The certainties, p.12
The Certainties, page 12
‘They’ve asked me to drive up the coast to look for—’ He scrunches his nose and doesn’t finish the sentence.
Pia shifts the box so that it rests against her hip. ‘I’ll come with you.’
The builder’s car is parked at his cottage and so he walks over to get it while Pia returns to the hotel and changes into dry clothes. They’ve been asked to head north on the coast road, to stop at the larger bays and report back if they find anything. This is the part of the island Pia knows best—the direction she chooses every morning when she runs—fields alternating with bog, the shaggy sheep, a few isolated farmhouses before the island’s western shoulder. She already knows exactly where the beach accesses are, how the northernmost tip of the island tapers like a finger to the sea.
While she’s waiting for the builder Pia finds an extra pair of socks and the gloves she’d forgotten earlier. She stuffs them into a bag. She towel-dries her hair again, quick, brusque movements because her head still feels cold. Then she sits on her bed; breathes.
On top of the dresser is the book she’s been reading. It’s slight but she doesn’t find it easy to understand: the ideas jump around as if the author isn’t certain of what he’s trying to say. Pia picks it up and opens its torn blue cover, thumbs through its pages. She only has a short chapter to go and then she’ll be done with mirrors, can close her eyes and choose another book from the widow’s library.
In the section Pia is reading the author is querying what it means to see the world through a mirror, to reveal the world in reverse. He describes at length a fifteenth-century painting of a wealthy couple. They are dressed in velvet coats with ermine trim, and are standing on the plain floorboards of a modest home, a grey-brown dog between them. The work is likely a commission: the commemoration of a betrothal or a marriage. ‘Already, in their postures,’ the writer says, ‘in the man’s sombre expression and the woman’s downcast gaze, in the slip of her upturned palm, there’s a sense of their future. The painting, and their fate, seems fixed…but behind the couple is a mirror—a luxury in this time period. This one has been made by glassblowers pouring a metal mixture into a glass sphere, which results in a curved shape that expands the viewer’s field of vision. The mirror in the painting shows us the room in reverse and in its full scope: the backs of the couple, the ceiling’s beams, the adjacent window, the crowd we did not know about, but who all the while were standing before them.’
‘Time,’ the philosopher writes, ‘is also like this. We know what we know by what’s revealed in reflection. These revelations permit us to see the larger world, to better understand what’s happened, and to guess at what’s to come.’
A knock on the door startles Pia. She sets the book down just as the builder says her name, his voice muffled by the wall between them. And though she could spring up to the door—open it with one easy step forward—she stays on the edge of the bed for a few more seconds, waiting for him to call her name again.
THE SHRIEKING GULLS lead them around the rock bed. The stench is immediate. Pia puts her hand over her nose, almost slips on the slick stone. The smell of the dead seal is blubber-fat and fetid, the animal’s entrails welling onto the stony ledge. Overhead the birds turn tight circles, then drop down close to where Pia and the builder stand. The bravest ones perch on the nearby rock face, spreading and flapping their wings.
The tide is retreating, and above the swash the first beach is clear, except for eelgrass and the stranded crabs the birds pick through. Back in the car, the builder wipes the inside of the windshield free of condensation—an old car, a leak he needs to get fixed. He starts the engine, turns onto the road. The sky outside the windshield is a veiled grey: curtains of rain receding in the distance. They drive in silence, the bog to Pia’s right brown and still, though every now and again between the coast and the bog a bed of fern crops up—so green it makes Pia think of her abuela’s herb garden—the virescent shock of the coriander, parsley and basil in the dull brown planters she tended in the corner of the courtyard. When Pia moved back to her abuela’s city at the age of ten, her abuela taught her to cook with those herbs. One of her mother’s favourite meals was thyme soup with parsley, and Pia would make this soup when her mother flew back from faraway assignments.
In one of those assignments, Pia’s mother covered a students’ strike—and in the recording Pia has of that broadcast, her mother describes the crowd, recites the slogans the students have painted on their signs. In another recording, Pia’s mother covers a mining disaster, and in another, an attempted coup. The silence of the bog—this island’s quiet as Pia and the builder drive along—feels a hundred years away from that world, a hundred years removed from her mother’s witnessing of these events and tipping them into another language so that listeners outside the country—people standing in kitchens, or dressing for work in their bright bedrooms, or driving their cars—could follow the concerns she was reporting, calamities occurring in some ‘remote’ corner of the world.
Sometimes in the background of the recordings, the rabble of a crowd can be heard, or the blare of traffic, or gusting wind, and these clues ground Pia in the places where her mother once stood. ‘The polls are closing,’ her mother says, over the protester’s chants, ‘demonstrations have broken out…’ ‘…the buildings at the north end of the city have been flattened. Emergency services are having difficulty navigating…aftershocks have been reported throughout the region.’ In this last one, there’s the sound of heavy machinery, and Pia imagines her mother standing near a crane that is clawing at the rubble around her.
When Pia was in her thirties, she received these recordings as part of her abuela’s estate. At the time, Pia was working in a big hotel kitchen that had become renowned. She was an assistant, working morning shifts with a chef de partie who liked to listen to the news at his station. Watching him work, she had seen what it would be like to be someone with daily rituals: Now I am kneading the dough, now I am slicing the apples, now, at eleven, I am taking my smoke break in the alley…The rituals were a comfort, a pattern she was happy to slip into, but it always struck her as disquieting—how the dollop of mousse, the fine grating of cinnamon were set against the cacophony of news from far corners of the world.
In Pia’s favourite recording, her mother is covering the funeral of a poet who had won a major prize for his work. She praises the poet in a language the poet did not write in. ‘Thousands of people are lining the street, crying and throwing flowers as the coffin moves slowly down the road…’ Then, at the end of the broadcast, she reads one of his poems in his own tongue—in the language she and the poet shared—full of intimations and rhythms that are like the lullabies of Pia’s childhood: like the must and rosewood smell of her abuela’s armoire, like the gentle thump of her father’s briefcase set at the foot of the stairwell when he arrived home.
The builder asks Pia a question, turning in the driver’s seat to face her. The bog has become forest now, and Pia inhales the scent of wet pine. How long has she been daydreaming? She shakes her head, as if she’s clearing water from her ears, and waits for the builder to ask again. She wants to answer in her own language, to say exactly what she’s thinking. His mouth moves, and she tries to concentrate, to hear him over the voice of her mother saying, ‘There are troops gathered outside the cemetery…’ ‘These arrests come at a time when…’ ‘Today I am standing in the middle of the plaza…’
The stag comes out of nowhere—a blur of rust in front of the windshield, his antlers like knifepoints against the sky.
The builder veers right and the car jolts to a stop a few metres from a stone fence. Pia’s head thunks against the side window, but she isn’t sure if she is hearing the side of her head hitting the glass or the car clipping the stag’s haunch. Then stillness, and a high-pitched hum that must be coming from somewhere inside her. Pia shakes her head and scans the tree line for the animal. He’s gone. The builder leans over, turns her face toward his. ‘Are you okay?’ he asks. He moves his fingers through her hair until she flinches and says, ‘Ouch.’
They get out of the car to check for damage, and a group of red deer standing along the hem of woods watch, blinking. After a minute the herd turns away, heads dropping back down to the wet grass.
BEFORE RETURNING TO THE HOTEL, Pia and the builder drive on, and stop at a second bay. The builder leaves Pia in the car. He’s gone less than ten minutes, and when he comes back he is winded. ‘There’s nothing,’ he says. On the drive back he asks if she feels light-headed or woozy. He reaches over and touches the sore spot on Pia’s head, says, ‘You’re going to have quite the bump.’
‘What kind of doctor were you?’ Pia asks. They’re moving south through a part of the island that’s usually so thick with grazing flocks of sheep that people can spend twenty or thirty minutes on the trackway, their cars inching forward while the sheep, picking through the tufted grass that springs up on both sides of the road, obstinately refuse to be nudged along. This afternoon the sheep are elsewhere—inland, undercover or herded into pens before the storm hit.
‘I was doing surgical training. Emergency medicine.’
‘Why did you quit?’
The builder doesn’t say anything. After a moment, Pia stops studying his profile and turns back to the road. They pass the headland and the chapel, until they are almost at the spot where she usually turns around on her run. The rain has stopped now and the sky has brightened. They pass the cottage the builder is fixing up—an old croft that had once belonged to the widow’s older brother. They park in the small lot beside the hotel and the builder cuts the engine. ‘How’s your head feeling?’
‘Okay, I think.’
‘Maybe put a cold compress on it?’ Then, in a voice threaded with regret, he adds, ‘I’m sorry.’
Pia opens the car door and steps out. She says nothing, allows the apology to mean all the things he needs it to say.
Back in her room, Pia wets her face in the sink. On her way out of the small closet that is her ensuite, she bangs her elbow on the doorframe. Just when her body becomes accustomed to a space—an apartment, a room—and she’s able to get up in the dark of night, pour herself a glass of water and make it back to bed without incident, she moves again. Over the years when other people have said the word ‘home,’ she felt like they were speaking a foreign language. Even at her abuela’s house in the city, her room was makeshift—a mattress on a low frame set up in the sewing room, a dress form on its wooden stand stationed at the foot of her bed. Pia surveys her accommodations in what would once have been the hotel’s attic. It would take her ten minutes to pack. That’s how little of the space she’s made her own.
The hillside house that Pia’s family lived in was not their own. When the family had arrived in the village by the sea, the house appeared occupied, as if the people to whom it belonged had gone out for a walk after a meal. Pia’s mother paid a local woman to come in and dust and clean and wash the sheets. When Pia came across her, beating the rugs out back of the house, the woman refused to look her in the eye.
In the dining room of the hillside house there was an ornate china cabinet. One day, when she’d been living there close to a year, Pia opened a drawer, expecting to find silver. Instead she found a framed photograph. She peered at the neat little triangle of figures, thinking that they were like ghosts: a ghost in a black jacket and bow tie, another in a white dress—a woman with almond-shaped eyes and her dark hair bundled on top of her head—and another, a child-ghost standing shyly in front of her parents in a pinafore. The girl was only a few years older than Pia. All at once, Pia understood that she was sleeping in this girl’s wrought-iron bed, playing with her dolls, brushing her own hair in the ghost-girl’s vanity mirror.
Pia’s father was from a large city to the west. He’d come to the coast to do business—hoping to start a shipping operation to support his mining interests. Where there is war there’s also an economy. Pia’s mother liked to remind Pia that her father had come from nothing. He’d once worked in the mines, and then in an office, and now the stack of papers on his desk, and the invoices, and his constant letter-writing signified that he was an important man. In those years Pia’s father was always meeting with people, concerned with moving commodities around as fluidly as possible. He rarely had meetings inside the house, although Pia can recall once coming out of her room to find a German man in shiny black boots drinking tea at the dining room table.
Pia checks the bump on her head in her wardrobe mirror. She can’t see anything between the dark parting of her hair, but the raised nub is palpable under her fingertips. Sometimes this room feels to her like that house by the sea: she wonders who else has moved through here, what they felt gazing out the window toward the bluff, what or who they dreamt about in those nights they slept in the narrow bed. When at last she leaves for good, the room will be cleaned, the sheets washed and tucked back up to the pillow, the duvet smoothed. She imagines a strand of her hair might catch in the carpet, or that she might forget some inconsequential object: a sock, a reminder note, an old pen—ephemera released from any association with her, the person to whom it once belonged.
PIA KNOCKS ON THE WIDOW’S DOOR, shifting the dish she’s cradling. A moment later, the widow appears wearing a burgundy cardigan with its buttons misaligned. ‘Come in, come in,’ she says, peering over Pia’s shoulder as if the storm might still be raging.
Over tea the widow tells Pia that her son has come by to check on her. He’d told her that a boat had broken up, and this prompts her to tell stories about other, previous shipwrecks along the coast, every story beginning with One time…When the teapot is empty, Pia says, ‘I should go,’ thinking that help might be needed in the second kitchen, but the widow says, ‘Have one more cup, just let me put the kettle on.’ The old woman eases herself up slowly, her back hunched as she heads to her kitchen. A minute later she’s back with an empty saucepan in her hand. She sets it in the middle of the kitchen table on top of the tea cozy, smiles, and says, ‘There.’
One night, after the hotel bar had closed, Pia asked the barman what was wrong with the widow. He paused, the clean wine glass in his hand midway to the hanging rack, and said, ‘She’s just a bit lost, it happens when you get old.’
Pia was not around when her father became ill. He was a private man and kept his deteriorating health to himself. He would send her short missives that said he was busy, and asked how things were at work, did she need any money. He sent a letter every month or so and it would arrive with its foreign stamp in whatever city she was working in, and during all that time she imagined him in a sort of stasis—with a bureaucrat’s busyness, orbiting concerns that had little to do with her. His last letter mentioned a course of treatment and gave a starting date, but by the time the letter was delivered he was dead.
Although the widow seems more and more confused as each week passes, she can still surprise Pia—remembering what Pia is reading, asking if she has thoughts about, say, the reign of Augustus. The last time Pia stopped by, she said, ‘Every time you visit you’re in the same clothes’—noticing Pia’s quirks and particularities, aware of how little Pia has brought with her.
The widow’s son is in his fifties. Pia spots him, gently dishevelled and glassy-eyed, in the bar some nights after her shift. He’s warm and easygoing, has been on the boats since he was a kid. He once admitted to her that his parents, both well educated, had always wanted something else for him. Pia had told him about the fox she’d seen, and he was the one person who believed her. He’d shrugged and said ‘this island’s strange’—an observation that struck Pia as odd because she knew he’d never lived elsewhere.
The afternoon light outside the widow’s kitchen has changed. The clouds are stretched into streaks, the horizon tinged with a softer blue. Pia smiles at the widow, sitting opposite her at the kitchen table, thinking that for her son it must seem as if his mother is standing on the stern of a boat that’s drifting slowly away. Pia herself feels the same: how often she catches herself in a dream, as if the widow’s kitchen, the window to the road, the village and the island and the mainland beyond, are evanescent, flickering.
The widow begins to say something, then stops. She taps her lips with the tips of her fingers in a gesture that’s something between a blown kiss and a sign for hunger. She inspects her empty teacup, tilting her head slightly so as to rely more on her good right eye than the milky left. ‘It was Livia who was really interesting, though.’ The widow sighs as she says this, and smiles at Pia, and Pia recalls the references in her book on Roman history to the woman who was Augustus’s wife. ‘My son doesn’t read at all,’ the widow adds. She glances over her shoulder to the hallway that leads to the back room and all of her books. ‘Is he back yet?’
‘Where did he go?’ Pia asks.
‘To get the body bags from the town hall.’
Behind the widow, in the alcove that leads to the book room, a white cat appears. He sits, licks a paw, and pads across the carpet to settle behind a beige armchair. The widow slowly stands up again, and Pia leans forward, ready to steady her if she should start to fall.
PIA’S MOTHER DISAPPEARED TWICE. First, when Pia was twelve, at the fountain in the city plaza; and then again much later, when Pia had almost forgotten such a thing was possible. Pia was in her mid-thirties then, and working at a hotel in a large city, and happy enough, though she felt the role of entremetier was beneath her. Every night her hands smelled of raw lamb or beef, and each workday was the same as the one before. Pia’s mother had taken up a position with a national news agency—working, at last, in her own language and thinking that in ten years she might retire. But her country was politically volatile, and becoming unstable.
