Passion (11 page)

The two men stood up simultaneously, shook hands. Then the rich man placed his hands on the marble, and we saw they were shaking. Fine comfortable hands that were shaking. The stranger noticed and with a litde smile suggested they complete the terms of their wager.

None of us spoke up, none of us tried to stop him. Did we want it to happen? Did we hope that one life might substitute for many?

I do not know our motives, I only know that we were silent.

This was the death: dismemberment piece by piece beginning with the hands.

The rich man nodded almost imperceptibly and, bowing to us, left in the company of the stranger. We heard nothing more, never saw either of them again, but one day, months later, when we had comforted ourselves that it was a joke, that they had parted at the corner, out of sight, given each other a fright, nothing more, we received a pair of hands, manicured and quite white, mounted on green baize in a glass case. Between the finger and thumb of the left was a roulette ball and between the finger and thumb of the right, a domino.

The manager hung the case on the wall and there it hangs today.

I have said that behind the secret panel lies a valuable, fabulous thing. We are not always conscious of it, not always aware of what it is we hide from prying eyes or that those prying eyes may sometimes be our own.

There was a night, eight years ago, when a hand that took me by surprise slid the secret panel and showed me what it was I kept to myself.

My heart is a reliable organ, how could it be my heart? My everyday, work-hard heart that laughed at life and gave nothing away. I have seen dolls from the east that fold in one upon the other, the one concealing the other and so I know that the heart may conceal itself.

It was a game of chance I entered into and my heart was the wager. Such games can only be played once.

Such games are better not played at all.

It was a woman I loved and you will admit that is not the usual thing. I knew her for only five months. We had nine nights together and I never saw her again. You will admit that is not the usual thing.

I have always preferred the cards to the dice so it should have come as no surprise to me to have drawn a wild card.

The Queen of spades.

She lived simply and elegandy and her husband was sometimes called away to examine a new rarity (he dealt in books and maps); he was called away soon after we met. For nine days and nights we stayed in her house, never opening the door, never looking out of the window.

We were naked and not ashamed.

And we were happy.

On the ninth day I was left alone for a while because she had certain household affairs to attend to before her husband's return. On that day the rain splashed against the windows and filled up the canals below, churning the rubbish that lies under the surface, the rubbish that feeds the rats and the exiles in their dark mazes. It was early in the New Year. She had told me she loved me. I never doubted her word because I could feel how true it was. When she touched me I knew I was loved and with a passion I had not felt before. Not in another and not in myself.

Love is a fashion these days and in this fashionable city we know how to make light of love and how to keep our hearts at bay. I thought of myself as a civilised woman and I found I was a savage. When I thought of losing her I wanted to drown both of us in some lonely place rather than feel myself a beast that has no friend.

On the ninth night we ate and drank as usual alone in the house, the servants dismissed. She liked to cook omelettes with herbs and these we ate with hot radishes she had got from a merchant. Occasionally our conversation faltered and I saw tomorrow in her eyes. Tomorrow when we would part and resume our life of strange meetings in unfamiliar quarters. There was a cafe we usually went to, full of students from Padua and artists seeking inspiration. She was not known there. Her friends could not find her out. Thus we had met and met too in hours that did not belong to us, until this gift of nine nights.

I did not meet her sadness; it was too heavy.

There is no sense in loving someone you can never wake up to except by chance.

The gambler is led on in the hope of a win, thrilled with the fear of losing and when he wins he believes his luck is there, that he will win again.

If nine nights were possible why not ten?

So it goes and the weeks pass waiting for the tenth night, waiting to win again and all the time losing bit by bit that valuable fabulous thing that cannot be replaced.

Her husband dealt only in what was unique, he never bought a treasure someone else might have.

Would he buy my heart then and give it to her?

I had already wagered it for nine nights. In the morning when I left I did not say I would not see her again. I simply made no arrangement. She did not press me to do so, she had often said that as she got older she took what she could of life but expected litde.

Then I was gone.

Every time I was tempted to go to her I went to the Casino instead and watched some fool humiliating himself at the tables. I could gamble on another night, reduce myself a litde more, but after the tenth night would come the eleventh and the twelfth and so on into the silent space that is the pain of never having enough. The silent space full of starving children. She loved her husband.

I decided to marry.

There was a man who had wanted me for some time, a man I had refused, cursed. A man I despised. A rich man with fat fingers. He liked me to dress as a boy. I like to dress as a boy now and then. We had that in common.

He came to the Casino every night, playing for high stakes but not gambling with anything too precious. He was no fool. He clasped me with his terrible hands, with fingertips that had the feel of boils bursting, and asked me if Pd changed my mind about his offer. We could travel the world he said. Just the three of us. Him, me and my codpiece.

The city I come from is a changeable city. It is not always the same size. Streets appear and disappear overnight, new waterways force themselves over dry land. There are days when you cannot walk from one end to the other, so far is the journey, and there are days when a stroll will take you round your kingdom like a tin-pot Prince.

I had begun to feel that this city contained only two people who sensed each other and never met. Whenever I went out I hoped and dreaded to see the other. In the faces of strangers I saw one face and in the mirror I saw my own.

The world.

The world is surely wide enough to walk without fear.

We were married without ceremony and set off straight away to France, to Spain, to Constantinople even. He was as good as his word in that respect and I drank my coffee in a different place each month.

There was, in a certain city where the climate was fine, a young Jewish man who loved to drink his coffee at the pavement cafes and watch the world go by. He saw sailors and travellers and women with swans in their hair and all manner of fanciful distractions.

One day he saw a young woman flying past, her clothes flying out behind her.

She was beautiful and because he knew that beauty makes us good he asked her to stop awhile and share his coffee.

'I'm running away,' she said.

'Who are you running away from?'

'Myself.'

But she agreed to sit awhile because she was lonely.

His name was Salvadore.

They talked about the mountain ranges and the opera. They talked about animals with metal coats that can swim the length of a river without coming up for air. They talked about the valuable, fabulous thing that everyone has and keeps a secret. 'Here,' said Salvadore, look at this,' and he took out a box enamelled on the outside and sofdy lined on the inside and on the inside was his heart.

'Give me yours in exchange.'

But she couldn't because she was not travelling with her heart, it was beating in another place.

She thanked the young man and went back to her husband, whose hands crept over her body like crabs.

And the young man thought often of a beautiful woman on that sunny day when the wind had pushed out her earrings like fins.

We travelled for two years, then I stole his watch and what money he had on him and left him. I dressed as a boy to escape detection, and while he snored off his red wine and most of a goose I lost myself in the dark that has always been a friend.

I got odd jobs on ships and in grand houses, learned to speak five languages and did not see that city of destiny for another three years, then I caught a ship home on a whim and because I wanted my heart back. I should have known better than to risk my luck in the shrinking city. He soon found me out and his fury at being robbed and abandoned had not abated, even though he was living with another woman by then.

A friend of his, a sophisticated man, suggested a litde wager for the two of us, a way of solving our differences. We were to play cards and if I won, I should have my freedom to come and go as I pleased and enough money to do so. If I lost, my husband should do with me as he pleased, though he was not to molest or murder me.

What choice had I?

At the time, I thought I played badly, but I later discovered by chance that the pack was fixed, that the wager had been fixed from the start. As I told you, my husband is no fool.

It was the Jack of hearts that caught me out.

When I lost, I thought he would force me home and that would be an end to it, but instead he kept me waiting three days and then sent a message for me to meet him.

He was with his friend when I arrived and an officer of high rank, a Frenchman whom I discovered to be General Murat.

This officer looked me up and down in my woman's clothes then asked me to change into my easy disguise. He was all admiration and, turning from me, withdrew a large bag from within his effects and placed it on the table between himself and my husband.

This is the price we agreed then,' he said.

And my husband, his fingers trembling, counted it out.

He had sold me.

I was to join the army, to join the Generals for their pleasure.

It was, Murat assured me, quite an honour.

They didn't give me enough time to collect my heart, only my luggage, but I'm grateful to them for that; this is no place for a heart.

She was silent. Patrick and I, who had not uttered a word nor moved at all save to shield our scorching feet, felt unable to speak. It was she who broke the silence again.

'Pass me that evil spirit, a story deserves a reward.'

She seemed carefree and the shadows that had crossed her face throughout her story had lifted, but I felt my own just beginning.

She would never love me.

I had found her too late.

I wanted to ask her more about her watery city that is never the same, to see her eyes light up for love of something if not for love of me, but she was already spreading her furs and settling to sleep. Cautiously, I put my hand to her face and she smiled, reading my thoughts.

'When we get through this snow, Fll take you to the city of disguises and you'll find one that suits you.'

Another one. I'm already in disguise in these soldiers' clothes.

I want to go home.

During the night, while we slept, the snows began again. We couldn't push open the door in the morning, not Patrick nor I nor the three of us together. We had to break down the wood where it had splintered and because I am still skinny, I was the one bundled face first into a snowdrift banked taller than a man.

With my hands I began scooping away that deadly heady stuff that tempts me to plunge in and never bother to come out. Snow doesn't look cold, it doesn't look as though it has any temperature at all. And when it falls and you catch those pieces of nothing in your hands, it seems so unlikely that they could hurt anyone. Seems so unlikely that simple multiplication can make such a difference.

Perhaps not. Even Bonaparte was beginning to learn that numbers count. In this vast countiy there are miles and men and snowflakes beyond our resources.

I took off my gloves to keep them dry and watched my hands alter from red to white to beautiful sea blue where the veins rear up almost purple, almost the colour of anemones. I could feel my lungs beginning to freeze.

At home, on the farm, the frost at midnight brightens the ground and hardens the stars. The cold there slashes you like a whip, but it is never so cold that you feel yourself freezing from the inside. That the air you breathe is seizing the fluids and mists and turning them into lakes of ice. When I drew breath I felt as though I were being embalmed.

It took me most of the morning to clear away the snow enough to open the door. We left with gunpowder and very litde food and tried to go on tracing our way towards Poland, or the Duchy of Warsaw as Napoleon had designated it. Our plan was to skirt along the borders, then down through Austria, across the