Peter Wells

The Good Tourist and the Laughing Cadaver

Even the guidebooks — index of the anodyne — described the city as ‘faintly sinister’.

Visitors are advised, the guidebook said, to avoid attracting attention to themselves either by their behaviour or their way of dress, to refrain from night-time strolls and, in particular, to be on the alert at all times.

He could, with effort, restrain himself from ‘night-time strolls’. But how, Eric Westmore wondered, could he, a gay man, avoid attracting attention to himself? His ‘way of dress’ in his own country would be considered, perhaps, a little too emphatic, colours a bit too carefully orchestrated with key aspects — thick leather belt, shaven shortness of his hair — sending signals to those interested in reading them. But, in this city, this particular circle of hell, it wasn’t simply a ‘way of dress’, he knew, which caused people to look sharply at him — or worse, turn away from him as if his very existence offended them.

Already within twenty yards of leaving the hotel, a man had turned and spat, with contemptuous accuracy, right by Eric’s feet. The day before a woman, a mother, had come very close to his face as if she bore a personal message, then her expression pincered into disgust, almost as if she were, involuntarily, going to vomit at the sight of him.

Eric now knew this was not to be an exception. He caught himself returned, with astonishing clarity, to the paranoid world of his childhood: when to be sexually different was to be extraordinarily obvious, almost an amusement for a majority so complacent in its selected paranoias.

But he was not a child, he told himself angrily — he was nearing what would be the midway section of other people’s lives: and his knowledge of himself and the world was gained at considerable cost: for men of his age and type there had been no established learning: that was, he told himself ironically, beyond those provided by psychiatric hospitals, prisons and the occasional morgue.

This was, he knew, to be paranoid himself: but this city of gargoyles, tortured saints — proud possessor indeed, of seventeen (how joyously particular) thorns, thirteen pieces of the Cross, a sponge, flails and even, it was passionately believed, a liquefying phial of the blood of Christ — was not exactly unacquainted with the tinctures of the curdled mood.

Yet with what quixotic fervour had Eric and his two friends — Tim, an Australian of unshakable self-possession and Giuseppe, his Italian ex-lover, a languid man from the North — chosen to stay within the heart of the old, decaying, sinister city.

Each held to the snobbisme that they were not so much tourists, perhaps, as cultivated men intent upon experiencing ‘the spirit of place’: yet the Sunday of their arrival was enough to shake Eric. The taxi-driver had almost killed them taking them the wrong way up a one-way street not far from the station. Their night-time stroll — Giuseppe said in his charmingly enpebbled English, ‘Please not to stray far from another’ — had revealed a miniature view of hell: an alley cut deep into ancient slums, shop windows behind steel shutters. The sky, high above the street-lights, had the look of flesh several days after a beating.

Eric’s immediate response, on returning to their spartan hotel, was to lie down on his bed and close his eyes. It was, in a way, his idea of nightmare. He had been paranoid — that word again — about even going away. He had fought a mounting feeling of panic as he was driven out to Auckland’s airport that he wanted to do one single thing: to turn around and stay at home. But this would have meant hiding from his friends and acquaintances, all of whom viewed his departure as the beginning of the one true joy, which lies in departing from New Zealand’s shores: a rest from its repetitions, a holiday from its isolation: it would be as if he were trying to elude the ‘time of his life’.

Perhaps he was. Eric, at the age of 39, had now to face the fact that in a foreign city, this positively sinister place, he might have to call a doctor, face the horror of an unknown hospital. A complaint he had almost managed to shake off only days before his departure had returned, like an avenging angel, to haunt him.

It was an intolerable itch which had begun approximately two months before: a small squadron of upraised pores which became, soon enough, a squabbling storm of pain, an armada of acute irritation: before long he was reduced to something akin to an animal: lying in bed at three in the morning, ripping the heads off sores with septic fingernails, trying to claim some relief. Then, as a refinement of his torture, there was the scratchy irritability of flesh forming a scab: worse still, anything which attacked his equilibrium sent him off, uncontrollably, onto a mission — hopeless as it always turned out, self-defeating, lacerating in its very futility — to soothe the ache, the itch.

Uncontrollable was of the essence. Eric was faced, immediately and close up, with the reality that he had a nervous condition he could not control. Doctors in New Zealand had offered balms, lotions, ointments, all as useless as they were expensive. (Indeed in the expense lay the inverse potential of salvation.) And now he was here, participating in his own worse nightmare: to be in a foreign land and ill.

He had worked it out at home before he left what was so peculiarly threatening about this thought: to be ill in a foreign country was simply to experience in advance the reality of all illness, which is to be homeless.

It was to be in a permanent foreign land — one where the language used is barely comprehensible, or at least where words seem to match, only clumsily, what they stand to represent. Worse still, you had to adjust to customs you barely comprehend in a place which you never can be, you never actually want to be, at home. It was to be in permanent exile from the world you knew. You were a refugee before you even knew it. A refugee in your own world too, perhaps.

Yet was he really ill? If he could only calm his nerves — evade the uneasiness which held him in its grip — he might escape back to that once-known, fondly remembered homeland: health.

Yet he was in search of no medicine that afternoon as he made his way down the Via Duomo. Eric had quietly got out of his bed towards the end of the siesta hour on their second day in the city. He had left Tim and Giuseppe dozing in their room, blind softly tapping against the window.

He was driven out of their room, restlessly searching for nothing so salving as a miracle. Rather he sought to solve all his earthly problems by an eminently materialist quest: a pair of Italian shoes.

He knew he must return to his own country with a few selected totems which signal the returning tourist: not to do so would be viewed as almost scandalous: as if all those kept at home, entrapped in the two small islands — no strangers to paranoia themselves — were being denied the news of exactly what people were wearing, eating, saying in that miraculous world which lay beyond New Zealand’s three international airports.

Eric now took his passeggiata past the ancient duomo, looking in shop windows. He carefully manoeuvred himself around passersby, avoiding ostensible eye-contact, rejecting, seemingly invisibly, the many intense stares which passed over his body, sought an entrance through his eyes, as if to snare out and hook, like an obdurate oyster, the moist matter of his soul.

Instead he concentrated on the saving safety of leathern objects. The shoes were displayed in ranks, their prices discreetly placed by their toes. Yet even as he stood there, the soothing practicality of his quest lost its focus.

He could not precisely name the feeling which overcame him at these times: yet all the time it was as if he were waiting: everything seemed a preparation yet, simultaneously, nothing was enough. If anything this trip, as everyone in New Zealand called it, this voyage into the outer world, served only to exacerbate his problem. Behind every destination lay another appointment, so everything seemed slightly out of focus, as if his eyes were always and nervously straining to something beyond: his smiles felt false, his attention flickering, his logic obtuse in its connections: the fact was he was already listening, with an almost manic intensity, to the silence within his own body.

Almost on impulse, to escape this introspection, he entered the shoe shop he had halted by.

Immediately an elderly gentleman, petitioner to a quattordicesimo secolo court, came forward with crossed palms.

Eric, who possessed no Italian, mimed the shoes he had seen: they were supple plaited shoes of a kind you could safely not find in his own country. The shop owner — his proprietorial hauteur was such that he could only own the shop — now mimed his own appreciation of true good taste. He ushered Eric to a low-backed chair set against 1960s mirrors. Eric sank back, murmuring, like a curtsey, a self-conscious grazie.

To travel, Eric now knew, was to be stripped of all your assets: you were simply what you were, in flesh, or, perhaps, to that more indefinable thing, the spirit. Was it an accident, then, he had come to a country so loaded with the detritus of spirit when he felt almost spiritually fractured: in need of integration? Yet how could he hope to find solace in a religion so offensive in its hatred for his type: not so long ago — that is, in the margin of this place, four centuries — he might have been burnt, broken on the wheel, crucified.

Comforting, then, to be alive, even in this haunted present.

As if in answer to his prayers, the shop owner came back with a pair of shoes. No, the shoes did not quite fit. Now Eric became subsumed into the shop-owner’s drama: that he should make a sale: and in fact the flattery of the shop-owner’s attention — after the outright affrontery of the streets — was curiously relaxing.

The shop-owner turned and, with the dismissive gesture of a great theatre director to a bit player, sent a boy along the road to another shop. Eric waited now, paused. And perhaps because waiting had become almost his natural state — a kind of anxious anticipation, or foreboding, underlying every event — he oddly, even luxuriantly, relaxed into this lacuna.

He looked at the other customers. In the women’s section, a dowdy middle-aged mama was crouched beside her daughter aged no more than nine. The child was dressed as an infanta in white. All around them lay an army of shoeboxes, all in disarray, routed in the quest for the perfect bridesmaid slipper. A grandmother, a more withered version of the mother, gazed on while a shop assistant crouched down in genuflection at the infanta’s tiny feet.

The child, Eric could see, was luxuriating in her brief regnum of power. Her legs swung to and fro, brow petulant with the perfect vision of the golden slipper, no doubt, that would take her away from all of this. Yet Eric wondered at her chances of evading the fate of her mother and grandmother, women visibly soured by life, beatings probably, premature deaths, men indifferent to them: no wonder these people clung to superstition, as a compensating, even avenging faith.

Eric caught his own image in the mirror opposite: or rather, his image betrayed him. Yes, looking at his smooth unfurrowed face, there was privilege in its softness. He was not visibly ravaged by any unhappiness: his unease was internal: he was simply looking on, almost a spy.

As if in answer to his self-doubt — did he really exist beside these people? — a man outside the door casually cantilevered his hips towards Eric. Behind the cheap cloth of his trousers, the man, possibly a gypsy, displayed a hand, frottaging a not-inconsiderable erection. The man’s eyes hungrily fed off Eric’s homosexual face. This was as much a part of the paranoia of the place, Eric now knew: the flagrant tumescence of the men.

Only the day before as he and Tim and Giuseppe went up in the funicular, a beautiful youth had engaged his attention. As they ascended — suitably upwards, as if only in a heavenly sphere this youth could exist — the young man had turned himself towards Eric, and under the eyes of everyone in the compartment — these people who saw everything — the youth had begun to leisurely, silkenly, squeeze his erection. All the while his grape-green eyes never left Eric’s face.

Thoughts had sped through Eric’s head: to spend an afternoon, even an hour — or let’s get basic, several hectic minutes — with a boy so beautiful (he had an atypical colouring of honeyed skin, dusky gilt hair, the eyes of peeled grapes) would be, well, heaven: yet was he, Eric, even capable of the magic which was sex, when he was so full of indecision? Finally, abruptly, the youth had broken off the gaze, the tenure of which had, as much as the wires pulling the funicular upwards, kept Eric’s mood in ascension.

The funicular had lurched to a stop. The youth turned and walked away. Was it some small compensation that he who had appeared so perfect stationary — or ascending — walked away unevenly: he had a club foot. Even so, he did not turn back.

‘Sì, sì,’ Eric said to a pair of shoes which matched, approximately the shape of his foot. Ah, the happy curve of an act completed. Now, almost bowing, in a flutter of money exchanging hands, the transaction complete, Eric walked out of the shop with his totem. He awaited, wryly, that de-escalation of mood which followed the efflorescence — or was it defloration? — which was purchase. In his room he would discover, perhaps, the leather was not quite so: perhaps the heels were packed with cardboard. There was any number of deceits for those people passing forever through: among the permanent inhabitants in the panorama of life, a tourist.

As he turned back towards the hotel, Eric’s eye, elated by the victory which goes with any sort of possession, happened to snag on the typography of an English-speaking newspaper. He hurried into the shop — really only a booth, maintained by a severely sceptical woman who eyed his money now, intently, as if he were a bona fide counterfeiter. Eric felt at this now-familiar affront a rush of irritation: involuntarily, yet as if it physically expressed his emotion, he sneezed. The woman shrank back angrily, crossed herself, and handed him the paper, a chill dismissal.

Outside the shop, the paper in his hand, Eric felt an unreasonable anticipation of pleasure overtake him. He would celebrate his good luck — his return to the world of language, and the logic which lay inside language — by an espresso, an apéritif.

He turned and went instinctively to the small coffee place where he had seen, the day before, an astonishing male beauty. This, too, would restore him.

As he made his way towards it — the streets growing busier as the siesta hour fell further behind — he thought to himself, amusingly, of Tim, Giuseppe and himself going, the day before, into one of those religious shops which specialise in items to ward off evil spirits. They had settled on some votives — small silver objects reproducing part of the anatomy which requires God’s healing intervention. Eric had chosen a leg as gratifyingly shapely as an All Black’s; Giuseppe had fallen for the Grecian profile of an eye and a nose: Tim who always went the whole hog sexually, went for an entire body, in toto.

A perfectly hypocritical madame had encased their purchases in whispering tissue-paper. Outside Eric and Tim had screamed with laughter as they walked away, imagining how the women would think they were men with very extreme illnesses to placate, whereas their hidden humour was that the objects were purely decorative: interesting totems to prove they had been to that particular place. The votives would end up sitting on a bookshelf, dusty and forgotten.

The coffee place had several men standing by the zinc counter: a woman sat behind her cash register, bored as a magistrate facing a daily line-up of recidivists. The male beauty had his arms in suds, washing cups and glasses, an act which piquantly feminised him. Eric’s eyes magnetically found the young man who, withdrawing his ruddy forearms, marble-white above the elbow, pulled off an espresso for Eric.

‘Grazie, grazie.’

Eric took the coffee and leant a discreet viewing distance away on a counter. He looked once more, appreciatively, at the young man. His face was Egyptian in cast, like those entombed replicas gaudily painted — eyes outlined not with kohl but lashes, with lips made for love, for kissing and sucking and teeth for biting. Eric quickly looked away.

He opened the paper with gusto: even the biscuity aroma of the pages he enjoyed. He caught up, speed-reading, the latest world news, the usual combination of catastrophe and calumny, then his eye, almost automatically, as if selecting the one true item of personal importance, found the celebrated capital letters.

In a profound silence during which Eric lost his presence in that city, in that coffee place, before that male beauty, he read the simple statement which had appeared a decade ago, that exact day in a New York paper.

An unknown cancer had appeared. Forty-one homosexual men had already died. It was possibly contagious.

He reached for his apéritif — an ouzo. He drank it numbly. Suddenly it tasted too sweet, too intense. What exactly, after all, was he celebrating? He looked up speedily. The male beauty was holding up to the light a glass, the cleanliness of which appeared suspect. Outside a clatter of horns battered the air.

Eric returned to the few lines and as he re-read, as if to find in them some further intelligence, an awareness settled in him —the reality of what these few lines conveyed.

It was that date, he knew, that the fateful diaspora had begun.

He sighed heavily and thought of what it had meant in his own life: friends he had not appreciated were so particular until they were wrenched, like garden plants too early, from his life: then the disease crept closer, robbing his heart of his best friend, Perrin, infiltrating his existence until it became an unavoidable, a central reality: a prism, as it were, to gaze upon a world.

Manners, over time, dictated that not too much was made of it. With so many people ill, it was grossly self-indulgent — risking even exhibitionism — to make much of the disease. The deflective language of the theatre was deployed: characteristic turns such as ‘scene-hogging’, ‘spotlight hugging’, ‘prima donna swansongs’ marked painful, humiliating demises.

In such simple ways the enormity had been reduced: the stark phrase ‘having health problems’ signified the advent: from here the stigmata varied in their elliptical progress: a ‘seizure’, ‘in hospital’, ‘on morphine’ and finally — usually, thankfully — dead. Thankful because out of pain — thankful, too, because the difficult business of being a witness was over.

But what about when you were the witness to your own — not death exactly — but the presence? There were as few rules here as there had been in the wilderness days of sex: to follow your instinct, to try and have courage in your convictions, your choice. What did that mean exactly when you awoke in the morning with unanswerable questions: what have I done with my life? To be more precise: what am I doing with my future?

Future, an interesting concept, that.

Eric laid the paper down.

Oh, irony, his saving grace, his god, almost — could it desert him now when he needed it most? Yet how could its deflective nature, its silvern armour save him from such sharp and piercing shafts of self-doubt? It could not, it would not. Yet really, when he thought of it, closing the paper thoughtfully, was there not a certain mordant irony in the fact that he found himself, at this moment, now, on such a personally historic anniversary, in the very city which had suffered a plague so terrible that at its end so many were dead there had not been enough living left to bury them?

He suddenly thought of the night before. Giuseppe, Tim and he were returning from dinner. The rubbish, in a nearby alley, was being collected. Eric could hear the threshing truck yet there was another sound his ears could decipher. He listened acutely. It was the scream of a cat in pain or abject terror. The truck’s roar drew closer. The cat’s terror rose in syncopation. A cat-lover himself, Eric knew instinctively what was happening.

Sitting in the café, newsprint moist against his fingerpads, the exact tune of the cat’s torture returned to Eric.

Sometimes it seemed to him the echo of this scream pervaded the entire universe. It underlaid everything, it was a basic note. At times, of festivity, of amore, this note was overlaid, forgotten. But then, at other moments — the silent moments, in the immobility which is doubt — or, again, in moments of great violence, this sound returned. It filled all space as if it were the one true essence of existence: chaos.

Eric hurriedly left the café, nodding at the young man who nodded back, as automatically as a dancestep in the waltz of living.

He walked home to his hotel among Caravaggio’s saints and executioners.

Tim had the way, he mused as he walked along: there were few agues that marijuana, booze and a raunchy sense of humour could not cure: and what could not be cured was faced with a blatant bray of black humour not indivisible from courage. Tim had lost more friends than other people had family. And Giuseppe, Tim’s ex-lover, was a charmingly vague man, as imprisoned perhaps in his own language as Eric was by his own lack of Italian: yet there was peace between them, no linguistic war.

Yes, Tim had the right idea. Every daily dilemma narrowed down to a choice of restaurant, then of dishes, a particularity of wine: and those moments after a meal, having eaten slightly too much, definitely drunk too well: to a sense of well-being as rejuvenative as good sex, yet somehow infinitely easier to obtain and of course, in this world now, this fin de siècle present — a century running out of monstrosities with which to haunt itself — much safer.

Eric passed on the street an ancient metal skull on which a few pinched blossoms had already wilted. This living with death, this fond familiarity, even fatalism, was a reality for these people. They, their cynicism intact, had survived.

It was not good enough, he told himself, firmly: he simply must adjust his mood.

As if in answer to his prayer he remembered something he had seen the day before. He had come across a crowd of people clapping. Over their heads he saw a cascade of fireworks: like toitoi feathers dipped in emerald, ruby and gold they painted the air, fading even as others appeared. He had always loved fireworks, their evanescence. The fragility of their beauty comforted him.

He had stopped to watch in the cold wind, then moved on.

But the yowl of that cat apprehending its own death returned, now, to haunt him. Why was it he in particular who heard it, while neither Giuseppe nor Tim appeared to? Was it that it tuned into his own frequency, as it were, of paranoia: which was that he might, in a more hauntingly real sense of the cliché, see the city and die? Or was it that his mood at present constrained him only to hear the descant notes: to view, mordantly, blackly, everything he was seeing on his voyage? And did this not mean, precisely, that he saw everything blackly. He must find — not the courage for optimism, that was foolhardy — he must locate at least an appetite for life: it was the essence, after all, of being a good tourist.

‘Ciao bello!’

Tim pulled him into his embrace, and Eric let his thin frame lean into the large, comfortingly fat form of his friend. Tim’s stomach ground companionably into Eric’s penis, as if by the rotation of his belly, its content, Eric might share in his happiness.

Giuseppe smiled and waved an elegant semaphore with a cigarette. He was lying down, reading Vanity Fair.

This, this was real now, this room with two friends, with whom he could share his thoughts.

He was suddenly tired. He eased his shoes off, and recounted, in as amusing a way as possible, the man outside the shoe shop, his proud display of an erection. Lastly, and self-deprecatingly, he produced his newly bought shoes.

Tim immediately said he himself had seen the shoes for half the price in another city.

To compensate for Eric’s natural national disability (‘the Pacific’s True Boat People’, ‘Irish of the Pacific’), Tim poured him a glass of an exquisitely fresh rosé wine.

It tasted, on Eric’s tongue, momentarily, of strawberries and mountain water, of ice and watermelon.

Eric let it enter his body, easing, cooling, numbing, soothing. His particular ache, for one moment, lessened.

Now Tim, who enjoyed being naked, stood there stripped for a shower. Eric, who had missed being Tim’s lover more by accident than design, averted his eyes, caught Giuseppe’s drowsy gaze and they exchanged a momentary jag, a snippet of shared amusement. How good it was to share a fondness about a mutual friend’s peccadilloes!

Tim removed his magnificence and, for one moment, his psychological presence occupied the room, as if his rotund physical shape were indented on air.

Water splayed on concrete.

Eric had instinctively not alluded to the epochal anniversary in the paper. An event so major in all their lives was better left to after dinner, perhaps, when satisfied appetite could better combat what would inevitably attempt to spread a pall.

A pleasant silence fell in the room. Giuseppe turned a page. Tim, from the bathroom, took up his anthem, all the more personal for being tunelessly defiant: ‘I’m going to live forever! I’m going to learn how to fly!’

‘Those fireworks I saw yesterday,’ Eric said slowly to Giuseppe, having deliberately saved the best, most private part of his thought for someone less proprietorial of pleasure than Tim.

His question was carefully un-elliptical.

‘I wonder what the fireworks were for?’

‘Oh, the fireworks,’ said Giuseppe, thoughtfully, listening abstractly to Tim’s watery ode to joy, ‘that day was … I t’ink’ — he could never quite manage that hurdle of the esoteric, that particular consonant which divided the world into the English-speaking and the forever-foreign, the aspirant ‘h’ — Giuseppe paused, searching his English inventory for the correct word, ‘the Day of the ’appy Cadaver, I t’ink.’

Eric said nothing for a moment.

Then a shout, a flag of irony, escaped his lips.

And Eric Westmore, a good tourist for the first time that day, began to laugh.