Now I feel small and exposed. I curl in bed like an elderly foetus, feeling my knees, touching my shins, checking that I’m still there. My heart is too loud in my eardrum where the ear is pressed against the pillow. There are strange little pains in my limbs, creeping reminders of trouble to come, little promises that things will get worse. If I’ve drunk too much coffee (or too much wine too early in the day to be soporific), the tide of wakefulness roars in my veins. That and the voices. Regrets, worries. Shots, screams, sirens blaring. The same shots, screams, sirens, from the same day in the unforgiving past, sounds I shall hear for the rest of my life. And memories of prison. The shit, the urine, the endless locking and unlocking of doors, the men who howled like animals. And the older, slyer, whispering memories of the other corridors I’ve never quite escaped, the fluorescent corridors I lived my life in in the days when I was like other men, when I had a job, when I had ambition. When I was still part of the race for prizes, when adrenalin still flooded my veins, when I fought and drank and talked with men… in the small hours I hear them laughing at the bar, Terry Fraser, my old mate Ian, Graham Healey who did so well after I left, the old male crowd I was once a part of before I gave everything up for that woman. I lie here and listen to them laughing at me.
— And the real noises of the Venetian night. Sounds of strange falls, of the tide sucking, of distant thrashing commotions of water which could be waterbirds taking off or could be the bodies of small children drowning… or perhaps the very first faint flurries of the final cataclysmic collapse which will draw us all down into the hungry mud. The great flood barriers have been a disaster; it’s as sure as death, we know it will come, Venetians have been hoping for a hundred years that nothing will happen till tomorrow, and tomorrow…
I think it will come one night, when human beings are easier to drown, all those white bodies laid out sleeping, ready. Sometimes at night I feel a trembling which I think is the world, and not me. A very faint series of shudders, as if the millions of wooden piles on which Venice is built were settling lower, finding their level, a level a little nearer the end.
It’s suicide to stay, of course. I stay because I deserve no better. I’m too much of a coward for suicide, but I shouldn’t protest if death came for me.
I would like to stand with my eyes open and face the wall of water. I’d like not to run away. I would like to be brave like the amazing Chinese students in Tiananmen Square sixteen years ago, who stood unarmed and faced the wall of bullets, others replacing them as they fell, and looked it in the eyes, the end of their future.
— You see, I still weep when I think of them. Perhaps part of it is that it makes me feel lonely; there’s no one to stand with me, no one to replace me, no one to notice if I die well. In my life there have been no causes, not since the early days in television news when I felt there was truth to be fought for. Later the truth grew more complicated, tatty, piecemeal, a compromise, accepting other people’s notions of ‘priorities’, accepting other people’s view of ‘balance’, accepting that we shouldn’t be ‘negative’. In short, accepting a lie. And then the only truthful thing left seemed to be my feeling for Alex. She was my own, specific, immediate. The air between us wasn’t fogged with consensus. I never had to lie when I told her I loved her, because I always loved her, you see.
I didn’t have a cause, but I had an idea. Living for Alex was my idea. Loving another finite, time-bound individual. To go on loving her through time, to go on loving her till death. So love was dignified by death, since death is what makes us unique and precious, the fact we shall not come again. It makes us more interesting than worms or amoebae, endlessly splitting or reduplicating, all those life-forms which never die.
And I think about love. Romantic love. Maybe love is romantic because we die; to love this person, this once-and-only person, on her single journey from birth to death… to stay faithful as you start to die yourself. Two unique individuals, facing life and death together. What painful rubbish, what a mockery when I think what a mess our lives became, and how stupidly death entered it.
I meant to love Alex until she died. That would have been a truthful life. OK, we never had children together, OK, we didn’t give much to the world, we were individuals, that’s all we were, bourgeois individuals, prigs might say — what do they know? What does anyone know? I knew my wife, I loved my wife, my lovely wife who will never come again.
And none of those students will come again, though now what they did is greatly honoured, though they have their place in the history books. They were all at the beginning of their lives. Most of them unmarried, they didn’t leave children. I was fifty-four when those students died. I went on living, and I’m worth nothing.
Especially now Alex has gone. So the idea on which I based my life is valueless, since I’ve outlived it. I’m just an old man with too much money and too much time to dislike myself, waiting for death in a dying city.
Out, out, I must get out, a flash of sun on a seagull’s wings. I must avoid Lucia on the stairs or she’ll nag me to wear my Panama, which is not quite right for what I have in mind, it makes me look like a distinguished old gentleman, but it doesn’t make me look much fun. I have to get out and find some fun, how dreadfully unfunny it is to need fun. Out into the daylight or go mad with gloom…
Buon giorno, Lucia. Good day, my dear. You’re looking well, wonderfully well. Yes, risotto alle vongole would be delicious (God knows what filth those clams have grown in, but they still taste delicious, tossed in butter… everything swims in human shit). No, I shan’t be needing my Panama. Thank you, Lucia. Until this evening.
And she lets me go, she gives me up, shaking her head in disapproval, her handsome head of blue-black hair so well restrained with invisible hairpins. They would fall on the ground like a barrage of hail if she would only let me have her. Sometimes I’m sure she’s fond of me. Sometimes I think it’s a little more… a hint of aggression, a hint of challenge in the way her brown eyes stare at me.
Besides, Lucia’s here. Right on the premises, every day. If she would love me, I could stay at home. I shouldn’t have to roam the dangerous streets, searching for some tart to milk my juice.
— There she is waving from my dark doorway, shouting something I can’t hear, so I nod and smile and pretend I do, I don’t want her to think I’m deaf and ancient, and I know from experience what she is saying as her large pale arms wave about like wings, she is probably pointing to last night’s flood-mark, the fresh green stains on her ground-floor empire, or else she is warning me not to get robbed, there is a new young population of footpads squatting in the flooded, abandoned houses… What energy in those large pale waves. I screw up my eyes to see her better.
Aha, there’s something in her hand! Letters, two of them, that’s what she’s shouting! Hope swells up within my heart. I won’t go back now and open them in case they are only a disappointment, in case they are only bills or bank statements. No, she is stupid but not that stupid, she wouldn’t wave a bill at me. They must be personal! Must be. At last!