Remembering Light and Stone (5 page)

‘But if you really want to see miserable people,’ he said, ‘you should go to Venice. It’s like Christmas – you know what I mean? There are times and places which are supposed to be happy, happy, happy, and if you feel bad there, you feel guilty too, for not feeling the way you think you ought to. Venice is full of people who’re as miserable as hell, because their expectations for the place are so high that there’s no way reality can match it.’

He was right. When we got up to the Piazza, we stood for some time leaning on the parapet, looking out over the roofs of the city. Here I was with someone I liked and who gave every appearance of liking me, and we were in Florence together, and yet I still felt troubled and anxious. I’m not a person who has much talent for happiness, but I remember one of the best moments in my life. It was in Paris, where I used to live. It was a wet weekday morning in March, and I was standing up at a bar counter having a quick coffee on my way to work. I remember I was tired because I hadn’t slept well the night before, and then I caught sight of myself in the mirror behind the bar. I saw myself as if I were a stranger, as if I were someone other than myself, and in that moment I realized that I had everything I wanted in life. I had been in Paris for about four months then. I had my job, a little apartment, I had money in my purse to pay for my coffee, I was an adult. I felt free. And with all these things I felt a sublime happiness, which was all the more intense for the banality of the surroundings – the tattered pricelist on the wall, the rain on the window. I don’t really understand why I felt like that at that particular moment, but I didn’t try too hard to understand, it was a mysterious feeling, and I thought that it was best not to try to analyse it. I was just grateful. I’ve often remembered that morning when times have been bad, for if you know that such
moments of peace have been possible, you know that they might happen again. And if you’re really troubled in your soul, it can mean so much to know that.

Later, when we were walking back into town, we passed a group of street traders, Nigerians and North Africans, who sat silently by their wares, which were set out before them – sunglasses and hairslides, fake designer bags and sweatshirts, and cassette tapes. Ted said, ‘I feel sorry for them: they’re not welcome here.’

‘I know,’ I replied. When I was teaching English in the past, one of my students said that he had been to England the previous summer. He had very little money, and had difficulty in finding a room, so he ended up in a hostel. It was full, but they let him bunk down in a sleeping bag on the floor of one of the rooms. There were six beds, he told me with a shocked air, and all the people in them were African. I said, ‘Maybe when they got back to Africa they told their family and friends, “When we were in London, we stayed in this joint that was so cheap and tacky that there was an
Italian
sleeping on the floor of the bedroom.”’ But my irony was lost on him.

I had a feeling that I would have to give account of myself to Ted, later on that day, and over lunch I decided that I would tell him about what happened when I was in France. Over a couple of plates of
spaghetti
alla
carbonara,
Ted kept asking me about Ireland. He couldn’t understand why I’d left. ‘Everybody says it’s such a beautiful country.’

‘It is,’ I said, ‘but sometimes that isn’t enough.’ I had had my own reasons for wanting to go away. I found life at home too homogeneous. Almost everybody I knew there had been to the local convent school, their experience of life was within a certain limited ambit, and I didn’t like that. My leaving had been premeditated, and deliberate. I had studied languages so that I would be able to move to another country with more facility. But on another level, my leaving was purely instinctive, as automatic as the new-born animal’s search for food, as mysterious as the migratory impulse of birds. It was all painfully clear and simple. I had had so many unhappy experiences in Ireland, that I wanted
to put distance between myself and that place. There was a day a few months after I’d moved to France when I was lying in bed late one night, half asleep, when I suddenly realized what I had done, what I had succeeded in doing. Here I was in a little apartment in Paris, a place so unlike where I’d grown up, and the room was full of my clothes, my books, my things. It was extraordinary that they belonged to me, because this was what I had wanted so much, and it was hard to believe that I had actually got it.

It didn’t last. The human capacity for irrationality, for breaking up things which you’ve worked so hard to build, is remarkable.

‘So how long were you in Paris?’ Ted asked. I told him that I had been there for three years. After college in Ireland, I had done a course in Paris to become a translator. I had been given a placement in a small factory, which went well, and became a
full-time
job. I rented an apartment in an unremarkable part of the city, and I worked very hard. The weeks were quiet and dull, but I made a point of enjoying the weekends. I used to go to exhibitions and galleries, and sometimes I would get right out of Paris, to the woods or to the coast. I went to Chartres and to Rheims several times, and I visited all the cathedrals in the city as often as I could. My life was much as it was to be later, when I was living in Italy. I did have a few friends, but it was very much a solitary, internal life, the life of someone without great ambition, someone who wanted peace and privacy, above all the life of someone who just wanted to be left alone.

And then, after I had been there for two years, I did the most stupid thing. I fell in love.

Well, it wouldn’t have been so stupid if I really had loved him, but as it turned out, I didn’t.

‘This man was an American too,’ I said to Ted. By this stage we were eating fruit, and had ordered coffee. I was carefully cutting up a pear. When I was much younger, I was wary of men, as wary as a dog that’s been beaten. I couldn’t understand women who wanted to get married, couldn’t understand women who thought that a man could make them happy. Then I met Bill. He was interested in all the things that I liked too: painting, music,
architecture. We went to concerts and visited galleries together; we used to sit in the Luxembourg Gardens and talk, or walk through the streets late at night in the rain, looking at all the people and speculating on their lives, laughing at silly things. It gives me no pleasure to remember all this now. I have no happy memories from that time, instead it makes me feel ashamed to think of how stupidly I was taken in. He was doing a language course when I met him, and was in France indefinitely. Before long, he moved into my apartment. Bill was from Missouri, and he told me all about his family, about how his parents had divorced when he was ten, about his mother’s drink problem, about other girlfriends he’d had in the past. I trusted him completely, and told him all about my life too, things I had never been able to talk to anyone about until then. When it was all over, I realized that he was like a lot of Americans, that he’d have told his most intimate life history to someone on a bus, to the newspapers, to any stranger. His confidences didn’t mean a thing. But mine did.

Then one day he came home and told me that a guy he knew was going down to Aix-en-Provence, and had asked him if he wanted to come along. This friend knew a painter living just outside Aix, there was room in his house for Bill too. He was delighted. He’d always wanted to see Provence. I had spent a holiday there, and had told him all about it. He told me now that he’d had enough of Paris. City life was beginning to get on his nerves, he was glad to be going to the country. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t believe it. I had thought he loved me. I had thought that because he had moved in with me and we had been so close that he was in some way committed to me, and when that word ‘committed’ came into my mind, suddenly I
understood
, and saw what a fool I’d been.

Later, what I regretted most was how predictable and clichéd everything was that happened next. The scene I created, all my stupid tears, ‘But you said … but I thought…’ all that nonsense that’s been said a million times in the past, and that’ll be said a million times again. I couldn’t believe that I was being so wounded by something that was so banal. I hated myself for
crying, for having been so stupid as to have let all this happen, for not having seen it coming.

Bill was amazed. He said that he had had no idea that I would react like this. He thought that we could still be friends, which meant that he thought he could rely on me for free meals and accommodation next time he was passing through Paris. I told him to get out of my apartment immediately, but I didn’t tell Ted how I had persuaded him to go: by picking up a kitchen knife and saying, ‘Because if you don’t go now, I’ll kill you.’ I said it like I meant it, and he left.

When he came back for his things the next day, I punched him in the face as hard as I could. It wasn’t that I lost my temper, it was completely premeditated. I had spent all night thinking of how much I wanted to hurt him, really hurt him, to get my own back. I’d been afraid I’d fudge it, but I didn’t. I cut his lip against his teeth, and got great satisfaction from the look on his face when he saw the blood. Ted listened to all this quietly. ‘How do you feel about him now?’ he asked me. I said that I still hated him. If I heard that something terrible had happened to him, that he was seriously ill or even dead, well, I wouldn’t actually be glad, but I wouldn’t be at all sorry either. ‘So it’s stupid to think I ever loved him, isn’t it?’ I said.

After Bill had gone, I realized that he’d ruined my life there. I had always liked my apartment, but now I associated everything in it with him. He’d contaminated it for me by his presence. It was the same with all the places I liked to visit in Paris and the things I enjoyed doing. They no longer held any pleasure for me, because they reminded me of him. I thought of the life I had so carefully built up for myself and how I had let it all be destroyed. I hated him, but he was gone. I hated myself, but I couldn’t escape from myself. I had thought that he was helping me to overcome all that, and now it was worse than ever it had been. I blamed myself for having been so gullible, and trusting. Even now I can hardly bear to think of how bitter and lonely I felt at that time.

A few months later, in the summer, I had holidays to take from work. My mother wanted me to go back to visit her in Ireland. I
didn’t want to go, I was afraid to go back. I was afraid that if I went there, I would really see what a failure it had all been, my attempt to make a life for myself, to mend things. I could hardly bear it in Paris, but to think of these things back in County Clare would be overwhelming. Maybe I would be trapped into staying there. So even though my mother pleaded with me, by letter and by phone, I said no, and set off for two weeks in Italy.

It restored me, to some extent. I went to Florence, then down to Umbria, to Assisi, to S. Giorgio. Only when I was away from the city did I realize how exhausting the daily round was, how crushed I had become by the endless journeys on the Metro, by the crowds, the work, the whole life I led there. I had no interest or energy left to do anything at the weekends. I had stopped going to the galleries after Bill left. But in Italy I was looking at paintings again, and they meant a lot to me, I realized that I needed that in my life. I visited the frescoes in S. Giorgio, and then sat down at a café in the main square and had an ice-cream. While I ate it, I felt lulled by the sunshine, the palpable softness of the life going on around me. I realized that I dreaded going back to France, that my life there was dead, and held nothing more for me. Then, in a window above the grocery shop on the other side of the square, I saw a bright pink card, on which was written, ‘Apartment to rent.’

Within a month I was living there. Within two months, I realized that I had made a big mistake.

Perhaps in the long term things worked out as well as could be expected, but at first it was so difficult. I had acted completely on impulse. I gave up a good job in Paris, through which I had accumulated reasonable savings. These were rapidly eaten into when I moved to Italy, much more than I had expected. I’ve always known how vital it is for a woman to have enough money, and it worried me to see it melt away like this. I had foolishly hoped to find another translating job, but it turned out to be much more difficult than I had expected. For months I had to scrape by on whatever I could find, translating, teaching English at all hours of the day just to make ends meet. It was such a struggle and I was so worried about money that at least it took
my mind off worrying about other things, like mere loneliness. I had no car at first, because I couldn’t afford one, and I felt trapped in S. Giorgio. I had visited it only in summer, and I couldn’t believe how quiet it was off season. I stood out much more than I cared to, and the locals couldn’t understand what a young woman was doing living there on her own. Franca and her family took a liking to me, they helped and befriended me from the first, and that made a big difference, but I didn’t make friends with any of the other foreigners living in S. Giorgio.

Then my mother died. I felt guilty, because she had wanted me to go home to see her and I hadn’t gone, and now I’d never see her again. I went home for the funeral, and I felt that everyone there, including my brother Jimmy, felt I had been selfish and heartless to stay away. Jimmy was older than me, we had never had a lot in common. He lived up in Dublin, and now that our mother was dead the family home down in Clare was empty. He pretended to be all surprised when I said that I wouldn’t move home now, as if that was all I had been waiting for, for my mother to die so that I could have the house. I could feel the disapprobation of everybody because I hadn’t been the warm, loving daughter, or rather, because I hadn’t behaved as they thought a loving daughter should. I didn’t get on with my father at all, but I had been fond of my mother. I regretted any pain I caused her, but I don’t see how things could have been different. When I got back to Italy and looked at my life there I thought: Was it worth it? I had made such a huge effort of will to make a life of my own, and what had I ended up with? A rented flat, a few sullen students, being snickered at in bars in the village.