Giovanni's Gift (3 page)

Then he saw them. Two of them.

A man dangled aloft with arms limp at his sides and legs stiff, hung by heavy rope from the crooked thick limb of an old oak there, one of the trees that had withstood many winters, had endured for generations, one of those trees that ranchers referred to as a wolf tree, because when all others failed you, if you were being pursued, this one would be there for you to climb and escape the predator's fangs. The other, whose movements were at first not much more emphatic than his companion's, or whoever, stood near the hanged man, visible in the flickering light of the fire. He wore a half mask that did not hide the crazed look set upon the barely visible features of his face—his mouth, the eyes seen through the cutouts of the mask. The two were framed, from Henry's vantage, by jagged, spiky leaves, and by twigs and many tesserae of saplings and wild hedges, on the opposite side of this meadow, a hundred feet distant.

Before he had the least chance to speculate upon what this could
mean
—one person hanged and with luminous spikes driven into his pale skull from forehead over crown and down to the base of the neck, the other with an insipid grin seizing his lips—Henry found he had stumbled headlong into the clearing, his own damp head swimming with confusion, in a state closer to terror than he had ever felt. In the low surge and dance of what small fire was left, Henry stared agape at the living figure as it strode toward him now with such quickness as to seem inhuman, then halted beside the hung man. With a nonchalant flick of the wrist, fingers touching the knees, he set the suspended body in motion, so that it swung, stiff and surely lifeless. The intruder said not a word but returned with frank delight Henry's shocked gaze, and then, taking several steps oddly backward away from the other, who stood with his shotgun half raised, offered Henry what could only be called a condemning smile. The music all the while continued, louder than Henry could bear. He put his left hand up to his ear, for a moment dropping his concentration. As he did, the figure leapt backward, crashing into the thicket on the far edge of the clearing. The silver crate or box, from which the music seemed to emanate, the fleeing man had been seen to snatch from the ground in one swift flowing movement as he sprinted into the tangle of woods. And there had been something else, too, inanimate and accusatory, which the trespasser had waved in the air before him, and which Henry witnessed in the dying light, before the figure made his escape.

Henry did not pursue him, nor did he fire any shells into the air, still reverberant for another few moments before all was a fresh calm and the forests on either side of the gorge swallowed up the last echoes of music. When he approached the hanging man, whose unpliant form still swayed to the beat of gravity's measure and no other, the recognition that its clothing was Henry's own came as a last insult. Plaid shirt, charcoal wool trousers, silver buckled belt—all had been stolen from his house apparently, to be brought up here for this. And the mannequin—for the hanging figure was not dead but constructed of rags, bound in white cotton to resemble the human form—had painted upon its blank countenance a childish rendition of a skeleton's skull face.

Henry unyoked the effigy and pulled it down. The thick rope he afterward cut with his pocket knife, having climbed into the wolf tree and edged out on the limb to get at it. He stood for a long time by the fire whose flames devoured the stuffed figure and lariat, and stared at its playful oranges and crimsons, until the thing burned itself out, was reduced to ashen junk, to nothing.

Over the course of my thirty-three years, my aunt had never asked for help. Edmé was a woman of prodigious independence. She was stoic, both she and my uncle were, always had been. It was not a matter of pride—though they were proud, after their own modest fashion—nor did it have anything to do with arrogance. Their manner was the result of a life lived simply, with detachment, and far enough away from the frenzy of success so as not to be ruined by its needs. This was how I always saw it, anyway. Independence was for them the greatest
sine qua non,
the very last thing they would ever relinquish.

Yet when Aunt Edmé telephoned me at my small flat in Rome, to apprise me of what had been happening during this past year at the ranch, I heard in her story, or behind it somehow, a cry for help. This was new. Nothing I had ever heard in her voice before. I offered to come visit, as it had been a while since I'd seen them, and although I didn't say so, such a trip wouldn't involve much of a sacrifice on my part, as my own affairs were not in the best order. But I sensed her immediate withdrawal.

“We're all right, Grant,” she said. “These past few months have been quiet. Just, like I say, all of a sudden they seem to be back to their old tricks, and we wanted to let you know, in case.”

“In case what?”

“Just … in case,” the words assuming the flat reserve of her part of the world.

“Edmé, why didn't you mention this before?”

“Tell me, Grant. How's your lovely Mary?”

“Well. I've been meaning to call you about that.”

“About what?”

Silence. Then, “I guess it just wasn't meant to be.”

Even before the cliché faded into a faltering explanation and her response that she hoped we would find some way to work things out, a wave of regret, a savory nausea, passed over me. Aunt Edmé was not going to pry. It was not in her nature. She presented another question, innocent if poignant: “How is your work going?”

I had no better answer to this than to her inquiry about Mary.

My work, I thought—this hodgepodge of translating, of private tutoring in English, of clerking in a bookshop, not to mention the ridiculous opportunity I'd recently been offered at an import-export firm—and muttered something by way of bringing this brief conversation with Edmé to an end. My God, I thought. My expatriation, my doomed marriage, my general absence of bearings and direction—these were not issues I felt it was possible to discuss with this beloved woman, who never had the least acquaintance, so far as I knew, with any of them. After we said goodbye, I found myself twisting the nose off a loaf of bread I had bought early that morning at the
alimentari
downstairs from the studio where Mary and I had lived this past half year. I lifted the bread to my lips and then, unable to eat, laid it on the table by the window. Looking out across the roofs of Rome, I saw the cupolas and domes here and there in the distance, and my mind went blank. What followed was a moment of thorough paralysis, an inertia of both body and spirit. What regret, what longing, what physical loneliness overwhelmed me as I stood alone in this room, nor would it have helped if I could have scolded myself for feeling so suddenly low. I had had my chance with Mary. There was no disowning that hard fact.

Rome was the end of our brief but troubled road. Mary and I came here hoping the eternal city would either restore our love or collaborate in the final throes of this marriage gone wrong. Why it seemed to us that Rome would be a better place than elsewhere to follow matters through to their inevitable end is now a mystery. Maybe it had to do with our belief that here in a city so inundated by ghosts, the deliverance or death of our love might happen with greater ease in the vast drowning wash of its history. The end would come quiet as a sigh underwater, was what we thought. Such was the peace we'd sought, and such was the peace we found, though both of us were aware that hidden within this small triumph of discretion was our great failure.

The marriage had gone well enough in the beginning, three years earlier in New York, where we met. An impetuous consortium of two, it was us against the world, the same way many must feel, encouraged by passion and the intuition that nothing can destroy an intimacy, a synergy this strong. We met one night, then again late the next afternoon, and by the third evening, after we'd spent the entire day in one another's arms, I was absolutely sure she must be pregnant. It seemed impossible to me, to both of us, that such erotic yearning and relinquishment could have any other result. She called me husband, and I called her my wife. Not for even the briefest moment during those nights and days together did any remnant of the larger, more cynical world, which would have seen us as perfect fools, break in on our selfish ecstasy with one another.

We shut ourselves away from the city. Day and night became emptied of meaning. Once in a while we would wander out into the whirlwind of urban life, into streets swarming with people going on with their innumerable pursuits, but we felt detached from all we saw, except when looking into one another's eyes. I have no memory of what we might have said to each other about what was happening to us, though no doubt we felt as if we'd managed to accomplish the impossible. That we had left this world behind.

Not some summer romancers, we fell in love under gray skies, walking hand in hand past Chinese families gathering ginkgo berries in the park, where within weeks the leaves would come down off the branches of the trees under the torrents of November rain. We kissed in dark corners and were scandalous in the back seats of cabs that carried us in the middle of the night from my place to hers. We made love in a corridor outside her door one impatient evening and were nearly caught by one of her neighbors, but felt that a kind of wholesome purity graced our every pleasure. Nothing could touch us, we believed. Ours was indomitable love.

We were married down at City Hall before Christmas. By first snow, an obstetrician was able to confirm Mary was indeed pregnant, and though we had predicted it, the disclosure caught us off guard somehow. How it transpired that after such a brief passage of time both of us had come not to want this child—at least “not now, not yet”—remains mysterious to me. I'd wager it will always linger in both our minds, the question of why we decided to go ahead with the abortion. I held her hand and looked into her eyes and saw the depths of her pain that day, as she lay under a sheet in the small recovery room in the clinic. We never discussed it after that.

I can picture Mary with such ease (her animated face and pale cream skin framed by dark-brown short-cropped hair, resembling with uncanny exactness the bewitching boy with pouty lips and haughty feather in his cap in Caravaggio's
The Calling of St. Matthew,
which hangs not far from here, in the San Luigi dei Francesi) and would imagine she'd describe these final months in terms not unlike my own. Because, even when we stopped agreeing about many things, we continued to acknowledge that when we made our decision not to have the baby, it was the beginning of the end of everything. And though it took several years for miraculous beginnings to come to a sorry end, it can't be said we didn't fight what simply happened to have been irrevocable. Rome was our last chance, as we saw it. We came, we tried to recapture our recent past, but the heat was gone. What kindled in its place was frustration, joyless and accusatory. Nothing we did was enough. Or, that is, nothing I did. For her part, I know she tried. But for mine, by taking up with a pretty young wanderer I met by the Barcaccia—a fountain, centered in a basin as oval as Mary's face, that depicts a flooded ship from whose marble hull water cascades through cracks and breaches—I put reconciliation out of reach for good.

Unaware of what I was doing, or why, I picked up this girl, took her home, and so delivered the quietus, as they say in the old romances. Coitus as quietus: Mary found us in bed, of course. Dreamily, cruelly, I made sure she would. And though I was furious, in my way, that she had the audacity to make the sanest possible move, which was to get away from me, from this monster we managed to become, I'm not the kind of person who would wish her harm or bad luck or anything of the kind. For her it had become life or death, really. And she thought to try life once more. For me, just then it hardly mattered which way it would go. The only decision I was able to come to was that I would make no decision. I would give myself over to the whims of chance. And if Rome was to be my little finale, all I could say was, it might have been worse.

Not that my life had been all that grand or theatrical before. Nothing much had ever gone on with me. No super-wicked skeletons rattled in my cupboard. The troubled road I mention has to do with an untidy personal life, would be a way of putting it. I'd been in another marriage before this, one between youngsters that was never intended to survive. That and the tenuous but persistent affair with a woman named Jude constituted the extent of my serious intimacies. These three mark the cardinal compass points of my adulthood. Mary—my second try at matrimony—gone. Daniella, wife the first, vanished into another improbable marriage, which has taken her away to Jerusalem with her Protestant missionary husband, dedicated to retrieving for Christ as many Jews as possible. And Jude, always there but not there. North, south, east. An incomplete survey of an unfinished journey, not a map one could follow with any hope
of arriving
somewhere.

In the dusty Forum one day not long after Mary had abandoned me, standing near what remains of those broken, evocative statues of the vestal virgins, listening in reverie to the hundreds of bells ringing the noon Angelus, I realized that there are times when loss is as easy to embrace as gain. This can happen only when hope is properly subdued, hope being a great troublemaker, with its cry of
Try, try again
and
Give it another go.
Hope was nicely becalmed that afternoon, as if the music of the bells had purified me. In my heart I felt a peace almost as sweet as any after the ecstasy of love. I'd failed anew, which was in itself nothing new.

But before that? before I met Jude on a train spiriting across France some years before, each of us living out of knapsacks? before Daniella first said hello to me in New York, downtown at the Quad, and asked me if I wouldn't mind moving to the left or right, as I was blocking her view of the cinema screen? before I met Mary?