It is the stranger in you to whom I am now making this – I admit – clumsy appeal.
The businessman Achille Lombardo had taken his wife on an all-expense paid trip to Switzerland. After their meal with esteemed colleagues and friends, she made her excuses and left him in the lobby. About fifteen minutes later, he followed her up to their room.
He sat down at a chair beside the bed. She continued to ignore him; he picked up a magazine from the bedside table.
After a while he put the magazine back down on the bedside table. He turned to her and said:
“Forgive me, my darling. What is it you wish me to do?”
“What is it I wish?” she said, repeating the question rather as if it was a rhetorical device deployed by a brittle heroine in an unremarkable play. “I wish you to leave.”
Not long after this Achille Lombardo’s marriage broke up. He and his wife separated, though they did not divorce.
Achille Lombardo moved into the room at the back of his office. It was a simple room with no flowers and no TV. Achille Lombardo brought his laptop and consoled himself by watching old movies he hadn’t seen in decades. He sat down to write his autobiography, but realised after a while that he was writing fiction and so he gave up.
Achille Lombardo threw himself into his work and partied with old university friends who he thought were as awkward and bitter as he. A while passed. Achille Lombardo was still living in the room where he had no TV and barely slept. He woke up one day with palpitations. He went to see an esteemed cardiologist, Dr Carducci. When he arrived in the surgery, the cardiologist Dr Carducci was chatting with another esteemed colleague who he referred to – somewhat facetiously – as the neurologist Doctor Tom-Tom. While he thought it was not very professional, Achille Lombardo did not say anything.
“What appears to be the matter, dear fellow?”
Describing his symptoms, Achille Lombardo complained of stomach cramps, bad dreams and sleepless nights.
Dr Carducci took his blood pressure, which did not tally with Achille Lombardo’s own heart-felt reading. His heart beat was as steady as that of a long-distance runner Etc.
Esteemed colleagues scratched their heads. There appeared to be nothing wrong with Achille Lombardo, suffice it to say he had lost ten kilos in the space of a few months and slimmed down to the size he was when he was about twenty-one.
At the end of the visit, they proscribed some pills.
Achille Lombardo was worried. Esteemed colleagues looked to reassure him. Really, they soothed, it’s little more than a placebo… He must learn to relax. Take a holiday.
Thus, on the advice of esteemed colleagues, Achille Lombardo went south, and rented a small villa on the beach. It was the middle of September, and the weather was still fine. The forecast was going to be good for the next two weeks. Achille Lombardo imagined paddling in the sea and idling in his shorts and sandals in the sun.
The following day, while Achille Lombardo was having his breakfast on the veranda, a stray dog turned up at the villa. Achille Lombardo wasn’t feeling hungry so he gave the dog some biscuits. He went for a walk along the beach. The dog followed him. Hey, where do you think you are going, you pesky mongrel?
The dog followed him back to the villa. Realising he had been adopted; Achille Lombardo took the dog to the vet. The vet was reassuring. The dog was as fit as a fiddle. Achille Lombardo took the dog back to the villa. They went for a walk on the beach. The beach was long and sandy and wide and flat with some dunes at the back. Both patient and dog liked to walk there and play with the sand and the seaweed on the shore.
The patient liked to take photos. Although he had never been a professional photographer, in another life he thought it would have been just the job for him. He began – under the watchful eye of his new-found friend – to take interest in the objects washed up on the shore: its flotsam and jetsam…
Two days ago, for example, he took a photo of a blue bucket. The blue bucket did not have a handle. It was sticking out of the sand, as the sea lapped around it.
Up by the dunes, yesterday, he found an empty coke can between two sticks bleached by the sun…Then, unexpectedly, he came across one of a pair of orange flip-flops. Though I cannot explain why Achille Lombardo did not take a photo; when he got back to the villa he was overcome with a profound sort of depression.
In the late afternoon, when the dog came to wake him, he did not want to get out of bed, any more than he wanted to go back to the long wide beach. No amount of tail wagging or leash shaking on the dog’s part could persuade him otherwise. The patient Achille Lombardo was patently not in the mood.
Achille Lombardo fell back to sleep; he began to dream he was back on the beach. Not the beach described here which is not dissimilar to the beaches I remember from my childhood… i.e. long and empty, but not unwelcoming.
The beach in Achille Lombardo’s dream is quite different. It is not my beach but one which I also know.
This beach, Achille Lombardo’s beach is quite inaccessible to traffic. One side of the cliff has fallen in, which is why it is risky to run a vehicle there. Beyond this point, there are a series of little coves where students, young couples and solitary bathers like to go.
In one of the coves there is a rock island. On the small sandy part of the beach Achille Lombardo can see a solitary bather. When the beach is crowded (by this I mean there is a handful of people, for example, students in Bermuda shorts sharing beers and joints, old men in scruffy shorts and the odd fisherman), the bather often swims out to the rock island.
In Achille Lombardo’s dream, everything happens as it normally does. The bather swims out to the rock-island and lies there as is her wont to sunbathe with her top off…
It is a such a peaceful scene. Indeed, we can all breathe in its calm serene!
The black clouds creep up on her. He tells it to me like that. “Doctor,” he says, “the black clouds creep up on her. The air is suddenly very cold, and the sea around her is very still.”
Ordinarily (Achille Lombardo can testify to this) she is a good swimmer, since she has been in the school team, but the current is strong. The current pulls her hither and thither. As the current pulls her hither and thither, the patient dreamer finds himself sinking down and down with her till he wakes up, sweating.
Achille Lombardo gets up and goes into the kitchen to get himself a glass of water. He looks round for his new friend, but he cannot see the dog. He walks out onto the veranda.
When, in the distance upon the shore, he sees the stranger walking with the dog at her side, he tells me he makes a solemn vow.
“Doctor, will I ever be able to exorcise the dream?”