Napoleon's Roads Read online

  ‘Excuse me!’ he’d said, as she’d left – leaning out of the lift, holding the door open himself now. ‘We’ve just decided to go back down, for a nightcap. Would you like to join us?’ And, just as spontaneously – as if the gesture, if that is what it had been (but whose had it been?) had already made sense of things, even before the idea had arrived – she had accepted.

  They had ordered a bottle, a famous, elegant white wine from the Cape – he was quietly celebrating, he’d explained, telling her of the award he was about to receive – and then, after just the one glass, he’d excused himself, said that he was feeling more tired than he thought and needed his rest, and, leaving them there, insisting that they stay, had gone up again to the eleventh floor.

  It hadn’t taken him long to go to sleep. The double-glazed windows opened in the European way, inward from the top, and there had been a breeze, cooling and soporific after the heat of the day, so that he’d not pulled the heavy drapes, but let instead the thinner, transparent curtains catch the soft light of the moon and the distant streetlamps. He had gone over the lines of an old song – he could never tell when it would come back to him – again and again, trying to get them right. Somewhere between the third and the fifth verses, at a point he’d stumbled upon, over and over, for so much of his life now, he fell asleep, and couldn’t have said how much later it was – but there was no sound of traffic, and the room had a long-after-midnight cool – that he half-woke to see her undressing with the billowing curtain about her, then felt her climb in, naked, and put her arm around him.

  In the morning, as they’d showered and dressed, they’d said nothing. There was no need. Halfway down on their way to a late breakfast, however, with no-one else in the lift, she’d suddenly turned and kissed him, that was all, lightly and gently on the lips, and he’d asked, at last, how it was. ‘Nice,’ she’d said. ‘It was nice,’ smiling softly. ‘She had a nice mouth.’

  GRIEF

  We are early – have to be, to greet the mourners – and sitting on a bench beside the open coffin. A strict ritual. Knowledge passed from funeral to funeral, by those who have been to so many. There has been discussion as to whether her face should be lightly veiled, as it was when we entered and the lid was first removed, or uncovered. Aldo wants it uncovered, and it’s at last his say. His mother. For some reason the funeral directors have made no attempt to disguise the wounds on her face and I can see now how large they are. But they are on her right side and we are seated on her left. Aldo touches her cheek tenderly – brushes it, rather, with the edge of his hand – then leans over, kisses her on the forehead. It is the first time I have ever seen him kiss her.

  ~

  I am still thinking about the cat. A lingering image on the mind’s retina. A dying glow. You look into the light – at some lit object – and then close your eyes, and the light, the shape of the object is still there, blurred at the edges, its features lost; some force emanating from within. Except that in this case it was not light. Was, and was not. Is not. A tunnel vision. A vortex down which, since it happened, I am always falling yet never seeming nearer or farther away. A kind of vertigo. And the mountains today like great waves there on the horizon, about to engulf us.

  ~

  The old lady died on the Tuesday. Sad, but no great surprise. I’d heard her from the rooms below, for six weeks or more, shouting, calling out names, lost in the corridors of herself. Long days of silence and then it would break out again. She would. I don’t know what brought it on. The wind maybe. Or some weather inside her. Katia told me of her death almost matter-of-factly as I was talking with Igor on the balcony. There’d been a phone call in her study, and she came out. ‘Nona just died,’ she said, ‘at the hospital a few minutes ago. That was my father. He’s there.’ And we went on with our day, tentatively, not knowing what else to do, waiting for something to arrive, to break.

  ~

  A nausea, perhaps. The overwhelming weight of being. But also something more, surely. The heart was wrenched, as if something had prised it open. The opposite of nausea. Not closed in by things, but offered them, in their depth. Or drawn by them, rushed into them. As if one were being sucked out of oneself. A force. A kind of gravity. The cat at its centre, there in the boot-room.

  ~

  At Alex’s, while we talked at the table inside, our chairs angled towards the French doors so that we could see the view, the cats came, four, with a fifth somewhere off in the forest – dying, Jacqueline said. All of them were scrawny, under-nourished. Jacqueline fed them but they never fattened. Village cats. Worm-ridden probably. Katia always annoyed that Alex and Jacqueline didn’t pay them more attention, offer more affection, see their condition. Katia rescued a white kitten two years ago, bonded with her instantly on the lawn, took her home. In twenty-four months she’s become sleek, independent, strong. Bianca. At the window, late at night, while I read. Waiting for entrance. ‘That one’s Bianca’s mother,’ Jacqueline says, pointing out a gaunt, long-haired tabby, oldest of the four. Looking as if she might be dying too. ‘No,’ says Jacqueline, reading our minds, ‘She has always looked like that.’ So many cats in these villages. You’d think they were the inhabitants, not humans.

  ~

  This late afternoon – this late afternoon and on into the evening – I have watched a mass of clouds gather in the north-east and darken to a deep bruise-purple, and felt the pressure mounting within them, electrical, torrential. Couldn’t it be like that? The Outside? And now, just moments ago, the first lightning. A crack. A fissure in the sky.

  ~

  Igor left, in any case, not knowing what to do. I waited for Aldo to return from the hospital, anticipating his grief. But when he came back he put the car away, went into the downstairs kitchen for a while, then came out and went down to the fields. Perhaps he was sobbing down there. I don’t know. And as to what Katia was feeling, there are times I can’t tell that either, especially when it comes to family. Her grandmother hated cats. And Katia had claimed to hate her grandmother for hating them.

  ~

  You carry such things around with you. I was sitting on the terrace of that strange hotel a hundred kilometres away, a fortnight later. Who ever heard of a hotel room without a table, a chair? And so I’d come downstairs. It was quiet on the terrace, and shaded by the building, out of the sun. A broad, calm view of slopes covered with trellised vines, mountains capped with snow even at this late stage of summer. And in the vineyard just below the terrace a dirt track, leading off along the edge of the vines, turning at the end into a small wooded area, disappearing from sight. What is it about a track that makes one walk along it in one’s mind, wonder what one would see? Grasshoppers, I thought suddenly, or a butterfly, a large bee on some thick clover beneath a vine-stock. And silence. There would be silence. That as soon as you listened to it would be full of busyness, the constant whispering and shuffling of things, the breathing that becomes almost a hum, a soft shrillness answering from within. Would the track reach the mountains, if I followed it? This dream, of all tracks merging, everything connecting, drawing you …

  ~

  As the priest delivered the eulogy I was looking at the stones. The cracks in them, the spaces between, the broken places. Filled with crumbled mortar. Here and there droppings that Danaja’s broom didn’t catch. Of mice, not rats. Too small for rats. Evicted temporarily but watching from somewhere. Rafters, cracks in the walls. To come out and re-occupy when all was finished. This chapel not much used. Another year, two, before the next disturbance. Light filtering through dust motes. Tiredness in the priest’s voice, or just a studied calm, as he went through the formulae, holding something at bay. That hugeness inside us, outside us.

  ~

  She had fallen. I had been working at my desk and there’d been a commotion below, muted: I couldn’t hear any sign of panic. A dragging of furniture, metal frame on tile, that can only have been her bed. Without the language I can’t help much, think I am only in the way. And others we
re there in any case. And then, ten minutes later, Aldo, asking for Katia though he knew she wasn’t here. And explained, although I only half-understood. Except that he needed to tell. I understood that. That she had fallen. Hurt herself. And went away, with a kind of shrug. His shrug. As much to the world as to me.

  A few minutes later an ambulance arrived. I watched from the upstairs window as they brought her out. She looked unconscious, head back as if in mid-gasp, a wound on her cheek, another above her eye. Not much blood. Why do I think it thickens, in the elderly, almost reluctant to leave?

  ~

  He had been there, Aldo, in the hospital, at her bedside. She’d complained of feeling sick, wanting to vomit, and he’d called for a nurse. By the time someone came she’d passed out and her eyes had rolled back. They had taken her away, and left him there waiting. Soon they returned and told him she had died. He told this to Katia that night, late, after I had gone to bed. They would not use the church for the funeral, nor the priest, not this one. No surprises there. They’d use the small chapel in the cemetery instead, and arrange for someone else to come. They’d have to spend the next day cleaning. The chapel stank of mice – or rats, who knew? Katia thought rats – and there were droppings everywhere. I offered to help, but no, she’d do it with Danaja. It was all arranged.

  ~

  I don’t remember when it was I saw the moth. On the light-fitting over the sink. There are moths here day and night during the summer, as there are anywhere when you leave the doors and windows open to catch the night air. Souls, people say. Psyche. This one of a bright green I’ve never seen on a moth before. Uniform, unvariegated, the colour of a grass-blade in late-summer sun. An after-image of day. But why? So that I would see it? Carry it into my sleep? As if it needed a ride somewhere, and I were a psychopomp.

  ~

  Katia is at loggerheads with the priest, a new appointee. Over an old transgression, on his part not hers. When they were at university together. A drunkard, and violent. She’s had him banned from the house, by order of the bishop who’s been inundated with calls to bring back the previous priest. His response to ban the previous priest from the parish entirely so that the new one can get on with it. But now Nona is dead, and Katia’s parents have bitten the bullet, gone to the bishop’s house, caught him and his minions at breakfast. He’d have looked petty to refuse. A special dispensation. The previous priest allowed back, just this once.

  ~

  Heavy rain the night before the funeral. Air clear in the morning, all the haze washed out. The far mountains outlined clear against the sky, mist like a white skin on the plain, peaks floating above it unanchored, cut adrift. I’d been worried that the grave had already been dug and would now be filled with water, but no, they must watch the weather. Came early in the morning and dug it then. Three men, who by the time the funeral had commenced had changed into suits. In the same small plot as her husband, dead forty-five years now. How would they do it? Dig until they find a trace of him and then place her on top? His coffin rotted now, surely. Gone. These things you don’t think about until you need to. So many bodies in that small cemetery. And how will they manage with me? Not so hard I suppose. I will be ashes in a jar. Katia will hold me.

  ~

  A thought crosses the mind. Or is it a vision, a glimpse? This of the moth – as if I were with it – in the garden somewhere, feather-light in the corners of darkness. Dreaming me, moving on.

  ~

  A week after. The eighth-night Mass. Has she been waiting, for this final permission? Aldo is anxious that he not have to go alone, but the church is being painted; the first floor of the gallery next door is to be used instead. And Lucia, Katia’s mother, is still on crutches after her operation, can’t handle the stairs. He comes to ask Katia to go with him, knowing full well her fury with the church, and she too at first refuses – he has left it too late, the dinner is already on the table – but then unexpectedly relents. Leaves the meal half-eaten. She will be half an hour, no more.

  I sit and watch the sunset. Half an hour, forty-five minutes, an hour. People are walking back from the Mass in first darkness. More people than I would have thought, but then Nona has been here a very long time. And then suddenly, from the courtyard, Katia’s voice calling, urgent. I go to the landing. She is holding something to her chest. A cat, she says, and it’s dying, might be dead already, she can’t tell. Bring water. Bring food. By the time I get down she has laid it on its right side on the floor of the boot-room. She rushes into the house to get a syringe, so that she can feed it water drop by drop.

  I watch it in the pool of yellow light, can see no movement. Long, thick hair, matted, gaunt, either very old or very ill. Both. It must weigh almost nothing but already the gravity has flattened it against the tiles. It. Him. Her. Such sad stillness. And then suddenly the right forepaw stretches, lunges almost, a spasm, and goes limp again. Within seconds Katia is back and tries to coax it to drink from the syringe, but the water simply runs out onto the floor. We place rags in the alcove at the side and she moves it there. There is no resistance in its body. It droops in her hands like something already far off. As we finish our dinner she tells me the story. That she’d seen the cat in the grass by the road as she was walking to the Mass, sick, obviously dying, and straight afterward had run back there, to find that it had moved to the other side. Robbie had called from his porch to say that it had been there for three days already, and the woman next door to him had been feeding it. She had checked next door; no-one was there; so she had gathered it up and brought it home. When I express consternation that people have been walking past it for days and that no-one has taken it to a vet, she tells me that I still don’t know these people. For them it’s just a cat. It, not he, not she.

  ~

  It was later, just after ten, I think. I had been reading some dry philosophy, bored, skimming, looking for something. I suppose you could say my mind wandered, without in any way signalling that it was doing so. And there was a sudden tunnel, a vision. I was looking at the cat – although it was impossible, although I was at my desk and it was downstairs and across the courtyard, in the boot-room – as if through a portal, or port-hole, surrounded by darkness, in a pool of hot, rancid light. And had just realised what I was seeing – that it was the cat, so deep and so burdened with its dying – when the wave struck and whelmed over me and I was submerged in it, fighting for breath. Of anguish, a sadness beyond measure. And I was standing there, before Katia, there was nowhere else to go, the sobs breaking from me, despite all I could do to hold them.

  When I slept at last it was to dream of a body discovered, a century after a shipwreck, frozen in Antarctic ice, and then of a bubble rising with unbearable slowness through a tar-like substance – a bubble that had been rising for millennia – at last reaching the surface, releasing its ancient, rotten air.

  ~

  The mourners are filing by, grasping our hands as they pass. Condolences. With twenty minutes still to go before the priest arrives most of them are seated, in silence, thinking, waiting. A very pious man in a back row – Katia has pointed him out as the bishop’s informer – takes out his beads and begins to say the rosary, and suddenly, as if a wave has swept over the room, the whole congregation of elderly women, elderly men, has joined him. Breaking from dry throats, scarcely more than a rasping at first, wind through dry grass, the prayer builds, pushing its way through voices almost too tired to stand, finding its passages, a bass drone slowly filling the space as water fills a jug. Groaning up through the stones, an ancient poetry underneath, within, of grief and bewilderment, incomprehension, overlaid by the old rituals and recipes of containment, this chanting of the rosary, people burying their own dead again, any funeral a reawakening, reburying, re-grieving, mothers, fathers, daughters, brothers, friends, wives, husbands, again, in slow showers of earth, insubstantial, heavy as this shadow, out of the afternoon sunlight, her death mask almost beautiful in its rest, after the torment, waxen, pearl-grey, the frigh
t and confusion become dignity, music moving through us in a kind of praise, making us instruments, wind, clay vessels, a kind of brooding bird, almost dove.

  LOST PAGES

  It’s a constant temptation of the human to invest the unknown with ulterior meaning, to see in the gaps of its own understanding some purposeful hand beyond. But how else explain the lost pages? The lines, the whole tracts of thought gone. If I can’t get them back it’s surely time they had some epitaph, though even in proposing such a thing there’s trepidation, apprehension that this, too, will mysteriously evaporate before it sees the light of day. Although perhaps it could be seen as some kind of test: proof positive, if this also goes missing, and proof negative if it does not, although such might also be a nefarious attempt to obscure the matter.

  ~

  It was a familiar joke, a story to be told while drinking or after dinner at Sarafini’s, a whimsy to most of his writer friends, although to him in solitary moments – moments of self-doubt or envy – also a matter of regret, resentment, even mourning. The Night of the Lost Pages. The Night of the Grand Illumination. It had been his own fault, perhaps, for telling the story with such self-irony, for making so light of it. As they all did: it was their manner. As if Truth had been ruled out finally and after all. There had been a divergence, at the tip of his tongue, a fork, and he had taken the wrong path. But since he had first told the story it had served as a magnet for other tales like it. M, for example, reminding him of the draft of the poem that he, M, had left on a seat on a suburban train, or J telling him of A’s notebooks, twenty years of ideas and reflections lost in an office fire. One by one almost all of the group had added some tale of their own, or brought him a story from a book they had been reading, a conversation they had just had: of the first draft of V’s novel left in a bookshop where he had been browsing and never seen again, of H’s wife burning what she thought to be his outrageous confessions, of S’s husband feeding her diaries to the fire on the twentieth anniversary of her death.