The Water-Breather

I call for Ama. She glares at me across the room, offended, disappointed. She shakes her head: ‘Jean-Pio, how could you? I can’t believe it.’

Michael is gesticulating at us. Pado gently steers me towards our bedroom. He asks me how he’s going to explain all this to his guests, and locks the door behind him. From the bedroom, I can hear everyone arguing and apologising. Giulio is trying to tell me something through the locked door. Pado yanks him away. I have to be left alone, otherwise I won’t learn.

There’s nothing to do in the bedroom. I gaze out at the farms beyond. There are cows scattered everywhere. On the drive, there is a little white car shooting off with Michael and Joan inside. I can’t see their heads from here, but I want to tell Michael that I tried my best to save him. Now he’s going to buy more cigarettes and Joan is going to collapse when he’s gone with swinging lumps of cancer strangling his throat. I lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling coming and going, shrinking down on me until the room pushes back its colours. I get up and pace round the bed. I shake the door from time to time. I look at the cows in the fields. I can’t even count them because the sixth or seventh sometimes slips away and then runs back and looks like the others. I feel dizzy, even without the motion of the car, the solid stillness of these four walls marching down on me. I have to get out. I start hammering at the door. There’s no reply. I don’t want to get a headache in here, not here, on my own. I fight against painful thoughts and images, creeping into me because they know that I’m locked in a room with no way out. I kick at the door again and fall on the bed. I breathe like Ama does when she’s upset. One, two, three, and out. I must stop a headache from coming. One, two, three …

There’s a knock at the door. It’s Machance. She wants to know why the door is locked. I say Pado has the key and it’s my fault because I flushed Michael’s cigarettes down the loo. She sits down on the carpet on the other side of the door. Through the wood, I imagine her gently pulling out the hairs from her chin. A soft sound like a blade of grass sliding from the earth.

Machance tells me she doesn’t know what’s happening to our family. Always tired. Always travelling. And now me misbehaving. ‘It’s really not what Ama needs. She’s already at the end of her tether.’ When Machance was young, she says, things were different, you had to be strong. There were no televisions or radios or cars. You couldn’t just switch on some music to brighten up your day, or jump in a car to have a change of scenery. In those days you had to have your own little television screen in your head to click into, turn off this, turn on that. But that was long ago. Now nothing is the same anyway, since Grand Maurice drowned in the lake in France.

She tells me that Grand Maurice looked a little like me. He had hair that you couldn’t keep down and he never stopped walking and thinking. From morning till evening, he pounded up and down the countryside. That’s why, one day, about four years ago, he set out for a stroll and got his foot caught in a jagged rabbit trap. At the time, Machance and Grand Maurice were living in their house in France and farmers often laid traps in the meadows and woods for game. But Grand Maurice had forgotten, because that was the way he used to walk, head in the air and eyes stuck to the sky. The trap sliced his ankle and clasped itself shut around his foot. He yelled out in agony, but no one heard. He tugged at the trap with his hands and picked at it with a large stone, but it only dug deeper into his flesh. The harder he tried to prise the trap apart, the worse the wound became. And so he waited. He waited three days, three whole days until the man who laid the trap came to pick up a crushed or squealing rabbit and saw Grand Maurice with his nearly-severed foot full of rusting metal, dried blood in the furrows of the soil.

During those three days alone, as Machance longed for news of him, Grand Maurice had to keep his mind. He counted trees and ran his tongue around his mouth until he knew all of his teeth in size and shape. He found that the back ones had holes with smooth tops and that the front ones were uneven. He could tell that some were going black and others had roots which wouldn’t let go. When he was bored of his teeth, and the pain was too much to bear, he called upon his memories of journeys, sights and sounds, and each time that he felt himself slipping, he came charging back in with a face from his past and a story to jolt the mind. As he watched his foot fester and swell, he thought hard of Machance and how they’d met on a warm cloudy day in September in London. He spoke to his remembering and chatted to himself. He went back to his childhood and pictured his mother, his father, his school, his friends and clothes. He tried to recall every moment that had been. He started with his earliest memory, year by year, then month by month and, finally, week by week. There were gaps, huge unaccounted-for absences, empty months, patchy years, faces without names, names without people. He tried harder and harder, until he felt his mind might burst, until he had managed to remember almost everything. Then he watched the skies. He invented new words to describe each different kind of cloud. He listened to the birds. He whistled back at them. He picked up leaves from the ground, felt their shapes and ran their surfaces across his hands. By the last day, his mind and body were so stretched that the past and present had merged into one.

Machance was so happy when they freed him from the trap and brought him home from hospital, with his foot stitched up and plastered, that she put together a dinner for all his friends. The pain in Grand Maurice’s foot only grew worse during the course of the dinner and he had to stand up and keep moving so as not to think about it. He dragged himself round the room with eyes full of seething sadness. The heavy plaster on his foot rocked him back and forth, gouging ruts in the parquet. Machance encouraged Grand Maurice to sit down again, but he couldn’t stay in his chair. He went to bed before the guests had left. He could hear them saying ‘goodnight’ to Machance through the bedroom window. As they went down the steps outside, they turned and asked: ‘Is he going to be all right?’ The noise of their cars leaving filled the house. Machance cleared the table on her own. She blew out all the candles lining the table. She climbed into bed alongside Grand Maurice and held on to him through the sheet.

Machance shuffles a little on the carpet on the other side of the door.

‘The doctors never managed to get his foot to mend properly. The bone didn’t really heal. Do you remember how Grand Maurice always limped? That’s why he needed you to help him when he went fishing.’

She taps at the door with her long hands. I can feel solid dry tears rolling down her fingers into the wood. She tells me to hang on. Pado should come and get me out of here. She’ll tell him, enough is enough. I wait a while, lying on the bed, my head swimming with Grand Maurice’s suffering. Thoughts eat into me.

Pado turns the key and swings in. He doesn’t smile. He still looks angry. I won’t talk to him. He sits on the end of the bed. ‘Ma Jean-Pio, cosa facevi? You do know you shouldn’t have done that, don’t you?’

I don’t care if he doesn’t understand. Anyway it’s his fault. He said everyone who smoked was going to end up dead. The photographs are in all his books. Now I can’t tell him anything. If Michael dies then it’s not my fault, because we all could have stopped him, but instead they laughed with him and all that whilst Grand Maurice was battling with a rabbit trap in his head.

Pado tells me it’s time to go again, to move on.

‘Andiamo! Pack your things! Everyone is waiting in the car.’

It’s a slanting wet afternoon and the rain is bouncing off the car bonnet. ‘It won’t last long,’ Ama says, almost to persuade herself.

We have visits to do: friends, and the annual international conference of specialists on legionnaires’ disease. Pado explains to us again how microbes and toxins collect in air conditioners and then expel themselves into rooms and grip in your mouths to kill you. In one company, in New York, the only person who didn’t get ill was the doorman and that’s how they found out because he spent his time outside and wasn’t silently sucking in germs to die. I imagine all those people sitting attentively at their desks, working away, and then, gradually, one after the other, they begin to cough, splutter, sag and turn grey. And then that’s that, they’re gone.

We stop at Elizabeth’s on the way to the conference in London. She’s Ama’s artist friend. We’re thinking of dropping off Duccio to have his beauty captured in a painting. Elizabeth looks Duccio up and down. She declares she’s never seen a boy quite so good-looking.

‘Here we go,’ Giulio mumbles to me.

Duccio doesn’t notice though. He never really notices because he doesn’t care any more. He’s too busy with his duties. Maps to read, cities to identify, trips to plan, cars to name. Pado needs him because Ama no longer knows the difference between motorways, dual carriageways, side roads and main roads. It’s all the same to her: one long journey across nowhere. Duccio though has little notepads in which he writes long lists: all the routes we’ve ever been on, the restaurants, the cities in alphabetical order, the value of local currencies. When he’s finished his duties, he reads books about great sporting geniuses. As Pado says to Ama: just being good-looking won’t get you very far in life.

Elizabeth thinks she can do a portrait of Duccio. It’s going to take some time however. Not an hour here or there – maybe two or three weeks of posing.

‘We don’t have that kind of time,’ Pado objects bluntly.

Ama seems annoyed. How are we going to get Duccio done? He’s coming up to twelve soon and then that’ll be that, he’ll be thirteen and fourteen and then his beauty will have vanished. Elizabeth takes some Polaroid snaps of Duccio. He looks uncomfortable and he is sighing heavily. When the pictures come up, slowly appearing like blue sky amongst dispersing clouds, you can see he is sighing so we have to start again.

‘Darling, make an effort for us,’ Ama pleads. ‘This is not what we need.’

We go off nosing through the paint tubes and turpentine. We find a canvas covered in cloth showing a naked woman reclining on top of a red table. She is motionless and holding a flower to her mouth. She looks like she might be sniffing or even eating the flower. Giulio fetches Duccio and I remain, running my eyes across the pink shapes and breathing in the smell of acrid oil colours. Duccio takes one look at the naked painting and tells us it’s horrible.

‘Stop poking around, come over here!’ Ama orders, exasperated.

This time the Polaroids are all right, but Duccio is refusing to say a word.

As we’re all getting back in the car, Duccio slams Giulio against the head rest and steps over him to get to his seat. Giulio lets out a scream and I can’t sit down either because Duccio keeps on shoving me away with kicks. ‘Behave!’ Pado shouts. Duccio settles down. I try to lean as far as possible towards Giulio, to avoid touching Duccio. He is packed with fury, bubbling, ready to burst. I know that if I even brush his coat, he’ll shower me with punches. I sit upright in the middle. I watch the raindrops drifting across the windscreen. I’m sure the wipers could go faster. They haven’t caught that drop, nor that one. That one, there, the big one! I’m about to make a wish on a raindrop when Duccio explodes. He can’t keep silent any longer.

‘I’m not going to be naked in the painting!’ he yells.

Everyone is a little astonished.

Ama leans into the back. ‘Darling, whoever said anything about being naked?’

Pado is grinning to himself. ‘Where did you get that idea from?’

Maybe I should tell Ama about her friend who stuck her tongue in Duccio’s mouth, but she doesn’t look like she wants to hear that now. Our mother calmly explains that no one will be naked and that’s that. It’s only a portrait of Duccio’s face and it’s a nice thing to have.

‘We’ll hang it on a wall somewhere,’ she adds calmly.

I don’t know where because we are always moving and I can’t see how we can stick it on top of the car as it won’t last with the rain and certainly not with the conferences outside Rome where they even steal the tyres off you. Pado is sure that’s an exaggeration though and that others are just as deceitful and clever at stealing.

Ama brings out the sandwiches Machance had made for our lunch. Salmon, avocado and tomato. I open mine up to make sure there’s no chin hair tucked away inside. I examine the fish for germs lost inside the pink pleats. I hold it up to the light. ‘Stop fiddling and hurry up,’ Pado tells me. We have to eat fast. The ‘legionnaires” conference starts soon. Pado wonders whether he should quickly update his diagram of an air conditioner water tank. Ama thinks that it would be clearer if he’s going to bring in recent theories on cooling systems and airborne microbe reproduction. We drop Pado off outside a large grey building. He rushes up the main stairs. Giulio shouts out that he’s forgotten the rat book from the glove compartment.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Ama shrugs, because he has all that stacked away in his mind.

We drive on, not knowing what to do in Pado’s absence. Ama buys a newspaper and flicks through the film and exhibition pages. She keeps on checking her watch, but there’s not enough time to fit anything in. She starts up the car, with a resigned turn of the wrist, and we push on to a park. Ama stops at the entrance and tells us to get out and play on the bit of lawn in front of her. It’s still raining and we come back after a few minutes. Ama is looking at her newspaper again. She’s ripped out sections, book and theatre reviews. She lays the strips of paper across the dashboard and reads them quickly. When she sees us, standing in front of her, she begrudgingly folds them into a wad in the glove compartment, stacked reminders of occasions to be missed.

We get back in the car and Ama wearily drives on past a few shops. She asks Duccio to get out and see if they have any dresses in the windows. He runs alongside the car, stopping and peering into each shop. He points at a dress. Ama leans over the steering-wheel and shakes her head at him. Duccio tries the next shop and then the next one, till we get to the end of the street and have to turn into another road. Eventually we find something for Ama in a decorated window, two streets further down. We park and Giulio is instructed to wait in the car. He’s sulking at being left behind. He says it’s not fair that it’s always him who looks after the car, but Duccio reads the guidebooks and I have to watch the petrol gauge.

‘Don’t you bloody start. Don’t make me angry Giulio! Not today! Everyone has to help with something,’ Ama warns.

She waves back at Giulio as we enter the shop: ‘If a traffic warden comes then pretend you don’t understand. Speak French or something! We won’t be long!’

In the shop, the assistant is all smiles. Ama tries to find something that Pado might like too. Duccio and I tease her by repeating what Pado says about her bottom being dipped on one side. Ama doesn’t find it funny at all, especially in front of the shop assistant and she whips a ‘Ca suffit. Assez’ at us in French so that only we understand.

It doesn’t work because the shop assistant says, ‘Where are you from?’ and Ama replies ‘England’ rather pointedly.

Then a man comes in and he is drifting across the shop looking for some clothes for his wife. The wife apparently likes red so I point him to a pair of reddish trousers I’ve seen on a rack in the corner. He has hardly started walking across the floor when he notices Ama. He compliments her on the dress she is trying on. Ama pulls back into a changing-room to get away. The man carries on talking to her through the curtain.

I can see her head coming up over the curtain. ‘Kindly leave me alone,’ she says in a curt voice.

The shop assistant intervenes and asks what kind of red clothes the man wants. He can’t answer because he’s got Ama in his mind and he can’t think of his wife’s shape and size any more. Ama pushes past him holding a black-grey dress. She wants to pay. The traffic wardens are coming and we have to go. The clinging man, who wants red clothes, follows us outside and pats me on the head. He hangs in front of the car and tries to help Ama get out of our parking space.

Giulio keeps on asking, ‘Who is that man? What’s he doing?’

Ama refuses to answer. She’s in a fluster. As we are leaving, indicator clicking down, the man blows a kiss at Ama.

She shouts, ‘Petit con,’ and we all laugh because the man doesn’t understand he’s just been insulted.

Giulio doesn’t like him either even though he didn’t see him leering over the changing-room curtain.

‘Not a word to your father,’ Ama begs, as we are all afraid that he will drive bumper to bumper at top speed if he finds out.

We arrive in time to pick Pado up outside the conference hall, before it starts raining again. He’s only been waiting a few minutes, so he’s happy. He has a colleague with him from Denmark. He agrees with Pado: ‘It’s a clear international policy on the regular maintenance of air conditioners that is needed.’

We’re going to be late for our next meeting at the Association of Toxicologists. We get away without anyone blowing kisses and speed across the city. Pado is in a good mood and he still can’t stop laughing about the fact that Duccio thought that he would have to strip off for Elizabeth.

‘Used to be a pretty woman in her day,’ Ama tells us.

‘What’s happened to her now?’ Pado wonders.

Ama explains that Elizabeth has been a little unhappy lately. Things haven’t worked out for her. ‘She even takes Polaroid photos of herself every day to see if she’s growing old. She has two years’ worth of photos stashed away. A photo for every day, and if you look at the first photo two years ago and the ones this month, you can tell her face has slipped and the wrinkles have appeared. But if you look from day to day, there’s no change at all.’

Giulio wonders whether she takes her photos in the morning or the evening. Ama doesn’t know. I’m thinking that she must take them in the morning, so that the thoughts that make up a day don’t weigh down her face.

Pado is convinced that this photo business goes to show Elizabeth still hasn’t got over her husband leaving.

‘Why did he leave?’ Duccio asks.

‘It’s a long story,’ Ama sighs. ‘Her husband told us he simply couldn’t cope, that’s all.’

‘How do you not cope?’ Giulio demands.

Ama glances sideways at Pado. ‘It’s a bit long to explain!’ but now Duccio and I want to know too. ‘Okay, okay,’ Ama says, ‘basically, one day, Elizabeth’s husband was sitting having breakfast with her and he noticed that her jaw clicked every time she chewed.’

We’re all a little taken aback. ‘Her jaw!’

‘Yes, her jaw,’ Ama replies. ‘He’d never really noticed it before. Anyway, he tried not to mind, but the more she ate, the more her jaw clicked away.’

‘Then what?’ Giulio is as curious as me.

‘Well,’ Ama continues, ‘he thought he’d be able to ignore it, but he couldn’t. Even when she stopped eating, her jaw clicked as she talked. It sounded like a bicycle chain against pedals.’

‘Why didn’t he tell her?’ Duccio objects.

‘There are some things you can’t say,’ Ama answers.

‘But then what?’ Giulio demands.

‘So,’ Ama carries on, ‘one night, after a supper when he’d listened to Elizabeth’s jaw click and click, he realised that he was always getting up to clear dishes, to go to the loo, sort out papers, anything just to avoid the noise. Elizabeth got angry and said if he kept on getting up and down, he might as well go and do something useful like walk the dog. He thought about telling her, but he couldn’t. How can you tell someone their jaw clicks?’

‘You say it!’ Duccio protests. ‘You say: excuse me, your jaw clicks!’

‘But he couldn’t,’ Ama argues, ‘because she would have said sorry and that would have been that. She would have explained that a clicking jaw is a clicking jaw and that’s not a reason to be angry.’

‘Well, exactly,’ Duccio answers. ‘Isn’t that what he wanted?’

‘I said it was more complicated than that.’ Ama can’t wait to get this story over and done with now.

‘So what happened?’ I ask.

‘He left,’ Ama snaps rather abruptly. ‘He just left. He got up, cleared her plate, put the cheese in the fridge, opened the door and walked out. She shouted after him, “Where are you off to, what are you doing?” but he couldn’t hear anything except the clicking of her jaw, opening and shutting like a window caught on a broken hinge.’

‘And that’s why she’s looked tired ever since,’ Pado adds.

‘All that for a click in the jaw!’ Giulio can’t get over it. Nor can I.

I press my forehead against the seat in front and go over the story in my mind. The car engine sounds loud behind my closed eyes and I can’t hear what Ama is trying to say to Pado.

8

Each spring, we drive to Italy and stay two weeks with our Italian grandparents. That’s the way it’s always been: two long weeks of heat and open space. Soon after we’ve crossed the border into Italy, Pado gets out of the car and stands on the verge taking in the air.

‘It’s the same air as over the border in France,’ Ama sighs impatiently.

Pado turns to us and in a singing voice smiles: ‘Siamo arrivati! Welcome to Italy, Benvenuti in Italia!’ He gets back in the car and announces that he’s in a better mood.

‘Maybe we should move here just for that,’ Ama laughs.

Ama never enjoys staying at our grandparents’ and, on the way there, she says to Pado: ‘I still don’t understand why we have to stay a whole two weeks. It’s far too long and it’s just another journey, as if we haven’t got enough on our plates as it is!’

‘My mother loves seeing us, and I can catch up on my reading,’ Pado explains. Ama says that’s not enough of an explanation for her. ‘Well your mother certainly doesn’t love seeing me,’ she adds, ‘I can tell you that much!’

‘Ma dai, nonsense, it’s all in your head!’

‘I tell you she doesn’t like me,’ Ama insists. ‘She never has. She thinks I’ve taken you away from her or something. Anyway, the sooner we leave again the better.’

‘That’s positive! Really what the children need.’

‘Don’t tell me what the children need Gaspare!’ Ama stops Pado with a glare.

From the border to our grandparents’ is a stretched-out journey of narrow motorways and cypress-tree bends. If the driving gets too much and the windows rattle with Ama’s stifled complaints, we head off into villages and towns in search of churches with cold stone floors. We stand in the aisles soaking up the cool air. Pado tells us the tales of the local families and the names of the popes. We stop and run our hands along carved tombs or strain to see fading frescoes tucked away behind altars. With a torch darting over the church walls, Pado uncovers the lives of saints and describes biblical stories. He sits us down to recite and memorise the cities of Renaissance Italy. Giulio gets stuck somewhere down south. I stall on the name of Ferrara. ‘Come on ragazzi,’ Pado says, ‘you can do better than that.’ We try again and reach the end of the list without any mistakes. ‘Nothing worse than a lazy mind!’ Pado reminds us as he leads us off into the crypts. The names of Giotto, Benozzo Gozzoli and Masaccio mingle with those of Jesus and the apostles.

Ama slips off and lights a candle.

‘What’s that for?’ Giulio asks.

‘It’s for Grand Maurice,’ Ama answers, grabbing our hands. We form a circle. We watch the flame flutter and struggle against the draughts. Ama stares down at the polished floor. She suddenly looks the way she did two summers ago when Machance called up from France to tell us that Grand Maurice had gone missing whilst out fishing by the lake. For a couple of days Machance kept us informed and then gave up. For a week no one dared think anything and we all sat silently waiting for news until a French policeman rang to say that a drowned man had been found. Ama put down the phone and left the room with Pado following her. Hours later when Pado came back in, he sat us down and made us understand that we wouldn’t see Grand Maurice again. We wanted to find Ama, we wanted to check it was true, it couldn’t be true, but Pado said Ama wouldn’t be coming down. I waited outside her bedroom all afternoon and listened to the walls crumbling with Ama’s cries. I tried the door several times, it was locked and, every time I called out, Ama couldn’t hear me because my voice had gone. No one made any food that evening and Ama didn’t join us. We took the biscuits from the larder and ate them dry. Pado sat with a book on his lap, reading and re-reading the first page. Each day after that Ama shrunk a little into herself. Pado tried to comfort her and then us and then no one could comfort anyone any more. Ama never made it to the funeral in France. She could barely leave her room. Then Machance came over and the loss we felt threaded itself through all of us.