The PowerBook (9 page)

The best riders manage both, but all riders are subject to the same rule: if a horse refuses to jump, he must be made to take it again. The rider must coax him round and convince him to do it. Horses have sudden fears.

So do I, but in this life you have to take your fences.

Later, walking home through the alleys as thin and black as the cats on every corner, you put your arm around me and asked again.

‘Will you always follow me?’

‘Who’s following whom?’

‘That’s what I’m beginning to wonder.’

‘There are two marks on a circle. Which is ahead? Which is behind?’

‘Neither.’

‘Then we’re tailing each other.’

‘Do you believe in fate?’ she said, in that nervous way that people say it.

‘Ye-es.’

‘You don’t sound so sure.’

‘Fate isn’t an excuse to let go of the reins.’

‘OK, but what if you find you’re riding a completely different horse?’

We were soon back at the place I had rented and I asked her if she was staying the night.

‘So this time I don’t have to beg?’

‘I was the one who was the beggar tonight.’

She took me in her arms. ‘I wish I could explain.’

‘Explain what?’

‘Oh, I know what you think of me.’

‘What I think of you and what I feel for you are different things.’

‘Do you usually sleep with people you despise?’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘I want you to be my lover not my judge.’

She’s right. I’m the one who’s muddling things up. How she lives is her decision. If I don’t like it I
should stay out of the way. If I don’t like it I should say so and close the door.

Her arms were warm and tight.

‘What is it you want?’ she said.

I want to be able to call you. I want to be able to knock on your door. I want to be able to keep your key and to give you mine. I want to be seen with you in public. I want there to be no gossip. I want to make supper with you. I want to go shopping with you. I want to know that nothing can come between us except each other.

We were lying together in the dark. The candle had burned out. Outside, the wind was whipping the canvas on the deckchairs. I could hear a plastic tumbler blowing round and round.

You were sleeping.

Why does nothing matter as much as this?

How do you seem to write me to myself?

I am a message. You change the meaning.

I am a map that you redraw.

Follow it. The buried treasure is really there. What exists and what might exist are windowed together at the core of reality. All the separations and divisions and blind alleys and impossibilities that seem so central to life are happening at its outer edges. If I could follow the map further and if I could refuse the false endings (the false starts don’t matter), I could find the place where time stops. Where death stops. Where love is.

Beyond time, beyond death, love is. Time and death cannot wear it away.

I love you.

In the morning, thunder was rumbling round the island, the waves were white-topped and the birds were quiet.

I like islands because the weather is so changeable.

I like the way the morning can be stormy and the afternoon as clear and sparkling as a jewel in the water. Put your hand in the water to reach for a sea urchin or a seashell, and the thing desired
never quite lies where you had lined it up to be. The same is true of love. In prospect or in contemplation, love is where it seems to be. Reach in to lift it out and your hand misses. The water is deeper than you had gauged. You reach further, your whole body straining, and then there is nothing for it but to slide in—deeper, much deeper than you had gauged—and still the thing eludes you.

I put the
macchinetta
on the stove and fed the cats the mince. At least I hope that’s what I did. The little lizards were scuttling under the trailing vine and there was the usual earnest column of ants transporting a sliver of parmesan down to their hoard.

In the holm-oak, a blackbird had finished his morning bath in a pan of water I put out for him. In return he sings. He sings of the morning of the world, which happens every day for him, untainted by memory. The island is new. The tree has grown under his feet. His hollow bones are sung through with happiness. He flies light as a note.

The hiss and bubble of the coffee-pot reminded me of my business. I clattered out the little white cups onto the marble counter and poured the black, boiling coffee. Carefully I carried the two cups into the bedroom. The smell drifted into your dreams and you followed it back through sleep into day.

‘What time is it?’ you mumbled.

‘Seven o’clock.’

‘Horrible.’

You slumped back. I propped you up with pillows.

‘You said you wanted to be woken early.’

‘I didn’t say the middle of the night.’

‘It’s been light for hours.’

‘Not in my world it hasn’t.’

‘Drink this.’

You sipped noisily from the edge of the cup.

‘Too strong.’

‘I thought you like it strong.’

‘A liquid should not be a solid.’

‘It will get you going.’

‘Going where?’

‘Your hotel. Like you said.’

‘Maybe I’ll just stay here.’

‘You can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘How many good reasons do you want?’

‘Why don’t you just go down there and get my clothes?’

‘You want me to go and ask your husband for your clothes?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m not Bugs Bunny.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that when he pulls off my head it won’t flip back on again.’

‘He won’t pull your head off.’

‘So what am I supposed to say?’

‘Say I’m ill.’

‘OK, you’re ill, so you need all your little black dresses …’

‘Of course I do.’

‘Try again.’

‘Say you’re my cousin from Illinois.’

‘I am not your cousin from Illinois.’

‘For a writer you stick pretty close to the facts.’

‘The fact is that your husband is down at the Quisisana.’

‘The fact is that my lover is here …’

She put down her coffee.

‘In bed …’

She leaned over and pulled me down on her.

‘With me.’

It was ten o’clock before we got up again, which proves the pointlessness of early starts. I’m not a morning person, but some virtue still clings to it. People who stay up late (me) are debauched. People who get up early are clean living. Well, this morning, for once, I had got up early and look where it had led me.

A second pot of coffee was bubbling on the stove. You must have caught a whiff of conscience because you suddenly said—

‘I ought to call him.’

‘There’s no phone here.’

‘Where’s your mobile?’

‘In London.’

‘What’s it doing there?’

‘Absolutely nothing.’

‘So where can I find a phone?’

‘I don’t know. In the square maybe.’

‘I’ll walk up.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘Look, maybe I should go.’

‘That’s not what you said three hours ago.’

‘Don’t bully me.’

‘I’m not bullying you.’

‘It isn’t my fault that you don’t have a phone.’

‘It isn’t my fault that you’re married.’

‘Not this again.’

‘What—does it weary you, my love?’

‘Yes it does as it happens.’

‘Well just fuck off.’

‘What?’

‘I said fuck off.’

‘Fine. That’s fine.’

She was out of the place, taking the steep steps two at a time and disappearing up the vertical alleys before I could fumble with the Calor gas of the stove, grab the keys and go after her.

‘You should let her go,’ I’m saying to myself, my
legs taking no notice. ‘For God’s sake, let her go,’ and my heart was pounding and I was angry, so angry, with myself or her, I don’t know. Just blood pushing against thought. Angry at me or her, and my fist clenched round the keys as I bounded up the track, hearing the church bell like a pulse.

When I got to the Piazza Monumentale, I saw her disappearing in one of the white taxis with the roof down. I ran over to the rank. Stopped. I had come out without any money. Ripping through my pockets all I could produce was a five thousand lire note.

OK. The bus.

I stood in the queue, the sun too hot, no sunscreen, sweating like a horse, my mouth dry, my face like a gargoyle (no sunglasses), my blood pressure at hospital level and my heart melting like a tourist’s ice cream.

For half an hour, bus after bus came in the opposite direction, and I kept saying to myself, ‘Get on, go down to the Faro, swim as you are, wash her off you.’ But it was too late for that, so I stood there like an idiot, waiting.

The bus finally arrived and I shoved on and darted for an orange plastic seat. This was hardly the stuff of romance. If I had been writing about it, I could have come out with more money. I would have remembered my sunglasses, ordered a soundtrack. As it was, the bus skidded and honked down to the terminus, and a woman with one fat hand on the chrome rail and another fat hand round a bag of onions, kept digging her heel into my foot. When I got off I was limping.

So this is me—sweating like a horse, looking like a dog, limping like a chicken, poor as a church mouse and jumpy as a flea—heading for the Quisisana, where naturally enough, the doorman won’t let me in. And you know what? I can’t even bribe him.

After a lot of bad Italian, I did manage to persuade him to call Room 29.

Any answer?

Niente.

I slunk off, past the Cartier and Vuitton, past the bar where I couldn’t afford a drink, past the sneering
waiters and the gold bracelet man at the Cambio, whose single split-second glance said, ‘Pauper.’

I crept back to the oily floor of the bus terminus and bought my ticket back to Anacapri. I was so thirsty that I could have unscrewed the radiator cap of the bus and dropped a straw in it—if I had a straw, or if I could have bought one. I made up my mind never to put myself in a situation like this again. As we changed up from the ear-splitting second gear into life-threatening third, I prayed to the Madonna of the Falling Rocks to give me the good sense not to crush myself.

Night. Screen. Tap tap tap. Tap tap. Tap.

The coded message that anyone can read.

I keep telling this story—different people, different places, different times—but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tightrope between two worlds.

There is no greater grief than to find no happiness but happiness in what is past.

This is the story of Francesca da Rimini and her lover Paolo. You can find it in Boccaccio. You can find it in Dante. You can find it here.

My father’s castle is built of stone. The stone is thick as darkness. Darkness is to the inside what stone is to the outside of this castle; impenetrable, unscalable, a stone-dark, heavy as thought.

The dark stone weighs on us. Our thoughts bear us down. We roll the dark in front of us down the icy corridors, and in the rooms the darkness accumulates, sits in our chairs, waits. We wait.

The castle is a pause between dark and dark. It fills the space between a man’s thoughts and his deeds. My father made the design for the castle himself. It is as though we are living inside him.

Inside the castle, the furniture is black oak from Spain. In the one room where we keep a fire there is a long black table with candlesticks. At this table, for the first time, I saw Paolo.

Paolo il bello …