Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

Besides, Lucia’s here. Right on the premises, every day. If she would love me, I could stay at home. I shouldn’t have to roam the dangerous streets, searching for some tart to milk my juice.

— There she is waving from my dark doorway, shouting something I can’t hear, so I nod and smile and pretend I do, I don’t want her to think I’m deaf and ancient, and I know from experience what she is saying as her large pale arms wave about like wings, she is probably pointing to last night’s flood-mark, the fresh green stains on her ground-floor empire, or else she is warning me not to get robbed, there is a new young population of footpads squatting in the flooded, abandoned houses… What energy in those large pale waves. I screw up my eyes to see her better.

Aha, there’s something in her hand! Letters, two of them, that’s what she’s shouting! Hope swells up within my heart. I won’t go back now and open them in case they are only a disappointment, in case they are only bills or bank statements. No, she is stupid but not that stupid, she wouldn’t wave a bill at me. They must be personal! Must be. At last!

I know that Mary has written to me. I’m sure, but not quite sure enough to test it… good God, it’s taken her long enough. I posted mine four weeks ago — why did I think she would write at once? I’ll take the pleasure of anticipation with me.

Goodbye, Lucia, you splendid woman. Perhaps we shall celebrate when I come home.

Abandoned!

Now I am entirely abandoned! Floods, come up and suck me down. A day of extraordinary reverses, great events, triumphs, catastrophes, more has happened to me today than in three years of existing in Venice…

I was a hero.

I was a clown.

I went, as usual pretending to myself that I had nothing particular in mind, towards the waterfront behind the casino, facing the sulphurous lagoon, a region which is deserted now except for prostitutes. They seem to hold their life so cheap that they don’t mind living by a lake of effluent, ammonia, naphtha, chlorine, cyanide, human sewage, detergents, oil… after all, we men put our rubbish inside them. What’s outside must be nothing to them.

The flash of sun proved illusory. A dank rain started as I strolled through the streets. I stopped and bought an umbrella, then continued my apparently casual walk, drawn, as I knew but the cats and old women who silently watched me pass did not, towards the dark passes of the waterfront. They’d be fluttering there even if it were raining, bright little birds with welcoming eyes, girls in red stockings and daggerish heels which remind me of youth and the 1960s…

Funny that cats like Venice, when they don’t like water or rain. It must be the promise of cadavers that does it. As I got away from the more populated streets and approached the edge of the red light district, the rain was so dense that it began to seem dark, and I started to notice the crying of a cat, locked out, I suppose, by a forgetful mistress, or abandoned by a family who had saved themselves.

The rain hammered down on the stone and the water. The cat kept crying against the rain. It was getting louder, not quieter.

— Till I realised it was a child, or a woman. Someone in a long reach of terror, or pain, for the cries had been coming for nearly five minutes. I ran towards them, or felt I was running, I forgot my age and slipped as I ran, landing hard on my rheumatic hips, jolting pain, green slime on my trousers, I wanted to sit there and suffer a little, but the cries were more desperate. I got up and ran on.

There was a half-open door in the blackened walls of a tenement house which looked deserted. Blistered paint. I hesitated, but the screams were definitely coming from there, and just as I pushed inside they quietened, a tiny, stinking porch full of bodies, the back of a man, a hulking brute, the face of a thin terrified woman, red as a chicken’s, he was wringing her neck, bulging eyes, bloated tongue, was she staring at me or staring through me? There was no room to see, no room to fight, I shouted the vilest curses I could think of and got his head in an elbow-lock, I was half on his back, being shaken against the slimy walls of the hall like a rat, one foot off the ground, the other slithering; but he couldn’t have seen how old I was, we hadn’t seen each other’s faces, and all he wanted was to get away, just as all I wanted was to let him go, but I couldn’t let go of his hold on my throat or I would have been flung headlong to the ground, he was battering my head and shoulders on the wall in a desperate attempt to fling me off…

The ridiculous struggle seemed to last for ever. He was cursing, too, in a steady stream. I kept my eyes fixed on the face of the woman who lay slumped on the ground where he had released her, a face which slowly became almost human as the gross distortions he had made relaxed, a face which registered nothing at first except a hunger to breathe again. Then something gathered. Concentrated hatred. She pulled herself up by the stairs behind her and drove her nails at her attacker’s eyes. He staggered back, we staggered back, we were suddenly out in the rain again, then all the breath was knocked out of my body and I found myself flat on my back in the street with the girl yelling curses on her knees beside me. We were alone. The man had gone.

She started to weep, in the grey rain. She had a pretty face, badly bruised and swollen where he had battered her. But she smiled as she wept, a marvellous smile (though rather crooked and the teeth discoloured) because it was full of authentic feeling, every kind of feeling, relief, surprise, love, she looked at me as if she loved me, and perhaps she did love me, for saving her.

She took me — or rather I took her, for she was trembling so much she could hardly walk, whereas I felt full of adrenalin, I didn’t feel my bruises until much later — back to her tiny room at the top of another damp and deserted tenement which smelled of urine and cheap scent, and she tried to sponge my suit, which was smeared black and green, ignoring her own cuts and bruises and the snail-path of blood on her cheap white jacket.

She made some coffee. Her name was Elisa. I sat on the chair. There was only one chair, but she insisted I have it, she perched on the bed, laughing and crying and stretching each limb to check that she was really still alive, telling the story of the attack and breaking off every other sentence to say how brave I was and mop at my trousers; was I really all right? How could she ever thank me…? Did I know that I had saved her life?

And it seems that I really did save her life, for the last few months had seen a succession of murders among the girls of the waterfront. ‘Seven deaths,’ she said, pursing her lips, her pretty mouth which had begun to swell up. ‘And you’re not young,’ she kept saying, as she filled my coffee-cup and wondered at my bruises.

We sat together for over an hour. Violence linked us, and the glow of relief. The rain grew quieter. We grew quieter. I stood up to go, a hero.

She offered to thank me in the only way she knew, with the only thing she had to offer. I was almost shocked. It was impossible. I had been a gentleman to her. I had done battle for her, protected her. She was not a prostitute, she was my daughter. ‘You don’t need to thank me. Please don’t thank me. I’m thankful I could be of service. How fortunate that I took a detour on my way to visit my family.’

Her eyes were amazed. They shone with tears. I gave her money. She didn’t believe it.

But she couldn’t know how grateful I was. It was I who was grateful, I who was lucky. I walked back home a different man. I had done some good. There was some point to me. I had saved a life. I had saved myself.

Lucia was putting some final touch to circles of pastry as I came in. I came into the kitchen so that she could see me, hear my story, admire me, care for me. She spoke to me without raising her eyes.