Questions of Travel (14 page)
HE WAS LOOKING AT
a photocopy of a sheet of ruled paper torn from an exercise book. A witness statement, Malini said. “This woman saw the bodies behind the temple. They took all the men there and hit them with rifle butts. She said she couldn’t forget the sound of the skulls splitting open—it was just like coconuts falling on the ground.”
It was the kind of information that came Malini’s way as she visited villages around the country. Ravi shuddered at her tales but managed to forget them quite soon. Some of these things had happened in the late eighties; a long time ago in his view.
Malini was folding the paper, her face triumphant. The center of him stirred.
Sex made her talkative. After lovemaking, she embarked on stories of death squads and abductions, which was one reason why Ravi didn’t always listen to what she said. Their bed was a site of ecstasy and education. From the first afternoon in a friend’s borrowed room, she had been shameless: experimental, bold.
A rotund baby, Hiran was lengthening into a scrap of a child. They fed him
anamalu
plantains to fatten him, but he remained a wisp; barely there.
Ravi heard,
Kang kang buuru! Chin chin noru!
From the window, he looked down at the street. Several small children, including his son, were playing on a patch of waste ground near the rooming house. A neighbor looked after Hiran when Malini was at work, and he had become inseparable from her brood. “Run, run, run…,” shouted a fat little boy who seemed to be bossing everyone about. Hiran scampered after the rest, his arms swinging stiffly with his fingers pointing down. These days he ran everywhere—the quick patter of his steps was one of the background noises to life in the rooming house.
Ravi lit a cigarette and remained at his post. A different game started up below. The children ran around until one shouted, “Bomb!” At once, the others threw themselves to the ground, where they lay spread-eagled and very still. After a little while, they got up and ran around again. Ravi couldn’t see the point of this game. But there were days when the children played it nonstop.
Malini didn’t get on with one of her colleagues, a woman called Deepti Pieris. The origin of their quarrel was blurred. It had something to do with education—Deepti sent her children to an international school—or the position of a desk. Before it erupted, Malini had been drawn to Deepti, a confident, careless person. They had even unearthed an old connection. As a junior reporter on the social pages of his newspaper, Malini’s father had been present when Deepti’s aunt made her entrance at a ball. An architect had designed her dress. The inner layer was made of dark, coarse silk, the outer of an improbably fine net; at the last minute, hundreds of fireflies had been inserted between the two and the opening stitched shut. Malini’s father had never forgotten it: the stunned faces all turned the same way, the girl encased in living light. His photographer, an excitable Eurasian, had swooned.
Recently, Deepti had let slip the name of her brother-in-law: a thug who owned a tire factory. When some of his workers had agitated for strike action, two strangers paid a visit to the most outspoken. When they left, the man had a broken back. “Deepti tells everyone that her brother-in-law paid for the man to be examined by his own specialist,” said Malini to Ravi. “As if we don’t know who put him in hospital in the first place.” That was the kind of story she brought home about Deepti now.
On top of everything, the Pieris woman had a temper. Only that morning, she had flown into a rage with the tea boy and threatened to have him dismissed. Afterwards, she had gone around the office all sweetness, pressing slices of chocolate cake on everyone, laughing and talking too loudly. “She’s a typical bully. Suddenly she realizes she’s gone too far and tries to win people to her side.”
Ravi was of the opinion that thugs and chocolate cake were secondary to the case. The underlying cause of Malini’s hostility was that she had liked Deepti at first. After the matter of the school or the desk, she felt she had been deceived. Her father was mixed up in the whole thing—Malini was as finicky as a cat where he was concerned. The tale of the firefly dress, something that had shone in her childhood, had been handled by Deepti and was tarnished. Ravi said all this to his wife, but in a tactful, long-winded way, and added that whatever the Pieris woman had done, she wasn’t responsible for her brother-in-law.
Malini was looking thoughtful. Ravi realized that she hadn’t heard a word. She said, “You know, now I think Deepti really did feel bad about the tea boy. All that fuss with the cake. He was the one she really wanted to give it to, in fact.”
A diptych:
The first panel shows their wedding night, when at Malini’s suggestion, he gently dipped his fingers in her. When he withdrew them, they were strung with a luminous gossamer that thickened here and there into a silver node. For a long time afterwards, whenever he heard
World Wide Web,
what Ravi saw was that glistening mesh.
The second scene dates from the last year of their marriage, a night when Hiran was keeping each outward breath pinched in his nose for a few seconds as he lay sleeping in an angle of their room behind a curtain improvised from a cloth slung over a nylon cord. It was a rhythm that created tension, Ravi’s own breath suspended as he strained to hear each faint exhalation. Meanwhile, Malini was whispering of a woman who had taken delivery of a small parcel, opened a jeweler’s velvet case and found her husband’s eyeballs nestled on ivory satin. He was a journalist and had been missing for weeks.
Ravi’s voice came out far too loudly. “Be careful,” it said.
BEA’S COUSIN VIVIENNE, WHO
lived in Naples, was returning to England because her father was ill. The thing was, she didn’t want to give up her apartment or the students with whom she was paid to converse in English.
Bea reported all this idly to Laura. Yet an idea fanned open in the two women’s minds at the same time. It was a Sunday morning in May, and they were drinking coffee in a blue-vaulted room, the courtyard of Bea’s garden flat. There was a yellow rose and a creamy one against a wall. The hillside scent of thyme spiraled from a tub where a bay tree also grew. In twenty minutes Laura would have to leave for the lunch shift in Islington. A sense of fate—the future fixed in a shining stroke—excited and frightened her. She looked into Bea’s face and saw that she was in the grip of the same shivery thrill.
Laura said that she couldn’t possibly do it, she had never taught English to foreigners, she had no idea how to set about such a thing.
A soft golden moustache was sometimes to be seen above Bea Morley’s lip. She stroked it now, summoning the brisk, encouraging tone she favored when addressing an underperforming minion across a desk. “Of course you can do it. It’s only
talking.
” Bea was a great fixer. If the thought passed across her mind that in the absence of Laura, Theo might have more frequent recourse to her, she batted it away.
Fate, magic, outcomes that seemed ordained—they hadn’t yet finished with Laura.
Weeks had passed since dinner with the Brydens, and she had heard no more about writing for the
Wayfarer.
She didn’t like to pump Theo, now a regular visitor to their flat.
Two nights before she left for Naples, she was with him when the phone rang. He said, “That’s for you.”
Meera Bryden was so sorry she hadn’t been in touch sooner, a million things had come up, she had no idea why she had ever agreed to edit this magazine, she must have been bonkers. But she had loved Laura’s piece about the cathedral in Strasbourg. Had she said how utterly chilling she found it? And so original. She loved it, really, and was so sorry she couldn’t run it, they had done the city’s famous Christmas market last year. But now it appeared that Laura was going to Naples, how clever of her, the Mezzogiorno was
the
coming destination. Meera would love to run a feature on Puglia or Sicily—something a trifle less cerebral than Laura’s Strasbourg piece, a touch more sensual? At the magazine they had been thinking about food, the simple, earthy dishes of the south, people adored reading about eating in exotic locations and you could run such glorious photos. Was Laura by any chance tempted…?
Theo insisted on accompanying her to Heathrow. When Laura’s flight was called, he produced a parcel from his pack. “Not to be opened before Naples.”
She tore at it as soon as her seatbelt was fastened. The steward, touching the back of each row of seats as he passed down the aisle on a last check before takeoff, paused when he spotted the passenger cradling something red. He realized that she was crying quietly over a teapot. The things people brought on board! That spout could very well put out an eye.
THE LAST BAG FROM
the London flight was claimed in Naples, and Laura was left alone. The carousel looped past again, a melancholy rubber stream. She might have stayed there forever, or taken the first flight back, but a uniformed figure approached. Officials spoke into walkie-talkies; Laura filled out forms; it was foolish, she was telling herself, to think in terms of
signs.
Then a panel in the wall slid open like magic: a man in overalls emerged. He handed Laura her case. It had been retrieved from the tarmac where it had fallen, unnoticed, from a trailer.
By the time the airport bus pulled in, Naples stood in a brownish, benzene dusk. What had Laura expected? Arias, gunfire, the ghosts of centurions perhaps, certainly her pocket explored by the expert hand. Circles of traffic tightened and hummed.
Just a short walk,
said the letter Vivienne had sent with a map. But there were two men beside Laura, one offering a Discman, the other a mobile phone. She shook them off and began to make her way through the crowd, between folding tables on which were set out socks, combs, pocketknives, cheap, useful things. A shadow came whispering of hashish and a hotel. Laura walked faster, tried to look purposeful and knowing. An enormous square had been dug up and barriers erected around the excavations. She had to cross it—but how? An iron hand seized her arm: it had prevented her from stepping in front of a bus. Laura thanked, wanted to cry, fled into a narrow street. The evening had deepened. Large spots of rain came padding. A bouquet of umbrellas materialized, thrust at her by a dark man. There were few streetlights and no pavement. She put up the hood of her jacket. A cat cried thinly under a parked car. The rain slanted and steadied. Laura’s shoes were sodden, then her feet. Her wheeled case lurched over flagstones, always one heavy step behind, a club-footed stalker from an evil dream. A shining electric eye flew straight at her—she flattened herself against hard-hearted stone. The Vespa sped past, spraying laughter. Then there was a shrine enclosing a rouged and solid Infant: a trashy brooch pinned to a wet, black façade. Its neon illuminated the name of a piazza that Laura spent minutes failing to find on her map. She went on, past the sound of someone coughing. There was always another square or another crossroad, there was always a scooter coming fast out of the dark.
A photograph of Sophia Loren adorned the window of a pizzeria. To enter would require courage, because the restaurant was crowded and Laura was wet. She trudged on, and came to a door, flush with the street, that swung noiselessly back. There was fragrance and gilt: a seraglio or a church. Laura turned a corner and before her, like a vision, a flight of shallow steps led to an archway surmounted by a bell. She knew that she was lost. She knew that she loved this place.
Laura had time and occasion enough, during the months that followed, when she was lonely, when the temperature and her spirits dipped, to marvel at her sympathy with the city. It was inexplicable. Naples was indefensible: a callous city, a raddled
grande dame
with filth under her nails.
Vivienne’s flat, reached across a courtyard filled with motorbikes and cars, was on the fourth floor of a former
palazzo.
A mechanic’s workshop gave on to the street. Ghost voices slipped under the noise of revving.
Since you consult only your emotions, Vanessa, I must urge you to consider the nature of Salvatore’s relations with our grandmother.
Between advice about spare keys and plumbing, Vivienne’s letter had mentioned a whispering wall.
It just means Signora Florescu’s watching one of her soaps. Her living room’s bang up against mine, and she watches telly at all hours with the sound turned right up. She’s from Romania or one of those places—harmless and quite mad.
Bea Morley came for a visit, and it was plain to Laura that her friend was appalled. She could be formidable, tall Bea. She pushed her long fair fringe away from her face and stalked about the streets saying little and sucking in her cheeks. Her mood was catching. Wishing to convey the city’s attractions, Laura found herself enumerating flaws. The traffic didn’t stop for pedestrians, the post office had run out of stamps, she had lost her sunglasses to a pickpocket, damp afternoons brought the scent of drains, the traffic didn’t stop for red lights, there were battalions of stray dogs, she had lost her keys to a pickpocket, rubbish lay rotting on the pavements, the traffic didn’t stop for ambulances, the headlines were proclaiming another Mafia murder, and the window in Vivienne’s bathroom was stuck.
On Bea’s last morning, they walked past newsstands patchworked with images of a dead woman. Bea had described the hillock of flowers outside Kensington Palace. “You couldn’t joke about it. People you’d have sworn were sane took offence. But the funeral was brilliant—about the time they were getting to the abbey, I drove from Notting Hill to Battersea in only fifteen minutes. I must say I wouldn’t mind a royal shuffling off every week.”
They were on their way to a collection of pictures housed in a monastery. Afterwards, Laura opened a door at the foot of a flight of stairs. They went through into a cloister. It was lush with overgrown oranges, loquats, figs. Weather, working at the walls, had turned them a creamy yellow—the color of fading gardenias, said Laura. The leaves of the orange trees were as glossy and distinct as if cut from green tin. That evening, on the station platform, surrounded by shouts, clanking, an aria oozing from the tannoy, the squeak of sneakered feet, Bea said that she would always remember the cloister. “A wonderful place.” She couldn’t understand why Laura kept complaining about Naples. “You’re so lucky to live here,” said Bea.
Other cities—Venice, Rome, Florence—offered riches to the casual eye. Naples chose secrets and revelations. Laura learned to follow the dingy street, to descend the unpromising stair. There would be a vaulted ceiling, or a family feasting on melons under a pergola, there would be the trace of a fresco or a damaged stone face. A dull thoroughfare brought a red-robed saint with an arrow in her breast—Laura turned her head and saw the painting propped in the window of a bank. So it was to be a day bracketed by Caravaggios: she had sat before another in the cold blast of a church that morning. There was no end, it seemed, to these stagings of discovery. Wrong turnings took Laura to an industrial zone near the port; every truck, slow with freight, coughed in her face. Then came a row of grimy archways and, waiting in the depths of each one, the sea. It was polluted and shining. Laura remembered the treasure hunts of childhood: mysteries, astonishments, gifts that weren’t delivered but earned.
Donald Fraser, passing through London that Easter, had amazed his wife, his daughter and himself by presenting Laura with a digital camera. Over the years, he had sent Laura checks at enigmatic intervals for inscrutable sums: £27, say, followed, five weeks later, by £1143. What calculation they represented not even Donald could have said; an impulse would, over two or three days, become an imperative before which he meekly gave way. On the latest occasion, he had gone into a duty-free shop at Changi Airport intending to buy himself a camera. He went on believing this until the moment when the sales assistant asked to see his boarding pass; as he handed it over, Donald realized that he was going to give the camera to his daughter. He had seen Laura four or five times in ten years, usually in London, once in Geneva. Now came the lacerating thought of his child far from reach and defenseless in the grinding world. Lines from a poem learned as a boy roamed about his brain:
“Come back! Come back!” he cried in grief, / “Across this stormy water…”
He was a scientist, a rational man. But he had buried one of his tall sons. At the duty-free counter, stalked by air-freshener and electronic pop, Donald felt the weight of that coffin on his shoulder. It brought the conviction, lunatic and absolute, that a digital camera would keep his girl safe.
Jet lag, diagnosed the anesthetist when he confessed. She remarked that she had some very nice perfume samples that even Laura would love. But Donald—although he took the hint and bought his wife a pint of Poison on the London leg of their flight—held to his intent.
Reunited with his child in a hotel in Kensington, he was overcome by a familiar distaste. Distance diminished and enhanced his last-born. She shrank in memory, an illusion instantly dispelled by the sight of her too, too solid flesh. Her hair was cunningly piled and fastened with opalescent combs, but as she bent her head over the duty-free bag, Donald saw that it was threaded with gray. It was, at first, a sign that made no sense. A full five seconds passed before he grasped that the runt was no longer young. And by some runtish trick of transference it was the desertion of Donald’s own full-bodied prime that she thus contrived to convey. She was smiling at him, and delight placed a girlish mask over her face. But the finger hooked across the camera displayed a ridged nail. A trapped thing in Donald’s chest was hurling itself against its cage.
That year the camera was often in Laura’s hands, a weighty silver charm. In Naples, she applied a pearly coral polish to her toenails and photographed the unflattering result. She photographed her red teapot and a yellow dish of blue plums. From day to day, she recorded the changing, textured splatters of pigeon shit on the crinkled tiles under the kitchen window. There was a compulsive quality to all this. Laura photographed Vivienne’s Indian quilt: lilac flowers on a cucumber-green ground. She photographed the dancing bronze god on the TV, the mirrorwork cushion on a chair. Meera Bryden sent her to Sicily to write about the island’s sweets. Oh, Palermo, capital of ice cream and murder! In streets end-stopped by a stony mountain, Laura Fraser breakfasted on cannoli. She photographed them first, along with sweet, pistachio-flavored couscous. There were almond biscuits, cassata, and a pig’s blood and chocolate pudding—but she couldn’t photograph the pudding, it was out of season.
Images uploaded and viewed on a laptop had a particular luminosity: colors fresh from the brush, radiant and wet. Rather shyly, Laura emailed Donald Fraser a few photos of Vivienne’s flat. There was no reply. Messages came in from Theo, from friends here and there on the planet, from the
Wayfarer,
from strangers offering get-rich schemes or sex. A new form of suspense had come into the world: everywhere, the profits of telephone companies increased as more and more people dialed up and watched a screen, waiting to see if an electronic mailbox filled with a sequence of colored squares.
In Lincoln, Vivienne Morley’s father recovered from surgery, grew strong. But Vivienne had fallen in love—deeply, life-changingly—with a girl called Gin. She was to have returned to Naples at the end of the year but now wondered if Laura would like to stay until the following summer. Laura’s emailed reply carried a photo of an ecstatic bronze dance.
An anniversary came, the first day of Laura’s thirty-fourth year. Birthdays are a time of reckoning and wishes. Laura spent hers writing about marzipan and a cake called the Triumph of Gluttony. “Luna Rossa,” played on an accordion, was persecuting diners at the end of the street. Long after she shut down her laptop, Laura’s thoughts were still of transience and sugar. She ate a pastry cloud stuffed with cinnamon-scented ricotta. Then she ate another. On waking, she had photographed the view from her bedroom: a concrete wall on a dank day. Why had she bothered? She owned three rings, a silver band, a lump of amber, a round red sparkler of faceted glass. Wearing them in the street was asking for trouble. She turned them on her fingers. The evening held the knowledge of passing unnoticed in the world. Where was the gaze that would gather up her worthlessness and invest it with loving sense?
In the courtyard, a man was whistling. Phantom insinuations arrived through the wall:
But, Assunta, my dear, we are all strapped to fortune’s wheel. Why do you speak of betrayal?
On the day the world learned of Diana’s death, someone had banged on Laura’s door. Beyond the safety chain, an old woman scarcely taller than a child stood sobbing. Signora Florescu’s Italian, stressed in all the wrong places, was a puzzle in which the dead woman’s name recurred. She was crying for her: that much was plain. Laura put her arm around her neighbor—the bent neck was surprisingly thick. Placed in a chair and offered tea, the signora only cried harder. She picked up a cushion and blotted her face; afterwards, snot glistened on the mirrorwork. Laura put a saucepan of water on to boil. It took forever, and she wanted to weep. Signora Florescu had reverted to her own tongue, but Laura knew exactly what she was saying. Diana didn’t come into it: she was only shorthand for the unbearable sadness of being. Laura could tell, because the same shapeless grief was working in her. “Back teeth together!” she urged. She had intended a light note, audible only to herself, but it came out ringing. The water changed its tune, and Signora Florescu raised her white head—she really was powerfully ugly. A wrinkled child, she stuck out her tongue.