Geoff Dyer: Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence

‘Don’t worry,’ I said.

Then it was my turn. The doctor did things to my arms, cleaned out some cuts. He began putting stitches in my arm and Laura left the room. I have had so many stitches in my time that they did not worry me at all. Cuts don’t really matter even though they hurt. It was the bits that were broken up inside, like my spleen which might have been ruptured, that worried me. My arm was stitched. I stood up. ‘My hip hurts,’ I said. The doctor took off my trousers and saw my hip was all gouged up and said, ‘We’d better do something about that too.’

After all these repairs we sat and waited awhile. They had no X-rays at this little hospital and so there was nothing to be done about Laura’s ribs which were hurting more and more, or my back which was beginning to hurt strangely. We sat and then we walked back home. A taxi took us back to the moped which I had thought we would ride back home but which turned out to be mangled and unrideable. We walked home and climbed in over the wall to our house. We got into bed, hurting everywhere.

From there on it got worse. As the day wore on the hurt set in. We hurt everywhere and we could not stop replaying the crash even though the thought of it made us both sick. The other thing we could not stop doing was having sex. We were in a terrible state but, for some reason, we were desperate to have sex. It was the shock I suppose. Neither of us could move properly but if we arranged ourselves, carefully, we could make each other come. I lay on my back and Laura moved over my face, saying ‘Ah, my ribs!’ when she came. We took it in turns to come and we took it in turns to say, ‘How was it possible that we didn’t hit our heads?’ We kept saying this because the more we replayed the crash the more it seemed a miracle that we hadn’t killed or paralysed ourselves. I kept saying, too, that I would never get on a moped again, ever, anywhere.

It was my fault, the crash, but Laura never reproached me about it. Had Laura been driving I would have held it against her, I would have nagged her about her reckless driving, how she had been on the brink of getting us killed in Rome and now, in Alonissos, had actually succeeded. As it was, the crash was my fault but at least I had taken the brunt of the impact. I had softened the blow for Laura and the reason my back hurt so much was probably because her head had banged into my spine. The last thing I wanted to think about was the moment of impact but that word ‘impact’ and the phrase ‘the moment of impact’ kept repeating themselves in my head. That’s all I could think of: the impact, the moment, the moment of impact.

The next morning I could not move. I had to be helped out of bed. I couldn’t move. My back, I said, my back and my neck. My hip was murder, my hands and arms smarted, but it was my back that worried me. We went to see the osteopath, an Australian woman whose hands inched up and down my spine, her fingers performing a manual X-ray, feeling her way through the skin to the bones beneath.

‘It can’t be anything too bad,’ she said. ‘If it was, you’d be in agony.’

‘I am in agony,’ I said, but not the kind of agony she had in mind. It was possible I had cracked a vertebra but that was all and even if I had cracked a vertebra there was nothing to be done about it anyway. It was the same with Laura and her ribs: even if her ribs were cracked all she could do was wait for them to get better. Reassured, we shuffled back home, Laura holding her ribs and me with my chin resting in my right hand, supporting it. To everyone else on the island it looked like I was deep in thought, wrestling with philosophical problems, when all I was doing was trying to bear the awful weight of my head — which, on reflection, is what all philosophical thought comes down to anyway: how to bear the awful weight of your head.

We were keen to leave Alonissos, and Hervé and Mimi were keen to get rid of us. One way and another we had pretty well ruined their stay on the island. Before leaving I tried to negotiate the return of at least part of my deposit from the guy who had rented us the moped. He wouldn’t budge, not by a drachma. He took out great wads of drachmas from his till — mechanic’s money: oil-smeared, disintegrating, held together by grease — and explained how impossible it was to make a living renting mopeds. At one point Lawrence says that ‘the Italians are really rather low-bred swine nowadays’. He should have gone to Greece, should have hired and crashed a moped on Alonissos before making such an insulting generalisation — insulting to the Greeks, I mean, for they pride themselves on being swine.

Hervé and Mimi took us down to the Flying Dolphin. We had a difficult journey in front of us — boat, bus, plane, another plane, train, taxi — but not an impossible one. Luggage was a problem and so I left my copy of The Complete Poems behind, together with many other books by or about Lawrence. I had taken The Complete Poems to Alonissos and now that we were heading back to Rome where I would be housebound for God knew how long I would once again be without it. I didn’t care. There was a curse on that book. I was better off without it.

Back in Rome people were using the word ‘heatwave’ even though it was the middle of August. I had two projects: one was to keep cool, the other not to sneeze. When I sneezed I felt like my spine was about to burst apart. Sneezing was terrifying and now that I could not do it any more I realised that I had always liked sneezing. Sneezing was one of life’s little pleasures, one that I could no longer risk — like sleeping on my side. I had to sleep on my back, I had to try to sleep on my back and, as I lay awake on my back, trying to sleep, I kept thinking what a great pleasure it was to sleep on your side, to sleep first on one side and then, while you were still asleep, to roll over on to the other side. Laura had to lie on her back too and so we lay there, on our backs, thinking about the crash which we no longer thought of as an accident but as a miraculous escape. How could it have happened, how could we have got away with it? How could we have smacked straight into a cliff wall at at least 25 mph and not banged our heads, not broken anything? We were wearing only T-shirts and shorts and yet we broke nothing: we were bruised deeply but our spleens had not ruptured and our bones were not broken. We were not paralysed, we were not cabbages, we were not dead — we just had to lie on our backs and I had to avoid sneezing. It didn’t even matter that we were confined to the apartment. All I had to do to get a feel of the neighbourhood, the quartiere, was hold my hand under the cold tap. First the water was warmish, room temperature, then cooler, then warm, as the pipes climbed down the walls into the apartment, hot as they moved over the sun-baked roof, warm again as they descended on the other side, in shadow, becoming cooler, and then cold, lovely black-cold, as they disappeared below ground, into the past.

Slowly we began to recover. In the evenings we limped to L’Obitorio for a pizza and then to our local bar, the San Calisto, where Fabrizio, the barman, had elevated surliness to the level of a comprehensive world view. With an unrelenting scowl, he abused everything he touched, yanking the lids off the gelato , gouging out the gelato , dumping it in glasses, thumping the glasses on the counter. To perform such simple actions with such aggression was no mean achievement but the truly remarkable thing was that he managed also to imbue them with a rough tenderness. His unfailing curtness — ah, how lovely it was to be on the receiving end of it! — was, likewise, a gesture of welcome. We liked to sit outside and listen to him preparing a cappuccino, hurling the saucer on to the zinc bar, tossing the spoon on to the saucer, chucking milk into the coffee, hurling the cup on to the saucer, and then throwing a hasty ‘ prego ’ through the clatter and noise of his colleagues. He did this even when the Calisto was empty: it was a way of generating business, like the bell of an icecream van: a call to customers: ‘The cappuccini are good here, we are always busy.’