Nostalgia

by Jonathan Buckley

  ‘You have come to Castelluccio to see our grand Gideon?’ Teresa enquires, with an adoring PA’s smile for Gideon. The teeth, of course, are marble-white.

  Gideon raises his hands in self-deprecation. ‘She is here to see her uncle,’ he corrects her. ‘And our fine little town, of course.’

  ‘And what do you think?’ asks Teresa. ‘Of our fine little town.’ The question is asked with such keenness, she could be discussing something that Claire might buy from her.

  ‘It’s a pretty place.’

  ‘It is,’ says Teresa. ‘But you are from London, yes?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So this is like toy town for you. Ten thousand Castelluccios make one London.’

  The smile is powerful, but there is perhaps a fleck of defensiveness in the tone of voice. ‘I like it,’ says Claire.

  ‘A good time to be here,’ says Teresa. ‘In winter it is dead. We push the Pause button on our life. But this is a good time. The best time.’ Then she turns to say something to Robert, in Italian, to which Robert shakes his head and Teresa cries ‘No,’ in a quiet wail of incredulity. ‘He says you are not here for the festa,’ she complains to Claire.

  ‘She has to leave on Thursday,’ Gideon sadly confirms.

  Teresa presents a pout of frustration. ‘It is the best day of our year,’ she tells Claire.

  ‘So I’ve heard,’ Claire answers. ‘But my flight is on Thursday.’

  Marta distributes the menus; Teresa scans hers in ten seconds and orders at once. ‘You must come another year,’ she goes on. ‘It is fun, you must believe me. Great fun. Tell her,’ she orders Robert, tapping the back of his hand.

  ‘It is fun. Great fun,’ Robert repeats, as though reading from a card, at which Teresa rolls her eyes, for Claire’s benefit. Robert lifts her hand and kisses it; she reciprocates. ‘You arrived when?’ she asks.

  ‘This is my third evening.’

  ‘So already you have seen everything.’

  ‘I’m taking my time.’

  ‘What did you see today?’ asks Teresa, emitting an implausibly bright interest.

  ‘I went for a walk,’ Claire answers. She describes the loop she followed up and down the valley, at which Teresa’s eyes widen with every sentence.

  ‘That is very far,’ says Teresa, fanning her face at the effort involved. She tells a story about how, when she was a girl, on a hot day in August, she decided to walk to Mensano. ‘I don’t remember why. I did some crazy things,’ she says, putting a finger pistol to her temple. Because she didn’t take enough water, she fainted in the heat. She was meant to be home for lunch, but hours went by with no sign of her, and her mother was praying to Beata Veronica for her safe return. ‘You have been to the museum?’ she asks, interrupting herself.

  ‘Not yet. Saving it,’ Claire answers, with a glance at Robert, which makes Veronica pause momentarily and cock an eyebrow.

  ‘There is a picture in the museum, of children. One of the girls is called Teresa. My mother loved her face, so I am called Teresa.’ Flattening her hands, crossed, on her chest, she lets out a percussive high laugh. ‘Is it possible to believe? You name your daughter for a dead girl in a painting? I love my mother, but what a thing to do. A film star, OK. Not a dead girl in a painting.’

  ‘A dead nun,’ adds Robert.

  ‘That’s right. The girl became a nun. So when her Teresa didn’t come home my mother prayed to the other Teresa who became the nun Veronica. And I was found, safe and OK, of course. Because of the nun.’ She spreads her beautiful hands like wings at the side of her face, illustrating the wackiness of her mother’s logic.

  Marta returns with the starters, imposing a break. The moment the last plate is down, Teresa is talking again. She wants to know what Claire does in London. Claire tells her: she has been helping people who have money troubles, and problems with their landlords, mostly.

  Before responding, Teresa consults Robert. ‘Useful,’ she comments, instantaneously in earnest. ‘But it is not very interesting?’ she suggests.

  ‘It can be. Not always. But more than sometimes.’ She tells Teresa about a recent case – the tenants of a top-floor flat who were in dispute with their landlord and came home one evening to find he’d removed the staircase and chucked their possessions out of the kitchen window.

  Though she looks appropriately appalled, Teresa appears not to be listening closely; rather, she seems to be reading Claire’s face and gestures, taking note of every little movement, as if trying to work something out. ‘My job is not very interesting also,’ she remarks when the story is finished; her eyes are now directed at her hands, which are cutting up her food with surgical delicacy. ‘I sell houses. To Germans and Dutch people. Some Italians too.’ She holds up a semi-disc of salami on a fork and examines it as though it might be a mistake to eat it. ‘I studied architecture. Michelangelo, Palladio, Bernini, Borromeo, Nervi – I studied them. I understand them.’ The perfect teeth snap onto the meat. ‘Now what do I do? I sell empty farms to men from Munich. But that is the world. In Italy there is no work. You do what you can,’ she says, and she fans the fingers of her free hand upwards, letting her dreams fly away. ‘But it is funny, no? We are in the same business, at different ends,’ she proposes, with a smile of sisterly complicity.

  Claire is about to say that she will be starting a new job soon, but Teresa turns to Gideon, with: ‘Robert told me about the picture. It’s so terrible.’ The eyes are suddenly tight with indignation. ‘Who would do such a thing?’ she demands.

  Gideon has been content to cede centre stage to vivacious Teresa; looking on with amusement, gratitude, maybe even affection, he has contributed nothing but an aura of good humour for the past ten minutes or so; now he takes over. ‘I can think of many people who would do such a thing,’ he answers. ‘I am not sure that any of them would travel all the way to Castelluccio to make their point, but our vandal is far from the first to abuse my work. Not the first to abuse it in those terms either. I once had a critic tell me I was shit. To my face. At a private viewing. I suppose I should have applauded his frankness. At least he didn’t scrawl it on the canvas. But he was a bilious little toad’ – Robert whispers the translation in Teresa’s ear; the insult evidently pleases her – ‘by the name of James Hannaher. A failed painter – so many critics are. “A pile of anachronistic shit” is what he called my work. Delightful phrase.’ He glances at Claire, and a smile develops. ‘You’re thinking I see his point, aren’t you?’ he says. Smacking his brow in revelation, he roars, attracting the attention of diners on the far side of the room: ‘Oh my God – it was you, was it?’ Then he laughs and puts an arm round her shoulder – seizing rather than hugging her. Teresa’s brow contracts for a moment, as if there’s something puzzling in Claire’s discomfiture.

  And now Gideon delivers his thoughts on being an anachronism, a topic on which he has often held forth. Robert interjects from time to time, usually to qualify a point, and Teresa interrupts occasionally with expressions of fervent agreement, but in essence it’s a monologue, for Claire’s benefit, and it lasts until his meal is finished. ‘The idea of anachronism is enormously interesting, and less straightforward than most people think,’ he begins. Having never had a thought on the subject, Claire nods noncommittally. ‘We think of the Renaissance as a period of resurgence, of innovation, of invention,’ Gideon tells the company, gesturing as if addressing twenty. There follows a brief disquisition on the etymology and history of the word ‘Renaissance’. ‘And we are not wrong to think of it in this way,’ he goes on. ‘It was indeed a time of unprecedented progress (if we may be permitted to use so unfashionable a noun), an epoch in which the foundations of modernity (in its best sense) were laid. Yet the Renaissance – as I will continue to refer to it, despite the objections of modish scholars – was also a period in which the most advanced artists and thinkers were always looking backwards, defining themselves by reference to the ancients: it was a period, in other words, in which anachron
ism was a good thing.’ The mother tongue of the great architects of the Renaissance, he exlains, with a gesture of acknowledgement to Teresa, was the architecture of imperial Rome. Throughout the history of western civilisation, radicalism and classicism have been intertwined. Poussin, Ingres, Canova and David are cited, plus several others. Gideon is glad to align himself with such artists – philosophically they are in the same camp, in which past and present and future are indivisible, whereas for ignoramuses such as Hannaher the three concepts have to be put in three separate boxes for ease of use. Consider this as well: two hundred years from now, perhaps, what seems to some of our contemporaries to be merely a throwback to a dead tradition may be seen by the artists of the twenty-third century as a vital continuation of that tradition, while much of our so-called modern art will be revealed as a dead-end digression. And one last question: is Gideon dismissed as a crank simply because he is just one man, working alone, beyond the pale of the Art World? If there were a thousand Gideon Westfalls, working in London or New York, with galleries and critics to promote them, wouldn’t they constitute a group, a movement, and therefore be taken seriously by the self-appointed arbiters of value? Instead of being an anachronism, wouldn’t he be a neo-Neoclassicist or something like that? Doesn’t it all come down to a question of numbers and influence?

  ‘But the value of art is not a matter of statistics and geography,’ he declaims, and he would certainly go on, if it were not for the fact that his watch is showing 9.50pm. As if summoned, he stands up; he pulls banknotes from his jacket and passes the cash to Robert; Teresa, unperturbed at the abruptness of Gideon’s departure, raises a straight arm at an angle of forty-five degrees, and Gideon and takes her slack-wristed hand to plant a kiss on the back of it. He departs.

  ‘That’s a party piece,’ Robert tells Claire. ‘He has several. The decline of the art schools – that’s a good one. The decline in our understanding of materials – another favourite. The decline of drawing – I’d be surprised if you don’t get that one at some point.’

  Teresa seems to have been exhausted by the performance, and the eye movements are suggesting strongly that she would rather have Robert to herself now. But when Claire says goodnight, Teresa springs up from her seat to clasp her. ‘It was so good to meet you,’ she says, with every appearance of sincerity, while holding Claire’s hands in hers and pressing them lightly, as though to transmit encouragement.

  3.11

  Too weary to continue the confrontation with himself, Gideon turns aside from the mirror; his gaze, listless, slides from canvas to table to floor to canvas, before coming to rest on the charcoal drawing of Ilaria that’s pegged to a board by the door of Robert’s work room. It was made just two days before she disappeared, and he wonders now, not for the first time, if that session will turn out to have been the last; it will.

  He studies it from this distance, the distance from which he would study the girl herself. It has force, he judges, and a simplicity, a robustness, that this body, this young person, had demanded of him. The images that she made him create had a vigour that had seemed to promise a new direction for his work – not a wholly new direction, but, as it were, a fresh path across familiar terrain, an opening of new vistas, new challenges. He closes his eyes and sees her again in this room, between poses, sitting on a stool, eating an orange, as fully at ease as she would have been clothed. Of all the models he has worked with, Ilaria was the only true innocent: there was no vanity to her, no coquettishness. ‘Stand there,’ he would tell her, and she would move into the light and install herself in it, immediately finding the position that was required and at once seeming fixed in it, as though she had placed her body in an invisible mould. Her face, as he worked, had the tranquility of someone in a deep daydream; they worked in silence; once they had begun, she never needed to talk. Looking towards the stairs, he can hear her heavy footfall; he sees her with the orange, giving all her attention to the pleasure of it, as intent as someone reading a book. Closing his eyes again, he sees the tone of her skin, the muscles of her arm; he sees and hears Ilaria’s father in the doorway, raging, while Robert, hands in pockets, calmly translated the insults: He says that people like you belong in prison … He takes exception to what you have done … Your attitude towards the family unit is to be deplored in the strongest possible terms.

  He replaces Ilaria’s father with the night he came face to face with her, in the alley by San Lorenzo: a door opened, and there she was, fiddling with the neck of her shirt, hair awry. She was fifteen years old. Since the time of the painting of the dead horse, a good four years earlier, they might have exchanged a dozen hellos, little more than that. He hadn’t as much as laid eyes on her for several weeks; but now, as he glanced into the doorway, she struck him with a look that established in a moment a true intimacy: the look – a glare, with a hint of smile – told him to say nothing to anyone about what he was seeing, while letting him know that she knew that he could be trusted, and that he did not disapprove.

  But another two years had to pass, two years of nothing more than a smile in the street, perhaps a ‘How are you?’, answered without stopping. Then, at last, the fulfilment: outside the Porta di Santa Maria, he saw her sitting on the ground against a wall, Coke can in one hand and cigarette in the other, in a grubby white vest and ripped jeans, the very image of disgruntlement. She stood up and approached him, but did not stop as they passed: rather, she slowed a little, angled herself towards him in mid-stride, and stated that she would like to come to the studio. Which she did, that night. She was still in the same outfit. A picture of Laura Ottaviano was hanging in the living room. Arms crossed, she regarded it; a shrug signified that she was begrudgingly impressed. ‘You can paint me,’ she said. ‘Do you want to paint me? If you pay me, you can paint me.’

  ‘I would have to speak to your family,’ he said.

  ‘I am old enough,’ she answered.

  ‘But I would want them to know,’ he said. ‘I’d be happier if they knew.’

  ‘I would not be happy,’ she said. Before he could reply, she had removed the vest; the jeans came off, then everything. Arms by her side, as though for medical assessment, she stood naked in the centre of the room. Smoothly, as if on a slow-moving wheel, she turned full circle. ‘Yes or no?’ she asked.

  He showed her the studio; she surveyed the room in the manner of a tenant accepting accommodation that was barely up to the acceptable standard. A fee was agreed without discussion, and a time for the first session. Ten minutes after ringing the bell, she was leaving. ‘This place is not alive,’ she said at the end, standing at this window, scattering contempt over all of Castelluccio with a sweep of her arm.

  He looks at his face in the mirror: the life has gone out of him; he is sick of himself.

  3.12

  ‘She is nice,’ says Teresa to Robert’s reflection in the bathroom mirror. ‘Not exciting, but she has a nice face. But sad. And sad clothes. Terrible clothes. Does she have no money? The job she has – maybe the pay is bad.’

  ‘She has enough. Her father died last year. She got some money from him.’

  ‘What was he?’

  ‘A doctor.’

  ‘OK,’ says Teresa, wiping her cheek. ‘So that is why she is sad. Because of her father.’

  ‘I don’t know that she’s sad.’

  She fixes him with a frown of incredulity. ‘She is very sad, Robert. Anyone can see that.’ She releases the cotton-wool ball from the grip of thumb and forefinger, held high over the bin; it falls precisely into the centre. ‘And she is scared of Gideon,’ she says, before scooping cold water onto her face.

  ‘I’d say she finds him a bit overwhelming.’

  She shrugs, then reaches for the towel. Having dabbed her face, she leans towards the glass, to examine first the left eye, then the right. ‘She doesn’t like him, I think,’ she says, pressing a forefinger to a cheekbone.

  ‘It’s a strange situation. They’ve only just met. Gideon is a strong character.
It can take time to adjust.’

  ‘She is a nervous woman,’ says Teresa.

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘And I think also she does not like me very much. I scare her too, a little.’

  ‘I don’t know why you say that.’

  ‘I had a feeling,’ she says, with another shrug. Taking her toothbrush, she says: ‘But not frightened of you. Oh no, not frightened of you at all.’ Her face in the mirror gives him a mock-annoyed smirk. ‘She likes you, I can tell. Certainly.’

  A couple of months ago, in the same room, with Teresa looking at him in the mirror, she had said exactly the same thing, about Ilaria Senesi, after catching a glimpse of them in the Caffè del Corso – and that was nonsense too. But at least in the case of Ilaria she had half-believed it.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ he says, as he’d answered before.

  ‘Not silly,’ she replies, through a mouthful of foam.

  He goes into the bedroom; he hears the shutters of the Sant’Agostino bar come down; it’s another ten minutes before Teresa comes in – she had an email to send, she explains. ‘You know I’m right,’ she says, getting into bed.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Your lady from London. She likes you.’

  ‘I’m a likeable person.’

  She is wearing one of her white La Perla vests; her shoulders gleam; he kisses her on the collar bone, and she rakes his hair lightly. She kisses the crown of his head, then reaches for the light on her side. ‘I am very tired,’ she says, but she isn’t. She has to be in Siena by eight, to collect Renata, she tells him, because Vito has emailed to say he has an appointment in Florence at ten. ‘On a Sunday. Unbelievable,’ she says, forcing exasperation into her voice. ‘There will be an argument,’ she sighs.