The Good Mayor (33 page)

“I will not,” he said. “I will not. I am Tibo Krovic, the Mayor of Dot. I will not go mad. I will not go mad.” Again and again he said it, louder and louder until he roared down the waves and the gulls rose up in terror and yackled at him and then, with his hair soaked flat on his head and his coat flapping in the wind, he stumbled back along the shingle spit towards the docks and home. “I will not go mad.” He kept repeating it, like a charm against lunacy. It protected him from the women in the shadows along the dock road and they drew back into the deep doorways of the warehouses as he passed. They are used to dealing with the crippled but they avoid madmen. Sometimes the mad hear the voice of God and it never seems to have a good word for whores and, from time to time, the madman has a knife to help him with God’s work. They listened to his muttered promise and let him pass, wondering if they could
ever be as certain. “I will not go mad? I will not go mad? Another winter of this and I might.”

His daily walks to the lighthouse taught Tibo to love the gulls. In order not to go mad, he resolved to be like them. The key was not to panic, he decided, to be at home, now, in the place where he found himself, like a gull. If a fisherman of Dot found himself alone and adrift at sea, he would suffer and probably die because he felt himself in the wrong place, but a gull was as happy on land as on sea, as much at home on this bit of sea or that bit. If you have no home, it doesn’t matter where you stay. It doesn’t matter if the waves come in black walls. Just float. Just survive. Be a gull.

At work, where he did not dare to look out the window in case he saw a fountain and where she was, just on the other side of the door, working, smelling beautiful, being Agathe, it was there he began his morning with that insane business of standing just inside the door, listening for the “clump” of Agathe’s galoshes when she came in to work and rushing to fling himself on the carpet, squinting through the crack beneath the door for a glimpse of her plump little toes as they wormed into her shoes. A few seconds of undignified wriggling and then poor, good, mad Tibo would sigh and stand up and brush the carpet fluff from his suit and go and sit down at his desk with his head on the blotter and listen to Agathe Stopak, clip-clip-clipping across the tiled floor of the office next door, putting something in a filing cabinet or brewing coffee or simply being soft and scented and beautiful and on the other side of the door and he would sigh and groan and cry.

He tried to be a gull. He tried to make himself float and be at ease in whatever place he was in. Just float. And then the picture came to him of a seagull waking after a storm, waking far out to sea with no sign of land, flapping, rising from the water and beginning to fly. “I have flown the wrong way,” said Tibo, “deeper into the ocean and now I’ll never get home. All this time, I was flying the wrong way.” He put his head in his hands and he began to weep.

Weeping was something Tibo did a lot. At the lighthouse, at home in the big old house at the end of the blue-tiled path or in his
office, alone, with the door closed. He developed a facility for it. He found he could weep the way some people can catnap. With a ten-minute gap in his diary between appointments, he could give himself up to grief, let the tears roll down on to his blotter, stop, compose himself and go on with the business of the day. Agathe knew, of course, and it wounded her but there was nothing she could do.

One day, not long after she moved to Canal Street, she tried. She tapped gently on his office door, waited, heard nothing, knocked again and, after a moment, when Tibo said, “Yes. Come in,” in a choked voice, she entered with a folder of mail. Tibo kept his head down, apparently engrossed in some report or other, too busy to look up or acknowledge her, not when she put the folder on his desk or even when she took his hand. He froze. His pen halted mid-line.

Agathe knew she had made a dreadful mistake but she seemed unable to prevent herself from making it worse. It was as if there were two Agathes, one standing by the desk holding Tibo’s unwilling hand, one hanging from the ceiling and looking on in horror as she said, “Tibo, please, I want you to understand. This isn’t about you. You are the same wonderful, lovely man and you always will be and I will always, always love you but I have to do this. I have to. Please, Tibo, try to be happy for me. Try to understand.”

He never moved his gaze from the page in front of him. He left his hand lying in hers like a dead fish. He said, “I understand. I understand perfectly. How many times? How often must I absolve you? How many times do you want me to bleed? All I ever wanted was for you to be happy. And now you’re happy so I’m happy too. I’m happy for you and these …” he swirled angry circles of ink round the pale blobs on his blotter, “these are tears of joy.”

Agathe left. There was nothing more to say and she wanted to hurry away before her tears started falling on the blotter alongside Tibo’s. There was a pigeon dancing on the window ledge of Rents and Commercial, over on the other side of the square and Agathe stared hard at it through the window, gripping the edges of her
desk almost as if she were afraid of falling off. Behind her, she heard Tibo close his office door with a click.

Tibo preyed on her mind. That evening, sprawled across the bed while Hektor sat at the table and drew her, saying nothing, she raged over him. “He has no right,” she thought. “It’s none of his business. He had his chance. He had plenty of chances. I won’t let him spoil this with his snivel, snivel, snivel. Not now I’ve got a real man.” She tilted her head to look at Hektor.

“For God’s sake be still,” he said.

“Sorry.” Agathe moved back to where she had been. “Can’t you talk to me?”

“No. I’m working. You think I’m playing at this or something? Look, just shut up.”

Agathe sighed and went back to a respectful silence.

There was a spider’s web in the corner of the ceiling and three tarry-coloured blobs, two large and one small. How could they have got there? And what about that Tibo Krovic? It offended her that he was so upset. It offended her more that he refused to show it. He should rage and scream and call her horrible names, plead to win her back—hit her even—but he wouldn’t. He just persisted in pretending that he wished her well when anybody could see that he was broken up inside. He was doing it to get at her.

“You moved your leg. Put it back. No, the other leg. Now you’ve moved both of them. Wider. Good.”

But it was Tibo’s obvious suffering that upset Agathe most. It offended her womanly instincts, all the motherly, nurturing, nourishing, healing urges that she had in abundance. He needed fed. She could feed him. “I could, I suppose. I could. I mean I was ready to before. It wouldn’t mean anything. It would be an act of kindness. I could. Once.”

Hektor snapped his sketchbook shut. “Keep still,” he said. “Stay absolutely still. Hold it. I want you exactly like that with just that look on your face.” He tossed his trousers over the bed and leapt on her.

HE NEXT MORNING—IT WAS A THURSDAY
and the last Thursday morning of Mamma Cesare’s life—Mayor Tibo Krovic went to The Golden Angel as usual, drank his Viennese coffee with plenty of figs, taking his time, then he left a packet of mints by his saucer and walked out into Castle Street.

As usual, Mamma Cesare hurried towards the Mayor’s table as soon as he was finished but this time, instead of clearing things away carefully, she took the mints, tucked them into a pocket of her apron, rushed through the swing doors and left Tibo’s cup and saucer abandoned on the table behind her.

Outside on the street, Mamma Cesare had to hurry to keep Tibo in sight. She ducked between the passers-by, weaving through the morning crowds on short legs, amongst people she had never seen before, people who were always outside, on their way to work, when she was inside, serving coffee and torte. Their breath hung in the air above her head, whispering, twisting rope-wraiths of steam all the way down Castle Street like the chill reflection of moisture that hangs over a quiet river on summer mornings and marks it out in the middle of still fields or hidden at the bottom of a valley. It was a very cold day. People remarked on it to one another as they went to work and later, in The Golden Angel, they wondered whether perhaps, if Mamma Cesare had stopped to put on her coat, instead of rushing down Castle Street wrapped only in a brown cotton apron, she might not have lived a few years longer.

But Mamma Cesare did not feel the cold when she was running.
It tugged at her sleeve to slow her as she hurried down the street, it forced burning fingers into her lungs as she ran, but she did not notice. She concentrated on Tibo, watching to make certain that he followed his usual route, down Castle Street, over the icy Ampersand across the efficiently gritted square and into the Town Hall. Only when she was standing under the broad arcade of square, granite pillars at the front of the building, peeking out, sweeping her eye across the square, up Castle Street, both ways along Ampersand Avenue and back again, watching, only then did she begin to feel the cold winding itself around her, gripping her, piercing her and dragging her down like prey.

She danced a shuffling dance behind the pillar, hugging herself, muttering dark curses in her old mountain dialect, beating clenched fists around her body, blowing on her bent brown fingers until, when Agathe came past, she shot out an icy claw and grabbed her by the wrist.

Agathe clutched at her chest. “Good God, you terrified me!”

“Is a good thing.” There was a shiver in Mamma Cesare’s voice. “You should be plenty scared. You come tonight.”

“I don’t know,” said Agathe. “I’ll try. Look, are you all right? You look frozen. Come in and warm up for a bit.”

“Never mind that stuff and never mind ‘I don’t know.’ You come. Long time I’m waiting. You keep saying you’re going to come. Tonight. Come tonight. You just better.”

Even through the cuff of her winter coat, Agathe felt the little woman’s grip like a talon.

“Long time I’m waiting,” she said again. “You come.”

Agathe looked down at her wrist and tried to twist away. “All right. Yes, if it’s that important, I’ll come.”

“Promise me now. You promise.”

“Yes, I promise.”

“Ten o’clock. Same as before. You promise.”

“Yes. I promise. Ten o’clock.”

Only then did Mamma Cesare release her grasp and she turned away and began shuffling on bent legs towards White Bridge without another word.

The icy cold that was already worming its way towards Mamma Cesare’s heart had penetrated Agathe too. She felt it as she climbed the green marble staircase, rubbing her wrist and scowling. It hung about her in the office and deepened. The place was chill. The place was frosty. The lamp under the coffee pot was out. Tibo was grey. She saw him hurry into his room as she approached. When she reached his door, it was closing quietly in her face. She raised a hand to knock, thought better of it and went to hang up her coat.

Agathe was still determined to make her offer to Tibo. Not for her own sake. Not that she wanted it but she felt it would be a resolution for him, a full stop, the drawing of a line which she would generously make possible for him. It would free him and, after it, they would both move on. She sat at her desk, behind a mountain of papers ready for typing, clackety-clacking her fingers mechanically over the keys and perfecting the words she would use. “Tibo, I was thinking … No. Tibo, I’ve been thinking … No. Have you ever wondered, Tibo? Look, if, just once, we … Oh, God.”

After two hours, the pile of papers on one side of Agathe’s desk had dwindled considerably and the pile of papers on the other side was mounting higher. She was getting ready to tidy up and go downstairs to Peter Stavo’s little office for a coffee when the door opened and Peter came in.

“There’s a man downstairs asking for you,” he said. “Don’t like the look of him much. Rough looking. Says his name’s Hektor. What do you want me to do with him?”

Agathe sighed and tapped a bundle of typed papers together on the edge of her desk. “It’s all right. I know him. I’ll come.”

He was waiting in the tiled space at the bottom of the stairs, shuffling about with his hands in his pockets, looking untidy and glancing up eagerly as if to hurry her on. When she saw him there, shambling and messy, the thought of Tibo, so neat and quiet up in his office, flashed into her head but, in spite of it, Agathe brightened when she saw him anyway. She couldn’t help it and she hurried down the last few steps towards him. Peter Stavo shut the door
of his booth without saying a word and made a great show of reading the paper.

“You got any money?” Hektor said.

She was crestfallen. “Yes. A bit.”

“Give it to me, then.”

“It’s in my purse. It’s up in the office.”

Hektor just stared at her as if she was an idiot. “Well?”

“Yes. Right. Hang on a minute. Sorry.” Agathe hurried back up the stairs, asking herself, “What am I apologising about?” but she said nothing.