Owen Marshall Selected Stories (61 page)

Giancarlo was clean-shaven an hour later, and wore a leather jacket of quality and appeal. Paul wondered for a moment what other things he would discover about his friends merely by moving with them beyond the rooms of his apartment, or theirs. Maria was ready to leave too, although the fatigue of the night showed in
the passivity Paul had noticed at other times. She made an effort, however, to match Giancarlo's deliberately up-beat tone, and replied to Paul's greeting. They had a small ritual which mocked their mutual language deficiency. Paul would wish her good morning and ask about her work, in Italian, always with the words by rote, and she would reply equally briefly in English with the same enquiry. Giancarlo had almost given up the struggle to interest them in acquiring each other's language.

Giancarlo had predicted difficulty in getting him down the stairs to street level. Paul found he was right. His friend was heavy, the chair awkward and the stairs steep and cramped. Paul placed himself below, and Maria was behind to control the descent. Giancarlo had his own powerful hands on the wheels, yet Paul at times had almost the full weight of both man and wheelchair, and he was relieved when they reached the lower hallway. ‘There, nothing to it,' he said reassuringly, and tried to keep his breathing steady. The next challenge was to get Giancarlo from chair to a seat in the van. They chose the front passenger seat for him: although access was more difficult, the seat gave him more support and he could see ahead clearly. As Paul closed the door and stepped back, he thought how handsome Giancarlo was framed in the van window. His longish, black hair was combed straight back in the Italian way, the leather jacket emphasised the bulk of his powerful shoulders, and his face had a calm intelligence. No one would know that he was physically half a man, that he was so dependent on Maria.

They drove through the narrow streets, past the civic buildings with their guardian gryphons — those winged lions with fierce heads of eagles. Paul remarked on them again, and Giancarlo said they were one of the most ancient of all the monsters of antiquity, even appearing on the frescos of Knossos. ‘A combination of the greatest power and pride in nature,' he said, ‘but even the gryphons couldn't save Perugia from the Romans in the end.' Giancarlo, the underprivileged boy from Rimini, had developed a great sympathy
for his adopted city. He said again proudly that Maria came of an old family in Perugia, with so long a history that she might well have Etruscan blood.

He loved the fertile countryside of Umbria too, pointing out the various crops to Paul, the maize, beans, tomatoes, gourds and vines, and tilting his head often to say something to Maria, who said little in reply. There were the old rural homes, a few quite grand, most functional and undecorated, with no gardens. There were new homes too, testimony to the growing prosperity of Euro currency Italy. The new homes were not farmhouses, nor were they gracious mansions. They drew attention to themselves with a spurious exaggeration of the traditional architecture. ‘No doubt your favourite, Dr Matteotti, lives in one of those,' said Giancarlo. He had accepted Paul's enemy without question as his own, as friends do. Paul knew, though, that Matteotti, with all his faults, had a genuine sense of his own culture.

As they drew out of the broad valley and into the hills, there were more vineyards and then olives. The olive groves were grey-green, in some lights almost pewter, and the catching nets were spread beneath many of the trees. Some of the ancient stone walls of the terraces had broken down. In small gullies that had no evidence of water flow, grasses and lavenders grew. In one, resting pigs were roughly fenced.

A bluff overlooked the narrow valley in which the reservoir was to be built. Paul had been there often with members of his team, with visiting politicians, or dignitaries, to point out what was proposed for the scheme. From a coarsely grassed parking place a track of fifty or so metres, which Giancarlo's chair should cope with, led upwards. Paul and Maria pushed him, and he kept talking about the fragrances in the country air which had become strange to him because he spent all his time in the apartment. From the lookout Paul could show them where the earth dam would be built, where the lake level would rise to along the hillsides, and where there was
an especially porous stratum that was a worry to him.

‘What gets flooded?' asked Giancarlo.

‘Mainly farmland which has already been bought and the houses removed, but at the top end of the valley are olives which will be cut down after this last harvest, and other full-grown trees around what used to be a small monastery. That was the big argument, really. It's the only building of any historical importance. In the end, though, it was realised that if the lake level were to be kept below the monastery then the whole project wasn't worthwhile.'

They made an odd group there on the bluff. Paul keen to have his friends understand the work he did; Giancarlo responsive not just to the explanation, but to the rare experience of being on a hill in the open air; Maria standing back a pace or two and working with her fingers at the fabric of a small bag she carried, rather than interacting with the other two. Giancarlo relayed to her much of what Paul said, and she nodded almost as a child nods in expected obedience to adults. Paul asked him if she was feeling unwell, and Giancarlo said it was just tiredness and not having the language to join in their conversation. Normally Maria moved gracefully and held herself well, but she stood there a little hunched and downcast, seeming reduced, almost cowed by the reaching country, the drop to the valley floor and the exposed expanse of the sky, hazy at its extremes. When Paul tried his talisman Italian in an attempt at contact, she replied with her rote English and a forced smile.

The two of them guided the wheelchair back down the dirt track. Paul opened the hatch and set out their picnic there on the carpeted floor of the van — bread with salami and tomatoes, cheeses and olives, individual fruit tarts of different flavours, wine in plastic tumblers. The stainless steel surfaces of Giancarlo's chair flashed in the sun; high in the blue sky lengthened the vapour plumes of invisible planes, the moderate wind brought summer scents and summer insects, but no noise from the small valley where the farms had all been sold. The two men began to talk of Matteotti, with Paul
telling of the latest test of wills, and Giancarlo offering the most preposterous solutions to the feud.

Neither of them noticed that Maria had left the picnic and wandered away, until Giancarlo suddenly stopped laughing, and looked urgently around for her. She wasn't at the van, and they saw her at the lookout, close to the wooden rail that guarded the edge. She was in an odd pose, almost, Paul thought, like some
Titanic
movie burlesque, and he started to laugh. But Giancarlo gave a gasp as if struck heavily, and lifted his body from the wheelchair by his arms, in sudden, futile urgency. He then fell back. ‘Quickly, quickly,' he implored, and without a word Paul took off up the track.

Maria had climbed beyond the rail when Paul reached the lookout. He stopped running, and moved tentatively towards her. ‘Hey, Maria, it's me,' he said. ‘Don't go any further out there.' Surely the urgency of the situation would enable her to understand English just this once.

She stood on the lip of the bluff, and as Paul stepped over the rail and edged towards her, he was aware that there was an odd wind coming straight up the cliff which held the long grass of the edge in a fluttering free fall. Maria seemed to lean into it, to be held up on its steady insistent breath. ‘No, no, Maria,' he said, and he took her left upper arm in his hand and steadied them both on the fluttering edge in the whine of upward wind. He could see her face, and it was the face she had shown him on the night he had passed her open bedroom. It was a face of absence and desolation, of some deep separation from the world. ‘Hey, careful now,' he said. As she leant forward, he leant back, neither of them in any struggle, but rather a momentary ballet. Paul's greater weight and strength began to tell and he drew her back from the edge until he could feel the rail behind them. Maria gave a little sigh, and said something in Italian in a low voice. She allowed herself to be drawn back onto the path, and to walk down to the van, with Paul holding her arm as if nothing had occurred.

Giancarlo hugged her waist and talked in Italian soothingly, but she said little. ‘We shouldn't have come,' he said. ‘I knew she wasn't well and we shouldn't have come.'

‘What is it that she suffers from?' asked Paul.

He had for the first time some understanding of the true relationship and dependence the two of them had — the complexity of it, the fragility and the fearful possibility. His friend looked up at him from the wheelchair, his face close to Maria's side. He was about to speak when his large eyes brimmed with tears, and he looked wordlessly at Paul for a few seconds and then said, ‘I can't talk about it. I cannot manage to talk about it now.'

What had begun that morning, at least on the part of the two men, with pleasurable anticipation, ended as a grim ride back to Perugia, though the sun still shone. Giancarlo was strapped in the back so he could hold Maria, who leant on him with a sort of dull fatigue, and said nothing of what had happened at the lookout. Had life become for her a grey monotony, or worse, and a descent against the wind of no more significance than the trailing threads she picked at on her bag?

She was little help back at the apartments in getting Giancarlo up the stairs, and try as he might, Paul was unable to do it safely himself. He went to the door of the Arcottis, and because Signor Arcotti was away, his wife and a woman visitor from Rome came somewhat apprehensively to help. With that assistance the three finally made the upstairs hall — powerful Giancarlo distraught by his concern for his partner and unable to take command, Paul without the language and afraid worse things might yet happen, Maria listless and sad, seeming always half turned away.

They went through to the blue-tiled room, dim because the shutter doors to the balcony were closed, and Maria sat by the table spread with her work, while Giancarlo first gave her two white pills with water, then made coffee.

‘I shouldn't have suggested the trip,' said Paul. ‘I didn't realise it
might be too much for her.'

‘No, no. It's a cyclic thing,' said Giancarlo, ‘but irregular, and I should have seen the signs, but it seemed a chance for once to be back in the world.' He expertly manoeuvred the chair to put himself as close to her as possible, and put his strong, large hand quite over both of hers on the table. ‘She'll be all right. It's part of our life together,' he said simply. He spoke to her in their language, but she made no reply, just put a weary shoulder against his.

‘Is there anything I can do?' asked Paul.

‘Yes, what we'd like is for you not to be afraid of what happened; not to be afraid of any of this; to come and see us again just as before.'

They sat in an easing silence for a time while Paul and Giancarlo drank coffee, while Maria had her head half bowed and rested on her partner, and the afternoon light bloomed softly through the full-length shutter doors of the balcony. As Paul rose to leave, Giancarlo lifted his hand with one of Maria's within it and touched his friend's arm briefly. ‘I'm glad I saw the site before it was flooded for the reservoir,' he said. ‘Something will be gained and something gone forever perhaps.'

‘I hope Maria feels okay soon.'

Giancarlo spoke to her, and she made the effort to glance up at Paul and spoke in reply. Giancarlo nodded vigorously and clasped her around the shoulder. ‘She said not to blame yourself. She will feel better again and again, and worse not so often,' he said.

On the way back to his own apartment, Paul stopped at the Arcotti's door to thank Signora Arcotti. She came out a little warily, but relaxed when she saw he was alone. Her English was adequate to say she was happy to help, but that Giancarlo never went out and perhaps it was better that way. ‘She sick,' said Signora Arcotti shaking her head and switching the subject to Maria. ‘She run across him in a car, you know that? Yes so. The big, handsome man and she run across him.'

‘I didn't know.' Yet somehow it was news of a kind he felt he had been awaiting from one source or another. Signora Arcotti clasped her hands to her breast, gave a shrug and held the pose quite unselfconsciously to express her pity, and the powerlessness of us all, then she went back inside to her visitor from Rome.

During the final weeks of his stay, Paul went often to his friends' apartment in the evenings, and there were no more postponements, or misunderstandings on his part of how it was between the couple. When Maria was feeling well, he would stay later, there would be more wine and laughter, and he would often put Giancarlo to bed before leaving. On the bad days he would drop in a paper, talk briefly with Giancarlo over strong coffee while Maria sat lost within herself, and then go.

She was well on the day he left, and kissed him for the first and last time as she and Giancarlo farewelled him at their door. ‘Buongiorno Maria, il lavoro, come va?' he said, playing their game to the last, and she replied with her English. He thought of her on the cliff above the reservoir site, and how she had begun to lean into the rising wind. He wondered what terrible world she had to journey through, and how fortunate Giancarlo and she were to have each other, how connected they had become through affliction. ‘I'll miss you both,' he said. ‘Let's hope we'll all be happy.'

‘Happiness is the absence of pain,' replied Giancarlo, and his strong hand tightened on Paul's.

‘In bocca al lupo,' said Maria. Paul asked Giancarlo what that meant.

‘It's a good luck wish between friends,' he said. ‘Being in the mouth of the wolf, and yet unharmed.'

There had been wind and rain in the night. When the taxi paused by the old wall, Paul saw liquidambar leaves stuck to the pavement, their stalks insolently up, small scarlet swans on the dark road. The taxi wound down the hill from the old city, past the gryphons of stone who had witnessed so much pain and so much happiness. Luca
Matteotti had first mentioned the gryphons, but he was nothing to Paul, who remembered rather Giancarlo telling him of those fabulous, threatening creatures that had never existed, yet been powerful in the human imagination for thousands of years. We all have things we cannot do, and sometimes life makes us do them, his friend had said. Maybe in Maria's Etruscan dreams the gryphons still take protective flight against her demons.