into his flesh. The harder he tried to prise the trap apart, the worse the wound became. And so he waited. He waited three days, three whole days until the man who laid the trap came to pick up a crushed or squealing rabbit and saw Grand Maurice with his nearly-severed foot full of rusting metal, dried blood in the furrows of the soil.
During those three days alone, as Machance longed for news of him, Grand Maurice had to keep his mind. He counted trees and ran his tongue around his mouth until he knew all of his teeth in size and shape. He found that the back ones had holes with smooth tops and that the front ones were uneven. He could tell that some were going black and others had roots which wouldn’t let go. When he was bored of his teeth, and the pain was too much to bear, he called upon his memories of journeys, sights and sounds, and each time that he felt himself slipping, he came charging back in with a face from his past and a story to jolt the mind. As he watched his foot fester and swell, he thought hard of Machance and how they’d met on a warm cloudy day in September in London. He spoke to his remembering and chatted to himself. He went back to his childhood and pictured his mother, his father, his school, his friends and clothes. He tried to recall every moment that had been. He started with his earliest memory, year by year, then month by month and, finally, week by week. There were gaps, huge unaccounted-for absences, empty months, patchy years, faces without names, names without people. He tried harder and harder, until he felt his mind might burst, until he had managed to remember almost everything. Then he watched the skies. He invented new words to describe each different kind of cloud. He listened to the birds. He whistled back at them. He picked up leaves from the ground, felt their shapes and ran their surfaces across his hands. By the last day, his mind and body were so stretched that the past and present had merged into one.
Machance was so happy when they freed him from the trap and brought him home from hospital, with his foot stitched up and plastered, that she put together a dinner for all his friends. The pain in Grand Maurice’s foot only grew worse during the course of the dinner and he had to stand up and keep moving so as not to think about it. He dragged himself round the room with eyes full of seething sadness. The heavy plaster on his foot rocked him back and forth, gouging ruts in the parquet. Machance encouraged Grand Maurice to sit down again, but he couldn’t stay in his chair. He went to bed before the guests had left. He could hear them saying ‘goodnight’ to Machance through the bedroom window. As they went down the steps outside, they turned and asked: ‘Is he going to be all right?’ The noise of their cars leaving filled the house. Machance cleared the table on her own. She blew out all the candles lining the table. She climbed into bed alongside Grand Maurice and held on to him through the sheet.
Machance shuffles a little on the carpet on the other side of the door.
‘The doctors never managed to get his foot to mend properly. The bone didn’t really heal. Do you remember how Grand Maurice always limped? That’s why he needed you to help him when he went fishing.’
She taps at the door with her long hands. I can feel solid dry tears rolling down her fingers into the wood. She tells me to hang on. Pado should come and get me out of here. She’ll tell him, enough is enough. I wait a while, lying on the bed, my head swimming with Grand Maurice’s suffering. Thoughts eat into me.
Pado turns the key and swings in. He doesn’t smile. He still looks angry. I won’t talk to him. He sits on the end of the bed. ‘Ma Jean-Pio, cosa facevi? You do know you shouldn’t have done that, don’t you?’
I don’t care if he doesn’t understand. Anyway it’s his fault. He said everyone who smoked was going to end up dead. The photographs are in all his books. Now I can’t tell him anything. If Michael dies then it’s not my fault, because we all could have stopped him, but instead they laughed with him and all that whilst Grand Maurice was battling with a rabbit trap in his head.
Pado tells me it’s time to go again, to move on.
‘Andiamo! Pack your things! Everyone is waiting in the car.’
It’s a slanting wet afternoon and the rain is bouncing off the car bonnet. ‘It won’t last long,’ Ama says, almost to persuade herself.
We have visits to do: friends, and the annual international conference of specialists on legionnaires’ disease. Pado explains to us again how microbes and toxins collect in air conditioners and then expel themselves into rooms and grip in your mouths to kill you. In one company, in New York, the only person who didn’t get ill was the doorman and that’s how they found out because he spent his time outside and wasn’t silently sucking in germs to die. I imagine all those people sitting attentively at their desks, working away, and then, gradually, one after the other, they begin to cough, splutter, sag and turn grey. And then that’s that, they’re gone.
We stop at Elizabeth’s on the way to the conference in London. She’s Ama’s artist friend. We’re thinking of dropping off Duccio to have his beauty captured in a painting. Elizabeth looks Duccio up and down. She declares she’s never seen a boy quite so good-looking.
‘Here we go,’ Giulio mumbles to me.
Duccio doesn’t notice though. He never really notices because he doesn’t care any more. He’s too busy with his duties. Maps to read, cities to identify, trips to plan, cars to name. Pado needs him because Ama no longer knows the difference between motorways, dual carriageways, side roads and main roads. It’s all the same to her: one long journey across nowhere. Duccio though has little notepads in which he writes long lists: all the routes we’ve ever been on, the restaurants, the cities in alphabetical order, the value of local currencies. When he’s finished his duties, he reads books about great sporting geniuses. As Pado says to Ama: just being good-looking won’t get you very far in life.
Elizabeth thinks she can do a portrait of Duccio. It’s going to take some time however. Not an hour here or there – maybe two or three weeks of posing.
‘We don’t have that kind of time,’ Pado objects bluntly.
Ama seems annoyed. How are we going to get Duccio done? He’s coming up to twelve soon and then that’ll be that, he’ll be thirteen and fourteen and then his beauty will have vanished. Elizabeth takes some Polaroid snaps of Duccio. He looks uncomfortable and he is sighing heavily. When the pictures come up, slowly appearing like blue sky amongst dispersing clouds, you can see he is sighing so we have to start again.
‘Darling, make an effort for us,’ Ama pleads. ‘This is not what we need.’
We go off nosing through the paint tubes and turpentine. We find a canvas covered in cloth showing a naked woman reclining on top of a red table. She is motionless and holding a flower to her mouth. She looks like she might be sniffing or even eating the flower. Giulio fetches Duccio and I remain, running my eyes across the pink shapes and breathing in the smell of acrid oil colours. Duccio takes one look at the naked painting and tells us it’s horrible.
‘Stop poking around, come over here!’ Ama orders, exasperated.
This time the Polaroids are all right, but Duccio is refusing to say a word.
As we’re all getting back in the car, Duccio slams Giulio against the head rest and steps over him to get to his seat. Giulio lets out a scream and I can’t sit down either because Duccio keeps on shoving me away with kicks. ‘Behave!’ Pado shouts. Duccio settles down. I try to lean as far as possible towards Giulio, to avoid touching Duccio. He is packed with fury, bubbling, ready to burst. I know that if I even brush his coat, he’ll shower me with punches. I sit upright in the middle. I watch the raindrops drifting across the windscreen. I’m sure the wipers could go faster. They haven’t caught that drop, nor that one. That one, there, the big one! I’m about to make a wish on a raindrop when Duccio explodes. He can’t keep silent any longer.
‘I’m not going to be naked in the painting!’ he yells.
Everyone is a little astonished.
Ama leans into the back. ‘Darling, whoever said anything about being naked?’
Pado is grinning to himself. ‘Where did you get that idea from?’
Maybe I should tell Ama about her