8.05 / May 2013

There Like Nothing is Ever There

1.

Father refuses to die. He’s always been an unconventional man, but this is getting out of hand. It is unseemly for a man his age. Makes him look like a louche ingrate. What is the world coming to if it cannot rely on people buggering off to the grave one by one, following the proper sequence? The universe requires certainties. Ordinem naturae, that sort of thing. Order of nature, my balls. Show some respect for cosmic etiquette.

He had me late too. Now, he says he was near his six hundred and sixtieth year when I was born. This man, this grey-haired eminence swathed in luxurious tweeds from head to foot, this subscriber to the Lancet and the London Review of Books, this scrupulous donator of numerous benches to various churchyards claims he may not even be able to die, after all. This is what he avers, pan completely dead. “Avers” might be the wrong term. “Postulates” is better. He merely posits, surmises, suggests. He doesn’t know. So who knows?

He doesn’t look six hundred in photographs from around my birth; fifty at most. But who does look six hundred, apart from Keith Richards? And even if he was fifty then, he must be about a hundred now. That’s methuselah material as it is. He doesn’t look a hundred. But who can believe anything anymore? Is he some sort of subtle madman? Dementia can prey even on the young, and I should think he caught it early. His talk is often ruby tripe marinated in well-made sentences. We know the world is filled with high-functioning lunatics. But whatever his age, he’s as sprightly as a canary. It’s embarrassing. Some of his mannerisms I’ve always taken for comic garnish. He’d say things to me like, “Young sir, this is something very nearly intolerable,” when I’d done something wrong. At twelve. Or, “Must this, truly, be witnessed by me?”

Though I don’t believe a word he says, I do dread the finding out. There are things that give me pause. But who knows?

I will be forty-nine next summer. There are ailments and medicines. I haven’t pampered my body. It has taken a mangling in the tavern. Now I’d like to live a little. A man wants to ask his father, how much time is enough? How much is enough? Who was it asked that? Albert Camus? Maybe it was George Michael. At any rate, it was prescient and deep. What I know is I am done being toyed with. I wonder about my inheritance. And father knows all too well how to tickle my detonator. He sent me a postcard with the words, “Let us go to Venice. I haven’t been there since 1819.” I ripped it in about forty pieces. But Italy it is.

 

2.

We met in Campo Santa Margherita, the square that’s nothing of the sort. A shapeless thing, as if a trapeze knocked up a rhomboid. A grey day, spiritualised by a breeze aspiring toward a sirocco. Not a tourist in sight. The houses somehow seemed to be shrinking, very shabby, very agreeable too. I could imagine an impoverished aristocrat hiding from creditors up there behind the shutters, squatting by a mangy ottoman, its upholstery once green damask now shorn of most of its embroidered flourish, and in the dusty darkling a mute oriole shifts on its perch. I have my fantasies too.

We sat outside the café draped in blankets, sipping espressos, father’s hair tossed and tousled unpredictably. Mind you, he has more of it than I do. Dogs passed each other straining their leashes, keen to sniff and copulate.

“I do love this square,” father says, in his tempered tone. “You know, it has hardly changed at all. One evening, I remember, Byron came this way with an English friend of his, a short, quiet man. Byron was drunk and he limped. His shirtsleeves were wine-stained. Very pale and serious he was, but courteous. An exquisite politeness, really. I’d met him the night before at the house of. Well, I forget her name, a contessa she was. Anyway, he lingered a moment and then apologized, for he had to leave. Had to sort out a baker’s daughter, he said, and then they were off. People loved him here, I could tell, though I was only visiting. Some came to kiss his hand as he passed.”

“Lord Byron?”

“Yes.”

“Right.”

“Quite a nice young man too. Slandered, of course, back home. Dreadfully.”

“Of course, dad. How was Kublai Khan?”

“I never met him, you silly fool.”

“No? I’m surprised.”

“That was years before I was born. Years.”

“Indeed.”

When he fell ill that night, I thought, Oh, well. Even biblical patriarchs did give up the ghost at last. And let their children live.

 

3.

I took him to his house some fifteen miles from Florence. He seemed to vomit whole centuries of banquets. Cecilia, his housekeeper, hired a young woman to take care of his comprehensive incontinence. Matter was leaving his body. Would his ghost?

Cecilia speaks to me in Italian. I stutter in protest, but she goes on in her unwinding maunder and I always take it as best I can before she is satisfied and leaves me to ponder what she’d been saying. And he lay heavy as a bronze in the plump sofa, very weak, speaking in a drone. He made me think of hibernating animals, even when he did not sleep. The slow way he’d swallow his spit, each glug like a meditated decision. I think of all the tenses.

“I should like to die before you, son,” he says to me. “But I fear I shan’t.”

“Let’s hope you don’t,” I say.

A few years ago I asked to see his birth certificate. This is what he said to me: “Do you think they made those in the fourteenth century? I do have a very good forged one, if you would like?”

Unbelievable cheek.

He moved to Italy years ago. Or “back to Italy.” I am Francesco again, he said. Not Francis, as I’ve always known him. The surname fits, though we’d never had any Italian relatives. In fact I had no paternal relatives at all. Also, he’s always had inexplicable money. We used to have these ancient artefacts at the house. Then he moved it all to this pink palazzo in the country. There I once stumbled upon a room where a family of ravens had made their home. No one had been in there for years and they patiently waited for me to close the door. He’d never had any childhood friends, this I would have remembered. Few friends of any kind. I’ve never even seen photographs of him young. And only now do I realize how little I have seen of him since I was a boy. How little we have spoken since I moved to America two decades ago. Only now does he begin to reveal details of his fantasy.

“I was born in a village nearby,” he tells me, “but I grew up in Florence.”

“And I suppose you met Dante. Botticelli, surely?”

“No.”

“No?”

“You know, I realized, rather quickly, that I had to keep my feet moving. I tried to find out what had happened to me. What it is I had done differently. How I disrupted the protocol, as it were.”

“And?”

“I still don’t know. People were dying around me. Plagues and wars would come and linger, but I was fine. I was quite fine. I liked rosemary, and the smell of resins, and astrolabes. Perhaps that’s it. Who knows? I kept moving. Learned trades. Learned languages. Language is good. They who say it are wise. Then I lived in France some two hundred years.”

“When?”

“During all the horrid Louises.”

“Loo-eez, he’d said, squeezing his mouth like an accordion with those antagonized vowels.

“And you met Molière, and Voltaire, and?”

“Oh no, not at all. Rarely did I see writers. That wasn’t my domain at all. Of course not. I did meet that man Diderot once shortly before I left. Did I tell you that? Perhaps I should have, knowing you’ve studied literature and all that stuff. Now, you couldn’t talk to that man at all. He spoke like some sort of bird, or imp, all fleeting. Very skittish, skipping from thought to thought. I think he got drunk to excess every day.”

“Then you went to London.”

“Then I went to London.”

Before dozing off, he says, “Memory is a terrible cargo.” He seems to taste his lips, like a disappointed sommelier I once saw in Macon. “There is really only so much story a man, or a life, can bear.”

 

4.

He recovered, of course. But not before he’d told me a thousand anecdotes. How as a child he’d once stolen eggs and fled to a house and onto the rooftops, making faces all the while an obese woman, the aggrieved party, wearing some grotesque broach in her headscarf, followed him down in the street with her thuggish son. Florence, he’d said, was a small city, the best city, of course, but very small indeed, much like a village. He broke all the eggs in the escape. In Milan, “around the year 1500,” he once glimpsed what he maintains was a man flying some sort of wooden contraption. Of course he did. It was night, he said, and he was in an archway, kissing a girl “of easy virtue much like myself,” and he saw the thing pass in an uncertain arc. He could hear the grind of some sort of system of pedals and clockwork fluttering, buoyed clumsily through space. It was nothing but a glimpse, he maintained, but it has haunted him since. Must’ve read about Leonardo, memory wedging him in, a perfect tessera for my father’s expanding mosaic. Then in London in about 1870, an aristocratic woman he knew well asked him if he’d arrange the death of her husband. He wouldn’t. He adds lovely touches to his fictions. These were the ravings of not only a sick man, but of a cultivated man at the tail end of his dotage.

Then I had an idea. I asked about the names of his parents. He seemed to think about it, standing there under the barren vine canopy. That stoic, inscrutable face of his, squinting. He’d aged precipitously, I realized. I felt like weeping.

“Baldo was my father. Baldo. Very ambitious, you know. He was a notary, then by some nice stroke of fortune he became secretary to an old house. He’d come from Pisa and married your grandmother. Her name was Madolina. She died very young, of course. A beautiful woman. But everybody died very young. Even when they were, when they are, well advanced in age. This is what it feels like to me. And your poor mother too. Poor, poor soul. When my mother fell ill, I knelt at the foot of her bed and asked god for her to never die. I lost my faith the next day and I’ve never seen it since.”

“No?”

“You see, religion invents a universal disease and then claims the singular cure is in the faith itself. How very convenient. Very hermetic, and it is, above all, a safe gambit. If it isn’t too late for such things, may I offer you some paternal advice? Fear certainty like the plague, son. I know something about plagues.”

 

5.

We go to the small town of his alleged birth, a catatonic place on a hill, terminal. There is a church of San Sebastiano in the main square. At this point I just want him to acknowledge his error. My Italian is weak so I listen as my father speaks to the priest. I’d told him to ask for old records.

“How old?” the priest inquires, pinching his spectacles.

“Thirteen hundreds,” says my father.

“Eh,” the priest says, with a scholarly facial shrug, “that will be difficult. Impossibile! This church was built much later.”

“Oh,” says father, without much regret.

“But what exactly are you looking for?”

“Records of certain ancestors,” I say.

“Yes, yes. Well, I’m very sorry. You’re still welcome to look, of course.” And then, “Ah, there is, of course, an older church, you know? A much older church. San Barnaba, not very far from here.”

“San Barnaba!” father shouts. “Ma, certo! San Barnaba!”

On the way there, behind a high fence, I see the tiny roseate head and trailing torso of a girl, with attendant train of hair, probing into view and disappearing, at brief intervals. I’d always found the sight of children on trampolines impossibly stupid, with all that mindless undulation, and their clumsy little bodies that they have no idea how to control, to say nothing of the stupid skip, and above all: the stupid stare. But now, in the tawny afternoon, appearing and vanishing against the stainless sky, the girl, her total absorption in the act, even if in common time, is hypnotic. Though no more than seven or eight, her numinous gaze has a lapidary, hewn poise. The whole thing is not an emblem of youth, it is agelessness itself, suspended. A forever condensed into now. She is there like nothing is ever there. An uncommon time. As usual with this kind of earnest rumination, once I’ve become conscious of it, I regard myself with bored disdain.

The church is small and hidden well behind a clump of cypresses, its stones begrimed and harnessed in tarp and scaffolding. The evidently senile sacristan takes us down to the crypt where the books are kept.

“When do you think you were born?” I’d asked my father.

“In 1302, or 3, I should think.”

And so we look for a couple of hours, coughing at the opening of each goatskin-bound volume. The sacristan comes from time to time, peering with an impatient smile, each time surprised to find us there. And then a Siberian frost encrusts my skin when I see this entry:

 

Friday, 29 February 1304: baptism of Francesco, son of Baldo Pisano (a notary), and Madolina.

“So I’m younger than I thought,” my delighted father says.

I stare. And for the first time I feel something alien to me: Don’t ever die, dad. I’d rather go first. Don’t ever die.

But is it real or coincidence? Does it mean, pan absolutely dead, what it seems to mean?

Who knows?

Who knows.


Elvis Bego was born in Bosnia, fled the war there at twelve, moved around, and now lives in Copenhagen where he is at work on a novel. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Threepenny Review, The Brooklyner, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, The Coffin Factory, and elsewhere.
8.05 / May 2013

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