Read Remembering Light and Stone Online

Authors: Deirdre Madden

Remembering Light and Stone (6 page)

BOOK: Remembering Light and Stone
6.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Things got better: I suppose they had to, I felt that they couldn’t have got much worse. I decided that I would do best to stay put for at least another six months, to try to make a year of it in S. Giorgio. I had enough sense to realize that I had made a hasty false move from Paris, and I knew that I couldn’t afford to make another. There was no place to which I felt particularly drawn. I had no reason to be in S. Giorgio, but I had no better reason to be anywhere else. I couldn’t go back to France, and for now there seemed to be no other openings in Italy. I decided to
keep going throughout the winter, and then in spring I could reconsider the situation.

But by spring, things had changed. By an odd set of
circumstances
, my life began to improve. A woman called Fabiola started to have English lessons with me. She took a liking to me – God knows why, for I barely registered on her consciousness. She thought I was
carina,
simpatica,
which shows how little she knew me. Fabiola had one of those smiles which makes no connection with the person being smiled at, its sole function to state ‘Aren’t I lovely!’ From the first she irritated me, with her gold pencil, her leather briefcase, bought specially for her English books, the way she dressed up for lessons with me as if she were going to a wedding. That struck me as particularly foolish, as the lessons themselves were such a complete
non-event
. She was by far my slowest student. Although she had studied English at school for five years, we had to begin again at zero, and in all the time I taught her, she never made much progress. Her husband owned a clothing factory down on the plain below S. Giorgio, and Fabiola had no financial worries, her only problem in life was to fill her empty days.

One day, at the end of the lesson, we were talking about a suitable time to see each other again, and Fabiola remarked, ‘If my husband knew how well you spoke Italian he might give you a job in his factory. He needs someone to translate letters and things for him.’ I immediately pursued this throwaway
comment
, but Fabiola tried to dismiss it. She said airily that he was looking for a translator, ‘But if you get the job, maybe you won’t want to give me English lessons any more, and where would I find another teacher as sweet as you?’ She smiled radiantly, picked up her briefcase, and was about to leave. I couldn’t believe it. I blocked her way. ‘Of course I’d go on giving you lessons‚’ I said. ‘Even if I stopped teaching everybody else, I’d still teach you, if I was working in your husband’s factory. You will mention it to him, won’t you?’ I did my best to give her a big smile – in truth, I could hardly keep my hands off her. She was quite liable to let this chance pass me by, for some stupid whim about lessons, which she could lose interest in at any time. ‘If I
tell Pietro he has to give you the job, then he has to give you the job‚’ she said. I knew she was perfectly capable of forgetting all about it as soon as she left my apartment, but Pietro got in touch with me two days later, and in a short while, to my enormous relief, I was back in regular employment.

Things got better then. I had a steady income, regular hours, and I could take on as much or as little extra work as I wanted. I was more used to S. Giorgio by that stage, and S. Giorgio was more used to me. I decided to stay for a couple of years, to establish myself again financially and to get some work
experience
, and to build up a life for myself, as I had done in Paris. Almost five years later, I was still there. It wasn’t that I loved Umbria so much, rather I got caught up in the gentle, soporific round of the years, which can be as hard to break out of as a dream. By late 1989 I was certainly thinking about moving on, but had made no definite plans to do so. I felt I ought to go, if the rest of my life wasn’t to drift by in a haze.

‘So that’s it,’ I said to Ted. It was a strange experience talking to him in this way, even though I didn’t tell him everything, and there were some things I couldn’t express, like the anger of those last months in Paris. I couldn’t explain to him the rage that there was in me, that was always there, no matter where I was, a force stronger than myself, and which I didn’t fully understand. It was interesting for me to look back over my past like that. I didn’t often do it, and it was strange to consider it, after all those years, to see what had changed and what hadn’t. It interested me so much on my own account that I hardly took any notice of what effect the things I was saying had on Ted. But he could never say that I had pretended to be something other than I was –
he
couldn’t say that I had taken him in.

The table in front of me was covered with the leftovers of a meal – broken bread, an empty carafe, fruit peelings, two crumpled linen napkins, two thick white cups, ringed inside with coffee. Ted said, ‘I know it must have been painful for you, but I’m sure that guy in Paris didn’t mean to hurt you as much as you think he did.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m out of step with everybody. That’s what
people I knew in Paris told me at the time. The way people relate to each other has changed. But it’s not just as if you can change like that – I couldn’t, anyway.’

The hanged woman was still lurking in the corner of my mind. They say that you’re responsible not just for everything you do, but for everything you see. I felt as if I had seen this woman, had broken some taboo by looking at her, and this was to be my punishment. The dead woman would haunt my mind. I made a huge effort to look across the table and focus on Ted. I wondered how much he had understood of what I had said – that is, I wondered to what extent he saw it as I saw it. It probably looked very different to him. He had most likely had relationships like the one I had described, the difference being that they had been with women who had not thought as I had, women who were capable of being close to someone without putting too much emotional commitment into it, knowing from the first that it was a transitory thing, and that it would be foolish to feel aggrieved when it ended. And I could see too that Ted wasn’t a wicked person. Far from it: he was a much better person than I would ever be, and perhaps the man I’d known in Paris wasn’t wicked either. But he had been the cause of such pain to me, and I felt that he should have known it. I could never forgive him, I didn’t even want to try.

When we came out of the restaurant, it was still very quiet in the streets. That lunch-time hush that descends upon Italian cities was still in effect, the shops closed, the streets deserted, so we went to Ted’s apartment. He lived near the centre of Florence, in a few attic rooms in a high yellow building. It was a simple, untidy place, with papers and books scattered around. I was glad to see that. I did try to hide the thoroughness with which I was taking everything in – the cream jug on the window sill, the crumpled envelopes with letters sticking out of them, the ailing potted plant on the shelf. I don’t like tidy homes, and I just can’t stand places that have been subject to interior design. The sort of things you see in homes and gardens magazines and that people really drool over, I absolutely hate. I don’t, for example, like Fabiola’s house, although I’m sure she thinks that I do,
because it’s a beautiful place by conventional standards,
therefore
everyone should like it. That’s just what I have against it. She’s got a marble-topped table and a lamp that just looks like a plain steel pole and some angular black chairs. There are marble floors, and everything else is black, white and silver, made of leather, chrome or ebony. Everybody oohs and aahs about it, but I think it’s sterile and uncomfortable. Fabiola herself only likes it because it’s what she thinks she’s supposed to like. She hasn’t a thought in her head that hasn’t been put there by social and commercial forces. I liked the small-scale scruffiness of Ted’s apartment. I told him so, and he laughed. He said that although it wasn’t very big, he had been lucky to find something he could afford so close to the centre. I asked him how he had found it.

‘Through a friend of a friend: how you get everything in Italy,’ he said. Looking at his possessions, I remembered how, when I was a child, things which belonged to other people often fascinated me – a hairslide or some furry slippers, foolish things like that. I would long to possess such things myself, but on the few occasions when I managed to obtain an identical object, it no longer had the magic which had drawn me to it in the first place. Its mystery and attraction were immediately lost, simply by my possessing it.

‘What sort of place do you have in S. Giorgio?’ I described my apartment to him. I told him I liked it, but that sometimes it was too noisy.

‘That’s a problem when you live in a noisy country,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I suppose it could be worse.’ Sometimes it didn’t bother me when Franca and Lucia would be shouting and roaring in the stairwell, and the television was on full blast from early morning until late at night. Sometimes it got on my nerves. What really annoyed me though was when Franca set herself up as a model of happiness, and said that I too could be as happy as she was. She was always telling me that I thought too much. It only complicated things, and made you miserable. I hated it when she talked to me like this. It was certainly true that I wasn’t happy a lot of the time, but I didn’t believe that putting your brain on ice could make much significant difference. If the price
of consciousness is misery, then I’ll take that any day, rather than dumb bliss. I can’t stand it when people try to make you be the same as they are, as if their own lives are so wonderful.

Sometimes I used to think that Franca was like a great big tabby cat, living on pure instinct. I once had a cat when I was growing up in Ireland. It was going to have kittens, and I realized one day as I watched her sitting licking her paws that she wasn’t at all concerned about it, she wasn’t getting ready for it or worrying about the future. She wasn’t even aware that she was going to have kittens. And then when they were born, she was perfectly contented, and stayed in her box with them and looked after them. She sat over them purring, and growled a little when I put my hand in to try and touch them. Six months later, she was killed. The kittens didn’t miss her. Often when I looked at Franca, I would remember that cat.

There was a glass egg on the table, and I picked it up. I asked Ted if it was Murano glass, and he said that it was. Franca had a Murano glass decanter and six matching liqueur glasses that she got on her honeymoon in Venice. They were made of dark red glass, and were all hand painted with flowers – really florid. I know that she never used them, not even once, in all the years she was married. She kept them locked up in a glass-fronted cabinet. I know such a thing is outmoded and foolish, like the idea of a best parlour, but it appeals to me. We had a china cabinet at home in Ireland. I like the idea of having all those bits of glass and delft and keeping them locked up for years and years. They became a sort of witness to all the
sturm
und
drang
of family life; they give you a fixed visual point, even if it is only in the form of a carnival glass tea-set, or a silver-plated sweet dish. We were never allowed to use them, and as a child, it was as if they didn’t even belong to us, they had that mystery of other people’s possessions. As I grew older, I liked them even more, for their worthlessness, because the only value they could have was sentimental. Sometimes when I was in Fabiola’s house, and I looked at her cold and costly fixtures and fittings, I’d think of those things we had at home, like two delft pigs hugging each other, one for salt and one for pepper.

‘I don’t like things that just have monetary value,’ I said to Ted. He was standing over by the window watching me. I was still holding the glass egg. ‘My grandmother used to say about people, “Money’s their God,” and in Italy I feel like I know people for whom that really is true, and they make no attempt to hide it. I often think about that when I’m in the streets, when I visit a city like Rome or Florence. In a shop window you’ll see maybe a pair of shoes on a little platform, all cleverly lit like they were a holy relic, and you’ll see people looking in the window, and it’s like they’re almost awed. I want to say to them – it’s only a pair of shoes, for crying out loud, only a belt or a handbag or whatever it happens to be. In a few years’ time all these things will be worn out or they’ll just look foolish. Sometimes when I see people in the street I feel pity for them, as if I’m looking at them from a thousand years away. Do you know what I mean?’

He said that he understood. I wasn’t sure that he did, but I decided that, for now at least, I would believe him.

I won’t say anything about whether or not I slept with Ted that night. Even if I did say, it would be foolish to believe me, because everybody tells lies about sex, and I’m no exception. What I will say is that it took me a long time to fall asleep, which is usual when I’m away from home. I lay awake far into the night, looking at the window. There was a big moon. It made a pale square of light on the floor, and I remembered a dream I once had. In it, there was a huge flat golden moon, which was low in the sky behind a leafless tree. I was able to reach out and touch the moon; I put my arm through the branches and pulled it out of the sky. It came down as smoothly and as easily as a circle of silk. Shimmering, golden, it hung limp in my hand, but now there was no light. I remembered I had felt happy when I woke up, because the dream had been a good one. When I looked at the moon over Florence I hoped I might dream it again, but I didn’t dream at all that night. I didn’t mind, because I could so easily have had one of my usual nightmares, and I was grateful that I didn’t.

The following morning, even though it was October, it was dry and bright enough for us to have breakfast sitting outside. We went to Piazza Santo Spirito, which was all but deserted, and quiet but for the noise of a television from behind a high, shuttered window, its frenetic gabble of trailers and ads muffled by distance. We didn’t talk much. I’m always quiet and sleepy in the morning, it takes me a long time to shake off the night. I had coffee and a big custardy cake, which I pulled apart with my fingers and ate slowly. If I could, I would eat things like that every day, but I only treat myself occasionally. I let my eyes
wander over the high pale buildings around us, the spotted trunks of the plane trees, and the flurrying crowds of pigeons which gathered around a fountain.

On the way to the café we had passed the place where Dostoyevsky had finished writing
The
Idiot.
I looked at the building out of the corner of my eye, and thought of the day I first saw it, years before, on a visit to Florence. It’s an unassuming yellow house opposite the Pitti Palace. The only unusual thing about it is the stone plaque that tells whoever cares to know that Dostoyevsky finished writing the novel there in 1868. I had been tempted for a moment to point it out to Ted, but I didn’t. It’s so precious to me that I wouldn’t have known how to react if he had just said ‘So what?’ or ‘Big deal.’ Often I had watched crowds of people drift past the house and never look up, paying no more heed to it than to any other building around, but to me it was precious. If Ted didn’t share that appreciation (and I felt quite sure that he wouldn’t), I thought it would be a desecration to draw his attention to it. So I said nothing, we walked on.

On one side of the square where we were sitting, there was a church. On the façade was a memorial to the fallen of two world wars, with a list of the names of the men of the parish who had been killed. The whole thing was surmounted by a dusty wreath, decorated with golden baubles like Christmas-tree ornaments, and their brightness only made the leaves and the ribbon look even more faded and dull. There was a war memorial in S. Giorgio too, with a flagpole. The cord which runs down the side of the pole pings in the breeze, it makes the same sound that the masts of boats make when they’re all pulled in to harbour on a quiet night. When I passed the war memorial in S. Giorgio, I always used to think of the sea.

The church itself looked old and neglected. Weeds and tufts of tough grass grew in cracks on the steps in front of it. Mass must have ended, because a congregation was leaving the building, twenty people at most, the majority of them elderly women. Then I saw two other people crossing the square, one of them also an elderly woman dressed in black, walking slowly with the aid of a cane. She was arm-in-arm with a middle-aged woman,
whom she was hectoring relentlessly. Oddly, because of her beaten, defeated look, the younger woman looked the older – that is, as if her soul had aged. She was dressed in a suit, dressed with neatness and precision, but was not at all elegant. Her clothes were drab and unflattering, her short hair set in a rigid style, her face submissive, tired. As they walked past us, I could hear their voices, the old woman releasing a torrent of angry language, the other woman patiently interjecting every so often, ‘
Si
,
Mamma
.
Si
,
Mamma
.’ In my mind’s eye, I could see the apartment they had just left. I had been in Italy long enough to imagine it down to the last detail – the clean, cold rooms, the glass-topped table with a lace runner and an ugly piece of ceramic on it, which, twice a day, the daughter would
laboriously
clear away, and then set the table. I could see the white stone floors which, after meals, would be ruthlessly swept, then polished. On the sideboard there would be a framed black and white photograph of the elderly woman and her husband, taken years before, but she would still not look young in it, would look hard and stern. Beside the photo would be a green plant, and there would be other green plants around the house, some of them huge. Their beds would be neat, narrow, perfectly made, and there would be a big multi-channelled television, which they would watch impassively for hours every evening. And so their lives would pass.

The two women had reached the top step of the church. They pushed the worm-eaten inner door, and the huge blank façade swallowed them up.

‘Ted,’ I said, ‘did you know either of your grandmothers? Do you remember them?’

‘Grammy? Do I remember Grammy? Who could forget her? Grammy was like a Marine with lipstick. Or rather, she would have been if she’d worn lipstick.’ He laughed and was quiet for a moment. ‘Funny you should ask about her. I think about her all the time. Well, a lot of the time, anyway. I guess I think about her to know what I really do think about her.’

He told me that ‘Grammy’ was his mother’s mother. He never met his father’s mother, she died in 1942, before his parents had
married, but from family legend she was every bit as tough as the grandmother he knew. The lies of the past! I never cease to be amazed by the discrepancy between the myth of womanhood and the reality of it. What family doesn’t have a sepia print of some doe-eyed creature, all roses and poses, in her high-necked white blouse and long dark skirt, pretending to read a book while her sister leans sweetly over her, or playing the piano while her sister turns the pages.

Looking at these submissive shrinking violets, who would ever guess the tales that are handed down in families, of how they drove through the lives of their children like tanks, making wounds which it would take generations to heal. Ted said that he thought a hundred years wasn’t a long time at all – in human terms, in terms of the individual, yes, it’s usually longer than life itself, but in terms of a family, it’s very short.

‘I look back at my grandparents,’ he said, ‘and I feel that me and my sister – especially my sister – are still picking up the tab for things that happened before the First World War. Doesn’t that sound crazy? But I can’t stop myself from thinking it. But then when I think of my life, the choice and the comfort I have, and then I think of her, I feel guilty. I mean, I’m sure my grandmother didn’t want to be like that, I’m sure she didn’t set out deliberately to terrorize three generations, it just happened that way. She had such a hard life – although of course, she never stopped telling us how hard it was for her, and how easy it was for us.’

He told me that his grandmother was a first-generation immigrant. She was born in Bergen, and in 1910, when she was sixteen, she migrated to the United States with her family. It was a classic migrant experience – travelling steerage, cardboard suitcases, possessions tied up in bundles. Through Ellis Island, like everybody else then, luggage labels tied to their coats. She said years later that she hated sentiment about that time, she said that it was awful, that if you hadn’t been through it you couldn’t imagine the coldness of it, the people checking you for vermin, treating you like you were nobody, nothing.

The family settled in the Mid-West, and although there was
already a large Scandinavian community there, the new
migrants
experienced hostility and prejudice. They were accused of being dirty, and to refute this, they overcompensated. ‘My God,’ Ted said, ‘my grandmother was obsessed with dirt. You never saw a person like her – with the possible exception of my mom. My mother keeps the house so clean that you wouldn’t believe it, you know, even things like the grill on the broiler or the lines between the tiles in the shower stall – I figure they’re not supposed to be clean after a while. But not in our house. It was only when I went to college that I found out how fluff can gather in balls under the bed. It never got a chance to do that around Mom.’

To begin with, the new arrivals moved in with other members of the family who had moved to America some years earlier. For ten years, his grandmother worked in a boarding house there, doing laundry, cooking, washing down flights of stone steps, cleaning, cleaning, always cleaning things. Then she married ‘the sweetest, most gentle guy you could ever hope to meet’. He worked with his family in running a general store, and so she started to work there instead, selling sugar and tea and cloth and wool, all sorts of things. She had a baby a year for the next ten years, but things being as they were, only six of them lived to adulthood. Ted’s mother was her eldest daughter. By the end of the 1920s, things were better. The shop was doing well, and they felt that things were beginning to come together, when the Depression happened, ‘and they were right back to square one’.

Ted said: ‘One time I was in a supermarket with my mom, and I asked her, “Don’t you think it’s sort of obscene, there’s just so much here, I mean
too
much of stuff like Twinkies and soda and junk like that?” But Mom stood there with a two-pound jar of mayonnaise in her hands and she said, “Believe me, if you’d gone through the Depression, you’d not think this obscene, you’d be glad you’d lived to see it.” She put the mayonnaise in the cart, and I knew not to say anything else. And this you can’t deny – my grandmother came through migration and marriage and the Depression and ten kids and the Second World War. I
didn’t. Maybe if she hadn’t been so tough she wouldn’t have made it through all those things.

‘But she did everything she set out to do, and in the end, she had more than she could ever have dreamed of when she was young. The sad thing is, it didn’t make her at all happy. Things picked up in later years and all her kids did well, they all got jobs and money. Dad was in Europe during the war, and when he came back, he and my mother got married. Then Dad went through college on the GI Bill, to become an engineer, while Mom helped support him, working as a secretary and running the house. In time Grammy saw Mom and all her kids with a good life style – nice big house in the suburbs, big car, smaller car that Mom took us to school in, me and my sister off to
summer-camp
every year. We were able to go to college, we didn’t have to start working as young as she did. But it still wasn’t enough.

‘By the time she was an old lady, she was still lethal. The toughness that was there; I don’t think that woman had a sentimental bone in her body. Do you believe this, Aisling? In all my life, I never once – not
once
– heard her say a nice thing to her daughter, my mother. Like, “You look pretty today,” or “That dress looks good on you” – nothing. She made Mom just as tough as herself, and I think Mom supporting Dad ultimately had a bad effect. My mother could never stop being in charge after that. She had had to be super-capable from the time she was ten until Dad left college, so she wasn’t going to stop then.

‘Grammy lived with us in her last years, and I really do have to say, I think it was a relief to all of us when she died. My mom in particular was just burnt out from her. She was relieved, but she felt guilty about being so glad.

‘There was an anger in Grammy, a rage. She fielded
everything
life threw at her, and yet I feel there was still a gap in the middle of her life, her self. There was something missing; she suspected that all along, and the older she got, the more she knew it, and the more she knew she’d never understand it, the madder she got. There was a part of her own soul that she’d never been able to come to terms with, and she just couldn’t bear that – that all those years of being thrifty and hard-working and
God-fearing and clean hadn’t been enough. That tormented her, that put her in a rage.

‘I always think she lived too long, because she lived to see the sixties. It was as if society was suddenly discrediting all the things she’d done. She was so mad at my sister Amy. She was really into the sixties, she’s older than me, and Grammy just couldn’t bear it that she was protesting Vietnam and wearing strange clothes and living the way she did. My grandmother felt that after everything that had been done for her, Amy was just selling out. But I think Amy had to be the way she was, she couldn’t just go on being like Grammy and Mom. The world changed too much. And I think my mother’s shaping up to be just like her mother, that’s what frightens me. After all those years of hard work and baking and taking us kids out to Trick or Treat at Hallowe’en, there’s the same toughness, the same lack of something, the same anger building up.

‘Amy’s a mess by now. I mean she’s done everything, she’s done drugs, done alcohol, been in the hospital twice to dry out; she’s divorced, she started her own business and it folded, she went back to waiting tables. She’s mixed up, and she’d tell you as much. But what did my family expect? Did they want her to sell Girl Scout cookies and dress the tree once a year and buy two hundred dollar’s worth of groceries once a week, and then everything would have been OK? In all the confusion, Amy’s at least trying to find out what’s missing at the centre of herself, and she admits that there is something missing, something wrong. Neither my grandmother nor my mother ever had the
consciousness
to know that about themselves. It’s been awful, but I believe it’s been inevitable, that there’s some sort of crazy logic to it. I do think about my grandmother a lot. Compassion’s important. Particularly when you don’t understand, you have to try to be compassionate.’

BOOK: Remembering Light and Stone
6.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Echoes of Earth by Sean Williams, Shane Dix
Helpless by Barbara Gowdy
Wild in the Moment by Jennifer Greene
All This Time by Marie Wathen
Goblins by Philip Reeve
Innocent Blood by Elizabeth Corley
Honey to Soothe the Itch by Radcliffe, Kris Austen
Once A Warrior (Mustafa And Adem) by Anthony Neil Smith