Remembering Light and Stone (17 page)

Ted was coming to stay with me at Easter. Franca invited us both to have Easter Sunday lunch with the family, and Davide came up to my apartment to plead with me to accept. I’d
hesitated because I didn’t want to give them extra work, but he thought that cheerful company was just what she needed. He said that it would be good for her to spend some time with people from outside the family. She seemed very fond of my
amico
americano,
and whatever made Franca happy would please the whole family.

And so Ted and I had Easter lunch with Franca and the others, and everybody enjoyed it. A ham had been sent down from the farm in the hills: meat from the pig we had seen being butchered at New Year. Franca set it up in a big metal frame which held it tightly, then she cut paper-thin slices from it. The delicate flavour of the ham was much commented on. Franca had a great time, teasing Ted, heaping his plate with roast lamb, and explaining how everything was made. She had an unfortunate habit of cramming her mouth with food just before starting to tell him how a particular dish was cooked, with the result that he couldn’t understand a word she was saying. She made him drink lots of
vernaccia,
and at the end of the meal, a large chocolate egg was cracked open with great ceremony.

Later that afternoon, Ted and I drove up into the hills, parked, and went for a walk. After a while we sat down under some olive trees, and looked down at S. Giorgio, neatly girdled by its walls, and the hazy plain far below.

‘On a day like this‚’ I said, ‘I know why I’m still living in S. Giorgio.’ In Umbria, the dreamy round of the seasons, the festivals, of life itself was so complete that once you had stepped into that charmed circle, it was almost impossible to pull yourself away again. Franca would have asked why anyone would ever want to leave such pleasures, but for me there was something missing. What was it? A sort of wildness. ‘Sometimes,’ I said to Ted, ‘I’m afraid that it’s all like a dream, and that someday I’ll wake up, and feel that I’ve let so much of my life slip by, and with it something important, that I was too drowsy and wrapped in luxury to miss until it was too late. It’s like living in a walled garden here – a fabulous garden, and one so big that you can’t see the walls, but you know they’re there, all the same. And yet on a day like this, none of that matters.’

I was glad that the winter was over, and I was even looking forward to the hot days of summer. I promised myself that this year I wouldn’t complain but enjoy to the full the different atmosphere that falls over the country with the heat. It would be good to come home from work in the middle of a baking hot day, when the whole village would be stunned into silence. I’d have a light lunch: tomatoes, peaches, thing like that. Then with all the shutters still closed, I’d lie down to drowse and snooze for an hour under a cool white sheet, and I’d look at the light of the sun, coming through the slats of the shutter, and falling in long, broken lines on the bedroom ceiling. I’d listen to voices in the square: things even sound different in extreme heat, the way extreme cold throws a silence over the world.

In early May, Jimmy rang me to say that Nuala had given birth to a little girl. They were both delighted, and I was pleased for them too, and glad to hear the news. (I have to confess that I was completely indifferent to the births of both Sinead and Michael.) I don’t really know why I felt so differently this time, but I do know that I was happy throughout that spring, between the time when I returned from the States, and what was to happen at the start of the summer. I was happy with Ted, and I thought I was close to Franca. Now I can see that I didn’t understand her at all. Sometimes when I think of Franca, I think of what Pirandello said about Italians, how they are weeping behind a mask that laughs. No, I didn’t understand Franca. I didn’t see, didn’t want to see, the extent of her melancholy. The strongest sun casts the blackest shadow. I didn’t take her seriously. It’s an age-old mistake. Other nationalities haven’t been taking Italy seriously for years, they see a sort of buffoonery that isn’t really there. I dismissed Franca’s worries as histrionics, as part of a national tendency to over-dramatize things. Now I know I was wrong.

One day in May, Franca called up to see me again. She had bad news. The operation had failed to check the illness. She was going to have to go for extra treatment. She didn’t believe that it was going to help her and, to be honest, by that stage, neither did I. This time I didn’t wheel out any well-worn platitudes to her. I don’t remember saying anything much that day, we just sat with
our arms around each other for a while, and she rested her head on my shoulder. After she’d gone down to her own apartment, I went out on to the balcony: not the one which overlooked the square, but the bedroom balcony, which gave on to the back yard. I looked down at the two broken-down cars, the faded houses, the heap of old wooden crates. In the long grass of the overgrown garden, a cat was sitting washing its face. I remember thinking of what Franca had said to me before Easter, and I thought: ‘She’s right. Life is very precious.’

I don’t remember if I was dreaming that morning: I probably was, I usually do. If I wake slowly I remember my dreams, but they get completely wiped out if I’m woken abruptly, for example, by an alarm clock going off, or, as was the case on this particular morning, by someone hammering with their fists on the door of my apartment, and shouting my name. It was Lucia. She was sobbing so much that I couldn’t understand what she was saying, except that it concerned ‘Mamma’. That much I had guessed. Opposite the main door of my apartment was another door, which opened on to a short flight of steps, leading to the attic. Usually this door was locked, but now it lay ajar, and Lucia, still crying, dragged me through it.

What I saw when we entered the attic shocked me so much, because, not in spite of, its being so familiar. The woman’s hanging body, the stillness of it, the heaviness: I felt that same sense of constriction and of terror that I had known for months, when just this image haunted my mind. As Lucia threw her arms around me and wept, I knew that it would haunt her now too, more than I could ever imagine.

It was all over the papers the next day, and all over the billboards of the local papers outside the newsagents. The Italian press – and Italian society – take a very different attitude to privacy, compared to what I had grown up with, which probably went too far in the other direction. However, I still felt uneasy at the openness and insouciance with which such things were reported there. Only a few days earlier I had read about a man who had thrown himself off a bridge somewhere in Tuscany. He was on
the bridge for six hours before he killed himself, and the paper reported, complete with photographs, how his wife had stood below pleading with him not to do it, holding little Lamberto by the hand, and little Roberta in her arms. It was enough for
someone
to be killed in a fire in a house for the by-line to run ‘Suicide?’

There was some comfort in knowing that Franca would not have minded in the least having the details of her death all over the paper; in fact she would probably have been quite pleased. I had often seen her read similar cases with relish, down to the last morbid detail. She had said to me once, after telling me a particularly sensational piece of local gossip, ‘You should never try to hide anything, Aisling. If you have a secret, it’s best to tell it to everybody as soon as you can, because they’ll only find out about it anyway, and then it’ll be twice as embarrassing.’ Time and time again she trumped the aces of people who would have talked about her, and so she would probably have been very pleased with the local press for disseminating full details of the circumstances of her death: that she was a shop-keeper, that she had cancer but killed herself because she couldn’t face the
long-drawn
-out illness, knowing that she was going to die at the end of it. She had thought that it would be better for the family, easier for them like this.

Which, of course, it wasn’t. Davide was inconsolable, and stricken with guilt. In the week before she died, Franca had wanted to sleep in another room. She was often restless at night, and she told Davide that it would be better for him to get a decent night’s sleep, as he had to work in the shop. ‘I told her it didn’t matter, Aisling,’ he said to me, again and again, and to anyone else who would listen. ‘I told her I’d rather she stayed with me, so that if she was sick or needed anything, I could get it for her, but she said no, and insisted on sleeping in the spare room.’ And it was because she was there that she had been able to sneak up to the attic unheard in the small hours, and end her life. ‘I’ll never forgive myself,’ Davide said.

The funeral was hastily arranged, and took place a day later. Even though I had been in Italy for a long time, it was the first funeral I had been to there, whereas when I was living in Ireland
I seemed to be going to them all the time. Franca’s funeral struck me as a rushed, unnatural affair, lacking the Irish talent for mourning. You could see that everyone wanted it to be over as quickly as possible. This was in spite of Franca being in a massive, ornately carved coffin, which was placed in a hearse with gold trimmings on the roof. She couldn’t have had more elaborate floral tributes, not if she’d been an Unknown Soldier on Remembrance Day. Don Antonio mumbled his way through the funeral Mass. There were lots of people there whom I
recognized
, including Michele and Patrizia from the farm, where we’d gone in January. Ted came down from Florence for the day. I found it hard to associate Franca with her own funeral, knowing how she always went her own way, no matter what the Church said. She had certainly gone her own way in death. It didn’t matter to her that the Church said it was a sin of despair to take your own life: Franca had gone right ahead and done it.

Only afterwards, when we went to the high-walled cemetery did I feel some essence of Franca’s self, her personality. I remembered being there with her on the Day of the Dead, and how carefully she had arranged the flowers she had brought with her, and lit the fat red candle. Spiritual things didn’t interest her, but practical things did, and she had tidied the tomb as deftly as she set a table. I had known when Mass was being said that day that her mind was wandering all over the place, that she was thinking about lunch, about how cold she was, about the flowers the women beside her had brought: anything but death. They slotted her coffin into a long space like the top shelf of a cupboard, as if she were being put away for a few months, like a winter coat, instead of for always. Then we all went home.

I rang Ted every single night that week, and then on the Sunday night, just as he was about to ring off, I said, ‘Wait, wait, I have something to ask you. I’m going back to Ireland for a few weeks in June. Do you think you’d like to come with me?’

‘Well‚’ Nuala said to me, ‘how does it feel to be home?’

‘Good‚’ I lied. ‘I’m glad to be back.’ Truth was, sitting in Nuala’s gleaming new kitchen I didn’t yet feel that I was home. Nuala and Jimmy weren’t exactly as I’d remembered or imagined them, and I realized this the moment Ted and I pushed our luggage trolleys out through customs at Dublin Airport, and saw Jimmy waiting for us. He had more of a middle-class gloss to him than before: smart grey slacks and a bottle-green v-necked pullover with the crest of a golf club embroidered on it. Golf! Jimmy had always been a mad-keen hurler. It was hard to imagine him sedately tapping a little white ball around a putting green. He looked older too: his hair had gone a bit grey at the temples, and I could see that he was quite nervous at meeting me again. That made me sad; but still, it was a much happier homecoming than my last visit to Ireland. Nobody spoke of it, but I know Jimmy was also thinking about the time our mother died. He’d also met me at the airport then. He’d been dressed in his best suit, and I knew to look at him that he’d been crying. That had shocked me. I’d never seen Jimmy cry before.

My life had been such a mess at that period. I had been in Italy just long enough to feel that moving there had been a big mistake, and I was tormented with guilt because my mother had asked me to go home and visit her, and I had refused, and now she was dead. Jimmy had reproached me bitterly for being away when she died, and I had felt my position indefensible (which hadn’t stopped me from vehemently defending it). There’d been a lot of bad feeling between us when I left to go back to Italy a few
days after the funeral, and I hadn’t been back to Ireland since then.

Sinead and Michael had grown out of all recognition. Michael had been a baby, five years ago. Sinead said she remembered the last time I was in Ireland, but I wasn’t convinced. Jimmy was right: she looked at lot like Nuala, but in terms of her character, I couldn’t see that she was like me. She was far more sparky and confident than I remember being when I was ten. And now there was the new baby: and the new house. I tried not to smile when Sinead said guilelessly, ‘Mammy says we used to live in a housing estate, but now we live in a development.’ When Jimmy and Nuala got married, they bought a flat-fronted brick and plaster semi, with a fenced-in front garden. Their new place was far more up-market, with bay windows and a neat porch with a pointed roof. Each house had its own separate garden at the back, but at the front there were no divisions. Nuala proudly showed Ted and me around all the house. You could still smell the paint and the plaster. They hadn’t yet furnished and decorated all the rooms: Nuala said they would do it slowly, as they could afford it, and so have everything just the way they wanted it. There was a microwave oven in the stripped pine kitchen. Things began to fit together for me. Now I could understand Jimmy’s new slacks and golf-club sweater. I could understand why he was going grey too.

Bringing Ted to Dublin with me turned out to be a far smarter move than I’d realized it would be. Ever since leaving home to go to university, I’d kept my private life completely private from my family. To this day, Jimmy and Nuala don’t know what
happened
in Paris. For years there was nobody in my life, but they didn’t know that, and I think Nuala’s imagination ran riot. If I was so secretive, there must have been something to hide. Like a lot of people whose emotional lives have followed a
conventionally
mapped-out route, she thought the only alternative to her way of doing things was heartless promiscuity. My own experience was of a messy, painful but sincere search for affection, where the ultimate goal wasn’t a mortgage and a cast-iron marriage contract. Nuala wouldn’t have been able to
understand that at all. She never understood me: or, to be fair, we never understood each other. I probably didn’t make much effort. She thought me strange because there’s so little evident family feeling in me.

When I rang Jimmy to say that I’d be coming to Ireland with an American friend, he said at once that Ted would be more than welcome. Jimmy and Nuala took my telling them about Ted and bringing him home as a rare sign of trust and openness on my part. They were both very nervous when they met him – God knows what sort of man they expected to love me – but within half an hour Ted had completely won them over. Nuala really liked him, and that made it easier for her to get on with me.

Everything was so different on this visit that it didn’t feel like I was at home. On the evening of the day we arrived, the four of us sat at the kitchen table over a Tea Time Express chocolate cake, and a pot of tea. ‘Was Rome packed with people over for the World Cup?’ Jimmy asked.

‘There were quite a few,’ I said, ‘but not as many as I expected.’ Ted told them about how we’d seen the children steal a wallet from a woman’s bag the day before we flew to Dublin. Nuala shuddered. ‘The stories you hear! They say people go about on motorbikes grabbing handbags from women there. I think I’d be too frightened to go to Rome.’

While I was still in Italy, I’d told Jimmy and Nuala a bit about what I planned to do when I was in Ireland. They knew that the following day we were going to collect a hire car, and drive over to Clare. They’d assumed that Ted was going to stay there with me, but I told them now that Ted had plans of his own: he was going to drive up to Sligo to see where his great-grandfather came from, and try to trace his roots. I promised Jimmy and Nuala that when we came back up to Dublin, we’d spend a few days with them before flying back to Italy. They seemed really pleased about that, and I didn’t say it out of duty or politeness: it was something I wanted to do.

When we left Dublin the following morning, it was raining a bit, but I didn’t care. We stopped on the way and bought some groceries, including matches and firelighters. Nuala had warned
me to be sure to light a big fire, as soon as we arrived. Because of the new baby and moving house, they hadn’t gone down there for a long time, and she said that the house would need to be well aired.

It was a good journey. Even when the scenery wasn’t anything special, it was nice to see the lush greenness of the countryside, after the summer-scorched Italian landscape. Driving through the Bog of Allen, a large flock of starlings suddenly swooped low past us. Because the land was so flat and the sky so big and the birds so close, Ted said that he felt like he was flying, rather than travelling by car. Beyond Athlone, we saw the start of the sky that I consider to be my sky, with the big high clouds coming in off the Atlantic. I was glad to be going home, but I was nervous too. I didn’t know what to expect, didn’t know how I’d react to being there again. When at last I caught sight of the roof of the house in the distance, I didn’t say anything to Ted.

I’d expected the house to look smaller than I remembered it, but I was taken aback at how shabby and run-down it was when we pulled up outside. The paintwork – light blue with dark blue door and windowframes – was badly weathered, and the little front garden that my mother had always kept so neat had gone completely wild. The currant and gooseberry bushes were choked with bindweed. While Ted got the luggage out of the boot, I cupped my hands around my eyes, and peered through the windows. I could see dim, familiar outlines, but it wasn’t enough to prepare me for the moment I opened the front door and went inside.

It was as if I were shrinking, and all my spurious sophistication fell away. My elegance, my smart Italian shoes: all this counted for nothing now. The memories flooded in with such violence that the self I’d made since leaving home was wiped out, and when I turned and saw a man dragging a suitcase into the room I looked at him blankly, wondering for a moment who on earth he could be.

We lit a fire in the hearth, and I draped sheets over a chair before it, to air them. The chair had a limp cushion on it, with a crocheted cover in lots of different colours. I remembered my
mother making it, out of scraps of wool. In the evening, I made dinner: potatoes, carrots and chops, and after it we had mugs of hot sweet tea, and I opened a packet of chocolate biscuits. It was raining hard. When I thought of Italy, it hardly seemed real to me. I couldn’t believe that I’d left an apartment there full of things, clothes and books and records. I couldn’t believe that my life was there. I looked at my watch, and tried to imagine the hot square, the people coming out of Davide’s shop with baskets full of vegetables and bread, the coloured plastic tapes that hung in the doorway draping themselves over their shoulders. I could picture the scene, but it didn’t have the reality of the thick striped mug in my hand. I poured more tea, and as I added milk, I thought of how Franca would have set her teeth in disgust.

Ted set off for Sligo the following morning. I’d helped him plan his route on a map the night before, and he was excited as a child. I told him to enjoy himself, and that I’d see him in a week’s time.

I wasn’t lonely when he went away. I realized then how much I’d needed that week on my own. I slept in my old room, with the table where I’d studied so hard for my Inter-Cert, longing to be away. My mother’s old bike was in the shed. Jimmy had told me it was still in good shape, so I pumped up the tyres and went cycling to the village to buy food. I had no friends left locally, for I’d long since lost contact with everybody I’d known when I lived there, but in the village shop, everybody recognized me. I didn’t feel comfortable, waiting to be served. People were friendly enough, probably on Jimmy’s account. They all asked after him, and wanted to know about the new baby, was it a boy or a girl? But I felt they were sizing me up, and I felt judged for having been away when my mother died. My earliest memory is of being in the shop with her. She was wearing a white dress with red flowers on it, and an old lady was offering me a tube of Silvermints. I didn’t want to take them, because the hand that held them out to me was so wrinkled and withered. I must have been barely three. All I can remember now are the sweets, the hand, and my mother’s dress: it was one of those things that are just on the very edge of your life, so near to your not being
capable of memory, so near to your not being there at all. I was older now than my mother was when I was born.

Every afternoon, I went for a walk, usually along the beach. After Umbria, the salt air and the crashing waves were
marvellous
. One day, on a flat rock, I found a little group of treasures all set out: a piece of green glass, rubbed smooth by the sea, a fragment of pottery, some shells, a curious stone. I thought of the child who must have found and put them there with such care, and how, later that day, when the tide came in, they would all be washed away, back into the Atlantic.

I did a lot of tidying and cleaning; and I threw a lot of things away, mainly clothes and old letters and papers. In the bottom of a drawer I even found the paper fan Yuriko had given me. It looked faded and tawdry, and I suppose I should have thrown it away too, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

In the evenings, I cooked myself a simple dinner, and then sat by the fire reading until the small hours of the morning. I’d decided to re-read
The
Idiot
while I was at home, and this time I understood why I liked it so much.

Ted phoned me one night in the middle of the week, from a payphone in a pub in Ballisodare. It was hard to hear what he was saying: one of the World Cup matches was on television, and there was a terrible racket, but he bawled down the line that he was having a great time. ‘I think I’ve found a brother of my great-grandfather on a parish register here,’ he shouted. He told me he’d see me in a few days, and he ran out of change while I was talking to him, so that I was left standing in the hall with the receiver buzzing.

The night before Ted was due back, I cycled out at dusk to the foot of one of the Green Roads. I left the bike there: the ground was too rough, and the hill too steep, and I wanted to walk, in any case. I like these overgrown roads you get in Clare, they’re called the Green Roads or the Hunger Roads, and they lead to ruined villages which were abandoned during the Famine. I was fascinated by them when I was a child. If we had lived in the same place, but a hundred years earlier, I used to think, there wouldn’t have been enough for my parents and Jimmy and me to
eat. We would have had to leave our house, and go to America on a boat, and not just us, but everybody in our village would have gone, so that there’d have been nobody left behind to look after anything. And then, years and years later, we might have come back and looked for our home, but it would have been so ruined and tumbledown that we might not even have recognized it. It would be the saddest thing, I thought. But now I realized that what I had thought so awful had actually happened: our family home was empty and abandoned.

I walked on up to the brow of the hill. It was a beautiful still evening. The sky was a deep, radiant blue, and out over the sea there was a new moon. I came to the ruined village. The doorways and windows of the houses were packed with nettles, and small trees grew in the former rooms. I remembered reading somewhere that the Colosseum in Rome had been abandoned and untended right up until the end of the last century. By that time there were over four hundred species of plants growing there. Some of them weren’t even native to Europe, having grown from seeds in the fodder of exotic animals brought to Rome to be killed in the games: lions, elephants, giraffes. Then, in a fit of late-nineteenth-century tidy-mindedness, the whole Colosseum was cleared out. Now fewer than thirty different types of plants grow there.

On a drystone wall near by, I suddenly noticed a large cat, silent, angular, blinking, and I wondered what advantage there was for a cat to be on a Green Road, late on a summer night. There must have been something to be gained, or else the cat wouldn’t have been there. It looked at me coldly, and I moved away, for I didn’t see any need to disturb it. I walked on a bit further, and sat down on a broken stone. A corn-crake was calling. I hadn’t heard a corn-crake for years. Ted would be back the next day, and I thought of the places I would show him. I knew of a field where there was a well and a cross. A hazel tree grew over the well, and on the cross was a woman’s head with a long pigtail. It had been weathered over the years: the pale stone had the texture of bread. It was a tiny field. There were high hedges all around, and it had the air of an ancient place. I knew
Ted would like it. I’d show him the Green Roads too, and Poulnabrone Dolmen, and we’d look for Bee Orchids. It might have been the other way round. My ancestors might have migrated, so that I would have been born in America, and come back looking for my roots. I watched the light bleed slowly out of the sky in a long, midsummer dusk, while the moon brightened. Then I thought of Italy, and at once the decision came into my mind, clear and resolute in a way it would never have been had I mulled over the question for weeks. I would leave S. Giorgio. When I went back to Italy, I would stay only as long as was necessary to pack my things, and work my notice in the factory. I’d come back here. I’d have to talk to Jimmy about it when we went back to Dublin, and I’d tell Ted what I was planning as soon as I saw him. I realized that he wouldn’t be surprised.