I tried to collect my scattered thoughts and shuffle them into some kind of order.
‘Teresa,’ I said urgently. ‘Why did they do this to you? What did they want to know?’
I couldn’t read the expression in those wide brown eyes for a moment, then I got it. Distrust. She still didn’t trust me.
‘Listen, Teresa,’ I said. ‘Like I told you in the Forum, all I want is the chance to see Angelica. I don’t know what the hell’s going on and I don’t really care. I want to see my daughter. I’ve got cancer. I’m dying. That’s why I left Venezuela. I haven’t got much time. So if you know anything that can help me …’
She was regarding me with astonishment.
‘Cancer!’ she said. ‘You, Tonto …’
‘Yes, me. Tonto.’
She turned her head away. Her gaze must have fallen on one of the scattered snapshots for she picked it up, despite the pain the action must have caused her. I could see it was a photograph of a typically unsmiling Vasco.
I said, ‘He’s with Angelica, isn’t he? Where’s he taken her, Teresa? I’ve got to know. Where, Teresa? Where?’
She groaned and shifted slightly. Her colour was very bad and her eyes were half closed. And the siren of the ambulance which would surely end our discussion was clearly audible now.
‘I was told they were in Ostia, your wife and daughter,’ she said in an almost inaudible voice. Asked to talk with the girl … only the girl … see how she was. We met her on the beach … Vasco was with me … it is easier for young people to talk together. They liked each other …’
I felt a sudden untimely pang of jealousy. God, she was only sixteen! Then I mocked my hypocrisy as I recalled the ages of some of my annual friends.
‘Vasco is impulsive … he thought it best … to be safe,’ apologized Teresa, looking fondly at the photograph of her son before closing her eyes again.
The siren halted outside.
I said. ‘Teresa, for God’s sake, where are they?’
She said in a strange, agonized tone, ‘I will never tell you!’
Then she opened her eyes wide and after a second registered my face.
‘Oh Tonto, it’s you … I thought it was Krylov asking … always asking … I would not speak … Vasari scattered the photos and said they would kill my grandchildren … but Krylov said my own pain would work quicker … but I still did not speak.’ She glared at me proudly.
‘But where are they?’ I asked again.
‘Then the phone rang,’ she continued, ‘Krylov answered it. He did not speak. And then they left … Why did they go, Tonto? … Perhaps someone else had told them … You must go after them Tonto … take my car, little Tonto … it’s in the street.’
‘I will, I will Teresa,’ I said. ‘But where are they?’
It was too late. I’d left the door of the apartment open and now a little posse of ambulance men burst in with a stretcher and Teresa fell back apparently unconscious.
The ambulance men looked aghast when they saw her injuries. One of them muttered something and went into the living-room, I guessed to telephone the police. The others lifted Teresa gently on to the stretcher. I didn’t see much point in mentioning Giuseppe at this juncture.
As they bore her through the door her eyes flickered open again.
‘The keys,’ she breathed.
She meant the car keys, I guessed. They were on the bedside table. I picked them up and thrust them into my pocket and followed the stretcher downstairs. I could tell the ambulance men regarded me a trifle ambiguously but they weren’t about to try to detain me. However, if I got into the ambulance with Teresa, it was odds on there’d be a welcoming committee for me at the hospital.
I tried once more as they lifted her into the ambulance, grasping the stretcher to hold it still.
‘Where will I find them, Teresa?’ I begged. ‘Please!’
‘She’s unconscious,’ snapped one of the men. ‘We must hurry.’
Teresa’s hand moved from under the sheet they’d draped over her. It must have been agony. In her bloody fingers she still grasped the photograph of Vasco. She held it out to me and spoke, but I couldn’t catch the words.
I took the photo and said, ‘What is it, Teresa?’
‘Grandfather,’ she said quite clearly. ‘Danger.’
Then the ambulance men pushed me unceremoniously aside and next minute the vehicle was on its way, lights flashing, siren screaming. Then the silence and the darkness came rushing back in on me.
I had to get away from here, but I’d no idea where to go. The thought that somewhere in that darkness and silence a man with the face of a romantic violinist and the scruples of Torquemada might be searching for my daughter filled me with an impotent rage which redirected itself against my father. His was the ultimate responsibility for all this. And clearly I’d been right in guessing that he’d make some contact with Teresa. Her final words, Grandfather. Danger, must surely refer to him.
She was right. If I got close to him, there’d be plenty of danger.
The thought seemed to release me and I set off down the street in search of Teresa’s car which her keys told me was a little Fiat 126. After a couple of bosh shots, I found it.
As I slid into the driving seat, I realized I was still holding the bloodstained photo of Vasco. I tossed it on to the passenger seat and started the engine.
But before I engaged gear, I paused and picked up the photograph again.
Teresa had given it to me at the expense of great pain. What had been going through that almost unconscious mind?
I examined the picture. And I swore at my own stupidity. So obsessed was I with my own concerns that I interpreted everything to fit them.
Vasco too had a grandfather, old Matteo Carducci, her dead husband’s father who had founded and held sway for forty years over the family baking business.
And that was what I could see in the background of the photograph. That sunlit archway, that narrow window with the engraved lintel, these belonged to the Carducci bakery in Amalfi.
Where else would an Italian boy in trouble go but to his grandparents?
It had been the home of my grandparents too and I was certainly in trouble.
As I engaged gear and slowly drew away, I could hear the distant wail of police sirens.
16
… ring of ripe pineapple …
I was on the Autostrada del Sole, motoring steadily south.
The temptation to burn a furrow in the tarmac all the way to Naples was strong, but for all kinds of reasons I resisted it. For a start, Teresa’s tiny car, which fitted me like a thirty ‘A’ cup fits Sophia Loren, had eighty thousand doubtless violent kilometres on the clock and gave vibrant hints that too much accelerator would bring the engine off its mounting. And in any case, there’s not much point in burning up an autostrada. If the cops don’t get you between the toll gates, the bastards checking your time-stamped ticket will often give a handily parked police car a friendly wave if you seem to have been breaking records. So I held steady at the limit.
In fact, so far I’d seen no evidence of police activity. I’d half expected to discover the carabinieri were asking quo vadis, milord? on all the main roads out of Rome, but now I was buzzing through the Castelli without a sign of them and felt able to relax.
The night was fine but very dark, and after half an hour or so the old hypnosis of night-driving began to lull my already exhausted mind. Time and space ebbed away like a neap tide and the darkness no longer rushed by, but gently stroked and caressed my troubled thoughts, easing away my sense of angry purpose. From time to time petals of light unfolded before me, then drifted by on the slow currents of dark river. Soon, soon, we would all drift into oblivion together. Soon, as I lay here gently rocking in my chinchorro watching the fireflies dancing in the dusk, I would fall asleep; soon, the race won, my weary victor’s limbs would relax and take their ease; soon Mama would come into the nursery and the darkness would be rich with her perfume as
she folded me in her arms …
Suddenly I was asleep and not asleep; suddenly I was dreaming and not dreaming; suddenly Mama was Numero Siete and my exhaustion was not the clean fatigue of the victorious athlete but the feverish emptiness of the sated lecher …
Suddenly the dancing fireflies were the tail-lights of a convoy of army vehicles and the little Fiat was astraddle two lanes and almost into the rearmost truck!
I slammed on the brakes and watched the needle plummet towards legality. Fear brought me back to complete wakefulness, but I knew it wouldn’t last. And while falling asleep on the autostrada wasn’t very clever, at least I’d got a second chance which wasn’t at all likely once I reached the Amalfitana.
This is the notorious road snaking along those rugged cliffs which tower above the sea all along the southern shore of the Sorrento Peninsula as far as Salerno. I’ve been on worse roads in the Alps and it’s a four-lane highway compared with some of the tracks I’ve broken springs on in the Sierra Nevada. But the combination of native machismo and tourist terror make it a dangerous road for a man in a hurry and a fatal one for a man in a torpor.
Ahead was the Casilina service area. I drew in and parked. A couple of turns round the car and a few deep breaths of the exhaust tainted air didn’t convince me I was in a fit state to carry on. Only the knowledge that somewhere for some reason a melancholy Russian, with the face of a romantic violinist and the stomach to prise fingernails from living flesh, was searching for my daughter had kept me awake this far. But if Teresa was telling the truth when she said she hadn’t talked, he could have no clue to her whereabouts. And what was certain was that I’d be no use to her dead.
Not that I’d ever been much use to her living, I told myself bitterly.
I climbed into the rear of the tiny car, locked the doors and lay down as best I could. I set my mental alarm system for an hour ahead. Then I closed my eyes and for a little while once more travelled back through the past till I reached the warm perfumed darkness of Mama’s shadow over my nursery bed. Then I fell asleep.
When I awoke, there was indeed a shadow falling over me but not Mama’s. It was cast by a policeman’s head which filled the whole of the small rear window. But for the moment it wasn’t the presence of the police that alarmed me, it was the source of the shadow.
The sun was clear of the horizon.
I sat up so quickly I bumped my head. Then I looked at my watch and swore. So much for my mental alarm. It was six-thirty a.m.
I climbed out of the car and found I was so stiff I could hardly straighten up. I did a kind of simian shuffle to get the blood circulating and this had the unlooked-for effect of making the pozzo laugh.
‘You should pick a car your own size,’ he said.
It struck me he had taken me for an Italian. It also struck me that his curiousity might quickly be aroused if he realized I was a foreigner in what was pretty clearly not a rented car. So I swore in Italian, swung my foot against one of the Fiat’s tyres, pretended to hurt my toe and limped off muttering towards the self-service.
At the cashier’s desk I paid for four caffes and a doughnut. I drank the first caffe to wash my mouth out, ate the doughnut, and downed the other three in quick succession. The woman behind the counter made a joking comment. I scowled ferociously at her and headed for the lavatory.
The police car had disappeared when I returned to the car park. I got into the Fiat and set off once more.
It would have been nice to discover I felt better after my sleep and breakfast but in fact I didn’t. My head was aching and my stomach too, though I tried to ignore that or at least to assure myself it felt no worse than I would have expected after a broken night, four black coffees and a stale doughnut.
There was a lot more traffic on the road now and after I left the autostrada progress became increasingly slow. Tourist buses were on the move and in the end I found I needn’t have worried about the Amalfitana. By the time I hit it, I was in the middle of a small convoy of coaches and obliged to crawl along in a miasma of diesel fumes and a carillon of warning horns every time we reached a bend. At least it gave me plenty of time to stare out into the Bay of Salerno and recall those days, now shaded with bitterness as were all my memories of my father, but then aglow with the gold of sunshine and joy, when I crewed for him as he set our sail-boat, the Ariel scudding across the Tyrrhenian Sea. In this art as in all that he practised he went beyond self-assurance into an almost godlike arrogance. It took me a long time to realize that gods keep their strength up by feeding on their families.
These were the nostalgic thoughts that burrowed through my mind as I came back to Amalfi.
Already the town was packed. I hadn’t been back here since the early ‘fifties nearly thirty years ago. Surely, even making allowances for a boy’s uncritical memory, it hadn’t been like this then? The place seemed riddled with tourists and every inch of space on the sea-front was packed with cars. I drove into the Piazza Duomo and parked by the cathedral steps. The last time I had climbed that splendid flight, which looked as if it could have been designed for a Busby Berkeley set, I had been following great-grandmama Dianti’s coffin. It had been hard to feel sad. The sun had been shining as brightly then as now and the gilded mosaic front of the Duomo had sparkled more like an entrance to Disneyland than to the Other World. Afterwards I would be returning to the Villa Colonna perched on the edge of the cliffs on the road to Positano. Later in the day perhaps, changed out of these stiff formal clothes, I would climb down the cliff-face with Pa to run up sail on Ariel and go in search of a breeze. Nothing seemed more certain.
I’ve learned a lot since then. Joy is to be trusted like a politician’s mail—it can always blow up in your face. No wonder the majority of the human race finds such consolation in the banalities of certain repetition—spring after winter, dawn after darkness, Saturday after Friday! But I was young enough to be quite devastated when I found myself an hour after the funeral heading for Naples and home with no prospect of ever returning to the Villa Colonna. It was now the property, by right of male primogeniture, of Pa’s cousin, Giulio Dianti. Great-grandmama didn’t care for him much, but as the only son of her only son, he had an inalienable right of inheritance. It was Giulio’s intention, Pa told me with distaste, to turn the villa into a hotel. Giulio was a notoriously unlucky speculator and Pa derived some consolation from the certainty that any such commercial enterprise was doomed to failure. But such consolations are balm only to adult wounds. All I knew was that a joyous sunlit area of my life had been blacked out without warning.
I shook my head free of the memory and got out of the car. The Carducci bakery was quite close, but I contented myself with observing it from a distance. The family did not live on the premises and I doubted if Vasco and Angelica would be here. Through the open door I glimpsed work in progress. It suited my book very well that I should find the young people alone. Vasco himself would be bad enough to deal with, but the rest of the Carducci family was a complication I could do without.
I had only a vague idea where the family house was, but a telephone directory soon solved that problem. I headed back for the car but on re-entering the Piazza, I saw a uniformed figure standing at the foot of the Cathedral steps. I guessed I’d broken one of the very few parking laws which were enforced in the town and as I’d no desire to be asked to produce documents, I just kept on walking.
In fact the Carducci house wasn’t all that far, though I increased the distance by getting lost a couple of times. It stood in the middle of a whitewashed terrace. The windows were shuttered against the opposing sun, but on the top floor there was an open balcony and here I glimpsed the head of a seated man. He had a fine mop of snow-white hair. I guessed this would be old Matteo Carducci, Teresa’s father-in-law, who must be in his eighties now and had wisely decided that the heat of the bakery was no place for a man with two daughters and a son to run the business.
I paused to light a cigarette. There were a couple of cars parked in t
he vicinity but none with Roman number plates. I felt suddenly uneasy. Suppose Teresa had been wrong and Vasco had not headed south? Or, worse, suppose the phone calls which had interrupted her torturers had been news that Vasco and Angelica had been traced and taken?
Perhaps they were being held in this very house. It didn’t seem likely but I made sure the automatic tucked into my waistband was ready for a rapid emergence and crossed the road.
There was an open archway which led into a small outer hall. It was cool and dark in there after the blaze of the mid-morning sun. I stood for a moment to let my eyes grow accustomed to the change of light. I let my instinct run loose and it told me there was no one on this floor, but I checked anyway. Instinct was right. I went up a narrow stone staircase to the next floor. Quickly, and quietly too so I thought, I checked the rooms here, but as I peered into the last empty bedroom, a male voice called in a strained hesitant tone, ‘Anna? Is that you?’
I went cautiously towards the balcony, suspicious that this tone might indicate constraint. But the old man was alone and it took only a moment to spot the source of the constraint. Some time recently he must have suffered from a stroke. In repose, with his head cocked on one side watching my approach as a cage-bird might watch the approach of a cat, he looked perfectly well, his sun and presumably oven-baked skin and white hair giving him a splendidly patriarchal appearance. But when he shifted his position and spoke again, asking who I was, the effects of his stroke became apparent. The right side of his body and of his face seemed almost completely paralysed.
I quickly introduced myself. He nodded and made a gesture which might have been an invitation to sit. I took it as such. He nodded again and smiled and spoke, but the combination of his physical difficulty in articulation and the stroke sufferer’s typical mental difficulty in getting the right word out made it hard for me to understand him outside the most obvious phrases. He repeated poco Inglese several times before I grasped he was referring to me as I had been all those years ago.
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