WRITING
This is the complete text in English of Jonathan Newdick's
book The Red Handkerchief (Il fazzoletto rosso).
To see a selection of complete pages including the drawings
click on BOOKS below.
1.
Something happens uniquely
when you travel by train. There
are wide vistas which hold
memories although you have
never been here before. There are
open curtains at back windows
where you sometimes see
someone cooking something.
A young woman behind Venetian
blinds in a doorway. Usually
there is an empty television with
no-one watching. In the film there
is a shadow with a dagger, a
glimpse of blonde hair and black
underwear but this never
happens. There is only an empty
television.
2.
All the land is black and white and
grey in the falling snow. Grey
pylons and grey poplars. A cold
sewage plant. Someone walking
by a river with a black dog. A
grey-green umbrella between
willows. Snowy headlights,
yellow, describing the course of an
unseen road on winter pasture. A
ragged buzzard on a post. Black
mistletoe on high branches and a
city of pallets beside the empty
tracks. A cloud of starlings.
Someone has lost a red
handkerchief.
3.
Somewhere in that late summer
evening people were laughing,
drinking, desiring, rejecting
proposals, laughing, drinking,
wishing the war was over.
She was bicycling home with the
low sun behind her, steering into
her own shadow. And when she
turned the bend in the road that
faithful shadow danced in the
brambles and rose hips in the
hedge beside her, and lay for
an instant on the bruised grass
between the gateposts.
Now, where there once had been
broomrapes and clover the early
ploughing had sliced the dark
earth so that in the low sun it
shone as smooth and clean as
the steel blade that had turned it.
4.
By three o'clock the rain had
washed away almost all the
snow. Black branches dripped
and the soil was surprisingly
dark. The grass surprisingly
green. The snow that remained
was moulded into elongated
islands the colour of aluminium
and they had the shape of those
cars which break speed records.
Crusted, hard, shiny as sugar.
The rain, and the water that had
been the snow, edged across the
rocky field, following the furrows,
and trickled, oozed, bled and
poured into the ditches, pregnant,
slow and brown.
Snow was unusual here. Rare.
Walking into Trieste under the
indigo sky the air was so pure,
so cold, it was hardly there at all.
In Piazza Unità d'Italia there
was a statue, classical, heroic.
It was a statue of her, carved
a hundred years before she was
born.
5.
It is four o'clock on this November
afternoon and, his desk light on,
it appears to be dark outside.
A blackbird calling from the
rhododendrons. He is writing a
letter to someone he doesn't know.
The doorbell rings. Within
minutes she is sitting opposite
him at his desk, her back to he
window, her heavy, dark blue
coat is still buttoned and she is
telling him her life story. She is
young, dark haired, immaculate
and he has never seen her before.
6.
Her name was Carmen Darling.
It really was. She should have
been a centrefold, a starlet or a
singer of ballads. But she was
Carmen Darling and he had seen
her only the once, walking
through the now empty square
inlaid with a geometry of white
marble paving.
Only the once.
The square is always empty and it
is the emptiness that emphasises
memory.
7.
There she is. The model. And
she's waiting. She's wearing
heavy black boots and her skirt
is as short as a handkerchief.
(Someone has lost a red
handkerchief). Her legs are lean.
They are twisted very slightly at
the knees as if there once had been
an illness. Conventional wisdom
attests that it is the artist who
defines the muse but she defined
him. She chose him. She chose
him and now she's waiting.
8.
Slowly she takes off her veil. By
the fountain in the square she
takes off her veil. A victim of her
own geography. Through the
binoculars you will see that, even
now, after such a long time, her
lipstick and eye liner are put on
with the perfection you see in the
Sunday supplements. Scarlet and
black. Scarlet and black
administering authority on the
map of her existence. Like
contours describing the hills and
hollow valleys of a naked
landscape.
9.
Long hot days and short still
nights without stars.
And Carmen waits.
A white road between wide fields
of blackening wheat. The broad
leaves of burdock are grey with
dust.
And the horizon liquid where the
wheat and the pale sky meet.
10.
Between the winter marsh and the
grey sea there is a concrete wall,
broken, as all defences against the
sea must eventually become. Not
high, but wide enough to walk on
if you can master its eccentric
cambers. The sea on one side is as
still as the filling pools on the
other. Among the brown and
brittle sea lavender a single
barnacle goose standing silent on
the decreasing silver mud. Silent
and slow the flood tide that folds
over the mud as if it were made of
oil.
11.
High summer.
The two-car suburban train beats
from the mouth of the cool tunnel
into the shimmering bluish haze.
The suffocating seats musty and
hot. An empty bottle rolls
eccentrically from the darkness of
one seat into the shade of another
as if afraid of the brightness. You
know it will re-appear but you are
not inclined to anchor it or to throw it
into the slow, neglected sidings.
A crop of willowherb like a
distant fire. The sun softens the
hot, felt-tarred roofs of the
allotment sheds. You can smell
the black blisters and the creosote
and the dry earth. The asbestos
roof of the Sunlight Laundry.
Steam from the high, brick,
iron-banded chimney with its
faded lettering. Eight characters
chalky on the tapering column.
12.
And who was Susan Red who
died in 1837 when she was fifteen?
Who was Susan Red?
What did she look like and why
did she die? There are no signs in
this lonely church so close to the
sea but there are some poppies in
a slender glass. Their petals have
long fallen away and now there
are only some dry seed heads.
It was such a long time ago.
13.
The hospital windows are
shining all night. You can see
the nurse making tea. Reaching
for the high biscuit tin and then
reorganising her broad,
elasticated belt. The silver
shining buckle.
Below, on the black wet road,
cars wait at a red light that
smears its reflection into the
empty pavement. A white
articulated truck crosses their
path in a cloud of spray.
Nocturnal Spanish lettuces.
When you look again to the
window she is gone. Someone is
receiving his regular injection
and you envy him.
14.
"I will love him to the grave" says
the assassin's pretty victim.
15.
In the tangled rhododendrons it is
very dark. It is a darkness that
comes with a unique silence.
Between the woody shrubs, the
path, all roots and stones and
black earth, is wet and slippery.
Within this shroud of silence
women are leaving home.
16.
Bless me, Father, for I have
sinned. It is twenty three years
since my last confession.
It is twenty three years since my
first confession.
17.
The salty iron railings are all there
are between her heavy coat and
the sea. Her name is April Dancer.
Where had you heard this name
before? Frost. It reminds you of
Frost. Was she a friend of Jordan
Baker? An unknown and frivolous
guest at one of Gatsby's fabulous
parties. The lights across the
sound. Or was she a colourful
artificial that you might find in an
old man's box? Next to
Wickham's fancy.
18.
The lint is still clinging to the
stitches on the downy forearm of
the beautiful gambler as she drags
her mink along the stones,
careless of its value.
19.
Under the yew tree among the
iron crosses and the ivy there are
some cyclamen.
The windows of the empty
orangery are running with
December condensation and she
is walking in a garden she doesn't
understand.
Slowly she stops to pick some of
the cyclamen but she is not there.
20.
And she moves without moving
through the still, dark night as the
small hand of a big clock. And the
trees are still. And the air is still.
At the edge of the wood you can lie
on the brittle grass and look at the
tiny stars. Some of them are not
there. And the frost falls silently
around you.
Anaesthetising.
Stiffening.
21.
The cracked concrete road at the
edge of the sea. The shining blue
bright sky. She walked (‘proud as
a young cadet') with a lilting ease
though her jeans were so very
tight and you knew that when she
forced them off, the patterns of
their seams and pockets would be
printed in her pale skin. The open
car, the speakers beating the bass
as the tyres beat the cracks in the
concrete. Is this the sound that
brings you back to that beach
road without permission? Not
asking if that is where you would
like to be. And still she is there.
You see her so well, walking with
her hands in her back pockets.
Jutting elbows moving with the
sway of her hips. The red silk so
thin that it told you more of her
loose breasts than if she were
naked. The practised pride with
which she ignored the car, the
bass and its driver. How when it
was gone she smiled her thin and
scarlet smile.
A wheel remains revolving,
clicking on a stick of teasel as
the music still plays in the bloody
dashboard. It is Chuck Berry
‘. . . I like the way you walk — it's
like you're dancing but you're
not.'
22.
She burned all his letters but she
kept the ashes.
She kept the ashes.
She kept the ashes in an old
tobacco tin that had belonged to
her grandfather. His shed always
smelled of creosote and dry earth.
23.
She danced.
She danced with the awkward
abandon of Justice in the great
golden basilica. She lay among
wet leaves of moonwort before
upland grasses give way to
heather.
She read John Stewart Mill.
24.
Pine trees growing on white sand
and their shadows are as the
shadows of sun-dials. And there
is a young woman, there, over
there, in the grass. She has taken
off her dress. And there are voices
coming from another time. There
are bicycle tracks in the soft sand
and, at the edge of the sea, the sea
which doesn't move, there are
some small brown birds running.
High above in the perfect sky
there are other birds, black,
wheeling, watching.
25.
A frosty February morning. Pale
onyxes of yesterday's air trapped
in roadside ice. It had begun cold,
botanically stiffening, but
somewhere in the milky sky a sun
was swimming, opalescent,
drifting. And the long leaves of
grass were greening, softening.
In the distance steaming chemical
plants. Silver shining road
tankers. Articulated. Flashing into
the low sun before it melts into the
sky above the horizon.
26.
A line of whimbrel far away and
low in the west. In a sky that, too
late for the day, allows the golden
sun to flood the golden mudflats.
There is a broken wall of concrete
(not high, but wide enough to
walk on if you can master its
eccentric cambers — yes, you
have been here before).
Beyond the narrow copse of
tamarisk and thorn, beyond the
field of grey grass and sorrel,
where civilisation begins, that
same low light falls on a
photograph in a silver frame on
a black and perfect piano. It is a
young subaltern without a love
song and he stares across the
shining blackness as he has for
sixty years and more.
A child, she might be five or six,
runs past the window in a white
cotton frock.
27.
A small station seems to have no
name. There is no-one here.
It has been raining.
You hadn't seen a bright road or
shining slabs of black marble in
an empty cemetery.
Polythene in a vegetable garden.
A manufactory whose broken
steel-framed windows are the
hungry grids of unfinished
crosswords. Glass crushed into
gravel and a regiment of dull
military trucks waiting.
28.
From this point where the power
lines cross the tracks, the road and
the railway run side by side and
straight. Here you can see the
articulated trucks from Bremen
Ljubljana, Napoli. Curls of grey
salty dust twist across the tarmac
in the cold brightness as they
pass. Their paintwork, their tyres
and licence plates are all this same
salty grey. It tells their autostrada
histories and only the shining arcs
left by the windscreen wipers are
immune to the story. Beyond the
grey tarmac and the tracks,
beyond the winter trees lie the
mountains. Far away but in the
Kodacrome air they seem much
nearer. Shining bright against
the cold blue sky, they remind
you of an advertisement for
mineral water.
You are very thirsty.
29.
She never imagined anyone
would want her body as
inspiration but once she had
decided on him there was never
a doubt. He would want her.
And, looking back, it was obvious
really. While the others wore high
heels, tight skirts, Crimplene,
knee-length, with cardigans,
she wore heavy boots, black,
with very short skirts, loose and
indecent when she ran. She was
thirty years ahead of her time, or
crazy, or both.
30.
He knew. He knew that ignorant
people would miss-spell it as if it
were the name of a medical
grease. But still he christened his
daughter Valesina. Valesina, the
aberrant nymphalid. And she
would be exotic, ephemeral,
flirtatious as that New Forest
Fritillary.
31.
The summer church is full of
emptiness, the damp walls
whitewashed but greenish on the
lower stones that flake to the floor.
The emptiness is not for no people
but for the essence of void.
Outside, the grass cropped short
and sharp by sheep innocent of
electricity and the blade. Thistles
and coarse nettles and bits of iron
under the tree. Some slow rabbits
on the rooty earth at the edge. The
air is full to the high sky but the
church is full of emptiness.
32.
A lieutenant in the naval artillery.
He is searching for an almoner,
his tunic is torn and from a
paperback book (The Age of
Reason) he takes out a folded
photograph of his beloved who he
has forgotten, or thinks he has. It
marks page eight which begins ‘In
an album. It was taken in 1928.'
"Do you know her?"
"Do you know her face?"
"Do you know her face?"
The cracked emulsion suggests a
scar above her right eye. Her silk
chemise gives her the casual
appearance of a transparent shift
and Isadora Duncan or Lucia
Joyce. He wipes his eyes with a
red handkerchief.
