Escape (17 page)

When I went to school Guido worked at the desk he bought for the
sunroom. It was a big expensive oak desk that took up half the room.
In the corner I put a traveller's palm like the one we'd admired in Fiji
in a lovely terracotta pot. He wrote in a blue and white exercise book
that he'd brought with him from Italy. When it was almost finished I
bought him a typewriter. I gave it to him for his birthday, with a gold
ribbon tied around it.

'A typewriter,' he said. He sighed, and opened the drawer of his
desk. Inside there were brochures full of typewriters. The one he had
circled was far more complicated and fancier than the one sitting in
front of him.

I was so annoyed with myself. Why did I think I would know
enough to buy him something so important? I looked at the price of
the circled one. I couldn't have afforded it.

'It doesn't matter,' he said bravely. 'I will use this.'

He did use it. I grew to love the typewriter, even if it was the wrong
one. When it was clattering cheerfully, I knew he was absorbed and
happy. I liked hearing his presence, the sounds of his existence. We
left notes on the typewriter for each other. At first it was just things
like –
late home today
,
staff meeting
, or
need milk
. But then it became
like something alive, a genie in the machine, the translator of things
we found hard to say.

I was sitting in the garden under the stars
, Guido wrote one night,
and I watched the moon rise over our pool. It made a ladder of light
across the dark to the bedroom. I wanted to climb it and wake you, see the
moon touch your face, the end of light's journey. But I stayed here, in the
shadows
.

'Oh Guido, that's so lonely,' I exclaimed next morning when I saw
it on the typewriter. 'Why didn't you wake me? I would love to talk to
you in the moonlight.'

Guido shrugged. He put his finger to my lips. 'Is not
meant
to be
lonely. Is, 'ow you say, longing. Some things can't be changed. I didn't
want it to be. Leave it.'

'I love you more than the moonlight,' I wrote the next day.

'I love you more than the idea of moonlight,' he wrote back.

'Is that a symbol?' I asked. 'I mean, like the possibility of hope?'

He shrugged. 'I don wan to explain.'

The next week I wrote, 'I love you more than myself. '

Underneath he typed, 'More than the baby?'

I saw it in the afternoon as I was putting down my bag. Maria had
come home with me for a cup of coffee. Guido looked past me up the
hallway, watching her peering into our rooms. He reached across and
tore out the sheet of paper with his words on it, crumpling it in his
fist.

'How long is she staying?' he whispered to me.

On Sunday afternoons we drove to the beach. If there were good songs
on the radio, we'd sing all the way. At first I just listened to Guido
humming, but when I joined in with the words, he told me I had a
lovely voice. It was
dolce
, he said. When we arrived at the beach we'd
stop only briefly to drop our towels on the sand, and race each other to
the sea. I loved the first dive under a wave, the sudden drenching quiet.
Under the water we were as light and easy as the tiny fish flashing past.
After our swim we'd lie on our towels, letting the sun dry the water off .
We lay for hours, the sun like the sea, wrapping itself all around us. I
loved his body warming so close to mine.

When we lay in our bed, the sound of our skins brushing together
was the rolling of the sea and I felt I'd known him forever, he was as
old as my dreams and now we'd weave new ones together. We would
make a new family, new lives.
La famiglia Leopardi!
And if we could
lie like this always our love might last, and only death could come
between us.

As we were lucky enough to have three bedrooms, Guido said, we
should have one each. 'We both need privacy,' he told me, six weeks
after we'd moved in, 'with space for our own work. You can have the
room with the double bed.'

I felt a twinge of grief. 'But we'll still sleep in our . . . in my room,
won't we?' I said. 'That's
our
bed.'

Guido smiled. 'Of course!'

He continued to read and work companionably in the sunroom,
but if we had an argument he'd take everything into his room, his
typewriter, his pens and paper and poetry magazines, and close the
door firmly behind him. In the drawers of his bedside table he kept all
his books and secret things.

'Never let the sun go down on an argument,' my father said.
Having separate rooms meant, occasionally, that this happened. I
could never sleep on those nights and I'd pace the hallway, listening to
Guido's snores as he lay on his lonely single bed.

One morning I left a poem of my own on the typewriter.

When I left you this morning
you were curled like a new moon
cuddling dreams.
I wanted to roll myself into a ball,
a warm sun,
and fit neatly into the cave
of your belly.
We could have been a circle,
a universe.

I was late to school because I lingered too long at the desk. I was
looking at my poem. Funny how the words no longer seemed mine.
They possessed authority, typed like that, with the gravity of men in
dark suits. Nothing I had ever said had seemed so correct.

Guido's respect for privacy was as solid as the wall that separated our
rooms. I understood after a while that he didn't want me climbing over
it, and he didn't want to have to keep rebuilding it. He kept his feelings
inside this fort like a small army of well-trained soldiers. It seemed
easy for him. He wanted me to do the same.

When I burst into tears after an argument, Guido shook his
head.

'I'm sorry,' I said, seeing his annoyed expression. I sniff ed loudly
but a drop of snot fell onto my lip. I wiped it with my hand.

He looked away in disgust.

'Well, haven't
you
ever cried?'

'Not since I was a little boy,' he said. 'In my 'ouse, crying was a sign
of weakness.'

Guido liked to keep his room private, too, but I had to venture
in at least once a week to clean. One Saturday morning when I was
vacuuming, I found another letter from James Heartacher on his
bed. I was examining it, looking at the date, when he burst into the
room.

'What are you doing in here?' he yelled above the roar of the
vacuum.

I turned it off and held the letter out to him. 'Could you read it to
me?'

Guido looked shocked, as if I'd asked to watch him peeing or
picking his nose. He said nothing, just snatched it from me and tore it
into little pieces.

'Christ, why won't you let me see?' I said. 'We're
living
together! I
want to know about your life!'

'Why can't you
stai zitta
?' He took a step towards me. He was
shouting, his face savage. 'Shut up for once!' He kicked the bed.
'Always with your nose in my things.
Cazzo
, you're everywhere! Why
can't you leave me alone?'

My heart was thumping with fright. I ran out into the garden and
leant my forehead against the cool metal of the Hills hoist. Guido's
pyjama leg flapped soft on my cheek. I closed my eyes and breathed in
the comfort of lemon soap. When I came back in, Guido was standing
at the sink, unwrapping a sausage of salame. 'Is not bad, this
sorpresa
.'

I said nothing.

'What is the matter, you don like it? The
sorpresa
?'

'I'm not used to . . . arguments. You shouting at me.'

Guido shrugged. 'But was not an argument – you call
this
argument? There were no arguments in your 'ouse?' He grinned. 'Must
be the Anglo-Saxon way again. Everyone must to be
nice
all the time.'

'No, but—'

'We jus have different opinions,
cara
, is okay. I'm sorry if you don
like the way I espress myself . . .'

That gave me courage.
Sorry
. 'Well,' I began, taking a deep breath,
'it's just that the way you react to this Heartacher man, I think he can't
just be boring. I mean, you wouldn't tear someone up for that small
crime.' Or shout at me so frighteningly, I thought, looking down at my
shoe.

Guido turned back to the sink.

'Did Heartacher do something really bad to you? Really off end
you somehow? Like, did he take your girlfriend or . . .' I heard my
nagging voice in wonder. As I hovered from foot to foot on the kitchen
lino, my cheeks burning, I realised that my need to know what mortal
offence James Heartacher had committed was far greater than my fear
of Guido's displeasure. Because if I didn't know the crime, mightn't I
one day, accidentally, do something similar?

Guido took the knife from the drawer. My stomach clenched. He
muttered something and cut a thick chunk of salame. When he turned
to face me, he gave a half-smile. 'Look,
cara
,' he said mildly, his left
cheek bulging with
sorpresa
, 'this person—'

'Heartacher?'

He rolled his eyes. 'Yes. I met 'im at a time in my life I don like to
think about.' He gave a short laugh. 'Was not a big thing, jus, how you
say? Unpleasant. I am not proud of myself about this time, or things
that happened. So I don like to think about it. Or talk about it. This is
jus the way I am done.'

I was quiet, thinking of ways to get him to do exactly that. To talk
about it.

He crossed the chessboard lino and put a hand on my stomach.
'Don get upset, is bad for you and the baby. No need for
lacrime
. There
are so many other more interesting things to discuss, no?' And his
hand moved from my stomach to my breast.

I put my hand over his and squeezed it. 'But I would like to
help
,
you know. Sometimes it's a relief to talk about things, and you can tell
me anything, I'd never stop loving you, ever.'

Guido's eyebrow rose. 'Try to understand. You do not 'ave things
in your past that disturb you? Things you would prefer to forget?'

'Yes, I suppose—'

'But I do not insist you tell me, do I? I respect your privacy, yes?'

'Yes, but maybe we could—'

'Well, is only this I am asking from
you
. You wan a piece of
sorpresa
? Is not bad.' And he picked up a magazine from the bench and
went to lie on the couch.

As I left the kitchen and went to hunt for my purse – there was
shopping to do for the seafood pasta we were having for lunch –
I thought how easy it would be to make a fatal mistake with Guido.
There were so many silent parts to him that I didn't understand. Guido
said this was because we came from different cultures.

'We are not all the same,' he said at lunch. '
Grazie a Dio!
That
would
be boring, no?' He grinned, and scooped up his spaghetti. After
the shopping, I'd spent an hour and a half preparing the sauce. It was a
pity, as Guido remarked, that I hadn't added enough salt to the pasta.

'Well, we never cooked spaghetti at home,' I said. 'Just like we
didn't
shout
at each other.' I stuck out my jaw.

'
Beh
, you think people are always polite, like your parents, the
teachers in your school, all with good motives, but not everyone is like
this. People show you what you wan to see. Is all on the surface. You
are so innocent, Rachel, but the real world is not so. I am just pointing
out the realities. You Anglo-Saxons, you don admit the true way the
world works. But the 'uman civilisation is not polite.'

'Yes, but—'

'Look at the 'istory of the feudal system. The peasants at the
bottom, digging at the earth with their hands for a living. Is not an
easy life, they must learn to be cunning, they must try to get every lira
they can from you to survive. Everyone knows this – the peasants, the
landlords. Your place in society shapes your attitudes. You must be
aware of this.'

I writhed on my chair. I hated the way he divided everything up,
divisions where there might be unity, privacy where there might be
happy closeness.

'Yes, of course, but can't we change? I mean, tradition isn't this
implacable force, like, I don't know, some great concrete boot that
comes down on top of us!'

'Of course.' Guido looked down at me with a smile. 'Ideals are
important, I agree. Vital. But they are ideals.'

'But that's what drives us! The imagining of possibilities, of what
could
be rather than what
is
.'

I faltered and Guido sighed. He pushed back his plate. 'I am very
tired. Is good to talk during the lunch, not after. Is time now for
la
siesta
.' He got up then from the table and went to take the weight off
his feet, while I stood up on mine, and washed up.

Later, when I went to lie down on my bed, Guido was there. He
was sprawled from one side to the other, his arms flung out as if he
had surrendered, quite suddenly, to the onslaught of sleep. I lay down
in the long thin space at the edge of the bed, trying not to disturb
him. Guido hated being woken up during his siesta. He would talk
in grumpy monosyllables all afternoon. I took shallow breaths so I
wouldn't make any noise.

You are ridiculous
, said the voice.

I know, I said. I felt two tears on either side of my head slide down
sideways into my hair.

You're just a cowering little mouse
, the voice went on.
You hardly
exist at all
.

I looked at his back. Such smooth olive skin. There was a dark
freckle on his shoulder. I loved that freckle. Why did he choose my bed
to sleep on? He could have slept in his own room,
privately
. Perhaps he
wanted to make up after the argument, just like I did.

It wasn't an argument
, said the voice.
You just can't handle anyone
disagreeing with you. Being separate. You go to pieces.

Very carefully I raised my head and then my shoulders off the
bed. I'll go and lie down on the couch, I thought, and read the paper.
It would be a change. Normally I lay on the floor when we watched
television with my head on the Indian cushions. Guido always took
the couch because he didn't like the floor, whereas I didn't mind it
much at all.