– Long thick brown tresses streaming like water weed in the yellow lamplight, the water sluicing from the white jug. She would kneel beside the bathtub, a votary before the sacred fount, broad shoulders bowed, her white neck bared. Feel of her big skull frail as an egg under my kneading fingers. Where? Newyorpennindi-anabraska. Always moving, moving westward, stepping over the chequerboard land in long, effortless strides. The cities and then the plains, then what they call the high country, with snow and pine, then the mountains, the great peaks, and then the desert, and then at last the Barbary Shore, on whose blue waters her ashes would one day briefly float, swaying -
What?
Someone asking me something.
"What?"
Cass Cleave was standing before me, peering anxiously into my face and enquiring worriedly in a voice that sounded impossibly far-off if I was all right. All right? I said of course I was. I squirmed my shoulder free of her touch. All these damned women, passing me from hand to hand! We were at the end of the corridor, by the big window. Outside, at eye level, there was the improbable ochre and burnt-siena pudding-dome of a church, the stark sun gleaming on its leads. Where was Kristina Kovacs? Somehow she had left us without my noticing. Had I dropped out of consciousness for a moment? If so, why had I not fallen down? Cass Cleave was saying something about an address, my address. I shook my head, like an old dog with water in its ears, struggling to understand. My address? My address where? "Your talk, I mean," she said, gesturing in the direction of the lecture hall, "your reading." I shook my head the more. "What are you saying?" I said. "You were there. I saw you come in." She frowned; she said no, she had arrived just now. "I saw you," I said. "You came in late. You sat at the side, by the door. I saw you." She tried to take my arm but I swung away from her. Stairs, and more stairs, and then a set of double emergency doors with a metal bar to open them that I could not work. Cass was beside me. She put her hand over my hand on the bar. I could feel the faint heat of her face close to mine. "I am all right," I said. "I am all right." The doors swung open like a bulkhead and a dazzling wash of sunlight broke over us.
But the fact is, I was not all right. I said I must have something to eat. What I really wanted, of course, was another drink, many other drinks. At the first restaurant we came to I ordered that we should stop. It was on a big dusty square, Piazza Vittorio Somebody, that sloped down to the Po. We sat at a table outside, under a canvas awning, with a view across the river to wooded heights that were bluish and flat in the noonday glare. I ordered a glass of sparkling wine. As I sipped the sweetish, slightly metal-tasting fizz, clouds of tiny bubbles, cold and sharp, detonated pleasantly in my sinuses. Now and then a strong waft of warm wind would come up from the river and make the awning above us ripple and crack like the sail of a boat. Cass Cleave sat silent, looking down toward the river, a hand lifted to shade her eyes, a mauve armpit bared. "Perhaps," I said, "you really should write my biography. Put all that research to use, all that sniffing along the seams of my life that you have been so busily about." Still she said nothing, still she held her face turned aside, expressionless as a profile on a coin. It was, I was coming to see, her favourite pose; how transparent you were, my dear, after all. "You could write it in the first person," I said, "pretend that you are me. I give you full permission. I grant you the rights to my life. What do you say, mein irisch Kind?" Suddenly I longed to be alone, just myself and my drink. The fact is, and I am aware, in the circumstances, of the grisliness of even mentioning it, the fact is that Cass Cleave was not, as they say, or used to say, my type. I never really favoured the tall, pale, pyriform kind, although they were the very ones who always seemed to seek me out. Given the choice – which I rarely was given, because of my great bulk, naturally – I would have preferred little fat women. There sits at the centre of the by now practically leafless maze of my sensual imagination a small, squat, Buddha-like figure, pink and naked, with heavy, raspberry-tipped breasts and nicely rounded shoulders and smooth, shiny, dimpled knees, and three charming, overlapping folds of fat above each hip-bone. She has no face, this fleshy idol, only a heart-shaped blank on which my venereal fancy, attaining a certain temperature, may hastily stamp a rudimentary set of features. I do see her hair, though, very black and lustrous, parted in the middle and drawn tightly back – the only attribute, incidentally, that Magda, and only in her youth, at that, shared with my secret ideal. Where did the image of this roly-poly little idol originate? Very far back, I suspect, very far back indeed, as far, perhaps, as the birthing bed itself. Unsettling thought.
The pastel roofs of cars parked in the square were shining in the sun, gaudy and heraldic, like the banners and shields of a prostrated, ornate army. "Who is Magda?" Cass Cleave asked, frowning now, and seeming to concentrate all her attention on the traffic speeding along the embankment. "You whispered it in my ear," she said. "Magda." I saw again the room, the bed, the girl. I wondered what the experience had been like for her, poor thing. She must have felt as if she had come to a far-off country, bankrupt and pestilential, where she had been captured and set upon by an ancient beast indigenous to the place, last specimen of its species, rampant and ghastly, with its mouldering pelt and its corpse breath and its single, glaring eye. "Magda," I said, "was my wife. She died."
Lunch was brought, although I could not recall having ordered it. The waiter stopped filling my glass while it was only yet half full – red wine now, I noticed – and I snarled at him and made him fill it to the brim. When I was lifting the glass to my mouth my hand shook violently, Parkinsonially, and the wine spilled over and splashed on the tablecloth. Cass Cleave attempted to mop it up with her napkin but I smacked her hand away and told her sharply to leave it. "Do not fuss," I snapped at her. "I hate for people to fuss." I began to talk then about Hitler at Berchtesgaden. It is a little dinner table turn that I do, for my own amusement if for no other reason. Deftly I sketched a picture of the magic mountain, with its band of trolls toiling to be the first in the Fuhrer's favour, the little smooth-haired fellows and their blonde women all calves and big, square, satin-clad buttocks, and he in the midst of them, the mountain king, dreamy and distant, exquisitely polite, calmly plotting the destruction of the world. She kept her eyes fixed on her plate. "You are wondering if I admired him?" I said. She looked at me. "I did, a little. Do. A little. My friends and I when we were young entertained the beautiful dream of a Europe cleansed and free." I took another deep draught from my glass and leaned back, smiling into her face. "I am an old leopard," I said, "my spots go all the way through."