Questions of Travel (15 page)
On Laura’s birthday, the signora’s TV kept up its whispered assault:
I may be your teacher, Massimo, but I am a woman first. And now another year has ended.
Laura countered it by cranking up the volume on Vivienne’s boombox. A boy sang,
Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
His voice had always been unearthly; now he, too, had joined the dead. Laura Fraser sat alone, and turned her heavy rings, and wished what everyone wishes.
HIS FRIEND NIMAL COREA
had been headhunted away from the university by an online agency that found accommodation for tourists in local homes. RealLanka was the creation of one of Nimal’s former students: a singularly dull boy, a surgeon’s son. His father had provided the seed funding and introduced the boy to backers who promised more. Nimal abandoned his master’s degree, and moved to Colpetty to design and develop the agency’s website on twice what the university had paid him. That still wasn’t very much, but he was unable to help boasting that his stock options would make him rich when the company was floated. He posted a back issue of
Wired
to Ravi and swore that they would work together again on web design. “Our portals will capture the most eyeballs,” he enthused.
There was another unsettling development. An Englishwoman had arrived to take up an executive position at the NGO, and one of those sudden, intense friendships had flared between Malini and the newcomer. Freda Hobson’s father was English, and she had grown up in Surrey, but her mother’s people were Jaffna Tamils. “She’s one of us,” said Malini. But she corrected herself at once: “No, she’s different.” Then she laughed.
She had her lovely wavy hair cut short. The size of her ears was revealed. Contemplating itself in the mirror, her smile was a little forced.
She had new clothes—jeans, a silky blouse—that had once belonged to Freda. There was also a skirt, blue with orange pockets and an orange band around the hem. It was perfectly decent and it suited Malini. But Ravi didn’t like seeing her in it. Acknowledging this was unreasonable, he disliked the skirt even more.
Whenever Freda was mentioned, Ravi pictured a white woman with red elbows. Then they met, at last. The eyes were even darker than the skin, but their brown was haunted by purple. A hand covered in rings squeezed: “Ravi! How super! I’ve been simply longing to meet you,” said Freda Hobson. And, “Malini, darling, we’ve had masses of support for your idea for the refuge. Repeat after me: I am a genius and a goddess.” Her beauty was as extravagant as her way of speaking, and Ravi mistrusted both. He had recognized her at once: here was another rearranger.
Ravi’s research into fractals was progressing slowly—he couldn’t see the point. Nimal was confident that the following year, or the one after that, Ravi and he would be able to set up their web development company; their user interfaces would be unbeatable, stylish yet
powerfully simple.
But Professor Frog-Face wanted Ravi to apply for a scholarship, so that he could do a doctorate abroad; he kept Ravi standing in his office while he described his future. Ravi understood that if he spent his life at his desk and bullied his colleagues for thirty years, he stood a very good chance of turning into Frog-Face.
The professor liked to select protégés among his students: young men who were bright but not overly so. He treated them with light scorn, and expected obedience—they were his sons, in other words. He had directed each step of Ravi’s career, even intervening to ensure that the university’s website was entrusted to Ravi and Nimal. It was not that Frog-Face cared about websites, for he held all applied science in contempt, but he was delivering a snub. Who could stand the head of Computer Science? The man was in the habit of folding and unfolding his hands! A note was carried to the vice-chancellor’s office reminding him that a website involved the prestige of the university, and that Mathematics took precedence over modish, upstart disciplines. The vice-chancellor had married Frog-Face’s daughter—he was in a weak position.
Now here was Frog-Face offering Ravi Canada or Japan. But even if he did succeed in winning a scholarship, Ravi knew that Malini wouldn’t want to go. When he said as much, speaking of his wife’s responsibilities at the NGO, “Leave her,” advised Frog-Face. He meant temporarily, because he believed in the sanctity of marriage just as firmly as he believed that if you didn’t manage a woman, she managed you. Ravi remembered that when he had broken the news that he was a father, Frog-Face had replied, “So now you are a slave.”
When Ravi thought of leaving his son, it was like trying to measure infinity: it couldn’t be done. But before the year was out, without a word to Malini, he applied for and received a passport. He would have sworn that he had acted on impulse. How, then, to explain that he had been saving up for the fee for months?
Ravi kept the passport hidden in a pile of old exam papers in his desk. It was a talisman, comforting to have at hand. On the day it arrived, he had arranged to meet Malini after work. He came out of the Maths building and spotted her nearby. One of the stray dogs that lived on the campus was eating what appeared to be a roti. Malini, who was probably responsible for the food, was watching with her back to a painted wall. Once she had seemed the answer to every important question. But in that skirt, she looked like a target, standing there against the wall.
LAURA HAD BECOME FRIENDS
with one of her students, with whom she practiced her Italian. They were at a restaurant for lunch when a man crossing the piazza stopped at their table. Silvia lifted her face to be kissed, pressed the man to join them, presented him to Laura: Marco, an old friend.
These days he ran a gallery in Rome. Laura saw him assess and dismiss her as a feminine object. But he had the Italian willingness to like and be likeable, and he turned to her with real interest on learning that she was Australian. His gallery specialized in tribal art, and he had traveled to Australia, “a magnificent country, stupendous.” He spoke to Silvia in quick Italian. As he did, his hand rose like an independent appliance and adjusted her blue shawl.
He addressed Laura again. He had been blown away by the Northern Territory. “The colors of the desert there. Wow!”
Long ago, Laura had noticed that Europeans who lived in the more desirable quarters of Paris, Rome, etc. were always going on about the desert. She thought, Now he’ll say something about Aborigines. Or stars.
“The stars were amazing. So many!”
But he was not harmful, merely predictable. Laura remembered his hand, plump-wristed and busy, fussing at Silvia, and imagined it between her legs.
Marco began to talk about a crisis at the gallery. On their islands north of the mainland, the Tiwi people of Australia carved poles called
tutini.
He turned to Laura. “You know these?” The carved wooden poles served two quite distinct purposes, Marco explained. Some, used by the Tiwi in their burial ceremonies, were placed beside graves. They weathered quickly, rotted. Others—no less beautiful, carved with no less care,
identical,
said Marco, spreading his thick brown hands for emphasis—were made to be sold in commercial galleries. He had been fortunate enough—
privilegiato,
was what he said—to acquire and sell a few
tutini
to collectors.
Now the art critic employed by a famous newspaper had published a feature in which she claimed that the
tutini
sold in galleries lacked the aura that attaches to the authentic. She had seen ceremonial poles in situ on Melville Island: decrepit, sublime. They were not to be compared with the pristine carvings created for Western consumption.
Soon after her article appeared, a client had returned his
tutini
to the gallery and demanded a refund. Marco feared that others would do the same. He would have liked to take legal action, but the critic had relatives in high places.
Food was being brought to the table. Marco excused himself—
la mamma
was waiting for him, he couldn’t stay. A diversion arrived, a moon-faced beggar woman accompanied by a graybeard in a knitted jacket. It was Sunday, the day of beggars. The woman gave Silvia a handwritten sheet—a story, a history—repeating,
Per amor di Cristo.
Silvia ran her eyes over it but kept glancing at Laura, at Marco. There was now quite a little crowd around the table, the beggars, the waiter, Marco, who had risen to his feet.
Laura handed one of her business cards to Marco, as the beggars closed in to impede Silvia’s view. “I’d love to hear more about your adventures in Australia.” Her jacket was unbuttoned, and she arranged herself in such a way as to afford him a prospect, from his not very great height, of the impressive expanse of her bust.
Per amor di Cristo,
intoned the old man.
Silvia returned the beggar woman’s letter. She lifted one shoulder, a movement that conveyed neither indifference nor acquiescence but helpless acceptance:
“Ma?”
What was she to do? The question, like her lips, remained open. Her eyes were the huge green ones Greece had bequeathed to Naples. They held the resignation of a people who, living in the shadow of Vesuvius, had long been exposed to unhappy conclusions.
Marco was the first person Laura knew to own a mobile phone. In her apartment that evening, he placed it within reach when he undressed. He played with it and Laura in turn, listening to messages. At one point, lifting his head from her breast, he cried,
“Che idiota!”
“Who?”
“This crazy woman, this critic, this…this…” By the light of the bedside lamp, he had the pouchy, self-absorbed face of an old woman;
la mamma
would be waiting in the mirror as he aged. Another collector had contacted the gallery, insisting that his
tutini
be replaced at once with “the real thing.” “I want to say, go there then and live on those islands. Become a Tiwi. Because if there is a problem of authenticity, as this imbecile says, it is not in the pole but in your possession of it.”
He cupped Laura’s instep. She had pretty feet, he declared, stroking her straight toes.
“I’m a product of the sensibly shod classes. And Sydney kids go barefoot a lot.”
But he meant something different. “So many Australian girls, their feet are too big. They make me cold.”
She let it pass. She had no real interest in Marco, only in what he went on to provide.
Theo came in the spring. He had lingered in the south of France and the north of Italy, he had been moving towards her for days. Framed in the window of the train, he projected the curious impression that there was more of him and that it was less defined. Laura saw the swag of flesh at his chin. His face had slumped; there were little hammocks under his eyes. She saw that his beauty had gone from the world. She went swiftly along the platform and into his embrace.
He brought her a star made of ruby-red glass, each of its five points finished with silver. The hinged central compartment swung open so that a tea light could be placed inside. That evening, they looked at it shining in the window. Theo said,
“A tiny object in the night.”
There was another present, too, an antique kilim. His mother had bought it in Kabul on her honeymoon. Laura saw a severe geometry of faded browns and greens dominated by a dull dark red.
That day was overcast, like the next. On the third, the sun, flattening itself between buildings like an assassin, found its way into Laura’s room. At once the muted colors on the rug glowed with life. Thereafter she would find herself looking forward to that hour of the afternoon, waiting for the transformation. It would arrive like a loved face, remembered, anticipated, yet never exactly as she had thought.
There was always rubbish for sale in the streets, someone sitting beside oddments of nylon lace or rickrack braid, broken-down shoes, chipped enamelware. It was one of the ways Naples affected her, said Laura, this wringing of worth from things that would be discarded in wealthier places. Scenes she had once associated with far, tropical countries flashed up throughout the south of Italy: concrete-slab tenements festooned with exposed wiring, women fetching water from a public standpipe, children whose games centered on a plastic bottle—a worldwide web of making do.
Theo wasn’t listening. From a tablecloth spread with a trashy assortment, he had snatched up a print. “
Exactly
what I need.” A Mediterranean beauty in a peasant blouse displayed her décolletage in a cracked frame.
His emails often came with an attachment showing a large, bad painting: galloping white horses, a violently autumnal forest, a paved beach where naked lovers sheltered under the wings of a giant swan. He said, “But I have the feeling my collection of mass-market masterpieces is coming to an end. This one could even be the last—who can say?”
The streets laid down by the Romans were unflinching: narrow, sunless, slabs of black volcanic stone underfoot. A piazza or crossroad brought a shock of light. Theo was dawdling, pausing to photograph a carved door, flirting with a barista. A small glass case mounted on a wall sheltered a shrine to Maradona, worshipped throughout the city; here Laura turned to wait. Theo made his way towards her, now shadowed, now lit, through the blindingly obvious: the origins of chiaroscuro, the cosmic on/off of brilliance and dark.
A nineteenth-century arcade named for a king was colossal and derelict, historical as royalty. They revolved alone under its great glass dome. An ice-cream vendor hovered by an entrance, and now and then there came the gray-suited flit of businessmen short-cutting between two streets. These peripheral presences heightened the otherworldly quality of the pillared galleries, decided Theo. “Like a figure that never shows its face on the edge of a dream.”
Laura felt a draught move through this remark. It was the kind of conversation they were having in Naples: glassy, high-storied, empty. They had talked about friends, of course, gossip moving smoothly in as intimacy ebbed. Laura learned that the Beloved actor, charged with the Saturday videos in Theo’s absence, was depressed about his career: he wished for greatness but had found only success. The guerrilla gardener was threatening to write a memoir. He had never gone hungry, never been beaten, raped or addicted, his childhood had vanished in untroubled happiness—the book would be a sensation. And Dr. Gebhardt? She had passed from his life, said Theo. At a conference in Chicago, the dean had collapsed from nervous exhaustion brought on by his dealings with Dr. Gebhardt. His transatlantic colleagues had never forgotten the dean’s magisterial treatise on Henry James. It argued that the best, the heroic work had been done long before James turned his back on his native land. The slippery narrators, the humiliations inflicted through the placement of cake forks, the bravura way with semicolons: everything had been perfected in a tale written when the Master was twelve. Europe had merely overextended and ruined a blazing American talent. That every review dismissed the book as drivel was only another reason to look with gratitude on its author. A chair of creative writing was found. It was in a former steel town in the Midwest, but the offer was so lucrative and undemanding that Dr. Gebhardt hadn’t hesitated. Already her influence could be discerned in the stark Derridean fables accompanied by grainy images of footwear that were starting to appear in
The New Yorker.
In any case, added Theo, his thesis was almost done: all he lacked was a conclusion.
In all this easy nonsense something iron was present. It supported the airy edifice of Laura-and-Theo. She took his arm as they left the arcade, but the ice-cream cart intervened. A wish for closeness melted in indecision over pistachio or hazelnut, in Theo’s remark that all the things Neapolitans loved—gelati, fireworks, music—were fleeting.
They fell back on tourism: food, shopping, sights. The overbearing façade of Mussolini’s post office was scribbled with neo-fascist slogans, its marble pillars were as black as shirts. But day-to-day postal transactions were carried out in a hole-and-corner way in a kind of basement around the corner; and in the large, defunct telegraph hall above, one corner of a poster that had something to say about communication and speed had come unstuck. At the table below it, an African was sleeping,
dead to the world
with his round head pillowed on his arms.
Theo wanted to buy a postcard. After a long search, a rack was found. All the legendary images—the bay, the volcano, the opera house—were out of focus. Naples could madden by refusing to perform itself. It was such a slovenly, neglectful place. The cat hit by a scooter remained in the street to flatten slowly, the best room in the museum was closed without explanation, the seventeenth-century courtyard had been turned over to cars. Laura said, “I’d like to stay here forever.” One possible response to that was, You can’t—how would I manage without you? Theo went on forking flesh from a shell. They were having lunch in a restaurant that catered to the staff at a nearby hospital. Two doctors in their white coats had just come in; the woman’s face, a long oval with blank, tilted eyes, was a Modigliani. Theo’s postcard, a blurry view of the Duomo, lay by his plate. It was addressed to Lewis Bryden. “I know it’s squalid,” said Laura. “And to be honest, I can’t bear it a lot of the time.”
“It’s squalid because it’s still alive,” Theo said. “Only the dead are perfect.” On their way home, he returned to the theme. Paris, Florence, Rome were superb mausoleums. “Europe’s buried there. This is a deathbed.” He took Laura’s hand, gripped. “Every time I walk down a street here I feel I might burst into tears.”
By night he drank Lacryma Christi, grown on the slopes of Vesuvius. Yet Laura sensed him making an effort. Once he rose and poured the second half of a bottle into the sink.
She had just returned from giving an English lesson one afternoon when the phone rang. It was Marco—passing through, and hoping she was free
to discuss Australia.
That was their code, developed over two or three rendezvous. Laura said repressively that she had a friend staying. That evening, Theo was deep into his story of the pear tree when Laura realized that for the past ten minutes she had been thinking only of
discussing Australia
with Marco. Here was Theo Newman on tap, and she would rather that made-to-order little sleazebag. She got up. “Sleep well. See you in the morning.”