• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 314 0

rhythms and clarity and ferocity. He had been Lepidus, and she had sewn and fitted the sheets. Later he had graduated to Hector in Tiger at the Gates, and she had made him a scarlet cloak and a crested Trojan helmet; she had fitted thonged sandals round those stalwart legs. The student theatre was a dark, hot box, peopled by flitting ghosts, too puny for their lines, but fiery, all the same. It was hard to remember, here in this square, where the stones were Roman stones, the spotlit flaring passion of that imaginary wooden box. He had called her Patra, and she had called him Antony, in those days, in secret. Large, kind Tony, through whom Shakespeare’s lines spoke strong and clear, and to her. They had whispered them to each other. ‘I’ll set a bourn how far to be belov’d.’ ‘Then must you needs find out new heaven, new earth.’ They had appropriated what many had appropriated. He wanted passionately to be an actor, for a year or two, and then gave up the idea, quite suddenly. So that the singing words and the brighter light of the dark box became less interesting than the complicated light of common day, so that the drama of international negotiation took over from the eloquent simplicities of love and death and power. But he could always make her smile by calling her Patra. It was a joke and not only a joke. All this she acknowledged and did not acknowledge, seeing and not seeing the lines of Hector’s harness, the folds of Lepidus’s toga on thin air and trickling water, beyond the dark crocodile.

She was getting thinner. She ate, but she got thinner. Other guests came and went, but she stayed. So did the blond man in the blue-green jacket. He had bought a straw hat, like the hat in which Van Gogh painted himself in the days of his madness in the fields of light around Arles. The hats were sold around the Arènes, by itinerant pedlars, woven domes ending in ragged spikes of reeds. It perched on his tough blond curls without denting them. She began to lose her sense of the businesswoman she had been, was. She walked the streets more purposefully as her sense of purpose wavered. Her French was improving rapidly. She would stop and read the local newspaper, the Midi Libre, which was set out on polished wooden rods, in the hotel salon. Most of the contents of this paper concerned bull-fighting. She realised slowly that she was in a bull-fighting hotel; on the walls of the bar were photographs of Hemingway and Picasso who had stayed here to admire the skills of the shining pigtailed dolls, with their braid and gilt and cockades. Later she noticed that the bar itself was called the Bar Hemingway. In the newspaper also were accounts of other kinds of combat, in which the heroes were the bulls, whose more complex rushes were rewarded with standing ovations and renderings of Carmen. There was almost no foreign news in this journal; what there was was North African, bombs in Algiers, tourists attacked in Egypt. And local news: school concerts, the building of cisterns, the pollution of rivers. She read it all, for the French language. One evening she sat on a sofa in the shade and worked her way through it. ‘Yet another traffic accident on the road to Uzès. A man was killed by a speeding car, as he stood on the edge of a vineyard. His body was found by a cyclist. From the marks on the road it was clear that the killer had made off immediately, without stopping to offer help, or to ascertain whether his victim was dead. This is the third such accident in the region this year. The police are searching . . . ’

Patricia began to weep. She thought of the unknown dead man in the road, and tears poured down her face. She moved no other muscles; she sat on the camel-coloured sofa, a dignified ageing woman, with the newspaper in her lap, and her tears splashed on to it, darkening the newsprint, the grainy dark photographed bulls, the catalogue of accidents. She could not move. She could not see. She could not imagine a moment when the tears would stop, or she would be able to stand. She suppressed all sounds; not a whiffle, not a sniff, not