The Passion by Jeanette Winterson
I left her and stepped into the wide hall, coming face to face with a full-sized scaly beast with a horn protruding from its head. I gave a little cry, but it was stuffed. In front of me was a wooden staircase that bent round half-way up and disappeared into the middle of the house. I determined to start at the top and make my way down. I expected to find nothing, but unless I was able to describe each room to Villanelle, she would force me here again. I was certain of that.
The first door I opened had nothing in it but a harpsichord.
The second had fifteen stained-glass windows.
The third had no windows and on the floor, side by side, were two coffins, their lids open, white silk inside.
The fourth room was shelved from floor to ceiling and those shelves were filled with books two deep. There was a ladder.
In the fifth room a light burned and covering the whole of one wall was a map of the world. A map with whales in the seas and terrible monsters chewing the land. There were roads marked that seemed to disappear into the earth and at other times to stop abruptly at the sea’s edge. In each corner sat a cormorant, a fish struggling in its beak.
The sixth room was a sewing room, a tapestry some three-quarters done lay in its frame. The picture was of a young woman cross-legged in front of a pack of cards. It was Villanelle.
The seventh room was a study; the desk was covered in journals covered in a tiny spidery hand. Writing I could not read.
The eighth room had only a billiard table and a little door leading off at one side. I was drawn to this door and, opening it, found it to be a vast walk-in closet racked with dresses of every kind, smelling of musk and incense. A woman’s room. Here, I felt no fear. I wanted to bury my face in the clothes and lie on the floor with the smell about me. I thought of Villanelle and her hair across my face and wondered if that was how she had felt with this sweet-smelling, seductive woman. Around the sides of the room were ebony boxes, monogrammed. I opened one and found it packed with little glass phials. Inside were the aromas of pleasure and danger. Each phial contained at most five drops and so I judged them to be essences of great value and potency. Hardly thinking, I put one in my pocket and turned to leave. As I did so, a noise stopped me. A noise not like the sound of mice or beetles. A regular steady noise, like a heartbeat. My own heart missed a beat and I began to fling back gown after gown, scattering shoes and underclothes in my haste. I sat on my heels and listened again. It was low down, concealed.
On my hands and knees I crawled under one of the clothes rails and found a silk shift wrapped round an indigo jar. The jar was throbbing. I did not dare to unstopper it. I did not dare to check this valuable, fabulous thing and I carried it, still in the shift, down the last two floors and out into the empty night.
Villanelle was hunched in the boat staring at the water. When she heard me she reached out her hand to steady me and without asking a question rowed us swiftly away and far out into the lagoon. When she stopped at last, her sweat shining pale under the moon, I handed her my bundle.
She gave a sigh and her hands trembled, then she bade me turn away.
I heard her uncork the jar and a sound like gas escaping. Then she began to make terrible swallowing and choking noises and only my fear kept me sitting at the other end of the boat, perhaps hearing her die.
There was quiet. She touched my back and when I turned round took my hand again and placed it on her breast.
Her heart was beating.
Not possible.
I tell you her heart was beating.
She asked me for the key and, placing both the key and the shift in the indigo jar, she tossed it into the water and smiled such a smile of radiance that had this all been folly, it would have been worth it. She asked me what I saw and I told her of each room and at each room she asked of another room and then I told her about the tapestry. Her face whitened.
‘But you say it was not finished?’
‘It was three-quarters finished.’
‘And it was me? You’re sure?’
Why was she so upset? Because if the tapestry had been finished and the woman had woven in her heart, she would have been a prisoner for ever.
‘I don’t understand any of this, Villanelle.’
‘Don’t think about it any more, I have my heart, you have your miracle. Now we can enjoy ourselves,’ and she unravelled her hair and rowed me home in her red forest.
I slept badly, dreaming of the old woman’s words, ‘Beware of old enemies in new disguises,’ but in the morning when Villanelle’s mother woke me with eggs and coffee, the night gone and its nightmares seemed part of the same fantasy.
This is the city of madmen.
Her mother sat by my bed and chatted and urged me to ask Villanelle to marry me when she was free.
‘I had a dream last night,’ she said. ‘A dream of death. Ask her, Henri.’
When we were out together that afternoon I did ask her, but she shook her head.
‘I can’t give you my heart.’
‘I don’t have to have it.’
‘Perhaps not, but I need to give it. You’re my brother.’
When I told her mother what had happened, she stopped in her baking. ‘You’re too steady for her, she goes for madmen. I tell her to calm down but she never will. She wants it to be Pentecost every day.’
Then she muttered something about the terrible island and blamed herself, but I never question these Venetians when they mutter; it’s their own affair.
I began to think of leaving for France and though the thought of not seeing her each day froze my heart more cleanly than any zero winter, I remembered words of hers, words she had used when Patrick and she and I lay in a Russian hut drinking evil spirit . . .
There’s no sense in loving someone you can only wake up to by chance.
They say this city can absorb anyone. It does seem that every nationality is here in some part. There are dreamers and poets and landscape painters with dirty noses and wanderers like me who came here by chance and never left. They are all looking for something, travelling the world and the seven seas but looking for a reason to stay. I’m not looking, I’ve found what it is I want and I can’t have it. If I stayed, I would be staying not out of hope but out of fear. Fear of being alone, of being parted from a woman who simply by her presence makes the rest of my life seem shadows.
I say I’m in love with her. What does that mean?
It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius, she is ignorant of what she does.
I was a bad soldier because I cared too much about what happened next. I could never lose myself in the cannonfire, in the moment of combat and hate. My mind ran before me with pictures of dead fields and all that had taken years to make, lost in a day or so.
I stayed because I had nowhere else to go.
I don’t want to do that again.
Do all lovers feel helpless and valiant in the presence of the beloved? Helpless because the need to roll over like a pet dog is never far away. Valiant because you know you would slay a dragon with a pocket knife if you had to.
When I dream of a future in her arms no dark days appear, not even a head cold, and though I know it’s nonsense I really believe we would always be happy and that our children would change the world.
I sound like those soldiers who dream of home . . .
No. She’d vanish for days at a time and I’d weep. She’d forget we had any children and leave me to take care of them. She’d gamble our house away at the Casino, and if I took her to live in France she’d grow to hate me.
I know all this and it makes no difference.
She’d never be faithful.
She’d laugh in my face.
I will always be afraid of her body because of the power it has.
And in spite of these things when I think of leaving, my chest is full of stones.
My passion can be explained away. But this is sure: whatever she touches, she reveals.
I think about her body a lot; not possessing it but watching it twist in sleep. She is never still; whether it be in boats or running full tilt with an armful of cabbages. She’s not nervous, it’s unnatural for her to be still. When I told her how much I like to lie in a bright green field watching the bright blue sky she said, ‘You can do that when you’re dead, tell them to leave the top off your coffin.’
But she knows about the sky. I can see her from my window in her boat rowing very slowly looking up at the faultless blue for the first star.
She decided to teach me to row. Not just row. Venetian row. We set off at dawn in a red gondola that the police used. I didn’t bother to ask how she’d got it. She was so happy these days and often she took my hand and put it to her heart as though she were a patient given a second chance.
‘If you’re determined to be a goatherd after all, the least I can do is send you home with one real skill. You can make a boat in your quiet moments and sail down that river you talk about and think of me.’
‘You could come with me if you liked.’
‘I wouldn’t like. What would I do with a sackful of moles and not a gaming table in sight?’
I knew it but I hated hearing it.
I was not a natural rower and more than once I tipped the boat so badly that both of us fell in and Villanelle grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and screamed she was drowning. ‘You live on the water,’ I protested when she dragged me under, yelling at the top of her voice.
‘That’s right. I live on it, I don’t live in it.’
Amazingly, she couldn’t swim.
‘Boatmen don’t need to swim. No boatman would end up like this. We can’t go home till we’re dry, I’ll be made fun of.’
Not even her enthusiasm could help me get it right and at evening she snatched back the oars, her hair still damp, and told me we were going to the Casino instead.
‘Maybe that’s what you’re good at.’
I had never been to a Casino before and I was disappointed the way the brothel had disappointed me years earlier. Sinful places are always so much more sinful in the imagination. There’s no red plush as shockingly red as the red you dream up. No women with legs as long as you think they’ll be. And in the mind these places are always free.
‘There’s a whipping room upstairs,’ she said, ‘if you’re interested.’ No. I’d be bored. I knew about whipping. I’d heard it all from my friend the priest. Saints love to be whipped and I’ve seen pictures galore of their extatic scars and longing glances. Watching an ordinary person being whipped couldn’t have the same effect. Saintly flesh is soft and white and always hidden from the day. When the whip finds it out, that is the moment of pleasure, the moment when what was hidden is revealed.
I left her to it and when I’d seen what there was to see of cold marble and iced glasses and scarred baize, I retreated to a window seat and rested my mind on the shining canal below.
So the past had gone. I had escaped. Such things are possible.
I thought of my village and the bonfire we hold at the end of winter; doing away with the things we no longer need; celebrating the life to come. Eight soldier years had gone into the canal with the beard that didn’t suit me. Eight years of Bonaparte. I saw my reflection in the window; this was the face I had become. Beyond my reflection I saw Villanelle backed up against the wall with a man standing in front of her blocking her way. She was watching him evenly, but I could see by the lift of her shoulders that she was afraid.
He was very wide, a great black expanse like a matador’s cloak.
He stood with his feet planted apart, one arm leaning on the wall blocking her way, the other fixed in his pocket. She pushed him, swiftly and suddenly, and just as swiftly his hand flew from his pocket and slapped her. I heard the noise and, as I jumped up, she ducked under his arm and ran past me down the stairs. I could think of nothing but getting to her before he did and he was already in pursuit. I opened the window and jumped into the canal.
I came spluttering to the surface with a faceful of weed and swam to our boat, loosening the tie, so that when she leapt in like a cat, I was shouting at her to row and trying to scramble over the side. She ignored me and rowed and I was dragged behind like the tame dolphin a man on the Rialto keeps.
‘It’s him,’ she said, as I finally tumbled in a heap at her feet. ‘I thought he was still away, my spies are good.’
‘Your husband?’
She spat. ‘My greasy, cock-sucking husband, yes.’
I sat up. ‘He’s following us.’
‘I know a way; I’m a boatman’s daughter.’
I grew dizzy with the circles she rowed and the speed she rowed at. The muscles in her arms stood out threatening to break the skin and when we passed some light I saw the outcrop of her veins. She was breathing hard, her body was soon as wet as mine. We were heading down a stretch of water that got narrower and narrower and stopped absolutely in a blank white wall. At the last second, when I expected to hear our boat splinter like driftwood, Villanelle swung an impossible curve and pulled us up an inlet that led through a dripping tunnel.
‘Home soon, Henri, keep calm.’
It was the first time I had ever heard her use the word calm.
We pulled up against her water-gate but, as we prepared to fasten our boat, a silent prow slid from behind us and I was staring into the face of the cook.
The cook.
The flesh around his mouth moved into a suggestion of a smile. He was much heavier than when I had known him, with jowls that hung like dead moles and a plump case of skin that held his head to his shoulders. His eyes had receded and his eyebrows, always thick, now loomed at me like sentries. He folded his hands on the edge of the boat, hands with rings forced over the knuckles. Red hands.
‘Henri,’ he said. ‘My pleasure.’
Villanelle’s questioning look to me wrestled with her look of pure disgust fixed on him. He saw her conflict and touching her lightly so that she winced said, ‘You could say Henri was my good luck. Thanks to him and his little tricks I was drummed out of Boulogne and sent to Paris to mind the Stores. I’ve never been one to mind anything that didn’t have something in it for me. Aren’t you pleased, Henri, to meet an old friend and see him so prosperous?’
‘I don’t want anything to do with you,’ I said.
He smiled again and I saw his teeth this time. What was left of them. ‘But you do, you clearly want something to do with my wife. My wife,’ and he enunciated the words very slowly. Then his face took on an old expression, I knew it well. ‘I’m surprised to see you here, Henri. Shouldn’t you be with your regiment? This is not a time for holidaying, not even if you’re a favourite of Bonaparte’s.’
‘It’s none of your business.’
‘Indeed not, but you won’t mind me mentioning you to a few of my friends, will you?’
He turned to Villanelle. ‘I have other friends who’ll be interested to know what’s happened to you. Friends who paid a lot of money to get to know you. It will be easier if you come with me now.’
She spat in his face.
What happened next is still not clear to me even though I have had years to think about it. Calm years with no distraction. I remember he leaned forward when she spat and tried to kiss her. I remember his mouth opening and coming towards her, his hands loosed from the boat side, his body bent. His hand scraped her breast. His mouth. His mouth is the clearest image I have. A pale pink mouth, a cavern of flesh and then his tongue, just visible like a worm from its hole. She pushed him and he lost balance between the two boats and fell on to me, nearly crushing me. He put his hands to my throat and I heard Villanelle cry out and throw her knife towards me, within reach. A Venetian knife, thin and cruel.
‘Soft side, Henri, like sea urchins.’
I had the knife in my hand and I thrust it at
When we had him belly up and running blood I tore his shirt from the collar down and looked at his chest. Hairless and white, like the flesh of saints. Can saints and devils be so alike? His nipples were the same shade as his lips.
‘You said he had no heart, Villanelle, let’s see.’
She put her hand out, but I had already made a rip with my silver friend, such an eager blade. I cut a triangle in about the right place and scooped out the shape with my hand, like coring an apple.
He had a heart.
‘Do you want it, Villanelle?’
She shook her head and started to cry. I had never seen her cry, not through the zero winter, not at the death of our friend, not in the teeth of humiliation nor the telling of it. She was crying now and I took her in my arms dropping the heart between us and told her a story about a Princess whose tears turned to jewels.
‘I’ve dirtied your clothes,’ I said, seeing for the first time the smears of blood on her. ‘Look at my hands.’
She nodded and the blue and bloody thing lay between us.
‘We have to get these boats away, Henri.’
But in the struggle we had lost both of our oars and one of his. She took my head in her hands and weighed it, held me tight under the chin. ‘Sit still, you’ve done what you could, now let me do what I can.’
I sat with my head on my knees, my eyes fixed on the floor of the boat that swam with blood. My feet rested in blood.
The cook, face up, had his eyes fixed on God.
Our boats were moving. I saw his boat in front of me gliding ahead, mine tied to it the way children tie their boats on a pond.