Authors: Rachel Cusk
At last the light resolves itself into the familiar flat grey of an April dawn on the south coast. We wind our way towards the port, past the toy-like Parker Pen factory, past the little train station and into the harbour, whose steeply rising grassy sides seem to be undergoing a kind of surgery, with their diggers and their piles of breeze blocks and their half-finished housing developments that look lived in and discarded before they’ve even been built. Rounding the bend we see our boat, black plumes of smoke pouring from its funnels, monolithic against the miniature scale of the muddy harbour. There are a few other cars waiting under the grey wadded sky, and some lorries, each like a great beast that has crept out of the night with its solitary driver. It is not yet the holiday season: people are at work; children have returned to school. We stare out of our car windows at the other cars. In the back we have clothes, books, a guitar, a box of toys, tennis rackets, a thermos flask, a large Italian dictionary, a set of watercolours and a leather-bound backgammon case. Other people seem to have nothing at all. They gaze through their windscreens, their back seats empty. Sometimes there is a pillow in a faded patterned pillowcase lying on the shelf behind, as if it is the only desire they can conceive of feeling, the need to pull up and sleep for an hour or two. We all inch our way gradually forward. I feel as if we are being held in a last moment of compression, like seeds held tightly in a hand before being scattered; as though our obligation to feel connected to others is running down to its last seconds. It is the only thing that remains to be shed, this garment of nationhood. We move slowly forward in the dull grey light that has broken now over the sea. When it is our turn we show our passports. We say goodbye to the officer in her booth, and roll out across the concrete jetty to where the boat stands shuddering vastly in the water, the smoke streaming from its chimneys, its doors standing open, its insides showing, its men
amidst the ribs in their white overalls, like people in a strange dream, beckoning us in.
*
Upstairs the boat smells of baked beans and fried food. I remember this smell from other journeys: it lies just off the shoreline like an olfactory fence, through which admittance must be gained in or out. The canteen isn’t open yet, but a queue of people is waiting at the shuttered hatches. We go and sit at the front, in the chilly air-conditioned salon with its wood veneer and hard grey-upholstered arrangements of chairs fixed to the floor. When the boat begins to move we hardly notice. The land slides noiselessly away past the windows. The grey-blue water churns mildly in front. A few gulls hover and circle our bulk and eventually drift back to shore.
For a while the two children are excited. They run up and down the half-empty boat, past people who are sitting silently or reading newspapers or breaking open packets of food, people who are conversing brightly despite the early hour, people who are already fathomlessly asleep amidst their bags and coats and jackets. For each of these groups they reserve a measure of interest as they pass and re-pass them: they cast out looks as fishermen cast out lines; they give them an opportunity, an opening. I see that it is, for them, the central mystery of life, how a course of events forms itself. They tiptoe around the closed bar with its fruit machines pulsing in the shadows. They keep us abreast of developments in the canteen, which to their satisfaction eventually opens, though this represents no particular change in their circumstances. For a while they haunt a corner of the salon where a family, all very pale and soft and large and all clad in black, are handing round biscuits and packets of crisps and colourless fizzy lemonade from a plastic litre bottle. The children clearly feel that this is a transaction of which they might at last entertain some hopes. They stay within this family’s rustling and torpid aura while the mother glances at them expressionlessly. Finally, they trail back to our table and sit down. They have exhausted every avenue and
come back empty-handed. The boat having been found to be a place of no opportunity, they wish to know when we will arrive.
I am studying Italian verbs and phrases. I have a little book in which I write everything down.
Faccio, fai, fa, facciamo,
fate, fanno
. I have not yet spoken any of these words: they are a form of trousseau, a virgin’s drawerful of unblemished linen. I like them in their spotless condition and cannot quite imagine the congress that is their destiny.
Vengo, vieni, viene,
veniamo, venite, vengono
. I also have an Italian textbook, called
Contatti!
. There are various recurring characters in
Contatti!
, Italian men consecrated in the national customs of eating and drinking, earnest young Italian women who ask for directions to public landmarks, and even an English couple called the Robinsons. It is full of human situations that are both stilted and consoling, as though through this gauze of language everything impure and uncertain has been filtered away.
The signora arrives with her daughters
.
The American
students work hard
.
Did you sleep badly at Capodanno?
It strikes me that
Contatti!
has something about it of Debrett’s book of social etiquette, in its insistence on the correct forms of expression within the randomness of the human plight. But there is even more of the atmosphere of the afterlife amidst its pages, of an unprogressing limbo where Tony and Mario are forever ordering the appropriate coffee for the time of day at the bar and Marcella, in her loop of eternity, stands on a street corner in Verona asking Fabrizio for directions to the railway station. People are helpful and kind in
Contatti!
, but they are untouched by passion or by failure: they do not scream or cry or love, or try to thwart Peter and Mary Robinson in their ambition to purchase a house in the Italian countryside.
L’agenzia puo fissare una visita al mattino
. The Robinsons seem to have an awful lot of Italian friends for a dull middle-class English couple. They crop up in nearly every chapter, lunching with the Pacianos at their Roman apartment, meeting up for drinks with their old pals Roberto and Carla,
Peter banging on all the while about their
casa di campagna
, Mary unfailingly repeating her unatmospheric observation that the Italians don’t consume nearly as much alcohol as the English. Because it’s
Contatti!
, no one tells them to shut up.
E
vero
, says Carla solemnly,
beviano molto poco
. Yet there is something soothing, something almost instructive in their tedium, for
Contatti!
startlingly omits to provide translations for the majority of things I say on a daily basis. I have come to rely on harsh imperatives and interrogatives in verbal expression, though I’m sure this didn’t use to be the case. Such grammatical refinements occur much later on in the pages of
Contatti!
, where in all probability I will never find my way. (It is an alleviating prospect, that of being confined to simple statements, straightforward desires and polite verbal forms.)
The ferry hums in its sphere of grey cloud and water. It is so large that it has encompassed the sensation of travel itself: sealed in and air-conditioned as we are, we appear to be virtually motionless. There is no tipping or rocking, no groaning of timbers, no wind or sea spray on our faces, no work that is necessary to advance us to our destination. There is nothing to do but wait, for one thing to become another. The great grey nothingness inches past the windows. I have the strange feeling that the other passengers are familiar to me. The man with combed-back hair and plaid shirt sitting reading
The Times
, the woman in the Barbour jacket with the face of a withered Memling damsel, the hefty Rhinemaiden doing Sudoku puzzles, who purses her powerful mouth round her pen and scans the air with narrowed eyes – surely I have met them somewhere before. Again and again I look at a face or a hairstyle or even an article of clothing and feel a sense of recognition that is almost like a touching of nerves in distant parts of the body. But instead of gaining substance the feeling recedes and grows indistinct. The memory does not come, just as the memory of certain dreams that on waking seemed so concrete implacably make their way into oblivion, like a train pulling out of a station and slowly vanishing down the tracks.
All the same, it would not surprise me if one of these people came and spoke to me of our shared past, however distant and tangential. In
Contatti!
, Roberto tells the waiter that he has known the Robinsons for many years.
Ci conosciamo da molti
anni
. Peter Robinson adds that they are hoping to purchase a
casa di campagna
. There is a small circular table fixed to the floor in front of my chair and I put my head on it and sleep for a while. It is a cluttered, grey-lighted sleep suffused with the hum of the ferry and with the same feeling of familiarity, which, now that my eyes are closed and it has nothing to fix on, washes over me in unstructured waves until my knowledge of where I am and what I am doing has been broken up and mingled with things I have thought or dreamed or imagined, mingled and mingled into a grey expanse like the sea, with just a few Italian verbs floating on the surface. When I sit up again the northern coast of France is lying in a rocky beige-coloured crust along the horizon. A piercing female voice begins to issue from the loudspeaker warning us of the imminent closure of the canteen. These tidings do not concern us: we are finished with this boat. We strain for release from its numb enchantment. The children are hurling their felt-tip pens back into their rucksacks and urging us into our coats. We go out on deck as the cliffs of Dieppe bear down on us and the wind whirls in a crazed cyclone on the ferry’s snub front, lifting our hair into maniac shapes, tugging at our clothes. The melancholy Dieppe sky is deep grey, its sand-coloured rocks friable-seeming and transitory. It looks like a place that would forget itself if it could. After a while we go back inside and file along towards the back of the boat, where people are forming long migratory queues and a girl in a white uniform is clearing piles of smeared plates from the tables and the voice on the loudspeaker is bidding us farewell and a safe onward journey.
*
The road out of Dieppe winds round and round, round and round and round its empty green hinterland, as aimless and methodical as a geriatric waltz around a deserted dance floor.
Beneath a sky the colour of smelted iron, raw patches of development stand out on the hills above the port: new supermarkets and warehouses, half-built roads, modern buildings standing in empty car parks, a double row of giant streetlights heading inexplicably off into a field. From a distance, the inharmonious spectacle of these creations, in which no one object relates to any other, gives it an appearance of almost human inwardness and alienation, like a crowd of total strangers caught in a random moment on a police security camera. We pass a building like a child’s drawing of a Swiss chalet and a building like a cardboard box and a building like a playground climbing frame painted in primary colours. We pass Gemo and Mr Bricolage and Decathlon. We pass a low, ranch-like building in a tundra of tarmac called Buffalo Grill, with a giant pair of white plastic cow’s horns attached to its tiled roof. The air-temperature gauge on the dashboard reads twelve degrees. The sky looks swollen and bruised. We revolve three times around a roundabout trying to identify the road to Rouen. The roundabout is planted with clumps of marigolds in forensic rows, like a cemetery. I wonder what became of the human instinct for beauty, why it vanished so abruptly and so utterly, why our race should have fallen so totally out of sympathy with the earth. An hour out of Dieppe, a shout goes up from the back seat. We are running through sombre green countryside now, past meadows grazed by white Charolais cows, past flat affectless fields under low skies, past narrow little lanes that meander out of sight like unfinished sentences. The children have observed that the temperature gauge has risen by two full degrees. An hour later, on the other side of Rouen, they shout again.
In the front seat we are discussing names. My husband has tired of his name: at forty-one, he wishes to change it. This is an unusual wish, but it does not surprise me. As a small child he was sent to boarding school, where his name was a graven fact on every sock and book and toothbrush in his possession, on the toy rabbit he hugged so hard over the years that it became crushed flat, on the metal trunk he dragged behind him
along the platform, beside the waiting train; inscribed on the polished plate trophies won by long-disbanded teams, on watches and pens and handkerchiefs, on yellowed monogrammed towels. He has an antique silver christening mug engraved with his initials – ACC – and there are portraits of his ancestors, frowning clerics, on his parents’ walls. It is almost as though his name, so concrete and indelible, preceded him in everything he did so that he was forever dogged by a sense of obligation. I do not know what this is like, only that it is the opposite of what the artist feels when he puts his name to a canvas. It is the opposite of self-expression. As a child my own name seemed strange to me, abstract, like a mathematical symbol whose representative function remained mysterious even once I’d grown accustomed to what it looked like. It was only when I began to write books and put my name to them that I understood its associative purpose. All the same, an artist might prefer a name less constricted by his mortal soul. The artists of the Renaissance often had such names: Veronese (‘the man from Verona’), il Tintoretto (‘the dyer’s son’), il Perugino (‘the bloke from Perugia’). A few years ago ACC discarded his profession, removed his name from the company letterhead and the ledger of good works. He began to take photographs, portraits of people whose names he writes out in full. They are unknown people, though at a certain level – police files, prison records, social security databases – their citations are as numerous and indelible as ACC’s own. This explains part of his attraction to them. But now he wants a new name to call himself when he looks through the camera lens. I suggest Ace, or even
The
Ace. It seems to me to be just what is required. Go on, I say; why don’t you?