Ti Amo, page 7
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It’s five to twelve, you’re asleep, your body twitches, it never used to, but now your body twitches and I can’t hold your hand in the night they way we did before, because now your fingers will suddenly start tapping in my palm and it wakes me up, Don’t leave me, I used to say, don’t find someone else, and you’d always say to me then, You’re so close to me, we’re so close there’s no room for anyone else between us. When I think of you saying that to me I always see you sitting on the sofa in our old apartment, and I realize it’s because that was where we lived before you were ill. We were still living there when we found out you were ill, and you were ill when we moved out, and in our new home, which is where we decided all the colors ourselves, the tiles on the bathroom floor, the kitchen, and the way we wanted the bookshelves, or rather it was me who decided, a few days before your surgery, at the superstore together with the surveyor from the building firm that was doing the place up, you were there too, but you were in such pain that you spent the whole time sitting down, and then you got tired and were cross with yourself, so it was me who decided on our behalf, I’ve done it before, and it was no time to dither, I went for colors I like, simple design, and wouldn’t listen to you when suddenly you pitched in wanting patterns and things I could see weren’t going to work, whereas I’d have listened to you before and we’d have found a compromise, but there just wasn’t room for that then, we needed to get things lined up, we needed a home, and even then I knew you were probably going to die. When you were on your way home after having been to see your friend who’s a doctor, you’d been waiting all summer for her to come home so you could go and see her, the one who at last and straight away knew what was wrong with you, her father having died from cancer of the pancreas and her brother a surgeon who carries out the same kind of interventions as you’d soon be having, after you’d vomited all that blood in early September she finally came back and you went to see her and she immediately sent you for a CT scan and the next day the results came through and her brother happened to be there too even though he lives in Switzerland and you looked at the images together, why wasn’t I there with you, and you could all see the tumor and how big it was, but also that there might be a chance with surgery, which isn’t always the case, and you phoned me when you were on your way home from there on the Metro and told me you had pancreatic cancer and I googled it before coming to meet you by the Metro stairs and it said so very plainly on the computer screen that this was something only few people survive, I knew this as I was walking towards you, and you’d got there before me, so we met halfway, on the sidewalk, your face seemed like it was swollen in a way, and your coat was hanging open, and you hugged me tight, but we didn’t talk about death, not then, and not since, and after we moved into the new apartment I made so many trips to IKEA, taking the train from Romolo, walking by the long, straight road between the warehouses and bushes and fencing, to the boxy blue and yellow building at the end, taking photos I’d send you, because you were at home, asking what you thought, phoning you, and eventually all you could say was you trusted me, you decide, and I bought lamps for all the rooms and lugged them home in those big blue bags, the bigger items were delivered, and in this apartment you’ve never not been ill, never, the apartment we’d so looked forward to sharing together, in this apartment all you’ve done is get more and more ill.
You sit up in bed, they’ve brought some food, but only for me, you’ve got to fast before the examination, only then the nurse comes and says it’ll be another two to three hours yet, so if you want you can have just a bite of something, and you say you fancy a brioche, so I go down to the hospital snack bar by the entrance and buy a pain au chocolat, you wanted one with jam in it, but that’s all they’ve got, and when I come back you sit up in bed and start eating it, while I munch broccoli and zucchini here at the table where I sit and write. And then you say, I’m not actually that hungry, I’m scared. Yes, I say, and look at you, and we say nothing for a moment. What are you scared of, I say then, thinking death, only you say you’re scared you’ll have to have more surgery, that’s what’s on your mind, another operation, and I just blurt out then that they won’t be doing that, they won’t operate twice, because that’s what I’ve read, they might perhaps operate to facilitate the passage of food if there are tumors that get bigger and block the way, or to ease the pressure on nerves and lessen pain, procedures that are meant to alleviate rather than cure, that’s what I’ve read, but all I say is that they won’t operate again, and at that moment you look at me as if suddenly there’s something you’ve understood, or seen, But what will they do then, you say, if they won’t operate and the chemo doesn’t work? Are they just going to let me die? you say, looking like this is a competely new thought, as if you’ve ventured into an area that until now has been cordoned off, where you’ve never set foot before and have no clue, your face looks like it’s collapsing in on itself and there’s nothing there for you to hold onto, I’m scared for you then, scared that now you’re going to be scared and distraught and helplessly adrift inside, and I’m surprised at myself, haven’t I been wanting us to make contact with the reality of this, to look openly into each other’s eyes, be together in the way things actually are, and yet here I am, scared by your mere mention of death, your even entertaining the possibility of it, and I feel I must get you away from there at once, because I’m not that resilient, not at all, and when at the next moment you seem to leap inside yourself, across to the opposite place where hope resides, and say you’re sure everything will be all right, all I can say is I think so too, even though I don’t.
That night, we’re allowed to go home after all, you didn’t have to sleep over at the hospital, the plan now is that all the doctors with responsibility for you are going to meet and confer on how best to move forward, the MRI revealed what the increased pain you’ve been having and the new lump on the right-hand side of your abdomen have suggested, that the effects of the chemo are diminishing, the cancerous tissue has spread and the lump is a new tumor inside the big stomach muscle, there’s no CA 19-9 level noted in your discharge summary, they simply haven’t measured it, there was no point, the MRI told them what they needed to know, under Treatment it says they’ll now consider experimental therapy, I’m not sure what that means, maybe that the normal treatment isn’t working anymore and they want to try something different and see what happens, and that night is no night for you, it holds neither sleep nor rest, a sense of panic has gripped you, now and then I’m awake with you, you talk to me and I try to answer without frightening you, Am I going to die, you ask, and I tell you that’s what they’ve been saying ever since they discovered how it had spread after the surgery, that you won’t recover from this, but it’s as if somehow you haven’t thought about that as death until now, you’ve been thinking it was all such a long way off, a lifetime, You’re going to die too, you say to me, Yes, I say, and that’s all I say, because where you are now it’s impossible to reach you with words, and you seem not to notice me touching you either, holding you, you’re in a place where there’s no one else but you. At the hospital, they gave you two packets of 200 microgram tablets, normally a packet lasts you twenty-four hours, but before seven o’clock both packets are empty and they haven’t helped, you say, it hurts so much, and just before eight-thirty you phone the oncologist, the one with the curly hair and brown eyes, he came in to see me after they took you away for the MRI, it was after you got scared and I got scared by your being scared. He told me they were going to stick to the same course, keeping you reassured, and asked if I was in agreement with that and I said I was, and now you phone him, I can hear you talking to him as I stand in the living room, and what am I doing to you, I ask myself, what right have I to decide what information comes through to you about your own life, and I go from the living room into the hall to listen in as you talk to him, you’re in the bedroom, spaced out on the medication, and sound quite composed, you say you’re phoning because you didn’t get the chance to speak yesterday and are wondering how things stand, and he explains something to you and you listen, and eventually you thank him and wish him a pleasant day, and when you hang up you come into the living room feeling relieved, he wasn’t alarmed, you say, there’s been a setback, but not that serious, you seem pleased, and I ask myself why you didn’t probe more directly as to the outlook, how much time he thinks you’ve got. If you’d asked him straight out he’d have been compelled then to give you a straight answer, and that’s what he said too, the oncologist, when he came to see me there in our room at the hospital when you weren’t there, He’s not asking many questions, the doctor said, and neither are you, not even now. I feel complicit in this and unsure if I’m doing the right thing, what is the right thing even, maybe there isn’t just one thing that’s the right thing, I’ve always thought there was until now, that the right thing is always to look the truth in the eye and live with it the way it is, regardless of how much it hurts, but even if I still think that’s right, maybe it’s not for me to decide what’s right for you. You’re the most intelligent man I know, and if you’re not asking it must be because something in you chooses not to know more.
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Do you believe in synchronicity? A asked as we sat in the car on our way from the airport, and I said yes, I did, and after that we talked no more about it, and in fact I can’t really remember that much of what we said a lot of the time we were together, what was important, what still is important with A, isn’t on the level of talk, it has to do with presence, energy, and I believe in that.
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When I met you four years ago it was all to do with presence then too, all I knew was that I wanted to be with you, meeting you was like gazing into gentle hills in a Welsh landscape, and I wanted to go there, to live there, and it wasn’t something I thought, but something I felt, I knew it in my body, though I was quite unable to put it into words for myself, it was simply the case. That I yearned to belong, to be inseparable from someone, I knew that, I’d felt it for some time, but it wasn’t until I wrote Novel. Milan that I began to understand more, and I could only get close to these places in me because you allowed me to get close to you.
It was when I was writing Over the Mountain that I met you. I wrote myself into a place then where our coming together became possible, I knew that the work I was doing in writing that novel, approaching the girl-child parts of me from which I’ve detached myself all my life, despised and shunned, was in order to ready myself to live in nearness to another person and love them. Because if I couldn’t be near the vulnerable, soft and silly girly parts of me, the parts that so yearned for affection, how could I believe I could ever allow another person to be? Another person can’t make me love what I despise about myself, therefore if I hate myself I can never feel loved. And I longed for someone to love. And when the novel was nearly finished I met you, and meeting you was to live out what the novel was a movement towards, which was belonging. And while we live our lives in days, the life I live in the novel, as I’m writing it, is perhaps the deepest, most truthful and most precise expression of the life that goes on in those days, before, during, and after the novel. The novel is the life I live on the inside and it fetches things up from different times and separate layers that I often don’t realize need to meet, so that I can be with them, the way you might sit on the edge of a bed in the evening and hold the hand of a child, just being there, for the novel possesses an insight so much deeper than my own, and because it’s in touch with this very life force itself, it knows so much better than I do where the wave of each new novel is going to take me. But since I finished writing Novel. Milan, which was when you became ill, it’s been completely impossible for me to write. I braced myself and then you came, and your coming meant that I moved forward, I came home. But now you’re going to die, you, who allowed me at last to find that home with you, and how am I going to move forward from that, here and now?
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Silence! Stop sign — zone border! Birgitta Trotzig wrote. I haven’t had the energy to keep up my notebook either. In what little I’ve managed to put down there, under November 29, it says:
It’s as if the writing in me has withdrawn — tactfully, almost — not wanting to bother me in these times.
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November 29 was a Friday, and three days later, Monday, December 2, I meet A. What my notebook tells me is that I’m not in touch with my life force. And that’s the force that’s awakened in me by meeting A, it’s meeting A that propels me into writing this, it begins like a fire between my legs and radiates upwards through my abdomen, making me laugh again, making me feel happy.
We saw each other only four times in all. The first time was at the airport and the few short hours we spent together before I could check into the hotel, the second time was the dinner that same evening, and the third time was when he showed me the old town in Guadalajara. I’d been doing interviews at the book fair all morning and into the afternoon, but at four o’clock when I was finished he picked me up at the hotel and off we went in his car, he parked in an underground parking lot from where we emerged directly into the historic center, a large area in the middle of the city where motor vehicles are prohibited, and we strolled around there, drawn on by a particularly colorful building we wanted to look at, or a street we wanted to go down because of the little crooked trees that grew there, and we lingered at the fruit stalls of the indigenous women, and if they had something I’d never seen or tasted before, A would buy some in a bag for me to try, and we went inside a food hall crammed with nacho bars that were full of smoke from the wood burners, and people perched on stools, eating from tin plates, the counters displayed meat and offal, we saw intestines and I had no idea they were twisted like braided hair, there were brains and tongues too, and the people behind the counters stood and smiled at us and said things in Spanish which A translated when I didn’t understand, and eventually we didn’t know what else to do, so we sat down on a bench, sat there for an hour perhaps, while the sun went down, and I tried to take some photos, because the light was soft and low, but they came out nothing like it looked, there were some children playing, and a fountain where couples kept coming and having their picture taken, and we watched them and looked sideways at each other, then looked out across the square again, we just sat there quite still, without talking, and I felt such a happiness, I don’t think I’ve ever known anything like it, it was as if everything was love, in that hour, as if the whole world was nothing but love, hallowed was how it felt, so immense, and tears ran down my cheeks, because in that hour I existed only there, and was immersed in love.
A knows I’m married, I’ve told him about you, how we met, and that I now live here in Milan with you, I’ve told him you’re very ill and that you were supposed to have come with me, only it wasn’t possible. The last time I’m with A is Wednesday evening, he’s going away on a trip early Thursday morning, it’s been planned for quite a while, and I’ve been allocated a new guide from the university, but we want to meet and say goodbye, that’s why he comes. I’ve been up since five that morning, unable to sleep from the jet lag, have run for an hour on the treadmill and showered and talked to you on the phone, before I go for breakfast it’s close to midnight where you are, nearly a night less to wait now, you say, and I say I love you, and you say I love you more than anything else, and then you lie down to sleep at home in our bed and at half past eight I’m picked up by the teacher from a school I’m going to visit as part of my book fair program, there’s so much traffic, so many traffic jams in Guadalajara, but slowly we make our way out of the city, it’s a two-hour drive to get there, a tiny road at the end into the mountains, then two hours back again. I have more interviews to do in the afternoon, but the last two I’ve rescheduled to give me an hour with A before going out for dinner with my Spanish publisher, an hour and a half in fact, only there’s traffic and A is flustered by the time he finally arrives, more than a quarter of our time has gone already, this feeling I sense we both have that what we do together, that our being together, is so important. I want to be outside and so we go to the shop across the road and buy a beer for me, mineral water for A, who doesn’t drink, and peanuts for A too, he bought peanuts the evening before as well, when we were in the center of town, he ate some and then gave the rest to a man who came begging as we sat on the bench, and then we sit down with our beer and mineral water on a wall by the road as the sun goes down, it’s rush hour and the traffic moves slowly by us, but at that moment there’s only us and I notice I’m touching him, touching his arm as we speak, stroking his back, my arm just reaching out, and we touch each other with our eyes without speaking, and I’m relieved to be going out for dinner with my publisher, because it’ll keep me from A and something I’m not sure I’d be able to stop myself from doing, something I really don’t want to do. Because I want to be with you. I want to be yours alone and for nothing to come between us ever. I want to be with you always. And it’s what I’ve been doing and have been all this time. I tell A how ill you really are. He’s brought his copy of Amor with him and I write a dedication on the title page, I write: Inside me we’ll always be sitting on this wall next to each other. A gives me a letter. And then darkness has fallen and I look at the time, I’m already a quarter of an hour late for my appointment, we stand up and cross the road back to the hotel, dodging the traffic, and then we’re not on our own anymore, my publisher comes out to greet us, she’s been waiting for me and A, and I say goodbye to him as she looks on, we kiss each other on the cheek and A gets into his car, pulls away, and is gone. After that I don’t see A again. But the fire stays in me, it’s alive.
