Memory and Desire

by Lisa Appignanesi

  It was this, as he well knew, that he was being groomed for.

  On the other hand there was the person Alexei thought of as his real father. A father who paradoxically grew stronger, more substantial in him, the further he receded into the wintry mists of time. A father who was vast, who loomed larger than he had when Alexei was knee-high and whose last words to him about the justice of the revolution took on increasing weight when an adolescent Alexei was able to fathom their meaning.

  By the time he had reached his final year at the Liceo, Alexei had read a great deal about the history of Russia and the makings of the Revolution. He had also read Karl Marx and Trotsky and imbibed a critique of a nefarious capitalism which seemed to him altogether apt. Words like ‘exploitation’, ‘alienation’ and the ‘struggle of the workers’ were part and parcel of his everyday vocabulary. As he drove in the car his uncle had bought him through the tawdry high rise suburbs of Milan where the workers, many of them migrants from the peasant South, lived, he felt hotly guilty at his unearned privilege, distraught by the injustices and inequalities of everyday life.

  He was hardly alone.

  Throughout the sixties public debate in Italy raged around these very issues. There was a deep sense in many that the resisters, the left, the very people who had freed Italy from the grip of Fascism were those who had been cheated out of the economic miracle of peace. In 1963, the Christian Democrats who had ruled Italy since the war with their advocacy of church and hearth and capital, were forced to form a coalition with the socialists. Everywhere there was talk of an opening to the left and what it meant.

  If Katherine Jardine had chanced upon Alexei and his friends arguing in a Milan cafe she would have felt like an alien creature - separated from these youths, who were in many ways her peers, by something far more than the Italian language. The very weight given to certain common words - Communist, Socialist, American, - the values attributed to them, would have divided them as irrevocably as devils and angels. Yet if the subject under discussion were movies, their idiom would instantly have shifted to a shared one. Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando and of course, the entire Disney cavalcade were common currency. America’s legacy to the world.

  Alexei’s interest in film had not abated. If anything it had grown into a consuming passion. His studies at the Liceo at an end, he wanted nothing more than to be able to plunge into the world of Cinecitta. But it was clear to him that this was a near impossibility. Giangiacomo Gismondi had insisted on university and Alexei, whatever his feelings, knew that in this he must follow his uncle’s will. He was, though the fact was never spoken, acutely aware of the debt of gratitude he owed his uncle. More than that. Whatever the nature of his nascent political ideas, he liked the man, respected him. He knew, too, how much he meant to this man whom he still thought of as uncle, but whom he called, father.

  They made an odd couple when they went out together. Giangiacomo, with his bald head, his girth, his florid gestures and genial manner. Alexei, towering over him. Slender, somewhat withdrawn, with his tumble of dark curls and reflective air. Invitations from Milanese hostesses, particularly those with daughters a little younger than Alexei, or indeed widowed sisters appropriate to Giangiacomo, were hardly scarce.

  Those who had not met them before and heard them introduced as father and son were always slightly perplexed. Whispered questions followed and then the, ‘ah, of course, the Russian…’ Nor were people quick to forget them. Giangiacomo’s ready wit. The intelligent blaze of Alexei’s eyes, that look which seemed to see more than one wanted to reveal. Once they had positioned Alexei in their minds, people would often comment, ‘Yes, yes, I suspected he wasn’t Italian.’ It had something to do with the quality of his silence, his restraint.

  Within himself, at these gatherings, Alexei hardly felt restrained. He was filled with excitement, the excitement of looking, of finding the telling detail - the movement of a napkin over red lips, the clench of a hand at the turn of a conversation, the swing of a trousered leg. The excitement of framing shots, of observing as if through the eye of a camera, of imagining the frame through Hitchcock’s eyes, or Rossellini’s, or Huston’s.

  The faculty of seeing was the one through which Alexei breathed. It was not a passion which was immediately visible to others. And it tended to position him outside any group.

  Giangiacomo Gismondi was always surprised, when they sometimes talked over these gatherings, by how much his son had taken in just when he had thought him most absent. A useful quality for an executive, he would reflect to himself proudly.

  Towards the end of his last term at the Liceo, Alexei determined that he would continue his studies in Rome. He had two reasons of equal weight. He wanted to be out from under his uncle’s all-embracing shelter. And he wanted to be in the proximity of the Italian film industry. He convinced his uncle of the validity of his decision and Giangiacomo conceded. But he insisted that Alexei live in the family flat in Rome.

  ‘Your mother always preferred it there,’ he told Alexei. ‘It would please her. And your being there will give me an extra excuse to visit my favourite city,’ he laughed and shrewdly assessed his son. He was not blind to Alexei’s reasons for wanting to leave Milan.

  Alexei merely observed that whenever his fathers wanted to affirm the validity of their choices, they called on the weight of the absent mother. That much, at least, they had in common.

  He remarked on this to his closest friend Enrico Mazzocchi, as they flew together to Sicily at the outset of the summer break.

  ‘You can’t argue with the dead,’ Enrico commented wryly, as he sipped another in his endless intake of Coca Colas ‘so they’re a perfect source of authority. The Sicilians, you’ll see, are stigmatized by the weight of their dead. That’s why they manage to carry on their vendettas over generations. The virtue of the dead is unquestionable.’

  He was elated by this visit to Sicily. He had seen Rosi’s film Salvatore Guiliano six times over the last years and was fascinated both by its brilliant semi-documentary technique, and by the story of this contemporary Sicilian Robin Hood who had been sold out by the politicians. When Enrico had asked Alexei whether he wanted to spend a few weeks with his family in their villa there, he had accepted with alacrity. The Mezzogiorno, the South, the problem this underdeveloped agrarian area posed, was something much discussed in the magazines and newspapers he read.

  But nothing, certainly not Rosi’s harsh camera, had prepared him for the sheer sensuous splendour of the island. As the car drove them along sinuous roads which wound below the dark ancient cone of Etna, he felt he had stepped into another time. A time which did not set its clock by the pulse of Milan. Before him stretched a coastline of jagged cliffs and great rock towers, a sea of purple and iridescent green. In this lush corner of the island, pockets of wild flowers still thrust their myriad colours through golden grasses. Citrus trees were heavy with the weight of orange and lemon.

  Enrico’s family villa sprawled starkly white and Moorish above the cluster of houses and church and ancient temple which formed the small town of Cefalu. When they stepped out of the car, lizards flickered electric green across the ground. The air was heavy with the buzz of bees and the sweetness of thyme and mint.

  ‘Ti piace?’ Signora Mazzocchi turned her handsome sharp-nosed face to him.

  Alexei nodded.

  ‘Yes, I can see you’re already under the spell of the place.’

  ‘Don’t get too spellbound,’ Enrico cautioned him with a lopsided grin. ‘Or we’ll never budge from this place. There’s a lot more to see. And I’m going to show it to you all.’

  Enrico was as good as his word. The very next day at dawn they set off into the interior, up steep bumpy roads where they met only the occasional Vespa or mule. Lushness turned to rocky escarpments and then to sun-bleached plain where the corn danced lazily in the wind. In one field, the harvest was already in progress. They stopped to watch. Young men stripped to the waist bending to clasp an armful of stems a
nd splicing through them with a sickle. Old men in red head-cloths, handkerchiefs at their throats, tying sheafs together with grass twine.

  ‘It’s as if the machine age had never come.’

  ‘It hasn’t in most of the South,’ Enrico said flatly.

  ‘I know.’ Alexei paused. ‘I have to fight the lure of the picturesque. It all looks so beautiful, so right.’

  Enrico snorted. ‘From the outside. For us tourists. From the inside its gruelling labour. And for what? For a few loaves of bread. They’re all probably relatives. In a couple of days, they’ll go to a cousin’s patch and repeat the process. Listen, they’re singing.’

  Alexei listened. ‘I can’t make out a word. It’s dialect.’

  ‘What did you expect? Tuscan? A little aria from Verdi?’

  Alexei glanced at his friend, startled at the edge in his voice. ‘No, no I didn’t,’ he said softly. ‘You really care about this place, don’t you?’

  Enrico shrugged. ‘We’ve had the villa for five years now. They still treat us as if we were creatures from Mars. From that other planet called the North of Italy. They hate us. And with reason. We’ve got everything. They’ve got their patch of land, a few grapes. And toil. Year after year. Over and over. That’s what they’re singing about.’

  Alexei listened, tried to make out the words. Then the rhythm changed. Incantation turned into a series of sprightly ripostes, one man after another.

  Enrico’s mood lightened with the melody. ‘They’re growing bawdy, now. There’s plenty of that. Singing about the King and Queen doing it. The weight of balls,’ he chuckled. ‘All that and yet they see the grain, bread itself, as holy. Reverence side by side with bawdiness. It’s altogether pagan.’

  They drove on, arguing. About the stranglehold of the Mafia and the priests. About the trap or comfort of superstition. In a nearby village, they stopped to stretch their legs. Women and girls, a length of lace or embroidery in their hands, sat in small groups in front of the huddled stone houses. Their presence hushed their voices. Only old weathered faces wrapped in black allowed themselves to glance at these aliens.

  By mid-day they had reached the antique splendour of Agrigento. Vast pagan temples caught between the blue stillness of sea and sky. Zeus and Juno and Hercules, Castor and Pollux, Demeter and Persephone roaming like ghosts in an acropolis of roseate columns only to find themselves in a Norman church. The pagan bumping into the Christian and co-existing.

  Alexei was entranced by the beauty of it all and fascinated by the collision of cultures. Pagan deities become patron saints, one for every crop and every stone, and each one in need of propitiation. A world of blazing sunlight and dark fears. A world centuries away from the machines and assembly lines and televisions of the North.

  The next day he astonished himself by agreeing to go to church with Enrico and his mother. He had not entered a church since his aunt’s funeral, though it was only in the last year or so that he had found reasons in the books he read to substantiate what had been a choice based in part on loyalty to his Russian father.

  The sleepy central square of the small town was abuzz with people, more of them Alexei thought than its precincts could hold. Women and children in their Sunday finery; bow-legged old men in soft hats resting on benches in front of the mellow baroque facade replete with finely carved statuary. Alexei could feel rather than see the eyes on him. At first he thought it was because he seemed so much taller than those around him. Then he realised that it might also be because of the paucity of young men. Of course, so many had left for the North, for other countries.

  Inside the church was cool despite the heat of the day. While the priest in his ornate robes intoned the mass, Alexei’s gaze wandered. The expression on those faces, those murmuring lips reminded him of his aunt, her delicate features, her beseeching eyes raised upwards towards a heavenly dome. Suddenly the burly form of his uncle Giangiacomo interposed itself in his vision. He was struck as never before by the difference between the two of them. How had they ever come together, that man with his unstoppable energy, his peculiarly animal gait? And that woman, as fragile as a china cup, all refinement and lassitude and intense devotion? A sudden image of them coupling leapt into his mind. He banished it. It was unthinkable. A desecration. Perhaps that was why they had had no children. The direction of his thoughts upset him. He forced himself back to the present.

  His gaze rested on three young women in white muslin who stood out at the end of his row amidst darkly clothed elders. The one closest to him had a purity of profile which arrested his gaze. Raven hair beneath lace haloed in the light of stained glass. A high rounded forehead, hooded eyes, a straight classical nose, and then the contradiction of full reddened lips. He watched her kneel, belatedly remembered that he was part of the congregation and also stooped to pray. But his eyes stayed on her, on the grace of that head bent in utter submission.

  Suddenly she shot a glance at him, dark, doubly secret in that atmosphere of hushed reverence. The hot nakedness of that glance, its potent intimacy, troubled him. It was as if for a moment there had been only the two of them in a private space, a bedroom.

  He watched her, waited for the repetition of that look. It didn’t come. There was only now, as the congregation rose and trooped into the blazing sunlight, a demure young woman with lowered lids shepherded by a gnarled old man through the fray of shouting children.

  ‘Stop staring,’ Enrico followed the line of Alexei’s gaze and roused him from his reverie.

  Alexei jumped. ‘Was I?’ he mumbled.

  Enrico nodded, laughed. ‘Very obviously. You’ll get yourself into trouble.’

  ‘Who is she?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Who are they, you mean?’ Enrico’s eyes rested on the backs of the three girls in white and the old man.

  Enrico’s mother overheard them. ‘They are our nearest neighbours. The villa is on land we bought from them. Old Bagheri used to be quite a wealthy peasant, but I think they’ve fallen on hard times. It would have to be hard times for a Sicilian to sell an outsider land. His wife is dead; the eldest son has gone North and the eldest daughter is already settled. That leaves three daughters who will cost a pretty penny to marry off. Dowries, you know.

  They stopped in the small cafe at the end of the square and ordered coffee. Alexei noticed that Enrico’s mother was the only woman in the darkened room.

  ‘I warned Alexei of the dangers of staring,’ Enrico chuckled.

  Alexei could feel himself flushing, could feel the imprint of the girl’s secret glance on his face.

  Signora Mazzocchi sipped the strong sweet coffee and looked reflectively at Alexei. ‘Enrico’s right. Eyes in Sicily speak loudly. And with them marriages are made, honour defiled, vendettas begun.’

  ‘And it always starts in church,’ Enrico said with a touch of malice.

  ‘The only regular meeting place. Otherwise the young are kept strictly apart,’ his mother concurred.

  ‘There’s an old proverb here,’ Enrico added, ‘Everyone can go to church,’ he paused dramatically, ‘and prison.’ He laughed. ‘Chances are you won’t see the lovely Miss Bagheri more than three times in the three weeks that we’re here.’

  ‘A ghastly state of things,’ Alexei said lightly. But in his mind, Enrico’s words took on the form of a challenge.

  On the way back to their villa, Signora Mazzocchi pointed out the Bagheri home. It was the last house in the town, a crumbling but not unimposing residence which bordered on a grove of gnarled olive trees. From behind the curtained upper floor balcony, Alexei thought he heard the sound of voices. He looked up and sensed rather than saw those eyes gazing down at him. Incomprehensibly, he shivered in the noon-day heat.

  Later that afternoon, while they were lounging round the pool, Signora Mazzocchi announced that she would be going to the Bagheri home that evening to pay her seasonal respects.

  Alexei who had been unable to settle into his book and had instead resigned himself to a daydream in
which three girls in white featured largely, felt an unaccustomed nervousness coil in his stomach.

  ‘Would you both like to accompany me?’ Her words seemed to come from a great distance. Not trusting his answer, Alexei jumped noisily into the pool.

  ‘Yes, why not,’ he heard Enrico say. ‘You want to come to the Bagheris, don’t you Alexei?’ he shouted after him.

  Alexei nodded vaguely and then plunged again into the cool water.

  The room into which old Bagheri sternly ushered them looked as if it had never been penetrated by a shaft of light. A large worn refectory table in the midst of which stood a ceramic bowl of dried flowers ate most of the space. An old woman who didn’t look at them deposited a tray on it and shuffled away. Signor Bagheri poured silently and gave them each a glass of pungent wine, a golden biscuit.

  They made desultory conversation about the weather, the poor crops, the poorer fishing, the latest series of Mafia ‘accidents’ in Palermo. All the time Alexei waited impatiently for the appearance of the three girls. Signora Mazzocchi seemed to read his mind.

  ‘And your daughters?’ she asked.

  ‘They are well, good children, the holy mother be praised,’ the old man answered. Alexei sensed the suspicion in the look he cast over himself and Enrico. ‘Giulia has had an offer from Signor Novellone. Father Paolo arranged it,’ Bagheri said with a touch of pride. ‘And he tells me my youngest, Francesca, has the makings of a vocation,’ a smile with a touch of guile lit his lined face.

  Alexei flinched. Was Francesca the girl whose eyes had left an indelible trace on him?

  ‘How splendid,’ Signora Mazzocchi kept the conversation flowing and then rose. It was time for them to go. Signor Bagheri must come and repay their visit. The peaches were doing very well this year. He must help himself. They couldn’t possibly eat all of them. She chatted their way out through the darkened hall.