The Night Stages (33 page)

He leaned the bicycle against the one small oak that had somehow rooted in this windswept place, knowing that its trunk would be the corner post for his hut. He removed the axe he had strapped to his crossbar, walked down the slope toward the fourth lake, where he had noted a grove of sallies, perfect in height for wattles, then brought back two bundles of these on his return, using the thicker pieces for upright posts that he pounded into the ground at two-foot intervals with the blunt end of the axe. After some thought, he decided that he would make the dwelling eight feet long and six feet wide, leaving two feet of open space in the east wall for a doorway. Then he began to weave the thinner sally branches back and forth between the posts, and the walls began to
grow. Sometimes the wattles broke. Experimenting, he found that if he twisted the sally branches with two hands when he came to a corner, the fibres would give rather than snap. It wasn’t until the walls were about three feet high that he realized he was using a method of weaving similar to what Susan must have used when making her Belleek baskets. He felt this connected the two of them in some way and was warmed by this.

By the end of the next day the walls were up. He could have finished them more quickly, but he knew he needed to continue his cycling so as not to lose strength in his legs. The following morning he set out on a hundred-mile ride, tearing down into the valley, pleased about the climbs he would have to make once he reached the bottom. On his return trip he removed timber and tin sheeting from the roof of a disused cow byre and, when he had pocketed all the nails he could pull from the timber by hand, tied the materials messily together, attached the end of the rope to the bicycle, and pushed the vehicle and all that trailed behind it up toward the last of the lakes. He had made the south wall of the building taller than the north by about eighteen inches so that his roof, when he had it in place, would have enough of an incline that the rain would run off. One of the vacant cottages had a clay pot on the top of its chimney, and he would cut a hole for that in the tin in order to have a decent flue, and a small chimney of his own, when he needed to make an indoor fire.

After the roof was up he began to make the daub, which was easier than he had thought it might be, because of the
non-stop defecating of a flock of nearby sheep. He used the dry ends of rushes for the straw, there was plenty of mud in the vicinity, and water was everywhere. Once he had added the dung, he beat the mixture with his boots in a kind of joyful dance until it reached the right consistency, then applied the resulting paste to the wattled walls one handful at a time, while the sheep watched him with a bemused curiosity. The child in him loved the process, and the next morning, when he saw the walls had hardened, he was ridiculous with pride.

He thought it would be good to do some off-bicycle training as well to increase the strength of his torso and arms, and remembered an article he had furtively read in a magazine he had seen in a shop in the town while the shopkeeper was serving a bevy of customers. The men pictured in the black-and-white photos were jumping with muscles, having apparently made use of the barbells advertised here and there in the pages. He determined to make himself a set of these with the materials at hand. A bough, three inches in diameter, was lying to the side of the oak tree, having been torn most likely from the trunk by a gale the previous winter. He seized this and chopped at the branch end until he had a strong pole about five feet long. Then he sought and found two stones, each the size of a man’s head. These he tied to each end of the bough with the rope, but they slipped from their rigging no matter the knots he employed. Eventually he bought some wire in a hardware store in town and that, along with the rope, did the trick.

While he lifted the barbells early each morning, under varying degrees of rain, or on the few fully clear days, he thought about what he would call the unnamed lakes. Or he thought about Susan, how she would feel about his new strength, whether or not she would notice the fine cut of him when he won the Rás. And him a single rider. Independent.
Unique
, he liked to think, savouring the sound of the word. He would never be part of a team.

He eventually decided on Wattle Lake for the name of the fourth lake because he had used the sally branches near its shore for his shelter. The third lake was round and pleasant and he wanted to call it Gerry-Annie Lake, feeling that was the least he could do for the other mother he had so abruptly left behind. But his own lake, the smallest, his neighbour, was more complicated. He knew it better than the other two, was beginning to learn its moods. It was fully black at some moments, but then he would look again and it would be gleaming under the touch of light or a shift of wind. At the remotest point of it you could see the continually spreading hand of the source. Each day, just after dawn, there was a heron that flew slowly and with great dignity up the valley, then settled down to fish in the lake’s shallows near the source, paying no attention to the animal with long arms and three heads that he, Kieran, became when he was lifting his makeshift barbells. For a time, he considered that the nearby water should be called Heron Lake, or Source Lake, but the names never really took. It was the girl making herself felt in his mind, how she would still be sleeping at
this early hour. While he prepared his body for her, and for the Rás, she would be dreaming, her hair spreading across the pasture of the pillow like the dark fingers of the source. There was that field Gerry-Annie had told him about. He wondered if he would call this water the Lake of the Dreaming Girl, but as he became more intimate with it, he settled on the Lake of the Dreaming. He would be the only one that would know what the dreaming meant.

K
enneth had found he wanted some sunlight in the right-hand side of the picture. The piece, he decided, had unwittingly become a night journey, and should be completed by a blazing zone of morning arrival; a redemption of gold after a dusky departure. There would be nothing dubious in this region, only clarity and luminescence. Everything would bloom. Everyone’s arms would be open. He had almost finished, could see the full composition now. Still, as the afternoon shadows moved across the tile floor of the unfinished passenger lounge in which he painted, a memory from the last part of his own travels settled in his mind.

He had wakened in a European room he didn’t recognize. Sunlight was moving in yellow bars through the slats of the shutters, then scattering, like bright, shivering amoebae, across the walls and over the ceiling. Barely awake, he had
watched this, wondering where the light would have settled had it not been trapped in a room, and then the room’s shadowed furniture began to take shape, and he recalled his arrival at the hotel the night before, and the journey that led to the arrival, and finally the reason he was there. This was where they were going to meet.

The train had been crowded and hot and, after leaving Milan, it had passed through one dispiriting industrial town after another. He had had trouble believing that the still lake and the quiet mountain scenery she had described could be anywhere near this part of the country, but eventually the window beside him blackened until all he could see in it was the reflection of his own face, and he knew they were leaving the more populated part of the north. Some teenaged boys got onboard at one stop or another, rough, jostling one another, and paying loud, gleeful attention to him. But still he had looked out and into the darkness, and toward the intermittent faraway lights that must have come from isolated farmhouses, or the traces of villages climbing up a slope.

An hour later, after stepping off the train at the tiny station at Orta, he had walked through badly lit, shuttered streets toward the faint sound of lake water splashing against what he imagined was a stone abutment or pier. The hotel, she had said, was on the lake, and she hoped they would have a view. There were mountains all around the lake, she said, and a monastery on an island that could be reached by a ferry that shuttled back and forth all through the day. He had had a sense of neither mountain nor
monastery as he approached the broken sign over the hotel’s door, only this slight breathing sound of lake water that he could hear right now in the room, though the windows remained closed.

He had taken the room for three nights, using up a considerable amount of his remaining cash to do so, as she had been uncertain when she could get away, whether a Wednesday or a Thursday would be possible. He was anxious to see her, believing he was in love in a way he had never been before, though he knew that she was not free and that any thought of a future was a thought that must be banished from his mind. He was too inexperienced and uncertain to even conjecture how she might have felt about him, so he had flung himself into the circular wholeness of being completely alone in love. Everything he saw, even something as simple as an abandoned flower on a sidewalk, or a dead bird near a lamppost, was examined by him in the light of this innerness that was both exhilarating and disturbing, though not yet as painful as he would have expected.

He had met her at an art opening in Milan. She spoke some English; they had fallen into a conversation about the contemporary Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, and at the conclusion of this she had touched his arm and had asked him how long he would be staying in the city. Her husband owned three or four galleries in the city, and as Ken soon came to discover, she was often left alone in these narrow places, which were more like long halls than rooms, in order to keep an eye on the paintings and talk to potential clients.
She was beautiful in an unusual way, with dark brows and lashes, and almost white blond hair. It was this hair that he would look for through the glass of one gallery or another once he began to seek her out in what had progressed from being a cautious to a fervent way. Her hair, he thought, was like a lamp in an otherwise dark room. Her English was good, but not good enough for him always to be able to grasp what she was saying on the telephone, if he was lucky enough to find a telephone in working order, which was seldom the case in Italy. In the galleries, however, he could read, or thought he could read, her expression. And then there was the physical way she had of searching for the correct English term, twisting her arms and torso as if the phrase were lodged somewhere deep inside her and must be released from her mouth, like the banderols he had seen emerging from the mouths of saints in fourteenth-century Italian pictures. He was moved by this. He did not know her age, but assumed she was older than he was, and knew her to be more sophisticated.

Once it was clear that they would become lovers, he had checked out of the hotel where he was staying and had rented a room for a full month in spite of the fact that he had intended to stay for only a week in Milan. Soon, though, she had begun to talk about the lake and the mountains, and he came to understand she wanted a more romantic setting. There was a hotel in Orta, she told him, a hotel on the lake. They could have one, maybe two days there. There were some small shrines in the hills that she wanted to show him,
and some stations of the cross. They were peasant art, she said, but art nonetheless, and charming in their way. She wanted him to see them. They could take a small train from Orta, up into the mountains, stopping every ten miles at villages along the way. Some of the villages would have the chapels of the penitents. Yes, she had told him, when he asked, there were Penitenti Bianci, and Penitenti Negri. Or there had been, back in the fifteenth century. And sometimes, even now, there were processions, but not at this time of year, which was early autumn.

He rose from his bed and walked across the wooden floor to one of the windows where he struggled for a bit with the metal clasp that held the shutters in place. Finally the shutters sprang open and the room was flooded with a kind of shocking and beautiful light that revealed mountains, sparkling lake, and pilgrims waiting patiently for the ferry to the monastery island outside, but also cracks in plaster, dust motes, crumpled papers, coins from his emptied pockets, and yesterday’s breakfast crumbs between the floorboards inside. Among the crumpled papers was a schedule of trains, and as he picked this up and smoothed it out on a table beside the bed, he realized that he had no idea which of the three trains she would take from Milan. He would have to be at the station, therefore, for each arrival, unless she arrived on the first. At the moment this thin piece of paper with its tiny, practically unreadable black type was more significant to him than the magnificent view. There was no morning train, but there were two in the
afternoon, and the one he himself had arrived on near midnight. Today was Wednesday. He hoped she would be at the station just after noon.

He waited for the first train with eagerness. There would be the exquisite pleasure of lovemaking in the afternoon, followed by the novelty of lovemaking at night, something they had not yet experienced, at least together. There would be long, earnest conversations, with her struggling to find the correct English words. She would wear a nightdress, an Italian nightdress, and he would slip the straps from her shoulders. He found he could not sit still while he waited, so he walked back and forth between the two benches in the station. And then, when the station came to feel too confining, he paced back and forth on the quay. When the train arrived and she was not on it, he walked around and around the exterior walls of the station, worried that he might have somehow missed her.