Human occasions, how strange they are. And yet, why do I say so? What are the unstrange occasions against which I measure them? The human is all we have. And people are simple, too much so. Consider Franco Bartoli, now, perched brightly there at the head of the table, with his newly smooth jowls and his little bluish chin, indecently cleft. He is quick, he misses nothing. He can engage in one conversation while listening to another. Tonight he is safe at the centre of his little world of women, smiled upon by his happily vacant old mother and fussed over by Maria the cook, with Kristina Kovacs on his right hand and Cass Cleave opposite and me safely off at the table's other end. The grey-haired fellow too is a source of assurance for him, speaking with loud, guttural authority on a diverse range of subjects, quaffing great draughts of wine and shooting in my direction the measuring, menacing glance of a hired heavy. I have still not discovered who or what he is, and will not. His huge hands are markedly unsteady; he seems to be labouring under a suppressed, general rage. He bears a striking resemblance to the poet Montale, but when I enquire if he might perchance be a relative of the great Ligurian, he merely stares at me, frowning darkly, as if I have said something insulting. His initial flare of interest in Cass Cleave quickly fizzles out; no sooner has she begun to tell him about her latest obsession, the commedia dell'arte and its origins – Susarion and his players, the Roman circus, Plautus, pilgrim plays, and, if I heard her correctly, something about the Mohammedan invasions – than his eye wanders back speculatively in the direction of Kristina Kovacs. But Kristina too will not hold his vigorous attentions. She would have, once, but no longer. That hollowed-out look she has is more pronounced than ever, it seems that if one were to touch her with a fingertip her skin might break up and fall from her in powdered fragments. She has grown vague in manner, too. For extended periods she and Signora Bartoli will sit in silence, with the same expression, gazing at the tablecloth without seeing it, not quite smiling, not wholly here. In the midst of these marionettes Cass Cleave is speaking earnestly and fast, while trying inexpertly to smoke another of Montale's cigarettes. "The ancient phallophori," she is saying, staring desperately into his face, "daubed with soot and adorned with the phallus, would leap upon gourds, performing all manner of obscene acrobatics." This is really aimed at me, and I recognise it; she has been reading my books again. I smile at her sternly. Mon-tale frowns, nodding, baffled, drinks another draught of wine. She laughs unsteadily; tears sparkle on the rims of her eyes. All stare at her, even Kristina Kovacs, even Bartoli's vague mother. Although I too am looking at her she will no longer look back at me. Now say that… Now say…
Say what? I am running out of things to say. There I am, as usual, with my glass of drink and my cigarette, smiling about me savagely, entertaining my old Caligulan dream of a world with a single neck for me to wring. My kind should be rounded up and corralled off somewhere, Madagascar, say, although I do not like the smell of cloves. Or is that Zanzibar? She wrote: I am going to America. The jolt, like an electric shock to the heart, as I stood there in the mild autumn light in Franco Bartoli's garden room with the scrap of paper in my trembling hand. That word, heart. I am like a stoker in the bowels of a ship, at night, on a raging sea, with only the thinnest skin of metal to save me from the black weight of waters. I look at my hand, catch sight of my old, my so old hand, and am halted. The falling flesh. Today, over our spiked coffees at the Caffè Bicerin, my new friend Dr. Zoroaster permitted me to see the numbers tattooed on his wrist. It was coy but quite deliberate, the way he turned up his hand that was holding his cigarette and let the cuff of his fine silk shirt fall back, like a stage magician pretending to show that he is hiding nothing. I made no remark, and nor did he. I was shaken, however; I still am. I have the disquieting sense that something that was dispatched to me a long time ago and went astray has suddenly turned up, something I would have been loath to take delivery of then and need even less now.
Somehow I got into an argument with the truculent Montale. Well, no, to be honest, I knew very well what I was doing. I was bored, I wanted amusement, I wanted to put on a show for Cass Cleave. The source of disagreement was some fashionable scribbler whose work Montale insisted on loudly trumpeting and whom I dismissed as a charlatan. Montale at once became heated, his face going puce under its playboy's tan. He said he believed I had not read the wretch's stuff, which was true, for all that it mattered. The rest of the table sat silent as we strove there, two moth-eaten warriors lunging and parrying with our greatswords. Franco Bartoli looked back and forth between us, his neck at each swivel seeming to grow longer and thinner, as if there were some kind of corkscrew mechanism inside it. Kristina Kovacs, her head inclined and eyes downcast, was absently rolling and unrolling a corner of her napkin under the palm of a flattened hand. Bartoli's mother, who from the first had taken Cass Cleave to be my daughter, would turn to her at each new feint of mine, and smile at her, and nod, with lips compressed and eyes widening, mutely congratulating her on her papa's fine turn of sharp-edged phrase, although I am sure she could not hear a word of what I was saying. Cass Cleave, meanwhile, was fixed on me with what I took to be an almost ecstatic intensity, her eyes alight and her fists clenched in front of her on the table, more and brighter unshed tears standing in her eyes. How I swirled and skirled for her, flashing my blade, captivated by my own ferocity and fighting skill. Franco Bartoli at last spoke up. Yes, Bartoli, that puny manling, from somewhere found the nerve to interrupt me. "Professor Vander," he said, addressing Montale and smoothly smiling, "holds that every text conceals a shameful secret, the hidden understains left behind by the author in his necessarily bad faith, and which it is the critic's task to nose out. Is that not so, Axel?" I hesitated. I considered. Montale, like his host, was smiling now, nastily, flexing his shoulders and shooting his cuffs. I took a deep, a calming breath. "I have been re-reading," I said to Franco, gazing up thoughtfully into a gloomy corner of the room, "those essays of yours on Shelley." Now, Shelley is Franco's specialty. He has got the poet wrong, of course – child of nature and champion of revolution, Apollonian prophet, drunken imbiber of the sublime, the usual Romantic claptrap – as I have tried to make him see, on more than one occasion. Self-deluding rhetoricians such as Bartoli are the monumental stonemasons of our trade. Over the buried bodies of the mighty dead they erect their marble statues, the frozen, idealised images to which I never miss the opportunity of taking a ten-pound hammer, as, for instance, now. I had squared my elbows and leaned forward to deliver the first withering blow when something… some thing happened. Grown old, the imagination, as I have been finding out, tends to play unnerving tricks. Visions that in youth or even middle age would seem no more than daydreams, mere dawdlings along the margins of fantasy, reify into what feel overwhelmingly like actual and immediate experiences. The familiar will shift and slide, will change places with things never seen before. A known face will turn into that of a stranger, a window will open on to a vista, menacing and dark, that was not there a moment ago. So it happened now. Under the dim canopy of brownish light in which I sat, attended by the silent sentinels of big black sideboards and looming bookcases, I saw the top of the table ripple and sway, and through this suddenly liquid surface something broke which seemed at first a submerged root or stump of tree. Up it came, and up, slowly, effortfully, a bloated, faceless thing with horrid head and straining shoulders and dripping chest, all hung about with fronds of water weed and wrack. There were no sounds, only the speechless shadows pressing in upon the darkling place, and the dark waters moving. The figure, although featureless, was facing me, and struggling, as it seemed, to frame a question, meant for me. The visitation, hallucination, whatever it was, lasted no more than a second or two, and was gone. I looked about. All was as it had been, Bartoli blackly frowning, and Mon-tale's double clenching his fists, and Kristina Kovacs rolling die corner of her napkin, and Bartoli's mother maundering, miles away. And then, all at once, without warning, Cass Cleave gave a terrible, high, hair-raising shriek and turned her eyes up in her head and slid from her chair and with an awful clatter disappeared under the table. Now came another flash and in it I saw again the skidding lorry, the girl spinning, the blood dripping from the porcelain of her ear.