After James (11 page)

Durant raised his glass to me but the test wasn't yet completed.

“The lover says, ‘The sun winks and we play blind.' It's the line that first caught my attention in that sidebar on my screen. Have you heard the expression before?” he asked.

“No. In context—I'm guessing a bit here, the poem is obscure in places—but it might mean that truth reveals itself but we sometimes ignore it. The idea is that the lovers have had a truth revealed to them that they've been ignoring but that one of them is no longer going to ignore. Presumably, given the tired figures, the fire and so on, it's that their love has lost its passion. It's dying.”

Even when I hadn't fully grasped the poem I felt the loss in it. After loved ones die, every last antacid ad is heartbreaking. In the first weeks after I was orphaned I couldn't read poetry or prose. The Londoner brought me back by leading me to Three Sheets, and because so many of the poems either made no sense or were less than excellent, I deputed them to express my emotions for me in little combustions I could smother with cold, analytical words if they grew too hot. One day in that Montreal basement the fire nearly caught me (the stale fire metaphor clearly has) and it took my online rant to extinguish it.

“The poem's autobiographical, don't you think?” he asked.

“We can't possibly know.”

“He's writing about his experience. Lost passion, lost love. He was here.”

“We don't know that. To avoid fallacies, we shouldn't assume he's writing about his life. Or at least not literally. It's the safer assumption.”

“So your training tells you. Mine tells me different.”

Some echo in the comment landed me back with the Londoner in Madrid. We ate dinner at a small wooden table, our money and time running out. I'd wanted to tell her that
she was the only woman who'd ever inspired me to poetry or song, inspired me to risk failing. I wanted her in words but couldn't have her there. It was a way of saying I loved her, though of course I would never admit to speech such a worn term as
love
, and so I felt both love and my inability to say it either straight or slant. She put her knife down and sipped her wine, close-set eyes, soft breath of a face. Before she took up her knife again I reached across the table and grasped her hand up high, near the wrist, and squeezed it. I meant to communicate my love and protection—her life had left her in need of protection from recurrent bad luck—and she looked at my hand on hers, then up at me. She wanted me to say what it meant, this touch. But I couldn't say a thing, and let go.

Now I sat looking at Durant's hands. He held one in the other, pressed a thumb nervously into his palm. The certainty struck me that Durant himself was the Poet. Who else would have taken such an interest in my posted rant? If I had to guess—so easily I stepped into the same trap of biographical conjecture—I'd have said the Poet was male, yes, and at least in his fifties, given the recurrent theme of aging as a kind of decline. And a man alone, often addressing an absent “you” who seemed not at all metaphysical. And Durant himself was a genetic biologist, and so might have known a woman with a scientific eye like the lost lover in the poem. And even an anonymous poet must want to meet one live reader.

He sat up slightly higher.

“There's a poem by Czesław Miłosz, the Pole,” he said. “He imagines this square here, and then takes us to where he's writing the poem, Warsaw in 1943, during the first uprising.
The ghetto is on fire. Outside the ghetto, couples ride in a carousel and the ashes from the fires drift to them in what he calls ‘dark kites' and they catch them like ‘petals in midair.' Miłosz has the authority of the survivor, of witness. The poem, as poem, stands or falls on those petals. But because he sees them with his own eyes, the charred petals are floating before us too, in the very words on the page.” I didn't know what to say. I had no compulsion to say anything. “Whether a poem is about love or historical atrocity, and whether or not the poet was really there, it has to come from somewhere real. Warsaw, this piazza, or a coil in the heart. I know you understand this.”

I understood less as the day went on. We left the café and through the Renaissance streets I followed him, or trailed him, more precisely, his person and his meaning. He allowed anything to come to his attention, voiced every thought and half thought. He must have been very lonely for someone to talk to as he met the city, a feeling I knew from my first visit there. But always I was on guard. The café meeting had been measured and planned, performed. Was he setting me up for more lessons as he stopped and bought us gelato or as we paused before the facade of a church? “Santa Maria dell'Orazione e Morte.” He pointed with his cone to the terrifying winged skulls on the doorway. “The place is dedicated to the burial of the dead. It inspires mortals to pay their tithes and eat their greens.” An underlying seriousness always there in his voice or expression enabled him to joke without disarming awe, even while ice cream melted onto his hand.

“In case you're wondering,” he said, “and you are, I'm not the Poet. And the job is still yours if you want it.” He was
striding again, looking into the ancient stones passing beneath him. “Don't decide until I show you the apartment.”

Those first days in Rome now in memory seem painted, the perspectives mastered to a mathematical exactness of light and shadow, the Della Francesca'd faces and fabrics somehow colouring even the sounds, the streets, voices speaking a language I didn't know. A kind of dark comedy crept into the hours. Words became prime elements, reduced not to sense but the urge to sense, the need to say, the need to share in the act of saying. Or maybe it wasn't quite like that. Sense came in fragments that combined or didn't, somewhere between Piero and Mondrian. I felt outside of my own experience, not unpleasantly, even as I was included in company. Durant had been absent for most of my first two days in the apartment, but on the second evening he invited me to dinner. We were seven on the rooftop of the apartment building, I, Durant, and five of his acquaintances from the building. Yves was a Paris-based travel writer on sabbatical with his wife, who was Greek and was never properly introduced but seemed to have once worked as a photographer. Their friends Patrice and Anton, a gay couple, both pilots for Air France, agreed about not much except the strength of their pilots union. The only Italian, Carlo, who owned the building, was about Durant's age. He resembled, it must be said, Mussolini, with even something of Il Duce's ridiculous bearing, at least when he thrust forward his chin to offer up the final word on Arab uprisings, the compromised Italian press, or the quality of the
Super Tuscan blend. He hosted these rooftop dinners for his tenants every second Wednesday night.

Though I'd just started work—my only instructions were to read Three Sheets “for patterns” and to “profile” the Poet, as if we were out to catch a serial killer—Durant had insisted on paying me in advance for my first two weeks. I'd been poor for months, so sitting there with four hundred euros in my pocket I felt good, trusted, valued, but also misjudged, soon to disappoint. Wanting to impress Durant, wanting to misrepresent myself impressively, made me feel younger than I was, needy and lacking in seriousness.

The talk moved between languages—Italian, English, French—until someone remembered me, who spoke no Italian and spoke French like a camp counsellor played guitar, and shifted them all back to English.

“Explain your joke,” said Anton. He was narrow-featured and tended to burst staccato into conversation and then pay no attention to whoever took up his point.

“I don't think I can,” I said. “It wasn't very witty. Do you have summer camps in France?”

“We have camps, yes. I thought you said ‘campos.' A field. I thought you were insulting the farmers' way of speaking. Or perhaps just the French. When I visit Italy I often hear these insults.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Then you did intend to insult?”

It would be more accurate to say his features were pinched.

“I'm sorry others insult you,” I said.

“You shouldn't apologize for others. It leads to confusion and disastrous political ennui.”

Yves was asking Carlo about property for sale in Turkey. Carlo's son would spend his summer away from university studies renovating a building in some gentrifying neighbourhood on the European side of Istanbul.

“The seller was a nervous man who inherited the address from his mother. He saw risk everywhere,” said Carlo. “The risk of Islamicists, reformists, a police state, a racist-nationalist government. Of the surrounding economies, of earthquakes. Stupidly, he told me of his fears. The price for the building was attractive.”

The word that came to mind was
retrench.
I wanted to go to bed but I saw Durant glancing at me, gauging. He wanted to see what he'd paid for. And now, Yves's wife was asking me for my feelings about Canada.

I said I had complicated feelings about it. I found it a highly agreeable country, comparatively strong by most meaningful indices, education, health care, crime and penal stats, collective rights protections, and so on, though it had never resolved or acknowledged its abhorrent treatment, ongoing, of native peoples, despite which, given the general failure of nations in their treatment of native peoples, it was the very global example of multicultural success that other countries, especially the U.S., claimed to be the exceptional, exclusive, or pinnacle—pick your figure of speech—examples of. For a few moments as I spoke the others listened but then drifted into other conversations. Even the Greek woman, with the countenance of a listener, seemed somehow to be listening to her left
and right. Though he wasn't looking at me now, I sensed that only Durant was paying attention. And yet, I said, not really aware that I had these precise opinions, compared to most countries with strong educational systems and a history of at least some leisure class, Canada persisted in a cultural adolescence, with a huge, silent gulf between its artists, few as they were, and their audience, brought on primarily by a vapid cultural commentary. All of this complicated by new technologies and a fracturing of the impulse toward serious attention.

“So your experience escaped shallowness.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. It turned out she was under the impression I'd recently visited Canada.

“I'm Canadian, not American.”

“My mistake,” she said. Then she asked if I'd ever visited the United States and what were my feelings. Then she interrupted my nonanswer and asked again about Canada, its vast regions and overwhelming vistas. I brought it all around—a trick I had learned on other trips outside North America—to a few stories about encounters with bears. Suddenly the whole table listened in. The stories weren't mine, though I put myself in them. The mother black bear following me (my former friend Derek) up a tree in which, I (he) saw too late, her cubs were lounging. The grizzly I (a guy in one of my literature classes whose name escaped me) met on a mountain path, where I (he) froze, unable to back away, until the grizzly turned around and left the way it had come, as if it had forgotten its car keys. The polar bear who walked into the bar up in Churchill, Manitoba, where I (the CBC camera crew) was thawing (their equipment) out. The stories were all implausible
and true. I survived in each one. By the time I'd finished them I felt surrounded by a borrowed northern gravity.

Carlo's son, Davide, arrived, introduced himself to all, and sat across from me. He looked like a buzz-cut soccer star, straight off a poster for the Azzurri. As if we'd been speaking for hours he told me he found Rome tame and dull. He was leaving for Istanbul the next day. He asked if I played music.

When conversing with nonnative English speakers I often have this sense of having missed a transition, and of unexpected echoes. It changes my own way of speaking. I didn't really know how I'd occasioned the bear stories, for instance, and now I expected bears to return as a topic in some unlikely way, just as guitar playing was about to.

“I play guitar badly, like a camp counsellor.”

“In Istanbul,” Davide continued, “I busk on the great street Istiklal with my friends. We play gypsy style. We're very good. Even the gypsies admire us. I'll send you a link.”

In this way my email address was brought forth. On the back of his business card, I printed it like a seven-year-old practising his letters, and handed him his own card. On the front side was a badly drawn figure of a very long-clawed hammer or a very thick-stringed instrument.

I asked Davide what he was studying. He said it didn't matter. He was going to drop out of school.

“Though I haven't told my father.”

He said this in full voice, with his father ten feet away, talking to Durant, paying his son no attention. I wondered if Davide hoped his father would overhear him or register unconsciously what he was saying, but then it seemed he
simply knew exactly how much volume he could safely get away with, in the way local taxi drivers measured small spaces at high speeds.

All at once the voices fell silent and Durant looked at me.

“James,” he asserted in a voice that made me want to deny that I was James or had ever met him, “your bear stories are amusing but they don't really display your greater talents.” He said that they'd recently had in their number a Canadian who claimed to be a clairvoyant. She'd announced that they all had known one another in a previous life. “She called herself a seer. And here you are, another Canadian, a seer of subtexts, a maker of connections. I wonder what you're thinking about all of us.”

Durant valued the idea that he'd been right about me.

“I'm thinking I'd like to be invited back next week and should dodge the question.”

“I wanted to ask her how a clairvoyant knows about past lives,” Patrice said. “Maybe our beloved dead have these Wednesday dinners together, too.”