The American (35 page)

‘
Ciao
, Edmund!’

She opens the door and sits in the passenger seat, the bags at her feet.

‘I am well,’ I reply and add, ‘put them in the back. We have a long way to go.’

She looks over her shoulder as she pushes the bags between us, squeezing the melon between the seats. It is too heavy for her to lift clear. She settles herself down, snapping the safety belt into its clip.

‘How far do we go? To Fanale?’ she enquires.

Clara assumes we are going to the Adriatic coast for the day, for my message instructed her to bring her bikini, suntan oil and a towel. Once, with Dindina, I drove her to the seaside and the three of us had a most enjoyable day, lazing on the beach with a rented umbrella and chairs, splashing in the water and eating calamari in a little restaurant close by, sandwiched between the beach and the main coast railway line. Like children, we waved at the passing trains: an English pastime, I explained, which drew no reciprocal waving hands but blank stares of dull incomprehension. Clara hinted, as we made our way back to the mountains in the gathering dusk, she would have liked just the two of us to have gone, causing Dindina to sigh with annoyance.

‘An hour. And we are not going to the sea but to the mountains.’

At my response, she is somewhat crestfallen. She had obviously been counting on my heeding her hints.

‘And this . . .’

She nods in the direction of the rattan basket.

‘A picnic.’

She is instantly alert, her disappointment forgotten.

‘We are going for a picnic,’ she repeats needlessly, continuing, ‘just us? Just two?’

‘Yes. No one else.’

She puts her hand on mine as I struggle with the ridiculous gear lever, changing from third into second to descend the steep hill out of the town, down to the river and the railway station.

‘I love you, Edmund. And I love to go for picnics.’

‘It is a beautiful day. I am glad we have the opportunity.’

‘I am cutting two classes,’ she admits, and winks at me. ‘It does not matter. The
professore
is . . .’ she is lost for the words in English, ‘. . .
una mente intorpidita
.’

‘A dullard.’

I roll back the canvas roof and a hot wind whips in.

‘Yes! A dull-ard.’

During the night, in the hour just before dawn, when time was readjusting itself to the present, the sky clouded over briefly and there was a curt but torrential rainstorm. The noise of the water on the shutters and gushing down the broken drainpipe woke me. The air was chilly and I pulled a blanket over myself. By sunup, the sky was clear, unblemished by a single cloud. It has remained so since. The sun is therefore fiercely hot and the air unsoiled. The mountains are so sharply defined, the shadows, the trees and grass, the bleak stone, I can see every crevice and gorge, every ravine and rockslide.

At Terranera, we halt at the bar. I do not leave the car on the road as before but reverse it up a narrow lane beside the bar. If, by some remote chance, the shadow-dweller has talked himself out of his traffic summons by waving a foreign passport and pleading ignorance in his hire car, and is following us, he will drive by and I shall see him. I pray this does not happen for I should then have to abort the picnic and have no excuse ready to counteract Clara’s inevitable disappointment.

The surly girl is there and gives Clara a hard look.

‘
Due aranciate, per favore. Molto freddo
.’

I smile but the girl does not respond. I am an old man with a young whore and that is all there is to it. And a foreigner, as well.

She rattles about in the icebox, puts two bottles on the counter, snaps the tops off with a twist of her wrist and pours the orangeade into two glasses. I pay and Clara and I go outside to sit at one of the tables on the pavement, in the sun.

‘Is it far more?’ she asks.

‘Ten, twelve kilometres. That is all. Another twenty minutes.’

She pauses to work out the mathematics.

‘Twelve kilometre! Twenty minute?’

‘We are going off the beaten track.’

The expression is unknown to her and she looks at me with puzzlement in her eyes.

‘I think you would say
lontano. Fuori mano
.’

She laughs and the sound thrills me.

‘You will speak Italian. One day. I will teach you.’

No vehicles drive by and I see no sign of the Peugeot. After ten minutes, during which time I am sure the shadow-dweller would pass by if he was tailing us, we leave the glasses on the metal table and drive away. At the start of the track I turn sharply off the road, giving no signals, the Citroën rocking over the bumps and Clara holding on to the door. I do not stop to check the road. We are safe: I sense it.

‘Where are we going?’

She is startled at my taking such an insignificant track, is clearly anxious. This was not what she expected.

‘You shall see.’

This heightens her apprehension.

‘I think it is good we should stay close to the road.’

‘There is no need to worry. I have been here before several times. On my butterfly outings.’

I swing the wheel over to avoid a particularly large rock and the Citroën pitches as if struck by an invisible wave. The suddenness of the jolt comes as an unexpected surprise to her, as the jarring of an aircraft striking turbulence might. She mutters a half-cry.

‘You are not afraid of coming into the wilds with me, are you?’

‘No.’ She laughs, tensely. ‘Of course, I am not. Not with you. But this . . .’ She snaps her fingers. ‘. . .
sentiero!
’ She waves her hand in the air. ‘You should have a jeep. A Toyota. It is not good for a . . .
una berlina
.’

It is as if the danger of the track diminishes her command of English.

‘A sedan car. True. But this is no sedan, no fancy Alfa Romeo or German limousine. It is a Citroën.’ I strike the steering wheel with the palm of my hand. ‘This was made by the French for taking potatoes to market. Besides, I have always come here in this car.’

‘You sure?’

‘Of course. I no more want to walk back to the town than you do.’

‘I think you are crazy,’ she remarks. ‘This will go to nowhere.’

‘I assure you it does.’

She pouts her reply. Her doubts are calmed somewhat, yet she still clings to the door with her right hand, her left pressed hard into the fabric of the seat to steady herself. We do not speak again until just before the valley, where the track runs out altogether into grassy shadows.

‘Now there is no road!’ Clara exclaims in an exasperated, told-you-so voice.

Beside the ruined shepherd’s hut, I stop the car and switch the engine off. She lets go of the window. In the silence, we can hear a bird piping in the trees and the song of crickets.

‘Is this where we go?’

‘No. Not quite. We go another hundred metres, around those stones. But from here we just roll forward. No motor, no sound. And you will see a wonder.’

She grips the window again.

‘You will not need to hold on. We shall go very slowly. Just relax and watch.’

I ease my foot off the brake and the car begins to move forward, the springs squeaking slightly. At the stones, I twist the steering wheel, applying the brakes to slow us. We roll gradually down to the edge of the meadow and under the walnut tree.

The valley is as it has been for the past few weeks, a riot of flowers. Despite the direct blaze of the sun, they are not bleached but still brilliant in their colours. At the edge of the lake stands a heron, still as a grey fence post, its neck straight and leaning forward.

‘How did you know of this place?’ Clara asks.

I shrug: it is sufficient an answer.

She opens the car door and steps out. The heron bends its neck and crouches into the reeds but does not fly off. I watch Clara. She moves slowly round to the front of the car and stands before it, surveying the valley, the woodlands, the high austerity of the rock crags above and the ruined buff stone buildings of the
pagliara
.

‘No one comes here?’

She speaks so quietly, I can hardly discern her words.

‘No. No one. I have been all over the valley. Up to the buildings. No sign of people.’

‘Just you.’

‘Yes,’ I lie, and recall my final client’s advice:
you must take your mistress up there
. I can again feel her dry, quick kiss on my cheek.

Clara has unbuttoned her blouse and dropped it on the grass. She is wearing no bra. Upon her back dapple the shadows and patches of sun eking through the branches of the walnut. She kicks off her shoes, which curve through the air to disappear in the grass, and unzips her skirt. It falls to the ground. She bends and steps daintily from her knickers, her buttocks tight and rounded, whiter than the rest of her skin, her waist slim. She turns to face me, her long tanned legs slightly apart. Her small breasts do not hang but stand out from her chest, proud and immaculate. Her nipples are firm and brown, the skin around lighter, like an aura around tiny dark moons. I look at her stomach, at the taut muscles and the notch of hair below it, and I step out of the car.

‘Well?’ I enquire.

She is coquettish and tosses her head. Her auburn hair swings from side to side, brushing against her face.

‘Well?’ I repeat.

‘I am going to swim. In the lake. Are you coming?’

She does not wait for my reply but starts to run through the grass.

‘There are vipers!’ I call urgently. ‘
Vipera! Marasso!
’ I add in case she does not understand me. I can feel dread creeping up my spine like age.

She looks fleetingly over her shoulder and replies, ‘Maybe. But I am lucky.’

The heron takes to the wing. It rises from the reeds with an ungainly flapping, its long legs swinging forward and backwards. It crooks its neck, raises its legs and flies down the valley with slow, lazy wingbeats. It is an Italian heron and we have disturbed its siesta.

I undress. It is many years since I last took my clothes off out of doors, except at the beach, which does not count: then, at least, I had a towel of modesty behind which to cower.

My body is old. My skin is smooth and my flesh has yet to metamorphose into the flabby waste of many of my peers, but my stomach is no longer tense and my chest muscles sag a little. My arms are too sinewy and my neck is just beginning to scrawn. I do not feel ashamed or embarrassed. Just not young. And, with the caution of years, I do not remove my shoes until I reach the bank of the lake.

Clara is splashing in the middle. She has not wet her hair.

‘Come in here,’ she says, her voice carrying softly over the surface of the lake, her hand risen from the water and pointing to a tumble of cut stone which might once have been a slipway for a cart or watering beasts. ‘There is no mud there. And there is no mud here. Just baby rock.’

I wade out to her. The water is pellucid, is almost blood-warm and rises deliciously up my body as I go in deeper. She is standing on the bottom, the water up to her armpits. I stand by her and look up at the cloudless, merciless sky.

‘Stand by me.’

I obey her order and she takes my hand under the water, holding it out in front of us.

‘Watch. Be still.’

As the ripples of my arrival peter out in the reeds, small fish no bigger than minnows appear in a shoal to gather about our hands. They hover like slivers of glass just under the surface then move in to nibble at the skin on our fingers, their Lilliputian teeth rasping infinitesimally at our flesh. I think of the mice, discovered in the Valley of the Kings by nineteenth-century Egyptologists, which had nibbled at the corpses of the pharaohs.

‘If we stay here for a year, they will devour us.’

‘It is said if these fishes bite at two hands holding, then love is good for the people.’

She kisses me then, pressing herself against me, her skin and body as warm and as pure as the water.

‘Do you make love in water?’ she asks.

‘I have not.’

She places her arms around my neck and raises her feet from the stones, wrapping her legs around my waist and pushing herself on to me. I put my hands beneath her but the water is taking her weight. The shoal of fish dart around us for a few moments then flee for the reeds, travelling with the rings swelling to the bank.

We leave the water and slowly walk, hand in hand, back to the Citroën, the sun scorching into us, drying us before we reach the car. I spread a blanket upon the ground, just inside the boundary of the shade, but she pulls it into the sun.

‘We do not want to hide from the sun,’ she rebukes me. ‘It is good. We can lie still and when the blood is hot again we can make love again.’

She takes from her carrier bag a tube of suntan lotion and waves it at me. The air fills with the scent of coconut oil as she commences smoothing the lotion into her skin. I watch as her hands rub it round her breasts, pushing them aside, pressing them upwards. She caresses the lotion into her belly and down her thighs, bending at the waist as she works it into her shins.

‘Will you put this on my back?’

I take the plastic tube and squeeze a snake of the lotion on to my palm; then I smear it across her shoulder blades. I work downwards, smoothing it into her flesh.

‘Go right down,’ she requests. ‘Today I shall be brown everywhere.’

And so I put more of the lotion on my hands and stroke her buttocks with it, feeling the firmness of her young body and thinking of how my own is older, looser.

This done, she rubs the lotion into me. Then, the sun full upon us, we lie side by side on the blanket, she upon her back and I upon my front. I close my eyes. Our hands just touch.

‘Tell me, Signor Farfalla,’ she asks, her voice lulled by the sleepy heat, her words tinged with irony, ‘why are you afraid?’

She is wiser than her years. Working in the Via Lampedusa has taught her more, I suspect, than ever the university might be able. She knows to seduce first a man’s body, then his mind, before searching for the kernel of his being. She is using the same technique upon my soul as a real whore might upon the wallet of a sex-hungry sailor in Naples.