Light Years (36 page)

She wanted to borrow ten thousand dollars; she needed it, she said—
you know how life is
. She promised to pay it back.

Ten thousand dollars. He did not dare tell Lia; he knew what she would say. The venality of Italian life, the rigidity of it informed everything. The woman who came to clean received twenty thousand lire a week, the price of a pair of shoes on the Via Veneto, not even the price. How could he tell her? Rome was a southern city, a capital laid out on the iron axes of money and wealth, the banks were like mortuaries. They bared their teeth over money, the Italians, they showed them like dogs.

Lia read the letter. She was silent, cold. “No,” she said, “you cannot. Why does she need money?”

“She’s never asked for anything.”

“She will milk you. She cares nothing for money, you told me that yourself, she throws it away. If you give her money now, six months later she will want more.”

“She’s not like that.”

He could not explain it, he knew that, not to this woman suddenly suspicious, alert. She was slight, she was certain, she knew the language, the machinery of this world.

At dinner that night she opened the subject again. The desolate sound of forks hung in the air.

“Amore
, I want to ask you something.”

He knew what she was about to say.

“Yes, of course, you know,” she agreed.

She seemed despondent, subdued, as if she accepted the presence of this other woman.

“Don’t send it,” she pleaded.

“Lia, why?”

“Don’t send it.”

“All right,” he said.

“Amore
, believe me. I know.” She was the guardian of a bitter knowledge.

“But the fact is,” he said evenly, “you don’t.”

There was silence. She took the dishes to the kitchen. She returned. “Have you ever heard of Paul Malex?” she asked.

“No.”

“Paul Malex is a writer, he is
the
intelligence of Europe. You’ve never heard of him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then believe me, his knowledge is rich, his insight; there is no one to approach him. He reads fluently in Greek and Arabic. He passes freely in the most elevated groups in Europe.”

“What does this have to do with—”

“Malex has gone below the plankton. He has gone below a level in the mind, like the level in the sea where the whales feed. Beneath it is the blackness, the cold, creatures with huge teeth that devour each other, death. He has penetrated that. He does it at will. He perceives structures there, the basic structures of life.”

He had lost the thread. “What are you saying?” he asked.

“I am saying that in Europe one knows certain things. They have been proved again and again. This city is almost three thousand years old. You will see.”

The letter lay on the brown marble surface of a bureau in their bedroom, its words invisible in the dark. They had been written quickly, as Nedra always wrote, in long sentences, without pausing, words which, like an insult or exact judgment, had to be reread, one could never recall them exactly, they were like their author, instinctive, glinting, like a glimpse of fish in the sea.

 … you know how I hate to go over things that are past, but how I wish we’d bought a little house somewhere near Amagansett. Either a house or ten acres of land. Marina told me what they wanted for land now and I couldn’t believe it. I suppose the reason we didn’t was the same as always: we had no money. I’m doing some interesting things now, things I always wanted to do. I’m working part-time for a florist, it’s ideal for me, it’s like going to a house I’m especially fond of. Very few flowers, actually. Mostly plants. It doesn’t sound too glorious as I write it—a florist—but I may not continue, I may do something else. Viri, there is one great favor you could do for me, and I want to ask it without a lot of explanation …

All night these words lay folded. They had arrived in Rome like so many other appeals, now they were waiting, they had joined that world of everything attendant, timeless, in despair. Still, they were dangerous. They lay amid crystal bottles, tattered lire notes, a comb, a gold pen. They were there at dawn.

Naked, Lia knelt near his waist. The morning light filled the room, he was still half-asleep. She was unbuttoning the worn, white buttons of his pajamas, her cool fingers did not hesitate, she was calm, assured, the Arab woman she had sworn. His head was rolled to one side, his eyes closed.

“Look at me,” she commanded.

She was dark, like a girl of the streets, struck along one side by the bright morning sun.

“Look at me,” she said. She was the blade of an angelic light; her arms were lean, her breasts like a sixteen-year-old’s.

She hesitated. Her movements were slow and dreamlike, her hands supporting her near her thighs. The letter was her audience, she was performing for it as if it had eyes, as if it were a poor, ineffectual child before whom she would demonstrate her shamelessness, her power. Her voice was uneven as she bent.

“Yes,” she whispered, “I will be your whore.”

His head lay back, as if severed, among the pillows.

His thoughts were tumbling.

“Everything,” she swore.

Afterwards she stepped from the bed. She was deliberate, unhurried, her act was not ended. The door to the bathroom closed. He lay with the room growing still, the walls fading, the ceiling, like silver water after the leap of a great fish. He was witness to this setting which remained, this world of memory as against the one of flesh, and his thoughts turned irresistibly to all he had been entreated to forget: to Nedra who was living on despite the letter, whose life still blazed strength, in whose wake—even before they had been husband and wife, before, during, after—he had always traveled. And then to her rival of whom he was afraid. These women with their needs and assurance, their dazzling selfishness, their smiles—he would never conquer them, he was too timid, too consenting. He was helpless with them; he was close to them, yes, enormously close, even kindred, but at the same time completely different and alone, like a lame recruit in barracks.

Alone, he lay in the sheets of the still-warm bed. He had drawn the covers to his waist, he could feel a wetness, dense and chill beneath one leg; alone in this city, alone on this sea. The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of days. He had achieved nothing. He had his life—it was not worth much—not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage, he thought, if I had had faith. We preserve ourselves as if that were important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching, until there is no one—we are left with no companion save God. In whom we do not believe. Who we know does not exist.

9

DEATH TAKES THE LAST STEPS
quickly, in a rush.

Nedra was ill. She did not admit it except to feel uncomfortable suddenly in the city. She wanted the open air, she wanted the invisible. Like those anadromous creatures that start without knowing it to their final sites, that somehow, across incredible distances, find their way home, she went—it was the beginning of spring—to Amagansett and took a small house that had once been the shed on a farm. There were some apple trees, long past bearing. The boards of the floor were worn smooth. The village and fields, everything was empty and still. Here she made her ashram, beneath the open skies, by occasional fires, near the continent’s fingery edge.

She was forty-seven. Her hair was rich and beautiful, her hands strong. It seemed that all she had known and read, her children, her friends, things which had at one time been disparate, contending, were quiet at last and had found their place within her. A sense of harvest, of abundance, filled her. She had nothing to do and she waited.

She woke in the silence of a bedroom still cool and dark. She was not sleepy, she was aware the night had passed. The small, gnarled branches of the apple trees were stirring in a soundless wind. The sun was not yet up. The sky to the west was the deepest blue, with clouds almost too brilliant, too dense. In the east it was almost white. Her body and mind were rested, they were at peace. They were being readied for a final transformation she only guessed.

In Rome the old woman who cleaned for Lia sat crying. She was eighty. She was slow but still able to work. Her hands were blunt with age.

“What is it?” Lia asked. “What’s wrong?”

The woman only went on weeping helplessly. Her body sobbed.

“Ma come
, Assunta?”

“Signora,” she moaned, “I don’t want to die.” She was sitting on a chair in the kitchen, grief-stricken.

“To die? Are you sick?”

“No, no.” Her face was worn and pleading, the face of an ancient child. “I’m not sick.”

“Well, what are you talking about?”

“It’s just that I’m afraid.”

“Oh, dear,” Lia said gently. “Now, don’t be upset. Don’t be foolish.” She took the old woman’s hand. “Everything will be all right, don’t worry.”

“Signora …”

“Yes.”

“Do you think there’s anything after?”

“Assunta, don’t cry.” How touching old people are, she thought. How honest they are, how emptied of deception and pride.

“I’m afraid.”

“I’ll tell you what it’s like,” Lia said, calming her. “It’s like being tired, very, very tired and just falling asleep.”

“Do you think so?”

“A beautiful sleep,” she said. “A sleep which only those who have worked a long time deserve, which does not end.”

She was warm, she was comforting with the strength of those who have nothing to lose. She could not even begin to imagine an end to life. She had decades before her, trips to Paris in December with her husband, dinners in small hotels near the Place Vendôme, the lights and Christmas decorations outside, oysters—her first—in the cold afternoon, the half-lemons beside them, the small squares of bread.

“A lovely sleep,” she said.

The old woman wiped her eyes. She was quieter now. “Yes,” she agreed. “Yes, that’s it.”

“Of course.”

“Still …” she said, “how beautiful to wake in the morning and have fresh coffee …”

“Yes.”

“The smell is so good.”

“Poor woman,” Viri commented later.

“I gave her some wine,” Lia said.

“She has no family?”

“No, her family is gone.”

That summer Franca came to visit her mother once more. They sat beneath the trees. Nedra had money, she had bought some good wine. “Do you remember Ursula?” she asked.

“Our pony? Yes.”

“She was so impossible. I wanted to sell her, your father wouldn’t permit it.”

“I know. He really loved her.”

“He loved her at certain times. Do you remember Leslie? Leslie Dahlander?”

“Poor Leslie.”

“It’s strange. I’ve been thinking of her lately,” Nedra said.

“But you didn’t know her very well.”

“No, but I knew those years.”

She looked at her daughter, a feeling of envy and happiness swept her, a gust of it thick as air. They talked of the house, of days long past, the hours lay beside them like a stream that barely moved. All around stretched the wide farmland made thrilling by hidden sea. Rabbits were feeding in the dusty fields, there were sea birds on the shore. All this would vanish, it would belong to poodle owners, Arnaud had said. Its remoteness had saved it, but now the farms were melting like ice in the spring; they were breaking, drifting off forever. All this vast endland, this barren province would disappear. We live too long, Nedra thought.

“Do you remember Kate?” Franca asked.

“Yes. What’s become of her?”

“She has three children now.”

“She was so thin. She was almost a boy—a beautiful, wicked boy.”

“She lives in Poughkeepsie.”

“Exile.”

“Her father’s famous,” Franca said. “Did you see the article?” She went inside to find the issue of
Bazaar
.

“I read something,” Nedra recalled.

Franca was flipping the pages. “Here,” she said. She offered it. It was a long essay. “He had a show at the Whitney.”

“Yes, I remember.”

A large, gray face, pores visible in its nose and chin, stared at her. It was as if she were looking at a kind of passport, the only kind which mattered.

“He’s really a very good painter,” Franca said.

“He must be. He’s right in here with the French countesses.”

“You’re making fun of him.”

“No, I’m not. Well, goodbye, Robert.” She turned the page to vivid, green pictures of the Bahamas, green and blue, long, tanned girls in caftans and white hats. “It’s just that it’s hard to believe in greatness,” she said. “Especially in friends.”

They lay in the holy sun which clothed them, the birds floating over their heads, the sand warm on their ankles, the backs of their legs. She too, like Marcel-Maas, had arrived. She had arrived at last. A voice of illness had spoken to her. Like the voice of God, she did not know its source, she only knew what she was bidden, which was to taste everything, to see everything with one long, final glance. A calm had come over her, the calm of a great journey ended.

“Read to me,” she would ask.

In the tall brown grass of the dunes, a pagan couch that overlooked the sea, she sat clasping her knees and listening while Franca read, as Viri had so often, to his daughters, to them all. It was Troyat’s life of Tolstoy, a book like the Bible, so rich in events, in sorrow, in partings, so filled with struggle that strength welled up on every page. The chapters became one’s flesh, one’s own being; the trials washed one clean. Warm, sheltered from the wind, she listened as Franca’s clear voice described the landscape of Russia, on and on, grew weary at last and stopped. They lay in silence, like lionesses in the dry grass, powerful, sated.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” her daughter asked.

“How I love you, Franca,” Nedra said.

Of them all, it was the true love. Of them all, it was the best. That other, that sumptuous love which made one drunk, which one longed for, envied, believed in, that was not life. It was what life was seeking; it was a suspension of life. But to be close to a child, for whom one spent everything, whose life was protected and nourished by one’s own, to have that child beside one, at peace, was the real, the deepest, the only joy.