Episode 39 | Everything harmed her

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I tried preparing a rather simple, fresh lunch, again thinking on my grandfather's sensible recipes, and trying to add a touch of elegance and daring with Armand's spices.

It mustn't have been that bad, for Catherine ate as much as she could. She had an amazing appetite for a such a petite girl -- and I wondered if she had caught a worm that she was also feeding in her stomach, haha. At least some kind of food poisoning she must have had, because despite having thanked me and discreetly praised my lunch, she was again to vomit in the afternoon.

I thought we were having another remarkable conversation, for like Armand and me she had also been an habitué at the Cinématèque Française. We shared impressions about many movies, but after a while she stopped listening to me. She seemed to be shivering, and I started getting really worried, remembering my own illness, that had interrupted my self-imposed exile in the old factory and made ​​me face the world again... And hadn't I just then found a letter from Armand in the mail... And because I had to go to the hospital was I now living on the Île du Blanchomme... Maybe I should thank the rats and rusty cans for my present good fortune? Had they led me to the lovely young woman before me? A sickness was a blessing in disguise?, I wondered.

I had had a good intuition the other night when I thought Catherine had been suffering from sunstroke. But my intuitions were to no avail when she began to actually feel ill.

During lunch I noticed how she had turned red from all those hours under the sun, and I realized that she was getting sick, though trying to keep her pretentious -- or true? -- friendly smile, listening with polite interest while I was discoursing passionately about... Art, of course.

"Are you feeling ill?" I finally asked, when I thought she might fall from the chair at any moment, from shivering so much. How could she have been cold under that tropical sun?

That question was the sign for her to get up and run to the bathroom... that she did not reach in time, puking on the veranda in front of Armand's room. She then moved on to the toilet, where again I heard her vomit.

I did not wish to interrupt Carlo's narrative, but I had been guessing something for some time now, and it was making ​​me suffer.

"Was my mother bulimic, Carlo?" This was a night of revelations for me, old lies were falling down defeated, and perhaps Catherine's diet, that had kept her with a flawless body at fifty eight years old, had a different, more sinister nature.

"Oh no!" Carlo gave the shortest of laughs, since laughing was not very appropriate at that stage in the story. "That's a disturb no one talked about, back then... Your mother has always had a very delicate constitution. She was thoroughly urban, and life in that tropical part of the world... the food, the water, the sun, the temperature, the insects, the boats, the tides, the moon... and even I..." Carlo smiled sadly. "Everything harmed her health."

"I was monitoring her from outside the room, listening to her crying after she had stopped vomiting..." my worries dismissed, we drifted back to the Île du Blanchomme, "And since after some time she hadn't come out of the bathroom, and everything was so quiet, I decided to check how she was..."

I found her lying unconscious on the bathroom floor, next to the toilet. She was soaked in her vomit, and when I tried to clean it from her, I noticed how she shivered at the touch of a cloth dipped in cold water -- and if I had been still thinking of food poisoning, from that moment on I was convinced of a heatstroke.

But I had never taken care of anyone sick before. My grandfather had never been sick, apart from an occasional flu -- he used to say himself that he would die healthy. As for Armand, I had accompanied him once to a private clinic of a friend of his father, some famous doctor, where he was treated for an inflammation in the lungs.

I was nearly desperate as I tried to recall what cares I had received at the hospital in Paris, and that was when I remembered a first aids book and a box of medicines that Armand had shown me in his office. It was the one room in the house that I rarely entered, since the only thing in there for me was the radio, that I had been unable to use. I tried to turn it on again, randomly pressing this and that button, but I don't know if it had to warm up or what, and again I gave up. I resented being so inapt at technological stuff. But even if it had worked, what then? I would be screaming for help, hoping someone would send an helicopter to the Île? Grow up, Carlo, -- I remember telling to myself -- this is the time. Someone depends on you.

And only then, glancing around the room in dismay, did I realize that Catherine had been in the office already, leaving her notebooks, pens and two novels on my friend's desk. It seemed like another outrageous invasion to me -- but who cared, when there was an emergency going on? At that moment, I was more mad at myself than I could ever be at the sick girl.

There was a manual on tropical diseases provided by the Colonial government, dating from Herr Weissmann's time, but I figured that orientations on how to treat heatstroke should not have changed with the decades....

Removing Catherine from the bathroom was my first problem -- when I tried to lift her, she cried in pain. I felt like I was violating her when I nevertheless lifted her in my arms and carried her to bed, despite her painful groans. I felt genuine tenderness with her in my arms, like I had never felt before. Despite her smelling to vomit and the sweat on her skin, I wanted to keep on holding her in my arms. But it was the wrong moment for romantic impulses, I knew -- I had to read the manual, my only adviser in that situation.

Her skin was almost purple and she was sweating profusely -- which was a good sign according to the manual, because it meant her sweating had not been affected -- but what worried me were the chills that made her squirm, and her state of consciousness, semi-consciousness or unconsciousness, that I could not quite determine. According to the manual, if the person presented an altered state of consciousness, she should be taken urgently to the hospital... that lied nine hours away at least, had the boat been there.

I tried not to panic.

One of the recommendations was placing the affected person in a cold bath -- but I had just brought her from the bathroom, and I thought it would be cruel to move her again. I then adopted the second best recommended method, which was to put cool, wet rags on her skin, at the back of her neck, on her groin, and her armpits. And I was supposed to mist and fan her to promote evaporative cooling.

 For hours, I moved between the bathroom sink and Armand's bed, drenching the floor along the way and also the mattress, while trying to cool Catherine's body. She struggled, and no matter how gently I placed a wet cloth on her skin, it seemed to cause her an unbearable pain and shock. I also gave her water to sip slowly, to counteract dehydration. And I started watching for the girl in her delirious state.

One of the recommended procedures, however, troubled me -- it was removing the clothes of the person with heatstroke, to help in the cooling process. I decided I would not do that, because no matter how much panic I felt in that situation, another bestial part of me still watched Catherine's exposed breasts. My criminal gaze kept falling repeatedly over the bikini tan lines on her burnt skin... Although there was nothing sensual about the situation, yet one continuous tingle seemed to live in my groin.

But night was falling, and Catherine still struggled in her delirious state, not showing much improvement in her condition. It seemed to me she was somehow trying to get rid of the clothes herself... So I decided to help her. Promising myself to behave like a monk, I undressed her. She had taken her bikini off before having lunch, and I found her completely naked under her fancy and now stained dress...

How utterly beautiful she were, I thought. Yet, it crossed my mind how helplessly weakened a sick person is, totally dependent and not able to defend oneself, and how in this situation someone with bad intentions might take advantage and abuse... Suddenly, I felt that, at that exact moment, the sick and helpless people around the world were being abused, so many of them at that very moment... at this very moment, for it is happening now, do you realize it, Laurent? All around the world indeed... as I watched Catherine's lovely naked body, bare before my eyes for the first time. At the same time that I was filled with compassion for the sick, I felt those demanding sensations in my groin...

"What is it Laurent? Why are you crying?" Carlo interrupted the story.

Those were tears I could not restrain nor explain, and I had been glad that my father was so engrossed in his story, imagining that he would not notice.

"It's nothing... It's just that... thinking about my mom so sick and in pain, and seeing you so lost and unprepared..." And while that actually sensitized me, there was something worse... a thought had entered my mind crawling from my darkest fears... it invaded me... the awful truth that my parents had hidden from me... "You were both so young..." I could see Carlo... taking advantage of Catherine, and I had been born... from an abuse! That would explain so many things in my life... my karma.

"That was just a training..." Carlo smiled tenderly, and in an instant his sincere sweetness liberated me from my fears, "...for the times when you got sick, my son. Caring for an adult is demanding and complicated, but caring for a sick baby, a baby crying in pain..." Carlo was sad again. "... it's heartbreaking!" He reached across the table and gently squeezed my hand. "Please do not cry, Laurent, or I'll cry too!"

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Episode 11 | Her elegant retirement

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 During Spring and Summer in the Apennines, I woke up to the morning melody gradually subduing the night noises. As the mist softly lifted, owls, crickets and toads would give way to hungry birds and the busy bees, while at dawn, the distant bark of dogs, and bleating sheep being herded to greener pastures, entered my room in echoes arriving from the facing cliffs. Year-round, on the first floor of the house, when Tarso's snoring turned into heavy footsteps on the wooden boards, I knew it was time to get out of bed.

The massive silence on the Île du Blanchomme startled me. It was as if the night sounds shut down and nothing replaced them in the hour preceding sunrise. Oppressive, the air weighed on my chest like it had condensed into a marble block. Along with the darkness, it reminded me of the only time I had been deep inside a cave, a frightened boy, worried that I would never find the way out from a site I should never have entered in the first place.

For a minute or so, I did not know where I was. First, I recalled the cargo ship, in which womb I had spent so many weeks. But something was missing. There was no reverberation of waves constantly crashing against the hull. Then I recalled having slept on the table at the port, and my sleepless night on the sailboat, with Armand resting his head on my shoulder -- I finally stood up and felt my way along the walls. As I stumbled out of the cave, recognizing Herr Weissmann's house veranda immersed in the night, the compass rose flashed into my mind. My heart banging in my chest, I headed South, to the stair, avoiding my friend's room.

I almost tripped and fell on the way down. Once under the house, a bulky square of blackness parting me from the starry sky, I did not know where to go, nor what to do. The tropical landscape enclosed me in its strangeness. Paralyzed, I just blinked, blinked repeatedly -- and at each blink, the light changed just imperceptibly, mounting, until the horizon was a thin silvery line foretelling the coming day. Just then, my ears met the faint murmur of caressed shores, and suddenly I thought the plants growing was audible, too.  But what plants were those, that I could not name?

Feeling the need to take refuge in something familiar, I decided to meditate. At the beach where the two lounge chairs lay, I sat on the sand facing the sunrise -- setting a morning routine that I was to follow for the biggest part of my stay on the Île.

As if blown by the sun itself, a mild breeze travelling from the horizon increased my awareness as I silently sat there, following my breath. My nostrils awakened, touched by the salty smell coming both from the ocean and myself, I realized even my body no longer took to goats -- but to fish. At least, my first tropical meditation felt the more pleasurable when I recalled how sorely I had gasped, during the coldest days spent at the old abandoned factory in Paris, when an incipient pneumonia had clenched my throat.

Reassured, having found refuge in the island within like recommended by the Buddha, when around me the whole island was foreign, I ended the session praying for the well being of all creatures, and that they may be free from suffering -- Armand especially.

*****

I had been deeply touched by my ex-roommate's tears, the previous evening.

I don't remember falling asleep. But a few minutes later, his crying, that rapidly turned into painful sobs, woke me up. As I recall it, I realize how so less noble than my friend I always was. In my hesitation, I happened to fail him -- he who had always helped me.

I still ask myself -- Why didn't I go to him, who was just a few steps away?

Half-opening my eyes, I saw he was still sitting on the sofa in front of my bed. Bent, his elbows pressing his knees, Armand cried hiding his face with both hands. More than troubled, he seemed deeply ashamed. Probably of his own emotions, was my quick guess. 

I could never, ever have imagined that I was the actual reason for his suffering. I thought it was his mother's eminent death that troubled and lacerated him. She was on her deathbed, while he was on the other side of the world, in my company enjoying the sunset and the moon rise, sun bathing and telling me fantastic stories and laughing along. Instead of relishing our reunion, could he be feeling guilty?

I just sensed it must be something very private, by the way he buried his face in his fingers. So I pretended to be sleeping until he left the room, carrying the gas lamp like it was heavier than his heart, shoulders bent. Audibly crying, I observed his moves as the flickering light delineated the openings at the bottom of the floor, on the wall common to our rooms -- and in a minute or two, I fell asleep again.

Tiring myself swimming in the cold sea against the currents, that in the morning seemed stronger, hadn't brought any relief. My arms left sore, I was still feeling guilty.

It was only partially true that I hadn't wanted to invade Armand's privacy the previous evening. True, I had never seen him crying like that in all those years we had been inseparable, sharing not only the same room but, apart from our classes, almost the same daily routine. Feeling I wasn't prepared to deal with his feelings, nor even sure if I should be there participating by witnessing it, I had kept the parody of the heavy sleeper that I truly was. Maybe he had been crying for many nights in a row, and I had arrived to intrude in his privacy. Armand's unexpected tears had surprised me, and I was not sure how to interact with them. Somehow, he must have felt more miserable than happy -- my presence not quite compensating for his mother's eminent passing. Just like my arrival was not detaining his departure for Europe, in a few days.

Hey mate, what's the problem?, I now pictured myself saying. Had I stretched my arm, I would have touched Armand's knees without leaving my bed. But there was something I could not quite cope with. It was not just the fact that, in his red tennis shorts, my friend was undressed like I had never seen him before. His emotional nudity was the more shocking and puzzling to me. That's why, though in the morning I could imagine myself walking over to him and patting him on the shoulder, I hadn't done it. Had I been justifiably too tired and sleepy to force myself out of bed? Or had I been just lazy, or ill-at-ease, that was the shameful truth that was suddenly troubling me.

Though famished, I decided to stay at the beach, laying on the sand, sunbathing, waiting for Armand's call for breakfast. No matter how unfair it was to leave the preparations all to him, I could still compensate by washing the dishes -- those from the previous lunch, too.

With the shade of a single palm trunk covering my face, I closed my eyes, trying to get rid of the haunting image of my friend's body shaken by sobs. His dark feelings seemed to contrast with his beautiful suntan, and the golden ponytail lost its emblematic quality of freedom and revolt, as it pathetically bounced with his sobs, too. Once or twice, he had even let out a longer, loud lament, and I wondered what could be so painful as to make him lose his customary composure.

*****

 I knew his family was going through a very difficult period.

During our final years at the École, Armand's mother, the noble Madame Marie Heléne Purlux Drurien et de Montbelle, found out that her husband, the preeminent Monsieur de Montbelle, had skillfully hidden a second life. He had had a lover for almost the length of their marriage, and with this other woman, he had a daughter, who was only 3 years younger than Armand.


Confronted, Monsieur had demanded to divorce Madame, who had denied it, then flipped, and afterwards grown increasingly ill. And now she was about to retreat -- forever.

I had dozed, and startled when I heard Armand's steps calmly descending the stair. As he approached, smiling, I noticed his glance falling on my worn underwear. I checked if all my parts were inside the loose cloth, though my hirsute, thick pubic hair would not submit. The white was less transparent when dry, and despite the outrageously outlined volume, I was decent enough for a deserted island. Just then did I blush, realizing Armand's reason to be eyeing me -- wondering if I was really going to refuse the fine trunks he had given me. Leaving the room in the dark, I had thoroughly forgotten to change into them, that morning.

Rehearsing my excuses, I decided to jump, instead, into the heart of the matter. "How is your mother, Armand?" I asked, feeling a bit remorseful, though, since my question seemed to arrive too late.

I knew how hard it was for my friend to talk about his own feelings. I could understand it in relation to having a father that had thorough and consistently lied to the family all his life. A life of deceit and pretending, of daily falsehood and deception. How could it have impacted the De Montbelle household, and what kind of behavior could have Armand learned from his father, even if subconsciously, when the man had been lying to him all the time? I mean, maybe Mounsieur de Montbelle wasn't faking affection for his son like he was for his wife, but how to measure what was sincere and what was staged under the perspective of his lifelong deception? This in a way explained, to me, why my friend had always been reticent in the expression of his own feelings and emotions, so diplomatic and tactful. And it was my role in our friendship to be uncomfortably direct and bring out his sincerity, though at the expense of my own diffidence.

"How are you feeling about it?" I asked, jumping the Good Mornings, when he joined me at the beach. Sunbathing had been a pretext, since I was actually ashamed of going back into the house. I should but could not apologize to Armand for my callousness, without revealing the fact that I had actually seen him crying.


"Thank you for asking, Carlo." Armand sat by my side on the sand, facing the direction of a sunrise long past, while I remained laying down, looking into a sky of the utmost blue, perfectly devoid of clouds. He seemed relieved at my question, that  would finally give him the opportunity to talk. Listening to him, I decided to consider it as my belated apologies for not having inquired about his mother the previous evening.

"I'm not happy about her death, of course, but I cannot be so sad either." He paused. Having scooped a fistful of sand, he slowly tilted the palm of his hand and watched the fine grains fall in a gentle cascading. Just when he started doing the same with a second fistful, did he resume talking. "She wrote me a rather moving letter, while I was in Rishikesh, in India. She said something like 'I have always been something in relation to someone. First, I was a daughter, then a wife, and finally mother. I am an orphan now, and your father practically doesn't live here any longer. I'm still your mother, and that seems to be the sole thing left for me to be. But since you've gone to Asia, I've turned into a mother that writes or reads letters about her son, who is experimenting a different existence in faraway lands... A mother at distance, that's what I have ultimately become, which is not much. Sometimes I have to think... Do I still know who my son is? What he is doing? Who his companions are? What are his interests? Now, my husband wants to divorce me for some plain actress. I'd rather die and become nothing... than become a divorcée!'" Armand paused, as if mentally folding his mother's letter and putting it back in the envelope, before adding, "Though I had been meditating twelve hours a day, and trying not to judge was central to the process of detaching myself from my afflictions, my mother's words had still sounded a bit like a melodramatic, cheap blackmail. They nevertheless afflicted me, and made me feel guilty when I read it. She was subtly accusing me of having abandoned her, and I had no defense to present. When the silent retreat  was over, I phoned my mother in France. I tried to reason her into becoming many new things, according to her eccentric logic. But she dismissed me, saying she was 'too old to start again'. So now it is going to happen as she wishes." Armand seemed quite serene about his mother's tragic decision, able to observe her parting from life just like he watched the grains of sand slip through his fingers . "She never refers to death. She calls it her 'elegant retirement'."

"C'est terrible, Armand!" Honestly moved, I watched myself pondering whether it was appropriate or not to touch Armand's arm, maybe squeeze it, as a sign of empathy. But I could not bring myself to do it, like formerly I surely would. My lack of spontaneity -- or was it sincerity? -- and a corresponding guilt, made me blush, and to hide my confusion I asked, "What about you father?"

Armand stopped scooping the sand. He was silent for a while, intently shaking his hand to clean them. I waited, in the known that he had never been in good terms with his father. But now things seemed to have grown even more unpleasant. Talking about his mother, Armand had fixed his gaze on the distant horizon, but keeping his face turned towards me, so that I had the pleasure of listening to his smooth voice and seeing his beautiful profile, too. To talk about Monsieur de Montbelle, he almost turned away from me, pretending to scrutinize the floor.

"At the same time that my mother started spending more time in bed, getting worse and worse, he started spending more and more time with his other family." He said something I did not hear, and just when I stood up on my elbows did Armand turn towards me again, changing to a nasal tone to quote his father's threats.  "'I'm not going to feel miserable, nor be held hostage of your mother's blackmail', my father declared, when I came to pay my last visit to them, just before leaving on my one year trip." Armand shrugged. "Surely, he pays her the best nurses and buys the latest in terms of drugs, and sedatives. But I sense he wants her to die, too. That is the final thing they agree on. Their love has long died... if it ever existed." Armand paused, stretching the arm to catch a tiny broken shell, that he observed with surprising concentration, before adding, "And when my mother, finally, could no longer leave her bed, he wouldn't leave his lover's home anymore. They never divorced, though. My mother calls this legal impediment her 'last victory'. But they are irreversibly separated, and my mother's death will finally and gracefully untie this knot." With a flick, he sent the broken shell flying back into the ocean, where it would grind until it became sand.

While Armand, updating me on his family matters, distracted himself with sand and shells, I had observed him closely. He did not shed a tear. His voice was sweet and serene, as usual. I was confused, and disappointed. I had heard him sobbing, the previous evening! But despite my sincere offer of listening to him, he was again hiding his feelings.

Armand shook his ponytail -- and there was something so astonishingly new to me in that movement, in the simple fact that he had grown his hair that long, that in a flash I understood it all. He had written his letter to me many months ago. Under different, more joyous circumstances. His invitation must have been sincere then. It was solely my fault that it had sat in my Parisian post box for so long. And even if it was not my fault that the cargo ship had been delayed, and that Armand’s mother had entered the terminal phase of her illness, I knew I had to liberate my friend from his social strait jacket, that had compelled him to still invite me to join him, when his urge was to depart.    

"Fratello mio, I don't want to hold you here." I was being sincere, and my voice trembled with emotion. "Please go whenever you need to go, to be by your mother. I'll leave when you leave, I'll manage to find another place..." Though, if you gave me a map I could not point where on the planet the Île du Blanchomme was, so lost was I. And afraid – I was afraid of that new step I had taken in life, that led me to foreign lands. But recalling Paris, a sense of courage invaded me. And maybe like Gauguin, hopefully I would find my Art in the tropics.

Armand cut me short, though very delicately. "Please, Carlo!" He turned his body to face me, and his expression was more somber and serious than it had been when he spoke about his parents. "Please, understand this...” He lay his hand lightly on my thigh, and it was trembling. “I am leaving. No sooner, though, than the day when there is a boat for the continent, which is within a week. And you are staying. This is your house as much as it is mine, and I need you here to keep it lively and cozy until my return. In a week you'll be all on your own,” Armand smiled, since he knew me so well, “and I know you gonna love it. So I'm not troubled with leaving you behind on these tropical shores.” He was absent minded patting my thigh, and it felt like a shy caress. “As for now, I wish we would...  be together..." He gulped, slowing retreating his hand from my thigh, with one last caress, "Be really together... really." Finally, like I had been expecting, there was deep emotion in my friend’s voice.

No need to repeat that 'really', I thought, since I wanted the same thing.

But I was wrong, and I hadn't really understood all implications in Armand's invitation.

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