Shantaram полностью

He paused and took a sip from his glass, replacing it slowly and carefully in the precise circle of moisture it had left on the table in front of him.

‘Well then, he was a brilliant man,’ he continued, raising his eyes to mine with a hastily gathered smile. ‘And, with one exception, he was a brilliant teacher. The exception was me. I was his only failure. I had no head for science and mathematics. They were languages I could never decipher or understand. My father responded to my stupidity with a brutal temper. His cold hand, it seemed to me when I was a child, was so large that when he struck me my whole body was shocked and bruised by the giant’s hard palm and the whips of his fingers. I was afraid of him, and ashamed of my failures at school, so I played the truant very often, and fell into what the English call a bad company. I was many times in the courts, and served two years in the prisons for children before my thirteenth birthday. At sixteen, I left my father’s house, my father’s city, and my father’s country forever.

‘By chance I came to Genova. Have you seen it? I tell you, it is the jewel in the tiara of the Ligurian coast. And one day, on the beach at Genova, I met a man who opened my life to every good and beautiful thing that there is in the world. His name was Rinaldo. He was forty-eight years old then, when I was sixteen. His family held some ancient title, a noble line that reached to the time of Columbus. But he lived in his magnificent house on the cliffs without the pretensions of his rank. He was a scholar, the only true Renaissance man I ever met. He taught me the secrets of antiquity, the history of art, the music of poetry, and the poetry of music. He was also a beautiful man. His hair was silver and white, like the full moon, and his very sad eyes were grey. In contrast to the brutish hands of my father, with their chilling touch, Rinaldo’s hands were long, slender, warm, expressive, and he made tenderness in everything that he touched. I learned what it is to love, with all of the mind and all of the body, and I was born in his arms.’

He began to cough, and attempted to clear his throat, but the cough became a fit that wracked his body in painful spasms.

‘You’ve got to stop smoking and drinking so much, Didier. And you’ve gotta do a little exercise now and then.’

‘Oh, please!’ he shuddered, stubbing out a cigarette and fishing another from the pack in front of him as the coughs subsided. ‘There is nothing so depressing as good advice, and I will be pleased if you do not inflict it upon me. Frankly, I am shocked at you. You must know this, surely? Some years ago I suffered such an offensively gratuitous piece of good advice that I was depressed for six months afterward. It was a very close call-I almost never recovered.’

‘Sorry’ I smiled. ‘I don’t know what came over me.’

‘You are forgiven,’ he sniffed, downing one glass of whisky as the waiter brought the next.

‘You know,’ I admonished him, ‘Karla says that depression only happens to people who don’t know how to be sad.’

‘Well she is wrong!’ he declared. ‘I am an expert in the tristesse. It is the perfect, definitive human performance. There are many animals that can express their happiness, but only the human animal has the genius to express a magnificent sadness. And for me it is something special; a daily meditation. Sadness is my one and my only art.’

He pouted for a few moments, too peeved to proceed, but then raised his eyes to meet mine and laughed out loud.

‘Have you heard from her?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘But you know where she is?’

‘No.’

‘She has left Goa?’

‘I asked a guy I know down there, Dashrant-he owns a restaurant on the beach where she was staying-I asked him to keep an eye on her, and make sure she was okay. I called him last week, and he told me she left. He tried to talk her into staying, but she… well, you know.’

Didier pursed his lips in a reflective frown. We both watched the shuffling, idling, bustling, scurrying street only two metres away, beyond the wide entrance to Leopold’s.

‘Et bien, don’t worry yourself about Karla,’ Didier said at last. ‘At the least, she is well protected.’

I assumed that Didier meant she could take care of herself and, perhaps, that she lived under a good and lucky sign. I was wrong. There was more to the remark than that. I should’ve asked him what he meant, of course. In the long years since that conversation I’ve asked myself a thousand times how different my life might’ve been if only I’d asked him what he meant by that remark. Instead, my head full of assumptions and my heart full of pride, I changed the subject.

‘So… what happened?’

‘Happened?’ he asked, bewildered.

‘What happened to you and Rinaldo in Genova?’