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2020 – on the terrace 1
All stories start and end at some place and at some point in time. Initially, I wanted to say that the story I am about to write starts and ends on the terrace of this house in the hills outside Treviso. However, second and third thoughts suggested that the story does not end on the terrace at all. Nonetheless, the story does have the beginning of its end on the terrace. So, a more accurate description of the story is that it begins and has the roots of its ending on the same terrace of the house outside Treviso. I might add that these roots of ending were signalled by a body spasm and random words from the mouth of an ageing man snoozing and entertaining dreams in a deckchair on the terrace of this house in these hills outside this provincial town of Treviso.
“That place…I know it…”
Toni Meldrum’s eyes flickered behind lids now closed to the perfumed delights of evening.
“Yes, that place…those people…I knew them once…”
And then, of a sudden, Toni was awake, lifted his mind from the dream and put it where it belonged, and it belonged here, near a town in the north of Italy on an unusually warm and light-breezy evening in March. The sun had shone from dawn to dusk and its warmth was still radiating from the bricks of the garden walls, the paving stones and the tabletop - and on the tabletop, a ball of paper was wandering hither and thither on whims of the breeze. The ball of paper had entered his life some hours previously as a neatly folded letter and what was written on it was so absurd, so ridiculous that, in an unusual act of aggression, Toni had screwed it up and tossed it to one side. Toni now blinked, blinked again and put out his hand to grab the paper before it rolled off the table and out of sight.
No, it belongs in the waking world, and I am not ready for it. The dream’s not over yet….
Closing his eyes, he rested his chin in the palm of his hand and he licked his lips. Nobody would have noticed anything untoward in Toni’s behaviour, and the presence of the letter had barely seen a single hair turn on his head, but had anybody asked him he would have told them that the effect of the letter was as intrusive as a pistol shot fired in the middle of a concert performance; a slow movement from a Mahler symphony, perhaps, or a renaissance Italian madrigal. He tried to find a way back into the contentment of the dream and…
…the happy feeling, the place I knew…the person I was…the happy person I was…
And he wondered whether the person he was now and the person he had been were so very different from each other in terms of happiness or whether he had simply removed the uncomfortable, the boring, the unremarkable and the unpleasant bits from his youth and filed them away so that they ceased to exist for him and what remained were endless days of sunshine and laughter.
He let the question hang over his head until it blew away in the evening breeze. The breeze carried the same warmth as that of the day, but now the moon was shining in a darker shade of blue, and Venus was posturing in her own sky, inviting her audience to admire and enjoy her presence along with the conjured-up memories of moments from other warm evenings in this place, of times past and past friends rambling on about this and that, and this and that were interrupted by a dream or two of futures emerging in a haze of night perfume. Such a notable evening had occurred 35 years before when they had all been together for the first and last time, his brother and his girlfriend, he and her and she and him and his mother and father and on this very terrace in the sun, and the day had been as warm then as it was warm now and the evening air full of the scent of flowers and faraway rumbles of thunder.
And what happened to that young, handsome and happy man?
It was something other than an interrogative that came to him with this question, perhaps an exclamation mark, because, in his dream, Toni was young again, 25 years old and on the brink of life, and he now knew that something had happened in the flicker of an eye and that something was called ageing. Ageing had happened and left him used up and twitching and dreaming and dozing in the evening light and wondering why he was uncomfortable and whether this discomfort was down to the corona virus circling the town’s medieval walls or this hazy dream, but one or the other was making him feverish and exaggerating this dream and this memory of his parents and two women and two men gesticulating and mouthing off while they related their stories and dreamed their dreams and hoped the hopes of their youth and, in his mind, he watched and listened to these youngsters and sometimes muttered along with his inner voices. He surfaced, shook his head at these old dreams that had come to visit him.
“Invited no doubt by the same warmth, the same sultriness and the same air perfumed with jasmine…”
And this sameness brings the same feelings and the same longings – yes, I know them well. And I still have that same sense of her presence, a presence I experienced from time to time with a power that was quite extraordinary. Yes, I know that sense of her. It has visited many times.
Yes, many times before had he seen and smelled these night trees, relived the power of love, the power of her, the promise of more, the promise of a gleaming future, a future of promise and yes, he had relived that night many times before.
That was the evening in 1985.
Indeed, it had happened here and what happened here and the feelings that accompanied it remained in the stones, the trees and the spring blossom. This might have surprised him, the passing of so many years, but it did not. Toni was only too aware that the sense of time had speeded up and then accelerated so fast that he was unable to keep up with it. After all, she arrived in his life with the sound of USA for Africa urging the world to help the victims of an African famine but she went away when there were other young people, and these others had never heard of that historic musical event or the famine which gave birth to it. It had all happened in the blink of an eye but its speed no longer concerned him. After all, time was punctuated and measured by memorable events, and when he was young there had been a flow of new things to interest him and leave a lasting impression: the first time he rode a bicycle, his first kiss, his first job, his first child and this constant flow of newness made time appear to pass slowly. But at some point, fewer new and notable events occurred in his life and fewer new ideas were received so that time speeded up.
No, this no longer surprised him. What surprised him, or so he told me on several wine-fuelled occasions, was that, with a movement of mind that was quite extraordinary, she had transferred her allegiance to somebody else, and its shockwaves still rocked him and reminded him of her faithlessness and his stupidity. What he meant, of course, was that the event was fresh in his memory.
I prefer the scent of the blossom and its reminders of the youth I was, memories of a person I once was but am no more. Yes, I have changed, but some feelings remain and come back when you least expect them.
Toni opened his eyes and shook away the lingering dreams but the remaining feelings had a life of their own and mixed with his blood and they would likely stay there for the rest of the evening and into the night, if past experiences was anything to go by, might even spark off a music-from-his-youth binge and all those sad songs from a yesteryear that contained hope for a future that had already become past. He had never lost touch with those feelings, he told me. They might disappear for long periods but they were ever present in the songs, their words and their melodies and they infused his dreams.
But Toni reflected, as most of us later do, that first love was a love that did not grow on trees and affairs of the heart were not things that often happened when a man was in retirement, and trust and feelings of betrayal didn’t get better when you were older even after you had done the building-a-home-and-raising-children thing. And those raised children were now autonomous individuals – Mario, now 33 and Giulia, now 31, were doing their own thing in England – and succeeding miraculously well given that they were still his babies but then, travel agent Mario had always been a restless individual while Giulia took after her mother, had enormous ambition and was upwardly mobile.
And first love never quite dies and all that – and how can it die when your very own kids are not only that love’s product but also a reminder of the way it was.
And Toni still believed, as many of us want to believe, and even more of us do believe, that those first moments with her had been special, really special and, along with other significant moments, he often relived those early times from so long ago, and so, in other memories, he was walking down that street again and he felt her presence and knew she was there somewhere, and from this somewhere she was looking at him and when he looked up, their eyes had met over a distance of at least 100 metres And there was the time, oblivious to his surroundings, he sensed her presence behind him while she took photographs of him, and what about those moments their thoughts had met, had revealed themselves in a simultaneous exchange of telephone calls - electronic pulses colliding in space.
Some people, he thought, might say: “Oh, what lovely memories.”
But some people don’t have a clue. She was hot and cold, near and far and ambition was in her DNA…and ambition destroyed us…
But how will I tell it, this story of betrayal? After all, Toni was 60 years old now and it had happened such a long time ago, and I wonder if it had all been the way Toni’s memory told him or the way his diaries recorded it all - their pages all a fiction, the story he wrote himself, he - the unreliable narrator – intent on reconstructing events in order to give them a different focus, a focus that sat with his own ideas about what was right and wrong. And now it was coming to an end, and the end was signalled by the letter now wandering willy-nilly in the light breeze and tossing from side to side in a manner that suggested it had not a care in the world; but this letter was not getting anything rolling. It seemed as though it was bringing the whole and sorry story to a dead and crushing end.
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