Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

The tourists are frightened. The old are not. I love this city of cats and secrets. Its endless flux of inhuman tears renders my own more bearable. I am old. I hope my travels are over (but if she called, if I were sure she needed me, I’d go to the utmost ends of the earth. I’d choke my way through the burning forests, I’m coming, Alex, I’m coming… )

Embarrassing. I am on my feet, I said her name. They are looking at me. A cough, that’s all. Since the waiter’s staring, I’ll have another brandy.

We were never tourists. We were travellers. Travellers are people who never go home. Epic travellers, world explorers, although we stayed in the best hotels. We stayed away for half a lifetime. We went on holiday and never came back. Our life was a great adventure, you see, a story to tell our grandchildren, if we had happened to have grandchildren, if I’d managed better with my son and daughter, if we had been — luckier. (I hear Alex hissing that I’m a liar.)

Alex didn’t care about grandchildren then. When we could have had children, she didn’t want them. She always said how lucky we were. She said we had everything — looks, love, money. Soon there will be nothing left but the money… but don’t underestimate the power of money.

The brandy I drink is the very best. I’m a smart old man, one might say immaculate, a seventy-year-old who could pass for sixty, with a smooth tanned face and a suit of exquisite old-fashioned cream linen, soft to the touch and five times as expensive because it contains no synthetic muck, real breathing linen like they used to make, torture to iron after every wearing… Lucia tells me this, with a smile, for the money ensures that I never have to iron.

The money means I can be sad in comfort. I have space to be sad, and time to talk, though these days there is no one to talk to… strangers, servants, I can always find, but they grin and listen without understanding, si signor, no signor, and I’m too proud to make them see.

It’s here, inside me. Maps, pictures. A map of the world, our life together. Seas and mountains and grains of sand. A thousand beds, a thousand bars. I don’t want the images to die inside me, I don’t want our story to be lost.

(Is it just a story? Can it really be over?)

Alex was always the talker, not me. Women often complain that men talk too much, but that’s not how it was with us. I never minded how much she talked. You see, she talked for both of us. She put my feelings into words.

Very late in life I realised I’d let her do too much talking for me. However much someone loves you — and it’s not a delusion that Alex loved me, she loved me a lot, she can never deny it, no, you bitch, don’t you dare to deny it — they don’t see things from your point of view. Why should they? They have their own to look after.

But we felt so close, the boundaries got blurred, we started to think and speak for each other.

— You can get lazy.

— You can get lost.

— You can get so close you are taken for granted. You can trust too much, and be betrayed, though I don’t think she ever betrayed me before… before the final total betrayal.

A decade ago. In Toledo, in Spain. Those Spanish summers in the 1990s. Alex kept wanting to go back. There was a tall shy man I worried about. He and Alex were friends, I think just friends. Stuart and his wife had a flat out there. Then the fear receded. We were safe again. Years ago he dropped away.

People fall from my life like snow, these days. So many white-haired tiny bodies sinking beneath their obituaries or dying as quiet as snow in letters. Friends who were slightly older than me, friends who were thirty, certain, jaunty, in their prime when I was twenty. There’s hardly a letter without a death.

— Why did I think she would never leave me?

— Why was I sure we should never die?

Now at the age of seventy I want to say things for myself. Maybe she’ll read it, if I manage to write it, instead of mumbling to myself. After I’m dead. She’s so much younger… She never liked to dwell in the past, but surely she’d want to read our story?

Yes, she’ll read it, and contradict, or add some details of her own. Beware of that; she was always a liar.

I ought to know, I admired her gift, when she started to add to the travel pieces I sent to the papers in England. The details were marvellous, but untrue. She would take these rotting bleached-wood windows; distil the smells of seaweed, sweat and beer; capture one fly, erratically loud; transport the whole to Rimini.

‘So wonderfully vivid,’ the editor would scribble. ‘You never fall into clichés of place.’ I didn’t, he was right — this was Alex’s carefree fictional geography.

If she tries to change our story — my story, mine, it is I who stayed faithful — I hope they’ll have burned and scattered my body so thoroughly that I shan’t have to know. I don’t want to haunt the margins of her fiction, bitterly disputing times and places, bodiless, impotent, a hissing ghost, reminding her of how much she loved me, reminding her she grew up with me and I grew happily old with her, that we grew together, and into each other, how much we laughed, how I made her laugh, how many times I entered her, she took me in, we cried out with pleasure…

Seventy years old, in a stifling bar, alone among strangers, stiff with longing. Stiff as a boy under my cream linen trousers. The brandy fills my throat with fire. I toss it down, and stand, awkward. My cock feels young but my knees are old…

If she ever comes back, I’m ready for her.

I saw Christopher yesterday — my husband Christopher.

That phrase was an experiment, but it didn’t sound right, he’s no longer mine, though we’ve never bothered to get divorced, he isn’t anything to me. I’m always telling my lover that.

But that’s a lie, too, I suppose he still means something. A patch of scar tissue in my brain. Even the sparrow on the white verandah means something, pecking the empanadas I throw him… I lie to Benjy because he’s young.

(I suppose it’s an ant-bird, not a sparrow. They all eat garbage, they’re all the same.)

Christopher’s not my husband, except in name and on paper, and it all happened so long ago, it was all so twentieth-century, for Christ’s sake, so juvenile, so old hat.

In any case, yesterday he looked ridiculous. The wide screen made him look fat and small. He had a thick black fringe and a pudgy face and his hair was almost shoulder-length. He was wearing what they used to call a ‘kipper’ tie, so wide you could hardly see any shirt between the lapels of his velvet jacket, and when he stood up and gestured at the map his hands were stagey and unnatural-looking.

They were showing an extract from an ancient documentary Chris made in the 1960s, before I knew him — God, I’d never have let him dress like that! 1967, they said. It was his first film, which I’d never seen. He must have been in his early thirties, but he seemed adolescent, and so did the title, ‘Path to the Untrodden Snows’.

— What snows there were then, I was amazed to see them, extraordinary expanses of snow, incredibly bright on the black and white screen. I can’t believe we ever took it all for granted. But it’s no good getting sentimental now.

Chris always said he’d take me to those snows one day. It was the last great adventure we had in mind, but we’d started to grow apart, you see, we kept putting it off, and the snow was shrinking…

Then our future disappeared. In a blaze of gunfire, a mess of heat. The stupid fool, he did everything wrong, it was all his fault, the klutz, the moron!