At my window the seagulls cry. I used to envy them their freedom, them and the fields that stretched measuring distance, distance into distance. Every natural thing comfortable in its place. I thought a soldier’s uniform would make me free because soldiers are welcome and respected and they know what will happen from one day to the next and uncertainty need not torment them. I thought I was doing a service to the world, setting it free, setting myself free in the process. Years passed, I travelled distances that peasants never even think about and I found the air much the same in every country.
One battlefield is very like another.
There’s a lot of talk about freedom. It’s like the Holy Grail, we grow up hearing about it, it exists, we’re sure of that, and every person has his own idea of where.
My friend the priest, for all his worldliness, found his freedom in God, and Patrick found it in a jumbled mind where goblins kept him company. Domino said it was in the present, in the moment only that you could be free, rarely and unexpectedly.
Bonaparte taught us that freedom lay in our fighting arm, but in the legends of the Holy Grail no one won it by force. It was Perceval, the gentle knight, who came to a ruined chapel and found what the others had overlooked, simply by sitting still. I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligations but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free. The mystics and the churchmen talk about throwing off this body and its desires, being no longer a slave to the flesh. They don’t say that through the flesh we are set free. That our desire for another will lift us out of ourselves more cleanly than anything divine.
We are a lukewarm people and our longing for freedom is our longing for love. If we had the courage to love we would not so value these acts of war.
At my window the seagulls cry. I should feed them, I save my breakfast bread so that I have something to give them.
Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in wonderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer.
Then, when I had regarded myself for the first time, I regarded the world and saw it to be more various and beautiful than I thought. Like most people I enjoyed the hot evenings and the smell of food and the birds that spike the sky, but I was not a mystic nor a man of God and I did not feel the extasy I had read about. I longed for feeling though I could not have told you that. Words like passion and extasy, we learn them but they stay flat on the page. Sometimes we try and turn them over, find out what’s on the other side, and everyone has a story to tell of a woman or a brothel or an opium night or a war. We fear it. We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much.
And still we long to feel.
I have started work on the garden here. No one has touched it for years, though I am told it once had fine roses of such a scent that you could smell them from St Mark’s when the wind was right. Now it’s a barbed tangle of thorns. Now the birds do not nest here. It’s an inhospitable place and the salt makes it difficult to choose what to grow.
I dream of dandelions.
I dream of a wide field where flowers grow of their own accord. Today I shovelled away the soil from around the rockery, then shovelled it back, levelling the ground. Why have a rockery on a rock? We see enough rock.
I will write to Villanelle and ask for some seeds.
Strange to think that if Bonaparte hadn’t divorced Joséphine, the geranium might never have come to France. She would have been too busy with him to develop her undoubted talent for botany. They say she has already brought us over a hundred different kinds of plants and that if you ask her she will send you seeds for nothing.
I will write to Joséphine and ask for some seeds.
My mother dried poppies in our roof and at Christmas made scenes from the Bible with the flower heads. I’m doing this garden partly for her; she says it’s so barren here with nothing but the sea.
I’ll plant some grass for Patrick and I want a headstone for Domino, nothing the others will find, just a stone in a warm place after all that cold.
And for myself?
For myself I will plant a cypress tree and it will outlive me. That’s what I miss about the fields, the sense of the future as well as the present. That one day what you plant will spring up unexpectedly; a shoot, a tree, just when you were looking the other way, thinking about something else. I like to know that life will outlive me, that’s a happiness Bonaparte never understood.
There’s a bird here, a tiny bird that has no mother. I’m taking her place and the bird sits on my neck, behind my ear, keeping warm. I feed it milk and worms I dig up on my hands and knees, and yesterday it flew for the first time. Flew from the ground where I was planting and up to a thorn. It sang and I held out my finger to bring it home. At night it sleeps in my room in a collar box. I won’t give it a name. I’m not Adam.
This is not a barren place. Villanelle, whose talent it is to look at everything at least twice, taught me to find joy in the most unlikely places and still to be surprised by the obvious. She had a knack of raising your spirits just by saying, ‘Look at that,’ and that was always an ordinary treasure brought to life. She can even charm the fishwives.
So I go from my room in the morning and make the journey to the garden very slowly, feeling the walls with my hands, getting a sense of surface, of texture. I breathe carefully, smelling the air, and when the sun is up I turn my face that way and let it lighten me.
I danced in the rain without my clothes one night. I had not done that before, not felt the icy drops like arrows and the change the skin undergoes. I’ve been soaked through in the army times without number but not by choice.
In the rain by choice is a different matter, though the warders didn’t think so. They threatened to take my bird away.
At the garden, although I have a spade and a fork, I often dig with my hands if it’s not too cold. I like to feel the earth, to squeeze it hard and tight or to crumble it between my fingers.
There’s time here to love slowly.
The man who walks on water has asked me to include a pond in my garden so that he can practise.
He’s an Englishman. What do you expect?
There’s a warder who’s fond of me. I don’t ask why, I’ve learnt to take what’s there without questioning the source. When he sees me on all fours scrabbling at the earth in a random-looking way that is quite scientific, he gets upset and hurries over with the spade and offers to help me. Especially, he wants me to use the spade.
He doesn’t understand I want the freedom to make my own mistakes.
‘You’ll never get out, Henri, not if they think you’re mad.’ Why would I want to get out? They’re so preoccupied with getting out they miss what’s here. When the day warders go off in their boats I don’t stand and stare. I wonder where they go and what their lives are like, but I wouldn’t change places with them. Their faces are grey and unhappy even on the sunniest days when the wind whips at the rock for its own delight.
Where would I go? I have a room, a garden, company and time for myself. Aren’t these the things people ask for?
And love?
I am still in love with her. Not a day breaks but that I think of her, and when the dogwood turns red in winter I stretch out my hands and imagine her hair.
I am in love with her; not a fantasy or a myth or a creature of my own making.
Her. A person who is not me. I invented Bonaparte as much as he invented himself.
My passion for her, even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in
love.
The one is about you, the other about someone else.
I have had a letter from Joséphine. She remembers me and she wants to visit me here, though I expect that’s impossible. She showed no alarm at the address and has enclosed seeds of many kinds, some to be grown under glass. I have instructions and in some cases illustrations, though what I am to do with a baobab tree I don’t know. Apparently it grows upside down.
Perhaps this is the best place for it.
They say that when Joséphine was in the slimy prison of Carmes waiting for death at the hands of the Terror, she and other ladies of strong character cultivated the weeds and lichens that spread in the stone and managed to make for themselves, while not a garden, a green place that comforted them. It may or may not be true.
It doesn’t matter.
Hearing about it comforts me.
Over the water in that city of madmen they are preparing for Christmas and New Year. They don’t make much of Christmas apart from the Child, but they have a procession at New Year and the decorated boats are easy to see from my window. Their lights bob up and down and the water beneath shines like oil. I stay up the whole night, listening to the dead moan round the rock and watching the stars move across the sky.
At midnight the bells ring out from every one of their churches and they have a hundred and seven at least. I have tried to count, but it is a living city and no one really knows what buildings are there from one day to the next.
You don’t believe me?
Go and see for yourself.
We have a service here on San Servelo and a ghoulish business it is with most of the inmates in chains and the rest jabbering or fidgeting so much that for the few who care it’s impossible to hear the Mass. I don’t go now, it’s not a place to bask. I prefer to stay in my room and look out of the window. Last year Villanelle came by in her boat, as close as she could get, and let off fireworks. One exploded so high that I almost touched it and for a second I thought I might drop down after those falling rays and touch her too, once more. Once more, what difference could it make to be near her again? Only this. That if I start to cry I will never stop.
I re-read my notebook today and I found:
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 go on writing so that I will always have something to read.
There is a frost tonight that will brighten the ground and harden the stars. In the morning when I go into the garden I’ll find it webbed with nets of ice and cracked ice where I over-watered today. Only the garden freezes like that, the rest is too salty.
I can see the lights on the boats and Patrick, who is with me, can see into St Mark’s itself. His eye is still marvellous, especially so since walls no longer get in the way. He describes to me the altar boys in red and the Bishop in his crimson and gold and on the roof the perpetual battle between good and evil. The painted roof that I love.
It’s more than twenty years since we went to church at Boulogne.
Out now, into the lagoon, the boats with their gilded prows and triumphant lights. A bright ribbon, a talisman for the New Year.
I will have red roses next year. A forest of red roses.
On this rock? In this climate?
I’m telling you stories. Trust me.
Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
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