Passion (16 page)

'What will you do, Villanelle?'

'With the money? Buy a house. I've done enough travelling. Find ways of getting you free. That is, if you choose to live.'

'Will I be able to choose?'

'That much I can afford. It's not up to Piero, it's up to the judge.'

It was dark. She lit the candles and propped me against her body. I laid my head on her heart and heard it beating, so steady, as if it had always been there. I had never lain like this with anyone but my mother. My mother who took me on her breast and whispered the scripture in my ear. She hoped I'd learn it that way, but I heard nothing except the fire spitting and the steam rising from the water she heated for my father's wash. I heard nothing but her heart and felt nothing but her softness.

'I love you,' I said, then and now.

We watched the candles make bigger and bigger shadows on the ceiling as the sky became completely dark. Piero had a palm in his room (got from some cringing exile no doubt), and the palm cast a jungle on the ceiling, a tangle of broad leaves that could easily hide a tiger. Caesar on the table had a profile to recommend him, and of my triangle nothing could be seen. The room smelled of fish and candlewax. We lay flat on the floor for a while and I said, 'See? Now you understand why I love to be still and look at the sky.'

Tm only still when I'm unhappy. I don't dare move because moving will hasten another day. I imagine that if I'm absolutely still what I dread won't happen. The last night I spent with her, the ninth night, I tried not to move at all while she slept. I heard a story about the cold wastelands in the far north where the nights are six months long and I hoped for an ordinary miracle to take us there. Would time pass if I refused to let it?'

We didn't make love that night. Our bodies were too heavy.

I stood trial the next day and it was as Villanelle had predicted. I was declared insane and sentenced to life imprisonment in San Servelo. I was to go that afternoon. Piero looked disappointed, but neither Villanelle nor I looked at him.

Til be able to visit you in about a week and I'll be working for you, I'll get you out of there. Everyone can be bribed. Courage, Henri. We walked from Moscow. We can walk across the water.'

'You can.'

We can.' She hugged me and promised to be at the lagoon before the grim boat sailed away. I had few possessions but I wanted Domino's talisman and a picture of die Madonna her mother had embroidered for me.

San Servelo. It used to be just for the rich and mad but Bonaparte, who was egalitarian about lunacy at least, opened it to the public and set aside funds for its upkeep. It was still faded splendour inside. The rich and mad like their comforts. There was a spacious visitors' room where a lady might take tea while her son sat opposite in a strait jacket. At one time the warders had worn uniform and shiny boots and any inmate who drooled on those boots was shut away for a week. Not many inmates drooled. There was a garden that no one tended any more. A matted acre of rockery and fading flowers. There were now two wings. One for the remaining rich and mad and one for the increasing numbers of poor and mad. Villanelle had sent instructions to have me put in the former, but I found out what it cost and refused.

I prefer to be with the ordinary people anyway.

In England, they have a mad King that nobody locks up.

George
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who addresses his Upper Chamber as 'My Lords and peacocks'.

Who can fathom the English and their horseradish?

I did not feel afraid to be in such strange company.

I only began to feel afraid when the voices started, and after the voices the dead themselves, walking the halls and watching me with their hollow eyes.

When Villanelle came the first few times, we talked about Venice and about life and she was full of hope for me. Then I told her about the voices and about the cook's hands on my throat.

'You're imagining it, Henri, hold on to yourself, you'll be free soon. There are no voices, no shapes.'

But there are. Under that stone, on the windowsill. There are voices and they must be heard.

When Henri was taken to San Servelo in the grim boat I set about procuring his release straight away. I tried to find out on what grounds the insane are kept there and if they are ever examined by a doctor to see if there has been any improvement. It seems that they are, but only those who are no danger to mankind can be let free. Absurd, when there are so many dangers to mankind walking free without examination. Henri was an inmate for life. There were no legal means of having him freed, at least not while Piero had anything to do with it.

Well then, I would have to help him escape and ensure his passage to France.

For the first few months that I visited him he seemed cheerful and sanguine, despite sleeping in a room with three other men of hideous appearance and terrifying habits. He said he didn't notice them. He said he had his notebooks and he was busy. Perhaps there were signs of his change much earlier than I recognised, but my life had taken an unexpected turn and I was preoccupied.

I don't know what madness drove me to take a house opposite hers. A house with six storeys like hers, with long windows that let in the light and caught the sun in pools. I paced the floors of my house, never bothering to furnish any of them, looking in her sitting-room, her drawing-room, her sewing-room and seeing not her but a tapestry of myself when I was younger and walked like an arrogant boy.

I was beating a rug on my balcony when I finally saw her.

She saw me too and we stood like statues, each on our balconies. I dropped the rug into the canal.

'You are my neighbour,' she said. 'You should pay me a call,' and so it was fixed that I should pay her a call that evening before supper.

More than eight years had passed, but when I knocked on her door I didn't feel like an heiress who had walked from Moscow and seen her husband murdered. I felt like a Casino girl in a borrowed uniform. Instinctively, I put my hand to my heart. 'You've grown up,' she said.

She was the same, though she had let the grey show in her hair, something she had been particularly vain about when I knew her. We ate at the oval table and she seated us side by side again with the botde in between. It wasn't easy to talk. It never had been, we were either too busy making love or afraid of being overheard. Why did I imagine things would be different simply because time had passed?

Where was her husband this evening?

He had left her.

Not for another woman. He didn't notice other women. He had left her quite recendy to go on a voyage to find the Holy Grail. He believed his map to be definitive. He believed the treasure to be absolute.

'Will he come back?'

'He may, he may not.'

The wild card. The unpredictable wild card that never comes when it should. Had it fallen earlier; years earlier, what would have happened to me? I looked at my palms trying to see the other life, the parallel life. The point at which my selves broke away and one married a fat man and the other stayed here, in this elegant house to eat dinner night after night from an oval table.

Is this the explanation then when we meet someone we do not know and feel straight away that we have always known them? That their habits will not be a surprise. Perhaps our lives spread out around us like a fan and we can only know one life, but by mistake sense others.

When I met her I felt she was my destiny and that feeling has not altered, even though it remains invisible. Though I have taken myself to the wastes of the world and loved again, I cannot truly say that I ever left her. Sometimes, drinking coffee with friends or walking alone by the too salt sea, I have caught myself in that other life, touched it, seen it to be as real as my own. And if she had lived alone in that elegant house when I first met her? Perhaps I would never have sensed other lives of mine, having no need of them.

'Will you stay?' she said.

No, not in this life. Not now. Passion will not be commanded. It is no genie to grant us three wishes when we let it loose. It commands us and very rarely in the way we would choose.

I was angry. Whoever it is you fall in love with for the first time, not just love but be in love with, is the one who will always make you angry, the one you can't be logical about. It may be that you are settled in another place, it may be that you are happy, but the one who took your heart wields final power.

I was angry because she had wanted me and made me want her and been afraid to accept what that meant; it meant more than brief meetings in public places and nights borrowed from someone else. Passion will work in the fields for seven years for the beloved and on being cheated work for seven more, but passion, because it is noble, will not long accept another's left-overs.

I have had affairs. I will have more, but passion is for the single-minded.

She said again, 'Will you stay?'

When passion comes late in life for the first time, it is harder to give up. And those who meet this beast late in life are offered only devilish choices. Will they say goodbye to what they know and set sail on an unknown sea with no certainty of land again? Will they dismiss those everyday things that have made life tolerable and put aside the feelings of old friends, a lover even? In short, will they behave as if they are twenty years younger with Canaan just over the ridge?

Not usually.

And if they do, you will have to strap them to the mast as the boat pulls away because the siren calls are terrible to hear and they may go mad at the thought of what they have lost.

That is one choice.

Another is to learn to juggle; to do as we did for nine nights. This soon tires the hands if not the heart.

Two choices.

The third is to refuse the passion as one might sensibly refuse a leopard in the house, however tame it might seem at first. You might reason that you can easily feed a leopard and that your garden is big enough,
but
you will know in your dreams at least that no leopard is ever satisfied with what it's given. After nine nights must come ten and every desperate meeting only leaves you desperate for another. There is never enough to eat, never enough garden for your love.

So you refuse and then you discover that your house is haunted by the ghost of a leopard.

When passion comes late in life it is hard to bear.

One more night. How tempting. How innocent. I could stay tonight surely? What difference could it make, one more night? No. If I smell her skin, find the mute curves of her nakedness, she will reach in her hand and withdraw my heart like a bird's egg. I have not had time to cover my heart in barnacles to elude her. If I give in to this passion, my real life, the most solid, the best known, will disappear and I will feed on shadows again like those sad spirits whom Orpheus fled.

I wished her goodnight, touching her hand only and thankful for the dark that hid her eyes. I did not sleep that night, but wandered the unlit alleys, taking my comfort from the cool of the walls and the regular smack of die water. In the morning I shut up my house and never went there again.

And what of Henri?

As I told you, for the first few months, I thought him his old self. He asked for writing materials and seemed intent on re-creating his years since he had left home and his time with me. He loves me, I know that, and I love him, but in a brotherly incestuous way. He touches my heart, but he does not send it shattering through my body. He could never steal it. I wonder if things would be different for him if I could return his passion. No one ever has and his heart is too wide for his skinny chest. Someone should take that heart and give him peace. He used to say he loved Bonaparte and I believe him. Bonaparte, larger than life, sweeping him off to Paris, spreading his hand at the Channel and making Henri and those simple soldiers feel as if England belonged to them.

I have heard that when a duckling opens its eyes it will attach itself to whatever it first sees, duck or not. So it is with Henri, he opened his eyes and there was Bonaparte.

That's why he hates him so much. He disappointed him. Passion does not take disappointment well.

What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?

Henri is a gende man and I wonder if it was killing that fat cook that hurt his mind? He told me, on the way home from Moscow, that he had been in the army eight years without so much as wounding another man. Eight years of battle and the worst he'd done was to kill more chickens than he could count.

He was no coward though, he'd risked his own life over and over again to get a man off the field. Patrick told me that.

Henri.

I don't visit him now, but I wave from my boat every day at about this time.

When he said he was hearing voices - his mother's, the cook's, Patrick's - I tried to make him understand that there are no voices, only ones of our own making. I know the dead cry out sometimes, but I know too that the dead are greedy for attention and I urged him to shut them out and concentrate on himself. In a madhouse you must hold on to your mind.

He stopped telling me about them, but I heard from the warders that he woke up screaming night after night, his hands round his throat, sometimes nearly choked from self-strangling. This disturbed his fellows and they had him moved to a room by himself. He was much quieter after that, using the writing materials and a lamp I brought him. At that time I was still working for his release and confident of securing it. I was getting to know