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- Herausgeber: Liberties Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
John Montague, best known as a poet, is also a gifted prose writer.A Ball of Firecollects all of his short stories, together with the erotic novellaThe Lost Notebook(which he hoped to have banned, but which ended up winning a major literary prize).In the shorter stories, fromThe Road Ahead, which comments poignantly on the loss of established landmarks, to the title story, in which a series of chance encounters helps unlock a painter s creativity, he casts a cool yet sympathetic eye over his environment, both in Ireland and farther afield.The longer works -The Lost Notebooks(about the incendiary relationship between a troubled American girl and a young Irish man in Florence),Death of a Chieftain(a daringly ambitious story set in Mexico) andThe Three Last Things(a moving meditation on love and death) - stand as pillars within the book.Montague's clear prose is shot through with hard-won insights into his fellow human beings, and the various burdens, physical and emotional, under which they labour. And of course through it all runs the theme of the importance of love, in its many forms.
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A BALLOF FIRE
COLLECTED STORIES
JOHN MONTAGUE
To the memory of Tim O’Keeffe, an exemplar for all gallant publishers
CONTENTS
PREFACE
THE ROAD ALSO TAKEN
I have always been drawn to the prose muse: how could I not be, reared amid the hills of Carleton’s Clogher Valley, and attending the university of Joyce? So although poetry slowly took me over, I was fascinated by stories, especially those of the three O’s (O’Flaherty, O’Faoláin, O’Connor), who charted the insular Ireland of their time. And then Ben Kiely, from my home county, beginning his career …
Joyce’s near-perfect Dubliners haunted me, especially since I read it as a student in Dublin. But the real masters of the short story in English seemed to me D. H. Lawrence and William Faulkner. Lawrence has a wicked story where a collier comes to a mine owner’s house with a message for a Mrs Montague, who opens the door stark naked, thinking it is her husband. This did not sound like my Ulster family!
And the burning, lava-like accumulation of Faulkner’s prose led me to make an old-fashioned pilgrimage to his home place, Oxford, Mississippi. ‘Bill’ was away hunting, but his brother, John, a dapper little man wearing a pink button-down shirt, received us kindly, and, registering my stammer, remarked in his warm southern accent, ‘You speak like our late King.’
I hammered together my first book of stories, Death of a Chieftain, in Paris, sometime after my first poetry collection, Poisoned Lands. It was the harsh period of the Algerian War, and in that fraught atmosphere I composed ‘The Cry’. Although they came from the North, Ben Kiely and Brian Moore were dubious about the ‘thinness’ of the storyline, while Les Lettres Nouvelles, a leading French literary magazine, leaped at it. Considering it was written in 1962/3, it may now seem mildly prophetic.
Coming to the end of the book, I wanted to let loose, building a dream from memories of days at a hotel on the Isthmus of Tehauntepec, in southern Mexico. After all, a Sioux Indian from Rapid City had told me that Sitting Bull, like most famous people, had had an Irish grandmother, so why couldn’t I let the balloon of my fantasy float?
In the 1970s I wrote few stories. I thought of a novel, but hadn’t the time to develop it: some day soon I may reanimate the skeleton, although so far I only seem to be able to sustain a story to novella length. Yet poems kept coming, in the interstices of a busy teaching and family life, and what can one do if the Muse descends but be grateful? Approaching retirement, I felt I could kick up my heels a bit, and went back to an early manuscript, based on my 1950 Wanderjahr, which would become the erotic novella The Lost Notebook. But how explicit could I be? Contraception, abortion and divorce, sex in all its negative aspects, still preoccupied the Irish psyche. I chose to write as honestly – and graphically – as I could, and made sure that the Censorship Board and the Hierarchy received copies. No reaction, except that I got the first Hughes Award for Fiction.
I was also lucky with films, ‘A Change of Management’, scripted by Eugene McCable for RTÉ, and ‘The Cry’, scripted by Derek Mahon for the BBC. The latter created an uproar in the North, with protests by disbanded B-Specials. There were vague plans to film ‘Death of a Chieftain’ which never bore fruit, but the story was published in Mexico, where, to my amusement, it was recognised as a precursor of Magic Realism. After all, in its strange way, it was meant to suggest my solution to the Ulster Problem.
My first fiction editor was Timothy O’Keeffe, at MacGibbon & Kee. A highly generous man, he fostered both aspects of my writing, giving me an advance for two books of poems, Poisoned Lands and A Chosen Light, as well as for Death of a Chieftain. He also appointed me as a first reader, which gave me some influence on their list. His firm was duly absorbed by a larger outfit, but many years later Seamus Cashman of Wolfhound Press would reprint Death of a Chieftain and a new collection, A Love Present.
JOHN MONTAGUE JULY 2008
PART I
1
THE LOST NOTEBOOK
If she does not come, my heart stands still:
Instead of summer, winter in a bound.
And if she comes, my golden girl,
Where do I stand? I die as well.
It was a makeshift notebook of the kind I am writing in now: small, neat, vellum finish; an ordinary writing pad of the kind one might buy in any shabby little street-corner stationer among the sweeties, perhaps with a wolfhound and round tower on its cover. I probably got it in Dublin before I left, but why I carried it with me through Europe that summer I don’t really know; I was never one for writing home, though I probably managed an occasional note to stave off the anxiety of my elders, who had never travelled outside Ireland except via the emigrant boat, ollagoaning, lamenting all the way.
Besides, my wanderings were now accepted in the family with something near fatalism, as a youthful, probably pagan, ritual, leading me far from ‘mother church, motherland and mother’. I do remember sending a triumphant postcard from Padua to my mother, who had a great devotion to St Anthony, among many other saints of course, and another from Assisi, Giotto’s St Francis Preaching to the Birds. It was always my casuistical contention that Europe was packed with shrines, where the saints we heard of in church had lived and died, and now the half-century, 1950, had been proclaimed by the Pope himself as a Holy Year, Anno Santo, so that I could present myself as a pilgrim, ardent to reach the holy door.
It was also my twenty-first year, and in the absence of any official recognition of my coming of age, I had planned and was now giving myself a sort of Wanderjahr, to assuage the hunger for all sorts of experience which I felt lacking in my native land. It was a rhythm that had become part of my life: I would reach out as far as I could on the Continent, for as long as I could manage, and then return slowly, usually through repatriation, to Ireland. There I would manage to survive, buoyed up by all I had seen and heard, until I had to hit the road again. Years later, such escapes abroad would become part of ordinary Irish student life, but in my urgency I was something of a pioneer, a new kind of Hibernian savage, invading the Continent in search of art and love, Peregrinus Hibernicus, a horn-mad celibate with a bright red comb and a roving eye.
It was a different Europe, of course, not criss-crossed with charter planes, not crammed with package tours and student fares. Then you made your way slowly, wearily, by boat and bus and train, waking gradually to some new excitement, like walking out into the aquatic bustle of Venice from Santa Lucia Station. Or cycling through the French countryside, surprised by lines of vines, the thick rustling of maize, giant red tomatoes, a glowing Van Gogh field of tournesols. Or the straight line through Paris from the Gare du Nord to the Youth Hostel at Porte d’Orleans; it made my non-linear intelligence boggle. The fierce roar of the Autoroute du Sud, thronged with long-distance lorries and family cars, was still far away, in the crowded future.
I suppose I was planning to keep a Journal; Gide had just received the Nobel Prize and introspection was fashionable. But I did nothing as systematic as that, for now only fragments from that summer float up before me: a curious visit to the headquarters of the Soviet Zone in Vienna; a night sleeping in a field outside Bologna, waking wet with morning dew; a zealous perusal of the subtleties of Sienese Art, trying to distinguish between all that gold, those slanting eyes! Piecing the jigsaw, I realise that it was a bewildering but necessary summer of growth, a preparation for something unknown, some sensuous epiphany.
The first part takes place in Florence, Firenze, where I had dropped off again on my way back from Rome. Yes, I had made it to the Holy City, all the way down the spine of Italy from Venice, my beard now red and ragged, my arms stippled with freckles. And yes, I did visit the four Basilicas, and see the Pope being ferried on the Sedia Gestatoria. I was within spitting distance of the pale bespectacled Pacelli, Pio Dodicesimo, because I was there as part of an official delegation, the International Conference on Catholic Cinema, to give it its full, sonorous title.
That was because of my work as a film critic on The Catholic Eagle at home in Dublin. So I led a double life; nights in the youth hostel, a hectic barracks on the outskirts of Rome, where a late bus dropped me off in the evenings; days as a delegate at the conference, sporting my one suit for official meetings and receptions. A famous Irish actor was attending it also, using the forum as an excuse for a holiday. And he was very friendly to me, bringing me everywhere with him like a mascot, deferring to my unfledged but extreme opinions in literature and art, my wild plans. Together we gaped at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, loitered through the endless rooms of the Vatican Gallery. Then back to his central hotel in the evenings, where we had cherries soaked in red wine on the terrace. And if I was lucky he would bring me with him afterwards to a trattoria, my one meal of the day. Between the heat and the wine I barely made it back.
But let the journey curve back to Florence, through the white splendour of Rome’s new railway station, after the conference was over, and my generous actor friend had flown away. I had stayed in a pilgrims’ hostel on the way down, and been thrown out for returning late; I tried to explain to the priest in charge that I was trying to combine pilgrimage with sightseeing but the philistine refused to see my point. So this time I made my way to the youth hostel, another large, thronged, happy building. The night burned with light and voices until well after midnight. And during the day I continued my exploration of Florence, from Ghiberti’s Baptistery doors to the Roman theatre at Fiesole, where I sat stunned in the afternoon sunlight.
My problem was time: three days was the limit in any hostel and, though I doubled it by hitchhiking to Siena and back, the time was approaching when I would have to leave. And I had only begun to understand the glory that was Florence! Earnest, intent, insufferable, I was determined to be an apostle of art, a martyr, if necessary, in the cause of beauty; but there seemed no way that I could simply stay on.
I shared the washing up with an English-speaking South African, who was also on his European year before he went home to take over the family business. He was stocky, neat and slow-spoken, but perhaps because we were opposites, we made a good enough team. He knew nothing about art, except that he should know about it, so he probed me for the little I had found out for myself, through a battered copy of an old-fashioned guidebook in my rucksack, which I promised to leave him. There was a Victorian earnestness about Pieter – he probably disapproved of all this paganism but it had to be seen.
So on my last morning he followed me through the city centre for a farewell look, and then bought me a light lunch, a panino and glass of wine, in a trattoria. We sat in the cool, listening to the rustle of the bead curtain as chatty Italians flowed in and out. All this richness and colour was about to leave my life; my rucksack was stowed under the table and I would shortly be tramping towards the station. I was sullen and down-in-the-mouth, a poor companion.
Sympathetic to my silence, he suggested that I should wait for the night train, and come with him to meet a strange young girl he had found himself beside in a queue at the American Express. ‘Very strange,’ he emphasised, in his clipped tones, under his little moustache. ‘You know how Americans are,’ he said, ‘very green but very loud. But she did ask me round. God knows what for. Says she’s a painter and I told her I’d met this young poet chap from Ireland. Like to know what you’d make of her. Really would.’ He sounded uneasy, still terse but tense, for some reason. So instead of the afternoon train to Paris, or hitch-hiking on the dusty fringe of some high road, I found myself squatting on the stone floor of a small studio, at the feet of a young American girl. She was quite young, a little older than me, pretty but shameless by my provincial standards, as she twiddled her brightly painted toes right under our noses. Clearly my South African friend bored her, but she was lonely and wanted to speak English. I had never really known anyone like her, with a halter holding her overflowing breasts, and shorts riding carelessly high on tanned legs. Except that I had met her once before…
II
I had met her in the Uffizi Gallery. Since I didn’t have enough money to eat at midday, I had taken to staying in a gallery through lunch-time, to avoid the sight of people eating; as well as to increase my knowledge of painting, of course. Trying to stave your hunger by staring at the details of master-works is an interesting exercise in mortification, especially in the heat of the day; what I had developed was a restless and ambulatory form of the siesta, like a mad monk on hunger-strike outside the door of a refectory. Down in the Piazza della Signora, happy tourists were tucking in, under gaily coloured awnings. If I looked that way, my eyes stuck out on stalks, so I stared at the paintings, as if through a magnifying glass.
On bad days, all still lifes were banned. Glorious pyramids of ruddy-cheeked fruit; vermilion cherries; green, black and purple grapes; soft furred peaches: on my imagination’s palate they burst endlessly. Streams of juice ran down my chin, seeds stuck to be sucked in my teeth until in the intensity of my hallucination I ran from the room. Sticks of bread doubly disturbed me. Thank God I was in Florence and not in some Dutch museum, with rich rosy sides of beef, freshly hung game or venison, the saliva-raising sight of a Brueghel village feast, full bellies and distended codpieces, rich food and lusty love afterwards. The worst I had to face was Caravaggio’s Adolescent Bacchus, his face already flushed with the wine fumes, a piled bowl of fruit before him to gorge on.
Sometimes I tried to assuage one hunger by another, spending a long time, for example, in the cool decorum of the Botticelli room. Venus rising from her half-shell, a strand of flaxen hair held demurely over her pudenda, her visage pensive; she was as mysterious and refreshing as an early morning by the sea. Luckily, I had not yet become an amateur of the oyster or coquilles Saint Jacques or that half shell might have been another source of temptation.
I was especially drawn to the room with the great Titians, large sensuous females at ease in their nudity, as leisurely and complete as domestic animals. The reclining Venus of Urbino also had a hand over her gently swelling belly to cover her thatch but the eye slid down that listless, boneless arm to join the fingers; it was a gently inviting slope, not a protective pudic gesture. And her soft, brown eyes and coiled auburn hair seemed to gather one into her rich nakedness, to lie beside her on that tousled linen bedspread where she had drowsed so long, be it only as the pampered lapdog curled beside her crossed calves.
But I would have to avoid even them if I had had no breakfast. The light-headedness of hunger can lead to extreme forms of lust, and sometimes I was less aware of the luminous Venetian tonality of the paintings, less inclined to compare them with Bellini and Giorgione in their use of colour, than overcome by their sulky physical presence. A scraggy frustrated Irish adolescent, I gaped at them hungrily, like the cats thrown in the Coliseum, and sometimes I could hardly hold myself back from leaping through the canvas to bite, even slice, a voluptuous golden haunch. Blake’s ‘lineaments of gratified desire’, I thought, as my stomach growled. Would I ever know such satisfaction?
As I was gazing at them, I realised that someone was watching them and me. It was a young blonde with brown tanned skin and ice-blue eyes, like the corn maiden of some Northern tale. With her cascading hair, her slender but fullbreasted figure, she looked as if she had stepped down from the frame of a painting! She had a red belt drawn tightly around her waist and wore bright red slippers of a kind I had seen in the market behind the Duomo. They seemed to flicker back and forth under her light, long skirt, to match her impatience, as she sized me up before speaking: ‘Gee, I wish I could lay on the paint like that,’ she said in a nasal American voice, almost a whine. ‘What’s this guy’s name again?’
Grateful for the excuse to show off my scant knowledge, I gabbled about Titian, Tiziano Vecelli, and his part in the Venetian High Renaissance. She listened with what I hoped was interest, contemplating me with her expressionless eyes. Then she turned on her heel and left with a parting shot that stung: ‘Thanks for the lecture, Mick.’ She made it sound like hick, an insult I knew from my reading. Was it so obvious that I was Irish, a gabbling Paddy? ‘I have to run to American Express. See you around sometime, maybe.’
The last word was emphasised, may-be drawn out with scorn until it seemed to rhyme with unlikely or not if I see you first, buddy. So I had bored her. I watched her tight little bum swagger down the corridor away from me, the lift of each hip a gesture of disdain. Or so I thought, looking hopelessly after the first pretty girl I had spoken to in months…
And yet here I was speaking to her again, my head only a short distance from her warm brown legs and knees. And she was finding me amusing, or at least less boring than my South African friend, whom she teased relentlessly. ‘Are they really all like you down there? We’ve got Negroes, too, you know, but you sound like same fruity mixture of British stuck-up and Georgia cracker when you talk about them. Let ’em be, they can’t be as bad as you sound. Bet your women like them – they got the old jelly roll.’ And she waggled her bottom on the chair, above him.
Pieter did not know how to take her as she rambled on about race and colour and sex – I gathered she was from New York and had definite views about all three. For the moment, I decided to agree with her about them all, if it ensured my being close to her for even a little while longer. Maybe God will be good, I thought with a mixture of faith, hope, and lechery.
Pieter decided to master his irritation by showing that he did not take her seriously; she was too young. ‘I think you are just a naughty girl,’ he said indulgently, waving at her his imaginary swagger stick, a short ruler he had found on the floor near an easel. She went off into wild giggles.
‘Don’t you shake your little stick at me, Mr Man,’ she said in what I recognised as a parody of a Southern accent. Then when he began to look not only puzzled, but angry: ‘Haven’t you read Freud, you nuthead? You’re wagging that stick at me because you want to beat or fuck me, but you don’t dare ask, do you, you silly racist prick?’
Raging, thin-lipped, my South African friend rose to go. He expected me to come with him, but I had been explaining to her earlier about having to leave the hostel. Watching me hesitate, she saw a chance to hurt him still more.
‘Why don’t you park your knapsack here? You look too young to be out but you can’t be dumber than him. If you are, you can always just sleep on the floor for a few days.’
With a weak attempt at a chilly look, the South African left, and Wandy Lang and I stared at each other. That hot July night in Florence, I slept in her narrow bed, beneath her easel.
III
And spent the rest of the month in that cot, except when we quarrelled and I slept on the stone floor in my sleeping bag. A strange duel took place in that hot narrow cell, on the fourth floor of an old Florentine house: a duel of unequals. There was my timidity, so much a product of my time and place, our forgotten island off the broken coast of Europe, which had largely avoided the War. And her avid American greed for experience, spoilt child of a rich but predatory world. We were both looking for something, but she expected it, I vainly hoped for it; the lately victorious and the colonial victim were bound to be at loggerheads.
She wouldn’t help me, at first, during those long, hot nights; every move was left to me. And my knowledge of female anatomy was restricted to picture-gazing: lacking sisters or adventurous girlfriends, I was a typical product of an Irish clerical education, eager but ignorant. Sometimes I made it to the magic centre, but often I fumbled, grappling blindly in that airless tiny oven of a room, where our bodies stuck together like stamps. And every time I fell back, she made sure it hurt.
‘I’m not going to help you. You’re all that I hate, kids that are clumsy and stupid. Why should I show you the works, you little Irish Catholic prick. Fuck you––’
At first, I tried to give some smart answer, like ‘But that’s just what I want you to do.’ But after tirades like these I usually lay awake; silent, hurt, still hoping. And she would rise in the morning, blithe as if nothing had happened. Then we would go to take a caffe latte together, inside the bead curtain if it was too hot, on the sidewalk if there was a cool breeze. And then we would begin our day together, which was usually easier than the night, with her painting, and me trying to write.
And as the days passed, I began to hope against hope that I might be able to please her. She was my meal ticket, of course, and the unsubtle art of freeloading was one I had already learnt a little of in the drab school of Dublin pub life in the late 1940s. But I also believed dimly in my mystic mission as a young poet, and around us lay all the ingredients for an idyll. With that impossible mixture of hunger and idealism, I set out to try and understand this ferocious young woman whom fate had flung directly across my pilgrim path.
Wandy Lang was pretty, rich, but as wild and clawing as a lost alley cat. She was not looking for the way out of an Irish Catholic childhood, stumbling towards fulfilment, but seeking something thing that would anneal, annul the empty ache that was already eating her. Somewhere along the line, someone or something had hurt her, in a more drastic way than all the pious regulations of my education. Or perhaps the combination of money and freedom that her background seemed to offer her was only an illusion that left her still empty and angry. Whatever the reason, she was trying to work it out, in her own strange way, far from her compatriots, in a loneliness that somehow resembled my own intense, Quixotic quest.
Perhaps sex would help? She certainly seemed to have tried it, to judge by her wild language, her ceaseless use of words like prick and ass and cunt. In theory, I was all for calling a spade a bloody shovel, but to hear her pretty young mouth spew swearwords scandalised me; when she was angry it rang like a litany, a litany of desecration, of blasphemy, but also of loss and longing, if I had been able to hear its dark rhythms. But the bruised places in myself had still to unseal themselves, and I could not meet her pain with mine, although it was that hurt which called me to her.
But now her ‘thing’ was art. Her elder brother was a painter, whom she admired blindly, and wanted to emulate. Although, she emphasised, he would be disgusted if he knew she was daring to paint, herself. He had always discouraged her because he was a real painter, a serious painter, like Paul Klee, or ‘Pete’ Mondrian, who was the biggest modern painter, who had replaced nature. Did I know his tree series?
I had never heard of Mondrian, and I certainly couldn’t judge the kind of painting Wandy was doing, carefully planned with an architecture of lines, constructed with the ruler the South African had waggled at her, and then intently filled-in squares, triangles and lozenges of colour. But she really worked: after breakfast, she set up her easel in the middle of the room to catch what little light came through our high window, and with bare midriff and loosely tied hair, she pointed herself at the canvas silently for hours. Heat flared up the Florentine sky, with its glimpses of red tiled roofs, the ochre façade of a high building. Her hair would tumble sweatily down, her forehead bead, until she unconsciously untied her blouse and stood bare-breasted before the canvas, like a defiant young Amazon. Now that I know more of painter and painting, I know that she was trying to imitate somebody, her brother probably, and his peers, in a pathetic parody of their intent professional preoccupation.
While she sweated before her easel, I tried to write poems. But it was too hot to concentrate properly and I was so obsessed with her presence before me in the small room that I could think only on one subject. Particularly when she stood naked to the waist before the easel, hair rippling down to her hips, oblivious of my surreptitious glances. I tried to write little poems about her, in praise of her unmarked young body, its mixture of sensuousness and childish boldness. They were Chinese lyrics, in the style of Pound, whose incarceration had made him an idol for the Irish young: a prisoner for the cause.
Her blonde hair pours
down her studded spine;
bare to the waist,
she stands, my girl.
Surrounded by the shy lasses of my country, I had touched, but rarely seen breasts. In Ireland, it was the blind leading the blind but with Wandy I could stare and stare endlessly, feasting my eyes on those mysterious forbidden globes before I began to try and net them in words.
How warm her white breasts!
Two bowls of cream with
Her nipples, bright cherries.
Such naïve tenderness! But the ardour of that young man in the Florentine heat reaches out for my indulgence across several decades. We were a pair, a team in our blundering ambition: as she dragged her brush across an area of canvas, or peered before adding a touch of colour, I tried to study her as a painter might, my first life class – but a very modern one, for I was painting a standing nude who was trying to paint an abstract: a nearly Cubist vision of reality!
As she works, she pouts.
Her face is young, serious.
Her eyes sharp blue.
And so forth. One day she looked over my shoulder. ‘Hey there,’ she exclaimed, ‘you make me sound nice.’ And she looked at me with warm, surprised eyes. Then she leaned over and gave me a quick kiss, the first she had ever given me in daylight.
From then on, the notebook followed us everywhere, to museums, restaurants, cafés, sometimes churches. She had taken to drawing in it; wild, impulsive scrawls to go with the poems. Clearly, I had found the way to her heart, for even in bed she began to ease up, relaxing her guard to the point where she seemed almost tender. And I was beginning to improve a little, learning how to please, to be a lover, although she was already so precocious that I lagged far behind, a blundering innocent, who had even to be taught how to kiss properly. She taught me other tricks, things that I only half-understood, bending her urgent young body like a bow, as she searched avidly for the next sensation; arching her spine, like a cat, in shudders of self-delight.
Somehow, desperately, I felt that this was wrong, that wild experiment should be the joyous fruit of love, not its budding point. But who was I to argue with her? She already knew so much more than I did about the mechanics of sex that our couplings were bound to seem clumsy and ludicrous, forcing her into the incongruous role of the older woman, the instructress of male naïveté. ‘No, touch me here. Higher up. And keep that other hand down. And slowly, gently. Women like to be stroked.’ Or, in another mood: ‘Don’t tell me you never did it like this! That’s the best way to penetrate, to get it deep. Look at the animals; I thought you said you were brought up on a farm. Some cowboy you are!’ And when I was spent, her hand or tongue would reach out, to revive me, rise me.
I did my best, or thought I did, to follow her urgent instructions. And she tried to control, restrain whatever irritation my incompetence caused her, compared to her previous male friends. Whoever had taught her the erotic arts had done it well, for there seemed to be little that she did not know: taking baths together like mad children, moving the bed until it was under the wall mirror, dancing together naked before we slid to the floor or bed. And for a while we seemed to enter into, at least hover near, the sweet conspiracy of lovers, although such words of endearment were not part of her harsh vocabulary. The widow next door, for instance, was shocked to discover that there was a young man staying with Wandy, a half-naked savage with red hair. Since we shared a lavatory on the landing it was difficult to avoid meeting, but she would lower her eyes when she saw us passing. And once when Wandy came to the door to kiss me, forgetting to cover her breasts, rather not bothering, the dark, startled Italian woman crossed herself several times, lifting the crucifix on her dark dress.
IV
To be twenty-one, to have a girlfriend – a mistress! – and to have the run of Florence; it seemed like the fulfilment of the dream that had lured me all the way from Ireland. I had padded dawn its narrow streets for more than a week before I met her and now she had given me a month’s reprieve, with the added pleasure of being a guide to a beautiful young woman. For she seemed to have lived in Florence as if it were any flat American city, seeing, sensing its quality without understanding it. She knew it was a place to be, but why wasn’t clear to her. So the little I knew I lavished on her while I kept boning up in the British Institute library, to impress her, as I had tried that first time in the Uffizi. Laying my small treasures of knowledge before her like a faithful spaniel, I was often oblivious to the ironies of the situation, as when I introduced her to the Fra Angelicos in the Convent of San Marco.
The first time we got turned away because of the shorts and halter she was wearing. But we came back and in those cool cloisters shaded by flowerbeds and Lebanese cedars, we saw the fruits of the saintly painter’s meditation, a guide to prayer, a fervent hymn to the glory of a Christian God. A long-fingered St Dominic clasping, embracing the Cross down which ran the ruby rivulets of Christ’s passion, the delicate dialogue of the Annunciation, the blue of the Virgin’s cloak and the multicoloured wings of the angel Gabriel, the rainbow-tinted dance of the Elect in his Last Judgement; I could not but hush before such feeling. These were not the gaudy repository images of my Ulster Catholic childhood – they seemed to breathe a mystical aroma, as light and radiant as the wing of a butterfly. Somewhere in me my fading belief stirred, the very faith I felt I had to disdain in order to live.
But for Wandy they were only pretty gewgaws, relics from a world long dead, inspired by emotions that no one would ever need again. Emerging from that rich silence she enquired plaintively: ‘They’re pretty colours, but why did he have to waste so much time painting virgins and saints and old stuff like that? We’ve left all that behind now. My brother says real painting should only be about itself.’
So I brought her to the Medici Palace, also built by Michelozzo. For me it was a Poundian paradigm of creative order, the walls where the Medici, those munificent Mafia, lived and lavished their wealth. They were all there in the ornate frescoes of Gozzoli, Emperors and Patriarchs invited from the East to join them in a stately procession through the landscape of Tuscany. It might be based on the Magi, but the emphasis was on earthly glory, clothes stiff with ornament, gloriously caparisoned horses. She looked for a long time at a handsome young man, astride a leopard.
‘I like him,’ she said, and when I explained that he was the brother of Lorenzo the Magnificent, she added: ‘He’s as pretty as my brother,’ and smacked her lips.
She went silent at last in the Medici crypt before the unfinished torsos of Michelangelo. She lingered before Dusk and Dawn, froze like a gun dog before Day, fighting to free himself, large-muscled and intent, from cloudy matter. But it was the graceful, sombre figure of Night, its large breasts and bent head, with sad, brooding eyelids, which finally got to her. ‘Jee-sus,’ she exclaimed, ‘I thought you said these were done by a man. He must have been pretty lonely to feel like that. I didn’t know you could get that deep down chipping a stone. It’s as bad as the blues.’
She tried to thank me, in her own way, for trying to show her so much, for sharing. Day after day passed without a dispute, and in bed at night she was, if not submissive, more subdued in her demands, less insulting in her remarks on my performance. Something akin to peace began to grow between us. Surprised by beauty daily, we made our fumbling efforts to create it ourselves, and afterwards we strolled by the Arno, holding hands as the sun lit the red of the roofs, the intense yellow-brown of the river.
On every walk we seemed to discover something, a lovely Venus in the Boboli Gardens, The Deposition of Christ from the Cross by Pontormo, in a church near the Ponte Vecchio. And if I didn’t know about Mondrian, I had heard of Masaccio, Big Tom, and led her to obscure churches where the walls were covered with his work – Adam and Eve fleeing from paradise, his head bowed, her hands shading her body from a relentless red angel. This time she did not complain about but admired the treatment of the subject; after all, Florentine painting was a disciplined art, with the kind of geometry of perspective that she was looking for in Modern Art: colour called to colour, shape balanced shape.
From the blue and white cherubs of della Robbia to the flower-covered meadows of Botticelli’s Primavera, I tried to offer it all to her, watching as she watched, ignorant but excited, a child gazing at a galaxy of dazzling stars. Back in the Botticelli room she danced for joy, like the three Graces in their transparent veils, and when I told her that Venus rising from her shell was Simonetta, the beloved of the young man riding the Gozzoli leopard, she clapped her hands like someone listening to a nursery story for the first time. Especially when I added: ‘She makes me think a bit of you, when you look thoughtful, with your hair down.’ And danced for me again, shyly moving her lissom body to the inaudible rhythms of the paintings. My heart was in my mouth as I watched, her graceful heel and instep echoing the flaxen-haired Florentine beauties of the wall. And then she bowed, and broke into a phrase of Italian I did not know: ‘Mi piace molto ballare’, ‘I really love to dance’.
When she had first come to Florence she had tried to learn Italian from a family to which she had an introduction, again arranged by her brother. Now she asked them if she could bring me along and told them proudly that I was a poet. With the deference of older Europeans to any mention of high art, I was received, scraggy, sweating in my single suit, as if I were the real thing, instead of a gaping novice.
Red wine flowed, pastasciutta and liquid syllables of Italian that sounded splendid even if I only dimly understood. And when our host began to quote Dante, with all the sonorous intimacy of a Florentine, I responded with Yeats, boom answering boom, like church bells ringing across the city. For the first time I heard those great lines describing the plight of the doomed lovers, Paolo and Francesca, their adulterous eyes meeting over a beloved book:
When we read how a lover slaked his drouth
upon those long desired lips, then he
who never shall be taken from my side
all trembling, kissed my ardent mouth.
and I countered with:
Beloved, may your sleep be sound
That have found it where you fed.
Our host’s wife beamed. Wandy beamed. And when they wouldn’t let us leave after lunch but ushered us for the siesta into a small white room with a real bed with laundered linen sheets, Wandy was beside herself with girlish delight. ‘They must think we’re married or engaged or something.’ And she blushed. And in those cool white sheets we made love with no preconceptions, no inhibitions, sweetly, tenderly, turning to each other with muted cries of delight, nibbling and hugging like children before we started again, our lips still joined by a light skein of kisses. That afternoon was her richest gift to me, a glimpse of near ecstasy, of the sensuous fulfilment I longed for in my damp, distant island. And like all such moments it had a scent of permanence, a small addition to the sum of sweetness in the world. Finally she fell asleep, her blonde head resting on my numbed arm, in total ease.
In the crook of my arm
my love’s head rests;
in each breath
I taste her trust.
V
That was our high point, the crest of the wave. But it couldn’t last, it seems; we soon plunged down. Already that evening, as we stumbled home, she had begun to turn sour. Between the harmony of the afternoon and the airless heat of her little room, the dinginess of the narrow iron bed, was a distance she couldn’t, wouldn’t, cross. When she was in that mood she had to yield to every caprice, however hurtful. There is a certain kind of character that needs to strike out, to wound, and if the victim cares enough to complain, all the worse for them. I fought back at first, but when I found that not only was it useless but it made things much worse, I lapsed into stricken silence.
As she did also, except that she could dredge depths of melancholy, of sadness, that I had never seen in anyone before. As the heat grew daily, we took to going to a suburban swimming pool, to escape from the baking claustrophobia of her little studio. The pool was a gaudy, massive imitation of a Roman Baths, the kind of official architecture that flourished during the Mussolini period. Like most young Americans, Wandy Lang could swim like a fish, used to pools and swimming coaches from her infancy. And like most young Irishmen, I had not been properly taught, and floundered nervously at the shallow end, despising my own pale freckled skin.
And for most young Italians, the Baths was a theatre in which to strut, and show off their wares. They wore crotch-tight swimming trunks and as they looked at her they stroked themselves, openly. And she seemed to like it, to welcome it; there were very few other women present and she had their full attention, especially as she wore the first two-piece I had ever seen, exposing her acorn-brown navel, that cup from which I had newly learnt to drink. When she struck into the water they dipped and dived around her, like dolphins. And when she stretched down to cool, they paraded like distended fighting cocks; one could nearly smell the sperm. As I climbed gingerly in at the shallow end, to practise the breast stroke, they raced past, showering me with spray.
Humiliated, I sat with a towel around my burnt shoulders and tried to contemplate the water, as a kind of exercise. Water in swimming pools changes appearance more than in any other container. In a pool, water is controlled and its rhythms reflect not only the sky but, because of its transparency, the depth of the water as well. If the surface is almost still and there is a strong sun, a dancing line with all the colours of the spectrum will appear anywhere. I tried to share the intensity of my contemplation with Wandy, appealing to her pictorial sense, but she only grunted, as if I were a boring schoolboy, distracting her from the company of grown-ups. My appeal to our artistic comradeship was in vain.
One afternoon I could take no more, and tried to protest to Wandy, where she lay on the edge of the pool, holding her shoulders and breasts up to the sun, then untying her bikini halter to turn her breasts downwards. This move always delighted her audience, especially since she did it slowly, to let them feast their eyes on her body. I could neither stand nor understand it: I had begun to love that body, and that she should let them gape and slaver over it was beyond me.
‘Shut up, you little puritan,’ she snapped back at me. ‘Just because you can’t swim properly, you want everyone else to go round hunched up like a cripple. You Irish hate water and sun.’ I tried to explain to her that, despite their preening and pushing, her admirers were as frustrated as any Irish provincial. The dark cloud of la mamma, as well as holy Mother Church, hung over the home; she was dealing with, teasing, regaling the most conventional males in Europe, with a double set of values – one for their own women, the other for whores and foreigners. Their only experience of sex, outside marriage, would be through the brothel, and there money ruled, especially since the dollars of the American army of occupation had ruined the trade. They were full of contempt for foreigners, especially women, on whom they would exact revenge for their humiliation in war. If she did let them near her, they would only despise and soon drop her.
I was brilliant, I thought, a week’s bile exploding in a sermon that surprised even myself. Had the fury of Savonarola, as well as Fra Angelico, infected me after San Marco, where I had returned to visit his tiny cell and contemplate on my own? Certainly there was a stench of burning flesh in my speech, a furious rhetoric which wrapped up both her and them, my disappointment at her desertion, my jealousy of their sun-warmed maleness. But most of the information was not mine; I had collected it, unconsciously, from film after film, where the tension between the sexes in Italy inflamed the celluloid.
‘So you think you know it all,’ she said angrily, after we came plodding home from the pool, and began to pull off our heat-dampened clothes. She was sitting on the bed, half-naked, her skirt already shed to the floor, showing her warm gold thatch. ‘Well, I’ve been fucking since I was fifteen.’
Silence.
‘And when did you start?’ She answered herself easily. ‘You never did, did you? Boy, your country must be backward. You hardly even know where the cunt is. Well, take a good look at it now – for the last time.’ And she lay back, provocatively spread-eagled on the bed, the pretty red shape of her sex, part wound, part flower, held open to me. But when I came forward to touch her, she jack-knifed up, laughing and jeering. ‘You’re not going to use me for your anatomy lesson, brother. If they didn’t teach you anything about sex in your country, don’t come crying to me. And don’t try to tell me about men; I know. You’re ashamed of your body; you can’t talk. Before I met you, you didn’t even know how to clean your foreskin, a real hillbilly. Christ, I don’t know what they did to you in your silly schools, but your prick isn’t part of you.’
She was right, of course; in school we wore shorts in the showers when we came to hose ourselves down after another sweaty, exhausting game of football, which seemed designed to drain us. And yearly we got a lecture on sex from a priest, his face brick-red with embarrassment as he tried to explain something that he barely knew about himself. Our information was garnered furtively, in dirty jokes and stories. Meanwhile the sap rose urgently, blindly, in our bodies, adolescents in the charge of celibates who were more scared than us of that pulsing power, the fermenting energy of sex that could not be denied, or channelled for long. But why did she have to mock me? Was I not more to be pitied than laughed at, to use our local Ulster expression? Between her early excess of knowledge and my ignorance was a gap that only goodwill could cross, and Wandy did not see why she should take charge of my re-education, any more than I was willing to accept her coarseness. Who had initiated her into sex, leaving her with such a mixture of avidity and terrible loneliness?
Meanwhile, we quarrelled, heat, anger, frustration crackling through that narrow room. After each attack, she tried to make it up to me, pleading silently, almost childishly, for forgiveness, in little ways that tore my heart. She would bring me a newspaper, for example, or an expensive book from one of the international bookshops. Or a brightly coloured pencil with a rubber on the top; a new fountain pen. But I wouldn’t come to the pool again, determined not to be hurt by her, or those grinning young Italian males, shorts bulging like nets after a day’s catch. I had had enough machismo to last me for a lifetime; instead, I trudged to the cool of the British Institute library, absorbing myself again in books, trying to blot out the images of longing and rage that surged in me. It was another version of my artistic hunger-strike and about as successful: a sexstarved bookworm, I could not, like the common or garden worm, split in two and have sex with my other half.
Suddenly a detail from Berenson’s Florentine Painters of the Renaissance would come alive, and a slender, delicious young body would stand, not before me, but before a gaping crowd who devoured her with their eyes. Then I fled to poetry, laboriously trying to decipher the message of the Duino Elegies. But then Rilke would betray me, his spiritual search turned sensuous, and I would nearly weep with jealousy and desire, the words fading on the page before me. Where could I be safe from the fragrant, furious presence of that wild young woman whom I both adored and loathed? A raw little American bitch who could scarcely read – how had I allowed her to shred me apart like this when, a star student, I already knew so much more about everything than she did? Except sex; the sharp perfume of her young, hot body was in my nostrils, until, like a maddened monk plagued by noonday visions of lewdness, I neady swooned. I was in love with this terrible young woman, in love, maybe, with the idea that I had been sent to help her. But how? I struggled for some formula of acceptance, suitable for an Ulster ascetic, an Armagh anchorite.
When I wouldn’t return to the pool, she organised a trip to the real sea, to Viareggio, perhaps because I said Rilke had once stayed there. And how sweetly careful her preparations were! She had a picnic basket, with a whole cooked chicken, a flask of wine, a good cheese and ripe fruit; just like any normal sweetheart, wife or mother, organising an outing with a loved one. We bathed, and lay under a parasol, and bathed again, running with linked hands into the waves. And to dance along the strand, that private intense dance of pleasure which I had not seen for a long time.
By the seashore
my love dances:
the waves press
to kiss her feet.
Phoebus Apollo,
the sun god,
the light bringer,
has blessed our feast.
But before we were bouncing back to Florence again by bus, her mood had already swung back to bitterness. There was a song she kept speaking of, a song of Billie Holiday; a name, like Mondrian, which I had never heard of in Ireland. It was ‘Gloomy Sunday’, and it was what she called blues, based on an old Hungarian tune, adapted by the doomed black singer. It had caused so many deaths, she said, that it was sometimes known as the Hungarian Suicide Song, and it was banned by some radio stations for its melancholy. If you listened carefully, you would realise that it was the lament of someone deep into drugs, for whom life was too much pain to sustain. And she told me of Lady’s life, the heavy drugs, the brutal lovers; a black boyfriend of Wandy’s claimed to have met her.
At this point, the seemingly endless cloud of our quarrels induced a kind of hallucinatory confusion. Did she possess some kind of radio or record player, an early portable phonograph? She certainly crooned the words to herself every evening in the hot darkness, as the light faded in the small, high window. I watched as the head I had tried to love sank lower and lower, drowning in a sadness, a thick, black gloom that resounded through those strange, husky tones, like the dark wax wasps exude:
Sunday is gloomy
My hours are slumberless.
Dearest, the shadows
I live with are numberless
Lulled by the spell of the song, she would topple slowly sideways to the floor, asleep. Above her was the easel she no longer used much; the few half-hearted attempts she had made recently reminded me of a pump or bucket trying to dredge from a long-dried well. Something was terribly wrong, and I didn’t know what to do about it. I was as unequipped as I had been at the pool to sound the depths to which she was sinking, to revive and rescue her.
In the window
daylight fails.
My love’s head
also falls…
The ochre shade
of the walls
fades; cracks
on a grey rock.
Love once
lit the room,
is there any
way back?
VI
Towards the end of the month, her money began to run out. What were we to do? Half-heartedly, I offered to change my last traveller’s cheque from Cook’s, the one that was supposed to bring me to Paris. She shook my offer away, partly because she understood my reluctance only too well, and also because, perhaps, she wanted us to maintain our roles. It had to be her money, her flat, if she was to keep the upper hand in our relationship – to call the shots, as she coarsely said. ‘I’m not going to raid the poorbox’ was another mocking reply, when I tried again.
So I waited, using all my newly won training in restraint. After a day or so sucking oranges, propping her head with her fist in total, sulky silence, her features distorted, she seemed to come to some decision. She told me curtly to stick around, while she went to see the owner of the flat. She came back with him, and another, to my eyes, ancient Italian lizard, whom I had already seen in the Black Market when we went to change dollars. A typical sensale, behind his old-fashioned linen suit.
We sat talking for a while in pidgin English and then suddenly I felt as if there was a vacuum in the room. No one bothered to speak, all politeness was dropped as they stared at me, or rather right through me. Thick as a root, I finally still got the message. I went out and wandered the endless streets, raging. Even Florence couldn’t please me: the statue of David seemed brazen, brutal, like the smirks of the young Italians on their farting motorcycles and lambrettas. At least I had a girl and didn’t have to go to whores, as they did, or pester foreigners in the streets. Finally I decided to turn back: why had she driven me out for those repulsive old codgers, with their triumphant leers, like Rembrandt’s Susanna and the Elders? Surely she would not let them touch her young beauty? I felt as protective as Galahad, as wrathful as Savonarola.
She was cleaning up the place when I got back. She had borrowed a broom from our surprised neighbour, and was wielding it well, with all our clothes, belongings, tidied into a corner, and the only carpet hanging through the small window. I came in slowly, spotted that my rucksack was still on its peg, and sat on the bed to be out of her way. It had been made, which was not usual, with the sheet tucked under the pillow.
‘What happened?’ I stammered finally, when she slowed down. She did not answer, so I waited until she sat down again, on the only place she could, on the bed next to me.
‘What h-h-happened?’ I tried again. ‘I ought to know. I-I want to know what they did.’
She turned her face towards me, blank at first, that deliberate blankness I had come to know so well, which baffled and troubled me. Then a rising anger sharpened her features, made her blue eyes blaze.
‘So you want to know, Mr Irishman, Mr James Joyce the Second, the budding poet. A little unwashed priestly prick is more like it. Well, you can hear my confession, you pious little bastard. They wanted to fuck me, the old farts, but they’d be too afraid, too afraid of heart attacks, too afraid of mama. So they just felt me up …’
Dumb, head down, angry at her, sad for her, ashamed of myself, I listened. There was no escape from, no recourse for, what I was hearing.
‘Yeah, they felt me up, good and plenty. One stuck his fingers up, while the other mauled my breasts. Then they changed around, like a ball game. You’re shocked, aren’t you, little Mr Know-It-All from Nowheresville? Maybe I even liked it better than your fumbling. My nipples hardened, anyway.’
The anger was subsiding in her voice; that strange sadness again.
‘The owner spotted that of course, and the bastard stopped. He said I was a bad girl and should be punished.’
At last I was indignant. ‘Surely, you didn’t let them?’
‘Did I what? We needed the money, didn’t we?’ She turned to face me, on the bed.
‘Yeah, I let them spank me a bit and tickle me with the ruler but the bruises won’t show. And now we don’t need to worry about the rent. And look under that pillow: we’ll be able to eat out tonight.’
And so we did, splendidly, under a trellis lit with tiny coloured lanterns. We had melon and prosciutto, bistecca alla fiorentina, and pints of Chianti. As we made our way back she staggered; she had been talking volubly about her family, how her father didn’t love her mother any more, and had been fucking around, of her admiration for her brother, ‘who is going to be a great painter, you’ll see’, but was probably bent.
‘But he has the prettiest boyfriends,’ she said. ‘I wish he’d pass them on to me. I wouldn’t even mind climbing in with them: I love my brother, damn it. I hope he doesn’t kill himself.’
As she cried out the last sentence people turned to look after us in the street. At first she didn’t notice, launched into her monologue. ‘But they don’t want the kid sister. Only the old geezers come sniffing after me. Especially in Europe – everyone’s so mixed-up over here.’
And then she saw the shock and amusement of the passers-by, who skirted us, as I propped her along: a drunken young girl was not a normal sight in Italy.
‘Fucking Italians,’ she screamed, turning to give them the finger. ‘Why don’t you go and get laid at home, you greaseballs. You fawning fuckers.’
There were two theatrically dressed carabinieri at the end of the street, and I didn’t want them to spot her. I had already had some experience of the hatred Italian police could show for visitors who got out of hand; in every hostel there was someone who had a grim story. Besides, at long last here was a situation I was familiar with. I held her up as straight as I could, hauled her up the stairs, and when she lurched towards the bed I helped her to undress, the now-crumpled skirt and stockings she wore for special outings, to get into churches and restaurants, posing briefly as a modest American miss.
Slack and vulnerable she lay across the bed, drunken mirth slowly breaking down into something even deeper than her usual sadness. Desperation, perhaps?
‘They’ll be back, of course, the greasy bastards, old meat-balls. They know what I am, they know they can do anything with me. For them I’m just a little American whore. And maybe they’re right. Anything goes–’ She began to cry, a shallow stream that made her features ugly, nearly old. ‘But you don’t know who I am. And you never will.’ And again she crooned:
Sunday is gloom-y
with shadows I spend it all.
My heart and I
have decided to end it all.
That night I tried to hold her gently, to console her, but she kept pushing my hands away, as if I were molesting her. ‘Go away, go away,’ she cried, from the depths of her offended youth. ‘Leave my tits alone; they’re mine, damn you, they’re mine.’ As she turned and moaned in the hot night, I lay awake beside her. I was at sea, out of my depth completely. I liked what I could understand of her, the childish eagerness when she saw something beautiful, clapping her hands before a Botticelli, doing her little dance when something I had written pleased her. But her other side frightened me. What she called my awkward body pulsed with need, and yes, I was ashamed of it, as I had been taught to be, in the gloomy corridors of school. ‘Take your hands out of your pockets, boys!’ rang out the Dean’s reprimand. Or in the intimate dark of the confessional: ‘Don’t defile your body, the temple of the Holy Ghost.’ But I was anxious to get rid of that shame, to be free. Until I was, I couldn’t help her, and I was beginning to be afraid of her games, those emotional snakes and ladders that exhausted me.
