called up to see me again. She had been in such good spirits the day before that I was a bit surprised to see how gloomy she was now. I knew, however, how moody she could be, and she never made any attempt to hide it. I offered her coffee, which she accepted, and we chatted over it in a scattered sort of way. Then, without any warning, she put her cup down, her face crumpled up like an unhappy child’s and she began to cry, completely without restraint.

‘They’re going to cut me up, Aisling, and I’m so frightened, and it’s not fair!’

‘What is it, Franca?’ I said. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I’ve got to go to the hospital,’ she said through her tears, ‘and they’re going to cut me open here,’ and she touched her breast, ‘and maybe they’re going to cut it off, and maybe I’m going to die,’ and her voice broke again.

‘How long have you known about this?’ I asked gently after a few moments.

‘There was a little lump. I felt it once when I was in the bath. I was afraid of what it might be.’

‘But when was that?’

She looked at her hands and mumbled, ‘Four years ago.’ I didn’t say anything.

‘But it didn’t go away and then Davide felt it, and he nagged me to go to the doctor, so at last I did, I went two days ago, and now I have to go to the hospital. What’ll I do? I’m so frightened, Aisling. I don’t want to die. What’ll Davide do without me? And Lucia?’

I made all the comforting noises I could. I said that she didn’t know for sure that it was malignant, and that soon she would know, and wasn’t that better than to go through what she had gone through these past four years; and even if she did have to have a breast removed, she would still have her life, and all those other things that are so easy to say when it isn’t your body and your life that’s under discussion and threat.

‘It isn’t fair,’ she sniffed, digging the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. ‘They took my womb away after Lucia was born. There’ll be nothing left to know I’m a woman. I don’t want to live all cut up, I don’t want to be left as just a few bits and pieces.’

I asked her when she was going into hospital, and she said, ‘Tomorrow.’ I promised that I would go to see her, and she was happy about that.

After she had gone back down to her own apartment, I went out on to the balcony, and looked down into the square. It was a bright day, and I felt that odd sense of dislocation that comes when you’ve just heard something really shocking, and then you look at something mundane, the sun, trees, people in the street, and you can’t reconcile them at all. If this terrible news is true, can ordinary things still happen, still exist? Can Franca have cancer and the sun still shine? People still cross the square, coming from her very own shop with bags of groceries and loaves of bread? People still squabble and shout in the bars? If I
was the one who was ill, could it all possibly go on? Of course it could. Of course.

You can get used to anything. In a day or two I accepted and believed in the reality of Franca’s situation, and its simultaneous existence with the sun, the people in the bars and shops, with the life that was going on blankly around us. Things unfolded as if pre-ordained. Franca went into hospital; she had cancer; they removed her breast. She cried and sobbed and railed against it, and then she came home from hospital and lay in bed, crying and sobbing there, while Davide and Lucia did their best to humour and distract her. It was very hard for Davide, because he had to bear the brunt of her obsession. Franca was convinced that she was mutilated and ugly. She wouldn’t believe Davide when he said that it didn’t make any difference to him, and that he still loved her, but Franca said that that was all lies. It was as if she wanted him to reject her, so that then she could say, ‘You see, I was right. I knew you’d love me less because of this.’

One night Lucia called up to see me. She looked tired and drawn. She was doing a lot of extra work in the shop, to make up for Franca’s not being there, and of course she was worried and upset about what was happening in the family.

‘Poor Papa,’ she said. ‘Mama’s always watching him to see if he’s looking at other women. He doesn’t, but she won’t believe him. When there are women on television with big chests she takes it personally, as if it was intended to annoy her, and she gets really angry if she thinks Papa’s looking at them. And it’s hard, Aisling, because the problem is this: so many of the women on television are big, and they wear hardly any clothes, even the ones advertising things like margarine. I never noticed that until now. Poor Papa. He’s looking forward to the World Cup, he should be able to watch that without Mama getting too upset.’

‘You’re doing a good job, Lucia.’

‘It is very hard, Aisling. I’m so worried about Mama. I don’t know what Papa and I would do without her. Did you look after your mother when she was sick?’

I said no, that my mother had fallen ill when I was away, and that she was only ill for a day or so before she died. I was a bit
caught off guard by Lucia asking me this, because during the time of Franca’s illness I often thought about it. When I went down to their apartment and Lucia was patiently nursing her mother, or just keeping her company, I used to think of how it hadn’t been like that for me with my own mother. Deep down, I did feel guilty in that empty, futile way one feels about things that are long past and irrevocable. Most absurd of all, I knew that if I had my life to live over I’d do exactly the same thing again: but I still felt guilty.

Franca gradually got over her operation, as the spring wore on. She was too inquisitive to stay completely out of circulation for a long time, although she still refused to go back to work in the shop. ‘How could I face people?’ she’d say. Davide tried to encourage her, pretending that he could hardly cope without her, but she said that he would have to get used to it. ‘Nobody’s indispensable,’ she said. ‘What if I die? You’ll have to manage without me then, won’t you? And I might die, nobody ever said I wouldn’t.’ She did spend a lot of time in the shop between one o’clock and half past four when the shutters were down, checking the money, rearranging the shelves, sorting things out and ordering stock.

What she said was true, but morbid, and no help or
consolation
to Lucia or Davide. As time went on, I suppose I began to feel less sorry for her. I thought she was wallowing in her grief, and I commented on this to Ted on the phone one night, of how her constantly looking on the black side was getting on my nerves a bit. I was taken aback when he said sharply, ‘Well, now you know what it’s like to be on the receiving end.’ I didn’t know how to answer that.

Franca went back to the hospital for check-ups quite often, and would have to continue to do so for quite some time. She never fought her illness, but lay down under it from the first. When she was feeling particularly sorry for herself (which was often) she said that she knew she was going to die, that there was nothing ahead of her but a slow, painful death, which had already begun. I didn’t always take her seriously. I had more sympathy for her family than I did for her. Franca was always so sorry for herself
that I felt an extra ration of pity was the very last thing she needed.

It was a beautiful spring: if anything, too beautiful, for it became warm very early, and hardly rained at all. The weather was to continue like this, all the way through to the summer. Easter came around. ‘It doesn’t mean as much as it used to,’ Franca said, and this time she spoke out of something other than unmitigated gloom. ‘Easter means less now, because Lent means nothing. Every day of the year now, people have cakes and sweets and nice things to eat, and plenty of them. Time was when things were different. I remember when I was small, growing up on the farm. For weeks you’d be praying and eating simple food, and then on Easter Sunday, there’d be such a lunch! I suppose we weren’t supposed to eat a lot in Lent as a form of penance, but for me it only made the feast at the end taste twice as good. The children now don’t know what it is not to have all the things they want, and to have them right now.’

It was late at night on the Monday of Holy Week, and Franca and I were standing in her shop. I’d been on my way upstairs, and she’d called to me to come through for a moment and talk to her. She was surrounded by chocolate bells, and chocolate eggs wrapped in vast flourishes of coloured foil. I asked her how business was, and she said that things were going well. ‘I’ll make you a proper Easter cake, Aisling‚’ she said. With her toe she poked at a box with a picture on it of a cake in the shape of a dove. ‘None of this rubbish that just comes out of some factory up in Milan. I’ll be making cheese pizza and sweet cake, and I’ll give you some of both. Get you a bottle of
vernaccia
too, if you want.’ In spite of herself, Franca was eagerly looking forward to Easter. In a closely observed round of feasts and festivals and customs, for her, Easter was the most important, surpassing even
Christmas
, about which she thought far too much fuss was made. Had she been well, she’d have gone to Mass on Easter Sunday morning, but more from tradition than belief. She didn’t make any connection between a festival centred on death and
resurrection
and her own situation. Resurrection in particular didn’t impress her.

‘It’s not that I don’t believe it‚’ she said. ‘It’s more that I don’t understand it, and what I don’t understand I never have much use for. Even if it does happen, it won’t be for a long time, and even then, it just won’t be the same. The thing is, Aisling, I just love life. It’s as simple as that. I know it’s full of problems, and I moan about it just as much as anybody else, but I can’t see a way to improve it. When we were children, we used to try to think of improvements you could make to the human body. We thought of so many things, but there was always a catch. We decided in the end that maybe people’s bodies weren’t perfect, but they were the best you could imagine. I feel the same way about life.

‘When I was small, I had this book, too, where I used to read all these stories about fairies and Princes and Princesses, and there was always a lot about jewels and riches. There was one story I always remember, about a Princess who had a pair of golden slippers, encrusted with diamonds and emeralds and rubies. I thought that they must be the most wonderful things; I used to dream about having a pair of shoes made of gold. Of all the stories, that was the one I liked best. And then I grew up and I thought about it, and I thought it was the most foolish thing in the world. How could anyone ever wear a pair of solid gold slippers? Can you imagine anything more painful? Golden slippers are useless, Aisling. There’s nothing better than
ordinary
life, and if I’ve learnt anything from my time on this earth, it’s that, and I want to keep living.

‘Yesterday I was in my room, and it was almost lunchtime. My mother-in-law was cooking in the kitchen, Lucia was just in from school. I could smell the sauce for the pasta, and then your car pulled up outside, same as that time every day. I heard the car door close and you said hello to Davide, and then I heard the crash of him pulling down the shutters of the shop. I thought, “This is what death means: all these things will still be going on, but I won’t be here any more.” And I thought my heart would break.’