Remembering Carmen by Nicholas Murray Read Free Book Online

Christopher reflects, I did not wish to be anywhere else, holding cupped in my hands the bright fluttering butterfly of present pleasure. I think you shared my desire. I think you would recall that moment were I to offer it to you now. But I cannot do so. I do not even know where to find you.
    Unthinkable, then, such an outcome.
    Each morning they would perform their ritual visit to the artopoieio , coming back with fresh bread to make their own coffee in the briki that hung in the small communal kitchen at the end of the corridor, all the rooms as yet uninhabited. Their arrival had acted as a catalyst. They heard the scrape of beds, the clatter of plastic dustpan on terrazzo floor, and the hosing down of chairs. The season was slowly declaring itself open.Their days were spent in delicious languor. After breakfast they would saunter up and down the waterfront, engaged on trivial and specious errands, then move slowly towards the beach or take a pack of bread, olives and a thin wedge of hard cheese up into the wooded hinterland where roseate craggy rocks hung over the twisting track and where they would climb for half a day before being driven down by the heat to a refreshing immersion in the transparent water of the pebbly beach. In the afternoons they would doze fitfully, or sit on the now shaded balcony reading their bulky paperbacks. What lessons, Christopher wonders, did I learn that fortnight from the plump pages of I Promessi Sposi ? In the evenings, showered and changed, they would descend to the bar for a milky ouzo, then walk to the opposite end of the front to the single restaurant where they chose stuffed tomatoes or fresh fish, washed down with no doubt too many jugs of wine from the great dark barrel at the back of the cool interior of the taverna.
    And afterwards what lovers do, holding each other lightly, too sedated by this Sybaritic regime to detour into their customary verbal skirmishing. Looking back, from the ruin of his present existence, Christopher considered that the memory of this was almost sufficient to redeem what came after. He told himself that he had received his due, more than his due, and that it was mere greed, mere peevishness, to insist on coming back for more. He must learn that lesson. He must learn to let her go. Carmen’s disappearance may have been the better part of wisdom. Perhaps, after all, it was not from cruelty but from having his interests at heart that she discharged him. Made mellow by these recollections he will agree to anything. He saves the hangover for his bitter awakening in the small hours.
    Jimmy, however, he cannot forgive. That was palpable cruelty. Carmen allowed herself to grow apart from him, to extend towards the other’s sun for – what? A brief affair that lasted only weeks and which destroyed everything they had built. Yes, yes, they spoke of freedom. They repudiated possessiveness. They held on to their rights. But surely that was mere rhetoric? They did not believe – Christopher did not believe – that it would be put to the test. That either of them would act on it. Carmen gave herself to him, she made him the recipient of her marvellous gift and he tossed it back to her, hardly used. This he did not understand.
    It has already been made clear that discord was the aphrodisiac cordial they quaffed. But on one occasion at least they became a splendid team of two. Before launching his career as a fashionable metropolitan shopfitter, Christopher had dabbled in photography. There had also been spells of teaching, pottery, landscape gardening – had he not also put on, for a season, the roomy trousers and peaked cap of a municipal park-keeper? Postgraduate qualifications in the literature of the Spanish-speaking peoples had quite disabled him from any proper and sustained employment. The photography had lasted for as long as six months. He had taken pictures of other people’s gardens for a range of horticultural and ‘leisure