Even Franca and Davide had been able to improve their lot because of the tourists. Davide had started off with a tiny, dingy shop, and Franca gave herself – fairly – all the credit for smartening it up, and making it a going concern. She was the one who had bullied Davide into taking down the row of rusty signs outside which said vini and olio di olive and olio di semi. She herself had taken down the faded awning, and replaced it with a bright new one; she had all the shelves inside refitted, to turn the shop into a tiny supermarket. It was Franca who carefully arranged the window in summer, with baskets of cheese and truffles, dried mushrooms and whole hams, to lure in the visitors. In the middle of the window she placed a hand-lettered sign: Prodotti Tipici.
Franca viewed the tourists who came to her shop with a mixture of indulgence and contempt. She could well understand why they wanted to come south, and enjoy the good life after slaving away all year in their grey northern cities. Franca had been abroad only once, but as she often said, once had been enough. For their honeymoon, they had gone up to visit Mario in Germany. She had hated Frankfurt. Even though it was summer, the weather had been wet and cold, and she had hated the food – all those deep-fried things, she said, all those horrible sausages! The whole atmosphere of the country unsettled her, there was something too orderly and subdued about it. She remembered they had driven through the mountains on their way north, and saw eerily neat piles of firewood stacked at the sides of the houses. She had said to Davide; ‘Wood was never meant to be as tidy as that,’ and they had laughed; but she didn’t forget it.
After four days of eating sauerkraut off tables they hadn’t even bothered to put a cloth on, she had had enough. She told Davide that if he didn’t take her straight back to Italy she would get on a train and go by herself. He dutifully drove her to Venice, and they spent their remaining time and money there.
It cured Franca of ever wanting to go abroad again, but she did feel that it gave her a certain understanding of those poor people who came to the village in the summer months. She could well understand how much they liked to sit down in a restaurant in Italy, and have a waiter put a clean white cloth on the table. Then he would uncork a bottle of good red wine and set a plate of lasagne al forno in front of them, and they’d think they’d died and gone to heaven, the poor deprived creatures!
3
When I met Ted, in the late summer of 1989, I had been living in Italy for just over four years. We met in the newsagents of S. Giorgio. I was standing reading the headlines of the Herald Tribune, and had my hand raised to lift it from the rack, when someone reached over my shoulder and whipped the paper away. It was the last copy in the shop. I turned round, annoyed. The young American man who had taken it grinned and pointed at the sheaf of papers I was already holding. ‘You’ve probably got enough there already.’ I was holding copies of Corriera Della Sera, La Stampa, La Reppublica, and the French paper, La Libération. I looked down at them.
‘No, I haven’t got enough,’ I said. ‘I want that one too.’ I suppose I must have seemed really aggressive, because he looked taken aback, so I smiled, and he thought I had been joking (I hadn’t). I decided to let it go, and suggested we have a cup of coffee in the square. I thought he might glance at his paper there, and maybe give me his copy when he had finished.
I should probably explain at this point why I was buying so many newspapers. It was the time when all the changes in the Eastern Bloc were just beginning to break, and I was interested in that, but I’m interested in politics and what’s happening in the world all the time. It’s an interest that developed after I moved to Italy.
When I first came to S. Giorgio, it took me quite a while to establish myself economically. I had had a good job in France, but when I moved to Italy I took a big risk. I had hoped to do freelance translating, but the pickings were thin. Now people come to me, but at first I had to make a huge effort to find work. As well as translating, I also taught some English at that time, just to stay afloat. I don’t know if my students learnt much, but I learnt a lot. Some of my pupils were children – I taught Lucia, that was part of the deal in my renting the apartment. Franca dreamed of the day when she could put a little sign in her window saying ‘English Spoken Here’. I suppose I was lucky, in that it became a little fashion to study English, not just for the people who might have needed it for the tourist trade, but more so for those who didn’t need it at all. Of the children I taught, I knew that in most cases their parents had no real interest in learning for its own sake. What mattered was money, money and status. Franca told me once that lots of people only sent their children along to me so they could say to their friends that their son or daughter was taking English lessons with a mother-tongue teacher. Like the piano lessons I had been subjected to as a child, or the dancing and drawing lessons of the last century, it was a middle-class frill, no more than that.
Sometimes when the kids were quietly working on an exercise I’d given them to do, I’d look at their expensive clothes, the brightly coloured backpacks they carried their books in, their transparent watches and their bored faces, and I would think how much of a fluke, how unreal it all was. They had been lucky to be born in Italy at the time of such an economic bonanza. Had they been born some fifty years earlier, they would probably have been living on a farm up in the hills, and their future would have been to work the land, to have faced poverty and possible migration. Instead, these children would probably never be forced to move out of their own region to find work, much less forced to move abroad. While some of the girls might have considered studying the arts at university, all the boys scorned the idea of it. They would study things like engineering, computing, or commercial studies. They went off to Oxford and Hastings in the summer to study English, but for all the money that was lavished on their studies (I charged as much as I dared), the children weren’t very motivated, nor were most of the adults I taught.
An exception was Ali, a Moroccan man whom I taught for a few months. He had been living in Italy for some years, and he spoke Italian well, but now the opportunity had arisen for him to go to the United States. He already had two brothers there, his situation in Italy wasn’t particularly good, and so he had decided to move. He came to me for lessons knowing no English at all. He worked so hard – possibly too hard, for he was tense and anxious and felt every mistake to be a terrible thing. There was one lesson in particular that I’ll never forget, even though in itself it was like so many others. I was trying to teach him to make offers – ‘Would you like a cup of coffee? Would you like a cigarette?’ and he was finding it really difficult. We had been struggling along for some time when I noticed the look on his face. He was tired, tense, frustrated, but under that I could see the terrible anger there was in him, anger at the circumstances that had driven him from his own country so that he had to acquire a language that was not his own, and struggle like a child to learn the simplest things. Until then I had felt hard done by in my own fate in Italy, teaching basic English to sullen little brats when I was a qualified translator, but my situation was so much easier than Ali’s. I had left Ireland because I wanted to, not because I had to, and had moved from France to Italy because I thought I would be happier there. I wasn’t being driven from place to place by sheer economic necessity, as he was.
In a way, it was all very clear. I had more money and better circumstances than Ali, because Ireland is richer than Morocco; and my students were generally better off than I was, because Italy is richer than Ireland. It had no connection with personal merit or hard work, it was a question of politics. Once I had realized that, I could never again see the world in the same way. I became fascinated by how people’s lives were at the mercy of political forces: fascinated, but often horrified, too. I took to reading the papers very intently, trying always to recognize what the human cost would be of the things reported there. Then I became aware of how limited and partial the press so often is, so I often bought as wide a range of papers as I could find and afford – Italian, French,
English, American – from which I would try to get as broad a perspective on things as possible. The day Ted lifted the paper from before my eyes I had been looking at a photograph of people climbing over the railings into the garden of the West German embassy in Prague. I was so absorbed in this that I was taken aback when the paper was suddenly removed.
So I had a coffee with this American man, and as we talked I remembered something else from my teaching days, a certain type of awareness of the English language. When I was teaching, I was always struck by how polite and cautious a language English is. ‘Would you …? Could you …? Shall I …? Do you mind if …? Will I …? Thank you so much. Please excuse me. Don’t mention it.’ It is a language eminently suitable for not communicating, for talking without making any real connections. At that time I didn’t have occasion to speak it very often, although I wrote and read it every day in work. While I was talking to him, I was aware of how much I had taken the Italian language on board, as a sort of protective colouring, like the elegant clothes I affected. I realized how wary I was talking to this American man, and remembering the past, I thought it was wise to be cautious. There can be great scope for deception when you share a language, because it can give the illusion of there being more in common between people than is actually the case. I’ve learnt to feel uneasy with the instant intimacy you often get with Americans. They tell you all about themselves and their daughter’s ectopic pregnancy and the most private details, and an hour later they’ve forgotten all about you. But I noticed that over coffee Ted didn’t pour out his whole life story, nor did he demand mine, and I was very glad for that.
I guessed that he was a few years younger than me, and I found out weeks later that I was correct. He lived in Florence, where he taught art history in a college affiliated to an American university. The students came to study art and architecture, some for a term, some for a year. He had come to S. Giorgio for the day to see the frescoes. As Americans usually are, he was charmed when he heard that I was from Ireland. ‘Are you from anywhere near Sligo? My grandfather was from there.’ I told him I wasn’t, that County Clare was a good bit south of that. He told me he hoped to spend the rest of his life in Italy, he loved it so much. I thought he was very nice. I know that sounds banal, but he was. I could see in him a complete absence of aggression, something I always pick up on immediately. It wasn’t a watery sort of yea-saying, but a genuine good nature and kindness. He even gave me his newspaper. I felt bad about that. But I took it.
Afterwards, we went together to see the frescoes. He had already been to the church, but in talking to him I realized he had missed a particular side chapel, so I offered to show it to him. After the warm square, it was very cold in the church. I put a few hundred lire in a little machine, and all the walls were suddenly flooded with light. Looking at the paintings, I was struck, as always, by how immutable they were. There was San Giorgio himself, holding the village on its covered dish, as he had done now for over five hundred years, through so many wars and revolutions. As Ted and I stood there, people in Prague were climbing into the West Germany embassy gardens. They were putting their children and a few suitcases into their tiny cars and driving away from their homes. They didn’t know where they would end up, but hoped against hope that it would be better than their present circumstances, thinking that it could hardly be worse, risking their health in a cold, overcrowded garden with poor sanitation. Huge social changes had taken place since the frescoes were painted, including changes in the religious sensibilities of people, so that while the paintings did not alter, the way in which they were viewed was now completely different.
One fresco in particular made me think of this. It showed two life-size figures, the man on the left was writhing, his mouth wide open and he was vomiting a large, black-winged devil. Before him stood a flat, blank-faced friar in a brown habit, his right hand raised. It was he who was casting out the devil from the man, to join the dark, spiky-winged swarm at the top-right-hand corner of the picture. This fresco had shocked me the first time I saw it, and even after having seen it so many times, it could still unsettle me. I used to be amazed at how often I would see people standing in front of it, laughing. I didn’t laugh. I took evil seriously. I knew that since I had arrived in Italy I had met no one who was haunted as I was.
A strange thing had happened just after I arrived in S. Giorgio. I had complained to Franca about the pillows on the bed, because they were made of foam-rubber and were too high and uncomfortable. She had looked a bit sheepish, and said, ‘I don’t know if I can do anything for you, Aisling. I can’t get you a feather pillow, because Davide’s mother is so superstititious, she won’t allow a feather pillow in the house.’ I asked what the link was between pillows and superstition.
‘Because of the fattura – il malocchio, you know, the evil eye.’ She could see then that I hadn’t an inkling of what she was talking about, so very patiently she explained.
‘Here, if someone wishes ill on you he puts a curse on you, and if you have a feather pillow, something strange happens. Some of the feathers in the pillow weave themselves into a knot. A person couldn’t do it, and it’s a thing that just couldn’t happen naturally, it must be supernatural. Davide saw it once, when he was young. His brother Mario was sick when he was about thirteen, really sick, with pains in his stomach. He was wasting away and they thought he was going to die, the doctors had no idea what was wrong with him. And so then they thought it might be the malocchio, so they sent for Don Antonio, because he’s an exorcist.’
I started at that, but Francesca didn’t notice, she just kept on talking.
‘So, Don Antonio came and he cut the pillow open, and found this knot of feathers. Davide himself saw it. He said that it was a tight, hard knot, and they were all so frightened when they saw it. His mother began to cry. But Don Antonio knew all the special prayers to say, and from that moment on, Mario began to get better.’
She told me that you could find the same sort of lumps in your mattress, sometimes, and then what you had to do was take it to a crossroads and burn it. She dropped her voice to a whisper.
‘They say Don Antonio was called to a house one day, and when he cut open the pillow, what do you think he found?’
‘What?’
‘A turd,’ said Franca. ‘Still hot, like it had just been done. Can you imagine how the person in the bed felt?’
I said that I couldn’t. I asked her if Don Antonio still worked as an exorcist.
‘Yes, but he does a lot less now, because he’s so old. He does things in a different way, too. During the last war, Davide’s mother saw him exorcise a young girl, right in the church. She saw her screaming and writhing on the floor. I don’t think that they’re allowed to do it like that any longer. He has a pendulum too. When people are having a lot of bad luck in their lives, their kids are sick and their business going really badly, and they suspect that it might be because someone’s put the evil eye on them, they come to see Don Antonio. They come from all over, too, from Tuscany and Lazio, and I even heard that a woman once came down the whole way from Bologna. He holds the pendulum over them, and if it swings in a certain way, then it’s bad news. Don Antonio says the prayers to take the curse away.’ Suddenly, she looked at me sharply. ‘You believe what I’m saying, don’t you, Aisling? You don’t think I’m making all this up, you aren’t laughing at me, are you?’
I replied without a flicker of a smile, ‘Oh, I believe you, Franca. I believe in evil all right, you needn’t worry on that score.’
There had been times since then when I had thought that I would take myself along to Don Antonio. Would he get the shock of his life, if the pendulum started to loop the loop, or lift itself up, to float in the air, with the ribbon that held it dangling limply? What if I suddenly found myself gripped by one of those terrible spasms, with which I was sometimes afflicted, when I felt that deep anxiety, so that my stomach heaved, and this time, instead of bringing up my dinner, I brought up a real live devil, coming ou
t like a perverted baby, leathery, black and as ugly as sin? I could imagine the reaction of Don Antonio, whom I would sometimes see praying complacently under the frescoes, in the dimness of the church. I thought of how shocked he would be to see the real thing, even after years of swinging pendulums and the odd turd-infested pillow. He would not be able to confront the sight with the same bland confidence of the medieval friar in the painting, to whom such things were all in the course of a day’s work. Oh yes, I certainly believed in evil, and I couldn’t understand how anyone didn’t, all they had to do was to buy a newspaper to read about it in a thousand different forms. I knew there was evil in me.
But I believed in goodness too, and I could also recognize it. Lucia was a good person, she was at peace with herself, and with the world, in a way I could only marvel at.
Remembering Light and Stone Page 3
