The Last Supper Read Free Page A

pals Roberto and Carla,Peter banging on all the while about their casa di campagna , Mary unfailingly repeating her unatmospheric observation that the Italians don’t consume nearly as much alcohol as the English. Because it’s Contatti! , no one tells them to shut up. E vero , says Carla solemnly, beviano molto poco . Yet there is something soothing, something almost instructive in their tedium, for Contatti! startlingly omits to provide translations for the majority of things I say on a daily basis. I have come to rely on harsh imperatives and interrogatives in verbal expression, though I’m sure this didn’t use to be the case. Such grammatical refinements occur much later on in the pages of Contatti! , where in all probability I will never find my way. (It is an alleviating prospect, that of being confined to simple statements, straightforward desires and polite verbal forms.)
    The ferry hums in its sphere of grey cloud and water. It is so large that it has encompassed the sensation of travel itself: sealed in and air-conditioned as we are, we appear to be virtually motionless. There is no tipping or rocking, no groaning of timbers, no wind or sea spray on our faces, no work that is necessary to advance us to our destination. There is nothing to do but wait, for one thing to become another. The great grey nothingness inches past the windows. I have the strange feeling that the other passengers are familiar to me. The man with combed-back hair and plaid shirt sitting reading The Times , the woman in the Barbour jacket with the face of a withered Memling damsel, the hefty Rhinemaiden doing Sudoku puzzles, who purses her powerful mouth round her pen and scans the air with narrowed eyes – surely I have met them somewhere before. Again and again I look at a face or a hairstyle or even an article of clothing and feel a sense of recognition that is almost like a touching of nerves in distant parts of the body. But instead of gaining substance the feeling recedes and grows indistinct. The memory does not come, just as the memory of certain dreams that on waking seemed so concrete implacably make their way into oblivion, like a train pulling out of a station and slowly vanishing down the tracks.
    All the same, it would not surprise me if one of these people came and spoke to me of our shared past, however distant and tangential. In Contatti! , Roberto tells the waiter that he has known the Robinsons for many years. Ci conosciamo da molti anni . Peter Robinson adds that they are hoping to purchase a casa di campagna . There is a small circular table fixed to the floor in front of my chair and I put my head on it and sleep for a while. It is a cluttered, grey-lighted sleep suffused with the hum of the ferry and with the same feeling of familiarity, which, now that my eyes are closed and it has nothing to fix on, washes over me in unstructured waves until my knowledge of where I am and what I am doing has been broken up and mingled with things I have thought or dreamed or imagined, mingled and mingled into a grey expanse like the sea, with just a few Italian verbs floating on the surface. When I sit up again the northern coast of France is lying in a rocky beige-coloured crust along the horizon. A piercing female voice begins to issue from the loudspeaker warning us of the imminent closure of the canteen. These tidings do not concern us: we are finished with this boat. We strain for release from its numb enchantment. The children are hurling their felt-tip pens back into their rucksacks and urging us into our coats. We go out on deck as the cliffs of Dieppe bear down on us and the wind whirls in a crazed cyclone on the ferry’s snub front, lifting our hair into maniac shapes, tugging at our clothes. The melancholy Dieppe sky is deep grey, its sand-coloured rocks friable-seeming and transitory. It looks like a place that would forget itself if it could. After a while we go back inside and file along towards the back of the boat,