This book has two narrators. All the even-numbered chapters are written by Penelope, and the odd numbered chapters by Vaughan.
The book can be thus read in two ways: either one reads all the Penelope chapters one after another and then all the Vaughan chapters, or else one reads the chapters alternately, Vaughan one, Penelope one, Vaughan two and so on.
The chapters are two different versions of nine months lived together. Neither narrator knows what the other has written.
All the characters and events depicted in the novel TUNC are fictional. No resemblance is intended to any real person. Even where characters in Tunc are based on real life events in the author's life, the people are fictional. No resemblance is intended between any fictional characters in TUNC and any person.
To further view TUNC you hereby agree to the © Heretic Press access conditions and copyright agreement.
VAUGHAN ONE See the moment as you lived it.
PENELOPE ONE How did it start? How does anything start?
See the moment as you lived it. That is not going to be easy.
It was five in the morning, Sunday morning.
The girl moved the King Bishop Pawn.
Oh God, she can't play chess at all! She thinks she's moved the Queen Pawn. She'll take it back.
The girl's hands lay on either side of the chess board. My eyes moved from one of these to the other. Hands that didn't do things. A girl's hands, certainly, soft knuckles hiding, sun-tanned and relaxed, but not looked after, with almost square nails bluntly cut.
I don't believe I had ever been faced with the King's Gambit in my life. A suicide opening. I vaguely remembered Fischer talking somewhere about Pawn to Queen three after you take the offered pawn. I kept playing variations of this in my head - it seemed very complex to me. I took the pawn and then tried to forget her hands.
She moved her knight instantly.
So she knows what she's doing! I'm going to lose! I must have waited ten minutes before I moved the Queen's pawn. The moments of fear in chess! Worse than fear in real life!
She wasn't expecting this move. I saw two of her fingers rise slowly in surprise and then drop again. It was the only time in the game that she hesitated before a move. I hate chess players who have decided what they are going to do before you move. I played very slowly. The girl's relaxed hands by the board never stirred. She didn't seem perturbed by my slowness.
Most of the time her grey eyes rested on the board. There was something simple and delicate about their greyness; now the fear in them that had tortured me all evening was no longer there. Was she thinking about the game or something else? Occasionally she glanced up at the paintings on the wall to her left for two or three seconds, not seeing them, I think, just relaxing her eyes.
How did I manage to play that game? The skin of her shoulders and arms was holding me in something like a trance. It was skin I would never touch. Why was I so convinced of this? I found myself unable to glance at the bruise on her shoulder: the bruise was sacrilegious, to look at it even more sacrilegious.
Yes. The moment contained something sacred. All evening I had had that sensation of something sacred: we humans are more than we appear to be. We need the improbable in life to tell us this.
And nothing could have been more improbable than the presence of this girl in my flat at five o'clock in the morning. I had had no intention whatsoever of going to Winnie's party. There had been that polite but painful morning with Meredith, Jean and Winnie. Meredith and Jean didn't want my changes; Winnie did. I, of course, didn't care either way. If they want to make money, my changes are valid, if they want something else, that's their business. They should have fought it out without me.
Then Gianni, the medicinal practitioner and hopeless student of English, turned up late for tennis; I had to book another court for the second hour. Doctors, conveniently, don't have to have an excuse for being late, but Gianni had been with Barbara, I would bet my life on it. We went to tie-break twice. Gianni likes a beer and a chat after tennis so it was after five when I got back to the flat. I lay down on my bed and found, at eight o'clock, that I had slept for nearly three hours. I was definitely not going to the party. Winnie phoned:
"Meredith and Jean refuse to come to the party. Isn't that a lovely line? I've been singing it under the shower. The other teachers likewise refuse. Elegant and generous expression of protest! Eva and Konrad stand by us."
"I can't come to your party, Edwin. I'm a victim of clay court tennis."
"You have no choice - you've become a symbol."
"I'm not coming. Give my love to blue-eyed Penelope."
Then Eva phoned and was quite insulting. Konrad phoned and waxed hyperbolical: my presence would be a thing of metaphysical beauty. He went on and on. My determination to resist transformation into metaphysical beauty grew apace.
Eventually the pair turned up. Eva found my ash grey summer suit and threw it and a silk shirt at me.
"I'm damned if I'm going to be the only elegant person at this symbolic party. Look at Konrad. A thing of rags and patches."
"Struggling to hide his impeccable taste."
Konrad had found my best shoes.
"Behold these examples of calceiform beauty."
"Just apply them to the peasant and shut up."
Konrad put my shoes on my reluctant feet. They had both had a few pre-party drinks.
Almost nobody was at Winnie's party, a party he holds each September to welcome back his staff. Winnie was wallowing in this tiny drama. Were we all there? No body else coming? He would write a list of names. Eva said something about her flat-mate. I wondered how long I would have to stay. I found myself falling into that damn state of misery that had been coming and going for the last two months.
There was a buzz on the citofono. Eva picked up the phone. Her excited and surprised reaction gave me a feeling of premonition. Yes, there was that moment of premonition. I have to think about that.
And then this girl turned up.
A once in a lifetime moment! You raise your eyes and find that something you see almost tears you apart. I saw the frightened grey eyes of this girl and knew, instantly, that she was indispensable to my happiness. How can anybody explain something like this?
I can only say that twice in my life I have had a similar experience. The first time, I was sitting on a bench in Regent's Park in London. It was about ten days after Cecil's death. I looked up and found myself looking into the concerned eyes of a young lady pushing a pram. It was as if my soul had been wrenched from my body, an emotion of sudden-death violence. Her eyes seemed to be saying that she desperately wanted to help me, but she was a young mother pushing a pram - how could she help? She walked on. I have gone back, in my mind, to that instant, a thousand times. Did her baby have a cold and was her concern for the baby or someone else and not for a complete stranger she hardly noticed? Or was, miraculously, her concern for me? Whatever she felt, the intensity of my reaction was instant and enormous.
The second time was very different. I was walking by the water along the beach at Fregene. I raised my eyes and saw a teenage girl in earnest conversation with an older woman, probably her mother. I almost fell to the ground. In the position of that first glance she appeared to be completely naked and probably by pure chance her body had taken on the pose of the eternal woman of art. But she was alive and talking. I remember turning my eyes away instantly so that the image would remain in my memory as static as it was in that first moment. I walked on, my trembling knees hardly able to support the weight of my body.
And now this third moment!
Eva assumed that everyone knew this girl and didn't tell us her name. The girl was frightened, I'm sure of it. Of what I don't know. Something permanent in her life, or something momentary? I was instantly willing to lay down my life to protect her from whatever it was. She was doing everything in her power to hide this fear. It tore my heart out.
The evening lasted forever. She was there for only three hours but as she was only going to be in my life for the length of the party I had to turn those three hours into a lifetime. Her very pale red dress of some feather-weight stuff was so simple in its line that it had you imagining that it must have been designed by some Italian genius of haute couture. But, then again, maybe she had made it herself. The body this dress partly hid, but subtly suggested, was evidently as perfect as the shoulders it didn't hide. As she was wearing no make-up and hadn't been very careful with her long plait she suggested that she didn't much care if you found her attractive or not. She spent the whole three hours dancing and pretending to flirt with everyone. The others treated this as a game. Except for a Polish friend of Konrad's. This individual had wandering hands and was taking advantage of this frightened girl's game to get maximum sexual gratification. I was watching desecration. I couldn't bear it.
The girl didn't include me in this game.
She hardly glanced at me all evening. Stupid Eva had kept referring to me all evening as the film star because my refusing to come to the party, for Eva, was a second-rate movie star tantrum. Perhaps this girl believed I was a film star impressing the world with his pale grey suit and Italian silk shirt. Perhaps she just didn't like me. But then her ignoring me had something deliberate about it. It was almost a compliment.
What happened then, I imagine, was manipulated by nasty Eva. Eva is always very conscious of what is going on around her, a consciousness that appears to become more acute with the imbibing of alcohol. She had decided to leave me alone with this girl. I discovered that she and Konrad and friends had made an unannounced exit. It took this girl about five minutes to realise what had happened. Now she was frightened and wasn't hiding the fact.
She squatted down in front of me.
"Why did Eva do this to me? Why?"
She looked angry.
"What has Eva done to you?"
"Left me stranded like this."
"Winnie would love to drive you home. Ask him."
Yes. Yes. That's what I said. I had spoken without thinking. My subconscious must have told me that this girl would never accept a lift from me. The infinitely cruel moment had come: she was going to walk out of my life.
"Don't you have a car yourself?"
I just couldn't believe this. She was going to let me drive her home! She would be in my life for another twenty minutes! Why did my brain go into statis that evening? Why did I think I was never to see her again? If she lived with Eva I could see her whenever I liked. It was far more natural for her to ask me to drive her home than ask poor Winnie who would have to go out and come back.
There seemed to me to be something exaggerated about the affection she showed Winnie's blue-eyes Penelope when she kissed her good-bye. And then something exaggerated about her coldness towards Mr. Edwin Long, director of a small school of English and my boss. Lecherous Winnie had been on his best behaviour that evening. Did the girl's fear have something to do with middle-age?
See the moment as you lived it! How difficult I am finding this! I am tempted to slip in the cynical remark, record it all as something comical, a teenage moment in the life of a world-weary, thirty-five year old man. But that is not how I lived it, and this is a document of no lies, to be read, if ever, by only one person, and she will forgive me for anything. Except lies.
In my chess game, after fifteen moves, I was in a winning position. The girl seemed to be playing a game which had a logic of its own but was almost unrelated to my game. I moved a knight to the Queen side to open up my attack.
This time she hesitated a minute or two. Then she lifted her king from the board and gently rolled it back and forward on the table.
"I'm not accepting that. The knight was going to the king side and I was going to resign. You've deliberately played me back into the game."
I made a half-hearted attempt to defend my move but she wasn't interested. I hadn't deliberately let her back into the game. I always make my big mistakes when I'm in a winning position; this was one of them.
The girl said she wanted to go to bed. I still have all my linen in the empty part of the kitchen cupboards and she followed me into the kitchen. I took out sheets and a pillow case.
"I can make the bed for you if you like."
"I'll make it myself."
"Do you want pyjamas?"
"Please. I always sleep better in pyjamas. You have lots. Can I use those dark blue ones?"
Yes, there were lots of pairs. Sonia and I used one another's pyjamas and they were all still there - I hadn't noticed.
"They're silk."
The girl looked surprised. "You look after yourself very well."
"A present. I've never worn them."
"For goodness sake! You don't have to apologise. Your girl-friend has very good taste."
Did Sonia have good taste? At least she didn't have bad taste. The dark blue pyjamas had been bought in a sale. Neither of us had used them. Why was this girl assuming the existence of another girl? - all trace of Sonia was gone, absolutely gone.
I asked to use the bathroom before her. Damn bathroom! Always a problem. She was already in the dark blue pyjamas when I emerged. She nodded at me coldly and said good-night.
It was now seven o'clock but I was wide awake. I went out onto the terrace to smoke a pipe -
I hadn't smoked for over twelve hours.
I sat in a deck chair in the early morning daylight gazing at Sonia's room where this girl was now sleeping. She had opened the rolling shutters a little and the windows were now ajar: an ironic touch; Sonia hated to be in a room with closed windows.
I realised, for the first time that evening, that I was in an advanced state of agitation. I had had the absolute conviction, all evening, that she would disappear from my life at the end of that party.
And here she was sleeping in my flat!
Of course I had the mid-night thrill-seeker outside her building to thank for that, nobody else. Or did I? She was already frightened as she hesitated with her keys on the cobble stones outside her front door before he attacked. Frightened of what? She seemed serene coming here in my car but looked even more terrified than ever before she, tremblingly, mounted my wooden stairs. I was behind her and saw her stop two or three times, and then her hand, flat against the wall, almost leaping from one point on this wall to another as she moved again.
There always seems to me to be something very erotic about the movement of the human body mounting stairs. I was very conscious of the lines of her hips, of all the lines of her body, come to that. Perhaps the absence of a bag accentuated them. Was she expecting, and dreading, a seduction attempt? My hand was trembling as I put the key in the lock. Did she notice this?
Now, three hours later, out on the terrace, I had the bizarre feeling that she had spoken to me in French somewhere in the evening and I was trying to remember when. I had returned from two months in Paris five days before and assumed that I was imagining things. She didn't look French and she had a mid-Atlantic accent, well, perhaps not mid, closer to Britain than the East Coast. Perhaps she was Italian. There were two Italian students at the party and, most of the time, everyone was speaking Italian; her Italian was accentless. I knew nothing about her. I found I didn't want to know anything about her.
Ignorance has no limits. Knowledge has.
I thought of Cecil's little girl, Natasha, in Australia. Natasha had seen Cecil only four times, I think. Cecil had told her his name and surname, nothing else. There were dozens of letters waiting for him in every port between Melbourne and Southampton. And then his death destroyed her at seventeen. Cecil's father has dedicated his life to her ever since. Uselessly. The limitless love of twelve-year old Juliet!
I had, yes, something of that limitless feeling that morning out on the terrace, though I was twice poor little Natasha's age. God existed for those hours, and God was within each human. The girl had something sacred about her, so everyone had something sacred about them, even the crude Pole with the wandering hands - he just wasn't aware of the fact.
As the September sun warmed in the East, I wondered how I was going to keep this sacred being in my flat. If improbable things had happened ever seen I first saw her, one more improbable thing was just going to fit into the pattern of things.
Touch her and you will lose her; I remember this line repeating and repeating itself in my brain. I have no idea why I was so sure of this. I would escape from the flat before she woke the next day, leave a note and duplicate keys telling her she was free to stay if she wanted, spend the day with Zoltan the Hungarian, and then return after midnight praying and praying that she would still be there. I remembered she had no money. It was enormously difficult to decide how much to leave. What would a girl with no bag have to buy if she decided to stay another night? I had no idea.
I remember noticing, when
I stood to go to bed, that there was a long, dark grey, mark on my trousers, above the left cuff at the back. For some reason, this irritated me. Certain areas of colour are born to be free of all intrusion. The pale grey of the light-weight wool of my trousers was one of these areas. I stood and tried to brush the dust-like grey off. But it stayed. A mark left by the gentleman on the motorbike? Probably. Strange how, now after ten months, I remember this moment of annoyance but can't remember if I suffered from a feeling of guilt after that night with no sleep. A girl was asleep in Sonia's bed only two months after Sonia had gone forever. Guilt had pestered me for two months in Paris. And now?
No, I remember no feeling of guilt.
How did it start? How does anything start? Billions of seconds down millions of years conditioning, conditioning to have us behave in certain moments the way we do behave. The doctor, hardly recognisable in jeans, had just opened the door of his flat and turned as the light went out. The stairs switch on this landing doesn't work. I imagine he put out his arm in case I fell. I found that my arms were loosely around his torso. But how, and why, were our cheeks so delicately touching? Laws of probability thrown to the wind. And then. And then. His cheek moving, ever so slowly, till the corners of our lips met.
Oh, the insanity of it! Lovely saliva melting and meeting. No, I'm not going to describe it. Every movement of every muscle an explosion of pure pleasure. Two minutes later, three minutes later, perhaps fifty seconds later, inside the total darkness of his flat he pulled my summer dress up over my breasts and then, with a lightning movement, his hand pulled at the only thing left on my body. His fingernail ripped the flesh of my hip.
And that, yes that, was what stopped everything. I had an image, an image of an ugly gash on my immaculate skin. Ugly and red. I was out of the innards of his unknown flat in a second, weightless cotton across my thighs, dress still under my armpits, I didn't care. I grabbed the bag on the landing and fumbled up to my flat in the dark.
Penelope, darling, you are not interested in describing this incident. You are recording your reaction, remember, your reaction. Bravely confronting chaos. Forget the details. This was the first time in your life you were out of control. That's where the terror of the memory comes from. Out of control. Nothing existed outside the soaring pleasure, no other people, no past, no future, no ethics. The present moment had become eternity. You were trapped inside something bigger than you are. You are in a cold sweat now as you record this, admit it.
I must have sat on my soft, bouncy bed, in a very awkward position, for half an hour pointlessly examining the skin on my hip - ugly gash? there was the faintest of faint red lines - trying to decide if I was going to the silly party or not. There would probably be no one there other than facetious teachers talking shop. The clothes on my body were in the exact same position they had had as I raced from the doctor, scrambled up the stairs, and, fumblingly, tried to find the keyhole, not really caring if someone touched the stair switch or not. I noticed that my tummy was pushed out - a very bad sign, in my case, since about the age of three. I sometimes forced myself to look up and gaze around my room. But the hundreds of newish books on the varnished boards, which rested so solidly on pale orange bricks, had changed from an element of beauty into something loathsome. In fact everything in my room had become repellent, even the vintage, age-sweetened, bedroom suite, the delicately sewn bed-spread and gossamer-like curtains, the lovingly searched-for mats on the mahogany-red tiles. I found I didn't want to see any of it again. Love to instant hate like this? This has never happened to me before in my life; I have always thought of my affection for people and things to be indestructible. So, another tiny twist in the never-ending irrationality of that evening.
I don't remember making any decision about the party, I just eventually found myself in a taxi going to Balduina, still in the same dress, same panties, with no make-up and hair all over the place. The only thing I knew was that I wanted to be out of that building, wanted to be out of it forever. Eva had given me the number of the street but she has always referred to her direttore as Winnie, or the Pooh; I found I had forgotten his real name, if I ever knew it. There were two English names under the citofano: W. Long and Malcolm R.. Malcolm R? What a ridiculous way of giving your name to the world! I rang the bell of W. Long. I heard Eva's laughing voice with relief - she said, thank God, there was a dearth of women abroad.
Oh, ye wild star-filled heavens! What a party! I must have seemed so giddy to all those men, sitting on their knees and drinking litres of water. Dancing on my own, dancing with each of them in turn. But my little brain was busy, busy. I don't think the doctor walked out of it for even one minute. I've only ever seen his elegant self about five or six in the morning, on the stairs, or mounting the powerful motorbike he affects, when I return home from some wild night with Eva or someone at the paper. He's a brilliant surgeon, according to Eva, already a Professore. But he looks so young and suave as he politely smiles at you with his adolescent smile, a smile which suggests very faintly that he knows you have been misbehaving. I imagine he does his operations very early. His wife, about thirty-five, always has a sour expression on her face, a face which is racé but worn somehow. They have two small boys, very hyperactive, to put it mildly - always racing one another up and down the stairs, laughing and shouting, with the truculent silence of mamma in their wake. Goodness! What kind of husband is the Professore? Does he seduce nurses, patients, students? Or was the incident on the stairs an unexpected, jagged, ever-to-be-cursed, incident in his life, too? What did he do that night? Lie awake in his empty flat thanking his lucky stars that his wife and children were still in villeggiatura, and sweat with guilt and fear. Or did he quietly go to bed and forget the whole thing instantly.
Yes, I'm a flirt, in my own quiet, harmless way, but darling girl, at that party you really went over the top. Everybody was kissing me, I was kissing everybody - well, maybe not the film star, something intimidating about him. But everybody else, yes. Eva was right. There was a dearth of women because there were only three of us, and six or seven men. Was I emulating Eva? Was I trying to make the Direttore's woman feel old? What in the name of goodness was I trying to do? I think everybody was pretty drunk. There were all kinds of jokes about the litres of water I was drinking. When I read all this in forty years, in fifty years, what am I going to remember? The doctor, the party, what happened after, something I'm not recording now? the people at the party: Konrad, the savage two-metre Pole from New York that I sometimes find in the kitchen discussing the Fathers of the Church, or Yung, or the true nature of alchemy with Eva; he had a stupid Polish-speaking Pole with him who compensated for his lack of English by trying to get his hands inside my dress. The round little direttore I had heard so much about but never met. Winnie, I discovered, was addressed as Edwin by his staff, and as Mr. Long by everyone else. I found his earnest Gauloise-smoking woman very attractive. She said she loved to see people who could let their hair down, something she had never managed herself. The serious theatre actor and his forestry-expert friend, my favourite for the evening, shy but talkative, were two students from the English school where most of these people worked. Not a good advertisement for the school - their English was almost non-existent. The silent film star. Then there was giddy Eva hiding her massive intellect as usual. Well, at least I'm never likely to forget my model-like, tall flatmate, Eva, am I? I discovered that this lovely girl, about two-thirty, was no longer there. Neither was anyone else, except our short, fat little host and his woman and the film star. How did this happen? I have absolutely no idea.
In a kind of panic I asked the film star if he had a car. He coldly agreed to drive me home. In his unwashed Beetle, somewhere near Piazza Venezia, I asked him why I had never seen any of his films. This annoyed him. His quiet, but professionally modulated, voice told me he was not a film actor, but a teacher. Why did I think he worked in films? Just a joke of Eva's, I said; anyway his voice sounded trained. His mother was a music teacher, who gave lessons of elocution. He was sorry about his hybrid accent, but he was stuck with it. I said he had a beautiful voice. He didn't thank me for the compliment.
I directed him to Via Madonna dei Monti and, outside our ancient building, for some reason, we just sat in the car. I desperately didn't want to go up to my room, certainly not alone. While I sat there wondering how long I could hold him in the car was I aware of someone else in the street? Someone lurking? Now I could swear I had that feeling, but possibly I am reading all this backwards. Eventually we were out of the car and there I was by the street door my keys in my hand.
And then it happened. All in the space of three seconds. A roar, my bag violently pulled from my shoulder, a powerful motorbike disappearing around the nearest corner towards Via Cavour. One of the teacher's arms had stopped me from falling but I brutally pushed it away from me. He was less stunned by the incident than by the way I had pushed his arm away, the poor boy. I was muttering things about my credit card, press pass, licence, but they all seemed so remote, so unimportant. Something else was important:
Yes. I was sure of it. The scippatore, the savage snatcher of defenseless girls' bags, was our dapper surgeon of the quiet teenage smile. Altro che guilt and fear! He had been hiding there, somewhere in that narrow street, for the whole of four or five hours, his raging anger panting to hit, hurt, and humiliate. My bag was probably tossed under a car, around the corner. He wasn't interested in the bag. It was all a thing of vendetta, vendetta. The girl who provoked, provoked, and then ran away laughing.
I leant against the wall trembling. My companion didn't know what to do or say. Minutes passed. Then he was saying something. I just stared at him. I heard him repeat himself: not your usual run of bag-snatcher; something of the young business executive about that gentleman. He clearly supposed I was fighting hysteria, and a note of banality, maybe a hint of humour, was his idea of a helping hand. I remember I began to nod, nod in agreement. No idiot this beautiful teacher - the bike-man was wearing a white T-shirt, blue jeans and tennis shoes and, needless to say, a helmet, that completely hid his head, hardly your business executive's uniform. Our teacher had a subtle eye. I began to laugh, a painful, painful laugh. The teacher moved towards me and, very concerned, reached out to hold me. Instantly my laughter stopped. I heard an icy voice that had emerged from somewhere deep in my psyche: Me touche pas! His hands stopped, frozen in the air. Oh God, I treated him so badly, but the only sensation I had at that moment was an immense compassion for myself. I nursed this feeling for minutes and minutes. Did I want him to take me up to my flat? The poor boy repeated this three times before I answered. Nothing on God's earth was going to make me go up to my flat. Did I want to report the whole thing to the police? He was frowning. There was a long silence, his eyes were on the point where the rider had disappeared. Finally, not turning his head, he murmured that I could spend the night in his flat if I liked, there was a spare room. Yes, he was blushing - I remember that. I no longer wanted to say a word to anyone. I walked to his car and opened the door.
Now this is strange: in the car I was totally awake and, by virtue of some weird incongruous reaction, able to think back over the whole evening with a detachment that I've never been able to summon since. The doctor hadn't been planning my seduction. In the split second of light on the landing the line that held his body was the unconscious serene line that told of a lifetime of absent greetings to strangers, neighbours, colleagues. It contained the innocence of ninety-nine per cent of all we poor humans' movements. It was the sudden appearance of darkness, the arm finding itself holding the uncovered shoulders of a girl, and the improbable finding of cheek against a girl's skin in the absence of light. I had been very unjust to the poor man. I was as much to blame, more to blame. Who was seducing whom? My emotions had arrived at a point where they said now is the moment when we compensate for generations and generations of repression. I laugh now, but in that car I decided I was going to write to him and apologise. The man on the motorbike? Someone else obviously. The film star, or actor, or elocution victim, or teacher, or whatever, was right: an executive giving himself a midnight thrill. Poor Prof. Giancarlo Germani was lying on his bed suffering torment and remorse. But one problem remained in that fleeting moment of lucidity: why was it so impossible for me to face a return to my and Eva's flat? The mere thought of it filled my soul with ice. Something in the incident contained an aspect of myself that I cannot come to terms with, cannot face.
So what was worrying me as we went up in a lift, somewhere in the Gianicolo area, was the question of how I was going to persuade this teacher to let me use his spare room until I found somewhere else to live. I saw this then as an enormous problem. There had been something sullen, pseudo-melancholic, in his expression when I first saw him at the party and I was immediately hostile. Then he had carefully ignored me all evening. Why shouldn't he? I had behaved like a twit. How was I going to repair the damage done now? Maybe he had a collection of beer mats or walking sticks that I could swoon over. Maybe I could be fascinated by the interior decoration.
When we got out of the lift I realised that his flat was on the roof. We were to go up another flight of stairs, worn, narrow, and wooden, very similar to the ones in Via Madonna dei Monti, probably the only other wooden stairs in the whole of marble Rome. I was going into the flat of a complete stranger at four o'clock in the morning. Oh yes, have the courage to admit it: you were frightened. I told myself he was a colleague of Eva's, a friend of Eva's colleagues, a friend of Eva's boss. I was building lightening lists of reasons why I shouldn't be in the grip of the terror that held me there by the lift. Now I explain all this in terms of the vision of the narrow wooden stairs, then I saw it all in the complexity of the teacher's expression. How many, many things one expression can hold! There was query, distance, hostility, concern, understanding and apathy, and hundreds of other things, all there together. His eyes were fixed on the point on my left shoulder bruised, I discovered later, before the strap of my bag broke. Possibly my momentarily shattered being was seeing things. But I also saw fear in his expression as well. Yes, fear.
Minutes later we were in the flat, so I must have got up the stairs somehow. Strange how you have these little gaps in your memory - I would love to know now how I felt as I walked up those stairs but my memory says: no entry, little girl, neither now nor ever! And here you have the weirdest thing of all in that terrible evening: something in this flat entirely seduced me. Instantly. How can I explain this? There was something there, drawing, drawing. But what exactly? I was seduced but could find no seducer. My sensitive, and ever-inquisitive, nose was quietly searching for scents. Yes, there was a very faint presence of lovely pipe smoke, a not-faint presence of floor detergent, a hint of garden musk, and the lightest of light suggestions of something female, not a perfume, but hair dye, fingernail polish, face-cream, something like this, one smell, but of what? my nose wasn't giving names to things.
It was very small, this flat, just two rooms. The first thing I noticed were the walls covered in paintings, all abstract. Without invitation, the girl with no bag moved around examining everything, except the paintings, because she hates making appropriate noises in front of paintings. There wasn't much to see. The first room, into which his front door opened, had a beautiful bedside table, a very ordinary bed, lots of things on the floor, record player, phone with a very long lead, radio, type-writer, a pile or two of dictionaries, a heap of LPs. Also on the floor, under the window were half a dozen circular pipe racks filled with briars of every imaginable shape. Was the teacher only a collector - I hadn't seen him smoke all evening. Were the pipes going to be her clumsy conversation piece? There were some Van Gogh chairs around a rustic table on which stood classical chess pieces on a large board.
The girl accepted the offer of coffee but didn't stay, while this was being prepared, in the clean, but very nondescript, small square kitchen near the front door, but, correctly informed, made her way, through the second room, to the corridor-shaped bathroom, an addition, she imagined, and made to look larger by the presence of a very wide mirror, the kind used, yes, used by actors or cat-walk models. She took a long time over her return to examine everything in the second room. Even more paintings here. The twin of the bedside table and a very fragile writing table and low antique chair looked like shop-window articles in front of a wall of book shelves, two thirds of them emptied of books. The prying girl looked at the remaining tomes. She was a little surprised to find that half of them were in French, half in English, with lots of heavily annotated Shakespeare plays. Almost nothing in Italian. She looked at the titles of the French books: Pantagruel, Histoire de Gil Blas, Candide, Les confessions, Les diaboliques, Le grand Meaulnes, Journal d'un curé de campagne, well-thumbed classics of all ages, sizes and publishing houses. Her heart was racing as she turned to look at the cupboard and elegant mirror on the other side of the room. The mirror reflected the three-quarter-size bed; the cupboard had, in ancient times, formed a unit with the bedside tables. She, very naughtily, peered inside this cupboard. There were two, rather expensive-looking, suits, a jacket or two with matching slacks, one extra coat-hanger, half a dozen tennis rackets, and nothing else. All that empty space! Why was her heart racing as she took in that emptiness? She found she had the bizarre urge to hang something up in there, she also found that she had a desperate urge to reread all those French classics, not any copy of these, but the ones pressing one another behind her bare shoulders on the shelves.
Yes, she wanted to stay in this flat, not just a few days, but for months, months. But what in this jumble of objects gave birth to this desperate desire? There was some imbalance in the air, which should have irritated, should have inspired unease, not a longing to stay. There are all kinds of flats and homes in the world but most of them have their own stamp of unity in their neatness or disorder, in their newness or oldness, their ugliness or beauty, their air of permanence or impermanence. But here the invisible thread that links one object to another in most living spaces was missing, some small thing was present or absent, which, acid-wise, burnt the thread at every point. So what was it that had her wanting to throw herself into this threadless world?
The teacher took me out onto the terrace and here that intriguing absent thread vanished. The terrace, that ran around three sides of the flat, was enormous, much, much larger than the flat, with flowers in pots everywhere, hundreds of them. Deck chairs, iron and wooden tables, awnings against the sun. The kind of roof terrace you sometimes find in Rome - delicious. But I knew I was in love with the flat, not the terrace. I wondered what my possibilities were of convincing him to let me share the rent.
Inside again I sat in the only armchair while he brought in now-cold coffee from the kitchen. He pushed aside the chess board to make room for the cups. I walked over to the table and picked up the white king and examined it. We talked about chess, our first attempt at conversation for the evening. He said for a person who played as much chess as he did he was very average, knew one or two openings and always played them, if his opponents let him. I told him my father wrote a syndicated chess column and asked him if he wanted a game.
I was wondering what his name was. It was embarrassing to ask after having spent the whole evening with him. I would phone Eva the next morning and find out. Then I spent the whole game trying to plan how I was going to word my phone call to Eva, and how I was going to stay in that flat and never go back to hers. The very average player had me losing after fifteen moves and, though he played slowly, after fifteen moves, I still had no escape plan, nor invasion plan.
After the game he let down all the rolling shutters to keep out the coming day. To my surprise he had me sleep in the second room; he never slept there, he informed me. The bed, neither single nor double, had a hard orthopaedic mattress, lying on wood, I guessed. I was asleep within minutes. I was vaguely aware of someone moving around on the terrace outside in those minutes. But I was past caring about anything.
© Patrick Hanrahan and Heretic Press 2005
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