The Apprentice Lover (11 page)

“I am drowning,” he said, water dribbling from his lips, in a reedy voice as we sat on the narrow ledge.

I pounded him between the shoulder blades to facilitate breathing. “You
were
drowning.”

Patrice eventually pressed his back to the wall, sucking in slow breaths. “You have saved me, Alexi,” he said, hoarsely. “I owe my life to you.”

“You scared the shit out of me.”

“I am your servant,” he said.

The severe disjunction between what he probably meant and what he actually said forced a grin from me. I claimed (falsely) that I had merely assisted him. “Just a hand,” I said, “I gave you a hand.”

“He is not just giving a hand,” Patrice said. “I owe my life to your marvelous swimming.”

Unsurprisingly, he had lost all curiosity about the grotto, so we abandoned the site, swimming back to the boat, with Patrice preceding me by
a few yards. At one point he rested in the water, putting a hand on my shoulder for support, telling me again that I “was the hero of his life.” Back on deck, he explained to Giovanni that our exploration of the Blue Grotto would have to wait until he had regained his confidence in the water. “I am without courage,” he said. “The water have defeated me.”

We docked in a cove nearby, then climbed a flight of stone stairs to an olive grove, where Giovanni reached into a cloth bag he had carried and produced fruit and cheese with a vaguely cool bottle of white Corvo, a dry Sicilian wine. Patrice was mute, still traumatized by the episode in the grotto; he sat with his back against a rock, devouring a hunk of cheese, with a bank of wildflowers above his head: blue lobelia, clusters of blood-bright amaryllis. He seemed Pre-Raphaelite, a pale and insubstantial figure painted by Rossetti. Both Giovanni and I studied him intensely, savoring the food and wine, saying nothing. It was as though a brush with mortality had whetted our appetites, sharpened our senses to a point of painful acuteness.

L
uigi Aurelio, the good father, was all beneficent angel as he heard from Patrice the details of his ordeal by water. “I am nearly drown, except for this man, my poet-friend,” Patrice said, nodding toward me.

The priest's almond eyes turned toward me, then swung back to Patrice. “Only our Savior, he can walk on water,” he said, in heavily accented English. “You must see, the grotto is marvelous, but not if you are dead. The dead cannot appreciate these splendors. We have a duty, a
duty
, to absorb them before passing on. God was careful to provide every delight.”

I was no theologian, but this sounded heretical to me. Nevertheless, I took to Aurelio, who welcomed us in the tiny kitchen of his three-room house. He seemed an incarnation of Rilke, so gentle and wise—a genuine father. I watched him with fascination as he moved around the room, light as cloud scud as he knocked over the sugar bowl or scattered biscuits onto the floor: the bland, ever-present vanilla biscuits that Italians like to eat for breakfast. His talk was frothy and good-humored, dashed with allusions to Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Giuseppe Parini, and other Italian poets I knew only by reputation. Rilke, in his own translation, was never far from his tongue. “He is the poet's poet, Alexi,” he said to me, having picked up this name from Patrice. “Tell me, do you know
Sonnets to Orpheus
?”

I did not, so was treated to long, obscure quotations in Italian. I nod
ded my approval, hoping he would not question my comprehension. When I told him how much I admired
Letters to a Young Poet,
he drew the volume (in English, acquired during a stay in England, he explained) from the shelf and opened to the fourth letter, written from Worpswede, near Bremen. He read aloud, sonorously: “If you will cling to nature, to the simple things in nature, the tiny things one scarcely sees, and that so unexpectedly multiply beyond measure; if you have this love of insignificant things and seek them out, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems inconsiderable—then everything in your life will grow easier, more coherent, and somehow more acceptable.” Aurelio then treated us to a sermonette about the love of nature, and how being on Capri one experiences the true glory of the world. “My church is in the woods, on the beach,” he said. “I go there for meeting God.”

I told Father Aurelio that many American poets were deeply affected by the natural world, and he grew excited.

“You must recite one of your own poems, Alessandro!” he said. “I'm so curious.”

“They aren't finished,” I said.

“I adore the fragments.”

I shook my head. “Not mine, you wouldn't.”

Aurelio led us into the garden, where the afternoon light was yellow as it played over a hedge of pale marguerites. The dirt of the garden was pinkish brown, and the air smelled of eucalyptus, a faintly metallic odor, like old pewter.

“Rilke is so correct,” the priest said. “Nature is our teacher. If you stand still, and if you listen close to her, you will learn everything you need to know about eternity. She has never failed us, and you will not find her unfaithful.” He looked toward one corner of the garden and recited some favorite lines from Montale, another of his touchstones. The lines rolled mellifluously from his tongue:

He translated the passage for me along these lines: “I can see in you a sundown crown of ashes that refuses to linger, that falls apart and crumbles.” Aurelio added, with dramatic finality: “We are nothingness.”

“That's a big word,” I said, hiding a degree of cynicism. I had never found abstractions particularly moving.

“Are you a Catholic, Alexi? You must be Catholic.”

“Yes, of course,” I said. It didn't seem worth explaining to him that I had lapsed in my faith since going to college, although Nicky's death had brought me face to face with the terrible fact of human finitude, and I had recently begun to reconsider the question of religion. It seemed impossible that human beings had evolved from chaos, or that the imagination—so limitless and thrilling—died when the body crumbled.

“Is your Rupert a Protestant?”

“I don't think so,” I said. I simply guessed that Grant was an atheist, recalling that he'd once said, at the dinner table, that people who used the word God in their conversation made him ill. It puzzled me that a poet could not believe in the realm of the spirit, which realized itself in “the world of ten thousand things,” as the Buddhists described it. But what about my beliefs? Father Aurelio certainly took my Catholicism more seriously than I did, and I chose not to disabuse him.

“You will say your confessions with me, tomorrow at noon,” he said. “And you will attend my mass on Sunday.”

Confessions? Mass? Saying no was probably my least favorite activity in the universe. “If you were a woman,” my father once joked, “you'd be pregnant all the time.”

Patrice, as usual, cut to the quick: “I do not believe in his mumbo-jumbo. I am raised Catholic, too, but what sense is there in this creed? But you, Alex, are different story. I said when I first saw you, he is such an American, and they are full of belief in everything.”

 

That night we had dinner with Father Aurelio at the Trattoria da Maria above the via Krupp near the Piccola Marina, devouring large bowls of spaghetti alla vongole, followed by a local white fish, spigola, grilled over
a wood fire by Maria herself, a large woman with muscular arms and a toothless smile. Below the stone patio with trellised roses and trailing geraniums, the sea was visible, spangled with the gold light of early evening. We polished off two icy bottles of Tiberio without the slightest hesitation, egged on by Aurelio. Normally a light eater and drinker, Patrice, emboldened by his miraculous lease on life, was voracious. We finished the meal with the complimentary bottle of grappa that the padrone by custom put on every table after serving a big meal.

I followed Patrice back to the converted garden shed he called home, saying good night to Father Aurelio at his door.

“And don't forget your confessions tomorrow—at noon,” he said, waving a finger at me, with a wry smile on the large red lips that bloomed, a pulpy flower, in the dark foliage of his beard.

“You can expect me,” I said.

The shed itself was not unpleasant or dirty, just cramped. In the dim light of several candles the room seemed cozy and benevolent. And the longer you remained inside its walls, the larger it seemed. “She seem to grow with familiarity,” Patrice mused. “I am notice this always.”

“I could use a drink,” I said.

Patrice agreed, uncorking a warm bottle of Tiberio. “This is special, 1966. I am said a good year for this wine.” I'd actually had enough alcohol already, but my appetite was aflame, and I was willing to ignore the wine's temperature. In certain moods, drink calls to drink, and the world becomes expansively liquid. Patrice set the bottle on a rickety table and filled two mugs. After we'd drunk perhaps half the bottle, he lit a bowl of hash. “I have conned this from a boy at the hotel,” he explained. “It is Morocco. Very pleasant.”

I said nothing as I took the pipe. Hash was unfamiliar to me, an exotic cousin of the usual pot I'd smoked in the States. We sat cross-legged on the floor, and half a dozen scented candles flickered in a semicircle around us. Smelling of cinnamon, the candle fumes blended nicely with the hash, which seemed abrasive, though I didn't complain. The high came quickly, piggybacking on the alcoholic euphoria already in place, and I liked the combined effect.

“You have saved my life, Alexi, and I owe you mine,” Patrice said,
seeming to enjoy the grand gesture. He would have made a good character in a medieval romance by Sir Walter Scott, full of high sentence and portentousness. “Nothing you ask of me is impossible.
Rien
.”

“We must defeat the English when they invade our borders,” I said, imagining myself as Robert the Bruce.

“I will walk to the moon for you.”

“You're stoned,” I said.

“No, Alexi. My sincerity must not be doubted.”

I reassured him of my gratitude for his gratitude. It began to annoy me that he kept referring to the incident in the Blue Grotto. I would not have let anyone drown, friend or enemy, if I could help it. (I had not been an Eagle Scout for nothing.) If anything, saving Patrice this afternoon seemed insignificant, a feat of mere physicality and pure animal instinct.

There was a time, long ago at Lake Winona in the Poconos, that kept rushing back to me. A present and palpable vision, not a dream. Nicky and I had gone fishing in a wooden canoe my father bought for us soon after we acquired the lakeside cottage. The night had been unseasonably cold (I think this happened in November, but I can't be sure), and the water was chilly, with a mist rising off the lake at dawn as we rounded the point beyond our cottage and settled into a cove to fish. Stupidly, I managed to flip the canoe by reaching for bait. The tackle box scattered in a hundred bits and pieces, and the rods sank quickly. And so did I. I was eight, and had been swimming for several years, but a combination of things—the unexpected flipping of the canoe, the loss of my rod, the inability to kick because I wore rubber boots, and the frigid water—unraveled my composure. I must have gone down two or three times before I felt Nicky's hand in my hair. He dragged me confidently to shore, boots and all.

I never thanked Nicky. If anything, I treated him badly for having demonstrated his physical superiority, complaining to my mother when I got a cold that it was Nicky's fault. He had, I said, insisted on fishing, when it was obviously too cold. We never spoke about this incident, not until Nicky wrote to me from Vietnam. “Asshole,” he said, “you remember when you tipped the fucking canoe and then blamed me for everything, even though I saved your lousy can? I lost a brand-new tackle box and two good rods, and Dad had to fetch the canoe. And then Mom rode
my case for a month, saying I should look out for you. Jesus Christ Almighty.”

I suppose it was out of rage and resentment that Nicky became a howling James Dean cliché: the kid who sought and found trouble in the usual places. That he managed to do reasonably well at King's, a respectable local college, had not registered with anyone but my father—who consistently found something to praise in Nicky. My mother simply ignored Nicky's successes, being so awed by my golden performances that anything with fewer karats and less gloss seemed irrelevant. Nicky glowed only after a six-pack of Rolling Rock; he smoked unfiltered Camels, snapped his gum at the most irritating moments, and hung around with monosyllabic guys on motorcycles with girlfriends in matching leather jackets. My mother derided all of this, never losing the chance for a subtle put-down. In retrospect, it amazes me that Nicky didn't explode, though maybe he did.

“It is good, no—the hashish?” Patrice wondered, exhaling. “My mind, she fizzes.”

“Aussi moi, mon ami. J'aime beaucoup hashish. Je suis tres content e plus haute que le ciel,”
I said. My fractured French—spoken with a self-conscious American twang—always amused him, and I enjoyed launching forward onto these weak limbs of language, tumbling into a grammatical abyss, forcing winces from Patrice.

“You don't like it when Vera, she massage you, yes?” Patrice loomed into view, transfigured by the candlelight. I could swear I saw a halo around his head, but it must have been a weird refraction.

“What was that?”

“Vera, when she rub your neck. You told me this story about what she did. It was no fun for you,” he said.

I could finally cut through the haze of mangled syntax and hashish.

“Do you like her?” he asked.

“I don't dislike her.”

“I think you like her very much, Alexi.”

“Okay, I like her fine. But it's not relevant, since she is somebody's wife, and she could be my mother.” The edge of anger in my voice took me by surprise.

“I would like to give you the massage myself, but it would displease you, I'm afraid. But I am very good at this, the Swedish massage.” Patrice was deeply stoned, his eyes glassy. His face was uncannily like Nicky's—though my brother's face was hard to recall. He did not photograph well, and the picture I kept in my wallet only vaguely resembled him, flattening the features so that he seemed broader and blander of visage. I guessed that Patrice, too, would lose something in photographic reproduction.

Before I could confirm or deny anything, Patrice came around behind me. He began to knead my shoulders, his hands surprisingly strong. I tensed—as I had with Vera. I wasn't comfortable with this form of intimacy, and the fact that Patrice was a man rattled me as well.

“Be soft, my goodness,” he said, “you are very stiff for me tonight.”

The hashish felt like a safety net spread out below me, an emotional cushion. I relaxed, taking a long draft from the pipe as he worked. The smoke fit my lungs tightly. Holding my breath, I let the chemicals mix with my blood, sensing a pleasantly silken numbness in my outer limbs. My head was predictably light, though I wasn't dizzy. I felt wonderfully clear-eyed. And I soon began to enjoy the mastering hands of Patrice as they worked the fibers of my neck and shoulders, then traveled toward the middle of my back, fingers leaping from vertebra to vertebra like stones in a stream.

“You must lie on the bed so I continue,” he said. “I will perform the best massage you have imagine.”

With my shirt off, I lay down on my stomach on the bed, my face to the left, toward the wall. Patrice sat beside me, out of view, working with unrepressed fury, folding and unfolding muscles, digging and kneading, finding crevices that I had not realized were part of my anatomy. A knot of nerves would harden, then relax, as if summoned only to be banished. He played with nimble fingers, seeking and finding a kind of sensual music—odd fifths and hauntingly diminished chords, tonic and subtonic combinations that drew emotions from me I had not confronted directly before. When he rubbed my feet, I found myself quietly weeping. Was it thoughts of Nicky that were released? Some lines from his letter came floating into my head: “Dying ain't so bad,” he wrote. “We're all atoms,
huh? Death is just a rearrangement of matter. It's just another way of putting the same old thing.” Under the controlling hands of Patrice, I felt the separation of spirit and matter occur—the strands gently untwined, my soul lifted and laid clear as the flesh was isolated and calmed.