AS A CHILD I used to love the weeks after Easter, when the ditches were flush with primroses, and the sun shone through the apple blossom, and the fields were drenched with the white flower of the May bush. It was as if heaven were all about me, and I felt secure that Jesus had done as he promised on the cross; he had delivered us all into Paradise.
Years later I happened to be staying on the outskirts of a little village in Italy for those weeks after Easter, in a large square-shaped villa surrounded by olive groves. The owner lived on the top floor. His son lived on the middle floor, with a wife and three little girls, and on ground level there was a small empty apartment which I rented. There was a tiny patio outside, surrounded by magnificent flowers of every shape and colour.
At the far end of the garden was a swing seat beneath a willow tree. In the evenings the owner would sit there alone, in dark glasses, with a yellow linen jacket around his shoulders. I joined him one evening, and he told me in broken English that he had built the house and planted the garden for his wife. “This,” he said “was to be our Paradiso.” But she died the year the garden was completed and she never enjoyed the place they had so often dreamed about, through the years, as they sold melons off the back of a lorry on the streets of Rome.
I found it hard to understand his melancholy, because I was young, and at the beginning of my own romantic life. And my beloved was about to arrive from Ireland on a plane a few days later.
I waited for her on the sidewalk outside Termini in Rome admiring the gypsies in long skirts as they flitted through the crowd. I was wearing a white shirt and trousers, and my hair was cropped short, and my face was tan from the sun. A bus arrived from the airport and suddenly there she was. I had not seen her in two months.
After a quick coffee, we got on another bus.
“It will take me time to get used to the heat,” she said. I suggested she take off her cardigan. She did. And then she smiled and said, “That’s better.” The blue bus went through deep gorges, and along cliffs and slopes and we looked out the window most of the time, and were silent. We stole glances at each other, measuring each other, and perhaps both wondering was this mad elopement doomed to failure.
During the following weeks, we drank a lot of Frascati by candlelight. The window was always open. The perfume from the garden flowers was always teasing our senses. The salad bowl was dotted with black olives. And even the noise of insects outside the window sounded to us like a wonderful love-song. We stayed in the bedroom, with the shutters down, for long periods every afternoon, each transfixed by the other’s presence.
In the mornings we walked a lot, up the mountains, and from village to village. At midday we usually had lunch. And in the evenings we drank wine. But in the afternoons we went exploring in that intimate world of shadow, sheet and pillow, behind the shutters. We were unlocking some frozen core in each other, healing each other from previous lives, from past mistakes, and from childhoods of sorrow. And though we were both over 30, we were slowly growing younger.
Sometimes we committed the act with the embarrassment of novices, or with the guilt of teenagers, or with the shame of thieves, or like strangers on a train who just need each other’s bodies. Sometimes we whispered to each other with conscious deliberation, careful not to speak the wrong name. And it’s probable that occasionally we both had separate fantasies that made us foreign to each other.
But when our passion was exhausted each evening, a kind of relief grew in us, a sublime awareness that we had found in each other an access to paradise. Then we could make pasta and open wine and relax in the garden or occasionally stroll down to the church in the village square, and sit for ages, in the cool shelter of its ancient stones, gazing at the flaking murals, and the stained glass behind the altar, and the sanctuary, as silent as the empty tomb on Easter Day.
