Remembering Light and Stone

by Deirdre Madden

  What with the early start, the cold weather and the hard work, everybody was hungry, and more than did justice to the meal, which was a huge affair. One thing that annoyed me was that I didn’t get to sit beside Ted. Michele slipped in beside me and throughout the meal kept plying me with more food than I could possibly eat. He also topped up my glass constantly, so that I couldn’t keep track of how much I was drinking. I didn’t like it that he was so attentive to me, and I kept trying to catch Ted’s eye. For a long time he didn’t notice me, because he was so busy laughing and eating and talking, and when at last he did look my way he was so delighted with the lunch and life in general that he didn’t seem to notice that anything was amiss. I was vexed and angry.

  The meal went on and on, as if lunch itself was reluctant to end, trailing off almost two hours later into grace-notes of ice-cream, spumante, cheese, chocolates, coffee and liqueurs.

  Afterwards, most of the people went back out to work, while Lucia and I helped clear up after the meal. When that was done, Franca called me into the parlour to look at some photographs on the wall. She showed me a picture of her grandmother, her mother’s mother, a voluptuous woman with soft eyes. ‘Nonna was so big,’ Franca said fondly. ‘I remember when I was little and she hugged me, I’d almost disappear into her. She had the biggest chest I’ve ever seen on a woman: each one was like a head.’

  When I went back to the shed, Grazia was standing by a bucket which contained the ears and snout of the pig. She lifted them out in turn, and casually scorched the bristles from them with a small blow torch, before throwing them back in the bucket again. Michele was cleaning the table. He poured a glass of white wine over it, which was rubbed well into the grain of the wood before they began to prepare the lard, kneading it and mixing it, and putting it in glass jars to be stored.

  By late afternoon, the job was done. All the meat had been butchered, the last links twisted into sausages, all the ribs, the cheeks, the ears: everything had been dealt with. Everyone was satisfied, not least the cats, who had been given the fatty scraps from the lunch. The butcher said that he would be back the following day, to deal with the second pig.

  When dusk had fallen, Michele and Patrizia took Ted and me on a tour of the farm. Ted had been in Italy for years, but it was the first time he had been on an Italian farm, and I suspected it was a long time since he had been on a farm anywhere. When Patrizia opened the byre door, and we went in, the warm fug of the animals was strong and comforting after the cold air outside. The six pale cattle who were generating this heat staggered nervously to their feet and stared at us. Back outside again we saw pens full of geese, rabbits, ducks and chickens, and a flock of long-legged Biblical sheep. The sounds and smells of the farmyard reminded me, not always pleasantly, of growing up on my father’s farm in Ireland.

  We went into another outhouse, where some of the pork from the day’s work was already in store. Apart from the hams and salamis suspended from the beams there were odd-looking pieces of offal, hanging from hooks. I didn’t know which bits they were, and I didn’t ask. There were buckets full of blood, and the same solid sweet stench which there had been all morning in the shed where the butchering had taken place. Michele reached up to the rafters and lifted down a bunch of grapes which had been hung there months earlier to dry. He offered them to us to taste, and beyond the initial sharpness there was a memory of sweetness locked in the heart of them, as though the sun of the past summer was still contained in these winter grapes.

  Then Michele wanted to show us the house too, and so we trooped from one dim, tiny room to another. I felt increasingly nervous. Michele kept standing too close to me, and was staring at me intently all the time. As at lunch, I couldn’t understand why Ted and Patrizia didn’t notice this. We saw a gun hanging over a wide bed in a room that smelt of sweat. I longed to get back to the warm brightness of the big kitchen, away from these claustrophobic rooms that looked somehow familiar to me, as if I had seen them in a dream. I turned around and saw with horror that Ted and Patrizia weren’t there. I could hear them talking and laughing in the hallway, where they had lingered to look at a picture. I was alone with Michele. I turned back. His face was inches from mine.

  I don’t remember what happened next, which is probably just as well. They must have carried me out of the house, for I remember coming to on the front step. I cried and clung to Ted, and I’ll never forget how embarrassed everyone was, particularly me, as the initial shock began to wear off. Everyone was keen to explain it away, I was tired, I was nervosa, I was so sensitive that all that blood and offal had been more than I could take.

  A second meal had been prepared in the kitchen, not as large as the first, but still more than enough. This time Michele sat beside Patrizia, and I was left in peace to pick at a bit of cold meat and some salad. The evening trailed on, because in Italy people find it hard to say goodbye, and so they extend the day for as long as is possible. After dinner, somebody pulled out a pack of cards. I sat by the fire with Franca while Ted tried to learn the rules of some complicated four-hand game, but even the cards, with their suits of sticks and cups were strange to him. He partnered Lucia, and she pretended to be furious as he lost trick after trick on them, until they eventually lost the game.

  When the time did come for us to leave, it was a slow parting because there were so many of us, and everybody had to be said goodbye to individually. They told us to come again, to come back at Easter when the hams we had seen being prepared that day would be ready to eat. Ted wanted to drive my car back but I insisted that it would be no problem for me, and a sleepy Lucia directed us down the twists and bends of the road, back to S. Giorgio.

  13

  I had a dream about snow. I often had nightmares about cold things, such as being trapped in an icy wasteland, the land and the sky both mercilessly white. You couldn’t see where one ended and the other began, and for some reason that was terrible. Another time I dreamt that I was trapped in a cathedral which was for some odd reason packed with ice. Stranger still, I was perched at the top of an ugly baroque altar of rotting wood. Far below me, I could see the huge green ice-bergs drift menacingly through the nave. It was a foolish dream, but it still left me with a feeling of terror when I awoke.

  This cold dream, a dream of snow, that I had at the end of January was also very strange. It was one of those dreams that is particularly convincing because it begins with you dreaming that you’re in bed asleep – which of course you are, so that whatever happens next seems logical and real. So, I dreamt that I was lying in bed sleeping, in the apartment in S. Giorgio, in the middle of the night, when the roof of the building suddenly rolled back without a sound. The bare sky was above me, and it was snowing. I knew all this, even though I was still lying with my eyes closed, and believed myself to be sleeping. The snowfall was heavy, and it drifted down on me where I lay. It quietly swallowed up things on the floor: a book I had been reading before I went to sleep the night before and had put on the bedside rug, a pair of shoes, a wastepaper-basket. It came up the side of the cupboard. I was aware that it was now as deep as my bed was high. The surface of the snow was level with me where I lay, and still it fell. I began to feel very frightened. There was a chill layer over my face and hair. That was one thing, but I knew that I would have to wake up if I was to save myself from being buried alive. The snow kept falling. I was still lying there, and part of me wanted to stay sleeping, to succumb to the soft, deadly coldness, while the rest of me knew that I must resist. By now the snow was piled deep upon me, the whiteness was giving way to darkness, to an uncompromising black. I was on the point of surrendering to the inevitable when I woke up, not in a bed buried in snow, but in my dry, soundly roofed room. I felt completely devastated.

  A short while later I was standing in Adolfo’s bar, licking sugar and jam from my fingers, calling for a second coffee. There was, of course, no snow in S. Giorgio that morning: it wasn’t even a particularly cold day. It was mild all over Europe that year, but eve
n during the hardest winter, S. Giorgio doesn’t get much snow. Where I grew up in County Clare it hardly ever snowed, and when it did, it never lay on the ground but melted away at once. I always liked to look at the snow falling. One night, my father called me to the front door when I was on my way to bed. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘the Old Lady is plucking geese up in Greenland and throwing down the feathers.’ I looked up and I saw them. The big soft wet flakes fell out of the blackness into the light above the door, but for me they were feathers, not snow. There really was an old woman at the top of the world, throwing down a million feathers: my father told me so, and I believed him.

  It was a Monday morning. I didn’t like to start the week badly, and I hoped to shake off the gloom of the nightmare and salvage the rest of the morning. My luck, however, was out. When I pulled into the forecourt of the factory, I saw that Fabiola’s big red car was already parked there. I swore out loud when I saw it. I wasn’t in the mood to talk to her, in fact I didn’t feel like talking to anyone. I just wanted to get to my desk and start work, but to do that, I had to go through Pietro’s office, where I knew Fabiola would be. When I went in, there she was, sitting behind Pietro’s desk arguing with him, while he leaned against a filing cabinet with a sheaf of papers in his hand and a harassed expression on his face. When Fabiola saw me, she jumped up and kissed me, enveloping me in her familiar scent of perfume and fur. She was still tanned from her holidays, and I asked her if she had enjoyed the Seychelles. She looked sideways at Pietro and then said, ‘Oh, it was all right, I suppose. A beach is a beach, after all, it’s the same everywhere.’ She didn’t ask me how my trip to Venice had been: I didn’t expect her to.

  ‘Travel is wonderful, though, isn’t it,’ she said as soon as Pietro went out of the room. ‘I’m already thinking about where to go this summer. I’m so pleased about all these changes in the Communist countries, because now it’ll be safe to go there. I’ve heard that Prague is very pretty. Who knows? We might even go to Russia.’

  Fabiola had travelled more than probably anyone else I knew, but it amounted to strangely little with her. She went abroad at least twice a year, and visited European cities like Amsterdam and Paris, as well as more distant places, such as Kenya and Canada. However, she travelled in such luxury and with such a lack of curiosity that afterwards it would all become a blur in her mind of four-star hotels and first-class restaurants. She would forget where she had been, and nothing remained but vague images. A few years before she met me, she had been to Ireland on a Castles and Gardens tour, but with the exception of ‘Dublino’, where she had spent a couple of nights, she couldn’t remember the name of a single place she had visited there. I tried to jog her memory with a few names.

  ‘Did you go to Killarney?’ but she only furrowed her brow and said, ‘Perhaps. I don’t know. I really don’t remember now.’ She could describe nothing she had seen other than ‘some castles that had been turned into hotels, and the countryside was very green’.

  And yet, the oddest thing of all was that she had a dream of visiting a place where Pietro resolutely refused to take her. Above all other cities in the world, Fabiola longed to visit Calcutta.

  ‘It must be so wonderful there,’ she said to me dreamily. I said nothing. She had rendered me speechless. Fabiola was the sort of woman it took a leap of imagination to picture pushing a trolley full of cabbages and toilet rolls up and down the aisle of a supermarket, let alone standing in the streets of Calcutta. ‘They call it the City of Palaces you know. I read an article about it once, it said that there is a great sense of joy there. Of course the people have very little, but they probably have a deep spiritual belief, and I’m sure they’re very happy. But I still can’t talk Pietro into going there.’ Fabiola probably didn’t realize that the Calcutta Holiday Inn didn’t exist, that it couldn’t, that it was a contradiction in terms.

  ‘You’re lucky, Aisling,’ she said. ‘You’re free, you can go absolutely anywhere you want.’ I knew she would think it poor form of me to point out that there was one other prerequisite besides freedom for travel: money. I had had to take on a lot of extra work for the trip I was planning to America. I used to get irritated by her refusal to acknowledge the economic difference there was between us. She was always telling me that she had seen just the coat for me, at a price I could never afford, or that I should take myself off ski-ing in the middle of winter when my bank account was still recovering from Christmas, or that I go to some overpriced restaurant near Assisi where they had the most wonderful spaghetti ai tartufi neri.

  Pietro put his head round the door, and told me that there was a fax just in from London, and could I come and look at it please? ‘Aisling’s talking to me,’ Fabiola said grandly. ‘She’ll come when she’s ready.’ Pietro scowled and mumbled, but retreated back to the main office. It was extraordinary how she had him under her thumb. I was glad he had come in though, and a couple of minutes later, I made my excuses. She swept her fur around her and left, in search of some other distraction to fill what was left of her morning.

  What was left of mine went quickly enough, with so much work that I didn’t notice the time passing. As I was going home from work at lunch time, for some reason I remembered that a local archaeologist had told me that the road along which I was now driving had once been a Roman road. Some excavations had been carried out there, and many of the Roman artifacts in S. Giorgio’s museum had been found there. The archaeologist said she thought that there were still probably many things buried in that area, and added that if you looked at the state of museums in Italy, it was probably better if the artifacts remained under the ground. Mosaics, painting, pottery, frescoes, Roman stonework and statues, from the most sublime art to objects whose sole interest and virtue lay in their antiquity: it was hard for the imagination to grasp the sheer quantity of such things in Italy. The Italians had neither the means, nor, more importantly, the will to properly maintain and restore their heritage. Given the weight of Italian history, the wonder of it was that it sat so lightly on the people, now speeding past in their cars. I imagined that I was looking at the scene from a great height, and saw not just the traffic, but the bones, the jewellery and the shards of broken pottery that were buried under the soil, and I felt a sudden rush of pity for everything that had ever been.

  The following Saturday I went to Siena with Ted, and on the way there I mentioned to him what the archaeologist had told me. He agreed. ‘The more you hear about Italian museums,’ he said, ‘the more you wonder.’ He told me the worst story he’d ever heard was from a woman he knew who worked in a state museum in Florence, who once visited a gallery in Naples while on holiday. When the attendant there found out that she also worked in a state museum, in a spirit of fellowship he picked three little squares of glass out of a Roman mosaic in his keeping, and gallantly presented them to her as a souvenir.

  It was quite a while since I had been to Siena. It was a city I liked, although my initial impression of it had been bad. My first trip to Siena had been years ago, on my first visit to Italy. I had liked the art and the architecture, but the general atmosphere of the city unsettled me. The people I dealt with in shops and restaurants struck me as cold and closed in a manner which was something more than the usual result of excessive exposure to tourists.

  Then one afternoon, I went into a bookshop and casually picked up what I thought was an art magazine. It had a glossy innocuous cover with an abstract painting on it, but when I opened it, I found that it was full of violent pornographic cartoons. There were drawings of live women being cut open, women having their backs broken, naked women being led along by nooses around their necks. Sickened and disgusted, I closed the magazine, and for a long time I damned Siena with that. It was years before I realized that it wasn’t exceptional to see such stuff for sale in Italy, nor for it to be beside art books, with no differentiation between the two. As far as the people who ran the shops were concerned, they were all just things to be sold. It would be hard to find a news-stand a
nywhere there which did not have a huge stock of magazines even more violent and fearful than the one I saw. And this of course was another of the things which was never acknowledged abroad, because it would have spoiled the myth of Italy as a passionate country, as a place of sexual freedom and happiness.

  When we arrived in Siena we went straight to the main picture gallery, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen Ted happier than he was that day, as we walked around looking at the paintings. For a long time it was a bit of a mystery to me why he loved early religious art so much. Then I realized that people often like what you wouldn’t expect, and that you can tell a lot about someone by the sort of painting they prefer. For instance, I was amazed when I read somewhere that Raphael was Dostoevsky’s favourite artist. The painting he loved most of all was the Sistine Madonna. He had a copy of it, and towards the end of his life he would sit gazing at it for long periods of time, lost in contemplation. I don’t like the Sistine Madonna: I think it’s far too sweet and mawkish, like a lot of Raphael’s religious paintings. When Dostoevsky was in Basel, on his way through to Italy, he saw Holbein’s painting of the dead Christ. It made a tremendous impression on him, and he never forgot it. It shows Christ as a dead man, after he had been taken from the cross, his body already beginning to decompose. There is no sense of divinity, no sense of anything but death. Dostoyevsky said that looking at it could cause a man to lose his faith. I could understand the significance which the Holbein had for him more easily than the Raphael. There was a strain of sentimentality in Dostoevsky which didn’t interest me, and which I didn’t wish to acknowledge, but I couldn’t deny it was there, when I thought of the Sistine Madonna.

  What Raphael meant to Dostoevsky was one thing: what Simone Martini meant to Ted was another matter entirely. Until that day, there was something about his attitude to art that didn’t quite add up for me. For one thing, I couldn’t understand why he had no time for modern or contemporary art. The more recent it was, the less interest he had. There was a big retrospective of Andy Warhol in Venice that year, and he didn’t want to go to see it, he sneered at the very idea. There was nothing inherently wrong in this, no reason why he should prefer Pop Art to Sienese painting of the early Renaissance. But I could see how necessary the forms of twentieth-century art were, and how they had had to come into existence to express the way people thought now, how they lived, how they saw things: in short, to express how the world was now. I could see this more clearly than most, because I wasn’t a part of it. Human nature may have changed around 1910, but there are still a few places where it hasn’t changed yet, or is only now beginning to change. Where I grew up in Ireland was one such place. I used to think that if I had known this earlier, it might have saved me a lot of pain, but now I wasn’t so sure.