Kudos (20 page)

It had been difficult for her son to gain a perspective on his father, whose long absences and dramatic presences were so unsettling, and whose lifestyle was both brutal and glamorous, while Paola's existence by necessity encompassed all the mundanities of domestic routine. His father had numerous girlfriends, all of them very young and very beautiful, while I, Paola
said, am getting old and barely seem like a woman at all any more.

‘I am no longer interested in having a man,' she said. ‘My body is asking for privacy. It likes hiding under these loose clothes, just as if it was covered with the most disfiguring scars. It has finally cast out my lifelong belief in romantic love,' she said, ‘because even at fifty I had somehow kept the idea of finding my true mate, as though he were the hero of a novel who had failed to turn up and had to be tracked down before the novel ended. But my body knows better,' she said, ‘and it demands to be left alone.'

We had been walking downhill along a succession of narrow alleys and were now passing through broader, tree-lined streets that occasionally showed glimpses of pleasant squares with fountains and churches along their intersections. This was a very old part of the city, Paola said, which only ten years ago had languished in squalor and neglect, but now money had been spent and it was becoming a popular neighbourhood, with new shops and restaurants opening up and even businesses starting to move here. The shops were the same shops you saw in town centres around the world and the bars and cafés were touristic versions of themselves in the same inevitable way as everywhere else, and so this regeneration, she said, begins to look a little like a mask of death.
Europe is dying, she said, and because every separate part is being replaced as it dies it becomes harder and harder to tell what is fake and what is real, so that we might not realise until the whole thing has gone.

She looked at her watch and said that we still had some time before we needed to be at the restaurant; if I didn't mind, there was a place not far away that she thought might interest me. We set off again at an even brisker pace than before, Paola's long fine hair flying out behind her and her silvery tunic flapping and swirling.

‘It is a little strange, what we are about to see,' she said as we walked. ‘I found it by chance a few years ago. I was passing nearby and the strap of my sandal broke and so I needed somewhere to sit and fix it. I saw that this church was open and I went inside, not thinking anything about it, and I got quite a shock.'

Some fifty years before, she said, the church had been ravaged one night by a terrible fire, whose intensity was such that the very stones had lifted and the leading of the windows melted away, and two of the firefighters had lost their lives putting it out. But instead of restoring the church, the decision was made simply to repair the structural aspects of the building, which continued to be used as a regular place of worship, despite the disturbing extremity of its appearance and the violent events to which that appearance testified.

‘Inside it is completely black,' she said, ‘and the walls and ceiling are warped like the inside of a cave where the layers of stone have expanded, and the fire, even while it devoured whatever paintings and statues had been there, left everywhere a patina of its own in which one believes one can glimpse ghostly images. Everywhere there are these strange half-shapes like melted wax and then in other places sheared areas where the stonework was split into two by the heat, and empty plinths and alcoves where things are missing, and the texture of the whole thing is so densely affected that it is almost no longer manmade, as if the trauma of the fire had turned it into a natural form. I don't know why,' she said, ‘but I find the sight of it extremely moving. The fact that it has been allowed to continue in its true state,' she said, ‘when everything else around it has been replaced and cleaned up, has a meaning that I am not quite able to understand or articulate, and yet people continue to go there and act as if everything is normal. At first I thought that someone had made a terrible mistake,' she said, ‘in letting it stay like that, as if they thought no one would notice what had happened, and when I saw people inside praying or hearing mass I thought it was indeed possible that somehow they hadn't realised. And this seemed so awful that I wanted to scream at everyone there and force
them to look at the black walls and the emptiness. But then I noticed,' she said, ‘that in certain places where statues had obviously been, new lights had been installed which illuminated the empty spaces. These lights,' she said, ‘had the strange effect of making you see more in the empty space than you would have seen had it been filled with a statue. And so I knew,' she said, ‘that this spectacle was not the result of some monstrous neglect or misunderstanding but was the work of an artist.'

We had paused at a traffic light on a busy intersection and were waiting to cross the road. There was no shade, and the air shimmered over the throbbing traffic while the sun pounded unrelentingly on our heads amid the noise. On the other side of the road stood an avenue of great trees like purple clouds in whose grove-like dimness human figures were discernible. People strolled or sat on benches amid the dark trunks and beneath the densely patterned foliage, whose depths of light and shade grew more intricate the more I looked. I saw a woman standing staring absently ahead of her while a small child crouched to examine something at its feet. I saw a man sitting cross-legged on a bench turn the page of his newspaper. A waitress brought a glass to someone sitting at a table and a boy kicked a ball that sped away into the shadows. Birds were pecking imperviously at the
ground. The separation between that silent glade-like place and the thundering pavement where we stood seemed for a moment so absolute that it was almost unbearable, as though it represented a disorder so fundamental and insurmountable that any attempt to right it would be ultimately shown to be futile. The lights changed and we began to cross. Sweat was coursing down my back and a pounding had begun in my chest that felt like the extension of the pounding of the sun, as if it had incorporated me into itself.

When we got to the church Paola had described, it was shut. She paced back and forth in front of the locked door as though expecting another way in to present itself.

‘It is a shame,' she said. ‘I wanted you to see it. I had pictured it,' she said, crestfallen.

The square where we stood was small and well-like and the sun was falling directly into it so that only a rim of shade remained around the edges of the pale shuttered buildings. I leaned against a wall and closed my eyes.

‘Are you all right?' I heard Paola say.

After the heat and light of outside, the restaurant was so dark it felt like the middle of the night. A woman was sitting at a table in the furthest corner, beneath a
reproduction of Artemisia Gentileschi's
Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist.
A bicycle helmet lay on the table in front of her.

‘We are very late,' Paola said, and Felícia shrugged, making a grimace with her large mouth that was half-smile and half-frown.

‘It's not important,' she said.

We sat down and Paola launched into an explanation of our detour and its failed purpose, while Felícia followed the story patiently with a furrowed brow.

‘I don't think I know that place,' she said.

It was just at the bottom of the hill, Paola said, only a few hundred metres away.

‘But you arrived by taxi,' Felícia said doubtfully.

That, Paola said, was because of the heat.

‘You are hot?' Felícia said to me, apparently surprised. ‘It isn't so hot at the moment,' she said. ‘At this time of year it can be much worse.'

‘But if you aren't used to it,' Paola said, ‘it might affect you differently.'

‘I suppose it's possible,' Felícia said.

‘A little bit goes to the head,' Paola said. ‘Like wine. I feel like drinking wine,' she added, reaching for the menu. ‘I feel like losing my bearings.'

Felícia nodded slowly.

‘It's a good idea,' she said.

She was a tall, spare woman with a long pale face
which in the dim light of the restaurant seemed carved out of deep shadows.

‘Let's – what is the expression in English?' Paola said. ‘Let's undo our collars.'

‘Loosen,' Felícia said. ‘Let's loosen our collars.'

‘Felícia has a very tight collar,' Paola said, and Felícia gave her strange half-smile half-frown.

‘It's not so bad,' she said.

‘Very tight,' Paola said, ‘but not so much that she chokes. They need to keep you alive, no? You are more useful that way.'

‘It's true,' Felícia said, moving her bicycle helmet from the table so that the waiter could put down the wine.

‘What's this?' Paola exclaimed. ‘Now you are bicycling?'

‘I am bicycling,' Felícia said.

‘But what happened to your car?' Paola said.

‘Stefano took the car away,' Felícia said. She shrugged. ‘It belongs to him, after all.'

‘But how can you manage without the car?' Paola said. ‘You live so far away it's impossible.'

Felícia appeared to think about it.

‘It's not impossible,' she said. ‘I just have to get up one hour earlier.'

Paola shook her head and swore under her breath.

‘What offended me,' Felícia said, ‘was his reason
for taking it. He said that he could no longer trust me with the car.'

‘Trust you?' Paola said.

‘The arrangement has been,' Felícia said slowly, ‘that whoever is looking after Alessandra has the car. So if Stefano has her for the weekend, the car goes with her. But most of the time she is with me, so the car stays parked outside my apartment. When something goes wrong with it, Stefano expects me to take care of it. Two weeks ago,' she said, ‘it needed entirely new tyres, and it cost almost half my salary for the month to replace them.'

‘So it has been to his advantage,' Paola said.

‘It was after I replaced the tyres that I received a letter from Stefano's lawyer,' Felícia said. ‘The letter said that my salary was not sufficient to justify having a car and to cover the costs of maintaining it. I had not noticed,' she said, ‘that the car was gone. I was getting Alessandra ready for school and we were late, but when I read the letter I looked out of the window and saw that the car was not there. Stefano has his own key,' she said, ‘so I realised that he must have come during the night and taken it while we were sleeping. I had a very full schedule for that day and it completely depended on having the car, so I was shocked by the fact that he hadn't warned me. But also,' she said, ‘I realised that unconsciously I had taken a feeling of
security and legitimacy from the car, because even though it was expensive to maintain, the fact that I shared it with Stefano seemed to offer me some kind of protection. Until that moment when I looked out of the window and saw an empty space where the car had been, I had been holding on to a delusion, when even an hour earlier I would have sworn I had no delusions left. And even then,' she said, ‘I remained deluded, because I picked up the phone and called Stefano, thinking there must have been some mistake. He was very calm,' she said, ‘and he spoke to me as if I was a naughty child that has to have their punishment explained to them, and when I began to cry he became even calmer, and he agreed it was very sad that I brought these misfortunes on myself with my lack of self-control.'

‘But that is completely wrong,' Paola exclaimed. ‘Your own lawyer can argue that you need the car because you are taking care of the child.'

Felícia nodded slowly.

‘I thought so too,' she said. ‘And so I called her, even though that kind of conversation is very expensive, and she said there was only one question, which was the question of whose name is on the documents for the car. According to her there was absolutely no moral argument I could make, which I found so impossible to believe that we ended up talking for
much too long and so running up an enormous bill on top of everything else. I should have known by now,' she said, ‘that Stefano does nothing on the basis of what is right or wrong, but instead acts only according to what the law will allow him to do. He understands that the law can be used as his weapon, where I only think of it in connection with justice, by which time it is far too late.'

‘It's unfortunate for you that Stefano is so intelligent,' Paola said, and Felícia smiled.

‘It's true that I made sure to choose someone intelligent,' she said.

‘The Buccaneer used the law like they use the big ball on the chain to demolish a building,' Paola said. ‘It was clumsy and it made a lot of mess, and in the end there was nothing left. Though if it ever becomes legal to kill another person,' she said, ‘I will hear a knock on my door before even a minute has passed and it will be him, because although he has been happy to break the law in small ways that won't expose him, he has never liked the idea of serving a prison sentence on my behalf, even for the pleasure of murdering me.'

Felícia sat back in her chair, her wine glass nursed in her lap and her melancholy smile just visible in the shadows.

‘The wine is so nice,' she said. ‘It makes me feel I could just sleep.'

‘You are tired,' Paola said, and Felícia nodded and half-closed her eyes, still smiling.

‘This morning,' she said slowly, ‘I got up at six, I dropped Alessandra at school at seven and I cycled to the college where I teach translation to give a class at eight. Then I cycled back and caught the train out to the suburbs where I had two English and French classes to teach at the school there. The only problem,' she said, ‘was that one of the other teachers was absent today and so there were twice the usual number of students and, since a test had been scheduled, twice the number of papers to take home to mark. I couldn't see how I would be able to carry them on the bicycle. I was quite proud of the solution I came up with,' she said, ‘which was to tie the bundle of papers to the seat and cycle home standing up. Then,' she said, ‘I took the train into the city and went to the library where I had been asked to give a talk on cataloguing translated texts, before coming here. Alessandra was unwell this morning,' she added, ‘and so I had half-expected to get a call from the school saying that I needed to come and collect her, in which case I didn't know what I would have done since my schedule was completely full, but fortunately the call didn't come.