The soundful surf
Thunders under the eye
Of the mourning moon
And thunders again,
While flashes
Savage and strange
Rip the ochre sky
With long, clear slashes,
Each tear,
Like a spastic leap,
Comes and goes
Along the reefs, gleams and screams
And in the heavens,
Where the tempest turns,
Thunder crashes
Like a great wonder.
—”Marine,” Paul Verlaine. Translated by B. Collins
It was one of about a dozen notebooks Whitney brought with her when she moved in with Paolo, all of them of the very same make, thick, black-covered things, perhaps two hundred octavo-sized pages in length. Thumbing through the pages he saw it was a great catchall: images clipped from fashion magazines; short quotations from other writers; quick notations, like “Woman at Il Forno with the long coat of faux leopard”; small patches of richly colored fabric the size of playing cards; and what looked like diary entries, referring as they did to things she had talked about, personal things, like strains with friends or remembrances.
Something told him to begin at the end, but the last dozen or so pages were blank. When he thumbed to the place where she last left off, it was the same melange of material—notes, clippings, the odd photo. He had an instant of thinking he should put the journal aside, then he opened to an entry that stood out for its length. Flipping back and forth he saw it filled a page and a half, beginning just below an old photo of the child Whitney in a jumper of ghastly plaid and glossy Mary Janes.
She had very clear handwriting, made with a fine pointed pen and forward-slanting like Palmer script but of a font more like close-kerned print than cursive. The taller letters were always elongated.
No one writes out of desperation. It’s too difficult. Writing is always an act of hope.
The sun rises late and the days are all grey satin.
I will do a little French then tea with Agnes,
for whom I am now just one more nuisance,
like a piece of fruit gone quietly bad. I will try
to face her with the imagination one might want
of a poem, but she can be difficult, like a person
of ordinary intelligence who thinks disagreeing
is the best way to cultivate a self. I will remind
myself that she overcooks vegetables, has taste
in furniture like a woman who cuts her hair short,
and I will know that I have lost again. Why in love
are things we can’t first see the only ones we can
see in the end? Why in the end is love always like
having eaten a whole pint of ice cream? But I will
listen to what little she has to say, wait a few minutes
so as not to seem peevish, then ask if I might
have my boots back, boots and my gran’s rosary,
and tonight again in a clearer sky that same moon
squinting down at me through the one skylight.
But our astrophysicist had long practiced a kind of dialectical thinking where it served him; he could show even the simplest, irreducable values to be the flimsiest of constructions, things whose propriety derived entirely from jerry-rigged meaning at almost every joint. All of which is really just to say he was a master of confusing an issue. And so from spotting Whitney’s notebook, then feeling an impulse that he had to hesistate over, he began the work of rationalizing what followed, looking more broadly at the nature of the thing—of the private and trespassing.
Look for some hidden tension—this was always a good place to begin—and wasn’t there something a little strange about privacy for two people who’d been sharing the same bed for two years. They saw each other naked, fatigued, and ill. They daily shared private thinking and feelings with one another. Each of them knew every square centimeter of the other’s body. All of their most private possessions were collected together in one place. That there could be any privacy in a life like that began to seem a bit of a stretch.
It is a strange thing to look into someone else’s journal, as close as one comes to entering another person’s consciousness with all of its contents, spoken and unspoken, speakable and unspeakable. Paolo hesitated as most people would; our presumption is that such things are very narrowly private, the journaler’s own and only the journaler’s.
Think of the girl’s diary with its emphatic little clasp.
Paolo rode his bici to the Institute that evening, though better with his umbrella he had walked, as only minutes from the apartment in via Ghibellina it began to rain like it does in November in Firenze, dutifully and raw. Coming to the river at the ponte alle Grazie, he was already wet to the skin and shivering, wet to the skin and weeping, like one might while pedaling into a cold wind, though it wasn’t the wind now but what he uncovered a few hours before when he’d looked into one of Whitney’s notebooks and read that she was fucking someone called M in the stacks at the biblioteca nationale—at the biblioteca and elsewhere he was quite sure. His whole center ached, from shoulder to shoulder, neck to navel, and his reflex was as predictable as it was foolish, to break it all down like it was just another complex mathematical object, break it all down into its most basic components to see how it added up. He was a smart one, Paolo Donati, yes, but there is smart and then there is smart; it just wasn’t the right domain for such operations. So along the lungarno he flew like a wraith through the dark, past the ponte vecchio, then down behind the palazzi along borgo Jacobo.
I may have opened a can of wormholes
when yesterday I texted my next self,
for when I woke this morning, someone
had messaged me from what was surely
a different timezone. She (he?) had learned
I was all about our helping each other out,
was the gist of it, so I to her (him?),
You’re not? Then she (he?) to me, Oh yes.
I’m you, but before.
How magical. I’ve so many questions,
I tapped. So it would seem, she (he?) shot
back, and though usually down for a little
irony, I have to admit it smarted a little.
No, I told myself. Open your heart. Don’t
be afraid, so across some stretch of ages
I to her (him?), I’ll take that feedback.
Now, what do you see? What am I missing?
What can you tell me that I might use?
There was a long delay then, more than
a few minutes, and frankly my imagination
ran wild with the historical possibilities.
Vesuvius and Pompei perhaps, Vichy and
a knock at the door, Ghana and the slave
trader’s truncheon. Are you o.k.? I finally
asked. Yeah. Fine. I had to take a piss, she (he?),
probably he, answered, then, Listen, I don’t
have a lot of time for this. I just want to say
you kind of blew it, and I was really hoping
you wouldn’t. Better luck next time. Then
nothing, and I felt so very alone, a forgotten
prisoner on a dead moon in an unmapped
star system without mail delivery. What
could I do but delete the conversation, turn
up the heat against today’s winter, and take
my coffee. Through the window I watched
a crow light on the blistering snow.
This morning, after brushing
and flossing, I messaged
whatever part of me will be
reincarnated in the next life.
Commit yourself from the very first
like an idiot saint, I tapped.
A few minutes later, he (she?) replied.
Happily he (she?) reads English or
knows how to use Google Translate.
Who is this? he (she?) wrote.
You’re not in my contacts.
Then me, I’m you, but before.
Hope all is well. Good work so far.
You’re doing just fine.
Eat lots of fruits and vegetables.
And when your heart aches,
lie down and let it wash over you.
Yes, it was still just a hypothesis. That they were lovers would have been rather hard to confirm. Some weeks later though, after forgetting her laptop at the office and doubling back, there was leaking from Malavisi’s office the unmistakable murmur of very earnest fornicating.
Would she have investigated further had his door not been a little ajar? Unlikely. But it was, and the still invisible couple sounded quite earnestly focused on their own business. So Whitney drifted to the door and turned one eye to the narrow slit there like Professore Galileo to his crude but historical eyepiece.
Quite within direct view of where she stood stretched the divan the director kept in his office for functions perhaps just like the one she was then observing—a tight squeeze, to be sure, Signora Lucia L. arse up at the north end of the thing, arse up and skirt tumbled up her back, while Capo Malavisi kneeled just south and behind her, bumping her bottom at a tempo roughly tango-like.
If only she could achieve a writing rhythm like that.
briancollins.xyz 