Passion (17 page)

the warders and I had an idea that I could buy him out for money and sex. My red hair is a great attraction. I was still sleeping with him in those days. He had a thin boy's body that covered mine as light as a sheet and, because I had taught him to love me, he loved me well. He had no notion of what men do, he had no notion of what his own body did until I showed him. He gave me pleasure, but when I watched his face I knew it was more than that for him. If it disturbed me I put it aside. I have learnt to take pleasure without always questioning the source.

Two things happened.

I told him I was pregnant.

I told him he would be free in about a month.

Then we can get married.'

'No.'

I took his hands and tried to explain that I wouldn't many again and that he couldn't live in Venice and I wouldn't live in France.

'What about the child? How will I know about the child?'

'I'll bring the child when it's safe and you'll come here again when it's safe. I'll have Piero poisoned, I don't know, we'll find a way. You have to go home.'

He was silent and when we made love he put his hands to my throat and slowly pushed his tongue out of his mouth like a pink worm.

'I'm your husband,' he said.

'Stop it, Henri.'

'I'm your husband,' and he came leaning towards me, his eyes round and glassy and his tongue so pink.

I pushed him off and he curled in the corner and began to weep.

He wouldn't let me comfort him and we never made love again.

Not my doing.

The day came for his escape. I went to fetch him, running up the stairs two at a time, opening his door with my own key as I always did. 'Henri, you're a free man, come on.' He stared at me.

'Patrick was here just now. You missed him.' 'Henri, come on.' I pulled him to his feet and shook his shoulders. 'We're leaving, look out of the window, there's our boat. It's a pageant boat, I got that sly Bishop again.' 'It's a long way down,' he said. 'You don't have to jump.' 'Don't I?'

His eyes were troubled. 'Can we get down the stairs in time? Will he catch us up?'

'There's no one to catch us. I've bribed them, we're on our way out and you'll never see this place again.'

'This is my home, I can't leave. What will mother say?' I dropped my hands from his shoulders and put my hand under his chin. 'Henri. We're leaving. Come with me.' He wouldn't.

Not that hour, nor the next, nor the next day and when the boat sailed I sailed it alone. He didn't come to the window.

'Go back to him,' said my mother. 'He'll be different next time.'

I went back to him, or rather I went to San Servelo. A polite warder from the respectable wing took tea with me and told me as nicely as he could that Henri didn't want to see me any more. Had expressly refused to see me. 'What's happened to him?'

The warder shrugged, a Venetian way of saying everything and nothing.

I went back dozens of times, always finding that he didn't

want to see me, always taking tea with the polite warder who wanted to be my lover and isn't.

A long time later, when I was rowing the lagoon and drifting out to his lonely rock, I saw him leaning from the window and I waved and he waved back and I thought then he might see me. He would not. Not me nor the baby, who is a girl with a mass of hair like the early sun and feet like his.

I row out every day now and he waves, but from my letters that are returned I know I have lost him.

Perhaps he has lost himself.

For myself, I still bask in church in the winter and on the warm walls in summer and my daughter is clever and already loves to see the dice fall and to spread the cards. I cannot save her from the Queen of spades nor any other, she will draw her lot when the time comes and gamble her heart away. How else could it be with such consuming hair? I am living alone. I prefer it that way, though I am not alone every night and increasingly I go to the Casino, to see old friends and to look at the case on the wall with two white hands.

The valuable, fabulous thing.

I don't dress up any more. No borrowed uniforms. Only occasionally do I feel the touch of that other life, the one in the shadows where I do not choose to live.

This is the city of disguises. What you are one day will not constrain you on the next. You may explore yourself freely and, if you have wit or wealth, no one will stand in your way. This city was built on wit and wealth and we have a fondness for both, though they do not have to appear in tandem.

I take my boat out on the lagoon and listen to the seagulls cry and wonder where I will be in eight years, say. In the soft darkness that hides the future from the over-curious, I content myself with this; that where I will be will not be where I am. The cities of the interior are vast, do not lie on any map.

And the valuable, fabulous thing?

Now that I have it back? Now that I have been given a reprieve such as only the stories offer? Will I gamble it again? Yes.

Apres moi, le deluge.

Not really. A few drowned but a few have drowned before.

He over-estimated himself.

Odd that a man should come to believe in myths of his own making.

On this rock, the events in France hardly touched me. What difference could it make to me, safe at home with mother and my friends?

I was glad when they sent him to Elba. A quick death would have made him a hero straight away. Much better for reports to seep through of his increasing weight and bad temper. They were clever, those Russians and English, they did not bother to hurt him, they simply diminished him.

Now that he's dead, he's becoming a hero again and nobody minds because he can't make the most of it.

Fm tired of hearing his life-story over and over. He walks in here, small as it is, unannounced and takes up all my room. The only time Fm pleased to see him is when the cook's here, the cook's terrified of him and leaves at once.

They all leave their smells behind; Bonaparte's is chicken.

I keep getting letters from Villanelle. I send them back to her unopened and I never reply. Not because I don't think about her, not because I don't look for her from my window every day. I have to send her away because she hurts me too much.

There was a time, some years ago I think, when she tried to make me leave this place, though not to be with her. She was

asking me to be alone again, just when I felt safe. I don't ever want to be alone again and I don't want to see any more of the world.

The cities of the interior are vast and do not lie on any map.

The day she came was the day Domino died and I have not seen him. He doesn't come here.

I woke that morning and counted my possessions as I do; the Madonna, my notebooks, this story, my lamp and wicks, my pens and my talisman.

My talisman had melted. Only the gold chain remained, lying thin in a pool of water, glittering.

I picked it up and wrapped it around my fingers, strung it from one finger to another and watched how it slid like a snake. I knew then he was dead, though I do not know how or where. I put the chain around my neck, sure that she would notice it when she came but she didn't. Her eyes were bright and her hands were full of running away. I had run away with her before, come as an exile to her home and stayed for love. Fools stay for love. I am a fool. I stayed in the army eight years because I loved someone. You'd think that would have been enough. I stayed too because I had nowhere else to go.

I stay here by choice.

That means a lot to me.

She seemed to think we could reach her boat without being caught. Was she mad? I'd have to kill again. I couldn't do that, not even for her.

She told me she was going to have a baby but she didn't want to marry me.

How can that be?

I want to marry her and I'm not having her child.

It's easier not to see her. I don't always wave to her, I have a mirror and I stand slighdy to one side of the window when she passes and if the sun is shining I can catch the reflection of her hair. It lights up the straw on the floor and I think the holy stable must have looked this way; glorious and humble and unlikely.

There's a child in the boat with her sometimes, it must be our daughter. I wonder what her feet are like.

Apart from my old friends, I don't talk to the people here. Not because they're mad and I'm not but because they lose concentration so quickly. It's hard to keep them on the same subject and, even if I do, it's not often a subject I'm much interested in.

What am I interested in?

Passion. Obsession.

I have known both and I know the dividing line is as thin and cruel as a Venetian knife.

When we walked from Moscow through the zero winter I believed I was walking to a better place. I believed I was taking action and leaving behind the sad and sordid things that had so long oppressed me. Free will, my friend the priest said, belongs to us all. The will to change. I don't take much account of scrying or sortilege. I'm not like Villanelle, I don't see hidden worlds in the palm of my hand nor a future in a clouded ball. And yet, what should I make of a gipsy who caught me in Austria and made the sign of the cross at my forehead saying, 'Sorrow in what you do and a lonely place.'

There has been sorrow in what I have done and if it were not for my mother and my friends here, this would be the most desolate spot.

At my window the seagulls cry. I used to envy them their freedom, them and the fields that stretched measuring distance, distance into distance. Every natural thing comfortable in its place. I thought a soldier's uniform would make me free because soldiers are welcome and respected and they know what will happen from one day to the next and uncertainty need not torment them. I thought I was doing a service to the world, setting it free, setting myself free in the process. Years passed,

I travelled distances that peasants never even think about and I found the air much the same in every country.

One batdefield is very like another.

There's a lot of talk about freedom. It's like the Holy Grail, we grow up hearing about it, it exists, we're sure of that, and every person has his own idea of where.

My friend the priest, for all his worldliness, found his freedom in God, and Patrick found it in a jumbled mind where goblins kept him company. Domino said it was in the present, in the moment only that you could be free, rarely and unexpectedly.

Bonaparte taught us that freedom lay in our fighting arm, but in the legends of the Holy Grail no one won it by force. It was Perceval, the gende knight, who came to a ruined chapel and found what the others had overlooked, simply by sitting still. I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligations but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free. The mystics and the churchmen talk about throwing
off
this body and its desires, being no longer a slave to the flesh. They don't say that through the flesh we are set free. That our desire for another will lift us out of ourselves more cleanly than anything divine.

We are a lukewarm people and our longing for freedom is our longing for love. If we had the courage to love we would not so value these acts of war.

At my window the seagulls cry. I should feed them, I save my breakfast bread so that I have something to give them.

Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in wonderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer.

Then, when I had regarded myself for the first time, I regarded the world and saw it to be more various and beautiful than I thought. Like most people I enjoyed the hot evenings and the smell of food and the birds that spike the sky, but I was not a mystic nor a man of God and I did not feel the extasy I had read about. I longed for feeling though I could not have told you that. Words like passion and extasy, we learn them but they stay flat on the page. Sometimes we try and turn them over, find out what's on the other side, and everyone has a story to tell of a woman or a brothel or an opium night or a war. We fear it. We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much.

And still we long to feel.