Water Theatre (28 page)

I saw one of them blink open on the gravel bed, releasing a simmer of bubbles through blue-green moss and ferns. As they dispersed, they left a cloudy twist of sand in their wake, which swiftly cleared as the bubbles reached the surface to expand across the pool in bangles of light. It happened once, close by me, then again, a few feet away.
After a few seconds, I made out more bubbles rising here and there through other budding apertures in the bed of silver sand.

The longer I looked, the more I realized how frequent these brief ascensions were – yet they never seemed to break from the same place twice. Only gradually did it occur to me that each tiny eruption was feeding the spring, that these were its secret sources, exhaled from the underworld as if on the watery breath of an invisible school of naiads. Then, above them, I made out my own reflection, quivering at every touch. No more than a flickering sway of light and shadow against the reflected sky, and laying no claim to boundaries, fixity or permanence, it was deeply immersed in – finally inseparable from – the seamless flow of being all around.

A moment later, my mind was on a rolling boil. As if for the first time I saw that if we actors are always questioning our own existence, it is because we are nervously aware of the void inside us. Others may feel free to fill that space with a substantial self, but we players have no such self (except as a more or less viable social strategy, which is itself an act), because that space must be kept clear for invention. And now, staring into the spring, I saw how deep my need for that essential vacancy was, no matter how often it filled me with dread and terror. It was the velvet bag from which doves and coins were conjured. It was the black hole where the stars go through. And, if Gabriella was to be believed, it was the pool of the living god. Without it, all the rest was imitation.

Such thoughts were breaking at the surface of my mind when I remembered why I'd been brought to that place. Then I was staring at a stretch of water where a person might drown. When I closed my eyes, the pool deepened to an abyss, dizzy and sheer. I could smell the sulphur there. I was thinking of what was forbidden by Gabriella's rule. I was thinking that there could be no scarier condition than to be held accountable for all the ills in your life. It made no sense to deny oneself the simple justice of blame, let alone its
consolations. What business did Gabriella have meddling in my life like this?

I opened my eyes again. I opened them on calm sunlight and shining water and living green depths. I opened them on the rowing boat and its perfect reflection; on the low rustic bridge that passed from one bank to another; on the poised white splash of a swan's back in the shade of trees. The afternoon composed itself into attentive silence.

I looked back into the pool where, as they had been doing since Pliny was here, and for millions of years before that, the bubbles were still rising through the gravel to break like light across the surface of my mind.

After a time, almost of its own volition, it seemed, my reflection opened its mouth and began to speak.

I don't know how long I spent in that trance of speech, or how much time elapsed in silence as I sought a route past each softly interjected “no” or “please”. Certainly there were moments of self-consciousness when I became aware of the absurdity and, therefore, of the possible falsity of this strange procedure. But there were also times when I heard thoughts passing through me with a fluency different from the old, worn-out record of my woes. Insights as fresh and sudden as the water pushing through the gravel bed uttered themselves in clear words. And as long as I stayed inside that zone, the process proved less difficult than I'd imagined.

I heard myself speaking first of the recent death of a friend from university, a fellow actor who had borne with patience the ravages of an incurable disease. No one was responsible for his death. Everyone who knew him had been prepared for it, yet we were all devastated. So I began with lamentation a low, raw cry of grief for someone I had loved and admired, and whose premature passing seemed a denunciation of the way things are down here beneath the moon.

Perhaps the absoluteness of death gave me perspective. I began to review the occasions of failure, betrayal, loss, hurt and humiliation that had knocked me off my feet during the past year. And though it had all ended with me losing my lover, my home and the last of my money, and though I'd been railing against a hostile fate for months, I found it possible now to acknowledge the fault as mine, to take my bow and let that crazy theatre go dark.

I moved on back. Things got harder. Several times Gabriella cautioned me for berating colleagues and friends who had let me down. Soon, as I approached what I thought of as the lost years, that drug-intoxicated delirium of time that began with the most catastrophic events of my life – a time which I had no wish to recall and of which I had even less desire to speak – I was openly defying the rule.

“This is too hard,” I recoiled at last. “You have no idea how painful this all was.”

“Then do you wish to stop?”

Perhaps I was fearful of her contempt. Perhaps, more positively, I had a dim sense of possibilities that would be extinguished once and for all if I refused this challenge. Either way, I shook my head, though I could glimpse the enormity of what lay in wait. But I said, “I just don't see what you expect me to do with it.”

“Only to accommodate the pain,” Gabriella insisted, “to own it as your own creation.”

And so, for as long as I could, I pressed on, staying with the tension of each remembered crisis, doing my best to own as mine each clumsy failure of the heart. For a time, I spoke as nakedly as I dared about some of the black places to which my mind had taken me – as a man in London and elsewhere; as an undergraduate when things first slipped out of control at Cambridge; as a terrified boy at Mowbray College, and earlier with that frightening experience as a child in Africa. At last – it seemed like hours later – I tried to speak about that devastating year in which all things seemed to conspire to overthrow
my sanity. The year in which my marriage ended; in which I was betrayed – unforgivably, I believed – by my closest friend; in which my mother was driven to her death; and in which I saw my father as the egotistical monster I had always feared him to be.

Staring into the waters of Clitumnus, I stared again into that dark chamber of the mind where I had remained too lucid to let madness rule my life and too cowardly for the act by which I might put an end to it. But as I tried to speak of these things now, the effort proved more than I could bear. I broke off, lifted my head, opened my eyes. “I'm sorry,” I said, “that's it, that's as far as I can go.”

The sun had moved across the sky, lengthening the shadows of the poplar trees. The gate to the gardens must have been reopened, because people were now strolling across the other side of the lake in ones and twos. Gabriella was seated where she had been throughout, a little behind me, out of sight. She had not spoken for a long time. Now she said, “Do not be sorry. You have achieved much.”

“But I failed at the end. I kept expecting you to interrupt me.”

“It was not necessary.”

“Even though I kept breaking the rule?”

“If we do not break the rules sometimes, then how shall human life progress?”

Puzzled, I turned my head to study her.

Evidently untroubled by contradictions, she added, “Also, when one attempts the impossible, it makes no sense to speak of failure. Only of more or less gain.”

“When we began,” I reminded her, “you said this was difficult – not impossible.”

“If I had said it was impossible, would you have begun?”

“Have you ever done this before?” I asked with sudden mistrust.

“Like this? No. Never before.”

“Then I don't understand. Why pick on me?”

“Because something was necessary. We were all agreed.”

“We?”

“Myself. Lorenzo. Marina.”

“Marina was in on this?”

“Of course. But the responsibility is all mine.”

I glanced away, beginning to see just how much preparation might have gone into this encounter. I imagined conversations assessing my condition. I remembered puzzling things that Marina had said, and Gabriella's provocative remarks at the cocktail party. Then I was wondering whether Meredith Page had also been involved, whether the astrologers had even been asked to study my horoscope. I felt the hot afternoon swirl around me. It was stationary and swirling at the same time, like the columns on the tempietto that were carved to resemble water. What had seemed the impulsive events of an extraordinary day were now revealed as a carefully staged operation to transform my life. And if the intention had been benign, the methods now seemed humiliating.

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” I said. “It just leaves me feeling manipulated. As if this has been some kind of experiment for you. A game, even.”

“Do you take me for so capricious a person?” And when I did not answer, Gabriella said, “If you have sensitivity as an actor, you will know the difference between those times when you have ceased to pretend and have become instead an instrument through which the play performs itself. I mean the times when the god has entered you. Today, for a while, I think you were more even than such an actor. You were also the author here. You were the play itself. And in that sense you are right – it was a game. But a serious game. A game of transformation. In any case, I think it is as I said.”

“What? What did you say?”

“That a tremendous thing might happen here. Qualcosa di irrevocabile, yes? I think already it has begun.”

“As far as I can see, all that's happened is that my ghosts have come back and I don't know how I'll ever lay them at rest again.”

“No,” she said, “I think that is not all. You have numbered the ghosts and owned them as yours. You have seen that these ghosts are of your choosing, that they are the needful occasions of your suffering, not the cause of it. For that we must search deeper. For that we must ask who is the one that has chosen them. The question now is whether you can remember who it was who made these choices, and why they were made, and whether you are yet ready to be worthy of them.” She pressed on before I could protest. “You have already risked much, but you must continue to be truthful with yourself, or all will be in vain. Now you must discover whether you are worthy to be possessed by the god, or willing to become so? If so, then everything can change. If you are not,” – she shrugged without glancing away – “our business here is done.”

She lay stretched on the grass, slightly tilted away from me. This woman was crazy, no question about it. Crazy as a hare. Yet her voice, its edgy absolutism, filled me with an almost sensual appetite for change.

I gazed back down where the bubbles simmered upwards in the spring. Perhaps this was a game after all, a game playing itself out at many levels. A game such as the one Marina and I had played with friends as children, that game called “Truth, Dare, Force or Willing”, the object of which was to push us beyond safe boundaries, sometimes merely into pranks and scrapes but, more scarily, into saying or doing things we secretly wanted to say or do. It was a game that brought desire and fear very close together, a game that made real things happen; and it always carried an undercurrent of excitement.

“Suppose I turn out to be worthy, as you put it,” I said, “what then?”

Alert to the change in my eyes and voice, she smiled before saying, “I think you will find that a number of astonishing things become clear.”

“Such as?”

“If I try to say more, it can make no sense to you. Also I do not presume to speak for who you might become.”

“Then speak for yourself. What difference do you think it might make between you and me?”

“As I said before,” she insisted, “we should take one thing at a time,”

“Surely we're not thinking in straight lines here? If I understood you correctly, the oracle isn't a railway station. It doesn't keep timetables.”

“Nor is it an express.” She countered my smile with her own. “Sometimes we must be patient for answers. Besides, you have not yet made the oblation.”

“Tell me what it is.”

“An offering. An offering to the god.”

“Of what?”

“Of yourself. But you must make some sacrifice as a sign of it. You must surrender to the spring something that is precious to you.”

“I haven't got anything. Nothing of value. That last disaster stripped me bare. I came here penniless. I've been living at Marina's expense. That's what I'm reduced to. That's the ignominy of my condition.”

Firmly she shook her head. “Everyone keeps a thing that is dear to them if they can. For you I think it was possible.”

“There's nothing,” I insisted.

Sighing, Gabriella got to her feet. “Then we must wait until you have something that you do not wish to lose. Come to me again when you have such a thing.” She brushed down her skirt and replaced her sunglasses. “I will drive you back to Fontanalba,” she said, and began to walk away.

She must have gone six or seven yards before I called, “Wait.”

She turned, tilted her head at me.

“There is one thing,” I said. “But I don't think I can part with it.”

“What is it?”

“A coin.”

“You are attached to money?”

“Only to this coin.”

She stepped back towards me, held out her open hand. “Let me see.”

Without moving, I stared back at the black lenses masking her eyes.

She said, “You do not trust me?”

“It's not that. This thing was given to me by my mother. A long time ago. It's all I have of her.”

“Your mother is dead. A coin cannot buy her back.”

“That's a hell of a thing to say!”