Issue #91

Hasu finds the Way, acity with my Father / The Grand Tour of Op, and Marinezza

by Ali Hildyard

Hasu finds the Way

Once I asked Hasu, the most peaceable and kindly man you could hope to meet, how he came to be the man he was. A lofty question whose answer must be pressingly inexact, yielding just the one, arbitrary account in place of a hundred others, reducing us to a single vision of ourselves. A question no one can rightly answer, though we like to think it can be answered, out of fear of the inexorable – that we conduct our lives on wires, animated by the rhythms of a music we cannot hear, those wires held taut by stubby fingers which may break at any moment for lunch. Or, worse, there is no method, and everything significant takes place by happenstance.

'Regret, ambition and malice,' he said at last. But this made no sense to me.

'Regret for what? Ambition for what? How could you, of all people, feel driven by any of these qualities?' I insisted.

'Maybe their apparent absence is a measure of my success in transcending them and turning them into something else,' he said. 'But that does not mean they were not the underlying qualities that drove me forward. Reach deeply enough into anything and you will turn it around, and maybe you will no longer recognise it when you look at it from behind. What you're asking of me demands a dim torch, a half dead battery, not quite enough light to see clearly but enough to cast a shadow. But this is only to get to a place that has neither dawn nor day. I can tell you my method but it will make no sense in the different place that you are coming from.'

He took a deep breath. 'One may as well begin with admitting I wasn't happy. And so, because I was not happy, I started to travel from place to place. The fact is, I had developed a plan, and my reckoning went like this: I would spend a few months in each place, and then I would move onto another place. I would spend exactly two months, give or take a few days, in each place, and then the next day or the first day it was not raining, I would pack my bag and move onto the next place. To do this I followed a schedule: I would stay four weeks in a place if its name suggested to me it was a four week town or village, and six weeks if it suggested it was a six week town or village. But mostly I used a system: If the name of the place was like the name of the previous place I had visited, I would spend five weeks and up to some further days there, because I did not expect to learn much that was new in such a place; otherwise I would spend seven weeks and as many extra days as were necessary to familiarise myself with the place and what it had within it. To get the number of days right, I used a mechanism: I would stay one extra day if the house had been rebuilt or the number of shadows was odd, otherwise two days. And that is how I came to be here, because I have told you exactly the method I followed to find the way.'

***

acity with my Father / The Grand Tour of Op

Following his death I saw much less of my father, but our few meetings took on a more intimate, almost existential quality. The last time, I entered the front garden to find him skirting the sides of my battered old Volvo, moving by turns from left to rear, and then along the right wing.

"Not bad, not bad at all, Bat," he said coyly, like a valuer confronting a novel artefact (the childhood nickname, long forgotten, blazed suddenly in its dark recess). Then, having completed his circuit, very seriously he gazed at the long crack in the windscreen with wordless respect.

Our first stop was the hotel -- the first hotel, that is. For reasons never ultimately defined, we were soon on our way again, taking with us the memory of the second landing and its polished floorboards, as we walked together between rooms that were either unavailable or inadequate (some, indeed, had no walls at all). But I suspect it was mostly price -- or an error of price -- that was to blame.

The second hotel was identical, even down to that second landing; but something had changed in the world, and where before our footsteps had been tentative, had stopped, and finally we had hastened back, this time we took long strides and compelled, by an act of will, those same rooms we saw to accommodate us.

The following day the steering played up; this was nothing new to me, though a novelty for my father. I turned sharply left into the corner of a single track road, and then back again to straighten out the problem. Entirely at peace, my father observed the bizarre manoeuvre without comment, and I realised that he wholeheartedly accepted our little expedition, whatever might come of it. A moment later, with the same attitude of credulous curiosity, he watched as I swerved right of a gargantuan hedgerow, the skyline peeling away to the left. He was my father, and today he trusted me as his son, even if, at the same time, I was a son he scarcely knew, and who drove in ways that must have struck him as unimaginable.

Later we parted, amicably and inconsequentially. Having scarcely spoken, each of us abruptly acknowledged the calls of the world, the calls of life, that once more asserted their claims upon us, moving us like destiny's pawns in different directions. The Grand Tour -- our Grand Tour -- was complete; it had lasted just a day.

***

Marinezza

Tourists in Marinezza will pass over mediaeval bridges; their paths will be disconcerted by cobbled streets that meet at irregular angles, mostly ascendant; in the Old Quarter dozens of criss-crossed washing lines will uphold the changing angles of the sun in a billowing patchwork of faded pink, fawn and beige; sets of cheap plastic chairs will be folded away in the corners of stone courtyards; there will be a hundred doors with glass insets and wrought iron grilles; there will be thirty seven hidden gardens that have run to seed; there will be three hundred and thirty two tenantless balconies looking out over a thoroughfare; there will be a solitary miniaturist by the harbour hawking decorated pens; there will be an uncountable number of men or women moving without clear agendas behind the windows of unilluminated rooms.

The tourists will pass up and down the streets, often the same ones, time and time again, their bags stuffed with bilingual programmes of events and maps that tomorrow they will discard; in one language the statue's gaze will be described as "morbid and cold", in another as "gentle and warm." A piece of playful humour -- "In our town this is not so sorry a state!" -- will translate in all its literal particulars, while at its heart there will be something, some imperative that inspired it, some self-evident outlook upon the world, that doesn't translate at all. The tourists will haggle, not really sure why they are doing so, and then, pleased with their skill, feel confirmed in their conviction that life here is mostly a deception. They will eat in bars with repetitive names, and when they read their pamphlets, they will learn only what they already know about a hundred similar towns.

Each man steps into a different river, and the pen maker knows this. When he depicts in a single scene the four towers, the castle as it once stood, a few prominent streets and even the town's coat of arms, he is well aware that they cannot exist together - not in these colours, not from this vantage point, not at this time. But, painting on a pen, he offers the hope that there could be a story which, in some single, definitive moment, might be the true one, alongside his own acceptance that this is not it.