Wild Gestures Page 2

  It was winter and the nights began to come in fast, rushing out of the forest like fire. The mother went to bed earlier than usual, suspended under the duvet in a state that was more intense even than wakefulness, until her husband crept in beside her. From under her cover it was like watching some very small, very urgent animal move across the forest floor; you could only tell where it had been and not where it was. It never occurred to her husband that she was not asleep and so he couldn’t disturb her.

  ‘I heard something,’ the mother said one night, sitting up straight. ‘Would you go and see?’

  ‘Go back to sleep,’ the father said. ‘Go on.’

  ‘It was like something thumping,’ the mother said. ‘You must have heard it.’ But the father hadn’t. The mother tried to describe the sound but in the dark she found her words were inadequate; there was no correlation between the sounds that could be offered as words and the sound that she had heard. Again, no. Her husband had no inkling of there having been any kind of noise. ‘I’ll make you a warm drink,’ he said, but his eyes were closed and the mother did not want a drink anyway. The noise was still there, distantly, like you would remember a noise years after an event when it was no longer something you could hear but more a thing you could summon, like poetry. She supposed this was how a newly deaf person might still be able to recall the sound of a lover’s voice. In this way she followed the sound to her daughter’s bedroom. She opened the door, pressed her toes into the carpet, saw the walls and the furniture fill the vacuum of the places they had always been.

  In the darkness the mother ran her hands along the wall where ten years before there had been a door, and windows. There was a ridge where the frame might once have interrupted the smoothness of the brickwork. For the first time the mother could sense its oddness. It was a broken bone under new skin. If it was possible to feel sadness for something as ordinary as a wall, she was feeling it, in her temples and across her forehead, like a fever. Some people would call it a migraine but the mother knew it was more than that. It was the sadness of the whole world. It was the sadness of every room where people didn’t belong. She sat on the bed, which was empty, but the mother had known this before she looked; she had already rehearsed this moment, the burst behind her rib cage was familiar, old, it was not even a feeling but an instinct, or a damaged kind of bravery. She stood up again to look at the paintings, which did not look like the same pictures that could be seen in the day. She stared at the cold colours. This panic, she thought, this love. This child.

  And then abruptly the mother saw her, soaring high above a gabled roof. At first it seemed that the daughter was going to fly directly into, or maybe out of, the frame, but at the last minute she turned and dove as if into water, her legs bent a little at the knee, her body unembarrassed by its fall. The daughter’s legs seemed to be telling her to let go. Each kick into the air took her further away. She rounded a church spire. Trees rose and receded. There were yellow houses, then a whole town. More and more details flooded into the foreground but the daughter kept flying over the town, as if she didn’t want to land. The mother waved in fear. But for a minute she also marvelled at what her daughter could do. Now her daughter torpedoed towards the trees. Now she coasted out over the river. The river below her daughter’s feet was old, it had seen wars, but now it dozed, now it slept.

  The mother went up close to the picture and touched the surface. Her fingers shook as they made contact. They covered first the door of a barn, then a small duck in the foreground. She opened her hands and spread her fingers wide. Nothing seemed to have changed, but there was her daughter. She stepped back and the wider perspective only made it clearer.

  Later the mother would recall a look on the daughter’s face that she couldn’t place, or perhaps hadn’t quite seen because of the angle of her flight. She would try and explain it to people who would listen, but the mother was now reduced to a language of absence, which made no sense to the people who could still celebrate presence in conventional ways. It was not like a hole had opened up in the world, the mother would say. It was not like that world was any different; everyone still had somewhere to get to, she still had floors to clean, and the gas bill, although she stopped making lasagne. It was a little like birth, the mother said, which she had been afraid of, but survived. That was the closest the mother would come. She would try to tell her husband, when he was taking down the Gyprock and the 2x4 battens: she would try to tell him how it seemed that in the painting the whole of the sky was flowing through their daughter and everything she knew to be solid was being exchanged, as if the sky was a feeling, as if the sky was life and only their daughter could see exactly what that meant.

  Noli me tangere

  There was an accident at the public beach and the boy from the hotel, breathless with the effort to convey urgency, suggested they went down to the promenade to look. If they didn’t go now, he seemed to be explaining, there would be no spectacle, the ambulances would come, a cordon erected. Alicia couldn’t really tell the details, because of the accent, but that was why there were international signs. When she flipped him the bird he looked almost pleased. The rumour was that a tourist had come off a pedalo; it was essenziale they didn’t leave it more than a few minutes if they were going to see anything.

  ‘You want excite?’ the boy from the hotel asked. He reached to take Alicia’s hand, briefly, dangerously, lacing their fingers together in a way that left dark streaks against the naked whiteness of her thumbs. To clinch the deal the boy threw in the fact they could get gelato afterwards. They wouldn’t have to buy it, he explained, because his sister was going to marry Marco who worked at one of the gelateria in the piazza Matteotti. The boy’s English was pretty bad, or almost good depending on whether you could tune in. The story he told her involved Marco and the sister’s best friend but in a way that made Marco seem like a good guy, like a hero. ‘I feel bad for Anna,’ he said, suddenly shy. ‘But ice cream forever—is good!’

  Alicia didn’t really know him, the boy. Just twice they had spoken, once when he carried their bags from the hotel lobby to their room and again when the air conditioning broke. She liked the way his face changed at her mother’s coldness, his visible surprise that she could be so angry about such a small thing. She noticed how he avoided looking over her mother’s shoulder, away towards the balcony from where she, Alicia, was watching and she liked that too, how studiously he ignored the pale shine of her stomach, her legs, the new and unfamiliar parts of her that were on show this summer, how the lack of interest seemed to be a different kind of interest. It was more exciting. What she did not expect: it was just more, like the way dark matter was there even if it couldn’t be proved. ‘I’m here!’ she wanted to shout. But the not looking was like answering. Out on the balcony it was like not being there. It was like the whole room was very far away, only a few things connecting her to it, like a skin, or another person’s memory; the hum of the bathroom fan, a guava, green and unripe in the fruit bowl. Some kind of bite irritating the white quadrants behind her knees. There wasn’t a word she knew for that part of you, a part you could touch but had to make an effort to see, and that was annoying. She was really worried about European hornets but they hadn’t seen any, so.

  Ten minutes later she had seen the boy walking fast across the terrace, his body upright and angry, like an animal. He kicked a stone that landed in the swimming pool. Then he looked up, at their balcony, shaded his eyes against the sun. They stood quietly, as if maybe neither one of them were there. The evening breeze came and lifted her skirt, only a little at first, and then wilder, so she had to smooth it down. But the boy said nothing. He stared up at the balcony a little longer. She stared down at him, but as if she was looking at the trees, or the air mattress that someone had left, floating like a dark island, like a nothingness, between the shadows. An archipelago of pine needles drifted past. She dreamed about the boy that night and in her dream she was the water of the pool, felt the hard descent of the stone a
s it split her open.

  When he asked her to go down to the promenade she thought; so this is what it feels like. Love. It felt less incredible than she had imagined. To be honest, it felt more like the start of Mono, or her period. He mocked going down on his knees and then she remembered a third time when they had met but not spoken, when he had been tying his shoelaces in the corridor, when he hadn’t noticed her. She pretended to think about it. ‘OK. Give me excite,’ she said, presenting her hand like they were about to dance, hoping it sounded like an order, which was the way her mother spoke and how she got people to listen. ‘But forget the ice cream. Today’s a fast day. A fast day. Never mind.’

  He moved in a way she hadn’t seen other boys move, as though he belonged to a different element, which right away was a thought that embarrassed her. Did she think he was some kind of ghost? His hand at the small of her back, urging her through the crowded street, felt real enough, but only in the way you just have to trust that anything’s real. There was that verb she used in her mid-term English paper, the one that got her a commendation for lexical inventiveness—hieing. He hied through the streets, winged. A vapour, a mercury flash. Was he even a boy? Half a man. Crowds parted for him, melted for him. ‘Wait!’ she shouted, falling behind. Suddenly there was the stink of feathers, a rapid change in the movement of the air. Again the air shuddered with the beating of wings. In an open marquee filled with trestle tables bright parakeets quarrelled in wire cages. Tourists, molten skinned, walked a sweating corridor of love birds, frantic in their flightless dash east to west. ‘Luis!’ Alicia called after him. ‘Luis, wait, I lost you.’

  ‘Luca,’ the boy shouted back, curving in and out of the crowd to where she stood frowning in at the lovebirds. ‘My name is Luca.’

  ‘You live on the second floor?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s just a song.’

  It was just a song that he didn’t know, which made it another way in which the facts could masquerade as mystery. They had nothing in common. But they could shrug it off. Later she might write home about it on one of the hotel postcards. It wasn’t like it could become their song, not a song like that, but it would be something cool.

  ‘Sagra dei Osei,’ was the boy’s explanation. ‘The Festival of Birds.’ He was trying to pick up speed but they couldn’t get past a woman who took up half the street with an entourage of canvas bags and some kind of terrier snapping on a halti. The heat didn’t do the woman any favours, freckling her upper lip with perspiration and cola. ‘Get our picture, Grace,’ she was saying to her companion and she meant herself and the dog. ‘Make sure those pretty fish are in behind. Not the goddamn kids.’ It was okay, because Grace would crop out the goddamn kids once they were home. But it was a bad shot anyway, Alicia could see that. It would be a shot of a fish tank on a trestle table while a fat woman sweated over a tiny dog, the whole thing inexplicable once viewed in an album. With the defiant confidence of the talentless, Grace shot through ten different poses; there was nowhere to go until it was over. Being cropped out would be a relief, Alicia thought, it would be like giving her permission to ignore how incredible it was that the boy didn’t seem to feel the sadness of the birds in the cages. He petted a gasping rabbit fenced in to a square foot of gravel and she could have thrown up.

  ‘You want to touch this bird?’ the boy asked her, stopping at one of the tables. He spoke in a low voice to the vendor and Alicia could see where the woman’s brassiere bit into her skin and also where once something had cut like a soft white bracelet across the flesh of her upper arm. ‘Jesus, no!’ she said, but the bird was on her anyway, attached to the vendor’s wrist by a narrow chain, equally reluctant to be held. It flapped once, and then set up a little march on the back of her hand.

  The lightness of the bird was surprising, the tiny scrape of its feet as it shifted up and down. There was a girl at school who’d gotten pregnant last year and whose body, when she returned to class, made the same apology, permanently curved into an embarrassed caesura as if she wanted only half of her to be visible at any one time. Alicia wouldn’t meet the bird’s gaze. But it didn’t seem like the bird cared. Again the feeling came; love was also a complicated kind of revulsion. ‘Tell her to get it off me!’ she said and the boy’s laugh was off-beam, like it had come from the back of a theatre at what is meant to be a moment of silent, poetic intensity. ‘We go, yes?’ he said, tilting his wrist so his watch, a cheap imitation of something that was supposed to indicate status, caught the sun.

  ‘But don’t you think it’s weird,’ she said after they had walked away, the boy hurrying her along with his hand at her back. ‘The way they’re running. The birds. Didn’t you see how they’re all running in the direction of the lake?’

  He didn’t think it was weird. But he did think they should walk faster.

  By the time they reached the Boat Hire there were already reporters there and poliziotti thinning out the crowd, but for the quick there were still ways in and the boy navigated with the proficiency of a person well-practised at making things disappear fast. From the pale green lawns of the promenade holidaymakers watched the water move about the figures of two police divers. What nobody was talking about was how cold the water actually was even with the heatwave. But it meant the piazza cafes were busier than normal and under the striped awnings ink-haired waitresses, proving how tragedy brings out the most expensive of human impulses, served whole bottles of Barolo and didn’t comment on the way their customers were updating their social media even as the divers made another ascent to the lake’s surface alone. Most of those gathered had a version of what they were doing when the incident happened. But almost nobody could explain the boat’s sudden lurch, or the way, for just a moment, the tourist had been observed standing quite still, frozen in an elongated present tense where they were neither falling nor sitting, but breathing and smiling, until the water hit.

  The lake swelled and sank, rolled like a glass ball. Like a fisheye it blinked, like a mouth it swallowed. The rise of blue, the falling blue, was regular as breathing. It was a shame how you couldn’t call things cerulean any more if you wanted to be the kind of person who didn’t use clichés. To Alicia the water looked so light, so impossibly, intangibly light, but inside it was the solid fact of the tourist, hidden somewhere in darkness, and behind Mount Baldo threw long shadows into the sky, pink and yellow towns clinging to its foothills the way an uncertain suicide, pockets lined with stones, might wait with one foot suspended above the water, unsure of the desire to drown. A forest of weed swayed at the shoreline. The breeze pulled the weed one way, then another, and back, and then Alicia was doing it too, this instinctive dance where she was entirely unaware of her own lunging movement, which was how her aunt, a teacher, had once described swaying in front of her students after her maternity leave, rocking an imaginary infant to prolong every second of quiet.

  ‘Too bad we see nothing,’ the boy said, breaking the spell. ‘I said we have to be quick.’

  ‘Shit. You think he drowned?’

  He shrugged. ‘Not he. A woman.’

  It was worse that way, somehow. As if even the Earth had not bothered to do the gallant thing. They stood in silence for a minute, watching a tall man shouting on the jetty steps and she wondered if later this would be the moment people spoke of as having changed everything, and how sad it was that it didn’t feel any different at all from the moment before or after. Alicia threw a stone into the jellied skin of the water, which was only a small thing but at least it was a thing. The falling feeling got her again, the one like in her dream, only this time she was going faster, being pulled almost, into the dark and the water sealed above her, tight, like someone had mended a drum. But it was just the drift of the branches overhead after all. They were in the light. They were in shadow. The light came back again, like an obscene, forgotten secret.

  The boy seemed to be listening to something. He turned to her, put his hands square on her shoulders and said, ‘You
want to go?’

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘Is over. Polizia di Stato are coming. From the city. You want ice cream now?’

  ‘Jesus!’ she said, the nausea building. ‘I already told you no ice cream. And what do you mean it’s over?’

  She didn’t want ice cream, but the need for something to take away the weighted feeling in her stomach made Alicia feel a little crazy. ‘You smoke?’ the boy asked but she shook her head. Where the promenade gave way to the main piazza was a café where two half-drunk bottles of Peroni sat on an otherwise empty table. ‘Take them’, Alicia told the boy, take them, and mimed drinking from the bottle. But he wouldn’t, so she grabbed them herself and in a street two minutes march away slumped down against a warm stucco wall and waited for him to catch up. From ten yards she tossed him one of the bottles, some kind of confirmation that she was entirely at ease with the thing that she knew for sure was going to happen next, because this was what death, or the thought of death, made you do. The boy caught the flash of amber by the neck. She could tell he wanted to kiss her and she kept the bottle with the most left to drink, in case she lost her nerve.

  It was hard to know what things to talk about. The boy aped a toast, drained his bottle, then looked up brightly. ‘You like football?’

  ‘Like, soccer? No.’

  ‘Movies?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Not ice cream.’

  ‘That’s just a thing. It’s a fast day.’

  ‘But you like how you look, yes?’