The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 89: June 8

Today I flew home from Italy after living for a month with a ghost. This Italian ghost and I had a not-so-great relationship, though arguably I got along with her better than did the others at the art colony. One man, the father of four children who famously, and to the presumed irritation of his wife, never had insomnia, the ghost woke up every night at four a.m. A woman fell down a flight of stone stairs and landed on her face. Another woman was beset by a monthlong headache. Another had a nightmare in which the ghost sat on the edge of her bed and unfolded a letter containing bad news about her kids. Another was sent to the hospital for a week with a hemorrhage (she’d been trying for years to have a baby).

If pressed to say a little bit about this ghost and her issues, I’d wager she had a problem with children. Maybe her objections were aesthetic, i.e., maybe she felt toward them as the German artist did — she simply disliked them and found boring people who had them.

Or maybe (given she was a ghost, clearly an unhappy one) her children had died before she did and she still, understandably, hundreds of years later, wasn’t over it. I honestly couldn’t tell if she was malicious or just incapable of keeping her emotions to herself. Like a few alive people I know, she unwittingly contaminated everyone who entered her radius. Regardless of her motives, the energy she generated and dispersed made me, for the month I was living in proximity to her, afraid for my children. Every moment I spent in this castle, I did not consciously believe but on some less conscious level totally believed, would increase the likelihood that they would die while I was gone.

A few weeks into my stay, I woke up in the middle of the night (I did not check the time) to see the ghost — a woman, black and opaque and wearing a long dress — floating horizontal above me, as if the poor thing were wondering what it might be like to lie down and go to sleep. She looked at me. I looked at her. I should have been scared, I guess, but instead I was calm. She and I shared a silent moment of interspecies respect. We wordlessly agreed, as I have agreed with bears I’ve come upon in the woods, not to mess with each other. Then she disappeared.

After our encounter I was no longer so worried about my children. But I remained (though living in the hills of Italy and being fed two incredible Italian meals a day with unlimited access to a very fine Italian espresso machine) exhausted. I suffered from a low-grade, unspecified malaise. Was it emotional? Was it physical? The symptoms were impossible to sort. They felt barometric in nature. My mind/body had become a gadget obliged to record the heaviness of the atmosphere. I felt put-upon, overtaxed. I did not hemorrhage like the other woman, but my female problem, the muscle down there, dormant for two years, tightened up. I stopped reading books. My personality, as it had when I’d last had that pain, went into hiding. But it wasn’t just the pain that oppressed me. Emotionally, I was a muffled version of myself. I was a jam jar inside an aquarium. Between me and the world were many thick panes of glass.

Finally, it was time to leave. I rode a van to the nearest town. I boarded a train. My friend from London, who’d joined me for my last night at the castle, scrolled through the photos she’d taken. I’d shown her the bedroom where the woman had dreamt of the ghost reading the letter containing bad news about her children. In this place, laughingly (because neither of us wanted to admit that we believed in the ghost), my London friend had snapped a photo of me. On the train we looked at this photo and could not believe what we saw. My body was in focus and so was the room. But my head, the right side of it, was a pixilated mess. It looked as though a snake were exploding out of my skull.

My London friend and I freaked out. We freaked out all the way to Rome. We wondered if I were possessed. Among other things, this presented certain legal problems. Would I have to declare my “possession” on my customs form? I’d considered smuggling truffles back in my suitcase, but then I’d heard the fine could be $10,000 for transporting meat or produce into the United States. Did a ghost count as a vegetable or meat? What kind of fee would my government exact from me for running over its borders a ghost?

I soon stopped worrying. In Rome my personality reengaged with a vengeance, suggesting the ghost had chosen not to emigrate. I endorphin-surfed like a person who’d escaped death, because I had. I’d been hanging out with a really blue dead lady who’d maybe lost her children, and over the long term, what a drag that had been. Now I was back among the living. I felt synaptically dangerous; after all of these weeks with my hubs blunted, I was extra-sensitive, like all I needed to do was desire a connection and it would happen. I chatted with our waiter at dinner and learned that he and I shared a birthday. I’d planned, while in Rome, to find the apartment of a dead French actress I wanted to write a book about, but now it seemed certain that she would find me. Every vintage store I entered, I expected to find photos of her or old movie posters with her on them or old clothing with her name tag sewed into the laundry. (This didn’t happen.) I thought of the landscape architect I’d met in Rome a few months earlier — she was literally the only person I knew in the city — and felt confident, even amidst the millions of summer tourists, that we would cross paths. We didn’t, but the next day on the airplane back to New York, I sat in front of a chatty American man. His seatmate was also American and chatty. I listened to them get to know each other. He mentioned, at one point, the landscape architect. He’d just visited her studio in Rome; he said, kind of bitchily, “She’s from a competing firm” (he was also a landscape architect) and that her most recent project was “basically just maps on a wall.” Then his seatmate, who turned out to be a novelist, told him about studying with a woman I’d just been living with for the past month in the castle.

If I’d failed to get along with the ghost, I’d really failed to get along with this woman. I have no idea why. She was brilliant and lovely but something between us grated. We never had our bear-in-the-woods moment. We never silently agreed to tolerate each other. In her erudite presence I talked only about reality TV and trashy novels and the Amanda Knox case. Whenever we spoke about the most benign topic — the pleasure of small rooms, for example — it seemed that we were, in fact, engaging in a not-so-veiled battle. Even though I am a professionally certified conflict avoider, with her I was unable not to take the dangled bait (and unable to see her plain conversation as anything but bait). I left our encounters mystified. I was willing to accept that maybe I just rubbed her the wrong way, and she me. Later I would write to this woman, feeling bad about how I’d behaved toward her at the castle. I apologized for being so sensitive and demented, and blamed it on the crazy semester I’d had, the deadlines and the intense barometric pressure of my regular life. She wrote back an incredibly gracious note and confessed to having had a similar experience a few years earlier. “The exhaustion made me very vulnerable to people around me, who, I’m sure, meant no harm, but everywhere I saw insults and infamy!”

Maybe this was also true of the Italian ghost. She meant me no harm. Possibly she didn’t even exist. I’d mistaken my exhaustion for a long-dead woman who’d lost her children. To be melancholy is to be self-haunted, and among the many reasons this is an unsatisfactory explanation for living inside a jam jar inside an aquarium, foremost among them is that there are no good stories to tell of your bleak time in a beautiful place, and no specter to blame for the fact that happiness, though it should have been inescapable, evaded you.