The PowerBook (8 page)

Anacapri is a small village high on the island. It has a busy square where the bus stops, and where the tourists go to get a chairlift up Monte Solano, followed by ‘English Toast’, as the sign encouragingly offers.

There are some smart shops leading off the square and the usual jostle of tourist stalls, but there is something else too, which I can’t quite explain …

About halfway down the Via Orlandini, and for no reason at all that I can tell, an invisible fence
rebuffs the tourists. They turn back. Yes, that is exactly what happens, they turn back.

If you continue, you will come to the true heart of Anacapri. There is the church. There is the square in front of it. There are greengrocers and a fishmongers and a bakery and market shops and a bookshop and a chemist and everything you could want. And no tourists.

So why am I not a tourist?

A tourist could be anywhere. The place doesn’t matter. It’s just another TV channel.

I went to the bus stop in Capri and took my turn with the matrons and off-shift waiters to stand in the tiny, throaty diesel bullet of a bus that fires on all cylinders up the ladder-like road. The cliff face is netted to check falling rocks, and here and there a Madonna cut into the cliff face smiles down under her blue light.

I always cross myself as we reach a particular bend. So does the rest of the bus.

At the Piazza Monumentale out we get, and the women disappear with their string bags, and the men stand together for a moment, jackets slung
over their shoulders, lighting cigarettes. I walk down towards the invisible fence and feel a slight tingle as I cross through it. Then I have been admitted. Then I am on the other side.

I know the people at the Pizza Materita, and they always find a table for me on their terrace, which overlooks the church and the square. I don’t ask for anything straight away, but still somebody brings a jug of vino rosso and a breadbasket.

I can see Papa, with his long-handled paddle, ladling the pizzas in and out of the wood-fired oven. Nearby, Mama sits at the cash register, her glasses on a string round her neck. The daughter and the son-in-law deal with the customers. She is dark and gorgeous. He is young and good-looking, with his hair tied back like a pirate’s.

The food is very good—all done to a secret recipe they say—and they are pleased with their cooking and each other and the new baby. You can taste the pleasure, strong as basil.

And then it happened as I thought it would. You came.

You had taken off the little black dress and you were wearing combat trousers and a hooded sweatshirt. That is, a hooded cashmere sweatshirt. Your hair was in a ponytail and the rings and the jewellery were gone.

You saw me, you came and sat down, your head in your hands for a second, then smiling.

‘You bastard.’

‘They only speak Italian here.’

‘Very funny.’

‘So why did you come?’

‘Why do you think I came?’

‘You are a Gemini and you have to be in two places at once.’

‘Thanks for the cod astrology.’

‘All right, here’s some cod psychology—you had a row and stormed off.’

‘I did, as it happens, that’s how I’m free to be here, but not why.’

‘OK. You tell me.’

‘For this reason.’

She kissed me.

While we talked, our food was set before us. We both had bresaola with rocket and transparent slices of parmesan. Then for her there was a fresh fish wrapped in paper and baked in the wood oven. I had a pizza with a base as crisp as lava, bubbled here and there with a black crust and spread with buffalo mozzarella and tomatoes new off the vine.

I looked over into the square. Mothers and grandmothers were sitting chatting, while the men stood in groups. The children were playing some complicated version of hide and seek, using the church door as a touchline.

An Australian in shorts and boots, and a sweat-stained shirt, walked into the square and pulled a Frisbee out of his backpack. He was slightly overweight, his girlfriend was tanned and rangy. They started surfing the Frisbee to one another, carefully, quietly, she darting about, he standing still, always catching it as though he called it to him.

One by one the Italian children joined in, and then some of the parents, until the whole square was ringed with about twenty people playing Frisbee. The Australians couldn’t speak Italian and the Italians didn’t bother to speak English. The rules,
the form, the technique, were all conducted in sign language and body language, with laughter as the interpreter.

Imagine the square.

On one long side is the Pizza Materita. On the short side is the church. On the other long side is a smaller restaurant and a few houses. The fourth side of the square opens onto the street.

The church of Santa Sophia has a great door and niched on the right and left of the door, high up, are two symmetrical statues. One is San Antonio, the patron saint of Anacapri, and the other is the Madonna.

Imagine the square.

Excitement, laughter, the whizz-curve of the Frisbee, new people pushing in, tired ones dropping out, then suddenly a boy throws the Frisbee too high and too fast, and the purple plastic orb neatly hats the Madonna.

Allora! Mamma mia!

Nobody knows what to do.

Suddenly a matron in black comes forward. She takes the Australian by the hand and stands
him below the statue. She crosses herself and gestures to him to do the same. Clumsily, he does it.

Then she shouts to her two sons—big heavy men in short-sleeved shirts. They too cross themselves before the Madonna and stand patiently on either side of the Australian.

The matron fetches her teenage grandchildren, stringy as beans. They cross themselves and are gestured upwards onto the shoulders of the three men, now arms round each other’s waists, their feet braced apart.

The matron whistles, and a little kid, about three feet tall, comes running, and climbs, monkey-footed, up the human scaffolding. The base sweats. The teenagers complain, as hair, eyes, mouth and ears, are tugged and pulled until the kid is upright. He leans forward to flip the Frisbee off the Madonna. There is an imprecation from the ground. He looks down to see the matron shaking her fist at him. Guiltily he nods, crosses himself and tries again.

He has it at a grab and with a cry of pleasure turns round, his feet gripping into the shoulders of his cousins. Their hands clutch his thin ankles. He
says something, they let him go and he jumps into space, both hands in the air, holding the Frisbee like a parachute. He jumps into the air as if he were a thing of air, weightless, limitless, untroubled by gravity’s insistence.

In the second’s difference between flying and falling his mother has run forward. She catches him at a swing, taking both of them to the floor.

There she is, scolding and praising at the same time, while everybody gathers round, and wine is fetched from the restaurant, and ice cream in a bowl as big as a font.

Everybody salutes the Madonna. Madonna of the Plastic. Madonna of the Mistake. Madonna who sees all and forgives all. Madonna who can take a joke.

Tonight maybe, when the blinds are drawn and the square is star lit and silent, the Madonna and San Antonio will laugh at the games, and talk over the events of the day, as they always do—watchers and guardians of the invisible life.

There are so many lives packed into one. The one life we think we know is only the window that is
open on the screen. The big window full of detail, where the meaning is often lost among the facts. If we can close that window, on purpose or by chance, what we find behind is another view.

This window is emptier. The cross-references are cryptic. As we scroll down it, looking for something familiar, we seem to be scrolling into another self—one we recognise but cannot place. The co-ordinates are missing, or the co-ordinates pinpoint us outside the limits of our existence.

If we move further back, through a smaller window that is really a gateway, there is less and less to measure ourselves by. We are coming into a dark region. A single word might appear. An icon. This icon is a private Madonna, a guide, an understanding. Very often we remember it from our dreams. ‘Yes,’ we say. ‘Yes, this is a world. I have been here.’ It comes back to us like a scent from childhood.

These lives of ours that press in on us must be heard.

We are our own oral history. A living memoir of time.

Time is downloaded into our bodies. We contain it. Not only time past and time future, but time without end. We think of ourselves as close and finite, when we are multiple and infinite.

This life, the one we know, stands in the sun. It is our daytime and the stars and planets that surround it cannot be seen. The sense of other lives, still our own, is clearer to us in the darkness of night or in our dreams. Sometimes a total eclipse shows us in the day what we cannot usually see for ourselves. As our sun darkens, other brilliancies appear. And there is the strange illusion of looking over our shoulder and seeing the sun racing towards us at two thousand miles an hour.

What is it that follows me wherever I go?

She touched my hand and said, ‘Will you always follow me?’

‘Is life a straight line?’

‘Isn’t there a straight answer?’

‘Not in my universe.’

‘Which one is that?’

‘The one curved by yours.’

‘I love the curve of your back when you sleep,’ she said.

‘Then why did you get up and disappear that night in Paris?’

‘I had to.’

‘To save your skin?’

‘To save my sense of self. You make me wonder who I am.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Someone who wants the best of both worlds.’

‘So you do believe in more than one reality?’

‘No. There’s only one reality. The rest is a way of escape.’

‘Is that what I am? An escape?’

‘You said you wouldn’t pin me to the facts.’

‘The fact of your marriage?’

‘Why do you keep thinking about it?’

‘Because you do.’

She said something about life for her parents’ generation. How it had been enough to raise a family, make a home, keep a job. Why isn’t it enough anymore?
Why does everyone want to win the lottery or be a film star?

Or have an affair.

I took her hand. I was happy. I couldn’t help it. She was here. I was happy.

‘Come with me to the showjumping.’

‘The what!’

‘Concorso Ippico. Eleven o’clock tonight. Now.’

‘You’re mad.’

‘No I’m not. I like horses. Come on.’

Looking at me very suspiciously, as intellectuals do when you mention animals, she took my hand and we walked together down the Via Boffe towards the Damacuta. Already we could hear the canned microphone voice of the commentator and see the floodlights of the stadium.

The air was hung with the scent of bougainvillaea, and as we walked past the muddle of houses crushed above the street, broken bars of music dropped through the open windows. A dog barked. Somebody turned up the television.
There was the sound of a hosepipe and a trickle of water ran under our feet.

As we turned into the Damacuta, the route to the stadium was lit with flares. Kerosene had been poured into shallow terracotta saucers, each with a wick, and these flares, placed on the ground, lit up the feet of the crowds. We looked like gods with feet of fire. We looked like lovers blazing for each other.

Fire-paced, we found our way to the terraces and squatted right at the front with a load of children shouting excitedly about the horses. The loudspeakers were playing
Swan Lake.

Then the riders came out, white jodhpurs, jackets off, to pace the distance between the jumps. This was to be a timed event; fastest time and fewest faults wins.

You said how great it would be if we all got a chance to walk the course before we had to compete.

I said we were walking the course all the time, but when the moment came to jump we still refused.

You glared at me.

Swan Lake
was abruptly switched off. The judges assembled in the box, the commentator told us that the first rider was Swiss.

The bell rang. Out came horse and rider and, after a doff at the box, they were off, in a curved canter that sent the sand flying in flurries.

You were sitting right by the first jump, five feet high, and I heard your intake of astonishment at the effort of beauty and the beauty of effort, as the horse cleared the jump.

There’s no such thing as effortless beauty—you should know that.

There’s no effort which is not beautiful—lifting a heavy stone or loving you.

Loving you is like lifting a heavy stone. It would be easier not to do it and I’m not quite sure why I am doing it. It takes all my strength and all my determination, and I said I wouldn’t love someone again like this. Is there any sense in loving someone you can only wake up to by chance?

Mister Archie, the Swiss horse, had a clear round, if a slow one. I was going to speak to you, but you were totally engrossed in the jumping.

The risks are interesting: do you aim for speed and a correspondingly greater risk of knocking off the poles, or do you take it steady and try for no faults?