Under the Rose (18 page)

‘I forged your signature. I’ve been practising.’

‘The letter’s sure to be full of appalling grammar. They’ll know there’s something wrong.’

‘No, it’s all formulas. I looked through your files of old correspondence and lifted all the ready-made office jargon I could. I write better Italian than I speak. You can see the rough copy if you like.’

‘They’ll think it extraordinary my giving notice like that.’

‘They’ll be annoyed but they won’t investigate. People never do.’

They didn’t. Apart from one phone call which I answered saying yes, Carlo was in London, no, he didn’t plan on getting back soon, we heard nothing from the office. Later in the week I went in to collect a few of his things and repeated my story to two of his colleagues. If they thought about Carlo at all, they probably thought he had been too embarrassed to show his face, envied him his influential father-in-law and forgot about him.

What followed was totally different from the scene imagined in my dream-scenario.
There
action had been fast and satisfying. I triumphed. Carlo cringed. I, like God, was in control. I spoke persuasively and Carlo saw my point. I was free. The choices were mine. Instead: I was
not
free since I was afraid to release Carlo. I disliked myself, had strong feelings of nausea, was not persuasive and, in fact, hardly spoke. My mind, as though it had been I and not Carlo who had fallen on my head, was in a state of stunned lethargy. It
could cope with no more than the mechanics of the situation, the physical routine required to keep the
status quo:
answering phone calls and letters, buying food, emptying his slop bucket, et cetera. When it came to thinking of the future, thought switched off. When he reasoned with me or tried to cajole me, I shrugged. I had imagined that I would use the time I held him prisoner to explain my grudges, to make him
see
how intolerable it can be to be always on the losing side, the weak partner, the one who must submit. I think I had supposed that his own position would make this clear to him in an immediate way. Zing! Message lodges in brain. Dominant partner apprehends reality of subject partner. True dialogue based on a shared premiss can now commence.

Haha! Permit me to laugh, Signora. It is at myself. Nothing of the sort happened or – I began to see – was likely to, unless Carlo was kept chained to the bed for ten years. Chained up or free, Carlo was still Carlo – in the short run anyway – and I was still myself.

I began to understand this on the fourth day.

We had begun to settle into a routine. Carlo was letting me feed him – at first he had refused to eat. I was looking after him, necessarily, in a more intimate way than I ever had before and this aroused inappropriately motherly feelings in me. I found myself cooking his favourite food, worrying about his comfort and generally behaving more like the tender-hearted daughter of the despot in prototypal prison stories than like the implacable despot himself.
He
noticed this eventually – one thing that might be said to have been achieved was that Carlo had to start studying me and wondering how I ticked. He was learning the techniques of the underdog.

On the sixth day I came down with his lunch and found him reading a paperback I had left for him. I had not used the second pair of shackles for his arms but had looped their chain around his elbows attaching these behind his back to the bed back, then bringing the chain forward to circle his
neck so that if he tried to pull his arm free the pressure would be on his own throat. His hands however were free and he could eat, drink, hold a book and manœuvre himself towards the slop bucket. The iron bar threaded through his leg-fetters was itself pierced by chains which hung down, one on the left the other on the right side of the bed, and were padlocked together underneath. These chains were long enough to allow him to adjust his position by moving to the right or left or by bending his knees as he had done on this occasion so as to form a support for his book.

‘Do you want lunch?’

‘You know what I want.’

‘Do you want lunch?’

‘How the hell can I eat lunch? My neck is rubbed raw by this bloody chain. Every move I make it rubs. I could strangle myself in my sleep. What are you trying to do? Unman me? Why don’t you castrate me and be finished?
You’ll
probably be locked up in a lunatic asylum for life when they get you. Do you want
me
to have to join you there? A fine future for us. Tell me, I can’t think why I never asked: is there madness in your family?’

‘I’m the mad Englishwoman, you’ve driven me mad!’

‘Christ, you are at that!’

‘Do you want lunch?’

‘Una, it’s
you
I worry about. I keep puzzling:
what did I do?
I mean tiffs and squabbles don’t normally lead to this sort of thing as far as is generally known. Or do they in England? Is there a whole, submerged, unreported section of people’s lives where the primitive urges are given leeway? Incest? Mayhem? Murder perhaps?’

The ironic look on Carlo’s face slipped. He had frightened himself. Murder
was
, after all, one logical way for me to get myself out of the fix I had got into.

‘Una,’ it was a little boy’s voice. ‘Una … I …’

I watched him watch me as I stood there with the cooling
lasagne.
I could see doubt ooze through him.

‘Give me the lunch.’ He ate it silently, wiped his lips with the napkin I had brought, shot me one shifty look, then another. ‘That was … good … Una?’

I took his plate and left, shutting cellar and basement doors carefully behind me. When I reached the kitchen I smashed the dirty plate hard into the sink, sat down at the table and rested my face against its scrubbed surface. So this was where we were at now! He thought I
was
mad! Was trying to humour me. Shared premiss indeed! We were communicating less than before. What a laugh! We never seemed to get our wires uncrossed.

‘You don’t know how to talk
to
people!’ I accused him some hours later. ‘You talk
at
them or get round them. You don’t respect anyone enough to try and meet them half-way – certainly not your mother. Not Giovanna. Let’s not mention me. It’s the same with your men friends. You either tease them or defer to them. You trust nobody.’

He looked tired. ‘Go on. Make yourself a good conscience. Blacken me. Do whatever it is you have to do.’

‘Do? What should I have to do? You’re so suspicious!’

‘I’d be a moron if I weren’t. Una … why don’t you go and see a doctor? I can’t get out, can I? Go and visit Dottor Pietri. You needn’t tell him what you’ve done to me, just that you’re feeling … depressed, nervous. Get him to give you a checkup.’

‘Carlo, it’s not
me!
It’s
you
! Why do you think I had to do this?’

‘I DON’T KNOW!’ he shouted. ‘TELL ME!’

‘Because you never saw me. Because you treated me like an automat, a penny-in-the-slot machine. Kiss it or stick your penis in it and it goes “mmmgh!”, hit it and it goes “ow”, set it for the dinner-at-eight schedule and it will comply. In case of breakdown send it to Dottor Pietri.’

‘You
are
mad.’

‘Well that’s convenient, isn’t it? Much easier to assume the trouble’s all in me than have to assess your own life.’

‘Are you enjoying this?’

‘No.’

‘Then what’s the point of the exercise?’

There wasn’t any. I realized this now. But it was too late to stop it. My power over Carlo was purely negative. I couldn’t make him think or feel differently. He’s cast in your mould. Doubts are alien to him. But releasing him straightaway would be too great a risk. What happened some days later underlined that. They had been uneventful days. Carlo ate, listened to his transistor radio, sulked, tried wheedling me a bit, had a tantrum, sulked, wheedled me again. His moods went in cycles. He was getting more anxious, however, as it became clear that his office had accepted my letter and that there was no immediate prospect of anyone discovering what was going on. He had been in the cellar ten days when Giovanna rang up. You and she were off to Austria next day on your skiing holiday and she wanted to give me your address there and say good-bye. I must have been a bit constrained on the phone. Carlo, I of course told her, was out. I’d tell him she’d rung. No, no point ringing back. He’d been invited to go duck shooting with some friends and was spending the night with them. He might be away two days. They were not on the phone. Duck shooting? Yes, I said, he’d just taken it up. These friends had introduced him to it. People we’d met at a party. They had no phone. He would certainly write and tell her all about it. Giovanna said oh, well, OK, give him our love. I said enjoy yourself. She bridled. The skiing holiday is part of your get-Giovanna-well-married campaign and she knows I know this and is touchy. Also she knows that Carlo and I could do with some of the money you spend like water – but this is by the way. I only mention it to show how she came to associate the constraint in our conversation with herself and
her
concerns rather than with me and mine. ‘I wish I weren’t
going,’ she said at the end, ‘but you know how la Mamma is!’ She had accepted the duck-shooting story easily. I went down and told Carlo.

I suppose this made him despair. It meant I had three weeks ahead of me during which I need have no fear of discovery. It must have seemed like an eternity. He was complaining of cramps already. Now he began to complain again of the chain on his neck. His complaints distressed me. I have already mentioned that I had begun to feel motherly about him. After all: I cleaned, fed, babied him. Perhaps I felt as you do towards him? I don’t know. My resentments were gone. (Who can call a baby to account?) My mind swung between terror at what he might – would – do to me if I let him loose and horror at what I was doing to him. Yes, yes, I had begun admitting to myself that eventually I would have to go and, from some safe distance, telephone someone to come and set him free. But go where? Telephone who? The world outside our house had become unreal to me. I felt bound to this nasty riveting nest of my own fabrication, could not bear to go leaving such a memory behind. My possessiveness grew with his dependence and with the odd morbid gratitude – it may just have been cunning – with which he thanked me for my efforts to make him less uncomfortable. Usually, I took care to keep out of range of his hands which were, as I told you, free. On this day too I tried to examine his neck from a safe distance, but he seemed to have gone limp from exhaustion and his lolling head concealed the area which was being rubbed by the chain. I leaned closer. Suddenly his hands sprang up and grabbed my throat. They squeezed. I tried to shout but couldn’t get my breath. He squeezed again, crushing my windpipe, railing at me (‘
Stronza
, turd, mad bitch! I have you now!’) and his eyes were stark and crazy. He had pulled the chain tight on his own neck which was in fact rubbed raw, but he seemed now to be unaware of this. Slowly his hands relaxed and he began to cry.

‘I could …’, he sobbed, ‘I could … Una, what have you done
to us both? We’re mad! We’re both mad! This is degrading. It’s valueless. It’s against every value. Una, we were normal people, we … listen, Una,
ti prego,
I’ll make any promise you like. But let me out. Look, I realize, I really do, that I must be to blame for some of this. As much as you. I was insensitive, I … But, look, this is destroying us both. Can’t you see that? Can’t you, Una? Una, say something.’

‘You’re choking me.’

‘What use is there in this, Una?’

‘None.’

‘Listen,’ his stranglehold had turned into a sort of caress, but he was still holding me tightly and his own arms were held tightly to the bed so that our movements were restricted. ‘I could kill you,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t you know that?’

‘What good would that do you?’

‘What good is any of this to anyone?’

His nervous excitement had found the usual outlet, he had begun trying to make love. But he was afraid to let go my neck. ‘Unbutton me,’ he whispered. I did. We managed to make love. I only tell you this, Signora, to show how hopelessly tangled up our emotions were: his as well as mine. We lived in a fetid bubble of dependence and rancour.

‘Do you hate me?’ he whispered now.

‘No.’

‘We must trust each other.’

‘Yes.’

‘Fuck,’ he said, then, and then: ‘you’re liking it. Go on: say it. Say it! SAY IT.’

Was that strategy, Signora? I don’t know, do I, any more now than I did then. I was enjoying it as I always did with Carlo. I was venting the pent humours of ten days. Slowly, his fingers uncurled so that I could move freely above him. At the end he was not restraining me at all.

‘Carlo!’ I wanted to weep.

‘Where are the keys?’

‘Upstairs.’

‘Go on up’, he whispered, ‘and get them. Go on, Una.’

I went upstairs to the kitchen and opened the drawer where I kept the keys. My neck was hurting where he had squeezed it. I turned to look in the kitchen mirror and saw the blackberry-juice outline of his ten fingers on my throat. I closed the drawer, leaving the keys inside and did not go back to the cellar again that day. Next morning I reconsidered the risks of releasing Carlo. They did not seem to me any less than before. I went down and told him I did not intend to release him.

He didn’t talk to me for thirty-six hours after that. He also refused to eat. But I did not, of course, give in. I won’t say I was firm. Every moment was a flea’s leap of doubt – but the effect was the same as if I had been stubbornly wedded to decision: Carlo did not get released. After the thirty-six hours, he asked for a drink. I gave him wine in which I had dissolved several sleeping pills. When he had been asleep for some time I approached him with great caution, blasted the transistor radio in his ear, poked him from a distance with a piece of wood and – lest he might be fooling – dangled a realistic trick-shop plastic scorpion close to his face. He did not wake up. I got my keys, unlocked the padlock on the chains which held his arms and neck, unlooped them and pulled him down to a supine position. Then I got my second set of fetters, pulled his wrists through them, fastened them in place by pulling the bar through the lower pair of holes in each fetter, laid the entire contraption across his thighs so that his arms were parallel to his body, threaded the chains through the ends of the bar and padlocked them together under the bed as I had already done with the foot-fetters. This meant Carlo could now actually move more. He could sit up or lie down by displacing the bars whose attaching chains were fairly long, and could edge over to the side of the bed to use his slop bucket. His hands, however, were free only from the wrist. It would be harder for him to make a grab at me. While he
was asleep, I brought down a basin of water and washed him all over. Then I powdered him with Roberts talcum powder. He was turning more and more into my baby: my battered baby. It humiliated me since it must him. I, who resent the body’s weaknesses – remember; the source of all our trouble was my lack of muscle – had now inflicted intolerable bodily constraints on Carlo. Ironically, that very day, I found one of my own constraints had gone: my overdue period arrived. The pregnancy –
my
fetter – had either never been or had terminated itself. Who knew? One knows so little about the biological processes – and when I say ‘one’ I don’t just mean ‘I’. Doctors are as vague as any female. ‘Maybe you had a little miscarriage and mistook it for a heavy period,’ they’ll say when questioned. ‘Maybe you are just irregular?’ Shrug, smile; what does it matter? Get on with it. It’s the curse of Eve.
I
saw a meaning here, however. My release was a nod from Fate, old
ignis fatuus
who lurks in the madder mathematical corners of my mind making his own kind of sense. This was a
quid pro quo
. Fate helps those who help themselves. Fetter your husband, said the sign, and Fate will unfetter you. The equation comes out evenly if X is added in one place and subtracted in another. I had been approved! I have to break into my narrative here, Signora, to remind you that superstitions are only metaphors. I am no madder than you when I make my own signs and patterns – they are a filing system for otherwise unrelated perceptions – no madder, I say, than you when you accept holus-bolus the ready-made metaphor of your religion. No, don’t be angry. I am really trying to get through to you, not to mock you. Let me say it another way: the arrival of my period, the abrupt flow of menstrual blood, had come too perfectly on time to be chance. Maybe something in myself had set it off: perhaps some nervous convulsion had caused the miscarriage of a real pregnancy or released the dam of a false one? Either way it had happened because of what I was doing to Carlo. The message was clear:
my interests and his were in opposition. I must cut the knot of our love/hate. I must go.