Owen Marshall Selected Stories (58 page)

H
is apartment was on the Corso Cavour, on the south-east side of the old city. He was quite close to the archaeological museum and the garden of the San Pietro church, from which pale Assisi could be seen on the flank of hills across the broad valley. The view from the upstairs apartment, though, was of the street, and the noises were of the street and kept him awake at night until he became accustomed to them.

Dr Luca Matteotti had met him at the station and taken him to the offices of the department responsible for water and power in Perugia. Rather than any personal welcome at the station, Matteotti outlined the hierarchy within the reservoir project organisation and stressed his own overall supervision and responsibility. The director's manner was distant, but on that first day Paul thought it just the effect of formal English as a second language.

Both the station and the offices were in the new part of the city, and nondescript in a way that made them interchangeable with the station and offices of a hundred other cities. But after the coffee and fruit, the introductions to strangers who would become familiar enough, the director drove him up the hill to the old city with its great walls and serenity. ‘The gryphon is the symbol of Perugia,' he said, as they passed through one of the gates with that strange hybrid carved above it. Paul was to see stone gryphons many times again. They were on the main buildings of the square, but also reduced and more roughly carved, sometimes mutilated, above low doors
in narrow streets and on some of the oldest tombs. They carried, despite absurdity, vestiges of ancient and superstitious power.

‘This was an Etruscan city,' said Matteotti, and Paul didn't reply because he knew nothing of the Etruscans except that they were superseded by the Romans. ‘There is a great well beneath the city which is nearly two and a half thousand years old. Hydrologists are not new in Perugia, Mr Saville.' The director was smiling, but obviously enjoyed the put-down.

‘That's interesting,' Paul said.

It was several days before he first saw the woman from apartment four. As he came up the stairs he heard the loud noise of one of the double turn locks on the apartment doors, and she passed him with a slight smile as a reply to his greeting at the bend in the stairs. Light brown hair she had and a pale skin. ‘Buongiorno,' he'd said, and she had smiled and glanced at him without much interest. She'd be nearly forty, he thought, and that was all that occurred to him. Three mornings later he saw her in the bread shop when he was earlier than usual for his breakfast panini. She was supple in movement and spoke quietly to the shopkeeper. ‘Buongiorno,' Paul said, and she gave him the same impersonal glance, as if she had never seen him before.

She lived in the apartment one down from him, and always when he saw, or heard, she went in and out alone. Perhaps because there were boisterous families in the other sets of rooms on that floor, and he and the woman lived alone, he wondered about her sometimes.

In the early weeks, though, he was preoccupied with work. Luca Matteotti proved to be an unpleasant and difficult man who saw no reason for Paul and Jeremy to be on the project team for the new reservoir, and accepted them as consultants only because the joint venture British company insisted. Within the first few days he had queried the need for a full series of bore samples to determine if material to be excavated from the site could be used as fill in the earth dam. ‘What else would we do with it,' he exclaimed. He had
the habit of looking out of the window of his office as he talked, as if Paul's face was repugnant to him, and he accepted outside calls during their discussions, and kept Paul waiting while he did so.

‘He hates us both,' said Jeremy.

‘Yes, but you he hates just because you're English. Me he hates personally.'

‘He hates us both because we know our job and we're here,' said Jeremy. Yet Paul knew Matteotti disliked him not just on the grounds of profession, or nationality, but because their personalities repelled each other. Nothing would alter that; nothing would mitigate it. There was some incompatibility which crackled like electricity between them whenever they were together, and which sometimes surprised the two themselves with its nakedness. Some atavistic emotions were at stake which careful formality could not completely cover. Paul disliked the habitual hauteur of the director's expression, his considered and false laugh, refined dress sense, assumption of cultural superiority, laziness, and his habit of observing the outside world instead of looking at the person he was addressing. He was something of a prick, Paul decided.

Jeremy he liked a lot, but the Englishman had his family with him, and although they were hospitable, Paul didn't want to push that hospitality too far, and he spent most nights working in his apartment, or in the many restaurants of the old city, sometimes with Italian members of the project team. He enjoyed their company, but his lack of Italian made it difficult for him to develop such friendships.

As he spent much time in the apartment, Paul took an interest in people coming and going around him: The Arcottis and Sarzanos were families who seemed similar in their noisy and happy concentration on children, yet they had little to do with each other. They had no time perhaps for anyone beyond the breathless confusion of their own lives. The woman from number four was apart from all that, as Paul was himself. She seemed to have only a fleeting engagement
with the world, though outside the apartments must have lain a more substantial life. He grew to know her balanced step in the hall when he was in his own room, and to recognise her from a distance outside by her walk, the cut of her hair and its light brown lustre.

In his mind she was alone always, because he'd never seen her with others, and in that unquestioned, almost unacknowledged, male way he saw little distinction between being alone and being available. So he was surprised, disappointed even, when he came past her door one evening and heard the laughter of a man and a woman in her room. The woman's laughter was quick and unrestrained, at variance with the demeanour he'd witnessed in public; the male laugh was relaxed. Though Paul hadn't paused in the hallway, he felt a moment of aural voyeurism and quickened his pace to his own apartment. Once afterwards he heard the two voices, but never in laughter again, and he never saw anyone coming or going there except the woman. Maybe it was just a visitor, a married lover, or a brother from the other side of the city. A woman like that should have more than a brother's company; should have someone close in the long evenings when Paul himself sat on his balcony, which was little more than a window ledge, and looked over the jumble of orange tiled roofs. They were the gutter-shaped tiles, alternately convex, concave, which Paul was told were originally made by women moulding the clay over their thighs. He had his plans and memos, but often instead of working he would observe the street beneath him, the local people cheerfully walking out to the restaurants, the lift of their voices louder and less guarded than the conversation of New Zealanders. Sometimes he would take the short walk to the high garden of San Pietro church and watch pale Assisi gradually fade behind the dusk that filled the valley. The great stone wall of old Perugia bounded the formal garden, and below it the cars and scooters contested the steep road, becoming visible when night fell, only as white and yellow firefly lights, although the noise remained the same.

By the second month, the feasibility study involved over twenty
men at the reservoir site, and Paul worked among them in jeans and an open-necked shirt. Only one or two had any English, but he joked with them using his few words of Italian, mime and laughter. The Italians loved laughter. He wasn't their immediate superior so he relaxed with them. Sometimes, instead of using his cellphone to call for a car, he would ride back to the city with the men in a van. Matteotti was against such blurring of status. He told Paul that he should have a jacket and tie when on-site, and that by fraternising with the men he made it more difficult for the overseer.

Matteotti gave him a ticking off about these things during a routine meeting with Jeremy and several other planners. It was such bad management etiquette that Paul went to his office afterwards and complained. ‘You could have asked me to come in and raised these things personally,' he said. ‘That's the way it should be in the first instance anyway, not an official blast. I don't appreciate being criticised in front of my colleagues, and in any case all that stuff about clothes and status is incidental to what we're trying to achieve here.'

‘It is incidental in your opinion, but not in mine,' said Matteotti. ‘On-site relationships have a performance outcome sooner or later.' He was looking at Paul, which was surprising in itself.

‘I've no argument with that. It's the nature of the relationship we seem to disagree about.'

‘And I told you at the meeting what I expected. That's the whole point, so there will be no further misunderstanding,' said the director. He drew papers towards him as a sign he considered the conversation over. Paul thought it likely that he felt satisfaction in such disagreement, that he saw himself as the bulwark against foreign technocrats who would usurp a legitimate Italian endeavour, and encourage a vulgar popularism. Paul looked at the smooth, dark head of the director bent over his papers, and was tempted to say something about their antagonism, and how they might deal with that in the time they would work together, but he knew
that Matteotti would see such openness as an attack, and went out without saying more.

Paul had half agreed to meet a group in the evening at a family restaurant near the Etruscan gate, but after the row he didn't feel like company. He sat on his ledge with a bottle of Trasimeno wine and took less pleasure than usual in the Italians passing beneath him. Because of his own mood, the happiness and laughter of others seemed vacuous and banal, and he wondered why he'd come to work among people so different from his own.

His isolation was broken by knocking on his door, and he went inside and opened it. The woman from number four was there. ‘Mi puo aiutare, per favore?' she said. ‘Ho bisogno d'aiuto.' Paul didn't understand. ‘Help,' she said in English, and beckoned with her hand palm uppermost.

‘What's wrong?' he asked.

‘Help,' she said again, and went down the hall to her own door, pausing there to gesture to him. When he went in he recognised that the floor plan of her apartment was the same as his, but congested with an abnormal mode of living. The first room had sofas and chairs, but also wood and aluminium contraptions that reminded him of a gymnasium, and a bedroom into which the woman quickly led him had a pipe frame over the special bed, with suspended handgrip and dangling straps.

On the floor was the reason his assistance was needed, and the explanation for his never having heard any man entering, or leaving, the apartment: a naked man of two halves in a twisted sheet. His upper body was well developed in a fleshy way, and his lower half pitifully wasted. ‘Did he fall out?' asked Paul, surprised into such a obvious remark.

‘Maria doesn't have any English,' the man said. His pronunciation was good, his voice calm. Lying naked and deformed before a stranger, he retained a curious dignity and self-respect. ‘Maria was giving me a bed bath and we turned suddenly,' he said.

Even with two of them to lift, it was difficult to get him back onto the bed, and when he was there, Paul noticed the sweat on his face and surmised that he must have felt some pain in the fall, or in being lifted, despite the paralysis. Paul had regained enough composure to address him directly rather than Maria when he spoke next. ‘Can I do anything else?'

‘I'll be fine now. I'm all right in the bed, or my chair, but if I ever get stranded, as I did now, I'm too heavy for Maria. Pacciale Sarzano would help, but the family is not there tonight.'

They both looked at Maria, and she smiled, hearing her name and seeing them turn to her. For the first time she met Paul's eyes directly.

‘My name's Giancarlo,' the man said, and Paul turned and took his outstretched hand while Maria quickly laid the sheet over her partner's hips to cover his cock in its thicket of dark hair.

Giancarlo's clasp was quite strong, and Paul could feel calluses on the underside of the fingers from the handgrip suspended above the bed. The folded sheet emphasised the physical dichotomy: the heavy, white upper body, and the emaciated legs, the shin bones without flesh so that the flat surfaces showed, and the feet permanently curled in and with contorted toes. Maybe Maria shaved his torso, for it was almost hairless, yet on his wasted legs the hair was darkly vigorous as if it benefited from nourishment there which was useful in no other way.

‘What is your name?' asked Giancarlo. He had an intelligent, handsome face, though slightly puffy and with unusual creases at the jaw line because of his posture. ‘We've been meaning to make contact as good neighbours, and now our laziness has found us out, and we've had to ask your help before introducing ourselves.'

Maria brought another chair through from the other room, and Paul accepted Giancarlo's invitation to have red wine. She helped her partner put on a loose top and covered his legs with a yellow blanket. She took away the large plastic bowl which she'd been using for his
bed bath. With her foot she pushed the clean bedpan out of sight. Paul expected her to sit down once she felt the room and Giancarlo were ready for a visitor, but after bringing wine and glasses, she left the room.

‘What work are you doing here?' asked the Italian. He seemed eager to hear of anything happening outside the apartment, and yet was to prove well informed also. ‘I read everything,' he said, ‘but see very little. It's so difficult for me to go outside.'

Of course it was: an apartment on the second floor, for God's sake, when he was wheelchair-bound. It seemed an absurd situation to Paul, but he was a stranger and didn't like to ask why they weren't somewhere more convenient. Giancarlo knew about the reservoir project from the papers, and encouraged Paul to talk about it. When Paul complimented him on his English, he said he'd taken it as a subject for his degree, and he'd taught economics at the university where English was used a lot. He said he still did assignment marking, and Paul was again puzzled for there seemed no reason why he couldn't continue to give lectures. There were vans with devices to load wheelchairs, and there was Maria to wheel him about campus. And this time Paul did ask. ‘It's difficult for us as a couple,' said Giancarlo a little vaguely. ‘That outside world's not for us.'