Peace Feelers

NIGHT THOUGHTS

Each night before I go to sleep I put on my thickest sweater, my climbing boots and snow goggles, because I don’t know where I am going – maybe to climb Mount Everest from the Chinese side.

My wife wears a red polka-dot bikini and carries a parasol because she believes in a different kind of trip, wanting the creamy edges of the Pacific breakers to make the round tour of her beautiful salty body.

iii

Once I bought her some climbing clothes and persuaded her to wear them. We both sweltered together under the noonday sun. A restless night. Next morning she said to me as tactfully as possible: ‘what did I tell you?’ I have to admit she is nearly always right.

Sometimes I take off my crampons, lay my ice-axe neatly by the side of my bed, take off my woolly mittens, wipe the sun-cream off my cheeks with a face-cloth, take off my windbreaker and heavy sweater, take off my cord trousers and long underpants, take off my check shirt and string vest, say hello to my St. Christopher medal and slip it under the bed. My wife is very nice about it and says that ritual is an important element in love-making.

I am lonely among these snows. I am sick of the Chinese side. In my sleep I am apolitical. I am lonely with nothing to love but my ice-axe. I am lonely with my sense of humour. The wind roars round the North Col like an express train permanently derailing itself, so loud that even if I tried shouting she wouldn’t hear me on her South Sea island. Half way across the world the wind is drowned in the roar of the Pacific breakers and when I wake for a moment, I am amazed to see that she is sleeping peacefully and smiling.

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PASSAVIA

‘Passavia’ means roughly ‘keep moving’, so

this dog got called Passavia by

the foreign painters who lived in Anticole

because most of them didn’t know any Italian

and the locals never said anything to it but:

‘passa via passa via passa via’.

Like name like nature, always

on the move at

4 or 5 miles an hour

up across down

flights of steps round

and back again past

where they kept the donkeys locked up for the night –

useful animals, donkeys.

Licked up dirty puddle water and the foreigners

took to the animal feeding it on

prime chop-steak, but

it didn’t get any ideas above its station, or

if the bitches were anything to go by,

didn’t have much of a station, never

humped any of them, maybe hadn’t been

taught about humping; or hunting –

not its line either – it would follow the hunters

at a safe distance sometimes

but didn’t seem interested in actually catching anything; it

must have lacked motivation; it was

a weird dog. It couldn’t bark.

No station so

kept moving,

no motivation so

kept moving, an

irrational animal

kept moving by

‘passa via’ said

more or less in its direction

or by a boot

in its direction

kept moving.

(Very rarely across the open sunlit piazza of the village

but alongside the cold shoulders of houses,

an elongated trotting shadow.)

And it was a blurred animal,

black and white spotted, only

more blurred as it got

older or moved faster, and pink

round the mouth, mild pink eyes and patches

of pink where the skin had worn out

and – between the toes – red; and it

gravitated towards the foreigners,

followed them when they got off the bus –

had that much of an instinct

for its own kind – would take

what they gave it without

saying anything, but could sit for hours

being an artist’s model –

only time it seemed to sit anywhere,

because Passavia

was its name

now travelling the

other side of nowhere since

one fine day

when they hadn’t anything to do,

the villagers

stoned it to death

and went and told Ida

who told me this story

four years later.

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