Shroud (33 page)

I am always angry in times of greatest stress. It is a not uncommon reaction, so Dr. Zoroaster informs me, especially in that day's circumstances. I shouted at the receptionist in my hotel, at the fellow selling tickets for the ferry, and then at a sun-blackened Charon in a jaunty peaked cap with an anchor on it who, as I was boarding the ferry at last, offered me a helping hand and almost managed to tip me off the gangplank into the sea. I was also less than civil to the polite young man who met me on the quay at the other side, an emissary from what in my mind was still Cass Cleave, the living girl. The afternoon was sunny, and quick with freshets of warm wind. The hotel clerk, let us call him Mario, a swarthy beanpole with an adam's apple that seemed to be worked by weak elastic, cowered before me as if I might be about to strike him with my stick, which I might well have done had we not been caught up in the mill of disembarkation. I demanded to hear what had happened, I must know everything, right away, now, here on the quayside, this minute, everything! Come on, I shouted into his frightened face, tell me! and I grasped him by the elbow and gave him a violent shake. When he began to speak, however, I would not listen, and instead turned him about and ordered him to take me to where it had happened. We climbed up through the village. There had been a priest, Mario was saying, he had arrived too late, the signorina had… He joined his hands together and mimed the act of diving. "She jumped, signore." Her body had still not been found.

After the church – there was nothing there, of course, and the priest was about his duties elsewhere and not to be seen – I went to the hotel, a small, shabby establishment, and made them show me her room. They left me there alone, closing the door on me softly. I searched through her bag, not knowing what I hoped to find. There were some soiled underclothes in a zipped side pocket, I lifted them out and examined them, these profane relics, and put the stained seams in my mouth and sucked them, to have a last savour of her familiar secretions. Then I went into the bathroom and washed them in the handbasin. The water gulped and clicked, bathing my wrists, a silvery unction. I thought of her down in the deeps of the sea, her eyes open, gazing sightlessly up at the surface swaying far above her. First I draped her silks, as clean now as I could make them, on the towel rail to dry, but thought that would not do, and stuffed them into my pocket instead. Then I returned to the basin and bathed my brow; lifting the towel away, I would not have been surprised to find the bloody image of my face imprinted on it. I went and sat at the table by the window and leafed through her notebook. Poor Columbine. On our trip to Genoa that day she had lost me briefly in the cemetery. I had wandered off up some steps to one of the latter-day sections, where the city's recently dead merchants and mafiosi are buried and the statuary is modernly pretentious. It was cool and quiet there, under the colonnades, and I tarried idly for a while, reading the inscriptions on the tombs and entertaining thoughts of the eternal. As I was about to descend again to the lower level I saw her below me, pacing a sunlit patch of gravel, and I stopped behind a pillar to observe her. She was in a state of some agitation, I could see. With her arms tightly folded and her head down, she was walking rapidly here and there in a seemingly senseless, zigzag pattern. She would stand absolutely still for a moment, as if weighing up profound alternatives, then set off abruptly at a headlong stride, only to halt again after a dozen stiff-legged paces and repeat the process, pausing, considering, and plunging off in a new direction. She kept this up for some minutes, but broke off when at last she spied me skulking behind my pillar. We stood and gazed at each other. I do not know what she was thinking. Perhaps she had thought that I had left her, finally, had just decided to disappear and abandon her here among the dead and their monuments. Strangely, or perhaps not strangely, it is the memory of moments such as this that weighs on me most heavily now, the moments, as I suppose, of her deepest desperation.

I went downstairs, her underthings a wet lump in my pocket, and spoke to the proprietor, a handsome, grey-haired fellow with garlic on his breath. I showed him a fistful of traveller's cheques and said I should prefer it if he would forget that I had been here. He said nothing, only considered a moment and then gave the faintest of shrugs. He stood impassively looking on while I signed the cheques, leaning on his fists on the desk. From a shadowy region behind him his wife made a soundless entrance. She was a corpulent person with three chins and a suspicious eye. Mario the clerk, too, was there. A wonder the entire village did not come jostling into the doorway to have a look at me. When I had handed over the cheques I said that I wished to rest now, and asked if I might lie down in her room, the room that had been hers. Signor Albergo demurred, saying another guest was expected at any moment. I looked at him, and he relented. I went up and lay on the bed where Cass Cleave had lain. As the day waned, I thought of many things, for example that phenomenon, the existence of which I chanced upon in the course of my reading on Mr. Mandel-baum and his ways, which is known among neurologists as the anarchic hand. This remarkable and rare disorder – there are no more than half a hundred recorded cases – is the result of a peculiar form of rebellion deep within the nervous system. Otherwise normal and sound in limb, the sufferer will find himself subject to the tyranny of one or other of his hands, which seemingly on a whim and of its own volition will perform actions independent of him and often against his own best interests. At table, he will find the recalcitrant hand force-feeding him food he does not wish to eat; he will encounter someone in the street, and instead of proffering itself in salutation his hand will fly up and slap the surprised acquaintance across the face. At times the behaviour of the hand will be so obstreperous that its fellow on the other side will be called upon to quell its antics; the resulting struggle can be violent in the extreme, and end in self-lacerations and fellings to the floor. One patient even suffered repeated attempts to strangle herself, and might have succumbed had there not been others by to rush forward and tear the suicidal, or murderous, hand from her throat. What I wondered, lying on the bed that day in that utterly emptied hotel room, was whether a half of the self itself might be an anarch, bent on the destruction of the whole. For it is one thing to think of Cass Cleave willingly leaping out of the light of the world, and altogether another to entertain the possibility that even as she made away with herself, clasped in her own unbreakable embrace, one side of her was crying out in terror, like a child being borne off in the arms of a fiend.

I caught the last ferry. The young man Mario accompanied me to the quayside, I do not know why; perhaps his parents – he was the son of the proprietors, did I mention that? – wished to be sure I had left the vicinity before they cashed the boodle. Or perhaps the fact of my bereavement required a ceremonial symmetry to be observed, and having met me at the boat he must see me off on it as well. He was adamantly polite, matching his pace to mine and offering me a steadying arm as I stepped on to the swaying gangplank. He waited on the dock, too, while the boat was pulling away, and even waved farewell. It was twilight, his white shirt had an unearthly glow. In fact, his name was not Mario, I do not know why I called him that, but Angelo; the emissaries of Heaven take the most unlikely forms.
Adio, Angelo.
With vigorous churnings the boat turned about and we glided out of the harbour and headed for the horizon where the day's last radiance lingered, trembling on the brink. I stood at the stern and took the sodden wad of underclothes out of my pocket and dropped it into the sea, where it swirled a moment, opening like a Japanese water flower, and then was dragged down into the dark under the waves. In Lerici the shell-blue night was already falling.
She left me at the silent time…
I should have waited until the sea had given up her body. Yes, I should have waited.

All that long afternoon I had been dogged by the sensation of there being somehow more than one of me. When I looked in the places where she had been, or touched the things that had been hers, it was if another were looking with me, through my eyes, touching those things through my fingertips. Afterwards it came to me, with the force of certainty, that by some form of sympathetic magic I must have been anticipating, I must have been foregoing, as it were, how it would be for her father, when he came there, and took the ferry, and walked up the hill to the church, and stood in that hotel room that was so full of her not being in it. I fear that between us we destroyed her, old Thespis and I. She said one day that she loved him, and I said why would she not, since he was her father, but she shook her head, closing her eyes and wincing in that way that she sometimes did, and said no, I did not understand, that what she meant was that she was in
love
with him, and always had been. I thought it fanciful nonsense, meant to impress or shock me, and made no more remark. Late one night, after she was dead, I telephoned the number I had found among her things, and was answered on the first ring by a man's voice. He sounded unnervingly alert, as if he had been lying sleepless, waiting for someone to call, waiting for me, perhaps. I tried to say something but I was too drunk, and was weeping besides. An actor he is, or was, so she told me. I am sure we would have many things in common, he and I. After all, I am an actor too, though only an inspired amateur. The difference is that the part I play is mine alone, and may not be taken by anyone else, on or off the stage. But then, should that not also have been true of Axel Vander?

There were further surprises in store for me, further shocks. One day at the card table in Franco Bartoli's garden room I was writing the opening pages of this record, using the fountain pen that she had sent to me, when the thing ran dry. I could find no ink in the house, and Franco was away. I went out, and after a tedious and listless search – the day was trying to rain, and schoolchildren were kicking leaves in the gutters – I happened at last upon a pen shop in a narrow back street down by the river. The place inside had, disquietingly, the desiccated, glue-and-wormwood smell of the schoolrooms of my childhood. The shop was so narrow that I had to insert myself sidelong between the counter and the display of writing implements and marbled notebooks on the wall opposite. The woman behind the counter, florid and disproportionately large, and dressed all in black, with painted eyebrows and a piled-up hive of lacquered hair, had something in her manner that was indefinably institutional; she might have been a hospital matron, or the wardress of an open prison, or, indeed, simply a schoolmistress. She met my request with a show of stylised professionalism, holding successive bottles of ink up to her bosom for my inspection and pointing out the descriptions on their labels with a long, scarlet fingernail. When I chose a bottle, at random, she nodded approvingly, closing her eyes slowly and pursing her lips, as if I had passed a test for exceptional good taste and breeding. She asked if I had brought the pen with me, and if I would like to fill it now. This invitation, along with the schoolroom smell and the proximity enforced on us by the confined space, raised a suggestion of intimacy that was at once worrying and oddly welcome, and I felt like a small boy who had been kept back for special favours after lessons. Almost shyly I produced the pen and unscrewed the barrel, not without resistance, for there was something inside, papers of some kind, tightly wrapped around what turned out to be one of those disposable cartridges –
"Ecco, signore, una segreta!"
– and held fast with a strand of silk, which after a miniature struggle I succeeded in untying, and unfolded the scraps of paper and laid them out side by side on the glass counter and tried to hold them flat under splayed fingertips. At first, because the papers kept curling and the lights under the glass were shining through them, I could not make out the printed words. Then I saw his picture, and mine, and our names, his misspelled. The shop woman, leaning forward so that her brow was almost touching mine and I could smell the not unpleasant, soapy scent of her hair, let fall a soft, shivery sigh, as if it were a buried treasure we had unearthed there between us. Then she looked up into my face, and an expression of concern, of solicitude, even, came into her eyes, and she reached out and laid one of her hands tenderly over one of mine. So strange they are, rare, certainly, affecting, but faintly discomfiting, too, those moments when some stranger steps out of the crowd and for no reason other than simple good-heartedness offers a word of consolation, a sustaining arm. What had she seen in me to spark such sympathy? The flinch, the wild stare, the panicked feint to this side now to that, the frozen helplessness. Look at me there, caught in the headlights, speechless with surprise and pain, my last poor secrets all on show, ready to lay my head upon this woman's bombasined bosom and weep my hard heart dry.

But here is the surprising thing. The profoundest shock was not the trick Cass Cleave had played on me, nor what was here revealed, namely that all along she had been aware of who I was and was not. As I goggled at those ancient scraps of newsprint, the
Staandard
announcement of his death and the two photographs that had accompanied his travesty of an interview with me in the
Gazet,
I was thinking not of him, nor even of Cass Cleave, but of Magda. And in that moment I realised at last what I had always known without knowing, that she too had been privy to my secret. Oh, I do not say she knew for certain that I was not Axel Vander, or that the bourgeois origins I professed to despise, the indulgent parents, the grand apartment, the poor relations, were not mine but his; I do not say she knew all this in detail. Her knowledge of my duplicity ran deeper than more detail, it reached far down into my very essence. Do not ask me how she had found me out. Perhaps she met someone who had been acquainted with me before I was Axel Vander – America in those days was rife with other people's secrets – or maybe her spurned Pole had nosed out something about me and my past and had confronted her with it. Or maybe it was simply that she guessed. No matter, no matter. What I marvel at is her silence. All those years when I thought I was preserving myself through deceit, it was really she who was keeping me whole, keeping me intact, by pretending to be deceived. She was my silent guarantor of authenticity. That was what I realised, as I stood that day in the stationer's shop on the Via Bonafous and one whole wall of my life fell down and I was afforded an entire vista of the world that I had never glimpsed before.