In a sense the destruction of the tower was inscribed days beforehand in our unhappy tour of Tuscany. Our marriage, problematic from the start, had grown increasingly fraught during the previous year. Elaine had married me on the rebound, to spite an unfaithful lover, but soon decided that her husband, a classics lecturer at a minor university, was minor in all other respects. I was losing my students in a ferment of curriculum changes that would eventually lead to the descheduling of Latin and Greek and their replacement by cultural and media studies. My refusal to sue the university, Elaine decided, was a sign of my innate weakness, a frailty that soon extended to the marriage bed.
Claiming that our union was unconsummated, she consulted a solicitor with a view to divorcing me, but was persuaded to make a last effort to save the relationship. Our marriage became a series of negotiated truces, in which I would yield more and more territory. StilI hoping to salvage something, and return to the few weeks of happiness we had known after the wedding, I suggested a holiday in Italy. I had arranged to give three lectures at the University of Florence, which would pay for our air fares, and then we would be free to enjoy ourselves in the Tuscan countryside.
Elaine agreed, but only grudgingly – her first husband had been a modernist architect, and she always claimed to dislike the past, the territory I had made my own, and pretended to prefer California and Texas. But soon after we landed at Pisa airport and took the train to Florence her interest in the Italian renaissance revived in a way that I found almost mysterious. Once I had given my lectures she threw us into a hectic round of tourist activities. Tirelessly she insisted on visiting every church and baptistry, every museum and cathedral. I was puzzled by this passion for the past until I realised that our visits to these historic sites had exposed yet another of my weaknesses.
As we took the creaking lift to the dome of Florence cathedral Elaine discovered that I was afraid of heights, a fear that I had never noticed in myself but which she immediately set out to maximise. Unsettled by the looming space below the dome, I could barely force myself from the lift. My eyes seemed unwilling to focus on the curving walls, and I felt my heart-beat fall away, leaving me on the edge of a fainting fit.
Gesticulating to Elaine, I refused to follow her around the narrow gallery. Scarcely able to breathe, I waited as she proudly circled the dome, calling to me in a insistent voice that embarrassed me in front of the other tourists. Yet as we left the cathedral she became strangely solicitous, holding my arm in a concerned and reassuring way. Far from deriding me, she seemed genuinely alarmed by my moment of panic.
Despite this show of affection, I soon noticed that our tour of Tuscany had become a series of vertical ascents. No battlement existed that we did not scale, no worn steps that we did not climb. At the Palazzo Vecchio, under the pretext of showing me the spectacular view over the city, she forced me to lean through the very windows from which Lorenzo de Medici had suspended the strangled plotters against his rule. I saw Siena cathedral from the roof down, almost breathing my last in the confined bell-tower. And all the while Elaine would watch me with her affectionate and lingering smile, like an older sister observing a timid sibling. Was she trying to cure me of my fear of heights, or to rub in my sense of my own inadequacy?
A climax of sorts came at San Gimignano, that surrealist township of towers constructed during the 14th century by rival families within this independent city state. As Elaine moved tirelessly from one tower to the next, I retreated to a cafe beside the cathedral with its macabre images of hell. All afternoon she gazed at the towers, admiring these symbols of an erect masculinity of which her husband was incapable, then sat beaming at me as the tourist coach carried us to Florence.
Three days later, when we arrived in Pisa for our London flight, I had been routed by Elaine’s campaign. We were both eager to return to England, I to the safety of my university office, she to her solicitor. We had packed in silence, and reached Pisa airport with two hours to spare before our flight. Inevitably we found ourselves taking a taxi into the city. Reading from her guide-book, Elaine described the baptistry and cathedral in glowing terms, but I knew that our real destination was the nearby campanile, this marble phallus that seemed to excite her even more than the towers of San Gimignano.
I stepped from the taxi and stared up at the dizzying structure with its dangerously canted floors. Without a word, Elaine strode away from me towards the tower. She paid her entrance fee and began to climb the steps behind two uniformed sailors and a father with his daughter. As she reached each tier she looked down at me with her affectionate but knowing smirk, her contempt rising with each successive storey.
I stood on the cathedral steps, still surprised by the steep inclination of the tower, some 17 feet from the vertical. Despite myself, I wished that the structure, tilting each year by a few added millimetres, would decide on this exact moment for its long-predicted collapse.
Then, as Elaine reached the penultimate tier, I found myself needing to touch the tower, to feel the unforgiving marble against my skin. I left the cathedral and walked across the worn grass where the tourists sat in the sun, waving to their friends high above them. Ignoring the ticket office, I strolled around the stone well that surrounded the tower. I placed my hand on the antique marble, its surface pitted with the graffiti of centuries, its veins as marmoreal as fossilised time. The tower was both too erect and too old. I pressed against the massive flank, urging it on its way.
Eight storeys above me, Elaine had reached the roof and stood beside the panting sailors. Scarcely out of breath, she seized the iron rail and smiled down at me in her most implacable way, slowly shaking her head at my weakness.
Angered by her open contempt, I pushed again at the solid marble. The wall refused to yield, but when I lifted my hand I noticed that a small crack had appeared in the surface, running away from a discoloured node of crushed limestone. Curious, I pressed again, only to see that the crack had widened. It inched upwards at a barely visible pace, then darted forward, climbing the wall like a sudden fissure in a sheet of ice. Three feet long, it crossed a decorative moulding and rose swiftly towards the cornice of the first tier.
Laughing at this, I pressed both hands at the marble drum. Immediately the crack accelerated, and I heard a distant rumble, the dark groan of an awakening creature deep within the tower. The crack was now an open fissure through which I could see the shoes of the startled old man resting before he and his wife made their way to the second storey. A fine rain of dust and crumbling mortar showered my face. The entire tower was trembling against my hands, and a section of cornice fell through the air, followed by a scatter of fragments each larger than my fist.
The Tower of Pisa was about to fall. I gave it one last push, both arms outstretched, and felt the tortured rumbling as somewhere the spine of this great edifice began to crack. I stepped back, aware that the building was about to collapse onto me, and then looked up at the roof, where Elaine was clinging to the iron rail.
The tower buckled, its columns spilling like skittled pins at a bowling alley. In the last moments, as Elaine was pitched over the rail, I saw her face falling towards me, and an expression of anger that unmistakably changed, as she noticed me far below her, to one of triumph.
A second Tower of Pisa is now rising on the site of the first, financed by the world-wide appeal launched soon after the tragedy. The structure, this time mounted on an immovable concrete base, has reached the third storey and already reveals the modest inclination designed into it. This tower, supported by a rigid steel armature, will never fall, and within a few decades most visitors will have forgotten that it is no more than a replica.
For me, though, the original tower remains as real as ever in my mind. I often wake from terrifying dreams as the tons of marble hurtle towards me. Then I remind myself that it was Elaine who died on that day. I remember the expression on her face, the fierce pride that lit her eyes.
Did she feel that she had at last triumphed over me, and was
happy to see me crushed by the cascade of tumbling columns? I remember the stones pelting my shoulders while I tried vainly to step back from the tower. At the last moment, as an amateur video-film reveals, the structure seemed to buckle, twisting itself in a desperate attempt to remain upright. It slewed away from me, sweeping Elaine, the collapsing masonry and the cartwheeling columns towards the ground by the cathedral steps.
I escaped, but that expression of triumph on Elaine’s face still puzzles me. Had she seen me pushing against the tower and assumed that I was responsible for its collapse? Was she proud of me for hating her so fiercely, and for at last stirring from my impotence to take my revenge? Perhaps only in her death did we truly come together, and the Tower of Pisa served a purpose for which it had waited for so many centuries.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The stories in this collection first appeared in the following publications:
‘Prima Belladonna’
Science Fantasy
1956
‘Escapement’
New Worlds
1956
‘The Concentration City’ (as ‘Build-Up’)
New Worlds
1957
‘Venus Smiles’ (as ‘Mobile’)
Science Fantasy
1957
‘Manhole 69’
New Worlds
1957
‘Track 12’
New Worlds
1958
‘The Waiting Grounds’
New Worlds
1959
‘Now: Zero’
Science Fantasy
1959
‘The Sound-Sweep’
Science Fantasy
1960
‘Zone of Terror’
New Worlds
1960
‘Chronopolis’
New Worlds
1960
‘The Voices of Time’
New Worlds
1960
‘The Last World of Mr Goddard’
Science Fantasy
1960
‘Studio 5, The Stars’
Science Fantasy
1961
‘Deep End’
New Worlds
1961
‘The Overloaded Man’
New Worlds
1961
‘Mr F. is Mr F.’
Science Fantasy
1961
‘Billennium’
New Worlds
1961
‘The Gentle Assassin’
New Worlds
1961
‘The Insane Ones’
Amazing Stories
1962
‘The Garden of Time’
Fantasy and Science Fiction
1962
‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’
Amazing Stories
1962
‘Thirteen to Centaurus’
Amazing Stories
1962
‘Passport to Eternity’
Amazing Stories
1962
‘The Cage of Sand’
New Worlds
1962
‘The Watch-Towers’
Science Fantasy
1962
‘The Singing Statues’
Fantastic Stories
1962
‘The Man on the 99th Floor’
New Worlds
1962
‘The Subliminal Man’
New Worlds
1963
‘The Reptile Enclosure’
(as ‘The Sherrington Theory’)
Amazing Stories
1963
‘Question of Re-Entry’
Fantastic Stories
1963
‘The Time-Tombs’
Worlds of If
1963
‘Now Wakes the Sea’
Fantasy and Science Fiction
1963
‘The Venus Hunters’
(as ‘The Encounter’)
Amazing Stories
1963
‘End-Game’
New Worlds
1963
‘Minus One’
Science Fantasy
1963
‘The Sudden Afternoon’
Fantastic Stories
1963
‘The Screen Game’
Fantastic Stories
1963
‘Time of Passage’
Science Fantasy
1964
‘Prisoner of the Coral Deep’
Argosy
1964
‘The Lost Leonardo’
Fantasy and Science Fiction
1964
‘The Terminal Beach’
New Worlds
1964
‘The Illuminated Man’
Fantasy and Science Fiction
1964
‘The Delta at Sunset’
The Terminal Beach
1964
‘The Drowned Giant’
The Terminal Beach
1964
‘The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon’
The Terminal Beach
1964
‘The Volcano Dances’
The Terminal Beach
1964
‘The Beach Murders’
(as ‘Confetti Royale’)
Rogue
1966
‘The Day of Forever’
The Impossible Man
1966
‘The Impossible Man’
The Impossible Man
1966
‘Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer’
The Impossible Man
1966
‘Tomorrow is a Million Years’
Argosy
1966
‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald
Kennedy Considered as a Downhill
Motor Race’
Ambit
1966
‘Cry Hope, Cry Fury!’
Fantasy and Science Fiction
1967
‘The Recognition’
Dangerous Visions
1967
‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’
Fantasy and Science Fiction
1967
‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’
International Times
1968
‘The Dead Astronaut’
Playboy
1968
‘The Comsat Angels’
Worlds of If
1968
‘The Killing Ground’
New Worlds
1969
‘A Place and a Time to Die’
New Worlds
1969
‘Say Goodbye to the Wind’
Fantastic Stories
1970
‘The Greatest Television Show on Earth’
Ambit
1972
‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’
Ambit
1974
‘The Air Disaster’
Bananas
1975
‘Low-Flying Aircraft’
Bananas
1975
‘The Life and Death of God’
Ambit
1976
‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’
Bananas
1976
‘The 60 Minute Zoom’
Bananas
1976
‘The Smile’
Bananas
1976
‘The Ultimate City’
Low-Flying Aircraft
1976
‘The Dead Time’
Bananas
1977
‘The Index’
Bananas
1977
‘The Intensive Care Unit’
Ambit
1977
‘Theatre of War’
Bananas
1977
‘Having a Wonderful Time’
Bananas
1978
‘One Afternoon at Utah Beach’
Anticipations
1978
‘Zodiac 2000’
Ambit
1978
‘Motel Architecture’
Bananas
1978
‘A Host of Furious Fancies’
Time Out
1980
‘News from the Sun’
Ambit
1981
‘Memories of the Space Age’
Interzone
1982
‘Myths of the Near Future’
Myths of the Near Future
1982
‘Report on an Unidentified
Space Station’
City Limits
1982
‘The Object of the Attack’
Interzone
1984
‘Answers to a Questionnaire’
Ambit
1985
‘The Man Who Walked on the Moon’
Interzone
1985
‘The Secret History of World War 3’
Ambit
1988
‘Love in a Colder Climate’
Interview
1989
‘The Enormous Space’
Interzone
1989
‘The Largest Theme Park in the World’
Guardian
1989