Painting Death

by Tim Parks

  So much for Sant’Anna. I suggested to the priest that if he wanted a new monument, perhaps my daughter, who was an artist, could design one for him, something more in line with the way young people now saw these things. When we got back to the car, Mimi said, ‘You must be completely crazy, Papà,’ and insisted I drove because she had some messages to send.

  ‘Who to?’ I asked.

  She didn’t even bother to ask me to mind my own business.

  Then about five minutes out of Sant’Anna she shouts, ‘Stop, stop the car.’

  ‘For why?’

  She was smiling brightly at me as if she’d just got good news.

  ‘What’s the point,’ she says, ‘of coming out into the country, if we don’t take a walk, Dad?’ Suddenly, she was full of warmth and pleasantness.

  We took a path to the right of the road that looked down over the Valpolicella towards the cliffs of Rivoli. All very beautiful. I had just started to explain Napoleon’s crushing tactics at the battle of Rivoli—there’s a marvellously melodramatic painting by Philippoteaux—and then to reflect that like ’em or hate ’em the French might have done a better job of unifying and running Italy than the Italians ever did, when she asked, ‘Papà, tell me, why did you come to Italy in the first place?’

  Her voice was rather dreamy and friendly. I sensed a new openness. What was that message she had received?

  I hesitated. You must have wondered yourself, Carla, why I came to Italy, why anyone comes. The truth is this was the fatal decision of my life. Had I stayed in Acton I can’t imagine I would ever have found myself charged with third-degree murder.

  ‘It seemed important to get away,’ I said.

  ‘But why?’

  We were on a path that ran along the hillside, a tall white stone wall to our left and the dramatic drop to the river as it plunges into the Rivoli gorge on our right.

  ‘Everything seemed so small-minded in the UK. Starting with my father.’

  ‘It wasn’t to do with a girl?’

  ‘Escaping someone, you mean?’

  ‘Papà!’ she laughed. ‘No, I mean you didn’t run off for a girl.’

  ‘Oh, heavens, no.’

  ‘I’m thinking of leaving,’ she said. ‘Italy that is.’ She sounded rather solemn.

  I thought about this. The logic of the conversation was that she was about to tell me that she was leaving Italy for/with a boy, or man, and had been looking for an instance in my own past that would soften any eventual criticism I might have had for such a move.

  ‘Not before you’ve finished college, I hope,’ I said innocently.

  She didn’t answer for a while. And here comes one of the reasons why I’m telling you this. There were trees overhanging the wall to our left and sunlight was dappling through the leaves. Cobwebs kept catching my face. Then because of this dapple of sunshine and shade I finally noticed that they weren’t just cobwebs. There were tiny worm things hanging from threads. They were caterpillars, small green caterpillars dangling like so many hanged convicts right at eye level. Just as when I had looked into the excavations an hour or so before, I felt a powerful shiver of presentiment.

  Massimina had noticed them too. ‘They do it to escape a predator,’ she said. ‘They’re baby moths. They drop off a tree when something’s trying to eat them and dangle on a thread.’

  Life is nothing if not resourceful.

  From being very chipper, Massimina suddenly turned gloomy. ‘Actually I wouldn’t mind being able to do that,’ she said. ‘Dangle a while.’

  The change of mood surprised me. ‘I thought you were telling me you were in love and planning to run off with some handsome boy.’

  She thought about this for longer than seemed necessary.

  ‘Have you never had a strange love, Dad?’ she asked.

  Now I was going to get the truth, I thought.

  ‘As you know,’ I told her, ‘I was once married to your mother’s younger sister, and some time after that I married your dear mother. Which is about it for me.’

  ‘Nobody else?’

  ‘Twice is enough,’ I said.

  ‘But weren’t you Massimina’s boyfriend too, Mamma’s youngest sister.’

  ‘Briefly,’ I said.

  She waited a moment. ‘Isn’t that a bit weird, three sisters in the same family?’

  ‘Not at all,’ I told her. ‘I imagine you know your Svevo. Zeno was in love with three sisters.’

  ‘Why did you name me after her? Did you want me to be like her?’

  ‘Actually, that was Antonella’s idea. To keep her sister alive.’

  She suddenly burst out laughing, ‘And if there’d been a brother?’

  What do you make of that, Carla? It really threw me. I had no idea at all what to think. In fact I begin to wonder now if I’m not wasting your time telling you all this. I should get back to the hard facts. Yet I feel there is something here that has to do with it all, some important connection, or imminent. Or perhaps it’s just the solitary confinement getting to me.

  ‘Being attached to three sisters,’ I tried, thinking of Zolla, ‘is not so strange as falling in love with someone twice your age.’

  Immediately she swung round and I thought, got her, it’s true!

  ‘Has that happened to you?’ she asked.

  I sighed. ‘Normally, with men, it’s someone half their age.’

  She was clearly trying to decide whether to tell me the truth. ‘You mean like Forbes,’ she said, ‘and his little boys?’

  Again I was taken aback. ‘You hardly need to think of a perverse old goat like that to imagine a man with someone half his age. Do you?’

  She giggled. ‘Oh Forbes was OK. Maybe the boys liked it.’

  ‘Forbes was evil,’ I told her. I will not hear any defence of paedophilia.

  She bit her lip. ‘Let’s go back, Dad,’ she said. ‘I’ve got stuff to do at home.’

  In the car she put her headphones on and spent the whole trip texting. I drove in silence and felt sure I was right. She was having a love affair with an older man. Most likely Zolla. My task must be to make sure that she stayed on the rails and completed her studies without undue distraction.

  To His Eminence Cardinal Rusconi

  Dear Cardinal Rusconi,

  Forgive me, Your Eminence, for occupying a little space in your mailbox and a moment of your precious time. I’m not unaware of the pressures on a Father of the Church charged with the care of so large and needy a flock.

  I had been meaning to contact you before this little catastrophe of mine (you will have heard, no doubt, of my farcical arrest for a crime I could not even imagine committing). The fact is that the building project in Sant’Anna has run into serious trouble. I don’t know if you have been informed, but a stream was discovered about two metres below ground running diagonally across the site. I must say it does seem odd to me that the architect was unaware of this geological feature.

  I am willing of course to have the foundations re-dug elsewhere, but we will need precise instructions. I will do my best to cover the cost through Fratelli Trevisan, though I’m not entirely sure given the present financial crisis how feasible that will be.

  May I, in the meantime, be so impertinent as to ask two favours, something I do only because I know what a generous man you are, and because I am truly in need. First, as you know, my spiritual guide Don Lorenzo is seriously ill and hence I have no one to whom I can turn in my present moment of discomfort. My question is, how can I avoid bitterness and resentment, Your Eminence? What prayers can I pray, what part of the Bible should I read? I see the danger of falling into a deep pit of bile. I fear for my soul.

  Second, I would be very grateful if you could take my wife into your pastoral care. I’m not sure if you are aware but our family has also been struck by a second catastrophe, the disappearance of my twenty-year-old daughter. These are extreme circumstances and I am concerned for my wife’s sanity.

  As for my own legal position, I ask not
hing, knowing that any help with attaining bail is beyond the mandate of the Church.

  All I can say is that I am glad to have met you, Your Eminence, when I was at the zenith of my career and can only beg forgiveness if I write to you now from my nadir.

  The humblest member of your flock,

  Morris Duckworth

  Carla. What next? (I just took a rather arduous toilet break. No, don’t worry, I shan’t trouble you with a description of the lavatory facilities here, not unlike the Last Judgement in Sant’Anna.) Anyhow, slow going though it may be, I hope I am building up for you an idea of my mental state in the weeks immediately preceding the murder. As we get nearer the fatal day I will give you all the necessary details about the painting of San Bartolomeo, the presence of the two young Libyans, and exactly how it was that I came to discover the corpse. But first we must spend a moment on my father’s funeral and of course my son’s trial. Again, the picture I am seeking to establish is that of a man so overwhelmed with duties and preoccupations that he simply would not have had time or interest to carry out such a primitive and senseless crime. Why, by the way, was the knife thrust in so deep, and actually left inside the body? I cannot remember such a circumstance in all the crime stories, fact or fiction, that I have read over the course of my fifty-five years. Imagine the violence that struck such a blow! I do not think I would be capable of it.

  To recap. In early March I had, as I told you in our interview, the strange encounter in Castelvecchio with Volpi, Zolla and a third, unseen person, who laughed, offstage as it were, in the most sinister fashion. I remain convinced that whatever was going on in that room is central to the murder. Yet when I tried to explain this to the police they refused to pay attention. They had already made up their minds in response to the two or three pieces of ‘evidence’ they have—the fingerprints, the timing, my being in the basement, the traces of blood on Zolla’s keyboard, and so on. All the merest coincidence and easily explicable with a quite different narrative than the one they have so morbidly constructed.

  Shortly after that incident in Volpi’s office, then, despairing of the way Zolla was organising the show, I wrote emails to all the prospective lenders for Painting Death, explaining both the philosophy behind the show and specific accounts of the importance of each single item in the topical mosaic of the whole. It was three days’ intense, creative work, but it was immediately rewarded by the first affirmative answers. From the National Gallery, the Frick, the Met. I was overjoyed and felt vindicated, to the point, I confess, that I thought no more of the scene in Volpi’s office, or my daughter’s strange behaviour, and was even beginning to assent to the general serenity surrounding Mauro’s trial when I received—I believe it was a Sunday afternoon—the news that my father had died and my presence was required in London for the funeral. This meant I would miss the opening morning of the trial. In fact it was while I was in the taxi driving to the funeral from Gatwick, that, in order to see if my wife had emailed me about the hearing, I checked for messages on my iPhone and found a mail from Volpi. Just four lines:

  ‘Signor Duckworth, given your devious, disloyal behaviour and your unwillingness to work in line with standard museum procedures, it has been decided you can have no further role in the organisation of the exhibition Painting Death. This decision is irrevocable.

  ‘The Director, Dottor Giuseppe Volpi.’

  You can imagine my sense of injustice. I was being turned away for having taken the initiative and made the show possible! Obviously they were embarrassed by their inefficiency. Perhaps Volpi had never believed that Zolla would be able to persuade the serious museums to give him the paintings. He had been humouring me. Now all of a sudden the permissions were arriving and the show would have to go ahead.

  A word about my father and the funeral. I shall keep it brief. My first memories are of a small, wiry, violent man slapping my mother. I remember her pallor, her quiet courage, her prayers. He smelled: of drink, of factory clothes, of, forgive my crudity, farts. Mother instead had an aura of wilting flowers. She manipulated me with a terrible pathos that intensified, never to be dispersed when she was killed—I was fifteen—by a drunk driver who lost control of his Jaguar and crushed her against the wall of Lloyd’s bank. I wasn’t allowed to see the body. Dad remarried in no time, a woman more than twenty years younger than himself, only five years older than me. I took all Mum’s old things, even her underwear, her perfumes, and doted over them for years. Later, when I became a successful businessman in Verona, I invited him to stay with us in Via Oberdan. By this time his second wife had left him, though he didn’t seem unduly concerned. He said Italy was too hot and the beer crap. He knotted a handkerchief on his head and wore socks with his sandals. The only thing he enjoyed was taking Mauro to the stadium. So in just a few weeks, he managed to pass on to my son the curse of his violent ways and his inexplicable vocation for the mob. I should have broken off with the man altogether. But I find it hard to break with people. Even the dead I keep talking to. I offered to buy him a nice place in Chelsea, but he refused and went of his own accord to an old people’s home in Willesden. When I visited, which I did religiously every time I was in the UK to visit customers for our wines, he invariably made fun of my clothes and scars and insisted on pouring me Johnnie Walker Red Label (I hate Red Label) from a bottle hidden in his bedclothes.

  I had expected to be alone at the funeral and instead the church was packed. Shabby and malodorous, all kinds of ancient creatures offered their bony handshakes and told me in croaking voices what a wonderful, gentle man my father was, and how he had always spoken well of me and excused my not visiting because I was such an important, busy person. Of this I believed not a syllable. Clutching walking sticks and Zimmer frames, they tottered up the chancel steps to make fulsome speeches about this extraordinarily kind man who had so loved the cats in the old folks’ home he might have been St Francis of Assisi. And how patriotic he was! He would have gone to Afghanistan himself, on crutches, if they had let him. Someone told a Good Samaritan anecdote about how Dad always bought the Big Issue from him. They used to stand together on the corner of Acton Vale, rain or shine, Saturday morning doing the pools and drinking Scotch from Dad’s hip flask. He was the soul of the community.

  Then out of the blue the vicar asked me if I wanted to say something before we committed the body to the flames. It’s hard to feel nostalgia for the Italian priesthood, but an Anglican clergyman can do it for you. The man had that stooped, thin-nosed sanctimoniousness they can never caricature enough in soaps and sitcoms. Having reached the top of the steps and turned to the congregation I didn’t know what to say. I’m usually quite resourceful in these situations, accustomed to speaking at board meetings and Rotary Club dinners, but of course when I do that, in Verona or Milan, it’s in Italian. All at once, facing this English public, I was struck by a powerful awareness that my real centre of gravity now is Italy, my real language, however much it plagues me still, Italian. Words of pomp and circumstance just won’t come to me in my native tongue. I opened my mouth and nothing came out. Below me the rabble of pensioners were expecting me to speak. Coffin fodder, I thought, gazing down on their wrinkled faces, grey hair, grey eyes, grey teeth. I tried to speak but couldn’t. I realised that if words did begin to flow they would be about Mother. You killed her, I was thinking. You bastard. You shit. You killed my poor mother long before the drunk driver did. Sarah Ann Duckworth née Winchester is gone and utterly forgotten by everyone but her obedient boy Morris. I am my mother’s son. Quite likely you’re not my father at all. I never wanted you to be my father. I . . .

  I opened my mouth and closed it. The coven of crones and codgers beneath me had begun to murmur. The clergyman took my elbow and said, ‘Mr. Duckworth, these are difficult moments, if you don’t feel up to it, we do understand.’ Then I simply yelled. ‘Dad! Daaaaaad!’ It was blood-curdling. The sound bounced off the stone walls. I felt the air vibrate and my chest quivered. ‘Daaaad!’ As I stumbled down the st
eps towards the shiny coffin a dozen pairs of arms enfolded me. The women were crying. The men were croaking, ‘Good on you, lad.’ Overwhelmed by foul breath, I fainted.

  Is that the kind of man who could plunge a knife into a fellow human being, a man who faints at a funeral?

  To Mauro Duckworth

  Dear Mauro,

  You are too young for the tasks I am about to place on your inexperienced shoulders, but if, despite my hectoring in the past, you have any affection for your much aged and misunderstood father, can I beg you to see to the following:

  1) First, take care of your mother. She is a strong woman, but these are hard times indeed. Should you see any signs that she is unable to cope, be in touch at once with Dr Bagnoli who has prescribed tranquillisers in the past.

  2) Please be in daily contact with Alvise Bersi who will be overseeing Fratelli Trevisan. Normally I would ask your mother to do this, but she will be too worried about Massimina to look after company affairs. I know it will be impossible for you to grasp everything about the many projects that are ongoing but try to get a sense of whether anything untoward is happening in my absence. When the cat is away, the mice will play.