I am always angry in times of greatest stress. It is a not uncommon reaction, so Dr. Zoroaster informs me, especially in that day's circumstances. I shouted at the receptionist in my hotel, at the fellow selling tickets for the ferry, and then at a sun-blackened Charon in a jaunty peaked cap with an anchor on it who, as I was boarding the ferry at last, offered me a helping hand and almost managed to tip me off the gangplank into the sea. I was also less than civil to the polite young man who met me on the quay at the other side, an emissary from what in my mind was still Cass Cleave, the living girl. The afternoon was sunny, and quick with freshets of warm wind. The hotel clerk, let us call him Mario, a swarthy beanpole with an adam's apple that seemed to be worked by weak elastic, cowered before me as if I might be about to strike him with my stick, which I might well have done had we not been caught up in the mill of disembarkation. I demanded to hear what had happened, I must know everything, right away, now, here on the quayside, this minute, everything! Come on, I shouted into his frightened face, tell me! and I grasped him by the elbow and gave him a violent shake. When he began to speak, however, I would not listen, and instead turned him about and ordered him to take me to where it had happened. We climbed up through the village. There had been a priest, Mario was saying, he had arrived too late, the signorina had… He joined his hands together and mimed the act of diving. "She jumped, signore." Her body had still not been found.
After the church – there was nothing there, of course, and the priest was about his duties elsewhere and not to be seen – I went to the hotel, a small, shabby establishment, and made them show me her room. They left me there alone, closing the door on me softly. I searched through her bag, not knowing what I hoped to find. There were some soiled underclothes in a zipped side pocket, I lifted them out and examined them, these profane relics, and put the stained seams in my mouth and sucked them, to have a last savour of her familiar secretions. Then I went into the bathroom and washed them in the handbasin. The water gulped and clicked, bathing my wrists, a silvery unction. I thought of her down in the deeps of the sea, her eyes open, gazing sightlessly up at the surface swaying far above her. First I draped her silks, as clean now as I could make them, on the towel rail to dry, but thought that would not do, and stuffed them into my pocket instead. Then I returned to the basin and bathed my brow; lifting the towel away, I would not have been surprised to find the bloody image of my face imprinted on it. I went and sat at the table by the window and leafed through her notebook. Poor Columbine. On our trip to Genoa that day she had lost me briefly in the cemetery. I had wandered off up some steps to one of the latter-day sections, where the city's recently dead merchants and mafiosi are buried and the statuary is modernly pretentious. It was cool and quiet there, under the colonnades, and I tarried idly for a while, reading the inscriptions on the tombs and entertaining thoughts of the eternal. As I was about to descend again to the lower level I saw her below me, pacing a sunlit patch of gravel, and I stopped behind a pillar to observe her. She was in a state of some agitation, I could see. With her arms tightly folded and her head down, she was walking rapidly here and there in a seemingly senseless, zigzag pattern. She would stand absolutely still for a moment, as if weighing up profound alternatives, then set off abruptly at a headlong stride, only to halt again after a dozen stiff-legged paces and repeat the process, pausing, considering, and plunging off in a new direction. She kept this up for some minutes, but broke off when at last she spied me skulking behind my pillar. We stood and gazed at each other. I do not know what she was thinking. Perhaps she had thought that I had left her, finally, had just decided to disappear and abandon her here among the dead and their monuments. Strangely, or perhaps not strangely, it is the memory of moments such as this that weighs on me most heavily now, the moments, as I suppose, of her deepest desperation.
I went downstairs, her underthings a wet lump in my pocket, and spoke to the proprietor, a handsome, grey-haired fellow with garlic on his breath. I showed him a fistful of traveller's cheques and said I should prefer it if he would forget that I had been here. He said nothing, only considered a moment and then gave the faintest of shrugs. He stood impassively looking on while I signed the cheques, leaning on his fists on the desk. From a shadowy region behind him his wife made a soundless entrance. She was a corpulent person with three chins and a suspicious eye. Mario the clerk, too, was there. A wonder the entire village did not come jostling into the doorway to have a look at me. When I had handed over the cheques I said that I wished to rest now, and asked if I might lie down in her room, the room that had been hers. Signor Albergo demurred, saying another guest was expected at any moment. I looked at him, and he relented. I went up and lay on the bed where Cass Cleave had lain. As the day waned, I thought of many things, for example that phenomenon, the existence of which I chanced upon in the course of my reading on Mr. Mandel-baum and his ways, which is known among neurologists as the anarchic hand. This remarkable and rare disorder – there are no more than half a hundred recorded cases – is the result of a peculiar form of rebellion deep within the nervous system. Otherwise normal and sound in limb, the sufferer will find himself subject to the tyranny of one or other of his hands, which seemingly on a whim and of its own volition will perform actions independent of him and often against his own best interests. At table, he will find the recalcitrant hand force-feeding him food he does not wish to eat; he will encounter someone in the street, and instead of proffering itself in salutation his hand will fly up and slap the surprised acquaintance across the face. At times the behaviour of the hand will be so obstreperous that its fellow on the other side will be called upon to quell its antics; the resulting struggle can be violent in the extreme, and end in self-lacerations and fellings to the floor. One patient even suffered repeated attempts to strangle herself, and might have succumbed had there not been others by to rush forward and tear the suicidal, or murderous, hand from her throat. What I wondered, lying on the bed that day in that utterly emptied hotel room, was whether a half of the self itself might be an anarch, bent on the destruction of the whole. For it is one thing to think of Cass Cleave willingly leaping out of the light of the world, and altogether another to entertain the possibility that even as she made away with herself, clasped in her own unbreakable embrace, one side of her was crying out in terror, like a child being borne off in the arms of a fiend.