Nostalgia

by Jonathan Buckley

  ‘Have you heard anything?’ Robert calls to Giovanni.

  Giovanni shakes his head.

  ‘You?’ asks Alessandra.

  ‘Nothing,’ Robert answers.

  The lad with the flag, as if this has nothing to do with him, grimaces at the sky.

  Once Robert has passed the shop, Giovanni mutters something, at which Alessandra laughs. Robert glances back, and sees the flagpole flung up, and the flag opening out, revealing a saffron oval and the boar of Saint Zeno, scarlet, in the centre of it.

  2.6

  The most famous Saint Zeno, patron saint of anglers, babies and the city of Verona, born circa 300 AD, is not the Saint Zeno who is celebrated in Castelluccio. Neither is Castelluccio’s Saint Zeno the Saint Zeno who became the bishop of Gaza and is thought to have died in 400 AD, having survived the persecutions ordered by Julian the Apostate, which had claimed the lives of three of this Zeno’s cousins: Eusebius, Nestabus and another Zeno. And he is not the earliest Saint Zeno, who was beheaded in Carthage in the middle of the third century. According to the Roman Martyrology, no fewer than 10,204 Christians, having been forced to work on the construction of the Baths of Diocletian (c. 300–305 AD), were slaughtered in a single massacre, at the commencement of what has come to be known as the Great Persecution of Diocletian; a Saint Zeno was prominent among this vast company of martyrs. This Saint Zeno is not the Saint Zeno of Castelluccio, who is also not the Saint Zeno who was martyred at Nicomedia with his two sons, Concordius and Theodore, nor the Saint Zeno whose jaw was smashed prior to his decapitation, as punishment for having laughed as Diocletian offered a sacrifice to the god Ceres.

  Tradition has established the salient points of the life of Castelluccio’s Saint Zeno, starting with his birth in the environs of the village that would become Castelluccio, in either 330 or 340 AD. His father was a miller, and Zeno grew up beside a stream that has come to be identified with the stream that skirts the north side of the town. His parents were not Christians, but when the boy was six or seven years of age he encountered a peripatetic holy man, by whom he was converted to the Christian faith. Manifesting a depth of piety that was remarkable in one so young, Zeno soon brought about the conversion of his family and of many others in the vicinity of the village. At the age of ten he performed his first miracle: the upper floor of his father’s mill collapsed, crushing Zeno’s mother beneath it; the child raised the fallen beams with his bare hands and revived his lifeless mother, whose body was found to be unscathed. Some time soon afterwards, Zeno drove demons out of the body of a boar that they had maddened to a terrible ferocity; the beast was thereafter as mild as a foal, and would not be separated from his saviour. In 360, all accounts of Zeno’s life agree, he went to Arezzo, where he witnessed a miracle that was effected by the bishop of Arezzo, the future Saint Donatus: having picked up the scattered fragments of the glass cup that had been smashed by pagan assailants as he conducted Mass, Donatus fused the pieces with the touch of his hands and proceeded to replenish the glass with wine, which did not leak from it, even though a hole remained in its base. No fewer than seventy-nine conversions have been attributed to the miracle of the broken cup.

  A month later, Donatus was arrested by Quadratian, the prefect of Arezzo. He was beheaded on August 7th, 362, one year before the end of the reign of Julian the Apostate, who as a boy had been educated into Christianity by a Roman priest, in the same class as the future Saint Donatus. When Donatus had arrived in Arezzo he had preached the Christian faith with a monk named Hilarian, whose martyrdom occurred in the month preceding that of Donatus. Zeno, who appears to have been a close associate of Hilarian, was beheaded in a meadow outside Arezzo on August 20th, 362. As it lay in the grass, his severed head uttered the words Credo in unum Deum / Patrem omnipotentem, / Factorem cæli et terræ, / Visibilium omnium et invisibilium – the first four lines of the Nicene Creed, which had been adopted in 325 at the First Council of Nicaea. At the moment of Zeno’s death, furthermore, the stream at his birthplace ran red from bank to bank.

  Zeno’s body was thrown into a ditch, but in 1263 his bones rose to the surface of the earth, in the middle of the wood that had grown on the site of his execution; they were discovered when a man came across a pig that was kneeling, as if in prayer, with a thighbone held reverently between its teeth. The relics were brought back to Castelluccio, where they were placed in a sarcophagus in the crypt of the church of San Giovanni Battista. In Castelluccio, August 20th is still celebrated as the feast day of Saint Zeno, though the Vatican removed his feast from the General Calendar in 1969, in accordance with the ruling contained in Chapter Five of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, promulgated by Pope Paul VI on December 4th, 1963: Lest the feasts of the saints should take precedence over the feasts which commemorate the very mysteries of salvation, many of them should be left to be celebrated by a particular Church or nation or family of religious; only those should be extended to the universal Church which commemorate saints who are truly of universal importance.

  2.7

  In the last hour Gideon has improved only the tiniest portion of the still life. His progress is rarely fast – fastidiousness is one of his defining qualities. He never makes an unconsidered mark. Today, however, he is sagged in front of the painting like an old widower on the bar stool he’s occupied every evening since his wife died. When at work, his eyes are usually in constant motion, taking the picture’s measure, as if it were a living thing, and potentially dangerous. Today he stares for minutes at a time, in what one might take to be a state of profound ennui. Recently his concentration has been erratic; this is the worst day yet. This morning he achieved almost nothing: a drawing of a loaf of bread, half-erased. Now, yet again, he changes his brush; he applies it to the palette, brings it to the face of the painting, pauses, withdraws, stares. He has spoken no more than a dozen words all afternoon.

  At four o’clock he takes his customary coffee. Robert places the cup on the table nearest to the easel. Gideon looks at it, frowning, as though momentarily confused by its arrival. Then, inspecting the tip of his brush, he mutters: ‘I have a very bad feeling.’

  ‘About what?’ asks Robert.

  ‘Ilaria. Something bad has happened. I can sense it.’ Last month he sensed that Luisa Fava’s mother was going to die before the end of the day; she is still alive. He has sensed her demise four times to date, and twice has been struck by a premonition of a major road accident involving Carlo Pacetti’s son, Ennio, who has yet to be involved in an accident of any kind.

  ‘Nothing bad has happened. I’m sure of it,’ says Robert.

  Gideon finishes his coffee in a single draught, like an invalid accepting a bitter but necessary dose. ‘You can’t be sure,’ he says.

  ‘She packed a bag. Ergo she hasn’t been waylaid or abducted.’

  ‘You’ve heard she packed a bag. You don’t know.’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Anyway, even if she did take a bag, that doesn’t mean she can’t have come to harm.’

  ‘True. But it makes it less likely.’

  ‘Perhaps. But the bag is just a rumour.’

  ‘I’ll bet you she’s gone off with a boyfriend. Someone the parents know nothing about.’

  ‘No,’ states Gideon, softly but immediately, dismissing the notion as unworthy of consideration.

  ‘It’s the obvious explanation.’

  ‘No,’ he repeats. ‘I would have known. She would have said.’ With narrowed eyes, he gazes into the picture as if it’s a window and he’s looking out at somebody who has unaccountably let him down.

  ‘But that would have implicated you,’ Robert points out. ‘Perhaps she didn’t want to do that.’

  ‘She would have told me,’ he states, with quiet finality. He straightens his back, picks up a fresh brush, works it on the palette and raises it, charged with viridian. Having scrutinised a corner of the canvas, he strokes on the paint. ‘Anyway – lunch went well,’ he remarks.

  ‘Glad to hear
it.’

  ‘But she appears to be in a rather fragile state of mind,’ he says. ‘We need to tread carefully.’

  ‘We?’

  Gideon pulls back the brush; he makes a huff of begrudging amusement, as if in reaction to something he’s seen in the picture. ‘Sorry?’ he says.

  ‘I said “We?”’

  ‘We what?’

  ‘You said: “We need to tread carefully.”’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says, moving his face to within a few inches of the canvas. ‘I meant “I”.’ With the tip of the brush’s handle he ticks a tiny cut into the paint. He studies the mark he has made, then makes another. For the rest of the afternoon he works in silence.

  2.8

  Robert, waiting in the foyer, is examining a yellowed poster, framed, which the manager has propped against the desk. It’s an advertisement for something called Come le foglie – ‘Like the leaves’, Robert translates for her. It was a play produced at the theatre across the road, in 1919, he explains, indicating the date.

  ‘I think I will put it here,’ Maurizio says to her, gesturing at a wall, as if her judgement might be of influence.

  ‘Very nice,’ she says, though she has no opinion.

  Gideon is outside, standing in the doorway of the theatre. The blue suit is perhaps a courtesy to her, or an attempt at ingratiation: she is to note that an effort has been made. Beneath the suit, however, he is wearing a white shirt that might have been found in a heap at the bottom of the wardrobe, and his moccasins are scuffed: such is the artist’s disdain for conventionality. ‘Good evening,’ he says, with a smile that proposes that she should join him in forgetting any disharmony that might have marred their earlier conversation.

  It takes three minutes to stroll to the restaurant: they cross Piazza Maggiore, then halfway along Corso Diaz turn left, into a narrow street that runs into Piazzetta Danti, a square that’s the size of a tennis court. The Antica Farmacia occupies one side of this piazzetta, where three tables have been set on the pavement. A German couple has taken one; a Dutch family the second; Gideon is taking possession of the third as a call from inside the restaurant confirms that it has indeed been reserved for him.

  Menus are brought by a waitress; consulting nobody, Gideon orders a bottle of Brunello. ‘This is very special,’ he informs her, as the waitress – introduced as Marta – gingerly draws the cork. He pours two full glasses; for himself he pours a much smaller amount, and a tumbler of water.

  An older and much larger woman appears. Gideon leaps from his seat to hug her. ‘And this lovely lady,’ he announces, ‘is Cecilia. Cecilia is the brains of the operation. And this,’ he says to Cecilia, ‘is my niece.’ You would have thought he’d been the most attentive of uncles since the day of her birth, and Cecilia’s smile says that she has heard a lot of good things about the niece. Uncertain of the form – is a cheek-kiss appropriate? – Claire half-rises from her chair, to have her hand sandwiched by Cecilia’s wide, soft palms, and as this is happening her husband, Giacomo, comes out from the kitchen. He is clutching a huge knife, and has the look of a man who is just about managing to keep chaos at bay. To Gideon he dispenses a comradely pat on the shoulder; to Robert, similar; he is introduced to Claire and shakes her hand crisply; he doesn’t smile.

  In Claire’s eyes there’s a tremble of amusement at the contrast between the slow and pillowy and pink-faced Cecilia and her fraught, swarthy, quick and tiny husband. Thirty seconds after arriving, Giacomo has returned to the battle in the kitchen.

  The owners of the Antica Farmacia are, says Gideon, the best double-act in town. ‘After us,’ he corrects himself, to Robert. Claire is assiduously reading the menu. She shouldn’t feel constrained by what’s listed there, Gideon tells her: Giacomo can rustle up whatever she would like.

  He summons Cecilia, and makes a great show of explaining that his niece, incredible though it may seem, does not eat meat.

  ‘My husband will make you something good,’ Cecilia assures her.

  ‘It’ll be wonderful,’ guarantees Gideon. He proceeds to extol the talents of Giacomo; he professes envy of him, because Gideon has no aptitude for cookery whatsoever. And he takes no pleasure in it, which is why, for the past ten years or more, he has come to this restaurant almost every night it’s been open. Claire asks how he came to be living in Castelluccio, so he tells her about his tour of France and Italy, and the day on which, in an unseasonal downpour, he drove into Castelluccio and decided to take refuge in the hotel. The next morning, a Sunday, he was presented with this vision of a place in which he sensed he would be able to work, a town that was peaceful and moderate in the best sense: not too large and not too small; nice-looking but not so nice-looking as to attract the hordes; amid terrain that was pleasing to the eye but not spectacular. Six months later, in winter, he flew back to see it at a time when it would be at its least appealing, and this second visit was a confirmation of that first impression. ‘I wanted to change my life,’ he tells her, ‘and I knew that this was where I would change it.’

  ‘And you?’ says Claire, to Robert.

  ‘I was part of the package,’ he answers.

  ‘OK,’ says Claire, after a moment’s hesitation, which provokes too loud a laugh from Gideon.

  ‘He recruited me at the Tate,’ says Robert, and Gideon promptly takes over, to recite the story of how his assistant came to join him: Gideon heckling the lecturer at the Jackson Pollock painting; the full and frank exchange of views; Robert, working as a guard, starting a conversation once the lecturer and his audience had departed; the discovery of shared opinions; the dead-end situation of Robert, the disenchanted former student of art; the offer of employment, days later. ‘God bless Pollock. He brought us together,’ he chuckles. ‘Do you know Pollock?’

  ‘Not really, no,’ says Claire.

  ‘Terrible man,’ he says. He gives her the truth about Jackson Pollock: ‘The Great I Am,’ he proclaims, fists clenched, eyes directed heavenward. ‘The hero who released the unconscious. Through his supposedly spontaneous dribbles and spatters the essence of ourselves is speaking. That’s the idea. But the essence turns out to have a liking for pretty patterns: a dash of yellow up here to balance the dash of yellow down there, a flick of blue there, to fill up this little vacancy. This isn’t the voice of the depths – it’s decoration. Pollock is a decorative artist.’ And so on and so forth. Ninety percent of the talking has been done by Gideon by the time Claire gets her main course – fried zucchini, marinaded and, as promised, delicious.

  Not until the food has been finished does Claire – in answer to a question from Robert – have a chance to say something about the job she has recently left, in the advice centre. After half a dozen sentences Gideon is glancing at his watch. Claire is trying to think of the right word for something when Gideon interrupts with: ‘Sorry, but I have to go.’ To Claire, who is blinking as though Gideon has just broken wind explosively, he adds, by way of explanation: ‘Inspiration is for amateurs. Professionals go to work.’ He gives a fold of banknotes to Robert, and to Claire he says: ‘In the evenings, you’re my guest.’ With that, he leaves.

  Claire, still blinking in amazement, says: ‘I know I’m not Oscar Wilde, but I didn’t think I was that boring.’

  ‘He has his routines,’ says Robert. He gives her the details: from 7am to 9am Gideon walks; he is in his studio from 9am to 1pm, drawing; he stops for an hour at lunchtime; from 2pm to 6pm he is in the studio, painting; from 6pm to 8pm he reads or takes a second walk or listens to music; he eats at 8.15pm, here, six nights out of seven, twice a week with Robert, usually Monday and Thursday; and from 10pm to midnight he paints.

  ‘Yes, but—’ Claire starts.

  ‘And nothing short of his own funeral will break the schedule.’

  2.9

  At some point in the coming decade Giacomo and Cecilia Stornello will retire from the Antica Farmacia, and when they quit the restaurant will pass out of
the family, or perhaps it will close: their son, Giorgio, is an officer in the Guardia Costiera, and their daughter, Gelsomina, married a man from Cesena and will never come back to Castelluccio. The Antica Farmacia, which ceased to be a pharmacy in the 1910s and first became a restaurant in the following decade, was acquired in 1957 by Giacomo’s father, Gaspare, who had been an army cook during the war, and worked in various restaurants all over Tuscany prior to becoming his own boss. Giacomo took over from his father in 1982, five years after marrying Cecilia, who worked for her parents in the alimentari that they ran in Via dei Falcucci, which closed in 1992, not long after the supermarket opened on the Siena road. Cecilia’s maternal great-grandmother, Violetta, had been the last cook of the Palazzo Campani, and Violetta’s eldest daughter, Marietta, had worked alongside her from the age of fourteen until the death of Paolo Campani in 1920. In the dining room of the Antica Farmacia, below a shelf of majolica jars that once contained the pharmacy’s materials, you can see a photograph of Violetta and Marietta with Paolo Campani, in the kitchen of the palazzo.

  Both Giacomo and Cecilia were born in Castelluccio and they intend to die here. The love they have for the town is akin to the love they have for their parents. In late July and early August, and at the end of the year, when the Antica Farmacia is closed, Giacomo goes away for a day or two, to visit his sisters in Empoli. Otherwise, he and his wife never leave the town, except to go walking in the valley. When they were younger, they sometimes went abroad for their summer break, usually to Spain or Greece. Since the spring of 1998, however, Cecilia has not been out of sight of Castelluccio, because of what happened on their holiday in Cavalese.