Ti Amo, page 1
Copyright © Hanne Ørstavik, 2020
Translation copyright © Martin Aitken, 2022
First published by Forlaget Oktober AS, 2020
Published in agreement with Oslo Literary Agency
First Archipelago Books Edition, 2022
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.
Ebook ISBN 9781953861450
Archipelago Books
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www.archipelagobooks.org
Distributed by Penguin Random House
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Cover art by Edvard Munch
Book design: Gopa & Ted2, Inc
This work is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
Funding for the publication of this book was provided by a grant from the Carl Lesnor Family Foundation. This publication was made possible with support from Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and NORLA (Norwegian Literature Abroad)
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Ti Amo
TI AMO
I LOVE YOU. We say it to each other all the time. We say it instead of saying something else. What would that something else be? You: I’m dying. Us: Don’t leave me. Me: I don’t know what to do. Before: I don’t know what I’ll do without you. When you’re not here anymore. Now: I don’t know what to do with these days, all this time, in which death is the most obvious of all things. I love you. You say it at night when you wake up in pain, or between dreams, and reach out for me. I say it to you when my hand finds your skull, which has become small and round in my palm now that your hair is almost gone, or when I stroke you gently to get you to turn over and stop snoring. I love you. Once, I would reach out in the night to touch your skin, to place my hand on your back, your stomach, your thigh, anywhere at all, and there’d be connection, contact. And in that feeling of skin and warmth, something small and without language, something perhaps undeveloped in me, a newborn part, could sink down to sense the base of night, return home, or arrive. I love you. But you are no longer in your body, I don’t know where you are. Awash in morphine, you drift in and out of sleep or languor, and we do not talk about death, I love you, you say to me instead, and reach out for me from the bed on which you lie through the days, fully dressed, writing on your phone, writing a novel on that little screen, two or three lines at a time before you drift into sleep again, and I let go of the door frame and step towards you and take your hand and look at you and say: I love you, too.
“Language difficulties”
The relationship to reality is what matters,
wrote Birgitta Trotzig in the mid-seventies when I was six or seven years old. I saw her one autumn at the book fair in Gothenburg, it must be ten years ago now, probably more; we were both on our way from the Stadsbiblioteket to the main site, she on the opposite sidewalk in a long black skirt, limping slightly, from hip troubles, perhaps. A year or two later, I read that she was dead.
When it comes to what really happens to me, in life, I’m struck into silence. Silence! Stop sign — zone border! It becomes almost physically impossible for me to as much as register facts, dates — at least periodically. The real-life event hits me, massively burdensome and complicated, overwhelmingly intangible — and transforms all speech, any form of direct articulation, into an unreal rustling of leaves.
When did it all start? When did you actually become ill? Were you already ill that January we were in Venice, nearly two years ago, and you vomited and pulled out of your business dinner and the talk you were supposed to give? Three days later, we went to India. Were your cells already then frenetically dividing as we sat in the darkness, in a rowboat on the river, and watched the funeral pyres on the ghats of Varanasi?
Were you already ill then, in January 2018? The next time was June. I’d been at the book festival in Aarhus and we met up in Copenhagen. We’d rented an Airbnb on Islands Brygge, with a pull-out couch and the tiniest of bathrooms, a second-floor flat with a little balcony from where we could see the mouth of the harbor, the canal on the right. We met up on Saturday. I came in on the train, you’d taken a flight and were already checked in when I got there, you’d picked up the key from the host, who’d told us to say we were friends of hers if anyone asked. She was a singer, and we made up stories in which we were Norwegian and Italian musicians, I a cellist, you a violinist. But we didn’t see anyone. The next day, we went out early and just walked, through the city center, into the northern quarters beyond the city lakes, streets we’d never walked before, we veered left into Vesterbro, and then suddenly, as we got to Kødbyen, the old meat-packing district, you had to stop and hold onto the corner of a building. You couldn’t walk another step. It was impossible to tell if you were exhausted or in pain, you were almost angry with yourself. We took a taxi back to the flat.
We ate outside on the balcony all three nights. You hadn’t the strength to go out looking for somewhere. It was nice, we both thought so. In bed you sat up, bent double in the night, such was the pain in your back. I’m not sure how much you slept, if you could even sleep like that. I kept waking up and you’d be sitting there next to me, bent double. Only now I remember you weren’t well before that either, two weeks before, at that wine festival in Bordeaux. You’d been there years ago with a friend and so much wanted to go back again, with me, to amble about with a wine glass in a holder around your neck, pausing at the various tasting stations, trying the different wines and rinsing your glass in the little fountain before moving on to the next. We went to Bordeaux before I was due at the book festival in Denmark. We’d booked a room at a little two-star hotel, there were windows on two sides, one facing out onto a park, French windows extending to the floor, and we didn’t eat out in Bordeaux either, despite you being so fond of eating out, we stayed in the room with wine and cheese, bread and couscous salad from the supermarket. You hadn’t the energy. And in the night you were in pain. You hardly mentioned it.
* * *
—
From my point of view, something happened during the spring of 2018. It was as if the flame began to dwindle. The energy went out of you, and I thought it was to do with us. That we’d gone into a slide and that living with you, my whole reason for uprooting to Milan, was now going to tail away, until there was nothing left but a bare minimum of energy, a minimum of intensity.
I was jealous of your pain, which mounted over the summer. You’d wander about at night in our dark, roomy apartment, moaning and whimpering. It never occurred to me that you could be seriously ill. I reasoned the pain was from keeping something inside, that you weren’t happy with me anymore and didn’t want the life we were living, only you couldn’t bring yourself to acknowledge it and tell me. That was what I thought. Sometimes I wondered if there was someone else, and would convince myself of it, that some other woman had become the object of your desires. For you were giving so little away, the signals you sent me were so unclear.
* * *
—
When we went to Venice again that August, to stay in the apartment the publishing house leases in Giudecca, you were in such pain the first night that it frightened both of us. When morning came, I phoned my father in Oslo. He used to be a medical worker and told us we should go to the hospital and get it checked. It was what we needed to hear, and we left at once. I remember the terror we felt as we clung to each other on the vaporetto, how we jumped ashore at the Zattere and hurried over to the Accademia, crossing the long, arching bridge that spans the Grand Canal, scuttling through the streets, past the church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli to the Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo and the Fondamente Nuove where the hospital lies, surely the most beautiful in the world. Weak with trepidation, we searched the corridors for the emergency room, the building consuming us. We passed through an atrium with plants and trees and cats, until at last we found the waiting room with its blue plastic chairs and take-a-number dispenser, and when you came out again after registering and we looked up at the electronic board, there was a red dot beside your number. Only a few were red, most were green or yellow, and it took only a moment to realize they were the ones who would have to wait the longest. We understood that red was for alarm and emergency.
They called you in and made me wait outside. What did I do for all those hours? I remember the sharp divisions between light and shadow, the heat, and the lions on the walls, emerging out of their painted fields, an illusion of depth where in fact there is none, only flat, bare stone. I hung around in the shade outside the entrance, went inside, came back out again. The square where the hospital is situated was a place I knew well, I’d crossed it so many times over the years, in all seasons, ever since I first started staying at the publishing house’s apartment in the nearby Castello district. I remembered all the times I’d passed by those lions, marveled at the illusion, but had never gone inside. And now suddenly that Venetian hospital had become so acutely relevant to me. It was where they were going to find out what was wrong with you. You, with whom I belong. You, who make the night
Sometime late in the afternoon, it must be nearly five o’clock, you’re able to text me and tell me you’ll soon be done, that I can come and fetch you, the name of the department. I go back inside and probe the corridors, searching, asking directions, at last to be admitted into a waiting room for relatives. But you’re not there. I sit down on a chair, then switch to another, and the people already waiting belong together in little clusters, I’m the only one on my own. Several of the patients are in wheelchairs, some hooked up to IV, mobile drip stands at their sides, sitting with people I assume are their families, and their wheelchairs make me afraid: Not yet, I think to myself. Not you. Is this what’s next?
And then you appear, in a wheelchair. You’re pale, but smiling. I told them I didn’t want the chair, you say, but they told you they were brand new and had to be used. There’s nothing wrong, you say, and I burst into tears, again. I’m right as rain, you say. The pain in your stomach has eased too, you say. The doctor said only you would know what was giving you such pain. In other words: it was psychosomatic, something emotional.
They checked your heart. The red dot was for your heart, and there’s nothing wrong with your heart.
We’re happy, and trembling with relief, and you have to wait a while in your wheelchair, something to do with the medication that needs to kick in before you go, but it doesn’t matter, because you’re fine and we’re together. Afterwards, we go out into a glow of low Venetian sun, buoyant, our minds at rest, and I can’t remember what we did, where we went, maybe to the hole-in-the-wall place by the Rialto fish market, they open at six and serve little bocconcini with baccalà or ham, and strong Campari spritzers in long-stemmed glasses. We find room to sit, but mostly people just stand around on the little square with their drinks, Venetians on their way home from work, who’ve picked the kids up from school or daycare and then come back out before dinner, the few who still actually live here, enjoying their normal Monday-apéritif lives, their standing-about-chatting, drink-in-hand lives, in which everything is normal and the alarm of death hasn’t just now sounded inside them and rendered everything else so depthless and unreal. Is that where we land, trembling and elated, to sit in the aftermath, fears allayed, with a drink and an appetizer? I can’t remember. I text my father to say it was nothing. He replies immediately, glad.
But they didn’t check for cancer. It didn’t occur to me at the time, and I’m not sure it occurred to you either. We only think about it later. And about what the doctor said: “Only you know what’s happening in your life that could make you feel such pain in your stomach now.”
Two weeks later, we’re at a reception for a writer at the home of one of your colleagues, all sparkling wine, white sofas and modern art, hired waiters in uniform circulating through the rooms, refreshing people’s glasses and offering snacks from their little black trays, I’m on the prosecco, but all you want is water, you’re not feeling well, you say, and that’s how it’s become, you never really feel like doing the things we did before, the things we did for fun together, in Venice I noticed you’d have a spritzer with me at the waterside café in Giudecca as the sun went down, every night we’d do the same thing and I know you were only doing it for me, because you knew it was what I wanted, that I wanted everything to be all right again, and you wanted that too, you’d have a spritzer and a tramezzino or a cicchetto, but without really wanting to, not even after the hospital had said everything was fine, and we ate at home in the evenings there too, unlike before, when the evenings had been new and lay open in front of us, when you’d be the most eager of us to go out and explore the streets for places we’d never been. It wasn’t like that anymore.
And I see you sitting on the edge of that white sofa with your glass of water, when suddenly you thrust it into my hand and jump to your feet, leaving me dumbfounded as you dash for the loo. And I get up and follow, and as I reach the door I can hear you being sick. And I go in to find you bent double over the toilet bowl, and it’s as if a river is running out of you, not food, not the lunch you’ve eaten or something you just drank, no, what’s spewing out of you is black, liters of it, or so it seems, like thick, viscous oil, and afterwards we realize it’s blood.
* * *
—
Ti amo. You’re lying on our bed in the light, it’s January 5, 2020, 3:10 pm, and we stopped by the Turks on Viale Papiniano and had a kebab for lunch, you drank two cans of Coke, it’s Sunday and the sun is shining. A week from tomorrow you’re going in for a new MRI scan and then we’ll see if the lump both of us can clearly feel now on the right side of your stomach is cancerous or just a cyst of scar tissue. Here, you say, can you feel it? It’s probably from the operation, don’t you think? It’s right where they put the tube in, and you indicate the little red indentation in your flesh, the tube they put in to drain the blood and pus from the abdominal cavity, and whatever else came out of you that way in the days that followed, when you lay in a hospital bed in a bright-blue pajama top with a catheter in your nose and still looked the same as you used to, before, when all this had only started, your illness, when it was still new to us that you were sick, when we still couldn’t grasp it because it felt so strange, so wrong and unreal. And now more than eighteen months have passed and still we could claim with some justification that we can’t grasp it, that it feels so strange, so wrong and unreal. But it’s not new anymore. Now it’s just the way it is. You’re dying. You lie in the bedroom, typing your novel into your phone, halfway through it now, you say, a sci-fi crime novel, as you’ve explained, and you’re so completely wrapped up in it that when we have breakfast together on the sofa, or if I just stand close to you for a bit, or sit down on the edge of the bed, and you look up at me and I ask you where you’ve gone, what you’re thinking about, you jab a finger towards your head or the phone, and it means the same thing, that you’re away inside your novel.
I too write, am writing this, the words I’m typing now, at this moment, in the study facing the rear courtyard, from whose window I can see rooftops and the dome of San Lorenzo, and far away in the distance the snow-covered peaks this side of Switzerland. It’s Sunday, January 5, 2020, 3:17 pm now, and I’m writing this and you’re still here, alive, in bed, presumably sleeping now, let me check…yes, you’re asleep, you’ve turned onto your side and have fallen asleep.
* * *
—
When it comes to what really happens to me, in life, I’m struck into silence. Silence! Stop sign — zone border! It becomes physically almost impossible for me to as much as register facts, dates — at least periodically. The real-life event hits me, massively burdensome and complicated, overwhelmingly intangible — and transforms all speech, any form of direct articulation, into an unreal rustling of leaves. But still I know I must write, says Birgitta Trotzig. And yet, the whole time, I sense deepest down, as strongly as if it were the life force itself, the desire to survive, that somehow I must connect with that real-life event in words, reach out to it, engage with it, take warmth from it.
When you became ill, I was still finishing my previous novel. When we got you home from the hospital after the operation, and we were still living in that big, gloomy apartment then, just a single living space without rooms, like a hangar almost, or the lower section of some large pyramid, you confined to bed in the sleeping area, your enormous wound dressed and bandaged, a white bandage running from your chest to below your abdomen, there was nowhere I could go to finish writing my novel about a young woman who arrives in Milan to pursue her drawing and live with her new Italian partner, a novel about being parentless and thinking you can’t be loved, that no one would want you, an awareness that precedes language and which the young woman is able to approach only in the pictures she draws, a novel itself comprised of pictures, in which her wounded urge for love quietly heals, the way sprigs and shoots will grow and put out the softest foliage and extend into what before was open and desolate and empty.
