Rome was half-deserted with the August holidays when I arrived there, restaurants and corner shops closed down, tourists wandering disconcerted from closed door to closed door. I returned my car to the dealer in the Trastevere and took a room for the night at my former hotel. A grizzled and unfriendly older man checked me in; I asked after the young concierge who had been there on my previous stay and was told he’d been let go.
“He was good for nothing, that one,” the man said.
“He seemed nice enough.”
But the man shrugged as if to say he couldn’t help it if I’d let myself be taken in by him.
I was given a room on the second floor, the garbage stench from the back courtyard overpowering in the August heat. For a long time I sat unmoving in the room’s dingy armchair, my two suitcases sitting unopened on the bed. I felt strangely affected, for some reason, by the young concierge’s dismissal – there had been something so hopeful in him, so innocent, at least as he had seemed to me then. But when I tried to call up an image of him I couldn’t bring it into focus.
I still had my open return for Toronto. But the thought of booking a flight, of tracking the number down for the airline, of dialling it on the tan-coloured phone that sat on my night table, filled me with an infinite exhaustion. It was as if the engine that ran my body, the little mechanism that everything depended on, was slowly grinding to a stop. I could not imagine boarding a plane, traversing an ocean again, stepping off on the other side, all the effort it would take to carry my life so far again, for so little purpose.
Rita and John might have embarked by now or might still be in London trying to arrange a passage. I had not got any details from them, who John’s friend was, where he worked, how I might track them down. I chided myself for letting them go off like that, for letting them get away, though I couldn’t think what else I might have done, whether there was some other resolution I had missed. There was no other resolution; and yet the thought of Rita still on this side of the world, still not yet returned to the fixity of things as they must inevitably be, gave me a sense of last desperate hope.
The light at the balcony door faded as I sat in my chair, to twilight, to dark, though at the top of the deep well of the courtyard there remained a fugitive shimmer of pale evening blue. I went out into the streets to catch this last bit of light but the buildings closed me in, all long and humid shadow, no escape. By the time I came out to the openness of a square the sky had dulled to black and the streetlights had come on. There were some buskers playing old Beatles tunes on the steps of a fountain, Germans, perhaps, or Scandinavians, blond-haired and bandanna-ed, the lyrics coming out with a telltale foreigner’s drawl. Young backpackers had gathered around them, sitting crosslegged on the cobblestones or on the fountain steps – they had the look of a marauding band, scavengers who had filtered into the city after the residents had deserted it. They were smoking and laughing, singing along with the buskers; and yet there seemed no joy in them, only the abandon of nowhere to go.
I walked for some time, finding myself finally in the square off Termini Station. Inside, great swarms were moving about, coming and going; Gypsy women with dirty infants in their arms moved up the lines at the ticket booths, begging alms. The schedule showed a train leaving at midnight for Paris, with a change there for the boat-train to London – it was something, at least, a destination, a way out of Rome, the oppression of its history, its heat. I went back to the hotel and sat in my room, chain-smoking cigarettes to kill the stench from outside. Finally I came to a sort of decision and repacked my bags, putting all my essentials into the smaller one and leaving the larger one behind when I went to check out. The concierge was watching a small black-and-white television when I went down.
“You’re leaving?”
“Yes.”
He shrugged.
“It’s the same to me. Either way you still have to pay for the night.”
The train was already packed by the time I boarded it, only standing room remaining, people crammed into the aisleway leaning out the windows in the heat. I stood pressed up against the curtained door of one of the compartments, my bag between my legs; there was no room for it in the overhead rack, and no room to pull down one of the folding seats that ran along the aisle. The train was late pulling out of the station, ten minutes, fifteen, all of us crammed there in a heat growing more and more unbearable until finally shouts and bellows began to go up all along the length of it; but when half an hour had passed and still we had not moved, the train grew strangely quiet again. Someone fainted up the aisle from me, a young woman, and had to be helped past us onto the platform, the crowd quickly shifting to fill the empty place she had left. Then finally there was a hiss of brakes releasing and the train set off, in an eerie humanity-crowded silence, floating out through ugly train yards into the night-dead outskirts of Rome.
It was not till after Florence that a bit of space opened up in the aisle and it became possible to let down the folding seats or make a place for oneself on the floor. People dozed off as best they could, propped against suitcases or knapsacks, the carriage filled with the breath and sweat smell of sleep. I had claimed my own bit of floor, nodding off from time to time before some jolt of the train awoke me again, each time the same sense of panic rising up in me, the disorientation of not knowing for an instant where I was, where I was headed; though once I’d got my bearings the feeling was worse, the sick hollowness in the pit of my stomach as if it could not matter, after all, where I was, one place was as senseless as any other.
Some time in the middle of the night the train began to falter: I had the impression through my dozing of a constant stopping and starting, the hiss of steam, the shouting of train men from outside. As dawn came on it seemed we had stopped for good: an hour passed, then two, and still we sat stalled. There was not a town in sight, just bits of bush and field; there was a smell of the sea in the air, but no view of it through the windows. People had begun to stir, to stumble out to the toilets, irritable at the delay, at the mess of bodies and limbs to be got through. When we had finally set off again it was only twenty minutes or so before we had stalled once more; and then in this halting way we continued until, some time past noon, the train finally hobbled into Genoa, hours behind schedule. An announcement was made: the train would be cleared here, it would not be continuing onward. On the platform people stood amidst their suitcases and bags looking abandoned, cut adrift, as if we had been cast out like stowaways.
There were no other trains for Paris until the evening. I decided to take a mid-afternoon one for Lyons – it seemed important simply to keep moving, to avoid the vertigo that set in when I stopped, the sense of being at a precipice. On the train I found an empty compartment and settled into one of the window seats, my body aching now with fatigue. An old man in a soiled linen jacket slouched past the doorway, came back to it, stuck his head in.
“C’è posto?”
“Sì.”
A stench came into the compartment as he entered it, of alcohol and days-old sweat. His face was purpled with carbuncles and broken veins, a whole anatomy visible there of drunkenness and nights in the open, of animal want. He huddled into one of the seats near the door, furtive, as if eluding a pursuer.
“È italiano?” he said.
“No. Canadese.”
“Hm.”
And he turned uncomfortably away from me to look out through the compartment door into the aisle.
Other passengers came up the aisle as they boarded, peered into the compartment, caught sight of the old man and continued on. Then a conductor showed up at the door: perhaps someone had alerted him.
“I’ve got my ticket,” the old man said, angry, defensive. “There’s nothing you can do, I’ve got my ticket.”
And with a callused hand he pulled a stub from the pocket of his jacket. The conductor looked it over without a word, seeming to weigh his options for a moment before finally handing the ticket back and moving on. The old man shot a quick glance in my direction as if seeking an ally, then seemed to remember my foreignness and silently turned back to stare into the aisle.
The train set off. The old man pulled out some bread and cheese from an oily paper bag he carried with him and then a bottle of wine, offering them out to me. I declined them but his show of generosity seemed somehow to put him more at ease. He began to talk, just a mumbling patter at first, as if he was talking to himself, but then slowly working up to a greater animation. He kept replaying the scene with the conductor, seeming very pleased with himself at having outwitted him.
“Did you see his face? They can’t do anything to me, I’ve got my ticket. Did you see the way he went off?”
I had opened the window but the stench from him still filled the compartment; it appeared to come up from his belly as he talked, a noxious odour of liquor and rot. He was on his way to some town near Turin where there was a festival, he said – it was good for begging, people felt guilty at a festival when they saw people worse off than themselves.
“It’s no different than anything, being a beggar. Any business. You just have to find the right way to take advantage.”
As he drained his bottle he became more and more garrulous and less and less coherent. I was only half following him, occasionally nodding or mumbling assent but wanting only to sleep, to be left alone. He kept coming back to his little victory over the conductor – it seemed emblematic for him, as if all his life had been this struggle to hold onto the barest human dignity; and yet there was nothing sympathetic about him, nothing that didn’t seem tinged with depravity.
“You know, I killed a man once,” he said. “At the end of the war. It was one of the Fascists – not that I cared about that, it was only to rob him. But you see what I’m saying, I could see the end by then, how things were going. You have to know how to take advantage. No one came after me for that. They were stringing the Fascists up in the square by then.”
I felt sick. I took my bag down from the luggage rack and left the compartment, though the old man hardly seemed to notice my going. I went through to the next carriage to get away from him and found an empty seat in one of the smoking compartments; but I could still smell his stench, could taste it in my throat. I felt contaminated somehow by my contact with him: my body was dirty like his, smelled of days-old sweat, the others in the compartment seeming to shrink away from me as I came in. I tried to sleep but couldn’t get the old man’s image out of my head, that dull gleam in his eye that seemed just brute, selfish need, the absence there of any humanness or perhaps its essence, what we were when stripped down to our barest selves.
Just past the border into France I finally nodded off. When I awoke it was to darkness, the train quiet and stilled, the compartment deserted. I felt the panic again, more acute, my mind scrambling to make sense of things, where I could be, stopped at a station perhaps, but there were no station lights and no signs, only the darkness and the silence. I made out the ghost of another train through the far window, also dark and still: I was in a train yard. The train must have reached its destination and been shunted off here. I felt a shame go through me at having been forgotten like this, at having been left behind as if I did not merit the kindness it would have taken for someone to wake me. I walked up the aisle to one of the doors, heaved it open – there were more darkened trains, a great expanse of empty tracks. In the distance, a cluster of lights: the station. I climbed down from the carriage, bag in hand, and slowly made my way across the empty tracks toward the light.
It was the following night before I reached London: there had been rain and rough sea across the Channel, and then a haze that slowly thickened to fog as the train entered London’s outskirts. It seemed days, weeks, since I’d slept, bathed, had a proper meal, since I hadn’t been living my life on trains and station benches, moving toward a destination that seemed now, as I passed by the blocks of soot-blackened row houses that flanked the rail line, like an arrival at nowhere, as much the end of the world as any place could be.
I stood outside the station thinking I might simply collapse there on the pavement: this was the end, there was nowhere further to go. I could hardly remember now what instinct had brought me here, if I’d imagined that Rita might somehow appear to me out of the whole anonymous world or if I’d simply needed to reach this point where there was no going on, where I was sure of that.
Someone had come up to me, there in the fog, a tall, stoop-shouldered bird of a man in a raincoat and spectacles, eyes blinking. He seemed an apparition, some phantom my sleep-deprived mind had called up.
“Are you looking for a hotel?”
I ended up following him through the foggy streets to a quiet sidestreet of slightly derelict Georgian townhouses, discreet hotel signs strung out along the length of it. Though it was barely eleven the street was deserted: we might have been in some quiet, elegant suburb except for the faint boarding-house look of the hotels, the peeling paint, the telltale bits of garbage at the bottoms of stairwells. The man had kept up a mumble of distracted conversation, seeming not quite entirely in his wits.
“There’s private bath if you’d like, though it’s a bit more expensive, of course.”
The hotel he led me into had a stale, animal smell like a private home, a doorway off the narrow lobby leading back into what looked like living quarters, the furnishings crammed tight and the walls overladen with photographs and cheap-looking paintings. The man took out a register and bent in close to scrawl in the details from my passport.
“An Italian name, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“My wife’s Italian, you’ll meet her in the morning.”
I took the room with private bath. He led me up a narrow staircase to a small, musty room on the second floor, faded red velour curtains covering the window and a narrow, thick-blanketed bed pushed up against the wall. Above the bed hung a sentimental watercolour: madonna and child.
He handed me my key.
“Can we expect you for breakfast?”
The question threw me into confusion.
“No. Thank you.”
The bathroom was stuffy and cramped, the bare wooden floor there discoloured and warped, seeming to roll beneath my feet as I stepped over it. A short ball-and-claw tub, streaked brown under a steady drip from the faucet, had been wedged between an air shaft and the toilet; above it, on a triangular ledge, sat a squat electric water heater. I reached up and flicked a black switch on the heater’s side; a red light came on, and the heater began to gurgle.
The water would be some time in warming. I went to the window in my room, pulled back the curtain; but the mist outside held the world back like a veil. A couple of taxis passed by on the street, dim forms pushing through the fog to emerge briefly black and solid below me before disappearing again in the other direction.
I sat down on the edge of the bed. I could hear the drip from the faucet; it seemed more insistent now, had sped up slightly or taken on a kind of asymmetry. I sat listening, my eyes following the floral pattern of the room’s wallpaper as if somehow to use it to force the drip back to its regular rhythm. But no, the wallpaper too had quirks and irregularities, roses giving way to flowers I couldn’t name, these to small, bent figures in frocks and kerchiefs, my vision beginning to blur with the dim, tiny detail of them.
Almost as an afterthought I took a packet of razor-blades out from my toiletries bag, the double-edged kind that were not much in use any more – I had had them since Africa, had packed them against some special need and then they’d remained there in my bag for years, till I took them out now. I had noticed them in passing while packing my things to leave the village; though perhaps the thought had already begun to form then at the back of my mind, required only that I should have come to the proper end of things, that all possibilities be exhausted. I set the package in a wire soapdish that hung down inside the tub, then placed the tub’s plug into the drain and tested the water. It was warm but not hot; it would have to do.
I undressed while the tub filled, unaccountably taking great care to fold my clothing and pack it back into my bag. When I’d finished I sat down on the edge of the bed again to wait, naked, my skin tingling. It felt good to have my clothes off after my days of travel, of smelling my sweat. I ran my hands up and down my thighs, my calves, feeling the muscle and bone there, the heat of my blood. This was my body: for a moment I understood with perfect clarity what it meant to have a body, the wonder and the tyranny of it, the strangeness. For a long time I sat exploring the textured surface of my skin, the lines on my knuckles and palms, the hairs and moles on my chest and arms. I had carried a body for so many years and yet wasn’t on familiar terms with it – it might have been some strange thing washed up by the sea, sprouting limbs whose purposes, lost in the recesses of time, would never be known.
A sound of splashing: I turned to the bathroom door to see a sheet of water spilling like curved glass over the rounded edge of the tub. It took me an instant to register the meaning of this, to undertand that the overflow valve must have clogged, that I ought to turn the water off. I rose and shut off the faucet, then reached into the tub to release some excess into the drain. A thin layer of water had collected on the floor; it seeped quickly into the floorboards, turning them a wet grey.
From the bathroom doorway I looked around the room again, at my bag on the floor, at the picture over the bed. For the first time, perhaps, I grew aware that I would do the thing, that I had only to follow out the chain of events I had set in motion, and it would come to pass. I stood naked there, staring out, and could only think to have the thing over, to have the courage, the energy to bring it off – there was no larger thought in me than that, as if the matter were merely some small, unpleasant chore to be got through, and this as much as anything, to be at the brink without an insight, to have learned nothing, made me wish to get on with the thing, and have it done. I turned, stepped into the tub, and lowered myself slowly into it, the water rising in counterpoint to my descent, coming up once again to near the tub’s rim. The water was tepid; it chilled me as I sank into it, stripped me down to a second layer of nakedness.
I reached for the package I’d placed in the soapdish. It was soggy now, the water had got to it; it fell apart in my hands as I opened it. Inside, the blades clung together from the wet. I cut my thumb prying one free, and instinctively brought it to my mouth to suck on the wound.
I held one of my wrists slightly submerged and gashed it with a blade, hard, not across but along, as I’d heard it was right to do. I lost heart then, at the blood – there was an instant when I seemed to black out, when there was only the panic, the animal pounding of my heart. I closed my eyes and a kind of calm returned, but I couldn’t face that instant’s panic again, to see the blood’s first pulsing out; and so I sat there with my single cut wrist thinking, it would do, the cut had been clean and deep, I had not made such a mess of it.
With my eyes still closed I lay back in the tub, sinking until I heard water spilling over the tub’s sides again. Something was ebbing away from me, I had the sensation of that, though it was not my very self, not the essence of me, merely the waking part, or so it seemed, merely what I could after all do without. I could hear the drip of the faucet at my feet, could feel the slight tremor in the water’s surface as each drop fell. The drip seemed to set the timing of my breathing, of my heartbeat, forming little ripples in my mind that then stretched themselves out over the surface of my thoughts, and died. I felt myself slipping toward sleep, felt it beckoning before like a country to reach, like home. Young maidens in kerchiefs and frocks were waiting for me there, had made me a bed of roses and daisies and angels’ tears, if only I could get to it, could hold on.
The drip had grown faint and plodding now, moving at the pace of dreams, each sound surrounded by long, lazy silences that threatened to stretch out endlessly. Time had slowed almost to the point of stopping: I could breathe or not breathe, my heart could plod on or stop, it didn’t matter. Someone would come, though, in a moment, to sit at the end of the tub and give me a word, a shibboleth. I could hear him knocking already at the door, and calling me by name – the water, he says, and I tell him I died once before, in that way, my corpse already wasting away on the ocean floor.
I was in a cave, in a warm dark pool. One by one their frocks and kerchiefs fell away and they stepped down beside me. They held me in the water and caressed my calves, my thighs. Luisa was there, and Rita, and another too, the third, though I could not make her out; I wanted to bring a hand up, to run it over the smooth curve of breast, of cheek. At the mouth of the cave, rough white pillars tapered down from the ceiling and up from the floor.
They were knocking again. Two of them, two voices, a woman and man – they had broken the window with their pounding, the fog was coming inside. But I wanted only to sleep, those last few precious moments before the clock wound down and began its wild ringing, and it was time to rise. My father would be waiting for me in the fields – there were miles and miles of beans to be hoed, and tomatoes too, we would do them together, laughing and talking and stopping at ten for cheese and homemade bread. All that and more was waiting.
Someone was standing over me.
My god, he said, my god, but I could not hold on for him now; and then the room, the face and voice above me slipped away, and my mind went dark.