Remembering Light and Stone (8 page)

‘This is the story: St Martin was riding along one day in winter, when he met a poor man who was begging by the side of the road. St Martin had no money to give as alms, so he took his cloak and he cut it in two, and he gave half of it to the poor man. And at that, the clouds suddenly rolled back, the sun shone, and it was warm. And ever since then, on the feast of St Martin, the 11th of November, the legend says that the weather will be unseasonably warm. It’s called St Martin’s Summer.’

Ted said that it must be true, for that day the sun had shone, and the sky had been clear. ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘legends are always true, you must always believe them and take them seriously.’ I told him that it was also called the Feast of Cuckolds, although I didn’t know why. Italians love the idea of infidelity, they think it hilarious, particularly men being cheated on by their wives. They just like the
idea,
of course; they wouldn’t like the fact of it happening to them any more than anyone else would. But it didn’t surprise me that they had a feast for cuckolds. I just didn’t understand why it should be associated with St Martin. If he was a saint, he was probably never married – saints never are – and even if he was, I don’t think that it would be remembered in that way, I don’t think he’d be held in esteem if he’d been betrayed by his wife.

There’s a tradition, too, that on the feast of St Martin you drink the first of the new wine from that year’s harvest, and eat roast chestnuts. That’s what we were doing as I told him the story of the cloak. Ted had come down to S. Giorgio for the weekend, and Franca had given me a couple of bottles of very good new wine, from someone she knew who had a vineyard. She also
gave me the loan of a pan in which to roast the chestnuts. Franca was one of the best people to know around S. Giorgio, because she knew everybody, and in Italy it’s the private contact that opens doors. She was adept at getting the best of everything – wine, cheese, truffles, wild mushrooms, and she was always generous with me about such things. I think that she felt sorry for me in my ignorance when I arrived, and enjoyed watching me develop a taste and fondness for good wine and food. She knew that her gifts were appreciated and treated as they should be.

I opened the second bottle of wine so that it could breathe for a while until we were ready to drink it, and as I did that, I asked Ted to shake the pan over the fire, because I could smell the chestnuts burning. They smoked and rattled as he shook them gently. They had begun to swell a little, and you could see the white flesh showing through the cuts I had made in them earlier. They smelt good.

‘More wine?’

‘Yes, thanks.’ He said that the wine was stronger than he had thought it would be.

‘That’s a mistake it’s easy to make.’ I said. ‘Just because it’s new wine doesn’t mean that it’s weak. Far from it. And because there isn’t any label with information on it, there’s no way of knowing how strong it will be. Look at this, it’s still cloudy.’ I held a bottle of new white wine to the light, so that Ted could see how turbid it was.

The room was quite hot from the fire, and we were listening to a record of Sibelius that I had recently bought. I liked my apartment very much, it could be very comfortable, especially at night. We didn’t talk all the time. I never feel at ease with people if I can’t sit in silence with them for long periods of time. He drank some wine, and I started to prepare the next batch of chestnuts, so that they would be ready to go on the fire when the first lot came off. One by one, I took them from the bag. They were big and fat and shiny, and one by one I cut a slit in them with a serrated knife. I like chores like that. I like the repetition and the slow rhythm of it. While I worked, I could feel that he
was watching me, and I wondered what he was thinking. I didn’t ask.

The first batch of nuts was ready. I tipped them into a cloth, and put on the second lot, and all the time I could feel him looking at me. Suddenly, I realized how nervous I was. All the things that I thought were so well hidden – my own sense of desperation, all my terror – were things that he could see clearly, because he was looking at me in a way that people rarely did. He wasn’t taken in by the manner I cultivated, he could easily see through that. He had listened to all the things I had said that day, and I now saw how long it was since that had happened, how rarely I had what could be termed a real conversation. You couldn’t buy Ted over just by listening to him. One thing I learnt early in life is that people love to talk about themselves, and you can easily use this to deflect attention from yourself, if you so desire. I had noticed this most particularly with Fabiola. She could happily walk away from me (and no doubt from many other people too), thinking she had just had a conversation about marriage or families or holidays, without realizing that it had been a monologue, to which I had made no contribution whatsoever. I could even stay completely silent, it wasn’t necessary to nod my head and say ‘Yes,’ or ‘How true,’ or anything at all, it was simply enough that I was there. Franca was more shrewd, but after all the years I had been there, she took me according to her own lights. She didn’t see me as others did, didn’t accept the image I projected, but had her own version of my strangeness which was closer to the truth, but still not the whole picture. So it really unnerved me to be with someone who was determined to get beyond the smoke screen, and to know me. I kneaded the cloth with the chestnuts in it too much. They don’t need that much pressure to loosen the skins, and I realized that I had been mashing them relentlessly for some time now. I unrolled the cloth and offered them to him. The chestnuts held the heat of the fire in them, and were hard to hold. He topped up my wineglass. I was drinking a lot out of nervousness.

‘Isn’t it nice all these traditions they have here in Italy? I’ve
never seen another country like it in that respect, there seems to be no end of festivals and celebrations.’

Ted said that he had never taken much interest in things like that up until then. Even Thanksgiving and Christmas didn’t mean much to him, he told me that he would have been quite happy to spend them alone. ‘Because I work with Americans, we usually do get together at Thanksgiving and have a turkey dinner. Last year one of my students asked me why it was Italians never celebrated Thanksgiving. I told him to think real hard about why
we
celebrate it. No, I guess it is fun to get together, but if we didn’t, I could do without it.’

I said that I thought that was a pity. ‘Those things are so lovely. You need little celebrations in life. If you took away all those things, life would be grey. There’d be nothing left but necessity. I bet you haven’t had a birthday cake since you were small.’ He said that he hadn’t.

‘It shouldn’t be like that. Life’s hard enough. When I asked Franca could I borrow the pan for the chestnuts because I had a friend coming to see me, she asked, “Is he Italian?” When I said, “No, American,” she handed it over at once and sighed and said, “Ah, these poor Americans. We have to do what we can for them, because they have nothing of their own, no food worth talking about, no festivals, no fun!”’

‘America isn’t that bad!’

‘Franca thinks it must be. She’s always shaking her head and saying
“Questi
poveri
Americani.
”
She said to me once, “You know, Aisling, it’s much worse for the Americans than it is for the Germans. They at least can get on a train, or get in a car and drive down to Italy. America’s so far away.”’

‘Has she ever been there?’

‘Franca? Are you kidding?’

Ted shook his head, and said that that was always the way. People were always sounding off about the States, but if you asked them, you usually found that they hadn’t been there at all, that they were going on nothing more than a few loud-mouthed tourists, and some of the worst television. He said that people should visit the country before they judged it. Parts of it were
really horrible, he admitted, and he was glad that he wasn’t living there any more. But there were, he said, great things about it. Even apart from whether you liked it or not, he felt that it was good to see America because ‘it has such a big influence on the rest of the world that it’s worth going there just to check it out.’

‘I’d like to visit America,’ I said. ‘Do you know the part of the autostrada here just after you join it, near the lower part of S. Giorgio? The road we were on this afternoon? That always makes me think “This is what the States must be like.” That big wide road, and all along the side of it all those factories, including the place where I work. They’re all flood-lit at night, and there are huge signs with the names of the firms on them. There’s even a motel, with its name in English – The Maple-Leaf Motel. The scale is inhuman, you can’t walk anywhere around there, you can only get to those places by car. I can’t imagine anyone could ever feel a sense of fondness or belonging for a place like that. I sometimes think that a lot of America must look and feel like that part of the autostrada. But I could be wrong.’

‘Listen, Aisling,’ Ted said suddenly excited. ‘I’m probably going home for a week or two in the spring. You should come with me, just for a vacation. It would be a good opportunity for you to see the States. And I’d really enjoy your being there.’

‘If I can afford it, and can get the time off work, I’d love to.’

‘Then maybe we could do it the other way around, and the next time you go to Ireland, I could go with you.’

I laughed and said, ‘You’re still mad keen to get there, aren’t you? Maybe we will do that sometime. Franca is always saying to me, “Never say never, Aisling.” I don’t have any plans to go in the immediate future, but who knows? If I was going there, it would be nice to go with you. Sometimes I think I would like to go back, more than I used to.’

Then I remembered that there was something I wanted to tell him. ‘The loveliest thing happened this week, Ted, on Tuesday afternoon.’ I had just got back from work, and I saw a dark shape over on the window sill. I saw that it was a bird, which was odd enough in itself, for the hunters had killed or driven away almost all the birds locally. But this was too big to be a sparrow or a
finch, and when I went over, very quietly so as not to disturb it, I saw that it was a young owl. It had a thick feathery neck, and round yellow eyes, which disappeared into black slits when it blinked. It looked in at me, but without seeming to see me, then it turned its head and looked out over the roofs of the town. It had big clawed feet, which looked out of proportion to the rest of its body. Its claws and its eyes made you know it was a predator. The most sentimental person couldn’t have thought it was cute, for all its soft feathers and its littleness. I liked it for that, for its otherness, its pride. It was a thing you had to respect. It stayed there for about half an hour, sometimes looking blankly through the window, sometimes sitting with its eyes closed for periods of time. And then, at last, it spread its wings and flew away.

I told Ted that all the time, it became more and more important for me to see things like that – not just pleasant, but important, or even just to know that they existed. Sometimes I like to think about seals swimming in the ocean, or of a whale rising out at sea. I like the timelessness of nature, of animals. If you see a seal, it looks as it would have looked had you seen it a hundred, a thousand years ago. I like the otherness, the completeness of animals. Sometimes, I told him, when I’m feeling really down, I like to think about animals and how they live. It makes me feel that there is some beauty and mystery left, something other than the way I live.

I could sense the question that was going to follow: And what makes you so unhappy, Aisling? He didn’t say it, but he was looking at me very hard, and I knew that he was going to ask. I rattled on nervously, so that he wouldn’t have a chance to speak.

‘I even like going to the zoo. I know that’s bad. In principle I don’t agree with it, but a part of me can’t resist it, because I see animals there I would never see anywhere else. I can hardly believe how strange and beautiful they are. The best thing of all is that they’re alive. They’re not like a painting, or a thing that’s been made. The more you know about them, the more amazing they are. You wouldn’t believe some of the ways they’re adapted to their environment, like polar bears have hollow fur. Did you know that? It keeps them much warmer than it would if it wasn’t
hollow. I have all these books, see‚’ I pointed to the shelves, ‘books about animals, and plants too. We think we know it all, but we don’t know anything. I’d like to have some animals of my own. I can’t have any here, Franca won’t allow me, but some day I will. A Persian cat and a cockatoo. That’s what I’d like.’

I had started to cry just after I began to rattle on crazily in this way, and in the middle of it, I had gone over to the shelf and pulled out some books, as if that would prove my point. Suddenly I saw myself as he saw me, and it was like waking out of a dream. I was sitting there by the fire, surrounded by shards of broken chestnut shells, which I had spilled from my lap when I stood up. There were a few coffee-table books on the rug –
Plants
and
Animals
of
the
Amazon
Rainforest,
The
Great
Barrier
Reef
in
Pictures.
I was sitting in the middle of all this clutter, crying, and I could see the bewildered look on his face. Suddenly, I screamed defiantly at him, ‘I could kill someone, I really could! Myself or someone else, it makes no difference, just don’t think I couldn’t!’

He didn’t say anything. He went on looking at me with a sort of fearless amazement, as if he didn’t know how to react, and then he held his hand out to me and said very softly, ‘Hey honey, who ever said you couldn’t?’

I put my arm up across my face as if to ward off a blow, a blow which was not struck. He put his arm around me, and I wept as I hadn’t allowed another person to see me do for years and years.

It meant so much to me to have him there, and I told him so. If he hadn’t been there that night, I would probably have been down with Franca and her family. They were very good to me. Sometimes I appreciated being in the company of other people for a while. I could imagine the scene downstairs on a Saturday night. The whole family would be sitting around the TV, watching some endless variety show, with singers, a lit-up staircase, ugly middle-aged male compères, and lots of young women in skimpy costumes flitting about, sexy in the way an inflatable doll is sexy. I would be sitting by the fire. Franca would be moaning about Davide (while giving him the odd poke with her toe), or about work or Lucia or the people in the village, or whatever, but a large part of my mind would have been locked
into my own thoughts. I’d have drunk too much, and then late at night I’d have thanked them and come back up to my own cold apartment, the hearth dead, the whole place empty and dark.