Ti Amo, page 8
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Evening has come in Milan, I’ve been writing since just before three, now it’s almost eight, I see the dome of San Lorenzo all lit up, myself reflected in the pane with my reading glasses on. When I came back from the gym you were asleep, it was just after twelve then, rest at last after that terrible night, and this morning before I went out I gave you an extra morphine patch on your shoulder now that you’ve run out of pills, and I come to your bedside now and smooth a finger gently over your cheek, you stir, only for your eyes to close again as you look at me, you force them open again, peering out from far within, Now I feel better, you say, you remembered you had some anxiety pills and you suppose they must have worked. An hour later you get up and put on your clothes and shoes to go to the office, and I follow you to the door and wait for the lift with you, Ti amo, we say. And now it’s evening and you’re home again, you let yourself in just after six and come straight to my desk and kiss me on the neck, Today’s been quite good, you say, holding a bag from the pharmacy in your hand, they’d managed to get some packets for you, I’ll take a pill now and go for a lie down, you say, and I carry on with my writing. This was almost two hours ago, it’s five to eight now, I’ve been writing this all that time, sometimes hearing you, your breathing, the odd snore before you’re quiet again.
Today is Wednesday, January 15, it’s two days since we were at the hospital when they did the MRI scan showing your cancer has spread, and I’d thought before Monday that after the scan, after Monday, something would have changed, that we’d have entered a new phase, only now I’m no longer sure, it’s like everything just carries on the same as before. This morning you went back to the hospital, you had a ten o’clock appointment with two pain specialists to map out where to go from here. And me, what am I going to do? Where do I go from here?
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When I touched down at Malpensa, Saturday, December 7, you were there to meet me. Only coming home wasn’t at all how I’d imagined it when I went away. I’d been so looking forward to getting all my traveling done and finally, finally being with you. But there was this new fire in my body and that energy was so different from yours, you, who have so little strength and must rest such a lot and are often so far away in that spacy state the morphine puts you in. Ever since you first got ill I’ve followed along with you, followed your energy levels, and you’ve been in such pain with all that was happening to your body, the catastrophe of that, and the long incision they made to remove things from inside you, I wanted to be so near to you, so I had to follow along with you wherever you were, and I did, because it was the only thing I wanted, I who had found you at last and come home. But after Guadalajara I realized that I’d doused my own life fire in order to be in touch with yours. And that suddenly there in Mexico mine flamed up again, while you continued to be ill, in such a low place, and it opened up a distance between us.
I didn’t want to drink in the evenings anymore, the way I’ve been doing ever since you got ill, all I wanted was a glass of wine with dinner, I was focused, I started looking for books to read that could nourish me as I moved towards a new novel, the one I’m imagining which isn’t this one, I wanted to inhabit myself again. I’d said to A that I’d be silent, I wanted to be with you, close to you again, and I didn’t want to go behind your back with anything, I really didn’t want that, although I’m already hiding your death from you, who do I think I am. But I know that being told I’d met another man would be worse for you in a way than becoming aware that you’re dying, even though I haven’t done anything more than kiss him goodbye on the cheek, because suddenly the closeness we’ve shared, which has been our we, us, the closest and strongest bond in all the world, suddenly we’d be blasted apart, by my having shared a closeness with another. I’ll never tell you that.
A was far away, but I had this fire in me, it was mine and it kept on burning, I felt its warmth between my legs at night and it felt like I was adrift on an endless wave of orgasm, and then one night I had a dream, it was after New Year’s, more than a month after I’d met A and left him again. I dreamt that I woke up and checked my phone and there were three messages from A, no text in them, only images, photos. It was such a vivid dream. The first image was of A’s hand, the back of his hand, with a big, black spider on it. The next image was similar, A’s hand again, though a bit further away, only now there were five spiders, they formed a pattern, and in the background there was water, as if the picture had been taken by the sea. The last image was from under the water, taken as if at that exact moment when a person walking into the sea stumbles and falls and the water is pierced by rays of light and everything is blues and yellows and greens.
The next day I wrote the first words of this, whatever it is. I love you, I wrote. I love you, I write, I say, when you come through the door in the evenings. You still come through the door when it’s evening. For now, you’re here, with me. And what I’ve been writing is the most truthful way I’ve been able to be with you, with all that cannot be said between us in our days together. I’m not going anywhere, I’m here, and I’ll be here all the way until it’s you who isn’t here anymore.
From my notebook, October 24, on the train back to you from Ravenna:
Bleak, drizzle. 9 am walked to Basilica di San Vitale and Mausoleo di Galla Placidia. The blue blue vaulted ceiling of the mausoleum with its shining stars of gold and a cross at the apex. You’ve wanted to bring me here and show me this from the very start. And now I’m seeing it on my own.
(Yesterday I saw Dante’s grave.)
In the San Vitale — the way the great marble blocks of the pillars possess a quieter beauty than the glittering mosaics. The mottled markings in the marble are just there, silent and displayed, defenseless, and what was hidden within the stone, the veins, the figures they trace, is exposed now for all time, laid bare, halted in once so sweeping, now dissected movements through the stone. And what we see is the cross section, the wound, and the beauty of what simply exists, neither devised nor constructed, merely disclosed. This is. These veins in marble. This traced figure. And you are somewhere between the two. Between the silent pillars of marble and the gleaming mosaics of the chancel. Between everything that is, you come towards me, are with me, are you.
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Hanne Ørstavik, Ti Amo
