The Book of All Loves, page 4
Montevideo Airport, 2.30 a.m.: the only passenger in the departure lounge, a solitude that conferred a cathedral air on the ceilings, a solitude in which she thought ahead to her arrival in Venice, the palazzo, leaving her suitcase by the door, a long, passionate kiss, then him unwrapping the gift and his look of surprise at the snowglobe of Venice, brought to Venice from so far away. But this would be the following day; for now, the other passengers soon started to arrive at the boarding gate. A man came and sat down opposite her; tall and slim with a silver head of hair, he must have been in his eighties. His face seemed familiar. It took her a few minutes to remember that she had seen him six months earlier, when first in Venice; it was strange to see him now, all this way from the Italian city. She and her husband had passed him several times in the street and been struck by his movie-ambassador get-up: the blue double-breasted blazer, the gold buttons and burgundy tie. The man crossed his legs just as they exchanged glances, and he soon got up, went over to the drinks machine and bought himself a small bottle of water, sidestepping a group of passengers on his way back to his seat, drinking the water practically in two swigs, keeping the empty bottle in his hands, seeming almost to caress it as he fixed his gaze on some indeterminate point on the departure-lounge wall, when, as he went on gazing, he looked more like a Berber to her than an ambassador.
The writer knows about Berbers and their customs because in her twenties, on a trip to the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, she had a guide who was a member of this tea-addicted indigenous people – addicts to visions of the other world, too. She remembered how no task had seemed beyond this man. If she needed water, he would stop the car, disappear off beyond a ditch and come back with the exact quantity of liquid required; if it started to grow dark and she was cold, he would pull up just where dry grass could be gathered as kindling, and they would then sit beside a small campfire, and he would start boiling some exceptionally clear water to make tea. She was in that part of Africa because she wanted to traverse the former weapon- and gem-smuggling route – stretching over vast distances and by then all but vanished – between Algiers and the Moroccan portion of the Atlas Mountains; the aim, to research and gather information about people’s diets and eating customs, in particular the recipes once used by the men and women who had roamed those lawless routes in centuries gone by; a clandestine path must, she wanted to prove, in some way correspond with meals that were also clandestine, existing beyond the margins of known menus and diets. In her memory, that man of the Atlas Mountains looked down into the dregs of his tea for a few moments and suddenly began to talk about his favourite animals to hunt, which were leopards, because leopard blood was the only kind that was good to drink as well as to eat fried, fried in the leopard’s own fat, ‘Discounting pigs and seals,’ he said, ‘it must be the only animal with which such tautologies are possible, but my religion prevents me from eating pork, and there are no seals in the desert. So, leopards are like the pigs of my culture.’ She said nothing, made a note. To one side, the desert in the last of the daylight, which fades so mysteriously; to the other, the Atlas Mountains, which burst up out of the plain to soar some 4,000 metres to the perennially snow-capped Mount Toubkal. And in her memory the man stoked the fire and took a sip of his tea before pointing up at the summit: ‘What’s up there that there’s none of down here?’ he said. In response to her silence and the shrug of her shoulders, the Berber went on: ‘Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai “Ngáje Ngái”, the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude,’ at which he paused to share some of his tea with her, before continuing: ‘That’s the opening of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, the short story by Ernest Hemingway, which you, being a writer, surely recognize, but you ought to know that the leopard Hemingway talks about, the real leopard, a leopard that the writer never saw, is not on Kilimanjaro but up there, on Toubkal,’ he gestured at the mountains again, ‘and, what’s more, it isn’t a male but a female leopard, a leopardess called Alexandra in the local traditions, originally a Greek name, brought to these lands by the Romans. It means “Protector of Humanity”. The bones of that female cat, she who protects us, are up on that peak. All of us here have seen her, the ice up there is particularly transparent, as transparent as the water of the River Ourika and as the ice cubes they were selling at the last petrol station we passed yesterday, at the last crossroads, 100 kilometres north – ice cubes made with water from that very river. You get foreigners coming here just to see the purity of the ice cubes at that petrol station; you can look through them and there’s absolutely no distortion to what you see on the other side, prisms so perfectly transparent that you almost don’t see them, like they’re imaginary. People try to take the ice cubes with them, as proof of the most crystalline water there has ever been, but they melt along the way. They mix them in with their soft drinks, with tea or simply with other water in their water bottles, and when they get home, drink them like holy water. And all this water comes from the slow melting of the ice cap at the summit of Toubkal, where it lays three metres thick, covering the body of our protectress, Alexandra, ice so crystal clear that, if you look in the big cat’s eyes, you see the last vision she experienced, the vision of death itself. Yes, the face of death could be said to be lying up there.’ Then the Berber placed his tea down on the ground beside his goatskin backpack, followed by something the writer did not initially understand: he took a photograph out of the inside pocket of his jacket, a picture of himself silhouetted in front of a mud-and-straw settlement, and threw it in the fire, simply threw it in, in a boomerang motion, but one from which there would be no coming back. In less than a minute the glossy paper had been reduced to a thin layer of carbon, during which time the writer watched the slow tide of fire climbing up the body of a man in the picture, eventually invading his face completely. The Berber, also saying nothing, observed this combustion of his own body. The writer felt that an ancient secret was latent in such a silence, though the nature of it evaded her. They stayed like that for some minutes, until he got up, said he was tired and for the first time asked if he could spend the night in the car they had hired several days before. She said it was fine by her, deciding to sleep under the stars for the first time, next to the fire. She was a small woman and did not need a great blaze to keep warm. When the sun woke her the next morning it was still cold. As she had learned from the Berber in their days together, she gathered some dry grass and made a small fire – big enough to heat the water for breakfast. Coaxing it to life, she saw that the burnt remnants of the photograph were still visible in the previous day’s embers. Then she went over to the car with its tinted windows. It took her a few seconds to see that the man was not inside. She looked down: there were two sets of footprints beginning from the car door; one went north, into the desert, and the other south, towards the summit of Mount Toubkal. The writer moved back a few steps to get a better view: in both directions, the same size sandals and the same shaped soles. She did not, could not understand. In her mind’s eye she saw the photograph they had put in the fire the previous night. It was as though reducing someone’s image to ash meant, rather than destroying it, multiplying it by two.
The writer continues typing, her husband asleep in the next room, the snowglobe jolting up and down on the desk and snow falling on the miniature Venice, while outside, in the city of water, tourists and stone, the summer storm continues to approach, and she sees lightning once more, still far off, and goes on casting her mind back to her flight from Montevideo to Venice a few days before. She remembers she had been in luck when she boarded: her row was unoccupied, two seats entirely to herself. She was wearing a white blouse with black pearly buttons; she had found it with her husband six months before, in January, during their first stay in Venice. Someone had dropped it in the street, and she had instantly been drawn to it; the material had a comforting effect on her heart, it made the beating in her chest seem softer, less staccato. The aeroplane climbed higher, leaving behind it the Río de la Plata delta, grey and turbid as ever, and the writer soon saw that skipping breakfast had been a sensible thing to do; until they reached altitude, the turbulence was terrible. She heard someone at the back throwing up, turned around to look. She was surprised to see only one other passenger in the tail section with her, but also that it was the man she had seen in the departure lounge, the one who looked like an ambassador – who in turn looked like a Berber man who many years before she had seen split into two people and disappear into the Atlas Mountains. They caught one another’s eye, she immediately turned to look forward again. Her husband came to mind, she remembered him, over the phone from Venice to Montevideo, saying he wasn’t going to meet her at the airport, and to take the vaporetto taxi, and her feeling wrongfooted by this; despite the magnetism of the voices, and due to some effect that remains unexplained to this day, things sound much further away and more unreal over the phone than in writing. The turbulence subsided, and with it the man’s vomiting. She looked out of the window. The sun was shining; above the cloud layer the sun always shines. The tip of the wing gleamed, it looked slightly curved to her, and she found something troubling in this. They soon turned off the lights.
The passengers slept, they slept like the dead, she too closed her eyes but did not fall asleep, recalling instead the first trip to Venice, six months earlier, in January, with her husband. The moment they landed, they had immediately set about the things they wanted to do. The estate agent had given them the keys to the palazzo’s first-floor apartment, before reeling off some suggestions on the city in general and about the Misericordia Canal area, not that many but enough for the fortnight they were due to stay, and before he left briefly advised them that there was something missing from the furnishings, but the landlord had given it to him, and that he would have a courier bring it later on. It was not only the first time they had been in Venice as a couple but also the first time they had been somewhere snowy together, a double novelty that felt overwhelming at first. They saw shop displays with pieces of jewellery selling for more than €20,000, and birds flying impassively through the snow clouds. She remembered that they had decided to waste no time in visiting one of the areas they were most excited to see, the gardens where the famous Art Biennale was traditionally held; nothing was going on there at the time, but for them it was enough to see all the different countries’ pavilions from the outside and to stroll in the woods around them. Snow began to fall, soon turning to heavy rain; very grudgingly they broke off their visit. In the afternoon they ate spinach and ham focaccias in the rain. They passed a taxidermists’, where a neatly arranged collection of squirrels, hares and seagulls in the window display seemed to be trying to catch their eye. They peered in at the window. Inside, all the way at the back, various men and women were working on what appeared to be deer, big cats and other large animals. He became entranced by the eyes of one of them, a leopard; half-visible behind the counter, the taxidermists had not finished working on it. She remembered saying then that the key moment in taxidermy is when the artisan picks out from her or his catalogue the eyes with pupils whose exact colour and shape ‘will give the animal the same depth as it had in life, and so extract it from death’. The sun had come out after that, the sun always comes out, and on his insistence they had gone around the upmarket clothes shops in the vicinity of the Rialto Bridge. She, naturally elegant but at the same time opposed to the prestige associated with big labels, waited for him outside; she stood watching the women and men on the terraces drinking sophisticated mineral water under the shelter of outdoor gas heaters; the towering flames seemed to spring from the pavement itself. The rest of the excursion to those lavish shops was lost to her, but she did recall, when they later became disoriented in the winding streets of the same quarter, that it was then they had seen the man who looked like an ambassador for the first time; sitting on a terrace, he was drinking a glass of water. It was too fleeting to be qualified as a vision, but in the few seconds it lasted, she felt the full force of a memory, an entire memory, that she had thought forgotten: in her twenties, and after years of not setting foot in a church, she had been obliged to go to the funeral of a close girlfriend, and arrived at the last possible moment, as non-believers tend to. The church was full, but she managed to get a seat in a corner at the back, beside a loudspeaker that hung down from a pillar. The PA system was not on; the excellent acoustics in the central nave meant there was no need for the priest to shout. And it was almost at the end when it happened. While one of the family members was again evoking the life and miracles of the dead girl, she had begun to hear breathing coming through the speaker next to her, a few centimetres from her ear. She quickly realized that the sound, rather than magnetic interference, was that of an actual mouth inhaling and exhaling, like when you wake in the night and cannot get back to sleep, and lie there listening to the breathing of the person beside you. After a couple of minutes, the sound simply stopped. The priest invited people to go and take Communion, and she, on an impulse, went and joined the queue to the altar. Although it was only the once in her life, she had felt the absolute necessity of experiencing mortal sin.
On another day during that first stay in Venice, on a street near the palazzo, he noticed a statue on the façade of a building that was missing both eyes, he said nothing, but found such vandalism incomprehensible; to take a statue’s eyes is equivalent to taking the eyes from all the world’s living statues: the humans. After that they had gone in and out of a multitude of cafés in search of some coffee that was not extortionate. It was raining, but the rain failed to melt the snow; on the contrary, the cold was such that the raindrops solidified into tiny spheres on impact, giving the frozen canals and the streets the look of a star-strewn sky; the couple imagined how many constellations they could create by joining them all together, before going on walking again, mixing the snow and ice back together. And it was when they turned the corner onto another street, relatively deserted and sunless, that they saw the blouse on the ground. At first its whiteness made it almost indistinguishable from the snow, but then they saw the pearly black buttons – neither was its fabric snow nor of course were the buttons dirty drops of ice. Completely spread out, it looked as though it had been dropped there by the city itself. She remembered her husband asking if it was a blouse or a man’s shirt, and her saying not to be so old-fashioned. They looked at it in silence for several seconds before going over, only, when they did, to both recoil: under the material, at chest level, there was a raised lump of some sort that was expanding and contracting. ‘Like a heart,’ she said. ‘It must be a little fish from the canals – they’ve overflowed in certain places in the city.’ He thought this impossible, that it was probably a small bird fallen from a nest in a tree, but she pointed out that there were no trees in Venice. The lump then suddenly started to move, darting up to the right shoulder where, more slowly now, it turned and went down along the sleeve. A rat’s snout emerged from the end of the sleeve. On coming into contact with the light, the creature seemed to take fright, and it scurried back underneath the blouse as quickly as it could, curling up again at the heart of it. It was still beating as they turned and walked away.
They returned to the palazzo that night to find a delivery man in the doorway, ‘I’ve brought this package, it’s from the estate agency for the people on the first floor, is that you? Sign here.’ As they went to go inside, he joked that the staircase, which was a very steep near-spiral, looked like a throat that was about to swallow everything. They went through to the living room and opened the package, which was no bigger than a shoebox. It took them some minutes to understand that the cylindrical, golden object before them was an Alexa, the personal assistant. The note read: ‘On behalf of the landlord we are sending you this device, to be of assistance during your stay in Venice. Regards.’ The small device spontaneously connected to the Wi-Fi network, and a blue ring of light appeared at its heart. Taken aback by this round, pulsing thing, for a few seconds they simply stood there. ‘It looks like a heart,’ he said. ‘More like an eye,’ she said. In bed that night, the darkness broken only by the blinking of the blue ring of light, which reached them from the living room, she, speaking very quietly so as not to be heard by Alexa, whispered in his ear: ‘Where does Alexa’s name come from?’ After a few moments’ thought, and also speaking very quietly, he said: ‘It’s an abbreviation of Alexandra, a Greek name that means protectress of humanity.’ She was about to say something else, but understood that his slow response had been because he was falling asleep – she knew he didn’t want for knowledge in dead languages – as demonstrated by the successive snores that followed. She curled up into a ball under the sheets and thought what Alexa would be making of these shapeless sounds issuing from some place in her husband’s throat. The next day, as soon as they were woken by the sunlight breaking through the blinds, they shared an unusually long, deep kiss, and, as though he had spent the night considering her question, the first thing he said when they broke off was, ‘I should also say that the great Greek poem recounting the end of the world is called Alexandra, Lycophron wrote it and it gives a complete account of Greece’s history, from Troy to the Roman conquest, an entire civilization hurtling towards extinction.’
