She is expecting a change of subject, but as soon as the waiter has gone indoors Gideon has more to say about his brother. David, he tells her, was the brainy one, the one who excelled academically, the first of the family to go to university. His brother was not greatly burdened by self-doubt, says Gideon, who confesses that some might indeed say the same of him. They were both ambitious, both worked hard. But there was a difference: Gideon had respect for his brother’s achievements, whereas David did not: art was not an intellectual activity, and it was not work. ‘He had no interest in what I was doing. None whatever,’ says Gideon, and the resentment could not be more blatant. David’s tendency to self-righteousness, it had to be said, became more pronounced as he got older: medics were the chosen people; artists were mere hobbyists, who sometimes mistook their hobby for a vocation. ‘He saw art and science as opposites,’ Gideon regretfully informs her. ‘But art is a science too.’ Neither was fair to the other. They saw each other as caricatures. But it was an irreducible fact that they were mismatched. If they hadn’t known better, they’d have thought they were from different parents.
After the food has been brought, Gideon resumes his monologue, at first somewhat more conciliatory in tone. Her father was right to regard himself as the more intelligent sibling, if by intelligence one means excellence in the acquisition and deployment of knowledge that can readily be calibrated, he tells her. David was of the opinion that his brother didn’t have what it took to be a doctor, and he was correct in this as well. ‘He had the right stuff,’ says Gideon, ‘and I didn’t.’ A doctor, Gideon proclaims, requires a certain coldness of heart, a capacity for detachment. David had this faculty, this imperturbable clarity, whereas Gideon – he admits with a rueful aversion of the eyes – did not. ‘I would have made the most dangerous doctor on earth,’ says Gideon – because he has an excess of empathy, of compassion. He admired his brother, he tells her. He didn’t much like him, but he could admire him. David always had a splinter of ice in his soul, and this was crucial to his success. It made him hard to love, but it made him very good at what he did.
‘I had no difficulty loving him,’ says Claire.
‘Different situation,’ responds Gideon, smiling sympathetically. ‘Entirely different.’
‘I don’t recognise the person you’re describing,’ she says.
‘Well you wouldn’t, would you?’ he says, and seems to think that this settles the matter.
‘And my mother loved him.’
‘Of course,’ he says, as a forty-something man in a dark suit and white shirt and maroon tie – a town hall bureaucrat if ever she saw one – spots Gideon from fifty yards off and waves to him. Of course, this is another reason for choosing to sit outside – it allows him to demonstrate his standing in the town. ‘That was a real meeting of minds,’ he tells her. She thinks she detects a grain of sarcasm in the magnanimity; she has something to say, but he sees that she’s about to speak and he raises a hand to prevent her.
‘Enough, enough,’ he says, frowning, as though rebuking himself rather than her. ‘Let’s enjoy our lunch, and this beautiful day.’ As he says this, he casts an acerbic glance at the gaggle of women, who are now taking snaps of themselves with the waiter. Their chatter becomes so loud, he actually grinds his teeth. Raising his voice, as if against a gale, he tells her that, to be perfectly honest, he’s not terribly interested in the past – or rather, in his own past. He is prone to nostalgia, as is everyone, but his nostalgia is not for his own life – it’s for a more distant past, a Golden Age that perhaps never existed. He is, he declares loudly, like a snake; he sheds his skin each year. ‘My paintings are my cast-off skin,’ he says, then gives a half-impressed nod, as if this notion had never occurred to him before.
This afternoon she is going to take a walk in the valley; Gideon suggests a route; the waiter brings him a piece of paper, so that he can sketch a map for her. Then it’s time for work. They are at the hotel, about to part, when Gideon, observing a woman emerging from the Palazzo Campani, raises a forefinger and says: ‘One minute’. He jogs up the street to catch up with the woman, his belly moving like a vast rubber water bottle. The woman and Gideon exchange kisses; she is wearing huge sunglasses and a cerise V-neck top that reveals much of a finely formed chest; the hair – auburn, of country-singer volume – gleams like wet wood. Gideon comes back, evidently pleased. There’ll be a fourth at the table tonight – Teresa, Robert’s ‘lady friend’. The words are accompanied by an expression that says a treat is in store; it is taken for granted that Claire will be there.
3.9
Until quite recently one could buy, in the sacristy of Santa Maria dei Carmini, a postcard that showed an image (a print by an unnamed artist) of a nun named Suor Veronica, who entered Castelluccio’s Carmelite convent in 1697, died there in 1709, and thereafter became the object of much local devotion. On the reverse of the card, a tightly printed text celebrated the piety of this remarkable woman, who, as Teresa Campani, on January 30th, 1697, took the habit of the Carmel and the name of Sister Veronica, and eighteen months later, at the age of nineteen, after an episode of near-fatal ill-health, professed before the Lord her perpetual vows of chastity, poverty and obedience.
At midnight on January 1st, 1700, Suor Veronica experienced a vision of the crucified Christ, and awoke in an ecstasy, proclaiming that her soul had become suffused with the blood of Our Lord. It was to be the first of many such visions. They came to her as she slept, and in her sleep Suor Veronica would give voice to what she was seeing and hearing. Suor Veronica was by nature a modest and quietly spoken young woman, but the voice in which she recounted these visions was sonorous and strong, and the words she spoke were of great power. Throughout the night, two sisters would sit with her while she slept, to record her speech, and often they would fill many pages with the words she unconsciously dictated. Suor Veronica spoke of becoming, through her pure love, the spouse of Christ, and of sharing with him the sufferings of the cross. She would come awake writhing and wailing with His pain, and rend the sheets of her cot in agony, but the pain would pass quickly from her and her whole being would be imbued with the radiance of grace. In her ecstasies she spoke often of the blood of Christ: in her vision of September 9th, 1701, for example, she saw the people of Castelluccio in a fall of rain that was the sacred blood. To return to God, she told her sisters, self-love must be annihilated through humility. ‘Humility is the gateway to grace’ – these are words she spoke on the night of her last vision, April 5th, 1709. ‘The soul must do nothing, will nothing, and comprehend everything. To transcend all created forms, we must make ourselves completely dead in God.’ She foresaw with perfect serenity the day of her death: Tuesday, April 9th, 1709. Despite the weakness of her body, she passed the preceding day in prayerful ecstasy, standing upright in her cell from dawn until darkness. At midnight, precisely as she had seen, she died in her sleep, whispering the name of our Lord; at the moment of her death a powerful joy pervaded the convent.
Teresa Campani was the youngest daughter of Pierpaolo Campani and his wife Giuditta. By 1697, the year in which Teresa entered the convent, the fortunes of the Campani family had been in decline for some time. Investments in Florence had produced no profit; businesses in which the Campani had an interest had foundered; harvests had failed; it was rumoured that when the frivolous duchess, Marguerite Louise d’Orléans, decamped to Paris in 1675, she owed a considerable amount of money to agents of the Campani, for wall hangings and Chinese porcelains and perfumed jars from Peru. It was said that nobody had seen the melancholy Grand Duke Cosimo III smile in public; the same was true of the beleaguered head of the Campani. In 1691 he sold the family’s house in Florence and a villa that he owned near Volterra. He now devoted himself to the cultivation of his estates around Castelluccio. In 1692, when Pierpaolo Campani’s first daughter, Anna Maria, was married, her husband received a substantial dowry, as did the husband of her sister, Chiara, the following year. Their brothers – Michele, Paolo and T
ullio – were not without funds. The last child, Teresa, however, was unmarriageable: there was now no surplus in the Campani coffers, and the girl, besides, was timid, plain and morose, and her health was poor. She was placed in the convent of Santa Maria dei Carmini.
Her most frequent visitor was Tullio, the brother closest to her in age. In his journal he made observations on his conversations with his sister, and on her conversations with other members of the family. This journal was discovered in 1979, when a research student, at work in the archives of the Palazzo Comunale, came upon sheets of Tullio’s writing interleaved between the pages of a ledger of accounts relating to the revenues of the Campani estate in the year 1702. Some suspected forgery. Why was it, they asked, that nowhere in the copious correspondence preserved by the Campani family – a hoard that includes many letters composed by Tullio himself, and scores by Anna Maria and Chiara – there is not so much as a single mention of the ‘facts’ recorded in the supposed journal of Tullio Campani? As far as anyone was aware, no document in all of Castelluccio offered the slightest corroboration of these ‘facts’. Unconvinced by those who argued that it was entirely understandable that the Campani should have kept secret some of the things of which Tullio wrote, the sceptics nominated a culprit: Paolo Campani, a Freemason, and widely known to have been a man of troublesome temperament. Paolo Campani, it was suggested, had written the journal himself, and secreted it amid the family’s papers, knowing that sooner or later, after his death, it would be found.
The theory that the journal was an act of posthumous sabotage was refuted, to the satisfaction of nearly everyone, by archivist Cinzia Zappalorto, who matched the script of the journal to letters known to have been written by Tullio’s hand; she produced, furthermore, evidence to show that the paper of Tullio’s journal was fabricated around 1700. There are many in Castelluccio, however, for whom the journal of Tullio Campani is a libel against the blessed Suor Veronica. For them, Tullio himself was the saboteur – for whatever reason (and plentiful reasons can be proposed), he had simply lied about her.
The earliest visit described by Tullio took place in the summer of 1699. He found his sister, at first, to be in good spirits. She joked about one of the novices, an empty-headed girl who had absconded while on a pilgrimage to Rome. She spoke with respect and affection of the Mother Prioress. There were many admirable women here, she told her brother. But as Tullio was preparing to leave, Suor Veronica’s face seemed to darken. Some days, she confessed, she watched the shadows creeping up the walls of her cell and it was as though she were watching the rising of floodwater. From time to time she had terrible dreams of murder and torture; her dreams, she said, were ‘full of blood’.
Pierpaolo and Giuditta Campani also went to the convent that summer, soon after Tullio. Their daughter greeted them coolly, and was taciturn throughout. ‘I live a life of prayer,’ she said to them. ‘I have nothing to tell you. Each day is the same as the one that came before and the one that will come after.’ It would seem that her relationship with her parents – especially with her father – was never to be warm again. Indeed, she would sometimes say nothing to her father after greeting him, addressing herself solely to her mother, and then in the fewest words possible. In 1701 she requested that they should not visit her again, and they seem to have complied with her wish.
Her visions of Christ are first mentioned by Tullio in an entry written on July 23rd, 1700. She had dreamed that she was asleep at a table, in a ruined house, and He had awoken her and showed her the wounds in His hands and His side, and an extraordinary happiness had overwhelmed her. A little of this happiness had remained with her, but not for long, when she had awoken in her cell, ‘as water adheres to us after bathing’. When she was read the words she had uttered in the course of the night, it was as if they were words she had heard many years ago. ‘She wept, silently, in anguish for the loss of the bliss of her vision,’ wrote Tullio.
To her sisters, it seems, she said nothing of these experiences. Anna Maria and Chiara came to the convent at Easter every year, and usually Suor Veronica wanted to talk about their lives in Florence, where both now lived. Sometimes they found her melancholic, sometimes she was excitable and laughed in a manner that disturbed them; they attributed the fluctuations of her spirit to her illness. Anna Maria and Chiara would pass an hour with her, and their sister always wept when they had to leave.
With Michele and Paolo, similarly, Suor Veronica never talked of the things she saw in her sleep. Michele’s conversations with his sister were as perfunctory as his father’s. She rarely spoke except when asked a question, and her replies were as terse as she could make them without insult. She stated that she was contented with her life. ‘I am satisfied,’ she would answer, again and again: ‘I am satisfied,’ as if the word had no meaning. It was always Christmas when Michele went to the convent; he would shiver as he spoke to her, but she sat on the other side of the grille, apparently insensible of the cold, making him feel like a great sinner before a statue of Our Lady. In 1706 she told him he need no longer trouble himself with her; she had said the same to Paolo, earlier that year. Paolo too described his sister as a statue with a censorious gaze, and complained of her silence.
But to Tullio she talked at length about the experiences she was having. ‘I am happy when I sleep, and only when I sleep,’ she told him. ‘In my dreams it seems that there is only myself and God in all the world.’ She described to him dreams in which, like Saint Thomas, she had placed her fingers in Christ’s side. She had taken His body from the cross, and in the instant His weight had fallen upon her she had become as light as a bee. With her own eyes she had seen the bestial faces of Calvary; in her flesh she had taken the pain of the thorns and the flail. And with the pain she had known a joy that was beyond all speech, a joy in which she seemed to dissolve like incense smoke in air, and which disappeared on waking. ‘I am in God in the night,’ she told him. ‘but he is not with me now, as I talk to you. He abandons me in the daylight.’ In order to sleep more deeply, she worked as hard as her body would allow. In the hours between prayers she sewed surplices and tended the convent’s orchard and garden, in all weathers. She washed clothes, repaired linen and sawed wood to exhaust herself. Often she would go without food, because her visions were most intense when she had starved her body. She had a vision every night now, she told Tullio on October 3rd, 1707, but in the mornings she might have no memory of what had happened to her; instead, she would awaken into a sense of being in a mist of delight, or rather of being herself a mist of delight, and from this mist her everyday self, the dismal Suor Veronica, would begin to take form for another day. Each morning, the nuns who had sat beside her bed would read to her the words that had come from her mouth. The words never sounded like her own: they were the words of a scholar, or a preacher. Sometimes the words were Latin: in her sleep she spoke Latin with greater mastery than she read it when awake. On February 17th, 1708, she told Tullio, in tones of wonder, that two weeks previously she had spoken in sentences that the sisters had been unable to understand, and so had written down as approximations to the sounds that they had heard. Upon waking, Suor Veronica was shown the syllables, and she had been unable to make sense of them. The pages were sent to Siena, where the text was understood to be the confession of Suor Veronica’s soul in the German language, a tongue of which she was not aware of possessing the slightest knowledge.
This was to be Tullio’s penultimate conversation with his sister. In August he found her very sickly, with ‘a face as pale as milk … and eyes like pewter’. She told him that she was too tired to talk, and that she would soon be leaving ‘this holy prison’. In December they met for the last time. Tullio wrote: ‘Teresa was proud and full of argument.’ (In Tullio’s journal she is nearly always Teresa rather than Suor Veronica.) She quoted to him the lines by Ciro di Pers, a poet of whom he was most fond, on the sorry fate of man and the vanity of our lives, which are but passing shadows, and then laughed wildly. She shrieked with la
ughter after instructing him: ‘Deny your desires and you will find what your heart longs for.’ Tullio believed that disease had made his sister almost mad. Flecks of blood sprang from her lips as she cursed the Campani and declared that she had seen a vision of her father in hell. Her skin had become mottled, like some reptile’s, and her eyes were ‘full of black fire’. She told Tullio that of her family he alone was the one she had loved, then she ordered him not to visit her again. Nevertheless, he presented himself at the convent in February and again in March, but he was not admitted. On Friday, April 12th, 1709, he wrote in his journal: ‘The Mother Prioress told me that Suor Veronica lay in her cell for two whole days, uncovered, and in all that time not one fly alighted on the body.’
3.10
Robert and Gideon are at the table with Teresa, who introduces herself immediately, extending a bare and beautiful arm, which is circled above the wrist by a broad band of silver, embossed with grapes and tiny birds. Claire takes the offered hand: the fingers are cool and long, and the nails have a shapeliness that can be achieved only through daily maintenance. Everything – the hands, the exquisitely low-key make-up, the enviable hair – suggests a woman for whom the day begins with a long session at the mirror. The face is not remarkable, except for the finish of it – and the eyes, which are large and the colour of mahogany. Looking at the skin around the eyes, Claire can tell that she must be thirty-five or thereabouts; otherwise, she could be taken for seven or eight years younger. The dusty pink V-neck, top-grade cotton, well filled, offsets the complexion perfectly.
Nostalgia Page 9
