Nostalgia

by Jonathan Buckley

  One winter, when Cecilia was nine years old, her parents took her to visit her aunt and uncle in Trento, and the uncle took her up into the Val di Fiemme, to go skiing. She had never enjoyed anything as much as she enjoyed this: it was easier than riding a bike for her, and a hundred times more exciting. From then on, young Cecilia went to Trento every winter for a week of skiing, a custom that was maintained after she had married Giacomo, even though Giacomo lacked her sense of balance, and even cracked an ankle on their sixth trip, after which he contented himself with hiking in the snow, and watching his wife, always dressed in bright blue, flying down the slopes like a bead of ink down a marble wall.

  On the morning of Monday, January 12th, 1998, Cecilia took the cable-car at Cavalese, in the Val di Fiemme; Giacomo, Giorgio and Gelsomina had decided to spend the day in Trento. Cecilia had ridden the cable-car many times; the height made Giacomo queasy, but for her it was no more unsettling than a ride on a bus. On this occasion, however, as her gondola approached the station at the summit, the cable stopped moving. For two hours it was stuck, and midway through those two hours a wind arose. High above the snow, the gondola rocked and creaked. Among the sixteen people trapped with Cecilia were two young girls, who were soon crying; one of them had a fit of screaming, and her mother almost had to smother her to keep her quiet. A woman vomited when something on the roof of the gondola made a loud groaning noise, like steel beginning to fail. Snow was now falling, and within minutes they were cut off from the sight of the summit and of the ground below them. It was then that Cecilia began to panic. Every sound from overhead was the sound of the cable starting to come apart; the gondola shook in the wind and she lost all strength from her legs; her face hit the metal floor, and she felt that she was still falling. When the gondola was at last hauled into the station she was shaking as if she’d been left naked in the snow for an hour; she gulped for air as though struggling to stay above quicksand. A doctor had to come up the mountain to escort her down.

  Every night, for weeks, she had nightmares: she was being buried alive in snow; she was floating up into space entombed in a bubble of white glass; she was falling into a bottomless crevasse. Previously ever-cheerful, Cecilia became depressed: her memory of things that had happened more than a year or so ago became unavailable to her; she felt that her mind had been damaged, that a part of herself had been destroyed in the space of those two hours of captivity and terror. And when, a month after her ordeal, the disaster happened with the Cavalese cable-car and twenty people were killed, her depression worsened. At every moment she was conscious that everyone she loved might die in an instant; she felt at times that she was in some way responsible for the disaster at Cavalese, as if she had colluded with fate to kill the twenty innocents instead of herself. Her doctor gave her drugs to reduce her anxiety, which they did, but she was even less like herself with the tablets than she had been without them, so she threw them away and became so depressed that she could not get out of bed.

  By April she had begun to recover. In May she and Giacomo went to Siena one afternoon. She enjoyed herself, but then Giacomo walked off to buy some film and the moment she lost sight of him she became strange: suddenly she did not recognise where she was; the crowd seemed to have some sinister purpose, as if they had conspired to remove her husband from her; the ground felt as if it were shifting; it tipped her over. In June, in Volterra, she was in the toilet of a restaurant when suddenly, with no warning, she could not breathe properly, and was convinced she was in a cellar that had no stairs. This was the last time Cecilia ventured beyond the environs of Castelluccio.

  She is wholly at ease only within the town walls, but can go out onto the hills as long as she does not lose sight of the Torre del Saraceno. The peak of Le Cornate is the farthest she has travelled since 1998. For most of the time, she is happy to be confined to Castelluccio. She would like to see more of the world, but it’s a small wish, not a strong desire: we all have unfulfilled wishes, she says, and perhaps, anyway, she will one day go abroad again. In Castelluccio she has everything she needs for a good life. If God were to grant her one wish, for herself, it wouldn’t be for her anxiety to be cured: instead, she would like to be the weight she was when she was half her present age. In the dining room of the Antica Farmacia, around the pictures of Violetta, Marietta and Gaspare are arrayed photos of Giacomo and Cecilia, one for every year that they have owned their restaurant, and in each successive picture Cecilia is a little plumper than in its predecessor, while Giacomo remains the same, except for the hair. But Giacomo loves her. He has never been unfaithful, as she once announced to Gideon and Robert, engulfing her husband in an embrace. It was as a reward for his virtue, she explained, that she allowed him to employ such pretty waitresses.

  2.10

  There are seven shops in the section of Corso Diaz that they walk along, and in the windows of five of them the poster for Gideon’s exhibition is displayed. ‘He’s the first famous citizen of Castelluccio for a hundred years,’ Robert tells her.

  ‘Is he famous? Really famous?’ asks Claire; the question seems to be a genuine request for information.

  ‘In certain circles,’ he answers. ‘They’re not going to raise a statue of him when he’s gone, but a lot of people know of him.’

  ‘And is it important to him, being famous?’

  ‘Well, that’s not why he does it, if that’s what you’re asking.’

  ‘It wasn’t. But is it important to him that he’s well known?’

  ‘He doesn’t dislike it. He wants to be respected, but not necessarily by a lot of people.’

  She nods, apparently making slight modifications to her view of her uncle, and says nothing more for a while. As they pass the Caffè del Corso she announces, with no evidence of regret: ‘We’re not hitting it off. Gideon and I. We haven’t started well.’

  ‘He said he’d enjoyed talking to you.’

  ‘He was being diplomatic.’

  ‘Gideon is no diplomat.’

  ‘He thinks I’m a dullard,’ she states, cheerfully enough.

  ‘Not the impression he gave me.’

  For the first time since leaving the restaurant she looks at him directly; it’s a sustained examining look, to ascertain if the source of the untruth is himself or Gideon. ‘And I think he’s a bit too full of himself,’ she says.

  ‘You don’t get far without self-confidence in Gideon’s line of work. He knows who he is.’

  ‘Nice way of putting it.’

  ‘Anyway, you were getting along fine this evening, it seemed to me.’

  ‘Three was company. Two would have been a crowd,’ she says. Then she asks: ‘Does he ever talk about his brother?’

  ‘No,’ he says.

  This appears to be the truth, but she says: ‘Really?’

  ‘Never said a word.’

  ‘When my mother died, he sent my father a letter. My father couldn’t bear to have his name mentioned after that. He ever mention that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you knew he had a brother?’

  ‘Not until we heard from you.’

  ‘Then what did he say?’

  ‘About your father?’

  ‘Him or me.’

  ‘Nothing much.’

  ‘He must have said something.’

  ‘What Gideon doesn’t want to talk about he doesn’t talk about.’

  Again she looks at him. ‘OK,’ she says, as if permitting him to leave after questioning.

  They have arrived at Piazza del Mercato. It’s a shame, he says, that she won’t be in Castelluccio for the festival. He tells her about the parade, in which Gideon will be taking part, and about the high point of the festivities: the Angel and the Falling Boy. ‘The boy slides down a wire, from the top of the Torre del Saraceno, and the Angel comes down from the campanile of the Redentore,’ he explains, his hands describing their convergence. ‘That’s what Marta will be doing. Marta the waitress. She’s this year’s Angel.’

  ‘Brave g
irl,’ she comments, then his phone rings – it’s Teresa, wanting to know where he is. ‘Good night,’ mimes Claire, walking off.

  2.11

  Gideon is in his studio and the photos that Claire brought are downstairs, on a shelf, with the sketchbook; he has scanned the sketches, but the wallet of photographs remains unopened. For the past twenty minutes he has merely been fiddling; the presence of those unseen pictures has become a distraction, at first intermittent, now unignorable, like the whine of a mosquito. He wipes his brush and goes down to the living room.

  In the first photograph, taken in Victoria Park, some time in the autumn (judging by the trees), in 1954 or 1955 (judging by the size of the boys), young Gideon has a ball between his feet, apparently attempting to get past his brother, who is leaning onto a shoulder as though to crush him into the ground; nothing is to be read into this, he knows. The next has them sitting on a dry-stone wall, grinning at the camera, each wearing voluminous shorts, crepe-soled sandals and an open-necked shirt with sleeves rolled, white for David, dark for Gideon; David, approximately ten years old, has his left arm around Gideon, and seems to be pulling him close; nothing is to be read into this either. Gideon lingers slightly longer on this one, but only to try to recall where the picture was taken; he cannot. A third photograph: perhaps two years later, outside the shop; the windows are smeared with suds; each boy holds a water-charged sponge; Gideon is laughing in the direction of David, who glares with what was probably mock fury, but might not have been.

  A couple of weeks later, after Claire has left, Gideon will tell his assistant that he tried, he really did try, to summon some fondness for the boy in the white shirt, but he could feel nothing: not affection, not resentment, not sadness – absolutely nothing. The image of the other boy, young Gideon, likewise stirred nothing more than a disinterested and tepid curiosity. ‘This isn’t me,’ he said. ‘It’s a child with the same name.’ He proposes an analogy with a wave travelling across a sea: it retains something of its form throughout its journey, but the substance of the water at point A is not the same as at point M. The analogy, he admits, is imprecise.

  Only one photograph in the batch of half a dozen touches him: his mother with her sons, on a bench somewhere, one on each side of her, holding a hand. Looking at his mother’s face, he will say, it was impossible not see a sadness in her half-smile, a sadness for a life unfulfilled, and for the discord between her children. He will show the picture to Robert, who sees a plump woman in a tight floral dress, her face expressing tenderness and exhaustion.

  The sketchbook has already been scanned, but now he inspects it again. It’s a miscellany of drawings, spanning more than a year, starting with portraits, in pencil, of two of his contemporaries at Camberwell: one looks a little like Vanessa Redgrave, and her name, he’s nearly sure, was Rosie something; the other one vaguely resembles Ringo Starr, and he can remember nothing about him. There’s a street view, drawn in Nunhead; it is of no interest. A spread is filled with studies of his own left hand; an unidentifiable dog lies on grass, belly to the ground, head held up heraldically. A page of glass bottles – a good drawing, this – is obviously a pastiche of Morandi; he would have dated the start of his interest in Morandi a few years later than this, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Two pages later, there’s a sketch of Lorraine’s torso, to which he reacts – he’ll tell Robert, much later – with mild surprise at how comely she had been, and some displeasure at the awkwardness of the draughtsmanship.

  This is the body of the last woman who could be called his lover: not the last woman he loved, nor the last, perhaps, to love him – but the last with whom he experienced complete intimacy. Yet the drawing does not move him, not in the slightest. The photograph of his mother moves him, as does one page of the sketchbook: a portrait in profile – meticulous but incomplete – of Martin Calloway, to whom he owes so much. Some of the lines are hesitant and fidgety, perhaps betraying nervousness; the shading lacks precision. Nevertheless, much of the man has been truthfully portrayed: the dignity, the intelligence, the honest consciousness of his own worth. For many minutes Gideon examines the profiled head. He cannot recall the names of his fellows students, but he can hear Martin Calloway’s voice, the whisper of authority: ‘Truth, not novelty,’ he instructs.

  2.12

  A precociously gifted draughtsman, Gideon Westfall always knew that art was his vocation. The fulfilment of that vocation, however, was frustrated rather than advanced by his experiences at art college in the early 1970s. ‘We weren’t studying,’ he says. ‘We were receiving indoctrination. I was naïve. I had expected to be taught how to paint and how to draw. Instead, we were recruits to a cause. Picasso was the horizon. Beyond him lay the wastelands of history. That was the attitude,’ he says. Desperate for a deeper knowledge, he would study the masters at the National Gallery, making copies of the artists he revered, and still reveres. ‘I was self-taught,’ he says, ‘and self-taught is never good enough.’

  Shortly before leaving college, he happened upon an essay by Martin Calloway: “On the Education of Painters”. It made a huge impression. To this day, he knows by heart whole paragraphs of Calloway’s plea for a return to the time-honoured system of studio apprenticeship. ‘“If our civilization is to maintain the art of painting as a vital part of its culture,”’ he recites, ‘“we must revive the method by which nearly every painter of importance was trained.”’ Calloway’s definition of the values that underpinned his work also struck a chord: ‘Everything I do proceeds from a belief in order and in wholeness,’ wrote Calloway. ‘For hundreds of years our artists spoke a language that everyone could understand. After two world wars, that language has become imperilled. We are in a latter-day Babel, and my mission is to play a part in building a road out it.’

  Keen to play a part in that mission, Westfall approached Calloway, asking if he would consider taking him as a pupil. He was invited to visit Calloway’s atelier in Windsor; having presented a portfolio, he was offered a place on the spot. Ruthlessly self-critical, Westfall has destroyed all of the work that so quickly persuaded Calloway to take him under his wing. ‘With Martin Calloway, I began again, from the beginning,’ he says. He is unstinting in his praise for his mentor. ‘You could put Martin Calloway in front of any painting in the National Gallery and he could talk to you for an hour about how it was made,’ says Westfall. ‘His understanding of materials was matchless. And his eye was infallible. Before I went to him, I didn’t know how to look. To really look,’ he tells me.

  He’s angry that a man of such talent and integrity should be so neglected. Martin Calloway died two years ago, and no public gallery placed a bid when the contents of his studio were auctioned. ‘It is all one can do to not despair, living in a world in which a person who pickles animals is lauded as a major artist, while a master such as Calloway is spurned,’ he fumes. The state of art education in Britain appals him. The colleges have become production lines, he complains, turning out young people whose only talent is for self-promotion. ‘There’s no instruction, no direction,’ he says. ‘Self-expression rules the roost, but at that age you have nothing to say unless you’re Raphael, and you get a Raphael once in a blue moon. A young person should be learning the language, not just babbling.’ The situation was almost as bad when he was at art school, he says. ‘Digging a hole in the ground is not art,’ he states. ‘Cutting grass is not art. Throwing piles of felt into the corner of a room is not art. But these were things we were expected to take seriously.’ So-called conceptualism, for Westfall, is the great plague of contemporary art. ‘Blindingly obvious notions – I cannot call them ideas – are presented as if they were flashes of genius.’ He has no time for abstract art, either. ‘Abstraction is a pathology of the twentieth century,’ he declares. ‘Expressive abstraction is the apotheosis of narcissism; and geometric abstraction – call it what you will – is like asking us to accept a grammar book as literature.’

  … To some, Gideon Westfall is a reactionary. He re
jects the accusation. ‘My work,’ he says ‘goes against the grain of modernist orthodoxies, of course, and in that respect it might be said to be provocative. But I am not working in reaction to those orthodoxies. To me they are an irrelevance. I believe in the value of tradition, which is something we are nowadays encouraged to disavow. I have one foot in this world and one in the past.’

  The same is true of Italy, he goes on, which is why he has settled there. ‘The Italians have a respect for tradition which the British have lost, or thrown away. Italians are conservatives, in the best sense of the word. Which is not to say that they are resistant to modernity. Far from it. This is the land of Michelangelo and also the land of Ferrari. They have the best of both worlds: craftsmen whose skills have been passed from generation to generation, and people working on the leading edge of technology. They also have some very dodgy politicians, and execrable TV, but that’s another story.’ His home is a large apartment beside a medieval tower. The climate suits him; the light, as he puts it, is sustenance. He cannot envisage ever returning to England …

  Unlike his mentor, he does not have pupils: he employs a single assistant. ‘Martin Calloway showed me what a teacher should be. He was a generous man and a great tutor. But I haven’t his patience or his kindness. I have to work alone.’ He has few close friends, he says. The sociability of Italians is something he enjoys, but he observes it from the outside. ‘An artist should never be entirely at home,’ he says.

  We have been talking for an hour, and it’s now 2pm in Italy – time for Westfall to return to the studio. I ask him what’s on his easel at the moment. His work, he tells me, has been taking a new tangent of late: he is making studies for a Last Supper. It will be philosophical rather than dramatic in conception – he has in mind something akin to the Sacraments of Poussin, but he cannot say more than that. He’s never happy talking about his work. The work should speak for itself, he believes. ‘Artists talk too much nowadays,’ he adds.