The letter was headed The Convent of Sant’ Annetta dei Fiori. Underneath this, Antonia had written the date in Roman numerals, followed by the salutation “My dear Angus”. Me, thought Angus; and read on.
“Your letter was a very pleasant surprise, as I had not expected to hear from you, although, as you know, there has been correspondence between me and Domenica. It gives me the pretext to say one or two things that I should have said some time ago, and never said. I shall deal with these and then go on to answer your question about that painting in my flat. That will be later, though, at the end of this letter. I tell you this now so that you should not read what I have to say with the irritation of one who feels that his question will go unanswered. I shall answer, I assure you.
“What happened to me in Florence was, as you know, somewhat distressing, not the least for you, I imagine. I had no idea that visiting Tuscany was so dangerous – and who could be expected to anticipate the sudden onset of Stendhal Syndrome? Looking back on it, of course, I can now see the signs that were there well before I collapsed in the Uffizi Gallery and was taken away so ignominiously. On reflection I can recall feeling slightly queasy two days earlier when I was paging through Gombrich, or was it Kenneth Clark, or somebody else altogether, and saw that photograph of Donatello’s David. At the time I thought it might have been the fig tart I had bought in Montalcino, but now I know that it was the first warning of Stendhal Syndrome.
“Since my diagnosis, I have done quite a bit of reading about the condition and I must say that I have been astonished to discover how distinguished is the company in which I find myself! If one has to have a medical condition, then I suppose it can be a comfort to know that it is a condition that has laid low such distinguished people! Of course, Stendhal Syndrome would not be expected to affect just anybody: one has to be attuned to the artistic possibilities of a situation before one can be overcome and suffer emotional collapse. A person with no imagination or with no interest in matters artistic or spiritual will hardly be expected to succumb to extreme emotion in the face of great art: such a person will usually be quite indifferent to these matters.
“It’s a very curious thing, Angus, but I have no memory at all of being in the gallery. Oh yes, I know I was there – I was told by the doctors in the hospital that I had been brought in from the Uffizi, and that this fact was of immediate relevance to their diagnosis. But for me that day remains largely blank. I think I remember breakfast, and I do remember being in the Piazza della Signoria, but apart from that … well, I’m afraid my memory provides no promptings.
“One of the doctors had a special interest in Stendhal Syndrome and he told me that amnesia of this sort is relatively rare in this condition. He felt that this meant that I had been in some sort of dissociative state as well. That interested me, and I read a bit about that too. Apparently we all experience dissociative states of some degree or other, and may have no recollection of what we did in that state. That’s interesting, isn’t it? I suppose most of us have no special name for it – we just know that we haven’t been there, so to speak. I sometimes found that when I was writing about my early Scottish saints; or when driving and my mind wandered. I also remember being in Jenners once and suddenly thinking, My goodness, how did I get here?
“They were very kind to me in the psychiatric hospital in Florence. I was put in a ward with three other women, two of whom had visits twice a day from various members of their family. One of the women was the wife of a farmer, and her people brought in great baskets of fruit and large salamis virtually every time they came in. They insisted on my sharing this – the Italians are naturally so generous – and so I was always well provided with treats of every description. This helped my recovery, I believe, and certainly the doctors took that view. I lay in bed, looking out of the window, grapes and olives and garlic salami on the table at my side. Why return to Scotland when one is in that position? Would one ever get that at home? Does the National Health Service ever do olives – even for clearly therapeutic purposes?”
48. The Scottish Male Psyche Laid Bare
Angust turned the page of the letter.
“As you know,” Antonia continued, “I was not in hospital all that long, but I had plenty of time to think. I must admit – and I hope that you will not mind my mentioning this – that I felt quite resentful of both you and Domenica. The whole idea of going to Italy was mine, after all, and yet it seemed to me that you excluded me more or less from the time we left Edinburgh Airport. And then, whenever I said anything, Domenica pretended not to hear – have you any idea how painful that was for me? Men sometimes don’t pick these things up; they pretend to themselves that everything is fine even when there is a real atmosphere. I’m not blaming you for that; you are a man and can’t help being a man … No, I shouldn’t say that because I’m not sure if that’s what I really believe. We are not trapped by gender to the extent that some people say we are; we can transcend all that and be people, simpliciter. (I like that word by the way, Angus; we had a teacher at school who misused it all the time to prevent any discussion of a rule. You will not do that, simpliciter. It somehow worked, and cut off any talking back. Simpliciter.) So the fact that you are a man is no real excuse for insensitivity to the feelings of others; we must all work to develop awareness of others; it is part of our necessary moral effort that we should make ourselves capable of sympathy. Too many men luxuriate in being men; they deliberately exclude the possibility of sensitivity and strike superficial attitudes. They close themselves off.
“Poor men! Have you noticed, Angus, how this all goes very deep in Scotland? The Scottish male psyche is a poor wounded creature, made to pretend to be tough, to pretend not to have feelings that are perfectly natural, human feelings. Do you know something, Angus, I had an extraordinary moment of insight while I was in hospital and thinking of home. It suddenly occurred to me that the Scottish male was not really interested in football! Yes, I know it sounds absurd, almost counter-intuitive, but I think it really may be true. Football is what they feel they must be interested in because it is expected of them. They become involved in football through fear: fear of being excluded from the male group, fear of being thought to be insufficiently masculine, fear of being thought to be too interested in any of the things that men are not meant to be interested in.
“And all the time, inside himself, the Scots male is crying, Angus. He’s crying for the hard, demanding world he’s created for himself; he’s crying for the softness and love that he, like all of us poor vulnerable creatures, needs and craves; he’s crying for the fact that he knows he has a soul – somewhere beneath all that unhealthy food and beer and cigarettes and hardness – somewhere there, under all those accretions of crippling toughness, he has a soul – and yet that soul is not allowed to blossom, is thwarted, is made to be something other than what it is.
“If I had the time and the energy, Angus, I would make it my mission to release the Scottish male from this awful prison he has made for himself. I would blow apart the walls that have been built around him; I would kiss him gently, I would try to bring him the comfort that he so desperately yearns for but that has been denied him, for generation upon generation. Oh, I would do that, Angus, I would take it as my holiest of duties to do that for Scotland.
“But I digress. You must have seen that I was upset by being excluded from the intimacy that you and Domenica appeared to have, and yet you did nothing about it. I felt real resentment that you did this, but I forgive you, Angus, and I shall not reproach you any more for that. As I lay there thinking, recovering from my episode of Stendhal Syndrome, I realised that I had no real reason to expect sympathy from others, including you and Domenica. What bound us together? What created any obligation on your part to do anything for me, let alone to feel anything for me? Friendship? Well, that raises interesting questions, doesn’t it?” Is the mere fact of being the friend of somebody else sufficient to constitute the obligation to do something for her? I’m not sure that
it does. And it certainly creates no duty to feel for the person who claims to be your friend. Friendship as an institution can hardly create feeling; that, surely has to come from within.
“I looked about me. There I was in that hospital ward with my fellow patients and the salami-bearing members of their families who drifted in and out. I had no bonds of any nature with those people, other than those created by the fact that I happened to be there in the same room as they were. But why should that create a bond? Do we have a bond with the people we find ourselves sitting in the same bus with, or in the same railway carriage? Having raised these examples, I realise that they rather work against what I was trying to say. I think we do have some sort of morally significant relationship with them, even if a very attenuated one. Imagine yourself in the train to Glasgow, Angus, and for some reason it stops. You look at the faces of your fellow passengers and you smile stoically. A man glances anxiously at his watch and you catch his eye. You shrug your shoulders, as if to say, What can one do? And he smiles back. You have established contact; there is something between all of you in that carriage. It is there, just glimpsed – a sense of being connected in some way. And that, perhaps, is what lies behind the old adage, We’re all in the same boat together. Exactly! We are, aren’t we; we’re all in the same boat together, even if for much of the time we don’t want to admit it. We want to pretend, I suppose, that our own boat is not sinking quite as fast as the boats of others.
“But enough of boats and railway carriages, Angus: let me tell you about the nuns.”
49. On Being in the Right Place
“The doctors were extremely kind,” Antonia continued. “One of them had trained briefly in Glasgow and was full of questions about the Byres Road, for some reason, and about a family called Mactavish, with whom he had stayed and whom he assumed I knew. But he was well-meaning and did everything he could to ensure that I was looked after properly. He brought me books in English although he was careful not to bring anything to do with art; an understandable reticence, I suppose, bearing in mind the nature of my condition. Nor did he bring me anything by Stendhal – that would have been extremely tactless, don’t you think?
“Eventually they decided that I was fit enough to be transferred into the country for a period of recuperation. I felt quite well enough to leave altogether, but they were insistent. I was told that there could be a relapse if I was not careful. They mentioned a patient, a German woman, who had been discharged from hospital after only two days, apparently quite recovered, but who had then unwisely visited the Pitti Palace and had created a terrible scene in front of The Martyrdom of Saint Agatha by Sebastiano del Piombo. She had to be readmitted to hospital and eventually spent a further three weeks there. They did not want this to happen to me, they said, even though it would be a positive delight, they assured me, to have me in their hospital for a longer period. They are so polite, the Italians.
“They proposed that I should go to a convent in the Sienese hills. This was run by nuns who had taken a number of women who had gone down with Stendhal Syndrome, and who had all recovered very well in the care of the sisters. I explained to them that I was not a Catholic, but they said that this did not matter at all. The nuns had never turned anybody away and I would not be expected to participate in their religious activities.
“I was given no choice, really. It’s not that I was a prisoner – they made it quite clear that I was not a compulsorily detained patient, and that I was free to walk out at any time. But they did rather cajole me into accepting their offer, and I must say that I’m very glad that they did.
“So I packed my things and said goodbye to my fellow patients in the ward. One of the other women started to weep when I told her that I was leaving; she wept copiously until a nurse appeared and calmed her down. The others all gave me presents: more salami, more olives, more dried figs. Then I was led out and put into a small van driven by a man in a white coat. This man insisted on practising his English throughout the drive, and I heard all about his history. He was from a village in the south, he said, and he was very pleased to shake the dust of his birthplace off his heels. I know very little about places like that, I’m afraid, other than that wonderful Carlo Levi novel – you know the one, Angus, the one in which the doctor is exiled by the fascists and finds himself in some awful god-forsaken place where the local brass band had marched over a cliff by mistake and could still be heard playing … They’re terribly superstitious down there, I believe.
“Then I heard all about his mother-in-law who, he says, is an incorrigible fraudster but will never serve any time in prison because the justice system is so slow. He says that she is very aware of this and continues with her frauds in the sure and certain knowledge that by the time they start her trial the offences will be prescribed by some sort of limitation period. Very odd. But he simply shrugged and said, ‘That is how this country is. You can do anything – anything – you like. And people do. All the time.’
“His English was very good, and I complimented him on it. He was pleased, and revealed that he was now learning German, so that he could go to Germany and get work as a driver. He had a cousin who had done just that; he had been the hospital driver in charge of driving the more dangerous and deluded patients. He was now back in Italy, and was driving a prominent Italian politician around. There is no difference, he said. The skills are the same.
“And so this conversation continued until we turned off the main road and started to make our way along a small local road. There were farmhouses dotted around here and there, and lines of trees on the brows of hills. You know those lines of cypresses that the Italians like so much? I always feel that they had been put there with an eye to their inclusion in a painting. And isn’t that an attractive idea, Angus, that you, as an artist, should approve of whole heartedly – that farmers should think of artists and design their landscape accordingly? Can you see that happening in contemporary Britain?
“Eventually we arrived at the convent. It is at the foot of a hill – one of those small hills that rise up in the Tuscan countryside like anthills. On the hilltop itself there is a village, a cluster of houses and a fourteenth-century church; down below there are fields, vineyards, groves of trees, thick tangles of brushwood. The convent itself is a large building, but not at all daunting. It looks like a very big farmhouse, in fact; a farmhouse that has been allowed to ramble over the centuries and has built additions to itself. It has ochre walls and a red-tiled roof. It sits in the countryside with that perfect assurance that good buildings have. You can tell a good building when you see it, can’t you? It’s in the right place – just the right place for it.
“And that, Angus, is the most important thing, don’t you think? Whether for a building, or a person: to be in the right place.”
50. A Trip to Glasgow is Planned
Bertie received no telephone call from Ranald Braveheart Macpherson that Saturday, nor did he get one on Sunday. Ranald had promised to let him know whether there had been any response to the adoption advertisement he had placed on eBay, but either there had been none, or Ranald had forgotten his promise. Bertie thought the latter explanation more likely: people promised things freely and rarely, in his experience, delivered on these promises.
Tofu was the worst offender when it came to broken promises, Bertie thought, with Olive and Pansy close contenders for second place. Tofu also told lies, not only about himself, but about others, and took a particular delight in baiting Olive with reports he claimed to have heard on the imminent arrest of her father for theft and of her mother for speeding.
“My dad knows a policeman,” he announced one day while the children were in the playground. “And he says they’re just building up their case. They’re almost there, but not quite.”
Olive looked at him suspiciously. “The police know all about you,” she said dismissively. “They’re going to get you, Tofu. Everybody knows that, don’t they?”
Pansy and Lakshmi nodded sagely, Pansy shaki
ng her finger sternly at Tofu and adding her own prediction. “They’re going to send you to Polmont, Tofu. Have you heard of it? It’s the place they send boys like you. Really bad boys.” She paused. “Many of them from Glasgow.”
Tofu was not cowed. “Oh yes? Well let me tell you something, Olive. The police have been watching your mum and dad for ages. Ages. That’s what my dad’s friend said. He said they’ve seen your dad pinching things and they know where he keeps them. And they’ve got tons of photos from those camera things showing your mum driving through red lights and going really fast. They’re going to send them both to prison really soon. And you know where? Glasgow! That means you’ll never see them again.”
Olive struggled to deal with this information. She bit her lip. “That’s not true, Tofu, and you know it.”
Tofu smirked. “But it is true, Olive. It’s really sad, and I feel very sorry for you. But there are some things you can’t hide from. And that’s one of them. Sorry about that.”
This was too much for Olive, who started to wail before she, Pansy and Lakshmi all ran off to knock on the door of the staffroom and report the incident.
“You shouldn’t tell fibs, Tofu,” said Bertie. “Even to Olive.”
Tofu laughed insouciantly. “Why not?” he said.
Bertie thought for a moment. Why should one not tell fibs? Because … because it was wrong. But why were things wrong? Was it because grown-ups told you that it was wrong? But then some grown-ups were themselves wrong about so many things – look at poor Dr Fairbairn, who had had no idea at all about what was what. Because God told you? That provided better authority, perhaps, but if God felt so strongly about fibs, then why had he not punished Tofu for all the lies he had told? It would be easy for Tofu to be struck by lightning, but Bertie had never seen anybody struck by lightning, not once – not even close to it. And that was in the face of a whole lot of unpunished, unrepudiated fibs, told, it would seem, by everybody; a whole forest of mendacity, stretching out almost as far as Aberdeen – fib after fib …
Bertie Plays the Blues Page 17
