Ti Amo, page 5
Now it’s Saturday, January 10, it’s 14:44 and I’ve sat down to write, I’m writing every day now, following the same routine, we get up, I make coffee and tea, we have breakfast on the sofa, you go for a lie down and I read for a bit, then go to the gym and work out, I work out nearly two hours a day in the little gym on the Via Panzeri a bit further along from our building. I come home, shower, have lunch, on my own or with you, if you’ve stayed at home, as you have today. Then you go for a lie down again, while I lie for forty minutes on my back on the living-room floor with my legs up on the sofa at ninety degrees, I lie there and listen to a kind of music from a therapy cushion I ordered online from the U.S., it gives out music I select from a dedicated app on my phone, half the tracks are designed for people wth autism, and then there are ten that are soothing and therapeutic for people in general. I lie there and know that I’m going to write. I think about my writing, but mostly I’m just aware of my body, attentive to what’s happening with it, sensing how my back flattens towards the floor, the way my mouth slowly opens as my jaw relaxes.
When you texted me yesterday to ask if the pharmacy had got anything for you yet, I was actually immersed in my writing. I just happened to pause for a minute and gaze out the window, and then I checked my phone even though I know it’s a stupid thing to do, because I can get so easily distracted then, which was what happened yesterday, with you having texted me and me having forgotten. I didn’t want to be the sort of person who forgets to go to the pharmacy for you, and since my attention was already elsewhere I decided immediately that I could just as well go out, down the stairs and along the street to find out, I wasn’t going to get anymore writing done anyway, not before I’d gone to find out, and it’s no use phoning them, because they don’t know who I am unless they see me, and the medication we need is dope with a big red warning on it, the anesthesiologist who lives in the flat below mine in Oslo said back in August when we were there and you hadn’t brought enough of your medication with you, or needed to take what you had, which I completely understand, but my anesthesiologist neighbor, who I phoned to ask if he could help us, or help you, and write out a prescription, he said it wasn’t that easy, there was a special procedure, a safeguard of some kind that meant he couldn’t access what you needed for a couple of days, because the tablets you’re talking about, he said, are worth a fortune on the street. It was still light out, the sun was still shining, and it was nice to get some fresh air, I told myself as I went along the Viale Papiniano in the direction of the Corso Genova and the pharmacy on the right-hand side there, just five minutes from where we live. And they know us there now, me as well as you, and when my turn came, the young woman behind the counter immediately checked her computer, they’ve got Fentanyl on order for you constantly, so if the main hub had got some in, it would already be on its way, that was what you were hoping I’d be able to tell you, that it was, only it still hadn’t come. Four hundred micrograms, she says, peering into her screen, that’s all they’ve got at the hub, two packets of four hundred, but he can split those in two, she says and looks up at me, your prescription’s for two hundred. Yes, I say, brilliant, that’s excellent. It’s already four o’clock almost, so it’s too late for tonight, she tells me, but they’ll be here first thing in the morning. I ask her what time and she says half past eight and smiles a big smile, we’re relieved, both of us are, and I thank her again and say I’ll come back then, and I go back out into the light and dig out my phone and call you. The news makes you so happy. That’s quicker than they could manage at the hospital, you tell me, because now they’ve finally got back to you. I love you, you say, more than anything in the world. And I love you, I say, See you soon, and then we say Ciao and hang up and I go up the stairs to the sixth floor and into the study and carry on with what I was writing yesterday.
Today I’m writing this. It’s Saturday. This morning after breakfast you got dressed and went to the pharmacy, I was lying on the sofa reading when you got back, the small birds have discovered the suet cakes we’ve put out for them and you think they’ll like panettone as well, you gave them a piece of yours from your breakfast and they’re still pecking away at it, I see them fluttering about in the corner of my eye as I read, and you come through the door with a whole different energy than you’ve had all week. How did it go, did you get two packets? I ask. No, only one, you say, and immediately I feel depleted, they couldn’t even get you two packets, but you’re pleased, you’re happy, you’re holding the packet in your hand as you hang up your coat and take off your shoes, I’m not the only one who needs this stuff in Milan, you say generously, because at this moment, you’re holding an unopened packet with four super-sized white tablets in it. I’ll take the first one whole, you say.
When I come to the bedroom doorway to say goodbye shortly afterwards, I’m on my way to the gym, you’re lying on your back with your head on the pillow, your knees drawn up and your eyes closed, and you look so peaceful. See you soon, I whisper, and glance back at you as I turn away, and you say Mm, with eyes still closed, and lift your hand almost imperceptibly in a wave. At last, I think.
Then when I come back you’re like you were more than a month ago, happy, vibrant, you tell me it even helps your writing, the medication, the sci-fi crime novel you’re writing on your phone, you haven’t been able to work on it for several days this week, but now you’ve returned to it, and you talk for a long time on the phone while I slice the smoked salmon we brought back with us after Christmas, and some vegetables, making us a salad, it’s a colleague of yours in Rome you’re talking to, you’ve got some meetings lined up with him there in a couple of weeks and have planned the whole thing, booked the hotel from your bed, mapped out a trip for us, first to Rome for your work there, then a weekend in Naples, which I’ve always wanted to see, though until now we’ve never been. But increasingly I’ve been thinking it won’t come to anything, this past week especially it’s been looking quite inconceivable that a fortnight from now we could get on a train to go anywhere at all. Monday, the day after tomorrow, you’re having your scan. But now, with 400 micrograms under your tongue, followed by a couple of hours’ sleep, you’re again so exquisite and smooth-featured, bright and buoyant, almost like new again.
Who are you? Are you the morphine man, or are you the man you’ve been all week while you’ve had no pills to take, the man in pain, increasing pain, afraid and turned inwards? What is the truth? Where are you? My dearest. Soon I’m going to lose you, but I don’t know where you are while you’re here either.
And who am I? I haven’t yet mentioned A. I’ve been thinking I could write this without him becoming a part of it. That this is about you and me, and that I’ll continue writing it until you die.
I write those words, until you die, and I start to cry, and I don’t know where I am either. I wander through the days, knowing that you’re dying, only somehow I can’t feel it. It’s ungraspable, that you’re going to die. I don’t know what it is. How it is. I don’t know. For now, you’re still here, and I can think the thought that you’re going to die, I can force myself to imagine waking up with you no longer beside me in our bed, I can think about waiting for you to come into the living room and drink your breakfast tea with me, that one day you won’t be coming in anymore, that one day you’ll just be gone. I can try to relate to that. But for now that’s not what’s real. What’s real is that you’re still here, and at the same time, as if embedded in that, the fact that soon you’re going to die. Often I don’t feel a thing.
We’ve been through so many phases in the time you’ve been ill, but after we got married in the summer, you’d been ill for a year then, and for a long time it was as if everything was all about getting that done, getting married, as if that was our focal point, the thing we were moving towards instead of death, and we were going there together, but after we got married there was nothing ahead of us anymore, nothing we had to look forward to, together. All there is now is that you’re going to die. And you say you’re not. So we’re not together in that, or at least it’s not something we talk about, but still it’s the point towards which we’re heading now.
I’ve been feeling so very low. It feels like it’s never going to be possible to ever feel happy again, buoyantly happy, the kind of happiness I used to know, in which the thought of death was quite absent. I think that from now on any happiness I feel will be tinged with death. Maybe for others it’s always been like that and I’ve just been naïve. But happiness for me has always been so straightforward. Being happy in that way feels like not even being in the world anymore. And for a long time just looking at you was painful to me, I couldn’t look at you without the knowledge that you’re going to die, your eyes, everything about you said death to me. And even though it’s not that acute anymore, it still won’t pass, now it’s quieter in a way, normal almost, death has become an attendant presence, everything’s just the way it is, I’m here with you and soon you won’t be here anymore.
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A is a man I met in Mexico. I’ve been traveling quite a bit with work, book launches and readings, library events, literary festivals and university conferences in various places since the middle of September until this coming December 8. In between obligations I’ve been able to get back to Milan now and then, and whenever possible, whenever your chemo schedule has allowed, and when you’ve been feeling up to it, you’ve come with me. We were at the Frankfurt Book Fair together, where of course you had your own meetings to attend, the ones you felt you could manage, and just before that we spent a few days in Berlin, I had an event at a bookshop there, and from Frankfurt we went on to Düsseldorf and Zürich, to the Literaturhäuser, where I read from my work and you rested in the hotel room, you hadn’t the energy, you had to choose between the event itself and going out with everyone afterwards, which was what we preferred, and in Zürich you met up with me and the women from the Literaturhaus just along the street from where we were staying, there was a pub with a kitchen that was open late and we had white sausage with sauerkraut, you even had a small beer. That was late October, and after that I was off on my travels again, to Ravenna, followed by a library tour that took me through the south of Norway, a book launch in the UK, with events in London, Norwich, and Edinburgh, intervals at home in Milan with you, and then that last trip before Christmas, after which everything was going to be quiet and I’d be staying put for three months, was at the beginning of December, to the book fair in Guadalajara, Mexico.
I’m so exhausted by all that traveling, so exhausted from being scared you won’t hold out until I come home again, every time I’ve been home it’s been to check and make sure you’re still alive. When it started to dawn on me during the spring, how much traveling I’d be doing in the autumn, how intense it was going to be, two and a half months solid, that was all I could think about, how things were going to be with you. Were those trips even feasible? Normally I’d have looked forward to it, and no matter how strenuous it was going to be, I’d have enjoyed it like an adventure. Now it was all death and you, and the time we had left. All that traveling meant precious time we were never going to get back, our time together. But what kind of time would it have been if I’d just stayed at home and sat there watching death encroach upon your face. And you wanted me to go. Go, you said. I’ll be fine. And so I went, and all I wanted was to come back. That whole autumn was like an archer’s bow stretched taut: will you still be here when all this is done and at last I come home?
My final trip, I pack a carry-on suitcase for Mexico, a country I’ve never been to before, but you’ve attended the same book fair twice, and for a long time I thought you were going to come with me, that we could grab the chance, it’s my last engagement, so we’d have time for ourselves afterwards, to see some more of the country, Mexico City, or perhaps travel out to the coast, and so I send off a few emails and look into things, though not with any real faith that it’s going to happen, because you’re getting weaker, but it’s as if you can’t feel it yourself, you really want to be well and be with me, to live life with me, to enjoy with me the life we so much love. A year ago, in January, I was at the book fair in Jaipur and you were meant to be there too, you were the one who’d encouraged me to wangle an invite, after we’d been to India together, Kolkata, Varanasi, and Mumbai, and we wanted to go back and if I got an invite we’d be able to go to Jaipur together, you as publisher, me with my books, and when the invitation came you bought a ticket too and so much wanted to go, but it was only three months after your surgery and you were still having trouble with your bowels, everything they’d cut away and sewn up, and then there was the chemo, you weren’t used to it, it wiped you out completely, and so you ended up staying home. When I attended the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley five months later, in May, the kind organizer booked tickets for us both, a single reservation so we could sit together all the way, you wanted to go there too, but when the time came you didn’t have the energy then either, so again I sat by myself on the flight and drank gin and tonics on my own, I sent you a photo of the hotel room when I got there, the room that was meant to have been ours, and we talked on the phone and I ordered takeaway every night from the Chipotle across the street and sat in my great big American window and ate my food and looked out at the traffic, with the time difference between us, you at home in bed in Milan, I thought about you asleep in our bed, and all the time, in everything I thought, you were going to die.
The email from the organizers in Mexico says it’s hot in the daytime but cool in the evenings and inside with the air conditioning on, so I pack one sleeveless black dress and a black woollen top I can wear underneath, one jacket, tights, clean underwear for each day I’m going to be there, my running shoes and gym clothes. It all goes into my cabin bag so I won’t have to hang around at the baggage carousels when I arrive back at Malpensa, you say you’ll come and meet me, the way you always used to before you became ill, whenever I was away, you’d come all the way out to the airport on the shuttle train, because you don’t have a driver’s license, you could never wait for me at home, you always said, not if you had the chance to come and meet me, and that’s what you’re going to do this time as well, so if all I’ve got is a carry-on it means I can get off the plane, hurry along the corridors and go straight through baggage reclaim out into the arrivals hall, and at long, long last be done with all my travels and finally be home, home, home with you.
On the outbound journey there’s a stopover in Madrid, it’s evening and I drink a whole bottle of prosecco I bought at the airport in Milan, sitting by a window watching the planes as they move out onto the tarmac in the dark, talking to you on the phone, you’re in your pajamas on your way to bed, and my flight departs at eleven-thirty, I find my seat and drink what comes with the food, until I fall asleep, which was the point of all the wine, all I want is to drink myself away. It’s a little after three-thirty am when we land in Mexico City, mid-morning back home, the connecting flight leaves at seven, an hour is all it takes, and then I’ll be in Guadalajara.
* * *
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It’s Sunday as I write this, Sunday, January 12, you’re going into the hospital tomorrow and I’m going with you, we’ve set the alarm on your phone, yours plays a classical tune, and tonight, after I’ve finished writing, I’m going to pack a small suitcase for you, and one for me, because I’m going to be staying the night with a friend who lives near the hospital. I wonder what it’s going to be like further down the line, if you’re going to be in the hospital at the end, or if it’ll happen suddenly, and if you’re going to be in the hospital I’ll be sleeping there too, at your bedside, the way I did for a whole fortnight when you had your surgery. I need to check if it’s going to rain, I don’t think so, the sun’s out now, it’s been unusually sunny this winter, normally winter in Milan means fog and drizzle, but at the moment it’s clear and sunny, day after day, we’re lucky. But I still need to check, because I’ve hung your clothes out to dry so they’ll be ready for when Rosa comes while we’re at the hospital tomorrow, Rosa from Peru, who comes in on Mondays and Fridays and does our washing for us and irons all our clothes, she stands in the kitchen listening to a Peruvian radio station, or else she chatters away on her phone with her kids in Spanish, she stands there after she’s done the cleaning, ironing your boxers, your shirts, putting the creases in your slacks, she even irons our socks, my undies, the towels and the bed clothes, and every day after you’ve washed, there’s a clean and ironed shirt for you to put on.
I go about here numbed, but lots of things are important to me, little things. Like our clothes, washing our clothes when the weather lets me hang them out on the line on the kitchen balcony, we still haven’t figured anything out for drying them indoors, as we’d talked about. I like to see our clothes hanging there, I like hanging them out, picking them up, giving them a shake, pegging them on the line. I make sure there’s yogurt for you in the fridge, and Chinotto, a sparkling soft drink you’re fond of at the moment. I remember to put a glass of water out next to your tea in the mornings, for your antacids, and I stock up on risotto rice and Parmesan cheese so I can make riso in bianco for you when there’s nothing else you can bring yourself to eat. I’ll do anything for you. But writing it down here it feels like so little. Isn’t there anything else? Is there nothing else I can do for you?
It’s just after half past three and you’re sleeping again, snoring occasionally, I can hear you from the study here, you managed to split your tablet in two, so today you’ve taken 200 micrograms this morning after breakfast, and I think another 200 now, because your sleep sounds so good, deep and full of rest.
