Ti Amo, page 4
When we first met, you carried a notebook whose closely spaced lines you filled with tiny handwriting. You told me you were writing a novel about a young woman, I think she was sitting in a tree or something. And you wrote music, sequences of music that kept appearing in your mind, compositions that were more advanced than you were capable of playing yourself on the piano, a young pianist would sometimes come and give you lessons, he studied those pieces with you and played parts of them so that you could hear what it was you’d written. But you’d already heard them inside you. I thought it was so brilliant you being able to hear these structures of sound inside you, visible only when turned into lines of notes on a computer, to me it was totally abstract, I couldn’t hear a thing. You were always working on something or other, it was a need you had, to create things. And when I asked you, when I came to live with you in Milan more than three years ago, why you didn’t take up your painting again, you answered me rather vaguely to begin with and said only that it was all a bit difficult. And so many things are convoluted and unnecessarily laborious in Italy, you get the feeling the systems are designed to make you give up before you’ve even started, there are so many regulations, so much red tape and hardly anything can be done online from home, you’ve got to get up in the morning and go there, take a number and sit in great big rooms for hours on end with hordes of people on clapped-out plastic chairs, to get done whatever it is you need to get done. It was difficult, you said, because your studio was rented out and the young guy who was living there had an eight-year lease with three years still to go. You could phone him and talk to him about it, I suggested. And eventually you did, and doubtless because you’d been so generous and let him live there at the lowest possible rent, because of course there are regulations for that as well, upper and lower limits, he agreed, and a couple of months later he phoned and said he’d found somewhere else and could now move out. From that day on, you were at the studio every Saturday and Sunday, and during the week you’d sometimes be there for a couple of hours over lunch, or in the afternoons if you had no meetings to go to at work.
Imagining the pictures you were working on filled me with excitement. Would they show me who you were inside, give me a point of entry into places in you I’d never been? Places I hoped and believed really did exist, that was the reason I fell for you in the first place, your eyes, the promise they held of this great inner landscape where perhaps I could wander too, at your side. Who are you?
Did you stop painting because you stopped believing? Believing in yourself, that what you were doing was worth it, that your work and what you could offer, the person you were then, was important enough to build a life around? But to give up painting is also to give up seeing. To give up looking inwards, into your self.
The first pictures you did were of animals. Four big canvases with a lion in them, and one with a rabbit. Besides the main figures in those works, you were concerned too with embellishment, it was the start of something that was to become much more prominent, your interest in ornamentation, much the same way as Bonnard works too, with light, for instance, the way the light reflects in the tiling of a bathroom where a woman reclines naked in a bathtub, the way light falling on a surface can possess a meaning all its own. I wondered where you were in those paintings. Were you the lion? And what were those candles in the background, burning with such small flames? Were you in their bold colors? These were helpless pictures, even I could see that. You’d stopped painting thirty years ago, and it was as if you needed to loop backwards and come at it again from behind in order to rediscover yourself there and get started again. But after that it all took off so quickly, since then you’ve progressed series by series, but although each new series has been a departure and moved you forward in that way, I think it’s probably more the skill side of things where you’ve improved, rather than what your pictures actually express. Technically, you’re very proficient. But what are you trying to do in your paintings, if they don’t capture something more than the actual motif? The ones I feel have the strongest contact with an emotion are those belonging to a series of self-portraits you did. At last I could see you. You painted five in all, and in each case an extra little picture has been attached, a kind of accoutrement, a shadow of something internal to the main picture, or perhaps a comment on it. So you can actually look at the picture as a whole and think: What if the little one wasn’t there? What if the main picture was the only thing that was shown or said or seen? What would that have been like? Because each of the small pictures does something other than the big one to which it belongs, they bring in a different quality, a sense of displacement, presenting the prospect of something more, something beyond what seems possible in the main picture.
I’ve persuaded you to bring one of them home, the one I like best, it hangs here now in the hall. It’s your face, painted with bold strokes, and it’s as if you’re not quite there, as if the figure that’s you is somehow at a loss, your expression one of despair, in blue and green, and a bird casts a dark shadow in the background. In the small picture that’s screwed into the top right of the main frame, everything changes. The hue is pale red, a light is coming, and there, there the bird flies.
It’s a long time since you were last at the studio. It’s on the third floor, with no lift, and the stairs make you dizzy. It’s a twenty-minute walk from here. You haven’t the strength. If you feel you’ve got some, you go to the office instead.
We don’t talk about it, even though I think it must be another reason you don’t go to the studio anymore. That in order to produce something, you need the energy to sense what’s there. To feel yourself close to it. Take warmth from it, as Trotzig writes, exploit it, put it back into the work. Not necessarily as a motif, but the force that’s in it, that force is what’s you in the now, and no matter what else is true, that’s what’s going to be there to be seen and felt, in the work.
And if you won’t think about dying. If you don’t want to know. But something in you must know. And use up so much energy not wanting to know. How are you supposed to paint then?
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When I met you first, when I saw you there in your light-colored suit jacket and your light-colored slacks, with your straggly white hair, when you came into the hotel foyer with a group of foreign publishers and shone in the middle of the group, even then, and when I spoke to you the next day, when you stepped out onto the stairs to have a smoke and we talked about Venice and I was embarrassed because I love Venice so much, and it made you smile, and you said that you found Venice extremely beautiful too, even then there was something about you that made me think of Mr. Lilyvale. Astrid Lindgren’s Mr. Lilyvale, who taps his knuckle on the window of little Goran who lies ill in his bed, who takes Goran out with him, takes him by the hand and whisks him away in that hour of the evening when twilight falls, which is how Goran is introduced to the Land of Twilight. So that he may prepare himself for death. It was as if there was something of Lilyvale about you even then, from the very start. It scares me sometimes, that we can know things with such certainty, see them and think them, and what’s scary is not the fact that this is so, because that’s just the way it is, what’s scary is that it’s only afterwards that we, or I, take it seriously. But perhaps that’s also because we don’t know what it is that we see, what it means. What was it I saw in you that made me think of Mr. Lilyvale? Did I see even then that you carried a nearness to death inside you? Because there’s something about you that, in a way, is outside of time. As if you’re actually an old man, something dusty and old-fashioned about you that I’ve always liked. And at the same time you’re not that at all, you’re only eight years older than me, and much savvier, for instance, when it comes to phone apps and the like, and whereas I can barely bend my body, you’re as supple as a yogi. But that was one of the feelings I had about you, and which I’ve had all along. That there was a Mr. Lilyvale in you. So maybe it’s me who’s Goran, and you’re here to show me that death exists. I, who have toiled and toiled to find an entry into life, to live and to feel, I’ve always thought there was something contrived about it when people go on about being so sensitive to death, being afraid of death. How can they, I’ve always wondered, these living people? I’ve struggled so hard just to feel the heart beating in my chest, to feel there’s something there that’s alive inside me, and not just steel and stone. Death would come all in good time. And then you came.
I look out the window facing the rear courtyard and notice that behind the dome of San Lorenzo you can actually see the uppermost spire of the Duomo. I check my phone, there’s a text from you, you’re at the publishing house, it’s Friday, January 9 and the time is 15:45, and you’re asking if the pharmacy’s got anything for you yet, you still haven’t managed to get hold of anyone at the hospital. Shit. I forgot all about the pharmacy when I was out earlier, we agreed this morning that I’d go there about lunchtime and ask if your medication had come.
It’s your morphine you’re asking about, you take 200 micrograms of Fentanyl to take the top off the pain, and besides that the patches for your shoulder, they give out 150 micrograms an hour, we change them every 72 hours.
Yesterday you stayed home from the office, you were having such pain, and I went to the pharmacy for you in the morning, but there was nothing on the way just yet, they said. In the afternoon, after I’d finished writing, you got dressed and I went with you to your GP, her surgery’s by the park in the Solari district and we walked there as the sun was setting, the sky all pinks and oranges, the way it so often is at that time of day now in winter. Hearing that someone was in with her, we waited in the narrow corridor outside her door, you’d already phoned in the morning and all we were there for was to pick up a prescription. You sat down on a chair while I wandered back and forth looking at the posters and notices, one of which I read in its entirety, an ad for a new local counseling service, three sessions for free, it said, underlined in blue. If only that was all it took, I thought, and then it was your turn and you went in to get the prescription for the tablets the pharmacy had already released to you in advance, and because you didn’t close the door properly I heard her ask, How are you doing? and your reply, Not so good at the moment, only she didn’t agree with that, I think you’re looking much better, she said, and you thanked her then for the prescription, See you soon, you said, and came back out to where I was waiting. Your little head under your felt hat, and your eyes, big and grey in your slightly pudgy face, swollen with cortisone.
When we left the surgery you said you felt like a cup of hot chocolate, so we walked to Clivati i Viale Coni Zugna and you ordered one with whipped cream and a cup of coffee for me and you remained standing over at the counter with your back to me in your navy blue North Face coat you told me you bought years ago for a business trip some of you took to a publisher in northern China where the temperature could drop to below minus thirty-five. The hood hung down between your shoulders and you had your hat on and looked like a little boy in front of the tall marble counter where you dipped into the cream and spooned it into your mouth as soon as it came, as if everything else in the world ceased to exist at once.
From there we went to the pharmacy again, the people who work there are all young, with scarves around their necks and thermal coats on top of their normal white pharmacy coats because the automatic doors have got stuck and won’t close, all from the South, from Sicily or Naples, you say you can tell from the way they talk, which I can’t, but they’re all very nice and would bend over backwards to help you, and as we came through the door I felt you tense up, a tiny contraction of hope, but then when we got to the glass counter and there still wasn’t any morphine for you, you sank, you looked at me, and for a moment your face was quite desolate and unsavable, you handed them the prescription from your GP, for the medication you’d already received, and then we walked home. You lie down on the bed when we get in, but after only a short while I hear you rush to the loo, the hot chocolate seems to go right through you, and when you’ve finished you go straight back to the bedroom to lie down again. You whimper. You’re in such pain. I hover in the doorway and say you must phone the hospital. It’s evening, soon it’ll be night, and you can’t lie here in pain like this. If your GP won’t help, and the pharmacy can’t get you your medication, the hospital will have to do something. You need attention, I say. And so you phone the hospital and ask to be put through to the doctor who’s responsible for you, it’s just after seven o’clock and dark outside, but they’re still on the job, and she comes to the phone, the doctor with the long henna-dyed hair and horn-rimmed glasses, the one who lisps when she speaks, sometimes she’s wearing frayed jeans with embroidered flowers on them under her open coat, and purple or pink anatomically shaped shoes, she’s like a little girl, a little girl who wants to be somewhere else, I think every time she comes into the treatment room when you’ve had your chemo and are waiting to go home, while I’m lying on the blue synthetic leather sofa next to you reading. It’s as if she never has time for us then, as if all she can do is drop off your discharge summary with the updated details of your treatment, another entry with each appointment, and then leave again, for somewhere far away, as quickly as she can. Arrivederci, she said, and had already turned on her heels when I stopped her — this was the time before last, in mid-December, you go every two weeks — Excuse me, I’d just like to know how things are progressing, I said. What do the tests say? She knows I mean the CA 19-9 marker tests, and says obscurely that yes, they’ve gone up a bit, but it’s hard to tell the reason, it could be infections, it could be something else, it’s nothing to worry about until the next scan, she says, and with a quick smile she’s gone again. The scan she mentioned is on Monday.
When we got home from the hospital that time in mid-December, I found the discharge summary on the desk in the bedroom and turned it over and read your record then from the bottom up, it was the first time I’d read it myself, and why hadn’t I done so before, it was all there in black and white.
Now all the hennaed doctor can do is advise you to phone the pain specialist. You thank her and wish her a good evening, then make the call right away, only to discover office hours there are between nine in the morning and four pm, there’s no one to answer the phone in the evenings. But you’re in such pain. Can’t we put another patch on, I suggest. The Fentanyl patches are the only thing you’ve got. So that’s what we do, we give you another 50 micrograms, then another 50 on top of that, and at last, after being racked with pain, in agony all through the day, at last you fall asleep.
That was yesterday.
This morning we gave you another 100, so now you’ve got three hundred and fifty micrograms of morphine an hour discharging into you through your skin, and then, after a night sitting bent double or twisting and turning, you nevertheless get up, as if your will was a completely different body inside your own, you get up and stand on your feet and somehow, improbably, manage to propel yourself to the office.
What your record said was that since the end of October your markers have doubled with every test. Reading backwards, I could see this was a new development. In the year you’ve been having chemo after the surgery, your numbers have been up and down, but have never exceeded four thousand. At the end of November you were up to five thousand and something. By mid-December it was over ten. They run the test after every other session, but they didn’t on December 30, there’s no CA 19-9 in the record for that date. Yet the pain you’re in increases every day, every night, and now you’ve got this swelling. It’s Friday night. Monday, when you’re due in next, is three days away.
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After visiting your GP, on our way to the Clivati pasticceria, we stop at a pet shop and go inside, passing between the aquariums, walls of glass behind which little fish dart, red and yellow, so quick they are, so much movement, so dainty and graceful, so much life. We want suet cakes, feed to put out for the birds on the balcony. We go up to the counter at the back of the shop, there’s another customer before us, a woman with two small white poodles, one of which yaps at you fiercely, I step back, but it doesn’t frighten you, you smile and crouch down to give it a pat, and there’s another dog too, behind the counter, a black labrador that wags its tail and comes towards you, and you pat that one too and ruffle its coat and talk to it, and the pet shop woman and the dog woman stand yakking away as if we didn’t exist, and you seem so contented, crouching there with the dogs around you, but now I can speak so much Italian that I manage to get a word in and ask if we can buy some suet cakes for the birds, and the pet shop woman calls for her mother who’s talking to some other people in the back room, where the labrador came from, I can see two more dogs asleep on a cushion there in the corner, and the mother comes out and you stand up straight again. Thanks, you say to me, I got distracted, and the mother asks how many suet cakes we want, you say they’re usually gone in no time, so we buy ten. She puts them in a bag for us, you say goodbye to the dogs, and we carry on then to the pasticceria.
This morning I put two of the cakes out on the makeshift bird table you’ve cobbled together, the saucer from an empty terracotta pot, the pot upturned, the saucer balanced on top. On the street when we were out walking you found a stone you dropped into your pocket, you’ve placed it in the middle now to add some weight, and have scattered some sunflower seeds and sesame seeds. And now this is what we talk about in the mornings, sitting on the sofa in our pajamas with our coffee, though you don’t drink coffee anymore, only tea, and a piece of panettone each. We watch the birds, their comings and goings, and you know the names of all the various kinds, you tell me what they’re called in Italian. And we sit there looking out instead of at each other, we talk about them and are together in that, instead of in what we see when we look at each other and don’t talk about.
