Passion (15 page)

It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius, she is ignorant of what she does.

I was a bad soldier because I cared too much about what happened next. I could never lose myself in the cannonfire, in the moment of combat and hate. My mind ran before me with pictures of dead fields and all that had taken years to make, lost in a day or so.

I stayed because I had nowhere else to go.

I don't want to do that again.

Do all lovers feel helpless and valiant in the presence of the beloved? Helpless because the need to roll over like a pet dog is never far away. Valiant because you know you would slay a dragon with a pocket knife if you had to.

When I dream of a future in her arms no dark days appear, not even a head cold, and though I know it's nonsense I really believe we would always be happy and that our children would change the world.

I sound like those soldiers who dream of
home ...

No. She'd vanish for days at a time and I'd weep. She'd forget we had any children and leave me to take care of them. She'd gamble our house away at the Casino, and if I took her to live in France she'd grow to hate me.

I know all this and it makes no difference.

She'd never be faithful.

She'd laugh in my face.

I will always be afraid of her body because of the power it has.

And in spite of these things when I think of leaving, my chest is full of stones.

Infatuation. First love. Lust.

My passion can be explained away. But this is sure: whatever she touches, she reveals.

I think about her body a lot; not possessing it but watching it twist in sleep. She is never still; whether it be in boats or running full tilt with an armful of cabbages. She's not nervous, it's unnatural for her to be still. When I told her how much I like to lie in a bright green field watching the bright blue sky she said, 'You can do that when you're dead, tell them to leave the top off your coffin.'

But she knows about the sky. I can see her from my window in her boat rowing very slowly looking up at the fauldess blue for the first star.

She decided to teach me to row. Not just row. Venetian row. We set off at dawn in a red gondola that the police used. I didn't bother to ask how she'd got it. She was so happy these days and often she took my hand and put it to her heart as though she were a patient given a second chance.

'If you're determined to be a goatherd after all, the least I can do is send you home with one real skill. You can make a boat in your quiet moments and sail down that river you talk about and think of me.'

'You could come with me if you liked.'

'I wouldn't like. What would I do with a sackful of moles and not a gaming table in sight?'

I knew it but I hated hearing it.

I was not a natural rower and more than once I tipped the boat so badly that both of us fell in and Villanelle grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and screamed she was drowning. 'You live on the water,' I protested when she dragged me under, yelling at the top of her voice.

'That's right. I live on it, I don't live in it.'

Amazingly, she couldn't swim.

'Boatmen don't need to swim. No boatman would end up like this. We can't go home till we're dry, I'll be made fun of.'

Not even her enthusiasm could help me get it right and at evening she snatched back the oars, her hair still damp, and told me we were going to the Casino instead.

'Maybe that's what you're good at.'

I had never been to a Casino before and I was disappointed the way the brothel had disappointed me years earlier. Sinful places are always so much more sinful in the imagination. There's no red plush as shockingly red as the red you dream up. No women with legs as long as you think they'll be. And in the mind these places are always free.

There's a whipping room upstairs,' she said, 'if you're interested.' No. I'd be bored. I knew about whipping. I'd heard it all from my friend the priest. Saints love to be whipped and I've seen pictures galore of their extatic scars and longing glances. Watching an ordinary person being whipped couldn't have the same effect. Saindy flesh is soft and white and always hidden from the day. When the whip finds it out, that is the moment of pleasure, the moment when what was hidden is revealed.

I left her to it and when I'd seen what there was to see of cold marble and iced glasses and scarred baize, I retreated to a window seat and rested my mind on the shining canal below.

So the past had gone. I had escaped. Such things are possible.

I thought of my village and the bonfire we hold at the end of winter; doing away with the things we no longer need; celebrating the life to come. Eight soldier years had gone into the canal with the beard that didn't suit me. Eight years of Bonaparte. I saw my reflection in the window; this was the face I had become. Beyond my reflection I saw Villanelle backed up against the wall with a man standing in front of her blocking her way. She was watching him evenly, but I could see by the lift of her shoulders that she was afraid.

He was very wide, a great black expanse like a matador's cloak.

He stood with his feet planted apart, one arm leaning on the wall blocking her way, the other fixed in his pocket. She pushed

him, swiftly and suddenly, and just as swiftly his hand flew from his pocket and slapped her. I heard the noise and, as I jumped up, she ducked under his arm and ran past me down the stairs. I could think of nothing but getting to her before he did and he was already in pursuit. I opened the window and jumped into the canal.

I came spluttering to the surface with a faceful of weed and swam to our boat, loosening the tie, so that when she leapt in like a cat, I was shouting at her to row and trying to scramble over the side. She ignored me and rowed and I was dragged behind like the tame dolphin a man on the Rialto keeps.

'It's him,' she said, as I finally tumbled in a heap at her feet T thought he was still away, my spies are good.'

'Your husband?'

She spat. 'My greasy, cock-sucking husband, yes.'

I sat up. 'He's following us.'

'I know a way; I'm a boatman's daughter.'

I grew dizzy with the circles she rowed and the speed she rowed at. The muscles in her arms stood out threatening to break the skin and when we passed some light I saw the outcrop of her veins. She was breathing hard, her body was soon as wet as mine. We were heading down a stretch of water that got narrower and narrower and stopped absolutely in a blank white wall. At the last second, when I expected to hear our boat splinter like driftwood, Villanelle swung an impossible curve and pulled us up an inlet that led through a dripping tunnel.

'Home soon, Henri, keep calm.'

It was the first time I had ever heard her use the word calm.

We pulled up against her water-gate but, as we prepared to fasten our boat, a silent prow slid from behind us and I was staring into the face of the cook.

The cook.

The flesh around his mouth moved into a suggestion of a smile. He was much heavier than when I had known him, with

jowls that hung like dead moles and a plump case of skin that held his head to his shoulders. His eyes had receded and his eyebrows, always thick, now loomed at me like sentries. He folded his hands on the edge of the boat, hands with rings forced over the knuckles. Red hands.

'Henri,' he said. 'My pleasure.'

Villanelle's questioning look to me wresded with her look of pure disgust fixed on him. He saw her conflict and touching her lighdy so that she winced said, 'You could say Henri was my good luck. Thanks to him and his litde tricks I was drummed out of Boulogne and sent to Paris to mind the Stores. I've never been one to mind anything that didn't have something in it for me. Aren't you pleased, Henri, to meet an old friend and see him so prosperous?'

'I don't want anything to do with you,' I said.

He smiled again and I saw his teeth this time. What was left of them. 'But you do, you clearly want something to do with my wife. My wife,' and he enunciated the words very slowly. Then his face took on an old expression, I knew it well. 'I'm surprised to see you here, Henri. Shouldn't you be with your regiment? This is not a time for holidaying, not even if you're a favourite of Bonaparte's.'

'It's none of your business.'

'Indeed not, but you won't mind me mentioning you to a few of my friends, will you?'

He turned to Villanelle. 'I have other friends who'll be interested to know what's happened to you. Friends who paid a lot of money to get to know you. It will be easier if you come with me now.'

She spat in his face.

What happened next is still not clear to me even though I have had years to think about it. Calm years with no distraction. I remember he leaned forward when she spat and tried to kiss

her. I remember his mouth opening and coming towards her, his hands loosed from the boat side, his body bent. His hand scraped her breast. His mouth. His mouth is the clearest image I have. A pale pink mouth, a cavern of flesh and then his tongue, just visible like a worm from its hole. She pushed him and he lost balance between the two boats and fell on to me, nearly crushing me. He put his hands to my throat and I heard Villanelle cry out and throw her knife towards me, within reach. A Venetian knife, thin and cruel.

'Soft side, Henri, like sea urchins.'

I had the knife in my hand and I thrust it at his side. As he rolled I thrust it in his belly. I heard it suckle his guts. I pulled it out, angry knife at being so torn away, and I let it go in again, through the years of good living. That goose and claret flesh soon fell away. My shirt was soaked in blood. Villanelle dragged him off me, half off me, and I stood up, not unsteady at all. I told her to help me turn him over and she did so, watching me.

When we had him belly up and running blood I tore his shirt from the collar down and looked at his chest. Hairless and white, like the flesh of saints. Can saints and devils be so alike? His nipples were the same shade as his lips.

'You said he had no heart, Villanelle, let's see.'

She put her hand out, but I had already made a rip with my silver friend, such an eager blade. I cut a triangle in about the right place and scooped out the shape with my hand, like coring an apple.

He had a heart.

'Do you want it, Villanelle?'

She shook her head and started to cry. I had never seen her cry, not through the zero winter, not at the death of our friend, not in the teeth of humiliation nor the telling of it. She was crying now and I took her in my arms dropping the heart between us and told her a story about a Princess whose tears turned to jewels.

Tve dirtied your clothes,' I said, seeing for the first time the smears of blood on her. 'Look at my hands.'

She nodded and the blue and bloody thing lay between us.

'We have to get these boats away, Henri.'

But in the struggle we had lost both of our oars and one of his. She took my head in her hands and weighed it, held me tight under the chin. 'Sit still, you've done what you could, now let me do what I can.'

I sat with my head on my knees, my eyes fixed on the floor of the boat that swam with blood. My feet rested in blood.

The cook, face up, had his eyes fixed on God.

Our boats were moving. I saw his boat in front of me gliding ahead, mine tied to it the way children tie their boats on a pond.

We were moving. How?

I raised my head fully, my knees still drawn up, and saw Villanelle, her back towards me, a rope over her shoulder, walking on the canal and dragging our boats.

Her boots lay neady one by the other. Her hair was down.

I was in the red forest and she was leading me home.

They say the dead don't talk. Silent as the grave they say. It's not true. The dead are talking all the time. On this rock, when the wind is up, I can hear them.

I can hear Bonaparte; he didn't last long on his rock. He put on weight and caught a cold, and he who survived the plagues of Egypt and the zero winter died in the mild damp.

The Russians invaded Paris and we didn't burn it down, we gave it up and they took him away and restored the monarchy.

His heart sang. On a windy island in the face of gulls, his heart sang. He waited for the moment and like the third son who knows his treacherous brothers won't outwit him, the moment came and in a salty convoy of silent boats he returned for a hundred days and met his Waterloo.

What could they do with him? These victorious Generals and self-righteous nations?

You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play.

The end of every game is an anti-climax. What you thought you would feel you don't feel, what you thought was so important isn't any more. It's the game that's exciting.

And if you win?

There's no such thing as a limited victory. You must protect what you have won. You must take it seriously.

Victors lose when they are tired of winning. Perhaps they regret it later, but the impulse to gamble the valuable, fabulous thing is too strong. The impulse to be reckless again, to go barefoot, like you used to, before you inherited all those shoes.

He never slept, he had an ulcer, he had divorced Josephine and married a selfish bitch (though he deserved her), he needed a dynasty to protect his Empire. He had no friends. It took him about three minutes to have sex and increasingly he didn't even bother to unbuckle his sword. Europe hated him. The French were tired of going to war and going to war and going to war.

He was the most powerful man in the world.

Returning from that island the first time he felt like a boy again. A hero again with nothing to lose. A saviour with one change of clothes.

When they won hands down a second time and chose for him a darker rock where the tides were harsh and the company unsympathetic, they were burying him alive.

The Third Coalition. The forces of moderation against this madman.

I hated him, but they were no better. The dead are dead, whatever side they fight on.

Three madmen versus one madman. Numbers win. Not righteousness.

When the wind is up, I hear him weeping and he comes to me, his hands still greasy from his last dinner, and he asks me if I love him. His face pleads with me to say I do and I think of those who went into exile with him and one by one took a small boat home.

They had notebooks with them mosdy. His Hfe-stoiy, his feelings on the rock. They were going to make their fortunes exhibiting this lamed beast.

Even his servants learned to write.

He talks about his past obsessively because the dead have no future and their present is recollection. They are in eternity because time has stopped.

Josephine is still alive and has recendy introduced the geranium to France. I mentioned this to him, but he said he never liked flowers.

My room here is very small. If I lie down, which I try not to do for reasons I will explain, I can touch each corner just by stretching out. I have a window though and, unlike most of the other windows here, it has no bars. It is perfecdy open. It has no glass. I can lean right out and look across the lagoon and sometimes I see Villanelle in her boat.

She waves to me with her handkerchief.

In winter, I have a thick curtain made of sacks that I drape twice over the window and fasten to the floor with my commode. It works well enough providing I keep my blanket round me, though I suffer from catarrh. That proves I'm a Venetian now. There's straw on the floor, like at home, and some days when I wake, I can smell porridge cooking, thick and black. I like those days because it means mother is here. She looks just as always, perhaps a little younger. She walks with a limp where the horse fell on her, but she doesn't have to walk far in this litde room.

We get bread for breakfast.

There isn't a bed, but there are two big pillows that were stuffed with straw too. Over the years I've filled them with seagull feathers and I sleep sitting on one, the other propped behind my back against the wall. It's comfortable and it means he can't strangle me.

When I first came here, I forget how many years I've been here, he tried to strangle me every night. I lay down in my shared room and I'd feel his hands on my throat and his breath that smelt of vomit and see his fleshy pink mouth, obscene rose pink, coming to kiss me.

They moved me to my own room after a while. I upset the others.

There's another man with his own room too. He's been here almost for ever and he's escaped a few times. They bring him back half drowned, he thinks he can walk on water. He has money and so his room is very comfortable. I could have money but I won't take it from her.

We hid the boats in a stinking passage where the garbage tugs go and Villanelle put her boots back on. It's the only time I've ever seen her feet and they are not what I'd usually call feet.

She unfolds them like a fan and folds them in on themselves in the same way. I wanted to touch but my hands were covered in blood. We left him where he lay, face up, his heart beside him, and Villanelle wrapped me to her as we walked, to comfort me and to conceal some of the blood on my clothes. When we passed anyone she threw me against the wall and kissed me passionately, blocking all sight of my body. In this way we made love.

She told her parents all that had taken place and the three of them drew hot water and washed me and burned my clothes.

T dreamed of a death,' said her mother.

'Hush,' said her father.

They wrapped me in a fleece and put me to sleep by the stove on a mattress of her brother's, and I slept the sleep of the innocent and did not know that Villanelle kept silent vigil beside me all night. In my dreams I heard them say, 'What shall we do?'

'The authorities will come here. I am his wife. Take no part in it.'

'What about Henri? He's a Frenchman even if he isn't guilty.'

'I will take care of Henri.'

And when I heard those words I slept fully.

I think we knew we'd be caught.

We spent the few days that followed cramming our bodies with pleasure. We set out early each morning and rioted in the churches. That is to say, Villanelle basked in the colour and drama of God without giving God a thought and I sat on the steps playing noughts and crosses.

We ran our hands over every warm surface and soaked up the sun from iron and wood and the baking fur of millions of cats.

We ate fish fresh caught. She rowed me round the island in a pageant boat borrowed from a Bishop.

On the second night incessant summer rain flooded St Mark's Square and we stood on the edge watching a pair of Venetians weave their way across by means of two chairs.

'On my back,' I said.

She looked at me in disbelief.

'I can't walk on water but I can wade through it,' and I took
off
my shoes and made her carry them while we stumbled slowly across the wide Square. Her legs were so long that she had to keep hitching them up to stop them trailing in the water. When we reached die other side I was exhausted.

'This is the boy that walked from Moscow,' she taunted.

We linked arms and went in search of supper and after supper she showed me how to eat artichoke.

Pleasure and danger. Pleasure on the edge of danger is sweet. It's the gambler's sense of losing that makes the winning an act of love. On the fifth day, when our hearts had almost stopped knocking, we were almost casual about the sunset. The dull headache I'd had since I killed him had gone.

And on the sixth day they came for us.

They came early, as early as the vegetable boats on their way to market. They came without warning. Three of them, in a shiny black boat with a flag. Questioning they said, nothing more. Did Villanelle know her husband was dead? What happened after she and I left the Casino so hurriedly?

Had he followed? Had we seen him?

It seemed that Villanelle as his lawful undisputed wife was now to be in possession of a considerable fortune, unless of course, she was a murderess. There were papers for her to sign concerning his estate and she was led away to identify the body. I was advised not to leave the house, and to make sure that I took this advice a man stayed at the water-gate, enjoying the sun on his forehead.

I wished I were in a bright green field staring at the bright blue sky.

She did not return that night nor the night after and the man by the water-gate waited. When she did come home on the third morning, she was with the two men and her eyes were warning me, but she couldn't speak and so I was led away in silence. The cook's lawyer, a wily bent man with a wart on his cheek and beautiful hands, told me quite simply that he believed Villanelle to be guilty and believed me to be an accessory. Would I sign a statement saying so? If I would then he could probably look the other way while I disappeared.

'We are not unsubde, we Venetians,' he said.

And what would happen to Villanelle?

The terms of the cook's will were curious; he had made no attempt to rid his wife of her rights, nor to apportion his fortune to another. He had simply said that if she could not inherit for any reason (absence being one), he willed his estate in its entirety to the Church.

Since he must never have expected to see her again, why had he chosen the Church? Had he ever been inside one? My surprise must have been evident because the lawyer in his candid mood said the cook loved to watch the choirboys in their red clothes. If his face showed the hint of a smile, the hint of anything other than an acceptance of a religious disposition, he hid it immediately.

What was in it for him? I wondered. What did he care who got the money? He didn't look like a man with a conscience. And for the first time in my life I realised that I was the powerful one. I was the one who held the wild card.

T killed him,' I said. T stabbed him and I cut out his heart. Shall I show you the shape I made in his chest?'

I drew in the dust on the window. A triangle with rough edges. 'His heart was blue. Did you know hearts are blue? Not red at all. A blue stone in a red forest.'

'You're insane,' said the lawyer. 'No sane man would kill like that.'

'No sane man would live like he did.'

Neither of us spoke. I heard his breathing, sharp, like sandpaper. He laid both hands over the confession ready for me to sign. Beautiful manicured hands, whiter than the paper they rested on. Where had he got them from? They couldn't be his by right.

'If you are telling me the
truth...'

'Trust me.'

'Then you must stay here until I am ready for you.'

He got up and locked the door behind him, leaving me in his comfortable room of tobacco and leather with a bust of Caesar on the table and a ragged heart on the window-pane.

In the evening, Villanelle came. She came alone because she was already wielding the power of her inheritance. She had a jar of wine, a loaf of bread from the bakeiy and a basket of uncooked sardines. We sat together on the floor, like children whose uncle has left them in his study by mistake.

'Do you know what you're doing?' she said.

'I told the truth, that's all.'

'Henri, I don't have any idea what comes next. Piero (the lawyer) thinks you're insane and will suggest you are tried as such. I can't buy him off. He was a friend of my husband's. He still believes I'm responsible and all the red hair in the world and all the money I have won't stop him hurting you. He hates for hate's sake. There are people like that. People who have everything. Money, power, sex. When they have everything they play for more sophisticated stakes than the rest of us. There are no thrills left to that man. The sun will never rise and delight him. He will never be lost in a strange town and forced to ask his way. I can't buy him. I can't tempt him. He wants a life for a life. You or me. Let it be me.'

'You didn't kill him, I killed him. I'm not sorry.'

'I would have and it doesn't matter whose knife or whose hand. You killed him for my sake.'

'No, I killed him for myself. He made every good thing dirty.'

She took my hands. We both smelt of fish.

'Henri, if you are convicted as insane, they'll either hang you or send you to San Servelo. The madhouse on the island.'

'The one you showed me? The one that stares over the lagoon and catches the light?'

She nodded and I wondered what it would be like to live in one place again.