Isaac Nowell 


Giulio 


to have found themselves not lost

in loss itself.

I hadn’t seen Giulio in ten years, but he hadn’t seen me in twenty. At least, I felt sure it was him passing security ahead of me at Heathrow Airport. I believe I would have recognised him anywhere. I expected him to look back as he collected his things from the tray, swung his jacket around his shoulders. I thought: now he must feel the weight of my eyes, now he will turn to me and smile, but he simply disappeared into the crowd. I sought him in the chaos of the departures lounge, but it was no good. I didn’t have long before my flight. I was on my way to meet a friend in Paris, a trip which, as it happened, determined the course of my career. That was ten years ago, and I was twenty-five years old.

~

I had last seen Giulio properly when we were teenagers. We both lived in N –, on a grey suburban street, identical to so many which had appeared on the peripheries of London following the Second World War. Giulio’s family were Sicilian immigrants. His father, younger brother, twin sisters, aunt and paternal grandparents all lived together in a house of the same dimensions and plan as ours, which seemed barely large enough for me and my parents. Their family brought life to the neighbourhood, subdued by memory of the war. As I grew older, I became aware that Giulio’s mother’s absence had been the subject of several rumours among the neighbours: a crime of passion, a near fatal jealousy and flight; the discovery of Jewish refugees; the ostracization of former fascists; even of mafia and incest. For some reason these rumours included a period of extended flight. I never thought to ask Giulio about his mother, and we never discussed her absence until one warm Saturday afternoon in September, when we were sat on the bridge over the weir. We often sat and watched the new supermarket being built, or placed bets on the number of beer bottles in the water. For some reason it occurred to me to say: ‘Giulio, why doesn’t your mother come to live with you?’

He finished counting and said: ‘27.’

There was a pause. I waited. He looked again at the water, then said: ‘Well, shall we climb on the scaffolding?’

And that was all the conversation we ever had on the topic. I suppose I must have been eleven or twelve, then. I remember his slender legs swinging back and forth above the water as he spoke.

~

Giulio had arrived in our town five years earlier, in 1962. He arrived the day before my sixth birthday. The arrival of the Aquilanti family was cause of much intrigue and suspicion among the neighbours. My mother had no such qualms, and invited the whole family to my sixth birthday party. As an only child, I think she was anxious for me to make friends. My father, who had fought and had been injured during the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943, looked askance at my mother’s indiscriminate choice of friends. I think they exchanged some heated words on the topic, but since my upbringing was generally accepted to be my mother’s business, and since my father declined to talk of his experiences, or his feelings more generally, he apparently yielded. I remember him saying: ‘At least they’re Sicilian. If they were from the north, it would be impossible.’ My father had a habit of talking of the possibility of things. Despite his bluster, and roughly biannual reassertions of his role as patriarch of the household, he found confrontation unbearable, and any sustained hostility on my mother’s part soon had him docile and eager to please as a Labrador. I sometimes wonder if this had been the case before he had gone to war, or whether the sight of people destroying one another had robbed him of any stomach for conflict. He seemed to want nothing from life but quietness and ease. In the event his prejudices came to nothing, and he and Luca, Giulio’s father, developed a friendship the closeness of which I believe he had never known. I remember my mother’s incredulous yet pleased expression when he returned home one summer afternoon, not long after my birthday party, and announced with a sly smile that we were going to Luca’s house for pasta that evening. I am not sure whether they ever spoke of their experiences in Sicily in 1943, but there seemed to be some special bond, silent or spoken, between them. Some days they would sit for hours together, at the table or before the television, until the light faded.

~

On 21 July 1969, we found ourselves at la festa della luna, Luca’s moon landing party. Luca had developed an intense interest in science fiction and space travel, and he was in a state of near ecstasy that evening. In contrast to Luca’s nervous excitement, Giulio’s aunt Isabela belligerently expressed her uninterest. His grandparents sat quietly in armchairs as the party accumulated around them, not noticing their presence. The room was adorned with Luca’s model spacecrafts which, Giulio told me, he sat assembling well into the night. From the ceiling hung paper stars, which the twins had fashioned under instruction from Vincenzo, Giulio’s younger brother. I think I’m right in saying that ‘Space Oddity’ played on repeat, the volume lowered intermittently as they waited for news from the television.

It soon became uncomfortably warm. The voices grew steadily louder, in competition and thickened by beer, and the declarations of man’s boundless power began. I heard my father’s voice mention Russia, and Luca shout something in Italian. I noticed the beads of sweat on Isabela’s moustache. Giulio said: ‘come on,’ and he led me into the kitchen. We stole a bottle of wine from the side and slipped out into the hall. Nobody seemed to notice our disappearance except Vittoria, one of Giulio’s twin sisters. She said: ‘Where you go?’ I remember the stern look in her eyes, the same eyes as Giulio, as she stood between us and the front door. She glanced at the bottle of wine. After a tense pause, Giulio gathered her up in his arms, laughing. He whispered something in her ear, tickled her, whispered something again. She giggled, then became serious. She nodded, looking into Giulio’s eyes, and ran back into the living room. A few moments later she returned with a second bottle of wine, which she handed to Giulio with a proud and conspiratorial smile, and we were allowed to leave.

It was good to be outside, and I was so happy, happy to be staying up late with Giulio. I said: ‘what did you say to Vittoria?’

‘‘In bocca al lupo,’ and I asked her to bring another bottle of wine. It’s an Italian saying, but we call aunt Isabela ‘il lupo,’ which means ‘the wolf.’ It’s our code for playing a trick on her. Vittoria and Isabela are enemies.’

We crossed the weir and began wandering along the banks of the canal, stepping in and out of the glow of the streetlights, the darkness of the trees. It crossed my mind that Giulio manipulated me with the same ease as he did Vittoria. He acted as if he were much older than me, though there was only a year between us. Perhaps because of this attitude, it seemed to me he really was much older. We sat on the banks of the canal, in the shadow of the trees. Giulio opened his wine and I followed his lead. I had never been allowed to drink before, but I knew Giulio was allowed wine with his meals. Hoping not to show my inexperience, I took the first, deep draught. The heavy fumes of the alcohol filled my sense and burnt my throat. My eyes watered and I sought unsuccessfully to stifle a cough. Giulio said: ‘let it breath.’ He waited another minute before swigging from his own bottle. I felt the effects almost immediately. My mind clouded, my thoughts became diffuse and difficult to distinguish. My words didn’t come, or came too late, or passed by. I heard my slurred speech and lay back, laughing. I closed my eyes, waiting for the world to still, and when I opened them, I noticed, for the first time that evening, the moon in the sky. It occurred to me that there might be human beings up there, indiscernibly small, moving across its surface. I said: ‘I wonder if they’re up there, now.’

I hadn’t paid much attention to the mounting excitement surrounding the Apollo 11 mission. The persistent stream of media coverage had had the adverse effect. Instead of it seeming something extraordinary, it seemed inevitable, like any other far off political event. Now, looking up at the moon through the branches of the trees, it seemed a part of my life also. Giulio said: ‘it’s only to beat the Russians.’ I didn’t know what he meant, but I knew that this new feeling of awe and pride I was experiencing was being derided, and I wanted to believe in it, to defend it.

I think I tried to say: ‘It doesn’t matter why, if it’s beautiful,’ but the words came out confused.

He said: ‘It’s just a rock everyone can see, that’s all.’

‘It’s still amazing to go so far away. Don’t you care at all? People cleverer than you care.’

‘I would care if it was done because it’s good, but it’s not done because it’s good.’

I still don’t know where he had found these ideas, but I think he spoke more out of a wish to shock than out of any philosophical or political conviction. It was past one in the morning, and we had drunk over half our wine. By now I was very drunk. My face was burning, my limbs felt heavy and my eyes slow. Then I said, I think as a joke: ‘Giulio, when we’re old, shall we get married?’

He said: ‘Okay,’ and rolled on top of me, and pressed his lips to mine.

The air left my lungs and I smelt the alcohol on his breath. He was slight, not much bigger than me, and I pushed him off without difficulty. He made no repeat attempt to kiss me and I gave no signal welcoming another. On reflection I suspect it had been the pressures of his self-conceived precocity that had led him to kiss me, rather than any real desire. He too was afraid, and relieved, I think, when his advances were rebuffed. I felt my heart beating in my head. He said nothing. We lay breathing heavily, side by side, a little closer than before. I sometimes wonder now what I would have done had he kissed me again, had he lifted my shirt, to reveal my flat chest, or even raised my skirt. I would, I suspect, ultimately have done anything Giulio wished. At the time, everything he wanted seemed good. Sometimes, this moment returns to me, as I lay awake at night. But he did not try to kiss me again. The stars shone on and there was a human being walking on the moon, but I had forgotten about the moon. I was happy to be with Giulio.

~

Two years later Giulio and his family moved away to London. We vowed to stay friends. I grieved his absence, but little by little we fell out of contact. I made new friends. I heard from my father that Luca remarried; that Giulio had become an apprentice shipbuilder. I studied and gained a scholarship to study modern languages at university, fell in and out of love. In Paris, just after I thought I had seen Giulio at the airport, a friend offered me a job working as a foreign correspondent for the BBC. It was my first winter after graduating from university and I felt I was closing a door I would be unable to reopen. I hesitated but accepted. I was in no way qualified for the role, other than being able to speak French, but for one reason and another they needed someone at short notice, and I was there. I learnt as I worked, and I believe I learnt quickly. In the following years I spent, and continue to spend, my time between Paris and London, with occasional trips to Rome. I now live mostly in an apartment in the 14th arrondissement, on the Rue –. When I arrived the old man in the apartment next door to mine invited me in for a cup of tea. His hands shook as he poured the hot water and lemon into our cups. He told me the building was designed as artists’ ateliers. It was built early in the century, he said, a long time ago. For this reason there are many high windows, which on clear days gives the impression of a world dissolving in light.

After our initial separation, I thought infrequently of Giulio. From time to time some word or gesture or smell would recall him to mind. The memories would come, as of another life. Then one day, a month or so ago, as I was walking along the south bank of the Thames, toward Hammersmith, I noticed a familiar face. Giulio was sat on a bench, looking out at the river, with a sketch pad and pencil in his hand. We agreed to meet for dinner that evening: I was returning to Paris next day. I took care dressing. We met at a small brasserie he suggested, in Islington. He held my chair for me and took my jacket, he was attentive. I watched the movements of his hands. His hands have changed, I thought, and the way they move, these are not the hands that once touched my face, but his face is the same. I ordered a fillet of sole and Giulio a confit duck leg. He had been married for four years now, though he and his wife, he said, lived more or less separate lives. Not long after getting married they had found they were incompatible, but they had reached a kind of agreement. What kind of agreement, he didn’t say. Following his apprenticeship, which had been more his father’s ambition than his own, he had studied for a qualification in engineering, and afterwards specialised in marine engineering. He lived in London, still, but his work took him all over the world: Singapore, Japan, South Africa, Ethiopia, Norway. He spoke of the places he had been, of characters he had met. He spoke clearly and without an accent now. I asked if he had been back to Italy and he said he had once, but only to Milan. He did not like it. We drank two bottles of wine and a glass of sweet wine. We drank a lot, but we ate well and drank slowly. I felt the alcohol only as a pervasive warmth in my chest. Giulio asked to walk me back to my hotel. I let him take my hand as we walked through a park near the hotel. I observed his profile as we stepped in and out of the glow of the streetlights, the shadows of the trees. His hair was cropped short now, where it had once fallen in soft curls around his face. His face was darkened by stubble, where it was once smooth. This deepened the contours of his face and sharpened his jaw. I thought: no, I was wrong, his face, too, has changed. There was no longer the petulant desire to shock the world into awe, but a quiet self-assurance. He smiled, as if keeping pace with my thoughts. When he smiled, it was the same. I sensed that such meetings with women were not infrequent for him. I turned before the door to my room, and as I did so I felt his eyes on my skin. He waited, expectant. I said: ‘Not now, Giulio.’ He didn’t ask what I meant. I kissed him, tasting the wine on his breath. ‘Goodbye, Giulio’. I closed the door, and I did not sleep well that night.

Isaac Nowell is a young writer living in Marseille, France. His first poetry collection, The Fountain, was recently published by Partus Press. His prose may be found in the TLS, the LARB, and Oxford Review.


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