David Szalay - All That Man Is

When he next wakes it is light in the room.

It is nearly eight.

He feels, dragging himself into a sitting position, exhausted and depressed.

Today he must do something.

He decides, staring defeatedly at some fresh mouse droppings on the antique tiles of the kitchen floor, to drive to Pomposa abbey. When he was sorting out one of the drawers yesterday he found some old entrance tickets to the abbey — they went there years ago, with Alan and his wife, he thinks, when they were staying once — and he decides that he would like to see it again. He doesn’t remember much about it. A medieval monastery, near the sea, some way north of Ravenna.

Anyway, what it is isn’t really the point. He has to do something, drive somewhere . Where exactly hardly matters.

It will take an hour or so to drive there, he thinks. He’ll arrive at eleven, say, have a look at the abbey, whatever there is. Have lunch perhaps — he seems to remember there was a place to eat there — and then drive home. Stop in Argenta to pick up a few things. And then have tea and spend an hour or two on Clark’s Sleepwalkers .

Freezing fog hangs outside the windows. The sea of freezing damp that spreads over this floodplain every winter. He has, these days, an intense physical aversion to the cold. The house’s old heating is just about doing its job — it is faintly warm in the tall rooms — and he finds the thought of leaving that warmth distressing. And driving in this fog. That would be asking for trouble.

He takes the stairs, slowly, and in the bathroom starts to fill the tub with steaming water. He will have a hot bath and see how he feels after that. He takes his pills, a multicoloured meal of them. Then he struggles over the tall edge of the tub and submerges himself in the heat of the water. He lies there sleepily in the steam. Feels his joints ease and loosen.

Afterwards, while he is shaving, the sun shines in at the window. The fog is lifting.

He dresses warmly. Two jumpers. His heaviest socks.

The trees that line the edges of the property — serving as a windbreak — are nearly leafless. The bushes and shrubs of the garden look brown and dead though the grass is still green. He opens the garage. A dark blue VW Passat estate. British originally, it has Italian plates now.

The idea of driving still makes him nervous. He takes his seat at the steering wheel with an unwelcome sense that he is perhaps not up to this.

Now that the fog has lifted, everything seems unusually well defined. The leafless poplars standing along the road, which is whitish with cold, throw faint shadows across his path.

He is not particularly aware of driving slowly. People keep overtaking him, though — there is a permanent little queue of them.

He has already passed through Argenta, and turned at San Biagio onto the road that leads to the lagoon, the long straight road across flat farmland. There is nothing in particular to love about this landscape. They had wanted, originally, something in Tuscany. This was twenty-five years ago, when Cordelia left home. Something in Tuscany. It turned out, however, that Tuscany was more expensive than they had anticipated. So rather than settle for one of the disappointingly poky little houses they were shown in the Chianti they decided to widen their search to other areas, and as they moved further and further away from Florence, the houses they were shown started to look more and more like what they had in mind — a substantial elegant villa with an acre of mature, secluded garden. That was what they wanted, and in the end that was what they got. What they had not foreseen was that it would be here , all the way over on the other side of the peninsula, in an area in which, at the outset, they had had absolutely no interest. And such a desperately flat landscape. (When, in the 1970s, as deputy head of mission at the embassy in Rome, he had had to attend an event in San Marino — to follow an oompah band and people in operetta costumes up to the top of the rock — he had seen it from up there, the flat land stretching north, and shuddered.) The house itself had won them over. Its distinguished, almost aristocratic demeanour. Still, it had seemed eccentric, and when it was theirs they wondered whether they had made a mistake. Slowly they made their peace with the place, until they felt a kind of love for it. You learn to love what’s there, not what’s not there. How can you live, otherwise?

Sun falls on the fields on either side of the road, on sudden expanses of still water. Even though the heating is not on in the car, he starts to feel too warm in his coat and stops to take it off — at a sleepy petrol station, Tamoil, one of the unmanned self-service ones they have around here. Next to it is a dirt track leading off into empty fields, and irrigation ditches, half-frozen now. Silence, except for a passing vehicle sometimes.

The lagoon, when he arrives at it, shines like a sheet of metal. From there he picks up Strada Provinciale 58, which wanders, even quieter, through the wetlands of the Po delta. There is something pleasantly hypnotic about the driving. The interior of the Passat is nice and warm. There is no impatient queue behind him now — he has the landscape to himself, until he joins Strada Statale 309 — the main road along the sea — and pootles in the wake of a truck, not wanting the stress of trying to overtake. The truck wallows in the wind that hits them from the direction of the sea, the sea itself not visible, only indicated by the signs pointing off at frequent intervals to lido this and lido that. Lido delle Nazioni. Lido di Volano.

—

He nearly misses the turning. He sees the campanile, and suddenly understanding what it is, immediately indicates and turns. The time it took to drive here passed so quickly. He doesn’t feel that he should be there yet. And yet here he is.

Nothing is familiar. If he was here before — and he was — he has forgotten everything. The little track-like road winding away from Strada Statale 309, first seeming to wander in the wrong direction, away from the tall campanile that sticks out above a stand of trees, and then turning on itself and taking him, past a vista of fields stretching to the horizon, to a little lake, a few dumpsters next to a wall, some parking spaces on an apron of tarmac.

He puts the Passat in one of the spaces, most of which are empty. The frigid air shocks him when he opens the door. There is quite a strong smell of dog shit. A sign indicates, surprisingly, that thieves are a problem here. He looks around at the silent, empty scene. The only sound is the quiet shushing of traffic on Strada Statale 309. Thieves? Not now, surely. Anyway, there is nothing in his car for them to steal. He puts on his scarf and locks the Passat.

The campanile is a few hundred metres off. He sees it through the leafless trees. Starting to walk towards it, he is weighed down, somewhat, by a feeling that this is pointless, what he is doing. He feels tired and cold, and he is not actually very interested in seeing this place. That is obvious now that he is here, walking towards it over the frost-blanched tarmac, quickening his step to keep warm. And in fact there does not seem to be much to see. The setting is a sort of sparse park. He passes two modest-looking places to eat, set behind empty terraces on one side of the road that leads to the campanile. Only one of them seems to be open — there is a sign outside, anyway. And it occurs to him that the abbey itself may not be open, on a weekday morning at this time of year.

It is open, however.

What there is of it.

—

After he has looked it over, he walks back to the place with the sign outside. A very simple place — not where they ate with Alan and his wife when they were here years ago. There is a slot machine with flashing lights. Old posters on the walls. Dusty bottles of wine for sale on shelves. He sits down at a small table. A man puts a paper place mat in front of him, and hands him a laminated menu. The only other people eating there are a middle-aged couple speaking in low voices at another table. German, they seem to be. He quickly scans the menu. He is not very hungry. He wants something hot. He orders soup.