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TRAVELS WITH FRANCES (PART TWO)
The three months of Frances' sojourn on the Continent happily seemed to coincide with a period in which I was to be sent to Europe on business, to negotiate the fare structure of a package tour with a large chain of hotels. In a brief, foolish moment of intoxication I even imagined Frances and I might possibly meet up there at some point, utterly by chance. Needless to say, the spurious rendezvous I conjured up took place in a tiny train station café, with the enchantment of wet coloured lights, tinkling glasses, and smoky spices in the air, all serving to overwhelm us and capture us in a reverie. Of course I realised - with, I confess, a small shiver of bitterness - that this was a childish fantasy. Frances would leave behind her many lovers and her real estate investments, but she would not leave them to join me.
Indeed, our journeys never intersected. When she was in Munich I was in Trieste; when she was in Birmingham I was in Dublin. Still, I was confident all this haphazardness did not defeat us since we knew the ordeals of separation and distance far better than friends ordinarily do. After she left, Peter Petronius received regular aerogrammes from her, and voluntarily relayed them to me. He seemed eager to be a conveyer of news between us; a conductor, as it were. I also contacted a friend in another travel agency who had helped Frances plan her itinerary. From his information I was even able to draw up a map of the approximate route she had chosen, and the amount of time she was spending in each place. When I myself was packing to leave, I decided to take it with me in my briefcase, and whenever I had time to kill in departure lounges, in taxi cabs or in hotel rooms, I brought it out and studied it.
For the entire length of Frances' travels I followed her movements on my map, and occasionally I consulted the travel agency documents. From these I knew her final stopover was Italy. Amongst other more scenic destinations on her route, she had chosen to visit a tiny, isolated town in northern Italy, near the Swiss border. In an aerogramme to Peter Petronius she told him that she intended to spend three days here by herself, since she believed it to be an area "relatively unsullied by the regular tramp of tourist feet". Here, however my heart almost stopped beating, for I knew this town to be the birthplace of the poet Cevio, and, furthermore, the subject and inspiration of all the verse in the book Frances and I had shared.
As clearly as I now see the passage of my own life, I see the events of these final days in Frances' journey, in all their terrible vividness. I repeat them now to myself, in the future tense, as though I am uttering the words of a premonition or warning:
Frances will venture at dusk outside the old town walls, into the hills so beautifully described by Cevio, into the sighing forest and heaving gullies. With the wheat stinging her calves she will stoop to refresh herself in a cold stream of melted snow. She will wash the dust from her face and catch her breath sitting on the large, smooth riverstones. She will return by way of the Catholic cemetery, picking her way among the moss-covered Madonnas and Jesus-on-the-crosses, pausing every now and then to examine an inscription that catches her eye. Frances will be stooping to note the dates on the tiny headstone of a baby's tomb when rain will start to fall, and hunching her shoulders and wrapping a scarf over her head, she will run back towards town.
She will take cover in an inn just inside the town gates, soaked and shivering. She will order a brandy from the man serving drinks, who is rough and wears a red cotton shirt, just as Cevio has described him. She will stand by the fire warming her frozen hands. He will come to her with her glass, mumbling in his dense local dialect. His warm, husky, viscous tones will roll on, oblivious to her protestations on "Non capisco!"; his face illuminated orange by the coals in the fireplace, his eyes shiny with liquor. He will talk in this mad way for what seems to her like forever, all through the night, never taking his shiny eyes from her, his red shirt sleeves soaked with sweaty and drink like some crazy old village story teller. Soon Frances' eyes will grow heavy with the wine. Pretending to go to the toilet, she will escape from the man by running out the inn's back door, and from there she will make her difficult, unsteady way back to the hotel. Once in her room she will pull the blankets back from her bed and lie in the darkness, waiting, looking at the ceiling; and the night will reveal a thousand spinning images flickering before her: skulls and sparrows, stillborn infants swaddled in red afterbirth, violins chattering in the rain, foreign newspapers, fingers stuffed into keyholes, and hysterical disembodied voices. These apparitions will continue to improvise their gory path across her sleep, and her eyelids will quiver like a frightened rabbit's.
Frances will end her life in this little Italian town. The sickness of the first night will develop into a fever with neither days nor nights, each hour elongated and inverted over the other. Miracles and visitations will make themselves known to her at this time, and in herself she will make some sense of them. But she will not be able to effectively guarantee their existence to anyone else; in fact they will only make her appear hopelessly lost in the eyes of others, and the doctor will conclude his diagnosis accordingly, with a weary skepticism.
When she realises this it will make Frances very lonely, for even within her delirium she will seek the companionship of a fellow traveller. Even from her hospital bed she will hear the rain on the roof, and on other roofs, and see the cracks on the ceiling, and on other ceilings.
My friendship with Frances ended as it began, lost in entrancement in the final lines of Cevio's final poem. I dare not repeat those lines here lest they prove burdensome or dangerous for the reader, or play havoc with the delicate balance of forces at work in his or her own life. I do not regret that Frances and I were never lovers, nor spoke to each other alone, nor wrote words for each other's eyes only. It simply puzzles me that though both of us travelled together through the same joys and perils, one of us was asked to pay for that journey, and the other left to wander freely.
When I think of Frances now, I see her face in the half-light. At first it is late afternoon, and I can still see the scatter of sunbeams on her hair, which falls over her collar; and her face seems illuminated from the white kitchen table below. She is looking at me in earnest. The room becomes gloomy. And the chairs and bottles indistinct, until finally she is just a dark figure, still speaking softly but receding into darkness.
© David McComb
Thanks to Per Stam
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