Secondhand Smoke

'ck it, I'll fix all the typoes and spls and mixed tenses later.

Remembering Angelo and His Nurse.

You will need to be patient, especially patient this time. Details have come to me, rather a lot of them, some quite vivid. I must tell them.

Angelo wore a bow tie, a white beard, and an expression of constant wonder. His voice was fine and querulous, he was confined to a wheelchair, his hands quivered as crumpled paper in a breeze. Yet I've met no-one with more vitality since. His tremors were the raw life shaking his fragile frame.

Angelo's nurse had the tight blond curls of a Botticelli cherub. His eyes as blue as his lips red, coloured by nature for tempting. His voice very gentle to the ear, but if you looked carefully he had a cruel mouth. This excited me. During that time I pictured him in atrocity of one kind or another, increasingly obscene and vicious, but never committed it to a solid medium though I was tempted. Angelo was very safe with his nurse, but I cannot definitely say the same for any other person, especially of men.

We would sit in the afternoon under the awning at the side of Drake's Hotel, Angelo, his nurse, and myself, all tinted rose by the sunlight through the crimson canvas above. It was at this hour that my wife would apprehend one or other of the youths loitering on the quays and be with him in the villa that we had rented for the season. Once the pavement was fully in shade she would return, flushed, buoyant, with a waft about her of that citric soap she used. We were happy then, happier than at any time before in our union, and Angelo and his nurse sensed it. I could tell our balance and contentment pleased them.

In the morning my wife and I would swim, or climb the hills and go prospecting among the dry ruins for fragments of this or that. At such times we might see Angelo and his nurse, from the water silhouetted at the pier railing, or from the outcrops as a conjoined shape crawling slow on the esplanade.

In the evenings I would paint. I had found a girl from the postal bureau to be a particularly rewarding subject. As I worked my wife would talk to the little telegraph operator of what the girl's life would be in the future. It seems to me now that at each sitting she planned for one more child than the last. And so my model would soften before me and suggest to me new tones and hues with which to represent her. My wife had always been useful to me in this way, for in her interactions with each girl she teased forth their character in a way that I could not. A shy model she would embarrass, one of spirit she would flirt with, a tigress she would bait, with the telegraphiste it was a wistful lulling and crooning. It is rather like bruising fruit to bring forth the flavour.

I remember clearly the atmosphere, but could not describe for you the room's interior. The odours remain with me: acid tang of the previous week's London newspapers grilling in the sunlight, the vernal reek of my wife's hashish cigarettes, the warm spiced sweat of the telegraphiste. Now there's a thing. Each person has a complex and distinctive signature and that is something I want to show on the canvas, so that those who are not with her, this lady in an afternoon, can share it too. Take two women of identical appearance and I will paint them quite differently according to that invisible emanation. There was always perfume and soap, but with a little time and proximity, one's nose, or perhaps some organ further back in the skull, would find a person's natural smell. Hygiene, or people's excessive interpretation of it, gradually washed the life out of the commission of portraiture for me. It happened quite slowly at first, but now my models take showers once, twice a day. They are little better than mannequins. It was the greater part of my inspiration.

Angelo and his nurse would play backgammon in the lounge of the hotel or attend the weekly dinners at the consulate of their homeland. They did other things too, about which we did not enquire so far that they should become coy or evasive. We understood, my wife and I, as did they us.

We were happy there and it was a great pity we were caused to depart so suddenly. The circumstances were certainly unfortunate, I resent that they so taint an otherwise pleasant memory.

One of my wife's boys somehow suffocated. There was a terrific fuss in removing him from our villa, his family arriving en bloc all shrieking and spluttering, and then the prefecture wanting to investigate. I could not see bruising on his neck and nor could my wife, but once the authorities of that region get a thing into their heads only expense, rather than reason, can prevail. Angelo kindly assisted with temporary funds and so we were able to ensure that the outcome of the autopsy was correct.

Then the telegraphiste would not visit us again, nor would any of the others. Even the bordel barred its stable to us. At that time my painting was all to me and in the town I had found a rare conjunction of subjects and circumstances that I had never before enjoyed (nor since). It was hopeless. These towns are smaller than one at first appreciates. They may have half a dozen squares and scores of bars and bath-houses but everyone knows each other. They talk.

We had to leave for, other than Angelo and his nurse, no-one would talk to us. The mayor snubbed us on the avenue, the boot-black child shrank away from my shoe in the passage. No-one would serve us. The owner of the villa sought to repay the balance of our lease at terms conspicuously disadvantageous to him. But there remained the matter of my unfinished canvasses, which I could not bear to simply abandon.

What contrivance Angelo's nurse wrought in pursuance of it I do not know, but on the evening before we were to leave he delivered the telegraphiste to us. She was, he explained, now quite fully ours, on the condition that we left the town and took her with us. Angelo's nurse spoke more with my wife than with me - I had taken a pacifying treatment that night - but I recall some reference to a broken engagement. Inconstancy was no less a characteristic of the young then than now.

Our consul, with some unnecessary melodrama, had provided us with an armed guard for the short downhill journey to the port. His manner rather suggested that this phalanx of troops was less for our protection than to emphasise his desire to be rid of us. We parted from Angelo and his nurse at the dock, of course we said we would write and naturally we never did. I last saw them waving to us, or rather Angelo waving to another couple at the rail, mistaken for us with his failing eyesight. With this as with many things I noted that his nurse sensitively did not correct him.

My wife and I set up for a while in one of the coastal cities on the mainland, but really the summer was over for us. The telegraph girl became somehow opaque to me, her expression now had an intractable quality, nothing like what I had before read in her face. Evidently she did not travel well. With further bad luck, she fell pregnant. I had been so careful and in any case only done the thing for my wife's entertainment - the painting itself being more my pleasure, as you know. So the best we could do was to leave her with the convent, for a girl in her position it was the best available option.

This was all perhaps fifty years ago. Not long after the war at any rate. The town is different these days, I am told. The native women go about in veils, bombs detonate from time to time. The former stock of Europeans have left, replaced by those visitors not like ourselves who are restricted to a resort where the beach used to be. You will have seen that now I have a nurse myself, some kind of Slav and she does not steal.

I relate all this recollection to you because I recently came across mention of a biography of Angelo in one of the literary supplements. My nurse bought the book for me using the computer. I had to have it translated for I have no facility for Angelo's language, we always conversed in French. There are some unpleasant details that I do not entirely believe and for this I blame the biographer. It seems improbable to me that Angelo died, as is claimed, in such sordid circumstances. He was too correct for that. I read that his nurse inherited his estate, which seems right. I wonder if his nurse is still alive.

Now, to the point of all this. I do appreciate your patience, I have presumed upon it so. This is something I have been postponing and deferring for too long. I must write my memoirs, and soon if the doctors are to be heeded. I have all my diaries and in strong light I can make them out. I am no egoist, but I think it important to place on record one's own account. Into a vacuum rushes speculation, smearing grubbiness all about it and before one is aware of it there is a new memory to be known by.

I try to write with a pen and my fingers feel too fragile for the task, hollow glass tubes in the meagre flesh. I can still sketch a little but the infirmity in my grasp informs the picture I draw, my curves run wider. The critics think my imagery is freer now but that is not true, I can no longer take the line sharply, by surprise. Writing, no, those deliberate tight curls of script are beyond me.

My nurse is at Smythson's buying paper and ink. You will do this for me. I know you will. We both know the importance of past lives, so many, and that only some should be chosen.

Anton sits in the chair in the corridor, the chair that once served the telephone, when that instrument had been fixed. He is reading a volume of Hulssman, in the original. Anton has been told that he should only read Hulssman in translation since, for the text to make any sense, the translators must impose an order and coherence upon Hulssman's work that does not exist in the original. Indeed for this reason Hulssman's fellow countrymen generally prefer to read him rendered into a language other than their own.

Nevertheless, Anton has lifted this volume, old but in the pristine condition that betrays a book's opacity, from the shelf, opened it at the beginning of a randomly chosen chapter, and to his surprise found it penetrable. More than that, it makes sense, a perfectly compelling sense. This is a moment to savour and elongate, Anton does not want to do anything that might break the spell. So he sits by the bookcase, barely daring to draw breath lest some disturbance to the current state should disrupt the delicate alignment of factors that have brought about this flukish phenomenon: that he, Anton, should find himself understanding and in accordance with Hulssman's ideas immediately and at the first attempt.

At the end of the hallway Beatrice, Anton's sister-in-law sits at the table, facing the window. Carlo, Anton's brother is fumbling with a packet of processed cheese slices with a repetitious picking motion thwarted by heat sealed plastic. Beatrice's hands fly up from her lap, startled white birds that tangle in her hair.

A page turns, there is a cry from the kitchen, soft-soled shoes scuffing the tiles and cutlery falling. There is something Anton must do, something expected of him. But not now, not yet. Hulssman was right, Hulssman was right.