Ti Amo, page 2
So I’d drop my Mac into a bag along with a charger and walk the half hour it took to get to the library next to the little park on Viale Tibaldi. It has a reading room with four rows of white laminated tables and strip lighting on the ceiling and there were always lots of other people there, there are so many people in Italy, everywhere’s always so teeming with people that whenever I go back to Oslo after being in Milan for any length of time, it always takes me a while to get used to there being so few people in the streets and everywhere, and the Tibaldi library is full of young people listening to music on their earphones and chattering ceaselessly as if they were all joined together, connected up with each other in body and thought, as if the notebooks in which they write, the words and passages they highlight with their yellow and pink markers, were part of a great communal script that in some subterranean kind of way they’re all logged into at once, in a world where no one else exists. There I’d sit with my novel, and no one ever knew who I was, that I’m a Norwegian writer writing a novel that’s going to be published in a different country, while they’re absorbed in their college work, and no one smiles at me at that library, the librarians don’t, everything’s crummy and clapped out, they’re underpaid, and I’ve got a terminally ill husband at home, but we still think then that the surgery went well, that they’ve removed what needed to be removed, that the big lump which had grown so monstrously in the three weeks from you being diagnosed to the day of the procedure, so much so that the surgeon said afterwards that if he’d known it was that big he might never have agreed to operate, and then you’d have been dead now — then, then when I was working at the library.
I finish writing that novel there, and it’s always dark, dark when I go there, dark when I go home again, dark in the apartment when I get back. You’re in pain. You’re unsteady on your feet and nauseous, and it hurts for you just to move. I finish writing that novel because it’s the only thing I can do. I can’t do anything to help you. I can’t do anything for myself either, apart from that, finish the novel. Because it’s what I do. I write novels. It’s my way of existing in the world, I make a space for myself, or the novel makes a space for me, we do it together, and that’s where I can be, inside the novel.
* * *
—
It was nearly finished when you became ill. I felt I needed to see it through, and at first I thought it was going to be hard, that it was perhaps even wrong of me to carry on working on it in that situation, like a detached technician processing my own life. But something happened between the two of us after you became ill which meant that the novel could finally come together. After you became ill, it was as if you needed to show me, in a different way, that I meant something to you, that in fact I meant everything to you. You asked me to marry you. You wanted to cement our relationship in formal terms. As if getting married could protect us, create a bond that could stop you from dying. Is that what we felt? That marriage was a silky red ribbon that would tie us together and give us something to hold on to, so that if death did come to snatch you away, it wouldn’t be able to, because you were tied to me?
Feeling that you really wanted me was essential to that novel. I love you. I love you more than anything. You’ve always told me so. But until we got married there was something you never managed, that was impossible for you to express clearly to me. Somehow it just wouldn’t come out. Was never quite clear. You. What you wanted. It wasn’t the getting married that was important, it was you showing me what you wanted, that at last I could see what that was and how much it meant to you, and that it was so very, very clear to me that you wanted, and had chosen, me.
The fact that I perceived that so clearly meant that Val, the young woman in that novel, could come to an understanding of herself in Milan. For Val, the light she saw in that other person’s eyes was like a lamp, illuminating at last the dark, lapping waters of the fjord outside the room of her birth, welcoming her into the realm of the new and all things possible.
* * *
—
And now I’m sitting here writing this.
This isn’t the book I’d seen coming after Novel. Milan. My novels nearly always start with a place. It’s how they come to me. I see, and know, where the story’s going to be set. The book I was going to write after Novel. Milan wasn’t supposed to be set here, at home in our apartment, in this study, with a view of rooftops and the dome of San Lorenzo. It was supposed to be set on another continent, in a city I barely know. That book is waiting for me there. But I’ve known all along that it can’t be written until this is over. First, I had to know where we stood with your illness, what was going to happen. That you were going to get well again. The first couple of months after the operation, that still seemed like a possibility. But then, when the first MRI scan revealed liver metasteses, microscopic, but still, and I understood that you were going to die, I knew that I couldn’t begin that novel until afterwards.
Why can’t it be written before this is over? Because I know that writing it will involve exploring issues that I won’t encounter until after you’ve gone. That I’ll need to feel my way in and sense the nature of those issues as I go along. Only then will I know what the novel is about. So I can’t do it yet. I don’t know what I feel. I don’t know what I’m going to feel. What questions will I have? I don’t know.
* * *
—
Today is Monday, January 6. Epiphany. A bank holiday in Italy. A week from today you’re going in for more tests. We have lunch on the sofa, florets of boiled cauliflower drizzled with olive oil, seasoned with salt and pepper, a wedge of gorgonzola and a salad you’ve taught me how to make: puntarelle chicory, sliced lengthwise, with a dressing made of the kind of anchovies we don’t have in Norway, salty anchovies, very firm in the flesh, finely chopped and mixed with garlic and olive oil. I warm some bread to go with it. I unfold the low, rose-colored table in front of the sofa and put the food out on it, an IKEA version of the kind of tables we sat and ate street food at when we were in Vietnam, nearly three years ago now, the first faraway trip we took together, me having always wanted to go to Saigon, where Marguerite Duras went to school, and see the Mekong Delta, the landscape in which she grew up, and when I told you, right at the beginning, not long after we met, you said it would be our first winter trip, we’d go to Vietnam. And that was what we did. We spent ten days there, biking behind a guide, a skinny young Vietnamese guy, following the narrow pathways that criss-cross the network of rivers and canals in the great delta, we slept on an island, in a house built on stilts in the reeds, and cockerels crowed all through the night, and in Ho Chi Minh City, as Saigon is called now, we stayed at an old colonial hotel next to the river. We lunched on the roof terrace, papaya, mango, and dragon fruit, and something else, the name of which escapes me, perched on tall stools at a small, round table, and from there we could look out on the river, which had barely any water in it, the banks strewn with rubbish, and we’d sit in the constant din of mopeds and motorbikes, blaring horns and the smell of exhaust fumes, there was no peace in the city, it wasn’t at all anymore like you’d imagine it reading The Ravishing of Lol Stein, in which they go for drives in the evenings as the sun goes down and you see in your mind’s eye a shiny black convertible with the top down, the white-clad women inside, gloves and hats and scarves, a seamless, gliding motion through the landscape. It wasn’t like that at all, but it was nice anyway, and you discover we can take a bus to Cholon, the quarter where the eponymous Chinese-Vietnamese man in The Lover lives, there’s a Chinese market there, the guidebook says. But when we get there, we realize straight away it’s as impossible to imagine Duras in the Cholon of today as it is in the city itself. We visit a temple where we each write down a prayer on a little piece of red paper, after which they’re attached to the inside of a spiral of coiled incense and the monk then sets the incense alight, the coil glows at the bottom as it burns, and he hoists it up under the roof where it remains suspended, smoldering with the other spirals, the glow gradually winding its way towards the prayers we’ve written. I don’t know what you put in yours. I didn’t tell you what I put in mine either. I don’t recall the exact words I used, but I know that I asked for love and that I was thinking of us.
There, before we catch the bus back that evening, as darkness descends, we buy a folding metal table like the ones we sit at every night, three orange beakers made of plastic, and a heavy-duty sack to put the table in when we fly home. That table stands in front of our sofa now. I move the book that’s on it and put your plate down in its place. The IKEA version was something we discovered in their outdoor furniture collection the following summer. We bought two, so now we’ve got three.
I shout to say that lunch is ready, you say you’ll be with me in a minute. What you mean is that you must wait until your medication has dissolved. You’re lying on the bed with the little white pill under your tongue. You say it’s like submerging, the way the morphine spreads through your body and mellows you out. You take your painkillers before every meal, because when they removed the tumor they also had to cut away parts of your stomach, the whole of your spleen and a section of colon, and afterwards they sewed you back together again, but still, nearly eighteen months on, eating remains strenuous for you, which is why the pain specialist suggested morphine just before mealtimes, and it helps.
You have a pain specialist, a cancer specialist, a consultant and your own GP. Ti amo, you say, as you come in and sit down beside me on the sofa to eat. Now and then, you close your eyes, fork still in hand, and are gone for a moment, then to snap back again with a jolt, and you look at me as if you’re afraid I noticed. After eating, you lean back into the sofa and I can see your face has taken on a more jaundiced hue, sicklier than before, I think I remember reading that it means the liver is failing, the cancer cells spreading inside it, but the thought of making a search and reading things through again exhausts me. The average life expectancy after the operation is fifteen to twenty months. We’re at fifteen months now. I don’t want to lose you, I sometimes find myself saying. I can say that, because it’s something I could say before as well. I don’t want to lose you. And tears well in my eyes, and I know that you see them, but we don’t talk about death. You’re not going to lose me, you tell me then. Never, never, never.
But I am already losing you. There’s not much time left. It’s what the cancer specialist said when I asked him, the moment you were out of the room the last time you had your chemo. It was between Christmas and New Year, and the doctor came in to say something to you, only you’d just gone out, I was on my own and finally able to ask without you listening. Can you tell me? I ask. Just me. You mean, how long? Yes. Can you just tell me? And he looks at me, young and handsome with long, dark curls and wide, earnest eyes, in his white coat. He looks like a shepherd boy in the Bible, from meadows outside Bethlehem. A year at the most, he says, no more than that. What does that mean? Three months? Maybe six, he says, but not a year. Not a year? Is that from today? Yes, from today, he says, and I’ve no longer any idea what we’re doing, all I know is that I need to know something, something firm and of substance, even if it’s when I can expect you to be dead. I need him to tell me, to give me a straight answer, give it to me, tell me, instead of all this avoidance, this mealy-mouthed pretense. But don’t tell him, the doctor says, and fixes me with his big, brown eyes, stepping closer, standing right in front of me and lowering his voice. He needs hope, something to cling to, he explains in rapid Italian, so fast that all I can do is nod and say, yes, thank you, and a second later he’s gone.
* * *
—
You want me to throw a party at ours on New Year’s Eve. We had one in the old apartment, the first time there was a new year for us to enter together, I was in Oslo over Christmas seeing family and you were in Milan with your elderly mother and a sister-in-law widowed when your brother died, but I came back in good time for us to clean the place up and do the shopping and get things ready. You were so happy, we were both so happy, and I remember you standing preparing the food, in that big, open kitchen, standing in the light from above the counter, chopping vegetables, meticulous and focused, you cut the white from each and every little cube of pre-chopped bacon before frying them in the pan, and you were doing it for me so there’d be as little fat as possible in the salad, and having so many different salads was something you’d decided too, for my sake. In total, perhaps thirty people came, all, with the exception of a friend from Oslo, people you work with, some with kids, one couple with a dog, a well-known judge and his journalist wife, and Ciro who’s a historian but makes his living writing about food, and he looks like it too, his lips are big and fleshy, it’s as if he’s always smacking his lips and tasting something even when he’s talking, and his stomach is big and round, with a white shirt tucked in and suspenders to keep his trousers up. I was wearing a sequined dress and high heels, and this was before I’d learned to speak Italian, I’d only been living with you for three months, and even though in Italy people don’t usually make speeches at parties, not even to bid everyone welcome once they’ve all arrived, things always being left to find their own fluency and fluidity, people standing around the room or seated on chairs that are pulled up as required or on the sofa up against the wall in the corner, but on our first New Year’s Eve together I stood up on a stool and pinged my glass for attention and we all gathered around the kitchen table, everyone took turns to introduce themselves, in English, to each other, and to me, who barely knew anyone, everyone saying their name and a few words about what they did, and what their children were called, and the dog was called Caesar, and you were so proud of me, you looked at me and your eyes shone, I think you were happy, not only because I was standing up and making myself known, but also because I was trying to make a circle of your friends, to look at them, each and every one, and reach out to them, and because I was so clearly letting everyone see that I was here now, that now I was yours, I had come here to join you in this circle, this whole connection of people, the lives that surrounded yours, and was showing everyone that I wanted so deeply to be included in it and to belong.
Not a year left. It’s the day before New Year’s Eve and I’m still standing where I stood when I spoke to the doctor, at the foot of the bed in the little treatment room on the seventh floor of the National Cancer Institute on the Via Venezian, not far from the Piazza Piola, when you come back in, and I look at you and I can’t tell you. And you smile at me, your head so small and odd-looking now, like that of a dithering old family member no one quite knows what to do with anymore, you sit down on the edge of the bed, it’s just before noon, we’re waiting for the chemo to arrive so the little bag can be hung up on the stand and the catheter can be inserted into the digital port you’ve had implanted under the skin of your chest, and the infusion can begin. Why can’t they tell you? Why don’t you want to know? You want us to throw a party this New Year’s too. Tomorrow. It’ll be our fourth New Year’s Eve together. The first was when we gave the party in the old apartment, the second was in Oslo at a friend of mine’s, drunk and full of joy we walked back through the snow from Grünerløkka, across the river and up the Telthusbakken, along St. Hanshaugen, up and over the final hill, past the park they call Idioten, until we were home. The third was last year here in Milan, we’d only just moved into the apartment high above the Darsena, such a view, the canal basin and all the traffic, the people and the noise, it was three months after your surgery, we were still in shock and your body was struggling to be a joined-up system again, you were in pain and frightened, and it was dark the whole time, the apartment a clutter of removal boxes, because we had no storage at that point, nowhere to put anything, your skinny body with the long, bumpy surgical scar all the way down your abdomen as you lay on your side on a towel on the fine new bathroom floor and the way you let me help you then, those nights when you were constipated and I would raise your soft bottom and locate your anus and carefully insert the long tube I’d warmed up in the bidet and greased with olive oil into your wrinkled hole and gently work it in as far as it would go and then squeeze the red rubber bulb to inject the lukewarm, oil-based solution as far as possible into your colon. The wave of your hand to tell me it’s enough, Basta, basta, and I withdraw the tube and put it down in the bidet, there’s excrement everywhere, and as you get to your feet I leave the room and close the door and stand and wait in the corridor, leaving you on your own in the bathroom, I listen and hope, as happy as you when it works, when something comes out, when all the hardness that pains you so much releases and is evacuated. Or else you’ve got diarrhea, and one morning you fall as you’re about to sit down on the toilet, the little guest toilet behind the kitchen, it’s all new in there, the pale, rose-colored tiles on the walls and the geometric pattern on the floor, we’re so pleased we chose that especially, playful and elegant I think you’d have said, and it’s early in the morning and my head is spinning from last night’s wine, I drink myself into a stupor every night now that you’re ill, drink myself away from it all, then collapse into bed, deep into sleep I drift, and from the depths of that sleep, in the early morning, I hear you calling out to me, your feeble voice, and I stagger into the kitchen. I’ve had an accident, you say from behind the door, and I’m standing there in my pajamas and don’t dare look inside at first, scared to death that you’ve hurt yourself, that something serious has happened, that you’ve come apart even more, and the light is so bright inside that little room, but all I can do is go in, and there in the corner I find you on the floor where you’ve fallen, your hands covered in light-brown liquid excrement, your pajama bottoms soiled at the calves, it glistens on the floor where you’re crumpled, on the toilet itself, and has sprayed up the walls. You’re not hurt, you tell me, and I’m so relieved I begin to laugh, Poor you, I say, and you start to cry, because you’re relieved too, you were scared I’d be angry with you.
