HER FACE IS equal to the light. She shines at the sun. Her dazzled dazzling eyes. Mara, demon tempter of the Buddha. For one-two-hundred-and-fiftieth of a second her eyes opened wide to challenge the sky. We laughed. Though that Mara was a man, a male demon. Whenever the gods saw a man was over-reaching himself, I told her – but that was years before – they sent a woman to distract him. The gleaming teeth, the wide and delicate mouth. To break the rhythm of his thought, I explained. You said that years and years before, at an embassy in Rome. The tall white neck. Or they sent another man to seduce the woman he loved. To distract him in jealousy. You said that when we met. In stumbling Italian. It was an embassy reception. She was dazzling in pink. To prevent Awakening, you expounded. What a serious young man! Your Italian was terrible then. I’m afraid you’re going to be a serious distraction, the young man told the woman in pink. She wore bright-pink lipstick. The gods are terribly hard on ambition, you laughed in the small hours, first of many. The hair, if you look closely, is an explosion of dark ringlets, thick enough to arrest any comb – my impossible hair, she boasted – thick enough to arrest any caressing hand, any vocation for disentanglement. To push a hand into your hair, I whispered once – my crazy curls, she sighed – is to plunge it into happiness itself. Happiness, you murmured – but this was so long ago – your face buried in her hair as you spoke. Years later – fifteen, eighteen? – the smile is knowing, dazzling, triumphant. Over light and enlightenment. Made up. Behind is the Amalfi coast, a sun-drenched Naples. It was the boat from Capri. I focused the lens. On the contrary, she protested, Mara was the Baltic goddess of fertility. She cocked her head. Prize not punishment. We laughed. It was the French embassy, I recall. We didn’t appreciate such things were not incompatible: punishments, prizes. Eighteen years later, I clicked the shutter. There is a terrible simultaneity to our marriage. The one-two-hundred-and-fiftieth of a second froze to a still, and through more years to come, still gazing, as I am gazing now, at that beautiful photograph, the best I ever took, at the face that will tilt and dazzle from the granite of her family tomb, a face you never got beyond I feel, never got beneath at all – though perhaps it is wrong to assume one can ever get beneath a face – through the years to come it would occur to me that the only relationship between the eye before the lens and the eye behind was the desire of the one to be recorded in the other, the desire of the other to possess the one. Two visions twined. The Nikon mediated an ancient haunting, our long protracted distraction. It’s not true we were always unhappy, she wrote on that piece of paper. It’s not true, Chris. Andreotti’s secretary had read it of course. In English she wrote: I love you.
A voice calls mother. This is the house of ghosts. We had left the children with their grandmother. Actually, our only attempt at a holiday, I remember recounting to Vanoli, since Marco was born. I remember this now. Our only attempt to get away on our own, to turn a dangerous tide. We did know a dangerous tide was running. We left the kids with their grandmother in Rome, a woman I never got on with, a secretive old woman who in many ways, I felt – I was at the height of my career now – still resented our marriage, still resented the English who had killed her husband. Over Malta. I resented Sunday lunches invariably in her company. At the height of a career that still seemed strange to me. His body was never recovered. Marco called while we were making love. It is called the house of ghosts because for generations every single De Amicis died there. Without exception. Her father broke the tradition. The English broke the De Amicis family tradition. In the sky over Malta. It’s a joke, ciccio, she coaxed. We were making love. It never occurred to her not to pick up the phone. No one’s ever really seen a ghost, she reassured him. We were already entwined, entangled. There are no ghosts, she told our little boy over the phone. My hand was in her hair as she spoke. Her explosive hair. Certainly she never saw her father’s. He too was called Marco. Her family had been dying in that house since the early seventeenth century. All of them. He was afraid of sleeping on his own, the boy said. In a room where people died. He called again. He’s ten now, I objected. Why wouldn’t she take the damn phone off the hook? For Christ’s sake! There’s his grandmother, his sister. We would never make love if she kept answering the phone. He can sleep with them, I said. I refused to put the suitcase in the car. Take the phone off the hook, I insisted. She phoned the station. You didn’t hear him wailing, she said. He should never have had our hotel number, I told her, who gave him our number? What for? You don’t give ten-year-olds your hotel phone number when you go away for a weekend. Mamma, calls the voice through the empty rooms, up the broken staircase. Mamma! The candlelight flickers on the photos, the family photos on the old credenza. He broke the staircase with a sledgehammer. It is typical of your wife, I tell myself, that she should make this sentimental gesture, this quasi-religious gesture of turning our old family photos into icons. She had locked herself in the bathroom. She fled when he rubbed mud in her hair. And now she lights candles before our photos. Am I gratified or appalled? Did she say a prayer before them? To bring me back? To bring him back? So much of what your wife does both gratifies you and appals you, I reflect. How can that be? The photo-faces are ghostly in the candlelight, in the house of ghosts. A moth flutters the dust, the shadows. Yet that was always the way. I was always gratified and appalled by her flamboyancy, her vanity, by the way she always sets out to move heaven and earth. Mamma, the voice calls. It’s a child’s voice, a boy’s, carrying over stone floors. Other worlds are credible in candlelight, I reflect, but not under the brilliant sun that shone when Mara smiled that smile on the boat from Capri. One hears voices in candlelight. Not under the sun that sealed his grave. It is Marco’s first night in his grave. Then you see things clearly. His body laid out under the great granite stone, his arms at his side. All’ apparir del vero – Leopardi was the last poet we read together – una tomba. My eye moves across the credenza from her face to his. A young man in a sweatshirt. Eyes flicker. Perhaps a moth. In his grave. The chaos principle applies in candlelight, I reflect. I reassure myself. For at least fifteen minutes I have been staring at these photos. Perhaps longer. You can never predict how the shadows will shift in candlelight, especially when there are moths about. When the flame shifts, his features seem to move, the eyes seem to flicker. My son’s eyes, Marco’s lips. In his expensive coffin, beneath the granite. All’apparir del vero – at the dawning of the truth: a grave. Youthful promise unfulfilled. The voice is definitely coming from the stairs. Leopardi’s theme. Youthful energy tossed away. Definitely calling me to the broken stairs. The stairs to our room. People believe things in candlelight, I reflect. I’m haunted by voices. My son’s. That’s why they use candles in the camera ardente. Eros and Night were the daughters of Chaos. If I remember rightly. Isn’t this the first sign of schizophrenia? Eros and Night. The two great unpredictables. She liked to make love by candlelight. At night, or with the shutters closed. She said sex was more liquid in candlelight. She had even brought some with her for the hotel room. They flickered on the furniture. Things will never be the same again, I shouted, if you insist on going back. She had snapped a switch. I was blinded. The candle-spell was broken. Her spell. The same as what, she sneered. These were the metalled ways of our arguments. Neither of us was surprised. I’m not driving you back, I said. Forget it. When the light snaps on, the candle loses all its power, I reflect, loses all its enchantment. We came here to be away from them, not to go running back, I said. The moths seem smaller. You always want to possess me entirely, she complained, you give me no space. I could turn the light on here too, here in the house of ghosts. I could kill the candles here too, I tell myself, on the old family credenza. Shrink the moths, the fluttering spirits. But as yet I haven’t done that. His features seem to move when they flicker. Candle-life. You make no allowances, she said, for the fact that I’m a mother. Such was our customary back-and-forth. Neither of us was impressed. You’re so cold and English, she said. She was dressing now. You’re so fake and hysterical, I replied. Our script it seemed. I didn’t need to add Italian. She said: Chris, there’s something wrong, I sense danger, we must go. She blew out the candles. We must go back. It was the same day I took the photo. We had taken the boat to Capri. An enchanted day. Gorgeous light and white spray in her thick hair. The eyes wide open for one-250th of a second. There is a terrible simultaneity about the kaleidoscope of our marriage. He has his grandmother, I shouted, his sister. Let him sleep with them. For Christ’s sake! A wearisome rearrangement of the same elements, round and round. You said yourself there are no ghosts. What can be wrong? I demanded. You spoil the boy. What on earth can happen that requires your presence? What is the point of a babysitter, if you go rushing back because a ten-year-old is afraid of ghosts? Because he gets on the phone and calls his mamma? I have a sixth sense for these things, she insisted. She blew out the candles. There is some kind of danger brewing, she said. It was an expensive hotel I had booked. A suite over the bay. The Bay of Naples. Gorgeous sunsets. There was a terrace bar. It was there, towards midnight, that I met Karen.
Karen! I phoned from the hospital. How shall I behave? I asked myself, walking up and down the long corridor of the hospital reading and re-reading my wife’s note. Remember the good times, she had written. Remember them, Chris. Franco and Karen are out, a male voice was saying. Messages or facsimiles after the tone. Facsimiles! Just Chris here, I began, saying hello to Karen. I was standing in the hospital corridor. Outside Urologia. For more than an hour I had been walking up and down reading my wife’s note. It isn’t true we were always unhappy, she wrote. Remember the good times. Remember when we met! Your wife is moving heaven and earth to get you back, I thought, walking up and down the corridor of the policlinico. Perhaps you’re right about the grandchildren, she wrote. Even Paola. But it isn’t true we were always unhappy. Your third policlinico in as many days. All equally drab. Or rather, no, she wasn’t moving heaven and earth. She was being delicate, she was making concessions. Perhaps you are right, she had written. I gazed at a fire extinguisher. My wife was writing delicate notes, then making timely exits. It was unheard of. No comment on my betrayals, I noticed. There was a line of phone-booths. No unpleasant enquiries, no snide asides. This is a generous note, I thought. Your wife’s behaviour on this occasion is exemplary, I conceded. She is making concessions. She is not attacking you. I left Piazza Santa Lucina, Andreotti’s reception room, and went straight to the hospital, as ordered by the doctors. Straight to Urologia. I was obeying orders. How swiftly my wife changes, I thought, from the exquisite to the unbearable to the exquisite again. At the shake of a kaleidoscope, ever the same. The doctors had insisted I go to hospital at once. There is a terrible simultaneity, I thought, about the back-and-forth of our marriage. One has to respect the intuitions of trained professionals. Back and forth. Certainly I always respected Vanoli. If we went to England, it was because a trained professional felt our absence would be of benefit to the boy. Not because I wanted to have Mara to myself. Apex and nadir all in a day. Capri and Naples. I’m in Rome, Karen, I explained down the phone to a tape recorder, just for a few . . . Chris! Karen’s voice cut in. It was Karen’s voice after all these years. But why? Why was I phoning Karen? For more than an hour I had walked up and down the corridor at the hospital, and now all of a sudden I was calling Karen. I’ll be at home, my wife had written. Please call. She meant the house of ghosts. A woman twenty years younger than myself. Please come, my wife had written. Instead I had got a girl on the phone. Why? You can come back tomorrow, the Roman urologist said. Tests at eight-thirty a.m. I was disappointed. I paced the corridor. Was it possible I didn’t require hospitalisation? With all I’d been through! If you’ve passed water regularly today, I can see no point in keeping you, he said. A small ratty-looking man. Could I trust him? You’ve moved your bowels, he said. A distinctly southern face. I have no reason to keep you. Chris! Karen cried, I don’t believe it! I couldn’t believe I didn’t need treatment. You have the appropriate drugs now, he said. You’ll be fine. And exactly as her voice cut through the recorded message, I thought: If I could understand why I was phoning Karen now, at this of all moments, of all crises, upon being denied hospitalisation by a ratty-looking southern urologist who had not even examined me, not even heard me out, then I would understand myself. Everything would be clear. Why was I phoning my ex-mistress – the number of beds we have is limited, the doctor insisted – when my wife was moving heaven and earth to get me back, to make one of her extraordinary changes from the unbearable to the exquisite? There’s still so much life in us, Chris, she wrote. Temporary occlusion need not have further consequences, he reassured me. Mara has made you impossibly unhappy, I repeated to myself, walking back and forth along the corridor outside the urology ward. As the urologist sees it, I’m not even ill. You must leave her. I felt sure of that. What had my mind been telling me so insistently these last forty-eight hours, if not that? I must leave my wife. It was an imperative. It is finished, dead. Fleetingly, I remembered the Ferrantes, their extraordinary display of conjugal solidarity in grief. That was marriage. It’s finished between us, I decided. How could my wife speak of there being life in our relationship? Just saying hello, I repeated. I heard you’d gone back to London, Karen said. In the background an infant was chattering. Our impossible alliance is over, I told myself. She chuckled. No, a little birdie told me, she explained. Does she keep tabs on me, I wondered? My ex-mistress. Five years of pleasure. She has a fruity voice. Then, amazingly, I was having a cordial conversation. I’m having a polite conversation, I thought. With my ex-mistress. In the background a child was calling Mummy. She was working part-time. I was well, I said. I was having a polite conversation, in English, with the woman who once told me, Our lives are separate now. Still so much life, she wrote. It was when she said that that your heart dried up. No it was when she said that that you realised you would have to face your wife, your life, you realised you would have to breast the flood, this flood. Then you gave yourself up to reading, you spent every spare hour reading. Your son sought you out, but you were reading, preparing your monumental book. He was fifteen now, sixteen, seventeen. You were going deeper. So you told yourself. To hide from your wife, from the eye of the storm. We had long since moved into the house of ghosts. I was never happy there. Why do you give me your affection, Karen asked – she wept – if your life is elsewhere? You know it is. Five years it lasted. We chatted about my move to London. I didn’t tell her I’d left Mara. You are not going to tell Karen that, I suddenly realised. I was saying how pleasant I found London after all these years in Rome. It is none of her business. You won’t discuss it. Though the infant in the background might perfectly well not be hers. She was babysitting perhaps. Or with friends. It might be perfectly possible to renew this old relationship, I thought, with all the pleasure it gave. You never know. Karen is a beautiful woman. She knows how to give pleasure. You never even came close to leaving your wife, she once told me. Without bitterness. Not even close. Just over for an interview with Andreotti, I told her. The old fox! A book I was writing, I said. I always said you should write a book, she laughed. That was a banal and predictable remark, I thought. The woman is banal, I thought, and incredibly pleased with herself for some reason. I could sense it in her voice. You must have been determined indeed to punish your wife if you managed to fall in love with a woman as banal as Karen, I thought. Very beautiful, in a black kind of way, but irretrievably banal. She is flattered by your call, I realised. Predictably enough. You must have been furious indeed. I’d had some health problems, yes, I said. But the doctors tell me it’s just a question of tension. Always the hypochondriac, Chris, she chuckled. Perhaps it’s her Englishness I find banal, I reflected. Essentially, it was an erotic relationship. Her English turn of phrase. A little birdie told me! They’ve given me some pills, I said vaguely. Why had I called? Why had I sought another side-show? First the urologist, now an ex-mistress. My wife’s note was in my hand. Her generous note. Your wife has written you a wonderful note, I told myself. Though hypochondriac was a bit rich, I thought, to a man who’d been through open-heart surgery. An enchanting note. You were always tense as a high wire, Karen laughed. Your ex-mistress seems extremely relaxed to find herself chatting to her ex-lover, I thought. And, in general, extremely pleased with herself. I wasn’t annoyed. To be chattering to the man who once made eager love to her on a terrace in Naples. The night his mother-in-law died. How I adored that exotic black skin, together with the banal, the in-every-way-familiar and reassuring English voice. It was never a challenge. I’ve been quite tense myself, she laughed, since I had Carlo. Apparently the child was called Carlo. Clearly it was hers. This is a ridiculous conversation, I thought, a ridiculous and aimless conversation. We will never make love again. If I was annoyed with anyone it was myself. She is immensely pleased with herself, I thought, because this is her chance to show her ex-lover that she now has a proper man, a proper family. Not just a lover. Carlo, come and say hello to Uncle Chris, she was chuckling. It was fatuous. Come on! Carluccio! Plane and home, I told myself. Ciao, said an infant voice. Then began to whimper. Uncle Chris! Karen was on the line again. You are not going to tell her about your son, I realised. It’s no concern of hers. Fly via Turin, perhaps, to pick up the mobile charger, the suitcase. Back to England. You are not going to tell her about the crisis with your wife. These are things between yourself and Mara, I decided. I said goodbye. Mamma, the voice calls.
Mamma, Mamma! Was it all just a long distraction? Perhaps the truth is I never finally and definitively chose my wife. Could that be the case? This thought occurred to me in the taxi to the policlinico. Never finally chose Italy. Perhaps these things just happened to me, I told myself in another taxi, leaving the policlinico. My marriage, my change of country. I never really chose them. As I never chose this skin, this mind that will not stop working. What can it mean for a mind to work so hard? Myself. Will I be able to pay for four cabs a day when I have settled with the tax inspectors? Certainly you never felt at home in the house of ghosts. Via Livorno, I told the taxi-driver. The house of ghosts. What other address could I give? I’ll be at home, she wrote. It is as if there were always some fatal distance between you and the life you lead, between who you are and what your life has been. Mamma! the voice calls, across the salotto, from the stairs. But I shall not turn on the light. A strange misunderstanding. I shall not kill the candles. A garment that was never quite me. But that made me more and more aware of me. Men and women do that to each other. To a point beyond all exasperation. Made me me by not being me. I often feel that when I speak Italian. Me not being me. My thoughts in the wrong clothes. I am exasperated with myself is the truth. This is grounds for annulment no doubt. You were attracted to your wife, I reflect now, gazing at her dazzling photo in mothy candlelight, the way somebody who is nothing and has nothing cannot help but be attracted to somebody who is something and has more, even if it wasn’t quite the something or the more you had imagined. Even if it was dangerous.
Stop there, I told the driver. At the gate, the garden gate. My mind is full of voices. Why won’t they call my name? An iron gate in a stone wall. A garden you never wished to tend. I paid off the cab. Of vines and shrubs. A foreign garden. Of oleanders and pittosporus. The De Amicis residence is a large and looming corner house, beyond the Parioli. The driver was impressed. I tip generously. Almost respectful. There is a St Anthony set in a niche. Who wrestled with demons. Like the Buddha. Who went into the desert. Was beset by demons. St Anthony. Your own family dissolved in your infancy, I reflect now, staring at these photos she has arranged in candlelight on the credenza. Italian is a language where the main piece of furniture is called a credenza, a ‘belief’. I discussed that once somewhere. In some article. A language that believes in its furniture, in its household traditions, its saints in their niches. When was the last time you looked at photos of your mother and father? I ask myself, looking at my son’s flickering face. Your own sense of place and home was tossed away in adolescence, I reflect. You never returned, never visit your parents’ graves. You have no sense of place, of home. No furniture or beliefs. Outside the house the evening air was warm and mild. In his niche St Anthony holds a small electric light that burns in perpetuity. The English are tossing away their traditions, it seems. There is a photo of his grandmother too, who died that night. To spite me I sometimes thought. In perpetuity a bill arrives. Tossing away their religion. This was something I meant to discuss in my book. Wisely no doubt. Wisely tossing it away. What can it mean for a light to burn by an effigy? A candle by a photograph? As they wisely abandoned empire, as they have ceased to bury their dead in family tombs. The English are in retreat from their tombs, I had scribbled in a notebook somewhere. They toss their ashes into rivers and rose-beds. Their children must do sums in their heads with the rapidity of calculators. An Anglo-Saxon delirium of clarity. How could somebody who had rejected his own preposterous past not be attracted to Mara, to her family, her country, her credenza, her extraordinary sense of belonging. Here. In Rome. This city of tombs and monuments, moths and candlelight and balmy evenings. The lucid Anglo-Saxon is ever seduced by Latin enigma. As the west by the east. Man by woman. Was that distraction? And how not be disappointed to discover then that her prejudices were even more preposterous than those you had left behind? They’re at mass together, Papà. Paola’s voice. Or was it simply that she was not distracting enough? Italy was not distracting enough. Mara not tempting enough. How can I ever forgive my wife, I had thought, returning home from making love to Karen, for growing old? How can one forgive a temptress for ageing? For failing to distract. What would have become of St Anthony the day the devil ran out of tricks? Of interesting temptations. What reason for staying in the desert? Certainly she looked old that morning I drove back from Naples. The children were shocked. I was shocked myself. Their grandmother was laid out in her bedroom. For the first time my wife looked haggard, old. Her mother was dead. Marco was clinging to Paola. My wife’s face had aged by a decade. While Karen’s was so young. My mind was full of Karen’s youth. I was fresh from fucking her after all. Another De Amicis had died in the night. In the house of ghosts. Sleeping beside the old woman, Marco had woken to find her cold. He had tried to phone but it was always busy. It was off the hook. I was fucking. My wife had been on the train. On her way back from her husband to her son. He had crept into his sister’s bed. In a night and a morning my wife had aged a decade. Marco was shaken. He had slept wrapped round his sister’s body. They weren’t flesh and blood. While Karen was so young. And it comes to me now, staring at the photo I took of my wife on the boat from Capri, it occurs to me that its poignancy, its wonder, lies in its being taken exactly at the turning point. A dazzled, dazzling face, tilted upward to the sky, but the make-up is evident, the defiance is evident, the defiance of a beautiful woman beginning to age, flaunting her beauty at the sky. Defying the light, the sun. That night I would betray her. I kept the phone off the hook. While I fucked. She was right to choose this photo for her grave. My wife is a remarkable person, I reflect, a remarkable person, I thought, standing at the iron gate having paid off the cab, to have come back alone to the house of ghosts, alone on the very day she buried her son, on Marco’s first night in his grave. To have come back, I tell myself now, and lit candles by the family photos, the icons, alone, the day her husband left her, the day her son was buried, that is a remarkable thing. It was midnight, unexplained hours had passed. My mind is full of voices, and one in particular calling Mamma, calling Mother, drifting through these dusty rooms, down the broken stairs. Despite having decided to leave her, I told myself, standing at the iron gate, you have returned. You have returned to the house of ghosts. Why? Why won’t the voice call my name? I hear it, but it calls another.
It was when we moved to the house of ghosts that the schism was consolidated, I reflect, the split became obvious. I didn’t press the bell, just stood by the gate peering into the garden. What constantly startles me, I tell myself, is how I can be so reasonable and so mad at the same time. You are making perfectly reasonable, even perspicacious reflections, I tell myself, and yet you are clearly mad, you are hearing a voice that cannot be there. It is the effect of the candlelight perhaps, the moths. Why haven’t you turned the lights on? There are so many. A child’s voice. At the funeral Marco went up to take mass with his mother, while Paola stayed back with her father. The schism was declared: the children one on each side, resenting each other, clinging to each other when we were not there. I phoned Karen afterwards to discuss the matter, to arrange another meeting. In Naples. I could never feel at home in the house of ghosts. We moved there at once. Immediately after my mother-in-law’s death. It was roomier and better located. Certainly Marco clung to Paola after Gregory came along, after the BBC correspondent began to take up so much of his mother’s time. I could imagine choosing my wife, it occurred to me climbing out of the cab in Via Livorno, and I could imagine choosing Rome, yes, when we were still in our rented apartment, but I could not imagine I had chosen this gloomy house with its coffin-inspired furniture and its photographs of the dead. Ageing, your wife is becoming like the dead, I thought, her dead, her ancestors who went before her. In the house of ghosts. Not your dead. Whose graves you never visit. She is still glamorous, I thought, still vain, I love her for that, she enchants me, but I could see their features in hers, and the same skull beneath them all. I could not feel I had chosen this. I could not forgive her for growing old.
Would you have fretted so much if it had been imposed on you? I stood by the gate of the house, but didn’t ring the bell. Why am I here? What am I going to do? Would I have accepted it, enjoyed it – even the house of ghosts – if everything had been imposed by some authority I recognised? By family. By dynasty. Some ancient authority one would never question? The garden is choked and untended. Perhaps it is the notion of choice that has destroyed you, I thought, gazing through the gate at the untended garden. Did I make a mistake? Why have I come? I lived here nine years and more, I thought, staring into the shrubs and shadows, and never lifted a finger in that garden. At the height of my career that was. The garden is laid out in the style of her ancestors, a criss-cross of gravelly paths dividing arid flowerbeds overgrown with vines. I lived here ten years and never changed the furnishings, never moved the credenza. I was travelling constantly at the time. Later I began to read, constantly. I changed nothing. I ignored my son. I rattled the gate, but it was closed, locked. Don’t ring the bell, I told myself. It was midnight. Don’t wake her up. Am I planning to speak to her or not? Why have I come? There was a rustle among leaves in the garden and a wail. A cat. A voice wailing Mamma. I rattled the gate. This house always shut you out, I thought. More than anything else, it was the move to this house, its old photographs and gloomy furniture, that consolidated everything that was wrong between your wife and yourself and hence everything that was going wrong between yourselves and your children. I’m not a baby, I once remarked to Vanoli. I can see the obvious. If your wife shut you out before, she shut you out doubly in the house of ghosts, the place of her ancestors. It was a terrible mistake to come here. A soft moonlight slides on its roof. The evening air is warm. Again the vines rustle in the garden. What can one do when a voice is calling another’s name, but hear and ignore? A voice calling another, a voice plaguing you on purpose by calling another. Not you. Though it is you who hears the voice. Can one die on purpose to return and haunt? Isn’t that the echo of all the times you were shut out? A voice calling another. She shut you out. And now this gate is locked against the midnight. You are locked out of your own house, the house you hate. Yet you never objected to living here, I reflect. I am wandering through the rooms now. She has put candles everywhere. The house is ablaze with candles. I couldn’t see them from outside with the shutters closed. You never actually refused to live here and you never changed the furniture you hated in nine long years. Or ten. Your behaviour is absurdly contradictory, I reflected. I was scaling the gate, my fingers feeling among the broken bottle shards set in cement on the stone above. Madly inexplicable, to come here, to want to enter a house you hate, and at the same time not to go and ring the bell. If it’s a place to sleep you’re after, I thought, hauling myself up to the bottle shards, you could go to a hotel. Credit cards are welcome in hotels as they are not in taxis. I was breaking into my own home. A house I hated. Though you never actually refused to live here. It was such a convenient location. Even after the staircase was broken. Instead you used the alienation the place generated to feed your affair. Yes. That’s it. You used unease to excuse betrayal. Never properly choosing your wife, but knowing you would choose no other. Imagining it imposed, but by an alien authority, an authority you couldn’t and wouldn’t recognise. A man should not exchange his own gods for his wife’s perhaps. Perhaps that was your mistake. I’ve had dozens of affairs, you told your wife in the pitiless glare of the cemetery. I’ve betrayed you in every possible way. How can you go back to a woman after telling her that? After saying those words. However generous a note she writes. I hate you, you said. It was a liberation to say that. I hate you and hate you. An enormous pleasure. Yet, here you are, hopping to the ground, here you are breaking into your own house. Mara’s house. I had torn my trousers. There are no good times to remember here. Ten long years and no good times. In the house of ghosts. It began with my mother-in-law’s death. Yet I didn’t actually object, I used that alienation to feed my affair. The trip to Naples was horribly ill-timed. We moved in immediately. We needed the space. Shut out, it was legitimate for me to indulge elsewhere. Mamma! calls the voice.
I’m in the long passageway between kitchen and salotto. Stone flags. Presumably she’s in her bed. She hasn’t heard me. Paola too climbed the gate, the morning she found the dramatic scene she described so well in court. She described how she was shut out, how no one responded to the bell, how she climbed the gate, tore her dress, forced the portafinestra into the kitchen. The portafinestra. All your life your wife has seduced you and shut you out. It is pointless imagining it can change now. So why do you want to get in? You should go and live with Paola, I thought, walking round the house in the moonlight. To the kitchen side. The portafinestra. There were rustlings in the vines and a cat wailing. Yet how can I speak of being shut out and at the same time wonder if I ever really chose my wife, if I ever really said to myself, this is my woman, my destiny? Why do you give me so much affection, Karen asked, if your heart is elsewhere? You exploited a distance between what you are and what you do, I realise, stepping through candlelight in the house of ghosts, gazing up the staircase. The place is aflutter with moths. The light is liquid as thought, uncertain as memory. If there is inevitably a distance between what one is and what one’s life has been, nevertheless you have exploited that, that existential conundrum. You deliberately make that gap wider, I tell myself. What would a monumental book be but another stone to roll aside? Another terrible weight. You sought out these situations, I realise, these distances, this foreignness, this alien tongue, these alien gods and customs. You have thrived on an energy of alienation. To excuse every sort of behaviour. For a second I fancy I hear a rustle, a voice calling from the top of the stairs. It is the voice that haunts the space between what I am and what I’ve done – I have behaved appallingly – the voice that chooses my head to call another’s name.
The portafinestra had been repaired. Perhaps this was true of Andreotti too, I thought. He too exploited the distance between being and doing. Andreotti, a devout religious man, engaged in all kinds of shady activities. What was complicated about that? Doing a distraction from being. I pushed hard on the portafinestra, but it wouldn’t give. The one an undertow of the other. What more need one say? Perhaps I myself had had it repaired. Perhaps language is the fizz between being and doing. I’m standing at the bottom of the stairs. The exploitation of that gap? Lying to yourself, in short. A mendacious fizz between opposing poles – essence, distraction – where patterns form and dissolve. Shadows shifted by moths in candlelight. You will never know the truth about Andreotti, I thought, pointlessly heaving my shoulder against a tall pane of glass. The portafinestra. It wouldn’t budge. I didn’t want to break it. I stood back and found my face reflected there, glossy black. It was a balmy, moonlit evening. No more distraught than usual. Apparently I wasn’t in need of hospitalisation. I hadn’t impressed the urologist. The light was soft on the glass, the air warm. A lover’s evening, I remarked, and felt quite furious. You will never know what went on in Andreotti’s mind, or even what happened in his governments, I told myself. You will never know what happened to your son, I thought. Or even between your wife and yourself, one warm spring evening outside the French embassy. I stopped for a moment to stare at the enigma of my face, as until a few minutes ago I stopped for so long to stare at the candlelit photographs on the credenza. All enigmatic. The eyes seemed no more distraught than usual, in the bright black slab of the window pane. His first night in the grave. There was a rich, perfumed smell in the untended garden. The air was very warm. I hesitate. This is definitely where the voice came from. The hall, the stairs. You set out to predict the future without even understanding the past, I tell myself now, thinking of the enigma of the photos, the bewilderment of the last forty-eight hours. What will I do at the top of the stairs? Mara’s photo, Paola’s, Marco’s. We live between the inexplicable and the unpredictable, I announce out loud in the candlelight at the bottom of the stairs. I’m frightened. My wife always kept an endless supply of candles. A kitchen drawer full of candles. Can one ever speak to a voice that calls another’s name? The dead house seems astir somehow. Mara, Paola and Marco are very ordinary names, in Italy. We were so unhappy here. It should be me in that grave, I thought, meeting my eyes in the glossy pane of the portafinestra. In the end I climbed in through the pantry window behind the wisteria. I tore away the wisteria, I who had done nothing in that garden in the nine years I lived here. In a sudden fury, remembering a balmy evening when we became lovers, I tore the big plant away, leaf and branch and bits of wire to bind. My wrists are scratched, my fingers are bleeding. I ripped it from the wall, guessing she might have risked leaving this window open to give the musty house some air. The dead house. But something is stirring. I sensed I heard a voice somewhere, a pleading, a whimper. Behind was a small window obscured by years of untended growth. It was open. One does guess some things right. I stripped the plant aside and tumbled in.
To do what? Why have I returned? I have left my wife now. Why did she light all these candles? was my first thought, on advancing from pantry to salotto. Why has she made icons of these family photographs? So like her. This room has the feel of a camera ardente! That was my first and immediate thought on entering the salotto, upon seeing the antique furniture I hated so much. The false life of candlelight flickering over faces. Photo faces. I never did anything to improve it, I left no mark. The house of ghosts was never my house, I told myself. But you have disentangled yourself now, I reflect. I’m standing at the bottom of the broken stairs. I’m about to go up. Having left my wife I’m about to climb the stairs to see her. There are paintings on the wall to the left. There are lacquer-black portraits and landscapes rising into the gloom. It was definitely from here the voice called. Why didn’t I have them stacked away and replaced by something decent? Something modern. The moment we moved in. Something mine. She has put candles on every fourth or fifth stair. Why? Presumably it was her. Who else? Certainly it was here the voice was drawing me. Calling her. Found a place for them on the broken slabs. Her hair was so thick then, was my immediate thought on seeing her face in the photo. On the credenza. The first thing I did on entering the salotto was to walk to the photographs. Iconised as they were on the credenza. And my eye fastened on hers. A 250th of a second frozen at the turning point in dazzling light on the boat from Capri to Naples. Mara! Eyes equal to the glare. Her hair was so thick then – my impossible hair! – but now it has thinned, I tell myself. Now you are free. Her flesh has begun to sag. You have extricated yourself, I tell myself, standing at the bottom of the stairs. There’s an umbrella stand. The banister is broken. No coats on the hooks. You are free of her spell. Her distraction. You should turn on the light, I tell myself. And go. Forget it. The house of ghosts was always a camera ardente. Always in thrall to the dead. A dead relationship. Turn on the light. This is unhealthy. It’s unhealthy, I announce out loud, to imagine you’re hearing voices. Go, I announce. Get out of here. It’s finished. And again the voice calls from above. Mamma! Mamma! As when he came to our bed. As when he called the hotel in Naples. A dangerous tide was running. He was banging on the door screaming Mamma, Paola testified. He had a hammer in his hand. The same hammer he smashed the stairs with. Smashed the banister. And at last it occurs to me: she too has killed herself. Mara too has chosen to extinguish herself. My Mara. That’s why the voice is calling. He is calling her to himself. Beyond the grave. Beyond the epiphanic veil. Beyond the stones and the monuments. I sepolari. I will fix her photograph to her tomb, the family tomb. She lit the candles, I realise, to prepare her own funeral chamber. Her camera ardente. I must go upstairs.
What was the power, then, that so disturbed the gods they must send men these distractions? I have often wondered that. Were they really threatened by a man’s ambition, his monumental book on predictability, on racial destiny? Or was the story just a way of positing an imaginary and blissful space from which we humans are to be forever excluded? The gods distracting us precisely as our hand found the handle. Madness, like passion, was also sent by the gods, I remembered. Just a way of ennobling our illnesses perhaps, of enchanting ourselves with our catastrophes. I have often wished her dead, I told Paola, at the height of our alliance, our unspoken pact. How could I not remember these words as I began to climb the stairs? Very often imagined my wife dead. Suddenly I was sure something terrible had happened. Almost every day, I told my adolescent daughter. The girl was not my flesh and blood. Almost every day of late I have thought of the liberation of her death. The schism was plain to all by then. Only Paola spoke to me when I went on my travels. Only she stayed in to answer the phone. They’re at mass together, she said. I was furious. But perhaps she was staying in to see Giorgio. Dear dull Giorgio. I am climbing the stairs, picking my way. The portafinestra was repaired, I reflect, against thieves and weather, but the broken stairs were not. The stone stairs to our bedroom were not repaired. I have often wished her dead, I told Gregory, the last time we met. That in itself would be cause for annulment, he said. But the BBC correspondent had lost his confidence by then. He couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t go to live with him. After all those letters in the style of Guinizelli. Il dolce stil novo. It was shocking to wish your partner dead, he said. You should leave her at once, he said. We could live together, Paola said. Just you and me, Papà. But they had both lost confidence by then. As Karen too lost confidence. Your life is elsewhere, she said.
Do I though? I stop to glance at the portrait of some ancestor. In shifting gloom above the candlelight. Is it the grandfather who killed himself? There’s no hurry to climb the stairs. The voice has ceased to call. Thank God. My head is clearing. The adrenaline is clearing my head. Do I really wish her dead? Do I want to find my wife dead? At the top of these stairs. The similarity of De Amicis skulls down the generations is frightening. Minor aristocracy. I am frightened by what I might find in her room. Skin shrunk to a skull. Our room I rarely slept in. How could she write: All my life I have lived for you. How could she write such a lie? Women are a distraction, I told Gregory. I was seeking to comfort him. The last time we met. It is not unusual to find yourself seeking to comfort someone who has tried to hurt you. Sent by the gods to distract us, I tried to make him laugh. We were in the café at Stazione Termini. From what? he demanded. He was moving on. Why should the gods bother to distract us? Gregory grew quite angry with my little joke, my half-hearted attempt to comfort him. He had had enough. He thinks I’m exulting, I realised. He thinks I’m turning the knife. I had made a mistake. What would the gods ever be afraid of in people like us: our journalism? He was scathing. Now he has lost out, I noticed – we were in the café at Stazione Termini – he is no longer giving you your due. He is not being even-handed. From nothingness, perhaps, I thought afterwards. These passions distract us from nothingness. And climbing the stairs in the house of ghosts, it comes to me that if I lose Mara I will become ridiculous. I will become like the old theatre director, with his old man’s vanity, his long swept-back white hair, his supposedly talented young Polish dancer, his dog Boccaccio. A ridiculous rootless nothing of a man who never saw his grandchildren, writing bad poetry to his opportunist mistress who didn’t even share his bedroom. A sublime theatre director. It was the dog found him dead. I have no dog to lead the way up the stairs in the house of ghosts. I beg forgiveness if I have hurt you, she wrote. But I always loved you. How many women would write such a generous note, I wonder, even if it wasn’t quite the truth, after everything I said to her over her son’s fresh grave. I’ll be at home, she wrote. Please call, Chris. Please come. And I didn’t come. I didn’t call. She has killed herself because you didn’t come, I tell myself, climbing the stairs. You didn’t come to her. To your wife, Mara. Now I don’t know whether to rush or creep, to run or stop. My life will be empty and ridiculous.
At least the voice has fallen silent. I stand at the top of the stairs. There’s an antique dresser of oak and marble. I always hated such things but never replaced them. A candle burns in the mirror. I stand quite still. Marco has fallen silent. That haunting voice. I listen to my breathing. My mind turning. A faint sizzle of wax. Or perhaps a moth’s wings. Because she has already gone to him, I tell myself. She is already dead. Mara is dead. She has flown to him. He doesn’t need to call her now. Her door is open. But there is no light in there. These panelled doors that squeak and sigh. Only the candle on the dresser outside, its flickering reflection diffused in the mirror, scribbling on the walls. Why don’t I switch on the lights? Why don’t I break this stupid spell that has gone on so long? Our destiny was to distract each other perhaps. In a world where you cannot go deeper, what else could destiny be but a long and fruitful distraction? We both resented it. I sensed that the very first night, at the French embassy. Outside in the garden. She sensed it. A garden I never tended. We both fought against loving each other. Against this passion. We fenced and fought against it. We both prayed the cup might pass. Scorched by passion. We both tried to seduce others, to be seduced by others. Even our children. We hurt others to avoid our love. Thus the rancour. But by the time you’re praying a cup may pass you know it won’t. You know it’s the Father’s will. It’s the way meaning lies. Meaning lies the way of the bitter cup. Identity is in pain, I told myself on the night-train from Turin. I was in pain myself. Now my fingers are bleeding. Marco must have seen that when he turned the screwdriver in his veins. Seen that he’d been seduced to no end. That was where the rancour came from. If there is nothing when one goes deeper, what can one do but accept the destiny of a long distraction? Our long distracting marriage. Mara is such a remarkable person, I tell myself, standing in the doorway now, looking into the dark. Such a theatrical person. So fatally different from myself. I have lost her. I have destroyed her. Quite gratuitously, I told her things too painful for her to bear. I spent the afternoon interviewing politicians, consulting urologists, calling ex-girlfriends. Hours lost I know not where. As I step inside the bedroom a voice whispers: Marco.
Marco!
I stop, swaying. This is the room I so rarely slept in. I slept in the guest room on the floor above, next to Paola’s. We would get on very well alone, she said. Papà.
Marco! It’s a thread of a voice.
I’m on the threshold. There is no light inside. The shutters are closed. I must be a wavering silhouette against candle-shadows behind. I can’t see. Only smell the staleness. The dust.
Marco! A wraith of a voice.
Mara!
The room is completely still and dark. Am I hearing voices again? Inside my head? In a sense, Vanoli once remarked, every voice we hear is generated inside our heads. Where can things happen but inside a head?
Mara! I repeat, almost shouting into the dark room. I was afraid I might not have spoken out loud at all. Afraid she was a ghost. She’s dead. Mara, are you all right?
Chris. My wife’s voice is suddenly quite normal. It’s you, Chris.
Are you all right?
I was dreaming. I was dreaming of Marco.
I thought I heard his voice. I heard him calling you.
She says nothing. I can’t see her. She sighs.
My hand moves to turn on the light. The switch clicks.
It’s off she says. The power’s off. I put candles everywhere. In case you came.
I can see shadows now, a whiteness in the bed. I move across to sit beside her.
Perhaps they always cut off tax evaders, she says.
How normal your wife’s voice sounds! I tell myself. How sane! Even wry! Without being able to see them, her features are suddenly present to me. Mara’s will always be a noble physiognomy, I tell myself, always a proud face, however scored by suffering.
How was the interview? she asks.
She isn’t criticising you for going to the interview, I realise. Scandalous though that was.
I’m exhausted, I tell her. I stretch out beside her. It went okay.
I am lying beside my wife in the house of ghosts. It went okay, I tell her. Andreotti’s such a predictable fraud. Then I tell her: that was a beautiful note you wrote.
Chris, she says. We’re breathing together in the dark. Our hands are touching. My wife isn’t dead. She hasn’t killed herself. This is the bed her mother died in. The night Marco phoned and phoned. The night I fucked Karen. And then I begin to tell my wife we must leave this place. We must leave this house, Mara. We must find somewhere new to live. I can’t live here. I was never alive here. It was a mistake to come here. Let’s go now, I tell her.
Tomorrow, she says. We’re both exhausted.
Now.
Tomorrow. I promise, she says. We can’t go now. How can we go now? We’re worn out. You’ve been ill.
Somewhere that can be mine and yours. Not here. Not London. Somewhere new.
You must get on with your work, she says.
My wife and I are planning the future.
I love you. All at once I am telling Mara I love her. I don’t wish her dead at all. I never wished her dead. Did I? Have I chosen to come back? It seems that is what has happened. The enchantment isn’t over. Our long distraction. I heard Marco’s voice calling your name, I tell her. We’re speaking Italian. In the hall. The salotto. I was so frightened you’d killed yourself. Or that I was going mad. Hearing voices. I was afraid I was going to see him. On the stairs.
I was dreaming of him, she says. Her voice is quiet. I dreamed he was calling me. He was well again. For a moment I was sure it was him at the door.
I love you, I repeat, with a kind of wonder that I can say such a thing.
I was thrilled, she said. Chris. I was terrified. This has exhausted us.
For hours now we have been lying in the dark, without speaking, without embracing. Marco is in his grave. I haven’t heard his voice again. Tomorrow it seems we will move out of here. She means it, I’m sure. I can and will insist. We will move out of the house of ghosts. Tomorrow we can begin to mourn our son.