Shroud Page 7

  Magda felt even more displaced than I did in lush and leafy Arcady. She had almost liked New York, its teeming streets, the bustle and the crowds and the ceaseless clamour of human concourse. The farther west we went the more of life was leached from her. The air in those vast spaces we travelled through dried her out, hollowed her out. In Arcady the young frightened her, from the boy on his bicycle who hurled the rolled newspaper against our front door first thing every morning with vicious energy, to the under-age hoodlums racing each other on motorbikes up and down the umbrous avenues, turning the air rancid with exhaust fumes. She began to hide from the world, hardly venturing out of the house and never without me to accompany her. I cannot recall at what point exactly I realized that her mind was decaying. Perhaps the defect was there all along, a spongy patch she had been born with in her brain, that had spread steadily until all within her cranium had turned to pulp. When did she develop her taste for toy food? I would find lollipop sticks stuck to the floors, crumbs of cake between the covers of the bed, candy wrappers floating unflushably in the lavatory bowl. Frequently now I would come into the house to meet her standing in the hall regarding me with a wild, unrecognising look. I would hear her talking to herself, in the bathroom, or on the stairs, a hushed, urgent whispering. Then one morning she walked into the kitchen leaving behind her across the floor a trail of little turds as flat as fishes, and I knew the time had come when she must go.

  In the hotel lobby a coach load of elderly tourists was checking in, with much complaining and bickering; they, like me, had suffered delays and loss of luggage. I paused on my stick outside the lift and looked about. Where was she, this persona?Two fat businessmen sat on low armchairs facing each other across a lower table, intent and watchful, as if in preparation for a bout of arm wrestling. A girl with red hair was hiding in the corner of a couch, with a bag at her feet, waiting for someone, hoping not to be noticed. A painted hag passed by, lost in the folds of a fur coat, with a pug dog in her arms. I went toward the reception desk but could not reach it for the milling tourists. I considered simply walking out the door and away, clearly I saw myself go, except that in my imagination my damaged leg was repaired, and my step was youthful, and rapid, and carefree. Even before she spoke I had sensed her behind me. It was the girl, of course, the girl with the red hair; I should have known. Tall; pale; freckles on her nose; eyes that were – what? – greeny-blue, yes, and flecked with amber. I noticed her tall girl's way of standing, one leg back, the forward knee bent, trying to take an inch off her height. She was holding her bag protectively before her with both hands on the strap, as if to ward off a feared and confidently expected assault.

  "I am Catherine Cleave," she said. "I'm called Cass."

  We sat in the lobby, facing each other from either end of the leather couch, the girl bolt upright with her fists on her knees, her raincoat beside her and her bag on the floor; she had the slightly dazed, disbelieving air of a refugee who no more than an hour ago had made it across the border under fire. I was irritable. The water splashing in the ornamental pond kept distracting my attention: what imbecile had thought to put ferns and a fountain there? I like things kept to their proper place. I studied the girl, or young woman, as I supposed I would be required to think of her. The aspect she presented was at once striking and dowdy. I noted the fine bones of her wedge-shaped face, the delicate, slightly inflamed pink at the canthus of her eyes, the blonde down on her arms and on her long, bare, bony shins. She was telling me in hurried and disjointed detail of a research project she had been engaged on, for years, it seemed, to do with Rousseau's children, if I recall; I barely listened. I was thinking how disappointed I was. I had expected someone far more formidable than this. She might have been a student of mine, one of the more desperate types, from the old days, when I still had to have students. So she hoped to make her name by exposing me, did she? Well, she might succeed, but at a cost, and what a cost, to herself no less than to me, I would make sure of that. As she talked, her eyes, unnaturally wide and bright, kept darting here and there over my person with a flickering, fascinated intensity, so that I felt I was being very rapidly assembled, a sort of living jigsaw puzzle. A faint, fast vibration came off her, as if there were something inside her spinning without cease at terrible, soundless speed. I interrupted the gabbled history of Jean-Jacques' abandoned brats to ask if she would like to have some breakfast and she looked at me in a sort of panic and vehemently shook her head. I felt as if I had come face-to-face on a forest path with a rare and high-strung creature of the wild that had paused a second in quivering curiosity and would in another second be gone with a crash of leaves. I knew the type. They always sat in the highest tier of the lecture hall, fixed on me hungrily, never speaking a word unbidden. I looked at the deep, shadowed cup above her clavicle and was surprised to feel my old libido rubbing wistfully its callused claws. I am afraid I always did favour the crazed ones.

  When I enquired where she came from and she told me I said it was a grand place, home of many fine and famous poets. How could I, even on the telephone, have missed that burr, that brogue? I asked which hotel she would be staying at, and saw from the way she faltered and frowned that she had nowhere to stay. Good. Perhaps there would be a room available here, I said smoothly, lifting my eyebrows at her. She looked about dubiously at the marble floors, the chandeliers, blinking. But yes, I said, she must stay here, I was sure there would be a vacancy, I would go and arrange it, right away. As I hauled myself to my feet I saw with obscure satisfaction how she had to check herself from reaching out a hand to help me. At the desk she waited silently at my elbow; in her stillness she was still vibrating. Yes, I announced, turning to her, all airy blandness, there was a suite available, would she like that? Mutely she looked at me. I smiled. "Something more modest, then?" Her forehead reddened. The sleek young man behind the desk was stony-faced. I set a registration card before her and offered her a pen, which she declined, and instead brought out a fountain pen of her own from the pocket of her blouse. She bent to write, with a schoolgirl's frowning haste. I tried to read the address she was putting down, but could not make it out. Her handwriting startled me in its violent uncontrol; the spiked letters in slanting lines were like so many rows of smashed-up type. Deftly I snatched the key the clerk was offering her, and picked up her bag, too, before she could reach for it. She reddened again. I drank her blushes like sips of the most refined and precious cordial. For certain, I would have fun with this one! She turned toward the lift and I followed her. Wide shoulders, long haunches, and much, much too tall. Side by side we ascended, eyes cast upward. She smelled sharply of sweat as well as something dull and faintly medicinal; I sensed a past of institutions – schools, and more than schools; sanatoriums, perhaps? Perhaps her lungs were bad. I was not sure if people have bad lungs, any more. How widely one's musings range on these peculiar, these extraordinary, these fantastical, occasions.

  The room I had got for her was small and looked out on a flat roof and a row of odd, blackened metal chimneys like the smokestacks of an ocean liner. I placed her bag on the bed. She stood with her back to the window in a defensive, folded-in stance, shoulders hunched forward around a chest made concave and her palms pressed together in front of her stomach. I said she must be tired, after the journey, and she said yes, it had been hard to sleep on the train. Then there was silence again. She had made no mention of the letter she had written to me or of its contents. I said that she should rest, and men we would go out together and take lunch. "Lunch?" she said, as if it were a word in a foreign language, her mouth slack and slightly askew, seeming to frame something further that she would not say. I flared my nostrils and snuffed up a draught of the room's deadened air, seeking to savour again the civet smell of her sweat. Old friend libido stirred anew. She, and the room, and the bag on the bed, and those ship's funnels outside, all seemed suddenly part of some thrilling, absurd adventure I had suddenly found myself embarked upon, and a thousand years or so dropped from me as
lightly as a fall of scurf. "Lunch," I said, "yes!" brooking no objection, and nodded, and turned, and reversed my walking stick and hooked it on the door handle and opened the door, a gamesome gesture, and if I had been wearing a hat I would have tipped it, too. I shall soon be free, I told myself, not knowing what it might mean, and not caring.

  Outside the door I paused; my hands were trembling.

  I took her to the Esmerelda, thinking to impress her, but she paid no heed whatever to the mournful rococo splendours of the place, the red plush walls and sparkling crystal, the napkins of rich damask, the heavy antique cutlery. She hardly ate, only stabbed with her fork at the food on her plate without looking at it, pushing it this way and that. She had changed into a dull-coloured dress without sleeves that gave her, disconcertingly, the stark look of a recent and very young widow. She sat before me, straight-backed, her tall, narrow neck extended in a birdlike, swanlike, fashion, and although we were level eye to eye I had the curious feeling that she was somehow set above me, looking down. She had done something to her hair, had tied it back, or perhaps had just brushed it in some different way, exposing her broad, flat cheeks and the too-large flanges of her ears; the effect, I am not sure how, was of a not quite concentrated state of desperation. I had no appetite, but a great thirst, as always. I drank first a bottle of red wine thick as blood and afterwards repeated jolts of grappa, each one driven home with a thimbleful of tarry coffee that made my nerve-ends twitch and fizz. She sipped a glass of water. The smoke of my many cigarettes formed a rank cocoon around us and set her coughing. We were seated at a window looking on to a narrow, deserted street, with a crumbling church opposite. So many times in my long and infamous career have I sat like this across from some girl in a restaurant, cigaretted, sinisterly smiling, an arm negligently thrown over the back of my chair, holding myself up before her awed and admiring gaze like a gobletful of the rarest fine old vintage. Now here I was, doing it again, even in my senescence. I was telling her about the first winter when I lived in New York, sequestered in that basement room on Perry Street where in the summer I had feared I would die of the heat and now thought I would never be warm again. Magda showed me how to roll up newspapers to make fuel for the stove. I was working all day and half the night, no let-up, giddy with excitement and fatigue. "I knew what the thing would be called before I had put down a word," I said. "The Alias as Salient Fact: The Nominative Case in the Quest for Identity. I could already see the dust jacket, with the title in big bold lettering above my name in more modest twenty-four point." I chuckled, and drank my grappa, and felt with masochistic satisfaction the sulphurous, oily liquor lifting another layer of membrane from my tongue; surprising, the semblance of assuagement such tiny pains, willingly suffered, can bring to one's sense of self-loathing… Ah, but how cold it was in that room. I would sit wrapped in a blanket with only my face and my writing hand free, my brain buzzing from the barbiturates I ate by the hour. The wind coming in from the river keened in the window frame and tiny balls of soot rolled across the page where I was writing. I had tried to work in the public library, for the warmth, but had been driven out by the presence around me of so many other mendicants who were too much like myself, haggard and sighing, picking their noses and surreptitiously eating sandwiches out of brown-paper bags. Then the thing was published, and at once, as in a fairy-tale, like Cinderella in her pumpkin carriage, I arrived. "Such things were possible," I said, "in those days. One book could do it. Of course, everyone read it" – I waved a hand lazily – "and everyone thought I was speaking directly to him. Or her." I caught her eye and smiled disparagingly. Do you know those smiles, that make the flesh of your face seem to crackle like cellophane from the effort?

  She watched me, motionless, her knife and fork suspended; her suddenly going still like this brought a small shock to the air between us, as when the refrigerator, that has been throbbing to itself unnoticed, all at once falls silent, with a lurch. "You convinced them," she said. I shrugged. "It was the times," I said. "Identity was the general obsession, then; identity, and authenticity, all that; the existential predicament, ha ha." Yes, yes, I convinced them. Most of them. Shiftiness: which one of them was it said that moral shiftiness was the most striking characteristic of every line that I wrote? I did not know the word, and had to look it up. "After that everything changed," I said.Yes, everything. Magda and I left that freezing basement and moved to an apartment in a big old town-house up in the West Seventies, a rackety place where mysterious smart people lived, theatre types, and studiedly mournful girls who wrote poetry, and a famous black trumpet player. Success was large and loud and ludicrous. Such euphoria! And the parties, the endless string of parties, where I rubbed shoulders with living legends, all those Edmunds and Lionels and Marys, and was rubbed up against in return. In their brilliant and never quite sober company I learned a new language, one of nuance and nod, of the ambiguous smile, the insider's wink. The comrades, of course, whom I saw now as so unpolished, so gauche – bon mot! – I quickly put behind me. I imagined them, the jeaned and crew-cutted young militants and their attendant, solemn handmaidens in their plaid skirts and white ankle-socks, standing in a huddle on the empty sidewalk, bereft and sullen, blinking in the dust from my departing heels.

  Cass Cleave put down her knife and looked at me. I shrugged again, smiling my most candid, my most winning smile. "My dear," I said, "I have turned my coat so often it has grown threadbare."

  It was only then that I realized how angry I was, how angry I had been all along, ever since I had opened her letter, and before that, long before that, in the expectation of it, for I had always known it would come, from someone, sooner or later. Cass Cleave had turned her face aside now and was looking out at the street. How much did she know? Beadily I studied her. Yes, I recognized the type: driven, clever, cunning and helpless, prey to secret hungers, nameless distresses, looking for rescue in all the wrong directions. Her nails were gnawed past the quick. I shut my eyes for a moment. Could it really be that the intricate exploit that was my life, this hard-won triumph of risk and daring and mendacity, would at the end be brought to nothing by the yearnings for attention of a half-demented girl? The afternoon sunlight had angled itself down past the high roofs into the street, and something from outside kept flashing through the window into my eyes, some reflection from glass or metal. I was well on the way to being drunk. Without thinking to do it I reached out and took one of Cass Cleave's hands in both of mine and smiled my compelling smile again, showing my teeth. What a spectacle we must have been for the other lunchers in the place, the rank old roué pawing this pale girl and grinning like a horse. "Come with me," I said, gallant and jocular, "I want to show you the place where an old friend used to live." She was looking at her hand resting in mine, her head tilted to one side, with an expression of puzzlement, as if no one had ever held her hand before. I brushed my fingertips along her palm; it was warm and unexpectedly hard. When she lowered her eyes the lids, mauve-tinted, slightly glossy, were so rounded and taut they seemed almost transparent.

  I looked about and the waiter came, a spry cadaver nearly as old as myself, bringing the bill, his moist fish-eye not quite looking at the girl's hand and mine where they lay together on the wine-stained tablecloth amid the empty coffee cups and the greasy glasses and the bristling ashtray. Cass Cleave had turned aside again to gaze at nothing, expressionless now. What was she thinking, what could she be thinking? Her hard hand, bird-warm, beat softly in mine, as if it contained a tiny heart of its own. Its serious weight was a sudden, shocking reminder of how much of my life was gone. I was wearing out, I, and my world as well. A wave of bitterness and anger washed over me, taking my breath away. So many of the tilings were blunted now that in my youth would have pierced me like… like what? I did not know, I had lost the thread of the thought. I let go of the girl's hand and stood up quickly, knocking over my chair, and this time she did reach out to help me, and it was as well she did, for otherwise I am sure I would have fallen down.
I leaned on her arm, swearing, and beat at my dead leg furiously with my fist. The ancient waiter shuffled forward to assist me, clucking as at a misbehaving child. I shoved past him and staggered to the door. Outside, in the sun, I walked a few steps and had to halt and lean with my back against a wall. I looked up at the sky; it seemed to be throbbing, slowly, hugely. I felt dizzy, and had again that sense of displacement, of shifting and separation, that I had experienced the previous day before the mirror in the hotel bathroom, but more strongly now. I wondered without alarm if I were undergoing a heart attack, or suffering a stroke. Cass Cleave was trying to take my arm again. "It's nothing!" I cried. I vented gas from my rear end without restraint, not caring if she heard, or smelt. I was laughing, laughing and coughing, in a euphoria of drunkenness and dizziness and rage. There sleeps in me another self who at moments such as this will start awake in amazement at all that is happening, all this life, the unlikeliness of it. The girl stood before me, frowning on my disarray. I swore at her. Another flash of light struck my eyes – was it coming from inside the doorway of that church? Ave, Deus caecans! I fumbled and let fall my walking stick, it made a rattling as of bones. She crouched to pick it up and I would have kicked her had I not been afraid that if I did so I would lose my balance and fall headlong on the pavement. My heart was clenching like a fist. I snatched the stick from her hand and turned and poled myself off along the pavement, cursing.

  Fury, fury and fear, these are the fuels that drive me, mixed in equal measure: fury at being what I am not, fear of being found out for what I am. If one day one or other of these forces should run out the violent equilibrium sustaining me will fail and I shall collapse, or fly off helplessly with farts and whistles, like a slipped balloon. Even when I was young… but no, no, I do not want to start remembering all that, I am sick of all that. I am done with the past; at a certain point when I look back a line is drawn stark across the view, as if a landslide had happened there. The girl was following me at a careful, fixed distance. Whenever I stopped she too would stop and turn her head away and stare at something intently. The dark dress and thonged sandals that she wore gave her an Attic look: Electra astray in the city of tombs. I pushed myself onward, and presently arrived again in the little piazza before the Cari-gnano palace. The afternoon had woken from its lunchtime torpor. Little cars buzzed in and out of busy streets. Here was the bronze plaque on the wall I had been seeking. Three steps led up to a narrow, tall door. When I pressed the bell a voice squawked at me from the grilled mouth of a metal box on the wall and the door lock clicked. I stepped inside. Grey walls, and the musty, hot smell of an airless indoors. Cass Cleave was still crossing the street; I considered letting the front door swing shut in her face, as I had tried to let the door of the caffè knock over Carrot Head, but I relented, and held it open for her, grudgingly. Yet as we climbed the stairs I saw myself in my imagination stop and turn and take her in my irresistible grasp and rip apart her clothes to press the length of myself against her. Even her nakedness would not be enough, I would open up her flesh itself like a coat, unzip her from instep to sternum and climb bodily into her, feel her shocked heart gulp and skip, her lungs shuddering, clasp her blood-wet bones in my hands. At the top of the third flight the ferrule of my walking stick lodged itself in a crevice in the scuffed marble step and as I levered it wrathfully back and forth in the effort of freeing it I had a vision of the entire building rocking and swaying and tearing loose of its foundations and crashing forward in an avalanche of falling masonry into the astonished and cowering piazza.