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By Root 249 0

that palace, looking at a few naive maps of local harbours, the neighbouring coasts; and then, as one climbs higher, from floor to floor, more and more recent maps chart the half-discovered islands, a possible continent. A pianist somewhere on the main level is playing Brahms. You hear it as you ascend, and you even look down into the central well where the music comes from. So there is Brahms, and paintings of vessels lurching newborn out of the docks in some prelude of a merchant’s dream where anything could occur—an eventual wealth or a disastrous storm. One of my ancestors owned seven ships that burned between India and Taprobane. He had no wall of maps, but like him, these ship owners could predict nothing of the future. There are no portraits of humans in the paintings that cover the walls on the first few levels. But then, arriving at the fourth level of the Palace of Ship Owners in Genoa, you find a gathering of Madonnas.

At the Cat’s Table they were discussing Italian art. Miss Lasqueti, who had lived in Italy for a few years, was speaking. “The thing with Madonnas is, they have that look on their faces—because they know He is going to die when young … in spite of all the hovering angels surrounding the child with the little spurt of bloodlike flame coming from their heads. Somewhere in the Madonna’s given wisdom, she can see the finished map, the end of His life. No matter that the local girl the artist is using cannot attempt that knowledgeable look. Perhaps even the artist cannot portray it. So it is only we, the spectators, who can read that face as someone who knows the future. For what will become of her son is provided by history. The recognition of that woe comes from the viewer.”

I think back, not just to this conversation during a meal on a ship, but also to my teenage evenings in Mill Hill. Massi and Ramadhin and I have quickly eaten a curry dinner at their house and are rushing out to catch the 7:05 train into the city. We have heard of a jazz club. We are sixteen and seventeen. This is the look, the long-distance gaze towards her son, with his unsafe heart, that I would have seen on Ramadhin’s mother’s face.

LAST NIGHT, MY FIRST DREAM OF MASSI. It is years since we separated. I was among alpine houses, the living quarters raised because the ground level was for animals. I have not seen her in a dream, let alone in real life, for a considerable time.

I was hidden when she came out. Her hair was short and dark, which distinguished her from the way she looked when she lived with me. It made her face clearer, there were interesting new angles. She looked healthy. I knew I could have fallen in love with her again. Whereas I could not have fallen in love with her again as she had been in the past, surrounded by a mutual history and a familiar look.

A man came out, helped her up onto a table, and I saw that she was in the beginning of a pregnancy. They heard something and came towards me. I leapt over a hedge, fell on my knees, then started running along a road where there were merchants, blacksmiths, and carpenters, all at work. The noise of their tools sounded like weapons. It became music and I realized suddenly that I was not running, it was Massi who was running between the dangerous rhythms of anvils and saw blades. I was disembodied, no longer in the scene, no longer part of her existence. And it was she, newly pregnant, who was in full life racing to escape the dangers. Massi, with her short, dark hair, determined to reach something beyond where she now was.

I must have been taught, or somehow learned early in my life, to break easily away from intimacy. When Massi and I split, no matter what pain there was, I did not fight back. We parted almost too casually. So that, long after my relationship with her ended, but still within the spin and eddy of it, I found myself searching for something to explain or excuse it. I stripped our story down to what I thought was the essential truth. But of course it was only a partial truth. Massi said that sometimes, when things overwhelmed me, there was