Memory and Desire

by Lisa Appignanesi

  All he had written was a list of pleases and buried amidst them the word ‘come’.

  But he felt a little better. The single action, no matter how small, had at least ruptured the monotony of his passive waiting.

  Later that night, after a dinner during which he managed to conduct himself with a modicum of normality, he returned to the spot. He did not expect to see Francesca, but he needed to be there. The goat was gone and to his delight so was the cloth bearing, as far as he could make out, his secret message. He leaned against the stone wall of the hut and gazed at the moon. In the distance he could make out the mellifluous sounds of a shepherd’s pipe. He was surprised to find himself uttering a prayer. A prayer he imagined that must be addressed to some pagan deity of place who could waft Francesca to him, unveil her from the bark of an olive tree, hew her out of the rocky escarpment.

  And the next evening, almost as if his prayer had taken flesh, she was there, magically released from the shadowy folds of the hill. He rushed towards her breathing her name, but she eluded his embrace.

  ‘I’ve come, but only to tell you that I can’t any more. I’ve promised.’

  There was no lustre in the eyes she focussed on him. Her face looked small, sad.

  ‘What is it, Francesca?’ he reached for her again. The way she evaded his touch angered him. Despite her protestations, he took hold of her hand, held it fiercely and pulled her up the slope towards the shelter of the hut. ‘What’s happened?’ In the sombre light he examined the curves of her face.

  She shrugged listlessly. ‘Father Paolo has forbidden it. He is right.’

  He stroked the heavy fall of her hair. ‘But we haven’t done anything bad,’ he murmured.

  Her eyes flashed suddenly with their old fire. ‘I wish I were a man,’ she said bluntly. ‘Then nothing is ever bad. Wrong.’

  Her words, their bitter edge, took him aback. In that instant, he was blindingly aware of the gulf between them. ‘No, yes,’ his words stumbled. ‘I’m sorry. I…’

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ her hand fluttered to his cheek and then darted away again, checking itself. He caught it in mid air, drew her down, so that they sat together, leaning against the stone wall. Gently he wound his arm around her, thrilling to the smooth skin of those soft rounded shoulders. They gazed at the shapes the moonlit incline thrust at them, each buried in private thoughts. He could hear the rush of her breathing. The ache it set up in him seemed unappeasable. She seemed to share it for she turned to face him, her lips parted.

  ‘One last time can’t matter,’ she murmured. ‘I shall have all of eternity to repent.’ Dark eyes challenged him and in a rush of passion, he pressed her to him, kissing her eyes, her cheeks, her neck, her lips. She clung to him fiercely, her whole fiery body intent against him. And then in a rush she disentangled herself.

  ‘Goodbye Alexei,’ her lips formed the words soundlessly.

  And then with a sad little submissive wave, she was off.

  He stood watching her for a moment, his limbs growing cold. And then anger uncoiled from his stomach and surged through him. He ran, ran like a man possessed, down, down the incline towards the thud of the sea. Ran past the moored fishing boats of the bay towards a neighbouring cove. There he almost tripped over a couple, their bodies intertwined. They sat up, disturbed by his footfall. The woman’s skin shone bare around the brief darkness of her bikini. ‘Northerners,’ the word rose to Alexei’s lips with the emphasis of a curse.

  He was surprised by its appearance there. Surprised by the strength of his identification with Francesca. A mere question of geography separated her from this bikini clad woman on the beach. A woman who could fearlessly wrap her arms round her lover, bare her body to the breath of the sea.

  Alexei clambered over boulders, leapt into the next cove, and dropping shirt and trousers in a heap, plunged into the sea. With all the savagery of his youth, he pounded out his anger, his sense of injustice on the waves.

  He only saw Francesca one more time. It was on the last night of the Festa as the brightly decorated floats moved through the heaving lantern-lit streets of the town. Amidst the shouts of the hawkers and the crowds, she wafted past, a waxen figure in a holy scene with the Christ child at its centre. Head lowered in rapturous adoration, she looked in her crimson and purple gown, like a saint in a medieval icon. For a moment, he thought her angelic smile was directed at him, but he realised his face must be indistinguishable in the crowd.

  ‘Francesca, mother tells me, is destined for the convent at Agrigento,’ Enrico informed him as he followed the direction of Alexei’s gaze.

  A blaze of fireworks saved Alexei from the task of replying. Not, in any event, that he could have found words to suit the confusion of his emotions.

  It was only in later years that this became possible. And then, his means of expression was the medium of film - a film which subtly explored the condition of women in the South, the fetters which trapped them, fetters which bred a peculiar sexual heat, fetters of family and tradition and poverty.

  And then Rosa had come to hone his sense of justice with a razor sharp tongue and force him to read the dictionary of desire through another set of eyes.

  Chapter

  Seventeen

  __________

  ∞

  Even after she had accepted his proposal, Katherine Jardine was unable to say for certain when her wanting of Carlo Negri had begun.

  Perhaps it had already been there all those years ago when she had first met him in Switzerland at the Princesse’s with Violette?

  No, it wasn’t at that first meeting. Although she had already been aware of him in that distant past. And again in New York. The magnetism of his eyes, those indolent gestures.

  But even if desire had been there, she wouldn’t have recognized it then. She would certainly not have been able to acknowledge its existence. That was only possible now.

  Katherine sighed and spread her books out on her preferred table in the stacks of London’s Courtauld Institute. Thick volumes whose contents by turn excited her and induced a daydreaming stupor - Panofsky’s Meaning in the Visual Arts, Momigliano’s work on the Renaissance. Richly coloured plates on heavily embossed paper, Leonardo, Titian, Rembrandt.

  Another few months and her three-year course at the Institute would be at an end. Three years of reading and discussion and intent looking. Three years of living in London and exploring the entrails of the sprawling city. And now there was the terrifying hurdle of her Finals.

  But she couldn’t concentrate today. It was no use.

  She pulled out the letter she had only glanced at before setting off from her flat on Highbury Fields that morning. Four pages in Jacob’s dense hand. She skimmed to focus on the relevant passages.

  ‘I have had a letter from Carlo Negri asking for your hand in marriage.’

  Her hand. The expression was so antiquated, so absurd, Katherine thought. It leapt out at her from Jacob’s fluent prose like a piece of mistaken phraseology. But she could imagine that Carlo, too, in writing to her father had used dusty formalities. He had told her he was going to write, murmured something about families, appropriate forms.

  Katherine read on.

  ‘I must say, I was rather surprised. I had no idea things had gone so far. Marriage, my dear Kat, is a serious thing, and without wishing to fall into the trap of clichés, you should at least believe it will last forever.’

  Irritation suffused her. How could Jacob take that tone with her? Had he thought seriously about marriage when he had wed Sylvie, believed it would last forever? And even if he had, what good had it done?

  ‘Carlo is a good twelve years older than you, a man of a certain experience. He may want different things of marriage than you do. You’re still very young. I had thought, when we last spoke of these things, that you wanted to work, to pursue a career, and not to settle into childbearing straightaway.

  Still, if marriage is your wish, I shall, of course, not stand in your way.’


  There was a p.s. ‘Have you spoken with Violette about all this. I believe she knows Carlo rather well.’

  Katherine winced with a mixture of guilt and triumph as she thought of her half-sister. Imagine Jacob suggesting that she talk to Violette about Carlo now, as if all that hadn’t happened, hadn’t been over aeons ago.

  With an irritated gesture she crunched her father’s letter into a tiny tight ball and took a piece of paper from her folder. ‘Dear Pappy,’ she began with hard sure strokes, then, changed her mind, ‘Dear Jacob, I want Carlo. We shall let you know details of the wedding. Love, Kat.’

  As she sealed the letter, she wondered again at the certainty she felt about that wanting if about nothing else. When had it really begun, this wanting of Carlo?

  That first summer in Rome? Yes, that must have been it. That first glorious month on her own in the world’s most beautiful, most surprising city, a city which seemed to contain all of recorded time within the precincts of its seven hills.

  For her course at the Courtauld, she needed another language and she chose Italian over German. Jacob, once he had been convinced of her determination to study in London, had agreed that a month in Italy learning Italian would not be a bad thing for a budding art historian. Princesse Mathilde had seen to the rest, had arranged for her to stay with an old friend of hers, Maria Novona, who lived in a vast flat a stone’s throw from the Villa Borghese.

  Maria Novona had arranged a little afternoon party for her, so that she could meet some young Italians, since her course catered only to foreigners. Whether by the Princesse’s intervention or by pure chance, Carlo Negri had come to that party.

  He had arrived a little late and Katherine had been aware of his eyes even before she had consciously acknowledged his presence. He had given her one of his lazy smiles by way of greeting. ‘La bella Katrina, now a student in Rome,’ he had said lightly, his gaze resting on her just a moment too long before taking in the crowd of young men and women around her. ‘When this is over, will you come with me for a drive. I’ll show you some sights.’ She had nodded her agreement and he had then withdrawn to talk to Maria Novona, not engaging with the group again, though she had the impression that his attention never left her.

  A drive with Carlo was like nothing else she had ever experienced. She had been terrified at first as that gleaming low-slung Ferrari had raced demonically over narrow roads past Frascati and up into the Alban hills. But then, just as she thought she must cry out, ask him to slow down, the sheer exhilaration of speed had taken her over. Her mind, all her anxieties had seemed to dissolve so that she was aware only of the wind rushing through her hair, the flickering movement of light in trees, the sheer physicality of hurtling recklessly through space. There was no past, no future, no responsibility, only that headlong movement. And the shape of that man at her side controlling it.

  When they had pulled up above the lake and the Castel Gandolfo, her knees, her hands were trembling. She didn’t know from whence the strength had come to resist Carlo’s kiss. But somehow, perhaps from sheer force of habit, she had turned her face away and extricated herself from the car. After two repeated nights with Ted some months back, nights where there had been no Shakespeare to lull her senses, awkward nights which gave her little pleasure and less satisfaction, she had decided that all that was not for her. She even went so far as to think that the pleasures of sex might well be an invention of her father’s generation, a great con perpetrated by the disciples of Freud. It was a time when she felt most bitterly about Jacob.

  Carlo, unlike some of the young men she knew in New York, had not persisted. She had heard a low, sardonic chuckle behind her, ‘Eh bene, e cosi,’ and then he was beside her, looking down at her, his eyes at once dangerous and approving. It was from that look, without quite knowing why, that she dated the start of their relationship.

  The next day a card had arrived inviting her and Maria Novona to take tea with Signora la Contessa Buonaterra, Carlo’s mother..

  ‘You are honoured, Katherine. La Contessa is very selective with her guests,’ Maria Novona had said with an inflection Katherine didn’t quite understand.

  The Buonaterra family Palazzo was some ninety kilometres outside Rome. As its gloomy grey stone facade emerged through the cypress-lined drive, the following Sunday, Katherine shifted uncomfortably in her seat. The heavy Baroque weight of the building with its formidably-muscled reclining figures oppressed her, blotted out the sun’s rays. She preferred to let her eyes rest on the symmetry of gardens, sculpted out of hilltop, and beyond, the blue haze of the sea dotted with tiny islands.

  A servant in full livery opened vast doors to them, led them through an expanse of echoing hall to a vaulted room which at first glance seemed to Katherine to be peopled by marble and painted figures. But some of them moved - like ghosts amidst the sombre grandeur, statuesque women in extravagant gowns, silent men tottering under the weight of years. Katherine dragged her steps, looked up at the ceiling with its bold images, so much more vibrant than what was in front of her.

  The Palazzo Buonaterra was grander than any house she had ever visited. She had had no idea that Carlo lived this way. And when he emerged smiling, white-suited, alive, from the depths of the room, she had to look twice to make sure it was him. He seemed to read her astonishment, for his lips twisted into a leisurely irony, ‘Welcome. Welcome to the familial pile,’ he murmured just for her ears, and then ushered her and Maria Novona to a far corner of the room. ‘Mama will want to meet you. We must pay respects to her first.’

  The familiarity of the word ‘mama’ seemed to bear no relation to the figure who sat regally in a chair which to Katherine had all the appearance of a throne. She felt somehow that she should curtsey but she had no idea how to go about that gesture.

  ‘Ah Signora Novona and Signorina Jardine, the young protégée of Principessa Mathilde. And how is the dear Principessa.’ Pale grey eyes examined her from above a haughty, jutting nose. Katherine felt as if each detail of her features, her clothes, her movements was being surveyed, judged, all while the thin mouth moved, smiling a little, eliciting response from her. The Countess seemed principally interested in details of her parentage. There was an additional smile when Katherine named her mother, a murmur, ‘Ah yes. Kowalska, Polish, Catholics, I know of the family.’ And then, ‘Sit by me, child. Take some tea,’ and a host of other introductions, cousins, uncles, aunts, politicians, judges. At one point, she had intercepted a glance between mother and son, a glance of, what had it been, complicity?

  When Maria Novona had stood to leave, Katherine had breathed a silent sigh of relief. Carlo had accompanied them to the door of the room. ‘I think, Katherine, you have passed the Roman mother test,’ he had whispered to her, his long lower lip curling.

  She had only seen him once more during that first stay in Rome.

  ‘Have time for a coffee, Katherine, before the lecture?’

  A familiar voice startled Katherine from her reverie.

  ‘Oh yes, sure,’ she looked dazedly at her fellow student and housemate, Chris, and tumbled her books into her bag.

  ‘You’ve been working too hard. You’ve got the pallor of one of those swooning pre-Raphaelite maidens.’ Chris joked, flicked through the pages of a book and pointed to a fiery-haired Rosetti. ‘See?’

  ‘I’m fine, Chris. Fit as a Rubens,’ Katherine insisted. She liked Chris. They were mates. Together, over the years, they had done the galleries and museums, arguing over the Rembrandts in the National Gallery, gazing at the Impressionists at the Tate, venturing into the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Dover Street.

  But today, she was devoid of conversation. The mood of reminiscence wouldn’t leave her. It obliterated Chris’s words, followed her into her four o’clock lecture, where she succumbed to it.

  Throughout that first year in London, she had only heard from Carlo once. A cryptic postcard had arrived from New York. King Kong atop the Empire State building. The message in Italian read ‘S
altare o non saltare.’ To leap or not to leap. ‘Auguri’ and his name, signed in a bold hand. She had spent some time pondering the words and then set the card aside.

  Life in London was too busy for a great deal of reflection, what with her courses, trips to museums, and weekend visits to Portia in Cambridge, where they cycled through tiny streets or punted along the magical Cam and chatted endlessly. Increasingly too, there was a small circle of friends with whom she went to Beatles’ concerts, for strolls along Carnaby Street or the Kings Road, or to a mass of theatres from the Royal Court to the Aldwych to a series of thriving fringe venues. The men she had singled out as friends at the Courtauld seemed content not to make passes at her. If one of them did, she froze them with her cool grey eyes and said she was distinctly not interested. She might also repeat the line about sex being the great Freudian con. In her closer circle none of them minded. And London had so much else to offer. It had been a wonderful first year.

  And then, the next summer she had returned to Rome. She had passed her Italian exam, but nonetheless, she knew that her Italian was poor. On top of that she had chosen the Italian Renaissance as her special subject and Rome was a treasure trove to her.

  She had no immediate intention of contacting Carlo in Rome. But during her first week there, she went to a club with a group of acquaintances from her previous visit. She was dancing with one of them. A slow number so different from what she had grown used to in London and she had the uncomfortable feeling that her flimsy King’s Road skirt showed far too much leg for conservative Rome. In order to cover her embarrassment, she flung back her hair which she now wore, London fashion, in a long loose mane. It was in the midst of that gesture that she met his eyes. There was a hint of anger in his features before they settled into their characteristic insouciance. He nodded, smiled a little mockingly. For some reason, she could feel an uncustomary flush rising to her face. He was dancing with a tall slim blonde who looked as if she had stepped off a catwalk. Katherine watched him covertly. She liked the way he danced, those sure, effortless movements.